Friday, June 15, 2007

"How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it." -
Edward Abbey

Uchu - Uchu (1998) & Buddha (1999) CD-r's



"One group I like on the CD-R label but that doesn’t seem to have been reissued or made more widely available in any form is Uchu. They’re described as a Virtual trip ambient unit consisting of Kawabata…Hiroshi Higashi, and Ayano. All the music is played on voice and electric guitar. Because the concept of the group is to create a kind of “human techno” from improvised cut-up lyrics (single words, actually) and repeating guitar patterns, we use no samplers, sequencers, or synthesizers whatsoever. The “human techno” bit is perhaps misleading, on their two CD-Rs Uchu and Buddha the general scheme is for flowing, open guitar patterns to slowly build on themselves while the voices of the three members, intoning concepts like “love”, “soul”, “buddha”, “space” echo in and out. All very cosmic, with the best of the music sounding like classic Popul Vuh. That’ll tell you whether you’d like them or not. Perhaps someone will see fit to reissue these releases at some stage." Description from Noise.as.

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Wednesday, June 13, 2007



Samara Lubelski Quartet - Samara Lubelski Quartet Cassette (2006)


Meditative violin drones dissolving time into wide open space of home recorded cosmic ambience. A universal consciousness of hypnotizing star gazing sounds that melts right into the centre of the mind’s eye. From Slooow Tapes

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Sunday, June 10, 2007

Daniel Higgs - Plays The Mirror Of The Apocalypse And Other Songs Cassette (2006)


Daniel Higgs, of Lungfish and the Pupils, is one of the very few contemporary artists who we would absolutely consider a sort of modern day shaman. A musical alchemist, an artistic cypher, an abstract philosopher, a strangely charismatic, yet disarmingly humble master of any artistic endeavor he puts his mind to. A legendary (but now retired) tattoo artist, an incredible painter, whose paintings are at once hallucinatory and gorgeous (one painting adorns the cover of Leviathan's Tentacles Of Whorror record) and of course an incredible musician, whose sonic experiments range from the mesmeric riffrock of his band Lungfish, to an entire record of solo Jew's harp. But in addition to being an incredible lyricist, an amazing vocalist, and a master of the Jew's harp, Higgs is also a seriously mean guitar player, with a style and sound as familiar as it is totally alien. A gorgeous buzzing steel string drift through the cosmos. Lengthy droning ragas, that drift hypnotically from deconstructed Appalachia to John Cale like slow-shifting skree (joined on those tracks by violin), to moody melancholy crawls, to thick serpentine swirls of snake charmer melody and reverberating steel string shimmer. Raw and lo-fi for sure, but so darkly emotional, and dreamily hypnotic. We've been listening to this non stop since we got it and it continues to unfold more and more on each listen, we're thinking seriously about grabbing a boombox, taking a ton of peyote, blasting this tape and laying in the thick grass, sprawled naked on a hilltop in the middle of nowhere, beneath a sparkling moonlit sky. Review from Aquarius.

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