FULL SNOW MOON (07 February 2012)

The musick dedicated to this Esbat is:

DEATH IN JUNE

THE WALL OF SACRIFICE


Original Issue: 1989 New European Recordings (BAD VC88)

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Margot-meter: 5 moons / 5

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from All Music Guide:

By the time of 1989's Wall of Sacrifice, Death in June was essentially a one-man project, although Doug Pearce is joined here by several collaborators, familiar and new: Non's Boyd Rice, filmmaker and occult author Nikolas Schreck, Strawberry Switchblade's Rose McDowall and David Tibet of Current 93.

Wall of Sacrifice juxtaposes melodic neo-folk with experimental pieces that dispense with conventional song formats. The album is bookended by numbers from the latter category.

On the opening title track, Pearce assembles a chaotic 16-minute soundscape, cutting and pasting together doomy repetitive piano notes, triumphant horn flourishes, martial drumming, old German songs and vocal samples. The track's sound-collage approach recalls some of Current 93's explorations on Nature Unveiled (1984) and Dogs Blood Rising (1984), but it's not particularly engaging.

The ominous, epic closer, "Death Is a Drummer," is more successful; a hypnotic, droning electronic pulse gives this track a more satisfyingly unified feel as ghostly military music while female vocals fade in and out. The most rewarding material finds Pearce pursuing his apocalyptic folk muse on several sparse acoustic tracks.

The brooding "Fall Apart" and "Hullo Angel" are compelling enough, but most memorable is the beautiful and austere "Giddy Giddy Carousel," which evokes Scott Walker's stirring Europhile ballads -- although Pearce's view is considerably darker than Walker's romanticism ("Europa has burned and will burn again"). While most of this material is either expansive and atmospheric or concise and melodic, some numbers combine the two tendencies.

The brief dreamscape "Heilige Leben" fuses melancholic synth ambience and spectral voices; "Bring in the Night" achieves a similar effect (notwithstanding Boyd Rice's spoken word nonsense about the divine order of destruction and violence).

Although Wall of Sacrifice isn't Death in June's strongest late-'80s album, it usefully maps the different sonic territories Pearce was exploring during that period.

IMBOLC (02 February 2012)

The musick dedicated to this Sabbat is:

HENNIX CATHERINE CHRISTER

THE ELECTRIC HARPSICHORD


Original Issue: 2010 Die Schachtel (DSART10)

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Margot-meter: 5 moons / 5

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from Boomkat:

This latest addition to Die Schachtel's sublime Art Series is a largely neglected masterpiece from Swedish-born composer Catherine Christer Hennix, a disciple of LaMonte Young and Pandit Pran Nath during the 1970s. Although her music is largely unknown - even among the experimental music community - those who've been exposed to Hennix's work tend to rank her among the elite of American minimalist composers of the twentieth century.

The Electric Harpsichord (recorded in 1976) is talked about with the highest reverence by the avant-garde's cognoscenti, with Glenn Branca describing it as "a pure perfect piece of music" and "a work of transcendent power". Having embarked on her compositional career in the 1960s studying the techniques of Xenakis and Stockhausen, Hennix's musical bearing was jolted somewhat by the Nuits du Fondation Maeght festival in 1970, where she first encountered LaMonte Young and Hindustani raga master Sri Faquir Pandit Pran Nath. Over the course of the ensuing decade, Hennix would study with both these men, and to many the piece reproduced on this disc is her magnum opus.

Made using keyboards tuned to just intonation and a tape delay feedback network based on Terry Riley's notion of the "time lag accumulator", the piece is a thing of sparkling psychedelic chaos, achieving that magical dichotomy between apparent narrative-shirking motionlessness and eternal flux. For all its droning stability on a 'macro' level, The Electric Harpsichord's continually recombining layers ensure it remains ceaselessly shifting in 'micro' terms. Significantly, none of this gets out of hand and you can still make out the individual pitches ebbing and flowing within the sound mass. Paying close attention reveals some incredible oceanic movements within the sound waves, and repeat listens reap considerable rewards. This recording lasts twenty-five minutes, though in the strictest terms it should be considered as only a fragment of what the composition represents; in conceptual terms The Electric Harpsichord would be an endless, perpetual entity. In support of the music itself, this release comes in a box that opens to reveal a 60-page booklet containing two LaMonte Young pieces written especially for this edition, plus an extensive essay by Henry Flynt (a close friend of Hennix) as well as some illuminating, if highly technical and abstract background text from Hennix herself, who reproduces excerpts from her "notes on the composite sine-wave drone over which The Electric Harpsichord is performed".

This utterly absorbing and highly involved passage is just the thing to show drone music naysayers who think it's all just somebody holding a note for a really long time. An essential release, presented with all due reverence and care by Die Schachtel.

FULL WOLF MOON (09 January 2012)

The musick dedicated to this Esbat is:

BIRCHVILLE CAT MOTEL

CHI VAMPIRES



Original Issue: 2004 Celebrate Psi Phenomenon (1008)

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Margot-meter: 4,5 moons / 5

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from Stylus Magazine:


campbell Kneale’s Birchville Cat Motel project has seen many a release, and—as befits a prolific solo artist unencumbered by a withering public gaze—not all of these releases have been great. Most contain scattered highlights that make them well worth owning, but a strident ten-minute patch often dampens the proceedings. Most albums would fold with a ten-minute drag, but Birchville Cat Motel has a way of making ten minutes seem like one, and one great minute seem like thirty.

Obviously I’m a sucker for Birchville Cat Motel. So what? That doesn’t make Chi Vampires any less incredible. Campbell Kneale stretches bagpipes to their absolute limits. He drags the Sunn O))) power sludge sound under the New Zealand sun, burning it to a tarred crisp. He amplifies the white noise of everyday modern life into an unrelenting dirge. What brings it all together? Oh, the drone, my friends. He makes music that pummels and uplifts, often at the same time.

What separates Chi Vampires from most of the works in Kneale’s oeuvre is its consistency. Not one minute of Chi Vampires feels excessive or indulgent. It hovers between accessibility and noise pain without falling into the traps of either. Though even an uninitiated listener weaned on a steady diet of indie pop can find something to like here, Birchville Cat Motel veterans will likely agree that Chi Vampires is among his best.

The heart and soul of the record is the 30-minute epic “Buckling Metal Snowflakes.” Describing this track in any detail feels hopeless and totally beside the point. Kneale’s sound is otherwordly and seemingly sourceless—without referents in music, literature, life, or whatever other little blurb we critics latch on to for lack of musical vocabulary. The track envelops the listener, pulling the mind over peaks of angelic sound and into gurgling swamps of fetid air and sour water. The track feels like the condensed history of something I cannot understand.

“Cold Herds Travel” doesn’t let up either. This one is a little shorter and more positive, driven to euphoric highs by the blaring church organ sounds composing the bulk of the track. Over the course of ten minutes, it repeats itself in all the right ways and eventually replaces thought as the language of life, if only for a little while.

While title track “Chi Vampires” doesn’t consume the time of “Buckling Metal Snowflakes,” it’s equally powerful. The song starts out soft and pastoral, pairing a plinking piano with a hovering high-pitched drone. A calm jaunt through a sunny field after the rigors of an emotionally involving album, right? So sorry—an absolutely punishing, stoner-metal drum blast drops in after two minutes followed by some of the most damaging, elongated riffs under the sun. Those familiar with Kneale’s Black-boned Angel project or the aforementioned Sunn O))) will know what I’m talkin’ ’bout here. But the plinking piano never quite surrenders to the metal assault. The song eschews the doom of the sludge metal gods for a more ambivalent and resonant emotional tone.

In short, Chi Vampires is great. Perhaps I should have said only this. Birchville Cat Motel has a way of making language feel utterly insignificant.

Bryan Berge

YULE (21 December 2011)

The musick dedicated to this Sabbat is:

CARETAKER (THE)

PERSISTENT REPETITION OF PHRASES



Original Issue: 2008 Install (INST002)

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Margot-meter: 5 moons / 5

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from Boomkat:

James Kirby's work as The Caretaker has always dealt with the suggestion of haunted memory and the obscuring of temporal motion, and this latest album makes that more explicit than ever, with titles that reference amnesia, Alzheimer's, past life regression and other such memory misfires and short circuits.

Musically, this album might be compared to Philip Jeck's manipulated vinyl tracts, featuring similarly oceanic swells of crackle and dust, with faded pianos or big band sounds wafting wraith-like across the mix.

After conjuring the sinister atmospherics of The Shining with his debut album Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom, The Caretaker has been chasing this idea of sound leaving its indelible mark on a space and time, so consequently these creepy, semi-dissolved musical passages sound no more tangible than shadows, and the album for the most part comes across as some sort of séance held via wax cylinder.

Arguably the most accomplished and rewarding Caretaker album to date, Persistent Repetition Of Phrases is an album you'll want to snap up fast - there's only 500 of these in circulation...Highly Recommended.

LAMMAS MOON (05/14)

VARIOUS ARTISTS

LAMMAS NIGHT LAMENTS VOLUME 05
(A Collection Of Wyrd-Folk Music From 1966-1980)



Original Issue: www.theunbrokencircle.co.uk/

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Margot-meter: 5 moons / 5

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Tracklist (courtesy of http://www.dlc.fi/~hhaahti/Levyt/levyt_kok2.html):

the wicker man: the landlord’s daughter
the incredible string band: invocation
donovan: the voyage of the moon
fairport convention: reynardine
clive’s own band (C.O.B.): solomon’s song
pearls before swine: rocket man
leonard cohen: last year’s man
sandy denny: bruton town
magna carta: elizabethan
steeleye span: lovely on the water
mourning phase: damn your eyes
mythos: oriental journey
perry leopold: the dawning of creation
the woods band: january shows
bread love & dreams: butterflyland
tir na nog: our love will not decay

FULL COLD MOON (10 December 2011)

The musick dedicated to this Esbat is:

MINEO ATTILIO

MAN IN SPACE WITH SOUNDS



Original Issue: 1962 World's Fair Records (LP-55555)

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Margot-meter: 4,5 moons / 5

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from All Music Guide:

Recorded in 1951 but only released in conjunction with the 1962 Seattle World's Fair as the musical accompaniment to the Bubbelator, a transparent, spherical elevator that carried as many as 150 passengers, Attilio Mineo's Man in Space with Sounds remains one of the most foreboding and complex records in the cosmic exotica canon.

A dark, dissonant exploration of interstellar travel rooted in the avant-garde ethos of Cage and Stockhausen, this is music that's alien not only in its presentation but also in its orientation, fusing traditional instrumentation and sound effects to the point that one becomes indistinguishable from the other.

Electronic elements pulse, hum, and sputter their way to complete domination of Mineo's sonic palette, depicting a bleak, sterile future where mankind gives way to machinery. Two versions of the LP were released, one with World's Fair voice-over narration and the other without, and the former is all the more chilling for its seeming ambivalence to technology's awesome power.