Arklight/Dead Gum - Split [Phase!]

Dang, Greeks love Arklight. The country is reliably pumping out Arklight releases even after the whole bottoming out of the economy. Thank you for your continued service Greece.
This one (from the Phase! label) is special because a) it’s a tape and b) Dead Gum is on the other side. I’d never heard Dead Gum before this and I can’t say the name lead to high expectations but they were a pleasant surprise. The tape is wound on their side right now so I’ll start the review there.
“Knock Your Head on the Tablet” starts things off with lots of distorted echoing guitars. I don’t know what the band line-up is or if it’s just one person but I’m pretty sure everyone who is actually in the band is playing guitar. The track amounts to a rough, glistening wall of shimmer; shoegaze with balls. “Let Me Show You Around” features rigid marching guitar strums courtesy of a delay pedal. From there the track gets gradually messier as the delays fold back on themselves. This one has a lot more space in it leading me to think Dead Gum is probably the result of a single pair of hands. Unintelligible vocals near the end are a welcome addition as it sort of feels like a bonafide song in its closing minutes. As one chapter ends another begins, Dead Gum segues into the track’s finale edging toward psychedelic territory with a slightly more upbeat and groovy feel. This shifts directly to the stark, jangling strings of “Secret Love.” “Rat of Tide” changes the vibe considerably as it’s a very loose, jangly guitar and voice song. It’s got plenty of prickly points all over but stands apartment from the layers of distortion at the outset of the side. The finale, “Six Packs of Everything,” inadvertently caused me to wonder how many things do really come in six packs, beer/soda, abs, crayons, I don’t think that many things do. Anyway, that tangent has nothing whatsoever to do with the music. The side’s finale is even looser, with some zonked vocals and rustling guitar strings.
This tape sounds awesome with the volume knob up. Not necessarily anything new I guess, but its tried and true cascading guitar fuzz and loner six-stringin’ that never gets old. I’d like to see where Dead Gum goes from here; maybe they’ll imbue their sound with a little more form next time around?
Arklight’s side opens with “Radonitsa.” A garbled weather report on the radio, needling guitars, a thunderous loop of bass feedback or something or other. I think there’s a live hi-hat in here too. Typical of Arklight, it’s an atypical arrangement. The jam stays locked into it’s groove, builds tension until distortion starts spreading like a virus through the track slowly eclipsing everything in static. I always enjoy it when Arklight brings the grooves, and “Russian Ark” flirts with that very idea. A spaced guitar melody slowly loops against unspecified percussive bumps, clicks, steps, scratches, whathaveyous. The piece is relatively unchanging; it almost feels like a Buddha box or something. “Like Light Night” jams on a single guitar a little like parts of the Dead Gum side. Much like some of the Dead Gum side as well, it lapses into a blurry, fuzzed out mess. The closer “Captain General” hits hard and heavy right off the bat with big distorted thumping toms. A guitar that sounds like it’s being molested by a violin bow is panned back forth as the rhythm section thrusts and rumbles on. The drums drop out for a fantastic breakdown, atmospheric guitar touches and especially a clutch bassline totally nail it, making it the stand out moment of the track before the drums return. The track as a whole has an elusive vibe I’m really digging. My favorite jam on the tape, hands down.
Phase did a nice job with screen-printed artwork. 65 copies, still in print. Hit up the label.

Super Fun 3" Round-up

I had a tiny stack of my favorite kind of CD-r and I decided to lump them all together for a super fun round-up...
Bearses – The Prettiest Girl I Ever Saw [Hymns]
Not sure if this band’s name is pronounced like “bare-zees” or “bee-arses” but that’s beside the point. This 3incher, from Florida label Hymns, is a crumpled up mass of static spread across five tracks. There are samples of stuff buried deep down but they’re mangled beyond recognition by incredibly thick, saturated distortion and pitch shifting. Near the send of the first track a bit of carribean dance/pop stuff (maybe?) is barely audible through the muck leading into flashes of slowed radio DJ babble, heavily rhythmic crunching distortion and garbled vocal tones in the second piece. It’s nice having bands like Bearses to remind us just how much a fuck-ton of fuzz can morph one sound into something entirely different——namely magnanimously crusty squalls. The third track brings up the curtain a bit letting shards of distortion interact with the source material (a slowed down, rambling folk tune) instead of smothering it. It’s a well-placed melodic break in the middle of the record. The fourth track is interesting as well. There’s plenty of distortion but bits and pieces of gongs, bells and ethnic percussion poke through at certain intervals. The fifth track uses a lot hi-pitched freakouts amongst sloshed zombie slurs——a nice little kick in the teeth to remember them by.
For people, like me, who keep the radio dial placed equidistantly between stations or for fans of listening to records at the wrong speed played through twelve Metal Zones.
Arklight – Nolo Contendre [Ruralfaune]
A nice companion piece to that last CD-r is this Arklight 3”. Two tracks making up 24 total minutes of relentlessly chugging, bludgeoning noise. This is my first introduction to non-song-based Arklight and it’s pretty damn good. The title-track builds and builds on a pummeling loop/drum machine, while specks of static stagger in and out. They play around with the tempo a bit and offset the bass pulse with brief, searing jets of feedback. The track just keeps slumming, being tweaked here and there but mainly just riding the domineering beat. With about four minutes to go friendlier instruments are introduced——mellow, dirty guitar and live drums——and the track unwinds. “Rakkasans” starts up with a speedy, nearly techno drum machine. This track isn’t quite as noisy as its predecessor but it dishes out its fair share of feedback blurring the drum machine into a seizuring piece of equipment. Human shouts are coming from somewhere but they’re almost sensed more than they are actually heard through the putrid, filthy layers of fuzz. Traces of live drums are evident but they’re drowned in the bog like everything else. Straight up mildewed fury.
Single Indian Tear – The Black Category [No Label]
Moving into the easier-on-the-ears stuff, Single Indian Tear (the name ostensibly referring to the crying Indian/litter monitor from the PSA) are an Iowa City based duo and this 11 minute track is heavy on the synths. Not dreamy synths either, they seem to work with a bit more of a Kraftwerk mindset of loving their machines for the machine sounds they make rather than trying to disguise them as the ocean or the heavens. A variety of synth-tones are employed here from squelchy, filtered bass and tinkling belltones to static-y pulses and ray gun sounds. The track hits a nice stride around four minutes in where it settles into its skin and slowly cycles through the array of sounds at its disposal. There’s a three note motif that starts the track out and it returns in the second half but surrounded by creepy, “cat meow” sounds. Weird, dude. The last minute is a toy piano melody plinking across inter-galactic deep space synth and radio waves.
Sean McCann – Background Sound Two [No Label]
This 3” is another long, lovely piece by San Francisco’s Mr. McCann. I know his stuff is always lovely but this thing is one of the lovelier ones. This would be meditative if it wasn’t so immediately, palpably beautiful and in a strange way, saddening. There’s a wonderful mournful quality to the sounds here. A pretty melody twinkles, emanating from a far corner of the stereosphere as you just kinda drift along in a synthy sea. Not too much to say about this other than I’m enjoying the ride. McCann shifts incredibly subtly between ideas keeping the piece entirely engaging over its 22 minutes. I like how the melody at the beginning drifts away but makes a sly, unexpected comeback in the last couple minutes.
But why am I telling you this? This thing was given out with orders from McCann’s label Roll Over Rover and is all gone. Furthermore, it was limited to an utterly ridiculous 22 copies. That almost makes me angry there’s so few of these around. This piece deserves a reissue as a side of a split LP or tape or something like that. Hopefully some good soul reads this and takes it upon him or her self to do just that. It’s too goddam good to drift into obscurity.
KRGA – Thousands [Debacle]
The theme of this double 3” is the first disc concentrates on predominately acoustic arrangements while the second disc brings on the electronic elements. The first track “Thousand Armed” is rather nice with plenty of layers of acoustic guitar and hand percussion and then bits of flute and pump organ flowing by underneath. It doesn’t establish too much atmosphere but it’s really melodious and easy on the ears. “Thousand Headed” is more brooding with a lot reverb and an effected acoustic guitar and patches of vocals and other sounds stitched in. The first disc’s final track, “Thousand Hearted,” exceeds the combined length of the previous tracks. It’s a real nicely unfolding piece with a couple of dueling guitars over chiming bells and a reed organ that quietly leads the track. That reed organ is the real key here cause it glues all the clanging, jangly percussion, random bits of whistling melodies and other sounds with the acoustic guitar digressions making a real beautiful, dynamic and effortlessly flowing track. My favorite piece here.
The second disc opens with its longest track “Thousand Beaked” which after a minute of oscillator doohickery steadies itself and glides along with burbling tones. You can see some similarity between this disc and the first. Both feature multiple layers of sounds and use ever changing clusters of notes on top of sustained tones. The piece shifts often throughout its 11 minutes, hitting upon some nice, even pretty spots, but it doesn’t quite have the invisible guiding hand leading it coherently, seamlessly on its course as in “Thousand Hearted.” The second half is a quite a pleasantly buzzing bed of synths. “Thousand Eyed” is also a bed of buzzing synths but not one you’d want to sleep in, and the buzzing is more akin to angry wasps. “Thousand Horned” has some pseudo-bowed sounds and a pairing of slippery, blipping melodies. A digital fog fans out and overtakes the piece by its end.
3” CD-rs get the shaft a lot of times when it comes to packaging, but the Thousands packaging is clean and classy with two printed CD-rs mounted on the inside of double-sided cardstock that folds closed like a book.

Trapped in the Closet: Volume 1

This is the first of a "feature" I'll be doing--and stupidly calling "Trapped in the Closet". The basic idea is that over the year and a half I've been doing this, I have been sent so much great music, way more than I ever could have expected when I started, actually still pretty amazed people ever sent anything. Anyway, I play something from every package I receive on the show at some point but finding time to review everything is trickier. I started cleaning out the closet and looking through stuff I got but never actually reviewed. My apologies to all the labels/artists that sent stuff that I haven't gotten to. Hopefully, doing these periodically will help make up for it.
Diamond Lemonade – Diamond Lemonade [JK Tapes]
I’ll start things off nice and easy with this Diamond Lemonade cassette that came out on JK Tapes earlier in the year before the label closed its doors and rose from the ashes, phoenix-style, as the quarterback/space obsessed Young Tapes. Diamond Lemonade is Ulf Schütte, who knows a thing or two about labels with his Tape Tektoniks imprint. The sound source here, I’m guessing, is just bells or chimes but they are chopped, screwed and looped creating a constant flutter of frequencies. Things don’t change too much but the track zips off rather quickly, never outliving its welcome. The second piece is longer, and sounds similar but is much heavier on the murk factor. Tones rise and fall and flit around. There aren’t really “melodies”, per se, but through repetition and the overlapping, all the layers create weird little rhythms and pseudo-melodies, all concluding with vintage radio blips. Cool stuff, wish there was more here, though I remember seeing a Diamond Lemonade tape on Bread & Animals so I’ve got a hunch we’ll be hearing more from this project. Same jams on both sides.

Arklight – Welcome to the NHK Wasteland [Little Fury Things]
I was curious about this crew since I saw the name popping up across a bunch of very different kinds of labels. This disc showed up from NY label Little Fury Things and this disc is a mess in a good way. The title track evokes earlier Smog type stuff with sleepy monotone vocals and fuzzy guitar, and then lo and behold, a sample of “Bathysphere”, my favorite Smog song, kicks in. At first, I thought I somehow had two songs playing at once but nope. That track encapsulates the general sound of this CDr, if you can make the argument that the CDr has a “general sound.” “Store Lights” continues this blurry but propulsive style of bedroom rock. As far as I know this is a group, but sometimes it seems like just one dude sketching out any idea for a song that enters his mind. Maybe it is at times, or maybe everyone is just so connected it creates that vibe. Arklight, even in rock mode, walks a weird line between hooky chord changes and skronkiness, and finds it totally natural to switch to playing funk guitar riffs mid-song. “Cycle” switches up the style with heavy auto panning, filtered vocals and it’s driven by a drum machine-like beat and this weird sample/loop of electronic screeching. It all wraps up with 30 seconds of beautiful reversed guitar strums. “Wind Me in Grime” sets blues rock licks against a slow but pummeling drum machine (or is it live drumming?) and various effected sounds (one of which sounds like someone hammering). “Field of Motion” returns to that Wild Love-era Smog style but way more fractured/weird than Bill Callahan dared to get on that record. “Stolen Revolutions (Night Shuffles)” introduces a legitimately grooving drum pattern over which, various guitars and vocals float over. The potential is fully realized with the next track “Micro Mesh”, in which Arklight boldly wears its Miami Sound Machine influence on its sleeve. “Micro Mesh” is the best song on the record hands down and according to my girlfriend, “this song is awesome!” I’m inclined to agree. There’s a heavy Latin vibe here but that’s crossed with sitar runs and drones. The piece is propelled atop this short loop of electric piano, while acoustic guitar, delayed violin and vocal shouts are all introduced at different points. It’s a magical song. “Spit on a Queen” wanders along against twinkling keyboards until drum beats and organ loops come in, and maybe I’m psyching myself out but I think I’m hearing a U2 sample somewhere (a la “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”). I think my mind’s probably playing tricks. “The Plague Years” is the resident folk ballad here but it’s still got a heavy drum beat and creepy recorded-in-a-cave backing vocals. “Death has No Imperfections” is the counterpart to “Micro Mesh”; it’s totally grooving, busy as a city and brings back the sitar too. Welcome to the NHK Wasteland has 15 songs and not all of them stick but there’s plenty of good stuff here to make the album worthwhile. And I do like that the record feels like this guy’s/these guys’ brain put on a piece plastic. Still in print.

6majik9 – Ritualisimo Putrido [Music Your Mind Will Love You]
Of the handful of 6majik9 releases I’ve heard through the years this is the one that has best fulfilled the group’s potential. They seem to push things just to the precipice of totally falling apart. All sounds, percussive/melodic/amelodic, are scattered everywhere but each track, for the most part, feels entirely focused. The album is well paced, keeping everything moving along at a decent clip, letting the sounds stream by you and leaving it up to your ears catch them all. My favorite, the album opener, “No Sense Being” compresses the mindset of the album into two minutes and forty five seconds. A hollering saxophone and stumbling percussion lead to a deliberate beat that guitar feedback, sax and other instruments are molded around. “A Beauty That Needs of Blots” creates and maintains a subtle groove mainly due to two dueling acoustic guitars along with flickers of percussion and keys. “Outsider Basement” works with an entirely electronic palette (I think), resembling an even more sloshed, instrumental Excepter. There’s a heavy synthbass that nudges the track along for me. Various blips from keyboards and drum machines skate along on top of that bass pulse. At least until somebody hits the “waltz” setting on their rhythm programmer and the band slowly coheres around the beat. “To the Inverse One” is eerie. Featuring a slow hand drum pattern, a great sax part and organ and other creepy swells. A solid disc of rambling, Australian gangly jangle and packaged in the trademark, tactile MYMWLY style. Still in print.

Cursillistas – Wasp Stings the Last Bitter Flavor [Digitalis]
This is a beautiful little disc of folky drone. “Drone (Groan)” opens with a minute or so of drones/groans before authoritative tribal-ish drumming takes over. Totally suspenseful; the track then segues into a pretty track of layered guitar and I think maybe a wooden flute somewhere wayyy in the background with “Caves Carved in Golden Light.” There’s a touch of wordless singing before segueing into the next track, “Larks on a String”. The tracks creeps along for nine minutes with eerie clanks, faraway whistling, a minimal guitar diddy, looped percussion and spaced vocals. It’s a bit like a lovechild between the scores of a horror movie and a spaghetti western; taking its tonal direction and ghostly presence from the horror movie but with an interesting, somewhat sparse arrangement not dissimilar to ones in Italo-westerns. With less than a minute to go, there is a drastic shift to a lonely acoustic guitar strumming, leading to “Treestain”. The guitar continues before being joined by others, spare percussion and eventually a main vocal. Again, sounds wordless to me but maybe it’s another language or something, I’m certainly not the one to ask. The song builds to a rather lush, brooding cave-addled crescendo. “Moccasin Tramp” increases the tempo just enough for foot tapping to ensue, vocals and acoustic guitar are ever present there’s also a synth providing a simple melody. It seems a synth might not work with the organic sound of the album, but surprisingly it does and is rightly soft and unobtrusive. This segues into “Happened in the Sun/Moccasin Stamp”, creating the second suite of the album. This track reminds me a bit of that Panda Bear record from last year, lots of looped layers of percussion and vocals moving pretty quickly. Not really a straight Beach Boys vibe though, more like just what was going on earlier in the album but with the “catchy” switch engaged (not a slag to the rest of the album so we’re clear). Around halfway through the 10 minute track length, the drumming slows down continuously and the vocal layers come through a little clearer along with some quickly strummed accompaniment, leaving the track floating like a cloud. Beginning with the tinkling of a bell, “Show Them Love” finishes off the album in fine style. It develops very slowly; making it the mellowest point on the album. Backwards guitar (I’m guessing) is introduced to the usual cast of characters operating with a very simple, deliberate melody. Very pretty multi-tracked vocals show up at the end singing words this time, though all I can make out is “show them love”. I really appreciate the care that was taken in constructing this release as an “album” as it is sequenced very naturally and logically, and it’s cool that the two halves of the albums work as suites as well. Still available from Digitalis and definitely worth your time.

Andy Futreal – Orphelia Wanders [Harha-Askel]
This is a CD-r of pretty acoustic picking released on the Finnish Harha-Askel label. This is a nice intimate album. It’s really great to relax and take it in. “Laterite Road” appears very early on and is one of my favorites. Futreal has a wonderfully gutsy style of playing. Sometimes when I hear solo acoustic guitar stuff it comes across as too smooth or even sounding, but Futreal isn’t afraid to use the guitar’s overtones and its odd, incidental sounds. That isn’t to say he can’t pull off plush, florid playing as he does on the title track. “Christmas04” has a magnificent melodic refrain which is altered ever so slightly each time it appears. “Frontporch” is a recording of just that, wind gently on chimes (on a porch I’m assuming). “Over Across and Down” has a tenser vibe, while “Minus5postbenadrylslide” is a tranquil, lighthearted slide guitar romp. “Occasional Rain” has a great, slightly musty feel. It’s a rather simple melody but played so expressively by Futreal that it’s quite gorgeous. “Chickenwing” is another standout. I’m pretty sure there’s multi-tracked guitar here, and if there isn’t then I’m very impressed. The track moves between fuller, strummed passages and sparse, brittle breakdowns—all of it beautiful. “Timezone II” surprisingly reaches for some heavier low notes and a noticeably “rock” vibe, but Futreal even skews that. Most tracks on the album fit into the 1-3.5 minute spectrum but Futreal unfolds “In the Failing Light” little by little over 12 minutes and pulls an amazing trick where he’ll slowly let his listener drift away before reeling him back in with an unassuming refrain; and he pulls this trick throughout the piece. Oh yeah, apparently these pieces are all improvised, which makes the playing all the more amazing. At 56 minutes, I think the album is a little long but there’s a lot of great material here and Futreal certainly has an interesting voice in the solo acoustic guitar sphere, and if you have any interest in that sort of thing you should definitely check him out. CD-r still in print at Harha-Askel as I write this.