v/a -- ALCHEMISM [Weschelbalg / Alchemy]

Another various artists compilation from the land o' the rising sun... and a fine one this is, consisting of artists from the Alchemy stable. Ten artists/ bands are represented here in fifteen songs, encompassing everything from quiet ambient pop (Shintaro Sugiyama), blues/rock (Auschwitz, INU, The Genbaku Onanies), punk (Sekiri, Ultra Bide, SS, High Rise) and noise (Hanatarashi, Hijokaidan). This is one of the better samplers i've heard; the track selection is nearly perfect, with plenty of variety and little filler. I particularly liked the one quiet track (Sugiyama's "Newton's Oblige," a moment of calm in an ocean of blitzed-out rock and noise frenzy) and the second of the Hijokaidan tracks, "B.A.D.," which reminds me remarkably of the controlled-fusion noise hurricane generated in Allegory Chapel Ltd.'s "Predatory Instincts" -- only here the noise is totally unchained, not just cycling from speaker to speaker like a speadily-moving cyclone, but jumping back and forth like jagged bursts of white-hot sheet lightning. The SS get nostalgia points for their totally deranged "speed-will-kill-you-if-my-flying-cymbal-doesn't- first" overkill rampage through the Ramones' "Blitzkreig Bop." Of course, since they "play" it at about 3,000 bpm, it's over before you have time to blink.... FNORD: WARNING: I have absolutely NO IDEA how you find this goodie... it was sent to me by my mad-dog samurai connection in Japan, so i would assume the only way for people outside of Japan to get it would be directly through Alchemy, unless you have a REALLY COOL indie music store in your chosen city of residence....

v/a -- A MEANS TO AN END [Virgin]

Okay -- we can probably agree that the Sex Pistols and Ramones built the house of punk, then the Clash came in and kicked holes in the walls, but Joy Division are who put in the reinforced columns that made it possible to build a second floor and beyond. This is the TRUTH (a sparrow told me so), and if you don't agree with me, well, go start your own ezine, ok? So it's a good thing when people erect audio shrines to Ian Curtis' homage, and fortunately this is one of the better ones. There aren't any bad tracks here (although there are a couple that don't really "add" to the Joy Division canon, either). Of course, anytime discussion turns to Joy Division, you're always dealing with the Ghost Card: the image of the Swinging Curtis that has long obscured what Joy Division was originally about and thrust them into the Goth territory (thus paving the way for lots of tortured souls with only a smidgen of Curtis' talent). Regardless of Curtis' personal problems that led him to achieve martyr status by hanging himself on the eve of Joy Division's first U.S. tour, what REALLY made him significant in terms of music history was this: he was the first to demonstrate possible to convey wide-ranging emotion, to be positively gripping even, with a limited tonal palette. In other words, even though he was a limited singer at a time when this was still considered "commercially unacceptable," his conviction and passion managed to overcome that barrier and allowed him to establish a distinctive style that has since been ripped off more times than i care to count.

So what's happening on the tribute? Well, most the performers here are doing pretty straightforward covers of your fave JD tunes, only with "improved" (more or less) production. Honeymoon Stitch's (a couple of Peppers and, uh, some other guys) cover of "Day of the Lords" sticks so close to the original that the only way you can tell them apart at low volume is the singing -- Ian this ain't. Moby's "New Dawn Fades," though, might as well BE Joy Division, right down to the vocals, which is kind of disconcerting. By the same token, Coedine's "Atmosphere" adds nothing but a bit more heft, and Further's "Insight" is virtually indistinguishable from the original. I thought REINTERPRETATION was the point here, guys....

Beyond those early tracks, though, things start to get interesting, beginning with Low's incredible slow-core version of "Transmission," which is just flat-out amazing and incredibly beautiful with its slow-building crescendos and its substitution of ascending arpeggios for the solo. Other interesting moments include the female vox of "Love Will Tear Us Apart," a bizarre and thudding techno remake of "Isolation" (courtesy of Starchildren, rumored to be a Pumpkins offshoot), which is actually pretty damn interesting. Kendra Smith's version of "Heart and Soul" is technoish, too, in fact, and intriguing in its own right, although the original is still better. And the radical reinterpretation of "As You Said" courtesy of Tortoise not only actually expands on where Joy Division might have been going, but actually improves a song i never particularly liked (!)

One thing about Joy Division -- everybody's so obsessed with the gloom and melancholy angle that they forget about the ANGER that was often simmering beneath the surface. A few bands here apparently haven't forgotten, judging from the slashing guitars on Girls Against Boys' stellar version of "She's Lost Control" and the manic fever of godheadSilo's "They Walked In Line." Best of all, Desert Storm manages to turn "Warsaw" into a pure whirlwind of sonic aggression that even includes an interlude of Bowie's "Warszawa." And Face to Face's "Interzone" manages to make Joy Division sound like the Dead Kennedys, if such a thing is possible.

The only real thing to find fault with here is the lack of a couple of key JD tracks -- particularly "Shadowplay" and "The Eternal" -- but i suppose they had to stop SOMEWHERE, right? And who knows, maybe those will turn up on the forthcoming tribute from Cleopatra....

v/a -- AMERICANOISE [Mother Savage Noise Productions]

Sheer gut noise-blowout... a legacy of brutality... wallowing in sonic filth... all this and MORE at your disposal! MSNP delivers another loud and obnoxious compilation for "severe noiseheads" and it lives up to its title (even though it "cheats" by including one non-American, Montreal's Knurl, but what the fuck, that's close enough, we got nothing against the Canadians). At 120 minutes (with stellar sound, lest you start getting worried about tape length/quality ratio considerations) and including such participants as Emil Beaulieau, Skin Crime, Death Squad, Taint, Chinawhite, Namanax, Daniel Menche, Abfall, Tropism, Knurl, Stimbox, Crank Sturgeon, Limacon, White Rose, AMK/The Haters, OVMN, One Dark Eye, and (of course) Macronympha). There's way too much here to go track by track, but it's all pretty damn savage -- all meat, no filler, and all loud and painful. Fuck art, let's drill holes in someone's skull, mon!

Highlights include: Shrill cut-up filth from Knurl ("Tetramix (excerpt)"), explosive bursts of pure demolition fury from Skin Crime ("White Trash Serenade"), the shuddering cyclotron rumble of Daniel Menche's "More Rooms to Explore," sadistic stuttergun audio assault and samples (of a perverted nature, natch) in Taint's "Teenage Discipline," Abfall'swhirling shriek of the mutilated ("Das Chemische Produkt"), and the subsonic bleating of Stimbox's "The Nightmare Continues." Namanax provides a white-noise hurricane in "Turbulence (edit)," while Death Squad pummels the listener into submission with the churning bed of avalanche sounds in "Neurology (excerpt)." Crank Sturgeon's "Kakistos" will have you wondering if your speakers have finally given up the ghost, and then Macronympha's "Political Kill Time" kicks in to equal the earlier Death Squad track in pure sonic street-leveling potential. Tropism implements the supremely aggravating effects of static distorted beyond all proportion on "Dirt, Disease, Crime" and White Rose gets positively catastrophic on "Effervescence," throwing in everything including the kitchen sink and setting the blender to "puree." Chinawhite's contribution ("Ovencleaner") combines hurricane noises, repetitive lockstep hammering, and other top- secret noises to approximate the sound of a Concorde being stripped away layer by layer during a sandstorm. OVMN provides sandblasting in the background, shrill drilling in the foreground to helpfully obliterate your senses on "Cocaine Erection," then Death Squad (again!) does you in for good with the closing track "Porcelain Fuck Machine/Charlie FF World (edit)," a blast of power combining stun-phaser mayhem and blasts of complete heart disruption that is the only fitting end for a compilation as intensely brutal as this one.

As with nearly all MSNP releases, this comes with a sizeable booklet (crammed full of obnoxious sleaze graphics); it also comes packaged in a deluxe hard-plastic slipcase box. This is deluxe edition is limited to only 150 copies, so if the thought of having your brain erased and squeegeed clean for two hours flat appeals to you, contact MSNP quickly... they will go FAST....

Strange sounds from a wild variety of people, including Monotract, Thurston Moore, Solmania (he's still around!), the Flying Luttenbachers, and others you never heard of. It's definitely not for the weak -- the very first track on side one, Ando Kumihiro's "contrast zero," is guaranteed to clear the room of all who do not enjoy weird skronking noises, which is good, because afterwards you won't have any conversational babble to distract you from the rest of the album. Monotract's offering, "in gai & dan," is possibly even stranger (although easier to listen to) -- over a wobbling anti-percussion track of sorts, somebody mutters and croons like a drunken lounge singer while someone clatters aimlessly about, until it all briefly turns into a "song" of sorts, only to break apart into weirdly-processed chattering vox before returning to something vaguely resembling actual music (but only for a moment). Solmania's track, "loop 7," is full of the catastrophic noise guitar for which he's known, and sounds like a jet airplane being sucked into a garbage compactor -- eek! The contribution from the Flying Luttenbachers ("dog death") is an even more creatively addled hodgepodge of strange sounds that swirl and whirl like miniature tornadoes racing across the landscape; Fukktron's "cd" is apparently the result of mixing together many segments of butchered and deformed skipping CDs and sounds like a grotesque form of heavy metal from Mars. Thurston Moore's "o michigan" appears to be snippets of songs from Michigan artists, weaved into his own guitar work (i think); as much as it pains me to admit it (i really don't like Sonic Youth), this is probably the most cohesive thing on the album....

The flip side of the album (yes, this is an actual real live LP, like an artifact of the past or something) is pretty much more of the same art-damaged aesthetic. I like the Jonas Lindgren track ("myronrnas krig-vit" -- where do they come up with these titles?), which begins as a low rumble (possibly amplified tape hiss); as the track progresses, crunchy noises start to eat away at the foundation in menacing fashion as evil hissing noises rise in the background. Of the seven other tracks on the second side, the ones i like best are "Yoko is a Punk Rocker" ( a "duet" of sorts between Kazumato Endo and Yoko Sato featuring Sato's voice in different modes -- singing, laughing, conversing -- laid over in snippets as shots o' white noise shatter the track from time to time), John Wiese's "Astronomy" (a noisy collision of crazed sounds), and Automobile's "Departing 52," a low-key stretch of violin-scraping and faint crashing sounds like glass bottles being dropped out a window. As noise collections go, this is one of the more interesting ones....

v/a -- AN EAR TO AN ATMOSPHERE [Rack and Ruin]

This business of not labeling CDs has got to STOP, dammit... i spent the first part of this review puzzling over why this sounded so un-electrolike until i finally realized that i was, in fact, listening to the Crawling With Tarts disc sitting right next to it in the disc changer. LET THIS BE A LESSON TO YE... LABEL YER GODDAMN CDS....

Anyway. * cough, cough *

So this is an interesting (usually) collection of electro-industrial tuffness from the Washington (D.C.) metropolitan area. Betcha didn't even know Washington HAD an electro-industrial scene, did ya? Guess there has to be something for people to do if they don't want to be Fugazi clones.... At any rate, Jennifer Barnes, who writes a column of the same name as this disc in THE MELODIA, assembled this collection of 14 bands in the area, and it makes a useful introduction to the scene.

Given that there are 14 tracks on the album and i'm already running out o' space, i'm just gonna do my homicidal fly-by ("WORDS WILL BE MY BULLETS! ALL POWER COMES FROM THE BARREL OF A UNIBALL PEN!") on the highlights. For instance, "Sadu Nei/The Garden Stone" by - she silenced seraphim -, whose first half is a beatless wailing that abruptly stops and turns into a synth-driven song with an actual pluse and a vaguely medieval sound. Flesh Pulse Flesh's "Freedom" begins with a childlike spoken-word bit about running up a hill to push the clouds away and segues into a hypnotic polyrhythmic groove flanked by twittering synth noises. The strong foundation of beats on electronic Control organization's "Sacrifice" is nicely complemented by the appropriately ominous lyrics from the singer, who sounds like he's been taking vox lessons from Ian Curtis. Dead Letter Office once again turns in a track of woozy instrumental effluvia from what sounds like a drum machine constantly on the verge of malfunctioning, with dreamy female vox overlaid as something like a calliope drones in the background and other odd sounds come and go (the song is "Stitch," btw).

Rupert's "I Don't Know About You Anymore" is waist deep in synths and lush singing and would come awfully close to being a (gasp!) pop song if it weren't for the emphasis on beats. Chapel Blaque, in the meantime, sound on "Gravity" less like ebm/industrial than... uh, death metal. But with synths. Like early Metallica gone electronic maybe. Interesting... and most heavy. DEAD ANGEL approves. Another agreeably heavy (well, relatively speaking) entry is Pulse, with the thundering/wailing "Godfuck." Full of stop/start riffing, hissing vox, and pure unadulterated guitar/drum heaviness, it will build CHARACTER if you listen to it enough... ha! "I Saw Death," by Memory Without Pain, is almost noise, actually -- except the noise is pretty much generated by synths, making them Maryland's low-rent answer to Whitehouse, i guess (only without the buffoonish "look we are evil sexist jackasses, aren't you AFRAID now?" baggage).

Other contributors to the disc include Black Chamber, Rhinovirus, Communion, Bacchus, Biofeedback, and Big Mouse. At $10, this is certainly worth a listen for anyone who is into the beat-oriented heavy electro- aggro-industrial thing. Plus the cover is really swell (finally! at last! one of these compilations that doesn't feature old buildings or screaming people or gruesome surgery photos or other cliched jazz on the cover! woo!) too....

This is an interesting (and extremely limited) disc commemorating an evening of live music hosted by E+J at Subculture in Grand Rapids, Michigan on May 24, 1999. Originally the plan was to have 100 of these CDs on hand to sell at the event, then a pressing mishap reduced that number to 50, so now there are still some CDs left to parcel out to those who so desire to hear the goodies. Although the event was live, i don't think this disc is an actual document of that event (unless i have my info horribly mixed up), but rather, a collection of recordings by all of the artists involved. And an intriguing collective of artists they are: K. K. Null, Damian Catera, Seaform, Drekka, and Goat. Null contributes two tracks (one short, one long) and the rest contribute one track each, for a total running time of 58 minutes.

The Null tracks are, not surprisingly, Null in electronic mode; on "3:13" (the track's length, appropriately) he employs the oscillating loops he has been tinkering with on releases like 004 and EXTASY OF ZERO-G SEX; while that becomes occasionally tedious on the CDs, though, here it works beautifully as a short introduction to the droning Nullsonic piece it segues into, "Zentropy - Phase 1." That piece is a return to the form of earlier releases such as ULTIMATE MATERIAL III, only accomplished with nothing more than a battery of efx pedals and loose cables. The body of the piece is a thick, barely-wavering drone that is brushed and feathered with efx of a different, shifting nature; as the drone gones on, sometimes changing pitch, Null varies the intensity and sound of the efx at the perimeter of the all-encompassing sound to maintain an element of variety. The result is stunning, far more powerful than the sound of many of his recent studio releases.

The remainder of the tracks are not quite as single-mindedly overpowering as Null's prime movement, but they are nevertheless interesting. On "Pax Jam," Damian Catera begins with a landscape of broken, jagged sound turned down just enough to resemble the sound of glass tumbling in a cement mixer; over this, he creates a variety of unexpected noises and tones, then moves to radically alter the EQ and mix of his sound, taking the noise and drone in different directions. The latter part of the piece is largely a high-pitched, oscillating drone that is occasionally augmented by landslide noises and other sonic debris. Seafoam's track, "S-A-S," is a bit more ambient in nature, with shuddering bass electronics like tectonic plates shifting and absolutely minimal accompaniment; Drekka's "Unbeknownst," by contrast, approaches being an actual song, although one that is broken into movements: the beginning is composed of acoustic strumming over seemingly random electronic noises, but this is suddenly obliterated by harsh electronic noise; that, in turn, gives way to what sounds like a record skipping amid other unidentifiable noises. From that point onward, the song progresses piecemeal -- brief bursts of acoustic guitar and cello are rudely interrupted by hard noise, there are periodic bursts of amp hum, and so on. The last track, by Goat, is entitled "21st Century Schizoid Goat," but trust me... it bears absolutely no resemblance to King Crimson. Goat favors a barrage of hard electronic noises, first in a rhythmic sequence, then in a loud avalanche of sound akin to airplanes falling from the sky and burning trains barreling down a mountainside. Play this one loud enough and it will fry your ears. Apparently power electronics is alive and well, regardless of the fact that the genre seems to have gone largely underground again....

As is often the case with E+J releases, one of the best things about this release is the inner packaging. The CD comes in a digipak with two color (!) mylar inserts, one listing the tracks and performers, the other a miniature duplicate of the poster for the event. Both are more evidence of E+J's continuing commitment to excellent graphic design. Even if you didn't happen to see the event (don't feel bad, i didn't either), this is an excellent CD to own, particularly for the synapse-frying Null tracks. Be forewarned: this was pressed in a limited run of 100, and i don't know how many are left, but my guess is not many, so if it attracts your interest i'd strongly suggest you move quickly....

v/a -- ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC box set [Smithsonian Folkways]

This is one of the most important music collections of the twentieth century and it's finally available on CD, thanks to the Smithsonian Institution, who acquired the Folkways label in 1987 largely just for this collection. It's hard to effectively convey just how significant this collection has been on the development of music in the second half of this century -- although you can get an inkling by noticing the impressive range of artists called upon to contribute to the liner notes: Peter Stampfel (the Fugs), Allen Ginsberg, and John Fahey (whose amusing, cryptic, and highly lucid commentary threatens to turn into a book of its own) are among the luminaries who speak here of the ANTHOLOGY's impact. Listening to the six discs in this set, you can suddenly hear where the likes of Fahey, Dylan, Nick Cave, Johnny Cash, among others, first got the initial slivers of their inspiration. (A detailed annotation of the songs at the end of the ridiculously huge booklet notes, after each song, a partial list of artists who have covered the song in question; a small sample of those names includes P. J. Harvey, Nick Cave, Professor Longhair, The Kingston Trio, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pentangle, George Thorogood, Johnny Cash, Dick Dale, the Grateful Dead, Doug Sahm, Boiled in Lead, Louis Armstrong, Townes Van Zandt, Eddie Cochran, the Silencers, Flatt and Scruggs, John Fahey, the Lovin' Spoonful, Hot Tuna, the Dream Syndicate, Thelonius Monster, and Kristen Hersh. Obviously the collection has had not only a tremendous impact, but holds appeal for a wide range of listeners.

The reissue itself is a work of art that rivals the original edition. For those not familiar with the story, Harry Smith -- an eccentric loon, veteran of World War II, and obsessive record collector (big surprise) -- got the bright idea to assemble a "beginner's primer" of sort on American folk music. His method of selecting the 84 songs that appeared was arcane and cryptic, yet (when it was all assembled) somehow made perfect sense; taking advantage of the emergence of long-playing vinyl (a new phenomenon when this was first released in 1952), he essentially created the box-set by compiling six records into one volume, divided into three sections with two records apiece: Ballads, Social Music, and Songs. He even threw in an eye- popping booklet decorated in a lurid fashion that anticipated the clip-art frenzy of art mutants like the Church of the SubGenius, complete with a dazzling series of annotated cross-references and lurid tabloid-style sluglines for each song ("FATHER FINDS DAUGHTER'S BODY WITH NOTE ATTACHED WHEN RAILROAD BOY MISTREATS HER! -- WIFE'S LOGIC FAILS TO EXPLAIN STRANGE BEDFELLOW TO DRUNKARD!"), all written in eyestrain-o-vision type. It was unlike anything anyone had ever seen or heard and immediately became the operative musical bible for an entire generation of musicians (mostly, but not limited to, folk singers).

Then for reasons too complicated to elaborate on here, the album went out of print. (Typical record biz woes.) And now the Smithsonian Institution has reissued it on CD, in a format that closely follows the look of the original set (they have even gone to the trouble of printing up a close facsimile of the original booklet). The new set also includes a 68-page booklet full of informative essays (one by Greil Marcus that is actually a chunk of his quasi-Dylan book INVISIBLE REPUBLIC), and one disc is enhanced to include photos, interviews, and other interesting notes. In addition, they went to a great deal of trouble to clean up editing and sound problems, sometimes to the extent of hunting down original copies of the 78s in question and recutting masters; they even managed to fix a problem that inadvertently plagued the original set by compensating for and correcting tracks that had been recorded too fast or too slow. (78s, by a quirk of their manufacturing process, actually varied in speed, sometimes by as much as ten revolutions a minute; the techno-freaks at the Smithsonian compared certain instruments on each track to instruments of fixed pitch to determine the proper speed. This sort of attention to detail has a lot to do with why it took them ten years to reissue the damn thing.)

All of which brings us to... yes... the music in question. What is it? Well, it's basically old-time music from the late twenties to early thirties (blues, bluegrass, hillbilly music, spirituals, and the like), performed by a bizarre mixture of professional musicians (the Carter Family, Blind Lemon Jefferson, etc.), genuine oddballs (Clarence Ashley, Buell Kazee), and plain old ordinary people from way out in the sticks (pretty much everyone else). Most of it is played off the cuff (this is, after all, from an age where everything was cut directly to the master and subsequently had to be performed live from start to finish); some of it isn't even in English (Smith had a fondness for Cajuns); all of it sounds eerie and primal. This is music that was never meant to be discovered, really -- the music people out in the back woods play for each other on the porch at night for entertainment because no one has any money to do much else. Some of it, like "I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground" and "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," are just flat-out creepy; others are more in line with traditional ballads (mostly about murder and disasters, interestingly enough). All of it sounds like it is not of this earth. Personally, I think it's all brilliant (note, though, that i definitely favor "The Mountaineer's Courtship" above all the rest). Everybody should own this. Fuck the cost. There's not a bad song on here (how many other six-disc collections can make that claim?), and a great many are classics that, as already noted, have been covered by just about everyone who's anyone. Now that the set is available in such excellent form, and for a reasonable price no less, this would be the time to investigate for yourself what all the fuss is about....

v/a -- APOKALYPSIS EXPLICATA [Multimood Records]

This lavishly-packaged double-CD commemorates ten years of existence for Multimood... which makes me feel just a wee bit dumb, seeing as how it's chock full of musical luminaries and i, um, have never heard of the label until now. (All together now: "wups.") Some of the better-known artists dropping science here include M'lumbo (aka Big Void for one Floydian album; see the previous issue), Oblivion Ensemble, Robert Rich (he of Lustmord fame), Shinjuku Thief, Vidna Obmana, Jeff Greinke, and Asmus Tietchens. An impressive roster, to say the least.

M'lumbo's "An Eternal View of the Future (Lilac With Heart Shaped Leaves)" resembles a more subdued and serious version of the Floyd-inspired art damage they inflicted on the Big Void record; vaguely African percussion floats through an ambient stew of moans, conversations, and ethereal saxaphones... sort of like hearing a late-night jazz party from a balcony five floors above the action, so to speak. Some of the tracks (like the ones by Ashley/Story and Plancton) sound like semi-classical desert music, moody and almost ambient soundscapes that are more atmosphere than actual song, while others like "Callipers" (Oil in the Eye) take on a considerably more percussive bent. With "Forgotten Side Beneath Your Eyes," it's good to see that Oblivion Ensemble haven't lost their penchant for operatic drama (although this long piece is actually a bit restrained for them). The swirling, almost-metallic drones emanating from Robert Rich's "A Flock of Metal Creatures Fleeing the Onslaught of Rust" will come as no surprise to those who've heard him before; as always, his sound is one in which the eerily beautiful and the beautifully ominous merge into one dark, unsettling sound. The most "active" piece on the first disc, though -- meaning the one track that breaks free of the otherwise mostly ambient surroundings -- is "Veni Creator Spirito," in which Roedelius/Spitzer- Marlyn lay down a hypnotic bed of tribal percussion, then smother it in a shifting fog of chants, gritty synth, and otherworldly sounds.

The second disc follows a similar pattern, with particularly inspiring moments coming from Vidna Obmana (the slowly building density of "Shaking the Surreal"), Sonic Fractal (whose "HOpe is Gone/Red Meddle" is composed of shimmering harplike drones that fade in and out like a twitching curtain of sound), R. Angus ("Papa Legba Dreams Again," one of the more animated tracks on the compilation), and Asmus Tietchens ("Tot Derivat," which superimposes gritty crunching sounds, then shifting sounds of a varying nature, over a loop of running water that gradually increases in volume).

The entire set, really, is excellent. This makes a fine introduction to the label itself, and would work equally well as an initiation for those curious about the creepy pleasures of isolationism (am i allowed to call it isolationism these days?) who have yet to get their feet wet in these particular waters. It doesn't hurt, either, that the packaging is stellar.

v/a -- ARRHYTHMIA 3 [Charnel Music]

For those who can remember all the way back to 1990, when Charnel Music was still called Charnel House (before some buttholes in the publishing biz made stinky noises and forced the name change), the first ARRYTHMIA compilation (including tracks by Trance, Pain Teens, Crash Worship, Muslimgauze, and many others) was the first CD release on this label, bringing to the public a great many percussion-oriented opi. (Is "opi" really the plural of "opus"? He'p, somebody bring me a dictionary....) Now it's 1996 and we're up to the third installment, and a happening one it is. Things get off to a good start with the slow-building drum frenzy of Then Tigari's "Shapeshifter," after which Desaccord Majeur treat us to rhythmic cawing to the beat of timpani and bongos (i think; while i can go on for hours about guitars, i'm on pretty shaky ground when it comes to drums) on "Darbouka." Low, brooding synths and ominous tribal drums make C.O.T.A.'s "Dark Reaction" an eerie, hypnotic listening experience; the A.B.G.S. contribution "Vier Am Fass" uses similar instrumentation and much the same approach to create something markedly different in sound, yet equally mesmerizing in its effect.

Things get a good deal more kinetic when Tekachi trots out "Amygdala"; layers of polyphonic percussion blend with chanted vocals (buried back in the mix), and the sound rises and falls like a secret jungle communique. Ditto for the dense and thunderous pounding of Scot Jenerik's "Geischt," where reverbed drums resonate like thunder in the hills. The last track, "Desire and Delusion" by Tribes of Neurot, offers complex swirls of densely packed sound amidst odd-meter beats, cryptic samples, wind noises, other noises, all resolving into patterns of fierce pounding... we are talking heaviness here. No wonder they get such good press....

That's seven tracks out of 14; the rest (by Raksha Mancham, Batterie Acid, Ancient Rites, Sephar Hulpe, G.L.O.D., A Chocolate Mess, and John Herron) are every bit as good and equally intriguing. Considerably more solid than most compilations and possibly the best of the ARRHYTHMIA series so far. Embrace that which desires to use your skull for a small yet tuneful percussion instrument.

This is an interesting idea: the compilation as a thematic concept. All of the bands here (most of whom are unfamiliar to me) contribute exclusive material (or in some cases, exclusive remixes of otherwise available material) inspired by butoh, the Japanese dance form. For those not familiar with butoh -- and i'll readily grant that my knowledge of the subject is minimal as well -- it is essentially a modern form of Japanese ritual dance, somewhat akin to ballet but more primal, exploring the idea that beauty can be found in that which is dark and malformed. According to Ralph Rosenfield, Butoh "exploded onto the art landscape in the late 1950's and early 1960's.... Because it was created against the backdrop of postwar Japan and the nuclear holocaust that country had experienced, butoh dealt with taboo subjects in both brutal and serene ways."

The idea behind this compilation, apparently, was "to add a rhythmic nature to that aesthetic" to explore a previously unimagined link between butoh and darkwave (the form of music, generally, that Middle Pillar distributes). I have to admit it's an original idea (gasp!) and the parallels are definitely there -- both forms are rooted in the dichotomy between beauty and ugliness, and the hazy, ethereal nature of most darkwave leaves plenty of room for interpretative possibilities, much as the dance form does. The comparison becomes even more intriguing when you consider the wide variety of sounds available on this disc -- does this imply, too, that butoh carries within it an equally wide range? An idea worth exploring....

The disc itself (which comes encased in a frankly gorgeous, full-color double-gatefold digipak; Middle Pillar must be doing all right, eh?) contains 14 tracks by ten bands, nearly all of which are clearly in the darkwave genre (lots o' swirling keyboards, dance beats, gorgeously doomed female vox, etc.). For once, the disc actually lives up to the fabulous packaging -- there are no bad tracks on this release. Period. I'm not hep enough on the darkwave thing to know if these bands/tracks are representative or not of the genre, but the songs here are certainly well-executed and appealing. There's a consistent level of songcraft at work throughout the songs that is usually missing on most compilations, which are more of a mixed bag with inevitable highs and lows, and this is one of the most consistently listenable compilations i've ever heard. Bonus points and fezzes for Middle Pillar! My favorite tracks would include the two short but intense tribal-drumming exercises by Kobe ("Primary" opens the disc; "Aftermath" closes it); "The Unaware" by The Machine in the Garden, Wench's "Damnation," and "Moebius Stripped" by The Mirror Reveals; the remaining tracks by Zoar, The Unquiet Void, Mors Syphlitica, Sumerland, Thread, and A Murder of Angels are every bit as good, though. Aside from being an interesting mediation on an exotic art form, this is actually a pretty good introduction to many of the bands carried by Middle Pillar (i think that's why they do these things, by the way)....

v/a -- CAUSE [Piece of Mind]

A bit of background here for those not in the know: Rock for Choice is the fund-raising entity founded by members of L7 and Sue Cummings to organize benefit concerts for the Feminist Majority Foundation, which works to protect abortion clinic workers and abortion rights in general. Most of the CAUSE CD was recorded live in Los Angeles at Onyx Sequel on February 26, 1992, and just about everybody who's anybody is here: Gretchen Seager (2 Nice Girls), Ann Magnuson (Bongwater), Sue Cummings, Exene Cervenka (X), Kira (Black Flag, Dos), Suzi Gardner (L7), and many more. The CD is also accompanied by a 28-page booklet explaining RFC's origins and how it works, along with pictures of the performers along with lyrics and poetry.

Having said that, here's the deal: 1) This is almost entirely a spoken-word effort; 2) given the nature of the project, it's VERY political. This may not be your "bag"; it really isn't mine, to be honest, and the main reason I bought this is because of Suzi Gardner's appearance (it's an obsessive L7 thing, you wouldn't understand). Having said that, I found a lot of this really, really interesting. I also found parts of it extremely irritating. Taking both sides now (a little Neil Diamond for you, heh), one at a time:

The interesting stuff: The stark, beautifully said "Pie in the Sky" by Jula Bell; the disturbing messages of sexism, racism, fear, and human stupidity in "Deep Well" (Debbie Patino), "One Million Skies" (Gretchen Seager), "Me and Me" (Ash Own), "Around the World the Ladies' Way" (Julie Ritter), "Family (Exene Cervenka), "She Wore A Red Carnation" (Candye Kane), and so many others; the defiant stand of "Ain't Nobody's Business" (Kira); the dark and sexy gallows humor of "Sex With the Devil" and "Art Professor" (Ann Mangunson); and the black ache of "Thinking Too Much" (Suzi Gardner plus friends). This is the material that makes the CD worth owning, regardless of whether you actually agree with the stands of these artists or not -- powerful stuff.

The irritating stuff: "This Is My Body" starts out in a really powerful manner as Mary Herzcog explains the point of the bracelet she wears in memory of Becky Bell (who died having an illegal abortion in lieu of filling out a parental consent form), but her monologue quickly deteriorates into a rant about how men are essentially pigs because they require women to look a certain way, and so forth. Well, I have news for Mary Herzcog, but while this may be unfortunately true, the reverse is every bit true -- as a short, skinny guy with glasses who doesn't match up to the look of the tanned, over-muscled buttheads in GQ ads, I've been snubbed by plenty of women for exactly the same reasons she's whining about. Hey, Donita Sparks of L7 explained it best: There are only two kinds of people in this world -- cool people and assholes. And there are just many assholes with vaginas as there are with penii, ok? So when I hear rants like this, I find it EXTREMELY ANNOYING and entirely counter- productive. I'm bothered by "Backdoor Daddy" (Duchess), about fathers having sex with their daughters, for similar reasons. While there is no question that this happens -- I know people who've had it happen-- it's kind of irritating that whenever the subject of incest comes up, it's almost always about daddies porking their little girls, and completely ignores the vast number of young boys who are molested in exactly the same manner, quite often by their mothers. I'm TIRED of men being painted as the bad guys all the time, ok? Not ALL of us are dickheads, and the ones of us who aren't get real tired of being pasted to the wall for stuff we don't even do.... Gender wars suck, ok? Divisive behavior sucks. Roasting an entire gender (men, in this case) for the actions of a few (or even more than a few) is nothing but sexism in reverse, and sexism is bullshit no matter which side of the fence it's coming from. Men are men, women are women, the smart ones in both camps should be working TOGETHER to get rid of the buttheads in both camps who want to make the world safe for conservatism by squashing those who don't agree with them, not enaging in stupid pissing matches. You know what I mean? Ok, enough said on THAT....

As with any project of this size and scope (32 tracks, nearly as many artists), there are some tracks that don't work out too well. Some of them, like "Protein" and "Caffeine Buzz" (Sue Cummings), "Martini Talk" (Betty), and "Katomania" (Kari French), are... um... kind of dumb. (Please don't throw things at me!) But the quality and blunt honesty of the majority of this CD are sufficient to overcome even the most annoying and/or self-indulgent parts, and the truth is that while I don't agree with everything the Feminist Majority Foundation has to say either, there's no question that SOMEBODY has to be out there matching wits with the stupid fucks like Paul Hill (whom I'd STILL like to turn into a walking body bomb -- Paul Hill plus about ten sticks of dynamite and a lit fuse would make a vast improvement to the nature of the species, I figure). So go buy this and put your $$$ to good use and hear something a little bit different....

v/a -- CHAOS OF THE NIGHT -- LIVE AT KFJC [Charnel Music]

This is the pick of the month for all you Japanoise fans. The recording was done live at KFJC Radio in San Francisco, and from the description of the show in the liner notes, i would have given my left hand to be there. Each of the three tracks is a collaborative effort. Mayuko Hino of C.C.C.C. is definitely the center of this effort. She is the only one of the four collaborators that appears on all three tracks. The first track, a half- hour long wall of noise, could easily be a C.C.C.C. release. Good, very good. Dense, swirling, loud. The other two tracks follow suit. After all, what would you expect when four gods of noise get together and jam? Nothing but godhead noise -- go buy it. If anything, buy it for the photomontage cover done by Monte Cazazza and Michelle Handelman. I could describe it here, but I may get in trouble with the censors on your on-line service for "pornographic" references. It's art, not porn, but it's still really graphic. [bc]

v/a -- CHIPFARM [God Mountain]

This is a collaborative project between Optical*8 (Hoppy Kamijyama, Reck, Otomo Yoshihide), Melt Banana (Yasuko, Agata, Rika, Sudoh), Elliot Sharp and Zeena Parkins. It's a team of players that one might not automatically envision, but in fact they pull this one off quite well. There are twenty tracks in all, ranging from about five minutes to less than a minute. The composing credits are fairly evenly split amongst all of the artists represented. Most of the tracks written by Sharp or Parkins sound quite a bit like Knitting Factory-styled improv duets, but not always. There's also one big noise extravaganza surprise at the very end. Guess who's responsible for that one? Otherwise, sandwiched in between all of that is the rest. It's a really unique blending of the various styles brought together, then thrown into a blender and served up steaming hot for consumption. It's a swirling, FAT and really tight combo. [yol]

Thee Childish lad sure puts together some esoteric compilations, to be sure -- the kind of compilations where the band names and titles are so exotic that you sometimes wonder which is which (band names like Bad Drug Latrine, Long Head, Audio Paucity Quartet, I.M.F., 222, D-503, Comissioner Jordan, Yin+B vs. titles like "Meddler," "Chance Meeting of the Scarlet Pimpernel and Crazyhorse," "Stormdoor," "Lost: Fifty Suns," "Cuban Bastard (excerpt)," "BM Sex Machine," "Dorry Overture," and... well, you get the idea). As you can imagine with such opaque titles and names, the music is pretty much all over the place... except this is Childish Tapes, so it's not even music, precisely, as much as it is lots of found sound, samples, distorted / loop snippets of music, and other crazed effluvia. The end result is like listening to primitive field recording of the crazed ritual bleatings and conversations of a whole underground nation of lunatic tribes. "Listening Habits of the Avant Lower Basin Aborigines," perhaps. Plus a lot of extremely devolved bullshit (but good bullshit, mind you) about Batman and Robin. As with most Childish releases, there's a pretty steep level of surreal activity at work here -- purloined sounds from cartoons, BATMAN & ROBIN episodes, disco, distorted weirdness, deliberately weird conversations, crazed effluvia coming at you from all directions. (There's also a lot of silences, some maybe less intentional than others, and primitive editing in places, but it doesn't detract significantly from the surreal vibe at work... might even be adding to it.) In some places it's hard to tell how much of the sound is intentional and how much is the product of lo-fi equipment, and i think this would have worked better as a cd-r (where you could keep track of the artists track by track a bit easier), but it's certainly worth looking into if you're into the surreal cut-up mojo bag. There's some smooth sounds buried in the wackiness, waiting for your attention....

Tragically, this disc technically cannot be reviewed due to niggling technical concerns, said concerns being that a) i turned it over to Brain, b) he determined that the packaging actually contained not only the CD but some hideous sentient mold, c) after leaving it in his car overnight the mold took on a sinister cast and attempted to break free and terrorize the free world, so e) he soaked it in napalm and destroyed it in a fiery blaze that would bring a tear to your eye. Plus the package was impossible to open without destroying the CD, and anyway, who the hell is going to put a mold-encrusted disc in his or her CD player? Call it a packaging concept that should have remained conceptual....

As for the contents, my psychic powers tell me that all of it was brilliant, really fucking brilliant, hardcore noise terror that would make your balls shrivel up and cause clotted chunks of blood to course through your distended vas deferens, shrieking devilman noise hell daring to slice through your cranium and leave blood-spattered shards of bone splattered across the walls. Too bad you'll have to rely on my psychic powers to know this, though. If you want to hear it for your own bad self, you'll just have to throw $$$ at the Menschenfeinds and take your chances with the creeping death mold. I'm sure as hell not going to risk it.

This came along with the Cold Electric Fire disc (sensible enough, since they have a track on here too), and i'm glad Tedder sent it along, because it even contains even more Robot vs. Rabbit, plus hep jazz by Mason Jones, Amber Asylum, Merzbow, and a whole bunch of other noisemakers contributing their own slices of painful sonic bleat. The Robot vs. Rabbit track in particular is a nice one: dark ambient drone like the sound of giant gears turning on a gyroscope orbiting a distant sun, far removed from the human rabble, something suitable for a soundtrack involving giant bug-eyed aliens in search of peopleburgers. While there are some seriously noisy, cut-up pieces here (the tracks by John Wiese and Nothing are particularly intimidating), the more interesting stuff (to moi, anyway) are the pieces that are less volume-dependent, like "I Love You" Yamaakago's collection of drones in motion through an ocean of reverb. The dreamSTATE track "Sunspot Interference" is another slice of semi-ambient drones, this time bathed in various efx and stacked up in piles that ebb and flow in density, like veils of sound rippling in the wind. The lefthanddecision track ("Theft As Entertainment") is a truly thunderous roar of steadily-exploding ammunition going up in a fireball, just pure grinding white noise and what sounds like buildings collapsing into a black hole. On "Tokyo Sundown," Mason Jones takes a bunch of guitar solo tapes recorded in Tokyo a while back ago and diddles with them, paring them down to some interesting drones and occasional burst of psych and overdubbing percussion and other sounds over them, all to hypnotic effect. Merzbow's track is an interesting one: on "Bamboo Honey," he begins with a scrambling, looped rhythm of some undetermined source and begins building layers of crackling, distorted white noise over it, eventually burying the rhythm track under a grotesque cloud of noise-laden sonic mung, followed by much screeching. Ashrae Fax's "Pan PUrsuing Syrinx" is one of the better dark-ambient tracks here, and Cold Electric Fire's "Cultivate Your Growl" is a purely sinister offering of dark, forbidden vileness, more ambient blackmetal than noise, and definitely not something you want to play for people wrecked on acid (unless you don't like them, in which case it's up to you, mon). Other tracks include nifty stuff by the likes of Anapthergal, Amber Asylum, MagWheels, Mindspawn, Gruntsplatter, and Ovum. Plenty of dark sonic umbrage to ingest here....

The second release from Parsomnic is this limited-edition cd-r, issed in a simple but stylish digipak, featuring three songs each by Anaphylaxis, Hollydrift, Kava Project, and The Devouring Element. The four artists here cover a lot of ground -- sound collage, dark ambient, trance, tribal sounds, musique concrete, neo-classical passages, and more, all swaddled in a decidedly avant sensibility -- and do so in a highly original and surprisingly accessible way. First up is Anaphylaxis, the solo project of Jason Coffman, who employs plunderphonic techniques to create exotic noise and sound collages such as "Restless Dreams" and "Tomorrow's Heroine" (in which he pulls off some really nice slo-mo drone as well). His three songs are constructed in layers of sound, piled up in sufficient density as to be nearly impenetrable, but these sounds (musical and otherwise) play out and are resolved in strategic fashion that makes them far more listenable than one would initially expect. Hollydrift's tracks reflect the compilations title in their uneasy, stuttering paranoia, far more so than I recall on previous recordings, especially on "Night Over Land," in which transmissions broken by interference drift over stuttering machine rhythms and dark soundscapes. The lurching, drugged-out voices of "Normacola" provide a surreal counterpart to the background noise, like harsh wind shrieking through the mountains, as textured noises fill up the middle between those spaces. "Out Among The Night" presents an intriguing conversation over a wailing drone like the sound of starlight, and the effect is dark and mysterious.

Kava Project shares some common ground with Hollydrift, especially in the choice of textures and feel for samples, but here the sound collages are built over tribal beats that often border on the subliminal. This works to best effect on "And There Lay The Pendelum," where soothing washes of drone make it possible to drift into a trancelike state. The final three tracks, by The Devouring Element, are built more around shifts in dynamic and, on "Revisionist History," a structure rooted in darkwave territory. Samples are employed, but it's the shifts in dynamic and approach to musique concrete that create the most interest. An exceptional collection of unusual sounds.

Another highly interesting release from Dorobo, this time aimed at introducing listeners to a new round of purveyors of the trance/tribal sound. I like the cover graphics, where the shortened front flap -- with a picture of what appears to be the exoskeleton of some mutant spider actually, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a backlit bat wing -- opens to reveal all the liner note information (with the band names still visible even with the flap closed). Economical, elegant, unusually effective packaging. The same attention to detail is apparent in the tracks themselves. The first track, "Ranidella Signifera", comes from The Melbourne University Department of Zoology, and is essentially the chittering sounds of the animal in question (whatever it is; i made a D in biology in college so, um, i wouldn't know). That leads into the hypnotic trance mantra "Red Garden" (Hanging Garden), where a looped track of tinkling percussion is overlaid with ebbing washes of synthesizer and other odd noises that come and go... eerie, twilight kind of sounds. Listening to this, i can see the bats under the Congress Avenue bridge (THE tourist attraction of Austin! hah!) emerging at sundown, wave after wave of tiny bodies taking wing to the night sky.... "Beyond" (Synapse Interuppt) takes a similar approach, only with more emphasis on the tribal drumming, and adds wailing vocals to a dark effect. "The Killing Jar" (Garry Havrilay) and "Afraid of the Aesthetic" (Shinjuku Filth) employ a more militaristic feel to the beat, with the latter adding jazzy reeds from time to time.

A disturbing sample track talking about the physical appearance of an unidentified but sinister-sounding animal (?) is the basis on which "Wrap Around Eyes" (The DNA Lounge) is formed, leading into the sounds of howling wind and muted percussion along the lines of a heavily-reverbed toy piano; soon operatic vocals come in, followed by a percolating synth line, and the track just continues to build into something truly surreal. More odd percussion turns up on "Nightsoil" (Soma), while "Strategic Womb" (Loggerhead) -- secretly an ambient track with brief bursts of trancelike rhythm -- derives its rhythm tracks from a distorted and unidentifiable source. Paul Schutze's contribution, "The Heart That Fades," is the final track, a brooding endpiece with wavering synths and disjointed percussion that ends abruptly. The overall effect is surprisingly cohesive for a various artists compilation... eerie, thoughtful music frightening in its own subtle way, music for the twilight of the idols, or perhaps the moment just before the world cracks like a china plate. Nietschze would have approved. (The tracks not mentioned here, by the way -- by artists such as Suntoy, Zen Paradox, and TCH -- are every bit as good; space limitations preclude me from going into detail about them as well.)

The first question this compilation raises in my mind is: Since when do Clutch sound like Black Label Society? That's certainly a new development to me. The first question this may raise in your mind, though, is: Who the hell are these people? If you're one of these people, then shame, shame on you -- while you and your backpack-totin' pals were swooning over all those earnest, bespectacled sissy-boys moaning about their emotional traumas, bands like Clutch, the Obsessed, Pentagram, Death Row, and other hardcore / metal crossover bands equally fixated on St. Vitus and the Dead Kennedys were establishing legendary reputations giggin' all over Maryland and the surrounding area. Some of those band members have kept up with the times and are still playing -- see the Hidden Hand, current home of the very Voice of Doom himself, Wino (St. Vitus, the Obsessed, Spirit Caravan, Place of Skulls), plus a couple of lesser-known but equally unpredictable pals. This cd serves as a nifty primer for some of the best doom to creep around the nation's capital.

And look what you get -- fourteen tracks of soul-crushing riff-grunt and pained vocals that essentially, track after track, boil down to "we're doomed, dude." It's all quality stuff, too, and a fair bit of it is obscure or unreleased: Clutch's "Sea of Destruction" (the opening track and one of the heaviest on the album) was previously available only a private cd release sold strictly at shows and the band's website, and tracks from the Hidden Hand, Earthride, Internal Void are all brand new. Hell, they even have the first new studio recording from Unorthodox in over a decade, the former drummer for Spirit Caravan (in Nitroseed), and the first studio recording from the new supergroup Los Tres Pesados (including members of Clutch, Earthride, and Unorthodox). All this whole-grain doom-laden goodness may explain why the first pressing pretty much evaporated before I even managed to review the thing, but maybe you'll get lucky and the label will repress....

My favorite tracks are the ones by Clutch ("Sea of Destruction"), The Hidden Hand ("Rebellion"), Nitroseed ("Class War"), Countershaft ("Black Sky"), War Injun ("Dangerous Prayer"), and Leviathan A.D. ("Breathing Rust"). The tracks by Earthride, Internal Void, Life Beyond, Unorthodox, Black Manta, King Valley, Carrion, and Los Tres Pesados are nothing to sneeze at either (although some of them lean a little too much on the Zepplinesque guitar heroics for my personal taste). If you're down with old-school doom and stoner music, you should find much -- if not all -- of what's here to be quality tunes worth throwin down the horns. And the guitar sound on the Leviathan A.D. track is just the baddest of the bad, slow wasting doom through dying speakers that should make you want to crawl up in fetal position on the floor as the big, big waves pound you senseless.

v/a -- ELSIE AND JACK AND CHAIR [E + J Recordings]

This is the first release by E+J, and it's a cryptic one. Crammed to the gills full o' tracks by names like Tabata (Zeni Geva), Tatsuya Yoshida (Ruins, YBO2), Rapoon, Crawl Unit, Fuxa, Shifts, Totemplow, Brume, and more, it also has a liner note listing puzzling enough to make me question what order everything's in. So i may end up attributing the wrong cranky noises to the wrong artists. You have been warned....

First up is Crawl Unit's "Hit Para Tu," a swirling miasma of gradually evolving noise (some of it an earthen rumble, some it crunchy, scratchy electrical filth), following by a li'l taste of the minimalism courtesy of Shifts on "Evolving Matters," which is kind of reminiscent of Alan Lamb, assuming he was miking up guitar amps instead of telephone poles -- lots o' shuddering, twitching, voltage-ridden twinkle-drone. Rapoon weighs in with a series of loops (distorted, disembodied voices, some muted earthquake rumbling) on "Exodus" while Totemplow and Fuxa wallow in shrill drones of reverb ectasy on "Laid to Waste" and "Pyramid Scheme," respectively. Brume's "Wish You Were Not Here" is one of the more unsettling -- not only is it the longest track here, but with unintelligble female vocals swirling around a clattering beat and other highly repetitive noises, it's easily the most disorienting thing on the disc.

While Monera, Mlehst, Pregnant Pause, and Flutter all contribute tracks that work the crunch/drone noise axis with some degree of variety and success, the real treats come toward the end: after an amazing (and short) high-pitched droning by FM Synthesis ("Stochastic Resonance") and an excerpt from the Shifts disc PANGAEA (reviewed elsewhere in this issue), Tabata drops some truly blues-damaged psychedelic acid on "Kamikaze," after which he and Tatsuya Yoshida blow up the psychedelic tape via hypno-guitar and crafty peekaboo drumming on "Theme of Human Insect" and "Hello, Brainsville."

All in all, a swell introduction to both the label and all of the artists, not to mention a hip way to preview the Tabata and Shifts discs. A suave move in every sense. Investigate.

v/a -- ENDLESS 2 [Manifold]

Okay, i'm FINALLY reviewing the ENDLESS 2 comp, and... um... there's not much to say except that it's... um... ambient. It's GOOD ambient, with tracks by the likes of Voice of Eye, Null, Richard Rich, Final, Controlled Bleeding, Steve Roach, and more, but what can you say about ambient that hasn't already been said? A is A; ambient is ambient; it is what it is.

Having said that, i must point out that not all ambient is equal and some ambient is more equal than others, and as we all know, the top animals in ANIMAL FARM weren't listening to this while running the show, eh? And no, i have no idea what that means, i'm rambling dammit, just let me GO WITH THE FLOW... i'm flowing... JESUS CHRIST, i'm flowing... just like the moaning wind and ebbing synths in "At the Edge of the In-Between (Anima Revealed)." And what's this business with Final's "Exit," which sounds more like minimalist guitar hum than what one would normally associate with ambient? Hmmmm.... Null's contribution, "Zen Walker," is not bad, mostly resembling an outtake from the "Leviathan" ep, but it's not stunning or anything. The Controlled Bleeding track is more interesting, actually -- a slow-building drone with creepy sounds gradually filtering into the mix until grinding walls (but QUIET grinding walls) enter the picture and eventually give way to something with an actual beat and weird phaser noises, etc. Mandible Chatter's "Burn Down the Sky" is most cool as well, with tribal drumming and odd cycling sounds; possibly the best track on the CD. The last track, by Richard Rich, is also the longest -- a whopping (have you ever wondered about that word, "whopping"? What exactly do you suppose it MEANS, "to whop"? Do we even want to know?) 18:07, filled with helicopter noises that gradually increase in volume and other spooky stuff. An interesting release... i would assume that the first volume of the set is essentially more of the same....

v/a -- ENTERTAINMENT THROUGH PAIN: A TRIBUTE TO TG [RRRecords]

It was only a matter of time before the current wave of tributes subsumed early experimental artists like Throbbing Gristle. Here are twelve contemporary dissections of classic TG tracks. The operating staff is a host of important experimenters of the present day, including Skullflower, Merzbow, Emil Beaulieau, Paul Lemos, and others.

Some of the versions presented here are rather true to the sound and spirit of the originals. Phlegm's version of "United" and Anchor presents: Genital de Orang's version of "Persuasion" feel more like a remixing or rerecording of the originals. (OK -- the version of "Persuasion" is only about 30 seconds long, but it has almost the exact same rhythm structure as the original.) But not all of the tracks take the same approach to the originals! Emil Beaulieau's version of "What a Day" takes a completely different approach. He completely mutates the original, makes it something of his own that was inspired by Throbbing Gristle rather than merely rerecording a song by one of the foremost leaders of experimental music. Likewise, Skullflower's version of "Hamburger Lady" bears no similarity to the original. It is the kind of random, drone-laden guitar work one would expect from Skullflower, but it feels more like they tried to capture the essence of the Hamburger Lady herself -- or perhaps the process that made her into the Hamburger Lady!

What is reproduced here is the spirit of Throbbing Gristle -- the focus on experimentation that gave TG their name in the late 1970s. This release does turn out to be more than just a collection of cover tracks. True to its subtitle, this is a tribute to Throbbing Gristle. [bc]

v/a -- ETERNAL BLUE EXTREME [Endorphine / Somnus]

This disc is a tribute to the late filmmaker, Derek Jarman by noise artists in Japan, Tawain and Hong Kong. There were no constraints put upon the artists except to use the word "blue" in the titles of their songs. What results are nine brutal and intense tracks that will shake the center of your very being without straightening up your hair when they are through. The standout tracks are by Merzbow, CCCC, Otomo Yoshihide, I.666 (with their track simply entitled BLUE COCK) and Aube, of course. Comes in a nice blue cardboard box that I had an increadibly difficult time figuring out how to open. [yol]

More devolved sounds from the jittery minds behind Sonic Alchemy, this time from the likes of Crank Sturgeon, Man Manly, Bob Cochran, The Ponies, and the like. First up is Crank Sturgeon with "Un Day," with lots of devolved sounds wandering around freely over a loosely-structured bass (?) figure, ebbing and flowing in terms of activity -- sometimes sparse, sometimes crammed full of noisy events. Id M Theft Able contributes "Spiral Gristle Diamond," which sounds like chipmunks squeaking viciously over a stuck record and is either intensely hypnotic or incredibly annoying, it's hard to tell which.... Man Manly's "R L ase" is a bit more pleasing to the ear, although closer in style to the Crank Sturgeon track in its abandon of structure and disdain for conventional rhythm. Bob Cochran plays an actual folk song to the accompaniment of bizarre instrumentation and shouting and tapes and all sorts of sonic effluvia on "Gorgonzola Variations I", and it's a strange piece of work all right, but by far the most entertainingly demented thing on the disc. Various unnamed jokers were apparently recruited to build the eerie and droning "Collaborative Work," a dronescape disturbed by noises of all kinds, while Shea Mowatt's work on "Urchin-Island-Pitchblack Stew, Delicious" is decidedly more minimalist, spare and deliberate, working with smaller sounds and fewer of them. The Ponies employ delay and reverb overkill to drone nicely in melodic fashion on "Avante Garde"; the disc is rounded out by a bizarre orgy of cut-up sound and experimental ensemble bits and Anu knows what else on "Drone" (which, despite its title, does not really drone... well, maybe in the backround a little bit, but still....), courtesy of Man Manly and Sugar. Not a bad intro to the label's whole bag, really -- worth investigating, unless you're really bummed out by electronic noise 'n (extremely) freejazz....

I'm probably a poor choice to be reviewing a Misfits tribute, in light of my near-ignorance of the original band's catalog (i owned a Misfits cassette once, so long ago that i've actually forgotten which one it was or what it sounded like, and the only other Misfits songs i've ever heard were covers themselves), but Freebird sent it, so here it is, eh? That said, this is one of the better tribute CDs i've heard -- i don't have any idea how faithfully they're capturing the songs (or butchering them, possibly), but all the bands on here (only one of whom i've heard of before; that would be Bongwater 666, natch) do at least a passable and often swank attempt at Misfits mayhem. So it's a hard-rockin' batch o' tunes, okay? Lots of four-on-the-floor drumming, revved-up sharkfin guitars, and incomprehensible vocal ranting. Best songs (to my ears, anyway; your mileage may vary): Bongwater 666's impossibly revved-up stab at "Where Eagles Dare" ("I ain't no goddamned son of a bitch!"); Fireball Ministry's bizarre (check out the stuttering keyboard intro!) yet rockin' "Cough/Cool"; Misdemeanor's high-octane version of "Hybrid Moments," which sounds like it could have been dropped straight from one of Metallica's cover-album extravaganzas, complete with spastic stuttergun guitar noodling (they used to call them solos, by the way); Sartana's chunky, treble-heavy, charmingly lo-fi (just like the original band!) version of "Hollywood Babylon"; Nice Cat's "All Hell Breaks Loose," one of the few bands on the disc with female players (it's a bit disorienting at first, then mighty swank, to hear Misfits as sung by a woman); a grinding take on "Who Killed Marilyn" courtesy of the Marilyns (actually half of Canadian Sabbath-lovers sHEAVY); "I Turned Into A Martian," with Dogma Hollow radiating thick 'n sludgy sheets o' doom; "Die Die My Darling" (by Volume), with a goofy/bizarre intro probably cribbed from whatever movie inspired the song in the first place; and the slo-mo feedback-fest of "London Dungeon" (rendered in lo-fi heaviness by Warhorse). The entire album is pretty solid, though, with no obvious clinkers, kind of a rarity on these kind of releases, don't you think? One of the better tributes floating around. The Misfits themselves might well approve. Groovy artwork too, mon... luv that one-eyed and many-tentacled monster menacing the curvy space bitch inside....

v/a -- GUITAR UNCONTROLLED [Alchemy]

Deep in the bowels of the Temple of Paz, far beneath the Staircase of Skulls, Captain 4-Track and TASCAM-Girl tiptoed through the dust-covered husks of the ancient dead, swathed in darkness, picking their way through the ruins with only the help of stylish infrared glasses. TASCAM-Girl, as was her custom regarding imminent battle, was loaded down with grenades, smoke bombs, seven automatic pistols, an M-16, two carbines, the sinister Freem Blaster and a Refract-O-Gasm Raybolt, a grenade launcher purchased with Green Stamps, and enough raw munitions to overtake France. The Captain, meanwhile, carried only a boombox on one shoulder.

"So let me get this straight," she whispered as they eased into the Hall of Creeping Death, "I'm carrying enough raw firepower to supply a third world nation and you're carrying... a boombox. Do you have some, uh, master plan you haven't told me about, or are you just out of your mind again?"

"All will be revealed," he said mysteriously.

"Oh, I like that. 'All will be revealed,' my ass. You're just a fucking fruitcake, you know that?"

Suddenly a massive stone door creaked open to reveal the terrifying countenance of their arch-nemesis Doktor Shithead, flanked by dozens of his evil minions. "HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" he cackled wildly. "I haff you BOXED IN! This will be zee END for you meddlesome do-gooders! My evil minions will chop off yer limbs and eat zem for BREAKFAST! We shall DINE on the girl's fat rump!"

"HEY!" TASCAM-Girl fired a round into the ceiling. "Don't be dissin' my ass, you pointy-headed li'l fuck!"

"SEIZE ZEEM!" The Doktor shouted, enraged. "Break zose tiny pipecleaners she calls arms and waste zeem both!"

The army advanced, only to be repelled by TASCAM-Girl's deafening roar of artillery. As they exchanged shots, she said to the Captain, "If you've got a secret weapon this would be a good time for it, buddy. I only have so much ammunition, you know."

"Certainly." With a flourish, he dropped a CD into the boombox. After a few seconds, music began to play. Tweety bird sounds emerged over a simple strummed guitar. A reedy female voice began to sing slowly in Japanese.

"What the hell is this, folk music? Are you going to bore them to death with Japanese folk music?"

"Quit," he said irritably. "Just wait...."

Suddenly, without warning, the song exploded into a slowly-spinning wash of hip-hop beats, hypnotic basslines, and chittering guitar warbling. The girl's voice chanted in robot fashion over the top. The sound was so perfect in its hip-hop trancepop danceability that all the shooting stopped as everyone in the room found themselves suddenly, horribly compelled to... to DANCE.

"Achtung!" one of the minions screamed. "My hips, they move without volition! I... I CANNOT STOP!"

"YOU MUST!" The Doktor raged. "SHOOT THEM! MEIN GOTT IN DER HIMMEL, you must fucking SHOOT THEM!"

"We cannot!" The chorus swelled up to meet the song's "aaaah, aaaah" vocal chorus. "Help! Help! Our feet, they move on their own!"

"Hey," TASCAM-Girl said gruffly, her booty causing carnage all of its own, "nice move. So what the hell is this anyway?"

"One of the songs from this fabulous new Alchemy compilation. This is 'Nadima,' by Hiroko Tanaka, one of the guitarists for the Japanese psychedelic hip-hop gods Mady Gula Blue Heaven. Is it not brilliant?"

"My God, listen to that guitar solo -- it sounds like she's feeding her guitar into a wood chipper-shredder."

"And the next one, 'Owari,' is even better." Calliope sounds whirled like a pinwheel before turning into a breakbeat augmented by wailing siren sounds. Then the song kicked into full gear, with a seductive lock and lull bass and drum beat augmented by all sorts of electronic frippery and more angelic vox.

"Here," he said, putting earplugs in her ears. Her hypnotic movements immediately ceased, even as the Doktor's minions were forced to helplessly get down. "Now you should have no problem mowing them down."

Her M-16 chattered with a furious roar. "Hey, you're RIGHT -- this is like shooting fish in a fucking barrel. So what else is on this swell disc, anyway? More stuff like this?"

"Yes and no. This is actually the second in a series of guitar comps from Alchemy, and this one features only women -- the aforementioned Takana in addition to two of the women from Sekeri, Miyu Uemura and Aya Ohnishi, plus one track from Angel'in Heavy Syrup guitarist Mine Nakao. The first two by Tanaka are actual songs; the third one is a strange hip-hop experiment that takes some getting used to. The five tracks by Uemura and two by Ohnishi are interesting, but more in the nature of sound vignettes than actual songs. The last song, 'Gin No Fume,' shows what Mine Nakao has apparently been up to while her bandmates try to decide if they're ever going to put out another album again. Here, listen."

He fast-forwarded to the song as TASCAM-Girl punched holes in another line of helpless dancing fools. "Hey, this sounds an awful lot like, uh, Angel'in Heavy Syrup. Listen to those spiraling guitars... what's with all the reverb, man?"

He shrugged. "She's a psychedelic girl, I guess."

"Look!" She dropped her gun momentarily -- no longer necessary now that dozens of minions lay dead and stinking on the floor -- and pointed to a tiny figure running away. "The Doktor is escaping! Should I go chase him down and pound a few rounds up his ass?"

"Not at all," the Captain said suavely. "For what the Doktor does not know is that during this little escapade, I deployed one of the robot cockroaches to climb up his pants leg. Little does he know that he is leading us directly to his hidden lair. Soon enough... we will meet again."

"And then I'll get to use the grenades?"

"Then you'll get to use the grenades."

"All right!" She pumped her fist. "So how about playing that thing again? That was actually kind of catchy...."

Here we are in 2004 and HIGH TIMES has decided to put out a stoner rock compilation. I hate to say it, guys, but you are a bit late to the party. If this had been released any time between 1998-2000, then it might have been relevant. But now? Ah well, I guess being a bit out of it comes with the territory.

That said, there is some great music here. Clutch's "Willie Nelson" (also available on their self-released SLOW HOLE TO CHINA b-side + demo collection), with its chorus of "Well I don't know if I'm comin' or goin' / if it's them or me / but one thing's for certain / Willie Nelson only smokes killer weed," is awesome. The Hidden Hand's "Falconstone," in which Wino takes a few more shots at George W. and co., is as strong as anything on DIVINE PROPAGANDA. Orange Goblin's "No Law" is equal parts Sabbath's "Hand of Doom" and Black Flag's "Six Pack." Suplecs contribute some instrumental heaviness with "Cities of the Dead." High on Fire and Bottom both kick out some heaviness. The biggest surprise is Corrosion of Conformity's "It Is That Way," which sees CoC moving back towards the sludge-coated Sabbath 'n Skynyrd sound of DELIVERANCE after detouring into LOAD-land with AMERICA'S VOLUME DEALER.

All in all, HIGH VOLUME isn't a bad listen. Fans of the genre will be all over it. Everyone else will probably just shrug their shoulders and grab the newest Lightning Bolt disc. [N/A]

To celebrate the release of Wantage Records' twenty-first release, Wantage (sounds like "vantage") main man Josh Vanek has pulled together this massive two-cd, 47-band compilation. There's no real rhyme or reason to this thing other than that, according to Josh in the liner notes, "WAN 021 highlights some of the best bands I've come into contact within the last few years." Why would anyone want to listen to what amounts to a two-cd mix pulled together by some guy who runs a small label out of Missoula, Montana? Because, to put it bluntly, Josh has excellent taste in music. Over the past few years he's released vinyl and aluminum by such quality bands as Federation X, Drunk Horse, Last of the Juanitas, and The Whip. He knows what he's talking about.

With that in mind, some of the highlights: 

In the heavy rock category: Drunk Horse (Led Zep + ZZ Top + a touch o' the punk = DH), Party Time (one of The Last of the Juanitas + others rocking real hard), Fireballs of Freedom (rock 'n roll the way it was meant to be played, nice 'n dirty), and Federation X (one of the best rock bands in the USA).

In the heavy as fuck division: The Narrows (what the hell? where did these guys come from? why wasn't I informed that someone decided to sludge up Slint-like, ahem, "post rock"?), Mico De Noche (one of the guys from Migas and, uh, someone else throwing down instrumental sludge), and Noxagt (could be in the METAL! section too -- three guys: drums, bass, viola).

METAL!: Skyforger (crazy Latvian metal), Bloodhag (making science fiction cool with the metal kids), and The Fucking Champs (making tapping cool with the indie kids).

Noise rock section: Replicator (jagged and angular shards of rock) and Stinking Lizaveta (they could all have one arm tied behind their backs and they'd still be about to out-play you).

Country + Americana: Juanita and the Family (The Last of the Juanitas and friends try their hands at a murder ballad). [N/A]

v/a -- ISOLATIONISM [Virgin / Holland]

Incredibly cool 2-CD compilation of ambient tracks by lots of noise/ambient/ industrial/etc. types like Null/Plotkin, Scorn, Ice, Total, Aphex Twin, Seefeel, O'Rang, Techno-Animal, etc., etc. There are 23 artists here with one track apiece, and the entire set clocks in at about 150 minutes, and there's very little filler... assuming, of course, that you're really hip to ambient in the first place. If you're already onto ambient, you have a pretty good idea of what the two discs sound like already; if you're not familiar with the ambient genre, then all i can say by way of description is that this is largely music about texture more than "songs," with no distracting lyrics, and sounds made largely of unrecognizable samples. I will say this: if you like even a tiny handful of the bands listed here, you should devote massive amounts of energy to tracking this down and making it YOURS, for all of these tracks are strong ones and otherwise unreleased (some are merely remixes of previously released stuff, though). It's also an excellent introduction to ambient in general, for those who haven't checked out the genre before. The only bad thing is that finding it may be difficult; it's imported from Holland and kind of obscure (of course; I like it, so it MUST be obscure, right?), not to mention hard to find. But it will be well worth the effort for those who do decide to seek it out.

Other artists on the compilation are Jim O'Rourke (Illusion of Safety), Paul Schutze, Zoviet France, Labradford, Disco Inferno, Nijiumu (Fushitsusa), Total (Skullflower spinoff), AMM, O'Rang, Final, Lull, and Thomas Koren. Many of these are splinter groups (for instance, Ice is an offshoot of God with Justin Broadrick on board, Techno-Animal is another variant of the same lineup, Final is Broadrick's solo ambient project, Lull is an offshoot of Scorn, which in turn is an offshoot of Napalm Death, Main is led by ex-Loop/Godflesh guitarist Robert Hampton, and so on) that might well be of interest to those who follow the original groups in question... just another reason to check it out and be entranced by those hypnotic, seductive background sounds. Of course, you need a scorecard and many, many pencils to keep TRACK of all these guys and which project they're doing what with at any given moment, but hey, who said life was supposed to be simple?

This is technically a compilation -- to be exact, "1 compilation of new independent music from Japan, 72 minutes, 80 track fragments, 28 artists" -- but because of the bizarre nature of the artists and the clever sequencings, the disc is a mindfuck in its own right as its own entity. The 28 artists are (get ready for a lot of names you may not be familiar with): Yuko Nexus 6, Ex-Girl, Acid Mothers Temple, Aki Onda, Astro Gaji, Thermo Yoshio Machida, Hadiot, Kangaroo Paw, Kazutoki Umezu, May No Niwa, Hoppy Kamiyama, Animo Computer, Kirihito, Pugs, Sawai Kazue, Tipographica, Freak From Ocean, Calculated, Lion Merry, Love Furniture Lounge Bears, Droptone, Cherry Co., Phnonopenh Model, Sakamoto HIromiti, Matsumoto Tadashi, and The Saboten. To accomodate such a large number of acts (each wildly diverse in its own right, probably) on one disc, they run fragments of tracks instead of full ones... and it's there that the compilation takes on a distinctly surreal nature. Playing the disc straight through is a roller-coaster ride through mutant psych country, doo-wop, fifties rock, noise skronk, new wave, no wave, prog rock, shoutalong pogo music... the list goes on. Even more spooky, most (if not all) of the bands here are doing something fairly interesting. Best of all, the tracks fade out into something else when things start getting repetitive -- cool! Not only do you get to hear tons of new, interesting Japanese indie artists in one place, but the album actually works as its own thing....

Just for grins (and since they helpfully included the info in their promo thingy), i've included links for all those swank artists (and ITSELF) in the EPHEMERA section. Feel free to investigate further from the comfort and safety of your own PC....

v/a: LAND OF THE RISING NOISE [Charnel House]

All the current interest in the Japanese noise scene has no doubt left a lot of listeners confused as to where they should start in their search for new sounds. With so many bands and releases out, and so little information to go on, it's compilations like this that make the interested listener's life so much easier. Charnel has issued an exceptionally useful document here, in a nice package with a gorgeous cover and informative liner notes. This is an excellent place to start for the uninitiated, with twelve high-caliber tracks of noise and experimental sound from an equal number of bands.

As cohesive statements go, well... it's a various artists compilation, how "cohesive" do you expect it to be? The bands are wildly different, making it a schizophrenic listening experience, but all are interesting in their own unique way. Approaches range from the kamikazes-out-of-control style (Omoide Hatoba, Children Coup D'Etat) to the pounding menace of Dissecting Table, along with excursions into soothing ambience (Agencement, Aube, DMV, Keiji Haino), pretty-but-weird skewed "pop" (Angel'in Heavy Syrup), and pure forms of experimental noise (Merzbow, Tokyo Dowser, C.C.C.C., Hijokaidan).

The sound quality is excellent throughout the disc, the musicianship is of consistently high caliber, and the disc is affordable. To open your ears to new sounds from a different culture, start here, go directly to your nearest record store, and do not pass "Go" (the board or the game)....

v/a -- LAND OF THE RISING NOISE VOL. 2 [Charnel Music]

Yes, it's that time again... time for another update from the land of the rising yen. Like the first volume, there are a variety of styles covered on this disc -- psychadelic, noise, industrial terrorhythm, and scratchy post- punk -- and even though the Japanese music scene has become a bit more of a known quantity, Mason (le Charnel honcho) has gone to some trouble to assemble tracks by a lot of still-obscure bands in addition to the ones that will already be familiar (Shizuka, Melt-Banana, Contagious Orgasm).

The psychadelic chunks come courtesy of Kadura, whose "Travel to Faraway" starts the compilation off in gentle, lilting fashion not unlike a slo-mo answer to Ghost; Kuroyuri Shimai, with the chantlike "Blue Forest"; and, of course, Shizuka, who contribute "Kimino Sora." Shizuka (the singer, who also plays guitar) still sounds like she might or might not be in tune, heh, but the song is certainly pretty enough to make up for any (real or imagined) vocal deficiencies. (Shizuka, incidentally, designed the dolls that grace the front and back of the booklet.) Volkha Dots also bounce on the (heavily synth-laden) psychadelic tip on "Illusion of Future," which has just enough guitar textures in it to keep it from floating away into the atmosphere.

Der Eisenrost (the band led by TETSUO's Chu Ishikawa) picks up the pace with with mechanical squipping and sqwuaking of "Diadectes," set to rigid, hypnotic percussion amid a stew of weird noises and complex polyrhythmic fiendishness. The noise element -- nowhere near as prominent on this disc as on the first (evidently Mason has become as bored with the noise thing as everyone else) -- comes in by way of Contagious Orgasm, whose "The Inner Life of Man" is a river of odd sounds, muted clanging, and creeped-out schizophrenic voices.

Of course, there are weirder moments. Melt-Banana's "Dig and Tickle, She is Hit" sounds like... uh... well... imagine Alvin and the Chipmunks. Now imagine that they have consumed massive quantities of Spaten Munich, picked up guitars, drums, weed whackers, and are thrashing around the room playing with manic speed. Wnico are right behind them with the hyperkinetic deathfuzz of "Cool Running," which gets even faster and harder toward the end with lots of yelping before ending abruptly. And then there is Gaji, an all-female (??? these names throw me) semipunkfunksomething who sound an awful lot like Super Junky Monkey on "Eleven Maladies." (Not that this is a bad thing.)

The eerie beauty of Onnakodomo's "Aoi Hata" is harder to describe, though; perhaps a more psychadelic version of Allegory Chapel Ltd. with female vox, perhaps? Whatever, it's plenty spacy and drone-infested. A similar vibe exists in the closing track by AmgSphont, "Kiaku no Tobila," with a wailing vocal and lots of ominous orchestral synth washes that is eventually augmented by tribal drumming and loping, droning guitars. Very weird and very hep.

One note for those of you who actually bother to read the liner notes: Don't be fooled; there is no Diesel Guitar track. It's mentioned in the notes but doesn't appear anywhere because DG didn't get his goodie finished in time and everybody missed it in the proofreading. Oops! So no, it is NOT a hidden track... do not damage your CD searching for that which shall not be found....

More whole-grain goodness from the fine folks at Elsie and Jack, this time in the form of a CD's worth of unreleased material spun off from their other full-length releases. The idea here is to serve as a sampler of sorts and to collect extraneous material overflowing from the label's other CDs as well; ergo, all of the artists on E+J contribute a track here that you won't find anywhere else. (The disc, incidentally, is free with the purchase of any other CD from E+J, although future mar/ino discs of a similar nature will probably cost you $$$; all the mar/ino releases will be limited to 250 and available by mail-order only.)

The first track, ostensibly taken from the initial sampler ELSIEANDJACKANDCHAIR, takes chunks of material by Crawl Unit, Shifts, Rapoon, Totemplow, Fuxa, Brume, Monera, Miehst, Pregnant Pause, and Flutter, and runs them all together in one long, seamless track. For all i know, some of the material may be overlaid rather than strictly sequential. The result is a series of shifting soundscapes, with segments that are cluttered with noise and others that are more sparse; sounds hover and dart which background ambience flows like a dark river. The sounds themselves drift from the ominous to the gorgeous, in a space where beats do not interfere with the wash of tonal color and texture. The track falls somewhere between ambient and isolationism and would make an effective introduction to the world of E+J in its own right. The Shifts track, "raw uncut," is a wavering field of drone saturated in shimmering layers of tonal color; Tabata's "viva revolutione!!" scatters seemingly random pellets of psychedelic guitar mutterings over a hollow, metronomic pulse as a psychedelic orchestra of sorts saws away in the background. The contribution by Subarachnoid Space and the Walking Timebombs, "a better feeling," is the closest the disc comes to an actual "song," one whose sound will be familiar to devotees of either band. As the Space lay down a skull-frying psych groove, Scott Ayers drills holes in the fabric of sound with his own wild guitar excursions. The track from September Plateau, "useless diamonds," starts like it might be an actual song, but abruptly dissolves into peculiar chugging noises... only to be overlaid by loops and layers of chiming guitar. Aube's contribution, "closed," is simply bizarre: drones build to abrupt shattering noises that fall away as more abstract noises build in intensity until it all ends in equally abrupt fashion. Possibly the most low-key entry here is "the beginning of the end of the reputation of the greatest secret agent" by FM Synthesis, a droning loop whose duration is almost exceeded by the title's length. Brume's offering, "ersatz-stellungen," is a bit more of a bumpier ride, with a plucked-string loop overlaid with random bumping and thumping, among other things. The final track, Monera's "locomotor structure," is a return to the drone mantra, albeit one in which the drones appear in a series of shifting loops that change in intensity and mood over a period of time.

As usual, the packaging is nifty -- the disc comes in a letterpress digipak with a series of translucent mylar inserts for the liner notes -- and given the quality of the material, it would be well worth buying one of the regular releases just to get this. (It helps considerably that the label has yet to stumble with the quality of their releases, meaning you pretty much can't miss even if you ordered something totally at random.) The only catch is that the mar/ino discs are available only through mail-order; in order to get one of these, you have to buy direct from the label (which you should be doing anyway, it's better for the label and cheaper besides). You can find the link to the label's home on the web in the EPHEMERA section, natch.

I'm not completely sure what's up here -- the "liner notes" are kinda cryptic -- but i gather it's Paradise 23 taking bits 'n pieces of material from the Mandragora catalog (including chunks by the likes of Paradise 23, Bull Anus, Rezenate, and Crackhouse) and retooling them into something new. That "something new" is noisy, whacked-out, repetitive, and full of forbidding death rumble. The end product sounds like the work of people on serious fucking drugs. Kids, don't try this at home! Sniffing airplane glue will not be powerful enough to achieve these effects! There are five tracks here, none of them have titles (or if they do, they are cleverly hidden), and they are all variously noisy/devolved/full o' satanic-sounding grunts and machine noises and psychedelic death spoo. This is some seriously grotesque-sounding shit. Walls of eerie-sounding noise and scary bleating make for an experience you won't forget if you're tripping too hard. DEAD ANGEL says investigate.

The twelve tracks on this fine disc comprise the soundtrack for a documentary film, FRONTIER LIFE, and the music is provided by members of the Nortec Collective (Tijuana) and Trummerflora Collective (San Diego), which makes it sort of like a cosmic meeting of the masters o' world beat and experimental music.(The movie itself is apparently about Tijuana.) This is on Accretions, so right away you can expect a heady mix o' experimental weirdness and suave world beat moves. Early on -- the first track, in fact ("Discar's "Iofobia") -- it becomes evident what sets Accretion's artists apart from other experimental labels: they know how to groove. They're not just doing odd things with prepared guitars and squeaky boxsprings; they have no problem with these concepts, but only as an additional element to the primal world beat groove. Speaking of grooves, that groove on "Iofobia" grows bigger, and on "Aguasnegras en Dub" (Panoptica), it becomes almost the sole focus of the song: a big, dubby rhythm is repeated endlessly as other beats and polyrhythms are worked out in hocus-pocus moves of great briefness over its mighty krush-groove. The swell groove continues into "Palacio," where Titicacaman offsets it with a mighty horn drone that eventually gives way to elliptical percussion that announces a slower and more deliberate accompaniment to a kinder, gentler drone. Clorofilia's "El Animal" is another festival o' polyrhythms over which horns high 'n low drone and wail, with a flowing and energetic world beat that commands you to get up and shake your bun. "Phone Damage" is a more unsettling slice of slo-mo power drone from Hans Fjellestad that almost (but not quite) drowns out sparse but interesting rhythms and occasional bits of conversation, until eventually it definitely drowns out everything as it begins to resemble the sound of a spacecraft coming in for landing. "Com Com" (Las Cajas del Ritmo) is built on two rhythms that don't quite work together, giving them an odd canter that is ripe for explotation by a third rhythm -- as the polyrhythms begin to pile up, the odd rhythm integrates perfectly into the rest of the increasingly complex rhythmic pattern. Latinsizer's "Falling Peni" is a cryptic series of fragmentary rhythms that eventually come together with a hard beat to form something akin to pulsing and distorted techno. Panoptica returns with "Camposanto," in which electronic glitches create twitching mechanical rhythms like the sound of a bad radio transmission as droning keyboard motifs circle endlessly in the background. Latinsizer's "Rubiconga" is an intensely swank collection of conga beats and added percussion that takes a few unexpected turns along the way; Marcos Fernandes contributes "Bullets for Ballots," more in keeping with what i would think of as part of a documentary -- minimalist shakers set in motion a rhythm that is eventually joined by slow piano and a winding flute, then the sound of a man speaking in Spanish commences as the horns imitate birds. When the deliberate beat comes in, it (and all that has come before) frames a shifting mood piece around the man's monologue, and it's only when he's not speaking that the band goes wild, picking up the pace rhythmically and the flute getting out of control... but it all calms back down when the man's voice comes back. On "Ensemble Circuits," Point Loma go from total silence to a faraway drone over the period of about a minute and a half; as a slow and repetitive beat begins, the drone begins to grow in volume and it takes on a rhythm of its own in response to the beat. The final track, "Unico Amour" (Marcelo Radulovich), begins with what sounds like a bulldozer warming up outside a zoo with a band playing in the distance and eventually turns into a roaring landslide of sound -- not a bad way to end the proceedings, whether on film or not. This disc works just as well on its own, divorced of the film; all in all, a fine collection of world-beat stylings with a wide range of sound that's plenty accessible while still being safely outside of the mainstream.

Plan Eleven is a label/distributor from Canada that's been up to interesting stuff in the past few years; while most of the artists they carry or distribute are Canadian (duh), and as such are not as well known over on this side of the continent, quite a few of them ought to be better known. Unlike some labels, Plan Eleven doesn't focus strictly on one thing; ergo, its compilations, like this one, are pretty varied. Witness the inclusion of groove-oriented EBM bands like Chromosphere ("Mother Ship"), Roger O'Donnell ("This Side"), Wave ("Seven Dials"), Christmas in Glass ("A Day This Long"), An April March ("Daylight Falters"), all of whom sound wildly different -- some of them, like Chromosphere, actually cross back and forth between EBM and goth, while O'Donnell's sound is largely piano-driven amid the beats -- and all of them sound excellent. Other bands like Ariel ("The Innocence ["Older" mix]") and Parade ("Deeper Here") are more guitar and keyboard oriented, with a sound that pushes at the envelope originally developed by the 4AD bands. Splinter Cage's offering ("Cascade Shift") sounds like a mix of all of the above -- dreamy textures, relentless EBM beats, and harsh industrial vox. Chesire Cat Smile ("Bicycle") churns out fuzzy, guitar-heavy dreampop, Bartok Guitarsplat ("No Excuses") wallows in peculiar guitar efx and a faltering sound structure that eventually builds into a dreamy wall of flanged-out guitars, Echo ("Reclining in Dub") weighs in with a springy dub track, and In Another Life ("Heavenly") carves out one more slice of the ethereal 4AD sound with EBM beats thrown in just to make you move. A lot of ground gets covered here and as compilations go, this one has a much higher quality ratio than most. A good place to start for someone interested in the Plan Eleven stable o' bands. Collectors take note: the song by An April March is unavailable anywhere else....

v/a -- NFCD [X-Units]

This is subtitled "Audio Documentation of the 1997 Northern California Experimental Music Festival," which pretty much sums it up. The festival took place September 12-13, 1997 and featured approximately thirty bands or solo artists; this CD includes tracks by approximately half of them. Much of the music here is of a cut-up, found-sound nature, as evidenced by tracks by Office Products ("Launch Break"), Diaz-Infante Dvorin ("Excerpt from Tryptich, Panel One") and ECOMCON ("Records Joe Gave Me"); others, like Crib's "Dissolution," are more in the vein of droning minimalism via electronic gadget manipulation. On "...recollecting past events of seminal importance, with allusions to three situations," CMU lures in the listener with stretches of silence intercut with bursts of gadgetry, abruptly followed by something resembling a slice of a droning song -- a sound that falls away into silence, then more gadgets. Moekestra employs heavy reverb and gating to achieve a hermetic drone occasionally spiced with peculiar clattering and bursts of sound on "Falling Objects from an Atmosphere"; Radiosonde puts shuddering and distorted bass loops into effect with noisy results on "Moments Before Play"; and K. Atchley puts more loud, fuzzy drones to work opposing each other on "Cactus Flower (Classical)," which doesn't sound remotely classical at all.

The shining tower of drone seems to be one of the more prevalent sources of sound construction here -- more than half the bands employ some form of drone -- along with snippets of found sound. This is best put to effect on pieces like "Surgaspring" (Klowd) and Eugene Thacker's "Opal-Binhex Aether," which features a great loop like the sound of an engine knocking that gradually increases in volume, wavering in strength. One of the more intriguing offerings here is the collaboration between Chris Cobb and Floyd Diebel (of CMU), "Twelve Evenings/Prometheus Loop," a more structured piece than most of the material here, in which different segments of sound are faded in and out in movements over a churning loop. A vocal and piano segment is looped in the middle, and grows in volume as the loop sequence progresses, then fades out. Hypnotic stuff.

This is quirky, unusual stuff that should be of considerable interest to those enamored of found sound and highly experimental cut and paste hijinks. How you get your hands on it, though, is a damn good question. Perhaps if you were to send a nice email message to Chris Cobb at [ cobbsf@sfai.edu ] he could enlighten you in that regard....

v/a -- NOCTURNE CONCRETE [Unit Circle Records]

I don't tend to review compilations because I don't like to. Compilation recordings have become a thing of cliche. After all, what is the purpose of a compilation anyway? Most of the compilations today are either genre specific, tributes or a collection of "best of" tracks. None of these concepts have much value to them, except that for people who are exploring a new genre, some compilations are a good way of getting exposed. Not to mention, it's more difficult to review a collection of tracks by different artists rather than a handful of tracks by the same artist. In that respect, NOCTURNE CONCRETE is a sleeper. The artwork, cheesy as it is, looks like a sick mixture between techno/ambient and goth stylings, making for a feeling of real trepidation. The artists involved are somewhere between unknown and not very well known. There's no manifesto, no explanation for making the recording. Nothing. Each artist gets a page in the booklet to plug themselves as they please and there is a single quote by Luigi Russolo on the inside. Perhaps the only clue. What makes this recording so intruiging is that, overall, the tracks don't all fit into a single genre or catagory of sound. In essence, the folks behind this recording have done something incredibly bold: they've attempted to put together a collection of different musics which probably appeal to them, to share with us. It's risky, but they manage it rather gracefully. There are perhaps only one or two tracks that did not appeal. The rest were, surprisingly astounding. The real standouts were those by Bill Horist, Rich Hinklin, Interference Pattern and Fear of Dolls. Each of these tracks is quite a bit different. The Horist piece is a minimalistic, contemplative soundscape. Whereas, Hinklin's contribution sounds like a cross between 20th century post-classical and avant garde improvisational musings. Interference Pattern do a poly-rhythmic percussion piece. And Fear of Dolls sounds quite a bit like a Savage Republic-inspired piece of pop/not-pop disonance fun. [yol]

Noise, chaos, distortion, big metal riffs, more confusion... this must be a Load record! Oh wait, it's not -- but you could be forgiven for the confusion, since plenty of Load bands appear on it. The compilation was inspired by the APATHY PISSES ME OFF tape comp and was originally released as a cassette in a limited-edition run of 70. Now the masses (or at least a few more people, anyway) can hear the soothing sounds of destruction, blown up real, real loud for the digital age. Play this in your car with the bass turned up and let your community feel the love! Favorite tracks include Landed's "they were eating caca" (which sounds every bit as demented as the title implies), Necronomitron's flying-drumsticks-of-death waltz with frantic guitar riffing on "bloodclotguts," the gritty and clattering weirdness of Mindflayer's "dust often," Em Dath Rir's evil and pummelling grindcore medley ("barren & lifeless," "abstain," "the few, the proud, the mangled," and "ask yourself" all in not much more than four minutes), Mahi Mahi's drone of death and minimalist electronica that eventually turns into something resembling a real song on "stop messing around," and Seratone's nifty (and brief) acoustic bit, "new dreams."

But wait! There's more! Not sold in any store! (Much, if not all, of the material here is probably exclusive to this release -- that's definitely true of the Lightning Bolt and Mindflayer tracks.) The mighty riffs o' fear return with Football Rabbit's "polished arrow," Suffering Bastard plows through five lo-fi grind spasms ("septic forest," "hot soup," "mouth of hell (noise)," "shit vomit," and "bride of maggot") in less than three and a half minutes, the grinding noisefest Kite brings on in "pacifist," Lightning Bolt's high-speed madness on the appropriately-named "swarm," and White Rice's rumbling and grumbling "violence of the lambs." Twenty bands making violent, flatulent noise with a wild variety of instruments and semi-stolen riffs; your mother will not like this. But you should. The next time that construction crew starts up outside your window at seven in the morning, you can match them in volume and chaos with this disc.

v/a -- ONE NATION, UNDERGROUND [Monkeyland]

Well, technically speaking, this isn't a demo -- in fact, it's a sampler CD from the newly-formed label Monkeyland Records, featuring sixteen songs by sixteen bands. This is essentially a "preview" of what's to come, as Monkeyland will be releasing singles and full-length releases by most (if not all) of the bands spotlighted here. So, since it's the first release from the label and (presumably) the first release of material by the bands involved, it's being reviewed here instead of the other section. And if you have a problem with that, well, life's hard all over....

First revelation: I normally treat various-artist compilations with the same caution I'd reserve for handling plutonium, so this comes as a pleasant surprise -- everything on here is pretty good, and in some cases absolutely great. This bodes well for the future of the label...

The Chrome-Moly Violets toss off a stunner early on with "Highschool Yearbook," coming across like a candy-sweet cross between the Call and Soul Asylum, with a song considerably better than anything I've heard on the radio lately. If the rest of what they have to offer is even close to this, I'll be first in line to buy the full album when it comes out, buddy... World In A Room follows with the brooding "Train," in which a throbbing bass and desperate vocals make this an eerie standout. Things get a bit noisier with SOR's "244," where they creep into the territory of Piss Factory guitar squeal without getting quite so malevolent. The Krayons provide a blast of pure punk with "Failing Miserably," after which Sandrew offers an acoustic respite in the instrumental "Pas De Bourree." Need some more metallic riffing? Little Savage is here to accommodate you on "Multi- Personality," and Betty Stress serves up some more pummel with "The Joke." And aside from having a really swinging tune ("My Room"), Poop get bonus points just for their name....

Limited space prevents me from telling you about the glories of the other bands (The Grovers, Cupid Garden, Zen Parade, Romeo Plowboy, Real Cool Rain, Klump, Night Shade, and the Candy Snatchers), but trust me, they're all worth hearing. This is one happening compilation, and I'm looking forward to hearing more from these bands. Check it out for yourself and see why.

v/a -- PARADIGM SHIFT [SubConscious Communications/Nettwerk]

The SubConscious label was originally created by Dwayne Goettel in 1993 so that he could release his limited edition techno 12" under the name aDuck. Since then, SubConscious has grown into an artist collective, remix team, 32-track recording studio, and record label. This release is actually the tenth release on SubConscious. So why haven't we heard much more from SubConcious? Perhaps this release has gotten better distribution because Nettwerk is backing SubConcious.

Well, on to the music. This disc seems to be one of those "love it or hate it" discs. Many people I know really don't like it, think it's boring, repetitive, whatever. Others love it, think it showcases other sides of the talent that made up Skinny Puppy and many of its offshoots. But whatever the opinion, this disc does showcase many projects that have members of Skinny Puppy. The featured artists are: aDuck (Dwayne Goettel solo), Philth (Phil Western - Download), Download, Plateau (The Green Guy - Skinny Puppy, Tear Garden), Doubting Thomas, Tear Garden, Dead Voices on Air, Kone, and an unreleased Skinny Puppy track. Each track is, more or less, dance techno, centered more on synthetic rhythm with random noises and samples thrown in to break up the beat, to add a little zing. Unlike most techno, each track, each band, does have a distinct feel to it. Yes, the focus is on rhythm, on the higher end of the BPM scale. But this isn't the kind of techno one would hear at raves, or at the local techno club. (Actually, I haven't heard these tracks at any clubs I've attended.) Most tracks aren't quite what one would expect from the Skinny Puppy camp because of the emphasis on dance-techno.

Some tracks do deliver exactly what one would expect. The Tear Garden track, for example, isn't much different than any of the other work by the band. It has the same psychedelia of which Edward Ka-Spel is known and the same musical accompaniment t hat only Tear Garden can put together. The same holds true for the Dead Voices on Air track. It is more of the same, strange experimentation that characterizes most releases by DVOA.

Essentially, this disc shows much of the diversity within the electro- industrial scene. It isn't another industrial music compilation, with the usual aggro lyrics and harsh rhythms. It's a collection of electronic music with a different focus. It might be the direction industrial music is taking. It might just be a fun collection of one-offs by important people in the electro-industrial scene. Either way, it's not a disc for everyone, but a disc for many that enjoy synthetic music with rhythm. [bc]

v/a -- PARASIT [Ant-Zen]

Hark! A noise compilation... this one from Germany, and a good one at that. Contagious Orgasm's offering, "Assertive Training," is reminiscent of some of Taint's work -- hollowed-out metallic percussion, unpleasant samples of violence abound -- but without the ear-shattering power electronics. "Loss of Life" (Crawl Unit) employs an eerie, processed loop of sound that fades in and out of oceanic electronics, producing an effect that could almost be ambient if it weren't so LOUD; by contrast, Japan's M.S.B.R. breaks out the power noise in static bursts against a backdrop of hum and screech on "Panicstricken Civilization." Streicher's "Decomposed Whore 2" sets rude samples and grinding and crunching sounds against a wavering bass loop -- repetition is a big theme on this record, kind of unusual on the noise front (perhaps signaling a new movement?), while Macronympha piles on thick sheets of pure white noise in customary fashion on "Caprineum," albeit with a wee bit more form than the uncontrolled chaos of some of their previous work. Aube's contribution ("Ionosphere II") is one of the more interesting tracks here, with screeching loops competing with grunting filth and telegraph rhythms before descending into the pure noise hell of C.C.C.C's "Live at Esterhofen," which produces a sound much like a rhino wrestling with a bulldozer. Thirdorgan's "Yagamania Part 4" is equally punishing, a seething river of white noise like the earth being sucked down a garbage disposal. Con-Dom's offering (with the long and convoluted title) is driven by a churning, repetitive loop of sonic quivering and augmented by various weird space noodling noises, taking a completely different approach than most of the material here with intriguing results.

While space prevents me from getting clinically detailed with everybody on the compilation, the remainder of the tracks (by the likes of Victim Kennel, Nimoy, P-A-L, and Small Cruel Party) are equally good, and the art direction is phenomenal -- Salt (apparently from Germany) has produced a stunning visual package to accompany the record (which itself is pressed on clear vinyl). The record is enclosed in blue rice paper and includes a large booklet adorned with a huge detail of a fly's eye on the front, with truly swank graphics inside; all of it rests inside a bag of clear stitched vinyl with the trilobite logo stamped on front. It has to be seen to be fully appreciated, and it is truly amazing....

The weeping woman opens the door to admit Joe Friday. After a brief discussion, he follows her to the back of the house and into a small, crowded office. The office is lined with shelves crammed full of cds, books, and videos. Frank is already back there, carefully taking notes and inspecting the remains of a man seated in front a blown television. The man's head has exploded; the walls are painted with blood and gore.

JOE: What kind of situation do we have here, Frank? And remember -- just the facts, sir.

FRANK: It appears this man was reviewing this DVD, a music compilation of some sort, when his head exploded. (Holds up a much-too-bright DVD case entitled PICK A WINNER.) I've already checked out the documentation -- nothing but a bunch of cards, like playing cards, only printed with pure gibberish.

JOE: Have you checked out the video?

FRANK: No, the television exploded. Much like the man's head. I have recovered his notes. See here, he made notes while watching. As far as I can tell, the accompanying CD is nothing more than the audio recordings of the music used in the films on the DVD. Seventeen songs on both discs.

JOE (taking copious notes): I see. Let's look at those notes, Frank.

The notes, they discover, are nearly illegible; even when translated, they don't make a hell of a lot of sense. The two detectives read, puzzled:

Thorn Pronged Fawn -- Opening title / Pick a Winner / Intro. Root menu offers these choices over video of diabolical puppet-fu with cheap efx. Bottle rockets! Satan smile! O how I fear the vile puppet!

My Favorite Homepage -- Overactive computer graphics, beating heart. Cookie monster die! Wolves got lips? WTF? I am destroying my astro-mind. Where's my lighter! Where's my lighter! Where's my lighter! These colors are fucking my eyes. OW!

Lightning Bolt -- Oooo, pretty colors! Hideous music but in a humorous way, more pretty colors. Bassman, drummer man, squee squee! Blang blang blang!

Neon Hunk -- Clouds with skulls! Breasts and phallocentric hooliganism, way mondo flashing, I think I just had a seizure. Mama, where's my baby mama?

Pixellan -- Hey, cool animation. Violent stuff too! Homo cops! Head go bye-bye! BALLS! Teeth acid pyramids! Breasts and camel testes! Evil gum-fu! Demon toothpaste! My pig is free! Stab the Earth, bleed for me....

La Machine -- Buh? So many squares go flashy flashy oh the horror! Eyes and balls and melty melty. Suitcase for mantis, Samsonite? I don't know. War of the satellites while penis cucumber fidgets!

Black Elf Speaks -- Whoa, trippy psych and trilobytes. Live on stage with nature and leaves. Crowd praises trilobytes. Yog-Sothoth wears a headband! Blair Witch Cymbal! I have big headache now. Foot (bare) of fuzz! Taco taco taco croons Ed Asner. WTF? Bugs! I fear them! Blair Witch Leaf make me vomit and go shitty poo in my diapers!

Wolf Eyes -- See first page you goddamn roach huffin' fuck pole! I'm pooing on your foot now! Digging white bunny out of the snow, then shaky camera hell following dog through woods. Weird computer animation over the top. Oh my, headache time.

White Mice -- Satan's mouse bites my pee-pee as band plays live. Frankenmouse will have his revenge! Pentagram Cthulhu-fu. Who knows what it all means?

Pink and Brown -- 4H gymnastics. Uh-oh. Look at those tiny buns and blue outfits. Them big hills, baby. Pre-fab homes in the desert. Music no relation to picture. My neck is crawling with fanged horseflies.

Monstrously Brinkman -- More computer graphics and techno. The world is a low-res video game. Aliens of future shock. Peace zone. Ghost castles in the sky.

Gerty Farish -- More of the same but basketball and cheerleaders. Color overload! Color overload!

Thee Hydrogen Terrors -- Spirograph on pep pills. Acid. Brown! Screaming! My weiner fell off!

Andy Puls (Neon Hunk) -- MC Escher sniffs glue. Leaves are hands. Hands are heaving. Horn of destiny. More unnatural colors. Eyeballs twitch. Claw and gnaw! Eyes leave sockets and take a rest. Chattering jaws!

Pleasurehorse -- Now this is hip shit but disorienting. Everything dissolves and jump cuts. Like TV bent out of shape! I may heave soon. In fact, I know I'm going to heave soon. This should be illegal. Damn those evil princes of diabolical eye-death at Load!

Forcefield -- Geometric shapes. B / W. Colors! Oh God my eyes! Stop! STOP! Shit my eyes exploded and my head feels real funny this could (text ends).

Joe looks at Frank, sniffing the air as Frank throws the CD into a nearby stereo.

JOE: Smell that, Frank? A hophead for sure.

FRANK: Think it had anything to do with his head exploding?

JOE: Could be. What is that unspeakable noise coming out of the speakers, Frank?

FRANK: This is the audio minus the video. These are the bands he was listening to while watching whatever it was that made his head explode. This is what the cool kids, the hipsters, the beatniks call music these days.

JOE: Are you sure this is music? It sounds like drug addicts beating randomly on things. And shouting a lot.

FRANK: Trust me Joe, this is -- how does my niece put it? -- totally the shit. Especially that Lightning Bolt thing.

JOE: I greatly disapprove of all of this. I'm taking this whole room down to the lab. Those crazy kids hopped up on go-pills! What will they think of next?

Joe and Frank leave the room as the ME and his assistant continue to take photographs. The lurid, hyperkinetic music, like bottled lightning blowing out the speakers, goes on and on and on.

Strange technoish beats collide with devolved sounds on this sampler funded by the Arts Council of England. Brought to my attention by OCOSI (who contribute two tracks and two remixes), it's filled with knob-twiddlers doing weird and interesting things in the name of "art." Witness Task, who churn out springy beats and growling efx noises on "Skinsect" and heavier beats with almost classical noise snippets on "Skin Collage." Then there's Kanal, mating vaguely jungleish beats with swirls of noise that rise and fall on "The Puppet Masters"; on "Supplicant and Turnkey," Kanal's beats are harder and the loops more pronounced (which may have something to do with OCOSI's presence as remixers). OCOSI turn up as remixers again for Su8m3rg3d on "040398," a track that ends up resembling ghost trains rattling through a subway station. OCOSI themselves get hard and rattly on "Devil Doll," which extends the loop o' doom sensibility of their CD and grafts on mumbling female vox and screeching liftoff noises; on "Skin Maze" they get even tougher, pitting hard beats against a drone materializing and receding as if from a Leslie cabinet. Hayleck (see the review of his full-length disc elsewhere in the issue) contributes what may be the most bizarre track on the compilation, a steaming swirl of reverbed-into-oblivion loops and bass shudders that's certainly rhythmic but bears little resemblance to "traditional" electronic dance music. The track from Sadist, "Katak," wafts through a melange of styles, incorporating sound bites, scattershot beats, tubby bass rumbling, and other peculiar rhythmic sounds that on first glance appear almost random but eventually coalesce into something at least vaguely purposeful. Sound bites, repeated ad infinitum, show up again on the Surface track "Fallen," along with hideous scratching and weird shimmering noises; just as it starts to be kind of irritating, a boss beat materializes out of nowhere and the entire track starts to not only make sense, but to actual sort of rock. Uh, nice trick. Strange new sounds for a strange new world, in which the cold-wave punters dance like robots while England burns into the doom-laden millenium....

Just a partial list of the contributors should give you a hint as to why you need this: Troum, Unearthly Trance, Thuja, House of Low Culture, Ruhr Hunter, Francisco Lopez.... The histories of said artists should clue you in, as well, to the nature of these proceedings. It's all about the drone, baybee! More accurately, it's about dark and sometimes forbidding exercises in dark-ambient grimness. The liner notes pay respect to all the right gods (Theater of Eternal Music, Phill Niblock, Terry Riley, etc.), and while the compilation is definitely paying obesiance to these gods and newer ones like Earth, Abruptum, and Maeror Tri, there are plenty of surprises along the way. The first one is the opening track from Ruhr Hunter ("in memory with blackest wings i fly"), which is not only one of the best tracks on the disc, but marries drone and Krautrock with such skill and elegance that I can't fathom why Ruhr Hunter isn't more well-known. Troum's "uswena" is a drifting swirl of subdued guitars, bass, mouth organ, voices and other effluvia, none of which is really recognizable as anything other than the sound of the cosmos reverberating. " Unearthly Trance add elements of dissonant violence to their shuddering ritualistic drone, conjuring up fatalistic visions of rituals at dawn leading to blood running down the hills. (I think they should just start covering Hermann Nitsch and get it over with -- or better yet, start staging Nitsch rituals.) Thuja adds a bit of primitive scratching and clanking to their brooding drone on "Cave Floor," House of Low Culture throws in noise and glitch electronica on "A.T. Drone Home," and Scot Jenerik's "Of A Dead God" begins with minimalist noises and near-silence that gradually builds to a near-fury then dissipates, only to coalesce again in pained drones like radio towers malfunctioning. Israel's Chaos As Shelter builds up an impressive wall of cycling drone on "nihil," but it's the Lopez track at the end ("Untitled 133") that will really get your attention (and wake your ass up, if you dozed off while buried in drone) -- loud, chaotic noise washed clean by the healing power of reverb. Ten tracks, all good, and ultra-swank packaging (design courtesy of Aaron Turner at Hydrahead). Pour yourself a fat cup o' drone and bathe in it, that's what I always say.

v/a -- REDRUM [Spilling Audio]

This is the second in a series of percussion compilations (that's thump-thump oriented stuff to you, buddy) from Spilling Audio; a third one is on the way soon. There are 22 tracks by 22 artists (more or less -- some work in several configurations, meaning that a few names crop up more than once here). "Station Cry" features a groovin' bass track overlaid with manic bongos and various other forms of percussion; "Strait fo Juan de Fuca: Allegory and Defense" (by Lab Rat) is a more clanking, industrial kind of thing, with wounded howling in the background. Bamboo Cathedral's "Duradjua" relies on a sampling keyboard to process sampled sounds into pounding patterns that lock together to form an intriguing song, while the contribution of David Barnes -- "A Boy, A Dog, A Dinosaur part 2" (part of a long soundtrack for a childrens' mime puppet show, how cool) combines such exotic (and not so exotic) instruments as a bylaphone, Rhodes piano, wood blocks, bronze Chinese rattle, squeaky chair, and more to make a bizarre but captivating track. For the truly bizarre, there's "Kristen's Cacaphony part 1," where speeded-up and spliced percussion sounds weave around a woman (Kristen, natch) providing outlandish answers to questions that aren't present.

And there's more! Yes! The track "Tumblethunder" (Barry Chabala and Mike Hovancsek) claims to be using waterphone and ryom, whatever the hell those are, but actually sounds more like guys rolling ball bearings across galvanized sheets of tin. The Conspiracy's "Africa" starts with an eerie whistle, then segues into a rhythmic groove thing with congas, bongos, and the like, and Dimthingshine's "He That Creates Me, Creates..." just goes completely apeshit with deranged percussion (but where's the beat?). "Seducing Mahatma," by Eleven Shadows, sounds like it could have floated off a Steely Dan album, assuming that the Dan could ever manage to put aside being clever (and uncovering new and unorthodox uses for suspended augmented inverted ninth chords) long enough to just groove. The Qubais Reed Ghazala track "A Light on Black Canvas" uses the passing of a freight train for the rhythm tracks (! -- gee, I wonder if he grew up in Buda and Manchanca too) [yes, i know that's needlessly cryptic.], then uses a lot of instruments with ridiculous names to approximate the sounds of the railroad brake and coupler.... Russ Steadman employs the creative use of household objects like a Tupperware bowl, cardboard box, pots and pans, and other junk to piece together the amusingly-titled "The Vietnam Vet Upstairs Who Drops His Weights On the Floor." The last track on the compilation is "Winded in the Timber," which also appears on the Eric Hausmann tape reviewed earlier this issue....

So what you have here is nearly 90 minutes of supreme weirdness and lots of extremely creative misappropriations of sound in the name of percussion. No doubt a joyous find for the percussion-enthralled... and an orgy of sample source material for the industrial crowd, too. Scope it out. (Other artists featured include Tom Nunn and Doug Carroll, Secret Archives of the Vatican (who get bonus points for their happening name alone, although their track is pretty hip too), The Miracle, John Herron, Sphinx Holotronic, Peter Hinds, Your Host Bobby, Ancient Chinese Secret, Boris and Ivan, and Ken Clinger.)

Another collection of cool and obscure eccentricities from cassette-only Spilling Audio. Like all the rest, it's difficult to describe the truly eclectic mix of stuff on here. As with most Spilling Audio releases, there's a lot of peculiar percussion on this, even more prominent this time due to the compilation's percussion-oriented theme.

There's a lot of whacked-out stuff happening here, songs that are all definitely more "different" than anything your average "alternative" marketing guru could ever dream up. Sometimes rumbling, sometimes quasi-ambient, "Hierarchy of Wisdom" (Jacky Ligon and Duke Andrews) consistently benefits from eccentric percussion; Eric Hausmann provides some pretty fierce percussion madness on "All That Glitters," only to be followed by even more demanding (albeit slower) pounding from Nux Vomica on "Collapsing Schemes I." Compelling percussion (along with slide guitar) is at the heart of David Barnes' "Fear of Icicles (part 2)," which incorporates hammer dulcimers and Balinese percussion to form a hypnotic tinkling mantra. One of the more interesting pieces comes courtesy of Mike Hovancsek and Paul Guerguerian on "A Study in Metals," where they basically beat on things with metal rods, use ebow and metal, etc. "Scared" (Hauz) is a brooding pulse of city-street ambience over a thudding drum track, minimal guitars, and a repeating sample that provides the title; excellent music for Quentin Tarantino's next pulp movie. Churning noises, scratching, and ominous percussion are the backbone of Bigg Siety Orchestre's "Murd"; and most lunar of all, Bryan Kieser's "Type Writer" is a bizarre reading of the beginning Kafka's "Metamorphosis" with "Gregor" and "cockroach" replaced by "typewriter," accompanied by percussion provided by... a typewriter. Other artists i didn't have room to mention here: Spilling Static Orchestra, The Miracle, Triptic of a Pastel Fern, Ed Ziffle, Peter Hinds and John Hinds, L.G. Mair Jr., Kirkenkampf, rOTTEN 211, John Cieciel, John Herron, Amscray Amok, Boris and Ivan, John Gillespie, Okaniwa Fumihiro, and Treblemaker. All have tracks way, way out in left field, so pick up a copy and see what i mean.

v/a -- ROCK STARS KILL [Kill Rock Stars]

Seeing as how honesty is supposedly the best policy (hah), I have to admit that I picked this up solely for the tracks by Helium, Team Dresch, Fifth Column, and the Spinanes. Which leaves 19 more tracks by 19 more bands, some of which I don't particularly care for, others of which actually turned out to be pretty interesting. The Helium (with The Bird of Paradise) track adds horns and semi- jazzy drumming to their usual sonic wall of sound with interesting results, although this still isn't anywhere near as impressive as their better stuff. The Spinanes weigh in with "Stupid Crazy," maybe the best song on the album, a churning riff monster that falls somewhere between the early singles and MANOS in terms of sonic attack. "Seven," by Team Dresch, is loud and chunky and kind of cool, but still not quite up to the standard of the first single... which is probably why it ended up here instead of there. Fifth Column's "Detox Killer (Erotic Thriller)" ends up sounding like a cheesy beach-party tune, kind of amusing as a novelty, I guess, but they've done better stuff elsewhere. Hmm....

Some of the remaining tracks are pretty happening in their own right -- the fuzzy riffing of Starpower's "Megablot," the Spinanes-Jr.-riffing-only-thicker sound of Severed Lethargy's "Rev," Starpimp's fuzzy rumbling and cool squealy guitar lines on "Roche Limit," and the pained turn from Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, "I Wish I Was Him," which is less abrasive than her band's usual output but hardly qualifies as a joyride. The most surprising track, though, comes from Pell Mell, on "Don the Beachcomber," where weird instrumentation and a semi-jazzy vibe combine to create something hard to describe but unspeakably cool nonetheless. And in their usual spirit of perversity, God is my Copilot's contribution, "Anatomically Correct," is actually more interesting than most of their better-known stuff.

The rest of the album falls into two categories: obnoxious screaming and thrashing without any real point (Tourettes, Multikaeo Fairies, and Free Kitten), and the merely there (everything else). Approximately half the album, in fact, which points up the main limitation of label samplers -- it's pretty hard to come up with a whole album's worth of good shit by rooting around in the leftovers of 23 very different bands. Oh well... approach at your own risk, but if you've never heard much of the KRS roster, then this is a good way to find out about them without spending too much $$$.

Meteor City brings you the east coast answer to THE DESERT SESSIONS. The short version is that Meteor City decided that New Jersey was stoner-rock central on the east coast and the Jersey "scene" needed to be documented (and why not?). So we get a shiny piece of plastic featuring members of The Atomic Bitchwax, Burnout King, The Clone Obey, Core, Daisycutter, Drag Pack, Halfway to Gone, The Lemmings, Monster Magnet, Rot Gut, Six Sigma, and Solace -- along with non-Jerseyites such as Alfred Morris III from Iron Man, Yukito from Eternal Elysium, and guys from a band called Giant Sloth kicking out the jams Jersey-style.

What's that? I hear the Moon Unit yelling something.... what's that? Oh, fuck off -- Jesus, I'm trying to write here. What? TASCAM-Girl is getting impatient? She can blow me. [tmu: Aye, m'laddie, but she's too busy blowing me instead.] Actually, scratch that -- she has those freaky razor caps on her teeth... What's the question again?

Oh, is it any good? Parts of it. I mean, there were a bunch of people and a lot of jamming involved so obviously you're going to have to take the good with the bad. I can honestly say that it's mostly good though.

What now -- you want examples? Fine. Your mag. I mean, your virtual mag, fucker! [tmu: Not that it takes any sooner to do it virtually than physically... you know, that almost sounds dirty, if you know what i mean.]

The good: Solarized -- "Back of My Mind." Jim and co. get down with the punk rock. They really should do this more often. The Rot Gut stuff -- This is a Solance spinoff. I'm a Tommy Southard fanboy, so of course I'm gonna think it's good. "You Know" by Jim LaPointe -- another Detroit circa '69-sounding tune. Some of the wanky instrumentals (i.e., "Midnight Snack"). The bad: OK, I can't say that any of it's REALLY bad. I mean, fans of the individual bands will probably dig the whole disc. Drag Pack makes me want to yell "Fuck off!" at my cd player, as does some of the other (i.e., the ones I don't personally like) wanky instrumentals.

How does it match up to the Desert Sessions? Do you really care? Yes, apparently you do. OK, the Desert Sessoins were (are?) a bunch of hipsters getting together and doing some high-concept/lowbrow art rock jamming in the desert. SCENE KILLER is (was?) a bunch of crusty men and women getting together to jam some big rock on the Jersey shore. Perhaps this is a better way to put it: For the Jersey scene, time stopped in 1974. If you think that rock attained perfection in 1974, then this is the disc for you. [n/a]

This limited-run cd-r is the companion to the recent drone compilation RECORD OF SHADOWS INFINITE, featuring lesser-known but equally drone-o-rific bands. Actually, not all of the bands here are technically drone bands -- Dead Raven Choir, for instance (who open with "Sonja") are technically country death folk or something equally complicated, although here Smolken comes on like Khanate with acoustic guitars, all minimal structure, background drones and noise, and darkly hideous vocals. Encomiast's "Nicht" is closer to more traditional drone, a drifting and brooding slice of dark-ambient sound that shudders and reverberates like the sound of high-tension wires swaying in the breeze after midnight. Then comes the clanging, metallic sheets of distorted amp-death favored by Korperschwache on "Let My Knife" (truncated, for some reason, from its full title "Let My Knife Trace the Contours of Your Skull") -- ugly, dissonant screech filtered through acres of reverb and extremely hostile distortion. Existential Dilemma brings an element of rhythm into the picture on "Wolven-Elf Deer," in addition to the necessary noise floor and sonic death-drift; with Burning Star Core's entry, "Blue Sunshine Vocalworks," the territory turns decidedly hostile again with screeching noise like a garbage disposal backing up and, somewhere far in the background, drones and howling. On "Untitled # 22," Feverdreams begin with a repetitive, mantra-like feedback riff and slowly but surely build layers of resonant, ringing feedback over the top -- this song turns out to be one of the most spatially complex tracks on the compilation, one in which the initial sound grows... and grows... and grows, becoming more disturbing as it goes, while some lunatic mutters in scary fashion beneath it all. Nadja (the doom side-project of ambient-drone wunderkind Aidan Baker) introduces the first serious elements of percussion on "Veil of Disillusion," in the form of an enormously pokey beat, as monolithic and glacial guitars drone around the rhythm. On "Coming of Lilith," Marax pits a teeth-grinding high-end machine screech against a subsonic rumble, allowing them to battle it out for supremacy; then UNHOLYDEATHMACHINE brings the entire doomed disc to its unnatural and sordid conclusion with "Infidel," a gruesome exercise in tinny noise guitar and a guttural death-croak over a blind and endless bass riff. Swell, swell stuff, and a worthy companion to the official SHADOWS disc....

This is an interesting spin on the tribute concept: 16 groups or artists have recorded their own versions of all the tracks from the Hanatarash's seminal album HANTARASH 2 (on Alchemy Records), all in the same running order. Having not heard the original album, i don't know how this CD compares with the original, but it's a unpredictable noisefest in its own right. "Frog Girl 9000" (Faxed Head) includes kitchen-sink sounds and scratching noises, all lurching in different directions; "My Dad Is Car" (Lee Ranaldo) ties together a hissing tidal wave that rises and falls in volume with screaming samples, that builds into a collage of madness with shouting, wailing, mutilated music samples and more unidentifiable sonic garbage. "Detroit Rock City" (Thee Bringdownzz) is a severely devolved anti-tune that may or may not be a cover of the Kiss tune, while "Vortex Shit" (Pork Queen) is exactly that: a spinning vortex of weird-sounding shit, most of it tweaked electronics and severely chopped samples. "No Noise" (Miss Murgatroid) is the sound of an accordion (!) after being processed through a wall of electronics, with peculiar results (like being in a birdhouse full of noisy hummingbirds). "Boat People Hate Fuck" (Glands of External Secretion) mixes a minimal percussion track with the voice of Barbara Manning (what the hell is she doing HERE?) and what i'd assume is a sample of a woman credited as Special Weapons and Tactics Officer Jennifer Tuuri threatening to shoot someone if he doesn't put his hands in the air. Yikes! "We Can Kill" (Maso Yamazaki and David Hopkins) is a brief burst of high-end hate, while "We Are Meat" and "California Sleep" (Macronympha) are blasts of crunching, roaring noise full of metal and broken glass and God only knows what else. And that's only about half of what's on here, all of it demented and noisy and as severely anti-pop as you can possibly get. The last (uncredited) "hold it bimbo" track is pretty humorous too....

This compilation wisely takes a bit of a different approach from most compilations: instead of assembling a bunch of unknown and/or unsigned bands and giving them one measly track each, it focuses on three bands with three tracks from each one. That way, it's easier to get a better feel for the artist's range and variety. The first band, Migala, is a previously unheralded treasure -- they have apparently released a couple of albums in their native Spain, but remain unknown here, and criminally so. "A Fistful" opens with cryptic clacking noises and guitar hum before the drummer lays down what is undoubtedly the coolest groove i've heard in a while, as guitars start to wail and drone around it, building into an actual song with the singer -- a brooding kinda guy -- going on about "riding red horses against the wind" like they all just stepped out of a spaghetti western. Piercing feedback drones open "That Woman (With Veil)" and then suddenly it turns into a fucking amazing rock tune with hard-strummed acoustic guitars and odd electric sounds in the background. "Low of Defenses" is every bit as righteous, only a tad more restrained and slower. The thing about these songs is that they are not really industrial or weird or anything except straight-ahead rock, really, but they are just so right that it's synapse-shattering. I... i must hear more by this band....

The three songs from Greg Weeks are bit more in the traditional folk music vein, albeit with some quirky sounds thrown in (a staple of Keyhole performers, apparently). "Tracy Bowen's Double Life" sounds like an outtake from some obscure sixties avant-folk album, complete with droning vox and a whistled outro -- sounds, in fact, like he's a heavy devotee of the FOLKWAYS ANTHOLOGY (not a bad thing at all). "Leaves and Limerance" remind me of Laura Nyro for some reason.... I was briefly thrown by the title to "Avalanche," and expected it to be a cover of the same tune by Leonard Cohen, but no, it's just another low-key droning tune about doomed love or something. Nothing wrong with that, but i would have liked the Cohen cover better, probably....

Which brings us to Tinsel, as obsessed as ever with integrating peculiar sounds into otherwise straightforward folk compositions. "Sink" is a blackly funny rumination on someone's sink that ends with "I want to save water and a little bit of face / So I'm pissing in your sink"; this time, unlike the songs on the first ep, the songs aren't as relentlessly dominated by the piano (he's cranking on an acoustic guitar this time). "Out of the Mirror" is a bizarre one in which the looped sound of, uh, something (whatever it is, it's weird) fades into the plink-plink of Sell workin' his mojo on the acoustic guitar and not much else. His odd worldview surfaces in the opening lyrics of "Teeth" (in which he's joined by vocalist Aleix Relue): "We sing our songs with mouths that have no teeth/ We live our lives by rules that have no teeth." As the song progresses, clunky noises in the background get louder and eventually overwhelm the song itself as it fades out.

As a bonus -- in addition to songs of a considerably better caliber than those found on your average comp -- the cover art is by everyone's favorite loopy queen of indie comix, Dame Darcy. I usually recommend comps mainly for the opportunity to check out new bands, but i'm recommending this one for the songs. You can investigate the further output of these guys on your own afterwards....

This is the second annual compilation of free-form weirdness from a collective of peculiar (in a good way) musicians from the Seattle underground scene -- they call it "enlightened anarchy," and that's as good a term as any for the unorthodox sounds emanating from this disc. Containing tracks by the likes of TCOR, Mutant Data Orchestra, Intonarumori, Mabuse, Sinister Kitchen, rebreather, Carl Juarez, Robert Pearson, Christopher DeLaurenti (who sequenced the 21 tracks here), and many others, it's a pretty exotic-sounding collection of sounds, all right. Crazed and machine-like noise data transmissions (Mutant Data Orchestra, "Edge Saturation"), perverse whimsy accompanied by kettle drums (The Bran Flakes, "The Magical Fairy Princess"), scraping droneathons like icebergs passing in the night (Steve Barsotti and Dave Knott, "Gongalong"), eerie guitar 'n cello workouts (Intonarumori, "Live at Consolidated Works 12.15.00 (excerpt)"), disturbed experiments in harsh, grinding noise (inBOIL, "Yaburebukero (reduction mix)" and Bakshish, "Peyote"), baroque nods to John Cage (Storrs Barrett Booch-Williams, "Thirty-Three Seconds"), obscenely damaged drum and percussion experiments (Carl Juarez, "Minmax Dub 23" and Robert Pearson, "Large Cortical Areas"), and sound-collage dominated by answering-machine tapes and drones (Christopher DeLaurenti, "Malevolent") -- this is just a sampling of the wildly diverse sounds and structures leaping out in all directions on this disc. Check this out and you'll never again think of Seattle as the home of grunge (or at the very least, it might become obvious that Seattle has more going for it than just heroin-addled purveyors of three-chord angst).

A collective loosely based in Seattle (for a more thorough explanation of what they're all about, check out their site at sonicabal.com), this is their third compilation of experimental music from a variety of contributors. (It also turns out, according to the site, that this is now out of print, meaning it was either really limited or spent way too much time in the listening stack at the Hellfortress.) This time around they have thirteen experiments in sound, form, and structure from artists like bios+a+ic ("Box of Light"), Ffej ("Four Color Season"), Lullabelle ("Windy Weather"), R. S. Pearson ("Photomultiplier"), Andrew Luthringer ("I Am Sitting Next To Alving & Takagi"), Entropic Advance ("Hidden Monkey"), Toby Paddock ("Magnetic Fields: Escape Vector For Notes Unplayed"), and others. The thirteen tracks cover a lot of ground, encompassing drone, glitch electronics, improv, gadget-fu, and sound manipulation in general. The disc may be unavailable, but the sound isn't: The site's MEMBERS section gives you the lowdown on the artists, along with links to their respective sites, where you'll find plenty of exotic exercusions into the Land of That Which Is Not Pop.

Man, the guys at Berkserker Records are on a roll. In the past year they've released the Weedeater disc, which kicked all kinds of ass; the Sour Vein disc, which, as RKF will tell you, kicked even more ass; the Spickle disc, which kicked all kinds of instrumental ass; and now this compilation, which is essentially 67 minutes and 22 seconds of ass-kicking heaviosity. Shit, did I just use the word "heaviosity"? Argh! What the hell is wrong with me? Uh, yeah... anyway, back to the review.... So what we have here are seven of the U.S. South's most pissed-off bands spitting out fourteen songs about, well, being pissed off. (OK, so the Dove songs might not be about being pissed off... their lyrics are a bit obtuse... stuff about "a busted horse" and the like.)

A band-by-band rundown:

Band: Leechmilk
Stomping Grounds: Turnerville, I mean Atlanta, Georgia
Comments: Interesting name, I wonder if there is such a thing as leech milk. They kick off the disc. Contribute three tracks, "Sinkhole," "Doubleplusungood," and "Imbalance."
What's to Like: eyehategod have been called death metal in slow motion. Leechmilk would be black metal in slow (and not so slow) motion, with a much better guitar sound than the average black metal band... none of the trebled out nonsense.

Band: Beaten Back to Pure
Stomping Grounds: Norflok, Va
Comments: Produced by the Rev. Steve Austin (Today is the Day.) Contribute one track, "Hog Tied."
What's to Like: I think they may have a new sub-genre on their hands, Doomcore! Stripped down like hardcore, groovy like the best doom. Some really great riffs, enough changes to keep it interesting.

Band: Dove
Stomping Grounds: Somewhere in Florida.
Comments: With members of Cavity and Floor. (Floor, the best doom/sludge/whateveryouwanttocallit band that never got to release a record. There are some 7"ers floating around. I suggest you try and track one down.) Contribute two tracks, "Eight Letters to Your Name" and "What's Best in Life."
What's to Like: Everything. I could go on about Dove all day. They're so good it's almost depressing. Great sense of dynamics, obtuse lyrics (see above), great players.

Band: Icepick Revival
Stomping Grounds: New Orleans, Louisiana
Comments: Mean. Contribute two tracks, "God's Machine Gun" and "Everlasting Disarray."
What's to Like: Fucking amazing players. Complex but not self-indulgent. Imagine Voivod on a sludge trip.

Band: Hawg Jaw
Stomping Grounds: New Orleans, Louisiana
Comments: Even meaner than Icepick Revival. Contribute three tracks, "Ruint," "From Angels to Insects," and "Marking Ground."
What's to Like: They take the "NOLA" sludge sound and amp it up. They have a song called "Ruint." The singer sounds like he's going to jump out of the stereo and beat you silly.

Band: Mugwart
Stomping Grounds: Somewhere in Virginia
Comments: Mining the same territory as Hawg Jaw. Contribute two tracks, "Razor" and "Extreme Depression and Fatigue."
What's to Like: Mining the same territory as Hawg Jaw. Slightly less angry, a bit more depressed.

Band: Rwake
Stomping Grounds: Little Rock, Arkansas
Comments: Engineered by the Rev. Steve Austin. Contribute one song,  "Piss and Shit." They're on more of a metal trip than the other bands.
What's to Like: The songs starts out with clean guitar playing pretty chords over a sample of a woman screaming then descends into metal hell. Easily the most brutal band on the disc. [n/a]

The latest sounds of Houston, maaaan... with lots o' punked-out riffing and Southern-fried guitar doodling to make yer worm wiggle. The thing about Houston, see, is that the city that smells like an oilfield has more bands than you can shake a can o' Triscuits at, and most of them are vaguely of the punk variety. When you have so many such bands crammed into one place, compilations become a bit suspect since you just know that a lot of the bands are going to be somewhat generic -- good, possibly, but still a bit generic, you know what i mean? Which is why i rarely pick up compilations anymore....

As it happens, there's more good than bad on this disc... in fact, there isn't much of anything bad at all, although a couple of the bands do drift dangerously into generic territory. But several other bands make up for it, and there are some completely killer tracks on here that make it worth owning just for them. And since a couple of those bands happen to be The Walking Timebombs, Truth Decay, and Hundred, the more perceptive among DEAD ANGEL's readership will have already guessed my real purpose in acquiring this item in the first place. So i'll dispense with all other shufflin' about and tell you which of the other bands i found particularly interesting: Drunken Thunder ("AA Crash," "Monticello"), Waster Pro ("Chinatown," "Thrown to the Wolves"), and Voltage ("Heaven & Hell," "Fire It Up"). The others are all right, but didn't do a whole lot for me... sorry....

The Walking Timebombs, Truth Decay, and Hundred, however, do plenty for me. Having just seen the full-band version of TWT live, where they impressed me greatly, i am happy to report that the two tracks they contribute here are equally swank. With both guitarist Scott Ayers and drummer Frank Garrymartin on board, along with a female singer (Sarah? i am unsure), the comparisons to Pain Teens are... uh, inevitable. But this is a far more psychedelic ride than PT ever were. They're working with the same elements (a rock-solid rhythm section, mutant guitar, noise loops, etc.), but they've reconfigured them in a new and interesting way. "Parasite" sounds like the direction PT might have evolved into had the band not disintegrated, and "Eden" would have fit in with the general direction of PT's last album. Both tracks are fucking brilliant and you cannot imagine how ready i am for the full-length album that's supposedly going to materialize in a few months. Truth Decay are a more straightforward affair -- the punk trio spearheaded by Ralf Arim (another PT connection!) and Scott Ayers (i can't remember if that's Frank on drums or not and the liner notes don't say) churn out a couple of slash and burn riff monsters augmented by Scott's brief but potent solos.

The real find, though, are the two tracks by Hundred, the evil hip-hop death swirl that springs like black smoke from the mind of Frank Garrymartin. Hundred made its first official appearance that i know of in the movie POSSESSION with the arresting track "The Devil Made Me Do It"; now Frank comes along with two more slabs of menace to prove that the first one was no fluke. "Anxiety" is all ghost noises, well-chosen samples, ping-pong bass, and ominous beats, all swirling and swaying like a drunken pig in heat as Frank raps in scary fashion. He sounds far scarier to my ears than most of the bad-ass gangsta dudes on most rap records; you'd never guess he's actually a nice and personable guy from listening to this! And "Vidor" is just so amazing that words nearly fail me. The disc is worth owning just for this track alone. Why is it that, in a genre that goes on and on at length about racism, that Frank is the first one smart enough to write a song about what is possibly the most racist city in the world? And unlike a lot of hip-hop songs, this one is actually built up like a song, not just a beat and some rapping. Brilliant lyrics, impeccable beats, a spring-loaded bass loop that comes and goes... if this and the other two tracks i've heard so far are standard-issue caliber for Frank, i want a full-length Hundred now. So i can play it over and over. This is more bad-ass than you can possibly imagine. Seek out the compilation and see for yourself.

Okay, dudes and dudettes -- this came with, like, you see, minimalist-type promo thingy stuff, by which I mean to say that if it came with a, like, thingy telling me anything about it, I don't know dick about it. If you know what I mean. And I think you do. Oh yeah. So anyhow, uhhhh, we got this li'l disc and I know nothing about it, except that it's put out by the same people responsible for the nightmarishly diabolical Green Andy disc reviewed elsewhere, so I figure I'd best approach with caution, right? Especially since I've never heard of anybody on this compilation. So you have to know I'm totally flummoxed when If Thousands comes out of the starting gate with a heavy bass drone and even more heavily-reverbed acoustic guitar on "I can close my eyes for you." Such lovely droning, psychedelic sounds.... The offering from Blac Ocean, "Cheer up," is a bit more devious -- it starts out in a similar, low-key fashion, then unexpectedly builds in intensity, backs down... then suddenly, like a bunch of badass gangstas from the Ohio Players posse crashing the party, they get down with bizarre-sounding robot funk. And it just keeps mutating, like everybody in the room got downed on Nyquil and decided to get their groove thang on. In fact, the groove thang, swell-sounding acoustic guitars, and celestial vox bathed in heavenly reverb are motifs that keep showing up throughout the album, especially to the great "I have this day" (Unlucky Axis) and Old Solar's "Forgotten sea." The album ends on an appropriately thunderous and majestic note with Linear High's "Stay of our lives." This is remarkably consistent and all eight bands (If Thousands, Blac Ocean, Disinterested, Ars Phoenix, Unlucky Atlas, Old Solar, Musicfor, and Linear High) are excellent and like, dudes, I am beyond impressed. The li'l thingy inside with the cd, you know, the thingy with words on it, says mine is 23 of 200, so I'm guessing that maybe, like, if you were to, like, want to be checking this out, mon -- which you should, unless you like looking like a fool in front of the hip beatnik girls who were never gonna nizzle your schnizzle in the first place -- then you should maybe hie your hienie on over to the label's web site and find out how many hoops you gotta jump through to get one before the cognescenti descend 'n scoop 'em up, eh? Eh? Well, what are you waiting for? Do it! DO IT NOW! Thanks....

v/a -- SWALLOWED IN ETERNITY [Corprolith]

A mysterious and daunting piece o' work, this one. It's 120 minutes to begin with, and since one series of bands are tracked on the left channel while another bunch are tracked on the right, it can actually be listened to three ways (mono left, mono right, or stereo) for a six hours of cranium-melting entertainment. The sheer size and scope of the project makes it difficult to review concisely, so i'm going to go for the general information on this one, ok? Heh.... First off, the participants, in order of their tracking: A-side, left channel -- Decibel Orgy, Macronympha, Cazzo Die, Korperschwache, Pulsar, and Anacoluthon; A-side, right channel -- Maeroi Tri, Age, Shunt, Separation, and Gregry S. Hagen; B-side, left channel -- Skin Crime and Sheephead; B-side, right channel -- Nosebleed Satori and Lumbar Trio. As for the sound, it's largely the more ambient side of noise. With the exception of occasional bursts of random junk from Macronympha during "Encryption" and the shuddering sonic clip-art frenzy of Shunt's "Carniceria," it's mostly a low-key affair... the noise forms an eerie backdrop landscape rather than assaulting your every orifice. Well, the obnoxiously-long Korperschwache offering "godfucked (crybaby satan mix)" DOES offers some full-on subsonic power, but the volume's been turned WAY down on that one to allow it to fit in here, and a good thing, too... and it's so long and repetitive anyway that after a while it becomes just another soundblur in the background, as intended.

Things get a bit grittier on the B-side, as both Skin Crime ("Live") and Nosebleed Satori ("Megamix") carve out solid chunks of churning white noise like the sound of concrete blocks bucking in an endless earthquake, but even then the effort is curiously even in its dynamics, resulting in a hypnotic feel that is more ambient than power-noise. Then Sheephead's "Live Improv" is even more ambient than that, eerie sounds that move like an ebbing tide, while untitled Lumbar Trio selection is power-noise mixed so that it sounds far and wee, like the sound of the ocean in a conch shell. Hmm.... noise and a sense of restraint, what a frightening combination....

Even better news is that unlike many compilations, there's no weak filler here; the participants have all turned in excellent work, and even more amazingly, Corprolith honcho Richard Stanton has managed to lay all these tracks out and arrange them side by side to the compilation's best advantage, no small feat in itself. Those whose interests cross over into both the noise and ambient camps (and there's more overlap than you'd think these days) would be well advised to look into this fine release.

This two-disc compilation is a follow-up to the 2002 compilation FIELDS AND STREAMS and features 43 previously unreleased tracks by KRS faves like Antietam, Superchunk, Dos, Gas Huffer, xiu xiu, Jucifer, Sahara Hotnights, Dead Meadow, and more. (The compilation itself is the second in a trilogy -- ROADS AND TRACKS will appear eventually -- in the vein of the label's original compilation trilogy, KILL ROCK STARS / STARS KILL ROCK / ROCK STARS KILL.) The compilation's packaging is ultra-swank, with two brightly-colored cds and a booklet that folds out for about a mile; the booklet even helpfully lists not only details about the bands and tracks, but addresses and links to websites, making it a really useful set not only for obsessive completists but for neophytes looking for an easy way into the whole KRS thing in the first place. Best tracks on the first disc (to my ears, anyhow) are the ones by The Legend!, Antietam, his name is alive, Superchunk, The Capricorns, Cynthia Dall, Lovers, Gravy Train!!!, The Charades, Brooke ("inside out" is my favorite thing on the entire compilation), Jucifer, Semiautomatic, and alaska! (So what's the deal with all the exclamation points, anyway? this sure is a punctuation-happy bunch....) Most happening cats on the second disc: Biographer of Ferns, Radio Berlin, sleetmute nightmute, need new body, Laura Veirs, Sahara Hotnights (my second-favorite track), C Average, and Dead Meadow. Plenty of whole-grain goodness for listeners of all persuasions. One thing I like is that there's a wide variety of sounds and styles across the disc, although it is loosely divided into poppier bands on the first disc and, um, much weirder and / or electronic bands on the second. If you're hep to even a third of these bands, this disc ought to provide that much-needed new-music jolt.

v/a -- UNDERGROUND USA [MSNP]

Bruised and bloodied, licking their many wounds like napalmed kittens, Captain 4-Track and TASCAM-Girl staggered across the desert, up the shifting dunes, and into the deep well of oblivion. From time to time the fetid air was filled with the Captain's weak cry: "Aaaaah... Perrier... Perrier...." They topped the last dune and he was startled when TASCAM-Girl gripped his arm with surprising strength for some who had so recently been beaten senseless. "Holy spinning pinch roller, Captain! LOOK!"

The Captain looked. A giant mushroom cloud jutted from the desert floor. Atop the cloud, an equally large black caterpillar sat in a hockey outfit, curled around an immense hookah. The caterpillar opened its orifice and burped out a great cloud of smoke.

"My God," the Captain croaked. "It must be a mirage."

"The fuck I am," the caterpillar grumbled. "Perhaps... YOU are the mirage, my friend. As for me, the heathen call me Soddy and I have much to say to you."

"Uh... right." The Captain blinked.

Soddy took another hit from the hookah and began. "Somewhere deep in the States noise rumbles on," he said. "Actually, all over the States it's been rumbling on forever. We need not count ourselves among the fortunate every time Momma Savage extends her heartwarming ogle to the fertile bowels of the earth, peaks beneath the rug and, with only the barest hint of piety, compiles a wide variety of good bits on tape. On the other hand, where would the auricular repairment industry be without her? In these dark times of economic uncertainty, someone at least is doing her part to ensure lasting stability and fortune; albeit in rather specialized sectors."

TASCAM-Girl scowled in puzzlement. Soddy continued, oblivous.

"Most of the good bits include several noiseheads you probably haven't heard of before, and several more you -- and your flayed-raw follicular receptors -- will probably wish you'd never heard of. That's the whole point, you see. Underground USA aims to breed familiarity and renown amongst the deserving ranks of America's more promising unknown. Unknown such as Michigan disciplinarian Strict, Shaolin Temple priestess Jennifer Wolski and Cleveland infirmitoid Bacillus.

"Well, two out of three ain't bad. The Prince of Pestilence maybe the sickest bastard ever to invade the scene, but Underground? Nah. Which doesn't make 'Deterioration of the Host,' 7.5-minutes worth of salacious, downtrodden stool, any the less virulent. Bacillus always prospers where more self-consciously overland scabs fail. It has a lot to do with his method. Not content to layer on the cannibalistic deathcrunch and let the carcasses fall where they may, the Prince opens wide the pulpitated Host and works down. Condemned at first to full-bodied, foundation-shaking absession, the overgrown festering mould will inevitably find itself at the mercy of quite maliciously-inclined microdiodes. Each chooses its own path to transcendence and starts breaking down the whole frozen cake of continuous self-immolation, sparing nary a follicle or flagella. For those with heart conditions, bladder problems, or otherwise tell-tale signs of fragile constitution, I would recommend terminating your read NOW. Just because one regularly abuses his earholes to the abusive sounds of decomposed subway railgrind does not necessitate glazed-over eyeballs. I've always preferred shellac."

"Shellac?" The Captain thought about this. "Isn't that a band fronted by the four-eyed spitting adder of the music kingdom, Mr. Albini?"

Soddy glared at him and ignored this. "Several thousand carcasses down the celeb factor," he said, "Jennifer Wolski let the good times roll in 'Crazy Cooter's House of Blues.' But don't let the title fool you. However overstuffed and suffocating, this House of Blues is subject to some pretty mean-spirited, thickly controlled, heavily moulded and modulated grate. Jennifer reign in the outlying micros and lays it on with the heavy-handed Macros...."

"Macros? Micros?" TASCAM-Girl scratched her head. "Captain, what the fuck is he talking about? I'm lost! He'p me!"

"Vague ambience shrouds disgruntled topspin and disenfranchised bloodcurdle almost as an afterthought. The thought always counts, though. We appreciate it: finally, someone who knows exactly what they're doing and isn't afraid to show it. Significantly less subtly rendered, Strict's 'Slut Kill' speaks for itself. One thing I like about these upstart comps is the pleasant surprises and discoveries one makes along the way. I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised with this particular discovery: absolutely ferocious fisting, unequivicably powerful slobbering, and a great deal of spasmodic hacking and slashing. Brontosaurus abattoir with all the trimmings. Grating, creaking protest, unbridled rage. Ingenious articulation. If Mauthausan Orchestra ever got their act together, started looking at agency -- instead of passive necronerdity and cool titles - they might have managed to sound like this. But I doubt it. Look out for these guys. Strict show loads of promise and serious mindfuck potential. No strangers to the art of brainbugger, Woe is Me dish out athoroughly aggravating 'Disorient Express.' Getting past the 'who the fuck are these people and what gives them the right to record such grunthappy shite?' stage is tough enough. Actually sitting through continuous raids on soundeffects libraries and portable pachinko arcades spells murder for the untreated sanity and significantly ups the stress factor. Which isn't as bad as it sounds. Where else canone receive the pointy end of a humorously- shaped cablecar pulled through a preferred orifice while getting buzzed by low flying, propeller-driven cropdusters in more ways than two?"

"He's talking about orifices," TASCAM-Girl moaned. "Oh God, I feel so... so VIOLATED...."

Soddy gave her the finger. As they tried to grasp the concept of a caterpillar with fingers, he went on: "Likewords may be spoken of New York poopshoot pedagogue Orifice Training. 'Nubile Tenderness' addresses the contemporary issue ofintra-youth violence with brokendown amps, overworked sphincters and a steady commitment to styrofoam freejack. The resulting old-style whine 'n drone power electronics get bilgepiped through studious flackjacket accumulation of plasticaster airbomb and then released into tweeter-unfriendly frequencies that successfully negotiate the blindside of a dilapidated scrapyard hearse doing 120 on the Disorient Express. It's not as easy as it looks.

"Armenia, a southern American pervert who has slowly but surely evolved into someone worthy of notice, makes a real case on 'Obsessive Panty Collector, Blood Sniffer, and Ripe-crotch Sex Addict (Interrogatorio Cientifico).' Yeah, a real case all right. Give the man some credit: if nothing, his heart is in the right place. Beyond the heart, dislocated, hierarchical cut-ups repeatedly saw away at bulging analog filters, sometimes blistering, sometimes bludgeoning themselves into near nonfidelity with what sound like forlorn, overdriven moosehorns caught in a rabid chihuahua's gagging yap. Side B abandons the closed world of pure, powerloaded tronics.Before one can reach that conclusion though, A.S.M. will doubtless lull the unwary noisehead into a false sense of security. Outtaken from the infinitely ambient 'Pure Electronics' sessions (Self Abuse), 'Pure Electronics' very quietly mediates an intimate altercation between vague, borderline overkill and subtle, minimalist soundscape psychedelia. If you aren't the noise type, but you're still not satisfied with ridiculously spacious and 'ominous' dark ambient, complete with Hollywood special effects, A.S.M. might be your thing: low-end 'power' electronics at one-tenth voltage, surrounded by the deeply suggestive whisper of cold, waffling, hydro field atmospheres."

He folded out a multi-panel graph, a physics diagram closely resembling an electron spectrograph analysis, and shoved it in their faces. That it had anything to do with his discourse was debatable, but that certainly did not deter him.

"Dave Gilden restores harshass integrity with a selection from his latest pseudonym, Depress/Regress. 'Two Packets of Dope' continues to explore Dave's only subject of interest, but this time effects a considerably nastier disposition. D/R scrapes the bong of noise to find a new buzz in its resin: rougher, higher, less acoustic, more dynamic. The cut-up chunkiness sounds familiar: cascading teflon sheets slither and shriek their rustproof agony and protest against the inevitable Macronymphonic riptide. And for once, not entirely in vain: the whole squealing slaughterhouse succumbs to dull, crumbling, overloaded bludgeon, but nevertheless, through frozen wastelands of electronic interference, cracks of metallic daylight repeatedly, and at last successfully, insert their chirpy, coughing grind. Not Breathing appear to assuage the perpetually outraged Harshead by 'Swallowing Dry Sand.' Crystallized granules of desperate, spontaneously combustible iron shavings and muddy lead encasings force their way down demucoused esophogai accompanied by jagged shards of impure amethyst. Pressure eases off in the stomach and liver, mostly because the hopeless bastards are still vainly trying to force oxygen into gravelpacked lungs: blistering harshead insignia relinquishes its rights to the compacting crunch of overload soup. Down to the intestines, and all semblance of necessity has disappeared: lazy, meandering oscillators snake their way around flustered squeegee backwaters. At long lazy-ass last, the light at the end: cracks of Daylight approacheth and several layers of long, stringy, drawn-out drones, flushed with spottycheeked joy; into the ambient spaciousness of septic heaven. It's hard to read the follow-up by Daylight Savings Time as coincidence. 'demo #1' takes The New Blockaders, and their quality assortment of rustcove red scrapmetal, for a brutal trip through bitchy, kitschy, prissbutt, turbulence. Overstarved tape heads consume vast quantities of delectable magnetic ribbon, failing against all odds to consume any sense of fidelity. Yes, the tape deckis indeed functioning within normal parameters. DST like to fuck with you that way. I guess they've earned the right. The Harshead isdefinitely pleased.

"Not for long. In the follow-up, 'Miyazu - 1, 2, 3, ...,' Bob Marinelli sings the ABC's according to Maso. This particular submission was apparently excerpted from a larger work that aims to educate preschool children in a more user-friendly way. If only everyone learned their ABC's this way, the dropout rate would surely diminish. Something seems to get lost in the translation, though, because we only get to D before Mother Savage, in her infinite wisdom and compassion, puts the annoying fuck out of his misery. Coming soon to a kindergarten near you."

"Mein gott in der himmel!" the Captain raged. "He's talking about the corruption of innocents! Why, I'd go over and beat the living pus out of him if I... if I weren't so tired and suffering from heatstroke...."

Another hit on the hookah. Soddy sniffed. "Thankfully, a return to form compliments of Corprolith chief executive Turbulence. The esteemed Mr. Stanton turns out 'Spectre of Dismemberment.' Subdued, soothing, fatass drones and some hollowed-out, overcooked, nasty-ass shishkabob serve up exactly what you need; and serve similarly to demonstrate MSNP's uncanny gift for misrepresentation. As it stands, the net results kick ass in the best way: slow, undulating masses of pure grit cut in, cut out, expand from end to end, then rise brutally up to the steady slaver of crass, pinwheeling, rollerderby sleighride. Eventually, metal skis burn through the tile and shred it into fibreglass noodle leaving a broken trail of grumbling, paraplegic reindeer amputees and crackling, freshly-waxed floorboard. Presumably, they at least got the title right.

"Underground USA came in to fuck you over, as they say, but it goes out through and through with a Bang. A big one. To say 'Inside the Burnt Wreckage' speaks for itself does not do the genius and creator that is Persn credit. Words rarely achieve anything beyond space filler and spleen- ventilation, but I'll try by throwing out 'monster harshass killer track thing.' Charred raw, scorched earholes. Hot hot hot. Yum. You can see how this is getting us nowhere. If you can't experience the analogy first hand, it just does not work. Might as well cut out the middle man, stop reading this spew, hop in a burnt wreckage yourself."

They waited as the hookah-hitter preened, satisfied. When it became obvious that there was no more, the Captain shambled down to the 'shroom cloud and made a half-hearted lunge for the hookah.

"Hey! What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"Whatever you're smoking, man, I want some... I wanna say fucked up shit too... aw, come onnnnn... gimmie gimmie gimmie...."

The sun descended as they struggled. The sun went away and the desert grew cold. At night, the ice weasels came. But there would be no opium for our fearless heroes, for Soddy had smoked it all. As the moon rose into the sky, the Captain went fetal with his bitter tears of rage while TASCAM-Girl searched for a place to meditate.... [jk (with "assistance" from tmu)]

More divine horribleness (and we mean that in the nicest way) from the freaks at Mandragora. First up, a bold move: Robot vs. Rabbit's stupefying uberdrone of pure crippling thunder, "Not Shiny," like the world's largest Sunn amp exploding in oscillating waves. Anybody who's truly unprepared will have fled the building before it even ends, and those who survive (and can still hear) will find the rest of the compilation soothing by comparison. Of the remaining eleven contributors to this collection (with one song apiece), some names are familiar (Acid Mothers Temple, Reynols, Primordial Undermind), others less so (Pine Tree State Mind Control, Delayed Sleep, etc.). Japan's Mandog contributes "#0215," a relatively interesting, often pulsing hallucination of repetition and droning guitars, and Escapade's "It Gets Banished Forever" recalls the darker and more droning moments of early 70s Krautrock psych. Not surprisingly, the most tripped-out and over-the-top track is the "Spaced Out," in which the Acid Mothers Temple does the unhorthodox Boredoms-on-acid freakout thing they do so well. The Reynols track (a bunch o' words i can't read since they're in Spanish) is the complete opposite, though -- plodding, minimalist drone and doomed, wailing vox. The Primordial Undermind's "Evestrum" is filled with all sorts of interesting drones and not a whole hell of a lot else outside of incidental music and tapes. Many of the participants here reference or hearken back to the earliest wave of industrial music, where formless 'n beatless started giving way to industrial sounds welded to a mechanized groove -- in this particular context we'd be looking at "Building My Own Nova Dreamer" (Delayed Sleep), the Interferents track "Rosewood Frog With Serbian Eye," and others by Pine Tree State Mind Control, Paradise Camp 23, etc. Given this many takes on an admittedly amorphous concept anyway (what defines psych, anyway?), it's not guaranteed all tracks will meet with approval, but they're all well-done and worth hearing. Plus you really do need it just for the Robot vs. Rabbit track alone, remember? There you go....

This is the first in a series from guys behind Dalas Tar, home o' sHeavy (Canada's answer to Black Sabbath), a compilation series where the label has invited pretty much anybody to send in tracks for inclusion on disc or the next in exchange for a handful of copies. The idea, of course, is to spread the word... to provide an outlet... and all that. As such, it's one of the more schizophrenic collections going around -- straight-on heavy metal sits next to experimental glitch-rock, there's metal, home-brew psychedelia, eccentric primitivism, extremely loose blues, doom noise, and metal (lots of metal). I can't comment on the Autodidact track 'cause i'm just a tad biased, but there are a number of strong tracks here by the likes of Howl, Gelatinous Resin, Fireign, and GAT, whose martial doom-noise mantra "For No Other Reason" is probably my favorite track here. You can glom your own copy from their site (see EPHEMERA for the listing) and just in case you feel like contributing yourself, they're already taking tracks for the second collection....

v/a -- VARIOUS ARTISTS PLAY WIRE -- WHORE [WMO]

Yet another tribute album... i know, you're as sick of them by now as i am. But this is a worthy cause -- paying homage to Wire, a most influential band. As is the case with tribute albums, the artists on board were invited to deconstruct Wire tunes, with varying results. (I must point out here, for sake of clarity, that i actually am not familiar with Wire's oevure, so i have no way to "compare" these offerings to their original versions; as a result, the tracks will have to stand on their own.)

Obvious "winners" include Godflesh, who weigh in with a heavy, brooding cover of "40 Versions"; Lush, who offer a bouncy and catchy reading of "Mannequin"; Resolution, whose version of "It's A Boy" is eerie and chugging, an interesting combination; Kustomized, with a rocking version of "A Question of Degree"; and the Band of Susans, whose cover of "Ahead" is not only the most stunning track on the album, but one of the best things they've ever recorded (and done with a drum machine, no less -- a first for them, if i am correct). Bark Psychosis also "pass" with their languid, lounge-jazz take on "Three Girl Rhumba," and The Ex-Lion Tamers turn out a pop-rock take of "On Returning" that's pleasant enough. Laika's "German Shepherds" is trippy and interesting, while Carl Marks' interpretation of "Eastern Standard" is sort of like Main with megaphone vocals for some inexplicable reason. Scanner do a really quirky, quasi-techno dub of "Eardrum Buzz" that's easily the strangest thing on here. Although My Bloody Valentine offer some serious competition with a fuzzy (of course) pass at "Map Ref 41 N 93 W" that at least proves they're still alive....

Some are merely okay: a-Miniature's "A Serious of Snakes," Spasm's "12XU," the Fudge Tunnel version of "Lowdown," and The Petty Tyrants' mildly annoying version of "Our Swimmer." Polar Bear (with one former member of Jane's Addiction, eek!) manage not to embarass themselves on "Being Sucked In (Again), but otherwise don't achieve anything really spectacular, either (although it beats the pee out of anything any of the OTHER ex-JA members have done). Lee Ranaldo grapples with "Fragile" and manages come across like a hard-rockin' bar band -- i'm not sure if that's good or not, although it sounds okay.... Transformer's "Outdoor Miner" doesn't sound bad, but it doesn't really go anywhere, either, and while Main's interpretation of "Used To" is sonically interesting, it's not the best thing they've ever done, either -- sort of like standing still for them, really....

There are some clinkers: Chris Connelly's faux-gospel version of "A Mutual Friend" is an interesting idea that doesn't quite work, and i'm still divided about Mike Watt's contribution, "The 15th." Still, any tribute that only has two tracks that are even remotely "bad" must certainly be worth your time to investigate, eh? Particularly since this is the only place you're ever going to find that godlike Band of Susans track, which should be required listening....

v/a -- W E TTE BOW [Spilling Audio]

An inexpensive (like, three bucks) sampler cassette, this is a pretty good introduction to the wild wild world of Spilling Audio. Mustard Bernard kicks it off with two songs that are considerably more metallic (in a late seventies or early eighties kind of way, sort of) than the stuff on their cassette reviewed elsewhere in this issue. As always, both tracks ("Right Through Your Head" and "We Will Survive") are unspeakably cool and very, very long. Plus the second one is really hyperkinetic and totally crazed. Chock Fullo Beak's sole contribution, "Post Industrial Downtown," is a squeaky, creaky noisefest minus all the painful high-tone earshred so common to the current wave of noise artists. The two tracks by Dr. Mongo Tari-Buru and Love Grenade (don't you love the name?) are bizarre, gonzoid exercises in weirdness that are beyond my ability to describe in one or two lines, so I won't even try... but I will say that anybody who's heard and liked MC 900 Foot Jesus' "Dali's Handgun" will probably appreciate "Rant Chant." The two tracks by Bryan Kieser are not quite so odd, but close. Spilling Static Orchestra contributes a jazz- noise track with a title much too long to recount here, Eric Hausmann turns in an eerie performance on "Fly Paper" with slow thudding drums and resonator guitar, while Amscray Amok, Joey Lupin, and Turntable Anxiety all appear with weird stuff of their own (particularly the last one). And there's even MORE -- Jeff Olsen has three tracks and there are four others taken from the REDRUM percussion compilation, but since I'm going to review the tapes they're taken from in the next issue, I'll refrain from elaborating on those at the moment in the interests of... um... brevity....

v/a -- WORKER'S COMP. [The Headlock Society]

An interesting collection of hardly-knowns and unknowns appear on this, the first release by The Headlock Society. Out of 18 songs here, only four are by artists i actually recognize: Bill Ding ("the bills to pay the way"), Shiva Speedway ("el loco"), Sleestak ("westside carjack"), and Babyland ("back of love"). They're largely proponents of the DIY ethic; judging from the sound of things, i'll bet a lot of these songs were recording on home four-tracks. If you're expecting that immaculately pristine radio-friendly wall o' sound so heavily favored by AOR weenies, you... uh... have come to the wrong place. Some of the sweller (is that a word?) pieces: Bill Ding's melancholy bit, mostly whispered vox over a xylophone riff with occasional wonked-out percussion; the mildly dissonant guitar (set to a solid bass and beat) of Novice Brown's "mascot master" (who also manage to bury their vox so far in the background that their singer might as well be standing in another room, leaving plenty o' room for the instruments); Treadwell's psychotic, overamped "in blue," which sounds much like Zeppelin's "Achille's Last Stand" after being sped-up and run through a dozen distortion boxes; the crazed, swirling fuzzdeth riffing of the always- entertaining Shiva Speedway on "el loco"; the subterrean fuzz bass of Sleestak's "westside carjacking"; the slow, ominous bass rumble of Rhelphe's "ex-girlfriends suck"; the almost-pop-with-lots-o-distortion of Emma's "limelight" and Ferocious Suck's "jock hands"; more slo-mo lo-fi grooving and scratchy guitar courtesy of E. Coli on "i sit (relaxed)" that turns into a sonic bloodbath from time to time; and especially the eerie, droning of the last track (by Slowrider, "the world's phattest junkies/lots of freaks."

Some of them are of the loud and racuous variety -- the Quarters track "recycle," GOB's "jon, there's a 7' in the bathroom" (which is also just plain weird and dissonant), Leopold's "brick full of tables," Fork's "gimpfest," even Babyland on "back of love" A few are just plain white noise with a beat and guitars (you can hear 'em in there somewhere if you listen hard), like sWITCHhITTER's "spermn in the face" or else just deliberately weird (Longstocking's "clammy," Zoe Goodrich's "year of conformity"... in fact, about half these bands sound like proponents of the lo-fi sound while the rest sound like they wouldn't mind being Unsane. An unusual mix, to say the least. A solid compilation with lots of noisy freakiness and attitude problems, hence worthy of your consideration.

More droning, organic noise strangeness from Zenflesh Central. This has actually been out a while -- it was Zenflesh's second release. The title doesn't make it obvious, but this is actually a compilation, with nine tracks by nine artists. Most are noisy (although not in the harsh, white-noise way o' power electronics) and obsessed with weird sounds; many are quite bass-heavy; none of it can be mistaken for pop. Petit Mal kicks it off with "insomnambulance," in which fuzzy background noise, shuddering bass, distorted loops, chiming drones, and other sonic effluvia make for an eerie listening experience. Hape Angel's "caper w/horse marauder" is a bit unusual for a Zenflesh track in that it's fairly percussion oriented; quiet bongos do the pum-pum while ghostlike feedback wails in the distant (often very distant) background and squelchy noises get added periodically to the foreground. Accelerator brings us distorted rumbling noises with other unidentifiable stuff being dredged from the riverbed in "kitum cave"; Matt Bramlette plies loops, delay-riddled drones, and other gadget-oriented sounds like a more upfront, American analogue to David Jackman or early Nurse With Wound on "detached"; and Zenflesh's flagship band, Turk Knifes Pope, brings on the washed-out electrodrone on "saturation (under review)." That tracks' title is most apt; often the sound is so distorted and overloaded that you just know the tape was buckling under the crush of tape saturation. Andru Kirkpatrick's contribution, "peggy sue DOE: suspension of belief" is a peculiar one: drone washes die away into chirping crickets, flanged-out washes like sheet metal sliding down a hill do battle with pounding metal croaks, and all runs into what is most likely a radically slowed and distorted drum machine before eventually dying out completely. The track from "sound source 21," sounds like a deranged repeat-echo remix of the test of the emergency broadcast system, and Brownie Mallets close the whole exercise in oddness with "sheer pique of boredom," another rumbling slice of brown noise that sounds sort of like the sound of buses being buried in an avalanche as captured by a cheap recorder in a concrete parking lot far beneath the accident in progress. Yes, it's another winning testament in the peculiar belief system that is Zenflesh Central....

They have cheesy cover art of demonic astronauts, intimating that they are a cheesy metal band, but instead it turns out they are more like... like... in the name of Ra, I think this might be a nu-metal band. They sound heavily influenced by Fear Factory, to be sure... maybe Godflesh... yes, after hearing "Prognosis," definitely Godflesh... probably a lot of other bands that make me want to heave. The band itself is okay. Industrial-metal and nu-metal don't do much for me, but at least these guys know what they're doing and some of the songs (like "Inertia" and "Where I Stand") are actually pretty catchy, and what isn't catchy is certainly plenty heavy -- much of the time they don't sound so much like they're playing as they are shaking the whole recording studio back and forth. It's not doing a lot for me, but it should do plenty for people who actually like nu-metal....

Now this is kind of intriguing... an album's worth of exotic forays into what they like to call "ambient world soul funk," sort of like a collision between the worlds of Sun Ra, Material, Parliament, and a bunch of ambient hipsters all waffling away on an obscure Axiom release. Aside from the novelty of hearing ambient, noise, funk, and world beat sounds all in one well-recorded package, the Nation (actually one Fredrik von Hamilton and various collaborators) have a knack for unusual, evolving song structures and a sound that largely defies description. The Axiom reference isn't far off the mark -- i can easily imagine Bill Laswell being involved with this -- but the Middle Eastern rhythms and dirge references give it a character all of its own. This is the kind of sound Sun Ra might well be exploring if he weren't currently busy teaching music classes in the caves of Saturn.

My favorite is probably "Pyramid" (i'm a sucker for a good piano player), with its languid piano juxtaposed with a hard beat and tripped-out singing and melodic background passages, but "Cairo Rider" is another strong track, making strong use of Egyptian motifs. Some of the more hardcore electronica moments are a bit iffy to me (as on "Oasis Near Luxor"), but then these occasional issues are negated by the presence of tracks like "Camel" -- near-flamenco guitar, repetitive chanting, hard minimalist beats, and a complex tapestry of sounds make for a pretty hypnotic listening experience. I like the ambient sounds in "Scorpions," where mantra-like shouting and hollowed-out, near-dub drums creep into the territory of ambient noise. Symphonic keyboards and carefully-chosen instrumentation (and efx) make "Wading in the Nile" a droning, majestic slice of otherworldliness, at least until it turns into a beat-heavy dance tune rooted in world-beat melodies. By turns exotic and surprising, this is an album that delivers the unexpected on a regular basis with a beat you can shake your can-can to while being drenched in ambient sound.

Vas Deferens Organization -- SWEAT YOUR CHEESES, BUT NOT IN MY SALAD [Charnel Music]

The latest from Charnel brings us a bunch of semi-hypnotic noisemakers from Dallas, Tejas, attempting a mind-meld between Gravitar and Crash Worship and not quite getting there. While i don't think they're quite as visionary as either of those other two bands, they have their moments. They set up a great thunder-drumming/cycling drone hypno-movement on "Reverie," although i find it most annoying when they interrupt it midway through for a few seconds of keyboard squeaking before resuming. "Whirling Dervish" has the same problem -- starts off with a great hypnotic rhythm (luv those steel drums), but then they break in with aggravating cheesy sounds from time to time. Oh well, perfection is so elusive....

"The Matmos" is pretty happening, though. It begins with spacy sounds and the drums buried waaaaaaay in the background -- then the noise ends abruptly and the drums jump out into the foreground, slow and relentless, as strange bird-call noises reverberate in the background. As the drums pick up the pace, adding new elements to the pattern, other weird noises creep into the mix, along with cyclotron keyboards. The wildly percussion- happy "Modular Squad" is a standout as well, with a primary beat that grows in volume as other patterns on various forms of percussion insinuate themselves into the mix until the song becomes a pulsing stew of sound and motion. Then the spacy noises start circling around and around and around as the acid kicks in, with jumpy guitars aplenty.

The patterns of "Alpine Gamelan" are most groove-inducing, and the entire hollowed-out tone is rather enticing as well. The essentially ambient "Cyclone" is interesting as well, with washes of sound rotating in time with the heavily-reverbed drums buried in the background. But "Boarding Instructions for Bird Carousels" and "Tao City Hovercraft" are, to my ears at least, somewhat marred by the same obtrusive, abrupt, and out-of-place noises found on the opening track. I suspect this is entirely intentional, and may well appeal to some listeners, but... ah... not me. Hopefully in the future they'll build on the more successful pieces like The Matmos" and "Cyclone"....

Whoa. So the stoners should be all over this. Ultra-fuzzy guitars, trippy vocals, and lyrics about space (and what sound like some extremely bad trips). Vaz bear a passing resemblance to the Queens of the Stone Age, mostly because singer/guitar man Apollo Liftoff sounds quite a bit like Josh Homme. Also, both bands have a distinct new wave edge. Vaz, however, are a much darker band -- they make the Queens sound positively sunny. Also, there's none of that grating hipster irony that the Queens seem to exude. Vaz stick to dropping slabs of twitchy claustrophobia. [n/a]

The blackest of black metal. None more black. If you like to be punished, this is the release for you. Raw, brutal, and full of hate. There are so many fucking posers out there that this is a relief. Fans of Leviathan will approve. Thank you. [TTBMD]

Veriform Front -- ACTIVE NIHILISM [Terra Vox]

More industrial sludge from the label responsible for Phycus; this one is more noise and drone oriented than the Phycus material, although still heavily sample-oriented. "Neoist Assault" and "Voluntary Human Extinction" incorporate jagged waves of noise over a slooooow, dirgelike drum clanking and ominious keyboard textures. "Hit List" expands on the format with shouted ranting against all the figureheads they don't like -- the Defense, the INS, government authorities of every size and description -- and comes across like the unnerving mad declarations of a street corner lunatic clutching a very big bomb. "Don't Complain Unless You Intend to Buy a Gun" continues in the slow, throbbing vein, its soundtrack augmented about by a creepy soundtrack of sampled voices discussing paranoid violence fantasies, real or imagined....

"World Peace is Dead" is another slow-motion spine freezer, with regularly surging pockets of noise and one looped drum pattern serving as the rhythmic bed while the vocalist howls and wails and irregular motes of feedback rise and fall in the distance. The long and tortured "Waste Land" is marked by big, hollow drums, more wind tunnel scraping, and toward the end, drums that sound more like metallic percussion; it takes the concept of long and obnoxious tests of endurance to glorious new heights. Great stuff, although i have to wonder how many people will make it through the entire thing. Not for the weak, ha hah!

Vertonen -- the Vertonen 7" series

This is an interesting collection of singles, all issued in limited pressings with ridiculously lavish artwork and li'l chapbooks inserted and more swell stuff. Vertonen (aka Blake Edwards, mixing desk fugitive) is apparently something of an ambient noise project, and i like what he has up his sleeve. (An arm? A tattoo of "MOM" on a burning skull? Never mind.) At any rate, Vertonen -- through its dissemination arm, Crippled Intellect Productions -- has issued five singles that are available separately but intended as a series. All look and sound great. (Vertonen has also released several cassettes, also available on CIP, but we'll get to those next issue since i'm running out of room and time here at the eleventh hour.)

The first single, "lock up! 1-15/seizure" is interesting for its concept alone: fifteen lock-groove noise loops on the first side, a murky water-based sea drone on the other, both sides "playable at any speed." Just for grins i played the A-side at 45 rpm and the flip at 33-1/3. The lock groove sounds are quirky, ranging from almost technoish blips to solid concrete noise, and the only problem with them is that the grooves are so close together that it's the devil's own work trying to actually hear them all one after another. But "seizure" is brilliant -- an endless cycling drone at the bottom with overlapping water noises on top, like a gentler, kinder Aube (or perhaps Not Breathing minus the techno thud).

Next up is "strip mining/camche." The A-side fades in on a cycling "shoop-shoop" loop; various noises and the sound of muffled shouting (from a city street, perhaps) are added to the mix. The result is kind of static, which i like (i greatly favor endlessly hypnotic pieces). It ends stuck in, appropriately enough, a lock-groove. The B-side is a springy, reverbed loop augmented by high-pitched metallic percussion and is most hep itself.

The third one in the series is actually a collaboration entitled "R/B two nights." The R/B are for Rennie Tulsi and Blake Edwards, who recorded over an hour's worth of material, which Blake later edited down (while his original intention was to release two 35-minute cuts on CD, financial constraints led to the artistic decision that perhaps it would be more interesting to edit it down to something more concise to release as a single... and hey, i understand those financial imperatives completely, believe me). The resulting material, while still underpinned by a sizeable drone/loop quotient, are quite a bit crunchier than the first two singles. The flip side (at least i think it's the flip side; once again i am stymied by a lack of labeling!) is much more loop-oriented.

Number four is "The Men Women Leave Their Wives For," and it's a good one too. The A-side is the eerie "a crush of petunias," which opens in abrupt fashion with crunch-laden noise before turning into an airy drone with wind-tunnel sounds swirling around a bell-like loop. The second side, "dies irae," is a more ominous chunk of swirl, punctuated by brief snippets of sound that come in unexpectedly then fade away; the sound of a domestic squabble from a couple being slowly swallowed towering sand dunes in an arid desert. This single alone is one of the most interesting i've seen and heard all year.

The final installment, "Heat" (with its stark declaration on the back, "The laughing children have cancer"), contains three songs. The first (on the A-side), "wedding engine," is a moderately harsh and lumbering staircase loop around which drones and floaty noises drift and circle. On the other side, "shake" is an even harsher loop (although still not as harsh and forbidding as anything by, say, Merzbow -- Blake is apparently an Aube man) with additional squeaky noises and indecipherable dialogue. The last song, "two-die town," is by far the most bizarre offering of all the singles combined -- a heavily processed loop snippet from a song by an infamous Cali bad-hair metal band (names withheld to protect Vertonen from lawsuits) with sardonic laughter tacked on for good measure. Now who says satire is dead, mon?

A word about the packaging: All of these singles are presented in a fairly elaborate fashion, their complexity growing with each release (at this rate, by the tenth CIP single he'll be issuing them on gold-plated discs enclosed in hardback photobooks). Several of the singles are on colored or transparent vinyl, and each of them comes with a mini-booklet of cryptic art/poetry/ramblings; the "Women..." single and "Heat" both come enclosed in lengthy, well-printed books of fiction and art. The "R/B" single comes packaged in letterpress printing on Japanese rice paper. How the hell he manages to afford all this is beyond me, but it all looks pretty impressive, so buy his stuff before he goes broke already, okay? I definitely want to see him keep this up....

Vertonen / Crawl Unit -- "Wards Island Circulation / Phase for South River Road in Rain" [Crippled Intellect]

Now this is an interesting move... CPI has apparently begun a series, the "Soundtracks for Locations Recording Project," of which this must be the first (???) issue. It's certainly hep enough; to begin with, the sounds come etched on slate gray marble vinyl, which looks most stylish and industrial (in a northern factory kinda way), and the packaging is stark but intriguing -- each side is a b/w picture related to the title against a brown paper background. (It looks cooler than it sounds, trust me.) The Vertonen side, "Wards Island Circulation," consists of sounds (water, factory, traffic, etc.) scavenged from the actual site of Wards Island (part of Randalls Island, between the boroughs of Manhattan and Queens) over a period of four days. The sounds have since been assembled into the track here, and a fine atmospheric track it is -- disorienting and filled with a multitude of scenic sounds without being overly busy. The flip side, "Phase for South River Road in Rain," comes courtesy of Crawl Unit. The source sounds were recorded at the Jarrett Foundation Company salvage lot in an industrial region of Sacramento. Joe Colley's description of the process is so instructive i'm just going to reproduce it right here: "Two tapes of an identical loop were played at either end of a pipe approximately 8 foot diameter situated in the lot. Rain fell outside. The result was recorded to stereo DAT in the center of the pipe, between the two tape players, attempting to capture the phasing of the two loops and resonance of the pipe. The intention was to create a temporary hypnotic state, to intensify the experience of an individual sitting in a large pipe in the rain. In actuality, the result failed, so the piece included here is a falsified reconstruction of the event described above." That pretty much covers it, yup... although it probably gives the impression that the piece didn't work, which is far from the truth. In fact, it's immensely hypnotic, a shimmering and shifting collision of rattling loops that, if extended much further beyond the length available here, would probably put you into a deep trance state and make you susceptible to having your house looted by thugs while your eyes rattle back and forth like ping-pong balls, glazed over from the sudden fugue state. Translation: this is a swell single and they should churn out more episodes of this project....

Vertonen -- THERE IS PEACE IN PROVIDENCE [Crippled Intellect Productions]

Ah, more loops and drones with the magic four-track... an entire cassette's worth, this time. As with the singles mentioned last issue, the method here generally remains the same: Blake Edwards composes bedrock tracks that consist out of simple loops, over which he layers ambient washes of sound and unidentifiable incidental noises. The sound that results, over the course of an entire tape, is not unlike the effect of floating through water tunnels in the middle of the night... or maybe driving through the lunar landscapes of city highways and overpasses still under construction. Part of the appeal in these tracks is the hypnotic effect of the sunken loops, the process of making ambience rhythmic; the rest of what holds your interest comes from Blake's inventive use of field recordings, treated guitar, AM radio, dulcimer, flute, sheet metal, and the like to create almost invisible layers of texture over the loops. His success at transforming sounds is so complete that i have no idea what sounds were actually generated by what instruments or objects, which only helps the tracks to sound that much more mysterious. Like the singles, this is works either as background music or something to which to can pay closer attention (if you're so inclined); and like the singles, it is worth seeking out and hearing. As with the round spinning things, it also comes with a nifty printed booklet....

Vesicant's sound is firmly rooted in old-school industrial dance, first wave (many of the suave moves here can be traced back to the heyday of Skinny Puppy, Cabaret Voltaire, Front 242, and other proponents of aggressive dance sounds), but is also modern enough to incorporate more recent developments on the front lines of glitch electronics. The processed vocals are a tad too reminiscent of Skinny Puppy at times, but otherwise there's a lot of energy in the beats and the sound they get in the rumbling, dark-ambient parts is sufficiently intimidating enough to command your attention. The fine employment of noise and glitch electronics also rounds out the sound and pushes it in interesting, often unexpected directions. A lot of this disc is closer to harsh ambient noise than anything danceable, but when they bring on the beat, they bring it on loudly and with great decisiveness. Unlike many (perhaps too many) artists working in this genre, they understand the importance of keeping the sounds varied and flowing, and to that end, they use a totally ridiculous amount of gear, including many different synths and samplers, a staggering array of efx boxes, and even broken toy guitar, metal barrels, and circuit-broken SK-1. The result is a vision that remains consistent throughout, but whose sound never grows stale because the elements (and even the tone of those elements) is always changing. Worth looking into if you miss that big techno-beat served up old-school style.

Bizarre sound doodlings from the Garden City (Missouri, to be exact). Actually, VNP are one of the closest things to an actual rock band appearing in this issue, although i don't believe they'll be mistaken for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers anytime soon. They rock, yes, but they do so loosely -- more like an updated answer to the Greatful Dead, maybe, minus the country leanings but still enamored of the occasional psych doodlings. "Welcome to the Prom" is straight-ahead rock with lots of heavily reverbed quasi-psychedelic guitar frippery and much bass rumble; however, it ends awfully abruptly (a flaw in the disc they sent , perhaps?). The psych guitar leanings continue on "Suffer the Children," a groove set at a slower tempo but every bit as solid. It appears that the jam tradition still lives; good thing they don't get carried away with it like Phish or the Grateful Dead....

On "Moon Light On Lucky" they make an interesting move -- not only do they employ some unusual percussion sounds, but they incorporate noise into their psych moves. Now this is what noise was meant for -- not as a tool for disaffected political losers, but as an ingredient in the mix along with other things. I approve of this. "Beagle Dance," by contrast, is actually sort of pretty in spots (although the bass is probably mixed a tad too high, one of the hazards of live sound), with scratchy guitar riffing and a slow tempo that leaves plenty of room for drawn-out solos between verses. By contrast, "The Love Gods Breakdown" is fairly crazed (and short), a frantic burst of overfuzzed guitar and spastic drumming... the end of the song, perhaps? They have presented the material here in strange fashion, as if it had been assembled from other places (which may well be the case, since they are apparently fairly popular on MP3.com and have a long list of songs available -- this may actually be a hand-crafted disc intended mainly for review purposes).

While the live sound could probably have been better in places, there's no obscuring that they have a solid handle on what they do, and the psychedelic guitar moves move me, mon. They're certainly far better than what i usually associate with bands on MP3.com, and worthy of your investigation....

On the final release from Viking Crown, we get the same lo-fi cult black metal you have come to expect. There is more keyboard work on this and it has a ritualistic feel to it. Murder music for those of the purest of heart. A drum machine gone crazy with chainsaw riffs fueling the desecration of the Nazarene. Also recommended is INNOCENCE FROM HELL, probably the best material of the band. [ttbmd]

If you seek melody, uplifting songs about human potential, and songs that actually can be distinguished from one another more than three feet away from the speakers, this is not for you. You have stumbled into the wrong review; you were looking for the Hidden or Desert Fathers reviews. On the other hand, if you worship monochromatic but deeply disturbed bands like Eyehategod, Dystopia, Zeni Geva, the Mentors, G. G. Allin and the Murder Junkies, and other bands whose musicians are likely to spend large periods inactive while waiting for key players to get out of jail, you may find this a soothing disc to listen to while drinking heavily and brooding over all the people at work you'd like to beat to death with a hammer. Titles like "Hand of Doomish" (which is funny, since the real Black Sabbath worship is happening not there, but on "Drug Orgy"), "Who Farted," and "The Shit," combined with dissipated white-trash lyrics about drug overdoses, bosses who should die, doing too much coke, and killing people, give the distinct impression of people with no hope and endless rage at a world drowning in its own shit. Thanks to the invention of stringed musical instruments and extremely powerful amplification, you can now share their pain. When they aren't grinding you into paste with their lumbering doom groove, they blast through fast bursts of hyperactive grindcore. None of it is pretty. I like that the album ends with their shrieking vocalist raging "KILL! KILL! KILL!" over and over. Monolithic as a truck, as enraged as the guy you just cut off who's reaching for his .45, and as horrified as the guy next to you whose shirt will be ruined when it's stained with your blood and brains. Better for you than Valium or cheap alcohol and way cheaper, too.

Loud, rude (but not intentionally malicious, really) experiments in sound. They have a tendency toward the cryptic (no titles, band info, etc., they do list the recording date as March 2003), and the sounds are frequently loud and unidentifiable, but there's nothing particularly sinister happening here -- just guys making weird noises in the context of avant rhythms, that's all. The music (probably performed live, by the sound and feel of it) is loose, but not as random as it might sound upon first glance, and well-recorded, and sounds very much like one would expect from the title. Strange rituals of amusement lead to the satisfaction of perpetrating unusual and entertaining sounds. The unnatural manipulation of instruments and other devices sounds good in these hands; what could be an addled disaster goes somewhere instead, in mysterious and occasionally amusing fashion. Probably even more entertaining to see live. Worth investigating, assuming you don't have a particular passion for verse/chorus format, or dissonance, or weirdness, or....

TMU: There sure a lot of explosive sounds on this. Tape and sound collage, with a sick fascination for grating tones. Shrill tones, even....

TTBMD: This is funny. It's a one-time listening deal. Reminds me of Chicken 4 Chicken. It's entertaining, but I'm definitely not going to listen to it before I go work out at the gym or something....

TMU: Oh come on, you know you like this part here with the... what exactly the fuck was that?

TTBMD: They must like making farty sounds. Like I said, funny, but....

TMU: I think I preferred the Butthole Surfers' farty sounds, they were much fatter and rounder. They had a better shape to their tubes o' sonic poo.

TTBMD: Yes,. they were top fuckin' shelf. I really liked LOCUST ABORTION TECHNICIAN. That's my favorite. You could get stoned to bejeezus and put that record on and be okay.

TMU: Especially when "22 Going On 23" kicks in.

TTBMD: You're so smart. That's why I like. You've got great taste in music. And you've worked around John Gavanti.

TMU: I sure hope he's feeling better since having to fire the bodyguards for their indiscretions in beating that motherfucker senseless when he was foolish enough to touch Mister Gavanti's collar while whining for change. Do you suppose the lawsuit will bankrupt him?

TTBMD: I can't talk about the case.

TMU: Oh, that's right -- you were there. I heard about that creative explanation of what the photographer could do with his camera... but was it really necessary to demonstrate?

TTBMD: You can't prove I was anywhere. Not then, not now.

TMU: Are they going to fart all the way through this tape? I can't decide if they're being deliberate in their obnoxiousness or if this is just poorly recorded. I am puzzled.

TTBMD: I decline to comment.

TMU: I think these guys are influenced by the Melvins, and this is not necessarily a good thing.... finally! The farting ends! I really like that a couple of these grotesque tracks were recorded in a church, though.

TTBMD: That's the coolest thing so far about this tape.

TMU: Well, it also came in a milk carton....

TTBMD: Yeah, that's way cool. If the carton had been empty, that would have been cool too.

TMU: You think being soaked in milk all the way through the mail has anything to do with the tape sound?

TTBMD: They should be so lucky.

TMU: I like the rhythms they come up with, and some of the efx are interesting, but truly, there are some very annoying tones on this cassette. Although when they really pile up they do sound sorta like Ornette Coleman outtakes, if you squint. They certainly have the abandon down. Are they possessed by funk?

TTBMD: I say nothing. Nothing, say I.

TMU: They could use a bit more variation in the sound. This is interesting as an exercise in deliberate, gross repulsiveness in sound. They do have voices possessed by the devil on the second side, though, amid great crunge-laden waves of sonic rot. This would be a good direction to lurch in the next time around....

TTBMD: (too busy coughing to respond)

Now THIS is psychedelic. I have no idea where these guys came from but they are the living definition of bad-assedness. Enslaving a French horn for the purposes of mind-bending hallucinogenic trance odes is a stroke of genius, as clearly evidenced on "I Was Kicked In the Horse by a Head When I Was Three." Squeeged wah-wah guitars set on loop 'n drone bob up and down in the background as the Horn of Doom bleats away... and then a crazed guitar solo that sounds roughly like an army of cockroaches scurrying up and down the fretboard crashes the party. The song grows loopier and loopier as the horn continues to bleat.... The riff-driven guitar dirge "She Is Missing" benefits from much EQ-diddling (the guitar sound keeps shifting even as the riff remains static) and the vox are pretty demented as well. The nice thing about this band is that they manage to be genuinely weird yet catchy at the same time, without wandering too far away from the song's essential structure. They're loose but not wildly free-form, dig? Props for the mad slo-mo psych jazz of "That's Entropy" -- what Spyrogyra wishes they sounded like, only ten times better. Man, if a French horn sounds this good, why the hell don't more bands use one?

Other swank bits include "Reading Railroad," another riff-driven ditty with more nifty horn nooding and a swirling cyclone of orchestrated guitars and the like; the warbling vox and improv drumming of "The Grand Substitution"; the slow and serene oomph of "Open Casket (for Tiny)," which is mainly a loping beat, drawn-out horn pooting, and bell-chime guitars. All of it's pretty damn brilliant, actually, and the only real tragedy is that even with ten songs the album is only 37 minutes long. On the other hand, they certainly don't wear out their welcome, eh? This is not just a throwback to classic psych albums of the late sixties/early seventies, but it has an actual sense of humor (a strange one, true) and completely sidesteps the noise element that has crept into most psych rock over the past few years, which makes it really stand out from most of its altered brethren at the moment. Hear it or regret your loss forever.

I'm mildly puzzled as to why two Swiss artists (Xeno Volcano, provider of eerie sounds, and Elektra Sturmschnell, provider of creepy ghost vox), on a Swiss label, have recorded an album in German... but then, Europeans in general often puzzle me. Not that it matters, because the album itself -- somewhere between industrial and gothic, which Elektra's disembodied voice soaked in reverb and floating over the droning electronic mantras -- is a pretty compelling one. It turns out that the two met when he was playing live on the street and she approached him about providing the musical backing for her poetry readings; they have worked together since then, often performing at dark fetish/sex shows in Switzerland, along with (presumably) more traditional venues across Europe and America.

More than anything else, this reminds me of the less beat-heavy moments of the Golden Palominos album DEAD INSIDE, which means it's mysterious and unnerving -- i don't have any idea what Elektra's saying (tragically, my grasp of German is nearly nonexistent), but it sounds pretty ominous. The sound is one of throbbing, gristle-laden electronica and keyboard washes, somewhere between Cabaret Voltaire and Die Form (both of which may very well be pivotal influences; certainly they share much in common with both of those artists, particularly the Cab sound and Die Form's obsessions). Comparisons to Coil wouldn't be far off (in fact, some of the venues and music productions they are associated with have links to Coil, and the eternally-perverted John Balance in particular). As befits their background as event performance artists, the album is broken up into 32 short segments, most of which are closer to static mood pieces than actual songs. It's a sound that manages to be exotic, occasionally noisy, and highly ominous without sacrificing too much in the way of melodic sound. This isn't the kind of album you listen to for specific songs; rather, it's intended (i think) to be used as background sound for ritual performances, sex performances, maybe anything where the music is only one part of a whole show. As a result, this probably works better as background music (although there's certainly plenty to appreciate upon close scrutiny, especially in Xeno's inventive sound-wrangling via keyboards and possibly samplers). The collision of near-traditional symphonic keyboard washes and unknown forays into cryptic noise sounds makes for an interesting mix, and that sound is the perfect bedrock for Elektra's otherworldly vocal musings. I don't know how you might get your hands on this in the US, but it's certainly well worth hearing, especially for those into the likes of old-school industrial, Coil, fetish/sex performances, and the like.

Voltage Regulator is apparently an ensemble of guys 'n gals (revolving mainly around James Kosharck and Mimi Wagonwheel, as far as i can tell) doing disturbed things in the name of ambient electronics and sound collage. Some of the references suggested in the poop sheet include Coil and Zoviet France, and i suppose that's there, but these people are even more demented and less inclined to fixate on anything for very long. The ten pieces on this disc flow from one to the next, pausing only briefly to launch into the next eccentric collection of sounds and drones. "stones thrown" manages to combine cocktail-lounge jazz with piercing electronic drone and increasingly bizarre vocals to unnerving effect; efx units gone bad (or at least heavily abused) create hypnotic layers of ping-pong sound with the most minimal of sounds on "bleem"; droning, ambient swirls of sound and unintelligble voices give "near distant future # 3" an ominous, even sinister sound; and "dirge" is exactly what its title implies, a droning dirge that ends the album with lots o' reverb and delay. In between these songs and the opening "introduction" are a number of "theme" songs ("theme#cook," "theme#diet," etc.); i have absolutely no idea what links them, and they are among the strangest-sounding tracks on the album. Varied and sometimes eerie work, maybe like a more electronic version of Pineal Ventana without the scary histronics, perhaps? Definitely worth checking out.

TTBMD: Holy shit! I am so impressed by this effort by Voltage Regulator that it gives me faith again. I feel like I've been deflowered.

It's on Mandragora, so you know it's going to be noise-related... and indeed it is, in a droning, mechanical kind of way. Sound manipulator Erik Amlee sets forth the mission agenda immediately by opening with "Bagadzha," in which a shuddering loop of sound like an engine turning over is gradually consumed by more mechanical loops and pure white noise, much like a tower of darkness eating itself from the inside. Deep bass grooves abound on the album as well, especially on "Sumatra Space," where rumbling bass tones open cracks in the earth from which strange-sounding and luminscent creatures of the dark emerge. "Loud I" is exactly that, an unseemly barrage of grotesquely reverbed rhythms, sound samples, shrieking, and more, all of which seems to be emerging from a tunnel that's caving in. Reverb efx abuse can be a terrifying and awesome thing. "Meat Show" and "Loop" bring on the staggered mechanical drones again and "Loud 2" is a variation (still a loud one) on the original version, while the closing "Drone" is a dark and lovely drone swimming in oceans of reverb. Good, good stuff. It's not rock 'n roll, true, but it builds bones... builds character... it will annoy your parents. More proof that noise is the only real universal "music."

Vox Barbara -- THE FIVE SENSES [Little Man Productions]

A side project (diversion?) from Frank Smith, one of the co-consiprators of Sappho's Fist. This cassette comes in an interesting package -- a large velcro-bound slipcase with an explanation on the back regarding a mystical narrative by Anaitre Tellsos back in 1797 dealing with the five senses, and inside, the cassette and a small (color cover) booklet with a quote from the book for each song, along with all the other requisite band/label info. Nice packaging, in other words. The music itself is equally intriguing, particularly the opening "Spirit Musk," a hypnotic melange of heavily reverbed rhythmic pulses of indistinct origin. "Liquidity" processes the sounds of water (shades o' Aube!), but here the sounds are in service of rhythm, not noise. Given the many strange sounds lurking within these two pieces, it's hard to believe that these sounds were made using only "household objects, human voice, strum stick and a handmade paper/metal sculpture." (Well, "Resonance has some extra help, but we'll get to that.) Given the heavy reliance here on trance-like repetition, along with many other bands currently exploring the same sound (including my own), i'm beginning to wonder if we aren't on the cusp of a trance movement or revival or something....

"Resonance," a vibrating, hypnotic piece built around a harp-sound swiped from the internet and "contaminated," along with other strange rhythmic sounds, also drags in louder moises and the sound/feel of electricity. "The Stickiness of Colors" processes edited voice loops in odd layers to eerie and brilliant effect -- the result sounds like a squadron of hovercraft ships taking off and landing against a insistent background of looped sound. The last track, "Membraneous Absorption," is a bit noisier than the rest, including what sound like windshield wipers, washing machine tumbling noises, and God only knows what else. Like the others, it's intensely rhythmic and aims for a trance groove. Think of the entire project as a more rhythmic and regimented version of Frank's main band Sappho's Fist and you're getting somewhere fast. Vivid, well-constructed soundscapes and thoughtful packaging... what more could you ask for, eh?

Leave it to Frank Smith to pop up with something completely different... something waaaaay out in left field. He's somehow managed to get his hands on an audio-manipulation program built by the CIA (he filched it from a hacker's FTP site a while ago) that employs a process called "hyper-timescale threshold gating" (whatever that means) to reproduce Kirlian audio waves. If you'll flash back to the seventies for a moment (platform shoes... polyester... pimp afros... smiley buttons... nightmarish color-coded clothing... etc.), you may remember when people were briefly going gaga over the idea of Kirlian auras, the idea that the human body produces measurable electromagnetic fields that can be used (theoretically, anyway) to judge a person's reactions, health, etc. -- the human body as walking mood ring, if you get my drift. Well, apparently you can do the same thing with audio waves, although how is utterly beyond me (i failed physics in college, so sorry, it was interfering with my drinking). If you want to know more about the science behind all of this, i suggest you scoot on over to the Vox Barbara site and read the liner notes, okay?

Anyway, Frank boosted this top-secret program thingy (go, mon!), spent a small eternity trying to figure out how to actually use it (apparently pirated government software doesn't come with a "Help" file), and eventually put it to use transmuting various loops and field recordings into "sonic auras"; once he had a nice pile of said auras, he assembled them into various configurations as songs and lo, a disc emerged. What's on this disc, then, are the sonic auras themselves, layered and looped but otherwise devoid of processing. And mighty strange sounds they are -- buzzing, crunching, distorted sounds like the dying croak of a blast furace imploding. Some of the songs, like "Electrical Purdah" and "Circuit Trance," sound like gruesomely distorted techno from another dimension, while other songs (particularly "Ritual Dissection,") sound like soundtrack segments from a particularly apocalyptic underground film. Nearly everything has a distinct rhythmic bent, although often the sounds are so alien and distorted (as on "Silicon Phantom") that it's hard to recognize them as rhythms at first. "Tabernacle Mirror," with its mulched sounds and exotic hammering-on-sheet-metal "percussion," sounds like an exotic cross between Gerogerigegege and the Der Eisenrost. Imagine a rawer, far noisier version of Techno-Animal... a frightening thought, isn't it?

As with all Little Man releases, this is a limited edition thingy... 200 copies, i think... so if you want to get hep to Frank's bizarre experiments in the science o' sound, it would be wise to act quickly. On my end of things, i'm almost afraid to even imagine what deviant corner of science he'll delve into next in his obsessive search for unusual sounds....

More strangeness, although unlike much of the PE catalog, this does not appear to be aligned with free-jazz... rather, it's a series of experiments in minimalist scrunch-noise (or something like that). The band (whose name i may have wrong -- the cover makes it kind of hard to tell) is actually two jokers, Jeff Surak and James Guggino, doing perverse things with homemade gadgets, random percussion, a hurdy-gurdy, and occasionally guitar and bass. There are some nice, shuddering bass drones and high-pitched wailing on "you're errors before," what sounds like cds skipping (and much other sonic effluvia) on "hjungle," and crunched-up noises plus random clattering and percussion on "endure beasts." The hurdy-gurdy makes its grand appearance (i think) on the heavily-reverbed "rescure urgent" -- it sounds like a string section being disemboweled -- while "puffed snails" returns to the clatter 'n drone strategy. The noisiest, most grinding tracks are "verify lunacy" and "is-not," both of which will give you a headache if you listen to them too loud.... Actually, comparing the track listing to the actual number of tracks on the cd reveals that they don't match, so who knows if any of these titles match up accurately with the sounds. It matters not; if you're down with the noisier, more arcane side of PE's catalog (Fukktron, Hair & Nails, etc.), then this will be like manna to your swollen ears. [