Radulovich is from Chile and has been tinkering in the experimental intermedia trade since he was fourteen, so he's had plenty of time to hone his skills -- applied here in a collection of pieces based on drones, looped vocal tracks, funk electronica, and other distinctly non-western approaches to music. Experimental music with roots in South American rhythms and a healthy appreciation for the diverse opportunities of sound and noise, his pieces here range from the fractured approach of disparate sounds and recurring motifs (the occasionally jarring "Ziplock Tub") to grinding, drone-heavy experiments in the immolation of found sound (the endless "Caterpillar," complete with shouting and much thrashing about from various participants), with plenty of variants in-between. The main link between all the pieces is the reliance on a foundation fashioned from looped vocal tracks and drones, over which the rest of the skeleton -- from avant-garde burst transmissions ("Earthworm") to exercises in noise masquerading as devolved funk ("Greeter," "Amp") or the grotesque dub hell of "Discoteca" -- is built, resulting in tracks that share certain similarities of sound and structure but are otherwise radically different, drawing from a number of disciplines, some of them occasionally quite noisy (watch out for the outburst near the end of "Discoteca"). There are moments where it brings to mind the overall feel of Kare Joao's SIDEMAN album minus all the Beatles references -- often cryptic and odd, but with a purpose and still within the realm of listenability (as opposed to getting so far-out as to be alienating). There's a nice tribal rhythm going on amidst the cacophony of voices, chants, and other noisemaking on "Rice and Beans," even.... It's interesting to see just what a wide range of songs can be built over field recordings, particularly when done with imagination. As a bonus for anybody who was ever amused by the satiric liner notes from old John Fahey albums, the disc's packaging all revolves around the saga of Titicacaman , with compelling excerpts from the BOOK OF TITICACA. Yet another fine and unconventional offering from the always-intriguing people at Accretions....

Rage Against the Machine -- EVIL EMPIRE [???]

I remember seeing this band back in 1991 thinking "Damn, these guys are pretty hard." Well, those were the days when my sensibilities were still primitive and punk rock, but this band has actually kept rather true to that original sentiment. Although I was a bit disappointed by thier first outing, this disc has held my attention for some time now. Rage mixes the energy and the anger of punk with some sly guitar work and a nifty dash of hiphop aesthetic to create a sound worthy of the band name. (This review is probably going to ruin my image, but I still dig old punk. Rage seems to be an update to the three chord anger of the late 1970s and the mid- 1980s. My sensibilities have evolved into an appreciation for a little more than anger anyway.) The guitar works is more along the lines of a noise artist than a rock band (although it's not worthy of some of the big boys like KK Null or Jim O'Rourke), though none of it is tremendously original (other than the fusion of noisy guitar work in a fusion format). Rage has most of the awareness of some of the polit-punk of '80s. All in all, a good album. The interest does start to dwindle towards the end of the album, mostly because they seem to lose the rage halfway through the disc. The last great track is "Down Rodeo," but it's in the middle of the fucking disc!! It did get stuck in the deck of my car stereo for weeks though! [bc]

The Rainmakers -- MAN'S BEST FRIEND [self-released]

Well, this is kind of an interesting idea -- two guys, Big Taylor and Lee Roy (actually Britt Monk and Steve Rohe) playing mostly original music in the pre-war (1920s-1930s) folk blues style. The sound is pretty authentic; on tracks like "Hound Dog Blues" and "Drunken Woman Blues," if you weren't clued-in already to the nature of the proceedings, you'd never guess that these weren't actual old 78s that had been cleaned up for presentation to a new generation. They have all the original touches down cold -- fingerpicked resonator guitar, slide, harmonica, and accordion -- and are good enough to turn out credible covers of Big Bill Broonzy's "Mississipi Blues" and Tommy McClennon's "Whiskey Headed Man" among the original tunes (which are, of course, sonically indistinguishable from the covers). Their sense of humor is most evident on "Bang! Bang! Thud! Thud!" and "Creak'n Bedsprings" (just take a guess what that's about, eh); it also surfaces in more pointed fashion on "Slick Willy Blues," a aiming its arrows at our currently- embattled Prez, he of the wandering trouser minnow. The remaining tracks, "Mister, MIster" (no relation to the horrible eighties band) and "Le Machine" are more of the same modern spin on an old sound. The results are pleasing enough; as the tape says, "This music is made to entertain." It succeeds splendidly in that aim.

OW OW OW MY EARS.... The appearance of Richard Ramirez in the festivities pretty much guarantees harsh audio damage, and this is no disappointment in that respect. What we have here is the monolithic, power-drill noise result of a three-way collaboration by mail. Ramirez sent a tape of source noise to Flatline Construct, who promptly mutated it even further before sending those results onto Prurient, who stepped on it a couple times and chopped it up in vicious fashion and returned the whole radioactive mess to Flatline Construct for final mastering. The finished product is intensely painful to hear -- screaming loops of white noise, high-pitched shrieking, the sound of buildings collapsing, bulldozers being nuked, trains falling down mountainsides, etc., etc. The disc contains two long tracks, both hyperactive and crammed full of destroyed sound remixed and retooled for maximum sonic damage. Approach with caution.... Note for the purists/collector scum: This was originally released on a C-60 in a video box on Let It Rot in extremely limited quantities, and this CD edition is itself limited to 500 copies. Recommended for enthusiasts of old-school power electronics.

Ramleh -- HOMELESS [Freek Records]

More brilliance from the Broken Flag camp, home to Skullflower, Total, all the side projects, and this "band," ostensibly the ongoing project of guitarist Gary Ramleh (although for some inexplicable reason, he isn't listed among the personnel on the CD). Like most CDs from this many- tentacled noise collective, the outing is LONG -- nearly 80 minutes -- but it's broken up into nine tracks, making them a bit more "manageable" for the weak. Of course, over a third of the CD is taken up by two songs, the title track and "Houston Bomber," but hey, it wouldn't be a Broken Flag gig without a couple of gratuitously excessive noise jams....

So. The big question: How does it stack up against the almighty Skullflower canon? Answer: It hangs tough. It holds its own. Hang 'em high time in Marlboro Country! Hah! "Marlboro High" sounds like it could have been lifted off one of the first Skullflower albums, with its cheese-grater guitar crunch and the li'l satan drums that lumber along like narcoleptic dinosaurs; "Homeless" (all 18:50 of it), in turn, sounds it was stripped from a Total album. Both are pretty amusing, but the CD really starts to crank with the fourth track, "FagEnders," which combines an honest-to-li'l- baby-Jesus chord progression with lots of spaghetti western guitar noodling and lurching drums; about halfway through the "vocalist" (whichever one of them it is) starts ranting about, uh, well, he's screaming SOMETHING and he sounds really pissed. Mondo hip. "Blind Alley Return Trip" is a short excursion into sandblasted wind-tunnel noises that turns into the cranky twittering noise madness of "Thumb Buster" and "Magic Tiger," but the hands-down winner is the eccentric-but-brilliant "Kansas City Bomber," with what sounds like the sick love child of Enrico Morricone on splatter- western guitar over a vaguely hip-hop beat for fifteen eardrum-piercing minutes. And the closing "Utopia Dust" ain't bad either. DEAD ANGEL approves. Hunt it down.

Ramleh -- BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR [Sympathy For the Record Industry]

Yes children, it's time ONCE AGAIN for this issue's Skullflower-related review! O boy! And here we have a BRAND-NEW Ramleh release, more guitar skullduggery for the salivating masses. (Next month we'll have the new release by Skullflower, so don't get any ideas about this horrible feature of DEAD ANGEL going away anytime soon.) As with most releases coming out of the Broken Flag camp, this is tremendously cryptic -- the songs are linked by a common theme (they're all "about" different cities except for the closing track "Blues for Herb Mullin," and many of them appear to be about women as well), but it's hard to say what it MEANS... is Philip Best trying to make a point about women being victimized by urban society? (Inner photos include lots o' cheesy fitness-buff women and old pix of Anne Frank, among other things.) Maybe it's about teenage runaways, sort of continuing the theme of HOMELESS... i dunno....

Regardless, one thing's crystal-clear here: the SOUND. This is a hell of a lot more focused and coherent than anything i've heard out of the BFC in a while. This is also the closest any of the BFC participants have ever come to making a "rock" record, although only in a "progressive" sense. Think of where Hendrix was headed before that unfortunate accident, maybe; i think he might have eventually made a stop by this station once his head cleared and he stopped all the flashy doodling. (This sudden inclination toward adopting a readily-recognizable "rock" form -- even if the songs are long and not exactly broken up into verse/chorus/verse pop format -- may explain why this one's coming out on SFTRI.)

Most of the usual BFC elements are in place here: use of samples (the disturbing intro to "Boston Concept," what appear to be sound of helicopter blades in the same song, etc.), heavily repetitive bass and guitar lines, and Ramleh's mutant-blues guitar playing. But this one also incorporates country-style finger-picking in places (!), and the songs are a lot more tightly wound this time out. Quite often one heavily repeated line (like the pinging guitar riff in "Seattle Nun Trailer") will form the backbone of the song while other elements fade in and out -- voices, drums, squeaks and squawks, honking guitars, pipe organ guitars, and other weirdness. The result is that the songs all appear to be GOING somewhere, instead of just wandering around while everybody makes disturbed noises. This makes the album far more "accessible" than some earlier stuff... which may annoy some, i'm sure, but also makes this an excellent starting point for the uninitiated.

About the other stuff, then.... "Buffalo Comeback" features opens with some fairly complex drumming --drums that shift from a straight-head rock beat to weird jazz and back abruptly -- before descending into primal noise chaos, calling up memories of earlier, noisier efforts. Incongruous samples turn up in "Alice in the Cities," dominating the song for several minutes until the shuddering, feedback-soaked guitars kick in. "Ohio Impromptu" features more loud, scraping guitars and immolated guitar shriek, while "Houston Water Angel" returns to the heavily reverbed pinging sounds of the earlier tracks before settling into one of the hardest-rocking grooves of the entire album (that breaks up into shreadded noise filth pretty quick, though). "Maryland Sheriff Factory" factors in rotating guitar hum and a huge, fat bass just guaranteed to make your speakers levitate, and the stuttering, weaving stun-guitar on "Michigan Showgirl" will helpfull finish them off. If your speaker cones are still functioning after THAT, the swirling cyclone of noise at the end ("Blues for Herb Mullin") will surely evaporate them. A fine effort and one you should seek out.

Ramleh -- WE CREATED IT, LET'S TAKE IT OVER VOL. I [Pure]

Bargain-basement sonic rumbling from the beginning of Ramleh's career, and it sounds like it, too. In a lot of ways this is closer to the output of Consumer Electronics than it is to more recent Ramleh offerings -- lots of low-end sludge-o-rama for the bedrock and various "wee-WEE! wee-WEE!" knob twidling, abrupt fading, etc. for the stuff that hovers above the swamp. "Throatsuck" is a pretty good impression of a jet with broken wings sliding down a runway to its explosive doom, though. But there are no riffs here, however; this is Ramleh emulating Merzbow. Well, on "Onslaught" there's something sort of like a riff, but it sounds like it's buried in mud.... There IS a lot of cool hovering-waiting-to-burn-minefields feedback frenzy of "Phenol," and more of the same only louder on "Fistfuck." Bottom line: Ramleh at their most formless, in the crushing death-grip of a severe Merzbow fixation. Approach with caution.

Ramleh/Skullflower -- ADIEU ALL YOU JUDGES [Broken Flag]

And now... yes... the obligatory Broken Flag Camp review. What we have here is a live document, part Skullflower and part Ramleh, and all rather noise- laden. (Big surprise.) Skullflower leap into the fray with "In to the void," a four-part exercise in squeaking, skronking, squealing drone and noise noodling that's leavened with plenty o' organ drone and spiced up with whistles, horns, and even a recorder. It also has plenty of seismic guitar hate flowing in and out of it, although for the most part the entire thing leans toward the more "ambient" side of Skullflower punishment. It's also a bit long and formless for my taste, but then again, long and formless has been the 'flower's chosen boat upon the river for a while now, so that's nothing new. (O, how i long for the return to Xaman!) Still, there are plenty of disturbed and hateful guitar noises to keep it all on the "pleasing" side....

The rest of the CD (in other words, the second track) is a really long and convoluted thing from Ramleh called "Toronto Blessing," which appears from the liner notes to actually be selected tracks from BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR and, uh, other stuff. It's pretty loud and catastrophic, with guitars that sound like Mack trucks falling down the side of Mount Everest and plenty of deranged soloing toward the end. I'll bet everybody went home with their ears ringing. Obnoxious behavior at its finest.

Ramleh -- WORKS III [Dirter Promotions]

Mein Gott in der himmel! Not one, but TWO discs worth of screeching, yawing, undulating guitar flatulence! Bring on the WESSON OIL, baby! Woo! Anyway... the first disc, SOUNDCHECK CHANGELING, was originally issued as a Broken Flag cassette, intended for listening along with HOMELESS. It sez on the CD cover that there are two tracks -- "Soundcheck Changeling" and "Anaheim '73" -- but there are actually ten tracks on the CD, so i don't know what that means. I guess they wanted to be irritating. The sound is largely what you have come to expect from these guys -- lots of rhino- screeching guitars and Neanderthal drumming, like a carefully-synchronized avalanche. Lots of sustain, effects pedals, speaker cones being blown to bits, etc. Essential stuff and required listening for your next military maneuver or other violent action.

The second disc, SHOOTER'S HILL, was also first released as a Broken Flag item -- except in this case, it was a limited-edition CD. We're talking limited to ONE. So for most of us, this is actually a "new" item, heh. It's pretty boss, hoss. More shrieking guitars and drum plod, and Philip Best sometimes even opens his mouth to shout stuff you'll never be able to understand (like you really NEEDED to?). Best of the nine tracks here: "Sure as Shit," "Rawbone," "Fun Stealer" (which actually sounds an awful lot like early Skullflower, now that i think of it), "Shooters Hill," and "Oedipus Rex." Not that there's anything wrong with the other tracks, though -- it's all pretty ear-raping stuff....

I haven't been this badly thrown on the Expectations-Based-On-Album-Cover vs. Actual-Music-On-Disc axis since listening to the Fires Were Shot cd. The cover (a whimsical and highly stylized watercolor depiction of suburbia) and title suggest new-age folkiness; what you actually get is... um... well, it's definitely not new-age. (It does share some similarity with the sound of John Fahey's epic lambasting of the same subject, though.) This band (mainly Christopher Brown and James Day, with additional contributions by Joe Zymonas) is a bunch of blokes from the suburban and rural Midwest who are apparently determined to bring the sounds of the country to the city and vice versa, mixing tools and techniques from both in all aspects of their sound. Probably the best way to grok their sound is to imagine a bunch of guitarists like Fahey and O'Rourke (with roots in guitar primitivism and hopelessly entranced with repetition, microtonality, tapes, noises, and weirdness), drummers from the jazzy 'n unpredictable school (William Hooker, for instance), and various instrumentalists from genres as disparate as rock, classical, and musique concrete. Now imagine that all of these guys representing all these wildly different approaches are working from scores by the likes of Sun Ra, John Cage, Stockhausen, and maybe even a Fluxus luminary or two. And they're playing in the alternate universe equivalent of the Grateful Dead. Can you smell the tie-died ink in the audience yet?

More seriously -- regardless of what mistaken impressions one might get with the (lovely, btw) packaging, this is essentially experimental music that actually acknowledges the existence of a life beyond the urban sphere. Most experimental music is concerned with either academic concerns whose execution is pretty mystifying (even, sometimes, nigh-unlistenable) or an insistence on the free-form and accidental to a degree that keeps everything pretty firmly in the neighborhood of the avant-garde. These gentlemen, however, have found a way to incorporate the sounds of "ready-made" instruments from daily life both inside the city and out into a vast fabric of unusual approaches to songwriting and instrumentation. I know where they're coming from -- the liner notes mention they "grew up on a surreal frontier: suburbia kissing the edges of rural America." I've been in that land a few times myself -- where the farmer's kid down the road might well be riding a tractor while listening to Metallica (or better yet, Merzbow) on his Walkman. It's a land where you can be isolated enough (and often bored enough) to spend lots of time pawing around in a barn making devolved music with other like-minded people without worrying about getting busted by the neighbors, and it sometimes yields interesting music (at least until the drinking gets too heavy and it all devolves into outright sloppy chaos). This is one of those cases. Brown and Day have created an interesting anomaly here: even though the vast majority of this album was recorded with synthesizers (and possibly electronic drums), outside of the many (and unnamed) "ready-made instruments), it sounds more like a session of roadhouse country musicians jacked up on hooch and playing stuff inspired by their secret collections of Coltrane and Sun Ra than an "electronica" album. It's certainly out there -- it's hard the separate the songs because their very structure makes the album flow without calling attention to the passage of individual songs. What may start out with a recognizable structure eventually mutates into an evolving freeform jam, or it may come together out of seeming chaos to form an actual song... and as these jams loosely linked by thematic sections flow, so does the album.

The country-as-freejazz motif makes it really difficult to characterize these songs without going into laboriously detailed descriptions -- complex music that's not built around slogans will do that to ya, you know -- but they're all striking in their juxtaposition of sounds and freeform tendencies. Combining elements of guitar primitivism, experimental music, and freeform jazz with country roots, they come up with a sound that defies categorization but is nevertheless quite listenable. (Probably still a bit "out there" for your grandmother, but still....) Full of all sorts of unexpected diversions into deviant genre splicing and most rhythmic as well at times. We like. You should investigate.

Spaced-out, droning, dark-ambient free jazz. Soundtrack sequences for the scenes where the clouds drift across the ocean. Drummer Christopher Brown, keyboard player James Day, and guitarist Scott Hamill are not just musicians, but multimedia musicians -- Brown and Day (who have been collaborating on various projects since the early sixties) have a shared experience as performers in the Trusty Wourins Performance Ensemble, known for their use of projected slides and film in conjunction with music both structured and improvised. The same sensibility runs through this album, fourteen soundtrack experiences that merge into one long procession of unexpected tonality. Random Touch are big fans of reverb overkill -- always a good sign in my book -- and thus the entire album has a vast, diffuse sound that makes their short soundtracks otherworldly. A lot of this makes me think of the extended psychedelic jam sessions prevalent on blaxploitation flicks, usually around the end when the hero is on the run from The Man, only not quite an funk-intensive and nowhere near as menacing. These tunes are film scores for the movies the hepcats like to see, dig? And... and... is that the ghost of Sonny Sharrock I hear squirming around in Scott Hamill's tortured guitar? I smell Sun Ra all over this. It's interesting to hear how free their free jazz is, given the soundtrack references -- and that they never get so far out there that they can't find their way back. Bonus points for the Morricone on steroids guitar on "slowing down time" (and additional bonus points for the title). I also like that they don't mind playing real slow from time to time, which is right about the time they start sounding like they're riding in the back of a cab with the windows open through a Chicago nightclub district circa 1972. Around two in the morning, I'd think. While wearing shades. Fine, fine moves from these swank tone scientists.

Rapoon -- THE FIRES OF THE BORDERLAND [Release]

Rapoon is the secret-agent name for Robin Storey, former member of Zoviet France long since gone solo, and this is one of his newer missives from the land of the ambient industrial loop festival. (He's most known for putting out albums on Soleilmoon, but apparently he was looking for a change of pace or something.) I find this all deeply mysterious -- the artwork, the title, the music itself. (I think that's intentional, by the way.) Even the song titles are unfathomable or cryptic -- "Cires divam," "Omaneska," "Talking to a stick," "Looking... not finding" -- you get the idea. Nevertheless, even though i have absolutely no idea what this guy's all about, i really like this disc. The overall sound is ambient (lots o' eerie keyboard washes and the like), but augmented by strange loops that rise and fall within the keyboard drones and odd, industrial-tinged noises that crop up from time to time. Ambient orchestral industrial? Something like that. At any rate, the material all falls into the same general pattern of ambience slugging it out with industrial motifs; some of the songs are "lighter" and some are a bit "heavier," but they're all anchored by ambience from another dimension and eerie, machine-like loops. The overall effect is that of listening to abandoned machinery still clattering in a desert after the end of the world. Needless to say, this is unspeakably cool. Highly recommended.

Rebro -- NO ONE GETS OUT OF THIS TRIP "ALIVE" [???]

Here we have an acid trip soundtrack. Pretty obvious from the title, eh? Well, something else that can be inferred from the title -- this music is fairly dark, pretty low-beat and moody. A backdrop or an atmosphere is created, and the listener can do as he or she pleases with the result - even ignore the music and read, write, or whatever one would do with music playing. The music tends to really fall into the background, and doesn't command any attention, doesn't change beats, raise its voice, or anything to bring the music to the foreground. And, some people like that sort of thing. [bc]

I'm not quite sure what to make of Rebro, the ongoing project of the mysterious Feel-X. The band's first album was essentially ambient; now this is one is considerably more technoish (not outright, mind you, but the feel is definitely there in the drums and chatterbox keyboard doodles weaving in and out of the background), even moving toward drum 'n bass at times. This is stylish and well-recorded stuff, though, and far more inventive for the most part than what i usually associate with the techno field. Oddly enough, while the tracks appear sans vox, the liner notes include thoughts/theory on each song that could easily be mistaken for lyrics, which is mildly startling... perhaps they should think about singing as well next time out? Actually, in concept Rebro's entire gig makes me inclined to think of them as a more techno-driven variant of <nada>....

There are some seriously happening tracks here, especially if you're down with drum 'n bass, such as the explosive juggernaut "Obsolete Machine" and the considerably more synth-driven "Laser in My Veins," whose percussion is a bed of stuttering beats and hibtone drones. "Modern Society," when it opens, starts out like a tinkly piano ballad, but that is soon overtaken by thumping techno drums and lower-than-low bass; afterwards, the piano track continues, but is largely drowned out by the growing avalanche of beats, bass, and noise. The closing track "Never Say Never (Deadly MX) opens like a more "traditional" techno track with a steady beat and hovering-UFO synths; it's not bad at all, but sounds almost tame by comparison to some of the earlier, more layered tracks. The rest of the disc is relatively engaging, if not necessarily envelope-pushing, drum 'n bass techno. In some ways i think the song notes are far more radical than the music itself, at times approaching a manifesto of sorts. Peculiar, but worth hearing. Like everyone else these days, they have a web site (see the EPHEMERA section) that includes sound samples, so you have no excuse for not checking it out if this kind of thing is up yer alley....

Real Cool Rain -- FILAMENT [self-released]

Hey, now THIS is interesting... the basement tapes equivalent of Final, maybe? Except they're nowhere near as messed up and cranky and ominous. Instead it's mostly long, droning synth/guitar lines, particularly on the first two cuts, "a forest where the city once was" and "reflecting," sounding much like the sun rising in the early morning... but in extreme slow motion. Lots of shuddering, seismic bass rippling through both cuts, too, like they borrowed Benny G.'s amp (which he bought from Geezer Butler anyhow) for the sessions. There are some interesting background noises happening on the second one, probably guitar tapping but it's hard to tell. After that my grasp on the tracking gets fuzzy -- it's hard to tell where one track switches into another --but the noises in the background eventually move into the foreground and stay there, and they're mighty strange noises, too. Not exceptionally harsh, but screechy enough (in a toned-down way) to make you start wondering if they've been listening to Merzbow or Skullflower or something, which is pretty weird since i had always pegged RCR for a somewhat twisted pop band. And yet another cut on the first side (this is a cassette, btw -- a prelease thingy for the CD to come or a tape in its own end, i dunno) sounds remarkably like an outtake from the soundtrack to CRASH, even though this was recorded and released before that movie came out over here. Either they have bootleg video contacts overseas or they're goddamn visionaries, and i opt for the latter.

The flip side of this tape is one long, druggy epic (drenched in slo-mo reverb/chorus/othwerworldly efx and lots of it) called "the planetarium dreams of being the sky," and it sounds... well, like the title says, mon. It starts out like a more zoned-out Gravitar on heavy doses of Percodan (minus all the jazz scree -- i don't think these guys really do jazz) and then moves on to churning loop frenzy (but slow frenzy -- this is a downer epic, remember), then moves on to other, equally spacy things... if these guys didn't spend major portions of the seventies eating li'l blue pills and nodding off to Hawkwind albums, i'll eat my tape deck. These are good things and you may color me impressed. Not to mention that i'm tremendously jealous that i didn't think of the title first. (Or, for that matter, PRY MY MOUTH OPEN WITH THE RED KNIFE OF HEAVEN, an album by some avant guy whose name i can't remember, although if i ever saw the damn thing in the store i'd buy it on the spot for the title alone.)

Real Cool Rain -- RESTLESS [Orange Sound Rhyme]

Good to see that these guys are still around, although i see they've gone and changed labels (the story of a rock band's life, in which time is measured by label tenures). The sound remains very much the same (although with increasingly improved sonics) -- low-key acoustic strumming and wee vox ("thermocline") that abruptly shifts into noisy mutant smudge-rock on tracks like "release." Their overall sound remains hard to describe; they started out in a similar vein to the lo-fi movement, but over the past year or two have developed a decided ambient bent that colors a lot of their work, and they still remain interested in tossing in odd rhythmic sounds at the fringes (especially on "can i get one of you smiling?").

On "afro desiac," heavily-reverbed quasi-chicken picking mutates into something considerably more amorphous before turning into a straight-ahead drone-pop song; while on "fountain of youth," treated drums and startling, unconventional ideas about placement of instruments in the mix impart a new life to what might otherwise be unremarkable. This talent for devising new approaches to mixing and arrangement, in fact, remains the band's most singular hallmark. Some of the tracks, like "eros," are minimal washes of acoustic dreaminess, while others become sharper, heavier, even noisier; "driven" is strongly reminiscent of Lockgroove, in fact (or, to be a bit less obscure, maybe a more laid-back My Bloody Valentine). The hypnotic, subdued droning of "beautiful in her day" harks back to the sound of their first album, as does "afterlife." The final song, "self portrait in the sun," opens with vaguely Floydian keyboard doodling before kicking into full gear as a musical seesaw ride propelled by a guitar riff that rocks back and forth most of the time. (The violin is a nice touch as well.)

Real Cool Rain are probably a bit too disjointed and musically schizoid to ever go over big with the masses, alas -- but that doesn't mean you should ignore them. Their largely restrained take on unpredictable sounds from the studio may be an acquired taste, but it's a taste worth acquiring.

The title is appropriate; while guitar-whacker C. J. Reaven Borosque comes from a family of jazzers and played violin and sax in her childhood, now she's grown, living in the San Francisco Bay Area as a writer and visual artist, and in love with the sound of detuned and prepared guitars. She's also fond of noise, chaos, machine-like repetition, and songs that combine layers of sonic strata to create the sound of machines growing, expanding, and overtaking their surroundings until they collide and destroy each other in gear-stripping, paint-stripping sheets of sound. Some of the sounds she favors (especially at the beginning of "Sword of Damocles") mimic violin and sax; at other times she's fond of using great, whining peals of distortion to make her point. On the opening track ("In Search of Palmer Eldritch") she not only references Philip K. Dick but stakes out the territory, seeding the sonic landscape with layers of mutated guitar and loops that eventually resolve into grinding machine-like terror, sounding giant torches cutting through sheet metal. Machine-like noises and loops abound on this disc, actually, a large part of what makes it so swank. Extreme volume and gadget-fu never hurt, either. Titles like "Bring Me The Head of E. Dankworth" (one of the more violently chaotic noisefests on the album) and "I Married the A-Bomb" (which begins with heavily-reverbed tinkly notes, oooo so pretty... then everything gets fed into a delay set on overkill and the Loops of Death begin blotting out the sun and oooo I can't watch) only add to the enjoyment. Repetitive noise and grotesque sounds with no vocals, solos, posturing, or other annoying effluvia to get in the way -- I greatly approve....

Word: this is an amazingly loud cd. Not surprisingly, they are a noise band (sort of) at the core -- but their noise is wrapped around chunks o' structure for your listening ease, natch. The opening monologue, "under the sycamore trees," begins with reverb-drenched vox droning on about something vaguely sinister while scary noises happen in very loud (if sometimes ambient) fashion -- the effect is monolithic and doomlike, and is a complete contrast to the cut-up electronoise diddling of "internal," which eventually morphs into the sound of crippled metallic snakes shaking their spines apart in a typewriter factory. Their harsh tones melt into pure noise around a hopped-up bit and pulsing electroblips on "gandharvas," but the tones are crunchier on "exhbit 1" (not to be confused with "exhbit 2" and "exhibit 3" later on down the disc, which sound totally different) and more like the sound of an earthquake devolving in slow motion. There's a nice set of polyrhythms on "puzzle box" buried under the noise (some of which is truly excruciating in its harshness), and on occasion it peeks through like a dark hallucination... this is a seriously fucked-up way to approach noise, from the inside-out and against the beat, sort of... i approve of this. Catured voices over a forlorn metallic beat are the center of "convulse," and their drone is sometimes interrupted by harsh noise-edits of minute duration to deliberately unnerving effect. Sometimes the noise provides the rhythm, as on "mass dispersal," where bursts of noise pulse against the beat -- one that's simple at first, then increasingly complex, with the noisefury responding in appropriate fashion. There are places on "torment" where the noise and the rhythm are one and the same as well.... Some of them (like "latch") are so consumed by gritty noise and distortion that they'll make your eye twitch while listening to them -- come to think of it, the entire disc is a pretty abrasive solvent in which to soak your ears. But if you're interested in seeing what's possible with noise beyond the cliches of power-electronics, or with what happens when noise collides with rhythm, then you should scope this out.

Red 7 Fury is one man, Furious, and a battery of synths, guitars, and efx modules. There's a heavy Nine Inch Nails and Front 242 happening in songs like "The Only One That's Left For You," especially since Furious shares Reznor's morbid obsession with building up layers of destroyed sound around the rhythms, then pounding them into dust with huge, stuttering electronic percussion. But then there's more goth-like material such as the loping "Red Velvet Sky," all tribal percussion and majestic keyboard drones and whining oscilloscope noises, over which Furious hisses and broods like a dark prince who forgot to take his meds. "Can't Believe I Loved You" is more akin to Depeche Mode on steroids or early Skinny Puppy, with seriously thumping drums and harsh vox. I like the way "Sea of Pain" is built around a fast percolating sequencer riff, but the when the drums come in, they're midtempo rather than blazing... and then he starts weaving sheets of rhythmic sound in layers and processing the vox in unexpected ways. He's not blazing new and uncharted territory here, but he sounds awfully good doing it; the attention to detail and the sounds themselves is most impressive, and his sound is a fair bit more raw and in-your-face than some of the bands he's been weaned on. Worth checking out if you're down with the industrial club moves.

This arrived in the Reviewing Offices of the Hellfortress waaaaaay too late to be dealt with properly, but since the next issue is coming out in four months (we're taking a break to reformat the ezine), and Regan has a full-length album coming out shortly, we're going to run with it. Due to time constraints you're on your own for the full bio poop (and you really want to look, trust me... be sure to stop by the PHOTOS section, especially the ones done by Eric Kroll, whose bottom left picture clearly delineates DEAD ANGEL's most favored object of veneration and craven worship).

Now that we've ascertained that the High Priestess is also Really Hot, we come to the four tracks on the ep. First off, while it appears she's being mainly compared to Trent Reznor, she actually has far more in common vocally with Liz Fraser of Cocteau Twins and Donna Blake from Miranda Sex Garden. In fact, her entire sound has elements in common (the good ones) with both of those bands, along with an old-school ebm and industrial mentality that compares favorably to early Front 242 or Cabaret Voltaire. She does share Reznor's fascination for weaving overlapping sound textures and unusual instrumentation, but she's far more subtle about it (plus she doesn't whine all the time). Given the piled-on approach she takes toward the end of "Interrogator" (where her initial vocal delivery is considerably less ethereal and more forbidding than on the rest of the ep), it would be interesting to hear her remake NIN's "Ringfinger." Her overall approach to song structure and the overall feel owes as much to her background in classical music as to hardcore ebm -- at times she sounds like she should be recording for Middle Pillar, but she's consistently more beat-oriented and often far more aggressive than any of those bands more firmly rooted in darkwave.

Strong, compositionally sound songs (i.e., she doesn't wander all over the place -- she's pretty focused) and a lot of attention to textures and the strategic placement of unusual sounds and juxtapositions are what make this material interesting, particularly on tracks like "Opium," where a hypnotic foundation that's part gothic, part ebm becomes the backbone over which she threads unusual sound motifs and phrases (my favorite is the distorted bass that suddenly fades up midway through the song, nearly obliterating everything else, just to fade back down again). The opening track "Oblivion" builds from an introduction in which gothic keyboards, deliberately artificial ebm sounds, and an industrial beat are combined in different configurations, shifting gears as the song proceeds. "Interrogator" starts off in pure ebm territory and builds into a pretty serious wall of sound that borders on being sheer noise. Oddly enough -- here's some irony for you -- "The Garden" is an inventive mix of ebm, pop, and tweaked industrial sounds that Danielle Dax might well have attempted toward the end of her career, had she not given it all up to become, uh, a gardener.... My guess is that all four of these songs will be on the forthcoming full-length album SELLISTERNIA, although whether they'll sound the same is a good question (she's working with Nicky Laumay, producer for the likes of Nick Cave and Killing Joke, and i don't think these tracks were recorded earlier with someone else). Based on this ep, i'd be inclined to pick up the album when it becomes available -- if you're seriously hep to ebm and old-school industrial dance, maybe you should check it out too, eh?

If this is the current state of the art for goth or EBM or whatever they call it at the moment, then i approve. Regan combines a lot of suave influences -- ethereal goth, EBM, etc. -- into a sound that's both haunting and aggressive at the same time. She combines arresting beats and the best elements of several genres into an exotic-sounding variant on goth-techno, plus she's apparently deeply pagan to boot. Sex-positive attitude only seals the deal and proves that this can only be good for you.... The opener, "Hallowed Ground," welds a dark ambient feel and wisplike vocalizing from the Liz Fraser school of wordless emotion to mechanical beats and propulsive low end. At times (such as "Opium," which originally appeared on the promotional ep i reviewed a couple of issues ago), she fuses several different genres -- in this case, goth, ebm, and industrial -- in which the different styles weave around each other and build steadily to moments of outright techno. It's her ability to segue from one style to another, and to integrate them so seamlessly, that makes her material stand out from the standard fare in any of the genres she's most likely to be lumped in with....

The beat to "Creepy" is beyond bad-assed, and the addition of high-pitched drone and a growing wall of percussion paves the way for hypnotic tones 'n drones; by the time Regan actually starts singing, she is just another instrument (and in fact, she floats in and out of the mix and never sings anything you can actually make out) in a shifting palette of tones that rise and fall over the swank beat. Even i, the King of the Dance-Challenged, could get up and zone out to this. The French song (technically "Le secret douloureux," and no i don't know what it means, i failed French, remember?), incorporates noise, hypnotically minimal loops and repeated elements, and an endless hip-hop beat to build a ghost-like machine beat over which Regan moans in French about... well, i dunno what it's about but it's inducing some vague horniness in my direction. Regan has a talent for making the machinery sound downright sexy. You could do a whole more than just dance to this, if you know what i mean.

Probably the best key to getting a handle on Regan is in deciphering songs like "Angel Eyes" -- an elliptical beat and samples with off-kilter phrasing form the backdrop for the more traditional goth elements, with ebm beats and technoish keyboards providing the dynamic shifts. The song goes in directions you wouldn't normally expect, shifting gears between a combination of styles and moments that are distinctly in one particular tradition. Most of the songs on this album are built on similar ground, with the overall sound and direction highly dependent on the balance between the background and foreground. There's a seriously heavy groove (complete with clanking nearly-but-not-quite-noise snare and a percolating bass riff) to "Temptress," and everything -- vocals, keyboards, incidental sound -- is completely subordinate to that thundering beat.

There are two versions of "Oblivion" here -- a "1st movement" and an "instrumental." On the first one, vaguely sinister rhythms on the keyboard and other instruments are augmented with marching-style percussion as Regan provides haunting, gothic vocals; the instrumental version is essentially the same song with the vox stripped away and rendered a bit more clubbish. The ancient sound of bells tolling in the distance as slow drums beat out a solemn rhythm introduce the final song, "Airetaina"; as the vocals are layered on, the beat begins, and the song slowly builds to a majestic finale. If you have any sense you'll get in line early to start genuflecting before the pagan beat queen....

I believe Replicator play what the kids call "math rock." You would think that would be rock as interpreted by engineers, calculus majors, and computer scientists. Believe me, there's nothing scarier than a pissed-off nerd (look at Alweenie). But no, "math-rock" means twitchy, angular riffs played against odd time signatures, along with spoken / sung lyrics, and it can be played by anyone, even English majors. The guys in Replicator are quite good at it. They do bump into genre touchstones such as Slint and Shellac, and vocalist Conan Neutron does sound uncanninly like Alweenie at times, but Replicator add enough little touches (keyboards, an uptempo lurchiness, little electronic glitches / washes) to stand on their own. [n/a]

Replicator is one of the many bands that probably wouldn't exist if Shellac and Slint had never released any records, but you shouldn't hold that against them. Unlike a lot of bands on the Shellac / Slint tip, these guys (a trio with the odd helping hand here and there) have the chops to back up their play and the songwriting skills necessary to keep things moving. They also have a fondness for discussing paranoia, the evil that governments do, the consequences of consumerism, and Marlon Brando, which never hurts. The Shellac and Slint references are unavoidable (especially since their most outspoken / highly visible member, Conan Neutron, is also the guitarist, and bespectacled, and a principled dude, just like the legendarily cranky Alweenie), but there's much more to them than that -- if anything, they remind me more of Breaking Circus and early Killing Joke (especially on "It seems like the real deal, but the citizenship doesn't hurt"), and they are most enamored of the odd but telling sound bite, weird noises, and other forms of chatter I associate more with noise and extreme electronica. Then, too, their concerns are inverted -- Conan may sound an awful lot like Steve Albini at times (whether by nature or design I can't even guess, and don't particularly care about anyway), but where Steve's righteous anger is generally directed at opaque, even cryptic personal situations whose real meaning is only evident to the band, Conan's anger is directed at oppressive bullshit and urging people to fix or dismantle The System. Steve may sound like a cranky old man, but Conan sounds more like the voice in the wilderness. (A wilderness populated by a really loud drummer and a bassist capable of levitating buildings, but still.)

At the core of it all, they rock -- drummer Chris Bolig in particular sounds like he's breaking shit even when he's quiet, and Conan sure gets worked up in a tizzy from time to time, spitting out hyperkinetic riffs of sometimes absurd complexity, frequently at a velocity indicative of excessive pill consumption (although the idea of Conan actually needing artifical assistance for his guitar hijinks is pretty hilarious, and equally unlikely). Through all the chaos, bassist Ben Adrian holds the floor down in such smooth fashion he might as well be playing in an ice-cream gangsta suit. Strange experiments in engineering abound, the band consistently plays with both precision and feeling (a tricky combination to master), and if it sometimes resembles Shellac a bit too much for its own good, well, what's a poor boy from Oakland to do? Bonus points for the totally boss "The weight of 3 Marlon Brandos" (which actually lives up to its title, and then some), in which Conan demonstrates that he can play real purty-like when it so moves him, before they all come together to crush your skull over and over with great precision. If more bands put this much effort into their work (which shows) and turned out such consistent results, maybe the music landscape wouldn't suck so much now. Go buy lots of copies of this so Conan can amass the bling-bling it takes to run for Prez and win. (Or you could just listen to the album for the sheer pleasure of it alone, I suppose....)

Strange experiments in sound with various participants, including Ernesto-Diaz Infante and Chris Forsythe (see the review of their latest duet release somewhere else in this issue). While the pieces here at first sound almost like random bursts of music and words and sound, there appears to be a method to their madness. Guitarists Diaz-Infante will lay down some peculiar piece and the others (99 Hooker on "chaos poetry" and electric sax, Akio Mukino on Powerbook, and Ross Bonadonna contributing studio tinkering and the mix) basically circle around them. Sometimes they'll get vaguely rhythmic, and sometimes they go off on a tangent, and the entire thing has a loose, chaotic feel that never quite totally falls apart (a feel that's remarkably similar to some of the pieces on WIRES AND WOODEN BOXES). The first six tracks are all actually part of one larger track "Das Capital Crime," and while the sounds of each segment are remarkably different, the same basic style of playing emerges in all of them, lending a bit of stability to the musical chaos. Sometimes they sound like a really devolved Sun Ra session; sometimes they sound more like the Nihilist Spasm Band with a different lyrical approach. Either way they're not within a million miles of anything remotelyr resembling mainstream music. (This is good, by the way.) Judging from the acommpanying text, i'd gather that's part of the plan anyway....

"Possum Ridge Paralyzer" is another beast entirely -- nearly twenty minutes long and built on noises and sounds (generated by guitar, loops, and other stuff) that gradually grow in intensity and volume, the rhythmic element growing steadily more complex as Hooker goes into a harrowing rant about sterno drinkers and glue sniffers and the like. Meanwhile the band just keeps getting weirder and weirder. From time to time Hooker interjects his chaos commentary, and the band just keeps more devolved in its sound. This piece, to me, works a lot better than the other one, although that may just be a personal preference. I must say, Hooker is a fairly demented-sounding guy, and the band's approach is just as surreal. I'm not sure how much of this (if any) is live or studio, and i suspect that's intentional. Interesting stuff and definitely non-traditional in every sense of the word... proof that sophisticated weirdness is not yet dead.

Rev. 99 is a sprawling art 'n sound collective led by highly agitated sax destroyer 99 Hooker, in which a large number of musicians (including guitarists Ernesto Diaz-Infante and Chris Forsyth, Rotcod Zzaj on keyboards, and Donald Miller on guitar) make a big sonic omlette as a commentary of sorts on postapocalyptic culture or something like that. What makes things interesting is that not only are real instruments being played (in highly unorthodox fashion), but other real-time elements are added to the mix -- video, radio, television, audience interaction, and more -- during the performances, which makes for a compelling sort of real-time chaos. 99 and his cohorts have gone back later and reshaped the material in postproduction, which leads to the intriguing possibility that with this many sound sources, there could be an infinite number of variations on the album.

Not surprisingly, given the title, the choice of media outlets and other issues were indeed influenced by the events of 9/11, but the 7-11 reference is not entirely without merit: apparently 99 Hooker is taking aim at 7-11 convenience culture as well. It's hard to say, since i don't hear many direct references to either one (i suppose television reports about 9/11 may be happening in the background, but if so, they're pretty submerged), although some of the background commentary on "Variable Terror" may be in that territory. The basic recording strategy bears this out: 99 Hooker and drummer Jeff Arnal performed the core tracks with several other members dialing in their performances by phone and the rest playing along with headphones. No particular concern was taken over eliminating background sounds; in fact, i suspect the players were all encouraged to leave their televisions, radios, whatever, going while they played. (This turned into an issue on the track "Notes On A Nervous Breakdown" because a song by Enya came on over the radio, and its inclusion in the final mix led to the track being withdrawn at the cd manufacturer's request). The task afterwards, i'm sure, was then to figure what to emphasize and what to bury in the mix -- i'm betting the mixes were an engineer's nightmare, although the finished results are plenty compelling and certainly full of variety and unexpected moments of beauty and chaos (not necessarily both at the same time). There are some occasionally sublime instrumental moments (particularly on guitar and piano) scattered throughout the disc, often deliberately obscured by media overkill and eccentric chatter -- a comment, perhaps, on the ability to find moments of beauty in a world filled with blaring, senseless media overload?

As an additional note, check out this statement from Rev. 99 regarding the issue of copyright laws, sampling, and intimidation from the big boys o' muzak; not only is it pretty interesting in its own right, it also explains why the songs "Britney Spears Autopsy" and "Notes On A Nervous Breakdown" aren't on the CD (replaced instead by silence for the duration of each track's original length). You can also download the original tracks from there and see what the fuss is about for yourself, if you're so inclined....

N/A (exhausted): How much more of this torture are you going to subject me to?

TG (still curled up in his lap): As much as you can take, boo-boo kitty. And then... then... (makes kissy faces)

N/A: AAAAAAAH!!!! All of a sudden I feel a review coming on....

TG: Don't forget, three sentences or less.

N/A: Guys from New Jersey should not try and play country music. I have a feeling that had Kleinman and Cronin stuck to the garage-rock type stuff like "Bootfull of Piss," IF I HAD A HORSE... would have been a much more enjoyable listen. [n/a]

Robert Rich / Lustmord - STALKER [Fathom]

Inspired by Andrey Tarkovsky's film "Stalker", this album works as an alternate soundtrack. Brooding and minimalistic at times, the music transports one over to the dank, dark, deep rescesses of the mind where anything can happen. There is an undercurrent of introspection and sadness, combined with the shimmering and exquisite sounds conveying the profound tension of managing life in crisis. Listen with the lights out, if you dare. [yol]

This peculiar batch o' sounds springs to life courtesy of Dave Weir and Erik Doole, both formerly and currently of bands which such names as Exploding Tits, Art Martian, Cleavers, and Exploder 01, and it's definitely hard to peg... some of it, like the opening "Dirty Brain," appears to be embryonic pop songs that have been deliberately recorded in distorted and grotesque fashion with (equally deliberate) hits o' hiss and noise thrown in at strategic measures. Others (like "My Prairie") are closer to "traditional" experimental sounds, with hiss and obscure ambient sounds forming the bedrock for collages of found sound, samples, and other sonic effluvia. On "Seeking Fit," the strange rhythmic sounds are supplanted by droning ghost vox and ping-pong efx. Drones abound all over the disc, usually in the background, but even more of interest, there are passages of acoustic guitar (sometimes recorded so the source is difficult to recognize) in several places as well, an interesting move for something that largely wouldn't be out of place in a collection heavy with Nurse With Wound and Hafler Trio and other sound-collage artists. One of the more interesting tracks is "Contraception," whrere a heavy subterranean drone washes over and largely buries what might be an actual song (a loose one, true, but one nonetheless); "Regeneration," by contrast, is almost nothing but hiss 'n drone, settling early in the low frequencies and staying there for the long haul. Loops of noise-drone are the anchor for "A Prowler in Sunshine," which also incorporates a lot of other Leslie-organ-style efx before fading out and leading into "Orange Socks," another of the acoustic jams leavened with barely audible background noises. A strange and disorienting debut.

Manly Swedes with a serious seventies fuzzrock fixation and an appealing fascination for big-assed women, judging from the cover art. (Since I also approve of big-assed women, they gain valuable brownie points right off the bat.) They also kneel at the altar of Black Sabbath and (probably, judging from the fuzzy noodling into to "House of the Wicked") guys like Grand Funk Railroad, which is okay by me. Heavy death by fuzzbox and amp implosion, mon. There's no point in going into each song blow by blow, for this entire disc rocks like a satanic pee dog pooping on Christina Aguilera's dainty foot. This beats the pee out of whatever passes for "rock" on the Billboard charts right now. That limp biscuit with the fake bug eyes in Limp Weewee and the doofuses in Korn aren't even worthy to suck Rencoret and Bravo's hefty salamis. One might argue that they perhaps step on their wah pedals a tad too often, but at least they don't do it for extended periods of time (it would get in the way of the brontosaurus riffing). It doesn't hurt, either, that the aforementioned Francisco Rencoret is also one evil-sounding dude. Combine him with a whole band o' guys bent on refusing to admit that the nineties ever happened (probably a good idea, really) and what you have is the sound of God sticking His foot up the whole world's ass. If listening to this really loud doesn't make you want to smoke several bowls and poke big-assed girls and set your neighbor's minivan on fire then there's something wrong with you. I need more of this. So do you.

This is jazz, all right, and it's plenty damn free, but i'm betting its roots are more in the new-age jazz movement than in the free-skronk of, say, Borbetomagus, or even the old-school of roots embodied in acts like AMM. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but this does mean that it's all about free jazz as the exploration of structures and textures, not about pure blinding sonic immolation for the sheer unbridled joy of it. Robinson waxes philsophical in the liner notes about the iduoi and his entire concept behind the interplay of two performers, and he puts his cash where his tenor sax is by performing (to wildly varied effect) with a different player on every song. Some names show up more than once (trombonist George Lewis, pianist Anthony Davis), but for the most part he's truly improvising -- mostly from scratch, occasionally from something a tad more predetermined but still open enough for plenty of improvising -- with a different performer each time. My favorites include the shifting, often chaotic but never out of control riffing between him and Anthony Davis on "Now and Here," the bizarre bird-call stylings of "Hogs & Swine" (with George Lewis), the repetitive riffing and delayed call-and-response of "C.T." (again with pianist Davis), and "In the Tradition," with its shambling (but consistent) drums and the trilling uberfigures of Robinson's tenor sax. The heavy, rich drones of "Birdrock Dub" come courtesy of sparring with Michael Dessen's trombone, and the mournful, drawn-out tones are some of the best-sounding stuff on the album. One track that stands out is "Sblat," mainly because guest instrumentalist Stephanie Johnston provides electronics, and the sound alone makes it very different from the other tracks on here. Michael Dessen returns on "Throne for Two" and that's a plenty fine way to end an album as far as i'm concerned, too. The tones on this album make me think of an earlier era of jazz, and this is a good thing.

From Mandragora comes more sonic filth with poignant, sensitive artwork of naked chicks with goat heads. This is loud, disturbed deathdrone from the word go. Three guys from North Carolina more or less in Thrones mode churn out grotesque slabs of dissonant guitar noise (big, squealing stuck-pig mojo in hideously dissonant intervals, just like the dude with the excruciating guitar tone in the sadly-lamented Arab on Radar) on grating, intimidating spoo like "jesus told you so," "hiroshima," and "what is sharper than the sword," and the rest of the time they drone 'n churn like the bad thoughts of the alien creeping in the bowels of the Nostronomo. (Remember, in space no one can hear you scream because the soundtrack's too loud.) A lot of these tracks feature any number of other unexpected instruments (piano, etc.) for dramatic effect, but the streetcleaner sounds are the main meat o' the enchilada here. Some of the more hypnotic moments ("I have been an axe in the hand," for instance) suggest what Pink Floyd might have become had Syd not fried his central nervous system, and "to avert ones eyes" suggests that they aren't solely reliant on volume and aggression for the production of their otherworldly doom. Some of this borders on the purely scary, like "kuate palace -- three piece suite," which starts of like the sound of soldiers marching off to war before turning into a forbidding martial psychodrone, from there on spiraling even deeper into dark psychosis. Through all the different moods of the piece, chanting vocals lend it an otherworldly aspect, like the sound of having stumbled onto a ritual for rising the Elder Gods or something equally creeped-out. I particularly like the droning flutes at the beginning of "painted men / yarmar uprising" -- the flutes that eventually swallowed by the growing thunder-drone that gradually dominates. They even wallow in the dark-ambient trough with the appropriately downed-out closer "the master's on his way," all black wind and shuddering drone and the vague but chilling sound of goat-lords convening in the background. Possibly a tad Melvins-oriented for the purists, but we approve nonetheless (their deathbleat is at least more consistent, to be sure).

TMU: Okay, let's see... the poop sheet says it's documentation of Rollerball and OvO live on tour in the States and Italy. Rollerball like playing improv sets with other musicians, including Bill Horist, and OvO are apparently avant noise or something. So we're expecting... what are we expecting as we prepare to press the PLAY button, o my brother?

TTBMD: Anything with Bill Horist is good, so my hopes are high.

TMU: Yes. Mind you, he only appears on one track, "hiperspasm." Shall we begin?

TTBMD: Yes. I am betting that the Bill Horist track is the best one on the cd.

TMU (presses play): This is "demon paw," by OvO. I hear a tortured wind instrument and... is that a xylophone? Such tinkling notes amid the tortured wailing....

TTBMD: Sounds like the Boredoms. And I think that's a piano behind that crazed voice.

TMU: On "hiperspasm" we have a nifty delayed rhythm going... I'm guessing that's Horist at work....

TTBMD: Pretty damn cool. Some acoustic guitars amongst Omide Hatoba-style weirdness. Are these guys from Japan or what?

TMU: This is Rollerball, and I think both bands are from the U.S. I greatly approve of this -- cryptic rhythms, percussion from the "wrong" instruments, clouds o' melody and harmony amid chaos and cacaphony... this guys swing a big billy stick and I approve.

TTBMD: Very soothing sounds from Rollerball.

TMU: I wonder if they have anything to do with the brilliant movie of the same name with James Caan. Not the horrible remake, that hideous piece of shit.

TTBMD: No shit, my brother. This has to be the best track on the cd.

TMU: Okay, now we're back to OvO and already I'm grokkin' the drummer on "walker." He's got a hip beat going behind the squirrels chattering.

TTBMD: I like it, but it's nothing that original. I think I would rather hear a different band doing that style of music. Nevertheless, this is interesting.

TMU: You are a difficult man to please, o my brother.... Let us hear the next Rollerball track, perhaps your ears shall be soothed.

TTBMD (listening): Freaky!

TMU: What the hell are they doing down in that tar pit? This is "hagakure," by the way.

TTBMD: Intense noise freejazz with great vocals.

TMU (studying track listing): I think this is OvO. This business of scattering the band's tracks across the disc is most confusing, and I am sure, entirely deliberate. There's some intensely weird shit going on with the flute or the sax or whatever that tortured wailing thing is.

TTBMD: This is pretty cool. Better than the earlier OvO track.

TMU: Look, now it's Rollerball again with "brighton," which I'm guessing is a reference to the suburb of Boston.

TTBMD: You can't go wrong with Rollerball. This is a dark, fluid, psychedelic drone from a distant planet. Or from a suburb of Boston. What's the difference?

TMU: Not much, o my brother. I greatly dig this. The sound of boats in the distance on the harbor... fuck, that sure ended all of a sudden, didn't it? I am jolted from my reverie. But "until yesterday" continues in the same vein as the band expands the idea, sort of.

TTBMD: This is good.

TMU: Foghorns in the distance....

TTBMD: There's a little more action going on here.

TMU: The boats are moving out. The lighthouse flickers like a dead and sleeping god as the dark clouds close in. The soothing sound of the apocalypse, arriving to set us all free and to liberate our very souls. HEEWACK!

TTBMD: I like the stuff this label puts out. They should put out a Rollerball full-length, if they haven't already.

TMU: It would be a wise idea indeed.

TTBMD: There's some sexy chick singing now....

TMU: Not to me, she isn't.

TTBMD: ... some kind of pseudo-folk song.

TMU: An ambient pseudo-folk song. Drifting allow in billowing clouds of dark sonic fluffiness. The orchestral moves of... of... fuck, i forget where i was going with this. What the hell, we're on to the next track... i'm betting this is OvO. Yes, this is "midnight playboy" by OvO. Dangerous moves with an atomic bullhorn. And reverb. A lot of reverb.

TTBMD: Not bad -- a great title for the song.

TMU: They're being most loud now. It's pretty devolved-sounding here... the natives in the jungle are getting restless. You know, i have this question i'm wondering about here -- are we more like the Siskel and Eibert of metal reviews, or the Wayne and Garth of metal reviews? I really gotta know this.

TTBMD: We're like the Barnum and Bailey of music reviews. And this isn't heavy metal.

TMU: You mean this stuff we're listening to isn't heavy metal? Well, fuck.

TTBMD: It's more sound collage. And I like it. Who is on this track?

TMU: It's OvO. See, they're comin' on in the third round here... the body blows are coming fast 'n furious.... Now they're gonna tell us all about "my first cowboy." I like this pounding business, the drummer is swinging his big fat mojo stick and it's not gonna be pretty....

TTBMD: this is like some industrial type of thing. I am unaffected.

TMU: Fucking hell, who can fucking think with that goddamn howling racket going on over and over and over like endless loops of a pig being butchered? This is gruesome, man. I am afraid of these people. They have bad intentions and are probably rude at afternoon tea socials.

TTBMD: This is stupid, this new song.

TMU: This is supposedly Rollerball, but it sounds more like OvO. Called "fallout" and features a lot of people saying dirty words over and over. I am bored. I am a bored fucking cheese. But then they stop fucking around and "pig fucker" not only has a way better title, but also sounds much cooler. The drummer is back. This is a good development.

TTBMD: (grooves)

TMU: He has the funk! The Mothership is IN THE HOUSE! What the fuck is with the wailing stuff?

TTBMD: An interesting direction for Rollerball.

TMU: I think their amps go to eleven.

TTBMD: This OvO song that follows -- I like it. This is good. So far.

TMU: It's called "bear 13" for absolutely no reason that i can see. There's some odd vocalizing going on here and lots of loops and tapes and effluvia.

TTBMD: Interesting construction of sounds. I like how they put the girl's vocals on top....

TMU: And now they're hitting shit.

TTBMD: Hey, who's playing the banjo on "jacopoism"?

TMU: Damned if i know. They have sketchy liner notes. I like this, though. Experimental banjo. A new genre, ripe for commercialization and strip-mining.

TTBMD: I could do without this song.

TMU: I like it, it reminds me of... of... (stretching) Henry Mancini.

TTBMD: That's just a damned insult!

TMU: To Rollerball or Mancini? Don't answer that....

TTBMD: This song, "estrogen," is more like Henry Mancini. Is that crazy or what?

TMU: I don't know, I'm lost in mystic clouds of melody. This is still OvO, for anybody who's keeping score.

TTBMD: This is okay, this song "castle everyday."

TMU: I cannot hear you, I'm still in the cloud... oh wait, i like the intro to "white elefant." Rollerball have returned to freak their cocktail jazz out for a spin. They gonna get down! Like James the Soul Man Brown! HEEWACK!

TTBMD: This is a song to be taken very seriously. This is a great, great song.

TMU: It's got the same drone mojo going as Worms on PELICAN SONGS.

TTBMD: Don't get me started on Worms. Worms are great.

TMU: This song meets with my approval. It is most mellow and jazzlike, but after-dinner jazz. This is the music you listen to when you're hanging out with gangsters after a hard day of shooting people. Relieves tension....

TTBMD: I love their seventies-style throwback on "peter piper's brother." They do all this crazy noise shit also and it's good. They are a very diverse band.

TMU: This is like Tangerine Dream during their "dark" period. Evil keyboard drone. I much like. They have peculiar ideas about beats. Now comes the last one, "il doppio (sex maniac)" -- OvO makes their final stand in a big bucket o' racket.

TTBMD: Not bad. (gives thumbs up) This might be one of the best tracks on the cd.

TMU: Great clouds of carcinogenic smoke rise to the sky as the wicker man burns. Yes. And yet, so suddenly, it ends. It is the end of time... time out of mind... and time to move on to the next cd.

TTBMD: That song should have been like twenty minutes long.

TMU: Perhaps thirty, even.

Now this is hip-hop the way I like it -- swank beats provided by real musicians, some intelligence behind the samples, funk 'n jazz served up in extra-large portions, and engaging rappers. Favorites include: "Rock You," "Rolling With Heat," "Thought @ Work," "Break You Off" (featuring Musiq), "Water," and "Complexity" (featuring Jill Scott). The band reminds me of a jazzier, looser Public Enemy at times, and this is the first hip-hop band I've heard since IT TAKES A NATION OF MILLIONS... that I've thought might be as powerful and good as Public Enemy was when they were firing on all cylinders. I gather there's a whole pile of previous Roots discs awaiting my discovery, too (how did I get this far without hearing them? ARGH), so at least now I have something to look forward to in life.... The release also comes with a DVD that includes two swell videos ("Distortion to Static" and "Proceed," both from earlier releases), two live appearances on MTV2 for "The Ultimate" and "Double Trouble," and a bonus clip of behind-the-scenes footage with the band in and out of the studio.

Or maybe that's the other way around -- the band is Truck Van Rental and the disc title is RUBBER CEMENT. Hard to tell these days. First of all, this disc is waaaay fucking long. Even the liner notes suggest listening to part one first (all 19 tracks of part one), waiting 24 hours, then listening to part 2 (a whopping 11 tracks). I'd say why not put out two discs? Materials aren't that expensive anymore... but I digress. I'm supposed to be talking about the noise, not the packaging.

I didn't get off to a good start with this disc, but the longer I listened to it, the more interesting it got. Perhaps the artist is just suffering from a case of bad editing -- or perhaps there was too much foreplay before getting down to the real noisy business.... tracks are kept relatively short and interesting. About halfway through the first part (tracks 1-19) I felt like I was taking some strange surrealistic factory tour with headphones on to amplify the sounds of all the weird little things being manufactured. That's when I really started to warm up to the disc. Sometimes I could hear what seemed to be forges, sometimes the controls for the machinery. A good outing, but some editing is really in order to find the best pieces and put together a solid outing rather than a mixed one. [bc]

Ruby -- SALT PETER [Creation / Work]

Oooo, i LIKE this. This being the new "solo" project of Lesley Rankine, former banshee howler for Silverfish (you know, the gal who's famous for screaming "HIPS! TITS! LIPS! POWER!" and creating a hip mantra for all those damn t-shirts). I intially approached this with a wee bit o' trepidation -- Lesley was the only thing i liked about Silverfish in the first place and this CD is getting big airplay on alternative radio, usually the kiss o' death as far as i'm concerned -- but i was finally convinced by seeing it on sale, uh, cheap. And now that i've bought it, i can't stop playing the damn thing....

It's essentially a dance album (!) laced with poisonous lyrics, skewed samples, and hypnotic singing -- Lesley's fond of trancelike mantras, a big plus to my ears. While there's plenty of emphasis on the beat -- especially in the first two tracks, "Flippin' the Bird" and "Salt Water Fish" -- the eerie "Heidi" is less dependent upon beats than upon scratchy samples and waiflike singing (geez, i didn't even know she COULD sound waiflike). And when the beat does kick in for real, it's accompanied by a really weird set o' rhythmic samples that are much more imaginative than most of what you usually find on dance records. "Tiny Meat" is the one the radio's playing to death, and while it's okay -- in fact, better than most of the stuff being played around it on the airwaves -- it's actually one of the weaker tracks here, in that it's nowhere near as twisted as the rest of the songs on the album. (Must be why they picked it for the lead single....)

The standout is "Paraffin," one of the most hypnotic things you'll ever hear -- scary-sounding chant mantra lyrics set against a clocklike beat and droning synths and twitchy samples in the background, all arranged in a flawless pattern that flows like a glacier cutting through arctic water. "Hoops" sounds reminiscent of NIN and employs a drum that i'd SWEAR is sampled from Ice-T's "Fly By," and "Pine" is a clunky sort of industrial thing that breaks up the dance atmosphere for a moment before turning into the hardest-rocking thing on the album. Then it's back to the dance routine with "Swallow Baby" before getting weird again with "The Whole is Equal to the Sum of the Parts" (where a fucked-up sample loop turns into an actual song before everything gets loud and noisy) and "Bud." The last track, "Carondelet," is a strange, droning affair in which she receives assistance from members of Swans and Pigface, so you KNOW it's kind of grotesque... not to mention the longest thing on the record.

This is one of the coolest things i've ever heard. I hope this isn't a one-off kind of thing, 'cause i want... MORE....

Now this is what I like: a wild and varied bunch of experimental musicians, some of whom are known more for making funny noises than what most people would recognize as music, coming together to make something considerably more straightforward and surprisingly accessible. Said musicians include Bill Frisell, Julian Priester, Michael White, Hans Teuber, Jay Roulston, BIll Horist, Amy Denio, Jovino Santos Neto, Jeff Hay, Ned Gitkind, Jacques Willis, Elizabeth Pupo-Walker, Jeff Busch, Erik Anderson, Issac Marshall, Farko Dosumov, Fiora McGill, and Josephine Howell -- recognizable names 'n faces from all walks of experimental music and improv -- and what's surprising is how well they work together. Rucker -- nominally a cellist, here playing bass in various forms -- presents eight pieces, played with various combos and occasionally solo or with minimal instrumentation, all thematically organized around the subject of the Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment and its aftermath. This is protest jazz, in the vein of Coltrane's "Alabama," only for the modern age, dig? Great moments abound on this disc, such as Farko Dusamov's bass solo on "every now and then..." ... Tracks like "history of an apology" are rooted in traditional jazz stylings, but benefit from the subtle integration of unusual textures and experimental sounds. A hypnotic sense of melody pervades the disc, particularly in the horns, and they rhythm section never fails to be engaging (the horns on "all the things i thought i didn't want" are particularly thrilling). On "lost years," Rucker and the band turn things over to Josephine Howell, whose wordless yet soulful vocalizing needs no fixed lyrics to communicate its message. A fine recording of intriguing ensemble action. The enhanced disc also includes more information on the experiment that inspired the song cycle.

OK -- Hootie and the Blowfish and Toad the Wet Sprocket opened some doors to pop music that should never have been opened. [tmu: Ouchie!] Now, any college band with a little bit of money and no real direction can start commanding attention - and the critics call it "novel," "fusion," "eclectic," or whatever new Queen's English term that can be invented to remain pleasant and not tell a band they suck. [tmu: Oooo! Double ouchie!] I guess if you like college folk rock stuff, you might like this. But, as unprofessional as it may sound, I don't. These guys should stay in cafes and put out the tip jar. [bc]

One could be forgiven for thinking this has turned into the "Ernesto Issue" -- he's all over the review section this time, isn't he? But that's all right, because we at the Hellfortress Beneath the Ice deeply grok his mad guitar stylings. On this disc of experimental sonics he's joined by Lx Rudis and Andre Custodio, two equally strange purveyors of sound who apparently roam freely in Ernesto's orbit (and everybody else's, apparently -- Rudis alone has recorded music for over forty video games and performed at the first Digital Be-In, among other things, and Custodio has been around the block just about as many times). The instrumentation should give you an approximate idea of how "out there" they are -- Rudis is gettin' jiggy with a Matrix 12 (whatever the hell that is), Custodio flails away at a darbuka, tom-tom, and Line 6 POD, and Ernesto provides the audio molestation of an acoustic guitar, violin, and voice. Not that you'd be able to guess any of this from actually listening to the disc, which sounds like short bursts of plinking and whirring and flanging and beating on things. It's pretty chaotic, to say the least, although there's definitely some sense of purpose behind the free-form improv -- it's chaos, sure, but controlled chaos (well, most of the time).

The disc is broken into two main chunks: "Three College Radio-Ready Edits" (three performance pieces in the four to five minute range each) and "Overthruster" (27 chunklets ranging from three seconds to nearly six minutes each). The performances from the the first chunk are close to being actual songs, especially the third (and longest) one, which features shimmering drones and swirly sounds along with the usual instrument abuse. They really like reverb on this track. The other tracks are just as otherworldly and dense with sound; (05) includes mouth noises and percussion along with what sounds like (but probably isn't) a well-tuned xylophone; later tracks feature bleeping video-game noises over layers of drone, exotic sounds from whacking on stuff, strange efx processing, and a wide range of weird tones and sounds. The disc actually works better, i think, if you don't even bother with trying to differentiate between the songs and just let it play in the background as the semi-ambient sound of a modern world caving in on itself. Information overload leads to sonic distress, that seems to be the collective mantra here. There are many strange sounds here that defy description. On (23) they have some decidedly evil-sounding vox growling away in the background and a vaguely black-metal tone happening under the clinking and bumping and sound efx; perhaps this is what happens when you let whacked-out experimental musicians listen to Abruptum and the like? Check out that obnoxious wailing on (24), too....

If you're hep to hearing how many truly exotic and disturbed sounds can be wrestled out of a guitar and a few other instruments, particularly if you're down with the sonic madness of giants like Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra (and maybe even not-so-giants like Sonic Youth), you'll want to look into this. If you're not hep to these things, you'll probably find this utterly unlistenable, but that would be your own fault....

The man with the hummingbird hands (that's Tatsuya Yoshida to you and me) returns with a typically inscrutable album of progressive hyperspeed jump-cut free-jazz, or whatever it is they call what Ruins does. For the uninitiated, Ruins is two men -- Yoshida on drums and vox, Hisashi Sasaki on bass and vox (where are the keyboards? i thought they had keyboards too) -- playing like they have eight arms apiece. You would never guess from listening to these dense, cyclonic mini-epics that they were being performed (usually live) by just two men. I'd have a hard time believing it too, if i hadn't recently seen Yoshida play a keyboard, guitar and drums all at the same time (and quite frantically, too) without ever missing a beat. They are the supermen of Japanese progressive free-jazz, all right? Imagine John Zorn's Naked City or Painkiller with far more finesse and less tendency toward angst and you are stumbling among the Ruins, like a lost soul looking for a bathroom on Easter Island....

As for the music itself, it's far beyond the understanding of my tiny mind, that's for sure. It doesn't help in that regard that they are apparently singing in something besides Japanese -- the printed lyrics don't look like any language i've ever seen, in fact, and with titles like "Gharaviss Perrdoh" and "Jallamjikko," with lyrics to match, i have to wonder what the hell is going on here. But that's all right; the sonic onslaught is truly a spectacle to behold, and it's not necessary to "understand" any of it to grok its dazzling proficiency. After sixteen shortish bursts of blinding speed and complexity, they do something amusing that's probably a bit more within the average listener's grasp: a series of medleys. The first, "Classical Music Medley," manages to cram in their interpretation of snippets of nearly twenty classical pieces into just over a minute's time; the second, "Hard Rock Medley," mushes together brief chunks of classic-rock tunes by the likes of Kiss, Black Sabbath, Aerosmith, Uriah Heep, Steppenwolf, Johnny Winter, Grand Funk Railroad, Led Zeppelin, Boston, Deep Purple, and more, into one long crazed high-speed jam that lasts just over two and a half minutes. The album ends with "Progressive Rock Medley," which purees well-known riffs from such luminaries as King Crimson, Yes, Univers Zero, Gong, Pink Floyd, Genesis, Camel, Focus, Magma, Caravan, and so on, all in the space of exactly two and a half minutes.

This is interesting to me because it reveals a side of Yoshida so totally different from his role in YBO2, where i am used to hearing him (i may be one of the only people on earth who came to awareness of Yoshida through YBO2 rather than Ruins). There, he's far more straightfoward; here, he's like a man possessed, hands flying all over the place, and apparently his cohort on bass is a kindred spirit in that regard. Fascinating listening if you have the stamina for the breakneck pace.

The title says it all: Ruins (Yoshida Tatsuya on vocals and drums, Sasaki Hisashi on bass and vocals) captured live in Paris, France and Tokyo, Japan while on tour in 1997. It wasn't mixed until 2002 (why? who knows?) and just recently saw the light of day in this limited run of 500 copies (mine is on blue vinyl; dunno if that's true for the entire run). Those familiar with the Ruins and their diabolical methods of madness will find this true to form and most satisfying; those not hep to the band's hyperkinetic aesthetic and sense of humor may find this more on the mystifying side. The sixteen bursts of manic energy here are executed with the usual superhuman skill and speed -- Tatsuya hammers out deranged and absurdly complex patterns while Hisashi matches him on bass, and sometimes they drag out a keyboard or dig into deliberately irrelevant samples, noise, all while chanting and shouting and singing with extraordinary gusto. Their music tends to sound very much like complicated but "normal" free jazz being played back at triple-speed, which makes it all the more terrifying to actually witness them creating this savage and jaw-dropping fury of unpredictably complex rhythms. This isn't particularly "better" or "worse" or even "different" than any other Ruins release, but it's certainly a swank platter of synapse-frying technical skills married to a purely demented sensibility. Plus it's on vinyl, you fool. Check it out while you can (assuming you still can, natch).

This is a three-song ep (also available on vinyl from Plate Lunch) from the Ohio grindcore band Rune (formerly Amputation), who specialize in a highly corrosive brand of extreme metal typified by nuclear-winter guitars and highly technical drumming, all at high velocity. The sound is relentlessly grim and aggressive, and the lyrics are squarely in the politically conscious/correct tradition of traditional grindcore (maybe even creeping into emo territory on "106 Degrees"). To say that they have their poo-poo together musically would be a serious understatement; these guys ply their highly technical moves with relentless precision. Their guitar tone is often reminiscent of early Swans (only played a thousand times faster), which adds another layer of oppressiveness to their caustic sound. I greatly approve of this. Anybody hep to intensely brutal grindcore should be all over this. Myself, i'm ready to hear a full-length release from them -- good as this is, i'm a greedy li'l pig and want more....