Music just moves on them, has its way with all seven of them simultaneously and they just let it. It's already out before anyone can do anything, audiences aren't sure how to help. First horns then heavy synth then dangerous headbanging, laughing bravely as they help music do even more things to them. Mercifully, this is a brief seventeen minute pants tingler. It bears witness to 30 years in the loving choke-hold of every genre that ever ogled Brown Whörnet's innocence from 1993's legendary Emena Pestisode to Stroke the Apechild right up to their pandemic premonition Doctor Dickle and now... this.
Mangled free jazz, luv-me-baby R&B, parodically straight hardcore, and something that sounds like Yes on a boom box whose batteries are dying are all in their arsenal. -Chicago Reader
Not only crazed synths, metal guitar, bass and multi-percussion but trumpet, trombone, sax, and organ because how else could you make the run from Zeuhl to Swamp Rock to Punk to Free Jazz to Noir and Kosmiche Ambient in seventeen minutes?
Virtuosity unquestioned, it's really the geyser of ideas, their triple-fold humor and absurd stage antics that set Brown Whörnet apart whether touring as Daniel Johnston's band, endless studio sessions wearing nothing but nitrous tanks, scandalizing the art world by syndicating impostor bands, or the release of their free Bröwnloads series online. Side projects include 0MEGAVIZI0N, Aaartfÿstte (Resipiscent) Alt-cunt & Western favorites Chablis, and live film scores for The Adventures of Prince Achmed and Nosferatu.
Brown Whörnet The EP not called 'Big Old Cup With Ice In It'
|
Thomas Dimuzio Sutro Transmissions
|
Ikue Mori and Christian Rønn are twin masters of unrule, radically attuned to time and sound, invoking the personhood of space and object, chordis et machina, as you'll soon discover once their music gets loose in your own environ.
“Endless probing that hooks into your neurons, this album leaves sonic organisms floating around you. Even if that's merely an illusion, the alchemy of Mori and Rønn’s hyperactive stew is very real.” -Marc Masters
Laid down at Elektron Musik Studion (EMS) in Stockholm, this is no meandering muddiness, the precision and responsiveness of their heady collaboration steps swiftly from fine grit distortions to leaky sinewaves, sweeping from the playfully melodic to the seriously xenomorphic. As prepared-piano hammers against braiding electronics, each possibility unfurls the next. Tossed out from the final groove, you'll hike up your needle and want to plunge right back in.
Ikue Mori & Christian Rønn Chordis et Machina
|
"Stunning, ingeniously, creatively combined to express concepts/inner life/personal expression profoundly beautiful haunting deep lush scary beyond comprehension otherworldly indescribable mind-blowing artistic execution, perfection. Trippy!!!!!!" -Mom
Psychic sisters, Steph and Miel Lister, take their cult-favorite live art performance from the underground to an after-hours fully-equipped television studio. Iconoclasts of form and concept, Oracle Plus traipse the fence lines of new media, braiding up pop, pagan ritual, synchronized swimming and industrial television.
This is free-form divined and reenacted aesthetics, not your art museum's brand of self-expression but something spookier by a fathom, teasing familiars into view only to dispel, casting them back into sinkholes of tactile video, sound art, costume, sculpture, guided nightmare humor and collective memory.
If video were marble slab, Oracle Plus carve negative space to reveal neolithic paintings and stained voices within. Now, as in millennia past, to consult an oracle is to greet fate, not what transcends the blizzard, but what is hidden within it.
Oracle Plus DVD
|
All children confide silently to themselves that dark gentle insanity of a newly fleshed mind, hearing through clean guts and jellied bones for which ears are just the lids. To hear Midmight is to listen again from that cavern, ready to erupt in laughter or tears before a world towering just outside your skin.
“Gurgling sine noise with tons of well chosen and very wide-ranging tape sounds. You'll be pleasantly surprised at just how great it is for something so unknown.” —Weirdo Records
Field recordings are cunningly orchestrated with instruments as complex as the Jomox Resonator Neuronium and as rudimentary as a homemade hockey stick bass. Weaving in and out are fragments from a 50-year-old reel-to-reel tape, originally a “letter” for relatives back in County Clare, and long-ago experiments with a shoebox-size cassette recorder.
Hockey rinks, printing presses, player pianos, steel plants, Irish revolutionary songs, and roller coasters are a few of the source materials in Cut Cut Cut Bruise, a spellbinding, beautiful and brutal gem.
The download includes a bonus album: Midmight's "Almost Clear" released in 2005 on Resipiscent.
Midmight Cut Cut Cut Bruise
|
Moving too fast, you're seized by sudden fear of what’s just been sung into your mind; but, once bitten the lyrics of Jeweled Snakes drip into your blood, seeding dark compulsions. Synth-straps bind you to a sexstep beat incubating desire, choking out your former self to spawn a stranger, hotter you.
“Satisfying sleaze beats and squelchy science fiction synth, between gloomy and horny, abstract and catchy. Both members sing, sometimes in tandem, usually through heavy effects. […] sounds like Throbbing Gristle rewriting Black Sabbath’s ‘Planet Caravan’” -Lord Gravestench
No guitars, no sequencers, and no laptops. Effects-laden keyboards cross like meteors illuminating duo vocals, male and female incantations, as if Exene and John swallowed Myra Hindley’s german wine. Album download also includes a bonus album, their limited edition cassette release "Flesh Lab" (courtesy of Midori.)
“This is what I, for one, was really wanting Twenty-first century music to sound like. […] The promise and the menace of uncharted times echo in the frightening, powerful sounds of an electro noisescape.” – Jake Hout
Jeweled Snakes s-t
|
skozey fetisch evidence
|
Scattered across the planet just as they hit full stride, this is the smoldering crater where Le Flange du Mal once had us dancing, exhorting riot, reviving possibilities of an armed music, from bent circuits, in doubled vocals, with Korg PolySix, horn, bells, and rugless-drums constantly crawling off stage. As drunken-master slam dancers exhausted themselves, the band clinched us in full blown melodies, earnest and unforgettable, too close for us to punch back.
Get ready to bawl when you hear this lost, caustic album from a dark, danceable, no-guitar, high speed synth and horn band at the turn of the millennium. Tears came easily enough back then: endless war; Dick Cheney in the nuclear throne; church, military, and global finance all in fascist lock-step at the rise of our present monoculture. Paranoia had never been more justified. Freaks, idealists, and artists possessed of wit and political conscience found no quarter, no succor. And in that time of total surveillance, a classic of the age went virtually unnoticed.
Le Flange du Mal drew upon radical traditions, including Crass and Discharge both in style and lyric, barreling straight for the bizarre heart of the beast: Bush’s “Animal-Human Hybrids”, Chrysler bailouts, and visions of an annihilating Weather War. Though unreleased, this album now bobs to the surface, corpse-bright, brined by time and bloated with fermenting possibilities of the here and now.
Le Flange du Mal Carrion, My Wayward Son
|
This release is a 2xLP in gatefold sleeve, download included.Music to make the body feel wild.
A saga that began four albums and five comic books ago with a fat stub of flesh burrowing beneath the grass to uncover hex givers, beepers, and severed sisters’ heads, draws to its epic finale deep within The Maze: Once a war sanctuary, then a home, now a biomechanized sarcophagus, and the only way out is up.
“The machine stirred, searching for a response. Chairs, table, out of proportion swollen in the dark. The ceiling pressing down. A discontinuous lump of flesh asks, “Who Are You!?”
“Nothing. Complete nothings. An empty space surrounded by an empty space.” He was coming closer to the truth. “That’s right!”
Though this story is crushing, the resulting shards dance, creak and spill into a psychic underground vast enough for cymbal, cello, tuba, storms, timpani, piano, guitar, foghorn, harmonica, double reeds, trumpet, Sylvester Stallone vocals, and synth that makes Pink Floyd blush. Audiophiles will test their high end gear with this album; laughing teenagers will crank it, flying top speed to the ocean.
Zeek Sheck’s sound is singular, unmistakable: sleep talking, skidding drums, 64th note woodwinds at full tilt, cult chorales, resplendent horns, and escape-velocity dance anthems. For such odd music to achieve a maturity is both rare and gorgeous; "Joinus" is spare yet lustrous, by turns mysterious and dangerously riotous. Listeners will scramble to hear the early records all over again.
Zeek Sheck Joinus
|
Shut in for years exploring the material capacities of complex handmade instruments, could an artist emerge to compose unlabored, wide-open, epic and instinctive music? Two such genius-naifs, Liz Allbee and Hans Grüsel, deliver back-to-back marvels on this split release. Impossible instruments blow the lines off your conceptual map. Wonder at how the sounds were crafted, lean in to listen then list further, plunging to the immeasurable depths they open inside you.
Liz Allbee’s “Strategies For Failure And Relief From Persistent Positive Symptoms” summons bells, conch, voice, extended trumpet, sine waves and electronics that include home-made fingertip mics and motor players tripping beneath dilated, unblinking lyrics.Hans Grüsel’s “Zuckerkrieg (Part I)” steers electrons through a skein of patch cord in and around concreted pianos, horns, winds, violins and found objects, bending them into a composition that weighs a single stuttering heartbeat before it swells, bursts, and inundates the full range of human hearing.
Limited to 250 copies, the album was brought to Xopher Davidson for premastering and Paul Gold for vinyl mastering. It comes packaged in a frame-able poster and a digital download is included.
Liz Allbee/Hans Grüsel Strategies For Failure/Zuckerkrieg
|
Uncovering a secret burrow in the woods exhilarates, snapping the air to life; but to enter that subterranean nest requires reckless, mortal courage. Enticed inside, you rest upon execra that the wild would make of you. From here you peer out as the predator peers from its own mind, heaving as it stalks a drenched forest of impulse, chaos and prey.
Worlds of interiority and transmogrification are native to the Bran(…)Pos, fifteen year veteran of handmade instruments and soft synths. Here he extends his mouth-units for synthesizer in a stereo-gyroscope, sounds a searing cello, and renders loamy timbres beneath a sylvan landscape thundered upon by tympani. All this betrays a fascination with epic 70’s synthwork: Tangerine Dream, Gong, and Yes but also Asmus Tietchens, Xenakis, Subotnick and even Nik Raicevic. Put on your mylar pajamas, and head into the den. Waking dreams await.
Bran(...)Pos Den of Ordure and Iridescence
|
Moira Scar Scarred for Life
|
|