No Eyed Bird

Hair Police is a NOISE/PSYCH group out of Lexington, Kentucky featuring members Mike Connelly (Wolf Eyes), Robert Beatty (Burning Star Core), and Trevor Tremaine (Burning Star Core). Droning screams, alarm sounding keys, distant drums, and slowly sideways pick scrapes equate to a nightmare of analog terror. Side B is sounds of sullen sunken ship exploration using radiation detectors and underwater saws. The drums leave us and amp tones distort like a trip down a conveyor belt. The final track is an array of lost signals against a constantly swinging rusty gate.

-johnny darko

Self-released CDR by Providence Rhode Island’s Raphael Lyon, aka Mudboy, is neurotic noiseter with releases on lables (Foxy) Digitalis & Not Not Fun. Mudboy sports custom bent instruments, self-built hybrid electric organ/digital keyboard (called the Mudboy Mini), & even composed/performed on a Wurlitzer for a free live ’05 performance at the PPAC in Rhode Island. This release is the second volume of Mudboy BEATS (series II) feat. DJ Jassy Jexx, and mashes up heavy industrial drone with Freakcore loops, drips and cuts. Two long tracks 20-minute tracks and 2 shorter 4-minute ones dissect heavy hitting bass, hip-hop & obscure sound clips, to construct homeless shelters for lost Burning Man’ers experimental minds.

-johnny darko

Four Songs & Ten Inches of the infinite underworld. Seattle is back on the map thanks to warm and fuzzy analog snail-tempo electro tripsperimental drone. Halloween is everyday for members Slicing, and Grandpa whose work never forgets to include a steady beat beneath the psychedelic layers of effects-laden guitars, feedback and illiterate ramblings. And that covers only the first two tracks on the A side. The B-side follows no rules, nor beat and is noisy like an autistic brain seizure. Think of any Japanese B horror movie, layer all their soundtracks and you’ll soon be opening up for slicing G. Dental drills, blister filled embolisms, and botched abortions as a giant mecha-warrior defends his title as world leader against the forces of wind, earth, fire, water and heart.

-johnny darko

Sorry, there is no sax as the cover art alludes, but plenty o’ speedy tempo, guitar sliding NO WAVE action by this Vancouver BC trio. A-tonally amped, shouting, gorilla style drum spasmatics. The vocals are rhythmically in tune with the drums and other parts of the song rather than offering and steady melody. Check out the included liner notes for you fill typewriter typo lyrics about guns, knives and snakes on one side, and a barrage of band live show posters on the other. During the last few years Shearing Pinx have shared the stage with Gay Beast, Animal, Twin, Lightning Bolt, Health, and Leviathans to name a few. They have an upcoming tour in April of 2008 with headliners AIDS Wolf. Overall, the Pinx sound is anti dance pop music for people who still wanna dance. Powerful screams quickly become trippy instrumentals as side A ends, with side B picking off right in the middle where they leave off. Some howling guitars, play tone plucking, silly slides sonically sweet stuff from Erin Ward (guitar), Jeremy Van Wyck (drums), Nic Hughes (vox/guitar), and Nic’s own label, Isolated Now Waves.

-johnny darko

Big hole, white label vinyl, limited, live performance by former Wolf Eyes member Aaron Dilloway and John Wiese of (Sunn O))) back in 2006 in the UK at a place known as Chislehurst Caves. These man-made caves stretch 22 miles long under the eastern suburbs near London, used for such things as mining chalk & flint, they were also used to shelter the Brits during WWII air raids. Even more interesting, the caves are speculated to have been used by the ancient Druids and also by the Romans and Saxxons. From this very rich background it would seem there was little left to accomplish until more recently when the caves began to be used as a music venue. Bowie, Pink Floyd, The Stones, and Hendrix have all played there, and now too have ear-piercingly experimentalists Dilloway and Wiese. Art noise meets electronic crunch. Three untitled tracks totaling over 8 minutes of pure noise in possibly one of the nosiest settings imaginable. Imagine sounds of Satan vs. television fuzz in a battle with loop pedals plummeting asunder with each attack. Frequencies so high they may reinvent hearing by broadening the spectrum of the human ear. Later sounds resemble background tones of the Atari 2600 game Wizards of War. Loopiness to the point of near locked groves, but leave your patience at the door as no track even reaches 5 minutes in length, distance or circumference.

-johnny darko

Limited press drone dream split between A side Cloudland Canyon of Germany and Midwesterners Mythical Beast. Instrumental track for the kraut droners on the front, while the flip features seductively sad vocals by Mythical Beast’s female lead singer Corinne Sweeney. Haunting and minimal with no drums, she is backed by guitarist Jeremiah Cowlin, and bassist Aaron Hawn. Very serious and depressed sounds without the look at me emo attitude of the mainstream. Slow and steady vintage sounds fill every crack with Sweeney’s low slumbering notes. Mythical Beast will be performing in the Not Not Fun SXSW showcase along with Pocahaunted & Robedoor March 20th 2009. Cloudland Canyon is an analog duo of early-era drone, mixing tribal beats with simple repetitive but building nowave vocal drones over 70’s kraut guitar much like psychsters Ash Ra Temple and Embryo. The only sad part is that they only contributed one track to this split, and it’s also at 45 RPM. Ignoring the lo-fi elements of the recording, their classic sound is massive and methodical, like a trance dance into sacrificial volcano. Faust and German Oak fans will like their work, which has also been released on the Holy Mountain and Kranky labels.

-johnny darko

Split Seattle dual-duo 7-Inch with the heavy gritty industrial strength drone of Sparkle Girl (Kurt D, & Jim E.) on the A side. Their track Hexis fuzzes out to near silence like explosions in space breaking the needle with such heavily distorted bass shaking and vibrating in your chest. A ghastly snowstorm of metal chains and barbed wire to then just end abruptly. Side B is Slicing Grandpa playing a stoner doom-ish hypnotic rawk track. Lo-fi recording and experimental sounds keep it real and out of the any metal genre, but you won’t get a sense of their true sound from this track. I still like it.

This is a 300 limited pressing re-release of a 1993 album featuring the duo from Seattle: Slicing (guitar, vocals) & Grandpa (drums). Noise trash fuzzy forgot what we did last night anger inspired happy holocaust mesh of surprisingly ear-friendly experimental music. The high pitch feedback isn’t as abrasive as say Yellow Swans, and you can still hear rock influence on this 7”. Side one starts out as a more drone-y experimental minimalist piece with a solemn march beat, but ends up with a rock sound, while side two begins as a rough live rock recording that slowly becomes more experimental ending with freak-out screams and glorious feed for your spine.
-johnny darko

This is a self-titled limited split 7” (33rpm) EP limited to 500 copies featuring Yellow Swans and The Goslings out on Not Not Fun Records as part of the bi-monthly Bored Fortress 7” series. The Yellow Swans untitled track is like a police chase on acid. You can sort of hear the sirens coming after you, but you can’t get all the sticky honey out of your ears. The guitars are freaky and cool and the scraping, static textures fit well with the vinyl. This side of the record ends without warning. So that was your warning. The Goslings track ‘Saw-Horse’ features demented, echoing, female vocals and a simple electronic drum beat in the background with haunting keyboard bass tones as well as slow hitting cymbals. It’s a much slower yet complex track with tempo changes, almost unexpected on a Yellow Swans release. You can buy the record here from The Goslings website.

Noise record solo project by Sailor Winters featuring loops and analog “black noise”. Combine side A and B to make the whole track. Play it on 45 rpm! Side A opens with a haunting drum beat echoing a hellish drone and joined with curdled, monotonous grunts, so distorted that one message becomes clear: It is coming from the seediest pits of hell! Tracks like this should replace the phony ’scary’ soundtracks of alien videogames like Doom and Halo. Try to imagine a lawnmower running over a high school marching band stuck in a pit of tar, sluggish and sticky but constant in its carnage. No samples were used on the album, and lyrics accompany the 7 inch insert.

-johnny darko

This album is a compiled remix of old works to get fans ready for the upcoming album: “Noon and Eternity” which will finally feature TLASILA as an octet with newest band members Andrew W.K. Don Fleming and Richard Russo. These reworked tracks span 15 or so albums from 1991-2006, beginning a new chapter for the band who has not released any original material since the original trio ended in 2002. Cuts are loopy grainy and crunchy with a mechanical robotic feel to them. Imagine being in a factory with robots shooting laser pens into your eyes. Frequent high pitch beeps keep your hands close to the volume controls with sound clips approaching unbearable levels at times. Some keyboard/piano clips accompany looped and half/eaten vocals, always surrounded by static, buzzing, churning and cyclical moving part sounds. The chaos & complexity of instrumentation makes sci-fi seem low-fi and empowers people who push buttons. Tom Smith and Thurston Moore could very well be the descendants of men who had to manually sound the alarm. Fine production and use of frequencies often create the sense of real world sounds occurring whirling around our heads. And then you realize its just Andrew WK bashing a bottle on your dome.

-johnny darko

Improv electronic experimental soundscapes, tracks range from chirping like insects, ringing, drum tones, keyboard ambience, click and pop, static and underwater ears plugged. Unlike loop or minimalistic music, Davignon engages attentive listeners to become lost in the relentless jams. There is no meter nor harmony, as tracks realistically represent the chaos of nature. Pieces tend to be echo heavy, with minimal looping giving the listeners a much more intense interaction. Production-wise, some intentional cd-skips are left throughout the disc and no fade-outs have tracks ending with a harsh aikido assassination. Track 4 has a great wet cave feel for the spelunker in all of us. The first 3 tracks reminds me of the noises that the tree branches make on your windows at night, or the clawing of zombies into flesh, harsh sandpaper toilet paper, like a cats tongue must feel on their orifices.

-johnny darko