dude, got a mammoth (mammoth!) package courtesy of jersey's finest: kevin winter (2673), king darves and kate (bone tooth horn). stoked was an understatement as to my feelings when i opened this bad boy up. lots of people i've never heard of combined with a few that i do know. for starters, i'll focus on the guys that could probably use some more attention. expect a plethora of reviews concerning the dealings of these three, spread out over god knows how long. awesome.

glossopetrae c24
[2007, bone tooth horn]

a quick search on google dashed my hopes that a chick was responsible for this noise. the term jenny haniver, circa 16th century england, refers to rudimentary (and fake) sea monsters carved out of existing sea creatures, mostly manta rays. this was all taking place on the docks of antwerp. apparently, while the other sailors were out cavorting with the town's womenfolk, some seamen would've rather stayed behind so that they could mutilate fish. i'm pretty damned convinced that that's one of the traits of sociopathy. truly though, i've no idea who's twisting the knobs on this cassette.

glossopetrae, another, obscure, historical reference (i'm done playing wikipedia, look it up yourselves), is an outstanding twenty minutes of desolate modulations, screeches, mood exploration and distortion.side a happens to be where all the noise is at. it's slow building and dynamic, but due to the lack of background ambiance, it deftly avoids the cold feel that, more often than not, pervades this kind of music. this side's also rather noisy for how creeping it is, which usually guarantees things to be, at least, more interesting. that philosophy holds true here. after the first half of the tape plays out i think you'll find that jenny haniver manages to proffer a unique piece of experimental noise that's thoroughly enjoyable. now, the other side chooses to play up the atmosphere extensively, err, exclusively. fifteen men on a dead man's chest, indeed. fog on the water spooky aura at work here and i'm into it.

while jenny's seemingly popped up out of the murky depths of nowhere (aka new jersey, perhaps?), i'm hoping that there's more where this came from.

Side A Excerpt (from :38 to 5:29)

cows in lye
[2006, pseudoarcana]

dialing in is seattle's reita piecuch.

cows in lye was certainly not phoned in (ahh, been watching too much mst3k lately, pardon my pun), and is a near perfect album of otherworldly drones and heavenly layers of atmospheric beauty. how many adoring adjectives can i fit in one sentence? three, apparently. every one of the five songs on cows in lye has something interesting going on, occasionally, such as on the eleven minute closer thorazine eclipse, there's multiple things. mostly by way of synthesizer, or is it laptop? whatever her chosen instrumentation, reita's showing off an immense talent for making music that's not only pleasing enough to listen to, but has a unique enough sound that will have you coming back again and again. this isn't indistinguishable background murmurs that you'd put on just to break the silence, no, this has a tangible, pronounced, beauty to it that you'll enjoy experiencing. oh, right, i did say near perfect. the imperfect moment comes with diamante's call to prayer. the diamante doing the calling is herb, aka john godbert of vibracathedral orchestra (formerly of some incarnation of skullflower). the real tragedy is that musically, it's a fucking keeper, but herb's pissing on the parade here with some straight outta the renaissance faire minstrel monstrosity. i love vibracathedral, who doesn't? but this is god awful. 1960s revivalism is one thing, but the 1360s? hell no. leave that time period to fans of gothic music. i'm sad to report that we now have a cure for the bubonic plague, there's a thing called electricity, the terrorists are winning, life sucks. deal with it. to his credit, godbert's herb diamante guise is purposely kitschy, supposedly lounge-based (but he does use the word "thou", if it talks like a duck, etc.), and i'm sure that people who like weirder sounding vocals, think of some sun city girls releases as points of reference, could enjoy this. me, i'm not big on the whole "outsider" phenomenon, so it's all soaring way over my head.
despite my contempt for call to prayer, it's but a mere surface scratch on an absolute gem of an album and shouldn't deter anyone from at least giving this one a spin or three. trust me, you won't be disappointed.

i don't know what's going on with the cover of this, but i see teeth and it's freakin' me out a bit.

In The Mojave

innature
[2006, barge]

innature was the coming out affair for the barge imprint. they didn't just sneak their way into the scene through a hole in the fence, no, they sent out rsvps and gathered quite a few better-known and respected musicians to join their little soirée.

the fun years open up the disc with, actually, a nice piece of music. this is a lot more memorable than anything on life-sized psychoses. all the earmarks of that particular effort are here, though; the record crackles, the repetition, but i like this more. kudos. the next two songs, unfortunately, lose the momentum that tfy established, for me anyway. the kallikak family's affected vocals, guitar and electronics is skippable. stay high by the bird show, ironically, reminds me of a more sober version of the animal collective. too bad, since i'd have to say that it's the drugs that make that band at least interesting. those two, popular amongst people who've uttered the term new weird america in all seriousness, are interesting inclusions seeing as how the rest of the disc is a lot more experimental in nature. polmo polpo offers up a lovely piece of spaced out guitar with farewell to the flyer. tim hecker's, tried and true, warm swirling atmospheric electronics on dungeoneering won't disappoint his rather large fanbase. loren connors' outside my window is a humanistic three minutes of acoustic guitar. then, with little haste, it's back to the electric guitar and a floor filled with effects pedals for animal hospital (kevin micka of the common cold) and his towering late summertime. it's part minimal delayed drone, part field recording and part slow deliberate riffing, with authority! the finnish circle's near twelve minute no battle, no fire is music to perform a human sacrifice by. there's some tribal sounding percussion in the back, various other little noises, water sounds and metal clanging also thrown in. the vocal wails and stern grumblings keep the sound here firmly cemented in sinisterland. the repetitious stringed instrumentation that'll eventually join in about midway through is a welcomed addition. the press notes that came with this disc pretty much had this to say about circle "for fans of nurse with wound and current 93". my press notes would say "they could've scored the film the serpent and the rainbow with this". providence's geoff mullen takes me back to a place i'd rather be with gold eyes. his affected guitar noodling / noise making accompanied by some jingling chimes provides the album's best track, in my opinion. isis guitarist mike gallagher, here as mgr (better in abbreviated form since the full name is mustard gas & roses. bad, bad name), sounds very un-isis-like with the tense neither here nor there. mike's serving up multiple layers of electric guitar with only some resonance to provide any backing support. sparse as hell, but i like it. mgr ups the pace quite a bit towards the end as he'll start playing some actual riffs, added as a third guitar layer, nicely offsetting the slower chord work that he's putting down. shortly thereafter, a layer of dominating drone and sputtering electronics will pop up only to swallow the track whole. this is my second favorite.

innature's a solid compilation with some very nice moments. for the most part barge recordings does a good job of adhering to a particular theme. which would appear to be guitar experimentation, something that i'm certainly fond of. i do feel like they could've easily left off kallikak family and the bird show since both of those artists' songs stick out like sore thumbs. without them, this would be something that i'm more apt to throw on and listen to in its entirety. as it currently stands, i'll just pick and choose what i want to hear.

Loren Connors - Outside My Window

dave nardone of brooklyn's barge recordings recently sent me a couple of discs for review, here's the first of the pair.

life-sized psychoses
[2007, barge]

it seems like the massachusetts-based fun years (isaac sparks and ben recht) have aimed to release a pleasant album... and didn't get any more ambitious beyond that. for their part, they've definitely succeeded. this duo have put together forty-nine minutes of vanilla ambiance. held together by warm vinyl crackling, life-sized psychoses drifts in and out of your consciousness with soothing textural layering (emanating from a turntable) and repetitious guitar playing, which isn't such a bad thing. i'm sure that the fun years could achieve a rather sizable fan-base with the kind of music that they're making, but this album's just a bit too innocuous for me. used cd bins the world over are clamoring for inoffensive background music to stock their shelves with, and that's the fate that seems likely to befall this. personally, i need that je ne sais quoi that makes me want to listen to an album more than once. make it uglier, catchier, prettier... something. not doing anything necessarily wrong isn't always better than not doing anything right. barring the opening track, there's a considerable lack of dynamics to the music. if there was more going on that i could get into, obviously that wouldn't be as much of a concern, but ten minutes of the same thing that you could either take or leave, over and over, can get old pretty quick.

in the hands (and ears) of someone else, i'm certain that tfy could get a more positive critique, but this just doesn't move me. there's plenty of opportunities on this album where ben and isaac have a solid foundation, such as on softy as stilts, which is one of the better pieces of music on here. yet, when they've put themselves in a position to make something worthwhile, they squander it by insisting on doing the same thing incessantly, instead of building on it. there's a few different routes that this track could've gone: either they could've delayed and reverbed the hell out of this and at least made a great piece of space rock that you could bliss out to, or they could've capitalized on the sparsity of the guitar and had it evolve into something a bit more epic and crescendoing. they already gave a bit of a nod to mogwai on the nice and meandering in case you had any doubts..., why not dip their brush into the post-rock palette a bit more?

D >> 2

the next disc from barge is a compilation that i'll get to tomorrow. based on the names i see on it as well as the positive press it's gotten, should be good.

tightening the hinges c32
[2006, trash ritual]

this is the monster release i have been waiting for genius females to unleash for quite a while now. an unholy collaboration between privy seals and ex-jesus, there had been fair amount of hype surrounding them. i first saw duo live opening for the rita and was beyond floored by their performance. it was two guys shredding mics, pedals, and whatever else. one’s sounds were coming from the left speakers, the other took charge of the right, making this a blissfully disorienting experience. there were crunching lows and painful highs, and somehow the two managed to create a cohesive sound despite doing entirely different things. it was one of the most intense live performances i have ever witnessed. eagerly, i picked up their two more easily found cassettes, the golden throat c12 on callow god and the at your throne begging c20 on stammer tapes, only to be slightly disappointed. it was dense and harsh, but almost completely lacked the dynamics i had fallen in love with from their live performances.

i refused to give up on them, knowing they would eventually capture what i had witnessed on tape. needless to say i picked up the tightening the hinges c32 as soon as it came out on trash ritual. i have nothing but respect for this scotland, maryland label. while most harsh noise labels are content to release slews of c10’s they have released nothing less than c30’s forcing any project that does a tape for them to up the ante as far as their material. i was happy to see that this applied to genius females, as they have come close to capturing their live fervor with this tape.

you can definitely hear the “l.a. harsh” influence as genius females have no problem repping their scene in their sound. this shit is thick and heavy; very tactile and crunching for the most part. there is none of that piercing feedback that can sometimes be more of a nuisance. these thirty-odd minutes are a sound document of what it must be like to die in an apartment fire; give yourself in and there’s never a dull moment.
whereas most are content to throw a black and white picture of a sexy, faceless girl in high heels on their cover, but genius females flip the equation and feature (at times explicit) gay themes and pictures throughout. brilliant.

i must admit this tape (all 62 completely sold out by the way) still comes up kind of short in the dynamics department when compared with their live sets, this is a step in the right direction for genius females and i hope they follow through in upcoming releases.

Side B Excerpt

reviewed by bortron

silverskull one-sided c60
[2006, imvated]

clay's festering lungs is the experimental noise concerned project of wisconsin denizen clay ruby. clay has lots of fun things that take up his time, including: being in zodiac mountain with james toth (wooden wand), being the poster-child for free folk in davenport, looking like a member of sunn o))) on his myspace page, running 23 productions, playing in the lamb called light with theresa behnen (davenport, visual artist), also running skull fucking tapes, being in jesus balls, sharing a ton of great mp3s on slsk and making harsh noise as metrocide. he probably also enjoys non-musical things too, but, based on his output with davenport alone, i kind of doubt it.

once you can get past the fact that someone with strong ties to the psych-folk scene is making noise music, you'll be won over by the results of what he's doing. while his output under the metrocide name is more brutal than what he's doing here, this is just as worth your time. maybe even more so, if harsh isn't your bag. but that's crazy talk, right?

silverskull, put out on lieven's imvated, which then turned to cauliflower dreams, which is now known as bread & animals, which will soon be known as something else (presumably), features a few different aspects to ruby's electronic experimentation, and i'm digging all of them. the tape's only twenty minute's long, and there's no mention of separate tracks, but i found that it broke up nicely into six parts, so i'll refer to them as such.

while clay manages to keep his sound fairly varied, he does have a couple of mainstays in static (not overpowering or obtrusive) and sustained electronic hummmmmmmmmmms. both of which get the thumbs up from me. there's some great tape manipulations combining with those previous elements on the fifth track, which is one of the more stand-out pieces. my favorite track though would have to be the fourth one. there's some vocals, and with its throbbing percussion, it makes me think of an unholy union between redrot (oppermann, again?!) and davenport, and let me tell you, the results are fucking super. feedback, reverbed vocals, affected vocal looping, unintelligible lyrics and shouting. bravo sir, bravo. psych-noise, has that genre name been coined yet?? sure hope not. the tape ends with a loud, yet pleasing, droner. there's some vocals on this one too, but they're buried to the point where it just sounds like an additional musical layer, but a good one. i only wish that i could turn this up more to hear the full scope of what's going on without it being deafeningly loud. ah well.dope little cassette. there's also a double c4 of clay's festering lungs, raven's hyke, on his 23 productions. the material on it was actually taken from the same sessions that spawned this tape. sure, it would've been nice if those extra sixteen minutes were used to fill side b of silverskull, but i'm just being greedy. oh, and this is a visual pleaser from imvated, as i'm sure you can see. more nice artwork from jelle crama and the tape's pink! and not that manly hot pink shite either, this is baby girl powder pink. good stuff.

A2

oxide lullaby
[2004, snip-snip]

ryan oppermann's the birth name of the dude behind the redrot, fabrico incubo, klinikal skum, narcoleptic ward, neuntöter der plage, post-mortem junkie and xombie projects. i've focused the majority of my attention to his dealings as redrot. that's mostly because it's sick as hell, but partly because i lost my xombie, p-mj and der plage downloads when my c drive went kaput last year, and have yet to reacquire them. as for redrot, i'd recommend picking up the new (redrot, new?! score!) 12" split with hair police, taken from a halloween show of last year.

how this managed to sit on my computer for so long without me getting around to listening to it remains a mystery, but i'm glad i finally did. first, totally not what i would've expected. at all. second, pleasantly surprised. third, holy fuck is there ever a diamond in the rough tucked away neatly in the middle of this album.

the fourteen minute opener oxide lullaby comes across more as a terrific score to some obscure italian horror flick. it's rather sublime with a wonderful and haunting background layer. the echoed musical arrangements that'll soon enter aide the overall aesthetic remarkably. there's a distinct edginess to this that ryan wisely plays to by adding some brief jarring noise that consistently catches you off guard, it also prevents you from keeping the volume too high, which you'll have the urge to do in order to pick up on everything. after the near half-hour basement terror of lockjaw, we get to rusted crust. this is seriously one of the most memorable pieces of music (emphasis on music) that i've heard in a while. this has the unique distinction of being oppermann's most beautiful and severe work. rusted crust has this harsh as hell metal screeching sound which is periodically piercing the serenity of this ridiculously good guitar line he's laying down. when that guitar peaks at about 3:40 in and changes form a bit, fucking hell. even better is at 5:12 when it reverts back. wow. after that track, things'll get more into comfortable straight-forward noise territory with the twenty minute take the sewer to the rats' nest and bleed the rest. hrm, the title on this one isn't leaving very much to the imagination as to what this'll sound like. dense, but still interesting in its minimalistic approach in the first half, and then again with its thick and loud rumblings toward the end. the closer, calm corrosion, revisits rusted crust's vision, but keeps it grimy.

take my word for it, rusted crust is amazing. that track alone is worth the four bucks that this disc'll set you back. luckily enough for you tightwads, oxide lullaby's a good album through and through, so your purchase would be an economically sound one. yes, despite the fact that this was released in 2004, it's still available. that's one of the best aspects of snip-snip, things rarely go out of print.

Calm Corrosion
(fixed the link)