-
-
PlayThe Blood Brothers - Love Rhymes With Hideous Car Wreck
-
Black Sabbath in the studio, 1970.
-
Play -
This is what 100 droning keyboards sound like.
Kills me to type this string of words, but “acoustic funeral drone” is actually what Onibaba does and damned if this trio ain’t creeping up next Halloween’s mixtape. Demon Haunted World is like an alternate soundtrack to Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s psychedelic nightmare House.
Oh, hey, it’s an unreleased Pig Destroyer track circa Phantom Limb sessions, it’s super droney and your $10 supports the college fund of a little girl who just lost her dad. I’m into that.
Anti-Gravity Bunny is one of my favorite blogs on the Internets. Justin Snow’s enthusiasm for ambient, drone, sound art and noise is extremely contagious, and he’s turned me onto some spectacular material.
This is why you should download ABG’s 5 Year Anniversary Comp featuring unreleased tracks by Mike Shiflet, Kyle Bobby Dunn, Superstorms, Lawrence English, High Aura’d and many more. Get dronin’.
Sometimes NPR Music likes to keep the year-end list deal tidy. Top 10. No more, got it? I get it: wheat, chaff, etc. You can read my opening spiel and blurbage for my top 10 “outer sound” records of 2012 there, but get everything else here. At some point, these things just become bullet points of the dumb stuff I listened to, so these are the records that I really hated to cut, feel me?
The list in alphabetical order because ranking is silly. There are also links to stream full albums where available. And by year’s end, I’ll publish my personal top 25 here — you know, the one with “Call Me Maybe” on it (seriously).
The “top ten”…
- Aaron Dilloway, Modern Jester [Hanson]
- Holly Herndon, Movement [RVNG Intl.]
- Jason Lescalleet, Songs About Nothing [Erstwhile]
- Motion Sickness Of Time Travel, Motion Sickness Of Time Travel [Spectrum Spools]
- Ricardo Donoso, Assimilating The Shadow [Digitalis]
- Richard Skelton, Verse Of Birds [Sustain Release]
- Scott Walker, Bish Bosch [4AD]
- Six Organs Of Admittance, Ascent [Drag City]
- Swans, The Seer [Young God]
15 more for a neat 25…
- Black to Comm, Earth [De Stijl]
- Clint Heidorn, +33° 58’ 41.85”, -117° 49’ 13.74” (The Oak Tree) [self-released]
- Daniel Bachman, Seven Pines [Tompkins Square]
- Demdike Stare, Elemental [Modern Love]
- Gunn-Truscinski Duo, Ocean Parkway [Three Lobed]
- High Aura’d, Sanguine Futures [Bathetic]
- Jon Mueller, Death Blues [Taiga]
- Julia Holter, Ekstasis [RVNG Intl.]
- Keiji Haino / Jim O’Rourke / Oren Ambarchi, Imikuzushi [Black Truffle]
- Keith Fullerton Whitman, Generators [Editions Mego]
- Kyle Bobby Dunn, Bring Me The Head Of Kyle Bobby Dunn [Low Point]
- Lee Gamble, Diversions 1994-1996 [Pan]
- Mike Shiflet, Merciless [Type]
- Nicholas Szczepanik, We Make Life Sad [WeMe]
- Panabrite, Soft Terminals [Digitalis]
- Superstorms, Superstorms [Experimedia]
Bonus: 5 reissues/archival releases…
- Don Cherry, Organic Music Society [Caprice]
- John Cage, Shock [EM]
- Maggi Payne, Ahh-Ahh [Root Strata]
- Pauline Oliveros, Reverberations: Tape & Electronic Music [Important]
- Tsege Mariam Gebru, Spelt Eigene Komposition [Mississippi]
Slowly, but surely, I’m going to get the whole Thor’s Rubber Hammer catalog on Bandcamp because A) Bandcamp rules, B) thorsrubberhammer.com is dead. In the meantime, here’s Last Winter We Didn’t Sing, a timely winter-themed compilation that I produced in 2008 featuring original tracks and blissed-out carols by Nicholas Szczepanik, Greg Davis, Scott Tuma, Susan Alcorn, Fabio Orsi, Beggin’ Your Pardon Miss Joan, Chartreuse, and what might be one of my favorite sad-n-snowy songs of all time, The Instruments’ “Last Holiday.” You can also also buy a physical CD (with Ariel Kitch’s beautiful illustration screen-printed on thick cardboard) of Last Winter We Didn’t Sing here.
(Also on Spotify, Rdio, iTunes, Amazon, Other Music digital, etc.)
I played the E-flat tuba in high school, which I hated, but I was always drawn to the deep, vibrating brass of the instrument. A couple months ago, I wondered out loud (on Twitter) if there was such a thing as “tuba drone.” You know, drone music made by tubas. It’s a silly idea that just makes so much sense. But of the musicians suggested, none seemed more promising than ORE.
Beyond Tree and Stone, on first listen, is pretty much what I want out of such a thing: Long, bass clef-rattling tones from a pair of brass-breathed players. The subtle use of organ and electronics is a nice touch, even complimenting and bedding the deep. And ORE doesn’t resort to distortion, a cheap ploy by string players in the metal world looking for an edge. Screw that. The tuba presses the valves of hell and ORE is its hydraulic pump.
Oh, to live inside Locrian’s blast beaten, kaleidoscopic nightmare…
Richard Skelton sure does make perfect music for sick days. His new work, “Cappanawalla,” relies on deep forest drones as usual, but adds a little high-pitched skree throughout.
