Consouling Sounds With just two LP tracks totalling a shade over forty minutes long, Lueur presents its mood-altering substance in paths that wander from ultra-faded darkness into the natural world and back again.
Antron S. Meister
140 posts
Consouling Sounds The very definition of slow-burning, Dead Neanderthals‘ début release for Consouling Sounds draws out what at first listen seems like an introduction over half the length of the CD’s single track and across the whole of one side of the vinyl edition.
Riot Season With no less a space cadet than Makoto Kawabata at the production controls, it’s no surprise that Hibushibire engender fabulous furry freak riffs of a sort that Acid Mothers Temple can be heard blasting into space at any given psychedelic happening.
Southern Lord Ten minutes and ten seconds of stoner riffs that some waited some sixteen years to arrive since the last hazy wafts of Sleep‘s 1998 LP Dopesmoker faded out, “The Clarity” finds Al Cisneros and Matt Pike joined by Jason Roeder of Neurosis on drums. Originally released as a digital single in 2014, it now gets the full Southern Lord vinyl treatment
Consouling Sounds Packing a lot into its two sides of vinyl (or one track on the CD edition), Forever And A Day finds Mathieu Vandekerckhove (Amenra, Kingdom and Sembler Deah) in a musical meditation on his relationship with his father, and the sculpture that he made for his son around the time of his birth. This bronze torso and head appears in close-up detail on the LP sleeve […]
Gizeh There’s a moment on The Stone Is Not Hit By The Sun, Nor Carved With A Knife, not long into “The Stone”, where Nadja hit their full metal mark, ramp up the drone-doom riffs hard and it becomes essential to reach for the volume knob in order to bring the levels up yet further.
Zoharum Occasionally known as Navel, whose Ambient series of albums of last decade included Eno-referencing titles such as Music For Spaceports, Günter Schlienz has been making delicately shaded melodic drones and curling electronica since the 1990s. His latest release comes courtesy of Zoharum, and concerns itself with the theme of autumn.
Blackcat A suitably rumbunctious beast, Unruly Milk‘s Spilaggges combines the eclectic guitar playing of Joe Thompson (also of Hey Colossus and Henry Blacker) with the rippling interventions of Kek (Hacker Farm and Ice Bird Spiral) to make for a neatly under-produced début album. Add in occasional vocals from Elisa Thompson and some unspecified help from Stefano Giaconne and the results are a woozy wander through a West Country psychedelic mindscape
Trashmouth Sweeping in on a waft of churning organ and pounding drums, Taman Shud‘s second album Oracle War has more than a whiff of classic seventies grungy acid-frazzled rock to its fragrantly-flecked switchback riffs and tight-as-you-like chops and changes. As soon as the wall of sound starts propping up their house of the holy noise, it’s impossible not to see images of dank basements, oil-wheels turning and the air heavy […]
Artemisia Long out of print and originally put out in 2006 by small DIY label Vendlus, then emerging on Southern Lord a year later, Diadem Of 12 Stars has now been remastered and re-released on Wolves In The Throne Room‘s own Artemisia Records.
Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard has been busily investigating the particular qualities that can come from quantity on his Sound X Sound series of seven 7” vinyl releases. In this third instance, he has nine pianists playing two very different pieces in a veritable fall and resurgence along the keyboard, descending and rising up from the depths with results that are on occasion remarkably similar to some of the impossible to play black MIDI tunes […]
(Self-released) Aphelion unfolds with the chirruping scratchiness of a host of slothful machines awakening and dozing, dreaming fitfully or snoozing comfortably in the electro-acoustic bath that Ipek Gorgun has prepared for them. Listened to in a state of semi-willing wakefulness in the imminent expectation of the arrival of hypnotised, tired-out dozing that movement through a landscape can engender, Aphelion matches those moods and the state of hovering just between […]
On-U Sound Nisennenmondai have turned their exploration of the extremes of guitar, bass and drum repetition into something of an artform, as well as seeming to find new and ever-inventive ways to continuously revisit and repurpose the same basic sound and tracks which first appeared on their now-classic N LP in 2013. With the superb live in the Clouds Hill studio version of N (and more) bringing the […]
No One Deserves Happiness Thrill Jockey Here’s a concept to consider: The Body have dubbed their latest misanthropic missive No One Deserves Happiness as “the grossest pop album of all time”, and they may just be right. Roping in Chrissy Wolpert and Maralie Armstrong from the Assembly of Light Choir to provide a more melodic vocal counterpoint to Chip King‘s enthusiastically atavistic yelping, the duo also utilise a range […]
Rock Action Mugstar have been at the vanguard of the British space rock revival (though perhaps it never really ever went away) for a good decade and more now, and everything about their music can certainly be assessed in terms as broad and well-trodden as spacious, cosmic and psychedelic, and it conjures up all of the tropes — long hair, biker chic, salad lights, heavy wafts of fragrant […]
Cosmo Rhythmatic It really makes a huge amount of sense for Mika Vainio and Franck Vigroux to have made Peau Froide, Lèger Soleil together, especially considering the latter’s storming Centaure 12″ of a year or so ago. There, Vigroux mashed up the hardest of beats in a welter of analogue electronics that bore easy and justifiable comparison to Vainio’s former outfit Pan Sonic; together they make a heavily […]
S Object/Folk Wisdom Inspired by Chris Marker’s fragmentary post-apocalyptic time travel film La Jetée and purporting to involve a mysterious black box dating from the Anthropocene era, AirEffect seems at once an imaginary soundtrack and the illusory object of its own investigations. Stanislao Lesnoj‘s haunting saxophone circles SmZ‘s shuffling drums and other percussion while Christian Fennesz‘s guitar and electronics scrape and shimmer. All the time and environmental sounds […]
Calostro Recordings (LP) / Little Crack’d Rabbit (CD) Following up on the success of Aidan Baker and Eric Quach (thisquietarmy)’s 2014’s début live album of the same name, the now-expanded Hypnodrone Ensemble is now a band in its own right and presents here a set of four new studio recordings laid down in Berlin. Judging from the album and track titles, the group seem intent on seeing just how […]