LISTEN UP: NEW RELEASES OF VARYING DEGREES OF BRILLIANCE (11.27.2021)

  OLD TOWER - TALES OF THE MAD MOON





Tales Of A Mad Moon is a compilation of the early work of Dutch dark ambient artist Old Tower. The LP includes the trilogy of EPs released as Grim Alchemy, the cassette-only EP Plague Harvest, Ruination, a New Dawn Cometh’ Part One and Two along with bonus tracks. If you like your ambient music dark, then this prime gloom really is for you. 

Or as Old Tower would have it:  A dream into the present without a future, a future without a past . . . exploration of different aspects of dark music in short gasps . . . ambient and field recording statements of decay . . . the Dark Ages as raison d'être to the lost spirit . . . a death mask laughing at humans from the mountains of madness . . .


ROBERT PETE WILLIAMS - LOUISIANA BLUES




Over fifty years since his discovery by ethnomusicologists Dr. Harry Oster and Richard Allen in the prison farm of Angola, Louisiana, one still must ask in near astonishment:  Just what is it that makes the blues as sung and picked by Robert Pete Williams such a singular listening experience, unequaled elsewhere in that musical form?  As Peter Guralnick, in his Feel Like Going Home book writes: "It's difficult to approve the banalities of most blues singers after listening to Robert Pete Williams. More than anyone else he shatters the conventions of the form and refuses to rely upon any of the clichés, either of music or of lyric, which bluesman after bluesman will invoke. Instead, he sings blues which reflect a unique and personal vision; he makes each song unmistakably his own." Unfamiliar keys, cliché-free lyricism, spontaneity, an individualistic style in invoking his particular blues, all make Robert Pete Williams an idiosyncratic entry into the canon.  It's impossible to listen to blues artists before him and hear strains of his particular style. None have matched it since. Louisiana Blues contains 10 songs recorded in the month of July 1966 out in Berkeley, California for John Fahey's Takoma imprint.  Comes with an eight-page booklet. Limited edition of 600 on bottleneck brown vinyl."


SHAKEY JAKE - GOOD TIMES








Chicago harpist and vocalist Shakey Jake Harris journeyed all the way to New Jersey to make his debut album in 1960. It was a huge stylistic departure for Harris -- he was paired with jazz mainstays Brother Jack McDuff on simmering Hammond organ and blues-tinged guitarist Bill Jennings. The trio located some succulent common ground even without a drummer, Harris keeping his mouth organ phrasing succinct and laying out when his more accomplished session mates catch fire.


POREST - CANCER IN THE SOFT BREEZE







Contemporary and historical Porest recordings channeled from behind the somnambulistic event horizon. The now sound . . . The bleak oblique. The minimal and the maximal. Filmic chamber drones, meditative radio massage and forged spiritual violence bury pop ephemera into the swirling murk of de facto instrumental nihilism and orchestral context-free drama.  Side A: A harmful journey into sickness and despair. You get sick and die.  Side B: You are healed. You stand erect and live forever. Layered field and radio recordings back electro-acoustic experiments via electric saz, strings, balypso, reeds, and synths. Big drones, small ensembles and mood-anthems recorded by Porest and friends between 1995 and 2020 in West Oakland, Germany, Sumatra, Syria, Hanoi and London.


DEVILS - BEAST MUST REGRET NOTHING







The Devils took their name from Ken Russell's bombastic 1971 potboiler and their inspiration from the likes of The Cramps, Hound Dog Taylor and Hasil Adkins.  They formed their own band in 2015 in Naples, the Deep South of Italy.  You know:  think Alabama and Arkansas.

Gianni Vessella plays the guitar and sings, and Gianni Blacula hits the drums and screams into the microphone.  We say this for no reason other than to let you know that this is a rock and roll guitar and drum duo.  Yes, that's it.  That is the reason for telling you this.  

Now the sound:  Huge walls of guitar fuzz and noise accompanied by vocals as moronic and minimalistic as it gets.  And no Dylanesque-Nobel Prize-poetry here.  Just pure nonsensical lasciviousness.  Chainsaw-massacre-hysterical emoting likely to lead to ear bleeding on the part of the unwary listener.  Tribal drumming most likely the result  of breakfasts fueled by speed and power food.  All while dressed up as preacher and nun.  Did we mention they were from southern Italy?

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