Vampire Slayer – Dumb Death (Indian Gold) 2012

Posted in Music, Vampire Slayer with tags , , on March 19, 2012 by noisenoisenoise

I may have become a little obsessed with bandcamp over the past two weeks. It has become my favourite late night time suck. I came across Dumb Death about two weeks ago and well let’s face it, music not withstanding, album has to have the best cover art of any record ever in the history of music.  Here is yet another absolutely wonderful slice of hypnogogic electronica, this time from Valentin Torres, a self taught musician from Mexico who is also the cofounder of Indian Gold Records. This is like one of those great records that Not Not Fun release every now and then. Dumb Death is like  a giant day-glo chill-mix of Dan Friel electronics, Oneohtrix Point Never style synth love, DJ Scotch Egg computer game dub, Mego ambience and even a pinch of Roni Size drum and bass. I can’t recommend this enough. One of the great records of 2012.

You can get it here.

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Drexciya – Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller I (Clone Classic Cuts) 2011

Posted in Drexciya, Music, Techno with tags , , on March 18, 2012 by noisenoisenoise

At the end of 2011 this popped out through an obscure Dutch label. Techno/Electronica is not something  I usually don’t post on Techno but it is something that  I listen to a shit load. I need white noise when I work to achieve anything. It helps me concentrate  and is probably one of the reasons I like noise so much. But when I put on Surgeon, Basic Channel, Robert Mills,Robert Hood, Luciano, Zomby, Rustie, Vladislav Delay and Gas my productivity goes through the roof. Yet I don’t think I’ve been any more productive in the past ten years than when I chucked this on the ipod.

Drexciya has been mythologised in the past ten years in the same manner in which they created a myth around their own work. When they first released their records on labels like Tresor and Underground Resistance, the people behind the band were a mystery. The mythology was that Drexciya was an underwater Atlantis type city full of people  who were the unborn babies of the pregnant African slaves that were thrown overboard on their way to America. The theme of the underwater city flows through all of the tracks on Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller which in its self is combined tracks from many of the band’s EP’s which have been unfairly out of print for years and exceedingly difficult to come by.   The tracks are placed here without the context of their original EP’s in a non-chronological order and if I hadn’t known that I would have been none the wiser. I love stuff like this and this is one of the best compilations released last year. I’m a bit excited that this is merely the first instalment of a series of Drexciya compilations. Bring it on.

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Max Bondi – Convolution (Tartaruga) 2012

Posted in Drone, Max Bondi, Music with tags , , , on March 13, 2012 by noisenoisenoise

Tartaruga records make beautifully packaged CD’s of weird electronica and experimental goodness. Max Bondi’s Convolution is their latest release and is due out on 28 March 2012.  Convolution is Max Bondi’s second full length and is another reason why 2012 is  starting out as one of the best years for experimental music. Records like Convolution are difficult to pigeon-hole. Each of the tracks explore a single theme. The first two give variations to low end, slightly animated electronic drone but track three, Overcoding, give a burst of Oneohtrix-style bubbling synths. Other tracks explore dark ambient drone (Ori) and the hard to define electronica of Tim Hecker. All of the tracks are tightly defined, you won’t find anything hidden in the layers here but each track seems to build on the one that has come before and the album is most successful on tracks like Faltung which combines constantly repeating synth lines with undercurrents of drone. Repetition is one of the big themes of Convolution and it may be why Boomkat compared this record to the abstract minimalism of snd. There is a lot here to enjoy and if your thing is challenging electronica then Convolution is well worth a listen. If you are keen to hear what all the fuss us about you can listen to Convolutions here.

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Gyps – Den (Self Released) 2012

Posted in Drone, Gyps, Music with tags , , on March 12, 2012 by noisenoisenoise

Sorry I haven’t been around but I’ve been a bit preoccupied with trolling through bandcamp looking for undiscovered gems. This is the first record I want to bring to your attention from my new obsession – Gyps amazing record, Den. Gyps is the side project of  Xander Witt, a musician based in Athens, Georgia. Xander also plays in the very fine Muuy Biien (which is also worth your time tracking down). On Den, Xander manages to concoct a glacial, guitar based drone in a similar vein to Stars of The Lid. But whilst Star of The Lid manage to evoke a feeling of calm, Gyps creates an atmosphere of shattering sadness. He is also not afraid to abandon the formula half way through a track to pile more emotional bleakness and a certain dark ambience. If you love the style of drone that Stars of the  Lid produce you are going to wet yourself when you hear this. Den is already destined to be one of my picks for 2012. A shockingly, brilliant, strange, sad record. You can pick it up here.

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Merzbow – Green Wheels (Self Abuse Records) 1995

Posted in Merzbow, Music, noise with tags , , on February 28, 2012 by noisenoisenoise

Green Wheels is one of those Merzbow records that has  a special place for a Merzbow tragic like myself. The packaging is wonderfully mid-1990′s with the CD and a 5′ vinyl record being housed in a cheap plastic video case. It’s another one of Merzbow’s fetish objects and now ridiculously difficult to find. Every now and then they pop up on ebay and I think this is where I tracked this one down.

Like much of his mid-1990′s period Green Wheels is an uncompromising cascade of brutal noise. Somewhere between Oested and Pulse Demon. It’s extremely good and if you ever see a copy I recommend you consider nabbing it.

When I first started ducksbattlesatan (or noisenoisenoise as it then was) my focus was to try to write sensibly about my interactions with more experimental music and describe the sounds from an outsider’s perspective. As I started to listen to more difficult and noisier records I became interested in coming to terms with other people’s reflections and writings on noise but those excursions have all been disappointing. Listening to a record like Green Wheels after a decent break from Merzbow had me reflecting on a quote from Alain De Botton who said that ugliness is the the material manifestation of a crooked soul. So if the quote is correct I’m scared to follow the reasoning to analyse noise as a genre. If noise is the most ugliest of sounds what does it say about the souls of those who enjoy it. Am I a deeply crooked or abhorrent soul?  I suppose it highlights in some way, that writing about noise as a musical genre and it development over the years always has some problems. Every essay or analysis I read on noise seems to miss a fundamental point. If noise itself is left over sound or valueless then where does the aspect of pleasure in noise come from. It can’t be simply an appreciation for the transgressive and it surely can’t be a reflection on my nature. I think it reveals that noise has value – that to say that it is left over sound misses the point.  Or maybe what gives noise value is the context. For instance a 30 minute recording of a jack hammer has no value but that same recording of a jack hammer when covered with layers of fuzz and other sound may be a highly meditative experience which I as a listener give value to. So intrinsically the sound may have no value but with context it’s worth is secured. And this is how records like Green Wheels have worth and how people like me  derive pleasure from them.

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Cane Swords – Big Warmup In The Mouth Of Eternity (Rubber City Noise) 2011

Posted in Cane Swords, Drone, Music, noise with tags , , , , on February 20, 2012 by noisenoisenoise

At the end of last year I stopped posting as much as I should have. I’m not sure why. It may have had much to do with the lack of sleep that my kids inflict on me on a regular basis. So sometimes I feel a bit of a prick because there are records that get sent to me that really blow me away. When I first heard this I emailed the  band to get some further info. I certainly don’t post on everything that gets sent my way but I do listen to all of it. Cane Sword’s Big Warmup In The Mouth Of Eternity was a record I fell hard for and one that should have been in my top five of last year. So I feel really shitty that after telling the band how much I dig their record I didn’t end up posting on it – and that was March 2011. Again, I can’t stress this enough, I feel like a prick.

So, anyway, with that out of the way lets talk about Cane Swords. Cane Swords are the “house band” of Rubber City Noise a record label/performance space/equipment manufacturer run by Curt and Karl from Akron Ohio. Big Warmup was originally released on cassette but you can download it for free from here (and while you’re there click on all of the  Black Unicorn stuff – amazing). Cane Swords record their material live and in one take. They have some idea of the theme when they start  but the sound is built through live experimentation. In my email exchanges with the band they pointed to the strong cathartic and hypnotic thread and when I first heard it I was reminded of the Yellow Swans, the sci-fi B movie records of Merzbow and maybe a bit of Oneohtrix Point Never. But that only tells part of the  story because Big Warmup contains influences in drone, noise, experimentation, dark ambience, pop and  hypnogogic electronica. It is a complex, immense record which contains everything I like about experimental music. I may be a prick for not posting earlier but you’d be a prick not to hear it.

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Hypsiphrone – And The Void Shall Pierce Their Eyes (Black Plagve) 2011

Posted in Doom, Hypsiphrone, metal, Music with tags , , , on February 19, 2012 by noisenoisenoise

I haven’t listened to a Dark Ambient record or some time. But when this little ripper showed up from Malignant Records sub-label, Black Plagve I thought,just based on its title alone, it was worth a spin. One of the first mistakes I made was to read the press release which spoke of virgins bathing on their own blood and other such crap that I have absolutely no fucking interest in. Does anyone actually write this crap without giggling to themselves? The fact is that what is done here is excellent but creation of  a lame mythology detracts from the greatness of many of these tracks. I’m probably the wrong guy to review this because black metal imagery is always funny to me yet I like to wallow in some dark/black/death ambient/metal records from time to time. I’m no expert but if you like Sunn O)))’s Black One or anything by Lustmord then this will be right up your alley.

Hypsiphrone is a one  guy project from Greece and this record  is pretty consistently great. Lots of evil wails and hammer-horror neo gothic death metally goodness with wonderfully absurd  titles. It’s fun though probably not in the way Hypsiphrone meant. There is one dud track on this and that is a track which begins about half way through which cuts up media broadcasts about necrophilia. How fucking transgressive. Why it is actually on this is a bit of a mystery and kind of made me angry. It’s inclusion just felt that he was trying a bit too hard. But hey, Mamuthones made one of my favourite records in recent times and the initial track on that sucks. It happens and shouldn’t be fatal to you buying this.

You can pick this up from the excellent Malignant Records site.

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