Zs: Arms

Dominique Leone from Pitchfork said:

Zs: Arms [Planaria; 2007]
Brooklyn quartet Zs play the real hard, real minimal, real painstakingly worked-out rock etudes that kids with beards and concentrated stares prick up their ears for. However, the real news is, this stuff actually does rock, though perhaps not as ragingly as bands to who they’re likely to be compared (Orthrelm, Don Caballero, Flying Luttenbachers). It helps that I first heard Zs live: four guys (drums, guitar, guitar+keyboard, saxophone) seated facing each other, sheet music and stand-lights illuminating some very focused faces, and playing stuff that pounded a lot more than you might think given the monkish air of the room.

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KAMAN LEUNG – Lacrimal

From Boomkat:

If you’re looking for an album that will make it seem like you have a large subwoofer buried under your floorboards, if BASS is your thing – come in, take a closer look. Raised with Swedish, Chinese and most recently Norwegian roots, Kaman Leung has long been a producer who’s ticked all our boxes when it comes to Low-End music of the highest, most advanced calibre. His early material for the obscure “A PMS Plan” imprint showcased his talent for producing instrumental beats that didn’t follow any conventional paths – the templates were borrowed from Hip Hop, no doubt, but the sound palette was channelled via Jamaican music at its heaviest – the emphasis from the very beginning was on BASS. Since then Kaman has dropped three killer twelves for his own lacerated imprint and an obscure whitelabel for Modern Love – with each and every release spinning into orbit another facet of the Hardcore continuum – so much so that mostly everyone we’ve played his material to in the last few months has wanted to know if it was the work of some mysterious dubstep producer working under anonymity. “Lacrimal” is Kaman’s debut album and through its 9 flawless tracks you start to realise that the material in front of you is nothing short of groundbreaking – and once you factor into the equation the fact that the tracks here are all 4 or 5 years old you start to wonder just how ahead of his time this producer has been. Opening track “Inquietude” sets the agenda – with the benefit of hindsight you could describe it as a blend of dubstep’s low-end templates with the shimmering echoes of dub Melodica, hardcore hoover sweeps and bass drops that are hard to fathom in one sitting – who was making this sort of thing back in 2002? Or in 2007 for that matter? Shockingly good stuff. Or take third track in “Stretchmarks” – a track that comes to life with an atmospheric sleepy hip hop shuffle – who could anticipate that a minute into it the bass would drop so low and so heavy that it turns into something that sounds like Burial, DJ/Rupture and El-P having a soundclash deep into the night in some abandoned bunker 50 feet underground? The bottom line is that Kaman Leung is a producer who casts his net wide over a number of seemingly disparate disciplines, stuffs them into his boxes and squeezes out a hybrid sound that is so enamoured with the rumbling, padded wobble of the bottom end that regardless of the tempo or template in use it comes over as a new kind of urban variation – a sort of proto dubstep fusion that still sounds like nothing else to these ears. Easily one of the most progressive, next-level BASS albums you’ll hear this year, “Lacrimal” is the kind of album that will hopefully push things through to the next level, one can only wonder what will happen when this most gifted producer unleashes new material onto the world…KILLER!!!…

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ELEGI – Sistereis

Being acoustic doom or whatever it is, Svarte Greiner already has a jorney partner into the lost and forgotten night of Oslo. Yes, the guy is from Norway – I gotta move to Oslo. Awesome!

From Soul Seduction:

Since last year’s ‘Knive’ from Svarte Greiner (Miasmah boss Erik Skodvin) the world has been waiting eagerly for the next addition to the acoustic doom canon. Maybe fitting then that it should also come from Oslo, as we all know that Norway is home to everything that is dark and all that is desolate. ‘Sistereis’ is the debut solo release from Tommy Jansen aka Elegi, a man who besides crafting effortlessly mysterious Lynchian soundscapes takes time out of his everyday life to go wreck-diving. For those of you unfamiliar with this sport, it involves diving into the deep sea to explore shipwrecks; empty maritime museums of lost life and forgotten history. This deep obsession is reflected in the album’s title ‘Sistereis’ which is a word used for a ship’s doomed final voyage, a theme which is followed closely throughout the recording.
It is hardly surprising then that Jansen, an experienced studio engineer and classically trained musician took his love of sound into the deep seas and while diving made reel upon reel of waterlogged recordings. These passages of sound, which Jansen believes capture the ghosts of the shipwrecks, formed the basis of many of the album’s tracks and if you listen very closely you hear the deep seas rumbling around you. Within the haunted piano melodies and scraping of damp wood there are much deeper, much more frightening sounds to be heard – and using his personal knowledge of all things watery Jansen has truly created the next chapter in the black book of acoustic doom. Where better to find influence for such music than the frightening world of forgotten souls that is the sea, and while the choppy blue expanse may have lent itself to many an album, there is something devastatingly original about Jansen’s approach. Maybe it is down to his deep historical knowledge or maybe it is down to simple compositional skill but it is almost impossible to listen to ‘Sistereis’ without being thrust into a blackened world of stormy waters and drifting bodies.
A truly epic record which is sure to appeal to fans of Earth, Wolfmangler, Angelo Badalamenti and of course Svarte Greiner this is something for the darker nights. Turn the lights down low, make sure the windows are locked tightly and drift away – just watch out for that rolling fog, there’s no telling what the seas might bring…

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Black Dice – Roll Up

No one is more challenging nowadays than Black Dice, they’re not rock, nor dance, electronic but damaged. The ‘tracks’ sometimes seems to be ’songs’, as if the tapes were bitten by a dog(hello Mr. James!). Mutant Music itself.

Mark Richardson(Pitchfork) recently said about Drool:

Once upon a time they stood on stages with guitars and basses and drums and played something close to rock music, but the last few years have found Black Dice gradually becoming one with their machines as their music turns toward abstracted electronics. Their latest 12″ has little use for carbon-based life forms as buzzing tendrils of drone and analog chirps with no need for hands become the essential units of sound. The B-side “Drool” entices by pushing the crude amalgamation of sine waves in the direction of rhythm. It sounds like a cadre of circuit-bent Speak & Spells trying to cover Bo Diddley, and the triangulation between the chugging beat, the alien melody, and the cold, dry texture leads somewhere satisfyingly weird.

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Arve Henriksen – Strjon

 

Even if Supersilent fans are anxious for the new album on horizon, this new Arve Henriksen album has its own merits. Going for the opposite pole from the Supersilent sound, Strjon is a meditative trip, reuniting old memories (or at least using his sound memories, tapes from his first recordings) filtered through quiet, but haunted, and emotion. The kind of album that is as good to be heard than to be remembered – it reverberates.

The album was produced by fellow Supersilent and Deathprod master Helge Sten and it captures an atmosphere of rituals and discovery, as if diving in the Strjon river.

The Guardian reviewer made a nice comparision with Sketches of Spain-era Miles Davis, but transposed to Norway. And where Miles/Evans effort was sun-light, Henriksen/Sten was shades and sunset.

Pitchfork Review

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Request: Machinefabriek

 Machinefabriek is some kind of a joke, or some serious business. How can this guy release so frequentely? Or is it a bunch of people? Hipster conspiracy? One is for sure – great sounds goin’ steady!

allengskens

feever

hieperdepiep

licht

Alessandro Stefana – Poste y Telegrafi

 

Pitchfork Review

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Pom Pom – 29

It can’t get minimal than that. Anonymous guy making great music.

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julien neto – le fumeur de ciel

Stylus Magazine review

Almost Cool Review

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