Neil Milton - Elements

[modern classical, ambient]

Recommended if you like: aching beautiful modern composition; elegant piano work; An Accidental Memory in the Case of Death by Eluvium

Neil Milton - elements (2mf012dd) by beneathusthewaves

Download "Air (or, The Dragonfly)”

Neil Milton is relaunching his label, Too Many Fireworks, with a personal EP dubbed Elements - devoting a track to each of the four elements and its finale to “Aether”- and talk about making a comeback: fans of Eluvium and early A Silver Mt Zion material should take note, because this is minimalist modern classical at its finest.

A brisk eighteen minutes divided into five tracks is ideal: enough time for thematic development and listener engagement without becoming rote like so much “ambient” music can. I'm not entirely sure if music this lovely can really command attention; I'd say it politely requests it and you'd have to be inhuman to say “no”. In any case, it never becomes background music, as each of the tracks does bring an idea to the table, like the fluttery “Air” or the appropriately weighty, tectonic “Earth”. Hands down the best part of the release is its subtle adherence to theme: “Air” doesn't begin with sampled wooshing and “Water” is entirely devoid of prefab waterfall recordings. Instead, a track like “Fire” excites with its vibrant strings and “Aether” is minimal, spacey and gorgeous. You're forgiven for your preconceptions, though, because such a broad and general subject matter could be handled entirely tactlessly. Thankfully (mercifully) Milton handled the concept wisely and colours his compositions with the concept instead of forcing them to fit it.

The whole thing streams for free right there, a few inches up, so you have no excuse to not already be listening to it. For your listening convenience, you can also download an MP3 of the first track. And if you're the type to do so, please support both Neil and his revived label. At the very least check out the stream: this is truly sincere and majestic music.

Buy the EP

Too Many Fireworks
Neil Milton

voiceless & floating

Mickey Mickey Rourke - Inner Gazing
[Ambient, drone, noise]
Recommended if you like: Birchville Cat Motel (but you wish Campbell Kneale didn't want to kill you with music), chill-as-hell dreamgaze or something like that I don't know


Download.

Massive collaborative introspective blissed-out drone excursions, boring straight into yr daydreamin' skull. Incredibly warm, full-bodied, slow-breathing tunes that will either pass right through you or entrance you, but eventually will add up to a meaningful experience. Not to say Inner Gazing isn't immediately gratifying - it absolutely is - but it's something you'll want to [digitally] spin a few times to let it sink in and really discover what the collaborators bring to the table.

If you're going to be uncooperative and demand immediate satisfaction, then just listen to "Stay With Me" (feat. Universe) because this is probably one of my favourite jams of the year. Maybe not the best representation of the album as a whole because it's decidedly darker in tone than a lot of what else is going on here, but it's insanely menacing, sort of in a Grouper or Giles Corey kind of way; a subtler menace. The Foxes in Fiction joint is pretty sweet, too - called "Koopa" - so a song featuring an artist you probably already know as being super cool and with a title referencing Nintendo should get you to at least check this out. I know you kids like Nintendo.

Additionally, there's a fairly expansive collection of Mickey Mickey Rourke tunes online, either for free download/stream or a dirt-cheap download, so if you're digging all this spaced-out drifting (and I can't see how you're not), then definitely check it out.

Songs to sleep next to

I've written about Devin Hildebrand (Dth) before, being quite found of his unique collage work, and was pleasantly surprised to hear that he had more new material so soon. Songs To Sleep Next To moves away from the focus on found sounds and, through that shift, really exemplifies some fantastic songwriting, something all too rare under the umbrella of "ambient".

Opener "Pruny Hands Felt Health" might be my favourite Dth track yet, absolutely lush, organic, intimate but sounding huge beyond its scope. It is a song to sleep next to, not a song to sleep on or with or under; it's music to take you to sleep, not put you there. The whole album is downright lucid, entirely dreamlike and weightless but it never lets go entirely, never succumbs to useless "ambiance" or droning wanderlust or forgettable meandering and is always aware, always in control. The smart collage work isn't entirely lost either, with half-imagined nature sounds uniting the first two tracks and vocal samples popping up later in the album's somewhat more abrasive middle section (featuring a collaboration with noise/drone maestro Chris Rehm, who, likewise, is doing tons of cool things in the genre on the more caustic side of things (Salivary Stones is an absolute must-hear.)

If you're feeling lazy and need some loose comparisons slapped together to condense my opinion into a sound bite, then boo on your lazy readership, but I will reluctantly tell you that if you like Atlas Sound at its absolute most somnambulant or the Sparklehorse/Fennesz collaboration, then you'll find tons to like here. And if that doesn't help you at all, then just listen to it anyway: it's short, it's free, and worth your bandwidth.


Stream/download the whole thing here.

When we finally fall asleep

Digital media is awful and that is a fact. You can get your "FLAC" or your ".WAV" or whatever bitrate or rip you want but it's so far removed from experiencing an album that it makes me cringe. Yeah, yeah, Ye Observant Reader, I do post MP3s (or M4As if I'm being a bitch), and they certainly have their advantages, namely their convenience. But it's a reproduction, at the end of the day, a snapshot of a sculpture; an introduction, a starting point, not an entire experience in and of itself. This might be coming off as horrendously pretentious, and maybe it is, but there simply some albums that are incomplete statements without a physical package.

We All Inherit the Moon understands this. Hell, lead member Adam - and honcho behind Future Recordings - seems to swear by this. Every single item he puts out - every CD, LP, tape, book - is so lovingly assembled and fairly priced that it's a shame he doesn't run music as a whole. We All Inherit The Moon releases get the slightest bit of extra love, too, and the new lathe cut 8" is fantastic in presentation and execution. Crystal-clear square vinyl (careful with those corners, though) and a succinct 4/5 minutes of music per side, with possibly my favourite WAITM material yet. Languid, almost shoegazey atmosphere with post-rock spirit that really breaks through in the absolutely gorgeous final stretch of the song when the strings come in full bore (well, as "full bore" as this sort of thing gets). Seriously beautiful music, occupying a lovely little niche between ambient and post-rock, being a million times more dynamic than the former without breaking out in full-on crescendo like the latter. Really, the band's only getting better and better as time goes on. Stellar stellar stellar, in every sense of the word.



We All Inherit the Moon - When We Finally Fall Asleep

No words

Review: Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words - "No Words"

Seriously, the [sorta] new Dead Letters etc cassette is fantastic. For fans of: ambient music not created with this.

I Hope I Can Feel Something Like That One Day

"Excuse" is an ugly word; it has connotations of lie, like a reason that is a lie, at least partially. But "I've been busy" isn't a lie, per se, it's just such a bad reason that it feels excuse-esque. So there's my reason (however poor) for not keeping up with this, though I'm sure it must feel like an excuse to one Devin Hildebrand who emailed me a few weeks back about his sound-collage project Dth. Excuse me.

A lot of this new EP seems to stem from forlorn distress, from the slightly heartbreaking title I Hope I Can Feel Something Like That One Day to the individual songs ("I Always Feel Like Crying (For Mom) is a knee-jerk " :'( "), but musically it isn't quite so hyper-depressive, nor is it as explicitly annoying/boring as sound collage can be. After the clusterfuck and appropriately titled opener "[!]" the album unscrambles and is surprisingly delicate and deeply personal, culling samples not just from random found-sounds but "From our VHS labelled "X-mas '95 / Jodi". It's all set to understated ambient instrumentation, some synth drones and acoustic guitar mostly, it seems, but nothing to overpower the star(s) of the show here (though that being said, cut-up sample set to a live drum beat at the end of the title track is a definite highlight). The whole album is beautifully balanced, between collage and composition, between the vaguely hopeful and the utter despair, between cacophony and ambiance but, somehow, it always ends up an entirely compelling and a quietly disturbing experience.

The highlight here is probably the closer, "Humans are like Ripples", which is probably the simplest in terms of structure and use of samples, but is strangely hypnotic as a whole crowd of people is asked "how was your day?". It sort of epitomizes the forces at work on the album, as the answers range from humorous to somewhat worrisome (sometimes simultaneously) and the music fluctuates accordingly, apparently with some science behind it:
Notes on a set scale (0-20, including halves of numbers) droned accordingly to numbers spoken in spontaneous dialogue prompted by "how are you feeling today, 1-10?"

Basically, I Hope I Can Feel Something Like That One Day is a wildly curious set of songs, which is meant entirely as a compliment. It's the sort of quiet headphone listening for one of those days. When you're not quite sure you want a pick-me-up or if you'd rather throw on Unknown Pleasures as a hold-me-down, then go ahead and try Dth. It'll kind of do both to you, and you'll like it, promise.



Click here to download/stream the whole thing.

Silber Records

Alright, minor slip-up on my year-end recognition of labels doing great things, but in my defence, I only became aware of this one towards the end of the year. Which is really a huge loss on my part, because these folks are among the newfound breed of independent music organizations that "get it": they get what's going on in the industry right now, they get how to find and work with undiscovered talent, and they get how to make it work for them.

Silber Records has been alive and kicking for over 10 years, doing the noble - and difficult - act of releasing varied and consistently great music. It'd be fair to say the focus is on "ambient"[ish] music, running the gamut from post-rock to the darker side of drone and noise, plus a healthy bit of experimental everything on side (is post-jazz a thing? There might be post-jazz). Something for all the kids, y'know?

Odds are, if words like "ambient", "post-rock", "drone" and "noise" have kept you reading thus far, then you're going to find something you'll like here. And for the avant-curious, everything is up for free download or cheap purchase, so you've got nothing to lose and horizons to broaden. There are literally days worth of free downloads and I still have a lot to sink my eager teeth into myself, but here's a couple of favourites I've stumbled upon:


Remora - Guitar Antihero


Download.

"Brian John Mitchell (Remora) boosted the sound to the next level by using five guitars, a bass, & four amplifiers instead of the standard single guitar & amp. The additional guitars were staged around the main amplifier to act as drone instruments. Probably the loudest Remora show ever (reports are it was heard clearly a block away) & often on the cusp of losing control of the wave of sound, the piece ended with Mitchell nearly throwing up from the volume exposure."

If you're not going to download this based on that quote alone, you're not my friend any more. Massive, hypnotic noise, pretagged as "guitar terrorism" and I can't say I disagree. Brian is also the head honcho at Silber, so evidently this label is in good hands.


Aarktica - Live at KUCI 6/15/05



Download.

Probably the most subtle of the Silber releases I've listened to so far, Aarktica tip-toe the thin line between post-rock and dream-pop/shoegaze: slow, methodical build-ups and blissful wall-of-sound embraces, with the surprise (and lovely) addition of vocals, horns and electronics. Don't be scared by the "post-rock" tag, I promise you this is not Explosions In The Sky-lite or crescendo-core.

Moodring - Live



Download.

Sorry, I'm really at a loss for how to describe this band. It's seems to be pretty free-form, and I might describe the drums as "free jazz-y" if I was rhythmically-inclined enough to make judgements about such matters; it's noisy but surprisingly listenable and the people involved in this are obviously talented musicians. I'll just go ahead and call this "pigfuckjazz" because it feels like a fairly concrete summation.


So go ahead and download and don't feel guilty. If you dig it, though, buy yourself a physical copy and throw some dollars at 'em through their online store. If nothing else, search through their archives for something that tickles your fancy. I can almost guarantee you'll find something.

Hey look, a thing!

Yeah, sort of back in the saddle. Expect typical end-of-the-year shenanigans in the coming weeks.

Anyways, I was on my way to school the other day, and being a commuter student from the next town over means I arrive at school either a) way too early, or b) during class. Being the dilligent student I am, I tend to go for the first option. So I arrive a solid half-hour before I need to for an 8 AM class, meaning the campus is essentially dead. I set up camp in the cavernous main hall and planned to do some much-postponed reading and listen to some tunes.


Appropriately, I decided to put on some music that, much like my reading, had fallen on the wayside. And while I didn't exactly regret puttng off Northanger Abbey, postponing Tobias Hellkvist and Dead Letters Spell out Dead Words's White/Grey/Black was pretty stupid on my part. Super dense celestial drones, ebbing and flowing with the just the right amount of ebb... it's wonderful stuff for lonley winter mornings, really. If you've got an empty field or long, snowy bus ride in your near future - and you count yourself a fan of the somewhat epic brand of ambient by Stars of the Lid or Eluvium - be sure to give it a listen. Although the decidedly "Black" part of the collaboration lives up to its name, so maybe I should qualify the field should be "devoid of life" or your bus ride to school should be "in a potentially dangerous blizzard." Or something.


Tobias Hellkvist and Letters Spell out Dead Words - White/Grey/Black

The hollow mountain

As I'm sure you may have inferred by now, I'm a big proponent of buying records and physically owning music: artwork and packaging is absolutely vital to fully experiencing an album the way it was meant to be heard. And what arrived in my mailbox the other day is, perhaps, the greatest affirmation of that fact: The Hollow Mountain by TwinSisterMoon.



Scans aren't quite going to do this thing justice, but give it a look. In person, the booklet is a huge 8"x8" piece of screen-printed gorgeousness, tucked inside a beautiful hand-screened sleeve with a slab of hand-numbered vinyl (19/105 here.) Let's just say thank goodness it came in a protective record sleeve.



I was almost hesitant to play this thing: what if my hand slips? What if the needle scratches this beyond repair? FUUUUUUCK. But yeah, eventually I found my testicles and played the thing and wow. Like most releases by Natural Snow Buildings and all related projects, this is truly a record to crank to 10 and get lost in.




The structure of this album is a lot like that on his portion of the 3-way split, The Snowbringer Cult: eastern-tinged drones interspersed with acoustic folk. The drone numbers are standard fare for Mehdi Ameziane, which is to say, fucking awesome. All matter of instruments I can barely pronounce ebbing and flowing like a Lightbright melting underwater on acid. Sure, it's pretty same-y to his Natural Snow Buildings stuff which, in turn, is pretty same-y to isengrind (aka Solange Gularte, aka the lady-half of NSB) but when it's all so great I can't really be bothered by it. It's the shorter, simpler folk tunes that make TwinSisterMoon stand out: although technically unremarkable and all following a similar arpeggiated chord pattern, Ameziane's falsetto is gut-wrenching, and to have the lyrics finally printed only adds to the experience, giving grounding to the otherwise indistinct wailings.

I daresay this is the most accessible material from the project, and certainly from the whole NSB collection: the folk songs are beautiful, and the drones are all soothingly psychedelic (as opposed to some of the stuff found on Nigh Coercion...) and in digestible lengths of less than 10 minutes (sorry, no 46-minute "Song for Laurie Bird" here). Probably the perfect gateway to anyone who's had this project. The vinyl sold out immediately, but there is going to be a CD version on Ultra Hard Gel with a bonus track to boot.

In the meantime, you can get your TwinSisterMoon fix with the 3-way split The Snowbringer Cult, still not sold out (?!) which is actually a better introduction to this French psychdronefolkgaze madness, so ignore what I said before.

From The Hollow Mountain:
TwinSisterMoon - Bride of Spirits
Note: Dull Knife, thankfully, made sure this LP was sold only to people who wanted the record, not to the notorious eBayers who re-sell these things at several times their original price. As such, I am respecting their wishes and only giving you the sample MP3 they have on their own site.

From The Snowbringer Cult
TwinSisterMoon - Amantsokan
TwinSisterMoon - Kingdom of the Sea

With Throats As Fine As Needles

Cool recording techniques, to my knowledge, always yield cool albums. Set Fire to Flames set up a bunch of equipment in a condemned house for a week with a whole lot of drugs to see what would happen, and put out the stellar Sings Reign Rebuilder. Sunn O))) set up shop in an old Norwegian cathedral to do Domkirke and churned out some of the best material of their decade-long existence (chiefly "Why Dost Thou Hide Thyself In Clouds?"). With Throats As Fine As Needles formed a four-man drone supergroup (featuring members of Nether Dawn and Birchville Cat Motel), then holed up in an abandoned bunker with portable instruments in a concept that, on paper, pretty much makes my dick explode.



Luckily the dick-explosion pretty much carries though on to record, too. (Wait, "luckily"...?) As one would could guess based on the talents involved in this project and the circumstances they put themselves in, this is abrasive, varied, noisy, and hugely reverbed stuff. It's all very layered and extremely dense, with so much shit going on it can't help but meld together into some blissed-out drone grooooooves, man. Especially the first track, where it feels like all four of them are going full bore and it comes off sounding like a much more evil Vibracathedral Orchestra or Natural Snow Buildings (both of which are terrible comparisons at face value, but imagine each of them were... locked in a bunker with battery-powered instruments.)

The packaging for this thing is swell too, with a hand-dyed rice (?) paper sleeve, so I'm assuming each of these is going to be unique. Less than 999 copies left, so get it while you can.

With Throats As Fine As Needles - I
With Throats As Fine As Needles - II

A Trap For Judges (& a schedule for blogs (this one (now every Monday and Thursday)

Doesn't it seem like the more "extreme" a genre gets (in any direction, i.e. extremely harsh or minimal or whatever), the more it has to do to be interesting? Noise, drone, ambient... all fairly interchangeable and indistinct, for the most part. There is simply only so much you can do with white noise/single-digit BPM/holding down a C on your Korg. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy all the aforementioned genres, but it's very easy to get burnt out and jaded with it all.

My first drone experience was, as it is for most people, with Sunn O))) (unless you're uber-tr00 and listened to Earth.) I didn't quite "get it", again, as it is with most people. Not that didn't understand, per se: I was a fan the Melvins' doomier, proto-drone, dirgey, [ominous-sounding-D-word] material, especially "Hag Me" off of Houdini. But what the fuck was with Sunn O)))? Ten minutes long, no discernible "riff", no nothin' as far as I was concerned. Admittedly, I was 15 and was much more interested in death/black/thrash at the time, so I probably wasn't in the best frame of mind.

A couple years later, when Black One came out, I (NOTE: this is not a blog about Sunn O))) and this story is indeed going somewhere, but feel free to skip this paragraph if you want to get to the meat and potatoes of this thing.) decided to pick it up and give the band another chance, especially since this album had a number of guests and seemed to be a fairly varied album. Which it actually was. Oren Ambarchi, John Wiese, Wrest and Malefic (of Leviathan and Xasthur, respectively) doing vocals HOLY SHIT. And it worked: almost every track stood out. The tremolo riff (riff?!) in "It Took The Night to Believe", the goddamn netherwordly screams in "Cursed Realm (Of the Winterdemons)", and, perhaps my favourite, the huge harmonics in "Cry for the Weeper." Drone could be more glacial paced guitar sludge, and I'm doing my best to come up with a "it only took me the night to believe in the genre" sort of joke, but I can't.

So with a newfound interest in the genre, I set out to see what other "experimental" drone I could find. Boris's unpredictable, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach; Earth's sun-baked southern doom; Asunder's monolithic funeral dirges. And, just recently, I have discovered, perhaps, the crown jewel of them all (ok, aside from Boris, but they're not really drone, ya know?): Asva.



What You Don't Know Is Frontier is absolutely massive. Oppressive, haunting, ethereal... every buzz word you use when talking about drone applies here, the only difference being these words actually mean those things now.

More than anything, it's the simple things on the album that are most effective. As I'm sure you can tell from the pictures, these are slightly more mature doom merchants, but it really does show. Take, for instance, the organ (keyboard? Synth?) in the opening title track. This is what takes it beyond most other drone. It's very basic but goddamn if it doesn't unlead this nightmare fuel.

The highlight of this album (not just for me, but for everyone, it seems, according to Last.fm , too) is undoubtedly "A Game In Heaven, Hard Work In Hell." Words aren't going to do much for this one, but let's say it starts of very droney (surprise!), builds with some eerie, indistinct female vocals before, out of completely nowhere, fucking bulldozes you with a glacier made of onyx and hate. I don't really want to ruin the track actually, because I do hope you'll shit yourself the same way I did when I first spun this record. Shit yourself with pure awesome.

I encourage you to buy this record if you like what you hear. The band, like a lot of people, have been affected by the current economic situation, and because of lack of money had to cancel a European tour scheduled for next month. Buy it straight from the band, cut out as much of the middleman as you can.

Asva - A Game In Heaven, Hard Work In Hell