especially the one called speakerbox.
Showing posts with label krautrock. Show all posts
Showing posts with label krautrock. Show all posts
Monday, October 4, 2010
Qa`a - Chi`en
especially the one called speakerbox.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Can - Queueing Down
live paris 1973 krautness from the masters themselves. great sound quality and half-hour jams with classic tunes like 'vitamin c', 'spoon' & 'one more night'. damo suzuki at his finest.
do this.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Monday, February 2, 2009
Guru Guru - Hinten
Mani Neumeier's barbarian rock horde in one of their more drug-blasted, wigged out efforts.
"'Hinten' was the second album by the three-piece Guru Guru comprised of: Mani Neumeier (voice, electric drums, cymbals, gong, contact microphone, kalimba, sounding being, zonk machine); Uli Trepte (bass, radio) and Ax Genrich (guitar.) And here they sound less lumpen/trudgin' than on their stellar "UFO" LP but every bit as Frei-Rock and exploratory. But unlike "UFO","Hinten" exhibits a more flexible and plastic structure: it's loose, yet tight. It's free flowing, yet scripted enough to accommodate a freefall of freak outs and it allowed themselves all the space in the universe yet managing to combine together with such effectively precise riffing JUST off enough to allow all concerned to wander off the path as many times as they liked without leaving a trail of breadcrumbs behind AND NEVER GETTING LOST. There are also more vocals present here, but only if you can call murmuring song titles over ten-plus-minutes' worth of an ensemble jumble of detuned, skittering guitars shrieking and groaning feedback with an overlay of contact microphone hi-jinks with jarring percussive strikes "vocals". And this was presented in a far clearer sonic image than ever before, courtesy of its self-production ably assisted by engineer Conrad Plank.
Even though the performance was several notches up on the tightness scale from "UFO", the chaos remained unchecked to an extreme because for all its pre-planned boundaries (which they wound up pushing through or just plain ignored for most of the time) the end result was a loose and gigantically sprawling, avant-proto-metal improvisatory monster that for all its audio strength caught the trio completely in the raw...And speaking of which, the cover's got that, too. What cheek. And when I say "cheek" I mean that literally cos it's a four times repetition of a photograph of a guy's backside with the word "GURU" painted twice across his bared glutei. Although it seems a long way round to go just to riff off the album's title, it did effectively scream "FREAK" before anyone got to hear it and the music sealed the whole deal with so many instantaneous stops-and-starts, false endings, guitar solos and outright freakery it both roots you to the spot and sends you off into a zone of anarchic mind-warp all at once. Makes you crack up at inopportune moments, too." - The Seth Man
Bo
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Klaus Schulze - Dune
Schulze was a founding member of Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel, played on the Cosmic Jokers, Sergius Golowin and Walter Wegmuller albums, produced crazy duo Sand, and made impressive electronic constructions as a solo artist. On this one his wall of electronics and keyboards are complemented by Wolfgang Tiepold's cello and vocal contributions by Crazy Arthur Brown, conjuring visions of huge deserts and empty landscapes. The album's a tribute to writer Frank Herbert.
Dune
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Popol Vuh - In den Gärten Pharaos (1971)
Werner Herzog might be one of my all time favorite directors. I feel it's only appropriate to post these guys' music since they have contributed soundtracks to Herzog films such as Nosferatu, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, Heart of Glass and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Here's a little info on Popol Vuh courtesy of www.last.fm:
"Popol Vuh is a German proto-ambient experimental rock / krautrock band founded by Florian Fricke in 1970 together with Holger Trulzsch (percussion) and Frank Fiedler (electronics). Other important members during the next two decades included Daniel Fichelscher and Bob Eliscu.
It began with an electronic approach as heard on first album Affenstunde, inspired by the invention of the Moog synthesizer. This continued for only one more album, In Den Garten Pharaos, before Fricke largely abandoned electronic instruments in favour of piano-led compositions from 1972’s Hosianna Mantra forward. This album also marked the start of exploring overtly religious themes rather than a more generally spiritual feeling within the music. The group evolved to include all kinds of instruments: wind, percussion and strings, electric and acoustic alike, combined to convey a mystical aura that made their music spiritual and introspective.
Popul Vuh influenced many other bands from Europe with their uniquely soft but elaborate instrumentations, that took inspiration from Tibet, Africa, and Precolombian America. They created dream-like soundscapes along with psychedelic walls of sound, and are considered by some to be precursors of contemporary world music, as well of new age music and ambient."
The Wrath of God
Friday, December 5, 2008
Neu-4
Requested by Felix. Not their best by a long shot, but still pretty damn good. Out of print and pretty hard to find.
Fly Dutch you bastard!
Neu-75
More Neu!, as requested.
"After splitting the band up, Rother and Dinger eventually regrouped for their best album. Strangely, it's anything but a cohesive masterpiece: Neu! 75 sees each occupying fenced-off artistic territory, the tracks divided fifty/fifty, and the components of the group's music being separated and ushered to extremes. Rother's fascination with texture and harmony results in wintry, crystalline music, frosted by keening analogue synthesisers and pristine lead guitar; Dinger has little patience with all that, and weighs in with two pieces of proto-punk lunacy. The moment at which Rother's painfully hushed Leb Wohl ("Good luck") gives way to the scabrous intro to Dinger's Hero acts as an utterly incontestable argument for divorce. That Dinger proceeds to the utterly insane After Eight, in which two fuzztoned chords pummel it out while the song's author and vocalist sounds like he's flying, bat-like, round the studio, only adds to the impression of barely-managed discord."-John Harris
E-muzakkkk
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Neu-Neu 2
More Neu! was requested, so more Neu shall be posted.
"Neu! 2 is one of those rare albums that challenges the very notion of music itself. It scrutinizes the concept of the album, the relationship between the artist and the listener, the producer and the consumer, as well as making the very notion of originality extremely dubious."- Nick Taylor
Fur immer
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Neu-Neu
The Genesis of Motorik. Staggering. Everyone from Wire to Stereolab, man up and pay them royalties.
"Neu!,their 1971 debut is arguably the strongest record the duo of Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger made; its stunningly reductionist stuff, rock stripped down to its essentials of pulse and texture, arguably predating techno and the whole post-rock movement by a good fifteen years. It's music with no narrative structure, not much in the way of dynamics - it just is." - Pete Marsh
Hallogallo
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Faust - Faust Tapes
Most surprising about The Faust Tapes is the number of truly wonderful pop and rock songs hidden within the cut-ups and experiments of the album's tangled grooves. And halfway through Side I is their most defining Krautrock riff of all. It's another of Faust's Krautrock/Family Stone/Temptations trips in the tradition of "It's a Rainy Day". A scientific German-American voice makes pronouncements over the groove and Gunter Wüsthoff's sax tears along over a loopy breakneck driving beat, as the call and answer of life kicks in: "Chet-vah Buddha, Cherra-loopiz Chet-vah Buddha, Cherra-loopiz. Chet-vah Buddha, Cherra-loopiz Chet-vah Buddha, Cherra-loopiz."
50,000 copies of The Faust Tapes were sold in 1973 and the night they played at Birmingham Town Hall, it seemed as though those words could become a football anthem. The Heads were taking over. Soon after, as we lay in my friend Cott's caravan listening to The John Peel Show, out of nowhere the DJ began to read out the names of the 20 or more songs from The Faust Tapes. The sleeve and label of the LP had showed no titles to any of the songs and Cott raced around trying to find a pen. It was all over in half-a-minute and all I could remember was some title about Humphrey Bogart. It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that John Peel was in on Faust's intended wind-up of its audience - that we were only meant to hear the titles fleetingly and race around like half-wits. And Faust were right.
. . it was their persistence in the Entirety of their trip that makes them so legendary now. Even better, The Faust Tapes was the social phenomenon of 1973, and it finally brought the true avant garde into everyone's living room, for a short while at least. But most of all this LP revealed just which side of the fence everyone was really standing. In April 1980, Jim Kerr, leader of dinosaurs Simple Minds, gleefully told me how he and his mates had all chucked their copies of The Faust Tapes off the roof of a Glasgow tenement. Enough Said? I'm sure that's the phrase." - Julian Cope
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Tangerine Dream - Zeit
TD as glacial, molasses like ambient outfit, recording approximations on the sound of galaxies colliding. Check how "The Birth of Liquid Plejades" puts chancers like Godspeed You! Black Emperor to shame...and it was recorded more 20 years before those canadian pretenders ever decided to pick up an instrument.
time
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Tangerine Dream - Electronic Meditation
Burning Substancia Nigra
Monday, November 17, 2008
Circle - Tower (2007)
This is NOT the same Circle posted by Abe a while ago which featured Chick Corea, Dave Holland, and Barry Altschul.
I highly recommend that you listen to this album WITH HEADPHONES.
Here's a review by Mason Jones from Dusted Magazine:
"Finland's highly prolific Circle are known by their fans for delivering the unexpected. Their beginnings were somewhat consistent, with several albums of loping, rhythmically convoluted and fascinatingly repetitive post-rock (for lack of a better term). Since then, the band have defied expectations with each release, not to mention the side projects. It's difficult to think of another band that has remained true to its core while simultaneously becoming both heavier and lighter on various albums. Recently adopting the acronym NWOFHM, a play on the old New Wave of British Heavy Metal, Circle have been, as they say, kicking out the jams.
Thus Tower comes as even more of a surprise than any Circle release thus far. Across six sprawling tracks and 44 minutes, the band and guest twiddler Verde (aka Mika Rintala) channel their inner spiritualists and let loose with a masterpiece of navel-gazing inner-space psych float. Despite the NWOFHM adorning the CD (which in fact says NWONWOFHM, perhaps meaning that this is an even newer wave), and despite the truly puzzling cover art, herein Circle draw from sounds like Alice Coltrane, electric Miles Davis, and Rovo with compelling results.
While the six songs do have their own personalities, they hang together so closely and make up such a cohesive whole that there's really no point in describing them individually. Suffice it to say that flowing synths, warm electric piano, gently propulsive drums, and tinkling percussion are here in abundance, all heavy on atmosphere but not too self-indulgent. The album generally picks up steam a bit as it progresses, with the 13-minute and faster-paced "Geppanen" at the center, but it closes in complete psychedelia, filled with synth washes, trippy cymbals and clattering percussion.
What's tricky is that this all sounds like it should be a bore, but that couldn't be further from the truth. In less capable hands, no doubt the album would be an insomnia cure. You can allow it to flow past as background sound, but if you lay back and focus, it's the details that make it work, that keep it from disappearing into its own navel. Sure, if you want to light up the incense and drift away, it'll work, no doubt about it. But ultimately, Circle have crafted a milestone in psychedelic-jazz-whatever, and it's certain to be one of the year's best albums."
Douche Bag
Friday, November 14, 2008
Amon Düül - Psychedelic Underground
A fair assessment of Amon Duul's excursions into the furthest reaches of the id can be found here. To me it sounds like the gates of hell opening and a smiling Satan waiting for your arrival with two pounds of fly agaric in each hand.
Care to join?
NOMO - Ghost Rock
The latest album by this Michigan funk collective.
"The album sheds light on the way forward for a band that has been forging its own vital sound. This is not the Afrobeat of Fela, nor the revivalist Funk of a forgotten decade. This record owes as much to Can and Eno as it does Kuti, Francis Bebey, and Funkadelic. On Ghost Rock, NOMO arrives in a new place. There's no loss of steam as they incorporate new influences, instead NOMO breaks through with a matured and developed sound that is fully its own."
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Faust - Faust
It's hard to damn this piece of sheer chutzpah and utter brilliance with faint praise. So i'll let their biggest fan, Saint Julian, try to do it:
"Listen to the Mothers of Invention's concert recordings from 1966 onwards and it's just trash. Musical bollocks of the most merely capable variety. Faust live? This is a different thing entirely. Like all the greatest Teutonic groups, Faust were brought up with middle-European dances and a staple of folk and tradition which was not 4/4. As a consequence, German bands could get far more complex than U.S. and British bands would ever dare and it still sounds rocking and crazy, rather than a bunch of Twee Smug Gits. Find an old Caravan,Man or Henry Cow LP for 50p somewhere and compare it with this. I'm joking of course.
Four years ago, I had dinner with a very successful journalist who told me that he'd had to review Love's "Forever Changes" for Q Magazine now that it was available on CD. Wow, I shouted. You lucky fucker! Yes, he said. But I know it so well I couldn't summon up any real energy, so I just gave it 8/10. "Forever Changes" is a dark achievement. Were it an ancient text or a document it would be hidden from view and spoken of in obscure circles, But because it operates through the medium of Pop Music, it gets tarts like said Journalist giving it 8/10. This is a classic case of a man sleepwalking through life.
So now I have to set to and tell you about the first Faust album, and I will not let you down. For a start, its a big 10/10. No, make that 11/10. It defies categories. It's a horrible noise. It's cut-ups to the Nth degree. Part of it is just like Frank Zappa's "Lumpy Gravy" (a funny bit, thank the Goddess.) It is super-gimmicky, syrupy in the weirdest places, and never outstays its welcome. But probably the strangest thing of all is just how good Faust sound when they are creating on the spot moments of rock'n'roll on the epic Miss Fortune. Here they transcend all studio trickery and here they come alive."