new home, new sounds - march
hello all. i have moved to a new place and am very happy. i look at the river and listen to music in my headphones and read. life is ok personally despite the ever-increasing terrors of the fourth reich. sound flows on.
new helicopter batch
i bought the 3 CDs that got released on John Wiese's helicopter label in feb.
akio jeimus/risa takeda/t. mikawa - third night sparks
i was only previously familiar with Mikawa out of this group when i ordered the batch. the lineup is drums, synthesizer, and noise electronics. it's a wild and chaotic session with lots of dynamism and movement, apparently capturing two live sets at an intimate bar. definitely freewheeling and very much in the japanese free improv style.
strain of laws - live non-plus ultra
strain of laws is john wiese and aaron hemphill formerly of noise rock band liars. i like this live album better than the studio one helicopter put out last year. the condensed length of the tracks really fits. honestly this stuff sounds very much like vintage wolf eyes, a guy muttering and slurring through delay over a bed of weird staccato electronics. i like that, it's not really a sound people go for anymore since the heyday of michigan.
sissy spacek - declension
(no link to audio online yet)
this is a pretty unique one in the ss catalog. someone described it as them doing power electronics and it kind of is, more bastard noise than whitehouse for sure, emphasis on crunchy textures and guttural grindcore type vocals more than high end and unhinged yelling. the thing that makes it more interesting to me is the use of out of sync loops and very dense mixes of sounds more than just overwhelming you with single textures with vocals on top. everything definitely feels like it's placed within the mix as an element to pick out rather than just a wall, and definitely has a live element like you'd notice jeimus/takeda/mikawa cd above but with a much more oppressive and heavy noise/metal edge than a freewheeling improv one.
bonus: john wiese - deviate from balance
mr. wiese generously included a bandcamp d/l code for this album in the package. it's a double LP of various large ensemble compositions, including live performances, running over an hour and a half. super varied textures on the musique concrete - free improv - modern composition spectrum, with people like c spencer yeh and evan parker contributing equally dizzying sounds along with the electronic manipulations. only a bit of harsh noise and a track featuring various gunshot sounds, mostly alien weirdness here, very enjoyable and definitely justified in its runtime even when viewed as a compilation of examples in a single area of wiese's corpus rather than a cohesive album.
self promotion section
i put out a new solo album, disgyrchiant which means gravity in welsh. it is made up of two long tracks i composed with different setups in my room in pittsburgh over the past year. it has a lot of stereo fuckery, movement, fast cuts, etc. been sitting on it a while so i thought i'd throw it out there. more to come, thanks everybody.