I've been a bit ambivalent about Birchville Cat Motel this year. It's because of the extremely disappointing Seventh Ruined Hex that he released on Important last year. That record highlighted just how careful a drone artist has to be in injecting enough texture into their noise to keep the listener engaged. What Seventh Ruined Hex managed to do was bore the shit out of me. It had it's moments but those moments were few and far between. This year I drifted over to the recordings of Daniel Menche and I hadn't given Birchville Cat Motel's new output  a great deal of thought. I'm happy with the records of his I own  but his last release made me wary of dabbling again. 

Birchville Cat Motel release two different sort of records; the dark ambient rock pig records like Our Love Will Destroy the World and Bird Sister Blasphemy and the blissed, transcedent, drone ambience of Birds Call Home Their Dead and Chi Vampires. I've always loved the field recordings he infuses into his sound and whether it's his drone or rock based recordings Birchvile Cat Motel is still one my favourite artists. Summers Seething Pulse is a record I never knew existed until three weeks ago. I have no idea how I stumbled over it but somehow during a late night surfing session I got directed to www.elsieandjack.com stumbled across this and I clicked that purchase button before I had time to think. Like most BCM records, Summer's Seething Pulse is beautifully packaged. It's limited edition and is on the elsieandjack sub-label Mar/ino which is all about the simple packaging of superb sounds. It's cheap as chips (even with the horrible exchange rate) and if you have any interest in Birchville Cat Motel it would be difficult to find a more tremendous example of his transcendent drone music than this record. The field recordings infuse the whole project with a pastoral elegance which few noise artists get right. These are the true sounds of a Southern hemisphere summer.  It is breathtaking and has stirred up all those amazing feelings I got when I first heard Birds Call Home Their Dead. I mean this is quite simply awesome. I've added elsieandjack to the blogroll. Buy this record. It's really that simple.

Sortie en janvier.

Tracklist :

1. In The Flowers

2. My Girls

3. Also Frightened

4. Summertime Clothes

5. Daily Routine

6. Bluish

7. Guys Eyes

8. Taste

9. Lion In A Coma

10. No More Runnin

11. Brothersport

The author (going by the name Heller Drone) puts it this way, keeping with the highwater metaphor:

"We don’t need to be rescued - we just need to be given the proper tools to get to shore on our own.  And those tools are that to which we are entitled and should expect to receive from the management of a once world-class law firm."

The blog was set up as "a support site for the professional support staff of a global law firm in turmoil" and notes how what he is doing is "a reminder of ... how a lack of preparation, forward-thinking, open communication and honesty led to the downfall of a workplace one could be proud of."

Where have we heard this before? The lack of open communication leading to a crash.

What I like most is the policy they wish to uphold, that says the blog will not tolerate badmouthing or be a place for diatribes. It is after all a safe harbor.

Great job, Drone!

Depuis quelques jours, je n'écoute que des bons disques ou des disques qui me plaisent presque tous instantanément : le CDR de KTL, l'album de Suarasama, celui de Spykes. Et maintenant, celui-ci : un disque court (12 minutes par face, 6 ou 7 morceaux au total), enregistré par un duo de Melbourne, Fabulous Diamonds. Le disque est édité par les américains Siltbreeze (Dead C a sorti des disques chez eux, pour ceux qui connaissent cet excellent groupe).

Fabulous Diamonds joue avec des orgues, un saxophone en arrière boutique, du rythme, pas mal de delays partout, des voix un peu âpres qui évoquent Pram en moins énervant, des grooves qui hésitent entre Liquid Liquid et Can ou Terry Riley époque mescaline, mais coupée avec de la vieille bière. Les compositions s'arrêtent vite, du coup, je retourne les faces pour replonger de l'autre côté, je le fais sans arrêt, par moment, je me trompe, je remets le même bout. Je ne sais plus où j'en suis. La beauté de ce groupe réside dans son sens de la temporalité, sa façon de savoir s'arrêter et de m'obliger à ne pas le quitter, comme un livre trop court qu'on relirait sans cesse pour comprendre ce qui nous aurait échappé la première fois.

gaze alicate para
sutura mais gaze
oxigênio perdemos ele.

prurient at last.fm

Les disques d'Alice Coltrane sont tous assez merveilleux. J'affectionne particulièrement celui-ci parce qu'il possède quelque chose d'hybride et d'inconvenant, mixant jazz et musique classique. Alice y reprend en compagnie d'un orchestre à cordes des partitions de Stravinsky. Planant et virevoltant avec douceur, le disque devient d'un coup free et fou, quelques secondes avant de repartir vers des hauteurs plutôt délétères. Son dernier morceau, un traditionnel intitulé Going Home, résonne comme une berceuse à la Spiritualized, un moment d'éternité suspendue. Je n'oublie pas la fois où j'ai parlé avec Alice Coltrane au téléphone pendant 30 minutes, elle était en vie, dans une autre vie.

http://cors.bgohio.org/jake/Surrent-gadgug.mp3 [MP3/320]
ambient, drone, experimental, noise (15:33)

[/caption]

http://cors.bgohio.org/jake/Surrent-LittleInternets.zip [MP3/320]
ambient, drone, experimental, noise (57:49)

[/caption]

http://cors.bgohio.org/jake/Surrent-20080107.zip [MP3/320]
ambient, drone, experimental, noise (34:01)

http://cors.bgohio.org/jake/Surrent-Wastrel-lo.zip [MP3/128]
ambient, drone, experimental, noise (53:15)

Ett projekt som föddes ur askan av satan. En mörk oktoberkväll
slogs ett piano, några stråkar samt ett jävla väsen ihop.
Ett mörkt dronelandskap skapades där varje ljus förblir mörkerlagt.
Första epn finns nu till försäljning. Innehållande två spår på tjugo
minuter speltid. "Det ruttnande köttets oavlåtliga lusta" är bara början.
Nytt material kommer inom kort.
Total domedag utlåvas.

Nytt projekt ifrån mig. Basigt och svårt. Ta en titt, helt gratis!!

------------------------------------------

Artist - Man.that.noise
Album - Det ruttnande köttets åavlåtliga lusta
År - 2008
Genre - Drone Noise Electonica

Tracklist
1. Nada es seguro
2. Oak tree

------------------------------------------

LADDA NER

I doubt I can do better than the mini-review of Growing's All the Way that appears on the cover sticker: "Two mates pissing about with effects", attributed to 'Some bloke in Bristol'. Succinct and to the point, I think you'd agree.

I've obviously come to Growing late given the amount of releases detailed here. Then again I've always been late to various musical parties throughout my fan years. Still, All the Way is a great serving of electronic looping experimental/improv that I'm glad I've found.

Opener ‘Green Flag' is more weird rainforest than roadside rescue: sliced droning vibrato guitars interspersed with strange machinic frog calls. On the fantastically entitled ‘Rave Pie Only' the looped guitars sound like they are connected to a dodgy amp or badly wired cable whilst being played down a mobile with poor reception. And this time they are caught in the cross-fire of proper B-movie sounding laser guns.

For Fennesz and/or Fuck Buttons fans this is hypnotic, peculiarly melodic and intense stuff. Worth a punt.

Green Flag

Rave Pie Only

Enlarge yourself here. Official website here.

angrybonbon

Perhaps simply calling it drone is a bit misleading, since it's not like L'autre consists of nothing but drones.  Dark ambient seems just as good a descriptor, even though the band doesn't come from the proper "scene" for that.  But it is quite dark and undoubtedly ambient (if you assume ambient music means beatless music).

The album opens with about 12 minutes of super-low bass rumblings interspersed with desolate notes plucked on guitar.  For me it brings to mind an image of a man, a Jandek-like figure, perhaps, sitting in an empty field at night, several hundred meters from a major highway, pouring all his emotions into his guitar where no one can hear him as cars drive by in the distance.  Or maybe it's like a rural radio station from a small town, playing strange sounds in the middle of the night that nobody but a few motorists passing through the country will hear.  In fact, L'autre is actually quite similar to Bohren & der Club of Gore's Midnight Radio album.

Around the 12 minutes in the "midnight radio" theme is emphasized further when radio static is suddenly added to the mix.  Voices appear for a fraction of a second and then disappear again like ghosts, making you question whether they were really there in the first place.  The noise, like fog, provides cover for whatever unknown might be lurking underneath, but by the midpoint of the album, clearer — although no less frightening — sounds begin to emerge.

All the while the lonely guitarist is still playing, oblivious to the intensifying level of noise surrounding him.  Eventually brief but noticeably human screams enter the mix, each lasting no more than a second in length, maintaining the atmosphere of the album but causing it to teeter on the brink of cacophony.  Of course, by 35 minutes in the the sound of Et Sans has become very harsh — listening to it straight through might not make it evident, since the chaos comes slowly without being noticed, but skipping directly from the 6 minute marker to the 36 minute marker should make the sheer magnitude of L'autre's gradual evolution clear.  The deep bass has been augmented with a grinding drone, and hellish screeches seem to completely drown out any guitar that might still be present.  Finally, in the last two minutes there is relative peace — although still not on the level of the first two minutes.

I have to say I was very surprised by this one.  Before writing this review I had only given L'autre a few halfhearted listens without paying much attention, but now it's really shown itself to be a very well-contructed album that anyone into dark, moody, and minimal music should like.  I guess it's yet another album that rewards close listening.

Usually, when someone mentions military drones, we think of something much smaller and less intimidating than this monster. This is an Airforce Phantom II, retrofitted to be a computer controlled killing machine. Able to carry 18,000 pounds of stuff that goes boom, a single computer can control up to 6 of these in formation.

Sounds scary doesn't it?  Actually, though these are capable of being offensive, they are mainly used for target practice. These are decommissioned units that have been fixed up and modified to be radio controlled.

[via BotJunkie]

Lung Cleaner runs about 57 minutes and consists of four tracks, the shortest of which is eight minutes long and the longest 20 minutes.  It is a noise and drone album, but Deutsch is from a more academic background, so maybe he'd use terms like "avant garde" and "sound art" to describe it.  Those words are just as good, I suppose.  On the liner notes he lists his sound sources as "wine glasses, baby toys, pure tones, bells, music boxes, gears, water, etc.", and the diversity of those sources is reflected in the diversity of the music presented here.  And a such a colorful palette of sounds is certainly something I look for in a noise album.

Even though I'm calling this a "noise album", it's definitely no Sheer Hellish Miasma in terms of the amount of utter chaos.  It's really a lot more like the Fe-Mail album I reviewed earlier: organic, almost like a field recording, like the sounds that would naturally occur at a certain location.  "Nice Day, Some Rain", the first track, is the harshest on the album, but still quiet tame when compared to the heavier noise artists.  At its peak it's a mass of grinding metal on metal, but elsewhere you can hear what sound like squeaky wheels, dripping water, animal sounds, turning cranks — the sounds Deutsch listed in the notes call all probably be heard hear fairly intact. "Dizzy From the Cold Meds" is also somewhat harsh at times, especially towards the beginning, but as the piece progresses the noise subsides, giving way to a collection of tiny, insect-like electronic sounds, providing a good transition into the similarly lifelike "Coughing the Lung Cleaner".  It opens with the clanging of pots and pans, but within a few minutes the sounds morph into something much more otherworldly, like an R2D2-style language, where different tones have different meanings, spoken by living beings.  "Sleep Fields (Go to Sleep)" continues down the path away from noise and drone and towards sparser sounds, reminiscent of works by early electronic musicians like Tod Dockstader and even more recent artists such as Asmus Tietchens.

I think it's a great album.  Like most noise music, Lung Cleaner took a while for me to get into, but stuff like this is really what I enjoy most from the genre.  The diverse, ever-changing sounds are arranged with tons of attention to detail so that an in-depth listen will never go unrewarded.

We wrote about [Chris Anderson] before when he released the Arduino based autopilot. He has since crashed his first Predator UAV, due to an underpowered motor and poor control of the v-tail only steering. He has since released a pro version of the autopilot controller, and is modifying this UAV Predator drone kit to work with it. One ATMega168 processor handles flying and the other handles GPS navigation, but because they work together, it results in a fully autonomous drone. He also has a BlimpDuino version we have covered before.

Britain’s political conference season of 2008 will be remembered as The Great Silence. Politicians have come and gone and their mouths have moved in front of large images of themselves, and they often wave at someone. There has been lots of news about each other. Adam Boulton, the political editor of Sky News, and billed as “the husband of Blair aide Anji Hunter”, has published a book of gossip derived from his “unrivalled access to No 10”. His revelation is that Tony Blair’s mouthpiece told lies. The war criminal himself has been absent, but the former mouthpiece has been signing his own book of gossip, and waving. The club is celebrating itself, including all those, Labour and Tory, who gave the war criminal a standing ovation on his last day in parliament and who have yet to vote on, let alone condemn, Britain’s part in the wanton human, social and physical destruction of an entire nation. Instead, there are happy debates such as, “Can hope win?” and, my favourite, “Can foreign policy be a Labour strength?” As Harold Pinter said of unmentionable crimes: “Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”

The Guardian’s economics editor, Larry Elliott, has written that the Prime Minister “resembles a tragic hero in a Hardy novel: an essentially good man brought down by one error of judgement”. What is this one error of judgement? The bank- rolling of two murderous colonial adventures? No. The unprecedented growth of the British arms industry and the sale of weapons to the poorest countries? No. The replacement of manufacturing and public service by an arcane cult serving the ultra-rich? No. The Prime Minister’s “folly” is “postponing the election last year”. This is the March Hare Factor.

Reality can be detected, however, by applying the Orwell Rule and inverting public pronouncements and headlines, such as “Aggressor Russia facing pariah status, US warns”, thereby identifying the correct pariah; or by crossing the invisible boundaries that fix the boundaries of political and media discussion. “When truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”

Understanding this silence is critical in a society in which news has become noise. Silence covers the truth that Britain’s political parties have converged and now follow the single-ideology model of the United States. This is different from the political consensus of half a century ago that produced what was known as social democracy. Today’s political union has no principled social democratic premises. Debate has become just another weasel word and principle, like the language of Chaucer, is bygone. That the poor and the state fund the rich is a given, along with the theft of public services, known as privatisation. This was spelt out by Margaret Thatcher but, more importantly, by new Labour’s engineers. In The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver? Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle declared Britain’s new “economic strengths” to be its transnational corporations, the “aerospace” industry (weapons) and “the pre-eminence of the City of London”. The rest was to be asset-stripped, including the peculiar British pursuit of selfless public service. Overlaying this was a new social authoritarianism guided by a hypocrisy based on “values”. Mandelson and Liddle demanded “a tough discipline” and a “hardworking majority” and the “proper bringing-up [sic] of children”. And in formally launching his Murdochracy, Blair used “moral” and “morality” 18 times in a speech he gave in Australia as a guest of Rupert Murdoch, who had recently found God.

A “think tank” called Demos exemplified this new order. A founder of Demos, Geoff Mulgan, himself rewarded with a job in one of Blair’s “policy units”, wrote a book called Connexity. “In much of the world today,” he offered, “the most pressing problems on the public agenda are not poverty or material shortage . . . but rather the disorders of freedom: the troubles that result from having too many freedoms that are abused rather than constructively used.” As if celebrating life in another solar system, he wrote: “For the first time ever, most of the world’s most powerful nations do not want to conquer territory.”

That reads, now as it ought to have read then, as dark parody in a world where more than 24,000 children die every day from the effects of poverty and at least a million people lie dead in just one territory conquered by the most powerful nations. However, it serves to remind us of the political “culture” that has so successfully fused traditional liberalism with the lunar branch of western political life and allowed our “too many freedoms” to be taken away as ruthlessly and anonymously as wedding parties in Afghanistan have been obliterated by our bombs.

The product of these organised delusions is rarely acknowledged. The current economic crisis, with its threat to jobs and savings and public services, is the direct consequence of a rampant militarism comparable, in large part, with that of the first half of the last century, when Europe’s most advanced and cultured nation committed genocide. Since the 1990s, America’s military budget has doubled. Like the national debt, it is currently the largest ever. The true figure is not known, because up to 40 per cent is classified “black” – it is hidden. Britain, with a weapons industry second only to the US, has also been militarised. The Iraq invasion has cost $5trn, at least. The 4,500 British troops in Basra almost never leave their base. They are there because the Americans demand it. On 19 September, Robert Gates, the American defence secretary, was in London demanding $20bn from allies like Britain so that the US invasion force in Afghanistan could be increased to 44,000. He said the British force would be increased. It was an order.

In the meantime, an American invasion of Pakistan is under way, secretly authorised by President Bush. The “change” candidate for president, Barack Obama, had already called for an invasion and more aircraft and bombs. The ironies are searing. A Pakistani religious school attacked by American drone missiles, killing 23 people, was set up in the 1980s with CIA backing. It was part of Operation Cyclone, in which the US armed and funded mujahedin groups that became al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The aim was to bring down the Soviet Union. This was achieved; it also brought down the Twin Towers.

On 20 September the inevitable response to the latest invasion came with the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. For me, it is reminiscent of President Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in 1970, which was planned as a diversion from the coming defeat in Vietnam. The result was the rise to power of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Today, with Taliban guerrillas closing on Kabul and Nato refusing to conduct serious negotiations, defeat in Afghanistan is also coming.

It is a war of the world. In Latin America, the Bush administration is fomenting incipient military coups in Venezuela, Bolivia, and possibly Paraguay, democracies whose governments have opposed Washington’s historic rapacious intervention in its “backyard”. Washington’s “Plan Colombia” is the model for a mostly unreported assault on Mexico. This is the Merida Initiative, which will allow the United States to fund “the war on drugs and organised crime” in Mexico – a cover, as in Colombia, for militarising its closest neighbour and ensuring its “business stability”. Britain is tied to all these adventures – a British “School of the Americas” is to be built in Wales, where British soldiers will train killers from all corners of the American empire in the name of “global security”.

None of this is as potentially dangerous, or more distorted in permitted public discussion, than the war on Russia. Two years ago, Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian Studies at New York University, wrote a landmark essay in the Nation which has now been reprinted in Britain.* He warns of “the gravest threats [posed] by the undeclared Cold War Washington has waged, under both parties, against post-communist Russia during the past 15 years”. He describes a catastrophic “relentless winner-take-all of Russia’s post-1991 weakness”, with two-thirds of the population forced into poverty and life expectancy barely at 59. With most of us in the West unaware, Russia is being encircled by US and Nato bases and missiles in violation of a pledge by the United States not to expand Nato “one inch to the east”. The result, writes Cohen, “is a US-built reverse iron curtain [and] a US denial that Russia has any legitimate national interests outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin former republics such as Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia. [There is even] a presumption that Russia does not have fully sovereignty within its own borders, as expressed by constant US interventions in Moscow’s internal affairs since 1992 . . .  the United States is attempting to acquire the nuclear responsibility it could not achieve during the Soviet era.”

This danger has grown rapidly as the American media again presents US-Russian relations as “a duel to the death – perhaps literally”. The liberal Washington Post, says Cohen, “reads like a bygone Pravda on the Potomac”. The same is true in Britain, with the regurgitation of propaganda that Russia was wholly responsible for the war in the Caucasus and must therefore be a “pariah”. Sarah Palin, who may end up US president, says she is ready to attack Russia. The steady beat of this drum has seen Moscow return to its old nuclear alerts. Remember the 1980s, writes Cohen, “when the world faced exceedingly grave Cold War perils, and Mikhail Gorbachev unexpectedly emerged to offer a heretical way out. Is there an American leader today ready to retrieve that missed opportunity?” It is an urgent question that must be asked all over the world by those of us still unafraid to break the lethal silence.

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=503

The main sound sources on Yours Gray are field recordings.  While Hum also used field recordings, here they often seem a good deal less "treated", which tends to make the album a bit less accessible when compared to her more recent work.  The first track, which features Asuna, is the most similar to the material on Hum, with its soft ambient tones, field recordings of birds and water.  It's quite nice and relaxing, actually, but once the track ends the album takes a turn for more experimental territory.

Asuna appears on "A Message From Bed of the Sea" as well.  It's a strange little piece, with a funny melodic loop that sounds a like a lo-fi tape recording of a flute or something being played in reverse, continuing for essentially the entire track as a shimmering drone and CD-skipping glitches rise up in the background.  "Petit garçon" is the first longer track of the album, more than seven minutes, and it's one of those tracks that you'll need to listen very carefully to in order to get anything out of it — it's very, very quiet, so you might even have to turn up your speakers a bit to fully hear the intricacies.  About a third of the way in a very deep, simple sinewave drone enters, and gradually other tones reveal themselves, layering on top of each other to create an spooky effect.  On "Hole", Kiyoharu Kuwayama is credited with "water, sand, shortwave radio, and clock", but the result sounds more like pebbles being dropped on a metal plate; it's sonically interesting but fairly harsh, so if you turned up the volume for the last track you might be in for a bit of a shock.  "Cache Cache" is based on a field recording that included a performance from Toshimaru Nakamura.  The performance, which was perhaps taking place across the street or down the block from where Sawako was recording, consisted of simple sine tones, able to carry themselves long distances and be picked up by her microphones.  The tones are high-pitched and at times even grating, but over the course of 11 minutes she is able to weave wide range of sounds together while (I assume) keeping the general sound of the recordings intact.  "Night Midlight" is easier on the ears, using processed piano recordings from Mitchell Akiyama to create a calm, atmospheric piece not too dissimilar to the pieces on later Sawako albums.  "Go to Ocean" closes the album with more sounds from the Nakamura performance, although this time they only make fleeting appearances amongst the sounds of the ocean and passing trains and cars.

Those seeking the ambient bliss of Sawako's more recent albums will probably the at least a little disappointed with Yours Gray.  It's a more challenging album than you might expect, but if you're into field recordings and organic, lifelike sounds, I think it can be a rewarding experience.