Starving Weirdos - Seance at Luffenhultz |Sound&Fury|

I miss a proper '06 Double Leopards release. For real. Not much comes close to the Leopard drone, filhty and intoxicating, able to transport the soul to acid-like levels. They're the ultimate experience. Some outfits come close, Family Underground does, Birchville Cat Motel does but rules on other pitchblack planets. The Double Leopard planet is a purple one, when it rotates the colours change. Like magic. Boo.

This ridiculously named band, Starving Weirdos, come really, awfully close. They're almost equals. The only thing that separates them is Double Leopards' larger, intimidating discography. I understand they're a foursome, names are seemingly irrelevant as they're shortened to acronyms. Seance at Luffenhultz is a mega transmission of a cosmic junkyard symphony. Concrete blocks of infuriating drones collapsing into black voids. The magnificent opener 'Red Crescent Moon' pops the lid off the album like a star exploding inside a tin can. Boasting cavernous drones, chiming endlessly while slowly being covered with a thick blanket of stardust. It never gets smothered though, rays of spellbinding effects shining through the cracks, blinding everything in it's path before slowly retreating into the shadows again. Unholy glory.

Rippling viola sounds moving throug a thick and foggy mud on the album's titletrack. Building up endlessly while never reaching it's climax. Traces of ghostly gong banging in the background, remaining mysteriously subdued. It's like LaMonte Young's perfect drone covered in mud, or Tony Conrad's Four Violins without the...you got it. It's the little details that matter here, coming in all shapes and forms. Vague traces of flute, cymbals and whatnot, all contributing to reach for the insides of Now, ripping out it's intestants and throwing them off the edge of the earth.

Pauze festival: Keiji Haino, Kan Mikami

The feeling of seeing two of my all-time Japanese heroes on the same night can't be caught with words, I need mimicry, magic, acrobatics and someone who I can trust to calm me down when I'm on the verge of exploding. Inexplicable but I'll try, you know I'll try, oh I'll try. Ok.

As part of the Pauze festival organised in De Vooruit in Belgian town Ghent, K-raa-K3 hosted three evenings packed with fringe explorers. Thursday saw Jonathan Kane and Ekkehard Ehlers, Joseph Suchy and Jos Steen while friday had one of the main attractions and I'm sad I missed them; freefolk spacemotherfuckers MV/EE & The Bummer Road. Also on friday: Spires That In The Sunset Rise, Charlie Nothing and Fish & Sheep. I know nothing about those last two by the way but I didn't make them up either. A friend even told me Charlie Nothing was one of the better acts of the festival. I do trust his opinion so maybe I need to check his Allmusic entry which doesn't give any info but then there's always a bio on his website.

Saturday it was time for my lazy butt to get up and drive to Ghent as Kazuki Tomokawa, The Overhang Party, Kan Mikami and Keiji Haino ALL took the stage during, as Pauze called it, the Far East Freak Out. I really think this is a rare event, especially in regions like the Benelux but K-raa-K3 is always on edge and they never fail to surprise even the crustiest fanatics. As usual I got there late cos even with navigation it's hard to get past the Kennedytunnel traffic jams in Antwerp, especially when there's a footballmatch and they close down half the city. That pissed me off.

Tomokawa was halfway his set when I arrived, his voice piercing through my skull immediately. No wonder they call him the screaming philosopher, extremely heartfelt though and even if you don't speak his language you feel it in your gut (I've no doubt the effect is less when this kind of thing is done in English though). As with Mikami, Tomokawa's guitarstyle is extremely explosive, every chord he plays feels like it could be his last one. It's overdriven and apocalyptic, but never in a cartoonish, maybe even Current 93 kind of way.

I'm always fascinated by drummers who hit their skins with brutal force. The Overhang Party's elderly drummer boasted a intensely cool white goatee whilst pounding his drums Hulk-style. Musically it's all engines in overload, sonic mayhem, guitars as sound-avalanches hi-jacking every ear they can reach and sending it into rehabilitation afterwards. There were parts when they locked into a groove for some minutes, some vocal parts that didn't really make much of an impression but the sheer volume and bulk of sound they created totally knocked more than a few of their feet.

Kan Mikami then and just looking at the guy puts a smile on my face. Setting up he already starts flexing his facial muscles, tongue in and out, stretching his lips in a weirdlooking way. Fascinating stuff. As is his singing/performing style cos he does perform, playing the part of a wandering folksinger, amazing mimicry. His singing sends shivers down my whole body, on cd already, needless to say I was shaking the entire time. He puts in a couple of different voices as well, creating an amazing array of vocal intensities.

Different intensity with Keiji Haino, clad fully in black he took the stage, the room and everyone inside with a lengthy, kaleidoscopic sonic adventure. Starting off with looping his harrowing vocals, layering tons of blizzard like effects on top of them. Sometimes it came across as a collage, a couple of exercises in a certain order. It all made sense though and seeing him rape his guitar gave a hint of what Fushitsusha must've sounded like live. Brutal.

For some visual understanding I urge you to hop to youtube, or check 'em out here:

Kazuki Tomokawa
Kan Mikami
Keiji Haino

Sick beard: Paul Flaherty

I'm not the first to say it out loud but if somebody made an impression on me this past year it has to be Paul Flaherty, the sickest beard in the biz today blowing his guts out of his reeds on a variation of albums, all completely essential. With Chris Corsano on drums, solo (Whirl of Nothingness, on Family Vineyard), with allstars Thurston Moore, Heather Leigh Murray, Corsano and Matt Heyner in Dream/Aktion Unit or in a threesome with Corsano and violin/throat tyrant Spencer C. Yeh (aka Burning Star Core).

Besides the fact the guy makes an impression based on his beard alone, his hard-edged manipulative style of playing fits perfectly well in todays musical outer edges. A bit bolder: he rules every album he plays on. Even bolder yet: he rules your life, if you'd want to.

Flaherty's earliest moves as a pro saxophoneplayer seemed to get smothered totally because of his anti stance towards any formal training and extremely punk attitude towards jazz. So he kept things on a downlow in the underground and when fellow New England crusader Chris Corsano met him some eight years ago that meeting resulted in a fabulous fire music collaboration named The Hated Music. This year saw it's follow up The Beloved Music and it's good to hear the two haven't lost their chemistry, nor their fire, on record.

Flaherty's solo album, Whirl of Nothingness is even more impressive while being extremely exhausting if you're not in the right mood for it. You can always just stare at that intriguing cover though. Beardy lament. Whirl of Nothingness is Flaherty at his most introspective, melancholic even although not often and only in contrast with reflective anger, he seems to be mad, dissapointed at something and doesn't know if it will ever change, he might be talking about life y'know.

There's two other Flaherty included albums I'm dying to talk about but don't have time for right now. Maybe I'll cough up reviews of those, A Rock in the Snow and Snow Blind Avalanche (both on the amazing Important label) in the near future.

Tonight I'll be seeing Kan Mikami, Keiji Haino and Overhang Party live. If life wasn't great already, it's gonna be this evening. Oh!

End of an era

For some of you who read this I'm the guy who 'runs' the MARS section at musicwebzine KindaMuzik. All things experimental are mine, or were mine as I should say. Per november 1st I hand my duties over to Vincent, a guy who I can trust will put as much effort and energy into it as I have done this past year and a half.

Here's my pressrelease, made by KindaMuzik's editor in chief, Atze. Much love playboy, needless to say I never had a more appropriate parting gift!

Joris, Boris & Sunn O)))
A unique and strictly limited edition recording of Joris Heemskerk’s farewell concert


KindaMuzik: “A timeless masterpiece. He will be missed!”
OOR: “What is this rubbish!?”


After three years of faithful service, mars editor Joris Heemskerk decided to
leave de safe mothership of the KindaMuzik redactie, to answer the call that was
carved in his arm. The ultimate goal: a further descend into darkness,
uncompromised noise, madness and obscurity. He, a treasure seeker, a man
without barriers, for whom no record is too dusty, for whom cassette tapes are
the most valuable, he could no longer be held back by useless tasks, annoying
7EVEN’s and meetings on early Sundays.

Joris started his musical career just like any other boy from Venlo, listening to
the likes of Queen. But as the years went by, he sharpened his senses,
eventually being able to bear sounds most people can only bear in their moment
of death. He went after his destiny, to a place where inexplicable noises are free
like ashes in the blackened sky.

Behold, the recording of his farewell concert, the night before he started his
quest into freedom. Featuring live performances by kindred spirits avant-garde
masters Boris and Sunn O))).

Release: 1 november 2006
Joris, Boris & Sunn O))) are available for interviews

Showers - Live In Rats Eyes |Maim & Disfigure|

If you listen to your Led Zep or The Who albums and the parts where they freak the fuck out thrill you the most than there's a PARADISE waiting for you downhere. In the land where Showers roam, a land of fuzz and scuzz, dirty sewers and sticky balls rubbing broken fretboards.
Not much of a surprise since they're from Providence, best known for it's fertile noiserock soil spawning freak units like Lightning Bolt, Mindflayer, Forcefield. All sharing creative space at the semi-legendary Fort Thunder. No idea if Showers hang/hung out there as well, although something tells me they'd actually prefer a filty urinoir over the safe luxury of a fort.

Live In Rats Eyes contains exactly the right amount of dirty, sweatsoaked avantgarage noise you're mom can deal with. Six tracks, averaging about 2,5 bloodsoaked minutes. There's definately something charming (and I know that might not be the right word) about some guys not being able to play their instruments in the proper Vai and deliberately creating mayhem with whatever sounds they can sqeeuze out of them. Exploring the fringes of ultimate freedom without knowing there might be such a thing. Unhinged to the bone and that's why you should love it.

Live In Rats Eyes is released on Maim & Disfigure which is the website to the daddies of modern scuzzrock, Lambsbread. Get it all. Eat it all.

When will it end: Graveyards

Confession: everytime Wolf Eye John Olson reaches for his saxophone to blow his sick breaths of fire out of the thing I can't help but to feel a slight sensation rippling down my backspine, circling around my thighs while shaking my balls. Too much information? Maybe so, but if you're in the slightest interested in improv, jazz, minimalism and a tiny bit of noise you will like his threesome with cellist Hans 'Bunny' Buetow and Ben 'Hell' Hall on percussion.

I managed to get my hands on one Graveyards LP recently and I'm damn proud of it too. Transparent vinyl housed in a yellow cardboard sleeve with in the right bottom corner a black and white photo of some oversized teeth on fucking piece of sandpaper! Pretty much everything is released on Buetow’s Editions Brokenresearch label which doesn’t have a website yet, although he promised me that should be fixed soon. For now, I've only listened to that LP, Bare Those Excellent Teeth, once because my lousy recordplayer decided to put a layer of annoying static on top of the music. Before you start to panic and go all; 'oh but I thought' on me; I do have a batch of other Graveyards recordings I listened to a lot this past year. Not all of them, the bastards choose to put out almost every live performance and 2006 has seen around 16 Graveyards releases on a variety of formats but some of them are definately worth your while. So here's a small selection.


Graveyards
John Brown, On His Way to the Gallows
This is one of the rowdiest and fiercest Graveyards recordings around. Where others tend to lean heavily on space and minimalist structures John Brown offers some full-on avantjazz explorations. Two tracks here, the first starts with some electro-acoustic bell tinkering while Olson let's his sax hover above, airing out subtle but threatening tones. That threatening vibe is a constant factor in Graveyards' music, there's a lot of silence, slow, smothered movements, haunted sounds but there's always that looming fierceness that makes Olson's saxplaying. Hall’s percussion makes up a lot of the noise here with Olson injecting the atmosphere with mostly slowmo Ayler-ish patterns. The second tracks begins even more mystifying, sparse percussion and shadows of saxophone and the occasional blurt of energy that tells you to keep focused. Buetow makes his cello heard with some mournful but heavy stringscraping, toning it down again and finally getting the band into full action although not for long. The spacious gaps between every outburst of clattering percussion make it sound like Han Bennink while asleep, and that’s not neccesarily a bad thing considering Bennink can hand out major blows with his eyes closed.

Graveyards
The Breath Stop
Seven breath stops on this cd-r released on Editions Brokenresearch. No information whatsoever about this awesome disc, I found the mp3's somewhere in a slsk dungeon. Nevertheless, these are among Graveyards' best and least minimal. Their haunted jazzfuckery seems to work well on more than one level but to the guts it feels better when they play it loud. Could depend on the setting as these probably were live recorded as well.

Graveyards
Vulure's Banquet
This could well be jazz as imagined by an orgasmic Einstürzende Neubauten circa 1981. From the start the trio plays a ramschackle, screeching set. Hitting everything with everything while Olson makes love to his saxophone's dark side.

Graveyards
Endings 3
Starting off as a microtonal adventure into the thick melée of Hall's percussion weaponry while Buetow makes hesitating moves to cut the circle in half with sawing cello movements. Olson kicks in at four minutes with small pockets of austere skronking, moving in and out randomly and by doing so creating a vibe of uninhibited freedom by way of uncertainty. These recordings were made during gig practice, goes to show how much focus and effort these guys put into 'just' a sideproject.

Sunn O))) | La Mort Noir Dans Esch/Alzette

Not much talk about this album, possibly due to being put out as a limited edition, already moving ridiculous amounts of cash at eBay. But it's about time Sunn O))) put out a live album and this is it. It's a glorious effort and about the blackest, most grim Sunn recording I've ever heard, especially when Malefic starts belching out his ultra-sinsiter moans and groans. The first couple of tracks are vintage Sunn riff meandering, but so much more rugged and raw than an album like Black One. Malefic appears on the last two tracks which might be the best Sunn tracks ever. Beautiful cover art as well.

For once, as an extremely limited (sic) extra, here's the full album available for download.

MP3| Sunn O))) - La Mort Noir Dans Esch/Alzette

Nath Family - Sounds of the Indian Snake Charmer Vol. II |Hanson|

Of course the guy wrote about it himself so why should I even bother to concur and try different words on the same matter? Possibly because it's that intriguing and spellbinding, also because I don't have anything better to do and I really think you should know of this asap.

Here's the deal. Aaron Dilloway once was a member of Wolf Eyes, he claims he still is and even mixed Wolf Eyes' latest Sub Pop beast Human Animal but maybe he just got kicked out and snuck inside their studio to tweak a few knobs and shit. Actually no, he didn't get kicked out. He just made use of one of the great Wolf Eyes company advantages and took a sabbatical to travel to the Far East. Thing is, Dillo (as he's called in the 'scene') basically was the noisy guts of Wolf Eyes, the guy responsible for that sinister crawling through stanking gutter vibe, he's like that charming but delightfully raunchy Sugababe that left last year. Without him, not so much dirty dirrty, get it? So that's a shame but the guy needed a break. And what country better to take a break in than Nepal? No uhm, Kate Moss isn't a country, yet.

While in Nepal, Dilloway's wife went to study at the Kathmandu Association For The Deaf and Dillo had a lot of time to roam the Nepalese backstreets. So, of course, he came across a couple of so-called snake charmers, people who play music to make snakes wiggle, y'dig?. When they asked him to hang out with them he joined the troop for some lovely intercultural interaction, even attracting spectators himself as that white kid with his fancy recorder in the midst of a couple of Indian snake&reeds hustlers. Dilloway taped these sessions endlessly and when he got back home he knew that the right thing to do was to release them on his evercharming Hanson label.

As I mentioned earlier, the results are spellbinding and overtly raw. Dilloway captured the essence of life in the Nepalese backstreets for real, for a large part because of the joy and immense endurance the Nath Fam has. They gotta have gigantic lungs or something. The droning that goes on when those guys play their bamboo reeds is extremely hypnotical and every pinch of sound actually drones, whether it's a short note or a looooong one, it drones accordingly.

Volume II opens with ferocious bamboo reed spurts, called pungi's, causing an immediate psychedelic rush as the droning figures move through the dense Nepalese air right right into your cerebral cortex. When the premtals, a stringed percussion instrument, join in it gains a surreal quality. The droning of the pungi's fighting with the left-right wobbliness of the premtals. The pace is constant and adds to the hypnosis, ultimately seducing but never openly welcoming. There's rhythm and slight hints of melody although they never go nowhere and are mostly overwhelmed by the pungidrones. The second side offers a more varied and detailed affair, starting with some Luc Ferarri-style background noise while quickly buttoning up for some serious pungi/premtal action.

I've yet to delve into Volume I but knowing that Volume II is culled from leftovers and second tier material that really ups expectations. What Dilloway really shows with these Nath Family recordings is the sheer audacity and endless creativity some of the key-players in the United States of Noise have and keep on exploring. It's definately a sign of longtime endurance and with all these influences in Dilloway's pocket, you know his journey has just begun.

Sp@m

It's a wonderful thing to write for a webzine like Foxy Digitalis. Not only because they allow writers to stroll through the murk of the most obscure music out here nowadays, also because Brad Rose en his wife Eden are busier than an army of bees rolling around in pure honey. Their labels Digitalis and cd-r centred Foxglove release a gem more than once a year, they also fool around in a variety of musical ensembles. This year resulting in at least one more than good album as Eastern Fox Squirrels. It might not be the most focussed freefolkjammy jam around but it's a very rich and exciting listen because it allows you, the listener, to dream their own structure around it.

Foxy Digitalis, the zine, updates weekly on monday. I have three new reviews up, from which Janek Schaeffer stands out as a modern minimalist semi-masterpiece, and I'm not even grinning when I say that.

Cut Hands & Solutions

Released from the shackles of commercial blogging I finally found my freedom again! Not that I really think you care but fuck, it's sweet to back here and I'm ready to hit you fiends with some of the most obscure shit I can find.

Cut Hands will mostly talk about music only 20 % of musicloving cybergeeks will wanna read about but whatever, it's the documentation of a revolution because I do believe that what's going on in all the undercurrents of music, the experimental dungeons, is truly groundbreaking stuff.

Of course, Cut Hands is derived from the Whitehouse track 'Cut Hands Has the Solution' and I will mark this post with an mp3 of that lovely horror fairytale. Enjoy and watch this space.
MP3|Whitehouse 'Cut Hands Has the Solution'