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Blackest Ever Black
Dalhous 'An Ambassador For Laing'
£11.99
Blackest Ever Black
Dalhous 'An Ambassador For Laing'
£11.99
An Ambassador For Laing is the debut album by Dalhous. Arriving in the wake of their recent 10", Mitchell Heisman, it's due to be released by Blackest Ever Black in May 2013.
The Edinburgh-based duo of Marc Dall and Alex Ander work with intricately stacked percussion, dubwise bass and a rich harmonic tapestry of processed voices, keys, harp, vibraphone, guitar, woodwind, strings and synthesiser - every sound re-sampled to the nth degree then subjected to subtle automation and rigorously fine-tuned over a period of many months.
From the mesmerised pastoral drift of 'Anger Sees Red' and 'Dwelling By The Meadow' to agitated arabesques like 'The Physical Body' and the self-titled 'Dalhous', the resulting pieces explore dreamlike but treacherous terrain. Eleven questions in a world of blue.
Tracklisting:
1. He Was Human And Belonged With Humans
2. The Physical Body
3. Anger Sees Red
4. Bolder And Lighter Than The Beat From A Wing
5. Who's Here, You're Here, I'm Here...
6. Dalhous
7. The Cruel Practice Of Art
8. Dwelling By The Meadow
9. Eros, Love And Lies
10. A White, White Day
11. Dreamers Of Decadence
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Blackest Ever Black presents a new vinyl edition, and the first CD and digital editions, of Af Ursin's 2005 masterpiece Aura Legato. Af Ursin is the alter ego of Finnish autodidact composer/improviser Timo van Luijk.Visit product page →
His work is rooted in the use of acoustic instruments (wind, percussion, strings), but his special sensitivity to the timbral qualities of each instrument, and his deft blurring of them, results in a sound-world that is mysterious, amorphous and hallucinatory, full of suggestive shadows, creaks and whispers.
Informed by years of intensive listening to various types of free music, exploratory drug use and especially the 'irregular organic forms' of the Belgian countryside where he resides, van Luijk's process begins always with pure improvisation: music played in an intuitive, sensual way, without the employment of conscious technique.
He performs and overdubs each instrumental component himself, and out of this process micro-structures and loose arrangements emerge: the piece becomes an improvised composition. Over time he has evolved his own richly poetic musical language, full of allusions to drone, acid folk, classical, Musique concrète and jazz, but beholden to none.
Aura Legato is one of van Luijk's darker and more acutely psychedelic offerings: a work of profound interiority, but one that also conjures images of old Europe and fin-de-siècle decadence - dabblings in Thelema, the fog of the opium-den - and has earned comparisons to Third Ear Band, Nurse With Wound, Mirror and HNAS.
Fully remastered and housed in die-cut sleeve with gold detailing and individually hand-glued labels.
Tracklisting:
1. Rêverie en mineur
2. Capsule détachée
3. Tableau fluide
4. Aphanes -
This is Amateur Childbirth's Christian Rock album. The previous LP from Ivan Matthew David's solo project, 2015's Pripyat, concerned itself with the blighted belief systems of UFO worshippers, Your Afterlife Is Cancelled expands this compelling solo project's field of enquiry to look at a wider array of 'religious anomalies' - cults, for want of a better word.Visit product page →
Each song is about a different such anomaly.To call Hicks'vision apocalyptic would be to underplay its cruelty. The Bible's rampant sadism pales in comparison. This is a world where faith - in a god or gods, in astrology, morality, or any meaning whatsoever - is merely a prelude to punishment. His lyrics are vivid glossaries of pain, abjection and indignity; the songs'protagonists swim in blood, piss, shit and ejaculate.
Eschatology and scatology are indivisible here. Drugs are rampantly abused, albeit to little benefit. There are scalpel-flashes of humour in David's wordplay, rhyming and dour Brisbane diction - but this offers scant consolation for the songs'embattled subjects, who wait, in vein, for salvation, while crows peck out their eyes, blood pours from their ears, and psoriasis ravages their skin.
These words, for all their pessimism and body-horror, are cradled in minimalist, folk-rock arrangements that are quite dazzling in their beauty and grievously earned simplicity: Hicks'monochord strum embellished with subtle violin, synthesizer and percussion shading.
Amateur Childbirth's caustic end-times worldview inevitably prompts comparisons with Current 93, but also a wider (non-)tradition of caustic and disturbed loner psych that includes Simon Finn, Patrik Fitzgerald, Robyn Hitchcock, Peter Jefferies and Roy Harper.
Your Afterlife Is Cancelled is a depressive tour de force from one of the most crushingly eloquent voices in the Australian underground.
Tracklisting:
1. My Throat = Abyss Of Tar
2. Emissary Of Light
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4. Portents To Beauty
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Ashtray Navigations 'To Make A Fool Ask, And You Are The First' Vinyl 12"
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Blackest Ever Black presents To Make A Fool Ask, And You Are The First, the latest - and, for us, greatest - full-length entry in Ashtray Navigations'uniquely important, uniquely sprawling - possibly sentient and self-multiplying - discography.Visit product page →
It picks up where the nerve-damaged exotica of 2015's A Shimmering Replica left off - ¦acerbic 'surf' guitar and synthetic salt-breeze fit for the Tropic of Yorkshire. Instant immersion in a potent, pungent psychedelia that feels equal parts cosmic and aquatic.
What Todd wrenches out of his instrument these days is a language unto itself (perhaps it always was) - ¦ a helical, ecstatic, grieving howl - ¦a (super)natural efflorescence, beyond earthly description or transcription - ¦ur-rock and post-everything. But equal emphasis is given here to pulsating machine rhythms and lush keyboard textures, with killer contributions from longtime fellow traveller Mel O'Dubhshlaine.
There were pre-echoes of all this in the recent(ish) Fluctuants and Aero Infinite: but To Make A Fool feels like the culmination, or the fullest expression, of something which was only glimpsed in those earlier works.
The side-long Spray Two' - gently eddying string-pads gradually slashed to all f***k with fraught piano improvisations - is a masterpiece in its own right. At its delirious peak, the whole thing boils over into brooding, arpeggiated noir-techno - Michael Mann's steadicam roaming Leeds'B-roads, some kind of tangerine nightmare - before finally cooling into a bleary starfield of pure and sumptuous hypno-tone.
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Tracklisting:
1. (Another) Hour Of The Grubber
2. A Crimson Coin
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4. Spray Two -
Sold outFaith Coloccia and Alex Barnett return to Blackest Ever Black with their second duo album, Weld; working with synthesizers, affected vocals, raw electrical noise, field recordings, EVP techniques, tape manipulation and drum machines to create a music at once lucid and mystic. Its songs embody various experiential philosophies and objectives: searching for the sacred in the forgotten and supposedly useless; exploring the meaning of 'natural'; listening for the pulse of the ancient; using technology both to materialise memory and to dream a folklore for a future age.Visit product page →
Coloccia and Barnett's ambition is apparent early on in the stately, medievalist keyboard/choral poetics of Truth Teller', moving through the agitated wormhole techno of Dreamsnake', to the white light-emitting, near-symphonic plainchant of Healer'. Blight''s zero-hour synth pulsations are first interrupted, then engulfed, by an extra-terrestrial broadcast of piercing bell and glass-tones; AM Horizon'is pitched bewitchingly between Prophet-5 pulp futurism and earthbound, atavistic dread; Agate Cross''s baroque harmonic sequence disintegrates at its very climax, cooling and dissipating into a deep starfield of pure tone.
Ash Grove'and Rose Eye'are exhilarating exercises in contemporary musique concrète: complex timbral constructs in which Coloccia's disembodied glossolalia, swooping strings and other nameless sonic spectra conspire to evoke extra-dimensional space and the highest spiritual drama.
Weld speaks its own distinctive dream-language, but we would certainly recommend it to anyone enamoured of the brittle sci-fi synth-scapes in Caroline K's Now Wait For Last Year, the amorphous electronics of Beatriz Ferreyra's recent work, Conrad Schnitzler's more gothic moments, and even the gravest metaphysical reckonings of a Stockhausen or a Rozmann.
Tracklisting:
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