More Bokeh Versions goodness for you here. I love the story told on this page, of how the artist sent the label almost 500 tunes and said ‘pick some.’ If only choosing album running orders was so easy!
Reference points for me here are like a mashup of Muslimgauze, Saint Abdullah and Hamza El Din being brought together in righteous dub-groove harmony.
What even is a Genog?
Well, duh, Mr supposedly university-educated Flipdog, it’s the name of the new album by Smote. What else need it be?
I have an earlier one of theirs also on my wishlist. Maybe I should buy one of them, they is clearly amongst the Gods of music. Said wishlist has gone beyond the realms of ridiculous into new levels though.
SO yet another collection of music where there are no words – I mean that descriptively not in the instrumental sense. There are words, and they are chanted, in amanner that puts me in mind of the wonderful Crow Tongue album, Ghost Eye Seeker.
Trancey, meditative with a definite sense of journey. One with a heavy end.
I think this one went on to my ‘things to check out’ list as a result of my Bandcamp feed but can’t be certain because there are many sources to me checking things out and the gap between getting onto said list and me actually listening to the full work can be really quite long indeed.
Anywho, this comes at you from the experimental end of things because I bet you’re all really fed up with all the mainstream stuff I keep posting, right?
As it’s me, it’s from the angle of catatonia inducing mong-trance, which is totally a genre in its own right, with it’s own rite and everything, and probably a section in HMV. Assuming HMV is still going, I heard a rumour it actually still is. Probably my favourite genre these days.
I note that she has an upcoming collaboration with the also very wonderful Jessica Bailiff, which I am very intrigued to hear.
Although that there image you see is a picture of yer actual cassette, I suspect such a thing is not available to us now as the page itself only sells the digital album. I don’t have a working tape player anyway.
THis is quite earlier in his career but I heard one of the tunes on a show that Bokeh Versions did which took me to the album, and this did really impress me, it did. I think this may be the first artist to whom you can apply the term ‘glacial’ that I have posted here. I may be wrong; my memory tends to be less reliable these days.
So it’s dark, cavernous dub/dubstep/dubtech/dub techno/ambient dub (call it what you will) and it knows where its groove is, particularly in the latter half.
I have occasionally listened to some of his other works and they’ve always intrigued me. I think this may be the prod to dive in a bit deeper.
Happy birthday to me…. I thought I’d celebrate by releasing an album. As you do.
I’ve faffed loads with this and ended up having to give myself a deadline and this seemed as good as any. However, I’m going to do the same for the next some too, and it is my current intention to have a busy year. It may even compete with 2018. Universe permitting, obviously.
Although the album has my usual vague, non-linear thread, there is no real over-arching narrative to this, though whether it ends up fitting into a larger scheme like the aforementioned series, well, things have an odd way of working out.
Now, this one is probably old news to most of you.
I actually ignored these for quite a while for reasons that all say more about me than the band. 1) Don’t like the band name. 2) I see the word ‘supergroup’ and I just think swearwords about people phoning it in. 3) What is that cover? Fucking disgusting.
So God Unknown records put it out recently after I’d ignored it’s initial issue on Rocket, and for reasons I don’t know why I decided to listen to it. Actually, I do know why. It was a Monday and I was in a Monday mood so wanted to listen to gnarliness and I thought these might tick that box. And they did tick that box. They ticked it righteously. But they did more than tick that box, they turned that box into a well of unfathomable depth with their riffing, repetitious, droning, hypnotic gnarliness.
And it turns out that one of them has visited these parts before, and that also had a ghastly cover.
This one is from when I was scrolling through the aforementioned wishlist and saw this, which isn’t actually that far down it. Nonetheless, I had zero memory of putting it there so I played it to try to jog said memory.
Now, memory remains un-jogged. None of the songs sounded like something I had actually heard before, so I doubt I’d heard it on the radion,and I had zero idea of this band at all, so what made me add it to the wishlist will probably remain unknown to me forever and ever amen. But I’m glad I did. This is very pleasing indeed. They sound like one of those bands who don’t take themselves uber-seriously yet want to make some bloody good music nonetheless.
It’s got more of a ‘classic’ psych rock feel, by which I mean it sounds more like the late 60s psych explosion than most of what I listen to, but they do it very well. It doesn’t sound like pastiche to me, rather that they just happen to like making this particular type of noise. And why would anyone make noise other than that which they want to make?
So my epic wishlist on Bandcamp has exploded since I re-discovered online radio late last year, but every now and again I need to remind myself of the stuff that’s been on there for absolutely ages.
So I was listening to the radio show that Golden Ratio Frequencies do, and it wasn’t doing a lot for me. It was full of the more new-age-bromide-y ambient music that I ultimately find a bit cloying. So I went to the aforementioned wishlist and scrolled right down to look for stuff that had been there ages and that I couldn’t really remember what it was, and I saw this, so I clicked on it and pressed play.
And got turned into a monged out vegetable. This is a very powerful piece of immersive and rather intense drone. I love it.
And then I noticed this was on the Golden Ratio Frequencies label, and I suspect is the man who does Golden Ratio Frequencies himself, who also is part of the Gnod family. They get everywhere!
Funny how circles close sometimes.
Some Japanese rock goodness for you here, something I’m not convinced I do too often.
I didn’t intend to leave it this long between posts, but time do get away, do it not? So, though they may be short of words, I am now about to post a bunch of stuff I’ve discovered lately that I think is really good.
In a completely unrelated note, my 12 year old daughter has just asked me whether or not I regularly question the nature of my existence, and upon receiving an affirmative answer, suggested that she wants to form an existential dread club. Shome mishtake, shurely? I’m sure we were late teens when we all hit that phase. They grow up so quickly these days…
With props to Jay Springett for this one.
When I was doing my Music Tech course those oh so many moons ago, one of our tutors did a quick demo of Steve Reich’s Clapping Music and got me to be the second person. It took hella concentration but it was really cool to do. I have, subsequently to the course, always retained a soft spot for Reich’s works (along with Terry Riley), so when I saw this I had to have a listen.
Despite the brevity of the EP, it is a fully immersive listen. I’ve moved my little studio around just a bit which has changed my speaker orientation to what I think is probably absolute perfection and as a result I can sink in to the music much deeper. Trancey works like this are, therefore, absolute heaven.
Soundbergs 