v/a -- ALCHEMISM [Weschelbalg / Alchemy]

Another various artists compilation from the land o' the rising sun... and a fine one this is, consisting of artists from the Alchemy stable. Ten artists/ bands are represented here in fifteen songs, encompassing everything from quiet ambient pop (Shintaro Sugiyama), blues/rock (Auschwitz, INU, The Genbaku Onanies), punk (Sekiri, Ultra Bide, SS, High Rise) and noise (Hanatarashi, Hijokaidan). This is one of the better samplers i've heard; the track selection is nearly perfect, with plenty of variety and little filler. I particularly liked the one quiet track (Sugiyama's "Newton's Oblige," a moment of calm in an ocean of blitzed-out rock and noise frenzy) and the second of the Hijokaidan tracks, "B.A.D.," which reminds me remarkably of the controlled-fusion noise hurricane generated in Allegory Chapel Ltd.'s "Predatory Instincts" -- only here the noise is totally unchained, not just cycling from speaker to speaker like a speadily-moving cyclone, but jumping back and forth like jagged bursts of white-hot sheet lightning. The SS get nostalgia points for their totally deranged "speed-will-kill-you-if-my-flying-cymbal-doesn't- first" overkill rampage through the Ramones' "Blitzkreig Bop." Of course, since they "play" it at about 3,000 bpm, it's over before you have time to blink.... FNORD: WARNING: I have absolutely NO IDEA how you find this goodie... it was sent to me by my mad-dog samurai connection in Japan, so i would assume the only way for people outside of Japan to get it would be directly through Alchemy, unless you have a REALLY COOL indie music store in your chosen city of residence....

v/a -- A MEANS TO AN END [Virgin]

Okay -- we can probably agree that the Sex Pistols and Ramones built the house of punk, then the Clash came in and kicked holes in the walls, but Joy Division are who put in the reinforced columns that made it possible to build a second floor and beyond. This is the TRUTH (a sparrow told me so), and if you don't agree with me, well, go start your own ezine, ok? So it's a good thing when people erect audio shrines to Ian Curtis' homage, and fortunately this is one of the better ones. There aren't any bad tracks here (although there are a couple that don't really "add" to the Joy Division canon, either). Of course, anytime discussion turns to Joy Division, you're always dealing with the Ghost Card: the image of the Swinging Curtis that has long obscured what Joy Division was originally about and thrust them into the Goth territory (thus paving the way for lots of tortured souls with only a smidgen of Curtis' talent). Regardless of Curtis' personal problems that led him to achieve martyr status by hanging himself on the eve of Joy Division's first U.S. tour, what REALLY made him significant in terms of music history was this: he was the first to demonstrate possible to convey wide-ranging emotion, to be positively gripping even, with a limited tonal palette. In other words, even though he was a limited singer at a time when this was still considered "commercially unacceptable," his conviction and passion managed to overcome that barrier and allowed him to establish a distinctive style that has since been ripped off more times than i care to count.

So what's happening on the tribute? Well, most the performers here are doing pretty straightforward covers of your fave JD tunes, only with "improved" (more or less) production. Honeymoon Stitch's (a couple of Peppers and, uh, some other guys) cover of "Day of the Lords" sticks so close to the original that the only way you can tell them apart at low volume is the singing -- Ian this ain't. Moby's "New Dawn Fades," though, might as well BE Joy Division, right down to the vocals, which is kind of disconcerting. By the same token, Coedine's "Atmosphere" adds nothing but a bit more heft, and Further's "Insight" is virtually indistinguishable from the original. I thought REINTERPRETATION was the point here, guys....

Beyond those early tracks, though, things start to get interesting, beginning with Low's incredible slow-core version of "Transmission," which is just flat-out amazing and incredibly beautiful with its slow-building crescendos and its substitution of ascending arpeggios for the solo. Other interesting moments include the female vox of "Love Will Tear Us Apart," a bizarre and thudding techno remake of "Isolation" (courtesy of Starchildren, rumored to be a Pumpkins offshoot), which is actually pretty damn interesting. Kendra Smith's version of "Heart and Soul" is technoish, too, in fact, and intriguing in its own right, although the original is still better. And the radical reinterpretation of "As You Said" courtesy of Tortoise not only actually expands on where Joy Division might have been going, but actually improves a song i never particularly liked (!)

One thing about Joy Division -- everybody's so obsessed with the gloom and melancholy angle that they forget about the ANGER that was often simmering beneath the surface. A few bands here apparently haven't forgotten, judging from the slashing guitars on Girls Against Boys' stellar version of "She's Lost Control" and the manic fever of godheadSilo's "They Walked In Line." Best of all, Desert Storm manages to turn "Warsaw" into a pure whirlwind of sonic aggression that even includes an interlude of Bowie's "Warszawa." And Face to Face's "Interzone" manages to make Joy Division sound like the Dead Kennedys, if such a thing is possible.

The only real thing to find fault with here is the lack of a couple of key JD tracks -- particularly "Shadowplay" and "The Eternal" -- but i suppose they had to stop SOMEWHERE, right? And who knows, maybe those will turn up on the forthcoming tribute from Cleopatra....

v/a -- AMERICANOISE [Mother Savage Noise Productions]

Sheer gut noise-blowout... a legacy of brutality... wallowing in sonic filth... all this and MORE at your disposal! MSNP delivers another loud and obnoxious compilation for "severe noiseheads" and it lives up to its title (even though it "cheats" by including one non-American, Montreal's Knurl, but what the fuck, that's close enough, we got nothing against the Canadians). At 120 minutes (with stellar sound, lest you start getting worried about tape length/quality ratio considerations) and including such participants as Emil Beaulieau, Skin Crime, Death Squad, Taint, Chinawhite, Namanax, Daniel Menche, Abfall, Tropism, Knurl, Stimbox, Crank Sturgeon, Limacon, White Rose, AMK/The Haters, OVMN, One Dark Eye, and (of course) Macronympha). There's way too much here to go track by track, but it's all pretty damn savage -- all meat, no filler, and all loud and painful. Fuck art, let's drill holes in someone's skull, mon!

Highlights include: Shrill cut-up filth from Knurl ("Tetramix (excerpt)"), explosive bursts of pure demolition fury from Skin Crime ("White Trash Serenade"), the shuddering cyclotron rumble of Daniel Menche's "More Rooms to Explore," sadistic stuttergun audio assault and samples (of a perverted nature, natch) in Taint's "Teenage Discipline," Abfall'swhirling shriek of the mutilated ("Das Chemische Produkt"), and the subsonic bleating of Stimbox's "The Nightmare Continues." Namanax provides a white-noise hurricane in "Turbulence (edit)," while Death Squad pummels the listener into submission with the churning bed of avalanche sounds in "Neurology (excerpt)." Crank Sturgeon's "Kakistos" will have you wondering if your speakers have finally given up the ghost, and then Macronympha's "Political Kill Time" kicks in to equal the earlier Death Squad track in pure sonic street-leveling potential. Tropism implements the supremely aggravating effects of static distorted beyond all proportion on "Dirt, Disease, Crime" and White Rose gets positively catastrophic on "Effervescence," throwing in everything including the kitchen sink and setting the blender to "puree." Chinawhite's contribution ("Ovencleaner") combines hurricane noises, repetitive lockstep hammering, and other top- secret noises to approximate the sound of a Concorde being stripped away layer by layer during a sandstorm. OVMN provides sandblasting in the background, shrill drilling in the foreground to helpfully obliterate your senses on "Cocaine Erection," then Death Squad (again!) does you in for good with the closing track "Porcelain Fuck Machine/Charlie FF World (edit)," a blast of power combining stun-phaser mayhem and blasts of complete heart disruption that is the only fitting end for a compilation as intensely brutal as this one.

As with nearly all MSNP releases, this comes with a sizeable booklet (crammed full of obnoxious sleaze graphics); it also comes packaged in a deluxe hard-plastic slipcase box. This is deluxe edition is limited to only 150 copies, so if the thought of having your brain erased and squeegeed clean for two hours flat appeals to you, contact MSNP quickly... they will go FAST....

Strange sounds from a wild variety of people, including Monotract, Thurston Moore, Solmania (he's still around!), the Flying Luttenbachers, and others you never heard of. It's definitely not for the weak -- the very first track on side one, Ando Kumihiro's "contrast zero," is guaranteed to clear the room of all who do not enjoy weird skronking noises, which is good, because afterwards you won't have any conversational babble to distract you from the rest of the album. Monotract's offering, "in gai & dan," is possibly even stranger (although easier to listen to) -- over a wobbling anti-percussion track of sorts, somebody mutters and croons like a drunken lounge singer while someone clatters aimlessly about, until it all briefly turns into a "song" of sorts, only to break apart into weirdly-processed chattering vox before returning to something vaguely resembling actual music (but only for a moment). Solmania's track, "loop 7," is full of the catastrophic noise guitar for which he's known, and sounds like a jet airplane being sucked into a garbage compactor -- eek! The contribution from the Flying Luttenbachers ("dog death") is an even more creatively addled hodgepodge of strange sounds that swirl and whirl like miniature tornadoes racing across the landscape; Fukktron's "cd" is apparently the result of mixing together many segments of butchered and deformed skipping CDs and sounds like a grotesque form of heavy metal from Mars. Thurston Moore's "o michigan" appears to be snippets of songs from Michigan artists, weaved into his own guitar work (i think); as much as it pains me to admit it (i really don't like Sonic Youth), this is probably the most cohesive thing on the album....

The flip side of the album (yes, this is an actual real live LP, like an artifact of the past or something) is pretty much more of the same art-damaged aesthetic. I like the Jonas Lindgren track ("myronrnas krig-vit" -- where do they come up with these titles?), which begins as a low rumble (possibly amplified tape hiss); as the track progresses, crunchy noises start to eat away at the foundation in menacing fashion as evil hissing noises rise in the background. Of the seven other tracks on the second side, the ones i like best are "Yoko is a Punk Rocker" ( a "duet" of sorts between Kazumato Endo and Yoko Sato featuring Sato's voice in different modes -- singing, laughing, conversing -- laid over in snippets as shots o' white noise shatter the track from time to time), John Wiese's "Astronomy" (a noisy collision of crazed sounds), and Automobile's "Departing 52," a low-key stretch of violin-scraping and faint crashing sounds like glass bottles being dropped out a window. As noise collections go, this is one of the more interesting ones....

v/a -- AN EAR TO AN ATMOSPHERE [Rack and Ruin]

This business of not labeling CDs has got to STOP, dammit... i spent the first part of this review puzzling over why this sounded so un-electrolike until i finally realized that i was, in fact, listening to the Crawling With Tarts disc sitting right next to it in the disc changer. LET THIS BE A LESSON TO YE... LABEL YER GODDAMN CDS....

Anyway. * cough, cough *

So this is an interesting (usually) collection of electro-industrial tuffness from the Washington (D.C.) metropolitan area. Betcha didn't even know Washington HAD an electro-industrial scene, did ya? Guess there has to be something for people to do if they don't want to be Fugazi clones.... At any rate, Jennifer Barnes, who writes a column of the same name as this disc in THE MELODIA, assembled this collection of 14 bands in the area, and it makes a useful introduction to the scene.

Given that there are 14 tracks on the album and i'm already running out o' space, i'm just gonna do my homicidal fly-by ("WORDS WILL BE MY BULLETS! ALL POWER COMES FROM THE BARREL OF A UNIBALL PEN!") on the highlights. For instance, "Sadu Nei/The Garden Stone" by - she silenced seraphim -, whose first half is a beatless wailing that abruptly stops and turns into a synth-driven song with an actual pluse and a vaguely medieval sound. Flesh Pulse Flesh's "Freedom" begins with a childlike spoken-word bit about running up a hill to push the clouds away and segues into a hypnotic polyrhythmic groove flanked by twittering synth noises. The strong foundation of beats on electronic Control organization's "Sacrifice" is nicely complemented by the appropriately ominous lyrics from the singer, who sounds like he's been taking vox lessons from Ian Curtis. Dead Letter Office once again turns in a track of woozy instrumental effluvia from what sounds like a drum machine constantly on the verge of malfunctioning, with dreamy female vox overlaid as something like a calliope drones in the background and other odd sounds come and go (the song is "Stitch," btw).

Rupert's "I Don't Know About You Anymore" is waist deep in synths and lush singing and would come awfully close to being a (gasp!) pop song if it weren't for the emphasis on beats. Chapel Blaque, in the meantime, sound on "Gravity" less like ebm/industrial than... uh, death metal. But with synths. Like early Metallica gone electronic maybe. Interesting... and most heavy. DEAD ANGEL approves. Another agreeably heavy (well, relatively speaking) entry is Pulse, with the thundering/wailing "Godfuck." Full of stop/start riffing, hissing vox, and pure unadulterated guitar/drum heaviness, it will build CHARACTER if you listen to it enough... ha! "I Saw Death," by Memory Without Pain, is almost noise, actually -- except the noise is pretty much generated by synths, making them Maryland's low-rent answer to Whitehouse, i guess (only without the buffoonish "look we are evil sexist jackasses, aren't you AFRAID now?" baggage).

Other contributors to the disc include Black Chamber, Rhinovirus, Communion, Bacchus, Biofeedback, and Big Mouse. At $10, this is certainly worth a listen for anyone who is into the beat-oriented heavy electro- aggro-industrial thing. Plus the cover is really swell (finally! at last! one of these compilations that doesn't feature old buildings or screaming people or gruesome surgery photos or other cliched jazz on the cover! woo!) too....

This is an interesting (and extremely limited) disc commemorating an evening of live music hosted by E+J at Subculture in Grand Rapids, Michigan on May 24, 1999. Originally the plan was to have 100 of these CDs on hand to sell at the event, then a pressing mishap reduced that number to 50, so now there are still some CDs left to parcel out to those who so desire to hear the goodies. Although the event was live, i don't think this disc is an actual document of that event (unless i have my info horribly mixed up), but rather, a collection of recordings by all of the artists involved. And an intriguing collective of artists they are: K. K. Null, Damian Catera, Seaform, Drekka, and Goat. Null contributes two tracks (one short, one long) and the rest contribute one track each, for a total running time of 58 minutes.

The Null tracks are, not surprisingly, Null in electronic mode; on "3:13" (the track's length, appropriately) he employs the oscillating loops he has been tinkering with on releases like 004 and EXTASY OF ZERO-G SEX; while that becomes occasionally tedious on the CDs, though, here it works beautifully as a short introduction to the droning Nullsonic piece it segues into, "Zentropy - Phase 1." That piece is a return to the form of earlier releases such as ULTIMATE MATERIAL III, only accomplished with nothing more than a battery of efx pedals and loose cables. The body of the piece is a thick, barely-wavering drone that is brushed and feathered with efx of a different, shifting nature; as the drone gones on, sometimes changing pitch, Null varies the intensity and sound of the efx at the perimeter of the all-encompassing sound to maintain an element of variety. The result is stunning, far more powerful than the sound of many of his recent studio releases.

The remainder of the tracks are not quite as single-mindedly overpowering as Null's prime movement, but they are nevertheless interesting. On "Pax Jam," Damian Catera begins with a landscape of broken, jagged sound turned down just enough to resemble the sound of glass tumbling in a cement mixer; over this, he creates a variety of unexpected noises and tones, then moves to radically alter the EQ and mix of his sound, taking the noise and drone in different directions. The latter part of the piece is largely a high-pitched, oscillating drone that is occasionally augmented by landslide noises and other sonic debris. Seafoam's track, "S-A-S," is a bit more ambient in nature, with shuddering bass electronics like tectonic plates shifting and absolutely minimal accompaniment; Drekka's "Unbeknownst," by contrast, approaches being an actual song, although one that is broken into movements: the beginning is composed of acoustic strumming over seemingly random electronic noises, but this is suddenly obliterated by harsh electronic noise; that, in turn, gives way to what sounds like a record skipping amid other unidentifiable noises. From that point onward, the song progresses piecemeal -- brief bursts of acoustic guitar and cello are rudely interrupted by hard noise, there are periodic bursts of amp hum, and so on. The last track, by Goat, is entitled "21st Century Schizoid Goat," but trust me... it bears absolutely no resemblance to King Crimson. Goat favors a barrage of hard electronic noises, first in a rhythmic sequence, then in a loud avalanche of sound akin to airplanes falling from the sky and burning trains barreling down a mountainside. Play this one loud enough and it will fry your ears. Apparently power electronics is alive and well, regardless of the fact that the genre seems to have gone largely underground again....

As is often the case with E+J releases, one of the best things about this release is the inner packaging. The CD comes in a digipak with two color (!) mylar inserts, one listing the tracks and performers, the other a miniature duplicate of the poster for the event. Both are more evidence of E+J's continuing commitment to excellent graphic design. Even if you didn't happen to see the event (don't feel bad, i didn't either), this is an excellent CD to own, particularly for the synapse-frying Null tracks. Be forewarned: this was pressed in a limited run of 100, and i don't know how many are left, but my guess is not many, so if it attracts your interest i'd strongly suggest you move quickly....

v/a -- ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC box set [Smithsonian Folkways]

This is one of the most important music collections of the twentieth century and it's finally available on CD, thanks to the Smithsonian Institution, who acquired the Folkways label in 1987 largely just for this collection. It's hard to effectively convey just how significant this collection has been on the development of music in the second half of this century -- although you can get an inkling by noticing the impressive range of artists called upon to contribute to the liner notes: Peter Stampfel (the Fugs), Allen Ginsberg, and John Fahey (whose amusing, cryptic, and highly lucid commentary threatens to turn into a book of its own) are among the luminaries who speak here of the ANTHOLOGY's impact. Listening to the six discs in this set, you can suddenly hear where the likes of Fahey, Dylan, Nick Cave, Johnny Cash, among others, first got the initial slivers of their inspiration. (A detailed annotation of the songs at the end of the ridiculously huge booklet notes, after each song, a partial list of artists who have covered the song in question; a small sample of those names includes P. J. Harvey, Nick Cave, Professor Longhair, The Kingston Trio, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pentangle, George Thorogood, Johnny Cash, Dick Dale, the Grateful Dead, Doug Sahm, Boiled in Lead, Louis Armstrong, Townes Van Zandt, Eddie Cochran, the Silencers, Flatt and Scruggs, John Fahey, the Lovin' Spoonful, Hot Tuna, the Dream Syndicate, Thelonius Monster, and Kristen Hersh. Obviously the collection has had not only a tremendous impact, but holds appeal for a wide range of listeners.

The reissue itself is a work of art that rivals the original edition. For those not familiar with the story, Harry Smith -- an eccentric loon, veteran of World War II, and obsessive record collector (big surprise) -- got the bright idea to assemble a "beginner's primer" of sort on American folk music. His method of selecting the 84 songs that appeared was arcane and cryptic, yet (when it was all assembled) somehow made perfect sense; taking advantage of the emergence of long-playing vinyl (a new phenomenon when this was first released in 1952), he essentially created the box-set by compiling six records into one volume, divided into three sections with two records apiece: Ballads, Social Music, and Songs. He even threw in an eye- popping booklet decorated in a lurid fashion that anticipated the clip-art frenzy of art mutants like the Church of the SubGenius, complete with a dazzling series of annotated cross-references and lurid tabloid-style sluglines for each song ("FATHER FINDS DAUGHTER'S BODY WITH NOTE ATTACHED WHEN RAILROAD BOY MISTREATS HER! -- WIFE'S LOGIC FAILS TO EXPLAIN STRANGE BEDFELLOW TO DRUNKARD!"), all written in eyestrain-o-vision type. It was unlike anything anyone had ever seen or heard and immediately became the operative musical bible for an entire generation of musicians (mostly, but not limited to, folk singers).

Then for reasons too complicated to elaborate on here, the album went out of print. (Typical record biz woes.) And now the Smithsonian Institution has reissued it on CD, in a format that closely follows the look of the original set (they have even gone to the trouble of printing up a close facsimile of the original booklet). The new set also includes a 68-page booklet full of informative essays (one by Greil Marcus that is actually a chunk of his quasi-Dylan book INVISIBLE REPUBLIC), and one disc is enhanced to include photos, interviews, and other interesting notes. In addition, they went to a great deal of trouble to clean up editing and sound problems, sometimes to the extent of hunting down original copies of the 78s in question and recutting masters; they even managed to fix a problem that inadvertently plagued the original set by compensating for and correcting tracks that had been recorded too fast or too slow. (78s, by a quirk of their manufacturing process, actually varied in speed, sometimes by as much as ten revolutions a minute; the techno-freaks at the Smithsonian compared certain instruments on each track to instruments of fixed pitch to determine the proper speed. This sort of attention to detail has a lot to do with why it took them ten years to reissue the damn thing.)

All of which brings us to... yes... the music in question. What is it? Well, it's basically old-time music from the late twenties to early thirties (blues, bluegrass, hillbilly music, spirituals, and the like), performed by a bizarre mixture of professional musicians (the Carter Family, Blind Lemon Jefferson, etc.), genuine oddballs (Clarence Ashley, Buell Kazee), and plain old ordinary people from way out in the sticks (pretty much everyone else). Most of it is played off the cuff (this is, after all, from an age where everything was cut directly to the master and subsequently had to be performed live from start to finish); some of it isn't even in English (Smith had a fondness for Cajuns); all of it sounds eerie and primal. This is music that was never meant to be discovered, really -- the music people out in the back woods play for each other on the porch at night for entertainment because no one has any money to do much else. Some of it, like "I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground" and "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," are just flat-out creepy; others are more in line with traditional ballads (mostly about murder and disasters, interestingly enough). All of it sounds like it is not of this earth. Personally, I think it's all brilliant (note, though, that i definitely favor "The Mountaineer's Courtship" above all the rest). Everybody should own this. Fuck the cost. There's not a bad song on here (how many other six-disc collections can make that claim?), and a great many are classics that, as already noted, have been covered by just about everyone who's anyone. Now that the set is available in such excellent form, and for a reasonable price no less, this would be the time to investigate for yourself what all the fuss is about....

v/a -- APOKALYPSIS EXPLICATA [Multimood Records]

This lavishly-packaged double-CD commemorates ten years of existence for Multimood... which makes me feel just a wee bit dumb, seeing as how it's chock full of musical luminaries and i, um, have never heard of the label until now. (All together now: "wups.") Some of the better-known artists dropping science here include M'lumbo (aka Big Void for one Floydian album; see the previous issue), Oblivion Ensemble, Robert Rich (he of Lustmord fame), Shinjuku Thief, Vidna Obmana, Jeff Greinke, and Asmus Tietchens. An impressive roster, to say the least.

M'lumbo's "An Eternal View of the Future (Lilac With Heart Shaped Leaves)" resembles a more subdued and serious version of the Floyd-inspired art damage they inflicted on the Big Void record; vaguely African percussion floats through an ambient stew of moans, conversations, and ethereal saxaphones... sort of like hearing a late-night jazz party from a balcony five floors above the action, so to speak. Some of the tracks (like the ones by Ashley/Story and Plancton) sound like semi-classical desert music, moody and almost ambient soundscapes that are more atmosphere than actual song, while others like "Callipers" (Oil in the Eye) take on a considerably more percussive bent. With "Forgotten Side Beneath Your Eyes," it's good to see that Oblivion Ensemble haven't lost their penchant for operatic drama (although this long piece is actually a bit restrained for them). The swirling, almost-metallic drones emanating from Robert Rich's "A Flock of Metal Creatures Fleeing the Onslaught of Rust" will come as no surprise to those who've heard him before; as always, his sound is one in which the eerily beautiful and the beautifully ominous merge into one dark, unsettling sound. The most "active" piece on the first disc, though -- meaning the one track that breaks free of the otherwise mostly ambient surroundings -- is "Veni Creator Spirito," in which Roedelius/Spitzer- Marlyn lay down a hypnotic bed of tribal percussion, then smother it in a shifting fog of chants, gritty synth, and otherworldly sounds.

The second disc follows a similar pattern, with particularly inspiring moments coming from Vidna Obmana (the slowly building density of "Shaking the Surreal"), Sonic Fractal (whose "HOpe is Gone/Red Meddle" is composed of shimmering harplike drones that fade in and out like a twitching curtain of sound), R. Angus ("Papa Legba Dreams Again," one of the more animated tracks on the compilation), and Asmus Tietchens ("Tot Derivat," which superimposes gritty crunching sounds, then shifting sounds of a varying nature, over a loop of running water that gradually increases in volume).

The entire set, really, is excellent. This makes a fine introduction to the label itself, and would work equally well as an initiation for those curious about the creepy pleasures of isolationism (am i allowed to call it isolationism these days?) who have yet to get their feet wet in these particular waters. It doesn't hurt, either, that the packaging is stellar.

v/a -- ARRHYTHMIA 3 [Charnel Music]

For those who can remember all the way back to 1990, when Charnel Music was still called Charnel House (before some buttholes in the publishing biz made stinky noises and forced the name change), the first ARRYTHMIA compilation (including tracks by Trance, Pain Teens, Crash Worship, Muslimgauze, and many others) was the first CD release on this label, bringing to the public a great many percussion-oriented opi. (Is "opi" really the plural of "opus"? He'p, somebody bring me a dictionary....) Now it's 1996 and we're up to the third installment, and a happening one it is. Things get off to a good start with the slow-building drum frenzy of Then Tigari's "Shapeshifter," after which Desaccord Majeur treat us to rhythmic cawing to the beat of timpani and bongos (i think; while i can go on for hours about guitars, i'm on pretty shaky ground when it comes to drums) on "Darbouka." Low, brooding synths and ominous tribal drums make C.O.T.A.'s "Dark Reaction" an eerie, hypnotic listening experience; the A.B.G.S. contribution "Vier Am Fass" uses similar instrumentation and much the same approach to create something markedly different in sound, yet equally mesmerizing in its effect.

Things get a good deal more kinetic when Tekachi trots out "Amygdala"; layers of polyphonic percussion blend with chanted vocals (buried back in the mix), and the sound rises and falls like a secret jungle communique. Ditto for the dense and thunderous pounding of Scot Jenerik's "Geischt," where reverbed drums resonate like thunder in the hills. The last track, "Desire and Delusion" by Tribes of Neurot, offers complex swirls of densely packed sound amidst odd-meter beats, cryptic samples, wind noises, other noises, all resolving into patterns of fierce pounding... we are talking heaviness here. No wonder they get such good press....

That's seven tracks out of 14; the rest (by Raksha Mancham, Batterie Acid, Ancient Rites, Sephar Hulpe, G.L.O.D., A Chocolate Mess, and John Herron) are every bit as good and equally intriguing. Considerably more solid than most compilations and possibly the best of the ARRHYTHMIA series so far. Embrace that which desires to use your skull for a small yet tuneful percussion instrument.

This is an interesting idea: the compilation as a thematic concept. All of the bands here (most of whom are unfamiliar to me) contribute exclusive material (or in some cases, exclusive remixes of otherwise available material) inspired by butoh, the Japanese dance form. For those not familiar with butoh -- and i'll readily grant that my knowledge of the subject is minimal as well -- it is essentially a modern form of Japanese ritual dance, somewhat akin to ballet but more primal, exploring the idea that beauty can be found in that which is dark and malformed. According to Ralph Rosenfield, Butoh "exploded onto the art landscape in the late 1950's and early 1960's.... Because it was created against the backdrop of postwar Japan and the nuclear holocaust that country had experienced, butoh dealt with taboo subjects in both brutal and serene ways."

The idea behind this compilation, apparently, was "to add a rhythmic nature to that aesthetic" to explore a previously unimagined link between butoh and darkwave (the form of music, generally, that Middle Pillar distributes). I have to admit it's an original idea (gasp!) and the parallels are definitely there -- both forms are rooted in the dichotomy between beauty and ugliness, and the hazy, ethereal nature of most darkwave leaves plenty of room for interpretative possibilities, much as the dance form does. The comparison becomes even more intriguing when you consider the wide variety of sounds available on this disc -- does this imply, too, that butoh carries within it an equally wide range? An idea worth exploring....

The disc itself (which comes encased in a frankly gorgeous, full-color double-gatefold digipak; Middle Pillar must be doing all right, eh?) contains 14 tracks by ten bands, nearly all of which are clearly in the darkwave genre (lots o' swirling keyboards, dance beats, gorgeously doomed female vox, etc.). For once, the disc actually lives up to the fabulous packaging -- there are no bad tracks on this release. Period. I'm not hep enough on the darkwave thing to know if these bands/tracks are representative or not of the genre, but the songs here are certainly well-executed and appealing. There's a consistent level of songcraft at work throughout the songs that is usually missing on most compilations, which are more of a mixed bag with inevitable highs and lows, and this is one of the most consistently listenable compilations i've ever heard. Bonus points and fezzes for Middle Pillar! My favorite tracks would include the two short but intense tribal-drumming exercises by Kobe ("Primary" opens the disc; "Aftermath" closes it); "The Unaware" by The Machine in the Garden, Wench's "Damnation," and "Moebius Stripped" by The Mirror Reveals; the remaining tracks by Zoar, The Unquiet Void, Mors Syphlitica, Sumerland, Thread, and A Murder of Angels are every bit as good, though. Aside from being an interesting mediation on an exotic art form, this is actually a pretty good introduction to many of the bands carried by Middle Pillar (i think that's why they do these things, by the way)....

v/a -- CAUSE [Piece of Mind]

A bit of background here for those not in the know: Rock for Choice is the fund-raising entity founded by members of L7 and Sue Cummings to organize benefit concerts for the Feminist Majority Foundation, which works to protect abortion clinic workers and abortion rights in general. Most of the CAUSE CD was recorded live in Los Angeles at Onyx Sequel on February 26, 1992, and just about everybody who's anybody is here: Gretchen Seager (2 Nice Girls), Ann Magnuson (Bongwater), Sue Cummings, Exene Cervenka (X), Kira (Black Flag, Dos), Suzi Gardner (L7), and many more. The CD is also accompanied by a 28-page booklet explaining RFC's origins and how it works, along with pictures of the performers along with lyrics and poetry.

Having said that, here's the deal: 1) This is almost entirely a spoken-word effort; 2) given the nature of the project, it's VERY political. This may not be your "bag"; it really isn't mine, to be honest, and the main reason I bought this is because of Suzi Gardner's appearance (it's an obsessive L7 thing, you wouldn't understand). Having said that, I found a lot of this really, really interesting. I also found parts of it extremely irritating. Taking both sides now (a little Neil Diamond for you, heh), one at a time:

The interesting stuff: The stark, beautifully said "Pie in the Sky" by Jula Bell; the disturbing messages of sexism, racism, fear, and human stupidity in "Deep Well" (Debbie Patino), "One Million Skies" (Gretchen Seager), "Me and Me" (Ash Own), "Around the World the Ladies' Way" (Julie Ritter), "Family (Exene Cervenka), "She Wore A Red Carnation" (Candye Kane), and so many others; the defiant stand of "Ain't Nobody's Business" (Kira); the dark and sexy gallows humor of "Sex With the Devil" and "Art Professor" (Ann Mangunson); and the black ache of "Thinking Too Much" (Suzi Gardner plus friends). This is the material that makes the CD worth owning, regardless of whether you actually agree with the stands of these artists or not -- powerful stuff.

The irritating stuff: "This Is My Body" starts out in a really powerful manner as Mary Herzcog explains the point of the bracelet she wears in memory of Becky Bell (who died having an illegal abortion in lieu of filling out a parental consent form), but her monologue quickly deteriorates into a rant about how men are essentially pigs because they require women to look a certain way, and so forth. Well, I have news for Mary Herzcog, but while this may be unfortunately true, the reverse is every bit true -- as a short, skinny guy with glasses who doesn't match up to the look of the tanned, over-muscled buttheads in GQ ads, I've been snubbed by plenty of women for exactly the same reasons she's whining about. Hey, Donita Sparks of L7 explained it best: There are only two kinds of people in this world -- cool people and assholes. And there are just many assholes with vaginas as there are with penii, ok? So when I hear rants like this, I find it EXTREMELY ANNOYING and entirely counter- productive. I'm bothered by "Backdoor Daddy" (Duchess), about fathers having sex with their daughters, for similar reasons. While there is no question that this happens -- I know people who've had it happen-- it's kind of irritating that whenever the subject of incest comes up, it's almost always about daddies porking their little girls, and completely ignores the vast number of young boys who are molested in exactly the same manner, quite often by their mothers. I'm TIRED of men being painted as the bad guys all the time, ok? Not ALL of us are dickheads, and the ones of us who aren't get real tired of being pasted to the wall for stuff we don't even do.... Gender wars suck, ok? Divisive behavior sucks. Roasting an entire gender (men, in this case) for the actions of a few (or even more than a few) is nothing but sexism in reverse, and sexism is bullshit no matter which side of the fence it's coming from. Men are men, women are women, the smart ones in both camps should be working TOGETHER to get rid of the buttheads in both camps who want to make the world safe for conservatism by squashing those who don't agree with them, not enaging in stupid pissing matches. You know what I mean? Ok, enough said on THAT....

As with any project of this size and scope (32 tracks, nearly as many artists), there are some tracks that don't work out too well. Some of them, like "Protein" and "Caffeine Buzz" (Sue Cummings), "Martini Talk" (Betty), and "Katomania" (Kari French), are... um... kind of dumb. (Please don't throw things at me!) But the quality and blunt honesty of the majority of this CD are sufficient to overcome even the most annoying and/or self-indulgent parts, and the truth is that while I don't agree with everything the Feminist Majority Foundation has to say either, there's no question that SOMEBODY has to be out there matching wits with the stupid fucks like Paul Hill (whom I'd STILL like to turn into a walking body bomb -- Paul Hill plus about ten sticks of dynamite and a lit fuse would make a vast improvement to the nature of the species, I figure). So go buy this and put your $$$ to good use and hear something a little bit different....

v/a -- CHAOS OF THE NIGHT -- LIVE AT KFJC [Charnel Music]

This is the pick of the month for all you Japanoise fans. The recording was done live at KFJC Radio in San Francisco, and from the description of the show in the liner notes, i would have given my left hand to be there. Each of the three tracks is a collaborative effort. Mayuko Hino of C.C.C.C. is definitely the center of this effort. She is the only one of the four collaborators that appears on all three tracks. The first track, a half- hour long wall of noise, could easily be a C.C.C.C. release. Good, very good. Dense, swirling, loud. The other two tracks follow suit. After all, what would you expect when four gods of noise get together and jam? Nothing but godhead noise -- go buy it. If anything, buy it for the photomontage cover done by Monte Cazazza and Michelle Handelman. I could describe it here, but I may get in trouble with the censors on your on-line service for "pornographic" references. It's art, not porn, but it's still really graphic. [bc]

v/a -- CHIPFARM [God Mountain]

This is a collaborative project between Optical*8 (Hoppy Kamijyama, Reck, Otomo Yoshihide), Melt Banana (Yasuko, Agata, Rika, Sudoh), Elliot Sharp and Zeena Parkins. It's a team of players that one might not automatically envision, but in fact they pull this one off quite well. There are twenty tracks in all, ranging from about five minutes to less than a minute. The composing credits are fairly evenly split amongst all of the artists represented. Most of the tracks written by Sharp or Parkins sound quite a bit like Knitting Factory-styled improv duets, but not always. There's also one big noise extravaganza surprise at the very end. Guess who's responsible for that one? Otherwise, sandwiched in between all of that is the rest. It's a really unique blending of the various styles brought together, then thrown into a blender and served up steaming hot for consumption. It's a swirling, FAT and really tight combo. [yol]

Thee Childish lad sure puts together some esoteric compilations, to be sure -- the kind of compilations where the band names and titles are so exotic that you sometimes wonder which is which (band names like Bad Drug Latrine, Long Head, Audio Paucity Quartet, I.M.F., 222, D-503, Comissioner Jordan, Yin+B vs. titles like "Meddler," "Chance Meeting of the Scarlet Pimpernel and Crazyhorse," "Stormdoor," "Lost: Fifty Suns," "Cuban Bastard (excerpt)," "BM Sex Machine," "Dorry Overture," and... well, you get the idea). As you can imagine with such opaque titles and names, the music is pretty much all over the place... except this is Childish Tapes, so it's not even music, precisely, as much as it is lots of found sound, samples, distorted / loop snippets of music, and other crazed effluvia. The end result is like listening to primitive field recording of the crazed ritual bleatings and conversations of a whole underground nation of lunatic tribes. "Listening Habits of the Avant Lower Basin Aborigines," perhaps. Plus a lot of extremely devolved bullshit (but good bullshit, mind you) about Batman and Robin. As with most Childish releases, there's a pretty steep level of surreal activity at work here -- purloined sounds from cartoons, BATMAN & ROBIN episodes, disco, distorted weirdness, deliberately weird conversations, crazed effluvia coming at you from all directions. (There's also a lot of silences, some maybe less intentional than others, and primitive editing in places, but it doesn't detract significantly from the surreal vibe at work... might even be adding to it.) In some places it's hard to tell how much of the sound is intentional and how much is the product of lo-fi equipment, and i think this would have worked better as a cd-r (where you could keep track of the artists track by track a bit easier), but it's certainly worth looking into if you're into the surreal cut-up mojo bag. There's some smooth sounds buried in the wackiness, waiting for your attention....

Tragically, this disc technically cannot be reviewed due to niggling technical concerns, said concerns being that a) i turned it over to Brain, b) he determined that the packaging actually contained not only the CD but some hideous sentient mold, c) after leaving it in his car overnight the mold took on a sinister cast and attempted to break free and terrorize the free world, so e) he soaked it in napalm and destroyed it in a fiery blaze that would bring a tear to your eye. Plus the package was impossible to open without destroying the CD, and anyway, who the hell is going to put a mold-encrusted disc in his or her CD player? Call it a packaging concept that should have remained conceptual....

As for the contents, my psychic powers tell me that all of it was brilliant, really fucking brilliant, hardcore noise terror that would make your balls shrivel up and cause clotted chunks of blood to course through your distended vas deferens, shrieking devilman noise hell daring to slice through your cranium and leave blood-spattered shards of bone splattered across the walls. Too bad you'll have to rely on my psychic powers to know this, though. If you want to hear it for your own bad self, you'll just have to throw $$$ at the Menschenfeinds and take your chances with the creeping death mold. I'm sure as hell not going to risk it.

This came along with the Cold Electric Fire disc (sensible enough, since they have a track on here too), and i'm glad Tedder sent it along, because it even contains even more Robot vs. Rabbit, plus hep jazz by Mason Jones, Amber Asylum, Merzbow, and a whole bunch of other noisemakers contributing their own slices of painful sonic bleat. The Robot vs. Rabbit track in particular is a nice one: dark ambient drone like the sound of giant gears turning on a gyroscope orbiting a distant sun, far removed from the human rabble, something suitable for a soundtrack involving giant bug-eyed aliens in search of peopleburgers. While there are some seriously noisy, cut-up pieces here (the tracks by John Wiese and Nothing are particularly intimidating), the more interesting stuff (to moi, anyway) are the pieces that are less volume-dependent, like "I Love You" Yamaakago's collection of drones in motion through an ocean of reverb. The dreamSTATE track "Sunspot Interference" is another slice of semi-ambient drones, this time bathed in various efx and stacked up in piles that ebb and flow in density, like veils of sound rippling in the wind. The lefthanddecision track ("Theft As Entertainment") is a truly thunderous roar of steadily-exploding ammunition going up in a fireball, just pure grinding white noise and what sounds like buildings collapsing into a black hole. On "Tokyo Sundown," Mason Jones takes a bunch of guitar solo tapes recorded in Tokyo a while back ago and diddles with them, paring them down to some interesting drones and occasional burst of psych and overdubbing percussion and other sounds over them, all to hypnotic effect. Merzbow's track is an interesting one: on "Bamboo Honey," he begins with a scrambling, looped rhythm of some undetermined source and begins building layers of crackling, distorted white noise over it, eventually burying the rhythm track under a grotesque cloud of noise-laden sonic mung, followed by much screeching. Ashrae Fax's "Pan PUrsuing Syrinx" is one of the better dark-ambient tracks here, and Cold Electric Fire's "Cultivate Your Growl" is a purely sinister offering of dark, forbidden vileness, more ambient blackmetal than noise, and definitely not something you want to play for people wrecked on acid (unless you don't like them, in which case it's up to you, mon). Other tracks include nifty stuff by the likes of Anapthergal, Amber Asylum, MagWheels, Mindspawn, Gruntsplatter, and Ovum. Plenty of dark sonic umbrage to ingest here....

The second release from Parsomnic is this limited-edition cd-r, issed in a simple but stylish digipak, featuring three songs each by Anaphylaxis, Hollydrift, Kava Project, and The Devouring Element. The four artists here cover a lot of ground -- sound collage, dark ambient, trance, tribal sounds, musique concrete, neo-classical passages, and more, all swaddled in a decidedly avant sensibility -- and do so in a highly original and surprisingly accessible way. First up is Anaphylaxis, the solo project of Jason Coffman, who employs plunderphonic techniques to create exotic noise and sound collages such as "Restless Dreams" and "Tomorrow's Heroine" (in which he pulls off some really nice slo-mo drone as well). His three songs are constructed in layers of sound, piled up in sufficient density as to be nearly impenetrable, but these sounds (musical and otherwise) play out and are resolved in strategic fashion that makes them far more listenable than one would initially expect. Hollydrift's tracks reflect the compilations title in their uneasy, stuttering paranoia, far more so than I recall on previous recordings, especially on "Night Over Land," in which transmissions broken by interference drift over stuttering machine rhythms and dark soundscapes. The lurching, drugged-out voices of "Normacola" provide a surreal counterpart to the background noise, like harsh wind shrieking through the mountains, as textured noises fill up the middle between those spaces. "Out Among The Night" presents an intriguing conversation over a wailing drone like the sound of starlight, and the effect is dark and mysterious.

Kava Project shares some common ground with Hollydrift, especially in the choice of textures and feel for samples, but here the sound collages are built over tribal beats that often border on the subliminal. This works to best effect on "And There Lay The Pendelum," where soothing washes of drone make it possible to drift into a trancelike state. The final three tracks, by The Devouring Element, are built more around shifts in dynamic and, on "Revisionist History," a structure rooted in darkwave territory. Samples are employed, but it's the shifts in dynamic and approach to musique concrete that create the most interest. An exceptional collection of unusual sounds.

Another highly interesting release from Dorobo, this time aimed at introducing listeners to a new round of purveyors of the trance/tribal sound. I like the cover graphics, where the shortened front flap -- with a picture of what appears to be the exoskeleton of some mutant spider actually, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a backlit bat wing -- opens to reveal all the liner note information (with the band names still visible even with the flap closed). Economical, elegant, unusually effective packaging. The same attention to detail is apparent in the tracks themselves. The first track, "Ranidella Signifera", comes from The Melbourne University Department of Zoology, and is essentially the chittering sounds of the animal in question (whatever it is; i made a D in biology in college so, um, i wouldn't know). That leads into the hypnotic trance mantra "Red Garden" (Hanging Garden), where a looped track of tinkling percussion is overlaid with ebbing washes of synthesizer and other odd noises that come and go... eerie, twilight kind of sounds. Listening to this, i can see the bats under the Congress Avenue bridge (THE tourist attraction of Austin! hah!) emerging at sundown, wave after wave of tiny bodies taking wing to the night sky.... "Beyond" (Synapse Interuppt) takes a similar approach, only with more emphasis on the tribal drumming, and adds wailing vocals to a dark effect. "The Killing Jar" (Garry Havrilay) and "Afraid of the Aesthetic" (Shinjuku Filth) employ a more militaristic feel to the beat, with the latter adding jazzy reeds from time to time.

A disturbing sample track talking about the physical appearance of an unidentified but sinister-sounding animal (?) is the basis on which "Wrap Around Eyes" (The DNA Lounge) is formed, leading into the sounds of howling wind and muted percussion along the lines of a heavily-reverbed toy piano; soon operatic vocals come in, followed by a percolating synth line, and the track just continues to build into something truly surreal. More odd percussion turns up on "Nightsoil" (Soma), while "Strategic Womb" (Loggerhead) -- secretly an ambient track with brief bursts of trancelike rhythm -- derives its rhythm tracks from a distorted and unidentifiable source. Paul Schutze's contribution, "The Heart That Fades," is the final track, a brooding endpiece with wavering synths and disjointed percussion that ends abruptly. The overall effect is surprisingly cohesive for a various artists compilation... eerie, thoughtful music frightening in its own subtle way, music for the twilight of the idols, or perhaps the moment just before the world cracks like a china plate. Nietschze would have approved. (The tracks not mentioned here, by the way -- by artists such as Suntoy, Zen Paradox, and TCH -- are every bit as good; space limitations preclude me from going into detail about them as well.)

The first question this compilation raises in my mind is: Since when do Clutch sound like Black Label Society? That's certainly a new development to me. The first question this may raise in your mind, though, is: Who the hell are these people? If you're one of these people, then shame, shame on you -- while you and your backpack-totin' pals were swooning over all those earnest, bespectacled sissy-boys moaning about their emotional traumas, bands like Clutch, the Obsessed, Pentagram, Death Row, and other hardcore / metal crossover bands equally fixated on St. Vitus and the Dead Kennedys were establishing legendary reputations giggin' all over Maryland and the surrounding area. Some of those band members have kept up with the times and are still playing -- see the Hidden Hand, current home of the very Voice of Doom himself, Wino (St. Vitus, the Obsessed, Spirit Caravan, Place of Skulls), plus a couple of lesser-known but equally unpredictable pals. This cd serves as a nifty primer for some of the best doom to creep around the nation's capital.

And look what you get -- fourteen tracks of soul-crushing riff-grunt and pained vocals that essentially, track after track, boil down to "we're doomed, dude." It's all quality stuff, too, and a fair bit of it is obscure or unreleased: Clutch's "Sea of Destruction" (the opening track and one of the heaviest on the album) was previously available only a private cd release sold strictly at shows and the band's website, and tracks from the Hidden Hand, Earthride, Internal Void are all brand new. Hell, they even have the first new studio recording from Unorthodox in over a decade, the former drummer for Spirit Caravan (in Nitroseed), and the first studio recording from the new supergroup Los Tres Pesados (including members of Clutch, Earthride, and Unorthodox). All this whole-grain doom-laden goodness may explain why the first pressing pretty much evaporated before I even managed to review the thing, but maybe you'll get lucky and the label will repress....

My favorite tracks are the ones by Clutch ("Sea of Destruction"), The Hidden Hand ("Rebellion"), Nitroseed ("Class War"), Countershaft ("Black Sky"), War Injun ("Dangerous Prayer"), and Leviathan A.D. ("Breathing Rust"). The tracks by Earthride, Internal Void, Life Beyond, Unorthodox, Black Manta, King Valley, Carrion, and Los Tres Pesados are nothing to sneeze at either (although some of them lean a little too much on the Zepplinesque guitar heroics for my personal taste). If you're down with old-school doom and stoner music, you should find much -- if not all -- of what's here to be quality tunes worth throwin down the horns. And the guitar sound on the Leviathan A.D. track is just the baddest of the bad, slow wasting doom through dying speakers that should make you want to crawl up in fetal position on the floor as the big, big waves pound you senseless.

v/a -- ELSIE AND JACK AND CHAIR [E + J Recordings]

This is the first release by E+J, and it's a cryptic one. Crammed to the gills full o' tracks by names like Tabata (Zeni Geva), Tatsuya Yoshida (Ruins, YBO2), Rapoon, Crawl Unit, Fuxa, Shifts, Totemplow, Brume, and more, it also has a liner note listing puzzling enough to make me question what order everything's in. So i may end up attributing the wrong cranky noises to the wrong artists. You have been warned....

First up is Crawl Unit's "Hit Para Tu," a swirling miasma of gradually evolving noise (some of it an earthen rumble, some it crunchy, scratchy electrical filth), following by a li'l taste of the minimalism courtesy of Shifts on "Evolving Matters," which is kind of reminiscent of Alan Lamb, assuming he was miking up guitar amps instead of telephone poles -- lots o' shuddering, twitching, voltage-ridden twinkle-drone. Rapoon weighs in with a series of loops (distorted, disembodied voices, some muted earthquake rumbling) on "Exodus" while Totemplow and Fuxa wallow in shrill drones of reverb ectasy on "Laid to Waste" and "Pyramid Scheme," respectively. Brume's "Wish You Were Not Here" is one of the more unsettling -- not only is it the longest track here, but with unintelligble female vocals swirling around a clattering beat and other highly repetitive noises, it's easily the most disorienting thing on the disc.

While Monera, Mlehst, Pregnant Pause, and Flutter all contribute tracks that work the crunch/drone noise axis with some degree of variety and success, the real treats come toward the end: after an amazing (and short) high-pitched droning by FM Synthesis ("Stochastic Resonance") and an excerpt from the Shifts disc PANGAEA (reviewed elsewhere in this issue), Tabata drops some truly blues-damaged psychedelic acid on "Kamikaze," after which he and Tatsuya Yoshida blow up the psychedelic tape via hypno-guitar and crafty peekaboo drumming on "Theme of Human Insect" and "Hello, Brainsville."

All in all, a swell introduction to both the label and all of the artists, not to mention a hip way to preview the Tabata and Shifts discs. A suave move in every sense. Investigate.

v/a -- ENDLESS 2 [Manifold]

Okay, i'm FINALLY reviewing the ENDLESS 2 comp, and... um... there's not much to say except that it's... um... ambient. It's GOOD ambient, with tracks by the likes of Voice of Eye, Null, Richard Rich, Final, Controlled Bleeding, Steve Roach, and more, but what can you say about ambient that hasn't already been said? A is A; ambient is ambient; it is what it is.

Having said that, i must point out that not all ambient is equal and some ambient is more equal than others, and as we all know, the top animals in ANIMAL FARM weren't listening to this while running the show, eh? And no, i have no idea what that means, i'm rambling dammit, just let me GO WITH THE FLOW... i'm flowing... JESUS CHRIST, i'm flowing... just like the moaning wind and ebbing synths in "At the Edge of the In-Between (Anima Revealed)." And what's this business with Final's "Exit," which sounds more like minimalist guitar hum than what one would normally associate with ambient? Hmmmm.... Null's contribution, "Zen Walker," is not bad, mostly resembling an outtake from the "Leviathan" ep, but it's not stunning or anything. The Controlled Bleeding track is more interesting, actually -- a slow-building drone with creepy sounds gradually filtering into the mix until grinding walls (but QUIET grinding walls) enter the picture and eventually give way to something with an actual beat and weird phaser noises, etc. Mandible Chatter's "Burn Down the Sky" is most cool as well, with tribal drumming and odd cycling sounds; possibly the best track on the CD. The last track, by Richard Rich, is also the longest -- a whopping (have you ever wondered about that word, "whopping"? What exactly do you suppose it MEANS, "to whop"? Do we even want to know?) 18:07, filled with helicopter noises that gradually increase in volume and other spooky stuff. An interesting release... i would assume that the first volume of the set is essentially more of the same....

v/a -- ENTERTAINMENT THROUGH PAIN: A TRIBUTE TO TG [RRRecords]

It was only a matter of time before the current wave of tributes subsumed early experimental artists like Throbbing Gristle. Here are twelve contemporary dissections of classic TG tracks. The operating staff is a host of important experimenters of the present day, including Skullflower, Merzbow, Emil Beaulieau, Paul Lemos, and others.

Some of the versions presented here are rather true to the sound and spirit of the originals. Phlegm's version of "United" and Anchor presents: Genital de Orang's version of "Persuasion" feel more like a remixing or rerecording of the originals. (OK -- the version of "Persuasion" is only about 30 seconds long, but it has almost the exact same rhythm structure as the original.) But not all of the tracks take the same approach to the originals! Emil Beaulieau's version of "What a Day" takes a completely different approach. He completely mutates the original, makes it something of his own that was inspired by Throbbing Gristle rather than merely rerecording a song by one of the foremost leaders of experimental music. Likewise, Skullflower's version of "Hamburger Lady" bears no similarity to the original. It is the kind of random, drone-laden guitar work one would expect from Skullflower, but it feels more like they tried to capture the essence of the Hamburger Lady herself -- or perhaps the process that made her into the Hamburger Lady!

What is reproduced here is the spirit of Throbbing Gristle -- the focus on experimentation that gave TG their name in the late 1970s. This release does turn out to be more than just a collection of cover tracks. True to its subtitle, this is a tribute to Throbbing Gristle. [bc]

v/a -- ETERNAL BLUE EXTREME [Endorphine / Somnus]

This disc is a tribute to the late filmmaker, Derek Jarman by noise artists in Japan, Tawain and Hong Kong. There were no constraints put upon the artists except to use the word "blue" in the titles of their songs. What results are nine brutal and intense tracks that will shake the center of your very being without straightening up your hair when they are through. The standout tracks are by Merzbow, CCCC, Otomo Yoshihide, I.666 (with their track simply entitled BLUE COCK) and Aube, of course. Comes in a nice blue cardboard box that I had an increadibly difficult time figuring out how to open. [yol]

More devolved sounds from the jittery minds behind Sonic Alchemy, this time from the likes of Crank Sturgeon, Man Manly, Bob Cochran, The Ponies, and the like. First up is Crank Sturgeon with "Un Day," with lots of devolved sounds wandering around freely over a loosely-structured bass (?) figure, ebbing and flowing in terms of activity -- sometimes sparse, sometimes crammed full of noisy events. Id M Theft Able contributes "Spiral Gristle Diamond," which sounds like chipmunks squeaking viciously over a stuck record and is either intensely hypnotic or incredibly annoying, it's hard to tell which.... Man Manly's "R L ase" is a bit more pleasing to the ear, although closer in style to the Crank Sturgeon track in its abandon of structure and disdain for conventional rhythm. Bob Cochran plays an actual folk song to the accompaniment of bizarre instrumentation and shouting and tapes and all sorts of sonic effluvia on "Gorgonzola Variations I", and it's a strange piece of work all right, but by far the most entertainingly demented thing on the disc. Various unnamed jokers were apparently recruited to build the eerie and droning "Collaborative Work," a dronescape disturbed by noises of all kinds, while Shea Mowatt's work on "Urchin-Island-Pitchblack Stew, Delicious" is decidedly more minimalist, spare and deliberate, working with smaller sounds and fewer of them. The Ponies employ delay and reverb overkill to drone nicely in melodic fashion on "Avante Garde"; the disc is rounded out by a bizarre orgy of cut-up sound and experimental ensemble bits and Anu knows what else on "Drone" (which, despite its title, does not really drone... well, maybe in the backround a little bit, but still....), courtesy of Man Manly and Sugar. Not a bad intro to the label's whole bag, really -- worth investigating, unless you're really bummed out by electronic noise 'n (extremely) freejazz....

I'm probably a poor choice to be reviewing a Misfits tribute, in light of my near-ignorance of the original band's catalog (i owned a Misfits cassette once, so long ago that i've actually forgotten which one it was or what it sounded like, and the only other Misfits songs i've ever heard were covers themselves), but Freebird sent it, so here it is, eh? That said, this is one of the better tribute CDs i've heard -- i don't have any idea how faithfully they're capturing the songs (or butchering them, possibly), but all the bands on here (only one of whom i've heard of before; that would be Bongwater 666, natch) do at least a passable and often swank attempt at Misfits mayhem. So it's a hard-rockin' batch o' tunes, okay? Lots of four-on-the-floor drumming, revved-up sharkfin guitars, and incomprehensible vocal ranting. Best songs (to my ears, anyway; your mileage may vary): Bongwater 666's impossibly revved-up stab at "Where Eagles Dare" ("I ain't no goddamned son of a bitch!"); Fireball Ministry's bizarre (check out the stuttering keyboard intro!) yet rockin' "Cough/Cool"; Misdemeanor's high-octane version of "Hybrid Moments," which sounds like it could have been dropped straight from one of Metallica's cover-album extravaganzas, complete with spastic stuttergun guitar noodling (they used to call them solos, by the way); Sartana's chunky, treble-heavy, charmingly lo-fi (just like the original band!) version of "Hollywood Babylon"; Nice Cat's "All Hell Breaks Loose," one of the few bands on the disc with female players (it's a bit disorienting at first, then mighty swank, to hear Misfits as sung by a woman); a grinding take on "Who Killed Marilyn" courtesy of the Marilyns (actually half of Canadian Sabbath-lovers sHEAVY); "I Turned Into A Martian," with Dogma Hollow radiating thick 'n sludgy sheets o' doom; "Die Die My Darling" (by Volume), with a goofy/bizarre intro probably cribbed from whatever movie inspired the song in the first place; and the slo-mo feedback-fest of "London Dungeon" (rendered in lo-fi heaviness by Warhorse). The entire album is pretty solid, though, with no obvious clinkers, kind of a rarity on these kind of releases, don't you think? One of the better tributes floating around. The Misfits themselves might well approve. Groovy artwork too, mon... luv that one-eyed and many-tentacled monster menacing the curvy space bitch inside....

v/a -- GUITAR UNCONTROLLED [Alchemy]

Deep in the bowels of the Temple of Paz, far beneath the Staircase of Skulls, Captain 4-Track and TASCAM-Girl tiptoed through the dust-covered husks of the ancient dead, swathed in darkness, picking their way through the ruins with only the help of stylish infrared glasses. TASCAM-Girl, as was her custom regarding imminent battle, was loaded down with grenades, smoke bombs, seven automatic pistols, an M-16, two carbines, the sinister Freem Blaster and a Refract-O-Gasm Raybolt, a grenade launcher purchased with Green Stamps, and enough raw munitions to overtake France. The Captain, meanwhile, carried only a boombox on one shoulder.

"So let me get this straight," she whispered as they eased into the Hall of Creeping Death, "I'm carrying enough raw firepower to supply a third world nation and you're carrying... a boombox. Do you have some, uh, master plan you haven't told me about, or are you just out of your mind again?"

"All will be revealed," he said mysteriously.

"Oh, I like that. 'All will be revealed,' my ass. You're just a fucking fruitcake, you know that?"

Suddenly a massive stone door creaked open to reveal the terrifying countenance of their arch-nemesis Doktor Shithead, flanked by dozens of his evil minions. "HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" he cackled wildly. "I haff you BOXED IN! This will be zee END for you meddlesome do-gooders! My evil minions will chop off yer limbs and eat zem for BREAKFAST! We shall DINE on the girl's fat rump!"

"HEY!" TASCAM-Girl fired a round into the ceiling. "Don't be dissin' my ass, you pointy-headed li'l fuck!"

"SEIZE ZEEM!" The Doktor shouted, enraged. "Break zose tiny pipecleaners she calls arms and waste zeem both!"

The army advanced, only to be repelled by TASCAM-Girl's deafening roar of artillery. As they exchanged shots, she said to the Captain, "If you've got a secret weapon this would be a good time for it, buddy. I only have so much ammunition, you know."

"Certainly." With a flourish, he dropped a CD into the boombox. After a few seconds, music began to play. Tweety bird sounds emerged over a simple strummed guitar. A reedy female voice began to sing slowly in Japanese.

"What the hell is this, folk music? Are you going to bore them to death with Japanese folk music?"

"Quit," he said irritably. "Just wait...."

Suddenly, without warning, the song exploded into a slowly-spinning wash of hip-hop beats, hypnotic basslines, and chittering guitar warbling. The girl's voice chanted in robot fashion over the top. The sound was so perfect in its hip-hop trancepop danceability that all the shooting stopped as everyone in the room found themselves suddenly, horribly compelled to... to DANCE.

"Achtung!" one of the minions screamed. "My hips, they move without volition! I... I CANNOT STOP!"

"YOU MUST!" The Doktor raged. "SHOOT THEM! MEIN GOTT IN DER HIMMEL, you must fucking SHOOT THEM!"

"We cannot!" The chorus swelled up to meet the song's "aaaah, aaaah" vocal chorus. "Help! Help! Our feet, they move on their own!"

"Hey," TASCAM-Girl said gruffly, her booty causing carnage all of its own, "nice move. So what the hell is this anyway?"

"One of the songs from this fabulous new Alchemy compilation. This is 'Nadima,' by Hiroko Tanaka, one of the guitarists for the Japanese psychedelic hip-hop gods Mady Gula Blue Heaven. Is it not brilliant?"

"My God, listen to that guitar solo -- it sounds like she's feeding her guitar into a wood chipper-shredder."

"And the next one, 'Owari,' is even better." Calliope sounds whirled like a pinwheel before turning into a breakbeat augmented by wailing siren sounds. Then the song kicked into full gear, with a seductive lock and lull bass and drum beat augmented by all sorts of electronic frippery and more angelic vox.

"Here," he said, putting earplugs in her ears. Her hypnotic movements immediately ceased, even as the Doktor's minions were forced to helplessly get down. "Now you should have no problem mowing them down."

Her M-16 chattered with a furious roar. "Hey, you're RIGHT -- this is like shooting fish in a fucking barrel. So what else is on this swell disc, anyway? More stuff like this?"

"Yes and no. This is actually the second in a series of guitar comps from Alchemy, and this one features only women -- the aforementioned Takana in addition to two of the women from Sekeri, Miyu Uemura and Aya Ohnishi, plus one track from Angel'in Heavy Syrup guitarist Mine Nakao. The first two by Tanaka are actual songs; the third one is a strange hip-hop experiment that takes some getting used to. The five tracks by Uemura and two by Ohnishi are interesting, but more in the nature of sound vignettes than actual songs. The last song, 'Gin No Fume,' shows what Mine Nakao has apparently been up to while her bandmates try to decide if they're ever going to put out another album again. Here, listen."

He fast-forwarded to the song as TASCAM-Girl punched holes in another line of helpless dancing fools. "Hey, this sounds an awful lot like, uh, Angel'in Heavy Syrup. Listen to those spiraling guitars... what's with all the reverb, man?"

He shrugged. "She's a psychedelic girl, I guess."

"Look!" She dropped her gun momentarily -- no longer necessary now that dozens of minions lay dead and stinking on the floor -- and pointed to a tiny figure running away. "The Doktor is escaping! Should I go chase him down and pound a few rounds up his ass?"

"Not at all," the Captain said suavely. "For what the Doktor does not know is that during this little escapade, I deployed one of the robot cockroaches to climb up his pants leg. Little does he know that he is leading us directly to his hidden lair. Soon enough... we will meet again."

"And then I'll get to use the grenades?"

"Then you'll get to use the grenades."

"All right!" She pumped her fist. "So how about playing that thing again? That was actually kind of catchy...."

Here we are in 2004 and HIGH TIMES has decided to put out a stoner rock compilation. I hate to say it, guys, but you are a bit late to the party. If this had been released any time between 1998-2000, then it might have been relevant. But now? Ah well, I guess being a bit out of it comes with the territory.

That said, there is some great music here. Clutch's "Willie Nelson" (also available on their self-released SLOW HOLE TO CHINA b-side + demo collection), with its chorus of "Well I don't know if I'm comin' or goin' / if it's them or me / but one thing's for certain / Willie Nelson only smokes killer weed," is awesome. The Hidden Hand's "Falconstone," in which Wino takes a few more shots at George W. and co., is as strong as anything on DIVINE PROPAGANDA. Orange Goblin's "No Law" is equal parts Sabbath's "Hand of Doom" and Black Flag's "Six Pack." Suplecs contribute some instrumental heaviness with "Cities of the Dead." High on Fire and Bottom both kick out some heaviness. The biggest surprise is Corrosion of Conformity's "It Is That Way," which sees CoC moving back towards the sludge-coated Sabbath 'n Skynyrd sound of DELIVERANCE after detouring into LOAD-land with AMERICA'S VOLUME DEALER.

All in all, HIGH VOLUME isn't a bad listen. Fans of the genre will be all over it. Everyone else will probably just shrug their shoulders and grab the newest Lightning Bolt disc. [N/A]

To celebrate the release of Wantage Records' twenty-first release, Wantage (sounds like "vantage") main man Josh Vanek has pulled together this massive two-cd, 47-band compilation. There's no real rhyme or reason to this thing other than that, according to Josh in the liner notes, "WAN 021 highlights some of the best bands I've come into contact within the last few years." Why would anyone want to listen to what amounts to a two-cd mix pulled together by some guy who runs a small label out of Missoula, Montana? Because, to put it bluntly, Josh has excellent taste in music. Over the past few years he's released vinyl and aluminum by such quality bands as Federation X, Drunk Horse, Last of the Juanitas, and The Whip. He knows what he's talking about.

With that in mind, some of the highlights: 

In the heavy rock category: Drunk Horse (Led Zep + ZZ Top + a touch o' the punk = DH), Party Time (one of The Last of the Juanitas + others rocking real hard), Fireballs of Freedom (rock 'n roll the way it was meant to be played, nice 'n dirty), and Federation X (one of the best rock bands in the USA).

In the heavy as fuck division: The Narrows (what the hell? where did these guys come from? why wasn't I informed that someone decided to sludge up Slint-like, ahem, "post rock"?), Mico De Noche (one of the guys from Migas and, uh, someone else throwing down instrumental sludge), and Noxagt (could be in the METAL! section too -- three guys: drums, bass, viola).

METAL!: Skyforger (crazy Latvian metal), Bloodhag (making science fiction cool with the metal kids), and The Fucking Champs (making tapping cool with the indie kids).

Noise rock section: Replicator (jagged and angular shards of rock) and Stinking Lizaveta (they could all have one arm tied behind their backs and they'd still be about to out-play you).

Country + Americana: Juanita and the Family (The Last of the Juanitas and friends try their hands at a murder ballad). [N/A]

v/a -- ISOLATIONISM [Virgin / Holland]

Incredibly cool 2-CD compilation of ambient tracks by lots of noise/ambient/ industrial/etc. types like Null/Plotkin, Scorn, Ice, Total, Aphex Twin, Seefeel, O'Rang, Techno-Animal, etc., etc. There are 23 artists here with one track apiece, and the entire set clocks in at about 150 minutes, and there's very little filler... assuming, of course, that you're really hip to ambient in the first place. If you're already onto ambient, you have a pretty good idea of what the two discs sound like already; if you're not familiar with the ambient genre, then all i can say by way of description is that this is largely music about texture more than "songs," with no distracting lyrics, and sounds made largely of unrecognizable samples. I will say this: if you like even a tiny handful of the bands listed here, you should devote massive amounts of energy to tracking this down and making it YOURS, for all of these tracks are strong ones and otherwise unreleased (some are merely remixes of previously released stuff, though). It's also an excellent introduction to ambient in general, for those who haven't checked out the genre before. The only bad thing is that finding it may be difficult; it's imported from Holland and kind of obscure (of course; I like it, so it MUST be obscure, right?), not to mention hard to find. But it will be well worth the effort for those who do decide to seek it out.

Other artists on the compilation are Jim O'Rourke (Illusion of Safety), Paul Schutze, Zoviet France, Labradford, Disco Inferno, Nijiumu (Fushitsusa), Total (Skullflower spinoff), AMM, O'Rang, Final, Lull, and Thomas Koren. Many of these are splinter groups (for instance, Ice is an offshoot of God with Justin Broadrick on board, Techno-Animal is another variant of the same lineup, Final is Broadrick's solo ambient project, Lull is an offshoot of Scorn, which in turn is an offshoot of Napalm Death, Main is led by ex-Loop/Godflesh guitarist Robert Hampton, and so on) that might well be of interest to those who follow the original groups in question... just another reason to check it out and be entranced by those hypnotic, seductive background sounds. Of course, you need a scorecard and many, many pencils to keep TRACK of all these guys and which project they're doing what with at any given moment, but hey, who said life was supposed to be simple?

This is technically a compilation -- to be exact, "1 compilation of new independent music from Japan, 72 minutes, 80 track fragments, 28 artists" -- but because of the bizarre nature of the artists and the clever sequencings, the disc is a mindfuck in its own right as its own entity. The 28 artists are (get ready for a lot of names you may not be familiar with): Yuko Nexus 6, Ex-Girl, Acid Mothers Temple, Aki Onda, Astro Gaji, Thermo Yoshio Machida, Hadiot, Kangaroo Paw, Kazutoki Umezu, May No Niwa, Hoppy Kamiyama, Animo Computer, Kirihito, Pugs, Sawai Kazue, Tipographica, Freak From Ocean, Calculated, Lion Merry, Love Furniture Lounge Bears, Droptone, Cherry Co., Phnonopenh Model, Sakamoto HIromiti, Matsumoto Tadashi, and The Saboten. To accomodate such a large number of acts (each wildly diverse in its own right, probably) on one disc, they run fragments of tracks instead of full ones... and it's there that the compilation takes on a distinctly surreal nature. Playing the disc straight through is a roller-coaster ride through mutant psych country, doo-wop, fifties rock, noise skronk, new wave, no wave, prog rock, shoutalong pogo music... the list goes on. Even more spooky, most (if not all) of the bands here are doing something fairly interesting. Best of all, the tracks fade out into something else when things start getting repetitive -- cool! Not only do you get to hear tons of new, interesting Japanese indie artists in one place, but the album actually works as its own thing....

Just for grins (and since they helpfully included the info in their promo thingy), i've included links for all those swank artists (and ITSELF) in the EPHEMERA section. Feel free to investigate further from the comfort and safety of your own PC....

v/a: LAND OF THE RISING NOISE [Charnel House]

All the current interest in the Japanese noise scene has no doubt left a lot of listeners confused as to where they should start in their search for new sounds. With so many bands and releases out, and so little information to go on, it's compilations like this that make the interested listener's life so much easier. Charnel has issued an exceptionally useful document here, in a nice package with a gorgeous cover and informative liner notes. This is an excellent place to start for the uninitiated, with twelve high-caliber tracks of noise and experimental sound from an equal number of bands.

As cohesive statements go, well... it's a various artists compilation, how "cohesive" do you expect it to be? The bands are wildly different, making it a schizophrenic listening experience, but all are interesting in their own unique way. Approaches range from the kamikazes-out-of-control style (Omoide Hatoba, Children Coup D'Etat) to the pounding menace of Dissecting Table, along with excursions into soothing ambience (Agencement, Aube, DMV, Keiji Haino), pretty-but-weird skewed "pop" (Angel'in Heavy Syrup), and pure forms of experimental noise (Merzbow, Tokyo Dowser, C.C.C.C., Hijokaidan).

The sound quality is excellent throughout the disc, the musicianship is of consistently high caliber, and the disc is affordable. To open your ears to new sounds from a different culture, start here, go directly to your nearest record store, and do not pass "Go" (the board or the game)....

v/a -- LAND OF THE RISING NOISE VOL. 2 [Charnel Music]

Yes, it's that time again... time for another update from the land of the rising yen. Like the first volume, there are a variety of styles covered on this disc -- psychadelic, noise, industrial terrorhythm, and scratchy post- punk -- and even though the Japanese music scene has become a bit more of a known quantity, Mason (le Charnel honcho) has gone to some trouble to assemble tracks by a lot of still-obscure bands in addition to the ones that will already be familiar (Shizuka, Melt-Banana, Contagious Orgasm).

The psychadelic chunks come courtesy of Kadura, whose "Travel to Faraway" starts the compilation off in gentle, lilting fashion not unlike a slo-mo answer to Ghost; Kuroyuri Shimai, with the chantlike "Blue Forest"; and, of course, Shizuka, who contribute "Kimino Sora." Shizuka (the singer, who also plays guitar) still sounds like she might or might not be in tune, heh, but the song is certainly pretty enough to make up for any (real or imagined) vocal deficiencies. (Shizuka, incidentally, designed the dolls that grace the front and back of the booklet.) Volkha Dots also bounce on the (heavily synth-laden) psychadelic tip on "Illusion of Future," which has just enough guitar textures in it to keep it from floating away into the atmosphere.

Der Eisenrost (the band led by TETSUO's Chu Ishikawa) picks up the pace with with mechanical squipping and sqwuaking of "Diadectes," set to rigid, hypnotic percussion amid a stew of weird noises and complex polyrhythmic fiendishness. The noise element -- nowhere near as prominent on this disc as on the first (evidently Mason has become as bored with the noise thing as everyone else) -- comes in by way of Contagious Orgasm, whose "The Inner Life of Man" is a river of odd sounds, muted clanging, and creeped-out schizophrenic voices.

Of course, there are weirder moments. Melt-Banana's "Dig and Tickle, She is Hit" sounds like... uh... well... imagine Alvin and the Chipmunks. Now imagine that they have consumed massive quantities of Spaten Munich, picked up guitars, drums, weed whackers, and are thrashing around the room playing with manic speed. Wnico are right behind them with the hyperkinetic deathfuzz of "Cool Running," which gets even faster and harder toward the end with lots of yelping before ending abruptly. And then there is Gaji, an all-female (??? these names throw me) semipunkfunksomething who sound an awful lot like Super Junky Monkey on "Eleven Maladies." (Not that this is a bad thing.)

The eerie beauty of Onnakodomo's "Aoi Hata" is harder to describe, though; perhaps a more psychadelic version of Allegory Chapel Ltd. with female vox, perhaps? Whatever, it's plenty spacy and drone-infested. A similar vibe exists in the closing track by AmgSphont, "Kiaku no Tobila," with a wailing vocal and lots of ominous orchestral synth washes that is eventually augmented by tribal drumming and loping, droning guitars. Very weird and very hep.

One note for those of you who actually bother to read the liner notes: Don't be fooled; there is no Diesel Guitar track. It's mentioned in the notes but doesn't appear anywhere because DG didn't get his goodie finished in time and everybody missed it in the proofreading. Oops! So no, it is NOT a hidden track... do not damage your CD searching for that which shall not be found....

More whole-grain goodness from the fine folks at Elsie and Jack, this time in the form of a CD's worth of unreleased material spun off from their other full-length releases. The idea here is to serve as a sampler of sorts and to collect extraneous material overflowing from the label's other CDs as well; ergo, all of the artists on E+J contribute a track here that you won't find anywhere else. (The disc, incidentally, is free with the purchase of any other CD from E+J, although future mar/ino discs of a similar nature will probably cost you $$$; all the mar/ino releases will be limited to 250 and available by mail-order only.)

The first track, ostensibly taken from the initial sampler ELSIEANDJACKANDCHAIR, takes chunks of material by Crawl Unit, Shifts, Rapoon, Totemplow, Fuxa, Brume, Monera, Miehst, Pregnant Pause, and Flutter, and runs them all together in one long, seamless track. For all i know, some of the material may be overlaid rather than strictly sequential. The result is a series of shifting soundscapes, with segments that are cluttered with noise and others that are more sparse; sounds hover and dart which background ambience flows like a dark river. The sounds themselves drift from the ominous to the gorgeous, in a space where beats do not interfere with the wash of tonal color and texture. The track falls somewhere between ambient and isolationism and would make an effective introduction to the world of E+J in its own right. The Shifts track, "raw uncut," is a wavering field of drone saturated in shimmering layers of tonal color; Tabata's "viva revolutione!!" scatters seemingly random pellets of psychedelic guitar mutterings over a hollow, metronomic pulse as a psychedelic orchestra of sorts saws away in the background. The contribution by Subarachnoid Space and the Walking Timebombs, "a better feeling," is the closest the disc comes to an actual "song," one whose sound will be familiar to devotees of either band. As the Space lay down a skull-frying psych groove, Scott Ayers drills holes in the fabric of sound with his own wild guitar excursions. The track from September Plateau, "useless diamonds," starts like it might be an actual song, but abruptly dissolves into peculiar chugging noises... only to be overlaid by loops and layers of chiming guitar. Aube's contribution, "closed," is simply bizarre: drones build to abrupt shattering noises that fall away as more abstract noises build in intensity until it all ends in equally abrupt fashion. Possibly the most low-key entry here is "the beginning of the end of the reputation of the greatest secret agent" by FM Synthesis, a droning loop whose duration is almost exceeded by the title's length. Brume's offering, "ersatz-stellungen," is a bit more of a bumpier ride, with a plucked-string loop overlaid with random bumping and thumping, among other things. The final track, Monera's "locomotor structure," is a return to the drone mantra, albeit one in which the drones appear in a series of shifting loops that change in intensity and mood over a period of time.

As usual, the packaging is nifty -- the disc comes in a letterpress digipak with a series of translucent mylar inserts for the liner notes -- and given the quality of the material, it would be well worth buying one of the regular releases just to get this. (It helps considerably that the label has yet to stumble with the quality of their releases, meaning you pretty much can't miss even if you ordered something totally at random.) The only catch is that the mar/ino discs are available only through mail-order; in order to get one of these, you have to buy direct from the label (which you should be doing anyway, it's better for the label and cheaper besides). You can find the link to the label's home on the web in the EPHEMERA section, natch.

I'm not completely sure what's up here -- the "liner notes" are kinda cryptic -- but i gather it's Paradise 23 taking bits 'n pieces of material from the Mandragora catalog (including chunks by the likes of Paradise 23, Bull Anus, Rezenate, and Crackhouse) and retooling them into something new. That "something new" is noisy, whacked-out, repetitive, and full of forbidding death rumble. The end product sounds like the work of people on serious fucking drugs. Kids, don't try this at home! Sniffing airplane glue will not be powerful enough to achieve these effects! There are five tracks here, none of them have titles (or if they do, they are cleverly hidden), and they are all variously noisy/devolved/full o' satanic-sounding grunts and machine noises and psychedelic death spoo. This is some seriously grotesque-sounding shit. Walls of eerie-sounding noise and scary bleating make for an experience you won't forget if you're tripping too hard. DEAD ANGEL says investigate.

The twelve tracks on this fine disc comprise the soundtrack for a documentary film, FRONTIER LIFE, and the music is provided by members of the Nortec Collective (Tijuana) and Trummerflora Collective (San Diego), which makes it sort of like a cosmic meeting of the masters o' world beat and experimental music.(The movie itself is apparently about Tijuana.) This is on Accretions, so right away you can expect a heady mix o' experimental weirdness and suave world beat moves. Early on -- the first track, in fact ("Discar's "Iofobia") -- it becomes evident what sets Accretion's artists apart from other experimental labels: they know how to groove. They're not just doing odd things with prepared guitars and squeaky boxsprings; they have no problem with these concepts, but only as an additional element to the primal world beat groove. Speaking of grooves, that groove on "Iofobia" grows bigger, and on "Aguasnegras en Dub" (Panoptica), it becomes almost the sole focus of the song: a big, dubby rhythm is repeated endlessly as other beats and polyrhythms are worked out in hocus-pocus moves of great briefness over its mighty krush-groove. The swell groove continues into "Palacio," where Titicacaman offsets it with a mighty horn drone that eventually gives way to elliptical percussion that announces a slower and more deliberate accompaniment to a kinder, gentler drone. Clorofilia's "El Animal" is another festival o' polyrhythms over which horns high 'n low drone and wail, with a flowing and energetic world beat that commands you to get up and shake your bun. "Phone Damage" is a more unsettling slice of slo-mo power drone from Hans Fjellestad that almost (but not quite) drowns out sparse but interesting rhythms and occasional bits of conversation, until eventually it definitely drowns out everything as it begins to resemble the sound of a spacecraft coming in for landing. "Com Com" (Las Cajas del Ritmo) is built on two rhythms that don't quite work together, giving them an odd canter that is ripe for explotation by a third rhythm -- as the polyrhythms begin to pile up, the odd rhythm integrates perfectly into the rest of the increasingly complex rhythmic pattern. Latinsizer's "Falling Peni" is a cryptic series of fragmentary rhythms that eventually come together with a hard beat to form something akin to pulsing and distorted techno. Panoptica returns with "Camposanto," in which electronic glitches create twitching mechanical rhythms like the sound of a bad radio transmission as droning keyboard motifs circle endlessly in the background. Latinsizer's "Rubiconga" is an intensely swank collection of conga beats and added percussion that takes a few unexpected turns along the way; Marcos Fernandes contributes "Bullets for Ballots," more in keeping with what i would think of as part of a documentary -- minimalist shakers set in motion a rhythm that is eventually joined by slow piano and a winding flute, then the sound of a man speaking in Spanish commences as the horns imitate birds. When the deliberate beat comes in, it (and all that has come before) frames a shifting mood piece around the man's monologue, and it's only when he's not speaking that the band goes wild, picking up the pace rhythmically and the flute getting out of control... but it all calms back down when the man's voice comes back. On "Ensemble Circuits," Point Loma go from total silence to a faraway drone over the period of about a minute and a half; as a slow and repetitive beat begins, the drone begins to grow in volume and it takes on a rhythm of its own in response to the beat. The final track, "Unico Amour" (Marcelo Radulovich), begins with what sounds like a bulldozer warming up outside a zoo with a band playing in the distance and eventually turns into a roaring landslide of sound -- not a bad way to end the proceedings, whether on film or not. This disc works just as well on its own, divorced of the film; all in all, a fine collection of world-beat stylings with a wide range of sound that's plenty accessible while still being safely outside of the mainstream.

Plan Eleven is a label/distributor from Canada that's been up to interesting stuff in the past few years; while most of the artists they carry or distribute are Canadian (duh), and as such are not as well known over on this side of the continent, quite a few of them ought to be better known. Unlike some labels, Plan Eleven doesn't focus strictly on one thing; ergo, its compilations, like this one, are pretty varied. Witness the inclusion of groove-oriented EBM bands like Chromosphere ("Mother Ship"), Roger O'Donnell ("This Side"), Wave ("Seven Dials"), Christmas in Glass ("A Day This Long"), An April March ("Daylight Falters"), all of whom sound wildly different -- some of them, like Chromosphere, actually cross back and forth between EBM and goth, while O'Donnell's sound is largely piano-driven amid the beats -- and all of them sound excellent. Other bands like Ariel ("The Innocence ["Older" mix]") and Parade ("Deeper Here") are more guitar and keyboard oriented, with a sound that pushes at the envelope originally developed by the 4AD bands. Splinter Cage's offering ("Cascade Shift") sounds like a mix of all of the above -- dreamy textures, relentless EBM beats, and harsh industrial vox. Chesire Cat Smile ("Bicycle") churns out fuzzy, guitar-heavy dreampop, Bartok Guitarsplat ("No Excuses") wallows in peculiar guitar efx and a faltering sound structure that eventually builds into a dreamy wall of flanged-out guitars, Echo ("Reclining in Dub") weighs in with a springy dub track, and In Another Life ("Heavenly") carves out one more slice of the ethereal 4AD sound with EBM beats thrown in just to make you move. A lot of ground gets covered here and as compilations go, this one has a much higher quality ratio than most. A good place to start for someone interested in the Plan Eleven stable o' bands. Collectors take note: the song by An April March is unavailable anywhere else....

v/a -- NFCD [X-Units]

This is subtitled "Audio Documentation of the 1997 Northern California Experimental Music Festival," which pretty much sums it up. The festival took place September 12-13, 1997 and featured approximately thirty bands or solo artists; this CD includes tracks by approximately half of them. Much of the music here is of a cut-up, found-sound nature, as evidenced by tracks by Office Products ("Launch Break"), Diaz-Infante Dvorin ("Excerpt from Tryptich, Panel One") and ECOMCON ("Records Joe Gave Me"); others, like Crib's "Dissolution," are more in the vein of droning minimalism via electronic gadget manipulation. On "...recollecting past events of seminal importance, with allusions to three situations," CMU lures in the listener with stretches of silence intercut with bursts of gadgetry, abruptly followed by something resembling a slice of a droning song -- a sound that falls away into silence, then more gadgets. Moekestra employs heavy reverb and gating to achieve a hermetic drone occasionally spiced with peculiar clattering and bursts of sound on "Falling Objects from an Atmosphere"; Radiosonde puts shuddering and distorted bass loops into effect with noisy results on "Moments Before Play"; and K. Atchley puts more loud, fuzzy drones to work opposing each other on "Cactus Flower (Classical)," which doesn't sound remotely classical at all.

The shining tower of drone seems to be one of the more prevalent sources of sound construction here -- more than half the bands employ some form of drone -- along with snippets of found sound. This is best put to effect on pieces like "Surgaspring" (Klowd) and Eugene Thacker's "Opal-Binhex Aether," which features a great loop like the sound of an engine knocking that gradually increases in volume, wavering in strength. One of the more intriguing offerings here is the collaboration between Chris Cobb and Floyd Diebel (of CMU), "Twelve Evenings/Prometheus Loop," a more structured piece than most of the material here, in which different segments of sound are faded in and out in movements over a churning loop. A vocal and piano segment is looped in the middle, and grows in volume as the loop sequence progresses, then fades out. Hypnotic stuff.

This is quirky, unusual stuff that should be of considerable interest to those enamored of found sound and highly experimental cut and paste hijinks. How you get your hands on it, though, is a damn good question. Perhaps if you were to send a nice email message to Chris Cobb at [ cobbsf@sfai.edu ] he could enlighten you in that regard....