Category: Reviews

Decaycast Reviews: CONSCIOUS SUMMARY “EXHAUSTIONS” (SKIN TRADE RECORDINGS, 2O18)

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Decaycast Reviews: CONSCIOUS SUMMARY “EXHAUSTIONS” (SKIN TRADE  RECORDINGS, 2O18)

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The newest work from LA’s CONSCIOUS SUMMARY carves a sharp and distinct  lineage from their previous works to this newest release from California based SKIN TRADE RECORDINGS. “Exhaustions”  encapsulates the delicacy and intimacy in which Samur  Khouja, the person behind Conscious Summary handles his sounds.  The first side, “Commitment To An Extinction” begins with a low, bubbly rumble just below a present volume and continues to undulate at a stasis-like pacing of a slow churning dark, gurgling sounds interjected with sharp and poignant shards of violent sorcery. The aggressively present scraping eventually gives way to a more subtle, peaceful tone poem of pulsating drones. We  are left in a contemplative, peaceful place, but not for long, a new dawn is on the horizon, one we did not plan for. The peaceful poem turns into a dynamic battle for space and form; shivering blades of sonic chaos, accented through monstrous  spurts of distorted, harsh, frequency battles, which slowly and effortlessly take control as background synthesizers pulse, hum, and vibrate with ascending tones while the chaos ensues.  After a brief but present harsh section the listener is once again placed into a new identity, which gently, calming efforts of swelling sine waves, which are so delicate and nuanced they almost weep to the listener in a morose, subtle, nuanced phrase.

The B side offers more voice forward pieces with stretched voices and textured, articulated synth happenings  work in a high tension psychedelic harmony similar to the oncomings of a long, desert experienced LSD trip, but this psychedelia is sonic, and not  chemical based. Through masterfully mixed and layered synth and voice sections, Khouja creates  high tension electronic happenings,  with choked and  eviscerated voice offerings thumped by a sub bass drone/beat that will take the listener unto the next plane of  existence, an unknown place  with spatial distortions unknown to our  current mind.

The sounds of “Exhaustions” pull from harsh noise, drone, ambient, and new age strategies in the best way possible, referencing these historic practices while simultaneously shattering the expectations of what any of these could and should be. Khouja masterfully blends these styles in a hypnotic, meditative tour de  force of minimalist contemporary electronic music. “Exhaustions” is not worlds away from the work of say Pauline Olaveros or Terry Riley however it offers its own dynamic breath of sonic interpretation. “Exhaustions” is poised, patent, and all around a profound minimalist interpretation of space, form, tension, and experience. Highly recommended, there is also a special edition encased in a  wooden box which looks beautifully crafted, and a perfect enclosure for this cavernous work of  experimental electronics and voice.

DECAYCAST Reviews: Jeff Carey “Zero Player Game” (Ehse Records, 2018)

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DECAYCAST Reviews: Jeff Carey “Zero Player Game” (Ehse Records, 2018)

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Jeff Carey‘s  2018 “Zero Player Game” which is actually out today synthesizes noise, cyberpunk concepts, and  abstract composition and  chance into a dark, heavy stew of experimental music. Carey’s sound on “Zero Player Game” is raw, fast moving, and uncompromising, at  times, sounding like a glitch-heavy classically inspired contemporary experimental music composition and other times bypassing the  dynamic and sharp ebbs and troughs for the all out sonic approach of mayhem. Carey’s sound oscillates between distinct and sonically intentional strategies. The sheer amount of  sonic spaces occupied throughout “Zero Player Game” is astonishing to say the least; sounds vary from thickly wet, pulsing pillars of square wave madness, short, quick, bubbly flesh being torn from bone accentuated by a cavernous thud, longstanding ambient background drones which create the architecture for Carey’s joystick of chaos to oscillate between endless synth and sample parameters in mere seconds. Whatever the compositional idea throughout, Carey has clearly mastered it. Carey’s sounds are deep, alive, and present, and despite their customized instrument/presentation being grounded in the  digital realm, sounds so life-like and present one can feel a slithery long arm reaching out of the speaker and  gently stroking your spine with a poisoned feather tip is the overall vibe of the sound. VISCERAL and R E A L, containing all what so many lack, ‘Zero Player Game” pulls no punches that operate outside of it’s own chaotic, but idiosyncratic structure and form and is in solid control of its own sonic destiny.

“Zero Player Game” is comprised mostly of intense, sharp and dangerous, cut-up music with an organic, live and honest feel, something not easily achieved. The press release states,  “Jeff Carey’s fourth CD release is is electro-instrumental music performed with custom software controlled by a joystick and gamer keypad. Zero Player Game is an intensely artificial sound world where beats and bass lines are replaced with an elastic structure of synthetic texture, feedback and bit crushed noise blasts” which offers a deeper explanation into how exactly this  style was developed and we wonder for this release specifically? However “Zero Player Game” was created compositionally, it at no point leaves the listener in a static, boring place, for every sonic action is a new adventurous wormhole for the ear to slither down into as the brain begins to break attempting to decipher these cosmically deep and  adventurous soundscapes.  Highly recommended for fans of noise, harsh noise, and electro-acoustic cut-up. Angrily blistering yet peacefully blissful music for the curious ear. Jeff is also on tour  supporting this release so check the dates and his website below!

NOVEMBER 6, Bushwick, NY @ H010 Gallery

7, Providence, RI @ Machines with Magnets

8, Ithaca, NY @ The Chanticleer

9, Columbus, OH @ Fuse Factory

10, Louisville, KY @ Kaiju

11, St Louis, MO @ The Juice

12, Dayton, OH @ Skeleton Dust Records

13, Chicago, IL @ TriTriangle

15, Pittsburgh, PA @ 3577 Studios

16, Nyack, NY @ Nyack Village Theatre Boutique

17, Philadelphia, PA @ Vox Populi

DECEMBER 2, DC @ Rhizome

3, Johnson City, TN @ The Hideaway

4, Gainesville, FL @ The Limin Room

5, Miami, FL @ Churchills

6, Orlando, FL @ Wills Pub

7, St Petersburg, FL @ Paper Crane

8, New Orleans, LA @ Mudlark

9, Birmingham, AL @ Firehouse

10, Asheville, NC @ Static Age

http://jeffcarey.foundation-one.org

 

DECAYCAST Track Reviews: SIGNOR BENEDICK THE MOOR “Srsly” (Deathbomb Arc, 2018) + Tour Dates!

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DECAYCAST Track Reviews: SIGNOR BENEDICK THE MOOR “Srsly” (Deathbomb Arc, 2018)

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Deathbomb Arc recording artist, and genre mutilator SIGNOR BENEDICK THE MOOR holds nothing back emotionally or stylistically with their reverent track “srsly” from the “Toybox” release on the esteemed longstanding imprint, who has helped spawn such artists as Death Grips, clipping. JPEGMAFIA and many more. On “srsly”  Moor begins with an honest, present, fuzzed out vocal presentation “bout to lose my body and soul” as an equally fuzzed out bass drum thuds in the backroom over the  artists melodic and vehement vocal presentation. The voice then mutates to a cleaner version, back to an ancient telephone fuzz, and then again to layered, almost “auto-tune” style vocals as the bass drum and claps refrain and break down, allowing the artists voice to dictate the pacing and  emotional expressions that is SB THE MOOR.

 

Un-categorized, yet defined, concise yet expansive, the sound of “srsly” is unmistakable, yet nothing quite like I’ve heard in contemporary hip hop.  Moor’s vocals oscillate between sung, spoken, and stuck in sonic sorcery as the track floats into a beautifully melodic breakdown where Moor’s voice shines atop the throbbing, warm, pulsating beat underneath. Warm synth pads creep underneath the beat to give a tingling sonic  topping to the already flushed out  beat, and ends as beautifully as it begins.  Moor creates music that defies rigid genre configurations and limitations and instead offers a futuristic, radical, idiosyncratic take on experimental  hip hop and r&b. Catch them on a  west coast tour right now,  stopping  in Oakland this Friday at at Pro Arts  gallery with  openers  Golden Champagne Flavored Sweatshirt and WOE. Check the tour poster below for remaining dates!

 

 

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– Maniere Zappone

DECAYCAST Reviews: AMANDA R HOWLAND “Spider, Milk, Batshit, Silence” (No Rent, 2018)

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DECAYCAST Reviews: AMANDA R HOWLAND “Spider, Milk, Batshit, Silence” (No Rent, 2018)

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Cleveland, OH recording artist Amanda R.  Howland comes with refreshing array of sonic possibilities and strategies with, “Spider, Milk, Batshit, Silence” her first tape for the NO RENT imprint, with two sides of mixed-bag, dense, electronics spanning from harsh noise, to musique concrete,  to sections accentuating voice, to more abstracted rhythm sections which blend in and out of a gentle, yet very present, bowed, hum.  Static, voice, melody, clattering broken rhythms, radio chatter of  ancient transmissions and a harsh sense of absence are all present in this short but important release.  Tension is another constant theme to the ear as  one section may contain a harsh, alienating scraping; a  sound nasty pissed and angrily broken, inching across the floor toward its prey as the  amplitude and aggression increase and climax into an alarm style buzzing; alerting the listener that, yes, now is your time. Another sound, if even for a moment, m0014255476_10ay offer a brief, ambient respite to the harsh reality that has encapsulated us all, “Spider, Milk, Batshit, Silence” is, indeed the sound of that. A chaotic, dangerous and aurally thick and swift climax appears and then vanishes leaving only a distant hum of  abstracted silence, a slow, subtle, thumping as if the decaying heart has pushed red for its final beat.  The silence at the end of side one almost doesn’t seem real as the listener is left with wanting more of this uncertain future the ears and brain have yet to test, yet to experience.  If any sonic territories are left unexplored under the “experimental”  or “out-sound” tags on side one, we soon learn they will be shredded and eviscerated on side two with as much skill, tension, and carefully articulated abstraction as they were on side one.

The second side, “Batshit, Silence” picks up  right where the  A side dropped us off, with a high-pitched, distorted and warped melody.  Intense shrieks, angry swells, and ancient hymns of bouncing, pulsing sine-wave frequencies gel together like a microbiological  fungus slowly transforming into something much greater and dangerous, the thick scraping, shooting radio0 transmissions into the brain grow together, seamlessly providing a ridged and ugly backbone for abstracted  layers of thunderous pounding, the a tonal scraping of a ferociously thick winds ripping across the gruesome and confusing scene, pulling tiny, flesh-ridden shards of the listeners inner ear with it,  to cascade upon, as Howlands’ dark, grinning, noisy, churning  machine glides through the wires and slowly leaks out of the pores offering a new dark reality, endlessly searching for a cave to whip around in, an enormous sound. This scene is eventually evacuated to barren, alien radio transmissions have crept their way in and angst-like shake and sputter long lost messages over the dense, thick walls of  bleeding electronics, this like life eventually fades away and we are  left with an alienating, deafening silence.  Highly dynamic and enjoyable tape for a wide variety of experimental delvers. Pick u the digital HERE and the cassette HERE

DECAYCAST Reviews : Witowmaker “Feather” Cassette (Sleep On Dreams, 2018)

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DECAYCAST Reviews : Witowmaker “Feather” Cassette (Sleep On Dreams, 2018)

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Witowmaker is the project of Bay Area electronic producer and internet cult personality Christopher Danko, also of Stable imprint/collective, and Religious Girls fame. On “Feather”, Danko crafts ten lush, dynamic,  emotionally present, fun and heavy electronic “dance” tracks which float the listener to an oscillating plane of lush tone poem arpeggiations, thick walls of decaying synthesizers, heavy, dynamic drum programming, atmospheric flutterings, and concisely layered, and intricately mapped vocal samples. The overall sound of Witowmaker is, at times,  surprisingly warm and ‘positive’, with a tinge of sarcasm, and at other times, darker, more dissonant, and even emotionally confusing in an interesting and uncontrived manner. Tension is sonically available throughout the wide range of aural moods on “Feather”, one track is accentuating the bent light sunshine across crashing waves, while the next track descends into another layer of cosmic hell, unsure of the outcome. Refreshing; this is a fun and important release in the arch of bay area electronic musings.

“Feather” offers complex, lush, delicate sonic textures while still retaining a pounding, thick, four to the floor heaviness which pulls from Acid, Dub, IDM and a dense warped version of straight-up dance music. Remnants of influence from Aphex Twin, FKA Twigs,  DJ Spooky, Art Of Noise, and later Carl Cox can be heard in the glistening, bright, affront production, yet Witowmaker offers a unique style of dance based electronic music all their own! The B side begins with a fast tempo, funky bass arp track titled “Trick Me Twice” which rings back to 90’s NRG/bass music with an experimental flare all it’s own. A classically trained arp machine spits out climbing cascading  rhythms while lush pads provide a warm backbone for chopped and glued vocal slices, offering a dense, warm, funky dance floor banger. Plug my ears with a drill to extract the earplugs that have been stuck for centuries at the club, ‘cause this is the high tempo, low bullshit dance music I’ve been waiting for.

This little tone machine gets funkier and more dynamic with each spin!  Other tracks like the B side’s “Contamination” offer a darker, more evil-grin means of electronic stylings, which perhaps might be the  darkest and most warped track on the album, pleasing the listener as the acid kicks in and everything changes. Witowmaker is refreshingly honest, dark and delicately crafted dance music for the jokester in all of us laughing to the trap door of life  until the doors spin open and we’re left wandering through a world of confusion not knowing what we’ve seen nor heard. Look for more from this project, we will be. Side note: this is one of the best sounding and best LOOKING tapes we have received in some time, and it’s refreshing when the visual look and sound unite to create a beautiful package of lush electronic presentation.  Order this tape, now!

 

Here’s also some free bandcamp download codes for the album:  redeem at http://www.bandcamp.com/yum

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DECAYCAST Reviews: Andorkappen “Temples Of The Unvirtuous” (Oxen, 2018)

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Andorkappen, LA  based noise/ drone maestro and also honcho at Underground Tape Review is back with “Temples Of The Unvirtuous”, on one of our  favorite labels, OXEN, also an LA based imprint. “Temples Of The Unvirtuous” begins with a slow, low, hollow  drone which barely is able to escape the speakers, however this distant  drone steadily becomes a thick, warm, comforting,  whirring sawtooth buzz accented by a steadily rising sine  wave pitch poem, steadily climbing the ladder or  alienation and confusion. This is the style of  synthesizer drone music i have been waiting for,  stripped, raw, warm, an a-tonal  form to atone to.  The bass  forward drone, and the high pitched ring, engrosses the hearing until the  sound is like a shaking, microscopic robotic insect drone which has  entered the brain via the ear canal.  You now have become rather UNcertain of what the future may hold.

The  drone remains omnipresent, now navigating the innards of your  nervous  system with its sweating,  pulsing, reverberations of mechanical hell, yet somehow this hell is soothing and relaxing, like the  warm hum of distant machines that will eventually come to end our life, but for now have  taken respite across the desert, gently vibrating and breathing, not  quite ready to attack yet. The high pitched buzz has gently, yet in a fixed, determined manner become the musical  crescendo and de-crescendo  of the A side, and of course the bass for the B side, but rest assured, no matter how your body takes it’s  new  implanted oscillations, things will be different. Even though this evil sound appears distant it  will slowly, steadily and eventually forcefully remap the sonics of your nervous system until you  are violently, shaking uncontrollably in a pile of confusion and as you collapse onto the floor, the buzzes  cease to exist, and all that’s left is a tiny mechanical bee buzzing  against a dark, barren, abandoned landscape, ominously and microscopicly floating in limbo, waiting for it’s next unknown victim.

You can order the cassette from OXEN Label HERE! 

DECAYCAST Premieres : Mathieu St-Pierre ” These Elephants”

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DECAYCAST Premieres : Mathieu St-Pierre ” These Elephants”

Slow, bubbling, long-form settle yet creatively present aural shifts of ambient swells from Canadian visual and  audio artist Mathieu St-Pierre.Lush, warm  tones  slowly pulsate to give the listener an soft  and gentle tone poem, displacing place, space, and  sonic orientation. St-Pierre paints lush  portraits of barren Canadian landscapes losing the listener over and over and over into a foggy, shimmeringly vibrant yet thick sonic haze. Chirping arpeggios give breath to layers of buried, shimmering, textured  sound  explorations. Phase out and take a deep listen. Also don’s sleep on their  extensive array of expended glitch art here : http://www.mathieustpierre.com

“Mathieu St-Pierre is a Canadian experimental visual artist, specialized in the fields of video art and photography and more specifically in glitch art. His passion for experimentation within a multitude of video manipulations stemmed from a lifelong passion of cinema. Since, he has refined his passion for visual art to focus on the creative medium of digital glitches, generative art and net art”

‘This is the first album by visual artist Mathieu St-Pierre. In this musical venture he explores the relationship of ambient sounds with the medium of the internet. More specifically by incorporating Google Maps’ Street View to his musical vision and therefore creating a new interactive experience.’

DECAYCAST Track Reviews: Forests 森林 “Disarray” from ‘Idol Collapse’ LP (Left Hand Path, 2018)

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DECAYCAST Track Reviews: Forests 森林 “Disarray” from ‘Idol Collapse’ LP (Left Hand Path, 2018)

Forests 森林 crafts dark, heavy, funky, and  occasionally sludgy, a-tonal industrial music for generations spanning many wars and technological shifts, collapses included.  On the track “Disarray” of their new 12” LP “Idol Collapse” on the rapidly accelerating  San Francisco Left Hand Path imprint,  Forests 森林 begin with an ancient howling metal percussion style clamoring as a distressed alarm-style sine wave bleeds your ears into a dark, thudding, hammering bass  riff.  “Disarray”  angrily and violently pounds forward  with thudding, unsettling cavernous percussion. An angular,  fuzzed out, monotone bass eventually gives breath to distantly haunted chanting/moaning style vocals. Words, and these worlds are unintelligible to my damaged, ramsacked, and now funky bassed-out,  puss-filled ears, but the tone of the story tells of an old, abandoned structure who’s walls are being slowly expanded upon by the  cavernous reverb,  pulsing bass tracks and churning hum of far away synthesizers and mutilated electronics,  Forests 森林  will lock you in a room and expand upon its  structure through sound, until you lie motionless on the  floor of  a place that once  contained  the form, now you have nothing but an old mangled, half  erased Front242 tape playing at a  third of the speed with  twice the  intensity and four times the  dynamics, whoops that’s actually the Forests 森林 tape i just dubbed as  I was  laying  there gasping for my last breath, i reach for the record  to button to  replicate these hellish,  booming sounds just one more time as my  turntable wont fit in this tightly bound coffin. Order the record HERE

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– Maniere Zappone

DECAYCAST REVIEWS Petridisch – “A Fixed Point” CD/Cassette (I Heart Noise, 2017)

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DECAYCAST REVIEWS Petridisch – A Fixed Point” CD/Cassette (I Heart Noise, 2017)

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Petridisch”A Fixed Point” CD/Cassette are already sold out in physical form (both CD and  cassette) but you can get a free download over there at the  I Heart Noise Bandcamp Page , which is a label and multimedia platform hosting a rather active blog of the same name. Petridisch’s  vocal and  percussion forward offerings of multi-layered, slow  ambient sonic explosions and chants of densely layered synths, build a wide variety of complex timbral experiments and densely articulated specimens. On “A Fixed Point”, Petridisch begins with slow shimmering waves of  ambient, buzzing waves, decaying, cavernous claps  and slowly and  steadily builds  layers of washed over plumes of texture and memory while structures of rhythm and  percussion begin to take form. Synthesizers slowly and  craftily edge  their way in with soft, present  swells,  mid  tempo arpeggiated sines, and layers of  ambient noise sustaining bright,  shimmering, articulate sonic  events.

The voice is an important part of this record and it adds a beautiful cloak around the various  track elements and really does gel all of the different  elements together as a compositional superglue.  Four short, ambient explorations pull equally from The Cocteau Twins, Boards Of  Canada, early Eno and  so much more, and so much less in the best way  possible, as Petridisch truly has cast their own unique sound into the  ethos of the word of endless sonic discovery and invention.  For fans of ambient, drone, early Tangerine Dream,  Terry Riley, and early synthesizer music, Petridisch packs a huge arsenal of sonic weapons in a  release that  is barely twelve minutes long, Highly recommended.

 

Petridisch

DECAYCAST Reviews – Witches Of Malibu – “The Grand Crucifier” (Dead Media Recordings, 2018)

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DECAYCAST Reviews – Witches Of Malibu – “The Grand Crucifier” (Dead Media Recordings, 2018)

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Witches of Malibu is the project of underground  industrial / harsh noise / psychedelic master Skott Rusch also of Hunting Lodge fame.  For this  release Skott’s playing under the WOM moniker and this one is released by  Dead Media Recordings, out of Ontario, CA. “The Grand  Crucifier” opens up  with a distant noisy, slow,  industrial rhythmic thudding which slowly grows with frequency, intensity and  terror.  A violent, shuddering call and response pacing develops between cold, clanging metal blasts of  metal and high pitched, unrelentingly harsh, static-filled, spikes of noise and chaos, however it never morphs into anything that could be construed as carelessly random. One thing that sticks out of these tracks is the the  tension, intention, and focus remain focused on their own bleak starkness which only serves to make the sounds that much darker and menacing. These cuts are super intentioned, and never fade into the realm often visited in harsh noise of unconnected,  random and selfish sounds, each  section possesses its own structure and harsh intentionality,  and with each sonic shriek, stab, or inverted  explosion comes a heightened peak of anxiety and uneasiness,  again and again until that is the listener is meant with deafening silence upon the tracks completion. Not to fear though, as dark soup will be served at the table all night, and the bleak, misty, cavernous  alienating sounds of WOM aren’t going anywhere, at least for the duration of this cassette.

The second track, Strike Strikes (04:11) is perhaps the  album’s most static offering in terms of movement, but  still provides a grating, hellish, scraping soundtrack to the days  activities of  gently knifing out your eyeballs and rolling them down the hill as they collect dirt and eradicate the last bits of light folded into your brain. The track builds with volume, form and intensity and by the end, a dark psychedelic confusion sets in and you can neither see nor hear nor feel where you have ended up, the pulsing has eclipsed all of your senses and the deafening shrieking has taken over. 

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The third and probably strongest and most dynamic track, “The Shine Cannon-Hectic Parasite”  starts with an almost inaudible hum for a  few seconds and then quickly turns into a buzz saw like cacophony of synth engine  destruction, slowly shifting and pulsing to bleed out the last bit of orientation one may have had at this point in the listening experience. The buzzing  goes from a constant square like jagged, aggressive, but relatively static,  sound to  morphed , twisted, swirling  sphere of sonic memory failure, blending into the next wave of  aural destruction. The cassette closes out with a slightly more minimalist, barren, percussion  forward track with some  subtly shifting whirling string like synths which sound more like a bowed saw than  synthesizer, blending perfectly with the choppy, blown out, mangled and twisted percussion. Rhythms pound and shake and eventually fade  away. The cochlear is now a dark, barren hole into the center of nothingness, and the  white noise blasts, high shrieking oscillators and garbled transmission ensure you won’t be making it back up the hill- you are forever  trapped in the  bottom of this pit and the sound  of  scraping, clawing, clamoring blasts of  sonic slag is the last sound that will  ever  pressurize your  ear  drum. Good bye. The end. Buy this TAPE HERE  or pretty much anything by this project.

 

– Michael Daddona