RECORD REVIEWS
by Larry "Fuzz-O" Dolman (except
where noted)
MAGIK
MARKERS: A Panegyric To The Things I Do Not Understand CD
(GULCHER) Oh
MAN. You know, Blastitude first wrote about the Magik Markers
back in . . . . August 2002. That was so long ago, they were
merely calling themselves the Magic Markers then.
Those cassettes were sweet, with silver and orange glitter
covers, and long sub-basement no-mind drone anthems, but the
band was just so brand new, new to their instruments, to singing,
barely recording themselves in a basement, let alone releasing
records . . . . . and I always wanted to hear more, though
for unknown reasons, I've barely heard 'em since, other than
one tuff-assed live show at the Empty Bottle in November 2003,
opening for a Don Caballero 'reunion' (one original member!)
and leaving the audience stuped. That show confirmed to me
that they were ascendant, but while watching their 'rise'
in all the 'major' media outlets, I've only heard one comp
track and maybe one mp3. Mostly I've seen a lot of pictures,
and checked out a few of the many live clips from ecstaticpeace.com,
and from that evidence, 'frontperson' Elisa Ambrogio has come
a long way from those early cassettes (and such charming and
relatively genteel antics as belting out an a capella version
of "I Think We're Alone Now" by Tommy James and/or
Tiffany, or beeping her way through the song "Beep Beep").
Now, I did not
hear nor even see the sold-out LP on Ecstatic Peace, but,
courtesy Gulcher Records, here is a new CD called A Panegyric
To The Things I Do Not Understand, some very recent Magik
Markers music, recorded at two different live events in May
and August of 2005. The band has clearly ALL really come a
long way, right along with Ms. Ambrogio -- they have fucking
honed it. Lots of high-stakes touring will do that.
And don't you dare call it the second coming of American Hardcore,
or No Wave, or Harry Pussy -- this is nothing old. This is
a new rock music where all the songs are twenty minutes long
and the guitars aren't played so much as they just rumble
like small giants breathing, and sometimes breeding, or at
least brewing, spitting electricity back and forth. Meanwhile
the vocals come and go, constantly blooming out a totally
brand-new poetic sexy jive mystery (hell yeah it's like Patti
Smith but with far less words and much more raw vocal sound),
while the drums connect the whole thing to the deeper essences
of the earth, via a flowing hardcore hardrock primordial rumble.
The Magik Markers aren't the second coming of anything, they
are quite simply the first coming of Fuck You. Perhaps you
will hate this record, but this record hated you first. (And
lest . . . yea, lest ye think, understandably, that
this record review is just another exmp. of zine-world dime-a-dozen
first-listen hash-flash crit-crush, know that I have already
listened to this album 15 times in one-thrice as many moons,
and the magik, yes, of course I say the magik, why,
it has not let up one bit....)
MANIACS
DREAM: Die, Learn, No Way LP (HP
CYCLE) Thanks
to the hook-up from HP Cycle, Maniacs Dream are now on vinyl
with great artwork -- nice. Maniacs Dream are one of those
new psychedelic freak-noisy Finland bands that come out of
the humongus 'Avarus etc.' camp. They're one of my favorites
from the whole scene because I feel like they use the most
distorto electric guitar, and they use it in 'the most rock
way', with a special proclivity for wild-ass wah-pedal chomping.
Good old electric guitar never gets old, and Maniacs Dream
do throw down heavy and weird jams for this LP. Like most
Finland records, the first couple times I listen it just blows
over my head like a bunch of one-time jams that even they
don't remember, but in ten years time I'm gonna lay out all
35 Finland releases I own back to back on the floor, and then
listen to 'em one after the other, and I'm pretty sure it
will be one long stream of beautiful music. Like a not-necessarily-wise
man once said, "There'll be time enough for counting.....when
the dealing's done."
MUDBOY:
Mudboy IV: This Is Folk Music CDR (BREAKING
WORLD); Mudboy IV: This Is Folk Music CD (LAST
VISIBLE DOG) Dude,
how do you expect me to keep up with all the good music out
there? With the Blastitude Record Reviews column, I'm mainly
just looking at one little micro-genre, the tiniest, which
is basically psych-noise-folk art-school dropout, and even
way down here I can't even come close to keeping up. I'm barely
even looking at people who write songs yet, mostly just those
who play primordial musical/noisical essence jams. Believe
me, I'm interested in good songwriting and arrangements, and
I want to cover all that too, but I can't even keep up with
all the really good primordial ooze bands, y'know? For example,
Mudboy. I got one Mudboy CD sent to me months ago, one of
a double-digit barrage of CDs from the Last Visible Dog (see
above), and I promptly lost it. Which kinda bummed me out
after hearing his contribution to the Elegy Box compilation
(see above), because I wanted to hear more.
And, as luck would
have it, another Mudboy disc arrived in the mail, this time
a CDR rather carelessly strapped to a goofy sci-fi drawing
of an alien jamming on an organ, from the Breaking World Records
label of Easthampton, Massachusets. This time, I played it
right away and damn -- it's good! As far as I can
say, Mudboy is a solo dude from Providence, RI whose thing
is simply to play the organ. And oh what playing -- dusted
70s hardcore progrock-scapes, pulsing rhythmic motifs, totally
psychedelic, like Richard Wright just showed up in your living
room with his Farfisa to jam out some Astral Social Club covers
he's been working on. I'm telling you, the electric organ
is one of the greatest of all instruments, and it's always
been a key transition point with which liberated souls can
take religion back, out of the church and back to the earth,
home of rock'n'roll and ecstatic music. Mudboy knows this
intuitively, and this is his music. Folk music definitely,
a travelling electric folk music. Unfortunately, maybe due
to the goofy packaging, or maybe just due to me being a mean
mistreater (of CDRs), a few tracks on here skip uncontrollably.
I hope I can dig up that Last Visible Dog CD . . . I want
more Mudboy . . . And
here it is a couple days later and I have found that
Last Visible Dog CD, which ends up being another issue (I
hesitate to say re-) of the very same album, This Is Folk
Music, now in a jewel case and with completely different
artwork, even though the Breaking World edition appears to
still be in print. The LVD artwork isn't as memorable, but
the edition is a very good thing regardless, because now I
can listen to the album all the way through. I'm realizing
that it kind of veers off into weird no-spaces at times, and
I forget that it's on the stereo, and when I remember again,
it sounds like industrial music to me, and I don't mean like
Skinny Puppy, I mean like a broken refrigeration unit. This
aspect of Mudboy music is interesting, and will be investigated
further, but it's the early extended post-Riley church-raga
peaks on here that I'm digging the most.
MWM/Maryfist:
CS (LAL LAL LAL) Here's
another odd new Lal Lal Lal release . . . . . No idea what
this is all about or what it's going to sound like . . . .
. . . [pushes play] . . . . hmm, some real clumsy
Butthole Surfers fandom with grinding stumbling fuzz bass,
clattering drumming, and ranting vocals . . . . Maryfist is
kind of a harsh name, and indeed, this is one of the more
'aggro' acts on the Lal Lal Lal label. Aggro, but kind of
funny. Kind of bad, actually. Ah, and now I'm on
the Lal Lal Lal website, putting the pieces together: this
is a split cassette, and side A, which I'm listening to, is
by a band called Married With Misanthropy, a/k/a MWM. It was
recorded 7 years ago (1998), and two of the band members went
on to be in Avarus. As the website says, "First side
is a bit embarrassing.... Here's a tape that can be way too
much for you. [MWM] serve six songs full of angst, passion
and Nine Inch Nails influences." Yeah, Nine Inch Nails
might be the intent, but the unintentional reality is played
more like a sober nervous teenage Butthole Surfers with a
young Marilyn Manson fan singing, and the overall recording
quality is so BAD that I can see why Lal Lal Lal put this
out -- for a jolt of honesty and candor, some much-needed
forest-mystique dispelling, and because the vocals and playing
may be bad but they are a riot!
Side two is Maryfist,
which is a solo project by the singer of MWM. (I'm guessing
he's the Marilyn Manson-looking dude in the picture but I
could be wrong.) Like a lot of solo/side projects that come
from punk industrial bands, this is scary soundtrack soundscape
stuff that is influenced by horror movies like Se7en.
(I think that's the first time I've ever typed that title
out, it looks kinda goofy. Very 1995.) It's a quiet recording
and it takes a while to get going. In fact, it never even
really gets going at all, it just kind of sits there and stays
creepy. This is a precursor to an album like Hair Police's
Drawn Dead, but the HP album perfects the form by
about 100 times. Which isn't to say the terrible recording
and goofy atmosphere of Maryfist isn't deliciously creepy
in its own right. Shit, I love this tape.
NIELLERADE
FALLIBILISTHORSTAR: Hålrum CD (SNSE) (review
by B. Edwards) When
I first heard of this release, the name had me tongue tied.
Once I heard the disc, I switched to jaw drop. First, this
disc revels in sound elements I enjoy (machines running and/or
breaking down, piece of metal clanging, object colliding,
the sound of whistling tones reflecting off a long stretch
of empty, buckled side street in the too-late hours). The
raw elements got me to 40% of “this is lovely.”
How the sounds were assembled handed me the remaining 60%.
The finished product is like being in your favorite abandoned
all concrete rehab/medical center. You know, the one located
next to the manufacturing plant fabricating automotive springs
for off road vehicles 22 hours a day…the one behind
that last freeway exit next to the middle of nowhere, where
the exit is taken only out due to miscalculated desperation
to find a u-turn (which doesn’t exist for many, many
long miles.) Animals lurk amid the dying grass, toxic waters,
and scraps of the mechanized world. Gray skies and blue/back
clouds offer no consolation from above. Power lines to the
manufacturing plant hum and buzz, as does the intermittent
sounds of mechanical labors. The breath of the civilized world
is being smothered, and Hålrum documents the death throes
nicely. Although I prefer not resorting to the facile “sounds
like a combination of X Y and Z,” elements of this CD
bring to mind six artists whose work I greatly enjoy, so I
hope you’ll forgive this summary: Z’EV is rehearsing
in a kitchen co-owned by Steve Stapleton and Eric Lunde; upstairs,
Chop Shop is rewiring some uncertain hulk of rusted metal
and telephone wire. In the back yard (a flat of cement and
rusty water), Vivenza tunes up his chainwheel wheat thresher
as the Hafler Trio retranslates broken frequencies on the
collapsing porch. This is a beautiful release that SNSE should
unequivocally consider a laurel to rest upon.
NUMBER
NONE: Urmerica CD (REBIS) Some
pretty harsh deep drone stuff from here in Chicago. Definite
noise aspect to it -- maybe even, dare I say it, industrial?
I swear I can hear the ghosts of Neubauten teasing through
the din, with a depressing dystopian factory vibe throughout,
audio scenes from inside an empty scorched urban industrial
park. Not the most free-flowing gush -- maybe a little stiff
-- but powerful, suitable, detailed, and the stiffness may
be intentional. And then the shuffle takes me back for a re-listen
to track one, "Suggestion for a New National Anthem,"
and damn, this sounds like some lost ultra-heavy prog instrumental.
It can at least be my new anthem for the city of Chicago --
this noisy, busy, ultra-flat city seems like the right petri
dish for growing this kind of sound. Plus, it's very hot today
in Chicago, for like the 35th day in a row, a real climate-change
kind of summer evening, so I have my windows wide open. It's
rush hour in the city, and I live across the street from CTA
el tracks, so there have been noisy commuter trains going
by almost constantly for an hour now. I don't think there's
one going by right now, but I swear I can hear one . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . so it must be coming out of the speakers,
the same train-sound exactly. I think Number None might've
recorded the el train that goes by their apartment
and put it on the album, so I'm having a real Chicago moment
here . . . maybe the same train they recorded is still in
use and going by my apartment right now.....
NUMBER
NONE: Nervous Climates 3" CDR (NEW AMERICAN FOLK HERO) Holy
shit, Number None have really delivered on all the promise
of their fine Urmerica album with this short and
sweet mini-masterpiece. 4 tracks and 18 minutes and it's really
just about perfect. Super-ghostly deep-brood stuff with strange
and welcome hints of melody spun throughout. Plus, the CDR
is spraypainted. Spraypaint always rules!
PAAVI
LP (LAL LAL LAL) With
its latest batch of releases, preeminent Finland record label
Lal Lal Lal seems to be moving away, in several different
directions at once, from the communal forest whiff it's been
handed. Such as: teenage industrial punk and dark ambient
(the MWM/Maryfist split cassette), techno-kitsch (the Kompleksi
7-inch), and killer solo works like the Fricara Pacchu cassette
and this vinyl LP, from a member of Munuaissymposium 1960
(split 7-inch with Maniacs Dream ruled) and The Puke Eaters
(that's an act I haven't heard yet), known here only as Paavi.
The graphics on here are typical Finland-style head-scratchers,
such as the paste-on cover photo of two suburban 90s girls
wearing goofy masks and sweatshirts (one of which says "Hockey
Club Original Sportswear"!), and on the insert a super-glossy
color photo of a topless mama and her baby (turns out she's
the artist's sister). As for the center labels on the record
itself, one features an extreme close-up on the bikini-clad
ass of a person of unverifiable gender, and the other says
"FUCK THE COPZ" in gothic writing! The music, on
the other hand, is pure serious solo-thought mind-stream zone-out
drone, and it's all played on an acoustic piano. Two side-long
tracks, just like in the old days. You could bring up Charlemagne
Palestine, because this is indeed "strumming music"
played on pianoforte, but this is slower and weirder. The
first side-long actually strikes me like Jandek recording
speed-metal demos, the way its one note goes from walking
to jogging to sprinting and back down again. The second side
drone-out is more lush but still has a pretty rich dark edge.
Top ten of '05......?
PEEESSEYE:
oo-ee-oo (burnt offerings) CDR (EVOLVING
EAR) This
band put out a fine CD last year and this is a very good followup.
Last year's Artifically Retarded Soul Care Operators
was a weird and somehow starkly original dose of harsh improv,
taking cues from AMM and making it younger, youthier, stranger,
skatier. They were called PSI then, or psi, but now they're
called peeesseye, or Peeesseye, or PeeEssEye, maybe because
too many people were pronouncing their name "Psi."
(As in "Main Entry: psi, Pronunciation: 'sI,
Function: adjective, relating to, concerned with, or being
parapsychological psychic events or powers <psi phenomena>
<psi capacity>," from dictionary.com.)
I like the new spelling, it makes me think of Peace Eye Bookstore,
and after all there is an Ed Sanders reference in the title
of this album (see The Family). The music this time
seems more acoustic and it's one 31-minute song. Yes, it is
a song. It has singing. There was no singing on the previous
album. They are a disorienting band. I'm writing short sentences
now. And "oo-ee-oo (burnt offerings)" is being very
quiet now but occasionally squeaking. And drumming. Someone
on the CDR is playing drums. My typing is louder. Very sparse
shit. Totally spaced-out. The cover of this CDR is hand-made
and pretty spooky, like it's packaged in a piece of a 1970s
J.C. Penney catalog (lifestyle section), but with the addition
of a Led Zep Presence style-move (hand-drawn), a
cryptic inflection of the arcane. And the music just might
be a deep black/bleak folk ritual, with the good sense to
not call itself by some "adjective folk" genre name.
CARLY
PTAK: Both CD/DVD/PRINT (HERESEE) Damn,
this one has been sitting by the stereo for awhile and I'm
just now getting my head around it. As regular Blastitude
readers should know (she was on the
cover of #11), Carly Ptak is part of the not so new, truly
weird, and definitely American group known as Nautical Almanac.
Originally part of the early Hanson Records etc. scene in
Michigan, they have since escaped the Midwest for the fertile/feral/fecund
climes of Baltimore, where they run all sorts of daring enterprises
from their not-completely-secret above-ground lair. (Go to
the Heresee website for
a glimpse, and remember, confusion is next.) There seems to
be something unique about every Heresee release, and Both,
for example, is a CD & DVD & print set. (Yes, the
cover art is a removable foldout print that looks and feels
like a nice densely-colored painting. People say "suitable
for framing" a lot when hyping up album cover art, but
if I had another copy of this, I really would frame it. Right
now it's working too well as the cover art!)
The music on the
CD is initially notable because it consists entirely of vocals,
with lots of overdubs and weird post-production. The transmutation
and reapplication of the human voice has been an ongoing area
of investigation for a lot of the Michigan crew, with Wolf
Eyes getting their Henri Chopin on here and there for some
time now, and Both (along with the earlier Quinta
Essentia spoken-word compilation on Heresee) seems to
be an apex of this area of investigation. This collection
of jarring and super-weird speaking-in-tongue voicescapes
is some pretty severe stuff, but get in the right mood, lay
down, and listen close, and you will enter an entire universe
of sound, surprise, and incantation. A lot of people these
days are chasing after anyone with an acoustic guitar and
a cracking voice so that they can dub it "freak folk,"
but maybe they should be looking at something like this instead.
I also have to mention
that interspersed throughout the voice pieces are several
excerpts from Ms. Ptak's appearance on the Art
Damage Radio Show on WAIF in Cincinnati, Ohio. A male
caller is talking on air, sounding older, lonely, intelligent,
friendly enough, only slightly creepy. Slightly creepier is
Ptak, as she calmly responds to his queries and conjectures
by dispensing wisdom and confusion in equal measures, with
a voice that sounds paranormally treated like something out
of Mothman Prophecies. I thought she had run her
voice through some FX, but it turns out the phasing and distortion
were just naturally there on her recording of the broadcast.
And wait, there's still
a whole DVD in here . . . it features four medium-length experimental
films, and jeez, here I thought the CD was weird . . . . last
night I sat down and watched all four of these in a row and
I still don't quite feel like I'm back on Earth yet. The first
one Foci Coincide is a fairly traditional concept,
in which moving images from machines and nature are stitched
together via superimposition, given an aggressive and futuristic
twist by things like extreme close-ups of chemical pollution
floating in water, the insectoid branches of a dandelion,
the spokes of a bicycle, and more, with music at least as
harsh as Mick Jagger's score for Invocation of my Demon
Brother. The second one Secret Mist is just
nuts, like afternoon public-access self-affirmation TV meets
Zardoz, with a cheap-video transparency of the face
of Ptak, or somebody, superimposed over shots of nature and
etcetera. She addresses the viewer directly, making eye contact,
with more of those unknown mantras, closing her eyes and breathing
deep in between words. Third film is called Dark Fare
and it's a rather kinky and disgusting Sadean piece involving
decadence, costumery, and lots of food and wine. And the last
film, Pronoia, is a slowly changing series of Ptak's
extremely distinctive and, yes, pretty goddamn creepy (and
beautiful, don't get me wrong!) photographic
prints. The soundtrack to this film is another radio routine
with a caller -- she's really very mesmerizing when she does
this wise/confused talk-radio guru thing. She even sounds
like a hypnotist. In fact, I'm feeling kind of hypnotized
right now. Have I ever show you how I can bark like a duck?
RITUAL
ALL 770: The Songs CD (FIRE
MUSEUM) This
just in: a label from San Francisco called Fire Museum Records
has put out a CD reissue of the debut album by Alan Sondheim's
classic Providence-based Ritual All 770 band. The album is
called The Songs, was recorded in March 1967, was
self-released in enough of an edition for the name "All
770" to end up on the NWW list, and is a must-hear for
fans of the group's two subsequent albums on ESP-Disk (Ritual
All 770, also from 1967, and T'Other Little Tune,
from 1968). In fact, it's my favorite of the three. Gorgeous
but constantly challenging improv mystery-movement with femme-chorale
vocals. Sondheim is credited with a super-whopping 19 different
instruments (including his slippery weird electric blues guitar
leads that you will remember from the ESP releases), and is
joined by others on a basic core lineup of bass, trumpet,
cornet, "jazz drums," and tabla (with many other
instruments filling out the ensemble). Again, the two women
on vocals are awesome (Ruth Ann Hutchinson and June Fellows).
Also check this
wild interview with Mr. Sondheim, and there's always the strange
and deep asondheim.org.
ROXANNE
JEAN POLISE: Nice Hands CS (APOP
RECORDS) Here's
a noise guy from the Flint area of Southeast Michigan whose
work has maybe been a little overshadowed by the all the great
shit coming out of the Ann Arbor/Ypsi area of Southeast Michigan.
Not fair, because this is a real good tape of heavy noise
textures and movements. Starts with a 'hooky' rhythmic metal-on-metal
thing submerged in huge echo, which gives way to a large wall
of obliterative sci-fi noise. The next track is a slow builder,
an electronic storm moving in from the next valley until everything
is black. I don't know, these scenarios have all been metaphored
to death by noise music, but this time it just sounds good,
and that's all that matters. Side two is labelled "szzidee
go to sleep" and that's about right -- more deep-drone
texture, slightly but only slightly prog-melodic, super-quiet
and chilled-out. Nice Hands? Nice tape!
SALA-ARHIMO
CD (LAST VISIBLE DOG) Is
it too late to nominate another album for this issue's Popol
Vuh award? Who the hell are these people, Sala-Arhimo? What
kind of name is that? And how did they make one of the finer
psychedelic krautrock-style albums of the 2000s? (Judging
from the song titles this is a Finnish group, which pretty
much answers all my questions.) Woodwinds, sci-fi hum, arpeggios,
trances, melodic vocals -- I'm telling you, if this was on
vinyl it would completely destroy me. Luckily it's on CD and
I'm still able to write these words. And as to the "who"
question, Last Visible Dog website says "Solo release
from frequent guest player with Islaja." So, this is
from Finland, and it's only one guy, and hey, I saw Islaja
here in (Chi)town last year -- was that him?
SAPAT
CDR (BLACK VELVET FUCKERE); NO-NECK BLUES BAND: Qvaris CD
(5 RUE CHRISTINE) HOLY
COW, and I'm not just making a joke about the cover art. I
did not expect full-on tunes on this new album by
Sapat. I did expect some jams, in fact some of the
very best in wasted and improvised long-form rock-and-folk
chanting and moaning available today, but certainly no songs
with words, verses, and choruses. But I'll be damned, there
are a few on here, like the very first one, a lurching acid
monster stooperfuzz bad-vibe blowout circa 1972, with vocals
supplying psyched-out lyrics and a couple of the best rock
screams I've heard in the last five years at least. In fact,
they're literally quoting Amon Duul 2 in there somewhere,
and speaking of krautrock, track three (no titles that I can
find) sounds like one of those little Damo-sung 3-minute glories
on Ege Bamyasi. (I know, I know, the name of Can
gets dropped a lot, like every time some new space-noise band
manages to put out a CDR and has a drummer who is able to
play in time, but this here is really the real Damo-deal.)
Track five has singing and words too, this time not like krautrock
at all, more like great Sapat rock, with some kind of blues-mumble
going on. And I haven't even mentioned the more Sapat-traditional
all-instrumental jams, which are as good as ever, especially
a lovely little bluegrass spinner in which backporch fingerpicking
hovers comfortably above a black hole of space-sound.
If you aren't familiar with Sapat, they're a large ensemble
with morphing personnel, more or less based in Louisville,
Kentucky, connected closely to such other scuzz-folk ensembles
as The Virgin Eye Blood Brothers and The Valley of Ashes.
I've always kinda thought of Sapat as a Midsouth mirror held
up to the decade-old No-Neck Blues Band (NNCK)
visage, and indeed I do have this new Sapat album in the changer
at the same time as NNCK's very strong new album Qvaris,
and the side-by-side gives me a vision of Sapat as the adventurous
younger band trying new moves with vigor, surging ahead of
their mentors, who are sagely waving them onward.
NNCK do new moves on
Qvaris, but it's more like subtle new ways of framing
old moves. They're a little more coy about it -- they are
after all the old men of the mountain. (First releases were
over ten years ago!) High no-mind electro-synth-squiggle duets
and trios still fall into shambling Beefheartian full-band
no-chord animal-vamps, but this time it only takes 2 minutes
("Qvaris Theme") instead of 22, and the remaining
20 minutes are divided into three or four shorter pieces,
smaller chunks of different serpentine fires. They've always
been subdued, slithering, creeping on the downlow, and there
are not a lot of vocals and almost never any words -- these
tough guys still ain't talkin'. (Not that it makes the vocals
on "Lugnagall" any less sublime.) This is something
like their fifteenth full-length album, and to still
be keeping it so low-key and song-free, it's almost like they've
set up camp inside their own bunker and they do not want to
leave, not even to go to the store. On the inside, they've
become a sinuous and sinister lean-and-mean true-blues machine
that stomps and shuffles and ambles forever down dark corridors.
It's pretty intense, and always rewards investigation -- some
assistance can be gleaned from this
interview -- but lately around here on these lovely fall
days it's been the wild and loose and somewhat less clandestine
ventures of this new Sapat disc that I've been coming back
to more. (And look for a new Sapat full-length on back-for-the-attack
Siltbreeze Records
sometime this year....)
SAPAT: "...a large ensemble with morphing
personnel..."
NO-NECK
BLUES BAND: Hell yeah. (Photo by Bryan Leitgeb.)
Oh
MAN. You know, Blastitude first wrote about the Magik Markers
back in . . . . August 2002. That was so long ago, they were
merely calling themselves the Magic Markers then.
Those cassettes were sweet, with silver and orange glitter
covers, and long sub-basement no-mind drone anthems, but the
band was just so brand new, new to their instruments, to singing,
barely recording themselves in a basement, let alone releasing
records . . . . . and I always wanted to hear more, though
for unknown reasons, I've barely heard 'em since, other than
one tuff-assed live show at the Empty Bottle in November 2003,
opening for a Don Caballero 'reunion' (one original member!)
and leaving the audience stuped. That show confirmed to me
that they were ascendant, but while watching their 'rise'
in all the 'major' media outlets, I've only heard one comp
track and maybe one mp3. Mostly I've seen a lot of pictures,
and checked out a few of the many live clips from 
Thanks
to the hook-up from HP Cycle, Maniacs Dream are now on vinyl
with great artwork -- nice. Maniacs Dream are one of those
new psychedelic freak-noisy Finland bands that come out of
the humongus 'Avarus etc.' camp. They're one of my favorites
from the whole scene because I feel like they use the most
distorto electric guitar, and they use it in 'the most rock
way', with a special proclivity for wild-ass wah-pedal chomping.
Good old electric guitar never gets old, and Maniacs Dream
do throw down heavy and weird jams for this LP. Like most
Finland records, the first couple times I listen it just blows
over my head like a bunch of one-time jams that even they
don't remember, but in ten years time I'm gonna lay out all
35 Finland releases I own back to back on the floor, and then
listen to 'em one after the other, and I'm pretty sure it
will be one long stream of beautiful music. Like a not-necessarily-wise
man once said, "There'll be time enough for counting.....when
the dealing's done." 
Dude,
how do you expect me to keep up with all the good music out
there? With the Blastitude Record Reviews column, I'm mainly
just looking at one little micro-genre, the tiniest, which
is basically psych-noise-folk art-school dropout, and even
way down here I can't even come close to keeping up. I'm barely
even looking at people who write songs yet, mostly just those
who play primordial musical/noisical essence jams. Believe
me, I'm interested in good songwriting and arrangements, and
I want to cover all that too, but I can't even keep up with
all the really good primordial ooze bands, y'know? For example,
Mudboy. I got one Mudboy CD sent to me months ago, one of
a double-digit barrage of CDs from the Last Visible Dog (see
above), and I promptly lost it. Which kinda bummed me out
after hearing his contribution to the Elegy Box compilation
(see above), because I wanted to hear more. 
And
here it is a couple days later and I have found that
Last Visible Dog CD, which ends up being another issue (I
hesitate to say re-) of the very same album, This Is Folk
Music, now in a jewel case and with completely different
artwork, even though the Breaking World edition appears to
still be in print. The LVD artwork isn't as memorable, but
the edition is a very good thing regardless, because now I
can listen to the album all the way through. I'm realizing
that it kind of veers off into weird no-spaces at times, and
I forget that it's on the stereo, and when I remember again,
it sounds like industrial music to me, and I don't mean like
Skinny Puppy, I mean like a broken refrigeration unit. This
aspect of Mudboy music is interesting, and will be investigated
further, but it's the early extended post-Riley church-raga
peaks on here that I'm digging the most. 
Here's
another odd new Lal Lal Lal release . . . . . No idea what
this is all about or what it's going to sound like . . . .
. . . [pushes play] . . . . hmm, some real clumsy
Butthole Surfers fandom with grinding stumbling fuzz bass,
clattering drumming, and ranting vocals . . . . Maryfist is
kind of a harsh name, and indeed, this is one of the more
'aggro' acts on the Lal Lal Lal label. Aggro, but kind of
funny. Kind of bad, actually. Ah, and now I'm on
the Lal Lal Lal website, putting the pieces together: this
is a split cassette, and side A, which I'm listening to, is
by a band called Married With Misanthropy, a/k/a MWM. It was
recorded 7 years ago (1998), and two of the band members went
on to be in Avarus. As the website says, "First side
is a bit embarrassing.... Here's a tape that can be way too
much for you. [MWM] serve six songs full of angst, passion
and Nine Inch Nails influences." Yeah, Nine Inch Nails
might be the intent, but the unintentional reality is played
more like a sober nervous teenage Butthole Surfers with a
young Marilyn Manson fan singing, and the overall recording
quality is so BAD that I can see why Lal Lal Lal put this
out -- for a jolt of honesty and candor, some much-needed
forest-mystique dispelling, and because the vocals and playing
may be bad but they are a riot!
(review
by B. Edwards) When
I first heard of this release, the name had me tongue tied.
Once I heard the disc, I switched to jaw drop. First, this
disc revels in sound elements I enjoy (machines running and/or
breaking down, piece of metal clanging, object colliding,
the sound of whistling tones reflecting off a long stretch
of empty, buckled side street in the too-late hours). The
raw elements got me to 40% of “this is lovely.”
How the sounds were assembled handed me the remaining 60%.
The finished product is like being in your favorite abandoned
all concrete rehab/medical center. You know, the one located
next to the manufacturing plant fabricating automotive springs
for off road vehicles 22 hours a day…the one behind
that last freeway exit next to the middle of nowhere, where
the exit is taken only out due to miscalculated desperation
to find a u-turn (which doesn’t exist for many, many
long miles.) Animals lurk amid the dying grass, toxic waters,
and scraps of the mechanized world. Gray skies and blue/back
clouds offer no consolation from above. Power lines to the
manufacturing plant hum and buzz, as does the intermittent
sounds of mechanical labors. The breath of the civilized world
is being smothered, and Hålrum documents the death throes
nicely. Although I prefer not resorting to the facile “sounds
like a combination of X Y and Z,” elements of this CD
bring to mind six artists whose work I greatly enjoy, so I
hope you’ll forgive this summary: Z’EV is rehearsing
in a kitchen co-owned by Steve Stapleton and Eric Lunde; upstairs,
Chop Shop is rewiring some uncertain hulk of rusted metal
and telephone wire. In the back yard (a flat of cement and
rusty water), Vivenza tunes up his chainwheel wheat thresher
as the Hafler Trio retranslates broken frequencies on the
collapsing porch. This is a beautiful release that SNSE should
unequivocally consider a laurel to rest upon. 
Some
pretty harsh deep drone stuff from here in Chicago. Definite
noise aspect to it -- maybe even, dare I say it, industrial?
I swear I can hear the ghosts of Neubauten teasing through
the din, with a depressing dystopian factory vibe throughout,
audio scenes from inside an empty scorched urban industrial
park. Not the most free-flowing gush -- maybe a little stiff
-- but powerful, suitable, detailed, and the stiffness may
be intentional. And then the shuffle takes me back for a re-listen
to track one, "Suggestion for a New National Anthem,"
and damn, this sounds like some lost ultra-heavy prog instrumental.
It can at least be my new anthem for the city of Chicago --
this noisy, busy, ultra-flat city seems like the right petri
dish for growing this kind of sound. Plus, it's very hot today
in Chicago, for like the 35th day in a row, a real climate-change
kind of summer evening, so I have my windows wide open. It's
rush hour in the city, and I live across the street from CTA
el tracks, so there have been noisy commuter trains going
by almost constantly for an hour now. I don't think there's
one going by right now, but I swear I can hear one . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . so it must be coming out of the speakers,
the same train-sound exactly. I think Number None might've
recorded the el train that goes by their apartment
and put it on the album, so I'm having a real Chicago moment
here . . . maybe the same train they recorded is still in
use and going by my apartment right now.....
Holy
shit, Number None have really delivered on all the promise
of their fine Urmerica album with this short and
sweet mini-masterpiece. 4 tracks and 18 minutes and it's really
just about perfect. Super-ghostly deep-brood stuff with strange
and welcome hints of melody spun throughout. Plus, the CDR
is spraypainted. Spraypaint always rules!
With
its latest batch of releases, preeminent Finland record label
Lal Lal Lal seems to be moving away, in several different
directions at once, from the communal forest whiff it's been
handed. Such as: teenage industrial punk and dark ambient
(the MWM/Maryfist split cassette), techno-kitsch (the Kompleksi
7-inch), and killer solo works like the Fricara Pacchu cassette
and this vinyl LP, from a member of Munuaissymposium 1960
(split 7-inch with Maniacs Dream ruled) and The Puke Eaters
(that's an act I haven't heard yet), known here only as Paavi.
The graphics on here are typical Finland-style head-scratchers,
such as the paste-on cover photo of two suburban 90s girls
wearing goofy masks and sweatshirts (one of which says "Hockey
Club Original Sportswear"!), and on the insert a super-glossy
color photo of a topless mama and her baby (turns out she's
the artist's sister). As for the center labels on the record
itself, one features an extreme close-up on the bikini-clad
ass of a person of unverifiable gender, and the other says
"FUCK THE COPZ" in gothic writing! The music, on
the other hand, is pure serious solo-thought mind-stream zone-out
drone, and it's all played on an acoustic piano. Two side-long
tracks, just like in the old days. You could bring up Charlemagne
Palestine, because this is indeed "strumming music"
played on pianoforte, but this is slower and weirder. The
first side-long actually strikes me like Jandek recording
speed-metal demos, the way its one note goes from walking
to jogging to sprinting and back down again. The second side
drone-out is more lush but still has a pretty rich dark edge.
Top ten of '05......?
This
band put out a fine CD last year and this is a very good followup.
Last year's Artifically Retarded Soul Care Operators
was a weird and somehow starkly original dose of harsh improv,
taking cues from AMM and making it younger, youthier, stranger,
skatier. They were called PSI then, or psi, but now they're
called peeesseye, or Peeesseye, or PeeEssEye, maybe because
too many people were pronouncing their name "Psi."
(As in "Main Entry: psi, Pronunciation: 'sI,
Function: adjective, relating to, concerned with, or being
parapsychological psychic events or powers <psi phenomena>
<psi capacity>," from 
Damn,
this one has been sitting by the stereo for awhile and I'm
just now getting my head around it. As regular Blastitude
readers should know (she was on 
This
just in: a label from San Francisco called Fire Museum Records
has put out a CD reissue of the debut album by Alan Sondheim's
classic Providence-based Ritual All 770 band. The album is
called The Songs, was recorded in March 1967, was
self-released in enough of an edition for the name "All
770" to end up on the NWW list, and is a must-hear for
fans of the group's two subsequent albums on ESP-Disk (Ritual
All 770, also from 1967, and T'Other Little Tune,
from 1968). In fact, it's my favorite of the three. Gorgeous
but constantly challenging improv mystery-movement with femme-chorale
vocals. Sondheim is credited with a super-whopping 19 different
instruments (including his slippery weird electric blues guitar
leads that you will remember from the ESP releases), and is
joined by others on a basic core lineup of bass, trumpet,
cornet, "jazz drums," and tabla (with many other
instruments filling out the ensemble). Again, the two women
on vocals are awesome (Ruth Ann Hutchinson and June Fellows).
Also check 
Here's
a noise guy from the Flint area of Southeast Michigan whose
work has maybe been a little overshadowed by the all the great
shit coming out of the Ann Arbor/Ypsi area of Southeast Michigan.
Not fair, because this is a real good tape of heavy noise
textures and movements. Starts with a 'hooky' rhythmic metal-on-metal
thing submerged in huge echo, which gives way to a large wall
of obliterative sci-fi noise. The next track is a slow builder,
an electronic storm moving in from the next valley until everything
is black. I don't know, these scenarios have all been metaphored
to death by noise music, but this time it just sounds good,
and that's all that matters. Side two is labelled "szzidee
go to sleep" and that's about right -- more deep-drone
texture, slightly but only slightly prog-melodic, super-quiet
and chilled-out. Nice Hands? Nice tape! 
Is
it too late to nominate another album for this issue's Popol
Vuh award? Who the hell are these people, Sala-Arhimo? What
kind of name is that? And how did they make one of the finer
psychedelic krautrock-style albums of the 2000s? (Judging
from the song titles this is a Finnish group, which pretty
much answers all my questions.) Woodwinds, sci-fi hum, arpeggios,
trances, melodic vocals -- I'm telling you, if this was on
vinyl it would completely destroy me. Luckily it's on CD and
I'm still able to write these words. And as to the "who"
question, Last Visible Dog website says "Solo release
from frequent guest player with Islaja." So, this is
from Finland, and it's only one guy, and hey, I saw Islaja
here in (Chi)town last year -- was that him? 
HOLY
COW, and I'm not just making a joke about the cover art. I
did not expect full-on tunes on this new album by
Sapat. I did expect some jams, in fact some of the
very best in wasted and improvised long-form rock-and-folk
chanting and moaning available today, but certainly no songs
with words, verses, and choruses. But I'll be damned, there
are a few on here, like the very first one, a lurching acid
monster stooperfuzz bad-vibe blowout circa 1972, with vocals
supplying psyched-out lyrics and a couple of the best rock
screams I've heard in the last five years at least. In fact,
they're literally quoting Amon Duul 2 in there somewhere,
and speaking of krautrock, track three (no titles that I can
find) sounds like one of those little Damo-sung 3-minute glories
on Ege Bamyasi. (I know, I know, the name of Can
gets dropped a lot, like every time some new space-noise band
manages to put out a CDR and has a drummer who is able to
play in time, but this here is really the real Damo-deal.)
Track five has singing and words too, this time not like krautrock
at all, more like great Sapat rock, with some kind of blues-mumble
going on. And I haven't even mentioned the more Sapat-traditional
all-instrumental jams, which are as good as ever, especially
a lovely little bluegrass spinner in which backporch fingerpicking
hovers comfortably above a black hole of space-sound. 
If you aren't familiar with Sapat, they're a large ensemble
with morphing personnel, more or less based in Louisville,
Kentucky, connected closely to such other scuzz-folk ensembles
as The Virgin Eye Blood Brothers and The Valley of Ashes.
I've always kinda thought of Sapat as a Midsouth mirror held
up to the decade-old No-Neck Blues Band (NNCK)
visage, and indeed I do have this new Sapat album in the changer
at the same time as NNCK's very strong new album Qvaris,
and the side-by-side gives me a vision of Sapat as the adventurous
younger band trying new moves with vigor, surging ahead of
their mentors, who are sagely waving them onward. 
