000 -- VAU [faint barren harmony]

000 is a spinoff of Shunt, sort of the "easy listening" version (HA!), if you will... meaning it's still noise oriented, but more spacy than purely catastrophic. The side-long "loll" comes across like satan playing a mean e-bow in a "contemplative" moment (probably while waiting for his pitchfork to come back from being sharpened) over a bed of gritty guitar hum that fades in and out. The nice thing is that it's not just all flat-out; there's a sense of dynamics and pacing that you don't see very often in this genre. "fract," on the other hand, is... noisier. Driven by the same hollow flanged-out sound of "loll," it also adds in bursts of guitar trash and what sounds like giants wrestling in a washing machine. And "vommrynd," the third and last track, continues with the growing wave of evil sounds, a trend of which DEAD ANGEL can only approve... plus it features lots of shuddering bass quake and crippled jet engine guitar noises, always a good thing. Well worth investigating.

13 Mg -- TRUST AND OBEY [Slipdisc Records]

Well, this is kind of interesting... quasi-"industrial" body rock (you know, you can wiggle your hips to it). Thunderous, even. I don't know that this is a bold new step forward or anything, but it IS a lot more listenable than anything I've heard in the genre in a while, and it manages to avoid sounding too much like Trent or Al -- no small feat, since leader H. Beno was the programmer/editor for Ministry's PSALM 69. (Explains why the guitars are so crunchy, though.) It's not as heavy as Ministry is these days, or anywhere as self-obsessed as Trent's been all his life, and it most certainly rocks -- crunchy guitars are manna from heaven ANYTIME dammit, they get bonus points for the crunch factor.

"Guardian Angel" and "Uppercut" both have a serious groove and a robotic vibe to them (particularly in the latter), with just the right balance of keyboards, guitars, and samples (most of which are unrecognizable; they pretty much sidestep the now-cliche "oooo let's see how many trash movies we can sample dialogue from!" move). "Sinister" is the one for me, though, a huge, lurching riff-monster with (you guessed it) big, crunchy guitars. I approve.... "Azimuth" is just as good or better, with a distorted percolating synth line that just clinks and clatters away as compressed riffs chug away. More percolating jumpiness surfaces in "Moan Song," while "Spree" returns to the heavy, orchestrated guitar riffing. Thuggish, mon.... Things get a mite noisy on "Four Speed," with heavily processed noise forming the spine of the tune, around which guitars swirl and churn. The bassist from Filter shows up on the last cut with the semi-ambient "Nath," which features drums that float up and then back down into the mix for a cool effect. All in all, a good one; if your life revolves around the whole Ministry/NIN/Skinny Puppy (when they were still good, anyway) axis, you probably should listen to this. Judging from what i'm hearing from those who've heard the new Skinny Puppy and Ministry albums, your hard-earned $$$ will probably be better spent here anyway, heh....

The cover looks an awful lot like the cover to Motorhead's HAMMERED (which may explain why they didn't send me one with the disc; then again, maybe they're just forgetful). It might well be intentional -- certainly it would not be a ridiculous comparison, since this is one LOUD band. Kind of like AC/DC with even less complexity, or 400 Blows with even less people. With only two members (drummer DJ Party Girl -- how is it, anyway, that there are so many Asian girly-girls who can play drums like they use sledgehammers for sticks? Where are they getting all that energy from and all that heft when they're all approximately the size 'n weight of a pack of ramen noodles, only better-looking and certainly much tastier? -- and guitarist/shouter Mr. Velocity Hopkins), they are nevetheless loud 'n heavy enough to need a license for the operation of heavy construction equipment. Imagine if the Unsane had been willing to admit they ever listened to Grand Funk Railroad and AC/DC -- monumentally heavy but without the pained crankiness! I am going to tell you right now, in all frankness, that you should worship this band already. Apparently they have been around long enough to put out a smattering of other hep shit (including a split with Oneida, oooo), so i am kicking myself that i'm just now hearing them, but better late than never. This album doesn't even sound like music as much as it does the sound of a demolition site. They favor everything basic and extremely loud. They don't believe in introductions, "solo passages," or meaning. They do believe in rocking. Result: music for parties that resemble barely-controlled riots. "AHHHH FEELS GOOD!" All meat, no fat, so self-explanatory that even the doofi at the NEW YORK TIMES can figure it out -- you need this. Quit fucking around with that poo ROLLING STONE is claiming to be "the new salvation of rock 'n roll" or whatever bullshit they're spewing and buy this instead. You'll feel better, deep down inside. Trust me. Would i lie to you?

This priceless artifact of pure, whole-grain rock goodness arrived in the listening room literally hours before going to press (finally), so our listening time on this one has been, uh, limited (to say the least). Nevertheless, it doesn't require a degree in rocket science to determine if 25 Suaves still got what it takes to sling punk-metal hash in the fiercest way imaginable. Turns out they do (big, big surprise, right?) -- this time primal thud 'n strum duo Peter Larson and Fumie Kawasaki are joined in the quest for sonic terror and, failing that, some real groovy kicks, man, by bass whompin' man Dave Sahijdak. I have no idea if he's a permanent addition or just guesting here; I don't suppose it matters (and even if it did, it's not like anyone cares -- he's here, he's playing, everything is cool, why worry about anything beyond that, huh?). He whomps in fine fashion, giving the drum and guitar drive a bit more oomph without turning them into art-rock or anything useless like that. So what you get for your $$$ here are nine high-octane bursts of RAWK, dude -- no-frills, no-bullshit, drummer hits everything really hard and guitar player plays really loud and hard and everybody yells and sweats a lot and it's all very cool. It's not exactly hi-fi, but it's clear and understandable and it rocks, and you didn't really listen to stuff like this for nuance, did you? Goddamn it, this is not a Steely Dan record, if you want fucking arty-farty nuance then you should be listening to something else, for this is party rock. Loud, obnoxious, riff-heavy, thumpin' and jumpin' party rock and not for sissies, either. There are nine songs here with titles like "Turn Up The Music," "Give It Up," "Born Dead," "Let It Burn," and "You're Gonna Die." The band wisely keeps the lyrics to a minimum and the big, pounding, chunky like peanut butter but with way more raw meat riffs to a maximum. The real sound of real rock, DIY style, loud and in your face. Fuck those limp fuck poles in the likes of Disturbed and Korn and all that horrible shit; go sell those cds in your collection and use the $$$ to buy this one instead. You'll be better off. Really. Would I lie to you? Better be sure to get their earlier album 1938 too, while you still can.

These New Yorkers are onto something interesting -- combining old-school 80s synth-pop moves (think Depeche Mode, OMD, etc.) with samples, more modern hints of electronica, and a Celtic-sounding singer (Claire Veniot). The results are surprisingly catchy. Apparently a lot of people think so, certainly -- "Anything" was selected by Billboard's talent web site for inclusion on the NEW TALENT SPOTLIGHT VOL. 1 CD, they're a featured artist on Riffage.com, and they're currently in the top fifty bands vying for a recording contract on Garageband.com. It's not hard to see why: from the grooving first track "Freedom Run" to the brooding synth drone closer "Alpha & Omega" they combine a new twist on a familar sound with a sharp, uncluttered pop sensibility. Some of the more brooding, less beat-heavy tracks like "Bardo Takes Time" remind me, bizarrely enough, of the first Tanita Tikaram album (remember her? you don't, do you?). Key tracks along the way include "The Boy Behind the Veil," which builds in intensity verse by verse (it's the first single, btw), the dreamy-yet-catchy "O Mayday," the clubby big-beat shake of "Wildfire," and "Anything," the song that managed to get Billboard's attention. They also manage to rework Melanie's "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)" in a manner that, while being almost unrecognizable in comparison to the original, is nevertheless a startling cover -- in fact, given their successful transformation of the song into an electronic Celtic rondo of sorts, it's actually a pretty inspired move. Their cover of the Beatles' "Across the Universe" is even more removed from the original -- they turn it into a cranked-up electronica romp that you would never recognize if hadn't known its origin beforehand. A fine disc that will appeal to those who miss the heyday of Depeche Mode and the like but aren't quite willing to give up the new sounds of electronica. Dragging in the Celtic influence was a stroke of genius; hear for yourself why....

TG: Review, please.

N/A: What did I ever do to deserve this?

TG: No editorializing! (motions with gun) Go on... get on with it... there you go... good boy....

If the Chrome Cranks were raised on a diet of blood pudding and Black Sabbath and had a singer who was more literate than (and almost as acerbic as) Steve Albini they might have, on their best day, sounded something like 50 Tons of Black Terror. [n/a]

Rhythmic chunks of devolved free jazz from Shawn Kerby and Brian Noring. I have no idea what instruments they're playing (some kind of horn and, um, other stuff), but the sound brings to mind bebop musicians stretching out on stage in a forgotten bar late at night when the only people left are drunks too pixelated to care about the strange sounds radiating from the stage. This disc isn't as noisy as many PE releases -- in fact, it rarely strays from pure improv territory -- and some of the songs such as "Is There a Splash of Hope in a River of Sadness" actually approach being soothing. This sounds more like an undiscovered beat record from the sixties than anything "modern." Even more startling, "I Know" features the first vocal I've heard yet on a PE release (at least, the first thing recognizable as actual singing, anyway). The vocal element appears on a couple of other songs, often in hair-raising fashion. Some of this makes me think of Eugene Chadbourne, maybe even Gerald Hawk. Devolved beat jazz crossed with neo-primitivism? Whatever it is, it's strange and exotic stuff.

I always look forward to checking out a new Jester release, because not only are all of their releases well-recorded and swaddled in packaging of exceptional design, but they frequently point toward musical scenes and territories previously left undocumented. This release is no exception. The heavy-duty fold-out booklet turns into a really nice poster, and the layout is sparse, simple, and elegant. The cd is worth owning just for the artwork alone, actually. But nothing in the artwork and liner notes will prepare you for the harsh vistas of sound that commence when you throw on the disc. 1349 Rykkinn, it turns out, is one Bard Torgersen, a DJ and noise-stylin' homeboy from the Rykkinn suburb of Oslo who spent from 1983-1996 mixed up in all sorts of crazy-ass, dangerous experiments in dissonant noise, heavy bass, fascist repetition, and surrealism. During these years he made albums and toured with the likes of Masters of Moh, SUPERskill, and Lord Bard; now he appears, apparently for the first time, on his own, using found sound from travels around the world and shuddering bass power electronics to create thundering rhythmic hallucinations.

Things get off to a perilous start with "Extreme Sunlight," in which crashing waves of mechanical chattering meld and recombine, until the entire track sounds like the cd is horribly damaged. The appeal of this track, as with the rest of the disc, is in its varied tones and rhythmic components -- Torgersen has a lot of stuff going on here, mostly loops of skipping cds from the sound of it (and heavily distorted loops at that), and he keeps stacking it up in different configurations, the stacks getting deeper and thicker as the piece progresses. The individual sounds also become more chaotic and arrhythmic as time passes, until -- by the end of the piece -- it sounds like the cd is not just hanging up, but hanging up in such a horrid, screeching fashion as to possibly damage the speakers. Painful-sounding, to say the least. "Glenn Kristoffersen is Dead" isn't quite so cut-up and mutilated, but its sounds are considerably more screechlike and hair-raising. Over what sounds like might have been samples of country music, Torgersen spreads out a vast array of high-pitching wailing sounds that eventually resolve into thundering rhythmic chatter like the sound of earthmovers demolishing a city block, occasionally creating wailing echoes when the bulldozer blades strike steel and buried electrical cables beneath the concrete. "Gilera 500 cc" opens with what sounds like anti-aircraft fire overlaid with twanging noises like giant metal straps being spanked with hammers; from there the sound just gets more devolved, with tight and machine-like rhythms degenerating into aimless, meandering cycles of madness.

Then we come to the fourth (and possibly most interesting) track, called either "Fields With Flowers in Crazy Colors" or "Sparkling White (hooked on heroin and Hitler)," depending on where you look. As the noises of the previous track die away, a gentle acoustic guitar emerges as the noise recedes far into the background, until it's barely distinguishable as anything but ambient sound. Eventually rhythmic elements of the noise are brought up into the foreground, obscuring the guitar in mystic clouds of swirling ambient wind and endlessly repetitive pinging as a counterpoint. At the end everything but the ping fades away and the hard noise returns with "K.I." Here the sound is closer to the vein of "traditional" noise -- that is, lots of high-pitched squealing -- but instead of remaining formless, it resolves into an actual rhythm before being joined by more noise-laden drone. "Best Boy" is almost nothing but rhythm: a pattern, crunchy and machine-like, rolls over and over and over like the rollers of a printing press as hissing, steamlike noise lurks in the background. Eventually the steam turns to shuddering waves of noise, rising and falling in unpredictable patterns as the looped rhythm continues. The last track, "Buenos Aventura," is a bizarre one: a babble of conversations centering around some Brit (???) standing around at some party talking about dreaming of Jesus, heroin, reincarnation, and slapping people around -- a typical party conversation, in other words -- all while different varieties of music waffle away in the background. I'm guessing this track is some kind of cryptic inside joke, although as musique concrete it works just fine (meaning, you don't have to get the joke to hang with the track).

What I like about this album is that it's not just noise for the sake of noise -- there's direction and form to it all. Torgensen's approach here makes me think more of Null and PEAK OF NOTHINGNESS more than it does anything by, say, Merzbow. Interesting stuff, and hopefully more follow....

Homegrown alternative rock, turned up loud and recorded / mixed in murky fashion. Aaron did all the recording and studio work himself, which may have something to do with the sound, or he may well be working in the lo-fi tradition (see Sebadoh, Liz Phair, lots of 90s lo-fi artists). "Your Skin" is pure blaring garage rock, indie style, with nods guitarwise to the likes of Neil Young and Dinosaur Jr., while "Someday" adds countryish riffs and unexpected percussion tidbits to the murky brew. His sound reminds me, bizarrely enough, of the now-completely-forgotten 54:40, who were operating in this ballpark on their first (and only good) album. There's an interesting overlay of voices, speeches, and samples at the beginning of "1995," as an acoustic guitar fades up, and when the song kicks into full gear, it has more to do with alt-country than anything else. Garage punk crossed with the country death blues and tone-drenched guitars... dark and desolate stuff when he's not rockin' out. Intriguing, to say the least.

Abdullah have come a long way. I remember receiving a demo from these guys way back in 1999. * The tape was really strong. They played old-school doom rock with a hint of blackmetal. What made it even more impressive was that the whole thing was done by two guys. Jump to 2002: They're still playing old-school doom rock, but the touch of black metal has been replaced with a pile of NWOBHM. Seriously, it sounds like before recording GRAVEYARD POETRY they locked themselves in a room with a stack of Diamond Head and Witchfynde records -- that or they've been spending entirely too much time hanging with fellow Ohio natives Boulder. What this means is that Abdullah have managed to pull together a record that makes it seem like the whole stoner rock thing never happened. Fans of the Hellhound Recs. bands and The Obsessed or Trouble circa 1989 should be all over this disc. [n/a]

* I believe said demo was re-released by Rage of Achilles Records back in 2000.

This is what death metal ought to be -- loud, brutal, heavy, unpredictable, and most of all, completely fucked up. Part of what bored me with death metal originally (which is why i gave up on it for about a decade) was that the bands all sounded alike after a while because they all drew from the same influences (especially the cheesy ones), and always played by the same general rules. Abscess are an exception. Their death roots are fairly obvious (not terribly surprising since drummer Chris Riefert and guitarist Danny Coralles used to be in Autopsy), but they bring to the gore party one synapse-shattering innovation that immediately sets them apart from their death-obsessed brethren: they are hep to psychedelia, mon. In fact, the entire essence of their style is to more or less wing it, shoveling out piles of brutal sonic mung at high velocity, then slow to a crawl without warning and trip out. In the title track, they shift from standard-issue roaring death to weird, slowed-down shit with chattering vox, then high-pitched droning guitar commences until a huge fucking weight of slow wasting doom crushes you flat for a while. And so on. Part of what makes them appealing (or annoying, depending on your view) is that they can't stay fixed on one sound or motif for very long without launching into something totally different. Imagine what happens when they decide to start switching gears totally independently (there's not as much of that here as there was on TORMENTED, but then, the circumstances behind that album were pretty off-the-cuff to begin with), spewing psychedelic death in all directions at once.

For this album they rehearsed considerably, and it shows -- they're a lot more focused and "together" than they were on TORMENTED. That's not always completely a good thing -- a band like Abscess works better, i think, when they're loose and totally improvising -- but it does mean that when they do tricky moves like going abruptly from breackneck speed to what must be the world's slowest riff (as they do in "Serpent of Dementia"), it's real impressive in its exactness. They have some seriously demented guitar tones going (especially on "An Asylum Below"), and they're heavily enamored of reverb, which leads to some nifty moments of grinding psych amid the audio carnage. For pure blinding pound, though, you must look to tracks like "Tomb of the Unknown Junkie," which has some pretty impressive shrieking as well hyperkinetic splattergrunt soloing from all three members in the middle. (Clint Bower, the other guitarist, used to be in Von, so you can just imagine how creeped-out his shit is.) There's some pretty insane moments of blinding i'm-playing-really-fast-now-woo! guitar in "Monolithic Damnation" as well....

One of the more interesting things about this album is that they did it without a full-time bassist, and all three of them play on different tracks (Bower on four, Riefert on four, and Coralles on three), with pretty consistent results. (It does seem like Coralles favors his basslines thunderous 'n fuzzy, but i haven't had the chance to listen extensively yet, either.) Riefert is the bassist of note for one of the album's best (and shortest, oddly enough) tracks, the mysterious 'n highly melodic "Vulnavia," which fades in just long enough to give you a taste o' the trance before fading back out to end in less than a minute and a half. Odd... very odd... naturally you must partake of this diabolical psychedelic death feast....

They definitely got the group name right -- this is distracted, agitated, sound-shaping on a really big canvas, sort of like Pollock with microphones instead of brushes. Given the sound jokers involved (Ernesto Diaz-Infante on guitar 'n objects, sax-torturer Rent Romus, percussionist Scott Looney, violinist 'n vibemaster Bob Marsh, and vocalist Jesse Quattro on loan from the thrash-metal group Saint of Killers), it's amazing that you can even tell what's going on. I gather the idea was to take a bunch of people from wildly different genres (experimetal, jazz, metal, improv, etc.) and see what kind of madness they would create. A fine madness it is: at any given moment their suave jazz ensemble blows cool 'n measured, then uncontrolled bursts of activity in all directions cause it to fall apart. Best of all, Quattro wails, shrieks, death-croaks, and drones in hair-raising fashion all through the pieces. Unpredictability is the order of the day.... The titles also reveal a bizarre sense of humor at work:  "Urban Gothic Hoedown," "H-bomb transvestite infiltration bop," "don't touch my shit," "hidden conversation -- who's sensitive here?," and "Sodium Pentathalon -- 400 loads" are just a sample, and certainly don't invite the belief that they're stuffy, eh? The general theme, though, is one of freedom -- improv is king here, and there are moments where it gets gloriously and spastically messy, so if you're not prepared to rumble with extreme freejazz and left-field eccentricity then you'd best stay at home. Once again, strangeness saves the day....

I first became aware of this band because of my ranting appreciation of Nisi Period's SOON THE LOVE BALLOON WILL POP in one of the back issues. Apparently one of the members of that now-defunct band is currently doodling at the keyboards in this band, and he informed me so. As i read up on the band and this album, i finally became intrigued enough to buy the damn thing and guess what? It's brilliant. Not only is the music (prog-psych-pop-something) stellar, but the packaging and concept are amazing as well. Here's the scoop -- the album is packaged as a psychedelic answer to the NUGGETS compilations, centered around a handful of Boston bands like The Sea Monks, Abunai!, The Red Baise, The Seven Seals, Spectrowax, , North Find Molasses Disaster, and so on, complete with lengthy liner notes detailing the scene from which all these hithero-unknown bands evolved. Of course, this is all essentially a giant put-on -- Abunai! is the swirly force behind every single track -- but it's a good put-on, a well thought-out put-on, and i definitely approve of the amount of effort and imagination that must go into something like this. The liner notes abound with bizarre claims of Earth-2 dopplegangers and sly inside jokes that are probably vastly amusing to progophiles and totally impenetrable to anyone else, and the whole thing is kind of a clever parody of earnest English folk and psychedelic compilations... strangely enough, it makes me wonder what it would sound like if Abunai were to cover in its entirety the FOLKWAYS box-set in their own psychedelic style and issue it with equally convoluted liner notes... there's probably a nod to Fahey in there somewhere too, givne his penchant for twisted fake notes on his early albums....

Fortunately for those too impatient for this kind of stuff, you can listen to the album without knowing (or even caring) about any of this. The twelve tracks on here are all uniformly excellent, and all just different enough to make it plausible as a compilation of different bands from the same scene... but at the same time the band's sound is unified enough to make it work like an album as opposed to a scattershot compilation. The "sound" here largely encompasses early Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, Fifty Foot Hose, maybe Fairport Convention, and tons of British folk-psych bands whose names i can't think of right this moment (so sorry), with occasional forays into more modern fuzzdeath and vaguely punkish elements. Lots of phased guitars, space echo, delay units, flangers, and other woozy efx make for big beds of floaty sound over which Abunai! rock to varying degrees of heaviness. The "best" tunes (the ones i like best, anyway), are the more mid-tempo ones crammed full of strange guitar efx and solid floor-on-the-floor drumming, like "Barbara Allen" and "Learning to Ask" (which also has pretty, melodic guitar bits as well), "Sweet William," "Can't Always See" (driven by a heavily delayed ping-pong bass line and swirly keyboard bloops, most hypnotic and otherworldly, mon), "Toast" (delay-line ching-ching guitar riffing with everything but the kitchen sink piled on top of it, sounds from another dimension are go, daddy-o). Everything is pretty much top-notch, tho -- unlike a lot of prog/psych bands, Abunai! don't get bogged down in endless jams, and while their songs are absolutely stuffed full of weird sounds (how the hell do they manage to play so much stuff at once?), the songs are also intensely structured, so the tunes are all actually going somewhere instead of just waffling. Swankness abounds. I await more....

The cosmic jokers from Beantown have done it again, whipping out one of the trippiest albums ever to come swirling down the cosmic wind tunnel. Like Pink Floyd's SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS cubed and slotted into a quadratic equation containing integers derived from Hawkwind, F/i, and the whole whaling kingdom o' Krautrock, the impact of this disc is less a matter of "listening" than something akin to having an acid bomb explode between your ears. Crazed, semi-psychotic stuff that pinwheels in all directions at once like a drunken octopus, but played with startling clarity and precision, this is the kind of thing that will turn your mind inside-out if you listen to it long enough. I think Abunai! just advanced to the head o' the psych class with this one....

The interesting thing is that while the album sounds basically like one long, inspired live psych jam, it's actually anything but that -- in fact, the album was assembled from miles of instrumental jams captured on tape over a long period of time. Apparently the band jams a lot with the tape rolling, just playing without conscious thought as to how it might work on an album, and after accumulating a large pile of these tapes, they decided to layer them into a giant spaced-out sonic omlette just to turn the average listener's mind to mush. To that end, they spent a long time ferreting out pieces that would work together, then layered them on top of each other -- sometimes backwards -- just mixing and matching until they emerged with something that met with their collective approval. The result is a long album of 21 tracks that flow seamlessly into one another with often mind-altering results; the "songs" (each listed individually with titles on the cover) are actually more like movements in one long epic piece. (My favorite song/movement is "Drowning in Light," the longest single section of the disc at 12:56, in which a UFO guitar dips and hovers in hypnotic, shimmering fashion while lots of other sounds swirl around it.) In some places the layers are stacked mighty high indeed -- the opening track, "The Sound Museum," has at least twenty tracks plowing away at once -- and the results are disorienting, mainly due to the depths of sound. No matter how hard you listen, burrowing down into the layers, if you listen just a bit harder you can hear even more happening in the background... and if you dig even deeper, even more than that. It's truly a sound without end, a space without borders, in which guitars and organs and drones circle and weave without ever settling.

The track listing is entitled "Chart of Dimensionless Numbers," and that's appropriate... if fractal patterns could be encoded as music, they would sound like this, i'm sure. Patterns build on other patterns and morph into yet other ones, until the sound becomes so dense, so thick, that it practically threatens to implode. How they managed to mix this into something listenable is beyond me. (And make no mistake, the sound clarity is remarkable, especially given the wild number of tracks at work.) The effort they put into the selection of tracks to merge together is obvious (at one point they color-coded the tapes to make sure they didn't have too much material continuously running in one key), and the organic feel of the resulting tracks is amazing -- it all comes together so well that it's hard to imagine it wasn't all done in one session as a continuous whole. More entertaining than swimming in a vat of drunken eels and probably healthier to boot....

Bonus points for the packaging, too (a faithful reproduction of a pack of guitar strings, enclosed in a polybag), even though its odd size does pose a problem for storing on my shelf. By gaw, this disc is so luridly over-the-top in its psychedelic excess that it sort of makes me regret that i gave up smoking dope....

Some wise guru with a mountain up his ass once said, "There are only three things in life that are certain: death, cockroaches, and AC/DC." And he was right, because look, here they are on the prowl again, thirty years after Los Brutahs Young decided that playin' rock 'n roll looked like a lot more fun than sewing bras and pastin' up porno magazines. (Turned out to be way more lucrative, too, but who knew?) Seriously, these guys are old enough to be your dads (for all i know they may be your dads, especially if your mother was one of the li'l tarts at their early shows), but they still out-rock all the dumb-ass whining shits in these nu-metal and emo-core bands who were still heaving oatmeal in their high chairs when Angus blew up a studio amp while recording "Let There Be Rock." This is not surprising, since Angus and Malcolm and the boys can actually, you know, play their guitars and stuff and don't have to rely only a pile of bullshit efx-boxes to get their "sound." These are men who grew up in a world where musicians were expected to know what the fuck they were doing when they picked up their instruments, instead of just jumping up and down like goddamn disorganized kangaroos on crack and screaming about fucking angst and shit. As far as the Young brothers are concerned, there is only one sensible way to spend one's time, and that is rocking. And that they have done, like clockwork, for three fucking decades. I give them outside odds they'll still be here in another thirty years, if the rest home will let them out -- which is more than i can say for any of these bands who can't spell and apparently think playing through lots of fuzzboxes is a magical substitute for actual songs 'n stuff....

I have to admit up front that AC/DC can do no wrong as far as i'm concerned, so i'm already in their corner. They are the only band i can think of (besides maybe the Band of Susans and Angel'in Heavy Syrup) who have never made a truly bad record. They have made a few pointless ones, though, especially for a stretch in the nineties, when they appeared to be running out of steam for a while. That's the point at which i got distracted by other sounds for a while ("oooo look, noise!") and lost track of what they were doing. (It turns out i didn't miss a whole lot.) It is true that lukewarm AC/DC is still better than the poo served up by your average hard-rock band at any given time, but when you reach the point where you have everything up to the album where they go into a holding pattern, why bother, eh? But now i am definitely all ears again after hearing this one, technically their latest even though it's been out a couple of years now. (One thing i'll say for the band: the decision to start taking more time between albums has definitely helped.)

The point at which i actually drifted away was when Phil Rudd left the band after FLICK OF THE SWITCH -- nothing against the other guys, but Phil is kinda hard to replace, especially when i'm the one in charge of the stereo. But apparently Phil returned on BALLBREAKER (which i still have yet to hear), and this is his second one back with the band, and unless BALLBREAKER is hot-shit way better than this, i'd have to say this is the best thing they've done since BACK IN BLACK. (I think i might actually like this better than BACK IN BLACK, actually.) What they've done here is combine the upfront sound and pure fucking catchiness of BACK IN BLACK with the groove of the older albums (particularly HIGHWAY TO HELL) and the quirkiness of the riffs from the still-underrated FLICK OF THE SWITCH, and... and... oh, for cryin' out loud, they've gone and made a fucking blues album, okay? It's all about the beat... well, that and a whole assload of immensely swell riffs and the most inspired note-strangling yet to burst forth from the li'l ass-wiggler himself. The first four songs are perfect examples: "Stiff Upper Lip" opens with Angus playing a nifty riff over a persistent high-hat, then Brian Johnson is there to tell you all about his stiff upper lip, natch, then the Big Beat commences and those harmony guitars sync up and it's like 1982 all over again. Then "Meltdown" turns out be... can it be?... a real-life honest-to-Anu boogie tune. It's like all those horrible bands with the sinister fucking Adidas never happened. The psychotronic dying guitar solo at the end is a swell bonus, too. "House of Jazz" is more of the same, a titanic beat cutting through hocus-pocus guitars (Malcolm is still the King o' Rhythm, and Angus is all over the place on this one), and "Hold Me Back" is another agreeable and perfectly-executed boogie with jazzy chords (!?!), but it isn't until "Safe in New York City" that they hit you with the first whammy. An intro straight out of POWERAGE leads into a big, fat beat over which bass, guitar, and more guitar just build and build until they launch into the kind of insanely catchy riff that made them zillionaires in the first place. (Brian's yelling over all this too, but that's just icing on the cake, really.)

One thing i like a lot about this record is that it sounds like it's being played by guys half their age -- they aren't fucking around here, not one itty-bitty iota. More proof that rocking correctly reverses aging, whoa! They're playing their buns off here, that's for sure -- especially on groove-soaked stuff like "Can't Stop Rock 'n Roll," whose chorus has one of the niftiest riffs on the whole album, and "Satellite Blues," a straight-ahead stomper that defies all rational description and yet rocks quite nicely, thank you. "Damned" ticks along like a Swiss watch, with not a single wasted beat, riff, or note, and filled with all sorts of quirky changes. "Come and Get It" is driven by cryptic blues riffs and more of those unexpected jazzy chords, plus some... um... peculiar backing vox (actually, unusual backing vox are in abundance on this album), while "All Screwed Up" gives them the opportunity to induldge in all manner of stop 'n start robot-riffing and putting the backbeat in funny places and leaving plenty o' holes for the Big Beat to shine through. What i really like, though, is how on the last song, "Give It Up," they manage to outright steal the plodding beyond-minimalist beat / intro to "Living After Midnight" and somehow graft an actual groove and beat that swings over it. Magic, i tell you... black fucking magic....

It is true that the lyrics are by and large nothing to get real excited about, but anybody who listens to AC/DC for the lyrics is kind of missing the point, right? (Brian is in particularly fine form on this one, just in case you're wondering, although his unmistakable shriek is beginning to show a bit o' age here and there.) The real message here is that, for whatever reason, the band appears to have found a new lease on life, and if this continues, they will soon own the free world (i wonder what their position is on Iraq). The only news better than this is that they're apparently finishing up a new one to be released before too much longer. And nu-metal appears to choking on its own bile at the same time... hmmm... could there be... yes... a relation? Only Angus knows for sure, and he's too busy rocking the fuck out to answer our piddly-ass questions....

The Acid King portion of this CD kicks off with a track entitled "Blaze In." It is an instrumental number that kinda sounds like something from Kyuss' "Blues for the Red Sun" ran through a Sleepinator. Acid King have always had a bit of a Sleep-y vibe. The Kyuss tip is a new development. From there it's on to the meat of their "side." "Free" is a typical Acid King drone-fest. It opens with some cool delay drenched guitar and quickly starts to crush. The next song, "Four Minutes" (and no, it isn't four minutes long...) is a little more atmospheric with Lori sounding positively ghostly. Stoner Goth? Finally, "Blaze Out" is a reprise of "Blaze In."

The Mystick Krewe of Clearlight's "side" consists of two tracks. For those of you not familiar with MKoC, they're a New Orleans supergroup of sorts featuring members of eyehategod, Down, and Spicke (to name a few....). They general play long-assed instrumentals that sound like a swampy mix of Deep Purple, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Black Sabbath, and the Allman Brothers. On this release one Scott "Wino" Weinrich (Spirit Caravan, ex-Obsessed, ex-Saint Vitus) contributes some vocals. Of their two tracks, "Veiled" sounds most like a "regular" Clearlight song with its heavy organ-driven groove and drawn-out (in a good way) ending. The other song, "Buzzard Hill (My Backyard)" sounds a lot like an Obsessed song peppered with organ. Both songs swing hard. In a way that could almost make people get up and dance... if people were still inclined to dance to rock-type music. [n/a]

(TG scrambles out into the hall with C12 a considerable distance behind. She's already firing rapidly, aiming in so many different directions that her gunfire seems random. As she approaches a corner, she tosses a smoke bomb, switches on her Magnasoles, and begins walking up the wall. Smoke billows as she runs across the ceiling, firing wildly down the hallway intersection; her pink latex miniskirt is so tight that even with all this action it barely moves, affording C12 a heart-stopping view of her ass when she unlocks the Magnasoles and drops to the floor below.)

C12: So what are we reviewing? Can you even do this? You seem a bit preoccupied....

TG: Not a problem, weenie boy. (fires a burst from the Locktite Neutrino Molecule Scrambler down the still-smoking hallway) Got the new Acid King and Mystic Krewe of Clearlight split right here. (inserts disc and begins to run again as it plays)

TG: The Moon Unit got this primarily for the Acid King tracks (big surprise), and they smoke, mon. That classic dirt-encrusted guitar sound is back and they're plenty hefty. We're talking bulldozer heavy, only in slow motion. Lori's voice sounds a bit rawer this time around, but the unearthly drone is still a swank part of her singing style, so this is good. (An elevator opens and a dozen sporebots pour out; an expertly-tossed Microtonic Fractal Fragmenter grenade turns all of them into metallic sushi, along with the elevator, the steno pool in the next room, the electron microscope laboratory, and most of the hallway.)

TG: They definitely get off on the right foot with "Blaze In," which is all clotted-amp feedback and thundering riff-humping with Lori tearing off lots of blinding lead moves before she even gets around to (eventually) singing. Once again Lori demonstrates that she is beyond bad-ass. (walks on walls again, wiping out a score of sporebots with automatic weapon fire) This is like the last rites of a dying dinosaur or something.... "Free" is more spaced-out, with wildly reverberating guitars making trance moves before the band starts to seriously crush, and "Four Minutes" also demonstrates that they can sound eerie even at low volumes, at least during the introduction (the rest of the song is pure slow crushing doom). They exit with "Blaze Out," which is similar to the opener but even heavier. Did i mention that Lori sounds totally forbidding, as always, on all of the songs? This disc is worth having just for the Acid King tracks.

C12 (gasping): What about the Clearlight portion? Oh, watch for that one! (shoots with .45 and nails a sporebot emerging from behind an industrial waste can)

TG: The Clearlight tracks aren't bad either, although they're wildly different and the segue between the two bands is a tad jarring on CD. "Buzzard Hill (My Backyard)" sounds like a throwback to the time when bands like Dr. Hook and Little Feat ruled the airwaves, only heavier and with way more boss axe-grinding. Basically a long jam with lots of opportunity to solo, it's not bad at all but not quite my thing. I like "Veiled" a bit better -- why i don't know, i just do. Excellent musicians, no question, but i think i prefer Acid King's molten-sludge drone....

C12: Somehow that fails to surprise me. (He rolls a Hallucination Inducer toward a crowd of advancing sporebots; as the smoke envelops them, they stop their advance and begin disassembling one another.) Ah, there! You know, I wasn't really quite sure that would work...

This live recording truly shows how great this band is. They offer up everything from space rock to mellow pieces that just evolve and then explode. Most of their music is improv and as musicians they have their shit together. I put this on and just fade away. [ttbmd]

Amusing in an unspeakably hideous sort of way.... This Austin band is popular mostly, i suspect, for their kitsch value; kind of like a less- tuneful and punkier version of the B-52s with one of the most truly annoying "vocalists" ever to abuse a microphone, they're lots of fun live and i'm sure they provide much entertainment on stage, but on record, they are, uh, a bit less compelling. Catchy as "Powerbag" is (in a distinctly 80s new-wave style) beneath the singer's obnoxious bleating, i can't imagine listening to more of this stuff in large doses. On "Insomnia" the band steps down into quasi-punk lounge mode, which is kind of interesting, and the singing marginally improves, but still... i dunno, maybe i'm just getting too old....

I'd comment on the completely ridiculous (but funny) video that accompanies this single, but i don't believe my heart can stand it right now. Perhaps in the next issue....

"I used to Fuck People Like You in Prison," now THAT'S a name for a punk rock label... but I digress.... Aerobitch are a sleazy, skeezy punk 'n' roll band outta Madrid, Spain. There isn't a whole lot you can say about the music. It's punk rock. They touch all the bases, The Dead Boys, Motorhead, old AC/DC, the Dwarves, and more modern bands like the Hellacopters and Electric Frankenstien. They cover The Saints' "Know Your Product"and AC/DC's "High Voltage." Singer Laura Bitch sounds like she smokes 3-5 packs a day and drinks tequila with a whiskey chaser. (This is a good thing, by the way.) I dunno, I really like this record but sleazy punk rawk should sound sleazy. You know, like it was recorded on a broken 4-track with shitty mics while the bands was too fucked to tune or work the volume controls on their guitars and amps. Laura sounds plenty sleazy but the band sounds too... accomplished. Like they went in to a studio and recorded everything separately and Laura come in to cut the vox later. If this were more raw sounding, I'd be raving. [n/a]

The concept: Julia Cafritz (Pussy Galore, Free Kitten), along with Joe DePhillips and Kim Rancourt of When People Were Shorter and Lived Near the Water, for whatever questionable reason, make (with the assistance of Don Fleming) a "radical reinterpretation" of the 1973 Wings classic album BAND ON THE RUN, track by track. After recording the initial vocal tracks, Fleming and and sound-porker Tom Smith (To Live and Shave in L.A., etc.) remixed (in strange fashion) the tapes, at which point Smith spent 14 months fucking with the tapes with extremely devolved results. Never mind the question of whether or not the world particularly needs a radical reinterpretation of a mediocre Paul McCartney album (frankly, I would have preferred to see this concept applied toward the Beatles' "white album") -- the real question is, was it worth it? I'd say yes, although how often is probably directly related to your interest in the album being referenced. Of course, if you're already obsessed with the pop-culture points referenced here or just have a passion for hearing pop classics butchered (for reasons ironic or otherwise), this could be your meal ticket to hell for all eternity. The initial recording is one of high quality, and there's a level of seriousness here that elevates the whole enterprise out of the joke / novelty category, while Smith's radically uberfucked remix is interesting on any number of levels. It may be pointless, and I'm sure it would be completely horrifying to the average McCartney fan, but at least it works more often than not purely as a collection of intriguing sounds. To say this is a strange version of the album in question is putting it mildly: it's McCartney and the Wings sound pulverized by glitch electronics, bizarre mixes, and deeply perverse motives, the barest essence of the original pop song left as a reminder of what it was before they started perverting it in the name of "art" (or whatever it is that motivates them). It's worth hearing at least once, just to see how radically unlistenable (in a disturbingly catchy way, sometimes) a collection of pop songs can be rendered in the studio. Strange experiments in the name of audio science (or the work of satan, assuming you're outraged by the desecration of venerated idols, blah blah blah).

Old-school new-wave synthpop dance tracks -- if the mere mention of bands like Human League and early Depeche Mode make your sweat glands want to crawl out of your skin and hide, quivering in terror, then Agency-X probably won't be your cup o' goat sweat. This particular item is actually the single mix (and many remixes) of "Don't Hold Your Breath," from the band's forthcoming album MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, along with a reasonable-enough cover of Yazoo's "Walk Away From Love." The single is bouncy with lots of chirping synths; of the remixes, i prefer the "waste of time" one. And the Yazoo cover is most swell. If you remember Modern English and Thompson Twins and their 80s contemporaries with fondness, then you'll want to grok this. (If you spent the 80s worshiping Judas Priest, you may... um... not.)

This is the recorded debut of Gustavo Aguilar's Get Libre Group, a collective of improv and experimental musicians from up and down the California coast with percussionist Aguilar as the eye at the center of the storm. Aguilar plays the sabor drum kit and provides other sounds; Todd Sickafoose completes the rhythm section on bass, leaving Eric Crystal (saxophones, flax, melodica), Chris Garcia (udu, tabla), and Robert Reigle (tenor saxophone) plenty of room to improvise over and around them. The choice of unusual instrumentation yields what will be fresh tones to many ears, and the album improvisational drift make it greatly resemble the hip soundtrack to a forgotten sixties film. They play against this agreeable tendency midway through "Legends," though, abandoning their nomrally measured tones for an escalating frenzy that builds to furious squalling before returning to a more reserved delivery. Desolate and deliberate sax lines are eventually joined by other instruments on "N-6," a short piece notable for its sparseness. The lengthy "Concepts in Travel Comfort" takes its time in building from minimal instrumentation and low volume to something more complex and dynamic, and creates a nice tablueax of pleasing, exotic-sounding passages in the process. The entire album goes down like musicians from all directions merging at ports of call to spread the sounds and rhythms of distant cities. For the cosmopolitan player, dig? 

Air Miami -- ME, ME, ME [Teenbeat/4AD]

From the ashes of Unrest, Mark Robinson and Bridget Cross emerge with the new Air Miami... and i'm impressed. I don't think there's a bad song on here. They're also heavily influenced by Joy Division (check out the ping- pong basslines, mon), even though they're not "goth," which is most guten. While they retain a lot of the punky edge Unrest was famous for (or so they tell me; i've never heard Unrest, myself, although after hearing this, that will shortly be rectified), the best songs on here are the pretty pop ones, like "Seabird" (which is totally gorgeous; Bridget's voice could melt polar caps, okay?) and "Special Angel."

About half the album features drums by machine, and the rest is credited to one "Gabriel Stout," who may or may not exist; either way, there's plenty of bounce all the way through. Sure, the sounds are cheesy sometimes, and deliberately so (as on the goofy "World Cup Fever" and "Neely," which incidentally features the most overt Joy Division sound appropriation), but that's all right --this is POP, it's SUPPOSED to be cheesy sometimes. And it's a GOOD kind of cheesiness... hmmm... didn't i have this conversation with someone already? At any rate, while there's plenty of tomfoolery going on here (catch the titles, for instance: the titles listed on the outside are recast on the inside of the gatefold, so that "I Hate Milk" becomes "Please Please Someone Kill Me Soon," "Sweet As A Candy Bar" becomes "Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba," and most amusingly, "Neely" is actually called "I'm Gonna Fuck You Up Today"), the songs themselves -- and all the playing -- is rock solid. The sound (on the poppy stuff, anyway) is sort of like Joy Division meets ABBEY ROAD-era Beatles, which is more than fine by me. The rest of the time they take detours into goofy uptempo stuff with a punky edge that nevertheless remains danceable ("I Hate Milk," "You Sweet Little Heartbreaker," etc.).

A word about the packaging: There's some sharp graphic sensibility at work here (and having the really cute girl with the poofy lips and slick fashion sensibility on the cover doesn't hurt either). They've worked out a deal in which 4AD releases the CD version and Teenbeat releases the album, which is what i have -- and it comes as a double-LP set of 12" 45s, which is most swank, believe me. Did i mention the graphics are great? Luv those staggering primary colors, mon....

OK, here's a quick Japanese lesson for today. Akaten means Red Heaven (aka = red, ten = heaven). Hence, the name of this project. Aren't you glad you know that now? Sure ya are! Well, it's Tatsuya Yoshida (Ruins) and Atsushi Tsuyama (Omoide Hatoba) teaming up to do some seriously wacky, quirky stuff! The liner notes, if one can call it that, are seriously lacking. Which is why I have no idea what label actually released this nifty piece of shiny silver plastic. I'm guessing that Yoshida put it out himself. It comes in a swank red bag with minimal graphics. Nearly all of the tracks are rather short, making this more of an EP than a full length release. As for what it sounds like... imagine what might happen if you fed an assortment of psychedelics to a caged monkey and then handed him an organ, drums and guitar just as he was coming down off the stuff. It's completely deranged, silly and hilarious. No description can do justice to the stuff your ears will hear. Just listen and don't try to figure it out. Aw, jEah... [yol]

Two bands, two tracks each. No room for filler here. Alabama Thunderpussy gets things off to a good start with their tunes "Heavyweight" and "Rabdos (The Strangler)." Equal parts punk, metal, sludge, and southern rock, the ATP side comes off as a swift kick to the head. This is easily the best thing I've heard from them. Halfway to Gone is a New Jersey trio that mine the same territory as ATP. They're slightly rougher around the edges and are the meaner-sounding of the two bands. (Maybe it's 'cause they're from Joisey?) Their tune "Darktown Strutter" is as catchy as all hell while the instrumental, "Thee Song," rumbles along in a most pleasing way. [n/a]

Allegory Chapel Ltd. -- WHEN ANGELS FALL [Charnel Music]

This automatically gets bonus points for the title and the gorgeous black and silver picture on the back cover of an angel falling into a whirlpool. Not that it needs any, because this is amazing, by far one of the best things yet released on Charnel. Basically, the album mixes elements of noise, classical (particularly the use of pipe organs), industrial, and dialogue into a fluid and dramatic whole (which is harder than it looks, believe me, I've tried it myself).

Aside from the powerful use of classical organ (especially on the first track, "Introduction...."), what I like most about this album is Elden M.'s use of controlled noise -- not the furious whiteout roar employed by Masonna or Merzbow, but instead noise that's sculpted and shaped into patterns, until it becomes an instrument into itself. From the simulated static thunderheads on "Trajectory Calculations" to the swirling vortex that keeps panning from speaker to speaker on "Predatory Instincts," the noise here often sounds larger than life. The effect is often quite disorienting and even menacing, particularly on "Predatory Instincts," where the static vortex is often augmented by the sample of a woman screaming "please let me out" and other, more explosive sounds buried in the roar; the cumulative effect is the most unnerving thing I've heard since the Pain Teens' "Bannoy."

The noise elements are composed of everything from static, hum, wind, vague thumping, strange clattering sounds, distorted crackling, and some stuff that's totally unrecognizable, but it always remains channeled in an obviously purposeful direction. "Escalate the Violence" features a series of ascending electronic whines that evaporate into what sounds like a city being completely and systematically levelled by mortar fire, and the noise elements of "P x Q," punctuated by shouts of "NO!" as a piano tinkles away in the background, are even more punishing.

"Recital 587" is a bit more traditional -- ostensibly a piano recital-- only it's weighted toward the bass end of the scale and fed through so much reverb that it sounds like elephants are jumping up and down on the keyboard. (Very slowly, though. Very slowly.) Arcane noises clink and clatter away in the background as the song progresses, giving the song a feeling of physical depth. The last song, "Requiem for Thee Possessed," begins with the sample of a man talking about racial discrimination and employs a titanic bass hum that eventually give way to a beautiful female singer, devolving fragments of noise, and eventually an unearthly choir, before returning to the original sample. Unnerving, unearthly, and meticulously arranged, and even then, weirdly accessible (well, sort of...).

Already a serious contender for DEAD ANGEL's favorite album of the year and still ten months to go... plus new albums by Angel'in Heavy Syrup and Band of Susans yet to come... I may LIKE this year after all! Woo woo!

TMU: Hey, John Zorn is on here. And Fred Frith. And it was recorded live somewhere in Japan. This first song is a collaboration between Frith, some guy named Sabu, and Onnyk.

TTBMD: Yes, very loose... loose... free jazz.

TMU: Geometric designs on the cover denote the songs as cryptic blocks of sound. The stone motif of the cover design reminds me of how impermeable the membranes of time are. This is the sound of Last Exit drunk on Mad Dog 20/20 and begging for change to get home. But they're on the mean streets, baby, and all they're getting for their pain is kicked in the teeth again! HEEWACK! (launches into bad AC/DC air guitar)

TTBMD: Seems to be starting to take some shape now. The guitar has become incorporated now. The percussion's pretty damn good. He's the glue that's holding everything else together.

TMU: This sounds kind of tribal in a fucked-up jazz hepster sorta way. This is what those punks in LORD OF THE FLIES would have been blowin' on the conch shell if they hadn't all been such fucking nancy boys.

TTBMD: Last Exit would not be far off the mark. And now I'm interested in hearing what Zorn has to offer in this band.

TMU: I am stained with their illuminating forebearance. Metallic strands of hope burn feverishly in the corridor of cells lining the limbic system, prodded back into life from previously jaded states by the loping intensity of these postmodern stylings. The juxtaposition of instruments sets up a play of motion that unfolds and develops like a virulent form of black magic.

TTBMD: This second collaboration, with Zorn, Sabu, and Onnyk -- very interesting things going on here. Horns, bird callings, keyboards, drums -- it's all here. Great. Great!

TMU: I concur, although i think i prefer Zorn in the context of Painkiller. Although they are raising quite a clatter.

TTBMD: (burps) Now we can check out the track with Frith solo. This is nice. Much more mellow.

TMU: He has these bell tones going on. I too appreciate the mellowness. Destroying your instrument is all fine and good, but there has to be a moment of quiet for the dynamic range to truly be grasped. Frith fills that spot here. He fills it well.

TTBMD: Zorn's solo contribution is next. Fucking obnoxious.

TMU: I hear the bleating cries of the goat, doom childe! Is he actually playing anything here, or is this just all disturbed samples or something? Or is he molesting his guitar? I can't tell....

TTBMD: It's all kinds of horns and shit. It sounds like a fucking zoo.

TMU: Look, if you squint right, you can see the monkeys throwing their shit at the gawkers. Fling! Fling!

TTBMD: "Don't look at my ass you sons of bitches! Here! HAVE SOME!" Shit sandwich.... in a nutshell.

TMU: You get the impression that all of Zorn's amps go to eleven.

TTBMD: No, I mean this track is literally a shit sandwich.

TMU: I think it sounds appropriately possessed by demons.

TTBMD: I think it's possessed by ducks. And swallows. And fucking....

TMU: Chickens?

TTBMD: Is Zorn a big hunting fanatic?

TMU: Fuck if i know. I thought he was Jewish and was forbidden to eat meat and shit. Jews don't get to eat meat unless it's been stamped with a "kosher" stamp, right?

TTBMD: Fuck if i know. He is Jewish, though. And if he's forbidden to eat shit, that's a good thing.

TMU: I don't think the Torah covers that. It just forbids meat, not shit. I guess it's okay to eat shit.

TTBMD: What if the shit is, like, from a cheeseburger? Wouldn't that still be like meat? Like the Meat Shits?

TMU: It sounds like the ducks are being raped with a shotgun now.

TTBMD: I'm finished with this review.

For a hardcore band, they sure sound sufficiently deathlike, especially on the blood-freezing intro "Through Deep Snow, Darkness Stalks the Hunters." These hyperactive misfits are apparently a product of the DC hardcore scene, although calling them strictly a hardcore band is a bit of a misnomer since they incorporate all sorts of hefty black / death metal guitar frenzy and blackened bleating into their hardcore ubershuffle. What they are, really, is extremely fast and really intense. They don't so much play as much as they jump out of the speaker and beat you silly with their instruments. The parts i like best are the noised-out grind intros, like at the beginning of "Summary Executioner," where slo-mo poundcare turns into a wash of grinding guitars and a bare-bones beat before the frenzy begins, sort of like the blood begins to churn in the water and then the sharks arrive. Most of the time, though, they tend to approximate the sound of bulldozers wired up with nitro and blazing down the freeway, destroying everything they touch in their blind rush to flatten buildings. (When they do slow down to fade out on "Denazification of Your Weak Mind" and segue into a melodic intro that grows more evil as it progresses on "Dragon of the Black Pool," though, it's a nice touch.) The pained, noisy bludgeoning on "600,000 Dead" leaves me deeply moved as well (more specifically, a few internal organs appear to have switched places after all that shaking). The album as a whole is a pretty earth-shaking affair, with plenty of feedback-drenched guitars and vast immolating pound. Make sure you turn your speakers down a tad before throwing this one on (unless they needed replacing or your neighbors need annoying, in which case turn it up, son...).

Amazing Cherubs -- "Space Pussy/Satyricon" [Feralette Records]

I freely admit that I picked this up solely for the A-side title and the cover (a sleazy-looking b-girl in a itty-bitty pink vinyl "space outfit" holding the cheesiest ray-gun I've seen in quite some time). Naturally, I expected nothing more beyond the cover -- in fact, it took me nearly a month to actually get around to LISTENING to the record -- so imagine my surprise at discovering that it's actually not bad. Not brilliant, mind you, but the a-side is kind of catchy and has that typically English zippy- stingy guitar and some amusingly low-fi "space noises." The b-side is essentially more of the same, only minus the space noises. Are these guys English? They sure have that catchy squealy "I'm so British" guitar thing down cold.... Oh, and the songs are short.

Death by harsh power electronics... like a streetcleaner for your ears. Monorail Trespassing is rapidly becoming the source of choice for all things noise in America, and the ear-frying sounds these guys make shows why. There are only two tracks on this CD-R, but that's probably enough to crush you beneath their massive wall of dirtsound. On "being beat up," grinding sounds of destruction grown in volume and density as the piece goes on, employing destroyed sounds and utterly gross levels of distortion in a deliberate attempt to ruin your hearing. While they're not immune to the high-pitched shrieking thing from time to time, mostly they prefer a chunk-style noise grind, like the sound of concrete walls trying to grind through each other. The second track, "being beat up again," is essentially the original track with a different mix and additional sonic porking by special guest Alexandre Huard. Both of them sound really obnoxious and appropriately unpleasant. This is raw power electronics the way it was meant to be done. If you're hep to having your ears efficiently stripped and cleaned, you need to act fast, though -- this is limited to fifty copies and i have # 42, so your chances of picking it up are getting slimmer by the minute. Don't dawdle or you'll miss out on all the fun....

These guys do filthy, amped-up boogie rock, and do it really well. The cheat sheet tips Hendrix, Blue Cheer, and Sabbath. I'd say ZZ Top, Canned Heat, and Motorhead -- which, for all intents and purposes, means they sound a lot like a nastier Nashville Pussy. Not a bad thing at all. [n/a]

Anal Drill -- STIMULATING THE MASOCHIST [Mother Savage Noise Productions]

OW! OW! OW! That hurts! This is what the Constitution meant by "cruel and unusual punishment," man.... sixty minutes of pure, hateful noise terrorism. Anal Drill are an all-female noise unit from Houston, Texas, which automatically gets bonus points from me just on the grounds o' STATE PRIDE, but truly, no lie, this is gloriously obnoxious. The first side of the tape features a thick wall of nearly continuous static over which these women lay down the occasional (and short-lived) pounding percussive beat, delay-induced hurricane noise, bandsaw effects, microphone feedback, and God only knows what else, all in a systematic attempt to turn your eardrums into runny pools of sludge. They are successful. Your high end will be GONE before you even reach the point of having to turn the tape over.... But you WILL turn the tape over, because you're such a masochist, and there you will find more of the same, augmented this time by chunkier and more repetitive sounds. Plenty of variation and texture here for the dedicated noise fetishist. This tape is seriously out of control... wall to wall noise designed to fry your hearing to a crisp. Imagine Gerogerigegege's 45 RPM PERFORMANCE being broken up and reconstructed by Merzbow while employing his most savage devices and you're groveling in the right direction....

WARNING: For the squeamish among you who might consider getting this, the cassette artwork is sexual in nature and EXTREMELY EXPLICIT. You might want to keep this in mind if your granny is prone to opening your mail by mistake....

Angel'in Heavy Syrup -- I (Subterranean)

More bizarre weirdness from the land of the rising sun... imagine the Butthole Surfers colliding with the Cocteau Twins in a punk jazz lounge and you begin to get a glimpse of the strange delights this disc has to offer. The first song, "S.G.E. (Space Giant Eye)" burps up a bomping bassline surrounded by guitars spitting out serrated shards of surprisingly melodious feedback. And then that VOICE comes in over it all... that breathy, ethereal voice. The other four songs are a bit less manic, closer to a tasty yet eccentric mix of free jazz and blues most of the time, embellished by Mineko Itakura's gorgeous voice. (Or is it Mine Nakao? The first plays bass, the second plays, guitar, but both sing, not that I can tell the difference.) The version of "My Dream" here is considerably different than the one available on Charnel's compilation LAND OF THE RISING NOISE; here the guitars are drenched in echo and reverb, twanging away like they marched right out of the Okeefenokee swamp, and the vocals are more prominent this time. Of the two, I think this is the better one, although that may be a matter of personal taste.... The final song is the extended "Crazy Blues," framed at the beginning and end by the sound of running water, a song that mutates wildly over the course of ... minutes and is probably actually closer to improvisational jazz than blues (at least as Americans think of the blues, anyway). Not only is the musicianship impeccable here (as on all of the album), but Mineko's bass playing here is flat-out amazing. Hunt this down, especially if you'd like to hear a foreign take on western jazz/blues.

Angel'in Heavy Syrup -- II (Alchemy Records)

More from the Angels! Not quite as immensely godlike as their first, this is still way ahead of the pack in terms of sonic quality and sheer adventurous eclecticism. Parts of the opener, "Introduction I," bring to mind a hipper Henry Mancini... at least until the wild guitar histronics kick in, at which point they reveal a secret Rush fixation (but only the good parts, thank God). Once again the vocals are gorgeous, even though there's no way to tell what they ARE unless you happen to understand Japanese. "Crazy Blues" shows up again, only much fuzzier and noisier, with a new, modified arrangement that inexplicably buries the best part of the original version. "Introduction II" is a variation, leaving a final track for the collectors and the curious: a mildly amusing cover of "I Got You Babe" that's immensely preferable to the original. (Then again, I never did like Cher. And Sonny never did much for me, either, now that I think of it.)

Angel'in Heavy Syrup -- III [Circular Reasoning]

Rah! Rah! Rah! Le Angels RETURN! And about time, too -- they record at a positively glacial pace, much to DEAD ANGEL's dismay. Would that they were only a fraction as prolific as the pranksters in the Broken Flag camp.... But on the other hand, the time they spend on their work pays off in amazingly intricate and well-crafted songs, so i'm not going to quibble TOO much about their obsessive attention to detail. Aside from the outstanding musicianship -- they may not be THE most technically proficient band in all of Japan, but they're damn close; the only other that comes readily to mind would be the Ruins -- the sound on this CD is just staggering. Their sound is much fuller and richer this time around than ever before, which means many blessings for the ears....

For those not familiar with the godhead that is Angel'in Heavy Syrup, they're four women from Japan playing a twisted brand of avant-rock/new age/spacy jazz psychadelia with breathy, helium-like singing. Of course, since the lyrics are all in Japanese, there's no telling what the lyrics MEAN, but they SOUND great. In the course of any given song, they'll change tempos a zillion times, incorporate wildly fluctuating dynamics, bizarre melodies, and shifting textures played in ridiculously complicated arrangements... and all without even breaking a sweat. In fact, one of their greatest strengths is their ability to flow seamlessly from one complicated movement to another, with the same smooth motion of a river winding through the hills.

The six pieces are here are uniformly brilliant; the highlights mostly revolve around personal taste (i particularly like the flute wandering through "Water Mind"). And in what's quickly becoming an Angel tradition, they rework a song from their last album, "Introduction I -- Naked Sky High." (They most add another layer or two of guitar this time around, with some genuinely squiggly riffing in places courtesy of Fusao, i think.) It's still too early to tell, but i think this might well be their best release yet. It's certainly head and shoulders above nearly anything i've heard in the last year, and i've heard a lot of genuinely good albums, so that's saying something....

This is one of those rare, rare albums that not only lives up to its title but is actually necessary listening even for diehards who already have all the original releases from which the eleven tracks are taken. To begin with, this rectifies a major problem with the Angel'in Heavy Syrup catalog -- it includes all of the second album (never released outside of Japan) but one song; in fact, half the album is a resequenced and radically remixed reconstruction of II with a couple of songs from I, also remixed, thrown in the middle. The rest of the album is two remastered tracks each from III and IV. One of the tracks from the first album -- "My Dream" -- is actually included here as the version from Charnel's LAND OF THE RISING NOISE compilation. All of it sounds like it has been remixed from the ground up, and judging by the extra bits floating between some of the songs, most likely from the original tapes. There's a lot less reliance on endless reverb, and the balance between the bass and the rest of the band has been improved, rendering a lot more clarity to the songs. Even the two songs (especially "Water Mind") from III sound different enough (without losing their original character) that listening to this compilation is like rediscovering the songs all over again.

In a lot of ways this sounds like a really well-recorded live recording, and since the band has always been exceptionally well-rehearsed from day one, the result is a psych album with enough oomph and variety to be totally mesmerizing from start to finish. The song selection and sequencing is impeccable, and the increased clarity really benefits the band by making it obvious just how good they are. "Stoom" devotees should note that while they definitely spend a lot of time being floaty 'n psych-like, they have their heavy moments, particularly on the last track, taken from IV. When they start getting heavy they approach being a psychedelic doom band. It's interesting to note that even though the songs are taken from four very different albums, they come across as a new whole. As usual, the Angels do not disappoint....

The main reason for owning this single is to have the b-side, which does not appear on the full-length debut by Gira's brand new bag. Of course, the A-side is certainly worth hearing in its own right, and this may even be a slightly different mix (awake, ye collector purists!), but if it is, it's not different enough to make much of a difference. "God's Servant," however is fairly interesting, with drums almost Swanslike in their intensity, but shot through with tinkling piano and lonesome violin. It's not quite as astounding as the material on the album -- hence its fate as a b-side -- but it's still worth hearing if you got behind the album in a big way. Other than that, this is strictly a completist's gig, mon....

The simple way to approach Gira's new bag -- to grok its essence, if you will -- is to apply the principles of mathematics. Start with Swans as your constant. Subtract the fearsome mania for repetition, female vox, thunderous drumming, aching piles of bombast, and high noise quotient. Add many new instruments for an incredible variety of textures, gospel and country influences, and a renewed commitment to relatively straightforward songwriting. Substitute "Leonard Cohen" for "Johnny Cash" in the vocal influence variable. Work out that equation, my sweating li'l children, and you should end up with Angels of Light. (If you ended up with anything else, you get a D and remedial exercises. If you ended up with "Britney Spears," you get an F and go to prison, you pervert.)

Of course, nothing involving Gira is ever that simple. While he manages to pull off sounding like the Swans but not sounding like the Swans (neat trick!), the parallels are all refracted. Yes, his lyrics are every bit as cheerfully morbid as always, but this time they come across as cryptically abstract narratives in miniature. Yes, the musical structures are uncomplicated, but here they have more texture thanks to the proliferation of guests wielding instruments you've probably never associated with the man. (Shame" -- the best song on the album -- opens with a banjo, for God's sake. And it sounds pretty damn good.) Yes, the tempos are fairly dirgelike, but the judicious inclusion of country instruments (dobro, hammer dulcimer, etc.) make the effect much different, not so much endless and static as simply languid. Swans sounded like the Velvet Underground or Joy Division played at half speed; Angels of Light sound like Johnny Cash or Leonard Cohen played at half speed.

Parts of "Forever Yours" are strongly reminiscent of Cohen's "No Cure For Love" (the similarities are mostly in terms of the vocal phrasing); the results are good enough that i kind of wish Gira would cover something by Cohen (it would be really interesting to hear him sing "Take This Waltz," actually). "The Garden Hides the Jewel" comes closest to sounding like traditional Swans (from the WHITE LIGHT era); it's actually quite pretty, just another indication of Gira's endless perversity, given that the song is actually (apparently) about a dead girl rotting in a garden. (It also happens to remind me strongly of the Don MacLean song "Till Tomorrow," but i don't know if that's intentional or not. I suspect it is, though.) The best song here, "Shame," starts out like a full-on western swing tune waking up in a bad neighborhood as the musicians build intensity only to slash it away at critical points of the lyrics. It's one of the few times Gira's ever made a serious effort at building the sound around the vocals, and the dynamics are simply astounding. The rest of the album hews to a general pattern of morose, low-key creepiness, and it's all excellent, even thought the aforementioned tracks are by far and away the high points of album. I'm not quite ready yet to go out on a limb and proclaim this the greatest thing Gira's done since WHITE LIGHT FROM THE MOUTH OF INFINITY (my candidate for the ultimate Swans disc), but i'm getting there with each repeated listen....

(As sporebots converge upon them from all directions, spilling out of hallways and doors and elevators, hurling their deadly metallic offal into the air, C12 -- who has regained a bit of his panache by now -- soldiers forward, his cybernetic suit activated and crackling with electricity. TG follows in his shadow, impossibly large guns in both hands, firing around him in convoluted patterns. She is wearing a latex mask now to prevent inhaling the spores, and the Captain's suit is hermetically sealed, his eyes invisible behind a dark strip of glass. Jagged waves of ultrasound blast from the sonic cannon on the Captain's Fighter Pack, pulling apart the sporebots unlucky enough to blunder into the sound waves.)

TG: What's next? You said we had a fat-ass pile of CDs....

C12: Indeed we do. (plays the new Angels of Light disc) Gira's back again with his peculiar brand of moody folk-rock. If you've already heard the first album, then you won't find too many surprises here, just more of the same melancholy dirges. A lot of this (especially the first track, "Evangeline") sound very much like an acoustic, prettified version of the same sound the Swans were pursuing on albums like WHITE LIGHT FROM THE MOUTH OF INFINITY.

TG: Is that the one where they went all soft and mushy and Gira started sounding like a weepy Johnny Cash?

C12: More or less. (annoyed) There are some people who vastly prefer the latter Swans albums to their... ah... output of the early years, you know.

TG: I prefer them back when they had balls. (crouches suddenly and ducks a heat-seeking mini-missile)

C12: Back when they sounded like unlistenable noise! 

TG (employing rapid motorized cannon fire to decimate the sporebots' ranks): You were saying?

C12: Ah, yes. The new album. The use of organ and countryish elments like slide guitar make the proceedings a bit more lush than the aforementioned Swans album. "Untitled Love Song" owes more to country death blues than it does to anything happening in the music world right now -- oooo, that aching pretty slide and lap steel! And that track even has Bliss Blood on it, providing back vocals. Gira has done well to make her acquaintance. "Song for Nico" is another nice one, sounding very much (one suspects intentionally so) like "All Tomorrow's Parties" with acoustic instruments. Then he's back to the country death motif again on "My Suicide" -- he does this kind of stuff really well; his temperament is just right for lonesome songs of crippled humanity.

TG: What about the rest of the album? Is it all like this? (shudders) Where's the thunder, dammit?

C12: No thunder, dearheart. Gira's past the need for thunder these days. The rest of the songs are pretty much somewhere in this neighborhood, so if that's not your bag you might want to skip this one. Old-school Swans devotees probably won't care for this much --

TG: Amen! (aims her Plasma Disruptor at the last remaining sporebot; it pulls itself apart in hot strips of metal like hot taffy)

The band was formed in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco and their name is inspired by their fingerless and legless bassist, a survivor of bacterial meningitis. The poop sheet that came with the disc mentions No Doubt, Operation Ivy, and The Muffs, all of which are pretty spot-on, and a bunch of other bands I know nothing about. So you can guess they have an attitude and issues, and you'd be right. They also have a cute guitarist / shouter (Stacey Dee), and the whole band is pretty respectable -- lots of energy, oi chants, and they're big on the pop-punk axis. They have nothing to be ashamed of. Songs like "Dubya" and "Psycho Bitch" don't tell me anything I didn't already know, and the music doesn't go anywhere I haven't heard before, but then again, I was never a huge fan of the pop-punk genre and I'm probably the wrong person to be reviewing this anyway. I'd rather listen to this than anything I've ever heard by any of the bands name-checked in the poop sheet, though, with the possible exception of The Muffs. It was recorded by Jack Endino and they know how to play, so if you're down with this whole style, then you should probably check it out.

Antibody -- IN LOVING MEMORY [Castrated Tapes/Loud Cat]

Unfortunately, the alphabetical list of reviews begins with a band guilty of the aforementioned sin of uninspired packaging. IN LOVING MEMORY really sounds as though Antibody is making their first foray into the depths of noise. The sound is rather simple and straightforward; little or no layering or complexity is to be found here. Most of the pieces are short, sound more like promotional excerpts than fully-developed pieces. The xeroxed notes that accompanied this particular tape indicate that this should be filed under "noise/ambient." The initial genre classification does work, but there is little innovation or novelty to this release.

So how does it sound? Some feedback, some droning, some processed screaming -- nothing out of the ordinary for a noise release. Essentially, a standard (though mainly freshman) noise release. [bc]

Antibody -- ON THE RACK WITH WIRE [Castrated Tapes]

This two-man noise team from Sayreville, NJ are classic cut-up power electronics artists in the vein of Macronympha, but this is a bit of a different take on the vein they've chosen to mine. While there are bursts of jagged electro-terrorism to be had all over the tape, most of it is more ambient in nature, ladling eccentric sounds over flanged-out loops (loops seem to be the big wave lately for some reason), giving their particular headkick a bit more of a hypnotic feel, particularly on tracks like "Peace comes from knowing pervert machines." Others like "Scape" and "Tack" employ more subterranean sounds and distorted throbbing, coming across like Throbbing Gristle played at 16 rpm. But then tracks like "Invade" are much more punishing, like scrap metal being force-fed through a meat grinder, complete with bursts of distortion like radios being blown up and all sorts of high-pitched evil tone hate. Other tracks like "Gash Chambered" and "Sluts in a Trash Heap" are even more violently obnoxious. All of which lends a bit more variety to the proceedings than with many noise bands. An interesting diversion from the usual full-tilt powertrip mania.

My, this is a loud one. "False Tench" disgorges great screaming walls of everything all at once without warning and you're off to the races with a wall of screechy noises, earthquake sounds, dank bass rumble, and no telling what else buried in the sonic mung. You'll definitely find it abrupt and bracing, assuming you can still hear and you didn't spill your coffee all down your lap. "Center" is even more abrasive and out of control, and grinding gears on B52s being shredded to strands of aluminum spaghetti as the jet screams sideways down the runway with the brakes locked before flipping over and crashing into the ocean. "Pataphysical" is no less loud and cut-up, but its movement is a bit more stationary; instead of propelling you face-first down the razor-lined metal chute and into the incinerator, it pins you to a wall initially and breaks things over your head first and then pushes you down the stairs in a barrel full of clattering knives. The last track, "Latrines," is so loud and pounding that jackhammers breaking up the sidewalk would almost be soothing by comparison. This is a new pinnacle of obnoxiousness for a tape-driven project that prides itself on obnoxiousness. If you like your wall o' sound louder than an avalanche and filled with the sound of alien ships that blot out the sun wiping out cities with chattering ray guns, then this is for you. Treasure it always.

Even for Jordan Krall, cut-up tape fiend that he is, this is a pretty chaotic wall o' sonic blort. He makes some interesting moves, though -- like a doom childe weaving through the sonic dung to perpetuate the Ritual of the Craven Blowfish, he throws in some unexpected efx and bizarre juxtapositions, like the flanged-out reverb on "HaHa" and the introduction to "False Hearted Villain Blues," which opens with some cheesy forties (???) record, all nice 'n jaunty, before being obliterated by tape noise hell. "Capas and Scrabble" combines a skipping record with walls of sonic doom, and the doom is heavy on fast-forward tape rumble and Buicks falling down a deep, dark hole. Then there's the totally surreal "Ballpoint Banana" -- a lengthy sample of some poorly-acted drama involving robbery and violence leads into squealing, shuddering, and the Wail of Death. "Nakema" is basically more noises piled on top of other noises, but the "paperdoll" remix of "HaHa" is a nice one -- weird samples, psychotronic panning, reverb overkill, scratchy vinyl noises, and a general sense of the really bizarre almost make me expect to hear supermodels chanting "Chanel No. 5" over and over (why, i do not know).

The one problem i have with this -- with noise-collage albums in general, really -- is that after a while the sonic bulldozer parts all sound pretty much alike. Outside of that, though, this is a pretty violent-sounding mess of audio fury; Jordan's getting better at capturing the sound of recording equipment being heaved off a cliff, still committing sounds to tape even as the mixer tumbles down the mountain and into the abyss. Note that this comes in a nifty li'l static-shield bag and the label is from Puerto Rico, of all places. I didn't know Castro and his stinky cigars even allowed noise in... oh wait, that's Cuba i'm thinking of. One of these days i really need to pay more attention to that World Atlas....

Anticage is a trio from Slovakia who call their sound "freakout crossover," and that's as apt a description as any -- they combine different disciplines into a chaotic brew of explosive sound that veers from pop to punk and more at will, with lyrics that would get them labeled an "emo" band in this country. In fact, their tendency to explode into bursts of sound and their disciplined, angular playing puts them squarely in emo territory more than anything else. They tend to favor barreling along at a fast clip (especially on "In the Jealous Sky") and they like to all sing together, bringing to mind various Dischord bands (in fact, one of the singers sounds very much like Jawbox's J. Robbins in places). On "Spiritual Cancer No. 2" they seriously rock in locked-down math-rock fashion, although the boss sound is somewhat obscured by all the shou ting (i personally would have mixed the vox down a tad, but i tend to favor that sort of thing). There are only four songs on this demo, but that's enough to get across the fact that they put a lot of energy into what they do and they have a fairly compelling sound. Interesting, disciplined playing -- i'll bet they sound swell live, too.... [pym

I don't honestly know much about Aoki, but he has aparently made a name for himself as a jazz/improv bass player. This disc consists of seven different duets with different musicians, including one with Jim O'Rourke playing guitar. One has to listen carefully to the way Aoki plays his bass to really appreciate the interplay between him and the other musicians. Some nice improvisational pieces here. The O'Rourke piece is indeed a treat. [yol]

Aphex Twin: SELECTED AMBIENT WORKS VOLUME II (Sire/Warner Bros.)

Well, Richard James finally washes up on shore this side of the Atlantic (took long enough, didn't it?), and the results are... rather ambient. For a guy who keeps getting lumped into "house" territory, this two-disc set is awfully short on beats and long on moody, trance-inducing drone. Which is ok by me, although people who were expecting something a bit more thumpadelic may find themselves drifting off as the CDs play on... and on... and on... we're talking approximately 140 minutes of music here, which makes it a real endurance test if you can't stand to go more than a few minutes without hearing somebody whack something in a vaguely rhythmic fashion.

The art packaging is both entertaining and cryptic, not terribly surprising for a guy who claims to do most of his work through lucid dreaming. The two discs come in one jewel box with a hinged tray to hold one on each side (clever, and a real space-saver too); the booklet folds out to a fair-sized poster depicting abstract photos symbolizing the tracks themselves. Since they aren't arranged in any particular order though, there's no telling which picture goes with which track. Ah, those arty types....

The music itself is kind of spooky most of the time; dark, eerie, and morbid in an oddly sophisticated kind of way, like the soundtrack to a high- class art flick about unfathomable mysteries that end in death. And how's this for an odd comparison -- those who've heard the 21-minute "Pure II" from the Godflesh CD PURE and found it pleasing would probably enjoy this set immensely. (In fact, Final, the ambient spinoff project of Godflesh guitarist Justin Broadrick, is working in remarkably similar territory to these two discs as well.) On the rare occasions when a beat gets going, the results are surprisingly funky, but the main attraction of this outing remains the eerie, processed-beyond-all-recognition sounds that paint pictures of another universe far beyond our own. Some clever reviewer who doesn't work for DEAD ANGEL compared this set to the sound the monolith from 2001 would make if it could sing, and that pretty much says it all. Maybe this is what I'll play when I watch the comets vs. Jupiter on CNN....

Performance art and music are generally a hit-or-miss proposition (ask Karen Finley how far the combination will get you and be prepared to duck), especially when you divorce the music from the event itself. For every brilliant example (say, the Great Kat, whose twenty-year career now has managed to outlast most of the magazines that laughed at her when she first appeared in the 80s), there's an equally hideous one (the Impotent Sea Snakes, who were indeed impotent in every sense of the word imaginable and then some, come readily to mind). The last band of any note I can remember having much success (artistically or financially) with this route was Boston's Women of Sodom, who combined catchy (and dirty) techno with a mind-boggling live BDSM show complete with whipping and enemas. Apocalipstick are more of a rock 'n roll thang, but their modus operandi isn't too different (catchy and dirty rock songs sung by Jackie O. Nasstie, aka Bay Area fetish-scene notable Mistress Josephine), and they have the good sense to keep their smutty sense of humor upfront. It doesn't hurt that the band (guitarist KC/DC, bassist Bob Three, and drummer Adam Knievel, all veterans of the Bay Area punk scene) sounds pretty good, giving the lo-fi recording the same sound as those swell old Motorhead and MC5 albums. Titles like "Rectal Inspector," "Lick," "Lolita Backwards," and "Headache" are a pretty accurate indicator of the band's lyrical interests, although they're delivered with far more humor and with less raunch (well, maybe) than you might expect. The sound behind the warbling fetish chanteuse is pure punked-out beach-party rock and roll -- fun fun fun till Daddy takes the lipstick away -- and I can only imagine how brilliant this must be live, with the amps turned up to 11 and the band in full drag while Jackie O. does her championship jiujitsu moves all swaddled in latex and fishnet and stiletto heels. If you're like me and you don't have the good fortune to live where you can see them, well, the cd turned up loud and the hallucinogen of your choice (plus the latest copy of MARQUIS for good measure) will have to do for a poor man's simulation. You can get the cd for $10 even, postage included, from Bazoom! directly (see EPHEMERA for details).

O, my. This is so... so... you need to go out right now and buy this. Period. That's all.

(waits)

What? That's not enough? You don't... trust me?

(waits some more)

Okay, if you insist on being convinced rather than merely taking my word for it, here's the deal. Arab on Radar are several guys (their bio is cryptic on the number, but i'm guessing four) with a sound like math metal turned inside out and imploding, all fucked beats in perfect time and guitars like stuck foghorns and chicken scratches turned up to ten. Frankly, they sound like genuine psychotics, possibly dangerous psychotics, given instruments and a voice. If the Butthole Surfers and Jesus Lizard had been locked up in an institution after turning into acid casualties, tortured and beaten daily, then given instruments, they might sound like this. They open with "my mind is a muffler," with a guitar line more like a sewing machine that turns into collapsing drums and this... this lunatic, sounding like an epileptic on Thorazine being sodomized with a cattle prod, shrieking lines like "sometimes i just gotta jerk off / my heart is a horseplay lawyer / my mind is a muffler / pussy exhaust not whooping cough." Imagine Godflesh's grotesque EQ and throb as practiced by Beefheart and you get an idea of how genuinely twisted they are. And that's just the first song. That's the accessible one. The others are even more deviant, both musically and lyrically -- "cocaine mummy" lurches along like a snake with a crippled spine, jerking and barking with drums that sound like a machine breaking down and guitars from another solar system playing what passes for death metal on Saturn. Then they graft on lines like "they say i blew the neighborhood bully / i just wanted to compare his length to mine." Oooookay....

One of the weirdest songs on an already out-there disc is "semen on the mount," where scrabbling chicken-scratch guitar plays an endless riff as the drums come in, monolithic but grotesque, and the "singer" goes on about wasting ejaculations, homosexuals, teachers' muffs, semen... um, that kind of thing, you know.... The riff changes midstream and they have something approximating a solo before coming back to finish the litany of perversion, but their ideas of soloing are pretty perverse in themselves. My favorite song is "birth control blues," which has this totally grotesque distorto guitar seesawing between riffs and sounding like an earwing chewing through your skull. I have absolutely no idea what the song is about (at first i thought it was about "holding his weiner," but that's a different song, sorry), but it sounds gross and scary and like the product of men who have some serious issues and might be willing to settle them with their hands. Think early Swans with a bad case of rabies. In terms of intensity they're scary for all the same reasons as Unsane (even though they sound nothing alike), only intensely more robotic and complicated. If Unsane is a sonic body bomb, Arab on Radar are a sonic body bomb built by the likes of the Unabomber. When robots break down and begin to hallucinate metallic fever dreams, this is what they hear.

What i like most about this band is that they bathe in the mud of perversion and depravity with the same kind of style and unnerving aim as Butthole Surfers and Cows -- sure, they have dirty minds and foul mouths, but they're talking about much weirder and more taboo things than your average ragin' pimp rock outfit. Korn may think they're "daring" by singing about being called a faggot in high school, but i'd like to see them pull off singing about blowing a bully to get him to leave you alone. These guys have a seriously high misanthropic quotient (always a point in favor, at least for listening purposes) -- i have a feeling that alienating people is perfectly okay with them -- but they're far more intelligent than most axe-slinging misanthropes (who tend to gravitate into death metal anyway). This band is every bit as heavy as some death metal bands, but in such a creatively addled way that they're closer to art-rock. I would imagine it takes extremely obsessive people to make albums (even short ones) that sound like this.

Now will you buy the damn thing?

Ariel -- WITHDRAWN [Plan Eleven]

Apparently i am not the only one who listens to old Cure albums. But then, Ariel listens to later ones than i do: "Vertigo" (which has a really cool, spiky piano buried under the guitars and ubersynths, by the way) sounds like it could have been lifted from the DISINTEGRATION sessions. Hell, singer Ali Jafri even sounds like Robert Smith, down to the wounded-puppy whine that's made Robert so "endearing" lo these many years. Of course, they further their more obvious inspirations with the use of Middle-Eastern and West African instruments (put to spectacular use on "If Only You Knew," among others), which saves them from being written off as mere Cure clones.

Stylistically, Ariel are a fair bit more varied than the Cure (whose entire oevure can basically be divided into death dirges or giddy pop), and if it weren't for Jafri's singing (throughout the album he sounds amazingly like Robert Smith, so much so that sometimes it's scary), the comparison most likely wouldn't even be evident. As it is, with vocalists who could be twins, it's inevitable. Which is probably a problem for Ariel, since it distracts from what is otherwise a fine collection of semi-psychedelic and highly ornate pop songs. Of special interest in the not-so-Curelike moments are "Take Me," whose lurching groove and noisy approach make it more consistent with industrial dance stylings than anything else (although it's laced with all sorts of Eastern doodlings, turning it into something else altogether), the lush "Heaven is Blue" (a secret nod to the Blue Meanies of the Beatles' film YELLOW SUBMARINE, woo!), and the last (and most unusual) song, "Akayla," an orgy of polyrhythmic percussion, battling synths, guitars spiraling upward and lyrics sung entirely in... yes... Urdu. If the band were to pick this one song as the progression point toward future albums, that would certainly eliminate the pesky Cure comparisons, all right... yessir....

Art of Noise -- THE AMBIENT COLLECTION [Discovery/China Records]

First things first: This is not REALLY an ambient album. Ambient is like, you know, Eno... sound without beat... nothing much happens... etc. This is something else. More accurately, this is probably "chill-out" music (hmmm, gee, that's what the back of the CD says too, obviously i am a VISIONARY). To clarify things further, this is one of the many remixes albums of AON material currently available, each one in a different form (jungle, techno, etc.). It's ambient only in the sense that everything is much airier (there's a lot more space in the mixes) and sounds of the real world are dragged in from time to time, and occasionally the beat drops out of the mix. What's really odd is that this particular project was masterminded by Youth, who, if you will remember back to the 80s, used to be the scary bass-thumper for Killing Joke, not exactly a recommendation for ambient remixing, one would think... but he must have gotten tired of being so big and violent all the time, because he does a pretty good job here of making everything sound lush and quiet and pretty and all that stuff. Oh, Alex from the Orb serves as DJ here... just thought you'd like to know....

So the verdict is that this is pretty good, as far as E-Z listening versions of AON go. The piano on "Island" is a nice touch. "Camilla" has been converted to some kind of weird electro-primitive throb, and the use of a wailing vocal chorus on "Counterpoint" and "Nothing Was Going to Stop Them Anyway" is a pleasantly otherworldly effect. "A Nation Rejects" has an ominous synth vibe going through it, which is hep. Overall, though, there's a bit too much synth-twiddling and beats (particularly on "Art of Love (7" edition") for this to really qualify as ambient, although that certainly doesn't stop it from being listenable. Just be sure of what you're in for.

I must say, though, that it was really disconcerting to realize that the bass riff at the beginning of "Opus For 4" sounds EXACTLY like one of the many such momentary riffs on the new Gravitar disc. I'm not sure what that means.... Then again, i could just be hallucinating again....

Art of Noise -- THE DRUM AND BASS COLLECTION [Discovery/China Records]

This is the third is a series of discs featuring various entities remixing Art of Noise tracks to fall into the format of a specific genre; the first two featured guests remixing everything into ambient fashion on one disc and techno on the other (they'll get reviewed in the next issue; i ran out of room for this one). The focus this time around is... JUNGLE! Yee ha! And it's interesting to me, especially since this is the first time i've actually heard jungle (you can tell i don't get out much lately). As the title implies, the mix on the songs is largely stripped down to big, cavernous drums and whomping, bomping bass. DEAD ANGEL approves of the results. My favorite is the first (and longest) track, "Something Always Happens," remixed by Doc Scott; a repetitive loop of a keyboard figure and eerie synth washes twist and wind like a toy piano on helium while the beat goes on. "Ode to Don Jose" (remixed by Dom and Roland) kicks off with mountains of reverb, then more eerie keyboards, before the beat starts moving the walls around... then it begins to slowly but steadily build into thick layers of throbbing sound. Color me impressed, m'boyo. I'd almost get up and dance myself if i weren't afraid of causing anybody watching to stain themselves laughing....

Without going into the blow-by-blow accounting, let me just say that the other nine tracks here are every bit as good as the first two. Other goodies include a tremendously devolved (and damn near unrecognizable) version of "Kiss" (yah, the Prince song) and an equally mutant rendering of "Peter Gunn." Those into jungle or Art of Noise will want to snag this. How can you go wrong with a disc whose participants believe so religiously that you can never have enough reverb? Solid, mon....

Okay, we've already established that the Art of Noise has engineered this slew of remixes of key AoN tracks in various styles -- bass and drum, ambient, and now... yes, you knew it was coming... techno. And the verdict? Coming from someone who's not exactly a raving techno devotee: it's okay. It helps the remix devils here had good material to work with in the first place, and that the remix devils themselves are big-deal type talents -- Youth (of Killing Joke eons ago), The Prodigy, Robert Gordon, other people who are probably really important that i don't recognize because i'm not clued-in to the whole techno thing. If you have a fondness for big beats (all the more mechanical to hump you with, my dear!), burbling synths, percolating everything, and a perpetual groove, then you have come to the right place....

The big winners here are the Prodigy's thundering "Instruments of Darkness (All of Us Are One People)," Rhythmatic's chirping keyboards set against a busy beat on "Roller 10," the oddly restrained (for a techno album, anyway) "Ode to a D.J. (Interlude 2)," in which Mark Gamble employs tons of spacy reverb and delay; and Youth's snazzy (and bizarrely jazzy) contribution, "The Art of Slow Love," in which he slows the beat waaaaay down and throws in jazz samples, wailing keyboards, weird percussion, and a beat that owes more to hip-hop than techno. The rest is pretty standard techno fare -- heavy on the beats and busy, busy, busy. As i mentioned before, it's hard to go horribly wrong with remixing material that was pretty swank to begin with, and there are no gut-wrenching disasters here, but unless you're already a techno disciple or an Art of Noise fanatic, i can't see this converting anyone to either religion. I think i preferred the bass and drum album myself, but then, i've never even understood the appeal of dancing, so.... [atlas shrugged]....

Art of Noise -- THE BEST OF ART OF NOISE [Discovery/China Records]

For a band that hasn't technically existed since 1990, Art of Noise sure seems to release a lot of stuff. The band originally started out as a studio project led by Trevor Horn (you know, the Buggles, the guy with the glasses in the nifty video for "Video Killed the Radio Star" that MTV never shows anymore, even though they should, because it pees all over the rest of the crap they show these days) and released several albums before calling it a day in 1990. (They've also since managed to release two remix albums and this in addition to the first remix album of ambient tracks that they did just prior to disbanding.)

So now they've gathered up ten key tracks and released them on this disc, which makes an excellent introduction to the band for morons like me who weren't smart enough to catch them the first time around. "Opus 4" is a "dance" track built almost entirely around repeated phrases layered and arranged in repetitive fashion in place of beats, to novel effect; then "Yebo" proves that they had the hyperkinetic beat thing down cold, and the bizarre chanting and yelping vox only make it even cooler. "Instruments of Darkness" manages not only to be both tribal and techno at the same time, but actually predates both genres (i think, don't hold me to it, i reserve the right to be wrong, all sales final, this offer null in certain states). Their reworking of "Peter Gunn" -- with Duane Eddy's help, no less -- is pretty suave in its own right, and i actually like their bizarre version of Prince's "Kiss" (with Tom Jones on vocals?!?) better than the original (which isn't really saying much, since i think Prince stopped being terribly interesting after PURPLE RAIN). And! For your listening pleasure! You also get the seething, percolating "Paranoimia" with guest babbling courtesy of Max Headroom (remember him?) and "Dragnet," from what may be the only good movie Dan Akroyd ever did. Special bonus points for the completely gratuitous reverb overkill on "Something Always Happens"....

I can't believe i never realized how suave this band was when they were still around. I... i feel stupid now. I am a worm. Now i must go crawl back in my hole and spend much time catching up on my learning with this and other Art of Noise CDs....

Asrielle -- s/t [Bobby J. Records and Tapes]

Now THIS is true lo-fi pop... approximately 30 minutes of one man, a guitar, and a mixer (plus the occasional synth -- i think -- and a crappy drum machine that's not always in sync with the rest of the music) spinning melancholy tales of dreary suburban isolationism. Think of Lou Barlow in Austin with less inclincation to "rock out" and even more depressed and presto! welcome to the world of Asrielle. This is pop so lo-fi and anti-pop that it might as well be punk, except for the fact that it's immensely catchy and oddly appealing, despite sometimes hideous production. Makes me wonder what the guy might accomplish with an engineer and better equipment, except that i think a lot of the charm here is its simplicity, something that almost always gets lost when you "move up" in the production world. Stuff to like includes the quasi-Dino Jr. guitar on "pinecone wealth," the ..., and just the fact that everything's just loose enough to sound like it was done by a real human being, someone who does his own thing just to DO it, rather than with some predefined "goal" (like becoming an zillionaire or an MTV god or being "hip" or whatever).

Atari Teenage Riot -- BURN, BERLIN, BURN! [Digital Hardcore/Grand Royal]

If you haven't heard ATR, here's the scoop: pasty-faced German homeboy Alec Empire got fed up with the right-wing politics of the German techno scene and the burnout aesthetic of punk and decided to do his own thing. With the help of a DJ and a female vocalist and a sampler and a pile o' gadgets, he proceeded to engineer a highly political techno aggregate that sounds more like a punk band overturning police cars and setting them on fire. Via their own label Digital Hardcore, they released several EPs in the UK, at which point Grand Royal stepped in to make them accessible to the bored US hipsters. Ergo, this here slab o' tortured wailing, sledgehammer beats, misappropriated and wonked-out samples, and proto-death riffing, which largely compiles the best tracks from the various EPs plus some new ones. (Don't ask me to tell you which are which, i ain't hip enough to know.)

Some pleasing things to note: They favor piling on shit until you can hardly tell what the fuck is going on. Their female singer has a voice like a demented pixie doll running amok with a samurai sword. They favor beats the size of bulldozers and like to employ them at tempos sufficient to make your chiropractor most happy and rich should be foolish enough to actually attempt to dance to said tunes. They like to say "fuck you" and "fuck off" a lot. They think the whole world sucks and they are correct. The female singer has an immensely cool pageboy haircut just like Uma Thurman did in PULP FICTION, and she favors black fetish fashion, always a plus. For that matter, the other two guys are quite suave, manly and handsome specimens themselves. They have a really cool name and logo. They incorporate the SS logo into the title of "P.R.E.S.S.," a crazed diatribe against the press. They are tremendously obnoxious. They don't care if you like them. This list only scratches the surface of their coolness. Their live shows are louder than God. They will probably all be completely deaf in less than a year. Obviously you should worhsip them as royalty.

So let's see, the songs... ah... are all loud and crazed and obnoxious and kind of run together. The best ones are probably "Sick to Death," "P.R.E.S.S.," "Deutschland (Has Gotta Die!)," "Destroy 2000 Years of Culture" (which makes impressive use of a death-metal riff for the intro and comes close to approximating an updated Public Enemy), "Heatwave" (which has the immense taste to crib a Motorhead riff), "Delete Yourself," the immensely crazed and overdriven "Death Star" (which sounds like harcore bitzkreig punk with a techno beat), the death-metal-derived noise pileup of "Speed"... fuck, it's all pretty goddamn hep. It'll all really fuck up your speakers if you play it loud. What more could you possibly want?

It's time for Neddal's first review, but just where is that tall, easily-annoyed Canadian? An intense search turns him up in a reading room on the 17th sublevel of the Hellfortress, where TASCAM-Girl finds him kicked-back on a couch reading DOOM PATROL and listening to the new Atomic Bitchwax cd.

Neddal (not looking up): Hey Tassie.

TG (eyes like tiny black pinwheels): AAAAAAAARGH! What the fuck is the problem with everyone around here lately? The Moon Unit's rambling around in corpsepaint and babbling about fucking Burzum all the time, that freak with the tattoos and the hat is disassembling the whole place so he can make funny noises, the Headless Sno-Cone Girl is now a burning bush of fire, and you... you... mere words cannot contain my intense loathing and disgust! I can't believe it! You let yourself get outsmarmed by a British fop who LIKES THE SMITHS and was ONCE IN A GOTH BAND! (starts pulling out her hair) THIS PLACE IS GOING TO HELL! I'M SICK OF ALL THIS BULLSHIT!

N/A (looking worried): Calm down, it's not that....

TG (pressing the barrel of a large-caliber weapon between his eyes): IT IS THAT GODDAMN BAD!

N/A (sweating): Bev is going to be very irritated if I go back to Canada with my head missing.

TG: HAVE YOU STARTED REVIEWS FOR THIS ISSUE?

N/A: Uhhhh... um... (looks at DOOM PATROL issue) Well, uh... you see, it's like this....

TG (eyes filled with psychotic rage): And while we're at it, FUCK these endless reviews! YOU, my friend, are going to give me reviews in three sentences or less AND NONE OF THAT MAXIMUM ROCK 'N ROLL BULLSHIT either! I want trenchant, witty, SHORT fucking reviews! OR I WILL KILL YOU!

N/A: Aaaaaah, why don't you fuck off.

TG (cocks gun): I AM NOT FUCKING AROUND HERE!

N/A: Okay, okay... should I start with this Atomic Bitchwax thing?

TG (hissing like a rattlesnake): That would be a fine idea, you worm.

N/A (clearing throat): While the straight cover of DIRTY DEEDS DONE DIRT CHEAP is kind of unnecessary, the rest of the disc sees the Bitchwax playing to their strengths: Ed (Mundell -- the good guitar player in Monster Magnet) lets loose with the solos while Chris and Keith pound away.

TG (stepping back, firing gun indiscriminately into the ceiling): See? See? Now that wasn't very goddamn motherfucking hard, was it?

N/A: You know, I think maybe you need to be shipped out to an outpost in Biafra or something.... [n/a]

Aube - METAL DE METAL [Manifold]

There's an interesting discussion going on via an electronic mailing list I'm subscribed to. The subject title says it all: "slow down Merzbow". if there could be a runner-up in the race to release the most albums, then Aube is fast becoming a candidate. In the case of Aube, this isn't a bad thing. At least, not yet. METAL DE METAL is limited to 1000 copies, and when examining the packaging, one quickly understands why. The CD comes packaged in a galvanized steel jacket that is quite impressive and beautiful in its own right. All of the tracks on this disc are created using "only the sounds of the metal as source material." I wish to make a bold statement. Next to MAGNETOSTRICTION, a recording I consider one of Nakajima's best, I claim that METAL DE METAL will go down in the history books as a seminal Aube recording as well.

The first track, titled "Quell" is a long and slow-developing piece which starts out not very differently from the way the first track on INFINITELY ORBIT (released by Alchemy Records) with a particularly ear- piercing, high-pitched drone. Unlike the aforementioned track, "Quell" actually develops into something that is infinitely (pun intended) more engaging. Over the span of this 12 minute track, a number of other metallic drones covering different spaces of the sound spectrum, build up, creating a complex tapestry of sounds weaving their way in and around the inner cortex ring near my inner ear. I almost wonder if these two tracks are somehow related in their origins or design.

Two other observations about this recording. Most Aube recordings follow a very strict sense of coherence along two distinct axes: the sound source and the processing of said sounds. For instance, FLOOD-GATE is a contiguous soundtrack of processed water sounds. On the other hand, for METAL DE METAL, while still following the first axis rule, Nakajima demonstrates that he can branch out and try different methodologies within a single release while still holding a sense of cohesion. It's very refreshing. For instance, some tracks focus on drone sounds, yet others focus on the percussive aspects of metal, such as on "Calx". Still others, such as the track titled "Unite Plate", are a real departure for Aube sounding like a guitar piece that might occur if one crossed Frippertronics with Final -- a pleasant surprise. Additionally, certain elements of this entire disc seem reminiscent of the work of Harry Bertoia's metal sound sculptures, taken apart and reconstructed to an intriguing effect. [yol]

Aube -- WIRED TRAP (Self Abuse)

The recorded work of Aube is most familiar to some as that of processed water sounds. Aube sets his works apart from that of "noisicians" simply because his methods of conceptualization, presentation and actualization are quite different from the cathartic chaos of the noise world. For this project, all of the sounds are recorded from using steel wire contraptions created by his friend Yuri Shibata. The result are five longish tracks that are quite a bit denser than most of his previous water works. [yol]

Aube -- PAGES FROM THE BOOK [E & J Recordings]

You know, the man releases too damn many albums. I can't keep track of them anymore; no one can. Does he do anything at all besides record? It's getting a bit ridiculous... at this rate he'll soon have more releases to his name than Merzbow, a most frightening thought....

Be that as it may, this is one of the more essential ones. Like all Aube releases, this employs sound material gathered from one source -- in this case, the Bible (but how? thumping it on the table? turning pages? even, God forbid, ripping out pages? dunno, for the sounds are too destroyed to tell). Said sounds are devolved and destroyed until they are rendered totally unrecognizable, then looped and mixed into building, droning soundscapes. The results are fairly startling. The promo thingy bills this as a "peaceful release of epic proportions," but a lot of this sounds more ominous than peaceful, although it's certainly less corrosive than some of Aube's other works. I like the way sound builds in stepladder increments in "In the Beginning," where one devolved sound gradually grows in volume, then fades out as another joins in, and as that grows only to be replaced by something else, the entire track gradually gets louder and harsher. This takes a while (in fact, there are only four tracks on the disc and the shortest is over ten minutes long), but the hypnotic effect makes that a good thing.

"Hymn" and "Concord Block" follow the same general blueprint, only with different sounds -- the beginning of the latter employs a great one, in fact, a looped sound like a tumbling block that gradually shifts in its tone without changing its essential nature. The last one, "Holy World," is a bit different; not only is it the longest track at just over twenty minutes, but it opens with a looped segment of speaking (the words are unintelligble) that is gradually, slowly, supplanted by sounds of a rhythmic nature and other ominous sonic effluvia. The entire thing builds to a harsh, forbidding density before cutting off abruptly halfway through... at which point the buildup begins anew, from a different sonic perspective. Before the end there are some great sheet-metal drones drenched in reverb.

In fact, drone and repetition are the hallmarks of this disc, a good thing in my book. Throw in the gorgeous packaging (the sepia tint of the artwork and packaging makes it look like the entire thing was bronzed) and you have one swank release. This also makes an excellent place to start for the Aube neophyte, actually -- and should be just as interesting to the long-time Aube follower. A worthwhile release indeed.

Aube/Cock E.S.P. -- MASCHINEWERK [Charnel Music]

Is this Aube thing starting to get out of control or what? This is a fairly recent release, and from what i can tell, he's released about six more things since then. Ah well, it's his decaying four-track, and he can cry to the bank if he wants to....

What we have here is a limited edition release (1000 copies) of Aube taking sounds provided by Minneapolis noisemeisters Cock E.S.P. and diddling with them in his usual fashion. There are four long pieces here (the shortest is almost ten minutes long, the longest is over twenty), and they're a bit more "heavy" and rhythmic than what Aube normally produces on his own, making this a DEAD ANGEL favorite right away. As with almost everything Aube has a hand in, the pieces swirl and build in slo-mo, especially on "The Voice of Allergy." The brooding "Autoburn" is probably closest the sound most people associate with Aube, and features what sounds like disembodied chanting mixed down in the background (gradually growing louder) and other churning, looped sounds. "Tour de Trance" is the noisiest and most jagged thing here, while the stupefyingly long "Spacedub" works its way up from a hollowed-out low roar to a full-tilt banshee wail of jagged scrap metal and screeching. Yow. Did I mention that the sharp line art and unique packaging (square inserts with one picture for each title, etc.) are pretty nifty too? Snag it while you can....

Aube -- "Monochord/Attune" [Gender-Less Kibbutz]

A word on the packaging: Godlike. Layers of mylar paper create different textures of gray stone or marble, all encased in a shiny plastic slipcover; nice. The sound source this time around? Steel wires, just like in WIRED TRAP -- although this is nowhere near as crazed as that one, which slouches toward pure frontal lobe meltdown about halfway through, if i remember correctly. "Monochord" generates lots of scraping noise creepiness, then juxtaposes a clunking, tumbling loop (cables tumbling in a dryer?) over that; toward the end munching, snarling noises join in the fun. Neighbor Annoyance Potential: High. "Attune" takes a different tack, gradually building from nothingness to the rising sound of squeaky sounds circling around each other while other sounds buzz and bump in the background. Hep, daddy-o. Use this to prime yer pump for the longer work of art below....

Wow, this is mysterious... two CDs by this band showed up in my mailbox one day with minimal info and they turn out to be gorgeous examples of droning ambient soundscapes. Well-done ambient sounds, i might add. On this disc they achieve a cathedral-like vibe, building somber waves of sound like a dying pipe organ. The disc is just one long track, nearly 48 minutes, of drones that ebb and flow in regular waves. The ambient sound never really goes anywhere, and thus is the closest thing i've heard to a "true" ambient album in some time. The tiny note that comes with the other CD (see below) helpfully informs those who would care to know that they (the mysterious they) are inspired by the likes of Coil, Brian Eno, Stars of the Lid, Robert Rich, and so on. So i suppose they are more specifically aligned with ambient rather than isolationist, although this CD rides the gray line between the two camps, at least to my ears. A fine disc for background music... droning, soothing, even relaxing... put it on after the end of a day of dealing with evil maggots at work and let your bones turn to tofu. Strongly recommended for those who think the entire ambient genre has drifted from its original intent and focus. See the EPHEMERA section for the link to their site.

This release is more recent and quite a bit different than the one above -- for one thing, it's actually broken down into six separate tracks as opposed to one long one. It's also more of an active listening experience; there are shifts in texture and movements, waves of sound, as opposed to a more static drone. That said, it's definitely an extension of their earlier disc in that the sound is predominantly one of drones and washes. The drones are almost gothic in tone, with textures that change as the disc moves from one movement to the next. It's hard to tell exactly where those movements occur, because while six tracks are listed, the entire disc plays as one track, making the divisions a bit difficult to discern... not that it matters, really. Depending on the volume at which it is played and your capacity for concentration (or fondness for drone), this disc could work equally well as background or foreground music. They get bonus points for the angel on the cover, naturally. Feel free to investigate....

Austere is the name for a couple of low-profile kinda guys who hammer out thick sheets of amazing, sonorous drone, sort of in the vein of Maeror Tri but with synths rather than guitar. Their previous two releases were mentioned here a while back; now they have a new one, and it is no less delightfully droning than the other two. In fact, particularly on the first track "swathe," they appear to have moved increasingly into pure drone waters... although recgognizable keyboard peals do creep in from time to time, most of this is a giant, wavelike drone that will make your speakers shudder. As with their previous efforts, the tracks flow into each other, so it's pretty much impossible to tell where one ends and the next begins; while the tracks are all similar in their bedrock style, they do each take on a different character, making them more like movements in a larger whole. On "lid," the swell of the drones changes and the keyboards become a mite more prominent; in "tranque," the entire tone of the drones changes, and dead space is introduced as a motif -- the drones rise and fade to total silence, then gradually rise and fall again. During this segment they remind me of old (good) Tangerine Dream, maybe circa PHAEDRA, for some reason. This segues into "aire," the only track with any kind of percussion or vox (although both quickly fade away); it builds into long lines of drone that gradually die away before growing again, all the while with a ghostlike synth drifting high above in the clouds. Beautiful, mysterous trance music for droneheads. Thou shalt investigate, especially if can't get enough already of things like Maeror Tri and Troum.

(TG has barely holstered her gun when the ceiling caves in and a titanic cluster of crazed spiderbots come crashing to the floor, death rays firing randomly. One bounces harmlessly off C12's exoskeleton; another comes perilously close to slicing off the heels of TG's imported Italian latex high-heeled combat boots.)

TG: HEY! I paid five hundred fuckin' dollars for those, you goddamn brainless gizmo! (draws both of her guns and turns the offending spiderbot into metallic confetti along with several others)

(The spiderbots begin to converge on them, firing wildly. TG returns fire with gusto, her eyes wild, as C12 cowers in a corner.)

TG: Get up, you worm! We're got a battle to fight here! My God, the smell of cordite really does something for me.... too bad this revolving fully-automatic servomotor hand cannon doesn't have a vibrator attachment....

C12: Um, should we perhaps do something about the review? The Austere CD that's playing?

TG: You expect me to hear that over this? (fragmentation grenade explodes, proving her point as shards of hot metal rain down on them)

C12: I suppose we'll have to run with one of RKF's reviews, then. Thank God he already had this one done....

(reads as gunfire destroys the room and explosions rock the building)

As you probably know by now if you're a regular reader of this ezine, Austere are a two-man ambient drone unit from Portland, Oregon who create long, droning ambient works using (i think) synthesizers are samples. They are old-school ambient -- they give props to Brian Eno in their promo thingy and they're hep to Steve Roach, Robert Rich, and various minimalists -- so there's no beat to shake your bon-bon to, no "chord progressions" to get tacky about, no "solos," no "singing" (voices burble up from the background briefly here and there, but i suspect those are samples), and no tedious foolishness to get in the way of the almighty drone. I think their main mission in life is to remind people of what true ambient music is (hint: it has nothing to do with Aphex Twin or the Orb, bands who use elements of ambient music but are still technically dance music). Austere's vision of the holy grail of ambience involves droning keyboards assembled into a spiraling cathedral of sound, and it's a haunting and beautiful sound. As with all true ambient music, what the sound evokes in the listener will depend mainly on the listener -- ambient music is "transparent" in the sense that with so little present to grab onto, the listener invariably projects his or her own experiences into the sound (which is why the same release can be beautiful to one person and intensely spooky to another). This is the sound i imagine fetii hear in the womb, or perhaps what dead souls hear as they travel through the tunnel of light into the heavens... your experience, like your mileage, may vary....

Which leads to the one problem with the ambient genre: describing it. Describing ambient music is like attempting to describe water. It is what it is, you know? I can tell you that Austere use keyboards and they drone a lot, but beyond that you'd have to hear them to truly understand what they're like. I can tell you with certainty, however, that they are indeed worth hearing. If your only experience with ambient music is with the likes of Aphex Twin or the Orb, i'd suggest you check this out to see how it's supposed to be done and then work back to Eno, the master himself. Austere are not as well-known as luminaries like Robert Rich and Voice of Eye, but they are every bit as good and more than worthy of your attention.

(TG manages the suave trick of emptying one gun with her left hand into a pack of spiderbots while loading another with her right; she leaps to kick two spiderbots attempting a pincer move and swings the new gun from right to left, scattering the spiderbots in a hail of exploding bullets.)

TG: That was actually pretty good. Maybe we should think about keeping him on just to write reviews....

C12: Speaking of which, now we come to another problem...

TG: Oh, you and your fucking problems! You are the biggest goddamn nelly boy I've ever met! Everything's a problem to you! I'll bet you lie awake at night worrying about the crabgrass growing in the Headless Sno-Cone Girl's garden!

C12 (looking alarmed): Her garden has crabgrass in it?

TG: Oh no, don't get off on a tangent here... what's your big-deal fucking problem, anyway?

C12: We have reviews from that Sienko chap, and it's all of stuff so willfully obscure that even RKF hasn't heard it, which means we are certainly not even remotely prepared to review it. And we don't have the discs in question anyway. I'm afraid we're going to have to run with what he's got....

TG: So run with it already! (peeks around a corner; pulls back rapidly when the intersection explodes) Hey, where do you suppose they got those Heckler grenades? I've been wanting to try those out....

C12 (rolling eyes): All right, here goes....

A bit of a surprise, this one. Autoa are a three-piece from the Basque region of Spain. The press sheet says, "The punkiest doom or the doomiest punk you've ever heard!" I don't hear a lot of punk rock here [tmu: This is why i always ignore what the poop sheet says and use it only to make sure everything's spelled right.], but what I do hear is some extremely heavy blues / doom that would be right at home next door to your Dead Meadow and Sleep discs. The recording is raw without being under-produced, and the songs are loose but not meandering. This is a really strong debut, one of the strongest stoner-type records I've heard in a really LONG time. Hopefully North American audiences will pick up on these guys. [n/a]

Autoclave -- s/t [Dischord]

Hmmm... i'm at a bit of a loss on this one because i haven't actually heard Slant 6, one of the bands that was spawned from this band. (The other was Helium, and i'm on firmer ground there.) I'm also pretty spotty on the band's history (apparently Mary Lou Lord figures into all of this somehow, even though she's not part of this band, don't ask me, mon, i just work here), so... if you expect a coherent history lesson, you've come to the wrong place....

As best as i can figure out, Mary Timony led this Washington, D.C. band (now you understand the Dischord connection, eh?) prior to founding Helium. She was the primary guitarist and singer, and under her leadership the band released two EPs on Dischord before splitting up and evolving into Slant 6 and Helium. Not surprisingly, a lot of it sounds... uh... like Helium. Only a shakier, more embryonic version. The proto-Helium sound is really obvious on "I'll Take You Down," which sounds like it could have been the flip side to the "Lucy" single. Others, like "Dr. Seuss," have a bit more punkier edge that Timony rarely explores in Helium. Since the warbling tremelo guitar of "Still Here" doesn't remind me of Helium at all, i'm assuming those noises are being emitted by Nikki Chapman's guitar... but who knows. "Hot Spurr," a bizarre attempt at art-damaged semi-funk, is... mmmm... well, it's about a hitman and it's probably a bit to spastic for its own good. The twitchy, squealy guitars of "Bulls Eye" are pretty hep, tho. There's also a second, mildly different version of "I'll Take You Down," although i'm not sure why they felt the need to do two versions of it....

Other stuff you should know: Both EPs are captured here, along with two demo songs, "Summer" and "Paper Boy" (and yes, they sound very demoish). Timony's face is featured rather prominently on the cover, to the exclusion of other bandmates, which is somewhat puzzling... and there aren't much in the way of liner notes, which is somewhat annoying. But for devotees of Helium and Slant 6, this is an interesting exercise in roots discovery or something like that....

Autonotext -- "volume one" [Crippled Intellect]

More madness from the fiendish mind behind loop gods Vertonen. The a-side is a bizarre slice of ambient spoken-word strangeness; as a loop of what sounds like a rusted ball bearing rolling down a steel chute wonks away in the background, several voices (all sped up chipmunk style) chant and recite what i would assume is the text of the poem "Intermittently Ophelia, Pt. 2." (Cosmic jokers that they are, vocalists Blake Edwards and and Karin Buchbinder are reciting a text that does not exist in the accompanying booklet; that oblique offering begins with Pt. 3.) Needless to say, it's extremely disorienting trying to track several voices and a corrupted ball-bearing all at the same time. Heeeyawongah! My brain, it spins! I ride the elephant into the circus of doom, yet still the wonked-out ball-bearing eludes me....

The flip side is another collaboration of sorts: Vertonen provides the cryptic sounds (loops of squeaky noises and bumpy noises, like rats in the basement discussing Che or something) while Sherman Johnson (who collaborated with Blake on the book mentioned in the previous issue, go back and check it out if you aren't aware of it, mon) rambles on in peculiar fashion. There are three brief "episodes" at work here: "Harlem Nocturne," basically a short burst of static and cryptic sounds, followed by the weird rambling of "Supervielle (Bleeding Cavities)," and topped off (like the cherry on a triple decker sundae) by "pasiphae." The last one is another of Vertonen's patented, rattle and roll, lock 'n lull loops, over which someone (Johnson, most likely) mutters the poetic text of the verses (helpfully reprinted in the booklet). As usual, strange and interesting stuff.

And as always, it wouldn't be a Crippled Intellect release without lots of packaging effluvia. This time, in addition to the single itself, we are treated to (in the case of my issue, # 128 of 200, at any rate): one nicely printed booklet full o' verse and munched text; one tiny blue insert offering CPI goodies for sale and a place to send yer hard-earned (or easily stolen) $$$; one Tetley Naturally Decaffeinated tea bag (now i know where to look when my wife runs out o' tea); and one microfiche of Theatre Playbills (California Actors Theatre). Tragically, no bribe $$$, but i suppose Blake knows by now this is unnecessary since i groove on what Vertonen and co. are up to... no sense in bribing the converted, eh?

Is it just me, or have the '90s been a bit of a cultural cesspool for new musical ideas? No wonder it's been the Decade of the Reissue (and yet we stand on the verge of crossing over to the millenium proper, and I still don't have my damn copy of NO NEW YORK!), our idea of a really "out" time has either been the fusionoid vibraphone noodle of Tortoise or the battalion of drunken Austrians with laptops, all excited to show us what cool new squelch they just made on their powerbook. As certain of us entrench ourselves in piles of ear-shaking noise albums or grab for just one more Derek Bailey CD, one begins to feel that while there's nothing new under the sun, there seems to be especially nothing new going on under this particular solar eclipse.

I've been feeling this way a lot lately, sure, I've been enjoying unhealthy amounts of new music same as ever, but it just doesn't seem like anything's come along in a long time that would really shake us up the way SECOND ANNUAL REPORT must have, or HARD ATTACK, or LICK MY DECALS OFF BABY, or whatever. What do you think the problem is? Are we so excited about all these amazing reissues of out period-pieces that we can't be bothered to hook up the three-legged humpophone and get our freak on, finally killing our parents right and proper? (Doesn't it bother any of you that we might be the first generation who hasn't killed their parents, so to speak?)

I blame it on the breakdown of the album.

No, not LPs, those are still going strong. Check Forced Exposure (ladies and gentlemen, give it up for THE CRIPPLD MESSIAH! Yeah, come on, let's really hear it, a nice round of applause) for further proof. I'm talking about the difference between a RECORD and an ALBUM. Look at the root words. A pile of photos is a record of a time and place, but you make them into a presentation by carefully selecting them and putting them into an album.

Who since the halcyon days of Aerosmith has bothered to make a recording that actually WORKS as a sequence of songs from beginning to end?

At what time did putting anything and everything that happened at the session, from the noodly improvs created while tuning the equipment to witty comments about the catering from the engineer, become the order of the day? Listen to Lou Reed's TRANSFORMER (I've been doing a perversely high amount of that lately). It's an album. Every song balances every other, and if you took anything out, the whole thing would fall over. EVERY SONG IS A LOAD-BEARING COMPOSITION, even that goofy little one about New York phone calls.

The debut LP by A Warm Palindrome came to me seemingly minutes before the end of this decade (don't be fooled by the last year's panic-stricken non-partygoers; this is nineteen ninety-ten, soon we shall show these mortals how to truly bust a move), and just as we are about to sail into new and Kubrickian realms of trembling discovery and obelisk-fiddling transgression, I finally am starting to feel good about music again. Like something new may actually start to happen.

Why does this LP work? Why does an LP of improvisations/spontaneous compositions seem so genuinely new and removed from everything that's going on? Well, among other things, it a real, honest-to-God album. Very few tracks sound even remotely like any others, nearly every one features different musical lineups, from duos to septets, and excising anything from the album would diminish its impact.

Start with the opening track, "Player One." Over the sick nattering of a broken synthesizer, a lone cello displays its sweet and sad melody, never quite resolving into a convenient progression. The sounds of a dictaphone fast-forwarding in short bursts of harsh static and sampled noises hover in the spaces. Make no mistake, though; this is a folk song. But, it also sounds like a digital glitch band. Um, no wait, you're not allowed to do that.

Too late. Now a male vocal has joined the melee (which also includes the occasional drum tap and some simple bass), and let's just say the melody is not written down. Probably making himself not sing a simple song, Phil Todd lurches his melody into so many different directions, it seems completely distanced from both western music, and the equally constraining rules of so-called "free improvisation." It's a song, dammit. And a heretofore unsung song at that.

"Impress the Mandate (Magnate)" expands on the fanfare while stripping the lineup to acoustic guitar, electric guitar and sampler. The harsh noises and cavernous swoops coming from the electronics meet and copulate freely with the folky acoustic and chattery electric. A forest still-life, with bundles of wires hanging alongside vines and little pistons growing out of the ground with dandelions, and nobody feeling the friction of their organic and inorganic lives co-mingling. And it happened the only way it will ever happen; when the electronics and the machines are just as grubby and unsophisticated/acecssible as our own grubby fingers.

This layer of crud quite nicely soils "Indifference," where an otherwise undifferentiated folk-rock song (with some nicely provocative but non-tell-all lyrics sung in a lilting if unassertive tone) is slipped a mickey in the form of a guitar amp that suddenly decides to start working. Suddenly there's bursts of distortion all over the place, and the song's Incredible String Band-isms are nicely balanced with unexpected malfunctions that often prove more interesting than what might have been the original intentions for the song.

The lines between acoustic and electric are further obscured whenever singer/flautist/cellist Mikarla Jarvis picks up her flute, which she plays with such a careful uncertainty that it ends up sounding like a mellotron attempting to simulate a real flute! Similarly, "Johnny Pigness" contains two acoustic instruments (harmonium and guitar) to only one electric (sampler), but still manages to float and shimmer like a Small Cruel Party record, full of crackles, scrapes and non-instrumental abstraction.

Other songs continue in similar forms to the above mentioned, with Phil again taking vocal lead for "May Break," a fairly detailed juxtapositioning of Allen Ginsberg's exile from Prague with the Soviet Government's attempt to thin the number of ears to hear of Stalin's atrocities by sending foreign ambassadors on sightseeing tours on the day of the "confessions" (the startlingly evocative line "protect a hall of empty chairs"). Again, his vocals jump and coil around with gleeful abandon, in a manner similar to some of the free jazz vocalizations of '60s Impulse! records. Mikarla lends some wonderfully resonant vocals to "Me Endeavor," which once again is saved from being an overly delicate piece of jangle by another malfunctioning guitar/distortion pedal that keeps threatening to swallow the entire recording studio, not whole, but in bloody, gnarled hunks. The horrible/beautiful balance here is well beyond my descriptive range.

Going back to my argument, what makes A Warm Palindrome's unaccountably sure-footed first album such a satisfying piece of work is the way everything balances everything else, leaning strengths against strengths and opposites buttressing each other perfectly. The rather solemn "May Break" is followed immediately by "(We Were Once) Doomed," a silly and exuberant improv for drums, bass and a most excitable harmonica. John Popper is rolling over in the grave I've just dug for him. An otherwise throwaway guitar/bass freakout like "The Inevitable Guitar Spectacle" makes a perfect transition from the song-based "Indifference" to the beatless miniature "Cracked Flower." Similarly, the otherwise dull "The Inevitable Gutter Spectacle," makes perfect sense in keeping the aforementioned "Doomed" away from the delicate "Me Endeavor." To put these in any other order would have ruined the mood. Speaking of mood, the one-and-a-half minute track "The Cuties" ends the album with a mood so creepy, I can't imagine how you could be more moved by a 70-minute Lustmord CD. Over bed of tranquil and near-motionless bass, flute and sampler tweks/fleks [sic], Joincey recites three little lines, supposedly the police confessions of a pair of five year olds who tried to kill one of their peers:

We left him in the wood
We dipped him in the water
He?s not our friend any more.

What makes A Warm Palindrome work is not just the fact that it combines seemingly incompatible elements like acid folk, digital glitch, song form and improvisation with an ease and naturalness that comes from perfect matches. It's the fact that they probably didn't come into the session intending to do this! While it seems that so many musicians enter the studio with a favorite album in their head or a basic idea of what genre they want to be filed under in the record store, very few just do what comes natural to them on whatever shitty third-hand equipment they can dig up. How many friends do you know who have held off starting a band until "we can get some decent equipment"? Don Van Vliet never walked into the studio intending to be inaccessible; he was just doing his thing, and was apparently quite hurt that it appealed to none but a handful of bent-spine freaks at the time.

Do I really think that this LP, which will maybe at the most reach 500 people, will really revolutionize music as we know it? Well, how many people do you think heard The Velvet Underground and Nico when it first hit the racks? (hint: not as many as you are imagining) Actually, I'm not REALLY making the grandiose claim that this specific record is going to change it all; sorry, but I don't have enough intrinsic faith in the common sense or good taste of the music-buying masses in general to think that they'll take the ball and run with it. (And by "run with it," I hope we're all hep to the fact that if this is the catalyst, the solution is not to create 25 more acid folk/digital glitch bands. C'mon, think people! It ain't illegal yet! [C'mon Sienko, quit passing off quotes better composed than your own, it may be illegal soon!]) What I am saying is that if people continue to make music as engaging as this by just setting up and letting their id run wild through the woods, or streets, or donut shops, or wherever the fuck they think Byron Coley isn?t going to be stroking his soul-patch at, then maybe we'll start to on to something. And maybe we can start actually thinking about digging some graves for those parents of ours? [cms]

Ax -- NOVA FEEDBACK [Freek Records]

THE SCENE: Somewhere in England, in a wooded glen just outside one of the major cities. We see buildings and faint smog in the background; overhead a jet flies low, buzzing like a mosquito on bad methadrine. A man steps from behind a tree and the camera focuses on him. He is utterly unremarkable, save for the ancient bass guitar strapped over his shoulder. He turns to the camera and speaks:

"Hello. I'm one of the many, many bass players who've played in God's Favorite Band, otherwise known as Skullflower, over the past few years."

Cue up portions of "Heavy Fluid," the sound of a droning bass guitar being forced to slowly implode.

"Naturally, since we're tremendously obscure and we almost never put our pictures on the albums anyway, no one has any idea who the hell we are. Why, I just released this nifty 12" album last year as Ax, with just a mutant mirror-image picture of tree roots on the cover, and you'd never guess this fine disc was my work."

Cue up the beginning of "Theme One," sounding much like a bass-heavy rain of trucks, millions of them, rolling down the side of Mount Everest.

"That's why I carry this wherever I go." Holds up an American Express Card stamped SKULLFLOWER. The buzzing, shimmering drone of "Metal Forest" can barely be heard in the background.

"Now if you'll pardon me, I'd like to send this musical instrument to another dimension -- or to hell, I'm not sure which."

Fade out as the bass disintegrates under the sheer crushing weight of the gradually-swelling droneroar of the title track....

TASCAM-Girl points her obscenely large Phantom-Powered Subatomic Phallogun at Neddal and demands yet another mondo brief review:

N/A: Droning (thus the name), almost ambient, sludge-rock punctuated with bursts of guitar noise. Semi-whispered vocals add to the moodiness. I'm reaching for metaphors and adjectives here -- The inverse of Buzzov.en? Mood-core? Whatever you want to call it, it is bad-ass.

TG: "Reaching for metaphors?" You'll be reaching for your ankles when I shove this gun up your ass.... [n/a]