CHATHAM, RHYS A Rhys Chatham Compendium (Table Of The Elements) cd 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
There are many reasons why somebody needs to smack some sense into Table Of The Elements, with this compendium of Rhys Chatham's work being simply the latest episode of marketing blunders. Sometime in the future, Table Of The Elements has plans to release a 3CD box set of Rhys Chatham's compositions of rock-as-minimalism for multiple guitar symphonies, a fusionist strategy also explored by Chatham's contemporary / doppleganger Glenn Branca. And that boxset is scheduled to have a huge booklet with essays by Chatham, Lee Ranaldo, and Tony Conrad, as well as artwork by Robert Longo. All of this sounds enticing, but until that day (which may never come after how long it took Table Of The Elements to complete the Captain Beefheart series), all we can offer from Chatham is this overpriced, condensed version of the boxset. Groan. Oh, and supposedly this has a track that *won't* be on the alleged box set. Smack!

CHATHAM, RHYS An Angel Moves Too Fast To See (Table Of The Elements) cd 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Always unpredictable and often a little bit frustrating, Table Of The Elements have decided to re-release 2 of the 3 discs from the now out of print Rhys Chatham An Angel Moves Too Fast To See box set (the third disc to follow later?), with no mention on either of these two new discs that they are indeed the same discs contained in the box. So if you already own the Chatham box, you already have this stuff, but if you somehow missed the box, you absolutely need this!
A gorgeously packaged and lovingly assembled disc chronicling one of the most important works of guitar experimentalist and early drone pioneer / minimalist Rhys Chatham, a man whose career seemed to always have been overshadowed by fellow New Yorker / guitarist Glenn Branca, who may have borrowed his multiple guitar idea from Chatham anyway.
The interesting thing, to us at least, is how accessible most of Chatham's pieces are. Sure, he's a minimalist composer, an artist, an avant garde pioneer, but when you get right down to brass tacks, much of his music sounds a lot like Stereolab or Neu! Filtered through Television and downtown Manhattan and with some more challenging arrangements, but very post rock nonetheless. Endless crescendos and repetitive intros build and build, until the band often launches into propulsive krautrock jams. Simple, repetitive and totally hypnotic. Echoes of AQ faves Circle and Salvatore as well as Faust and Can. Even though the pieces are for multiple guitars as well as sometimes horns and drums, it's hard to hear anything other than some really nice, spacey jams. Occasionally the dense horn jams remind us of Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk" slowed down and played through the sound system at CBGB.
This disc, the 5 part title track, starts off with a dense brassy drone that sounds a bit like Niblock composing for an army of trumpets or a little bit like later records by Dutch metallers Gore. That jam quickly slips into a sleepy krautrock groove before drifting off. The second movement is a blissed out brass drone beneath a dynamic mathrock workout, stacatto bursts demarcating a wide open expense of reverberent whir. The third movement is straight up Stereolab / Neu!, a loping post rock rhythm, a dreamy sunshiney melody, all propulsive and hypnotic. Next up is a much more dissonant slab of twentieth century angularity, an amorphous cloud of swirling notes and thick washes of orchestra-tuning-up clatter and cacophony. The final movement sounds like Circle or Salvatore or Tortoise or Zombi, but with strange synthy swooshes, like bits of Chariots Of Fire or something. Driving and almost rocking, totally mesmerizing and head nodding.
While this stuff is obviously of interest to folks into modern minimalism ala Maclise, Cale, Coleclough and other masters of the mighty drone, Chatham's more rock stuff, like An Angel Moves Too Fast To See, will definitely appeal to the more adventurous post/pop rockers into the above mentioned outfits (Tortoise, Stereolab, Circle, Salvatore) as well as folks into all things krautrock/free rock/space rock.
MPEG Stream: "An Angel Moves Too Fast To See - Prelude"
MPEG Stream: "An Angel Moves Too Fast To See - Allegro"

CHATHAM, RHYS An Angel Moves Too Fast To See: Selected Works 1971-1989 (Table Of The Elements) 3cd 51.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Another gorgeously packaged and lovingly assembled artifact from Table Of The Elements. This time chronicling, albeit in edited form, the career of guitar experimentalist and early drone pioneer / minimalist Rhys Chatham, a man whose carreer seemed to always have been overshadowed by fellow New Yorker / guitarist Glen Branca, who may have borrowed his multiple guitar idea from Chatham anyway. Plenty to take in here. An amazingly comprehensive booklet with notes on each piece as well as a fascinating artist's diary that Chatham kept during the seventies, eighties and nineties. And three discs chock full of some truly gorgeous music. The interesting thing, to me at least, is how accessible most of Chatham's pieces are. Sure, he's a minimalist composer, an artist, an avant garde pioneer, but when you get right down to brass tacks, the tracks here sound a lot like Stereolab or Neu! Filtered through Television and downtown Manhattan and with some more challenging arrangements, but very post rock nonetheless. Endless crescendos and repetetive intros build and build, until the band launches into propulsive Krautrock jams. Simple, repetitive and totally hypnotic. Echoes of AQ faves Circle and Salvatore as well as Faust and Can. Even though the pieces are for multiple guitars, it's hard to hear anything other than some really nice, spacey jams. There are also some pieces for multiple horns that are really gorgeous, repetitive and woozy. Militaristic drums underpin seasick melodies over rumbling low end bass drones with the horns playing a warbly, wavery melody over and over. Reminds me of Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk" slowed down and played through the sound system at CBGB's. The first disc though is worth the price of the box alone. The entirety of disc one is taken up by the piece 'Two Gongs", where two huge gongs are beaten, rubbed, bowed, struck and shaken to produce an unbelievably rich, rumbling, moaning drone, with overtones that shift restlessly and endlessly changing the emotions of the piece every second. Dark and langorous, deep and powerful. Fans of the recent Karen Stackpole gongs 12" we listed a few lists back will love this, as will fans of Flynt, Maclise, Cale, Coleclough and other masters of the mighty drone. But like we mentioned before, the other two discs may also appeal to adventurous post/pop rockers into Tortoise, Stereolab, Circle, Salvatore as well as folks into krautrock/free rock/space rock.
MPEG Stream: "An Angel Moves Too Fast To See - Prelude"
MPEG Stream: "An Angel Moves Too Fast To See - Allegro"
MPEG Stream: "Two Gongs"

CHATHAM, RHYS Die Donnergotter (Table Of The Elements) cd 16.98
Always unpredictable and often a little bit frustrating, Table Of The Elements have decided to re-release 2 of the 3 discs from the now out of print Rhys Chatham An Angel Moves Too Fast To See box set (the third disc to follow later?), with no mention on either of these two new discs that they are indeed the same discs contained in the box. So if you already own the Chatham box, you already have this stuff, but if you somehow missed the box, you absolutely need this!
A gorgeously packaged and lovingly assembled disc chronicling one of the most important works of guitar experimentalist and early drone pioneer / minimalist Rhys Chatham, a man whose career seemed to always have been overshadowed by fellow New Yorker / guitarist Glenn Branca, who may have borrowed his multiple guitar idea from Chatham anyway.
The interesting thing, to us at least, is how accessible most of Chatham's pieces are. Sure, he's a minimalist composer, an artist, an avant garde pioneer, but when you get right down to brass tacks, much of his music sounds a lot like Stereolab or Neu! Filtered through Television and downtown Manhattan and with some more challenging arrangements, but very post rock nonetheless. Endless crescendos and repetetive intros build and build, until the band often launches into propulsive krautrock jams. Simple, repetitive and totally hypnotic. Echoes of AQ faves Circle and Salvatore as well as Faust and Can. Even though the pieces are for multiple guitars as well as sometimes horns and drums, it's hard to hear anything other than some really nice, spacey jams.
This disc begins with the slow building epic title track, all keening guitars and droning sustain, peppered with splashes of jazzy percussion and extra layers of chordal warmth, but like most of Chatham's pieces, it eventually kicks into a groovy post rock / krautrock jam, driving drums, soaring melodies, all with a blissed out fuzzy sheen. Definite shades of Stereolab and Circle on this one. "Waterloo #2" is the track that reminds us of Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk" slowed down and played through the sound system at CBGB. Martial drumming and dense horn figures float above. Up next is the scuzzy garage stomp of "Drastic Classicism", nods to Faust and Can but with plenty of distorted guitar scuzz and atonal fuzz rock jangle. The minimalism here is in the relentless repeated main riff, building to a blissed out jam, similar to the way black metal riffs at their most buzzy fuzz out into epic dronescapes. But Chatham's take is more like some sort of Stooges/Brainbombs drone. Cool. "Guitar Trio" is another spacious post rock jam, guitars hover and float, chords and notes ring out and drift into and around each other, supported by a simple solid rhythm. Finally, things finish off with Chatham's infamous "Massacre On MacDougal Street", a nearly twenty minute long, horn / percussion freak out, with honking skronking horns moaning and screeching and warbling, weaving dense stretches of marching band repetition and long slow stretches of moaning and groaning drones, all above BIG percussion, booming toms, miltary snares, chaotic drum fills and spurts of complex tribalism. The perfect soundtrack for some insane sixties psychedelic horror film. Full of tension and minor key atonalism. Intense!
While this stuff is obviousl of interest to folks into modern minimalism ala Maclise, Cale, Coleclough and other masters of the mighty drone, Chatham's more rock stuff, like An Angel Moves Too Fast To See, will definitely appeal to the more adventurous post/pop rockers into the above mentioned outfits (Tortoise, Stereolab, Circle, Salvatore) as well as folks into all things krautrock/free rock/space rock.
MPEG Stream: "Die Donnergotter"
MPEG Stream: "Waterloo, No. 2"

CHATHAM, RHYS Echo Solo (Azoth Schalplatten) lp 16.98

CHATHAM, RHYS Guitar Trio Is My Life (Table Of The Elements) 3cd 28.00
Excessive minimalism?! For the thirty year anniversary of the release of Rhys Chatham's seminal musical manifesto, Guitar Trio, a piece that married avant minimalism to No Wave punk aesthetics, Chatham made a five stop tour (Brooklyn, Chicago, Buffalo, Toronto, and Montreal) recruiting a star studded cast of musicians at each location. Brooklyn featured members of Sonic Youth and Jonathan Kane; Chicago featured members of Tortoise; Montreal, members of God Speed! You Black Emperor, and so on. Table of The Elements has released this whopping three disc set documenting both parts of the piece at each locale. Those not familiar with "Guitar Trio", the piece is basically three or more guitarists (sometimes up to 14), a bass player and a drummer, playing the same chord (an Em7) roughly to the rhythm of "My Baby does the Hanky Panky" by Tommy James and the Shondells. Starting with one guitar player, the others join in and the piece soon builds into a wall of buzzing harmonic overtones. Part two repeats the structure but faster with more driving drums. It's an amazing piece no doubt, and important surely in the scheme of musical breakthroughs (i.e it's so simple, it's genius!). But despite the star power wielding the axes and sticks, and the microtonally subtle nuances of all those harmonic overtones, there is extremely little variation in listening to five versions of the same one chord piece. Making this triple cd set more of a souvenir document of an event than an essential listen.
MPEG Stream: "Guitar Trio Pt. 1 (Chicago)"
MPEG Stream: "Guitar Trio Pt. 2 (Brooklyn)"

CHATHAM, RHYS Reve Parisian (Primary Information) lp 21.00
A gorgeous new lp recording from the venerable minimalist composer Rhys Chatham, who in the recent past in New York and Paris has been staging, and revisiting, his multiple guitar orchestras (sometimes numbering in the hundreds!), performing his long form pieces of large repetitive clusters of sound. However, on Reve Parisian, Chatham returns to solo trumpet after a nearly twenty year hiatus from the instrument. Unlike his martial horn compositions of the eighties and nineties, the four pieces here are delicately layered cloud-like compositions of horn tones that billow and pulsate in rich harmonic textures and atmospheres. The first three tracks on side 1 are improvisational pieces for solo trumpet that build tonal free jazz passages into airy fields of circular momentum. The side long piece on side two, "Un Chanson Si Vieille" however, was composed for multiple trumpets resulting in a plaintive and moving piece where the lush warm wind tones weave a gossamer like sound environment that eventually no longer seems like horns at all. It reminds us somewhat of Harold Budd's instrumental collaboration with members of The Cocteau Twins, where tendril like vibrational layers of treated piano and guitar combined in a vast misty breath-like condensation of sound, yet Chatham creates these tones solely through the use of horns to wonderfully stunning effect. Originally created as a sonic component to a visual art show by collaborator Jacob Kassey, the lp is packaged in a stunning gatefold with an arced die-cut cover, and is limited to 1000 copies. Recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Un Chanson Si Vieille"
MPEG Stream: "Impromptu 1"

CHATHAM, RHYS Two Gongs (Table Of The Elements) cd 16.98
Previously available only in the now out of print triple cd set An Angel Moves Too Fast To See: Selected Works 1971-1989, "Two Gongs", that set's highlight is finally available as a single disc.
Two huge gongs are beaten, rubbed, bowed, struck and shaken to produce an unbelievably rich, rumbling, moaning drone, with overtones that shift restlessly and endlessly changing the emotions of the piece every second. Dark and languorous, deep and powerful. Fans of that Dielectric Karen Stackpole gongs 12" we listed a year or two back will love this, as will fans of Flynt, Maclise, Cale, Coleclough, Organum and other masters of the mighty drone. So awesome.
MPEG Stream: "Two Gongs"

CHATON, ANNE-JAMES Evenements 09 (Raster-Noton) cd 17.98
Oh how we hate spoken word. Bad poetry, dramatic readings, in all but a very very very very few rare cases, spoken word = BAD. But then this is not your average spoken word record. In fact it's not even strictly a spoken word record. It's a modern minimal electronic record, made with voices instead of electronics. Closer to someone like Jaap Blonk, that is if someone recorded Blonk's bizarre poetry and then chopped it all up and reassembled it into complex rhythms.
Sound poet Anne James Chaton has been collecting receipts and train tickets, newspaper headlines, and various other seemingly mundane bits of text, specifically related to rare media related occasions, in the case of these recordings, specifically Barack Obama becoming president, and the death of the 'king of pop' Michael Jackson.
Much like those sound exercises where a phrase is repeated until it becomes a jumble of nonsense syllables, these pieces are paced on short spoken pieces, which are recorded, cut up, and reassembled into human beatbox style hyper rhythmic arrangements. The result is strangely hypnotic, not just the words, but the percussive elements of recorded speech are transformed into lurching, stuttery, skittering beats, the jumble of rhythmic vocals peppered with brief snippets of the original phrase, creating weirdly meditative trancelike expanses of rhythmic speech, or speech based techno, or whatever you want to call it.
Baffling and brilliant, this stuff would sound so amazing mixed randomly into a DJ set, but it's also some serious headphone bliss, it's so easy to get totally lost, letting the words and sounds, the sibilance and phrasing, the pulse and throb of these textual rhythms transport you to some strange world where sound and speech, music and words, blur into something wholly other.
Also included are shorter loops, presumably so you can assemble your own rhythmic word workout....
MPEG Stream: "Jeudi 22 Janvier 2009 - Evenement N20"
MPEG Stream: "Jeudi 19 Mars 2009 - Evenement N21"
MPEG Stream: "Vendredi 26 Juin 2009 - Evenement N23"

CHAUVEAU, SYLVAIN S (Type) cd 14.98

CHAUVEAU, SYLVAIN Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated) (Type) lp 19.98

CHEN SANTA MARIA Jefferson Chopper / Great Society (333) 7" 5.98

CHEN SANTA MARIA Jefferson Chopper / Great Society (333) 7" 5.98

CHEN SANTA MARIA KFJC 3/22/08 (Two Thousand Tapes) cassette 5.98
Latest blast of psychedelic textural soft-noise sonic experimentation from this local duo, who swing from heavy crunch to blissed out drift, this particular sonic session captured live on the radio, on the always awesome KFJC...

CHEN SANTA MARIA Murked (self-released) cassette 5.98

CHEN SANTA MARIA Murked (self-released) cassette 5.98

CHEN SANTA MARIA s/t (GSSD) cd 11.98
George Chen is responsible for so many cool things in the Bay Area. Whether it's helping keep the all-ages scene alive with Club Sandwich, injecting life into zine culture, championing all sorts of weird and unusual music, etc. So it's kind of easy to forget that the man is also quite an awesome music maker himself, for proof just check out records he's been on in bands like 7 Year Rabbit Cycle, Common Eider King Eider, Voltz, etc.
Teamed up with Steve Santa Maria the two have put together quite a potent concoction of damaged, haunting and often gorgeous textural sounds that rank right up there with folks like Taiga Remians, Simon Wickham-Smith and Birchville Cat Motel. Collapsing electronics, fractured guitar, seamless samples and primitive drum machines all come together to create sounds that would make the perfect soundtrack to a mysterious and brooding post-apocalyptic experimental film. These are sounds of machines on their last legs, creeping and crawling through fields of grit and grime and buzz and glitch trying to survive. Their affiliation with the East Bay noise scene can be heard on some of the more squelching and stuttering moments here, but they also have a more subtle side to their sound that is more dreamy and drifting keeping things drifting and spacey and oh so hypnotic!
MPEG Stream: "Tic Taxed"
MPEG Stream: "Insides Out"

CHEN SANTA MARIA & LUUSE s/t (self-released) cd-r 5.98
If you live in the bay area and don't know who George Chen is, we can safely say you've been locked in a windowless room for the past decade, surviving only on bread crust and lint. For those of you who fall under the above condition and have not had the pleasure of knowing Mr. Chen, he is a huge organizer of all kinds of all ages events and get togethers in the bay area, and has been on the road with all kinds of people from Grey Daturas to Common Eider King Eider. He also makes some seriously awesome music under the name Chen Santa Maria, usually of the noise freak-out persuasion. And this collaboration between Chen Santa Maria and Luuse is no exception, almost an hour of live sonic exploration from these dudes, relentless and all the while totally immersive and huge. Recommended!
MPEG Stream: "A"
MPEG Stream: "B"

CHEN, GEORGE Fried (Two Thousand Tapes) cassette 5.98

CHERRY BEACH PROJECT Silo II (Mystery Sea) cd-r 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The latest in the Mystery Sea label's ongoing exploration of "night-ocean drones", which as we've mentioned in the past, is precisely what these discs sound like. Dark, moonlit nights, rippling black seas, and drones, glorious drones!
Cherry Beach Project is the Canadian duo of Joda Clement and Nigel Craig, and Silo II was indeed recorded in a silo, at Cherry Beach, an industrial wasteland, on an abandoned peninsula in Toronto, know as a place, where "off the record" police activities occur, and all manner of crime. The area has since been demolished, but on the nights of recording, the duo were forced to abandon their equipment in the midst of some sort of violence, forced to return the next day to retrieve their equipment, only to be pursued by several unidentified men. With that sort of story behind the recording of Silo II, one might expect something more jagged, or harsh, or extreme, but instead, the sounds here, are glistening and delicate, massive stretches of shimmering space separating low end thrums and sparkling upper register glimmers, each note hovering gently like dust motes caught in moonbeams. Drops of water, send sonic ripples skyward, deep cavernous groans and distant chimes swirl lazily in wide open fields of reverb, huge barely audible rumbles permeate the proceedings, offering up subtle sonic support, bumps and random percussive thumps surface occasionally out of near silence, but just as quickly fade away. Definite nods to Japanese field recordists Toshiya Tsunoda, as the silo is as much a part of the action as the sounds created within it. So mysterious and dark, spacious and abstract, minimal and haunting.
Like all Mystery Sea releases, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each disc numbered, and gorgeously packaged in striking full color artwork.
MPEG Stream: "Untitled 1"
MPEG Stream: "Untitled 2"

CHERRY BLOSSOMS (AND JOSEPHINE FOSTER) s/t (self-released) cd-r 9.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Never heard of the Cherry Blossoms? Neither had we, but some quick digging around revealed that they are a damaged abstract free folk jugband from Tennessee, and that for this here disc, they were joined by none other than folk songstress Josephine Foster for a dizzying, tripped out experimental folk freeforall. Foster fans should be well prepared to not expect only gentle strumming, dreamy torch songs, and Appalachian fingerpicking, while some of that stuff is present, Foster spends as much time wading through dizzying folk flecked soundworlds that have way more in common with the No Neck Blues Band or Sunburned Hand Of The Man or Avarus. But even compared to those far out cats, some of this sounds pretty dang unhinged.
Thee opening track is a minimal chaotic swirl of random clatter, detuned guitar strum and scrape, and a dense cloud of tangled voices, a druggy psychedelic choir, voices all intertwined, crooning and cooing, careening back and forth, wild and confusional, eventually coalescing into a drug folk lament right at the end, before drifting into the next track, a wandering atonal folk jam, the guitar stumbling and detuned, jaw harp, more kitchen sink clatter, and those vocals again, not your typical harmonies, ghostly and mildly atonal, the main male vocal, a lazy drawl, wandering through a forest of feminine chanting and falsetto ooh's and ahh's. A lot of this sounds like genuine old timey music, that became corrupted as it was transmitted forward through time from the old days, everything coming through slightly twisted and tweaked, the vocals wavery and haunting, the guitars slightly out of tune, the drums more a splatter of percussion than actual rhythm, the whole record wavers druggily from dreamy damaged folk to abstract drone and strum, back and forth, often multiple times in the same song. On first listen, it's definitely strange and off putting, but a few songs in, we couldn't help but be carried off, lulled into a strange trance, by these mesmerizingly off kilter lullabies.
MPEG Stream: "Shimey Chuck Down"
MPEG Stream: "Shaker Tune"
MPEG Stream: "These Were Our Woods"

CHESSEX, ANTOINE Fools (Tourette Records) lp 17.98

CHESSEX, ANTOINE Terra Incognita (Absurd) lp 17.98
Total fucking destruction by way of a man with a saxophone and a couple of pedals. Zurich born and Berlin based, Antoine Chessex has a background in jazz, although his treatment of the instrument through his punishing use of distortion pedals arrives at something wholly other. He neither skronks nor screeches with his sax; rather his is a very physical sound, sculpted out of electronics possibly more than the prolonged bellows from his sax. Even the aggressive sounds that Ulrich Krieger gets out of his horn in Zeitkratzer pales in comparison to the monstrous noise that Chessex can muster. It's all about the circular breathing techniques, which form the undercurrents to his pulverizing distortion. The room clearing blasts from Chessex on Terra Incognita are actual live recordings from a couple of unspecified gigs in Japan and Germany. When he stomps down on the pedals and unleashes his crusty noise, it's an all-enveloping thrumm of mid-range noise through which you can make out various screams and yelps of Chessex vocalizing through his saxophone at the microphone in the bell of his horn. Throughout, he'll also hit upon some pretty fucking heavy riffs that hold more in common with the crustcore distorto-punk sounds from Man Is The Bastard. The middle half of side one finds Chessex eschewing the obliteration aesthetic, allowing his circular breathing to stand on its own. With the help of a delay pedal, Chessex offers an intensely psychoacoustic drone that falls somewhere between a Tibetan horn and the sound of WWII bomber engines.
This is billed as a 'single-sided lp with a hidden track'. Dunno how it qualifies as a 'hidden track' when you can see it clearly on the second side. Well, it is pressed as if were a 7", but on a 12" so that's a little odd.

CHESSMACHINE Live In Los Angeles (Line) cd 14.98

CHIE, MUKAI & GARY SMITH Eight + (Paratactile) cd 23.00

CHILD READERS Boy On A Cliff (Jewelled Antler) cd-r 9.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
An increasingly prolific body of work is emerging from a loose collective of San Francisco artists and musicians, a group that has spawned such neo-psychedelic improvisers as Thuja, Mirza, The Knit Separates, The Blithe Sons, and now The Child Readers. Self-described by the ever talented Loren Chasse (who is half of The Child Readers and released this cd-r through his Jewelled Antler imprint) as "Jandek meets Francisco Lopez," The Child Readers is somewhat of a metaphysical extention of the campfire sing-a-long. Alongside the spontaneous songwriting ability of Jason Honea (who sounds as if having equal parts Nick Drake, Martyn Bates, and yes, Jandek), Chasse filters into the mix empathic field recordings of fire crackle, birds, wind, and snapping twigs, as well as his lonely harmonium. The production techniques of The Child Readers are quite unusual, as they'll record something (possibly an action of scraping rocks or a floating vocal harmony from Honea) and then play it back through a cheap boombox and / or car stereo which would in turn get further augmentations. The resulting abstractions add a gritty richness which nicely complements Honea's often baroque voice. A strangely evocative record.
RealAudio clip: "Darkness Beneath The Trees"
RealAudio clip: "Reading For Winter"

CHILD READERS Dark Laughter (Jewelled Antler) cd-r 9.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
In the ongoing stream of releases, the Jewelled Antler collective continues to offer new facets to their signature of hazy, psychedelic improvisations; but of all of their productions, none are as risktaking as The Child Readers. The collaboration between Loren Chasse and Jason Honea, The Child Readers juxtaposes the detail oriented field recordings that Chasse brings to his numerous projects with Honea's idiosyncratic songs that center on Honea's fluttering falsetto. For those 'purists' in the field recording community, Honea's voice, uttering stream of consciousness lyrics of wide-eyed wonder and innocence, may be an irritation within the time-based narratives that Chasse builds though his seemless collages of crows, airplanes, and campfire cracklings. Yet, there is a strange logic that exists in The Child Readers, which seeks to reconcile Chasse's field recordings and Honea's voice by blurring everything into expressions of natural sound. The Child Readers cares little for semantic distinctions, preferring to concentrate on listening to each other and what they bring to the collaborative process and wandering wherever inspiration takes them. "Dark Laughter" is sloppy, obtuse, and occasionally stumbles; but even in those falterings, The Child Readers could be one of the more rewarding projects you will find.
MPEG Stream: "Perfect Rainbow"

CHILD READERS Memory and Fantasy (Mallard Lake) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
"It's not magic, it's music". The Child Readers are the duo of Jewelled Antler mainstay Loren Chasse and vocalist Jason Honea of The Knit Separates. This, their third album (the two earlier ones were cd-rs on JA, now out of print) is something like an audio postcard from their own far-off fantasyland... They give free reign to their creativity, with tracks here ranging from textural noise/drone of near Merzbowian dimensions to the folky acoustic song-fragments seemingly recorded on a picnic in the woods...We hear child and adult voices mingling, alongside tape spooling and twinkling tinkling toy piano or chiming music box sounds...Honea's sensitive, melodic vocals might be accompanied equally by sparsely strummed guitar and the burble of a brook. Lyrically, he could be taking inspiration from children's stories -- that is, stories BY children. Such as the weirdness of "The Shark Airplane". Other tracks, like "Sexual Anguish (including The Psychic Castle)" can only be the work of grown up children. Full of interesting textures and real emotion, this is yet another excellent Jewelled Antler-related release, something like Honea's inner child being babysat by the Blithe Sons. Euro import, limited.
MPEG Stream: "Voyaging (The Reds, Pinks And Purples)"
MPEG Stream: "The Shark Airplane"

CHION, MICHEL Requiem (Sub Rosa) lp 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

CHOP SHOP Oxide (23five) cd 14.98
LAST COPIES AVAILABLE!!! When we heard that one of our favorite noise albums was nearly out of print, we grabbed a bunch. If you've not gotten a hold of this album, this is probably your last chance! Here's what we said about it a while back...
Akita. Menche. Blankenship. Dilloway. These are the men of noise with discographies the size of small town phone books, proving their might in the international noise community by the sheer audaciousness of their output. But then again, you might really only need a single testament to stake your claim as one of the greatest noise musicians. Chop Shop has chosen the latter tactic, with Oxide being that sole document, after a relatively tiny back catalogue of cassette only releases, a couple of cd-rs, and two infamous 10"s. Both released through RRR, the first was the Steel Plate 2x10" that was literally bound to a steel plate; and the second was a split 10" with Small Cruel Party that was literally cut in half, making playback a dangerous proposition for the needle on your record player. Both of those releases have long been out of print; and despite the hushed respect that those 10"s demand, Chop Shop has kept a low profile. A very low profile. Hence, after a career that has spanned nearly two decades, Oxide is his first proper cd. And it's stunning.
The sole proprietor of Chop Shop is New York based noise technician Scott Konzelmann, whose audio demolition revolves around speaker constructions forged out of hammered plate metal and disfigured commercial grade pipes, which focus particular frequencies and resonant overtones into swarming orchestras of rust, noise, drone, and static. Tape has long been Konzelmann's medium of choice for recording; and like William Basinski before him, Konzelmann endures the self-disintegration of the medium whilst transcribing the sounds of Oxide digitally. Where Basinski's vocabulary of decay is all romance and melancholy, Konzelmann's is muscular and urgently present. Oxide offers a metallurgist's din where compressed air strikes hard steel and machine vibrations generate noxious resonant frequencies in neighboring vents. Konzelmann composes the old school way, with a razor blade and pieces of tape, generating jump cut edits alongside the self-generated debris from the magnetic literally falling apart. These grey, dead-tech drones thus rupture and explode along the faultlines of those edits, and Oxide emerges as a forceful, dynamic album without resorting to puerile shock tactics. This is a seriously great noise album for anybody with a passing interest in Broken Flag, Hansen Records, or early Hafler Trio.
MPEG Stream: "Oxide (extract 1) "
MPEG Stream: "Oxide (extract 2)"
MPEG Stream: "Oxide (extract 3)"

CHORD Flora (Neurot) cd 14.98
Avid readers of our blog probably already got a taste of Chord, a high concept super group, who craft longform compositions, each one the sonic realization of a single chord. Some folks might remember the group Physics from San Diego, a group who did something similar, with a revolving lineup, at one time or another featuring most famous or semi famous San Diego rockers among their ranks, and who typically featured multiple guitarists, all playing a single chord, quite often a C chord.
The group Chord, featuring one member of Pelican along with several other Chicago area musicians, are bit more highbrow with their 'Chords'. This record displaying four of them: Am, Am7, E9 and Gmaj(flat 13). As we mentioned in our blog post too, for an April Fool's Day a while back we imagined the ultimate doomdrone record where Earth, Boris and SUNNO))) would each play one not of a chord, and that chord would be the release. Well, how prescient were we?
Here the players are each assigned a note but are allowed to do whatever they like with that note, octave, timbre, playing style, effects, the various players letting their notes drift and intertwine with the other notes, the resulting chord a lush, cloud of sound, constantly shifting and transforming, changing shape, slipping from hushed shimmer to corrosive buzz and back again, sometimes building to a Sunroof!-like wall of sound, other times, so minimal it seems to be just particles and fragments floating in an expanse of soft focus whirs and whispers. Some parts are simple and strummed and sound like a proper song, but those parts soon blossom into something much more layered and abstract. A Minor is our favorite chord, and the Am track here just completely fries the chord, a cacophonous chaotic wall of crumbling churning super distorted buzz and skree, blurred into an almost hypnotic slab of corrosive pulsing noise. It's all quite dramatic and epic, quite beautiful, stately at certain moments, almost chaotic and crumbling at others, anyone into Conrad, Cale, Maclise, Flynt and especially Branca and Chatham will definitely dig this. As well as guitardrone freaks who count Fear Falls Burning, RST, Seconds In Formaldehyde, Elm, Continuum and the like among their favorites.
MPEG Stream: "Gmaj (flat13)"
MPEG Stream: "Am"

CHORD Progression (Important) cd 14.98
The return of high concept ambient dronescapers Chord, a sort-of side project of post metal heavies Pelican. Chord, as their name implies, only ever play a single chord, each track a different one, this time around it's EbMaj9, Gm11 and D6. Sounds boring, but it really isn't, in fact probably most drone outfits play one chord their whole career, but this, this is something more, with each member contributing a note, the notes forming a chord, and all of them playing different instruments, different tempos and timbres, the guitars shimmer warmly, the piano (?), swirls and drifts in a sea of hazy reverb, there seems to be some burbling bass too, it's all woven into something lush and dreamy, hypnotic and mesmerizing.
When we reviewed the first Chord album, we pointed out that we had come up with the idea of a 'chord' band on our April Fool's list way back when, with SUNNO))), Earth and Boris each tackling one of the notes, to make a mighty E chord. We still like to think that's where they got the idea. We also mentioned the late great Physics, a San Diego supergroup who always played a C, long spaced out jams, with multiple guitar players, always C. But as we mentioned before, Chord is a much more thoughtful project, definitely on the nerdy side of the spectrum, I mean, they made a song called "EbMaj9", and the group is as much about concept for the players as it is about the sound, but whatever the inspiration, the resulting soundscapes play out like our favorite guitardrone records. Smoldering slow burning expanses of deep layered thrum, hazy, washed out drifts of abstract choral blur. Whereas the other record occasionally built into Sunroof!-worthy squalls, Progression seems to be much more minimal, hushed and restrained, the only deviation is near the end of the epic 40 minute "Gm11", where things get full on heavy, a crushing avalanche of crumbling, superdistorted, blur and buzz, before slipping into the final track, a surprising bit of twang flecked folkiness, wreathed in a hazy buzz, and underpinned by some FX shimmer, but otherwise, sun dappled and dreamy, and for the record, all in the chord of D6.
And speaking of single chords, the most recent Austerity Program, besides being an awesome record, did something similar, in that they only ever used one chord, for the whole record, the band was appalled that no one noticed, but it just goes to show you what someone can do with a single chord, making more with less, a concept that Chord also embody, especially considering their sound has most definitely blossomed into something much more than just a quirky concept. Really great. And WAY recommended for fans of Fear Falls Burning, Final, R.Y.N., Elm, RST, Vulture Club and other practitioners of guitardronedrift.
And just to make things totally confusing, the cd and the lp are TOTALLY different. Progressions is a single collection of songs spread out over both formats, so the record starts on the cd, and continues on the lp, the music on each exclusive to that format. So if you do want ALL of Progression, you have to buy both, although most folks would probably be fine with one or the other.
MPEG Stream: "EbMaj9 (Descent)"
MPEG Stream: "Gm11 (Pelagic)"

CHORD Progression (Important) 2lp 22.00
The return of high concept ambient dronescapers Chord, a sort-of side project of post metal heavies Pelican. Chord, as their name implies, only ever play a single chord, each track a different one, this time around it's EbMaj9, Gm11 and D6. Sounds boring, but it really isn't, in fact probably most drone outfits play one chord their whole career, but this, this is something more, with each member contributing a note, the notes forming a chord, and all of them playing different instruments, different tempos and timbres, the guitars shimmer warmly, the piano (?), swirls and drifts in a sea of hazy reverb, there seems to be some burbling bass too, it's all woven into something lush and dreamy, hypnotic and mesmerizing.
When we reviewed the first Chord album, we pointed out that we had come up with the idea of a 'chord' band on our April Fool's list way back when, with SUNNO))), Earth and Boris each tackling one of the notes, to make a mighty E chord. We still like to think that's where they got the idea. We also mentioned the late great Physics, a San Diego supergroup who always played a C, long spaced out jams, with multiple guitar players, always C. But as we mentioned before, Chord is a much more thoughtful project, definitely on the nerdy side of the spectrum, I mean, they made a song called "EbMaj9", and the group is as much about concept for the players as it is about the sound, but whatever the inspiration, the resulting soundscapes play out like our favorite guitardrone records. Smoldering slow burning expanses of deep layered thrum, hazy, washed out drifts of abstract choral blur. Whereas the other record occasionally built into Sunroof!-worthy squalls, Progression seems to be much more minimal, hushed and restrained, the only deviation is near the end of the epic 40 minute "Gm11", where things get full on heavy, a crushing avalanche of crumbling, superdistorted, blur and buzz, before slipping into the final track, a surprising bit of twang flecked folkiness, wreathed in a hazy buzz, and underpinned by some FX shimmer, but otherwise, sun dappled and dreamy, and for the record, all in the chord of D6.
And speaking of single chords, the most recent Austerity Program, besides being an awesome record, did something similar, in that they only ever used one chord, for the whole record, the band was appalled that no one noticed, but it just goes to show you what someone can do with a single chord, making more with less, a concept that Chord also embody, especially considering their sound has most definitely blossomed into something much more than just a quirky concept. Really great. And WAY recommended for fans of Fear Falls Burning, Final, R.Y.N., Elm, RST, Vulture Club and other practitioners of guitardronedrift.
And just to make things totally confusing, the cd and the lp are TOTALLY different. Progressions is a single collection of songs spread out over both formats, so the record starts on the cd, and continues on the lp, the music on each exclusive to that format. So if you do want ALL of Progression, you have to buy both, although most folks would probably be fine with one or the other.
MPEG Stream: "EbMaj9 (Descent)"
MPEG Stream: "Gm11 (Pelagic)"

CHORD FORT, THE Smile Louder / Regions Of Memory (3 Acre Floor / Paha Porvari) cd ep 5.98
You can just imagine a bunch of rambunctious childlike outsider artists and freak folk musicians deciding to get all their old sofa cushions and broken instruments and stuffed animals to build a big old Chord Fort in the corner of their practice space / crash pad. And this is sort of the musical equivalent. Jason Honea (who you might remember from Jewelled Antler outfits The Child Readers, the Franciscan Hobbies, as well as the Knit Separates and Teenage Panzercorps) teams up with a couple of other musical miscreants to build their very own Chord Fort, a super lo-fi Steve Reich-ish meditation, a slowly shifting keyboard figure, swathed in tape hiss and fuzzy sonic detritus. Totally mesmerizing, the melody only barely wavering, the fuzz and hiss becoming more and more agitated in the background. The track is titled "Smile Louder" and you can almost imagine hear a face trying to sustain a huge smile for the whole 8 minutes, his muscles twitching, the strain showing on his face, beads of sweat dripping into his eyes, the genuine toothy smile slowly becoming more of a sneer as the corners of his mouth begin to droop. It's a gorgeously tense minimalist exploration. "Smile Louder" is followed up by an ultra brief, one minute long, dreamy ambient coda, a warm whir beneath simple chimes, children's voices and a creepy music box melody.
Another gorgeously packaged cd-r -- full color cover, an amazing painting, printed inside as well, a folded over, textured paper insert, and the disc is professionally printed and quite striking.
Only 9 minutes long, but also only six bucks!
MPEG Stream: "Smile Louder"

CHRIS & COSEY Heartbeat (CTI) lp 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Throbbing Gristle ceased to exist (for the first time) in 1981, shortly after the transgressive industrialists performed in San Francisco in May of that year. TG were deft in their manipulation of media, ominously stating that "The Mission is terminated," with the 'mission' referring to their numerous stark proclamations against society at large conjoined with their adventurous manglings of noise, rhythm, and atonality. But there's another rather self-evident historical fact: that TG's Genesis P-Orridge broke up with fellow bandmate & long-term partner Cosey Fanny Tutti. Shortly thereafter, Cosey and fellow TG member Chris Carter struck out on their own (with a romantic partnership not far behind), and later on in 1981, Chris & Cosey released their first solo project, the minimal wave / synthpunk masterpiece Heartbeat. In TG, Carter's propensity for beguiling electronic melodies and disco rhythms could be heard on such classic tracks as "United" and "Hot On The Heels Of Love." Both of these were signature tracks for Carter's aesthetic, which espoused an economic proto-techno approach to drum machine rhythms and heavily sequenced electro pulse melodies. Such has been the template for Chris & Cosey's sound since.
"Put Yourself In Los Angeles" opens the album with a dizzying percolation of flanged electronics which snaps into a militant march of Cosey's gnashed guitars locked against barked samples of a lunatic radio host and insistent rhythms. At least on this track, it's easy to hear the influence that Chris & Cosey would have on the likes of Front 242, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails. Other tracks such as the metronomic spiralling of "Voodoo" and the downright pastoral birdsounds of "Moorby" looked back to the Krautrock electronic meanderings of Cluster. "Just Like You" is one of Chris & Cosey's finest tracks, oozing with paranoia and dread throughout the slashed noises and found dialogue haunting the minimalist techno-horror sequencing and sustained minor-key melodies. The title track completes the album brilliantly by looking forward to any number of Detroit-inspired techno trax with double timed rhythms emerging out of maudlin, if cybernetic melodies and electronic-pop propulsive sequencing that really does act as a bridge between the realm of Kraftwerk and the British new wave that was bubbling up around Chris & Cosey back in the day. An absolute classic!
MPEG Stream: "Put Yourself In Los Angeles"
MPEG Stream: "Just Like You"
MPEG Stream: "Heartbeat"

CHRISTA PFANGEN Watch Me Getting Back The End (Die Schachtel) cd 17.98
The Die Schachtel label's "Zeit" series devoted to current acts from the Italian avant-garde/indie-rock underground has a couple new releases out now -- discs by Christa Pfangen (reviewed here) and Angelo Petronella (which we'll try to get to next time). The Zeit series started off with the fabulous self-titled album by a band simply named A, hopefully you've checked that one out already (we highlighted it on list 248). This cd is almost just as good. Their fragmented, abstract electro-acoustics, and use of silence as well as sound, definitely puts Christa Pfangen in the same experimental ballpark as A, 3/4hadbeeneliminated, Giuseppe Ielasi, Stefano Pilia, Renato Rinaldi, Larsen, Sinistri/Starfuckers, and other artists from this happenin' scene. Playing "guitars, drums, voices, objects, electroacoustic devices", Christa Pfangen is in fact a duo, comprised of Andrea Belfi (who also has a new solo album out on Hapna by the way) and Mattia Coletti. These ladies have named their band Christa PFANGEN in some sort of odd tribute to Nico, whose real name was Christa PAFFGEN...but beyond that we don't think this has much to do with Nico or her music, though maybe there's some harmonium on here somewhere!
A tangle of nervous drumming and ambient drones, all staticky and stuttery, Watch Me Getting Back The End is both challenging and pretty... they've got a moody melodiousness to 'em not unlike 3/4hadbeeneliminated, or Jewelled Antler projects such as Thuja and the Blithe Sons. Certainly there's a lot here for even the not-so-experimental indie pop fan to mellow out to. String-born notes fall like leaves from a tree, melodies blow away in a gentle wind of drone, whispering voices caress the ear... so nice!
As with all Die Schachtel stuff, the packaging is super spiffy -- a digipak with embossed cover art.
MPEG Stream: "I'm Leaving"
MPEG Stream: "The Nail, The Eye"

CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS Communal Rust (Community Library) cd 16.98
Ok, so this has been passed around the store for a little while with a rotation of different people assigned to review it. Why the hesitation? It seems the folks around here who had no idea who Christmas Decorations are, took a look at the cover and thought it was perhaps another Christian psych-folk reissue from the seventies or some twee homey Americana and kept putting it below their priority list. And the folks around here who DID know who Christmas Decorations are, from their Kranky debut a few years ago, didn't like that album very much at all, mainly due to its atonal vocalizing over quirky electronica. Well, when we finally put this on, we were pleasantly surprised, if not out and out AMAZED at what we heard. First of all, there are thankfully no vocals, and while this is not the Christian folk or Americana record some of us thought it to be, there is a strain of, er rustic folkiness through the presence of slide guitar as it barely permeates through the murky minimal ambience of shifting electronics. It seems that Christmas Decorations have cleaned house since their debut, removing all the unnecessary elements of song-forms from their compositions, and reducing their sound to layers of decayed and drifting abstractions barely hinting at the melodies beneath them. Think the winter equivalent to Fennesz's Endless Summer. Like the sounds of oxidation on old and rotting wood, subtle and melancholy with the textures of wet dirt and leaves burbling under slowly melting ice. So beautiful! We think fans of Jasper TX and Machinefabriek and similar outfits of dreamy drift would dig this a lot. What a surprise!!
MPEG Stream: "Closer To the Carpet"
MPEG Stream: "Twig Harpoon"
MPEG Stream: "Aphid Text"

CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS Far Flung Hum (Wodger) lp 17.98
Christmas Decorations are a tough band to pin down. Which just might be why we like them so much. In fact more and more with every record. Their latest, the vinyl only Far Flung Hum, might be the most confusing, the most difficult to describe, and consequently, very likely their best yet.
On their last record, they began to introduce a sort of folky twang into their soundscapes, nothing dramatic, but enough to give the proceedings a rustic vibe, to temper their electronics, helping to create a sound both modern and timeless, alien yet warm and familiar. FFH begins with a sort of disembodied alien folk, strings creak, instruments buzz and rumble, melodies are seemingly digitized and released to drift like pixilated clouds, in some places it sounds like a field recording of a hoedown on some ranch, frozen, then played back incredibly slow, allowing the listener to wander science fiction style amidst all these peoples and happenings that seem to be moving a hundred times slower than us. Drones buzz softly, bits of abstract percussion tinkle and chime, organs (or accordions?) wheeze and warble, there's a Finnish folk vibe for sure but with more twang, and somehow filtered through a much more modern, if slightly cracked approach. Some tracks have a distinct No Neck Blues Band or Sunburned Hand Of The Man feel, very tribal and jammy, but with the sounds of machines, and what sounds like folks laboring in the field, digging, water being bailed, it could all be manufactured, but it does sound like processed field recordings rendered musically. Deep resonant drones, insect like chitter, tons of ambient sound, almost as if all the recording had taken place on farms and in people's homes or on street corners, allowing all the various sounds of every day life to subtly blend into the music being made. And where the electronic aspect in the past sounded more, well, electronic, now the Decorations have mastered it so the bits of electronics and glitchery, sound less like some electronic band making weird sounds, and more like electronics are in fact some living thing, that just happens to occasionally flit by, its natural sounds and calls a part of the every day soundscape, which again helps make FFH sound so organic and alive.
Elsewhere the sounds dip back into tribal rumble, sounds are processed and released back into the wild to interact with natural sounds, there are long stretches of Morricone-ish cinematic ambience, deep growling swells, little flurries of electronics and fractured melodies, but all arranged into one constantly evolving soundworld, an ever shifting space the listener is forced to navigate, and is left to wander in freely, enjoying the sounds, returning to familiar areas, or better yet, getting completely and utterly lost.
Incredible packaging, and oversized gatefold matchbook style fold over sleeve, letter pressed on thick textured cardstock, with the inner sleeve sealed to the inside of the outer sleeve. Can't remember exactly HOW, but as you might well imagine, probably pretty dang limited.

CHRISTOPHE HEEMANN Magnetic Tape Splicing lp 13.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Rumours have it that Christophe was clocked at over 500 splices per second for this record. Regardless of the truth to this, his brilliant cut-up collage done entirely on an old reel-to-reel sounds very similar to recent digital collages of Stock, Hausen, and Walkman!

CHRYST PhantasmaChronica (Omniversal) cd 14.98
Way back in the nineties, when we were first getting into black metal, we discovered an Austrian horde called Korova, that were pretty much everything we wanted in a weirdo black metal band, blasting riffage, soaring baroque keyboards, over the top male/female vox, their sound constantly mutating and getting weirder and weirder, the band eventually introducing electronica and other non-metal weirdness into their sound, and transforming into what was essentially an experimental blackened pop band. Sort of. The band eventually transformed into Korovakill and released a sort-of concept record called Waterhells, which continued the band's descent into sonic madness and progression towards a grim/kvlt-metalhead-alienating whattthefuckness that we of course LOVED. That record came out nearly a decade ago, so we just assumed that Korova/Korovakill were no more. That is until a few weeks ago, when we got an email from a band with the odd moniker of Chryst, who it turns out were the latest incarnation of Korova. We got a copy of the record, and were a bit confused by the bizarre and surreal cover art, the front of which features a plastic model of christ crucified on one of those wind turbines, a silhouette of which forms the 'Y' in the Chryst logo. Flip over the record and there's a strange man with a head of hair, a beard and mustache made from photoshopped clouds, oh and alongside his head is a fish floating in the air. Pretty ridiculous for sure, but once we threw the record on, it all made sense. Sonically, the record sort of sounds exactly how the artwork looks, surreal and over the top, twisted and confusional, and pretty geniusly baffling.
Our first impression was that Chryst sounded like a crazy mash up of Hammers Of Misfortune, Uz Jsme Doma, Hollenthon, Judson Fountain doing that witch voice, Cradle Of Filth, and Orff's Carmina Burana (which they do an a cappela version of at one point!!), look those up on the aQ site and see if it doesn't make perfect sense. And it's really not that far off the mark, the sound is super theatrical, and totally twisted, and not a little bit ridiculous, and in lesser hands it could have been a total clusterfuck, but there does seem to be a method to their madness, moving well beyond the weird metal dabbling of their previous incarnations, and leaving other weird metal contemporaries of theirs like Dodheimsgard, Borknagar, Arcturus in the dust. And creating a sort of modern avant black metal cabaret.
There's really too much going on, and the songs change direction and sound it would take forever to describe the whole record, but let's go through the first few songs and you should definitely get a feel for how fantastically freaky and totally ruling this really is.
The opener "The Awakening" starts off like some traditional black metal, some killer buzzing riffage, pounding drums, howled demonic vokills, then it switches gears, into a furious blast, still pretty straight ahead except for the weird insectoid theremin melody, and then the deep dramatic crooned vox, but still well within the realms of black metal for sure, that is until the background vocals come in, a weird falsetto choir, and the strange extra percussion, the productions seeming to shift, until everything stops, leaving just a haunting stretch of chimes and harmony vocals, only to lurch right back into that blasting metal, only to have the track start changing speed, slooooowing waaaaaay down, then speeding back up super fast, then slooooooowing doooooown again, and finally finishing off in a blaze of hyperspeed buzz, which leads directly into the super dramatic synth/vocal opening of "I Are You", which is where those croaky shrieky Judson Fountain witch-like vox surface for the first time, then some orchestral percussion, some strange pseudo operatic vocals, and then the band launches into some furious blackness, with some insanely fast drumming, and those operatic vocals continue within the buzzing and blasting, a strange mix, but it definitely works in some weird way.
Then there's "Leaving The Ashes" with its buzzing cold wave synthy opening, which leads to some seriously ruling keyboard/vocal heavy epic power metal replete with horns, which abruptly shifts into "Storming Outside", a furious blast of punky heaviness, rife with slippery atonal guitars and more moody vox, all wreathed in swirling maniacal synths.
And so it goes, not necessarily getting stranger and stranger, merely keeping the already off the charts level of weirdness throughout. Most of the tracks are quite short, more like movements, all woven together into a single flowing epic, the sound shifting constantly and relentlessly, lots of black buzz, and the black metal parts are definitely black enough for the true grim hordes, but even those parts are twisted all up into new freaky fantastical shapes, but as should be obvious by now, for every bit of black blast, there's plenty of other stranger sounds, that range from carnivalesque cabaret to strange almost sun shiney Beach Boys vocal flecked freakfolk/Appalachia, but ultimately the key to this fractured fucked up schizophrenic avant metal opus, is that every part, be it straight ahead (relatively) or twisted beyond recognition, is impossibly catchy, so the ADD arrangements become an embarrassment of sonic riches, with your initial disappointment when a part ends, mitigated by the beginning of a new, equally kick ass part, which is most definitely a rarity in most music, metal especially.
Absolutely recommended for all the aQ-ers out there who love their metal demented and damaged and totally ridiculously over the top, and for the metal shy, this might just be the sort of gateway record that could very well lure you over to the dark (weird) sideÉ Here's hoping!
MPEG Stream: "The Awakening"
MPEG Stream: "I Are You"
MPEG Stream: "Leaving The Ashes"
MPEG Stream: "Storming Outside"
MPEG Stream: "The Surge Lands"

CHRYSTAL BELLE SCRODD Belle de Jour (Klang Galerie) cd 17.98
While this is the reissue of the second Chrystal Belle Scrodd record which was originally released in 1986, Belle De Jour features some of the earliest recordings that Diana Rogerson produced with her husband Steven Stapleton (aka Nurse With Wound). Belle De Jour opens with three short pieces of bowed cymbal scrapes and metallic screeches bathed in variable layers of reverb sounding not too far off from the early Nurse With Wound album Homotopie For Marie. However, things get really going later on in the disc when Rogerson and Stapleton present "Deadroads / A Gothic Western," which gets off to a groovy start with an infinitely looped '60s go-go rock riff twisted into something that Brainticket would have been proud to have birthed, complete with hallucinogenic guitar freak-outs and Diana ranting in a cavalcade of voices through an impossible to follow stream of consciousness narrative. The thunderous "Riding The Red Rag" follows this piece with Diana's cold-stare vocals haunting above a thick atmosphere of drones and heavily reverbed cracks from a kick drum. Unfortunately, this reissue confuses some of the names of the tracks, as "Riding The Red Rag" is misnamed as "The Demon Flower," and the equally impressive creepfest "Black Mother Mountain" is listed as "Riding The Red Rag." This may probably only upset the die-hard NWW completists; but it certainly does not distract from this amazing reissue of damaged art-rock / post-industrial mantras. Recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Deadroads / A Gothic Western"
MPEG Stream: "Riding The Red Rag"
MPEG Stream: "Immanence"

CHRYSTAL BELLE SCRODD The Inevitable Chrystal Belle Scrodd Record (Klang Galerie) cd 17.98
Diana Rogerson began her art career in the early '80s collaborating with Jill Westwood in Fistfuck, which has long been referred to as the "female Whitehouse" because of their infamously humilitating performances, intense sonic actions, and degrading films. Some of soundtracks to those films were actually not scored by Fistfuck but by Chrystal Belle Scrodd, the moniker of Rogerson and her future husband Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound. Throughout the early Nurse With Wound recordings, Rogerson made her presence known, thanks mostly to her eeriely zombified vocal delivery which blended perfectly within NWW's surrealist collages of decontextualized sounds and darkly lysergic atmospheres. By 1985, the two conspired to release the first Chrystal Belle Scrodd record as a separate entity from Nurse With Wound. While Stapleton's fingerprints are all over the Chrystal Belle Scrodd recordings, the direction and peculiarties of the debut recording speak much more of Diana Rogerson's sensibility, that's only slightly more indebted to psych-art-rock structuralism than Nurse With Wound. The Inevitable Chrystal Belle Scrodd Record opens with an oblique rhythmic tumble of Egyptian reeds, cat-scratch guitar feedback, and all-thumbs bass fumbling that dissolves into a quiet rumble on top of which Rogerson offers one of her trademark, emotionally detached mantras with plenty of double entendres and overt sexual declarations. Later on, Rogerson and Stapleton get a bit more abstract with nightmarishly kaleidoscopic twists of children's voices, twinkling bells, throbbing ritual drums, and discordant horns soaked in a metallic reverb and haunted drones.
MPEG Stream: "Cradle Your Snatch"
MPEG Stream: "Relax"
MPEG Stream: "Unknown"

CHUGGA Memphistophelis (The Tapeworm) cassette 7.98
Latest slab of sonic wonder and weirdness from UK tape label The Tapeworm, this one from a duo called Chugga, a name that probably doesn't ring a bell, but most folks will probably know their partner in retro-sonic crime, musician/sound artist Terre Thaemlitz, the three have cobbled together this fuzzy, buzzy, old school assemblage of seventies disco groove, synthfunk, drug dub exotica, and while it most definitely sounds dated (it was recorded in the nineties after all), it's MEANT to, but real dated, as in seventies, not nineties, and it sounds pretty good alongside other contemporary retro groovers like Zomby, Martyn, etc.
Thick rumbling subsonic bass, woozy porno wah guitar, liquid basslines, simple stripped down drums, spaced out sci fi synths, cheesy electronic percussion, all woven into super rad instrumental grooves, some new wave-y and propulsive, others laid back and sexy and sultry, still others ethereal and skeletal, clouds of tangled melodies drift over warm low end rumbles, Latin percussion wrapped around lazy unfurling melodies, orchestral disco stabs, strings, organs, the songs slipping from lush and over the top, big production, to spaced out and sinister, spare midnight grooves. Killer old school dancefloor destruction for sure.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!!!

CICADASHRINE Crumpled Multiple Agonies (Battlecruiser / Celebrate Psi Phenomenon) 3" cd-r 10.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Battlecruiser is a new label from AQ pal Campbell Kneale who runs the impeccable NZ cdr label Celebrate Psi Phenomenon. Battlecruiser is basically an outlet for a bunch of New Zealand noise guys to fufill their secret desire to be metal gods! Who can argue with that? Cool band names, distorted guitars, demonic vocals and all that good stuff! Metalheads might have to stretch their definition of 'metal' to really get into this stuff, but the rest of us, metal and unmetal alike will find lots of beautiful crushing far out noisy weirdness on these evil lil' 3" cd-r's!
Cicadashrine's sonic world slowly reveals an epic ambience, with distant crushing chords over a rumbling bed of throbs and pulses. Eventually the ROCK kicks in, not so much metal as industrial sludge grind. Reminds us of Flipper or Prong or OLD or even the Melvins. Super slow motion riffs, downtuned so that the riffs themselves feel like they might crumble into pieces, inhuman vocals buried so far down in the mix that they just sound like another downtuned guitar, bass strings so loose they're slapping against the bass, adding even more rumble and sludge to the mix. Sheets of caustic feedback separate the riffs, but just barely. The whole thing is like a metallic bulldozer driving through a tarpit! One twenty minute pit of despair.
MPEG Stream: "Crumpled Multiple Agonies"

CICCIOLINA HOLOCAUST / SERMONIZER Albeit Albeit / Sibelius Spiders (Forced Nostalgia) lp 21.00
Enter Forced Nostalgia - a label mining the post-punk underground of dark electronics. Judging from this release and their upcoming programming for "a wayward selection of often unreleased, mostly unheard and overlooked material from tape music to industrial, from bossa-pop to proto-techno, and from drone to out and out analogue experimentation," Forced Nostalgia looks to be something wholly different from Vinyl-On-Demand, Minimal Wave, and Dark Entries. The bands here are two terminally obscure Italian industrial outfits who made these recordings in the early '80s with a clear aesthetic framework set forward by the Industrial Records model of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Clock DVA, and Cabaret Voltaire. Cicciolina Holocaust's woozy cornet buried in the mix of murky rhythms and electronic arpeggiations certainly draw their inspiration from the early productions of Chris & Cosey (think Heartbeat and the collaborative single with John Duncan) and of course there's plenty of TG to be heard in the mix. There are a couple of exceptional minimal wave numbers with clockwork nocturnal techno modulations and super creepy windswept dronings, all of which have been expertly remastered and sound really amazing on this piece of vinyl. Sermonizer harkens from the same realm of spooky electronics, with weirdly plucked guitars working through tape-delay splutter which is more Illitch than TG. Cold radio detunings, dark meanderings of synth warble, and highly sexualized moans and groans flush out Sermonizer's contribution to the split. All of these tracks seem to have come from private cassettes handed out back in the day. This is an amazing find and whets our appetite for what else Forced Nostalgia will be offering in the years to come.

CILIO, LUCIANO Dell'Universo Assente (Die Schachtel) cd 24.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Yes! We're glad to have this back in stock. 'Twas originally limited to just 500 copies when it came out last year and thus quickly went out of print, but now due to demand the label has pressed more. So if you missed out, get it now. Highly recommended. Our review from the first time around on list #199:
We'd never heard of Luciano Cilio before, but of course Jim O'Rourke has. The ubiquitious O'Rourke (Wilco/Sonic Youth/you name it) contributes liner notes to this beautifully presented deluxe digipack cd reissue of what amounts to the collected works of Cilio, an Italian avantgarde composer from the '70s whose music is indeed experimental but less academic than you might expect. But even without O'Rourke's endorsement, a listen to the cd should reveal to you that Cilio was exquisitely talented, and maybe something of a genius. This disc is a simply fantastic document of what we might consider a hybrid of 20th century classical, minimalist psych-prog, and folk music, not entirely of this world. The all-white cover perfectly echoes Cilio's lovely, quietly haunting compositions for acoustic guitar, cello, piano and flute, sometimes visited by wordless female vocals. Achingly melancholic, immensely deep, truly beautiful. Limited to 500 copies [again], this cd consists of Cilio's sole album, Dialoghi del Presente, originally released on EMI in 1977, along with several previously unreleased tracks. Apparently he more or less abandoned music after the album's release, and sadly committed suicide in 1983. Allan's favorite new long-lost reissue after the Flamen Dialis disc reviewed on list #194...
MPEG Stream: "Primo Quadro..."
MPEG Stream: "Interludio..."

CINDYTALK Hold Everything Dear (Editions Mego) cd 16.98
Prior to Hold Everything Dear, the resurrected Cindytalk had been the work of Gordon Sharp sitting down at his computer by himself to experiment with digital glitches and abstracted electronic drones. The Crackle Of My Soul from 2009 felt more like the first fruits of Sharp wrangling with his ideas in a digital environment with a few too many compositional rough edges that were in need of refinement. Up Here In The Clouds was a marked improvement through the glassine drones and fizzing noise; but Hold Everything Dear is the first Cindytalk album that truly feels like it has a connection to those brilliant post-punk records from the early '80s. While Sharp hasn't returned to the noise-rock abjection of Camoflage Heart and he has yet to sing on any of these recent albums, the fragmented smears from bowed metals, haunted clanging bells, watery field recordings, and impressionist piano of Hold Everything Dear harken to those post-noise ambient constructions found on the Eno-esque album Wind Is Strong and which concluded In This World. Many of the cavernous sounds on the album are probably sourced from the late Matt Kinnison, who had been Cindytalk's bassist since 1982 and who died in 2008. Sharp has cast a bleary atmosphere throughout the album through subterranean passages of sodden drones, cobwebbed dark elegance, and decayed textures. Sharp pocks this album with plenty of piano interludes whose somber half melodies and shadowy ambience are pulled from the same mold as those earlier piano works. They were beautiful then, and they are still beautiful now.
MPEG Stream: "In Dust To Delight"
MPEG Stream: "Fly Away Over Here"
MPEG Stream: "From Rokko-San"
MPEG Stream: "I See You Uncovered"

CINDYTALK Hold Everything Dear (Editions Mego) 2lp 29.00
Prior to Hold Everything Dear, the resurrected Cindytalk had been the work of Gordon Sharp sitting down at his computer by himself to experiment with digital glitches and abstracted electronic drones. The Crackle Of My Soul from 2009 felt more like the first fruits of Sharp wrangling with his ideas in a digital environment with a few too many compositional rough edges that were in need of refinement. Up Here In The Clouds was a marked improvement through the glassine drones and fizzing noise; but Hold Everything Dear is the first Cindytalk album that truly feels like it has a connection to those brilliant post-punk records from the early '80s. While Sharp hasn't returned to the noise-rock abjection of Camoflage Heart and he has yet to sing on any of these recent albums, the fragmented smears from bowed metals, haunted clanging bells, watery field recordings, and impressionist piano of Hold Everything Dear harken to those post-noise ambient constructions found on the Eno-esque album Wind Is Strong and which concluded In This World. Many of the cavernous sounds on the album are probably sourced from the late Matt Kinnison, who had been Cindytalk's bassist since 1982 and who died in 2008. Sharp has cast a bleary atmosphere throughout the album through subterranean passages of sodden drones, cobwebbed dark elegance, and decayed textures. Sharp pocks this album with plenty of piano interludes whose somber half melodies and shadowy ambience are pulled from the same mold as those earlier piano works. They were beautiful then, and they are still beautiful now.
MPEG Stream: "In Dust To Delight"
MPEG Stream: "Fly Away Over Here"
MPEG Stream: "From Rokko-San"
MPEG Stream: "I See You Uncovered"

CINDYTALK The Crackle Of My Soul (Editions Mego) cd 17.98
Cindytalk on Mego? It was a shock to see that pairing. Cindytalk has been the sporadic project of Gordon Sharp with a shifting ensemble over the past two and half decades. At first, Sharp's abject post-punk took a gritty, almost industrial growling to the ethereally dark tunes of the Cocteau Twins. Sharp's voice in many ways is the masculine equivalent to Liz Fraser's, just as beautiful and haunting; and the two had paired up on a few tracks through This Mortal Coil and the Cocteau Twins. Cindytalk's two releases in the '80s - Camoflage Heart and In This World - have been secret gems to all those who had uncovered that work, with Cindytalk only emerging a few times since. There was the impressionist Ambient piano record The Wind Is Strong and 1994's underwhelming Wappinschaw. Then, a decade of silence followed by a limited edition single from 2003 and a brilliant one-sided 10" of drone-rock beauty in 2008. So, it was hard to know what to expect with a 2009 full album from Cindytalk, especially from the digi-centric label Mego.
Here, Cindytalk is just the work of Gordon Sharp; and The Crackle Of My Soul certainly sounds like a Mego record on par with the likes of Pita, Kevin Drumm, and BJ Nilsen, as shards of digital noise are looped and phased into building compositions that glow with a very intense high-end piercing. Not quite Whitehouse territory, it's actually far more glacial and icy in tone. Nevertheless, Sharp's electronics have a way of drilling into your skull. Voice and piano occasionally creep into the mix, but not to the extent that you would hear on any of the earlier records, even the aforementioned album The Wind Is Strong. We have to admit that we didn't love this record as much as Camoflage Heart and In This World; but it's sort of a different beast, and there's a lot of very strong electro-acoustic renderings to be found here...
MPEG Stream: "Feathers Burn"
MPEG Stream: "One Hundred Years Tomorrow"
MPEG Stream: "Debris Of A Smile"

CINDYTALK The Poetry Of Decay (Editions Mego) 2lp+7" 32.00
This is a vinyl collection of Cindytalk's two previous cds on Editions Mego - The Crackle Of My Soul (2009) and Up Here In The Clouds (2010), spread over two pieces of vinyl and a 7".
It was hard to imagine what to expect with a 2009 full album from Cindytalk, especially from the digi-centric label Mego. On The Crackle Of My Soul, Cindytalk is just the work of Gordon Sharp; and it certainly sounds like a Mego record on par with the likes of Pita, Kevin Drumm, and BJ Nilsen, as shards of digital noise are looped and phased into building compositions that glow with a very intense high-end piercing. Not quite Whitehouse territory, it's actually far more glacial and icy in tone. Nevertheless, Sharp's electronics have a way of drilling into your skull. Voice and piano occasionally creep into the mix, but not to the extent that you would hear on any of the earlier records, even The Wind Is Strong. We have to admit that we didn't love this record as much as their '80s efforts Camoflage Heart and In This World, but it's sort of a different beast, and there's a lot of very strong electro-acoustic renderings to be found here.
As with The Crackle Of My Soul, Up Here In The Clouds is well suited to Editions Mego, a long time bastion of glitch-born abstraction, volatile noise, and electro-acoustic consternation. After those initial cycles of tidal lapping, Sharp introduces the first of many lush, elongated drones built upon tensely vibrating noises that are equal parts John Duncan sound dilation and Tim Hecker fuzzed digitalia. Elsewhere, his ring-modulations transform the source material into glassine textures that hang above faux-shepard tone constructions and blustery oscillations spun upon radio interference, almost like a digital recapitulation of Loren Chasse or Small Cruel Party. At times, there are glimpses shot into the past reconnecting with the overdriven-noise-turned-into-ambience that graced some of the 1986 Cindytalk album In This World, but for the most-part the digital modulation and transformation that Sharp elicits in 2010 is a newer model in pursuit of those same ideals of abjection becoming beautiful but through digital means.
MPEG Stream: "Feathers Burn"
MPEG Stream: "One Hundred Years Tomorrow"
MPEG Stream: "Debris Of A Smile"
MPEG Stream: "The Eighth Sea"
MPEG Stream: "I Walk Until I Fall"
MPEG Stream: "Multiple Landings"