Righteous Acid

Almost everything available (or not available) at the Sun Araw shop is worthy of attention and dollarsbut I've been really enjoying/digging/wigging to this bright little baby recently:



Fans of Sun Araw will recognise a certain jaded/faded humming of psychedelia... a psychedelic sound that is undeniable but curiously monochromatic; as if somewhere, elsewhere, there's a really grooovy party going on but you're sitting in a room, headstuffed with Cumin and Salvia Divinorum imagining what it might feel like to be invited to that party.

And:

swept endless tumbling

jerky guitar trail offs

rhythms made out of the mis-hits from a 70s Cow Punching competition

others discarded from Maximquaye's dark hours on two track

tracks that seem like afterthoughts and come-downs

fidelity slips

broken-wheeled wagons, circling in the snow

cannibals w/cannabis

If any of this tickles yer kidneys then of course it's a monster fuck that this little fellah is all sold out but the good guys/girls at Mondo Nation have put it up on their site for your downloading pleasure pips... Don't normally link to full albums and will take down if it gets a rerelease but, for now, indulge....

High Wolfings

High Wolf is a little brain worm.

Been listening a lot to High Wolf, stands out in an overloaded crowd of dronescapers and murkrakers

(seriously; there's so much of this stuff... used to be you managed to track down a few Zoviet France LPs, maybe some HNAS cassettes, the odd track on a compilation of amplified washing machines and scratches; now you can live a lifetime of drone, a futility of slipped discs)

But High Wolf transcends the genre, I think; a lighter touch, more wholly psychedelic than the Ferraro(adkillers) contingent; less in thrall to the sources of the samples and loops, more deranged by the looping itself; the lightly propulsive power of the everloops and the ever-so-sleight of hand gearshifts...

And the tones are generally lighter too; less stomach sucked-in blackness, more pushed out lightbeams, digging right at your brains... sparkly, even.

Maybe, it's just me.

Anyway, there's a bunch of stuff up at the Winged Sun Records bandcamp site, including a little slice of High Wolf from the Japan Tour CDR; listen and then pay what you will...

If you're in the US then High Wolf is about to tour there and are apparently hooking up with likeminds along the way - Robedoor, Magic Lantern / Super Minerals, Plankton Wat, Sun Araw, Starving Weirdos, L.A Vampires, Deep Magic and many more...

These collaborations are always hit and miss but I'd imagine when they hit it's going to put the mental in transcendental...

Pink Priest

Came across these guys here or there, probably here.



Okay. So I've only heard one track: Vultures Circling Weird Carcasses. It's a good one. It's made me think there might be more out there.

Like an overdriven Fennesz, or a Fennesz more in love with, say, The Stooges than The Beach Boys. There's lots of noise, pink and otherwise, and lots of drop-out, the sound just sliding away... like it.

There's identifiable guitar and tinned drums, sped up and stolen from the early Palace albums, little specks of colour here and there, little yelps...

Everything's smeared as hell. Well soiled.

I like it. It sounds faraway. Mythic. I like the way it doesn't feel the need to gooooooooooo onnnnnnnnn; it's immediate, in it's way, less reliant on narcosis or psychedelia... it's mushroom music for the ADHD Generation...

Go find these folks or go here or here.

Kemper Norton Collective

The first CD from the Cornish / Su-Sex Kemper Norton Collective is out now. It's a beautifully packaged little artefact - mine came with a little introductory booklet and a sample of Cornish sand (thus invoking the fiery Gods of the Department for Anti-Social Insecurity and, perhaps, Fisheries).

Despite the deliberately fragmented nature of the release - Kemper himself features on most of the tracks but there's also stuff from the Rradiant Boys, Speckle, Loic Rich (whom I vaguely remember from my early years as a paranoid chaser; [Comments Deleted Due to Misplaced Freudery and Scatologics], Singularity Jones, employeeseven and Burnthouse - there's an inhouse feel to the crackling and slurtronics that seems to suggest a kind of Hive Mind at work... as if the Borg only assimilated FE teachers, Social Science researchers, computer technicians from 1973-1979 and Arthur Machen's godchildren, steeped in bedtime stories.

The collective vision seems to be one that evokes the dreaded hauntological word while channelling some of the sludgier aspects of Four Tet (the breakbeats are more often than not broken) and even Boards of Canada.

Of course, it doesn't sound like either of those bands but there's a fellowship there, a collective memory of what music might have sounded like, had things taken a turn for the worse.

Distant drones, crackles and water drips permeate several of the tracks, seemingly dragging up Salt Marie Celeste ghosts from the Cornish seabeds and then often letting them wander around abandoned fairgrounds and Morris Dancing competitions (the kind where rival troupes start swinging their sticks and flicking each others eyes out in debates about Olde English pronounciation). The Wicker Man, obviously, but I'm also hearing a film that I only just remember seeing, Carnival of Souls as well as that Dali dream sequence from Hitchcock's Spellbound.

That said, it's not especially dark - there's a brightness in amongst the occasionally overwhelming and overlapping sound and there's real songs in there, tiny psychfolk passages that break the tension. The raven on the cover gives only part of the picture.

Unprocessed found voices break through, BOC style and remind me a little of how they're used in The Advisory Circle and some of the better tracks on Mordant Music's Dead Air i.e. they sometimes work a little against the tracks but sound all the better for it.

It's not ecstatic music, not really danceable unless you're suffering from an Asperger's hangover and sometimes it gives you the giddy feeling that it might kind of topple over, taking you with it. A sleeping cow, covered in spiderspit. This might be what you hear when deaddrunk and trying to keep the the world from spinning. In a good way.

Go to his myspace site, pay the guy a little money - it's also very cheap! - delve deeply. If you like the stuff on this site you'll like this stuff. He's got a got a few celebrity fans and he'll get more...

You know you can't resist a conversation that begins with you saying: "Course, I was kinda into them a bit back in 07, after that they got a bit, well, commercial I thought... the old CDRs were great though, still play them all the time even if the dog gets a little boss-eyed..."

Gown - For the Maples

Many thanks to the great Three Lobed Recordings for sending me a preview copy of Gown's latest grammaphone record, For The Maples . It's pretty impressive stuff, with Gown tag teaming up with the Sunburned Hand Of The Man girls and boys to create an album that lurches seamlessly (is that even possible? perhaps lurching negates seamlessness...) from almost pastoral guitar textures to roaring Raccoo-oo-oon rumbles. At times, this sounds like a better recorded early Sonic Youth but it's a little more far-reaching than this, makes more sense played straight through; letting the air fizz, letting the guitars breathe.

Worth checking out the rest of the Three Lobed Catalogue, I think; it seems like they have a real style and, well, ethic about them. This release comes in chunky vinyl with a glass mastered CD (okay, no idea what glass mastered might mean) and a silkscreened cover. I have a few of their releases, including the excellent l'un marquer contre la moissonneuse by wooden wand and the vanishing voice, which I think Kek gave me as well as my favourite Sunburned release The Mylar Tantrum. If you have any, give these people some money; these kind of labels ought to make you feel warm inside and, one day, your post-angular psycheDelia derbyguitar scrawl might find it's way to their door, begging for entry (and begging for etching)onto one of their slabs. Or else, if you're that way inclined, pretty much all these mostly limited releases are destined to shed tears on eBay a few years from now when people just like you suddently come into money and start scrabbling for a little piece of early 21st century history.

Here's a preview of For The Maples:

"Taylor's Jam"

Duals and Triples And Quadrapaedics

For no particular reason, phrases such as this "The Dream/Aktion Unit were originally birthed as a side-project to allow Thurston Moore and Jim O’Rourke to fully explore the kind of ecstatic power blues that their work in Sonic Youth repeatedly implied." have started to nag at me, like an ulcer or a small blind child, waving a spoon.

It's the use of the word 'allow'.

'Allow' sneaks in there and seems to be seems to go almost unnoticed, a weird state of affairs in that it appears to be suggesting that musicians are not allowed to do what they want with their regular bands. It's not a new thing (and I talked about the beginnings of the latest wave here) but it's rapidly turning into a plague. Everyone's doppelganger has an alter-ego. I succumbed to the blogging version myself, forcing into existence the twin beasts of Tuche and Automaton and even the artbloated linkdump that became Subject A Obliterates.

And to what end? Couldn't any of that crap be safely posted here? Would I disappoint anyone if I diverted from my usual mp3 fare? Are blogs capable of disappointing in the same way that media you pay for?

One day I might come back to this. Or maybe not. As Coum used to say I "guarantee disappointment".

I can see perhaps why Major League playahs like, erm, Sonic Youth might not be able to dish out any old crap under their real names for fear of abusing their $1,000,000 record deals but what's with all the Jewelled Antlers and the Fonal folk's eternal twisting - and why does it even seem reasonable that The Tuss might be Richard James aka Aphex Twin aka AFX aka Caustic Window aka The Diceman?

I remember Mark Pritchard going on about how he needed all the different monikers to reflect the different styles he was coming out with - techno, ambient, drum n bass, electro etc - but couldn't one of the names deal with multiple genres? Is no name big enough to transcend its signifiers?

I remember Coil talking about the same thing just before the ElpH and the Black Light District period - the pressure to live up to a name (which seemed to have crippled the Backwards album), to not be a disappointment to all the t-shirt wearers out there.

Now everyone's at it. No names unwound. No names sacred. No names willing to carry the can. What's happening? Am I being bugged in all the wrong places or is there something sinister machining its way through the system?

The Tuss album? Really good. Well poppy. Best thing ol' AFX has done for ages.

Psychic Secession

This sounds like the cover art, only slightly louder. Be at ease in the bedroom or the kitchen and with an orginal AGA and dual aspect lounge diner, this is a must for any discerning doomdroid, sludgeathonic neckbender or freespinning noisegoat. The blinds and carpets are included and the vendors are willing to throw in a whole horse-tub of ultra-strength chlorine tablets to use in the pool. Don't delay because this little babyblue is likely to be in editions of 5000 or less. It's the nicest thing that Novocaine Homes have built for quite some while.

This track, though, is untypical.

Yellow Swans - The Belocity Of The Yolk

A Yousendit Eas-e-drone present-ation