Blog: Visitation Rites

Invisible Days present themselves as a "psych/shoegazeish trio from Brooklyn, NY." Now think about those labels for a second. Already those loaded words have given you a preconceived notion of what this new track will sound like. However, be prepared to be a bit surprised when you go to listen to "Solitary Time". The song certainly shows the typical psych/shoegaze sounds we're accustomed to: reverb, slow and steady bursts of guitar and noise, apathetically half-mumbled lyrics about isolation, you name it. But it's the absolutely infectious bass line that pumps blood through this track and sets it apart. Invisible [...]

Under new solo alias Hubble , Ben Greenberg of Zs and Pygmy Shrews has been channeling his formidable guitar chops into distortion-drenched, loop-based compositions that lovers of distressed ambience will be more than happy to zone out to. He just released his first cycle of material on Burlington's VT's NNA Tapes- also home to Driphouse, Julia Holter , Oneohtrix Point Never , and Caboladies , among other AZ faves - and we're having a hard time believing that there is not a single synthesizer on Hubble Linger - or strings, or [...]

Much like the previous LA Vampires and Matrix Metals videos, this new clip, directed by Spencer Longo and Jon Clark , brings us to a wonderland of artifice. However, this time around its much more Lisa Frank than Sunset Blvd. Longo, who is one half of the directorial team, also designed the cover art for the So Unreal LP. This clip takes us into an imagined version of his design process, where vibrantly colored still images take on a life of there own. Meanwhile, LA Vampires' Amanda Brown brings her late 80s/ early 90s [...]

The Manchester electronic duo of Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty have been climbing further and further above ground of late with their lantern-lit, patiently unfolding explorations of the farthest and most arcane recesses of our archival music consciousness (even, most recently, as high as NPR ). The three LPs they released on the UK's Modern Love imprint in 2009-2010- Symbiosis , Liberation Through Hearing , and Voices of Dust - have the particularity of being almost entirely sample-based, stitching together crackly vinyl sources as diverse as jazz, early electronic and industrial, musique concrète, vintage Arabesque sounds, [...]

• alteredzones - Demdike Stare: "Nothing But the Night 2"

Endless House, half-finished, December 1972 Dangerously intrigued by the story of the Endless House, a failed utopian experiment in communal living, electronic music craft, and modernist architecture spearheaded by Czech audiophile/venture capitalist/megalomaniac Jiri Kantor in the early 1970s, Visitation Rites jumped at the opportunity to speak with one Walter Schnaffs, one of the many German-language composers revisited on Dramatic Records' recent Endless House compilation. Our questions were relayed to him by one Jack Dramatic in London, who tells us that the elderly synth-master responded using IM technology from his flat [...]

Don't get me wrong people. I love making a musical discovery all on my own and plopping it here with some words. However, plucking gems from other blogs and writing about them here is just as rewarding. Grrrizz'ly recently became one of my favorites. I came home through a blizzard tonight from a double shift at work-something that's becoming an unfortunate theme in my life-and found this unflinchingly groovy song by "three teenagers from San Francisco" on the new tumblr home of the former Delicious Scopitone curator. "There's Nothing For Me Here" seamlessly ebbs and flows [...]

Sometimes we have to cut the crap and just play around. This new clip from Madison, Wisconsin's Peaking Lights , directed by Ben Shearn and LA Vampires ' Amanda Brown, invites us to that whimsical place. Brown describes the video's aesthetic as " Warhol dub." Certainly the playful side of pop art is invoked here. When we're taken to Rasta nation it's through pastiches of album cover images. While the track's drum machine and keyboard dub recalls the titans of Jamaican music like The Congos and Sister Nancy , David Bowie and [...]

By Emilie Friedlander. Published in Perfect Wave , a new culture mag founded by Camilla Padgitt-Coles of Future Shuttle and Arthur Radio notoriety. Perfect Wave is hosted on Will Swofford/Grant Lyons new Greener Mags publishing platform, which allows users to scroll content from left to right and disseminate articles as embeddable modules. Highlights of the Winter/Spring 2011 issue include features on light artist Tony Martin , avant-garde turntablist Maria Chavez , and Belgrade improv guitar player WoO . Click "Fullscreen" to read my article. [...]

Toronto rapper and producer Emay taps into something undoubtedly cool on new mini-LP Mind Altering Dynamics . If this catches on we may all be talking about "chill-hop" or "hypnagonic hip-hop" a lot in coming months. Dude combines a buttery smooth flow with samples and beats that sound like they're lifted right off of an album called Duckface VII: Arcade Dynamite . This combination of sound rings most obviously in Emay's other project- Seeing Suge with Blackbird, Blackbird and Star Slinger -but it permeates the songs of Mind Altering Dynamics [...]

These are two videos that were recently shown at Public Fiction gallery in Los Angeles. They aren't music videos, but they are more or less a document of my experience making and viewing music videos for the web over the past 1 year +. The first one is silent, and should be paired with your favorite ambient track. The 2nd one has sound, but might give you a seizure. Words: Samantha Cornwell Video: Samantha Cornwell

The blogosphere would probably hailing Ghostwriters' Objects In The Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear LP as one of the best pieces of music to come out of the contemporary synth revival is it didn't date back to 1981. I was informed by an expert source last week that Philly's Charles Cohen - formerly one-half of Ghostwriters, and now one-half of the band Planet Y (with Stinking Lizaveta 's Yanni Papadopoulos)- composed this tittering fairy wallop in front of a 200 series Buchla Music Easel, an intrepid, candy-colored modular dashboard by synth pioneer [...]

Nature tends to flex its control over us during the winter. No doubt the weather is rough down in New York City, but here in the upper hemisphere of the Empire State appreciating the delicate beauty of a northeastern winter can prove difficult. Luckily songs like "Sun Room" exist to keep spirits up. Here J. Irvin Dally -who I have written of before-displays a talent for conjuring up the prettiest images of the bleakest weather. The bright textures on "Sun Room" combined with Dally's soothing croon turn large crystalline ice spikes from something that [...]

Sometimes it takes a real sense of purpose, and a lot of thoughtful work, to make something that's exquisitely chaotic. Los Angeles video artist Miko Revereza knows this, and lives by it. He and I once spoke about the experience of foreign language film, and how reading is a central part of it. In his video for Delofi 's "Med Scene #33, he riffs on this idea to the point of abstraction. Delofi's drugged-out, stuttering beats are accompanied by an unusual collage of text and image. The base video motif comes from a VHS compilation of cultural [...]

Those of you living in the New York area should be sure to check out Severed Ways , on show at the Angelika Film Center this March. Set in 1007 AD, Severed Ways follows two flaxen-haired Vikings into the heart of the North American wilderness, struggling for survival as they burn crosses, shack up with the natives, and headbang to Morbid Angel, Popul Vuh, Burzum, Dimmu Borgir, Queens of the Stone Age, Brian Eno, Old Man's Child, and Judas Priest. Already on its way to becoming a cult classic, [...]

Matt Mondanile and his co-conspirators are certainly working a lot of bikinis in a twist these days, blowing up the blogosphere as the DIY forerunners of a new “beach pop” phenomenon. The hype surrounding Ducktails and Real Estate is well deserved, but dwelling too much on the “drinking a pina colada in black Ray-Bans and an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt” aesthetic undermines their breadth and talent as musicians. Predator Vision, a prog/metal trio uniting Mondanile ( Ducktails , Real Estate ), Etienne Duguay (Real Estate, Cave of Time ), and Ben Daly (Wavehead), transports us [...]

Infinity Window is a bit of a game-changer. Not that there's anything drastic about them, but listening to their atmospheric lull is bound to effect you. Try putting on "Artificial Midnight" on a late, dark Saturday afternoon with your friends, like I did, and see the change. If your friends are anything like mine, they'll sink into the couch and won't budge an inch. But that doesn't mean they aren't traveling. What are we hearing? An implosion? An explosion? Infinity Window's music is a calm combination of light and dark sounds. Eerily uplifting church-like synthesizers cross [...]

United States postal worker by day, musician and co-founder of the mythic Tetrapod Spools label by night, Mark Tucker is finally beginning to earn his due as one of America’s lesser-known outsider heroes. Batstew , his 1975 debut, is now a cult collectible, and De Stijl ’s 2006 reissue of the album has expanded his fan base beyond the more obsessive collector contingent. With new reissue “In the Sack” (1982), Tucker’s second album, De Stijl reopens Tucker’s slanted and enchanted universe to the public. Following Batstew , which doubled as an ode to [...]

Noise is not for most people. It's a challenging form of music and involves, by definition, intrusive sounds that one resists instinctively. One way to come to an understanding of the genre is through the live setting, where, as with a rock show, there is a bodily confrontation with the performer and their visceral squall. The live form of noise raises many ambiguities because the goals of the performers are not always clear: sometimes they seem confrontational, sometimes indifferent. So, what makes the live performance good or bad? I find myself considering this while taking in a collaborative, improvisational [...]

Bethany Cosentino is one half of Los Angeles duo Pocahaunted (with Amanda Brown), known for their long, spooky, and almost meditative drone compositions. Their music is both calming and foreboding, often simultaneously, and can feel like being lullabyed into a nightmare-filled sleep. Amid war drums, lulling guitar, and howling voices, Pococaunted always seem to be beating, guiding, and gathering towards some sonic place, a place where we'll probably never arrive. But if we can't know where Pocahaunted are going, we can at least find out where they come from. Alexander Frank: [...]

The prolific Adam Kriney is perhaps best known as a drummer, hammering it out freestyle for a handful of Brooklyn-based psychedelic and improv outfits on the Colour Sounds Recordings label (Dragonfrynd, Owl Xounds, La Otracina), which he himself runs. With Vorg Vessel (Cut Hands), his first solo outing, this Boston expat sets down his sticks and sinks his claws into a classic Lowrey organ and a keyboard, presumably cheap and battery-powered. A disclaimer in the liner booklet informs us that “The Queen of Fish Mountain” (5”) and “Illuminated by Stripes” (3”) are 100% synthesizer and [...]