about Soundcloud — my mistake! diggin deeper i see how many useful features musician can find here. at least 1 is gorgeous — to obtain track u pay directly to the author (i hope). well... this is the future.
while brand new Zelienople ("Give It Up" @ Type records) is on its way, here's their 2007 release. Boomkat keeps labeling 'em "dark ambient/drone/metal", but His/Hers is a certain psychedelic piece and it sounds very sweet at quarter to eleven.
by the power given by sounds i forecast... winter.
@Type: Zelienople (named after a borough in Pennsylvania) is the moniker of Chicago based musicians Matt Christensen (guitar/vocals), Mike Weis (percussion) and Brian Harding (guitar/clarinet) and between them, in a desolate suburban basement, they have come up with a record of pure psych-rock sludge.
Now on their fifth album, the band have struck upon their finest moment yet, honing their skills to create something singular and utterly unique. There is certainly no shortage of acts willing to throw down waves of experimental guitar noise and clattering percussion, but with the benefit of focus and experience, Zelienople sound like something totally out of time and almost impossible to place.
Residing in a hazy drunken world in-between slow-core pioneers Low, psych-folk outsiders Charalambides, Japanese overlords Boris and Dead Man era Neil Young ‘His/Hers’ is a faded photograph of rock music past, yet still manages to keep a firm footing in the present. Guitars echo like disappearing ghosts and vocals moan and wail mercilessly while percussion bubbles up in glorious waterlogged waves.
‘His/Hers’ isn’t a concept album, but it might as well be with five bravely sculpted tracks acting like chapters, taking you through a whole gamut of emotions, from pensive and lonely through to aggressive and impulsive and beyond. Fusing the warring factions of blues, noise, metal, folk and jazz the trio have made as breathtaking a psychedelic album as you’re likely to find, and unlike so many others in the scene it never threatens to overwhelm you with meaningless academia or pretension.
This is an album made for listening, for enjoying and sinking in to, an album that is made as an illicit treat for the discerning music fans among us. Grab hold and step aboard, Zelienople are just about ready to take you on a universal journey into the subconscious, and it’s gonna be quite some ride.
@Boomkat:
[...] His/Hers succeeds as one of the more digestible, personable albums to come out of America's psych-folk scene of late: for every gesture towards abstraction there's something to keep you hooked in, something very human that breaks out from beneath that cloak of murk and shadow.
frankly i never would say that Soundcloud will gain attention of suchguys and — even more — that they'll start using it this way. looks kinda weird and maybe complicated to me (for this kind of compilations i'd myself prefer uhmm... 8tracks, maybe), but nevertheless here's "the third mix from Digitalis head-honcho Brad Rose" placed @ Type records' "Typecasts". have to admit, this >1 hour mixture of wide range artists ain't really my piece (ok ok — generally i meant), but since i admire the idea of moving music into web storage, this mix i definitely want to put here. at least as a bookmark and maybe as an introduction for somebody. listening to new and interesting stuff, discovering new names and sounds via web is the future. and the future is almost here.
Type guys say:
You should know the deal by now, Brad Rose is The North Sea (among other things) and also runs the fab Digitalis label. He’s got a sizable record collection and, well, we love it when he graces us with a mix (or three). Here’s one primed for the Fall with some pure hits, old and new…
1 “Behind the Habit Wheel” – Flowerman (from “Exotic Cameo” CDR)
2 “Canned Air” – Mars Accelerator (self-released & FREE http://www.marsaccelerator.com)
3 “Honey” – Altar Eagle (from forthcoming “Mechanical Gardens” album on Type)
4 “Bells” – Secret Colors (from s/t tape/CDR)
5 “God Bless The Child” – Terrors (from split tape w/ Infinite Body on Cavelife)
6 “Love Lagoon” – Blue Sabbath Black Fiji (from “Gemini” CDR)
7 “Fear is a Man’s Best Friend” – Shahs (free download EP from their myspace)
8 “When I Get Home” – Baby Dee (from “Love’s Small Song”)
9 “Song for Dennis Brown” – the Mountain Goats (from “The Sunset Tree”)
10 “Centennial” – Acre (from forthcoming Digitalis CD)
11 “Moan Roar Squawk Yelp, How’m I Gonna Sway You?” – Alphabets (from “Pow Sound” tape)
12 “The Sound of Lies” – Odawas (from “The Blue Depths”)
13 “Into the Ground” – Roll the Dice (from forthcoming LP on Digitalis)
14 “India” – Mira Cook (live on WFMU, from forthcoming LP on Digitalis)
15 “Thunder Road” – Bruce Springsteen (live recording)
"I never have a confidence in myself,
but i have great confidence in others
so the others are keeping me alive."
Kazuki Tomokawa
Thanx to Ed the commenter for tip — here we have recently published "La Faute Des Fleurs: a portrait of Kazuki Tomokawa", shaped in 3 10-mins parts, wild as it supposed to be. "A story about swallowing a star". "Pistol". "The God is crying in the well". "Pygment sky". Japanese streets. In/outdoor live performances. Brothel introduction. Prostitutes. Pics and flowers. Cigarettes. That noir movie hero's hat. And lots of faces... Very different ones. Maybe not the best musician's portrait, but these 3 short pieces are obviously about Tomokawa's music. Great. Who'd expect smth else?
"Many years have passed, for me, since I fell under this spell of his but the years definitely have not passed for him; for everyday he grows older he seems shines brighter. Strangely enough my love, also, has lost no vigor and so the time has come for everyone to see what I see and feel what I feel. And what better timing and way than with Moon's impromptu filming style… and now, a motive has been set."
Produced by Naohito Koike
Filmed and edited by Vincent Moon
Sounds by Teresa Eggers
Mix by Gaspar Claus (thanx, man, for yr lay-down cello!)
"He is still wearing the medieval cloak and he knows it is his old plague cloak. It is a beautiful garment of fine black camelwool lined with raw silk impregnated with suppurating lymph glands, tuberculosis and leprosy, the sweet rotten aftersmell of gangrene and putrid blood, the sharp reek of carrion, winter smell of typhus in cold doss houses where the windows are caulked with paper and never opened.... a very old cloak.... been in our family a long time, picking up a whiff here and a whiff there.... sweet diarrhea smells from cholera wards, black vomit of yellow fever in Bushwick, the congested sour smell of mental illnesslike rotten milk and mouse piss."
(William S. Burroughs, "The Place of Dead Roads"/Humansacrifice's MS profile)
Couple of months ago i dropped here live cuts from Lambs Gamble Italian tour, which Eric (of Vialka) revealed before. Then i received a message from another Gambler, "American-living-in-Glasgow" Fritz Welch and here's the result of our correspondence, where i asked him to chat a little about his work within Peeesseye project. He agreed to write few words about few albums and added download links so, my friends, yr eyes and ears can work both. Feel free to smoke and drink while reading/listening.
Band site's history section (named btw Perfect Salvation Initiation) in opposite to their unbounded audio incarnation speaks not so infinite — just few words, comprehensive in it's modesty: "Since 2002 The Peeesseye (Jaime Fennelly, Chris Forsyth & Fritz Welch) has been combining elements of warped rock architecture, freejazz horror, intergalactic glossolalia and stripped down abstract expressionism. Their concerts and recordings travel through fields of fine decay and up against walls of bonechilling catharsis." But words are for reading, so combine it with attached sounds to get into!
The following is a quick synopsis lowdown on the downloadable Peeesseye material on our website. It begins with the most recent release and goes backwards to the beginning of our recorded history. The group was formed in 2002 and was initially called psi – short, simple and almost not there. We changed our name to the phonetic spelling after a latenight gas huffing vision in which we all saw the letters glowing neon, made of bits of garbage and asteroid chunks.
This album was recorded by the illusive audio wizard Bob Drake at his secret sonic coven at the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains. This dude's responsible for a couple of amazing Vialka albums among others by a wide range of artists. We had been on tour and still had road crud in our lungs and tracers in our mind eyes. These pieces were composed partially on the road and partly in the midst of improvised tom-fuckery. The room grew legs as we unearthed the pure sources providing each layer with its necessary components. There was someone there with us besides Bob, Maggie and them 2 dogs. Listening back i feel comforted by the density of the oozing cushions and the extra large mouth & lungs grafted onto my own. This shit makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck....
Mayhem in the mansion, Shivers in the shack
Give us our world or we'll steal it back!
Our acoustic opus recorded over 4 or 5 months in NYC with multiple studio session including a graceful dalliance with a spinster harpsichord. 'Commuting' has a pastoral quality with lurking murky undercurrents of unrest and unsettled creepiness. It's as if a haybail had just bounced off a tractor, unweaving its threads and reversing the flow of grain growth. Or like some water grew hair and threatened to go moldy and majestic. My clearest memory of making this record is all of our heads crammed into a computer screen for hours on end, sharing the same tiny specs of oxygen and wondering if the specter would ever stop growing. Luckily it got big enough to support the inclusion of the excellent special additions on trumpet by Nate Wooley and harp & ghuzeng by Clare Cooper and percussion & voice by Shawn Edward Hansen.
As if the devil had worked overtime to create his garden
The great vaulted halls beneath the mountains
Within a world without light, food is scarce as sound
Sleep safe and sound on a soft bed of leaves
The carefree sounds of spring come to an eerie halt
All fledglings must one day take their turn
and turning inward without turning to talk
Commuting between the surface & the underworld
This is a live recording made in a dank and shitty basement in New Brunswick New Jersey. It was at the tail end of a year of playing completely stripped down acoustic gigs: harmonium, snare drum, acoustic guitar and vocals. The coldness of the room is reflected in the simple, stark and harsh shutter of a 20 minute song going in a single forward driving hexing tumble. No ghosts wanted our throats this night!
The title is ripped from an essay by Herbert Brün from a book we read while playing a gig at The School for Designing a Society. The title set the tone and feel for this oddball combination of concepts and constructs. It is the most chaotic and teeth scraping Peeesseye album and yet it also revels in cryptic silences. It features studio tracks as well as live recordings made on the road on a US tour in 2004. One of the most ridiculous tracks 'Golden Showers' (see Golden Showers/Catastrophe of the Infinite Regress 7” below), was made in Louisville Kentucky on Sept 9 at a gig in which we had the glorious opportunity of opening for an ultra cheesy Hootie and the Blowfish cover band. The club manager ordered us to stop after the first song. The audience hated us more. This piece is a chunk of the shattered remains of our longing to bring joy to a room full of vat grown zombies. The cd also has a secret 'bonus' track which is a field recording made by septuagenarian social worker and goat farmer Danna Laliberte.
Side A of this 7", Golden Showers is a splattered wrinkle of residue borrowed from the Peeesseye side project peeinmyfacewithsurgery. In this context a 'golden shower' was the shorthand signal for an explosive sonic eruption in a field of relative silence. In their purest form the static passages become crucial building material supporting the diseased chunks of soundmass. Side B, Catastrophe of the Infinite Regress, is a cicada song cycle inside a post coma breathing exercise. Go try and sleep softly trapped in your own wrinkled corpse!
May Day is a live recording made on May 1st 2003 in Brooklyn NY at Improvised and Otherwise Festival. It's a typical document of our live sound at the time; patiently unfolding and ready to unload. We were gunning for a full blown assault on patriotic complacency and nationalistic retardation as well as the expected formulas of improvisation. Equal parts stampede and foetal kicks.
Earliest recordings of psi made at the now long defunct Black Helicopter Studio in lower Manhattan just a stones throw from Ground Zero. Run by DIY engineers Willis and Willard, this studio also recorded Lambs Gamble, Forsyth & Heenan and Irritating HorseEye. This was our slow, clean and stark phase. We were all quite relieved to find each in the musical garbage dump and took our time looking under the rocks of possibility. At this point it was a total revelation to lay back and let almost nothing happen. This was the sound of spores being shifted from moss on a stone to a dungheap to a drifting iceberg....
In addition to the releases mentioned above, Peeesseye has various smaller things dribbling out bit by bit. The most ambitious of these is the 6 cassette series 'Robust Commercial Fucking Scream' on Digitalis Industries. These are all live recordings made on tour between 2005-2008. The Oklahoma based label first became interested in the group after hearing us play the 24 hour song cycle 'Bury Me Deep' at the annual WestCoast Shapeshifters Festival in Phoenix Arizona 2003. Brad's disembodied form contacted us through a microscopic bacteria in a watery grave. We agreed to put out the series in exchange for minibar refills and unlimited bionic ear refurbishments.
Two news which blow away: Japanese psycheroes Shinsuke Michishita (of LSD March) and Makoto Kawabata (of AMT) are back. Twice. First comes yet unavailable brand new duo's collab — 500 ltd. LP Maru Sankaku Shikaku (Circle Triangle Square), announced to be released by Prophase. Tracklist: Spider's Thread/Rock Of Fate. Street date — Nov 3d (or 24th?) (preorder it here or here or here). Quote: "Traditional Japanese folk instruments processed through the lens of Acid Mothers and LSD March instigators. New psychic territorial landscapes the cosmic cartographer mapped yesterday before tomorrow."
The 2nd miracle is Dip Apple, "Norwegian/Japanese band featuring Petter Flaten Eilertsen (Love Hz, Phonoloid, Satangora, We Snakes), Per Gisle Galåen (DEL, The Birds, Slowburn, Crazy River, Ranheim), Hiroshi Higashi (Acid Mothers Temple), Makoto Kawabata (Acid Mothers Temple), Shinsuke Michishita (LSD March, LSD Pond), Kai Mikalsen (Kobi, Sketch, Origami Arktika) and TOMO (Transcendental Organic Magical Objective)." Their 2007 Japanese tour documentary CD, predictably (as cover and song names, ha) entitled "Made In Japan", was planned to be released a year ago, but still noted as "TBA" thing even at official Synesthetic label's site (where u can TRY to preorder it).
Tracklist: Space Fuckin'/Dope In The Water/Strange Kind Of Woman From Tokyo.
Free Music Archive moved up it's long-awaited feature: now they provide each album with a code to embed player for blogs. To celebrate this news here are Grasshopper's 2 songs/45 mins Castle of Quiet Session. From 1st try the label was immediately born and it sounded like "pipers at the gates of drone". Since i already said lots of times — i'm not a heavy-weight reviewer — here's few self-representing words from band's MS: "Grasshopper is Jesse DeRosa and Josh Millrod's behemoth answer to "jazz infused" experimental electronic music. Using trumpets, EVI, and a modest amount of electronics the duo warp classical and traditional instrument sound sources into otherworldly drones and peaking waves of pulsating electric mire."
Grasshopper's profile page at FMA also have an intro message from Wm. Berger, who said the following: "Grasshopper, a multifaceted trumpet duo, comprised of Jesse DeRosa and Josh Millrod, don't so much play their instruments, as they do brutally butcher them in an outpouring of drone poems, noisescapes, feedback shrieks and gentle amp hums, portraying as much a direct lineage from Black Flag as they do Stravinsky, Bitches-era Miles Davis or Morton Subotnick. Grasshopper have been described as the sound of "a wolf's heartbeat on ultrasound," "a windspiel made of knives" and "snake charming music made by industrial robots." Basically, these Brooklyn boys take all the "nice" out of the implications of your mental picture of either a friendly garden insect, or a young Kwai Chang Caine. Terrifying sounds, but beautiful too."
To reach download links check down arrows @ right
The video report from this Castle session available at Berger's Castle blog.
Thanx to all Acid Marshmallow's incarnations @ Vimeo for videos))
PS Pity we don't have a possibility to check their own mentioned @ MS website — http://fuckbatman.com is down...
about Soundcloud — my mistake! diggin deeper i see how many useful features musician can find here. at least 1 is gorgeous — to obtain track u pay directly to the author (i hope). well... this is the future.
frankly i never would say that 
"He is still wearing the medieval cloak and he knows it is his old plague cloak. It is a beautiful garment of fine black camelwool lined with raw silk impregnated with suppurating lymph glands, tuberculosis and leprosy, the sweet rotten aftersmell of gangrene and putrid blood, the sharp reek of carrion, winter smell of typhus in cold doss houses where the windows are caulked with paper and never opened.... a very old cloak.... been in our family a long time, picking up a whiff here and a whiff there.... sweet diarrhea smells from cholera wards, black vomit of yellow fever in Bushwick, the congested sour smell of mental illnesslike rotten milk and mouse piss."
Mayhem in the Mansion, Shivers in the Shack
Commuting Between the Surface & The Underworld
oo-ee-oo (Burnt Offering)
Artificially Retarded Soul Care Operators
Golden Showers/Catastrophe of the Infinite Regress 7"
Black American Flag
The __ who had begun his career as a useful ___ of the ___ court later became the ___ of ___ and the ___ of ___.
Two news which blow away: Japanese psycheroes Shinsuke Michishita (of LSD March) and 
The 2nd miracle is 
