Surface Of Eceon - Tussyan Ruins CD (2003, Three Lobed)

This EP Is Part Of The Eight-Volume Subscription-Only Purposeful Availment Series. Description from Discogs.

Surface of Eceon (or Surface of Eceyon), is a supergroup of sorts whose music has been described as ambient, space rock. This unit, which has a penchant for the phantasmagoric, includes members of from Landing and Yume Bitsu, two notable psychedelic rock groups. Description from Wikipedia.

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Heavy Winged - Hunting the Moon CDr (2006, Ruralfaune)

What we have here is yet another platter of sonic mayhem issued from the increasingly mighty Ruralfaune camp. This time around, it’s a disc of distraught weed whacking and hardcore-tribal skin desecration from Brooklyn boys Heavy Winged. In three tracks over 45 minutes, this trio of sensitive thugs unleash a massive wall of cathartic heaviness that straddles the line between 700 punches to the ribs and the raw beauty of a black eye. Three dudes (and I say ‘dude’ with utmost respect to the men of Heavy Winged) with only guitar, bass and drums succeed in wrangling a mother load of sonic intensity through sheer improvisation and mastery of instruments that must melt in their hands.

Opening salvo “Concrete Glass” is the superstar here; a 20-minute blowout of ghostly yet intense guitar/bass improvisatory riff and drone with a maddening drum assault courtesy of jackhammer Jed. The fact that all of these songs were improvised live to 4-track leaves me dumbfounded as to how these guys can keep such a high level of intensity going for such a long time. “Concrete Glass” begins and ends with the same brutal force: no slow build-up and no wimpy ending. It’s definitely not for the faint of heart. “Death Instinct” features a bit of a groove, and a taped conversation that invokes the feeling of certain dread. The final track, “Last Forever” is an uplifting romp that is probably the most straightforward thing these guys have ever released. The proverbial weight is lifted from our shoulders as the boys provide us some breathing room.

Unfortunately, I heard through the grapevine that Heavy Winged is no longer, as drummer Jed has moved across the country to Portland, Oregon. It’s a damn shame, but hopefully there’s a ton of archival material waiting to be released. There’s also a heap of other releases available on an assortment of micro-labels worldwide to keep us fixed. That being said, I guess we’ll have to wait a decade or two for a Heavy Winged reunion tour. 9/10 Review from Digitalis.

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Double Leopards - Out of One, Through One and To One LP (2005, Eclipse)

To find a more apt title for this record would be all but impossible, as this is the most unified DL album to date. No one needs to be told that NY’s Double Leopards have mastered the drone, but here they redefine and recontextualize it, giving it new life and a single-mindedness of purpose that can be soothing, terrifying and exhilarating all at once.

This offering, one of several group projects this year, further hones established skills to absolutely mesmerizing effect. It is fair to say that the DL trademark drone is often simultaneously rhythmic and arrhythmic. Like late Trane, it lives comfortably in both worlds, rendering the group name appropriate for the overall sound. Halve Maen, the group’s masterpiece, clattered, buzzed, melted and throbbed with jungle and industry, the pairing never seeming incongruous and the drone always present just behind any foregrounded texture. Now, all that’s left is drone – all-encompassing drone – from the lowest rumble to a sound so high it can be felt with the eyes and face, penetrating my listening space with three-dimensional clarity.

Each of the two side-long nameless tracks on this LP are one huge slab of soft but powerful trance-induction. Like Theater of Eternal Music of the early 1960s, the drone is the message, but where La Monte Young, John Cale and company sometimes employed awkward microtonal changes to create an ephemeral sense of motion, DL has refined the effect. Like any good orchestral playing, the ensemble sound is unbelievably focused and each minute transition is well-executed. Even DL side projects, such as Hototogisu or the peripherally related Sunroof never sounded like this. Hototogisu’s volume and brute force sets them apart, and Sunroof often has rhythm at its heart. Somehow, it seems that this is the ideal Double Leopards piece, the sound they’ve been looking for from the beginning. What next? Review from Dusted Magazine.

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Birchville Cat Motel - Cranes Are Sleeping LP (2000, Ecstatic Peace!)

Birchville Cat Motel/Black Boned Angel is the music of New Zealander Campbell Kneale. An ever-changing, gently unravelling, ball of pure sound, sometimes beautiful enough to make you weep, sometimes ferocious enough to rip the gravel off your driveway. Moved among other things by '60s minimalism, musicologial field recordings, religious music, doom metal, and Appalachian music, and crafting his ecstatic blur-scapes from delicately caressed pieces of electronic junk, Birchville Cat Motel has gained international recognition as one the bright shining lights of what music journos have dubbed 'drone-music'. Verging on the ultra-prolific, a large number of Birchville Cat Motel albums have been made available to the public through some of underground musics snappiest dressed labels as well as through the international cassette/cdr underground.

"I just want to make beautiful things."
Campbell Kneale

Description from 20BuckSpin.

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Pelt - Six of Cups CDr (200?, no label)

It is said that "The Six of Cups repersents an orgasmic rush of feelings, a wave of ecstasy." Surely Pelt was experiencing this sort of feeling upon their sixth anniversary as a trio, and decided to mark this occasion with, among other things, this compilation (also sometimes known as "Odds And Sods") featuring one previously-unheard track from each of the past six years. It was a limited eidition of 30, so if you weren't at one of the anniversary shows, you missed out, sorry... Description from Klang.

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*In somewhat related news Jack Rose will be touring the east coast and midwest. Check out the dates here.*

Jackie-O Motherfucker - Change CD (2002, Textile)

Jackie O Motherfucker make the kind of emotionally developed experimental music half of the so called "post-rock" crowd can only dream about. Creating layers of sound often dominated by Jef Brown's saxophone, at times Change sounds like a free-form jazz version of Godspeed You Black Emperor. But there is much more here. While Brown places crescendos of fluttering saxophones above scratchy violins and electronic samples on tracks such as "777", cofounder Tom Greenwood is one minute teasing gentle harmonics from his guitar above country twanged vocals ("Everyday") and the next throwing out Velvet Underground-esque guitar hooks above reversed beats ("Sun Ray Harvester"). And if that isn't enough of a pointer, check out the beat poetry sample on "7" or just listen to the drunken bluesy slurs on "Bus Stop". Change is an album steeped in a multitude of Americana influences. As a result Jackie O manage to side step the formulaic nature of much post-rock quite nicely. Let's hope others take note. Reviw from Amazon.uk

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Who watches this ghastly thing? Post a comment please. Thanks and enjoy the show.

Double Leopards - A Pebble in Thousands of Unmapped Revolutions LP (2001, Eclipse)

Though tethered to some mundane Northeastern burg, Double Leopards make utterly placeless music. Immense, ungovernable music that sidesteps description as surely as it scoffs at chronology and geography. I've decided to attempt to do justice to Double Leopards' second LP, A Pebble in Thousands of Unmapped Revolutions, well aware that anything I write here can and will fall laughably short of the task. I suddenly feel like David approaching Goliath armed with a tattered thong and a cotton ball.

Double Leopards were before Chris, Marcia, and Jon; Double Leopards will no doubt continue to be long after Chris, Marcia, and Jon. Not to discount the role these individuals have played in the ascendance of Double Leopards, mind you. Some fortuitous convergence had to rouse Double Leopards into its current state of being, and Chris, Marcia, and Jon drew this particular card. 30 years ago, eight Japanese souls were called together by the same fateful purpose. Double Leopards adopted the name Taj-Mahal Travelers then. But Double Leopards are not Taj-Mahal Travelers any more than Taj-Mahal Travelers were Double Leopards. What both are is the avatar of a unique consciousness capable of spanning universes and locating some furtive but specific tear in the time/space framework. Where so many other collective minds batter clumsily against the wall, forever fumbling for that same secret defect, Double Leopards pinpoint the puncture, plug in, and light up instantaneously with the song of electric communion. Yes, Double Leopards reach out and touch the mystery just beyond the Veil the way you or I would call an out-of-state acquaintance over the wires. And the tape is always rolling.

Double Leopards' intimate connection makes each recorded transmission (and there have only been a few) seem like a love letter. Not "roses are red" grade-school scribblings but mystic missives of Song of Solomon magnitude. Even transcribed into the Pythagorean poetry of sound, and further reduced to vinyl grooves representing the polymorphous play of bass, voice, and vibration, the words whisper of metaphysical couplings - flesh and energy, essence and electricity - too profound for earthly ken. Knowing that we're unlikely ever to experience such cosmic intercourse firsthand, Double Leopards deign to share the sensation. Fortunately for us, Double Leopards recordings retain unmistakable traces of contact with untold Power. This becomes evident in the way that what sounds at first like midrange clatter somehow stokes the senses, spreading warmth and well-being through networks of nerves heretofore dormant. It's apparent when conventionally pretty drones seem to pulsate with a character that transcends conventional prettiness; when even silences sound incandescent and so melodious as to melt and shimmer; when your head and heart seem to fill with light and swell in response to certain sustained wavelengths.

Sadly, it's most apparent when the stylus lifts at the end of each side, rudely pulling the plug and dispelling the divine. Review from Fake Jazz.

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Total - Beyond the Rim LP (1993, Majora)

Matthew Bower of UK power-drone outfit, Skullflower, who, surprisingly, are "back" with a new album on Tumult. If you ever lay your eyes upon copies of the band's Ruins, Xaman and Last Shot At Heaven CDs, then hold on tight, baby: them be the goods. I was fuggin' obsessed with Skullflower ca. '93, so this was a pretty predictable purchase on my behalf. I hadn't listened to this in years until the other night, though halfway through Side 1 and my mind was already made up: this is good, real good. Armed with a roomful of exotic instruments (gongs, bells, you name it), a piano, guitar and a distortion box, Bower has built a massive wall of sound, aided by his ability to stick an honest-to-God tune in amongst all the noise. A missing link between the caustic shriek of Masami Akita and late '70s Eno, this is a mixed bag that still sounds mighty good. Score it on the board for Majora! Review from Lexicon Devil.

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Double Leopards - Urban Concussion Pic Disk 12" (2004, QBICO)

The Wire-July 2004 issue 245: "Though their previous releases were impressively dense, last year's Halve Maen felt like Double Leopards' defining moment, a massive hole that swallowed every pebble of this Brooklyn quartet's gravelly drone. Urban Concussion, a beautifully titled pic disk on QBICO label, at fisrt seems smaller in scope. It's limited ed., 32 min. in length, and coated with a glowing Graham Lambkin artwork that's so eye-freezing it's tempting to hang the record on the wall without ever placing it under the needle. But once the stylus hits, Urban Concussion is as cavernous and gravitational as its predecessor. Side one begins with a warped hum and some intermittent claking, resembling Morse code from a distant star. Low spoken vocals echo in the background, combining with wavering feedback and busy ambience to create the feel of a hallucinatory train station. Live, DL' power rises with amplification and room size, but here they prove equally adept at limiting its dimensions, gaining speed so gradually it's like watching technicolor grass grow. 15 min. in , a hollow roar slides into a beam of treble, then decays into gitty rumble akin to a fuzzy needle stuck happily on a groove. Side two is more open and roomy, with distinct noises more prevalent than heavy drones. Ping-ponged bleeps, propellered whirrs and shards of abrasion all push and shove. While the range of sounds hardly varies throught the track's 14 min., the permutations are fascinatingly unpatterned, like a simple mathematical exercise that accidentally creates infinity inside a box. But DL can never stray too far from drone, and Urban Concussion ends by immersing the listener in a planet sized seashell that this stellar group seems to have patented." Marc Masters. Description from QBICO.

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Sunroof! - USSA CDr (2003, VHF)

Limited cd-r document to commemorate Sunroof!'s recent first foray to American soil! More of everything you already love about Matthew Bower's Sunroof! Snatches of rock and roll are crushed and smeared into a swirling sonic cloud of scattershot percussion and thick distorted throb, guitars are scraped and scratched eliciting random melodies over a sweetly gauzy melodious backdrop, glitchy electronic percussion underpins huge rolling swells of throbbing fuzz, and guitars squirm and slither all over the place amking this a pretty noisy record for Sunroof!, with definite nods to Bower's other heavier projects Skullflower and Total. Description from Aquarius Records.

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Sun City Girls - The Multiple Hallucinations of an Assassin Cassette (1987, Cloaven Cassettes)

Outtakes from the Torch of the Mystics sessions, circa 1987–88. Exotica with a capital X using two electric guitars and drums. Description from the Sun City Girls homepage.

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Daniel Higgs - Solo Harmonium (recorded August 8, 2005 live on BSR 88.1FM)

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Daniel Higgs Live 5/18/07 from (( magdalenus )) and Vimeo.

Mike Tamburo - Dance Enis Dance CDr (2007, Barl Fire)

Mike Tamburo returns with an epic 32 minute suite of Basho-esque fingerpicking and psychedelic drones, that are exhilarating yet meditative and clearly an expression of deep catharsis. The album is packaged in full colour sleeves featuring cover art by Pete Spynda, housed in vinyl slip cases, contains an insert and is limited to 100 copies. Go to Barl Fire to see where the cd is still available.

VHK (Galloping Coroners) - Hammering On The Gates Of Nothingness & Giant Space! Cd's (1992 Alter, 1994 Studio Kft)

Galloping Coroners, or Vágtázó Halottkémek (VKH), emerged in 1975, finding instinctively its path to play instinctive primeval music eliberating the elementary powers of nature creating ourselves and revolting to its high completion in a free spontaneity and overwhelming energy. The VHK discovered a new method of playing music, which is not a simple improvisation but a completely free creation of music born on stage, liberating the deepest musical creative power, as well as playing more or less pre-written materials. This music is called as shamanistic/psychedelic hardcore but is in reality an unrestricted outburst of life energy. This is not only a music, but an attitude to grasp the essence of life with our deepest nature and grow it by its own law. The group says it is a magical natural music, a cosmic vision about the origin of presence. It develops in a sovereign way as a self-revelation with its elementary power.

The VHK is a distinguished cultic band in Hungary as well as in Germany. The first eight concerts were interrupted by the authorities in an afraid from the consequences. The band was banished for eleven years, nevertheless even at that time it continuously found spontaneous occasions to act by chance pushed by the audience of an other group, or simply playing by pseudonyms, as guest musicians of friend bands and without declaring themselves as a band at their the concert.

Meantime they won the festival of the experimental film studio in 1981. The video of this event was presented many times in the West German TV. Gábor Bódy, the internationally famous and youngly died film-director made his film "Dog's Night Song" with them, including the lead howler Attila Grandpierre in one of the featuring roles. VHK plays from 1984 regularly in the West. In 1986, when Amsterdam was the "cultural capital of Europe", the Dutch Queen, Beatrix personally intervened at the Hungarian authorities in order to allow the guest performance of the band. A similar event happened in 1987 when Fred Sinowatz, the Austrian chancellor had to interact with the Hungarian Ministry of Culture. They played in the "Mythen, Monstren and Mutationen" festival in Berlin, Tempodrom, 1988, together with La Fura dels Baus, where VHK was the best surprise (Zitty Berlin, 1988). Einstürzende Neubauten, Henry Rollins, Jello Biafra and Iggy Pop regarded VHK as one of the most important bands. VHK hosted Rollins Band in Hungary where they were shocked on the overwhelming effect of VHK on the audience. Rollins Band invited VHK for a tour in England which occured in 1989. In 1992, the CD "Hammering on the Gates of Nothingness" reached the 2nd position on the Top-100 list of the year of a Belgian Radio. Dietmar Lupfer, the first manager of the band, and later on the famous American cult label Alternative Tentacles released "Teach Death a Lesson" (1988), "Jump Out the World-Instinct"(1990), "Hammering on the Gates of Nothingness" (1992). The London chief of Alternative Tentacles Bill Gilliam described the music of VHK as "primal God-feeling".

Many American managers suggested VHK to play in USA, telling that "every American band wants to play such a music what you, do but they cannot." The VHK released the live-album "Giant Space!"(1994). Dietmar took the band to the New Music Seminar in 1990, New York. The New York Times wrote "the Coroner's music is basic and elemental and filled with obsessive, galvanizing passion." Melody Maker wrote on their show at the Pop Komm!, the large international festival of Germany, where they get the greatest power on the audience. VHK played in the Steirischer Herbst '95, completed with the fellows of Les Tambours du Bronx, 27 people on the same stage. VHK attracted 40000 people in 1996 in the Diáksziget (Student's Island) festival, one of the biggest festivals of Europe, and reached an extraordinary effect on the crowd. Iggy Pop declared them as the most interesting band today (1996). Our recent CD's

"The Reconquering of the Eden - 1st attack, and 2nd attack" (1997, 1998) is of a band radically improved, with a new guitarist and bassist, and invited musicians playing on contrabass, violin, flute, hurdy-gurdy and cymbal. The VKH used basically two sounds: one with the greatest energy for the electric songs and one which they developed themselves which is an unusually natural and vital dreamspace for the acoustic songs. We second part of the album is recorded in a large hall to record in a live atmosphere in May, 1998. The "Reconquering Eden - 2nd attack" was released on August 5, 1998. Both of these CDs reached the Top-40 of the Hungarian best-selling records and stayed there for 3 months. People are usually very much intensified and surprised when seeing VKH alive on stage nowadays, still. Description from Neurot.

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Pull My Daisy Directed by Robert Frank, Written by Jack Kerouac (1959)

Michael Flower - Returning To Knowing Nothing LP (2007, QBICO)

"Debut solo album by founding Vibracathedral Orchestra guitarist and Chris Corsano duo partner Mick Flower, with cover art by Rob Thomas of Sunburned Hand Of The Man. Featuring material recorded between 2003 and 2005, Returning To Knowing Nothing seems to draw on more primeval drone strategies than even Vibracathedral with guitar/strings/vocals blending in a series of tracks that combine Eurasian sounding horsehair hee-haw with a flash of prole drone more commonly linked to Henry Flynt, Magical Power Mako and early John Cale and the kind of tone gargling associated with members of Pandit Pran Nath’s immediate circle. A deeply personal tho still historically reverent series of drone scores and one of the best recordings to come out of the whole Vibracathedral implosion. Highly recommended." Description from Volcanic Tongue.

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