Drag City
UK digi-dub veterans Alpha & Omega have taken on the task of remaking Om‘s track “Addis” from their recent Advaitic Songs album, transforming the original’s hypnagogic swell of doomy bass and mournful cello into a dub workout in two parts. Side A weighs in as “Ababa Dub,” Kate Ramsey‘s haunting vocal lifted into the echo chamber while the strings vibrate below, riding on a coasting undercarriage of sampled drums and bass.
Alpha & Omega snip out a syllable which sounds exactly like “Om” and send it bouncing off on a trail of delay while other sounds emerge as haunted sirens, and as far as dub mixes go, they could hardly have found better source material. On the reverse, “Addis Ababa” continues the meditative mood almost seamlessly (apart from
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Unlike Star Trek fans, Can enthusiasts never have to choose between the two key vocalists of the Can oeuvre. Partly this is because Damo Suzuki and Malcolm Mooney both found idiosyncratic ways in which to interact with the rest of the band. It is also because Can enthusiasts are not necessarily Star Trek fans.
Bringing together musicians who have worked together separately before – Burnt Friedman and Jaki Liebezeit have released several outstanding records of electronic dub together, among numerous other guest spots and collaborations; Irmin Schmidt and Jono Podmore made two albums as Schmidt & Kumo; and of course Schmidt and Liebezeit were Can members together, as well as collaborators since the band’s demise. Add in Podmore’s sterling work on editing The Lost Tapes, and it’s really no surprise that this début Cyclopean EP appears (via Mute) on the Spoon imprint either.
Russell Haswell‘s Further 12″ opens with a burst of what could be fireworks, or might indeed be some kind of demented “Black Metal Instrumental Intro Demo” for that matter. The rippling bursts of reverbed drum machine splutter and brap with an apparent randomness which could just as easily be blasting into the sky as into an unlit, dank Norwegian cellar club with spasmodic arhythmia and no sense of blast beats being allowed to kick in. It’s this sort of toying with expectations, especially when if comes to track titles, which makes Haswell so entertaining. That and the crawling chaos of noise which he introduces into the mix; and as with all the best noisemongers, he knows how to judge when and when not to
Sometimes, smaller and quieter is better, is perfect. This slender little piece is 20 minutes exactly, a precise slab of (ahem) Lovely Drones that shows Stephan Mathieu at his serious, studied best. Beauty slowed down. The WK is legendary “quiet” pianist Wilhelm Kempff, whose 1927 recordings of Beethoven‘s Piano Sonata No. 26 Les Adieux are used as some of the generative material here.
It was 1974 when Comus, after two truly blood-curdling albums (1971’s First Utterance and 1974’s To Keep From Crying), retreated to his woodland bower, lay down in a mossy hollow and went to sleep. Those recordings had been barely understood at the time, their power and strange attraction undeniable, yet somehow they remained too demonic, too priapic, to be embraced by those frightened of the twisted, leering face and the danse macabre melodies. The time of Comus had not yet come.
It’s got text in Amharic on the sleeve! I assume! It’s about single length! It uses exclamation marks to describe itself, and this seems awesome! Because the music is awesome!
A little sliver of electronic gargling from the man of the moment, Ekoplekz. If you want to know which moment, you’ll perhaps have to remember that Dromilly Vale is Nick’s imaginary recording studio, a hybrid of King Tubby’s on Dromilly Ave, Kingston and the Radiophonic Workshop’s Maida Vale studio in London. This is 1973 re-imagined uchronically; maybe Dick Mills and Lee Perry did hang out, swapping tape delays, pressing buttons that weren’t theirs; maybe John Baker just couldn’t stop putting some of his jazzy tangles all over Augustus Pablo’s melodica lines; maybe they swapped close-miked pocket protectors over Rum and Pineapple…
As part of the Lumberton Trading Company‘s limited edition subscription series (others in the set include Glass Out – with vox from the late Jhonn Balance; the ever-crackly Main; Brian Conniffe, Human Greed and Jean-Hervé Péron plus guests) of 12″ singles, Cindytalk – (AKA Gordon Sharp) teams up with Phillipe Petit for a double-A side mini-album.![Lustmord - [Transmuted] cover](http://freqzine.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/lustmord-transmuted.jpeg)
For most of the twenty-eight years since Lustmord’s debut, the lot of a devotee has involved much twiddling of thumbs between infrequent releases and little chance of catching the man live – the portentous date of 06/06/06 seeing his first (and to date only) live appearance since the early eighties.
Mockery is the breathtaking début album from Littl Shyning Man, a.k.a. Christopher Haworth, which was originally released in 2005. To me it struck a chord with Mothlite‘s The Flax of Reverie – a huge symphonic sweeping spectrum of style: a mixture of electronics and instruments, frantic modernist string pieces, vocal harmonies, spoken word, raw buzzing noise, drum and bass joins folk in a shimmering clicking whir. And like Mothlite, Mockery has a quality that is very English. The name Littl Shyning Man comes from the book Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. Mockery is a sound track to this post apocalyptic tale. Christopher Haworth steers us through a landscape that is disjointed and fractured, melancholic and unsettling. The shards and embers of electronica and folk
The debut release from the Skull Disco label, this double A side 12″ shows there’s lots of promise lurking between the drumming and dancing skeletons which are sure to become a sought after signature design characteristic of the label. Neither track references dub as a chilled out dope-nodding groove, instead distancing the bass and drum sounds, such as they are, from the body and drilling themselves into the darker parts of the brain instead with the subtle insistence of a paranoid delusion.
Sub Dub‘s percussionist Raz Mesinai manifests here in his Bedouin guise, deplying five tracks showcasing his cultural heritage through a New York filter. “Final Warning” has a persuasively swaying main drum loop, topped with stretched ululations and sirens which lend a hallucinatory character to the cross-pollinated groove, while “Do We Belong” shows that bagpipes are not a purely Celtic invention. Badawi mixes pipes, chants and depth-charge dub bass expansion on “Bedouin Raid,” which is as energetic as the title indicates, while Simmie Sernaker‘s haunting violin drones and scrapes combine with the low-end rumble and swirling drum rhythms of “Yashar” to provide the EP’s highlight, a glorious combination of ancient and modern trance techniques.