Audio Samples
Yellow Swans - Untitled
Liz Allbee - Palsied Grace
CMJ ARCHIVE FOR
SKZZZ!
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SKZZZ!: January 2006 Feb 1, 2006
By Christopher R. Weingarten
A red-hot 18-minute eruption from industrial-powered Oakland fuzz-feasters Yellow Swans and Hollywood "blood electronics" terrors Cherry Point, Live At Camp Blood (Troniks)
is a sizzling mystery howling from a jewel case. Is this really live? Are there really "guitar" and "vocals" somewhere under this horrible mess? Either way, Troniks mercifully advises it's "not recommended for fans of music." iheartnoise.com
San Francisco free-improv mutant Jacob Felix Heule sounds like Dolphy but wants to roll with Darkthrone, playing icky jazz-noise with the dark soul of a church-torchin' black metal Viking overlord. His band Ettrick some inspired downtown-styled skronk, but the real trip to Valhalla is Hodag, his noise-doom duo with bassist Chadwick Rntnen. Their self-titled, self-released, self-screened debut doodles corpsepaint on Albert Ayler, sounding like jazz-spazzes trying to claw their way out of Xasthur's murky coffin. http://heule.us
Everything released by impossibly prolific noise bastard John Wiese gets sucked up by rabid noise collectors faster than an eBay administrator can send a cautionary e-mail. Recent treats on Troubleman, PACrec and Kitty Play sold out within two bloops of a homemade oscillator, and the glossy 3" CD Arrhythmia Wave Burst And Panner Crashon his own Helicopter Records should be no exception. Recorded live at the Knitting Factory in L.A., Weise's usual dentist-drill buzz and radio-static blurgles are in full force, but with a triumphant velocity that mirrors the bursting fireworks on the cover. http://home.earthlink.net/johnweise
Oakland trumpeter Liz Allbee (pictured) runs her honker through all kinds of mystifying electronics, turning somber and melancholy soloing into bubbling swamp things, woozy merry go-rounds, brassy drones, laptop-jacked folk anthems and enough ebb/flow to warrant a handful of Dramamine.
Her solo album Quarry Tones (Resipiscent) comes in a handsewn felt pouch and sounds like a single double leopard retreating into a woozy REM state—and also curled up in a hand-sewn felt pouch. Labelmate Porest is known mainly for his plunderphonic pranksterism (his debut was on Negativland's label, natch) and fantastic field recordings (for Sublime Frequencies, also natch), but his third album, Mood Noose, is a schizophrenic think piece—a fistful of film music here, some fauxanthropological antics there. Radios fistfight laptops, Pierre Henry-style electroacoustics get an Over The Edge makeover, and a Sublime Freakazoid sets his tape collection to "WTF?!" Ambient music for the death of the death of irony. www.resipiscent.com
Bubbling from somewhere moody and pissed-off in Birmingham, Alabama, the Trust Riots sound like your favorite Japanese psych band playing in a local dive bar, with a recording quality so low that it's almost negligent. Their new split 8" with Rameses III, recorded for their own Scarcelight label, is like Fushitsusha on a four-track, peaking in distorted bursts of joy, but all confined in the comfy snuggle of lo-fi hiss. Totally unhinged in all the right ways. Conversely Into Tone, a 33-minute live dispatch from New Zealand sextet Plains, is an exercise in restraint, desolation and precision.
Like rain falling on a near-silent desert, this high-tech sound-art crew makes laptops drizzle pixels onto the barren earth, causing the air to become prickly and the earth to rumble. Imagine a Sergio Leone western staged with no actors, no audience and no instruments. www.scarcelight.org
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