LITURGY Renihilation (Ormolycka) cassette 5.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
BACK IN STOCK!!
This incredible collection of Pure Transcendental Black Metal is now available again, this time on the KVLT-est of formats, the cassette tape, and if you needed another reason to buy this Liturgy record again, other than it RULES, and that as we mentioned, KASSETTES ARE KVLT, well, the tape version includes a bonus track, a remix in fact, by our very own Andee. His FIRST EVER remix. Created with basically no knowledge of sound programs, and none of the original tracks, but within those constraints, he's whipped up a pretty kick ass, heavy, noisy, old school jungle version of maybe our favorite Liturgy track.
Here's what we had to say about Renihilation when we first listed it a year or two back:
These guys sent us an lp a long while back, and somehow we totally slept on it. Not sure why, a 12" x 12" image of a cloudy sky, the sun glinting in the background, and the words "PURE TRANSCENDENTAL BLACK METAL" writ large in big black records across the front, and inside, just what the cover promised some seriously buzzing blazing blackness. It's not surprising these guys found their way to 20 Buck Spin, a pretty good fit for sure for this NY horde.
Unlike the blissed out blackened ethereal transcendentalism of the lp, back when Liturgy was a one man bedroom black metal band, Renihilation finds Liturgy expanded to a 4 piece, and the sound is much more raw and organic, still blown out and pretty blissy, goddamn soaring and epic in fact, but it sounds more like a proper rock band, although the drumming is still inhumanly fast, and the band lock into these cool, weird, and very un-black metal sounding high end trills, that only make the sound that much more mysterious and mystical. The band claim some unlikely non-metal influences, but as you get into Renihilation, it's easy to hear that there's way more going on here than Ulver or Darkthrone worship, the band slipping into lurching, almost mathy breakdowns, incredible dynamics, that almost sounds like Harvey Milk at 78rpm, the sort of stop start, sway and lumber, that only works if the band is tight as fuck.
These songs are not super long either, but they feel majestic, and sprawling, and never ending, in a good way, the guitars are frantic, the drumming relentless, the guitars seem to exist only in the upper registers, like wild psychedelic leads transformed into some sort of blackened tremolo picking, so instead of black metal, these jams almost sound like modern classical compositions, like Arvo Part composing for black metal band, when a song ends, you feel exhausted, and drained, like at the end of a long journey, but before you can even catch your breath, the band explode into action once again. And before you know it, they're locked into another high end blast of extreme tension, no let up, no slipping into acoustic interludes, it's almost like the musical version holding your breath, soaring as high and for as long as (in)humanly possible, so when the band does pause briefly, it knocks you on your ass, of when they switch gears and get all spacious and dynamic, it nearly blows your mind.
When we first got this, we only listened to it a couple times, and thought it was pretty cool, but on repeated listens it is proving itself to be truly transcendental, unlike almost all of the other black metal out there, and is quickly becoming one of our new favorite black metal records...
MPEG Stream: "Pagan Dawn"
MPEG Stream: "Mysterium"
MPEG Stream: "Ecstatic Rite"
MPEG Stream: "PGN>DWN (TICWAR-ped MIX) (Excerpt 1)"
MPEG Stream: "PGN>DWN (TICWAR-ped MIX) (Excerpt 2)"

LIVE HUMAN Elefish Jellyphant (Matador) cd 13.98
San Francisco's fantastic live improv hiphop/jazz/turntablism trio, featuring the skills of DJ Quest of the Space Travellers/Bullet Proof Scratch Hamsters, as well drum kit and double bass. Everybody loved their FatCat/Hip Hop Slam record "Monostereosis", and this is more of the same. Kinda like a more advanced version of the instrumental tracks on the last few Beastie Boys records, actually. Good stuff.

LIVE HUMAN Elefish Jellyphant (Matador) 2lp 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
San Francisco's fantastic live improv hiphop/jazz/turntablism trio, featuring the skills of DJ Quest of the Space Travellers/Bullet Proof Scratch Hamsters, as well drum kit and double bass. Everybody loved their FatCat/Hip Hop Slam record "Monostereosis", and this is more of the same. Kinda like a more advanced version of the instrumental tracks on the last few Beastie Boys records, actually. Good stuff.

LIVE HUMAN Elefish Jellyphant (Matador) 2lp 16.98
San Francisco's fantastic live improv hiphop/jazz/turntablism trio, featuring the skills of DJ Quest of the Space Travellers/Bullet Proof Scratch Hamsters, as well drum kit and double bass. Everybody loved their FatCat/Hip Hop Slam record "Monostereosis", and this is more of the same. Kinda like a more advanced version of the instrumental tracks on the last few Beastie Boys records, actually. Good stuff.

LIVE HUMAN Live (C.O.D.) cd 11.98
Live Human's previous albums never really did it for me, so this great album is a revelation. Here the groundbreaking trio of standup bass, drums, and turntables is *live*, recorded right here in their hometown of San Francisco at the Great American Music Hall in July 2001 (this after playing a sold out show at the Montreux Jazz Festival!) While they have been called "punk jazz" by some XLR8R reviewer on the back of this cd, you should know that there is nothing punk about the trio's sound -- although their deft improvisations have certainly been informed by the jazz tradition.
Live Human mixes warmly organic bass lines that are funky but not overly so, with percussion that is as breakbeat "funky drummer" style as it is carefully shuffling, staccato and delicate. The third equal element is hiphop DJ Quest's visionary turntablist style. While he does his fair share of athletic, textural scratching here (he even plays with the tense sound of a skipping cd, of all things), it isn't overdone, nor boring, nor predictable. He brings in just enough outside elements like women's voices, snippets of old hip hop classics, James Brown's "heuh!", etc., to prevent the "jazz" from imploding self-indulgently into itself, yet not so much that it becomes a sample-heavy smorgasbord. It is incredible how perfect Quest's instincts are for what is too much and/or not enough. I have to say that the turntablist skills demonstrated here are so seamlessly integrated with the bass and the drums that I can't help but think this is one of THE FINEST examples of turntablism I have ever heard -- he knows that the way to us listeners' hearts is not to showboat his virtuosic skills, but instead to bow to the demands of the music itself.
This is an awesome record that is completely worth your money. As if that wasn't enough, it is purposely being sold directly from the label to retailers for the express purpose of keeping the price down and, according to the liner notes, "cutting out many of the redundant music-industry middle-men that traditionally add nothing to the art but are happy to pocket more than their fair share of the profit (biiiiaaaatch!)."
RealAudio clip: "Fr-Fre-Fre-Fresshhhhhhh!"
RealAudio clip: "Breakbeat"
RealAudio clip: "Human til Inifinity"

LIVE HUMAN Monostereosis: The New Victrola Method (Hip Hop Slam) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
These popular local artists' album was previously only available as an import, now finally it's available as a domestic release! What we had to say about the import still applies: San Franciscans Kushin, Mathias, and Quest (DJ that is) come up with a kick ass 'new jazz'/turntablism/hip hop hybrid for their debut album. A couple of the tracks from their previous singles on Fat Cat pop up on the album which is loaded with wykked scratching, sikk beats, and phhat bass. Excellent!

LIVE HUMAN Monostereosis: The New Victrola Method (Fat Cat) 2lp 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
San Franciscans Kushin, Mathias, and Quest (DJ that is) come up with a kick ass 'new jazz'/turntablism/hip hop hybrid for their debut album. A couple of the tracks from their previous singles on Fat Cat pop up on the album which is loaded with wykked scratching, sikk beats, and phhat bass. Excellent!

LIVE HUMAN Monostereosis: The New Victrola Method (Hip Hop Slam) 2lp 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
And it's here on vinyl, too...These popular local artists' album was previously only available as an import, now finally it's available as a domestic release! What we had to say about the import still applies: San Franciscans Kushin, Mathias, and Quest (DJ that is) come up with a kick ass 'new jazz'/turntablism/hip hop hybrid for their debut album. A couple of the tracks from their previous singles on Fat Cat pop up on the album which is loaded with wykked scratching, sikk beats, and phhat bass. Excellent!

LIVE HUMAN Orange Buch Monkey Flower (Fat Cat) 12" 8.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The second single on Fat Cat from Live Human, a San Francisco trio with turntablist DJ Quest scratching over a mellow funk of skittering jazzy percussion and stand up bass. A really good American version of Red Snapper!

LIVERPOOL Por Favor Sucesso (Shadoks Music) cd 17.98
We pretty much thought the well had run dry as far as great lost tropicalia gems goes. A few years back there was an explosion of amazing finds from this fertile era in Brazilian music history, with records by folks like Som Imaginario, Ronnie Von, Paulo Bagunca and Alceu Valenca & Gerardo Azevedo.
While there has been totally essential reissues of many of the biggest names of tropicalia (Jorge Ben, Gal Costa, Caetano Veloso, etc.) it was looking like we were going to have to concede that there might not be anymore totally obscure gems left. Of course time after time we're always blown away by unearthed discoveries that just sound way too damn good to have remained obscure and unheard for so long. Such is the case for Liverpool, who released this record in 1969 and of course by their name you know they were influenced by some of the paisley sounds coming out of the UK, and they incorporated that influence into their own take on breezy and driving tropicalia. With a vocal delivery and arrangements that would sound right at home on some of Caetano Veloso's best outings, Liverpool were just as potent mellow and sun baked as they were rocking and psychedelic. We're so happy this has been unearthed for us to finally appreciate, an absolute classic!
MPEG Stream: "Por Favor Sucesso"
MPEG Stream: "Paz & Amor"
MPEG Stream: "Planador"

LIVING JARBOE / LARSEN Krzykognia (Tank Pictures) dvd 21.00

LIVINGSTON, GUY Don't Panic: 60 Seconds For Piano (Wergo) cd 21.00
60 composers from 18 countries commissioned to score 60 second pieces for piano (and occasionally tape). Go! Quick!! FASTER!!!

LIZZIE BORDEN Master Of Disguise (Metal Blade) cd 14.98

LL COOL J Phenomenon (Columbia) cd 17.98
More major-label price gouging. But, not a bad LL record.

LL COOL J Todd Smith (Def Jam) cd 15.98

LLOYD ARTHUR 3 Spheres Of Nothing (Twisted Village) lp 13.98

LLOYD, DALE Akaska For Record (Elevator Bath) picture disc 17.98
Strange that we haven't posted anything about Dale Lloyd in previous lists, but this is a man whose influence should be well known throughout the experimental and sound-art communities. Lloyd runs the And/OAR label, which specializes in environmental soundscaping with a few subsidies that push toward an electronic-pop context. Even so, the last full album from Mr. Lloyd emerged well over five years ago. This album continues in Elevator Bath's very impressive series of picture discs, which began in 2008 with releases of corroded drones from our own Jim Haynes and kosmiche brainmelting from Rick Reed. Lloyd's work is an excellent companion to these two releases. One of the two sides opens with a modulating hiss that harmonizes with a sinewy drone and gets punctured by a series bone-numbing electrical charges for something that could have some unsavory context had it been generated by John Duncan, but then again it could be a field recording of a grain-slew with minor post-production techniques. In fact, each of the pieces on Akasha For Record have this sense that they could be the results of well-situated field recordings like those of Tarab or Eric La Casa, as the smudges and grittiness of these recordings allude to such strategies. Another track shimmers like the vibration of a loose piece of metal on an industrial HVAC, with the timbres generating a surprisingly fluid and beautiful resonance like something Andrew Chalk would actively seek out. There's greater evidence of field recordings on the tracks that do feature the roar of surf and a cold wind intermingled with the softened white noise of sand getting pushed around. Lloyd had devised this album to complement the crackles that get magnified through the picture disc - a medium which notoriously wears heavier than most pressings of vinyl. The album certainly works well with its medium. Beautiful stuff, and super limited to 216 copies.

LLYR Heathen (Brotherhood Of Light) cassette 5.98
First we've heard from this local outfit, released on the Brotherhood Of Light tape label (Sunchariot, Haar, Sirius, Cosmic Breath, Surt, Uruk Hai, Domus Mactibilus, Worldscape:18), and like much of the stuff on BoL, we're assuming it's the work of the same core folks, much like the Black Legions and the BM scenes in Russia and the Ukraine, it seems like a handful of folks in multiple configurations make up the multitude of groups, but we're not complaining, in fact, as BoL continues to move away from black metal, or at least push the boundaries, we're digging their releases more and more. A couple lists back we reviewed a tape by a group/person called Worldscape:18, which was some weird sort of collaged/noisescape/electronica. And this week, we have one of several new releases from Llyr, whose tape starts out with the gentle slightly sinister lilt of drifting synths, sounding like it could explode into some serious Goblin style action at any point, but instead, sprawls out, soft billows of almost new age-y shimmer, until finally, some super distorted guitars surface, and some seriously sick, anguished vox, wouldn't say it was black metal, but it's definitely blackened, and sort of metallic. More free form and abstract, the guitars churning in thick billows over those shimmery synths, the vokills howling and rasping in the murk. Tangled melodies unwind beneath the vocals, as well as strange sci-fi electronics, maybe not sonically, but most definitely spiritually, Llyr reminds us of outsider metal acts like Circle Of Ouroborus, Tomb Of, Varghkoghargasmal and Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg.
And that pretty much sets the template for Llyr's sound, long stretches of icy synth, chiming ethereal melodies, beneath sheets of blurred guitar buzz, disembodied riffs, wraithlike rasps, and even some drums, stumbling programmed drums that bring to mind Fastest weirdly enough, and when the electronics peel back, and leave just lurching drums and woozy riffage, it's like some gloriously damaged primitive black metal ritual, that soon disappears into another cloud of dense, swirling WTF weirdness.

LMO, VON Future Language (Flemish Masters) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
As the cover art proclaims: "The group from the future is here now! Advance yourself!" And well, Von Lmo has actually been bringing the future to us for quite some time now. This CD reissue of his classic early 80s LP includes the awesome track "Leave Your Body" that certain list-recipients might be familar with from the re-recorded version on one of Lmo's 90s underappreciated (but great) "comeback" efforts. Von Lmo exists in a futureworld not of synths, robotics and electronic blips'n'bleeps. No, it is instead one of skronky saxophone, raw garage-y guitar mayhem, balsa wood spacecrafts, and raging positivity. After all, "this album is dedicated to the advancement of the United States space program". And who can resist music that comes vacuum-packed in silver suits with giant red snowboots?

LMO, VON Red Resistor (Variant) cd 13.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Includes a full 31 minutes of "X+Z=0." -Advance Yourself.-

LMO, VON Tranceformer (Future Language 2.001) (Munster) cd 15.98
The reissue of this bizarre figure's collected sonic disturbances comes by way of Munster Records in Spain - licensed from the man himself. It includes the 1981 album "Future Lenguage" (or "Future Languaje" or "Future Language" depending on which edition you're looking at, previously available on Flemish Masters) as well as "Tranceformer" which was his compilation of demos, rarities and live stuff. The electrifying packaging is chock full of slogans ("Advance Yourself!"), info tidbits (this group is "from the future" and this music was "recorded in space"), not to mention mad mad silver spacesuits and huge red moonboots! Von Lmo's impassioned singing style often brings to mind the untethered energy of Jello Biafra, Tomata Du Plenty, and Lux Interior. And when he chants "Leave your body!", look out! It's absolute frenzy. The music is just as frantic. Propulsive sax a la James Chance over raw garage punk guitar, bass and drums. There are a few songs where the group slows it down somewhat, but it seems that it's then that things get even more tense, eccentric and strange. The aforementioned packaging includes a fold-out filled with extensive, entertaining liner notes written by Von Lmo.
RealAudio clip: "Leave Your Body"
RealAudio clip: "This Is Pop Rock"
RealAudio clip: "Black Noise Toys"
RealAudio clip: "We're Not Crazy"

LOBDELL, STEVEN WRAY Automatic Writing By The Moon (Holy Mountain) cd 13.98
First solo album in the burgeoning career of guitarist and Holy Mountain hero Steven Wray Lobdell, best known for his work in the recent incarnation of seminal krautrockers Faust, as well as his bands The Davis Redford Triad and Sufi Mind Game. Oh, yeah, and he played on that weirdo Baseball Astrologer LP too. Like all those projects, this is as psychedelic as all get out, but not at all freaky, distorted and overdriven: rather, this is acoustic, folky instrumental stuff, including a beautiful cover of a tune by Chilean folkie Victor Jara as well as much cosmic improv. It's the combination of wondrous playing and studio overdubs and effects that play the tricks on your mind. Lovely & recommended.

LOBDELL, STEVEN WRAY Live At Club Donut (Holy Mountain) lp 14.98
This live show from an actual establishment called Club Doughnut, features Lobdell, sometime Faust member and head of the mighty Davis Redford Triad, all by his lonesome, with just an electric guitar but holy fuck can this man wrangle amazing sounds out of those six strings. From acid fried Eastern tinged raga, to super effected psych freakout, to massive walls of Skullflower like skree, to full on riff destroying sonic mayhem to warm rumbling ambience, all assembled from the unlikeliest guitar sounds, crumbling super distorted throb, crystalline angelic shimmer, and flat out head caving crunch. Fans of Jack Rose, Pelt, Skullflower, Total, and all things massive gorgeous guitar will be floored.
MPEG Stream: "Live At Club Doughnut 1"

LOCKWELD Metal Pieces (Crucial Blast) cd-r 6.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Our friend Adam who runs the super cool Crucial Blast label, has, for over 6 years now, been quietly (and not so quietly) putting out some of the coolest shit around. From crusty Finnish metal to droning electronica to sparse folk to brutal power electronics. This new series of cd-r's, limited to 100 copies and nicely packaged in oversized DVD cases will only be available via Aquarius records (unless you get them directly from Crucial Blast). So don't blow it...
Lockweld should be a familiar name to industrial fans. This noisy sampling duo has been at it for years. For their Crucial Blast recording, Karen and Makita employ a mighty arsenal of synthesizers, samplers, vocals, electronics, machinery, tools, weapons(!) and fire(!). The sound is brutal and harsh. A thick wall of sound, white noise and pink noise with looped samples creating barely audible rhythms and the occasional melody being beaten bloody amid all the ROOOOOOAAAAAAAARRRRR. And since it's called "Metal Pieces", each cd comes with a little baggie of custom cut little metal pieces. Cool.
RealAudio clip: "We Can Not Return"
RealAudio clip: "Metal Pieces"
RealAudio clip: "With Best Regards, As Always"

LOCKWOOD, ANNEA A Sound Map Of The Danube (Lovely Music) 3cd 37.00

LOCKWOOD, ANNEA Early Works 1967-82 (EM Records) cd 22.00
Hooray, Japan's EM Recordings is back with two new discs! You never know what sort of stuff they're gonna dig up for reissue, only that it's probably going to be pretty far-out and interesting. The releases we're reviewing this week both fit that general description, thought they couldn't be more different. One's an amusing and strange attempt at calypso-punk (!) from 'Wild' Billy Childish, the other, this, is an anthology of early sound-experiments from New Zealand-born avant garde composer Annea Lockwood. She studied in England and Europe during the sixties and early seventies, and since 1973 has been a professor at Vassar College in New York. Her music, as heard here, is on the conceptual side, abstract but fascinating and listenable. Her 1970 album The Glass World (previously reissued on cd in 1997 by What Next? Recordings) appears here in its entirety, plus her 19 minute droning musique concrete tape piece "Tiger Balm", originally released on a 10" record in 1970 that came with issue number 9 of SOURCE: Music of the Avant Garde magazine.
Moody and mysterious, her Glass World is a weird and wonderful place, indeed. Clinking, tinkling, scraping, shimmering, humming, droning... every sound you could imagine somehow generating with pieces of glass, and more! It originated as a performance piece she developed in 1966, of "discreet sound actions" all using glass as the prime source material which has been bowed, scraped, shattered, tapped, etc. There's 23 individual tracks, each one with a straightforward title ("Glass Rod Vibrating", "Water Gong", "Wine Glass", "Bottle Tree Showered With Fragments") more or less explaining what's going on, usually with a glass object noun and sound-producing verb. It's a veritable catalog, sort of a Smithsonian Folkways approach: The Sounds Of North American Glass Objects! Meanwhile "Tiger Balm" features a woman's orgasmic sighs, tinkling bells, and of course the purring of a big cat... it's pretty trippy!
This includes two booklets, one with vintage photos, scores, and Lockwood's own liner notes. The other documents the realization of her conceptual art piece "Piano Transplants" (i.e. "Piano Burning", "Piano Garden", etc.). As with all EM releases, this is really nicely presented (and now, EM's putting things out in non-jewel case, cardboard digi-packaging).
Oh, and EM fans, look out for this summer's "EM Under Water Series" of five surfing-related reissues from '60s/'70s Australia, all really cool stuff.
MPEG Stream: "Micro Glass Shaken"
MPEG Stream: "Glass Rod Vibrating"
MPEG Stream: "Vibrating Pane"

LOCKWOOD, ANNEA The Glass World (What Next? ) cd 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
"For me, every sound has its own minute form - is composed of small flashing rhythms, shifting tones, has momentum, comes, vanishes, live out its own structure." - Annea Lockwood. 'Glass World' originated a two hour performance of discreet sound actions, using glass as the prime source material which has been bowed, scraped, shattered, tapped, etc.

LOCRIAN Dort Is Der Weg b/w Frozen In Ash (Flingco) 7" 10.98
Latest from these blackened doomdrone soundscapers, once again demonstrating that these guys definitely don't let any sort of genre classification define what they do, cuz what they do here is let their krautrock freak flag fly, whipping up a gorgeous chunk of hazy, rhythmic psychedelia, a reinterpretation of a classic Popol Vuh jam (from 1976), which does indeed channel the same sort of brooding, blissy mesmer, a dreamy, dark dirge, hypnotic and hazy, spidery guitar melodies over simple spare propulsive drumming, all wreathed by distant synth shimmer, the female vocals adding an ethereal angelic vibe to the proceedings. The track explodes about halfway through in a little squall of blackened psychnoise, only to slip right back into it, albeit a bit louder and heavier, some seriously mesmerizing metallic shoegaze krautrock heaviness, that had us sort of wishing these guys sounded like this all the time.
But then the B side goes ahead and reminds us why, as cool as that would be, we would most definitely miss what these guys do already. And what they do here is, lay down some frantic buzzy black metal riffing, letting the riffs unfurl into long streaks of tangled melodies and layered lush blackdronebuzz. Howled vokills come in, and the sounds drifts ever closer to pure black metal, the tension in waiting for the song to kick in, the blasting beats, the galloping crush, but instead, a sort of liquid black drone surface from below, and begins to envelop the sounds, the whole track growing darker and more dense, until finally, inexplicably, the band introduce melancholy acoustic guitar, and what sounds like piano, changing the tenor of the song completely, the buzzing riff no longer defining the sound, but instead acting as a blurred shimmery backdrop for the creeping dirgey drift that's now at the forefront, the drums minimal and spare, the sound seeming to build once again for an inevitable black metal blow out, but instead, the song shifts and fades out an soft squall of hazy shimmer and slowly dissipating psychedelia.
Maybe the best stuff we've heard from these guys, which at this point is saying a LOT.
Gorgeous packaging too, a striking black on black 4 panel sleeve, includes a sticker and a download code. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES.
MPEG Stream: "Dort Ist Der Weg"

LOCRIAN Drenched Lands (Small Doses / At War With False Noise) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Somehow this is exactly what we've been hankering for. A sprawling blackened songsuite, equal parts dark ambience, dense drones, heavy electronics, buzzy lo-fi almost new wave sounding keyboards, spidery post rock guitars and soft noise. Even writing it, that seems like a pretty unworkable, or unrealistic combination, but somehow these Midwesterners make it work. Big time.
They definitely could be considered sonic brethren of bands like SUNNO))), Pussygutt, MZ412, Troum, To Blacken The Pages, Wolf Eyes, Vulture Club and the like. However, Locrian take that sound someplace all their own, creating actual SONGS, as opposed to just soundscapes or drones. And there's a definitely black metal component for sure, no matter how abstract. Guitars are everywhere, seemingly the foundation for Locrian's sound, although as often as the guitars are unfurling spidery post rocky melodies, or distant reverbed riffs, they are also smeared into warm whirling clouds, left to drift and gradually change shape, or pulled apart and allowed to crumble into jagged little shards. Noise in a big component too, often the prettiest parts are treated with a patina of grinding soft focus electronics, or groaning downtuned tones.
The record opens with a gorgeous, elegiac guitar part, simple and stripped down, like it could be a black metal intro, until the organ comes in, wheezy and warbly, giving the track a weirdly lo-fi almost industrial vibe, definitely had us wishing it was in fact more than just a two minute intro.
That is until track two, "Ghost Repeater" takes over. An epic slow motion drift, strange echoey sounds floating in a warm muted sea of buzz and drone, glitched out bits of electronics, and eventually, a very epic black metal riff, that remains off in the distance, repeated and repeated until it too simply becomes another layer of sound.
"Barren Temple Obscured By Contaminated Fogs" (another great title), begins again with some creepy spindly guitar, draped over a deep pulsing low end, before transforming into some seriously abject and WAY abstract blacknoise. Shrieked distorted vokills over that same spidery guitar, Abruptum like ambience meets warped Goblinesque synth drones, the whole track twisted and warbly, eventually the vocals dropping out, leaving the buzzing guitars and wheezing keyboards to play out a super haunting horrorscape. "Epicedium" is delicate and crystalline, noodly guitar lines looped beneath a glimmering softly throbbing drone, peppered with fragmented strums, soon the track begins to grow gradually more and more distorted, the guitars more tense and frantic, the mood so haunting and weirdly beautiful and so subtly dramatic, reminding us of a super twisted soundtrack to some lost Giallo.
The record proper ends with another awesomely titled jam: "Obsolete Elegy In Cast Concrete", tolling bells, space kraut drones, all washed out and shimmery, the bed for some seriously corrosive guitar buzz and grind, adding layer after layer of crunch and rumble, but also slipping to some seriously black chug, joined by still more harsh hellish vox, a strange combination for sure but manages to be both beautiful and brutal, until the very end, where the track shifts gears and becomes all dramatic and melodic and weirdly majestic.
The cd features a bonus track called "Greyfield Shrines", which is nearly as long as all of the other tracks combined, a sprawling slow building blackened world of sound that slithers from hushed drift, to fractured buzz, to woozy moody ambience to blown out speaker shredding crunch, absolutely epic, super cinematic, mysterious, and even at it's noisiest, still quite melodic and blackly beautiful. Most definitely a track that could have been (and we think maybe was) a record all on its own.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES. Cool fold over arigato-pack style sleeve, with a full color printed booklet. And for anyone going to the Matchitehew metal/noise festival in Chicago in a few weeks, you'll be able to catch these guys live.
MPEG Stream: "Obsolete Elegy In Effluvia and Dross"
MPEG Stream: "Ghost Repeater"
MPEG Stream: "Obsolete Elegy In Lost Concrete"

LOCRIAN Drenched Lands (Bloodlust) lp + 3" cd-r 23.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL AS AN LP + 3" CD-R (as the record apparently was too long to fit on a single lp)!!!
Somehow this is exactly what we've been hankering for. A sprawling blackened songsuite, equal parts dark ambience, dense drones, heavy electronics, buzzy lo-fi almost new wave sounding keyboards, spidery post rock guitars and soft noise. Even writing it, that seems like a pretty unworkable, or unrealistic combination, but somehow these Midwesterners make it work. Big time.
They definitely could be considered sonic brethren of bands like SUNNO))), Pussygutt, MZ412, Troum, To Blacken The Pages, Wolf Eyes, Vulture Club and the like. However, Locrian take that sound someplace all their own, creating actual SONGS, as opposed to just soundscapes or drones. And there's a definitely black metal component for sure, no matter how abstract. Guitars are everywhere, seemingly the foundation for Locrian's sound, although as often as the guitars are unfurling spidery post rocky melodies, or distant reverbed riffs, they are also smeared into warm whirling clouds, left to drift and gradually change shape, or pulled apart and allowed to crumble into jagged little shards. Noise in a big component too, often the prettiest parts are treated with a patina of grinding soft focus electronics, or groaning downtuned tones.
The record opens with a gorgeous, elegiac guitar part, simple and stripped down, like it could be a black metal intro, until the organ comes in, wheezy and warbly, giving the track a weirdly lo-fi almost industrial vibe, definitely had us wishing it was in fact more than just a two minute intro.
That is until track two, "Ghost Repeater" takes over. An epic slow motion drift, strange echoey sounds floating in a warm muted sea of buzz and drone, glitched out bits of electronics, and eventually, a very epic black metal riff, that remains off in the distance, repeated and repeated until it too simply becomes another layer of sound.
"Barren Temple Obscured By Contaminated Fogs" (another great title), begins again with some creepy spindly guitar, draped over a deep pulsing low end, before transforming into some seriously abject and WAY abstract blacknoise. Shrieked distorted vokills over that same spidery guitar, Abruptum like ambience meets warped Goblinesque synth drones, the whole track twisted and warbly, eventually the vocals dropping out, leaving the buzzing guitars and wheezing keyboards to play out a super haunting horrorscape. "Epicedium" is delicate and crystalline, noodly guitar lines looped beneath a glimmering softly throbbing drone, peppered with fragmented strums, soon the track begins to grow gradually more and more distorted, the guitars more tense and frantic, the mood so haunting and weirdly beautiful and so subtly dramatic, reminding us of a super twisted soundtrack to some lost Giallo.
The record proper ends with another awesomely titled jam: "Obsolete Elegy In Cast Concrete", tolling bells, space kraut drones, all washed out and shimmery, the bed for some seriously corrosive guitar buzz and grind, adding layer after layer of crunch and rumble, but also slipping to some seriously black chug, joined by still more harsh hellish vox, a strange combination for sure but manages to be both beautiful and brutal, until the very end, where the track shifts gears and becomes all dramatic and melodic and weirdly majestic.
The 3" cd-r features a cd track that's not on the vinyl called "Greyfield Shrines", which is nearly as long as all of the other tracks combined, a sprawling slow building blackened world of sound that slithers from hushed drift, to fractured buzz, to woozy moody ambience to blown out speaker shredding crunch, absolutely epic, super cinematic, mysterious, and even at it's noisiest, still quite melodic and blackly beautiful. Most definitely a track that could have been (and we think maybe was) a record all on its own.
MPEG Stream: "Obsolete Elegy In Effluvia and Dross"
MPEG Stream: "Ghost Repeater"
MPEG Stream: "Obsolete Elegy In Lost Concrete"

LOCRIAN Falling Towers / After The Torchlight (Black Horzions) cassette 8.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Latest jam from these atmospheric black metal drone ambient soundscapers. Now expanded to a trio, this epic two track workout finds the band sounding better than ever. Slow burning riffs churn relentlessly over a swirl of electronics and rumbling drones, vocals drift ghostlike throughout, melodies peal amidst the crumbling low end and heaving blackness, like some epic post doom, stripped of it drums and blurred into whirling shimmering riffscapes, haunting and otherworldly, abject and post industrial, pulsing and throbbing, gradually transforming from doomdrone to dreamdrift, but remaining heavy and mysterious.
The second track begins with a buzzing black riff, but instead of exploding into a blast of black fury, the riff seems to melt into the background, the various drones and tones bleeding into the riff, all smeared into a swirling black cloud of slow burning blackness, washed out and gauzy, growing more and more abstract, the riff pulled apart, the notes left to drift amidst a vast sea of wheezing chordal shimmer and crumbling glitched out electronics. So awesome. And if that wasn't enough, the flipside features a palindromic rendering of the two songs, the whole first side played in reverse, a warped woozy, swooping bit of twisted droned out black mystery.
Super sweet packaging, silver reflective sticker on the tape, seven panel, silver ink on black matte j-card. LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!

LOCRIAN Plague Journal (Bloodlust!) 7" 8.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Super limited tour only 7", we got the very last handful. Unlike the blackened drones on Locrian's full length, this is way more in the realm of guitar heaviness, not quite black metal, but there is definitely some shades of black happening. A killer riff fragment, looped over and over, hypnotic and trancelike, slowly evolving in tone and timbre, getting higher and more jagged, while all around it, the ambient sounds build to a thunderous almost industrial cacophony.
The B side is a billowy bit of spaced out drift, trippy synth shimmer, another looped bit of abstract guitar, swirling effects, layered textures, erupting into a stretch of slow motion doominess right at the end. More dark heavy beauty from this Chicago duo.
All white cover, white labels, very little info, a Xeroxed insert with liner notes. 300 copies, these are the last ones ever.

LOCRIAN Territories (Small Doses / Bloodlust!) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
NOW ON CD!!
With every single release these guys get better and better, their sound, a constantly evolving, ultra dense blend of abstract black metal and deep ambient dronemusic, the early records were more about energy and vibe than execution, still eminently listenable, heavy and atmospheric, black and brutal, but their skills as composers and arranges have definitely made leaps and bounds, arriving finally at Territories, the latest sprawling epic from this Chicago duo, here, aided and abetted by a whole bunch of guests, including Blake Judd from Nachtmystium, Andrew Scherer, drummer for black metallers Velnias, and Mark Solotroff, power electronics maestro, and man behind Bloody Minded and the BloodLust! label.
And the guests make their presence felt right away, on opener inverted ruins, a smoldering doomic plod, more power electronics than black metal, with Solotroff ranting over a sea of swirling buzz and skree, glitched out electronics, and some simple stripped down drumming. Over the course of the track, it begins to coalesce into a more ominous creep, shedding noise as it goes, before finally slipping into a deep shimmering drone, which introduces the next track, a lush, slow building cinematic dronescape, constantly shifting layers, drifting through clouds of cymbal shimmer and blackened buzzing strings. It's not until nearly the end of side one that black metal rears its ugly head, a flurry of manic riffing, and they're off, a pounding midtempo blast of raw feral blackness, insane shrieked vocals, chaotic drums, muted riffs, all blurred into a blackened haze, lo-fi and muddy, but also epic and intense.
The flipside opens with another bout of power electronics, dueling synths unfurl undulating layers of wheeze and warble and buzz, laced with shimmering overtones and fragmented melodies, a churning black sonic sea, that eventually fades out leaving, a smoldering stretch of shadowy guitar, of blissed out ambience, a short stretch of crystalline chiming guitars laid over a warm whir, shoegazey and blissed out, which finally leads into the closing track, the weirdest of the bunch, with organ and saxophone, acoustic guitars, and pretty much all the gusts present and accounted for, a bleak buzzing driftscape, sort of post industrial, keening melodies over fractured buzz, and deep rumbles, creaks and skree and groaning low end, finally explode into full on melodic black metal, martial drumming, epic riffing, more tortured vokills, cool tangled woozy minor key melodies, a swirling druggy ambience, weirdly catchy and otherworldly, but still heavy and psychedelic, maybe our favorite track, and the perfect way to wind down this serpentine blackened outsider drone metal journey...
MPEG Stream: "Inverted Ruins"
MPEG Stream: "Between Barrows"

LOCRIAN Territories (At War With False Noise / Basses Frequences / Small Doses / BloodLust!) lp 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
With every single release these guys get better and better, their sound, a constantly evolving, ultra dense blend of abstract black metal and deep ambient dronemusic, the early records were more about energy and vibe than execution, still eminently listenable, heavy and atmospheric, black and brutal, but their skills as composers and arranges have definitely made leaps and bounds, arriving finally at Territories, the latest sprawling epic from this Chicago duo, here, aided and abetted by a whole bunch of guests, including Blake Judd from Nachtmystium, Andrew Scherer, drummer for black metallers Velnias, and Mark Solotroff, power electronics maestro, and man behind Bloody Minded and the BloodLust! label.
And the guests make their presence felt right away, on opener inverted ruins, a smoldering doomic plod, more power electronics than black metal, with Solotroff ranting over a sea of swirling buzz and skree, glitched out electronics, and some simple stripped down drumming. Over the course of the track, it begins to coalesce into a more ominous creep, shedding noise as it goes, before finally slipping into a deep shimmering drone, which introduces the next track, a lush, slow building cinematic dronescape, constantly shifting layers, drifting through clouds of cymbal shimmer and blackened buzzing strings. It's not until nearly the end of side one that black metal rears its ugly head, a flurry of manic riffing, and they're off, a pounding midtempo blast of raw feral blackness, insane shrieked vocals, chaotic drums, muted riffs, all blurred into a blackened haze, lo-fi and muddy, but also epic and intense.
The flipside opens with another bout of power electronics, dueling synths unfurl undulating layers of wheeze and warble and buzz, laced with shimmering overtones and fragmented melodies, a churning black sonic sea, that eventually fades out leaving, a smoldering stretch of shadowy guitar, of blissed out ambience, a short stretch of crystalline chiming guitars laid over a warm whir, shoegazey and blissed out, which finally leads into the closing track, the weirdest of the bunch, with organ and saxophone, acoustic guitars, and pretty much all the gusts present and accounted for, a bleak buzzing driftscape, sort of post industrial, keening melodies over fractured buzz, and deep rumbles, creaks and skree and groaning low end, finally explode into full on melodic black metal, martial drumming, epic riffing, more tortured vokills, cool tangled woozy minor key melodies, a swirling druggy ambience, weirdly catchy and otherworldly, but still heavy and psychedelic, maybe our favorite track, and the perfect way to wind down this serpentine blackened outsider drone metal journey...

LOCRIAN The Clearing (Fan Death) lp 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The Clearing is the latest from the Chicago duo of Andre Foisy and Terence Hanuum, now seemingly permanently expanded to a trio with Steven Hess on drums, and like past records, these guys effortlessly conjure up another series of haunting dronescapes and blackened ambience, opening with a creeping sprawl of funereal piano, wreathed by all manner of distant industrial clatter and metallic buzz, before finally transforming into a proper song, complete with clean vocals, loping drums, laid atop a wild squall of feedback and squealing guitars, all blurred into an undulating stretch of softly caustic mesmer, the result a sort of noise drenched slowcore, dramatic and intense, a little bit doomy, before finishing off with a sort of Sunroof!-style ur-drone.
"Augury In An Evaporating Tower" starts off all power electronics buzz, the sounds layered and shifting like some sort of deconstructed riff, which could have gone on forever as far as we're concerned, but instead the band slip into some serious buzzing and blasting blackness, the transition is fantastically abstract and creepy, but once they're in it, it's about as black metal as we've heard these guys, the black buzz rife with al manner of tangled melodies, the sound strangely muted and woozy, eventually giving way to a buzzing psychedelic second half, that sounds a bit like a more fracture blackened Barn Owl, moody and melancholy, before slipping right into "Corprolite", which begins with a gorgeous bit of decaying sound, a little Tim Hecker, a little Philip Jeck, warbly and crumbling, which is soon joined by some acoustic guitars, and some tribal drumming, until other guitars surface, adding heft and turning it into something resembling a Swans jam, albeit still minimal, instrumental, and wreathed in crumbling crackle.
The 17 minute title track finishes things off with a slow build epic, starting with some John Carpenter like pulses, overlaid by some heavier synth buzz, some spidery guitars, and lots of other layers gradually creeping into the picture, while way off in the background, vocals howl, drums pound, electronics hum and whir, the sound staying pretty abstract the whole time, but eventually building to a sort of wall of black buzz, before fading out in a squall of sine waves, throbbing synths, fractured electronics, and looped industrial noise. Seriously killer stuff. We're often skeptical when bands release so much stuff, but these guys never fail to deliver.
Packaged in super glossy jackets with some of the coolest cover photography we've seen. Includes a printed insert and a download card.
MPEG Stream: "Chalk Point"
MPEG Stream: "Augury In An Evaporating Tower"

LOCRIAN The Clearing & The Final Epoch (Relapse) 2cd 14.98
This two-fer is a strange sort of reissue, ostensibly a re-release of Locrian's 2011, previously vinyl-only The Clearing album on cd for the first time, but also including a whole disc of unreleased material called The Final Epoch. More on that disc in a second. First up, The Clearing, here's our review from when we listed the lp version last year:
The Clearing is the latest from the Chicago duo of Andre Foisy and Terence Hanuum, now seemingly permanently expanded to a trio with Steven Hess on drums, and like past records, these guys effortlessly conjure up another series of haunting dronescapes and blackened ambience, opening with a creeping sprawl of funereal piano, wreathed by all manner of distant industrial clatter and metallic buzz, before finally transforming into a proper song, complete with clean vocals, loping drums, laid atop a wild squall of feedback and squealing guitars, all blurred into an undulating stretch of softly caustic mesmer, the result a sort of noise drenched slowcore, dramatic and intense, a little bit doomy, before finishing off with a sort of Sunroof!-style ur-drone.
"Augury In An Evaporating Tower" starts off all power electronics buzz, the sounds layered and shifting like some sort of deconstructed riff, which could have gone on forever as far as we're concerned, but instead the band slip into some serious buzzing and blasting blackness, the transition is fantastically abstract and creepy, but once they're in it, it's about as black metal as we've heard these guys, the black buzz rife with al manner of tangled melodies, the sound strangely muted and woozy, eventually giving way to a buzzing psychedelic second half, that sounds a bit like a more fracture blackened Barn Owl, moody and melancholy, before slipping right into "Corprolite", which begins with a gorgeous bit of decaying sound, a little Tim Hecker, a little Philip Jeck, warbly and crumbling, which is soon joined by some acoustic guitars, and some tribal drumming, until other guitars surface, adding heft and turning it into something resembling a Swans jam, albeit still minimal, instrumental, and wreathed in crumbling crackle.
The 17 minute title track finishes things off with a slow build epic, starting with some John Carpenter like pulses, overlaid by some heavier synth buzz, some spidery guitars, and lots of other layers gradually creeping into the picture, while way off in the background, vocals howl, drums pound, electronics hum and whir, the sound staying pretty abstract the whole time, but eventually building to a sort of wall of black buzz, before fading out in a squall of sine waves, throbbing synths, fractured electronics, and looped industrial noise. Seriously killer stuff. We're often skeptical when bands release so much stuff, but these guys never fail to deliver.
So as mentioned above, included here with The Clearing is also The Final Epoch, a collection of previously released material, from various cassettes and things, on labels like Small Doses, Deathsmile, Tape Drift and Black Horizons. Five long songs that while not a proper record, definitely play out as one, and are a pretty good foil for the Clearing. The opening track is a gorgeous bit of droned out tension, all deem billowy rumbles, warm swells of melodic feedback, almost like a darker more intense and metallic Expo 70, the shrieked vox buried in the mix pushing it from meditative kosmische into abject blackened industrial, but without making it any less blissed out and mesmerizing. From there on out the disc drifts into Our Love Will Destroy The World like chaotic swirl and skree, building lush landscapes from heavily reverbed guitars and keening high end shimmer, dubbed out and droney, lush and layered, slipping into hushed minimalism here and there, but more often flitting from churning black thrum to dense tangled melodic mesmer, many of the songs laced with cool little looped guitar figures that remind us of Durutti Column, those elements woven into Locrian's blackened soundscapes makes for something tripped out and weirdly transcendental.
The final two tracks find the sound starting out as an abstract bit of spaced out subtly twangy atmospheric riffage, hints of Earth and Barn Owl, but that dark dreamy drift is soon subsumed by more thick viscous washes of crumbling blackness, before finishing things off with a gorgeous gristly noisy droned out closer, that sounds like the Dead C but more spare and spacey, lots of buzz, and crackle, tangled atonal feedback, rumbles and thrums, a churning droned out muted riffscape, that eventually blossoms into a soaring, keening noise drenched celestial ur-drone. So good.
Both discs housed in printed inner sleeves, those sleeves in a super fancy old school tip-on full color mini lp style gatefold jackets.
MPEG Stream: "Chalk Point"
MPEG Stream: "Augury In An Evaporating Tower"

LOCRIAN The Crystal World (Utech) 2cd 17.98
Full length number three from these black drone audio alchemists, offering up their latest sprawling epic, this one conceptually based on a JG Ballard novel about a leper colony, and the mysteriously crystallizing forest that threatens their existence. Heady stuff, but the sort of concept perfectly suited to Locrian's sprawling sonic mystery, epic and cinematic, haunting and harrowing, the music of Locrian already plays like a soundtrack, their sound evoking all manner of other worlds and alternate realities, lost civilizations and spiritual planes, underworlds and inner worlds and what lies between.
Normally a duo, here Locrian have been expanded to a trio, with an additional member contributing electronics and percussion, allowing the band to expand their sound even further, stretching out into lengthy explorations, drifting from deep buzzing drones to starry fields of glitched out electronics, swooping spacey black ambience to lumbering blackened doom, abstract post rock to churning crumbling low end dirges.
After what plays like a black metal power electronic intro, all corrosive black buzz, layered drones, distant buried melodies, howled anguished vox, and delicate tinkling chimes, the record shifts into a more tranquil blackness, the two tracks connected by those tinkling chimes, that melodic refrain, distant melodies drift beneath chant like vocals, processed guitar throb and thrum, eventually evolving into a stretch of gorgeously epic doomic plod, deep ominous vocals over keening high end melodies, subtle tribal drumming, and swirling ambience, a glacial groove that finally dissolves into a squall of white noise.
Gorgeous looped proggy guitars drift over electronic squelches, dizzying and hypnotic, multiple guitars layered into a mesmerizing harmony, eventually, another melody, and a thick crumbling distorted riff join in, drums too, and it's a fantastic bit of hypnotic chaos, laced with squealing guitars and bursts of free drum splatter.
The record unfurls an epic bit of hushed dronemusic minimalism, that also eventually erupts into some abstract rhythmic churn, looped and cyclical, all over grinding guitars and FX drenched squealing electronics, before slipping into some caustic blackened drones, abject and grim, the guitars rumbling and crumbling and super distorted, while voices wail and howl way off in the distance. Finally the record finishes with a long stretch of moody melodic doom, acoustic guitars, crooned wordless vox, swirls of psychedelic guitar, high end electronic streaks, which expand into another pounding dirge, this one strangely pretty, even the anguished vokills can't take way from the track's lilting loveliness, a hazy bit of metallic slowcore, wrapped in increasingly frantic psychguitar, before all of that fades out completely, leaving just acoustic guitar, strings and what sounds like harmonium or accordion, a darkly emotional outro, culminating in a wild tangle of frenzied freaked out strings.
But that's just the first disc. Disc two continues with a nearly 54 minute single track, all instrumental, an epic sprawling, ever shifting chunk of blackened dronemusic, that could have easily been its own record. Deep ominous pulses, give way to hazy washed out melodies, laid over that ominous low end creep, which slips into spaced out looped electronics and haunting stretches of chantlike chorales, blown out blasts of white noise psychguitar splinter into blurred expanses of soft focus static, all wrapped around buried melodies, and muted metallic riffage, huge pummeling sheets of blown out black rrrrooaar plunge directly into black hole shimmer, laced with woozy bass thrum, and finally a stretch of tinkling echo drenched ambience, a swirling cloud of tinkling guitar melodies wrapped in thick black rumbles, and creepy looped laughter.
Epic and gorgeous, LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES! Housed in a super swank Stoughton style cd gatefold with gorgeous grim art by aQ pal Justin Bartlett, aka Vuberkvlt.
MPEG Stream: "Triumph Of Elimination"
MPEG Stream: "The Crystal World"
MPEG Stream: "Pathogens"

LOCRIAN The Crystal World (Utech) lp 19.98
This killer slab of blackened ambient doom drone, a Record Of The Week here when it came out on compact disc, NOW ON VINYL!!! (But it doesn't include the bonus 2nd disc that the cd had.)
Full length number three from these black drone audio alchemists, offering up their latest sprawling epic, this one conceptually based on a JG Ballard novel about a leper colony, and the mysteriously crystallizing forest that threatens their existence. Heady stuff, but the sort of concept perfectly suited to Locrian's sprawling sonic mystery, epic and cinematic, haunting and harrowing, the music of Locrian already plays like a soundtrack, their sound evoking all manner of other worlds and alternate realities, lost civilizations and spiritual planes, underworlds and inner worlds and what lies between.
Normally a duo, here Locrian have been expanded to a trio, with an additional member contributing electronics and percussion, allowing the band to expand their sound even further, stretching out into lengthy explorations, drifting from deep buzzing drones to starry fields of glitched out electronics, swooping spacey black ambience to lumbering blackened doom, abstract post rock to churning crumbling low end dirges.
After what plays like a black metal power electronic intro, all corrosive black buzz, layered drones, distant buried melodies, howled anguished vox, and delicate tinkling chimes, the record shifts into a more tranquil blackness, the two tracks connected by those tinkling chimes, that melodic refrain, distant melodies drift beneath chant like vocals, processed guitar throb and thrum, eventually evolving into a stretch of gorgeously epic doomic plod, deep ominous vocals over keening high end melodies, subtle tribal drumming, and swirling ambience, a glacial groove that finally dissolves into a squall of white noise.
Gorgeous looped proggy guitars drift over electronic squelches, dizzying and hypnotic, multiple guitars layered into a mesmerizing harmony, eventually, another melody, and a thick crumbling distorted riff join in, drums too, and it's a fantastic bit of hypnotic chaos, laced with squealing guitars and bursts of free drum splatter.
The record unfurls an epic bit of hushed dronemusic minimalism, that also eventually erupts into some abstract rhythmic churn, looped and cyclical, all over grinding guitars and FX drenched squealing electronics, before slipping into some caustic blackened drones, abject and grim, the guitars rumbling and crumbling and super distorted, while voices wail and howl way off in the distance. Finally the record finishes with a long stretch of moody melodic doom, acoustic guitars, crooned wordless vox, swirls of psychedelic guitar, high end electronic streaks, which expand into another pounding dirge, this one strangely pretty, even the anguished vokills can't take way from the track's lilting loveliness, a hazy bit of metallic slowcore, wrapped in increasingly frantic psychguitar, before all of that fades out completely, leaving just acoustic guitar, strings and what sounds like harmonium or accordion, a darkly emotional outro, culminating in a wild tangle of frenzied freaked out strings. So good.
And like the cd version, housed in a super swank eye popping jacket with gorgeous grim art by aQ pal Justin Bartlett, aka Vuberkvlt. Only 500 copies pressed!
MPEG Stream: "Triumph Of Elimination"
MPEG Stream: "The Crystal World"
MPEG Stream: "Pathogens"

LOCRIAN Visible / Invisible (Small Doses) 3"cd-r 4.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Ultra crazy limited tour only 3"cd-r from these Chicago blackened dronelords, we tried to order a ton of these, but managed to get less than a dozen. Considering it was limited to 93 copies, and most of those went on tour with the band, these are most likely the last and only copies we'll ever get.
Which is a bummer cuz this is really great. Two tracks, both the same length, the second is the exact reverse of track one - which makes this a musical palindrome. Prettier than most of the other Locrian stuff, delicate and drifty, washed out and woozy, long fuzzy layered drones, a little bit space-y, very hypnotic and trancelike, the end of the first track (and thus the beginning of the second) builds to a buzzing blown out looped sounding coda, which then follows the reverse path through the length of the second track eventually settling back down into some soft sun dappled dronebliss, before finally fading out completely. Quite lovely, even the heavy parts are more pretty than heavy. Only 10 or so of these in stock. Be quick, or be without...
LIMITED TO 93 COPIES. Housed in a mini plastic sleeve, with a cool black on black fold out insert.
MPEG Stream: "Visible / Invisible"
MPEG Stream: "Invisible / Visible"

LOCRIAN & CHRISTOPH HEEMANN s/t (Handmade Birds) cd 12.98
Now here to list on compact disc, too!
Christoph Heemann (of HNAS , Mirror, and many other storied tape music/drone outfits), finds himself in yet another collaboration, this time with none other than aQ faves, Chicago's blackened doom drone duo Locrian, and the results are fruitful to say the least. Albeit a bleak and black fruit, that the shiny and happy amongst you might be hesitant to taste. But then, there's much to enjoy, even for the less adventurous, in the moody drifting darkness conjured up here.
We see Locrian dialing back the harshness in favor of a more hushed and dreary post apocalyptic soundscapery. Opener "Hecatomb" starts with a creepily stark, almost Nitschian drone, complete with what sound like a cacophony of burbling horns, with disassociated fragments of 12 string guitar floating atop a heady haze of drifting textures. Part way through a lush drift of beautiful piano harmonies intermingle with a pulsating tom tom, while scraping doom-laden electronics lie buried beneath the surface, creating a haunting whirlpool of mesmeric aphotic bliss. The proceedings take a much grimmer turn with "Loathe The Light". As the title suggests, this is a dark one. Wonderfully depressive skeletal guitars outline the overall feeling of doomed helplessness. Scraping cymbals swell and clang and hiss, tortured blacked screams reverberate inside some long forgotten cavern. The mood is tense and forlorn and beautiful. "Edgeless City" has more of a lost in the cold depths of space vibe. Writhing guitar textures seep out across a barren moonscape, buzzing and dubbed out, it builds subtly into a spacious brooding stasis. A throbbing grumbling underpins the whole thing, a moody desolate soundtrack for impending end times. The last cut "The Drowned Forest" is a deep and murky miasma of death time vocal crooning and cold twisting drone harmonics, completely enveloping and angelic, like a much bleaker depressive Tim Hecker, the track as a whole developing into a churning lush hypnotizing swirl of glacial black drone. A stunning collaboration brought to us by the always ruling Handmade Birds imprint. RECOMMENDED!
MPEG Stream: "Hecatomb"
MPEG Stream: "The Drowned Forest"

LOCRIAN & CHRISTOPH HEEMANN s/t (Handmade Birds) lp 24.00
Christoph Heemann (of HNAS , Mirror, and many other storied tape music/drone outfits), finds himself in yet another collaboration, this time with none other than aQ faves, Chicago's blackened doom drone duo Locrian, and the results are fruitful to say the least. Albeit a bleak and black fruit, that the shiny and happy amongst you might be hesitant to taste. But then, there's much to enjoy, even for the less adventurous, in the moody drifting darkness conjured up here.
We see Locrian dialing back the harshness in favor of a more hushed and dreary post apocalyptic soundscapery. Opener "Hecatomb" starts with a creepily stark, almost Nitschian drone, complete with what sound like a cacophony of burbling horns, with disassociated fragments of 12 string guitar floating atop a heady haze of drifting textures. Part way through a lush drift of beautiful piano harmonies intermingle with a pulsating tom tom, while scraping doom-laden electronics lie buried beneath the surface, creating a haunting whirlpool of mesmeric aphotic bliss. The proceedings take a much grimmer turn with "Loathe The Light". As the title suggests, this is a dark one. Wonderfully depressive skeletal guitars outline the overall feeling of doomed helplessness. Scraping cymbals swell and clang and hiss, tortured blacked screams reverberate inside some long forgotten cavern. The mood is tense and forlorn and beautiful. "Edgeless City" has more of a lost in the cold depths of space vibe. Writhing guitar textures seep out across a barren moonscape, buzzing and dubbed out, it builds subtly into a spacious brooding stasis. A throbbing grumbling underpins the whole thing, a moody desolate soundtrack for impending end times. The last cut "The Drowned Forest" is a deep and murky miasma of death time vocal crooning and cold twisting drone harmonics, completely enveloping and angelic, like a much bleaker depressive Tim Hecker, the track as a whole developing into a churning lush hypnotizing swirl of glacial black drone. A stunning collaboration brought to us by the always ruling Handmade Birds imprint. RECOMMENDED!
Fyi, there's a cd version too, we have a handful, waiting to get more though...
MPEG Stream: "Hecatomb"
MPEG Stream: "The Drowned Forest"

LOCRIAN & MAMIFFER Bless Them That Curse You (Profound Lore) cd 13.98
Killer collaboration from these two aQ faves, both trafficking in a similarly ominous abstract minimalism, and who together have conjured up something pretty epic. The opening track begins as if to creep abjectly through some expanse of blackened thrum, but instead blossoms into something almost more Godspeed like, minimal propulsive drum pound, spare haunting piano melodies, distant vocals drifting ethereally over clouds of distorted buzz, and peppered with little bits of backwards effects. Haunting and heavy, epic and brooding, a cinematic sprawl that has one more surprise up its sleeve, the surprisingly heavy and metallic last couple minutes, buzzing guitars over monstrous drum pummel, transforming the sound into something even more epic and heavy.
Most of the rest of the record, seems to meld Locrian's penchant for distorted blackened dirgescapes and droned out psychedelia, to Mamiffer's stately haunting abstract chamber music, the tracks unfurling dark swirls of shimmering thrum and roiling, crumbling crunch, often smoothed into blissed out ambience, but just as often blurred and blackened into something much more corrosive and caustic, over which drift various tendrils of bleak melancholic piano melody, moaning whorls of bowed-string low end, sheets of gristly electronics and industrial clatter, as well as slow shifting clouds of smeared grey shimmer.
The record closes with a nearly 19 minute three part epic, which perfectly encapsulates the two groups' symbiotic collaboration, dark dolorous piano, ghostly angelic vox, over lush swells of chordal thrum, monk-like chants, spare acoustic guitar strum, which all disappears in a cloud of feedback drenched psychedelic guitar skree, before transforming into a stretch of FX heavy power electronics black-noise crunch, and then transforms again, into some sort of black doom trudge, gnarled super distorted guitar wrapped around booming almost jazzy drum damage, and a throat shredding metallic bellow, the result a glorious sprawl of minimal blackened industrial doom that eventually fades out to just a low level hum, and a slow, funereal, martial drum plod.
Gorgeous packaging too, both the vinyl and the cd in swank sleeves, with super striking artwork, the cassette version in a cd sized box, with a hand sewn booklet, and two stickers. The tape version limited to 200 copies...
MPEG Stream: "In Fulminic Blaze"
MPEG Stream: "Bless Them That Curse You"
MPEG Stream: "Corpus Luteum"

LOCRIAN & MAMIFFER Bless Them That Curse You (Utech) 2lp 26.00
Killer collaboration from these two aQ faves, both trafficking in a similarly ominous abstract minimalism, and who together have conjured up something pretty epic. The opening track begins as if to creep abjectly through some expanse of blackened thrum, but instead blossoms into something almost more Godspeed like, minimal propulsive drum pound, spare haunting piano melodies, distant vocals drifting ethereally over clouds of distorted buzz, and peppered with little bits of backwards effects. Haunting and heavy, epic and brooding, a cinematic sprawl that has one more surprise up its sleeve, the surprisingly heavy and metallic last couple minutes, buzzing guitars over monstrous drum pummel, transforming the sound into something even more epic and heavy.
Most of the rest of the record, seems to meld Locrian's penchant for distorted blackened dirgescapes and droned out psychedelia, to Mamiffer's stately haunting abstract chamber music, the tracks unfurling dark swirls of shimmering thrum and roiling, crumbling crunch, often smoothed into blissed out ambience, but just as often blurred and blackened into something much more corrosive and caustic, over which drift various tendrils of bleak melancholic piano melody, moaning whorls of bowed-string low end, sheets of gristly electronics and industrial clatter, as well as slow shifting clouds of smeared grey shimmer.
The record closes with a nearly 19 minute three part epic, which perfectly encapsulates the two groups' symbiotic collaboration, dark dolorous piano, ghostly angelic vox, over lush swells of chordal thrum, monk-like chants, spare acoustic guitar strum, which all disappears in a cloud of feedback drenched psychedelic guitar skree, before transforming into a stretch of FX heavy power electronics black-noise crunch, and then transforms again, into some sort of black doom trudge, gnarled super distorted guitar wrapped around booming almost jazzy drum damage, and a throat shredding metallic bellow, the result a glorious sprawl of minimal blackened industrial doom that eventually fades out to just a low level hum, and a slow, funereal, martial drum plod.
Gorgeous packaging too, both the vinyl and the cd in swank sleeves, with super striking artwork, the cassette version in a cd sized box, with a hand sewn booklet, and two stickers. The tape version limited to 200 copies...
MPEG Stream: "In Fulminic Blaze"
MPEG Stream: "Bless Them That Curse You"
MPEG Stream: "Corpus Luteum"

LOCRIAN & MAMIFFER Bless Them That Curse You (Sige / Land Of Decay) cassette 12.98
Killer collaboration from these two aQ faves, both trafficking in a similarly ominous abstract minimalism, and who together have conjured up something pretty epic. The opening track begins as if to creep abjectly through some expanse of blackened thrum, but instead blossoms into something almost more Godspeed like, minimal propulsive drum pound, spare haunting piano melodies, distant vocals drifting ethereally over clouds of distorted buzz, and peppered with little bits of backwards effects. Haunting and heavy, epic and brooding, a cinematic sprawl that has one more surprise up its sleeve, the surprisingly heavy and metallic last couple minutes, buzzing guitars over monstrous drum pummel, transforming the sound into something even more epic and heavy.
Most of the rest of the record, seems to meld Locrian's penchant for distorted blackened dirgescapes and droned out psychedelia, to Mamiffer's stately haunting abstract chamber music, the tracks unfurling dark swirls of shimmering thrum and roiling, crumbling crunch, often smoothed into blissed out ambience, but just as often blurred and blackened into something much more corrosive and caustic, over which drift various tendrils of bleak melancholic piano melody, moaning whorls of bowed-string low end, sheets of gristly electronics and industrial clatter, as well as slow shifting clouds of smeared grey shimmer.
The record closes with a nearly 19 minute three part epic, which perfectly encapsulates the two groups' symbiotic collaboration, dark dolorous piano, ghostly angelic vox, over lush swells of chordal thrum, monk-like chants, spare acoustic guitar strum, which all disappears in a cloud of feedback drenched psychedelic guitar skree, before transforming into a stretch of FX heavy power electronics black-noise crunch, and then transforms again, into some sort of black doom trudge, gnarled super distorted guitar wrapped around booming almost jazzy drum damage, and a throat shredding metallic bellow, the result a glorious sprawl of minimal blackened industrial doom that eventually fades out to just a low level hum, and a slow, funereal, martial drum plod.
Gorgeous packaging too, both the vinyl and the cd in swank sleeves, with super striking artwork, the cassette version in a cd sized box, with a hand sewn booklet, and two stickers. The tape version limited to 200 copies...
MPEG Stream: "In Fulminic Blaze"
MPEG Stream: "Bless Them That Curse You"
MPEG Stream: "Corpus Luteum"

LOCRIAN / CENTURY PLANTS Dissolvers (Tape Drift) lp 13.98
Another fantastic split, on a list jam packed with killer splits, this one featuring recent aQ Record Of The Week honorees Locrian, whose The Crystal World double disc was a big hit around here, and Century Plants, a duo we dig who are WAY under represented on the aQ site, with only a single cd-r having ever been reviewed.
Unlike the black and buzz of The Crystal World, Locrian explores a sound world more hushed and minimal, more cinematic and soundtracky, two long tracks, that flow into one another, the first beginning with streaks of shimmering buzz, over deep ominous drifts, tinkling melodies way off in the distance, soon overcome by thick swaths of swirling thrum and whir, gorgeous shards of keening high end, bits of electronics and feedback, the sounds thickening as the track progresses, sounding more like a lost John Carpenter soundtrack that some avant/post black metal thing, haunting and atmospheric and mysterious. Which leads directly into the second track, pulsing, throbbing, muted melodies, a brooding tense slow build, strangely pretty, but still dark and ominous, plenty of murky buzz and roiling blackness beneath the surface, the track never exploding into something strictly heavy, instead, drifting darkly and dreamily as a suite of mysterious cinematic dronemusic.
Century Plants dial it down even further, an ultraminimal strum and drift, whispering riffage over a cavernous low end hum, tendrils of minor key melody intertwine with smears of moaning low end, soft swoops of backwards guitars, and super subtle effects, the sound gradually becoming more insistent, the guitars subtly buzzier and blacker. The second track begins similarly, a soft hushed shimmer, but quickly blossoms into something much more sinister, a thick slab of churning black SUNNO)))-ed buzz, a glacial low end drift, that heaves and roils, but is deftly smoothed into something more tranquil and otherworldly, than heavy and harrowing.
Fantastic stuff from both bands. Definitely needing to hear more Century Plants, and of course can never get enough of Locrian.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, housed in a beautiful silkscreened blue metallic ink on matte black sleeve, with heavy printed insert.

LOCRIAN / CONTINENT split (self-released) cassette 8.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

LOCRIAN / HARPOON split (HeWhoCorrupts Inc.) 7" 12.98
With all the Locrian love going on, a recent Record Of The Week, a new split lp on this week's list, thought we'd get a few more of these back in to relist as well...
Killer tag team match up from two of Chicago's finest, Locrian and Harpoon. We've long been fans of Locrian's grim dark drift, infusing their ritualistic black ambience with plenty of black metal, but here, they go full on black, spitting out a slab of dirgey, muted, murky, howled hate. After a rumbling intro, the track explodes into a swirling cloud of frenzied riffing, loping demonic pound, and shrieked anguished vokills, with the drummer from Velnias driving them in their dirgey blackened plod, grim and atmospheric and surprisingly metal. We dig. Ambient drone fanciers might be a bit... overpowered, but everyone else will definitely dig.
The flipside comes from Harpoon, who we've yet to list, which is a bummer as it features ex members of LONG time aQ faves (and tUMULt recording artists!) 7000 Dying Rats. But Harpoon is not comedy grind, no this is some serious metallic brutality, slipping from frenzied blackened thrash, to pounding downtuned doom, throat shredding vox, crushing riffage, all wound around some complex arrangements and of course some seriously brutal drum damage.
A pretty heavy seven inches for sure. And in some seriously sweet packaging. Letter pressed black on black gatefold sleeve on super thick nice cardstock, green and black swirled vinyl, a full color two sided printed insert, and a download card.

LOCUST Wrong (Touch) 2cd 21.98
Two disc set. One of the discs is atmospheric layers of electronica of the not-quite-noisy noise flavor, as we have loved Locust for in the past. This is a cool soundin' disc, but it's meant to be played simultaneously with an accompanying CD wherein Locust's Mark van Hoen gets his pop on, as he is wont to do, and when he does pop we have to say we don't like him. Female vocals, you know the type, breathy and ethereal. So if someone gives you a $22 gift certificate, buy this and throw away the disc with the vocals. Happy Holidays!

LOCUST You'll Be Safe Forever (Editions Mego) cd 16.98
We always wanted to like those Locust records that came out in the '90s, with their alluring 4AD-inspired visual aesthetics and matching moody atmospherics, the sound a darkly silken electronica. Even though Locust's principal technician Mark Van Hoen had worked on the best Seefeel albums (and the underappreciated side project Scala), his work in Locust never really hit the mark. The baroqueness of it all seemed a bit too contrived. The female vocals that he was so fond of seemed superfluous as well. So when Van Hoen resurrected his career last year with a record under his own name on Editions Mego, we approached it with some skepticism, but thankfully that skepticism was unfounded as he finally delivered an album of what we always hoped for. The strengths of that album - the spooky atmospheres, the hypnotic sequencing, and those breakbeats which align so nicely next to the best from Boards of Canada - are reprised here on You'll Be Safe Forever, the first Locust album in nearly 12 years.
A somber tranquility eases through You'll Be Safe Forever, with its heavily reliance on swelling ambient synths, languid samples, dark-eyed kosmische vibes, and deconstructed pop motifs. Even when Van Hoen revs up things up on a track like "Strobes," the punchiness of crunched rhythms and taut arpeggiation dissolve within the hypnotic patterning from his female vocal samples and bleary-eyed drones. "The Washer Woman" with its painterly sequencing, skittering rhythm track and tone-bent melodies has all of the tropes of a great Biosphere track. By the end of the record especially on "The Flower Lady" and "Subie", Van Hoen hits those blunted notes of low-slung basslines and slow-motion grooves that would have been right at home on Mo' Wax back in the day. One of the finest electronica records of 2013 for sure.
MPEG Stream: "Strobes"
MPEG Stream: "Fall For Me"
MPEG Stream: "Just Want You"

LOCUST You'll Be Safe Forever (Editions Mego) lp 22.00
We always wanted to like those Locust records that came out in the '90s, with their alluring 4AD-inspired visual aesthetics and matching moody atmospherics, the sound a darkly silken electronica. Even though Locust's principal technician Mark Van Hoen had worked on the best Seefeel albums (and the underappreciated side project Scala), his work in Locust never really hit the mark. The baroqueness of it all seemed a bit too contrived. The female vocals that he was so fond of seemed superfluous as well. So when Van Hoen resurrected his career last year with a record under his own name on Editions Mego, we approached it with some skepticism, but thankfully that skepticism was unfounded as he finally delivered an album of what we always hoped for. The strengths of that album - the spooky atmospheres, the hypnotic sequencing, and those breakbeats which align so nicely next to the best from Boards of Canada - are reprised here on You'll Be Safe Forever, the first Locust album in nearly 12 years.
A somber tranquility eases through You'll Be Safe Forever, with its heavily reliance on swelling ambient synths, languid samples, dark-eyed kosmische vibes, and deconstructed pop motifs. Even when Van Hoen revs up things up on a track like "Strobes," the punchiness of crunched rhythms and taut arpeggiation dissolve within the hypnotic patterning from his female vocal samples and bleary-eyed drones. "The Washer Woman" with its painterly sequencing, skittering rhythm track and tone-bent melodies has all of the tropes of a great Biosphere track. By the end of the record especially on "The Flower Lady" and "Subie", Van Hoen hits those blunted notes of low-slung basslines and slow-motion grooves that would have been right at home on Mo' Wax back in the day. One of the finest electronica records of 2013 for sure.
MPEG Stream: "Strobes"
MPEG Stream: "Fall For Me"
MPEG Stream: "Just Want You"