skinnypricks

High in One Eye - Skinnypricks
[noise rock, hardcore]
Recommended if you like: Lightning Bolt (but they feel too tame for you), Jesus Lizard (but they're not noisy enough for you)




















Download/stream here.

Less than 10 minutes of spontaneous, lo-fi aggression, apparently written and recorded in the space of two hours. This either is completely your thing or it is not at all, but it's free and less than ten minutes long, so make it your thing. It's surprisingly good for something more or less unplanned; there's a lot of really cool ideas going on. Especially in the drum-heavy assault and battery of "Tease" (best vocals on the EP?) or downright doom-laden "Jack-of-all-trades". Which eventually segues into 80's thrashy black metal worship before devolving into Daughters-esque dissonant riffing. But really, you saw that coming. Absolutely primal.

High in One Eye bandcamp page
(also includes another EP and a single up for free)

Carnival

Sleep In - Steady
Sleep In - Amorous
Sleep In - January

I really want to hate Sleep In. Not because I don't like the music - I do - and not because Hamish Duncan is a jerk - he isn't, at least, in my experience - but because he has accomplished so much with his music despite being only 19, thus making me look like a lazy, untalented jerk for also not putting out 4 full-length albums of shoegazey psychedelic meandering. Well, shoot.


And really, the whole discography is pretty grand. Incredibly solid. Unprecedentedly solid. It's a whole mess (in a good way) of genre-hopping/defying denies your (read: my) best attempts at pidgeonholing. It's noisy, it's trippy, it's vaguely catchy, it's expansive when it's not being minimal, it's straightforward when it's not being obtuse, and its the sort of thing that will take more than one listen to grasp (which is my excuse for not posting this much, much sooner after I said I would). From my experience, the whole Sleep In project is just a vast outpouring of ideas, the sort of project that really couldn't have existed, say, 10, even 5 years ago. Truly a product of the digital age, and certainly a musician who understands what it takes to be a musician in this era and, furthermore, knows how to take advantage of it. You can grab Sleep In albums for $1.75 from his own label, Nightgull Records (oh, yeah, he runs a record label, too. At this rate, the next Sleep In release is going to be "the cure for cancer") or get a digital double-album from Enemies List Home Recordings for $5. I literally spent more on bus fare this morning.

I've posted some tracks from Carnival - available with Pyramid from Enemies List - to give you the best 'snapshot' of the Sleep In M.O. From the spacey, wintery jams of "January" to the straight-ahead psych-rocker "Steady" (Magic Lantern would be proud (and also look for a disarmingly spot-on Thurston Moore impression), it's incredibly diverse but smartly unified. You know, they way they used to make albums.

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.

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

Back in the saddle with The Black Vase

Yeah, it's been a while. How've you been in the last... year and a half? Good? Good. I've decided that Facebook notes aren't quite the proper outlet for writing about the things I write about, mostly because the things I write about aren't things my Facebook friends particularly care to read about. So here you are, my wider audience, and maybe some of you cats can dig what's going on here.

Despite the blog title, I don't really have a particular theme going on, or, in fact, any rhyme or reason behind what I post outside of the fact that it's something I like. And if you like it too (or dislike), you should drop me a comment or somesuch thing.

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Prurient is the moniker under which Dominick Fernow creates a shitload of noise (to be eloquent, of course), which mostly lands on the "harsh" side of the genre (as opposed to "gentle" noise, I suppose?) Which, for the uninitiated, means that some of these frequencies will likely, at proper levels, damage hearing and kill dogs (possibly. Probably.) Seriously, though, crank the volume way the hell down for "Roman Shower", the scathing 15-minute endurance test that opens Black Vase. I am by no means a conisseur of the noise genre, so perhaps I "don't get it", but I can see no point to this opener other than to sort out those who will not stick around for the next 50 minutes.



However, for those who can brave the (literally) piercing first track, what lies ahead is one of the few albums in the genre that can actually hold my interest. Ironically, in a genre that has pushed music to its very outer limit, to where music arguably ceases to even be "music" in any traditional sense of the word, most of it feels painfully samey and boring. You can only listen to so many kids running a distortion pedal through a loop until even walls of scathing white noise become yawn-inducing, much the same way death metal becomes hilariously pedestrian when every single band is doing their best be the extreme opposite of that.

But this is where Prurient comes in and makes noise that feels as if it has purpose, direction, meaning: as if he knows he is still a musician and still writes songs. Of course these terms are all still used with regards to noise and not traditional music, so when I say direction, I don't mean in the sense of "Godspeed You! Black Emperor slowly winding up some explosive climax after 10 minutes of hazy meandering", but more like "an explosive climax on a scrambled porn channel, all colours distorted and organs miscoloured but the last 10 minutes of hissing moans did lead to a static money shot." Various tribal drum beats all reverb'd to hell and feedback sirens/controlled squeals seem to direct the underlying/overlaying noise, with Fernow's indescernable static screams belting out some barely-there lyrics about S&M, rape, and all matter of such material that would make de Sade proud:

Show me how it's done
Open me up
Make me lick it up
Replace my air

Anywho, I've rambled enough. These tracks are .m4as, and for that I am terribly sorry; I will do my best to make future posts in mp3. k? k.

Prurient - Silver Flashlight
Prurient - Soft Crack


Comments always appreciated.