Fuck Yeah(No) Fest
Fuck Yeah Fest was yesterday, and of course I’m still feelin’ it. As with any show/fest/what have you, there were ups and downs. Unfortunately the up was arriving at the show, and the down was everything to follow. I arrived around 1:30 to find $20 parking and a will call line six blocks long. It was a little over 90 degrees and only getting hotter. By the time I got inside, all stages were up and running. The comedy tent was full and the venue had pretty much run out of water. With thousands of visitors, most of whom were too young to wait the forty minutes to get into the beer garden and buy a cup of overpriced PBR, there were bound to be problems. The venue, L.A. Historic National park, was little more than large dirt pit and a few small half-dead patches of grass. Up until the minute the sun went down, the thing to do was find shade, of which there wasn’t much while trying to relax and avoid being hassled by the overwhelming amount of security, park rangers, and local cops (not to mention ghetto birds). Continue reading
This is far from a lazy cash-in from Justin Broadrick, even if it does tie in neatly with his decision to re-ignite Godflesh after eight years. Streetcleaner never got the production it really deserved. Whilst not necessarily the finest Godflesh release (in my opinion, anyway), it’s arguably the one with the most primitive negative energy seething within it–a quality which, due to the way the album was produced at the time, could be sensed but never really felt.
German for Shark passed as a big beautiful blur on first listen. Discounting the selection of remixes at the end, it’s actually quite a brief release, with big blocks of sound surging forth and fading into one another without too much pause for breath between each piece. The result is a gorgeous dreamlike montage, with vibrant snatches of ideas forming and melting quickly into something completely different just minutes later.
Despite only one year lying between Baalstorm, Sing Omega and its predecessor Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain, there’s a drastic difference in the sound of both albums. Aleph was an angry record, centered on harsh guitar stabs and razorblade leads – a very deliberate texture overload accompanied by an appropriately aggressive vocal delivery from David Tibet. Baalstorm, Sing Omega is much more delicate in contrast, calling upon the flow and cascade of piano and cello instead, moving in wave-like surges and nudging along Tibet’s abstract ramblings, which babble breathlessly with an epiphanic urgency.
The Skullflower contribution to this split won’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Matthew Bower’s recent output. “Great Hunter” is streams upon streams of noise, shouting down a crackling melody that just barely scrapes the surface of audibility – kind of like someone taking a dirty, bludgeoning axe to The Angelic Process. It’s riddled with the same grimy catharsis as his latest album – Strange Keys to Untune Gods’ Firmament – and makes for equally as relentless and exhausting listening as that LP.
A Book of Songs for Anne Marie isn’t technically a new album – the more avid of Dee fans may have even owned a copy of this from as early as 2004, when it was first issued on David Tibet’s Durtro label. However, this initial release was limited to a mere 150 copies and recorded briskly once through on the piano; the fact that A Book Of Songs… has now been granted a more thorough recording process and distribution means that it’s more than justified to refer to this as its first proper release.
I think the fact that I knew so little about Gultskra Artikler prior to hearing this release contributed heavily to my enjoyment of it. Galaktika seems to work best when free from any prior knowledge of its conception or its creator, turning the whole experience into an intrepid exploration without any preconception of what lies up ahead.
The debut 7″ single from Troubled Horse, Bring My Horses Home, brings to mind bands of the ’60s and ’70s, and will make you wish you were living back then until you realize that, with bands like this around, you’re not missing anything!
Recorded in just two days, Verona is the music of impulse – of sporadic ideas without the relentless tweaking and perfecting of retrospect, unleashed and recorded and left relatively untouched. That considered, it’s surprising how cohesive and well-structured this album is, clearly existing as a celebration of putting faith in what feels right rather than painstaking hours spent trying to achieve glossy sonic symmetry.
Gradually I’m becoming to think that Aidan Baker’s solo material is where his most expressive and compelling work lies. His Nadja project is tied to a trademark sound (that distinctive planetarium of fuzz and carefully woven ambient layering), whilst his music under “Aidan Baker” provides a canvas for anything and everything he’s unable to convey through the Nadja output.
the Crossing 
