Blackest Ever Black
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Blackest Ever Black presents Sleep Heavy, the debut album of broken-hearted, downtempo R&B/street-soul and supremely atmospheric, introspective electronics from Jabu: a trio comprised of vocalist/lyricists Alex Rendall and Jasmine Butt, and producer Amos Childs.Visit product page →
The group was born out of Bristol's Young Echo collective: an ecosystem unto itself which has birthed and nurtured a number of other notable soundsystem-rooted projects and artists to date including Kahn & Neek, Sam Kidel, Ishan Sound, Ossia, Asda, Chester Giles (the title Sleep Heavy comes from a giles poem) and Killing Sound (Childs with Kidel and Vessel).
Jabu's previous 7' singles, though arresting, barely hinted at the level of accomplishment and emotional heft that Sleep Heavy delivers. It's a future Bristol classic with a universal resonance, with songs that are highly personal but deeply relatable, and tripped-out, time-dissolving sound design that both haunts and consoles. It is, first and foremost, a meditation on grief, on loss, making sense of separation and death; but it also looks forward to what might come after the aftermath: healing, acceptance, the chance to begin again.
Childs is one of the most gifted producers of his generation and his work here, grounded in hip-hop but floating free, is a thing of sustained wonder: crepuscular, melancholic - funereal, at times - subtly psychedelic and heavily dubwise, but always concise and purposeful. Stitched together from deep-dug and beautifully repurposed samples, it draws on influences from US R&B to Japanese art-pop minimalism - Mariah to Mariah Carey, if you will - and a rich seam of underground UK soul, boogie, DIY/post-punk, library music and lovers rock; refining and reconstituting these inputs into powerfully immersive, emotionally ambiguous soundscapes as eloquent and engaging as they are understated and bottomlessly mysterious.
There is also of course a distant connection to the Bristol blues of Smith & Mighty and the sultry urban gothic of Protection-era Massive Attack, but Jabu's orchestration of womb-like ambiences, cold synth tones and brittle beats feel entirely sui generis. They provide the perfect setting for Rendell's wounded, imploring and carefully weighted vocals, which are no less extraordinary: nodding to giants like Teddy Pendergrass and The Temptations in terms of phrasing and front-and-centre vulnerability, with something of The Associates'Billy Mackenzie in there too; defeated but defiant.
Meanwhile Jas's heavenly interventions, sometimes leading but more often parsed and layered into tremulous, gossamer abstraction, draw a line between the Catholic choral harmonies of her childhood and the ethereal, oceanic sweep of Cocteau Twins. Oceanic is the word: this is music to drown, and drown gratefully, in.By its end, Sleep Heavy's world-weariness is intact and scarcely diminished, but some light has been admitted, and is visible from the sea-floor. A chance, not a promise. Something to swim towards.
Tracklisting:
1. Let Me Know
2. Tomb
3. Get
4. Fool If
5. Bones
6. On
7. Searc
8. Wounds
9. Which Way
10. Lay You Down
11. Give
Release Date: 29/09/2017 -
Antigravity is a new trio album from legendary trumpeter Jac Berrocal and two fellow travellers in the French avant-garde, David Fenech and Vincent Epplay. A lugubrious mise-en-scène in which ice-cold outlaw jazz meets musique concrète, DIY whimsy and dubwise studio science, all watched over by the lost souls and hungry ghosts of rock n roll The Berrocal/Fenech/Epplay trio's first album together, Antigravity is a richly imagined universe combining original compositions and détourned standards.Visit product page →
Berrocal revisits his own signature piece Rock 'n Roll Station', which first appeared on his '77 LP Paralleles with chain-wielding, leather-clad wildman of British rock n roll, Vince Taylor, singing the lead, and Berrocal on mic'd up bicycle; here, the Frenchman takes the vocal reins.
A barely recognisable interpretation of Talking Heads'The Overload'pushes beyond the bush of ghosts into a fourth world dread-zone of stalking drum machine rhythms, humid electronics and jagged guitar phrasing, while Where Flamingos Fly'reroutes the Gil Evans Orchestra's classic rendition through the seamiest back-streets of the 13th arrondissement; there, as on the trio's reading of Kinder Lieder', the mood is romantic, but stark, isolationist: imagine Chet Baker falling through the glacial sound-world of early PiL or Scott Walker's Climate of Hunter.
Originals include the agitated Iberian psychedelia of Spain', and Panic In Bali', which begins in seemingly trad-jazz fashion only to swell into a cacophony of a gurgling electronics and fevered Lonely Woman'quotations. Solaris'is a swirling, suspenseful arabesque of whiplash guitars and Black Ark FX, Berrocal's trumpet hitting deep blue notes while his vocals are sliced and diced and tossed into a yawning void of tape-delay - like Antigravity at large, the result is oblique, dissolving, forever out of reach.
Despite the chilly, sometimes austere mood of the album, it is, ultimately, a deeply human and welcoming work, with a playfulness and sly humour pervading: see the anarchic cross-hatch of Ife Layo', or L'essai des Suintes ou le bal des Futaies', Berrocal's poetic disquisition on the infinite variety of female genitalia.
Mischief and misdirection are rife here, and fans of Officer!, Henry Cow and the ReR axis will find much to chew on. Play, as we know, is a serious business. Put another way, and to quote Berrocal entirely out of context, Antigravity is completely crazy, completely timeless, completely out.
As its title suggests, the objective is nothing less than lift-off, weightlessness, a total unshackling from earth. Sunglasses on, collar up, let's go.
Tracklisting:
Vinyl LP:
Side A:
1. Nanook
2. The Overload
3. Panic In Bali
4. Rock n Roll Station
5. Where Flamingoes Fly
Side B:
1. Kinder Lieder
2. Tsouking Chant
3. La Valse des Lilas
4. Nanooks
5. Solaris
6. Ife L'ayo
7. Spain
8. Riga Centraal
CD:
1. Nanook
2. The Overload
3. Panic In Bali
4. Rock n Roll Station
5. Where Flamingoes Fly
6. Kinder Lieder
7. Tsouking Chant
8. La Valse des Lilas
9. Nanooks
10. Solaris
11. Ife L'ayo
12. Spain
13. Riga Centraal
14. L'essai des suintes ou le bal des futaies (CD only) -
'Six Harmonies', the febrile opener from Killing Sound's recent EP double-pack (BLACKEST028), refashioned as a shapeshifting, shark-eyed junglist wrecker.Visit product page →
Nine minutes of pure dread at 180, cut by Matt Colton at half-speed for maximum dancehall pressure.
A one-sided 12" release.
Tracklisting:
1. $ixxx Harmonie$ Version -
Sold outVisit product page →The alias of Welsh-born, California-based Brian Williams, Lustmord first emerged as an associate of SPK in the early '80s, before embarking on a solo career that has yielded such classics as Heresy (1990), The Place Where The Black Stars Hang (1994) and (with Robert Rich) Stalker (1995).
Lustmord has also contributed to numerous Hollywood films as music and sound designer, and collaborated with the likes of Clock DVA, Chris & Cosey, Geir Jenssen, The Melvins, Tool, Aaron Turner, Monte Cazazza and Coil's John Balance. Often seen to epitomize dark ambient, it would be more accurate to say that his work simply goes deeper, further, than conventional ambient dares, or is able, to go. Half a decade in the making, The Word As Power is his new studio album and an exploration of ritual music without dogma.
For the first time in his 33-year career Lustmord places vocals at the centre of his abyssal ambient creations, coaxing incantatory performances out of Aina Skinnes Olsen, Jarboe (ex-Swans), Maynard James Keenan (Tool) and Soriah. Those looking to properly decode the subject matter of the album are advised to study Simon Fowler's fiendishly elaborate, double-spread cover illustration. Suffice it to say here that it concerns "the word" as written - signs, ciphers, symbology, semantics, etymology - and as spoken - myths, mantras, chants, invocation and evocation.
Of course it's also about the unwritten, the unspoken; that which exists beyond the reach of language. Sonically, The Word As Power is even more detailed, expansive and consuming than Lustmord's followers have come to expect, with voices, electronics, immense sub-bass, field recordings and other acoustic phenomena harnessed and arranged to stimulate feelings of dread and desolation, certainly, but also escape, renewal and rebirth..
Tracklisting:
1. Babel
2. Goetia
3. Chorazin
4. Grigori
5. Andras Sodom
6. Abaddon
7. Y Gair -
Five tracks of darkside slither from somewhere under London. Sidereal downers for all hardcore ravers. The dread energy of grime and bleep techno distilled into pungent electro-acoustic ooze.Visit product page →
Paranoid street music meets the cosmic disturbances of musique concrete, the spine-freeze of isolationism and England's Hidden Reverse.
Staccato string stabs, murmured voices, black holes of reverb and pulverising, body-numbing bass. Drums optional. Unwanted side-effects include nosebleeds, earaches, stomach cramps, and nausea. Just say naaahhh.
Tracklisting:
1. Blooz
2. Empty Rituals
3. My Theme
4. Neck Devour
5. Theme 2 -
Blackest Ever Black presents to youDead Unique, an album by Officer! recorded in 1995 but - outrageously, inexplicably - never before released into the public domain. This then is not a reissue or a revival; it's a new record that just happens to have been maturing in the cask for, oh, a little shy of 20 years. It also happens to be a lost classic of English art-rock, and the crowning achievement in the career of its mercurial creator, Mick Hobbs.Visit product page →
Londoner Hobbs'roots are in the fecund RIO scene of the late 70s and early 1980s, initially as guitarist in The Work (alongside Bill Gilonis, Rick Wilson and Henry Cow's Tim Hodgkinson), and subsequent related groupings The Lowest Note, The Lo Yo Yo, and The Momes. Over the course of the decade he became closely associated with This Heat and their Cold Storage studio in Brixton, working with the likes of Flaming Tunes, Family Fodder, Catherine Jauniaux and Zeena Parkins, to name but a few.
Officer! - the project that this incorrigible collaborator and connector calls his own - surfaced in 1982 with a cassette tape entitled Eight New Songs By Mick Hobbs.
It marked the blossoming of a singular writer and improvisor, with a gift for plangent melody, ingenious arrangement and lyrics at once caustic and courtly, playful and profound (two songs from this tape, Life At The Water's Edge'and Dogface', have been remastered for a limited edition 7' release on Blackest Ever Black later this year).
The Cold Storage-recordedOssification LP arrived a year later, followed by Cough (1985) and Yes Yes No No Yes No Yes (1988). Megaphone Records, responsible for Ossification's recent 30th anniversary reissue, rightly describe it as 'one of the most unusual, pleasurable and character-filled pop'records anyone has heard - ¦a timeless anomaly in the history of recorded music.'
By the start of the 1990s Hobbs had joined Jad Fair's Half Japanese (he continues to play in that group as well as Strobe Talbot, a trio with Fair and Benb Gallaher). In the early months of '95, Half Japanese were in Baltimore to record their Hot LP; Hobbs stayed on to cut the bulk of the songs that comprise Officer!'s Dead Unique - songs drawn from a rich store of material written and refined in the seven years since the band's last outing - with a talented assemblage of local and visiting musicians.
Returning to the UK, Hobbs brought the tracks to producer Julia Brightly to mix at her 16-track home studio in Bethnal Green; by the end of the summer,Dead Unique had taken shape. And then? Nothing. For reasons that no one, least of all Hobbs, can remember, Dead Unique was shelved, all but forgotten about until 2012, when Blackest Ever Black chanced upon it while trawling the Officer! archive maintained for Hobbs by Andrew Jacques. Finally, rightfully, on May 26th, 2014, the album will be made available to all for the very first time - on double-vinyl, CD and digital formats.
A complex but thrillingly immediate avant-pop song cycle that charms and confounds at every turn, Dead Unique will give immense pleasure not only to Officer!'s existing cult following, but to anyone with an appreciation of piquant, idiosyncratic songcraft - fans of Kevin Ayers, Flaming Tunes, Art Bears, Woo, Dislocation Dance, R. Stevie Moore, Robert Wyatt, Cleaners From Venus, Lol Coxhill or The Monochrome Set should especially pay attention. It touches upon ragged-raw rock n roll, sumptuous chamber music, pastoral folk, blowsy prog-jazz and paranoid dub-space, effortlessly shifting from skronking abstraction to rousing harmonic refrain and back again.
Dead Unique is also the culmination of Hobbs'lifelong collaborative impulse: his visionary ability to bring musicians together, galvanise them and wrestle coherence out of the collective free play of ideas, arriving at something far more than the sum of its parts.
The tension between composition and improvisation is key to the LP's power, with Hobbs abetted by an extraordinary supporting cast that includes Tim Hodgkinson (bass clarinet), Pleasant Livers'Fred Collins (vocals), Legendary Pink Dots'Patrick Q (violin), filmmaker/animator Martha Colburn (vocal), Gilles Rieder (drums), Jad Fair (vocals) and Jason Willett (bass, keyboards, trumpet).
Special mention must go to John Dierker, whose superbly expressive clarinet and saxophone parts are a fixture throughout, and to Joey Stack, who takes lead vocals on Good'and the show-stopping Elephant Flowers'. Nonetheless it is the voice of Hobbs - as principal writer, performer and protagonist of these songs - that resonates most powerfully. Blurring the roles of storyteller, poet and prankster, he turns memorable line after memorable line, booby-trapping them with mischievous puns, fleet-footed literary allusions, sudden digressions and shifts of register, nonsense rhymes and other wordplay.
But his acute wit and flair for the absurd is moored by a deep romantic sensibility, and though it delights in the minutiae of the human comedy, Dead Unique ultimately addresses its biggest themes: love, loss, commitment, independence, the mutability and inconstancy of all things. 'You lose, you learn, you advance - ¦but you always go back.'
Tracklisting:
1. Nest
2. Elephant Flowers
3. It Goes Up / Revenge
4. Go Back
5. Cows Hum In The Fields
6. Shrug / Good
7. Biteman
8. Nardis
9. Someone At The Door
10. Stewed Fruit
11. All I Got
12. V.I.M.
13. Bugs In Amber
14. Guess
15. The Pony Was Contented
16. Lilac And Orange
17. Clint -
Sold outHeavy-weather, beyond-good-and-evil soundsystem poetics, channelling raw and rootical techno, Isolationist abstraction, and dub at its most turbulent and raw-nerved and space-time-warping. New worlds ahead - ¦ Equal parts tuff, tail-thrashing dancehall pressure - see Hell Dub' - and art-of-darkness ambience and introspection, culminating in the slow-burning, third-eye-opening 23-minute dreamweapon, Vertigo'.Visit product page →
Part of the Young Echo crew, Ossia embodies the best tradition of Bristol underground music in that he doesn't pay much mind to tradition, just does his own thing. Yes, Devil's Dance shares DNA with those sullen masterpieces we will always associate with the city, from blunted 90s street-soul/hip-hop to sub-loaded dubstep - but like his forebears Ossia is ultimately a mongrel breed, drawing from his own, very contemporary and idiosyncratic well of influences: grime, jazz, steppers, dub, post-punk and industrial abrasion, concrète minimalism - ¦
Devil's Dance could easily be not just a forbidding, but a suffocating proposition. But even at its most angst-ridden it feels lithe and aerodynamic, its darker impulses both intensified, and offset, by a pure soundboy's delight in detail and colour and higher dancefloor mechanics. The music pulses with energy, a fever to communicate - ¦and Raki Singh (violin), Jasmine (vocals) and Ollie Moore (saxophone) add vivid flesh-tone to the punishing, plasmic electronics.
The record was mixed at an infamous, subterranean Bristolian recording studio, using an arsenal of spring and plate reverbs, modded pedals, tape-delays and compressors: systems of black magic crucial to the album's intense presence and physicality and carefully modulated dread.
In the end what we are witnessing, and experiencing vicariously, is a purging, an exorcism: find the devil, dance with the devil - ¦ and then chase, chase, chase him out of the earth.
Tracklisting:
1. Concrete
2. Radiation
3. Devil's Dance
4. Slow Dance
5. Dub Hell
6. Hell Version
7. Inertia
8. Vertigo -
Graciously welcoming the second full-length lp from Philadelphia's Jesse Dewlow, recording under the moniker People Skills. The follow-up to 2014's Siltbreeze set Tricephalic Head. Ten sunken songs, derisively adorned with rhythm and rudimentary dub effects. Bedroom elegies for the lost and irretrievable, last-ditch spells for transformation and renewal.Visit product page →
Thurston Moore and Byron Coley likened the previous record to 'South Island NZ pop played inside of an armored car', and that description holds here: underneath the hoods of these wracked and weather-beaten recordings are melodies of disarming beauty and optimism, bordering on the (wilfully) mawkish, bubblegum ground underfoot. Each piece as time-stopping and evocative as an old photograph of someone who used to mean something.
Whether speaking through stately keyboard pastorals (Mint Julep'), rat-arsed rock n roll slur (89¢ Public Render') or sulphurous aggro-electronics (the two-part title track), Gunshots At Crestridge exposes, then seeks to redeem, all our tiny acts of self-sabotage, all our sins against time. When to stay, when to go - ¦you never got it right, not once.
Tracklisting:
Side A:
1. Obstinate Truss
2. Gunshots at Crestridge
3. In the Mulch and Trimming
4. A Chain Undressed
5. Mint Julep
Side B:
1. Town of Diana
2. Gunshots at Crestridge II
3. 89¢ Public Render
4. Dust In The Old House
5. The Clock Player -
Sold outVisit product page →Mesmerising, moody-as-f**k new production from Pessimist, owning the dark blue space where icy drum’n’bass minimalism and sub-aquatic dub-techno meet. Perfect alignment of stripped, shadow-boxer drums, swooping drones and earth-shaking subs, with a thin layer of crackle and masterful use of silence…..you can hear the influence of Chain Reaction outliers, Source Direct, even early dark garage in there….but this is pure futurist blend. On the flip, the dense, dungeon rollage of ‘Orphic’, an effortless bridging of torques and tempos that builds on the radical groundwork of Regis, Felix K and Pessimist’s own Ruffhouse crew.
Following a run of fine solo work for Ingredients and Samurai Music among others, the Bristol-based producer and UVB-76 co-founder has truly excelled himself here, demonstrating both a subtlety and a ruthlessness that sets him apart from his peers. If you come across a deadlier record this year, let us know.
Tracklisting:
Side A:
Balaklava (7:04)
Side B:
Orphic -
With his ice-cold debut album Pessimist delivers a defining work which to us represents the culmination of nearly a decade of collective research and development in underground drum'n'bass. It is hard to think of any producer, past or present, who has so skilfully and successfully bridged the sonics and sensibilities of d'n'b and techno.Visit product page →
In fact Pessimist makes drum n bass work as techno: combining the monotone, infinite-horizon quality of the latter with the rhythmic swerve and soundsystem heft of the former.
The perfectly formed Balaklava'12' for BEB's A14 sub-label in 2016 was his first work to attract serious attention outside of d'n'b circles, but the young Bristol producer's singular aesthetic had been honed across important records for the likes of Samurai and Ingredients, and as a member of the Ruffhouse crew, and since then the experimentation has continued across releases and remixes for UVB-76, Osiris Music and Ilian Tape.
Cutting edge techno-dnb hybrids form the backbone of this, his first LP, but there's more to it than that. Out of its relentlessly noir, paranoid, smoked-out dubscape emerge fierce, Babylon-shall-fall jungle tear-outs (Through The Fog'); zoned, acidic rave (Peter Hitchens'); downtempo breakbeat excursions (Glued'); sleek and rude Balaklava'-esque steppers (Spirals'); and passages of bleak, bombed-out industrial ambience.
At times it feels like the missing link between British Murder Boys and Source Direct, or what might have happened if late 90s UK junglists had listened more closely to Chain Reaction. But really, it sounds like Pessimist and Pessimist alone.
The ruthless minimalism, and the tension which comes of that restraint; the swing and propulsion of the drum programming; the abyssal reverbs and long trails of delay; the deep and body-numbing sub-bass; the uncompromising palette of blacks and blues.
Tracklisting:
1. Intro
2. Bloom
3. Grit
4. Spirals
5. Glued ft. Loop Faction
6. War Cry
7. Peter Hitchens
8. No Matter What ft. Overlook
9. Through The Fog
10. Outro -
Visit product page →Order Now and get a Free Download of 'Dead Heat'
Raime's second album, Tooth, arrives June 10, 2016 on 2xLP, CD and digital formats.
The widescreen melancholia of their 2012 debut, Quarter Turns Over A Living Line, gives way to an urgent and focussed futurism, in the shape of eight fiercely uptempo, minimal, meticulously crafted electro-acoustic rhythm tracks. The DNA of dub-techno, garage/grime and post-hardcore rock music spliced into sleek and predatory new forms.
No let-up, no hesitation. Needlepoint guitar, deftly junglist drum programming, brooding synths and lethal sub-bass drive the engine. The production is immaculate, high definition. No hiss, no obscuring drones or extraneous noise: the music of Tooth is wide-open and exposed. The seeds of its supple dancehall biomechanics can be found in the self-titled 2013 EP by Raime side-project Moin, an ahead-of-its-time synthesis of art-rock and soundsystem sensibilities, but Tooth pushes the template further, binding the disparate elements together so tightly that they become indistinguishable from one another.
If Quarter Turns was an album that confronted total loss and self-destruction, even longed for it, then Tooth is the sound of resistance and counter-attack: cunning, quick, resolute; calling upon stealth as much as brute-force. At a time when so many pay lip service to experimentation without ever fully committing themselves or their work to it, Raime return from three years of deep, dedicated studio research with a bold and original new music: staunch, rude, and way out in front.
Tracklisting:
1. Coax
2. Dead Heat
3. Hold Your Line
4. Front Running
5. Dialling In, Falling Out
6. Glassed
7. Cold Cain
8. Stammer -
Sold outVisit product page →Blackest Ever Black release Deformed Worship, the second album by New York's Raspberry Bulbs, on August 5.
Since their debut LP Nature Tries Again (Hospital Productions, 2011) RB has grown from the solo project of M. del Rio (HWCT from Bone Awl) into a five-piece of extraordinary force and focus.
The first studio version of Deformed Worship was scrapped, and its songs re-recorded by the band on cassette 8-track in November 2012, before being mixed and mastered by Kris Lapke (Alberich).
Stomping, vicious and unrelenting. 9 songs. 30 minutes.
Raspberry Bulbs defies the constraints of classification but is often mistakenly labelled as a black metal band. It is not a black metal band.
Tracklisting:
1. Cracked Flesh
2. Lusty Climbing
3. When A Lie Becomes The Truth
4. Before Man
5. Standing In Line
6. By The Root
7. Groping The Angel's Face
8. Wild Inside
9. I Was Wrong -
Manbait is a survey of Regis' 2010-15 productions and remixes for Blackest Ever Black. As well as three originals (in several different versions) and his celebrated remixes of Raime, Vatican Shadow, Ike Yard and Dalhous, it features three previously unreleased tracks: a brand new Regis take on a lost song by his teenage synth-punk group Family Sex, an alternate mix of Tropic of Cancer's 'Plant Lilies At My Head', and a new edit of his own 'Blinding Horses'.Visit product page →
The 2LP edition features 8 tracks, including Family Sex and Tropic of Cancer, and the now rare sought-after Raime, Vatican Shadow and 'Blinding Horses' remixes. It also comes packages with a download code (MP3/FLAC) for all 12 tracks on the CD/Digital release.
With exquisite cover art (Survivir, 1987) by none other than Val Denham, this is an anthology that no conscientious stableboy or girl can refuse. Life hurts!
Vinyl 2xLP Tracklisting:
Side A:
1. Loss (Regis Version) - Ike Yard
2. He Was Human And Belonged With Humans (Regis Version) - Dalhous
Side B:
1. Church Of All Images (Regis Version) - Vatican Shadow
2. Manbait (Regis Version) - Family Sex
Side C:
1. Blinding Horses (Original 12' Mix) - Regis
2. C U 1 - CUB
Side D:
1. This Foundry (Regis Version) - Raime
2. Plant Lilies At My Head (Alternate Version) - Tropic of Cancer
CD Tracklisting:
1. Loss (Regis Version) - Ike Yard
2. He Was Human And Belonged With Humans (Regis Version) - Dalhous
3. Blood Witness (Original 12" Mix) - Regis
4. Church Of All Images (Regis Version) - Vatican Shadow
5. Manbait (Regis Version) - Family Sex
6. Blinding Horses (Original 12' Mix) - Regis
7. C U 1 - CUB
8. Blood Witness (Downwards Extended Version) - Regis
9. Plant Lilies At My Head (Alternate Version) - Tropic of Cancer
10. Blinding Horses (Turin Version) - Regis
11. This Foundry (Regis Version) - Raime
12. Blinding Horses (Stableboy Version) - Regis -
Sold outThe most important jazz album of 1964-65.Visit product page →
12" housed in die-cut sleeve. Vinyl-only release.
"Trust is good but control is better."
Tracklisting:
Side A:
The Master Side (Version 1)
Side B:
The Master Side (Version 2)
Release Date: 10/11/2017 -
"A new long-form offering of poignant, isolationist machine music from Secret Boyfriend.Visit product page →
Eschewing the cryptic and compact song-sketches that characterised his 2013 Blackest Ever Black LP, This Is Always Where You've Lived, Ryan Martin instead guides us through vast interior topographies and nerve-damaged ambiences that comfort and deceive like memory itself. Beginning with The Singing Bile' - minimal synth submerged and subjected to an almost oceanic pressure - the tracks are mostly crude, extended live improvisations, recorded straight to tape.
Martin's loose intention was to subtract himself from proceedings and 'let the music play itself', but the erasure is not quite complete: on the contrary, each piece feels distinctly authored, and charged with personal significance.
The atrophying loops of Memorize Them Well'broach the elegiac grandeur of Gas and William Basinski, while Paean Delle Palme'summons E.A.R., Af Ursin, and the clammy, opioid exoticism of :zoviet*france:*'s Just An Illusion.
The album is largely instrumental, but there are two weighty exceptions: the sprawling, drumbox-driven space blues of Little Jammy Centre'and the guileless yearning of Stripping At The Nail'.
This is electronic pop undressed, unravelled and mapped onto the infinite wave."
Tracklisting:
1. The Singing Bile
2. Little Jammy Center
3. They're Playing Themselves
4. Paean Delle Palme
5. Stripping At The Nail
6. Memorize Them Well -
Blackest Ever Black's last release of 2013 comes from Secret Boyfriend, the solo project of North Carolina's Ryan Martin, who is also one half of Boyzone (not that Boyzone, unfortunately) and founder of the Hot Releases label - a catholic endeavour that has seen him release records from the cream of the contemporary N.C. underground as well as reissuing classic sides by the likes of Maurizio Bianchi, Ghedalia Tazartes and Ashrae Fax.Visit product page →
To date, Secret Boyfriend's presence has been felt largely in the shape of live performances and short-run cassette releases (including Carved At Birth, Furnishing The Void and Skin On The Clock), as well as vinyl splits with Russian Tsarlag and Horaflora.
This Is Always Where You've Lived is SB's first LP release and unquestionably his most potent, fully realised work to date. Twelve songs from under the floorboards: a heart-rending but hard-edged synthesis of downer folk, tape experiments, noise etudes and basement-mildewed pop for edgeland fuck-ups, loners and wanderers; recommended if you like Peter Jeffries, Flaming Tunes, Storm Bugs, etc.
Arguably comes closer than any previous BEB release to articulating the 'mesmerised suburban daydreams of our youth".
Tracklisting:
1. Summer Wheels / Mysterious Fires
2. Silvering The Wing
3. Form Me
4. Flashback
5. Remarkable Fluids
6. Beyond The Darkness
7. Dream Scrape
8. Glint And Follow You
9. Have You Heard About This House?
10. Last Town
11. Deleted Hill
12. This Is Always Where You've Lived -
Sold outVisit product page →The Vienna-based trio's second LP to date, following 2013's crushing BEB debut Licht, Crack finds Peter Rehberg (Editions Mego), Christina Nemec (comfortzone) and Christian Schachinger leaving behind the post-everything in search of their very own neo-something: a powerful alloy of extreme electroacoustic music, luminous ambience and the mineral fundaments of rock and black metal. As before, they're staring down the void, but this time they're looking beyond it, too, for the fissures and faultlines that might let some light in.
Opener Spalt'immediately signals a departure from the monolithic doom of Licht, conveying instead a sense of adrenalised movement, of acceleration towards an ever-receding horizon. There is no percussion, yet Nemec's chasmic bass and Rehberg's protean electronics insistently eddy and modulate and give rise to an unstoppable momentum. Spalt'becomes a peculiarly wracked Autobahn chase, one where you're uncertain if you're the pursuer or the pursued. There seems to be some promise of escape in Schachinger's highly lyrical, spiralling guitar improvisations, which nod to Fripp and Goettsching, but Shampoo Boy's vision of the cosmos is more hard-boiled and unforgiving than that of their forefathers. There are some furies that can't be outrun.
If Spalt'dramatises a failed getaway then Riss'considers what happens if you do get away, only to find your hiding-place isn't quite as safe or secure as you had presumed it would be. A trap? Certainly you're being watched. Slow, ceremonial downstrokes suggest a return to the vast and uncanny woodland landscape in which the events of Licht unfolded. This time, though, the city impinges and intrudes upon the scene of pastoral unease: Rehberg seems to be scanning the airwaves, picking up unintelligible snatches of conversation and machine noise. These mingle with nameless natural currents to create pernicious hybrid forms, which curl and ricochet about the stereo field. Subterranean bass tones, meanwhile, seem to reverberate from an ancient and appalling source. The accumulation of noise and energy across 12 minutes becomes unbearably suspenseful; a reckoning seems inevitable. It is typical of Crack's unorthodox Weltanschauung, however, that just when we think the game is up, we are faced not with oblivion but with potential absolution: Riss''s closing section is a gravely serene tone-painting that clearly suggests the possibility, if not certainty, of rebirth and renewal. Perhaps you can start again after all.
But of course the game isn't up, and all roads lead to Side B: given in its entirety to the three-part Bruch', the most potent and pugilistic manifestation of Shampoo Boy's brute psychedelia to date. Part 1 is a near-gothic assemblage of tortured computer processing, abyssal drones and stray industrial noise. This gives way to the calm but agonised concrète of Part 2; sparse, minimalist and dub-damaged, it's the sound of Part 1's traumas remembered through a fog of painkillers. Before long, however, the medication falters and those traumas come back in to focus: so much so, that the broiling digital synthesis and annihilating slow-motion riffage of Part 3 come as a relief. For a while the thuggish monochord attack here feels almost Stooge-ian - grungy, swaggering, sewer-savvy - but it doubles back into abstraction, subsuming itself into the Shampoo Boy's larger, gravity-defying architectures of feedback. By this point it has become impossible to distinguish individual instruments, processes or contributions; the group mind has taken over, the third eye is on fire, and the album climaxes in a black flash of negative ecstasy.
Epic in scale, complex in mood and dazzling in technique, Crack is a momentous achievement from three improvising musicians at the height of their powers. A lived-in and emotionally-charged work, harrowing but energising, it digs deep, deep into the underworld to open up new lines of space-time enquiry. It is also a sustained achievement of arrangement and post-production remarkable even in light of its makers'pedigree: the harshest and heaviest passages are rendered with a sense of space and richness of detail that is truly otherworldly. Russell Haswell's astute mastering recognises and amplifies this, and the result is one of the most exhilarating and rewarding entries in the Blackest Ever Black catalogue.
Tracklisting:
1. Spalt
2. Riss
3. Bruch I-III -
Sold outLicht is the debut album by Shampoo Boy, a new guitar, bass and electronics trio from Vienna, comprising members Christian Schachinger, Christina Nemec and Peter Rehberg.Visit product page →
Schachinger and Rehberg have played together in various projects over the last 25 years, most notably Peterlicker - see Last Slave (2010) and Nicht (2011), both released on Editions Mego.
Schachinger was also involved in Der Scheitel, their album In einem Haus das Liebe heißt being a classic of German 'Schlagermusik'.
Rehberg currently operates the Editions Mego family of labels and is a member of KTL, R/S and Fenn O'Berg as well as working on theatre productions with Gisele Vienne, and with choreographer Margret Gudjonsdottir.
Nemec's background is in avant-rock and industrial outfits such as Bray and her own performance group SV Damenkraft. She remains highly active as a solo artist, both as Chra and under her own name, and she has performed on several occasions with Lydia Lunch.
Licht is made up of four improvisations recorded and mixed at Twisted, Wien between April 2012 and January 2013. Mastered by Noel Summerville at 3345, London. Artwork by Stephen O'Malley.
Tracklisting:
Side A:
1. Loch
2. Fall
Side B:
1. Gift
2. Still
