Dangerous contortions in the name of all that is free from a room full of talented eccentrics. This collaboration with the name destinied to short-circuit spellcheck programs across the globe first came to life when composer Eric Glick Rieman (prepared / extended electric piano) collared his pal Fred Frith (guitar, maniacal laughter) and talked him into a collaboration. They then brought in trumpet player Lesli Dalaba and violinist Carla Kihlstedt and recorded this album as a quartet. Given their pedigrees (a partial listing of people they've worked with at one time or another includes John Zorn, Carbon, Eugene Chadbourne, LaMonte Young, Tom Cora, Zeena Parkins, and Ikue Mori), it's hardly surprising that the results are loose and flowing, yet still organic in their complexity and unpredictability.

This may be free, but ultimately probably has more to do with film soundtracks than with free jazz. At times their sound resembles that of Tangerine Dream more than anything else, which is kind of interesting. The musical moods occasionally become loud in their drama, but this is not wild and flailing improv on the order of Last Exit or Painkiller -- this is more restrained, less about pushing the boundaries of sound and more about finding a harmonious balance of many elements. The seven tracks on here all sound largely improvised, but not self-indulgent, and while they are all instrumental tracks, they nevertheless paint vivid pictures with their powerful tones and lilting, beachcomber rhythms (especially on "shallow weather," portions of which are nearly ambient). Given that large portions of the album play out like extended soundtrack music to an exotic foreign film, it's easy enough to just sit back and let it all just happen without worrying about the sounds and their origins. Their sound is somehow both crystal clear and suspended in thick fog at the same time. Contradictions exist and are resolved when it pleases them. More brilliant compositions with a bigger palette than mainstream music pundits would have you believe exists.

Three tracks of uptempo punk / metal. One member used to be in a band called Monster Voodoo Machine, an extremely underrated Canadian band that prefigured the whole rap / electronic-rock thing by about six years. The songs on the EP have one foot in Hellacopters-style rawk and the other in BLIND-era Corrosion of Conformity crunchiness. I have a feeling that this is the sort of sound Metallica and Corrosionof Conformity have been going for on their past couple of releases; stripped-down, heavy, and rocking. The disc also contains one of those multimedia deals with a video and some desktop backgrounds. [n/a]

Damon and Naomi -- PLAYBACK SINGERS [Sub Pop]

The wonder-duo of lo-fi gloom pop return! And this time it's even more low-key than before; most of the songs here are acoustic, all of it recorded in their home over a period of a year. Prolific they ain't -- this is only the third album they've released together (well, maybe fourth if you include the Magic Hour thingy) since the dissolution of Galaxie 500, the legendary band of which they comprised two-thirds of the personnel (the third chunk, guitarist Dean Wareham, can now be found doing his thing in the band Luna). But obviously they are big believers in quality over quantity, for this is a gorgeous, melodically minimalist sleeper (in more ways than one) of an album. Especially notable is the fuzzy, overmodulated quality of the recordings themselves, undoubtedly the results of working at home, which give the album a homegrown warmth lacking in most of the conventional releases recorded in professional studios. This feeling is borne out by the album's stated slogan, "Compromising quality of reproduction for the sake of nostalgia."

I haven't heard the previous D + N discs so I have no idea how they sound, but I'm struck by how reminiscent this is of Galaxie 500's sound. As before, the driving melodic forces of the album are in Naomi's basslines and the harmony of their voices (and as before, Naomi remains the primary singer -- a good deal for moi, since I really like hearing her sing). Of course, her wispy, droning vox make it almost impossible to tell what she's actually singing, but they print the lyrics, so how bad do you really need to know anyway? As for the songs, they're all fairly ethereal and filled with vaguely middle-Eastern musical references. The most wispy of them are the openers "Turn of the Century" and "Eye of the Storm," while the quietest (and prettiest) would be "In the Sun." In all of them, Naomi manages to impart both a sense of sadness and hope at the same time, no small trick (and probably the key to Galaxie 500's enduring appeal). "I'm Yours" especially sounds like it could have come from the first Galaxie 500 album, in fact. They also turn out to have a couple of interesting surprises up their sleeves: first, a cover of Ghost's "Awake in a Muddle" (!), complete with with droning middle-Eastern keyboards, and a cover of the hopelessly obscure Tom Rapp song "Translucent Carriages" (as in, so obscure that I have no idea who the hell he is). As always, the key to their success is simplicity, and to say they succeed again with this album would be an understatement.

The title is honest: these are indeed old-time sounds from a modern bluegrass band. They're from Austin, but you could be forgiven for thinking they're a bunch of hillbillies from the Smoky Mountain range. (One of them -- the singer, i think -- is actually a waiter at Opal Divine's House of Free Love, a most favored DEAD ANGEL watering hole, even if they can't keep nonalcoholic beer in stock.) "The Girl I Love Don't Pay Me No Mind" is the true face of back-country bluegrass, and "Red Wagon" is the laid-back hoedown playing at the country dance out in the sticks. I really like the full-on gospel sound of "By the Mark" -- this is an absolute throwback to the Carter Family singalongs, or maybe even as far back as the unearthly sounds found on the Smithsonian FOLKWAYS ANTHOLOGY. This is no less true of the other two tracks, "True Life Blues" and "Jesus Is On the Main Line." Fine, fine sounds of the hill country unspoiled by modern sensibilities. I sense the potential for greatness here somewhere down the line. Definitely a band to watch.

The return of Darkthrone offers up more primitive blackened metal. I think this album is the best of their latest efforts. The songs are long and full of chainsaw riffs. The thing I liked most about this record is that they maintain their sound that so many people try and copy, no trends. The drumming on this is toned down a bit, but fits in perfectly with the misanthropic feel. Buy this record and pay tributes to the gods. [TTBMD]

Dataclast are a couple of dudes from New Jersey weaned on death metal who could apparently only find electronica instruments in the pawn shops, so they decided to wing it electronica style; Earwigs are mysterious dudes in black from Seattle who have been grinding out hideous sheets of noise since 1990 or so. The first half of the disc (actually 29 short and grinding blasts of obnoxious behavior) is taken up by Dataclast acting very much like Blood Duster armed with a pile of damaged analog synths, sequencers, and a drum machine instead of the usual metal instruments. The second half (six songs of greater, less attention-deprived length) belongs to the Earwigs, who are very different in their method of attack but just as obnoxious.

The Dataclast recipe for destructive behavior goes something like this: Start with a pile of electronic gadgets, some of which are broken and don't exactly sound good. Turn everything up real, real loud. Throw in some obscure samples about violence, torture, people being hacked into tiny roach cutlets, satanic laughter, whatever. Play everything by pounding on it until it breaks; if it breaks in the middle of a song, keep playing it anyway. Pure molten metal riffs like the one on "Research Methodology" sound good even on tortured keyboards; add as necessary for texture. Give the vocalist a mike and let him rant, knowing full well nobody's ever going to figure out what the hell he's croaking. Garnish freely with song titles like "Frampton Takes A Bribe" and "Snow White Power Violence." Stir briskly, leaving the metal spoon in the bowl to get tangled in the beaters when the Head Noise Cook throws it in the blender and hits PUREE. Best served in bite-sized chunks.

After all the crazed thrashing about from Dataclast, the Earwigs are a pleasant return to old-school noise antics. Earwigs came of age next to the likes of Taint, Macronympha, Black Leather Jesus, Smell and Quim, that sort of thing, and their methodology is primitive but effective -- turn everything up loud, pound on shit, shout a lot, drench everything in reverb, live by the mantras "more noise is good" and "efx pedals are my friend." In the hands of the uninitiated, such vague operating methods can lead to tragic results; fortunately, the Earwigs know what they're doing. (Well, most of the time, anyhow.) Pieces like "Megatron Locust Invasion"  and the droning filth-o-tron "Unconquerable Golden Dragon!" are so totally old-school in their lo-fi, blown-up noise moves that will bring a tear to your eye if you were around when PITTSBURGH, PA came out. Unlike most of their noise contemporaries, however, Earwigs are down with space-rock, which results in droning interstellar noise mantras like "Total Destruction," in which UFO noises compete with each other in the Wind Tunnel of Doom as howling aborigines get sucked down to their deaths. Like, swank. Plus they yell a lot on "X," which is always a good thing.

Yes, much prime rib here... just be aware that Dataclast are from the glitch school (among other things) and are not even remotely "traditional" in their outlook about anything. The Earwigs tracks, though, should be heard. If you claim to love noise and aren't cleaning your underwear after hearing the apocalyptic noise deevolution on "X," then there's something wrong with you....

Daviess County Panthers -- JE N'AIME PAS BEAUCOUP MA GAMELLE [Sonic B.]

This seething tub o' fear was produced/engineered by Steve Albini and Tom Zaluckyj (one of the former aluminum-axe beaters for Tar), but with the exception of "cat jack" -- a high-velocity flying wedge of spinning overtone guitar and wailing feedback -- you'd never guess it. Except maybe you would after all, seeing as how Albini has been charting a downright schizophrenic course in the last few years, alternating turns with quasi- accessible "alternative" icons (Nirvana, Veruca Salt, and... ick... Bush) and artier/weirder types (Zeni Geva, Jim O'Rourke, Cheer-Accident). Think of the Daviess County Panthers as the missing link between the two camps and Albini's appearance behind the board of many dials becomes a bit more obvious, then....

So anyway, this is an unquestionably swank album. The band sort of resembles Wire crossed with the Birthday Party, or maybe a jazzier and more antagonistic Helium with ominious nods to the first Dream Syndicate album. At any rate, the disc has taken up semi-permanent residence in my CD player, a rarity these days when i'm drowning in releases and never have enough time to listen to anything over and over (ah, for the good old days, right). Unlike the current vogue of smearing three or four fuzzy chords all over the place and shouting a lot, the DCP actually play real songs with structures just barely conventional enough to remain accessible, yet still warped enough to make them genuinely memorable. Matters are helped immensely by guitarist Michael Hibarger's unerring control of feedback and dynamics (check out the lurching jolts of crunch-riffing and the sound of a guitar spitting razor blades on "sinner," or the slo-mo action drone and feedback orgy of "meteor"). The best moments are when the guitar plays a spiky hide-and-seek behind the bass only to eventually jump out and dig trenches in your skull on "resigned" and "leave the lights on." And speaking of "resigned," bassist John Paananen gets the best bass sound there i've heard in years. (He churns out swell bass tones all through the album, actually. He also supposedly plays Farfisa, although it must be buried in the background somewhere 'cause i'm not hearing it....)

The other two members of the band pull their own weight: drummer Chris Keene switches back and forth between lumbering-behemoth mode and weird stuttering demi-jazz beats, employing so many twists and turns that God only knows how the rest of them manage to follow him. (Betcha they practice a lot.) The secret weapon, though, is singer Suzette Fontaine, who sounds like a sleepy, marginally psychotic cross between Lydia Lunch and Bliss Blood (and maybe Lou Reed; she has this tendency to alternate talking with singing). Her best moment is on the creeped-out, blackly paranoid and surreal hallucination-fest "leave the lights on," where she wails about the voices in the pipes and in her closet and under her bed until the endless ditch-digger riff comes along without warning and caves your skull in.

Listening to this is kind of like wandering through the corridors of a spooky underground bomb shelter, peeking around every corner to make sure mad dogs aren't waiting to chew off your face, only to find that the crazed fanatics ready to impale you with steak knives and push you screaming toward your doom are actually BEHIND you. Wups, shouldn't have flinched.... I could go on like this, but you get the idea. You should own this. Period. Seek it out and be impressed....

This is a fair bit more restrained than many of PE's outings. Three duets between guitarist Bryan Day and pianist Brian Noring, where treated guitar collides with extremely "free" piano motifs. On "Part 1," the piano is clean and bright, upfront in the mix, with Day's guitar muted in the background -- sometimes plinking along, sometimes providing a noisy counterpart, sometimes impossible to distinguish from the piano. The mix is reversed to a great extent on "Part 2," with the guitar upfront and making peculiar noises, while Noring plays an organ in the background, deliberately invoking perverse chords and swelling drones from time to time. The sounds on this one are more abrupt and noisy, the dynamics more intense, and the effect marginally more chaotic. "Part 3" returns to the overall sound of the first movement, but there's a bit more happening, and a shift toward actually recognizable rhythms from time to time. Exotic and experimental in the vein of AMM or Bill Horist, perhaps....

One of the things i like best about Public Eyesore as a label is that you have absolutely no idea what you're going to hear when you put one of their discs in the player. Even with artists you've heard before, every release is a brand new bag. This is no exception -- here guitarist Bryan Day joins forces with Keith Nicolay (abuser of various instruments) to create a series of highly improvisational vignettes of cocktail freejazz. Improv guitar runs collide with near-random bursts of activity from a number of sources (samples, taped conversation, piano, other instruments), resulting in a sound much like a lounge band after hours getting squiffed on Ripple and just making stuff up as they go. An idea that could be sheer disaster in the hands of those less schooled in improv, but this is good (although wildly chaotic) stuff. The interplay between the various instruments is a pleasure to hear, and what initially came across as random effluvia often, after careful consideration, turns into something far more tangible (if still way out there). The sounds of anarchy in action!

Now this is the way music should be presented. Begin with a nifty sleeve that also matches the covers for all the other artists on the label, pressed using stiff cardstock, like real albums. Discover the two cryptic inserts enclosed (one for the label, one for the album). Marvel at the simplicity, the mystery, the complete lack of credits or recording information. Pull out the album itself. Note how heavy it is, how clear and bright the colors are on the labels, how clean and shiny it is. Look, doom childe, and you will see: the format that would not die! Pressed on... yes... fat-ass 180-gram vinyl or something like that. Now put the record on the turntable and drop the needle. Dig those chopped-up grooves on Carson Day's "Into the Night" -- listen to the stuttering screech beats as they build to a frenzied crescendo of stripped gears and clattering percussion. Listen to the zombie rattling off random words as it all comes crashing to a halt. Is your soul clean now? Good. You are ready for the droning luvfest of "Different Agendas," where Ilet Apt lay down the oceanic doom drone and proceed to nail it to the cross with a big beat and skittering scratch riffs. Atomic drone techno. If they'd played more of this at Burning Flipside, I would have grokked their techno leanings with a lot more grace....

Oh no! The side ended. You'll have to turn it over, you know. There you go... good... Observe, doom childe, as Ilet Apt lay down the law with "Tripout" -- good sounds converted to good noise riffs that don't interfere with the mighty Beat are the way to go. Robot funk for the rave generation; somewhere far above the clouds the Starchild smiles. The Bop Gun will not have to be used. On "Come Here Often," Carson Day demonstrates that he can be a smooth operator when the occasion calls for it. We're in the land of the good groove, doom childe. Can you feel it? Can you feeeeeeel iiiiiiiiiit? I know Iggy could, but he's not smooth enough to be mackin' here, dig? Let me sum it up for you, squinting li'l doom chile -- this is electronica, techno, whatever they call it this month, minus all the stupid parts. And really, really well-recorded, too. These people are not fucking around. Of course I'm sure you already have this fine, fine listenable and already know of which I speak, right? Right? You don't? Well, what are you waiting for? Hoo hah....

Dead Body Love -- REPUGNANCE C60 [Bludlust!]

Italy's most loathsome noisician is just beginning to get his due on the noise front. Now that local noise reps MSNP and Self Abuse have have formalized the acquaintance, and with his second release on Bludlust!, G. Guiliani should start popping up everywhere. Everywhere that matters, anyway.

Opportunistic as ever, Guiliani takes advantage of this Bludlust! follow-up by dipping a little deeper into the power electronic side of the noisepool. Oscillating pulses form a backdrop to the slow layering rush of DBL's trademark crunch. It's an a absolutely fantastic sound and REPUGNANCE only serves to demonstrate that it works as well with temporal markers as without. Temporal markers aside, this is a very well-developed, well- intentioned -- need one mention heavy-handed -- bit of grit. Not an oversnuffingly heavy onslaught, by DBL standards, but very forceful: we can see the hand at work, and it's hardly a limp-wristed affair. The sense of purpose overindulges, the darkness descends. More melodramatic words, and a well-timed flash of lighting help accentuate such an eerie statement. Feel the fist ease around your neck, grab you by the throat and with inexorable patience and cruelty, wring the living shit out from between your ears, and shove some dead shit back in.

In we go: "Give Way to Grief" is first for the chop. Guiliani whips out his orbital sander and starts buffing up a petrified elephant corpse. He has a lot of raw material to work with here, but manages to rip and tear most of it right off anyway. Sounds of dry shredding and mechanical protestation accompany slow, grinding burn and non-stop sobbing 'n sniffling. I can identify. It always breaks me up to see brand new electronic toys reduced to useless lumps of warped metal and melted plastic. They sure don't make 'em like they used to. Elephant corpses, neither. After the failed attempt at corpse preservation, Guiliani tries his hand at the internal organs: "Flooded Lungs." No sense letting a perfectly good set of lungs going to waste. This time he puts the circular handsaw to work. It takes time. He goes through several hundred blades and a few fingers in the process. But eventually, out of impenetrable grumbling dull-drudgery, a crack of daylight: screeching saws work at the tattered edges with a frenzied passion, repeatedly cutting into sharpened corners and jutting scales. Periodically, he switches back to the mangled buffer just to smooth out the dangerous edges. Then he hits paydirt, splattering leftover embalming fluid everywhere. The crazed pervert is in a state of fevered dementia by now, scooping up the shop-vac, trying to suck-up the hard-to-get areas. I've no idea if he ever succeeds in his task because at that moment, the track ends. I doubt he would have noticed anyway.

Whatever the outcome, a new obsession blossoms on side B: "Human Destruction". Now there's something we can all get behind. At least it's a little more mainstream. Once again, electronic pulses oscillate at the perimeter, though these tend to disguise themselves with glaringly abrasive overkill. Razorsharp assemblyline flesh-processors splice at a furious pace, blades whirling and swirling through both ends, often grinding up against less-yielding carcasses and other tissue-draped blades caught in the frenzy. Which carries quite naturally into "Destruction Pt. 2": the final processing stages, I imagine. Here it's all blades with little raw material of any kind. Electronic pulses be damned. Instead huge, slavering jet-engines suck up everything offered up front and indiscriminately reduce the writhing whole into minute crystallized particles of frozen dust. [JK]

Dead Kennedys -- GIVE ME CONVENIENCE OR GIVE ME DEATH [Alt. Tentacles]

While i think Jello Biafra is a real swell guy and everything, and of course East Bay Ray is the master o' the Echoplex, i've always had a wee problem with the DKs in that their overall effect was always kind of... scattershot. On any given album, they'd have four brilliant songs, a handful of okay ones, and several less-than-okay ones. As a result, i was never a huge fan while they were still together, even though some of their stuff is utterly brilliant.

Which is what makes this collection such a swingin' good deal, then. As they were disintegrating in the wake of the expensive FRANKENCHRIST/dirty Giger poster trial, they assembled this disc (originally a double-LP) of primo DK tracks... the best of the best. And what a swank collection it is, containing such essential tracks as "Police Truck," "Too Drunk to Fuck," "California Uber Alles," "The Man With the Dogs," "Holiday in Cambodia," "Pull My Strings," "I Fought the Law," and more -- many more. There isn't a bad track on the album, and it's certainly a hell of a lot more consistent than any of the actual albums. Granted, there are some significant omissions (including "Let's Lynch the Landlord" and "Nazi Punks Fuck Off"), and i would have preferred to see a few different tracks in places (it would have been really nice to have PLASTIC SURGERY DISASTERS' best track, "I Am the Owl," on here too), but i suppose you can only fit so many rockin' tunes on one tiny disc, eh?

One important caveat -- the LP comes with a stupendous and lengthy booklet of cutup art hijinks; the CD doesn't. You can get it by clipping out part of the CD insert, but who wants to fuck up the CD insert? (And no, a photocopy won't do -- sez so on the insert. Guess punks aren't too trustworthy or something like that.) On the other hand, the CD does contain the lyrics, a good thing given Jello's tendency toward incomprehensibility at times....

Dead Letter Office -- demo

This four-song demo is kind of interesting, to say the least -- sludgy, primal industrial goth stuff that's hard to pigeonhole, anchored by a drum machine and two vocalists (male and female, for that yin-yang thing, you know). Unfortunately, it isn't recorded very well, which kind of obscures their sound at time; Jennifer also doesn't appear to have a large vocal range, although that could be the result of the recording process, and ultimately doesn't matter anyway, since it actually just adds to the overall creepiness factor (particularly on the ominous, rumbling opener "Nicotine"). "The Miracle Baby," apparently (judging from the printed lyrics) inspired by the film TETSUO: THE IRON MAN, opens with a mournful keyboard pattern, then the drums come crashing in and everything gets much heavier -- and, due to the production, much muddier. There are moments here where things get a little too busy for the song's own good, though. A little more clarity would be useful....

"Angel's Ice" is considerably less cluttered and works much better, and (outside of the keyboards) is essentially an "old-school" industrial composition, occasionally reaching for symphonic heights and generally succeeding. The last track, "Staying Alive in Hell," is a bizarre one, integrating samples from the original "Staying Alive," strange noises fading in and out of the mix, and samples about "burning in hell." It's also short, probably good idea, since the novelty of such songs wears off pretty quickly; this one doesn't overstay its welcome, so to speak. Overall a good first effort, one that hints at real possibilities once they clear up the recording problems.

I definitely like the cover, though -- a picture of a sculpture created by a religiously eccentric janitor, James Hampton, over a period of 14 years, incorporated wooden furniture, aluminum and goil foil, and other odd materials he found during his day job. The finished piece, entitled "The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millenium General Assembly," was intended to be a shrine for the second coming of Christ, and wasn't actually discovered until the man's death. An amazing piece of art, and an interesting choice for the cover.

I wonder if Joe Lally (Fugazi bassist and the man behind Tolotta Records) sneaks joints in the back of the Fugazimobile. He sure does seem to dig "stoner" rock. In the past year or so he's released records by The Obsessed and Spirit Caravan, two bands featuring the "godfather" of Stoner Rock, Scott "Wino" Weinrich. And now these guys, Dead Meadow, a band who don't feature Wino, but who are a Stoner band in the truest sense of the word. By Stoner, I don't mean that they necessarily ingest copious amounts of green matter. I mean that they're way into big riffs, lyrics that don't mean a whole lot, super fuzzy guitars, wah workouts, and pretty, spacy breakdowns.

The disc starts off with a song called "Sleepy Silver Door" which features a riff so blasted, and a guitar sound so fuzzy, that it would make Matt Pike shit his pants. Hell, it might even make Tony Iommi shit his pants at this point. The rest of the disc ins't quite as crushing, but it does swing. It sounds like bassist Steve Kille and drummer Mark Laughlin have put in a lot of time with their Sabbath, Blue Cheer, and Zeppelin records. Over the course of the record you notice that the band has a tendency to wander off into unnecessarily long jams, but more often than not they find their way back. One thing I have to say is that singer/guitarist Jason Simon's voice takes some getting used to. He spends most of his time in Geddy Lee territory, and if you did not come of age in the 70s when apparently rock singers were supposed to sound like castrati, it can be a bit disconcerting.

I should also mention the lyrics. Simon spends a lot of time going on about "distant lands," never-ending stairways (to heaven? arrrgh! I know... but I couldn't resist...), ladies of the morning light with flowing hair, and dancing stars... I mean, ok, I realize that a lot of the time the lyrics take a back seat to the jams, but really, is all this C.S. Lewis/Tolkeinesque stuff necessary?

To be fair, these are minor complaints. As a whole the record rocks... well, not rocks exactly, it doesn't really rock a lot. I'll say this: When it rocks it rocks, when it jams it jams, and when it trips out it trips waaaaayyyy out. [n/a]

This is so insanely loud -- i mean really goddamn fucking loud, man -- that the average person won't be able to approach it without earplugs, but fortunately for you, my ears are toast already so i can suffer for you. (But first i'm turning my fucking stereo down, thank you.) Once the volume's down at something slightly less than the detonations at nuclear test sites, the music is revealed to be more of Smolken's demented take on folk music (that is, warbled with quasi-operatic blackmetal vox and bathed in titanic clouds of blinding white noise). On "Sawney Bean," the white noise sounds remarkably like a celestial choir of angels beaming in their moans from a distant (well, maybe not that distant) star as Smolken emotes heavily over doomlike piano. The noise motif continues throughout, sometimes (as on "Czarne Oczy") in extremely painful fashion. Stripped of all the noise and overblown sound, i suspect this mainly sounds like Smolken's more sedate folk-oriented outings; with the noise going, it's hard to tell exactly what he's doing back there (it sounds pretty forbidding, whatever the hell it is). This is what Merzbow and Masonna geeks should be fixating on -- why spend all that cash on imports when you can listen to noise even more interesting (or obnoxious, i guess, depending on your view) from over here, available at domestic prices? Two final notes: 1) "Siadla Muszka" is what Emperor would sound like if they weren't so infatuated with geek-like keyboards, and 2) the liner notes credits drums to "an anonymous source," but i can't for the life of me figure out where the hell they are in the first place. Now that's serious blackened noise, my friend. The whole deal comes on a wee three-inch cd-r in an elaborate full-color, hand-assembled package, too, if you're deeply moved by that sort of thing. It looks real pretty. Just make sure your stereo's turned down before you play it, okay?

More folk-gothic / noise suites from the ever-prolific Smolken. For the uninitiated, DRC's drawing mainly from two wildly disparate influences: traditional (if dark) country-folk idioms on one hand, and pure atonal noise on the other. The effect (particularly on this release) is in the ballpark of the sound of the Slap Happy Humphrey album (where gentle, lilting folk is often supplanted with or obliterated by sheets of white guitar noise), although rarely as pronounced -- often the noise content is so far in the background as to be nearly invisible, but it's there. The album itself appears to be a concept album of sorts, apparently the musings of various dead poets set to music (mainly acoustic guitar, piano, and the aforementioned background noise bleat) by the Dead Raven Choir and various guests. It's a lengthy one, too, with nineteen songs, and all appropriately gothic in tone. This would actually be a good place to start for those not yet hep to the Smolken discography (apparently vast). Note that Smolken's guitar-whackin' skills and overall sound remind me often of Greg Weeks, and the entire feel of this album reminds me of Tinsel (itself a homegrown Leonard Cohen for the avant-garde).

I just realized who the Dead Raven Choir sound like: they sound like a roomful of Jandeks, assuming Jandek was really big on the pagan folk tip. This is a mysterious-sounding album, just like most everything i've heard so far from head raven Smolken. The sound is one of two Shakespearean bards with li'l mandolins and piano and the like sitting around a living room playing as a storm brews in the background -- very homespun (this is definitely not a hi-fi production, although it's clear enough to tell what's going on, and the rest is just window dressing, right?), but in these hands, very dramatic and effective. There are ten movements, and while i have no idea what the hell they're saying, it sounds like something that would qualify for a more recent version of the FOLKWAYS records. I really like the way the storm outside, which comes and goes throughout the disc as the band plays, actually enhances the whole sound and feel. If the recently-departed Alan Lomax were still around and taking his tape recorder to the hills to record the obscure and otherworldly sounds of the real country and folk musicians, this is the kind of sound he'd be capturing. Griel Marcus would shit his pants over this. Outsider country -- o yeah. It's time is coming, yes it is....

Talk about enigmatic -- Dead Raven Choir is a one-man pagan-goth-something band based in College Station, Tejas, not exactly a hotbed of such activity to my knowledge... and he was booted out of Poland for political reasons and somehow wound up in Tejas. Apparently he was originally into death metal, not that you'd guess it here -- this is more like the pagan folk-worship of Current 93 and likeminded World Serpent bands, a folksy but sinister sound indeed. Smolken (he that is DRC) refers to what he does as "an intense and barbaric form of psych-folk," and who am i to disagree? It's certainly compelling enough in its otherworldliness, like music calling back to the medieval age. The pace is generally funereal, the mood one of melancholy, and it sounds nothing like anything "modern." These are pagan hymns for a lost time. Titles like "Hound-Voice," "The Black Tower," "The Withering of the Boughs," and "The Prophet Lost in the Hills At Evening" give an indication of where his head is -- off in the distance, in solitary contemplation of nature. I could imagine this being made by some fiendish black-metal warrior in a more contemplative mood as a side-project. This would probably hold great appeal for the followers of World Serpent bands and paganism in general....

In a crazed sort of way, Dead Raven Choir may be the missing link between the mystical "old, weird America" encapsulated on the Folkways box set and the new wave of doom (or whatever it is they call this, this thing of ours, capice?) Is Smolken really just the Dock Boggs of the blackmetal generation? Or am Ismoking too much lengleaf again? Either way, Smolken's vision stands at the crossroads of something -- folk and black metal, most likely -- and this mini-cd, the latest in an ongoing quest to map out the territory of wolves, is a bit of a new direction. In addition to the acoustic orchestration and a general inclination to pick up the pace a bit, there are now elements of dark, reverb-laden percussion and snatches of decidedly metallic guitar in the background here and there (like at the end of "War Has a Beauty of Its Own" and the last third or so of "A Ballade of Theatricals"). More and more, especially while listening to the sinister minimalism and dark, hushed whisphering of "Sonja," it occurs to me that what the world really needs is a synapse-shattering collaboration between Abruptum and Dead Raven Choir.... The ep ends with the old-school medieval folk stylings of "Moon Over Castle Ruins," dominated by string bass and mandolin. More proof that even country folk out in the sticks can be possessed by satan. The disc's aforementioned return (sort of) to tempos a bit faster than death marches and a subtle shift in dynamics makes this a good starting point, actually, for anyone who has not yet dared to peek across the dark, black plain of scorched earth and dying crops where Smolken does his thing.

In some ways DRC is the Khanate of country death folk; Smolken and Glenn Donaldson may only be armed with acoustic instruments, but they sure like their folk so slow it's almost stationary. Prone to a noisy sort of deliberate primitivism, their albums tend to sound like someone placed a mike in the living room of two intensely morose country boys, possibly after a couple of swigs o' moonshine, trying to out-spook each other with instruments they found in the attic. Or perhaps they're just soundtracks to an endlessly bleak and desolate movie about wolves coming to eat the sheep. They stick to acoustic instruments and not-so-fi recording for that authentic sound, that sound you first heard on old, old albums with titles like "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" and "Hellhound on My Trail" -- their sensibility is more epic and operatic, however, although they thankfully avoid the screeching diva thing. The kind of thing you should be listening to when you want to transport yourself to another world, one rooted in the rural sounds of the past, and the sound of outsides far beyond the imagination of modern society.

Smolken sure has a thing about wolves, doesn't he? As usual, I can't tell what the lyrics are actually about, but this doesn't stray from the sound he's favored on recent releases -- mainly country-death folk with drones that come and go, and silences. Lots of silences. (I like that the liner notes include "all silences dedicated to kris lapke.") This is one of the better-quality recordings from Dead Raven Choir, and restrained enough to not totally freak out someone who's never heard it (well, at least until they get about halfway through "the pavilion," maybe). As usual, the artwork is lovely, the paintings this time by Jan Stanislawski. For those discriminating country folk with a wee taste for the gothic, o my yes.

More grim foreboding from the DRC, this time via three glacial tracks on a 3-inch cd-r (which I gather is suddenly the hip new format or something) in a plastic sleeve with cryptic but lovely artwork of the woods and a wee insert with notes printed in microscopic type. This outing isn't quite as noisy as some of the earlier stuff, but on slow (and long) tracks like "night scene," "the horn's sound in the wood," and "the shepherd's hour," their approach can be a tad disorienting, with figures built on lengthy pauses that often make you think the song stopped until something happens again. Stuff like this makes me start to wonder if they aren't just the Melvins of the avant neo-folk world or something. Cool stuff, although I suspect most can't hang with the truly epoch-spanning sense of time happening here. King Buzzo would approve.

Decay of the Angel [demo]

Goth. In a way. Only instead of relying so much on cheesy synth stuff, there's a real piano at work here, not to mention a genuine emotional current lacking in much of the latter-day goth offerings. "Valentine's Day" sounds kind of like early Sisters of Mercy, only slower, with piano where the guitar would have been, and minus the vocal histronics. "Choking" is similar, elegant and mournful; "Ever to be in Heaven, Never to be in Hell" adds bongos (!) to the mix, which works well even though it shouldn't, and dire samples about heaven and hell. The samples continue in "Funeral," along with a slowed-down echo and pipe organ, all of which work to eerie effect. "Analog Hell" is quieter, and not quite as gripping, but "Red" -- sounding like it could have been an outtake from Joy Division's CLOSER with the addition of a piano -- more than makes up for it. If there's any problem with this demo -- which sounds utterly immaculate, incidentally -- it's that it's too short; there's only six songs, and it's over too soon. Certainly well worth investigating....

[TG and C12 clatter down an endless hallway, the lights above them bright and humming the drone peculiar to fluorescent bulbs, with TMU and his noise-making guests in hot pursuit. In an attempt to distract them, TMU blares this disc from his portable CD-player....]

C12: What is this stinky thing the Moon Unit is assaulting our ears with?

TG (firing randomly as she runs): The scary product of teenagers who've mastered their instruments without learning to write actual songs first, I think. They were apparently signed about six months after forming and they sound like it, believe me.

C12: You find this bad, then?

TG: More like uninspired. They've got the chunk-chunk thing and the jumping up and down bit down, all right, but all the songs sound alike and they don't go anywhere. This isn't so much bad as it is pointless, really.

C12: Wasn't there a band with the same name active in the 1980s?

TG: Yes, and I'm pretty sure this band has no connection to them, outside of being unimaginative enough to steal their name.

TMU (in the distance): If I ever catch your sorry asses I'll make you listen to this all day every day for a month!

C12: Eek, now there's a frightening thought... is this a nu-metal band? They are, aren't they?

TG (launching grenades at their pursuers): I'm afraid so. They'll probably get compared to Kittie since their singer Gen is a hottie, even if she does have ugly metal shit hanging from her face.

C12: Are they at least as good as Static-X, the only listenable nu-metal band currently in existence?

TG: No. (plugs fingers in ears just before the grenade explodes behind them) Occasionally they get something interesting going, like the slo-mo fuzzriff intro of "Under Locks," but then they start piling on the shapeless nu-metal business and it all turns kind of generic again.

C12 (looking back nervously): I don't think that deterred them... they're still coming.... You know, I believe I'd find this more tolerable if they varied the tempos and song structures more often.

TG: Yeah, and it would help if they understood that they actually sound better when they play slow, like on "Intro," which is the middle of the album for some goddamn reason. I blame this on the producer -- the band is new and young, probably in the studio for the first time, and the whole point of having a producer is to tell them stuff like this, but this fool Russ Russell was probably too busy making coffee to actually do anything as mundane as helping the band improve their songs.

C12: So you'd recommend avoiding this one and hoping perhaps their next one, after touring and maturing a tad, might be better?

TG: I'd say forget about this and fast-forward to the new Zeni Geva disc....

This Seattle orchestra, formerly known as The Young Composer's Collective, is sort of like a Kronos Quartet for the Coffee Generation (only with way more players -- ten on this release, to be exact). Which is not to say that they're amped up or anything, but that they have a more "modern" approach to classical musical and traditional sounds. Under their earlier name released a soundtrack to Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS [un-labeled records]; on this one they worked with Scott Colburn, who has also worked with The Climax Golden Twins and The Black Cat Orchestra. So obviously they have a good pedigree.... Their sound is that of an orchestra (albeit a most unconventional one), and they coax some unusual rhythms and sounds from their instruments on this release, the music based on a butoh dance and concept by Haruko Nishimura. I'm not familiar enough with butoh to know how this fares by comparison to other butoh-styled music, but it's certainly engaging enough in its own right. Occasionally unsettling, too -- just as you've been lulled into submission by the low-key "The Woman Awakes," the giant percussion of "The Hunt" will make you literally jump out of your seat. The opening piece "Hibernation" is a perfect example of their sense of dynamics, with the instruments slowly swelling in volume then receding, over time growing louder and more "awake."

The danger and uneasiness of traditional butoh comes through in "The Target," which is almost all wildly unpredictable percussion (percussionist Robert Walker is particularly spectacular all across the disc, actually). I find "Interlude" especially interesting, given its echoes of Tony Conrad in the dissonant intervals and drones that build to a frenzied full band climax before fading away and coming back in a more chromatic fashion. The thundering rhythms in in "Confrontation" are closer to tribal psychosis than anything i normally associate with the orchestra -- maybe i've been listening to the wrong stuff all the time, eh? The crickets (or mimicry of such) at the end are a nice touch....

Their initial assault of sonic violence at the beginning of the final track, "Chase," is worthy of early Neubaten, only in the context of an orchestra as opposed to maniacs playing shopping carts and bandsaws. In fact, the whole tone of the the piece is pretty strident, and much heavier than you'd expect, plus laced with plenty of dissonance for my taste. Drop in unexpected bursts of percussion heaviess and riffs that gradually fade out and slow down in perfect time and you have moments of pure heaviness in a most unexpected context. Recommended, and not just for the classical or butoh enthusiasts, either.

Christopher DeLaurenti -- THREE CAMELS FOR ORCHESTRA [American Archive]

The CD cover calls this "adventurous new music made with traditional and homemade instruments that sounds like nothing you've ever heard before." It's definitely different, although elements of it can be traced back to other sources (even if they aren't where DeLaurenti was coming from, they share similarities). For instance, "The Old Frontier," combining quick snippets of noise, sound collage, odd instrumentation, and occasional peculiar vocal choruses, calls to mind Stockhausen [tmu: oops, sorry hellfarmer] dissecting Stravinsky after listening to lots of Merzbow (for the tape-edit frenzy). DeLaurenti has a fondness for jamming as many different sounds as possible into a composition, something obvious from the very beginning; there's more unusual sounds happening on this one cut than most full-length "experimental" albums. Then comes "Canon Sludge," which really sort of DOES sound like Kerzbow, although i doubt that was the intention. Unexpected behavior from a composer... this is a good sign....

Two long pieces (each over twelve minutes) form the core of this disc: "Three Camels for Orchestra" and "Hiram's Blood." The first comes in several movements, combining orchestra, occasional snatches of jazz, repetitive passes of devolved swing, crazed flanged-out skipping-CD noises, and basically everything but the kitchen sink -- this is not a man who likes to stand still -- into a seamless orgy of sound exploration. "Hiram's Blood" is, i think, a composer's take on radically misappropriated free jazz that's been bent out of shape and twisted into the ominous shape of Miles Davis possessed by the soul of Merzbow (or maybe that should be the other way around, seeing as how Miles has croaked already). "Iszkarrchse," a "sonic pile-up originally scored for orchestra," is a brooding, heavily layered stack of keyboard drones augmented by eerie wailing, crumbling noises, and other stuff even more unidentifiable. It reminds me of Voice of Eye in a way, but at the moment everything reminds me of Voice of Eye for some reason, so we'll let that one pass....

There are several more pieces here, all equally surprising and even unpredictable. And he delivers on his promise of providing no "new age noodling, droning drum machines, ambient fog or other demeaning crap." (Of course, i LIKE drum machines, but that's beside the point here.) Just more proof that odd things are afoot in Seattle, once you get past the glazed- eyed heroin-snarfing goatee slackers in flannel all currently gasping like beached fish now that "grunge" has begun its slow descent into oblivion.

Delerium -- SEMANTIC SPACES (Nettwerk)

Ummmm... a funkier, more beat-heavy Enigma? I'm not sure the world really NEEDS two versions of that band, but if I have to pick one, I side with this one -- if only because Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber (Front Line Assembly) make more interesting noises. Plus singer Kristy Thirsk (Rose Chronicles), who appears on some tracks, is a better singer than the breathy one from Enigma. The name of the game here is ambient tribal techno (is that even a category?); lots o' thump-thump beats, weird percussion, spacy background noises, wispy singing, etc., etc. In addition to Thirsk's ethereal vocals, there's plenty of background chanting, particularly on "Resurruction" and "Incantation." This is their first effort for Nettwerk after several on Dossier overseas, and it's sonically immaculate; the big drawbacks here are that (like most dance music) it all kind of runs together after a while, and the songs are LONG (out of nine, the shortest one is 6:21), meaning it's the kind of album that works better when heard in small bites rather than all the way through --perfect for club action, actually.... Bonus points for the stellar art direction from Technografix, which rivals the work Steven Gilmore did for the early Skinny Puppy releases.

This band really sort of defies description, but i'm going to give it a stab anyway. Imagine Melt-Banana and Boredoms as fronted by a warbling woman obsessed with Mardi Gras drag-queen fashion and backed by a band of equally suspicious-looking characters, only plying their trade through... samba. Isn't that just an evil notion? I'll bet you never in your wildest nightmares imagined there might be a band equally influenced by Japanese noise, avant culture, and samba rhythms. If the Boredoms crashed a Miami Sound Machine concert and kicked Gloria Estafan off stage to jam with the band, it might sound something like this. Which is to say, obviously, that this is a damned strange record....

The star attraction, obviously, is crazed singer Emi Eleonola (she also controls the keyboard and other incidental instruments), who comes on like a drag queen having a Tourettes seizure, spitting out shards of warbly Japanese, English, and Martian all at the same time. She sounds like she sucks helium in prodigous quantities and matches them with li'l pink pills. The rest of the band is distinctly stuck in the second-banana role, but they're a sharp bunch o' players and Miss EE would be lost without 'em (or at least, would just sound like another ranting bag lady). While most of the album is based more or less in the world o' samba (even though their take on the subject is pretty, uh, demented) and filled with ranting spiels, they do occasionally just flat-out rock (as on "Love Maniac"), and like most Japanese bands, no matter how far out in left-field they wander, you never get the idea that they're lost -- you may be mystified, but they know exactly what they're doing., even when they're piling on the sound waves in the warped psychedelic acid-soaked samba mode (which is exactly what "Recreation" sounds like; "The Second Magic" is pretty spacy in its own right).

DSQ have been around for a while -- i used to see singles and cassettes by them hawked in Japan Overseas years ago -- but this is apparently their first serious attempt at cracking the US market, perhaps encouraged by the moderate success of other Japanese bands like Boredoms, Super Junky Monkey, Angel'in Heavy Syrup, and more recently, Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her. How successful they'll be remains to be seen -- while this is a pretty swank album, it's definitely a bit beyond the pale for the average listener, and the fact that Miss EE wanders schizophrenically between singing in English, Japanese, and tuning in broadcasts from the outer planets doesn't exactly help their commercial potential. Best check it out now while it's affordable, before it goes out of print and the band sinks into obscurity on this side of the ocean again....

I am embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of Amy Denio prior to finding this CD in my mailbox. Which is my loss, evidently, since she has a unique free-spirit sensibility that often reminds me of Anna Homler, a good thing in my book. Like many musical free spirits, her musical travelogue has been a long and varied one; of the 19 tracks here, culled from the past 12 years of her career, nearly all of the albums they are culled from were recorded for a different label each time. Several of the albums she appears on are out of print, and the rest are damned obscure, so this disc is a useful document and introductory primer for dumbasses like moi who managed to somehow miss her along the way. She's certainly been busy; judging from the tracks here, she's appeared not only solo but with seven different groups, among them the Billy Tipton Memorial Saxaphone Quartet, Pale Nudes, and Tone Dogs. She also plays a wild variety of instruments -- in addition to singing, she plays guitar, bass, sax, accordion, drums, and hubcaps -- and approaches them all differently not only from instrument to instrument, but from one song to the next. Needless to say, finding a strong strand of continuity in her career is a difficult task, which may explain why she's not exactly a household name. Too bad, because if this disc is any indication, she churns out excellent, otherworldly material like nobody's business.

The disc is arranged not in chronological order, but in clusters of group/solo appearances: first come the Tone Dogs songs, then the one with Curlew, then a string of solo tracks, one with [EC] Nudes, more solo tracks, one with the Billy Tipton Memorial Saxaphone Quartet, several with Pale Nudes and FoMoFlo, and finally one with Die Knodel. Nearly all of it is impossible to easily describe, although some tracks do at least suggest lines of musical relation to other groups -- the Tone Dogs track "(When George Bush Was Head of the) C.I.A." reminds me a bit of Anna Homler (if not so much in actual sound, then definitely in spirit), while "Czechered Pajamas" brings to mind something that could have been birthed during sessions for an early Golden Palominos album. Her Curlew track "What Is Free to a Good Home," by contrast, is clearly muted free jazz (i think). The [EC] Nudes track "Salvatore" actually approaches being straightforward rock with some seriously frantic guitar playing (courtesy of Wadi Gysi), except for the fact that it's sung in Italian. (Shades of the guitarist from Henry Cow doing a live, note-perfect version of Z. Z. Top's "La Grange" with lyrics in Russian.) The Billy Tipton Memorial Saxaphone Quartet song, "Air Drone," is an example of truth in advertising: against a minimal beat, Denio (on alto sax) and the others drone like an homage to LaMonte Young. The songs with Pale Nudes are interesting because of her choice of instrument -- accordion, amazingly enough -- but are otherwise more or less straightforward songs (as opposed to avant-garde tone explorations), especially on the lovely "Axis" The Die Knodel song "Ambaraba Ci Ci Co Co" is one of the most unusual selections here, apparently a movement from an opera (and again sung in Italian, logically) in which Denio provides the voice of Angel # 2. She really gets to unleash a startling vocal range on this one. My personal favorite of the disc, however, is an unreleased solo tune, "Exiles," a beautiful and spooky track that would sound just as wonderful being covered by Edith Frost. (In fact, that kind of makes me wonder what a Frost/Denio album would sound like.)

Trying to squeeze the wide range of her talent and sounds into a brief review is not only impossible, but actually sort of ludicrous. Suffice to say that after hearing this disc, i'm scratching my head wondering how someone so original and compelling can remain so undeservedly obscure. Obviously this is a fucked-up world when Amy Denio labors in anonomity while the miserable bastards in Korn get to drive Maseratis. I'll never own a Korn album (thank God), but i'll definitely be on the lookout from now on for Amy Denio's albums....

John Denver -- THE COUNTRY ROADS COLLECTION (box set) [RCA]

Looky looky looky -- they FINALLY came out with the box set to end all box sets, the one ah been whinin' about for years, and they managed to do it, what, just a month before his final plane ride into the ocean? I mean really, talk about TIMING....

As exits go, Denver could have done much worse. RCA presents a pretty thorough overview of his career on the label (from 1969-1986), seventeen years worth of highlights compressed down to four CDs (but the discs are crammed full -- there are 79 songs total here). They get immense, massive brownie points from moi by including about half of the still-out-of-print AERIE album. In fact, they appear to have included something from every album released on RCA, and the scary part is that i get the feeling they only scratched the surface -- i know of at least a dozen songs not here from three albums that COULD have been, and i'm sure there are even more from the albums i haven't heard. They also re-engineered and remastered most of the early material (some to the point of reinstating parts absent from the actual album releases); Denver has never, ever sounded this good, at least in terms of pure recording quality. Sort of makes me wish they'd go back and relentlessly remaster every single one of his albums and re-issue them.

Some interesting surprises crop up. For instance, i never knew that Denver had such a fascination for the circus, which shows up in at least two early songs ("Circus" and "Molly"), or that the ubiquitous "Sunshine on My Shoulders" was actually released three years before it was reissued as a single in conjunction with the first GREATEST HITS album and basically imbedded itself forever in the public consciousness. It's also surprising to see just how many of the good songs (and they're all good, really) -- about ninety percent of them, in fact -- were written by Denver himself. RCA also gets my thanks for including absolutely none of the horrible, career- damaging Muppet-related trash on this set.

In fact, they get just about everything right in this set. They have all the obvious ones -- "Poems, Prayers and Promises," "Leaving on a Jet Plane," "Sunshine on my Shoulders," "Rocky Mountain High," "City of New Orleans," "Annie's Song," etc., etc. -- plus plenty of favorite lesser-known (but just as good) ones like "Casey's Last Ride," "All of my Memories," "We Don't Live Here No More," "Ripplin' Waters," "It Amazes Me," "Thirsty Boots," "Some Days Are Diamonds," "Dreamland Express," "Fly Away," "Flying for Me"... the list just goes on and on.... There are also no obvious clunkers on the set (although the insanely, irritatingly cheerful "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" and "Grandma's Feather Bed" come awwwwwwwfully close). True, there are moments toward the end of his RCA years where everything starts to get a bit too bombastic (my God, whose idea WAS it to pair Denver with Placido Domingo on "Perhaps Love"?!? Never mind how it sounds -- pretty good, actually -- just the mere IDEA is so deranged that it fairly makes the mind reel), but you can blame that mostly on the label, who took note of Denver's declining sales and suavely booted out his longtime producer Milt Okun in favor of new and "hip" yoyos who nevertheless weren't, uh, quite as good. Fortunately Denver's talent was still too large to completely squash, but some of the material on the last disc is still a little over-the-top....

Aside from that, though, this is a reasonably swank collection. It is true that i could quibble over some of the selections -- i would have traded a few of the lesser songs for more selections from AERIE, for instance -- but that largely comes down to personal taste. I do have one mildly bigger complaint in the fact that they left out completely his protest songs (about Nixon, Vietnam, and the like), which -- had they included them -- might have gone a long ways toward combatting his goofy Mr. Sunshine image. Outside of that, however, it's almost impossible to fault this box set. I really didn't expect RCA to do a decent job of it and now i'm pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong. Color me impressed....

Maximum heaviness from the word go is the order of business here, my sweating li'l piglets. From the forbidding cover (black! more black! blackest of the black! what the hell is it? no one can tell, for it is BLACK!) to the punishing deathfuzz stompfests on the disc to the attitude problem evident in the lyrics, this is a band that has no time for wimpiness. Their apparent goal is to squash you and in that they succeed admirably. Heaviest tracks: "27 Years," "Driven to Perversion," "Godfed" (with caustic anti-Christian lyrics and a violent, blinding delivery more in line with grindcore than stoner rock), "Cast From Thee" (which opens with eerie ambient stuttering and turns into an evil chunk-chunk deathgroove), and most of all, "None But Myself," which is just a full-tilt barrage of pure grinding hate and fury that's most impressive in its unremitting violence and blackened thrash. The rest of the album is pretty close in heaviness quotient to these find crush-anthems, though, so if it's complete, surly destruction you seek, you have come to the right place. Pound, pound, pound those instruments like hammers driving nails in coffins....

A number of people have already written a lot of really ridiculous poo about this album. Depending on who you listen to, it's either the apex of modern music -- nay, art in general -- or a steaming pile of pretentious... well... you know. As with most things, the answer lies somewhere in between. First things first: If you prefer your music served up in discrete, easily-discernible songs, then you probably won't like this at all. There are ten tracks, but between ambiguous beginnings and endings and eccentric material bridging the songs, it's hard to tell where one thing ends and another begins. The album was clearly meant to be listened to as an album, and if you can't hang with that, well... you probably thought Yes songs were too long, didn't you? Speaking of Yes, if you loathed the Golden Age of Prog Rock (Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Gong, King Crimson, etc.) and can't grok the repetitive minimalism of bands like Slint, Unwound, Zeni Geva, and the like, you should probably avoid this album like it was a dead cockroach you found in your sock drawer.

The album was engineered by Greg Norman and Steve Albini, working with the band over a period of three years in seven different studios (including Electrical Audio), and the result is a densely-packed of beat-heavy music, noise, trip-hop, and many layers of strange samples, instruments, and snippets of conversation. The level of detail in the coordination of music, noise, beats, and sound layers is formidable, and in places it's an overloaded wall of sound. I gather that the band (composed of the cryptic trio of Acquaman, the Real, and Levitos; Ecco Terres of The Forms appears as a guest vocalist) essentially evolved out of By Symmetry (whose THE MATH OF BIRDS ep remains legendary in some circles), and the inexplicable nature of their names extends to their music. Highly evocative and difficult to pigeonhole, I can see why people are worked up about it.

Still, while the album's highly-orchestrated music is generally interesting and always well-executed, this is not exactly as original as some would lead you to believe: I hear hints of Beme Seed, Massive Attack, Cheer-Accident, Slint, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, My Bloody Valentine, and Funkadelic in here, along with an epic prog sensibility that largely went out of style when Yes stopped being interesting (right around the DRAMA album, in other words). On the other hand, they have good sense about what and when to borrow and their own ideas are usually intriguing. There's a big beat and a high drone quotient in places, which is always a good thing. They're also down with minimalism, repetition, rhythm that actually swings, weird droning vox, and all sorts of whole-grain goodness that you should want to check out. The effect of the entire album is much like a psychedelic funhouse ride through an endless collision of styles and genres, overlaid with cryptic hints of a bizarre spiritual philosophy. Plus I really dig their hopelessly ornate and complicated digipak-within-a-digipak packaging. And at least they're trying to do something interesting and different, which is more than I can say for any of the tedious shitheads I saw on the Grammy Awards earlier this year. So what are you waiting for? Go on... you've wasted your $$$ on lesser stuff before....

Here we have Dick Metcalf on keyboards and Jim Konen on guitar, synth, and vox, gettin' together to swing on some supersonic future jazz. Sun Ra would have approved, I'm sure. Over Metcalf's hypnotic trance riffs on "Sine," the two of them go off on wild tangents, playing off the beat with increasingly wilder sounds. They get a good jazz beat going on "The Beat" and work some peculiar-sounding mojo over it, one moment smooth soundtrack music, then wah-wah, then vox and other things. They take it all down for some chill-time on the majestic, droning "Inner Strength," then get back to the business of funking up proud, electronic style on "Oasis." More hep shifts in style abound on "The Fastrack" and "2BLU2GROOVE," but it's the last track -- the swift 'n boppin' "Rongnine" -- that really makes the room jump and shake, and it's filled with exotic sounds over a driving beat that commands you to BOOGIE! Yes, BOOGIE NOW for FUTURE! Won't you get down with the Mad Doktors of Electronic Soul? You know you want to....

Deutsch Nepal -- COMPRENDIO... TIME STOP!... AND WORLD ENDING [Release/CMI]

This particular release is a compilation of tracks recorded between 1992 and 1996. Since the final mastering was completed in 1996, the disc has a more cohesive feel to it than most compilations that similarly span time periods.

It is very easy to say that this disc characterizes the darkly experimental music for which Cold Meat Industry is becoming known. Most of the disc remains very low-key, very moody, very dark. Each composition is based on slower rhythms, samples tha t add to the unsettling feel of the rhythm, and different loops that continue to create the darker mood. The samples serve to disorient, to add a flair for the eerie and unnerving. This isn't as assaultive and hateful as a release by Brighter Death Now, but it does have the same compositional feel to it, the same underlying desire to unsettle, to take listeners out of a passive listening experience and let them think about some of the compositions. The comparisons are rather easy to make; fans of Lustmord, certain, more instrumental Coil, or even Hilt would truly enjoy this release. [bc]

Robert Devereux is a Pittsburgh musician who's leery of being pigeonholed (not that it would be easy to do in the first place); Jeff VanderMeer is a dark fantasy writer and winner of the World Fantasy Award. This cd is an interesting collaboration between the two -- unusual, often mysterious music to accompany VanderMeer's book CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN. The cd comes in a beautiful digipak with extensive notes and writing bound into the package, all of it exceptionally well-designed. I like that the notes include specifics about the songs themselves, elaborating on their relevance to the stories they accompany and how they were created. (I'm particularly intrigued by the story of the Moroccan record from 1954 where he found the first "Festival of the Squid," which he subsequently reworked for this album's song of the same name.)

The music is exotic-sounding, partly because of a heavy Middle Eastern sound prevalent throughout, but also because of its gestation methods. The music was written to accompany various selections from VanderMeer's book (an excerpt of his writing is included in the liner notes), and Devereux wanted an electronic sound without using electronics -- so he took the acoustic sounds of acoustic guitar, drums, piano, and Tuvan throat singing, then processed them. The result is an often-hypnotic, melodic, and tonally rich collection of soundscapes that do indeed simulate electronica while retaining the lovely sound of acoustic instruments. Helpful reference points would be Neurosis, Q. R. Ghazala, Tribe of Neurot (especially the collaboration with Walking Timebombs), Maeror Tri (even when the guitars aren't present or particularly upfront, there's a heavy experimental drone vibe floating through most of the album), techno, and Middle Eastern melodies, but Devereux's sonic palette is really too wide and vast to be confined to a handful of catchy motifs. Interesting and highly listenable sonic action. If you're hep to VanderMeer's thang, you should definitely try to lay your hands on this and let it spank your ears. Even if you care not one wee figgy-fig for the V-man, fear not -- the material stands up easily on its own, and it's well worth hearing. The Devil Kitty likes it; who are you to defy him?

Okay, first up: They get about a billion bonus points for the inner painting of Ol' Scratch looking out over a destroyed temple (with a tile floor straight out of TWIN PEAKS) filled with way-underdressed succubi and naked wizards and skeletons and gargoyles. Beyond the temple: Golgotha. They even have pentegrams (two of them, in fact). Second: Their encyclopedia-length thank-you notes include Danny from Southern Gun Culture -- they get props for respect. Their li'l press thingy calls them "doomy stoner rock" and that's accurate enough, but I think they sound more like Eddie-era Motorhead (although they're not as persistently obsessed with speed), assuming Lemmy had thrown away his Chuck Berry and MC5 records upon hearing Black Sabbath. Guitarist Steve Janiak can actually sing without sounding like he's heaving up a bowl o' razors, though, and this recording sounds like it was engineered by people who knew what they were doing and weren't smoking crack (which is more than you can say for half of Motorhead's albums). The stereo panning at the tail end of "Angular Shapes" is a nice, unexpected touch in particular....

Expect lots of riffs, many of them melodic, quite a few of them catchy. The album is full of heavy riffs, slow riffs, fast riffs, simple riffs, not-so-simple riffs, and way better arrangements than your average stoner / doom album. They know how to keep things moving, instead of beating a riff to death (something maybe only Zeni Geva has ever been able to really get away with consistently), which is good. That there are plenty of nifty riffs is better. Their twin-guitar thang goes down obscenely tight and bathed in distortion, just like Thin Lizzy used to serve it up. The rhythm section does the dinosaur shake with clarity, volume, and plenty of crunchy heaviness. There are eleven tracks and they all rock. You should buy this. Better yet, go see them live and buy it there.

Devo -- ADVENTURES OF THE SMART PATROL [Discovery]

Devo goes multimedia? No surprise there... Devo were always well ahead of the curve on these things, whipping up convoluted deevolutionary videos before MTV was even a dribble down some marketing maggot's leg and getting into soundtracks and video game muzak before it was "cool." So now Devo have some apparently deranged game out on CD-ROM that, as best as i can remember, is about saving the world by capturing a genetically devolved monkey-turkey in a spacesuit. Or something. I don't really know, since i can't find the promo junk that came with this CD. It doesn't matter anyway, because this disc is merely the audio goodies from said game. About half of it consists of Devo standards we've all come to know and luv -- "Peek A Boo," "Beautiful World" (possibly the best song Devo ever did; small wonder that they obsessively tack it onto every compilation release now), "Whip It," "Freedom of Choice," and "Jocko Homo." The rest of it is new stuff, much of it written expressly for the CD-ROM game, and it's mostly good, some of the best stuff they've done in a LOOOOOOONG time. Perhaps the time is ripe for the rise of Devo....

"Theme From the Adventures of the Smart Patrol" is an instrumental that comes on like a crazed, satanic hybrid of bad rockabilly, 50s exotica, lounge, surf, and Moog bedevilry all rolled into one meaty, beaty, bouncy track o' goofiness. It has horns! Mutant horns! We approve! "That's What He Said" is even hipper -- loping hip-hop drums, detuned motorcycle guitars, synth bleating, Moogs aplenty... it's unmistakably Devo, but the first thing in years they've done that actually holds up next to the older stuff. "Mechanical Man" is also prime weirdness, although not quite as spiffy as the first two tracks, and "U Got Me Bugged" is... is... well, if i ever meet Mark Mothersbaugh i'll be very tempted to smudge his glasses and smack him silly while screaming "What the HELL were you thinking? AAAAIEEE! IT IS ANNOYING WHEN YOU SQUEAK LIKE THAT, DAMMIT!" But this won't really happen, because they immediately make up for it with the hilariously smutty and immensely godlike "34C," which is about exactly what you think it is. Crazed Moog-fueled surfabilly that rides the motha' wave while Mark chants "34C is not good enough for me, I need to have... at least a D... big ones, round ones, fat ones too... the itty bitty teeny ones just won't do...." Is it tremendously sexist? Well, uh, YES, but hell, it's just so CATCHY....

There's one more new song, the sample-heavy "The Spirit of JFK," but i think JFK should be dug up so we can shoot him again, so i didn't pay that much attention to this one. It's okay. I'd rather hear "34C" again instead. The final verdict -- go Devo, young man... more meat, less filler, and Whip-Its thrown in for good measure....

The promotional thingy that came with this describes it as Australia's answer to Fear Factory, only heavier. I can't argue with that, but since i'm not a huge Fear Factory fan, that makes me twitch a bit.... Given that description, the album is pretty much what you would expect: louds of pounding, crazed 'n heavy guitars, lots of screaming about living in a world cluttered with machines and various oppressive trains of thought. It's certainly heavy enough, but all the songs sound pretty much alike to my ears, and i'm continually puzzled as to why bands this heavy think they need keyboards at all. Keyboards and heaviness have worked for exactly two bands -- Deep Purple and Burzum -- and as loud as the guitars are, it's not like you can even hear the keyboards or samples half the time, so having them in the first place seems kind of pointless. This is music for moshing in arenas, and since i avoid those scenes like the plague, i'm probably the wrong guy to be reviewing this, but oh well...

So if you like Fear Factory and similar bands, this should make you soil your pants. But since i don't care much for Fear Factory and the whole pounding industrial-metal thing started to bore me about the same time Ministry started blowing chunks (basically about five minutes into FILTH PIG, as i recall), i can't say this album does a lot for me. Cool graphics, though (even if they do borrow a bit too heavily from Fear Factory's aesthetic). [pym imitating rkf]

There's no need for an essay here. The Dexateens are the band the Black Crowes always wanted to be. They play scrappy, snarling, southern-fried rock 'n roll, but instead of cribbing from Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Faces, they lift from the masters: Mick Taylor-era Rolling Stones. "But the Stones were from England, you twat!" Yeah, but for my money they had a better feel for southern music than all those "real" southern bands put together. [TMU: That's because they were looser and less-inclined to doodle endlessly, thus making them more closely resemble their idols.] With that in mind, THE DEXATEENS sounds like the album that could have come between STICKY FINGERS and EXILE ON MAIN STREET, had the Stones been aware of the Stooges. Since STICKY FINGERS and EXILE are about as good as rock 'n roll gets, The Dexateens should give themselves a pat on the back. [N / A]

Fans of improvisational guitar and sound, mostly of the kind typified by AMM, Bill Horist, and Fires Were Shot, will want to take note of this. Pianist Diaz-Infante and guitarist Forsyth have worked together before, but where their earlier release LEFT & RIGHT was a series of long-distance duets, this album finds them together in the studio, improvising live at the same time. They have also expanded the instrumentation to include toy piano and other odd-sound instruments (Diaz-Infante also plays acoustic guitar on some songs), and the pieces were discussed beforehand, so their improvisation is less about chaos and the unexpected and more about loosely-controlled strategies of sound architecture. Some of the pieces, such as "NYC Journal excerpt (2000) piano/guitar," employ the use of noise generated by one or both guitars, generally used as a counterpoint of sorts, and on "sound is good all the time" employs piano soundboard and acoustic guitar to emit bizarre sounds as the instruments are abused (through scratching, tweaking, and general prodding). While some of the pieces are more structured than others (such as the melodic "passing one another... acoustic/electric # 17," which begins as reverberating tones from various instruments and evolves into something far more alien), none of it sounds entirely random. One piece, "knock on wood... acoustic/electric # 11," comes perilously close at times to sounding like a lot of toys running loose in the room as guitars play randomly, but there's a kernel of structure that holds it all together (just barely), like an artful simulation of chaos on the edge of becoming uncontrollable -- surfing the improv wave, so to speak. One of my favorites, "trace out motion," opens with tinkling piano playing repetitively and near-random squeaks and scrapes from the guitar, building to a point where the guitar drops out for a while as the piano moves up and down the scale, then comes back in from a different tonal perspective. The guitar's sound gradually evolves and devolves in complexity and tonal color as the piano remains largely static, a tonal generator spitting out unexpected bursts of otherness. This is compelling stuff and executed with a high degree of technical proficiency, but without sounding academic by any means. Well worth seeking out, and both artists have extensive pedigrees and numerous releases together and separately.

I'll say this, they certainly know how to get your attention: the beginning of this cd (the first several minutes, actually) is a miasma of damaged-electronics sound and edits of pure silence so abrupt and random that you'll think your cd player is all screwed up. Or the disc. It's effective enough that you can't really be sure one way or the other right up until the second track begins playing.... This disc is one long, continuous work divided (possibly arbitrarily) into 13 parts, consisting of Diaz-Infante doing horrible things to acoustic guitars, drums, and piano, plus the odd vocal here and there, and Forsyth coaxing deviant sounds from an electric guitar and piano. As with much of their previous work (including WIRES AND WOODEN BOXES, which this collection resembles at times), they appear to be more concerned about the sounds they're making and the pursuit of their own cryptic structures to be real worried about how it sounds to the listening public. There's quite a clatter going on in some parts, near-random collisions of mutant sound from whatever's at hand, strange ideas about vocalization, and moments of unexpected beauty buried in the near-constant barrage of sonic distractions. This scattergun-of-sound approach is perhaps a more refined and academic suggestion of what you might get if you slowed down the Boredoms and Melt-Banana and limited them to instruments that don't require volume or power for the most part. After hearing a few of these collaborations, i'm growing mighty curious as to where they record them, because even though they employ a wide variety of sound sources, the final tracks are clear and distinct. You may well still wonder what it all means, but at least it sounds good....

On this disc, Ernesto unveils his sensitive singer-songwriter side in between long streches of weirdness. A pattern develops early on in the sequencing of the 30 tracks on this disc: he presents two to four short, avant samples of anti-structure and power-electronic sounds (whose titles are simply the track lengths), then follows with an actual song (minimalist as it may be; these compositions are the ones important enough to actually rate titles), with the result that eight actual songs are scattered across the disc, islands in a sea of wordless exercises in sound and experimental stylings. Some of those exercises are quite interesting indeed: track 12 (3:13) sounds like it's all field-recording drone, hypnotizing even with next to nothing going on, darkwave without the waves. The "songs" are a bit closer to recognizable tunes (well, sorta), with vaguely-discernable structures mostly swaddled in drone and accompanied by strange rhythms and sounds as Ernesto sings (sounding bizarrely like a cross between Tom Waits 'n Todd Trainer -- takes a bit of getting used to). What he's singing about i have no idea, but with song titles like "from Henry who just wrote," "cranking up its pathos," and "a ride to Cuba with Martin Sheen," i suspect it's fairly elliptical and opaque. With this solo disc Ernesto proves once again to be a tone scientist of the highest order, branching out in unexpected directions, working with unusual sounds, integrating electronics and acoustic instruments into his soundscapes and songs. He also has swell taste in hats. I'm not convinced this would be a good place to start if you haven't already grokked Ernesto's mighty (and mighty eccentric) anti-guitar mojo, but if you're already down with his deep-dish experimental groove, then you'll want to scope this out.

Sure, they're avant / drone cats of the highest order from the word go, but they're plenty accessible even for non-avant listeners. Large chunks of this album sound much like a lost Godspeed You Black Emperor! album minus the tedious political poo and with the addition of more adventurous sonic textures. Unlike GYBE!, however (and most "soundtrack music" in general), their sounds are completely guitar-driven. Acoustic guitarist Pablo St. Chaos and electric guitarist Bohol lay down droning black holes of psychedelic strum as Ernesto Diaz-Infante perverts the plan with prepared guitar and processed vox. The results are really interesting, because the three of them together work really well, maybe even better than any of them individually. I have no idea how the album was recorded (it was recorded in San Francisco, though), but a lot of it sounds live and improvised, with plenty of surprises and interesting sounds. I like the way there are layers of sound (treated, acoustic, electric), and in places, even deeper layers of drone and efx. The sound manages to be minimalist and complex at the same time, and even though there is no drummer (or any designated timekeeper, for that matter), there's definitely a serious rhythm to the drone. The first song, "slow in the unday," is essentially an introduction to "sunlight fixed, folded," which sets the tone with slow, droning acoustic and electric guitar overlaid with strange sounds courtesy of Diaz-Infante and his tortured (um, treated) guitar. By the time "death valley, restless, tired" rolls around, it becomes obvious that the main strategy at work is to let St. Chaos and Bohol construct repetitive drone structures over which Diaz-Infante can freestyle in avant-noise mode. This is an excellent strategy. The disembodied vox on "la cosa pasada en la noche" competes with grinding walls of textured sound (and a lovely sound it is) over unpredictable free-jazz guitar. The gritty textures of the next song, "still endless & drawn out toward you," are reversed -- the noise elements are more dark ambient and the vocals more obscure, with the freejazz elements far more upfront. After a while it spaces out in a dark wash of noise and rumble punctuated by endlessly reverberating sounds. The last two tracks, "sans division" and "amor fati," are less dramatic and more casual than the previous ones, with the former being heavily down with the endless repetition motif and the latter making suave use of found sound (at least that's what i think it is). More fine work from Diaz-Infante plus the introduction of two previously unknown talents... what more do you want?

Yes, i know, we are apparently whores for Ernesto's boss pickin' tones -- pretty soon we won't even bother with other artists, we'll just become All Ernesto, All The Time. He sure puts out a lot o' stuff, i'm having a hard time keeping up with it all.... At any rate, here he's doing his thing with the "prepared guitar" in tandem with Bob Marsh, whose violin and cello make a nice complement to Ernesto's devolved guitar stylings. There's nine tracks on here and the lengths are pretty manageable (well, the last one, "Dance of the Bear Clan," tops out at 11:50), and judging from title similarities, i'd say there's some kind of primitivism theme running through the release. (Or maybe it's just a vast in-joke; experimental musicians are an easily-amused lot.) With titles like "Gathering of the Fish People," "First Ceremony (Dawn)," "Second Ceremony (Noon)," and the like, it certainly looks like there's a concept at work here. As for the music, it's pretty amorphous and chaotic -- lots of squeaking and squawking, thumping and bumping, guitars and other stringed instruments being tortured into making sounds their designers never intended for them to make. Some mighty strange doings afoot here.... This is definitely "out-there" music, somewhere in the neighborhood of Bill Horist with Sun Ra peeking over the fence, so the timid and unadventurous need not apply, okay? As for the rest of us, we can only wish we sounded this exotic. On the "Ceremony" songs (there's four of them, and they essentially form the center of the album) they rein in the chaos just enough to (usually) sort of approximate actual songs as opposed to collections of weird noises, while "Dance of the Bear Clan" is an exercise in extended minimalism that maybe goes on a tad too long (it does build from nothingness to somethingness rather nicely, though). More fine sounds from the devolved sound heartland.

You could probably make a compelling argument that Ernesto plays on too many albums for his own good -- I've already lost count of how many DEAD ANGEL has reviewed, but it's a lot -- but he delivers the goods pretty consistently, and works with a lot of interesting people... besides, what's he gonna do? He's a guitarist, the whole point is to play live and put out albums, right? The thing is, even with so many releases floating around, nearly all of them have been significantly different, and he's had some interesting collaborations along the way. This is one of the more compelling ones, an "electro-acoustic work" constructed over time on two primitive four-tracks, with the two of them sending work back and forth in the mail. Materials used / recorded by the duo in the process include turntables, a broken cd player, snippets miked from the TV, MUNI / BART field recordings, violin, voice, keyboards, percussion, hand cymbals, handbells, Ghanaian windmill bells, newspaper, bentwood tambourine, rattles, shakers, and other esoteric stuff; the result is two long tracks of destroyed samples, electrohum, glitch electronics, and other damaged sounds. "Part I (tracks 1-7)" are largely more about electronics / noise, while "Part II (tracks 8-11)" more prominently feature the use of traditional instruments, but both long tracks spend plenty of time exploring the dimensions of sound inherent in their choice of noisemakers. The tracks are long enough (46:39 and 30:44) to allow plenty of room for development, and while some listeners may find that a bit on the long side, there's plenty of nice elements to latch onto. Recommended mainly for the patient.

Eleven more collaborations from these experts in modified guitar nuances. Ernesto plays acoustic guitar and Chris plays electric guitar, not that you'd recognize them half the time, thanks to unknown modifications of said instruments, unorthodox methods of "playing," and a southern-sized helping of efx processing. The beginning track, "the sun is shining," frequently sounds more like insects buzzing around a grunting rhino; the final track, "six years," sounds like bells chiming over the hum of telephone wires. In between they manage to evoke the sounds of a heavily-reverbed piano ("how little observed... half a mile distant") reverberating in slo-mo and the percussive sound of tuned drums and droning wires ("i once carried... from time to time"). Their methods of attack vary, although they have a tendency to interact, then drift apart, especially on "one afternoon last year." You can hear the ghost of John Fahey reverberating around in the hollow spaces of Ernesto's restrained and near-tentative stabs at melody in "on a morning five years ago (touched my trembling ears)," even as Chris destroys them with odd sounds and textures. Similar in style and (probably) execution as their first collaboration, but gentler and more contemplative, perhaps. Excellent, as always.

More proof that two guys with a minimal amount of instruments can make a pretty impressive racket, assuming you pick the right two guys and give them the right toys. In this case the two noisemakers would be Ernesto Diaz-Infante, prepared-guitarist par excellence who appears on way too many albums to keep track of, and Rotcod Zzaj, a legendary figure in the cassette mythos (and now releasing swell underground recordings like this one on cd-r), here wrestling exotic sounds from a Kurzweill 88. On "Speeches for the Schizoid," Ernesto pounds his guitar like a piano and drum simultaneously, creating both a percussive rhythm and shards of melody as Rotcod provides exotic noises and a shrieking, buzzing sound that nearly fills the musical space. The sound they achieve on "Slightly Demented Diatribe" is that of a zoo in which the animals have all crawled out of the cages to play with the instruments as a radio babbles in the background (and the great apes in particular are really fond of the reverb box). On "Voicemail From Venus" and "Tourbus Trade," they ply their tools in unorthodox fashion over tapes of conversation (in the case of the latter song, a tour bus guide commenting on the scenery passing by). Some of the most engaging tracks are the one where Rotcod provides a beat or pulse from the keyboard, as on "Hiddenspeak," over which Ernesto can make unusual sounds with the treated guitar. "Mysterious Notions" is another such track, with a beat and hypnotic feel that are reminiscent of classic exotica, yet adorned with clusters of unidentifiable sound and prepared guitar sounds that approximate, at different times, a classical string quartet and the soundtrack for a spaghetti western. Insect-like drones and a slow, tidal motion are the inspiration for the title of "Orkin Man on Ludes," which is filled with plenty of offside sonic chatter in addition to the deliberately-lethargic bass pulse. The four-note keyboard bass riff that runs through "Conveyance" is simple but hypnotically catchy, and it provides the foundation for a landslide of sound, in which prepared guitar, samples, muffled conversation, and efx abuse create a hallucinatory psych dirge. The fourteen tracks on this release reveal the wide range of sounds that can be coaxed from just a couple of instruments, and given the substantial roots these fine fellows have in the realm of free music, that it's all pretty compelling is hardly surprising. A fine primer on the exploration of sound.

What we have here is a disc full of strange experiments in sound collage and spoken word, like an exotica album gone horribly wrong (maybe that's why the cover sports a retro design). Your reaction to this collection of tunes is largely dependent on your fondness for sound collage and found sound; imagine Evolution Control Committee with a fondness for retro sounds and self-help tapes and you have the general idea. The personnel remains mysterious (the insert contains only lyrics, which are certainly amusing, especially since they're generally delivered in a hipster-beatnik manner that contrasts nicely with the authoritarian voices from the tapes), but they're up to all sorts of hijinks: cut-up snippets of sound, layers of tapes, jazz bites, processed vox, and other forms of sonic weirdness. With lyrics like "It's midnite at the farm / I am a scarab twice reborn / 2 stroke the mink and don the fuzz / of the Blessed One," it's hard to tell if this is all a big joke or if they're hinting at Deep Thoughts -- their choice of background sounds and tapes/sound sources foster a joking novelty feel much of the time, although there are interesting (if brief) musical interludes buried in the sonic effluvia, so i'm guessing there's a level of seriousness somewhere down in there that's not immediately reflected on the surface. This is a most mysterious album, especially since it's difficult to tell where the found sounds end and the actual music begins (assuming there *is* any music on here that isn't purloined -- i have the feeling these jokers are totally down with the likes of Negativland, ECC, and the whole Plunderphonics school of composition-by-borrowing). If this style of assembled sound collage and music is your bag, it's worth checking out for the interesting near-jazz music and juxtaposition of sounds; if you're not down with the whole collage bag, it will annoy the living hell out of you. Feeling brave, doom childe? Then wade through the unpredictable river o' stacked-up sound and see where it leads you....

imitating

Die Cheerleader -- SON OF FILTH [Human Pitbull/London Records]

THIS is a punk band. Not cheesy stuff like Green Day and the Offspring. They're three women and a guy on drums, from England (i think), and they believe in big guitars. Many of them. The album was produced, as it happens, by Henry Rollins; he also co-mixed it (along with David Blanco, whoever he is), so of course it sounds like they're playing in a vat of sludge half the time, but even then they're unstoppable. Their main two weapons are guitarist Rita Blazyca, who would apparently like to kill you, and singer Sam Ireland, who sounds a lot like Nina Hagen on steroids. The drummer (Andy Semple) and bassist (Debbie Quargnolo) are pretty nifty too, but it's Rita and Sam who most often sound totally out of control. I'll bet this band crushes like a bad-tempered elephant on crank live. Best moments include Sam's impressive air-raid siren singing on "Saturation," the stop 'n start intro of "Starsucker" (followed by an avalanche of guitars), the careening overdrive riffing of "Disease or Accident," and the total overkill of "Washington D.C.," a "cover" (deconstruction is more like it) of Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love," which sounds like it was recorded in the middle of a riot. Great stuff and if MTV's going to go punk happy, i'd rather look at Sam and Rita than Billie Joe and that guy with weird hair from the Offspring ANY day....

What we gots here, my weeping li'l sheep, are two cds -- count 'em, two -- of alien soundtrack drones of doom. Die Elektrischen (armed with his diabolical electric train) joins forces with various other pals and players from the label (Karen Stackpole -- forty-inch symphonic gong; Bill Noertker -- double bass; Garth Klippert -- accordion; Tony Cross -- violin; and Ben Hayes -- digeridoos) to create vast, epic sheets of ringing, moaning, reverberating, almighty fucking Ra-approved drone. The beautiful part is that they're using, for the most part, instruments that not only drone exceptionally well by design, but do so with a rich and varied tonality. At the same time, everything is bathed in reverb and recorded in such a way as to imply vast, even cosmic spaces, creating a forbidding and otherworldly sound. On some songs, like the first disc opener "amon hen," the playing is so sparse and reverb-drenched that it's hard to even tell what instrument is generating which drone -- the sound is glacial and alien, and utterly swell. It's a tad easier to grok what they're doing on "trainline" (which brings more of the noise content out of the background), but it's no less mind-altering in its dark alien soundtrack vibe. There's a bit more of the high-end thing happening on "ghosts in the shitter" than I'd normally care for, but they get bonus points for the title and the rhythmic motion, like the drone-o-tron spinning slowly... slowly... s l o w l y... until coming to a halt. There's a nice incorporation of sound efx happening on "plotinian plateau," sound that is probably running water but might be noise, and it forms the backbone over which the other players work their mojo in unpredictable and cryptic snippets of drone. "Fatal Blow" turns out to be the secret weapon, armed with a serious dynamo hum that comes close to drowning out the other drones sawing away in the background (although the violin does get a nice and prominent workout in places). The last track, "sote's camouflage," is full of drones both high and low that build to a crescendo then crash away, with melodic (and harmonic) effluvia twinkling in the background... only to be crushed by hard-beat electronics and stuttering sonic filth.

This is what Godspeed You Black Emperor! wishes they sounded lik