Kadura -- FROM THE DEPTHS OF THE OUTER SPACE [Charnel Music]

This is the third disc in Charnel's ongoing series of "Japan's Rising Sounds," and it's a swank one. Kadura are a psychadelic band (aren't they all these days?) equally influenced by eastern drone (particularly where the vox and guitar tones are concerned) and space-rock. Which means, of course, that they tend to play pretty slow, like they just smoked a good- sized bowl or two, and they believe in kettle drums and the healing power of reverb. Lots o' reverb. They get much more reverb going on here and they'll float away into the ether, mon....

If i had to compare them to anybody (just for purposes of figuring out where they're coming from), i'd have to say they must live down the street from Ghost. The main difference is that Ghost is a bit more schizophrenic and hyperactive at times; Kadura definitely prefer the slow scenic route through their dreamy soundscapes. If you're really insistent on variety in tempo, i suppose that could pose a wee problem, although it suits me just fine, personally. They also like to wail for long stretches -- several of the tracks here pass the ten-minute mark -- which is godlike to moi (i hate short songs unless they're by Cub) but may make others twitch.

All of this disc is excellent. These are exceptional ensemble players and Atsushi Kobayashi does a more than credible pass at the eastern drone style of singing. Guitarist Go Kuwahara is pretty much a psych-god in wait, rolling out trippy leads and reverberating circular riffs (again, drenched in reverb so they just rattle and shimmer endlessly) all over the place with impeccable style. The rhythm section is a bit interesting: they have two drummers and two bassists (one of whom also doubles on A-Synth), which gives them a really huge and textured sound. Amazingly enough, their sense of restraint is such that you can't really tell this (unless you're like me and cheat by looking at the liner notes); there are no instrument hogs here calling undue attention to themselves. Impressive.

Highlights include "Travel to Faraway," a long, slow epic of dreamlike cloudburst guitar and kettle drums that takes over ten minutes to slowly unfold (you know, i don't remember it being that long on the ...RISING NOISE VOL. 2 compilation, which makes me wonder if this a reworked version or if that was a truncated one) and "Alyster," almost as long and full of shimmering curtains of repetitive, hypnotic guitar lines so thoroughly soaked in reverb that they appear to bounce back and forth off the walls. "Oceanic Element" is another beautiful-sounding slice of psych heaven, with bright arrpegiated guitar lines and wailing vox that approximates the sound of cathedral music. The Zurna (a double-reed horn that i think is native to Japan) shows up prominently in the introduction of "Move," whose heavy drums (when they kick it in) make it the closest thing to an uptempo number on the disc. More twangy reverb guitar shows up on "Inner Trance" and "Sky Heart," while the rhythm section takes up a bit more prominence on the closing track "A Distant Land." Really, the entire album is impressively droney and hypnotic, with a sound like the music of the spheres. Just as their contribution was one of the highlights of the latest ...RISING NOISE compilation, so this disc is probably the highlight so far of the Japan Rising series.

I have only the vaguest idea of what an "ockodektet" might be -- i'm guessing eight people in unison doing mad things with wind instruments, which is how it comes across on this live recording, captured on the festive occasion of Kaiser's 40th birthday (obviously a man who knows how to throw a party). The disc is broken down into two suites in which the songs all run together, instrumentation provided through woodwinds, trumpets, euphonium and valve-trombone, tuba, prepared acoustic guitar (courtesy of Ernesto Diaz-Infante), electric guitar and electronics, organ (and theremin) and electronics, contrabasses, drums and percussion, and -- to conduct all this madness -- Kaiser himself acts as both conductor and lead trumpet blower. The first suite is the longer one, and the opening "Dirge" is two and a half minutes of applause, hooting, trumpet fury, what sounds like bird calls, and Anu knows what else: madness unleashed like the opening of Pandora's box. The group settles down a tad on "Clad Like Birds," although the lonesome bleating o' various wind instruments in succession eventually leads to a wall of dirge 'n drone, that, when it dies away for the last time, neatly segues into "Amplifying Their Parallels," where we discover there is an actual drummer buried down in there somewhere (actually two, Billy Mintz and Richie West, although whether they take turns or play simultaneously eludes me). "Nothing May Be Taken Naturally" is a respite in the midst of the chaos, with drawn-out notes from individual instruments winding around each other, less dependent on volume and density than pure drone. "Even WIth Diagrams" and the mildly less freeform "One Absolute Material" demonstrate the free-jazz dictum that music desires to be free, unfettered by the restrictions of tempo, meter, and predictability. Chaos gradually coalesces in a hypnotic rhythm over which the woodwinds shriek like gazelle being prodded with steak knives. Even as order threatens to take over, entropy begins dismantling the system. (Listening to music like this for too long will make you insane, by the way.) The fearful rumble of percussion dominates "Figures to be Actualities," while the chittering of woodwinds in the higher register and the earthen drone of contrabasses provide the structure and framework of the first suite's closing act, "Figure With Wings."

I'm assuming that in between the suites everybody took five to go have a smoke, grab a beer, fool around with girls (boys? both?) in the pantry, and retune all the exhausted instruments , but since they didn't include any of that audio documentation here, we'll just have to guess. We'll leave that to your suitably lurid imagination....

The second suite opens with "Coincidentia Oppositorum," which threatens to be a tad more conventional in its harmonic and structural sensibilities, only to abruptly start flaking out pretty quick as devolved horns and treated guitar do cryptic battle over a percussion break that's often drowned out by the neighboring chaos as the woodwinds gather again to provide more thunder. The foundation for some of these tracks, especially "Fulfilled by the Reflected Image," appear to be grounded in electronics and partially masked by droning contrabasses, and while they are a tad more "controlled" than many movements from the earlier suite, none of this will be mistaken for conventional jazz by any stretch of the imagination. (There is a recognizable nod to classical symphonic sound, however.) The closing "Into That Nothing-Between" makes a nice summation of many earlier themes and is appropriately dense with rumbling tone clusters, plus it's got a good beat and you can dance to it (well....). The most interesting thing about this disc and its suite format, though, is that it suddenly makes me realize that i've never thought of Kaiser before as a composer rather than merely an artist -- i guess i'll know better know, eh?

Experimental improv artist Jeff Kaiser appears here as part of a larger ensemble, acting as the conductor and playing trumpet; he's joined by Eric Barber (soprano / tenor sax), Vinny Golia (sax, clarinet, flute), Emily Ray (flute), Lynn Johnston (sax, clarinet), Jason Mears (alto sax), Dan Clucas (trumpet), Kris Tiner (trumpet), Michael Vlatkovich (trombone), Eric Sbar (euphonium, valve-trombone), Mark Weaver (tuba), Ernesto Diaz-Infante (acoustic guitar), Tom McNalley (electric guitar), G. E. Stinson (electric guitar, electronics), Jim Connolly (contrabass), Hal Onserud (contrabass), Wayne Peet (organ, theremin, electronics), Brad Dutz (percussion), and Richie West (drums, percussion). I don't know how the orchestra is divided, but it frequently sounds like a traditional chamber orchestra or quartet playing in tandem with a free-jazz group and a handful of electronic agitators. It's an interesting sound, allowing for structure, layers of rhythm and tone, chaos, and an abundance of opportunities to spiral into avant spheres of improvised unpredictability. The orchestra's construction and the sheer number of players and instruments make it possible to devise a wide variety of interesting arrangements, and the length of most pieces (four to seven minutes in most cases) allows for plenty of room to develop interesting themes. The playing is excellent (I like the drummers in particular, especially on "Devout, venerable, hoary-headed man, meekly holding up a box"), the pieces expansive and disciplined, but still loose and flowing. The judicious use of electronic frippery and exotic beats keeps the flow of the album fresh, along with arrangements that shift the emphasis from one instrument to another from one piece to the next. Smooth... very smooth.

(Having crawled through the wreckage of the elevator and emerged on Level Seven, a good half-mile below the ice, TG and C12 crouch in a hidden sub-sector of the karoke bar, gasping for breath as the death weasels rumble across the floor above their heads. TG takes this opportunity to arm and load several varieties of handguns, all of them exotic and intimidating in size and appearance. C12 waits until the robots have all passed, searching in vain for them down other halls, and puts on the Kangaroo Note disc.)

TG: What's this? Sounds jazzy, kind of... but in a really strange way. There's some weird noises....

C12: Strange sounds abound on this release, one of the newer ones spewed out by the increasingly prolific label (where does he find all these people?) devoted to strange and noisy bands. The trio's sound is informed by a mix of electronics, bass, and saxophone (contrabass and "breath-controlled synthesizer" make occasional appearances as well), and the result is something akin to Blue Note jazz artists soloing over backing provided by noise artists. This is the direction Coltrane and Sun Ra would have eventually gone, i suspect, had they lived long enough to hear and embrace the noisier side of free-jazz.

TG: That's making the big assumption that either one of them would have had any interest in noise, don't you think? What if they decided disco was better? Sun Ra made a disco record, you know. It's a very weird disco record, but....

C12: Oh hush. It helps to have an appreciation for jazz when listening to this; the sax is the primary instrument here, the bass a bit less so, and the electronics are largely subservient to the jazz feel. (This band is Japanese, which explains a lot of things.) As with most jazz albums, there's a lot of improvisation around the same general theme -- one song is called "Electric Configuration," another "Acoustic Configuration," and there are three variations of "Twelve Notes, and so on. Different songs emphasize different emphasis on the instruments, with the sax more prominent in one and the contrabass taking the lead in others, and for the most part the electronics provide background texture and sometimes piercing drones. Do i detect a Lamonte Young influence buried back there somewhere? I think i do....

TG: Yeah, but you hear LaMonte Young's influence in the way the toilet sounds when you flush it. I think you have some kind of sick obsession going there, pal. I've seen you with those magazine articles, gazing at his nasty beard and fondling yourself....

C12: Let me finish this, dammit! (glaring) The electronic element is most prominent in "A Definate Integral of Autonomy" and "Electric Configuration Again" (where the background electronic ambience sounds remarkably like something Aube might have produced). If you have ever wondered what such a collision of genres would sound like, well, wonder no more....

I really like this record a lot. Especially since I have a copy of it on vinyl. 180-GRAM VINYL, MOTHERFUCKER! This is another fine production from Southern Lord. The songs are long, heavy and so slow in places that you almost can't tell there are notes anymore, and the vocals are coming from somewhere in the darkness. The sound of endless torture. Four songs in about 44 minutes -- "No Joy" is only on the CD -- and they all kill. Slowly. Top-notch production, top-notch packaging. Sit down, get stoned, and put this album on. [TTBMD]

Well, fuck: it is possible to make "No Joy" even heavier. Given that the final track from their self-titled debut pretty much shouts out "I defy you to get heavier than this, anywhere, anytime," the idea that James Plotkin somehow figured out how to do it has enormous ramifications for the future of the entire human race. (I'd be happy to explain exactly how this reveals Plotkin and the band's respective parts in the coming apocalypse, but large men in black suits are standing by to suggest that perhaps it would be better to let you wonder.) In the process of remixing, Plotkin shaves off a minute or so and tightens it up a bit, and adds a bit of meat to the skeletal structure. The other side of the record is from the same session that yielded the tracks for the new album coming out later this year and it sounds like... like... like N'Sync! Really! NO YOU FOOL -- it sounds like the blackest, slowest, most evil essence of pure blinding DOOM and it's real fucking heavy too. Christ, I laugh at those jackasses in the military who think they're "intimidating" captured POWs by making them listen to Metallica's "Enter Sandman" over and over. If they really knew what they were doing, they'd play this instead. Of course, then they'd have to spend a lot of time cleaning the piss and shit out of the room, and the prisoners would be so mortally and permanently stricken by gaping, slack-jawed terror as to render them useless, so perhaps it's best for them that they haven't gotten quite that bright yet. If this was something they left off the album, I'm almost afraid to find out just how heavy the new album will be.... Incidentally, the 12" comes in a nifty sleeve designed by O'Malley and is almost certainly limited to something like 500 copies or whatever, so if you're interested you should get moving. And if you're seeking what may be the single heaviest record ever made, well, this would be a good benchmark. I can't even imagine what this must sound like played live with massive amplification. No wonder people worship them like gods.

The complete and total essence of blind, sociopathic evil, bar none. The second album from Stephen O'Malley's oppressively slow doom band raises the bar for bleakness in just about every way imaginable. The riffs and beats this time around are so slow (and yet so precise) as to be almost stationary, while vocalist Alan Dubin's pained serial-killer shrieking has been honed to a fine and grotesque edge, with distinctly unsettling results. "No good times in here," he rages on "Commuted," and he's not kidding. With four songs playing out over approximately an hour, all about psychotic rage leading to ritual murder or worse, all slower than cell death and just as hopeless, it's not for the easily bummed. What you get kind of depends on how you like to listen to your depressed raving: the cd contains "Commuted," "Fields," "Dead," and "Too Close Enough To Touch," while the double-lp substitutes "Commuted (coda)" for "Dead" (which you can find on a separate 12" backed with a remix of "No Joy" from the first album, if you're so inclined).

All of the material here is stellar, excruciatingly slow drone-riffs played at maximum volume with minimum movement, but my favorite is probably "Fields" (in which Dubin raves, apparently to a girl he's just killed, about all sorts of psychotic stuff over frozen-tundra riffs, repeatedly howling "I did this all for you" over and over as he buries her in the field). Lots of intense psychodrama thanks to their spectacularly pained singer, who sounds even more convincingly unhinged this time around than ever. The riffs themselves appear more well-thought out as well, spread out more strategically and better prepared to keep things moving over twenty-minute suites of minimalist doom, and the lyrics are brilliant, delivered in a state of simulated psychosis that perfectly complements the bleak drone. If you can't get enough of his shrieking scream, be sure to scoop up the gatefold double-lp version on Load, where -- in addition to packaging equally as swank as the cd but now large enough to properly appreciate and heavyweight vinyl pressing -- you get a "coda" version of "Commuted" that features an enormous amount of horrific shrieking at times. O'Malley designed the packaging again, and this may be his best effort yet (and yes, he retains the spidery art-deco look of the band's logo, a smart move). The true current masters of slow motion doom. By the voice o' Ra, albums like this make me proud to be an American....

Witness the sounds of crazed improvisation as violinist Mike Khoury (he of Entropy Stereo and maker of exotic sounds for many moons) is joined by percussionist Ben Hall and the bleating sax of Jason Shearer. This is pure rhythmic chaos, often anchored more by the violin or sax than by the actual percussion. "Suzie's Blues" is more like extremely free jazz (old-school, mind you), and while "International" has an actual steady beat, it rests in the background and is often drowned out by the harmonizing between the sax and violin. The stuttering violin in "Panties" is offset by eccentric drum patterns and brief, squealing runs from the sax; "Last Date," however, sounds less like jazz (free or otherwise) and more like a disrupted radio transmission of violin from another planet. The jazz stylings are more evident in "8 Mile, Between Woodward and 75," dominated mainly by Shearer's trilling sax lines, and (to a lesser extent) on "Grand River at M.A.C.," where Hall trades his drum kit for a piano as the other two wind around him in elliptical fashion. More and more Public Eyesore is beginning to look like ground zero for the new wave of American free jazz and noise....

I've never heard of guitarist Ted Killian before, but apparently i should have. He's a guitarist in the vein of Fripp, Sharrock, and maybe even David Gilmour, creating droning and repetitive soundscapes with tweaked electric and acoustic guitars, often over a bedrock of alien-sounding loops. Some of this, like "Last Sparrow," is the sound of machines hallucinating -- in fact, in many ways this a throwback to seventies acid-rock, only with more modern (and out-there) influences. Ambient, singing guitars play hypnotic avant-blues lines while other guitars hover quietly in the background on lock 'n lull. Imagine Sonny Sharrock playing for Pink Floyd while Fripp natters on in the background with slo-mo starlight guitar loops that suffice for a "beat." That's the general gist of the songs here. The opener, "Hubble," begins with throbbing, swirling drone and graduates to brilliant, celestial guitars bursting like fireworks. "Leaving Medford," probably owes as much to Tangerine Dream as it does to any avant-guitar icons -- it's a pulsing slab o' tones rippling beneath a winding, scorched-earth guitar playing demented psychedelic machine blues. My favorite is probably "Last Sparrow," which opens with an endless chittering guitar loop, then slowly builds to a massive, droning collection of drawn-out machine tones before exiting on the same endless loop. "Recurvate Paint" sounds like something that could have come about during a collaboration with David Gilmour, circa his first solo album, and Fripp during his ambient Frippertronics phase. Pinging, ringing, endless ambient guitars become the backdrop to slo-mo psychedelic blues -- it sounds glacial and beautiful and seems to last forever.

"Reverse Logic" is pretty bizarre in its own right, sounding like M's "Pop Muzak" as remixed by Techno-Animal and ripped apart, then rebuilt by grindcore players under the direction of Sonny Sharrock and Painkiller. By contrast, the guitars in "Convocation Solitaire" are all pretty ones -- acoustic, electric, clean, distorted, whatever, they're ringing those celestial tones. "Gravity Suspended" almost sounds like it could have come from a mislaid late-sixties Pink Floyd record -- in a lot of ways it's a kissing cousin to "The Narrow Way" -- but the title track is far weirder, more alien and monochromatic, like the sound of the Monolith in 2001 vibrating, until a violin-like guitar soars above the increasingly noisy bedrock. This is seriously spaced-out stuff, and really well-executed to boot. This disc is one of the unexpected surprises of the issue....

Loud, rude hardcore with big tinny guitars, just like Big Black, Breaking Circus, Hemi, Honcho Overload, and a whole bunch of midwestern bands who used to serve up punklike slabs of sonic filth in the wake of Husker Du's wave of barely-controlled land speed explosions on one stage after another. There's a certain quality of lurch (not to mention the singer's delivery) that lean heavily in the direction of Shellac on "Sandeater," but at the same time they share Big Black's fondness for moments involving abrasiveness solely for the sake of being abrasive. They're a three-piece, so the comparisons to Shellac and Big Black are kind of obvious, but they also share the fondness for big drums and hocus-pocus guitar favored by lots of post-Slint bands. It doesn't hurt that they're really good at it, and the recording makes all the highly refined thrashing about come through loud and clear. "Class of '96" is particularly loud and intricate, with lots of sections that branch off into other sections and a lumbering rhythm that turns into a full gallop before devolving into other directions. As "Computron 2000" proves, they have strange ideas about beats, but even those thrown by the band's weird meter cannot fail to be impressed by the tune's sheer thundering weight. The seven songs here are very much in the thundering math-rock neighborhood, and when they latch on to a good, meaty, and devolved riff (as on "Bad Ass ID"), it's a pleasure to hear them beat it soundly into the ground. They probably sound too much like Shellac or Big Black for their own good, but at least they know what they're doing. Probably lots of fun to watch live, too.

CyberLieutenant 12-Track watched with interest as TASCAM-Girl, seated at a long table with every individual piece of her Plastmotronic Molecule Agitator spread before her in neat rows of shiny plastic and glittering metal, laboriously cleaned each piece by hand. She cleaned each component with a towel, then sprayed a teflon aerosol lubricant over it, then rolled it carefully through a series of felt towels, before moving on to the next one. By the CyberLieutenant's conservative estimate, there were at least five hundred such tiny pieces on the table. He suspected they were going to be there for quite a while.

"I say," he said, "what do you say I put on a bit of music to break the monotony of this incredibly tedious task you're performing? Why, that looks almost as insanely boring as the duties the moon unit has been performing lately in his ongoing attempt to make America safe for democracy."

"Sure, sure, whatever," she mumbled, closely inspecting a ball bearing for scratches.

The CyberLieutant dropped a disc into the CD player and music began to fill the room. After a while, TASCAM-Girl looked up and said, "Is this the new My Bloody Valentine disc? Like, did Kevin Shields finally fix his massive musical constipation problem and finally deliver the goods?"

"No no, this is an American band. King Black Acid, to be exact. They used to be the Womb Orchestra or something along those lines. They do sound quite a bit like MBV, though, don't they? Except that they aren't anywhere near as reliant on fuzz overkill, they write actual songs -- pop songs, in fact -- and their guitarists are quite dextrous indeed."

"Yeah, I can tell by the way you were playing air guitar during that spine-crushing solo halfway through 'Butterfly Bomber.' But tell me, what the hell is with these really long songs? That one's nearly ten minutes long and a couple of the others are even longer. These people sound like they're on drugs. What's the moon unit's position on this disc?"

"It's been in nearly constant rotation in his CD player ever since it showed up at the Hellfortress, along with Acid King's BUSSE WOODS."

"Figures. He doesn't know how to shut up in his own band either." She held a modulator ring up to the light. "Ah, that looks better. You know, i like the dreaminess of this album. These slow, low-key songs like 'Kiss the Beast' are pretty happening. And it's good that occasionally they burst the love balloon with pig-squealing feedback and solos and stuff. Is this what they call psychedelic music?"

"I believe so, yes."

"Their guitar player -- one of them, anyway -- is really fond of slo-mo string bends, isn't he? You don't hear that too often these days."

"It might be a she," he replied. "There are two guitarists, one for each gender -- a wise move, I think. If you'll note, they are also most enamored of reverb and chorus units. At times they make me think of what Abunai might sound like without an organ and more of an MBV influence. If you can imagine such a thing. Listen that fine Leslie-organ guitar sound on "School Blood" -- tell me that isn't something Abunai would have dreamed up. And then they follow it with intensely melodic guitar and piano lines subtly mixed into the background. As a matter of fact, this is one of most well-produced indie albums I've heard in quite some time."

"What I like best is this ridiculously sprawling thing in the middle of the album, 'I've Heard You're Still Alive.' A hypnotic doodling synth riff sets the stage for the entry into the actual song, which is good, but then even better, halfway in the bass goes into lock 'n lull mode while the guitars and keyboards just make doodly UFO sounds for a long fucking time. This is the best nod music I've heard in a long time that wasn't made by dope-smoking stoners in Kyuss t-shirts. Hell, I could see The Mike Gunn doing this if they were still around."

"And the rest of the album is every bit as stellar! I must say that I'm grateful, most grateful indeed, that the moon unit picked this up on the spur of the moment just because he liked the band's name. This album makes the perfect accompaniment for my meditation hour...."

"I wouldn't doubt it." She reached the end of her machine parts and began to reassemble the weapon.

"Incidentally," CyberLieutenant 12-Track said, "since I don't believe I've seen that weapon before, might I ask just what it does?"

"Not much," she sniffed. "Just excites all the molecules in your body until they vibrate apart like beads of oil rolling off a sheet of water."

"Oh, how poetic... I never would have known you had it in you...."

This is the fourth in Load's split series, available on 12" death-o-matic vinyl or cd (where you get a bonus track, a collaboration between the two artists). One side gives you the square-wave distortion tricks of Kites, a guy with a penchant for surprisingly sweet, hummable melodies and lots of square-wave distortion, working the same general territory as Amps For Christ. Kites material frequently resembles happy, shiny songs that have been systematically perverted through unnatural sound processing. The five songs here do nothing to dispel that notion, especially on "The Hidden Family" (where the idyllic suburban dream meets some powerful gadget-fu). The shriek factor gets turned up a bit on "Screw-Style" (which I first took for a Swans reference, but apparently it's not, too bad), and "All The Jesus Shit" is just pure cut-up microphone screech-fu and power-violence. It's also quite short. But these things are mere warmups, a stretching up of the loose limbs, if you will, before "Tears of the Youth," the shimmering noise-pulse and counterpoint low-end throb that captures your attention and hypnotizes you from the moment it starts (leaving you helpless against the fembot's measured instructions to break things), and the utterly whacked-out "Footsteps on the Path, Animals in the Trees," which really does sound like a reenactment of some fool lost in the jungle only to find himself savagely under attack by things that crawl, fly, and bite (and make noise), in spite of using obviously electronic equipment. All Kites needs now is a puppet show and a slot on Saturday morning television and THE CHILDREN WILL BE OURS....

Then there's the two pained tracks of sonic death by Prurient. If you have never heard Prurient, then let me point out the obvious about this one-man (again!) band from Providence: Prurient is real fucking loud. Part of why I like Prurient is down to their minimalist leanings (one man, two mikes, and wall of amps = good rockin' tonight); the rest of what I like about them is that he's really loud. Plus he screams a lot and sounds really, really upset. "I Lay Down on the Ground in the Woods and Fell Asleep (Instrumental)" is a short, brooding bit of shuddering low-end power drone that lasts just over two minutes and lulls you into the correct sort of half-asleep, blissed-out state that the following track is designed to rudely bust up like thugs kicking down your door and slapping you around, maybe even hassling your woman, while tearing the place apart looking for cash and dope. On "Spanish Moss," the rest of the Prurient's contribution to the LP, the guy from Providence screams a lot about... well, I'm not real sure, frankly, but he sounds real adamant about it -- whatever it is you want, he ain't doin' it! Probably, I suspect, because that would interfere with his hobbies, which (judging from the sound captured here) apparently include getting drunk and hopped up on go-pills, then screaming and breaking shit while badly abusing the feedback potential of microphones and gadget-fu. There are some choice moments on this piece that will bore holes through your skull, then circle back and bore new holes to get back to the other side. The screaming is a nice touch -- for some reason, power electronics in the U.S. has always been way too fixated on the gadgets and not necessarily on the performers, so it's nice to see one of them emoting so freely, and with such... ah... feeling. Violent bursts of pure, psychopathic noise never hurt either.

The cd version offers a goodie not on the LP -- a collaboration between Kites and Prurient under the rubric Young Lords, offering up the track "Young Lust." A hypnotic, repetitive acoustic guitar picks out a minimalist melody, maintaining a steady pace and feel as light screaming feedback far, far in the distance trails in its wake. After a couple of minutes of this light frivolity, the screaming deathpig UFO in the distance suddenly sweeps in and obliterates the guitar in a burst of noise-laden explosions. The rest of the tune is all crashing UFOs, explosions, death-screech, and a real bumpy ride. "Your ears will be clean, as guaranteed. Load cannot be held responsible for damage inflicted upon headphones, wallpaper, structural edifices, etc., upon contact with its ear-abrasive products. Use with caution and only under adult supervision."

The opening salvo of the first track on this diabolical instrument of skull destruction is one of the loudest and most piercing moments of audio tone hell I've ever encountered. Thanks, guys.... That track is called "Staring Into The Sun" and it's probably the longest track on the album, all high-pitched squealing and screeching at a volume you never even believed possible. The other tracks aren't as long, but they're just as noisy or out there. Witness "Changling," in which they chant over a tinny beat somewhere between abrasive handclaps and a highly compressed cymbal or something equally annoying, sounding much like Sun City Girls fiddling around with some stolen gadget. On "Suppress Control Reduce Destroy," the howling and shouting is buried in thick sheets of cyclotron noise; right on the heels of that, they're back to the mutant country-death folk thing again on "Cry For the Death of a Crazy Man." If it weren't obvious that they know what they're doing (well, I think they do, anyway), I'd wonder if they had yet even decided what kind of band they are.... But they have, and it's a weird one. Curve balls! Inexplicable phenomena! (What the hell are they doing on "Local Boy," anyway? Are those efx pedals having sex or something? Is that like power violence erotica? Will this be the next big thing in Poland?) Exploding pedal-fu! Big-titted chicks nursin' on the back cover! Psychedelic and cryptic graphics! The Hum Of Death starts to swing a mighty big hammer on the exquisitely-named "Big Ponytail" -- goddamn, there's nothing better than a biiiiiiiiig fucking ponytail, dig? This album is doing strange things to my mind, like cheap drugs....

Then there's "Call Out Your Name (live 2003)" -- all five movements of it, each section from a different gig during the year -- in which they cut 'n paste live hijinks of busted pedal-fu and pained, shrieking noiseterror. The whole thing is a bit looser and more "on the fly," so to speak (nice screaming, though!), but that just makes it all that much more unpredictable and chaotic. They return to the Shrill Tones of Death on "Milkweed Arrows (ghll)," and give them counterpoint in the form of what sounds like a broken Speak 'n Spell through a stack of distortion pedals. Nasty, ear-raping stuff, doom childe. The last track, "(shut off the lie, we will die) (we will transform)," returns to the plinky-plink banjo of eternal crippling tinniness -- a marginally soothing respite from the sonic violence that came before it, perhaps. The overall effect is wildly schizophrenic, to be sure, but I'm sure that's the whole point. And their command of the Sonic Icepick is formidable -- approach with caution, or at least wearing earplugs....

Combine Eurotrash techno with full-throttle death metal and what do ya get? Ya get Kittie, four teenage girls from England who play like they'd enjoy ripping your lungs out and eating them, preferably to a dance beat. Actually, the techno thing is a tad misleading -- there's only a couple of songs here that incorporate that element (most notably the big-deal single "Brackish"); mostly they're straight-ahead death metal with subhuman slabs of downtuned riffage, big and convoluted beats, precise drill-strike tempo changes, and creeped-out subject matter. Two things make them stand out from the crowd: one, they actually understand the concept of dynamics (witness the break in "Charlotte," where they pull back from the grindathon and drop down to just bass and chiming guitar for a few measures before building back up to a wall o' fury again); two, Morgan Lander is a phenomenal singer, capable of going from guttural death-howl to falsetto goth moans without even blinking. She reminds me a lot of Dawn Crosby, the late singer of Fear of God, and in some ways the entire band can be seen as an extension of FoG's "more styles is better" ethic... but where FoG mixed death metal and eerie psychedelia, Kittie opt for mixing techno moves into their bag o' death. If you can soften your focus from the wall o' grind, you can hear machine-noises and other techno moves happening in the background on songs like "Suck," and of course "Brackish" is a perfect mind-meld of death metal and techno. Beyond that, the truth is that this is one of the most solid and rewarding metal albums i've heard in ages -- i don't care how old these women are (young enough to be my daughters, if you want to know; i'm not sure all of them have even graduated from high school yet), they play better and rock harder than 95% of the metal bands out right now, plus they aren't complete dumbasses like the morons in Limp Bizkit and Korn and the like, so i don't have to be embarrassed by owning this album. My personal fave of the album: the jolting "Raven," one of the many on which drummer Mercedes Lander gets to demonstrate why she ought to be sampled for use in drum machines. We are talking mondo precise regardless o' the tempo, okay? Plus i think Mercedes must play with sledgehammers, not sticks. They get bonus points for the wonked-out, unmetalish, utterly creepy "Paper Doll" and the thundering dronefest "Immortal," the quivering slab o' evil that ends the album. I'm already waiting for their next one, which will supposedly be even heavier, although i don't quite see how that could be possible....

More strange experimental guitar sounds from Houston, this time in a more... ambient... mode. And when i say guitars, i mean heavily processed guitars -- almost nothing here is recognizable as what it really is, and the structure is divided as thus: one layer of ebbing, flowing sound that stays relatively static for long periods, and another layer of almost random stuff (drum bits, brief instrumental passages, voices, passing traffic, noises, and more). The background guitar sound reminds me at times of The Mike Gunn or Dry Nod, which is probably due to the involvement of former members of those bands (i think Dev was in Dry Nod, or somebody here was; i'm not too sure and the liner notes are nonexistent, so you'll have to live with my tentative guesses). Approximately thirteen minutes into the CD all the randomness builds into a sudden crescendo of noise and fury, and for a few moments everything decides to cohere and hang fire before imploding and disintegrating back into formless bits. Out of the chaos comes looped stuttering noises against the subterranean droning. This eventually settles into a spaced-out groove straight out of early UMMAGUMMA-era Pink Floyd, which is broken up only by the occasional odd instrumental muttering or babbled voices before eventually fading out after approximately 24 minutes. Note that this is the only track on the EP... apparently they are believers in not wearing out their welcome. Interesting stuff and a bit more "coherent" and less noisy than their other releases so far. Definitely one to check out.

Interesting sounds from Houston, land o' the burnt oil ozone and creepy serial killers. There's just something about Houston -- the stink of refineries, the hopeless traffic gridlock, the prevelance of violent rednecks and serial killers, the general air of a town trying to rise above its own inherent sleaziness -- that does something really peculiar to the musicians there. Ask the Mike Gunn or Pain Teens; they knew what it was about. Now comes Klak, prone to long, droning epics of otherworldly sound and spookiness. Of the two lengthy tracks here (the first is 45:22, the other is 24:18), the first one -- hope, faith, courage, life, or death?" -- demonstrates a range of influences from AMM and early Pink Floyd all the way up to Skullflower and raga music. The track flows in vaguely ambient fashion, with drones and intermittent basslines weaving around bits of static, distortion, and waves of feedback, along with various other trippy instruments, all anchored with minimalist drumming. We're talking major shaking of the improv stick, mon. At various points the track reminds me, at least in terms of pacing, of Lhasa Cement Plant, even though they don't really sound like that Borbetomagus-derived group; things have a tendency to build in waves and then fall away. There's probably a serious Ascension influence happening here; it's hard for me to tell, since i haven't heard much by that group. Fine, dreamy, and sometimes unsettling stuff.

The other track, "12/0/97," is every bit as deviant and out-there, but with more emphasis on the weirdness and unpredictability factor. Various bits and pieces (and sounds) are interesting in of themselves, but the track as a whole never quite comes together (at least not for moi), although it does appear to have a rudimentary structure in addition to a direction and a purpose. Whatever that may be, though, i never quite manage to completely hang with it and vastly prefer the first track. Nevertheless, there's something happening here that others more attuned to the more random aspects of improv may find worth investigating. For more info, send email to the band at domokos@rocketmail.com.

The Knockout Pills knock out scrappy, snotty punk rawk. The playing and overall vibe remind me of the first couple of New Bomb Turks records, back before the Turks broke the 4-track barrier. The Knockout Pills are a little less manic than the Turks, which means that theirs is the sound of a tantrum, rather than a full-on freak-out. [N/A]

Words fail me. This is possibly the most demented thing I've ever heard. Reverend Knox, who died in 1996, apparently engaged in deeply disturbed backwoods religious broadcasting for fifty years, defiling the airwaves with a hillbilly presence and truly atonal singers in the name of the li'l baby Jesus. When Flannery O'Connor wrote of deeply cracked religious misfits from the south, she was talking about people like Knox -- and here Tom Smith, a long-time Knox-enthusiast, has collected a sample here of the seventy-plus shows he taped (in poor fidelity, true, although some of that may well have originated on Knox's end) off the radio between 1982 and 1994. What you get is mind-blowing in its otherness, a fanatical gospel show as performed by the people from DELIVERANCE while handling snakes and occasionally speaking in tongues. Words cannot do it justice; it must be heard to be properly appreciated. You only thought you knew about the outer fringes of religious mania and its tragic potential for hazardous listening in the hands of the deluded and the tone deaf. You won't want to listen to it often, though, and then purely for anthopological reasons: the Reverend and his singing sisters were totally devoid of talent and their pained caterwauling is hair-raising, to say the least (or perhaps they were secret devotees of extreme atonal theory, but I'm kind of doubting it, eh?) -- not to mention the Reverend has a terrible voice, a propensity to fall asleep at the switch periodically (resulting in dead air), and babbles nonstop, at least when he's not singing the praises of the Holy Ghost in tongues and explaining afterwards that he did so without end. Truly a synapse-shattering document of the freakish side of religion.

Konkhra -- SPIT OR SWALLOW [Progress Records]

Aaaaaaah, big cheesy Danish metal... how EXCITING! Full of flying hair and bad attitudes about life and lyrics so ridiculous that i cannot quote them to you, because then you'd laugh so hard that you'd pee in your pants and then you'd sue me for emotional distress and payment of dry cleaning bills, and alas, i have no $$$, so you'll just have to take my word for it that the lyrics are most cheesy, ok? The guitars, however, are big and primitive and loud and sizzling and all those good things, and since you can't tell what the "singer" is saying anyway, it's EASY to ignore the lyrics and pay attention to the other guys trying to beat you into submission with their fried-out guitars. Look, a SOLO! He's WANKING! Yow! And how about the SOUND, you ask? Oh my, i'm so glad you asked: think Metallica. With a Danish accent.

THINGS THEY GET BONUS POINTS FOR: Grotesque facial hair, brain- corroding scrape 'n chunk guitars on "Spit or Swallow" and "Subconscience," impressive death-croak, good taste in stealing liberally from pre-poofy hair era Metallica, reasonably cool samples, thunderous drummer, cool artwork and layout (they spent some $$$!), curvaceous Danish babes with puffy lips and large-caliber weapons, incredibly tasteless album cover, total lack of shame at pandering so obviously to disturbed 14-year old sociopaths who probably set animals on fire for fun.

THINGS THEY LOSE BONUS POINTS FOR: Grotesque facial hair, stunning lack of originality, lead guitarist who Plays Too Goddamn Much, overworked lyrical topics (religion, Hitler/Stalin/Ayatollah Were Bad Guys, drugs, we're all going to die, etc.), and probably other stuff i can't think of right now.

SHOULD YOU BUY IT?: Only if you have a fondness for cheesy metal or, like DEAD ANGEL, feel nostalgic for the days when you were a teenager and the only things you had to worry about in life were "When's the new Slayer album coming out, DUDE?" and avoiding being shot by your own wild-eyed, gun-toting, amphetamine-fueled friends....

I know next to nothing about this Holland label or its releases, other than to say that a bunch of extremely weird stuff arrived in the Hellfortress Postal Drop one afternoon and i'm still not entirely sure what to make of it. My copy of this CD-R was scratched in transit and what little i heard of it before the disc stopped playing leads me to believe Krimpo's is very much in the vein of Torture Chorus -- lots of bizarre, inexplicable shit rendered with odd voices and freaky instrumentation. Titles like "Nice Ass Boy" and "Big Brown Titties" indicate that perhaps they're perverts in more ways than just musically, and the accompanying grotesque ink drawing is most reminiscent of Rudimentary Peni, so there may be a bizarre punk thing going on too. The little of it i did hear sounded pretty out-there, so if you're looking for the next plateau of extreme weirdness, this might bear looking into.... You'll either love it or hate it like nothing else ever before, i'm pretty sure.

Holy shit! This is THE record of the issue. (That's right. If the moon unit disagrees, he can blow me. What's he gonna do, sic Low on me?) [tmu: Even worse -- i'll force you to listen to the Mammal LP all the way through....] Formed from the ashes of Damad***, Kylesa take everything that's good about metal, hardcore, sludge, and postpunk and combine it into one big, roiling, churning, atmospheric monster of sound. An obvious jumping-off point would be Neurosis, but unlike Neurosis, Kyelsa don't feel the need to be "epic." They're in and out within five minutes per song (the entire album runs under forty minutes) and there's absolutely no filler, and whenthey're done it feels like you've had a solid punch to the head a good kick to the ass. Then you want to play the disc again. [n/a]

*** -- A band that I must admit I'm not familiar with. I get the feeling that I totally missed out.