…
They didn’t say anything.
The man and the woman moved closer to each other,
The round table between them.
The stove was still on and burned the empty pot.
She started to get up.
One of them shot her.
She leaned over the table like a schoolgirl doing her lessons.
She thought about being beside him, being asleep.
They took her long gray socks
Put them over the barrel of a rifle
And shot him.
He went back in his chair, holding himself.
She told him hers didn’t hurt much,
Like in the fall when everything you touch
Makes a spark.
…
- Frank Stanford , Freedom, Revolt, and Love .

.

” Freedom, Revolt, and Love ”

01. LSD Pond – We are LSD Pond
LSD Pond (Disc 1) (Archive, 2008)
02. Donny Hathaway – The Ghetto
Everything Is Everything (1970)
03. Bettye Swann – Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye
Bettye Swann (2004)
04. Ben E. King – Stand by Me
Spanish Harlem (Collectables, 1961)
05. Willie Tee – Teasin’ You
Teasin’ You (Night Train Int’l, 2002)
06. Fontella Bass – Talking About Freedom
Free (The Paula Recordings) (Varese Sarabande, 2003)

note: The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. That always strucks me as unresolved and vaguely defined statement that leads to the exact opposite situation to most people but few who sits up top. Who exactly define what freedom and its physical manifestation? Yeah I know I am ranting, but that’s the mood I have for this list. Inside mid tempo soul and incredible melody, everybody is screaming something that hasn’t been resolved yet. Freedom. A great soul piece always spooks me. Like a soundtrack for a metaphysical movie scene that’s about to go terribly wrong. Hey, you figure it out, maybe this list should be about nothing but a textual exercise of composition. Freedom or no freedom. … Give cheers to the great soul singers peeps. Work like that will never be recreated.

image: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], [1, 2, 3, 4], [1, 2]

Image credit: Robert Gendler

In the sixth instalment of this series I actually promised it would be the last. For a while now however I’ve been feeling the urge to post some serious star-gazing psychedelic rock and drones again. So this marks the rebirth of the series and I have some really awesome stuff lying around for a handful of new instalments. First up is a selection of heavy grooving and hypnotizing monsters to get back into the rhythm again. This is the 1st heavy-artillery regiment recalibrating your psyche so you’d better be warned.

Nadja is a doom-ambient/drone-metal duo consisting of ambient/drone hero Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff. It’s interesting to see the significant contrast between Baker’s often dreamy and atmospheric work as a solo artist and the growling cacophony that characterizes his work with Nadja. Their most acclaimed work to date, Touched, was reissued last year by the awesome Montreal-based label Alien8. An album that is best described as a blurred cacophony of colossal drums and mammoth guitar- and synthesizer-driven noise. Together creating a roaring and deafening pulse that gloomily moves in ultra slow-motion like a monstrous Godzilla rip-off in an old Japanese b-movie. Sounds like a beast? It is and it kills. Alien8 also lets you stream all of their albums on their website. I truly appreciate it when artists and labels provide this service so that we can legally and easily try before we buy.

A similar contrast between different musical outlets also characterizes the work of Sietse van Erve who’s best known under the moniker of his ambient/drone solo project Orphax. Van Erve is also a member of one of the most promising bands in the Netherlands at the moment called Zonderland whose debut album released last year was a terrific tour de force of dark and hypnotizing grooves powered by drums, guitar and electronics. Featured in the playlist below is a 27 minute track that keeps you chained to your loudspeakers as if time didn’t exist. As Vital Weekly wrote in their review: “taken with all the right substances you could easily be lost in this trip.” Yet another similarity lies in the fact that you can also stream their album in its entirety on their website.

But we start off this small (yet 60+ minute long) playlist with a track from my favourite 2008 release so far, the insanely awesome collaboration between Bardo Pond, LSD March and Kawaguchi Masami’s New Rock Syndicate. Now I know what you’re thinking, this can’t be real, usually collaborations like this can only be dreamed of. But let me tell you that is indeed the real deal and it more than lives up to its potential. There’s no better way of introducing them to you than with the stunning (and improvised) opening track called We are LSD Pond. Archive has done it again!

1. LSD Pond – We are LSD Pond
   LSD Pond (Disc 1) (Archive, 2008)
2. Zonderland – Bad Habits-Massproduced
   Oidipus: Motherfucker (Self released, 2007)
3. Skullflower – Can You Feel It?
   IIIrd Gatekeeper (Crucial Blast, 2007/Headdirt, 1992)
4. Nadja – Stays Demons
   Touched (Alien8, 2007/Deserted Factory, 2003)

Stream playlist

Previous instalments:
Dark Stars in the Dazzling Sky pt.1
Dark Stars in the Dazzling Sky pt.2
Dark Stars in the Dazzling Sky pt.3
Dark Stars in the Dazzling Sky pt.4
Dark Stars in the Dazzling Sky pt.5
Dark Stars in the Dazzling Sky pt.6

All of these should still be online so make sure to check them out before it’s too late.

I would an eye in a Bengal light. Eternity in a sky-rocket. Constellations in an ocean. Whose rivers run no fresher than a trickle of saliva.These are suspect places.

I must live in my lantern. Trimming subliminal flicker. Virginal to the bellows of experience. Colored glass.

- Mina Loy, Lunar Baedecker.

Klute – Phone Call
(Phone call 12″ / 2000)
Grooverider – rainbows of colour
(Mysteries of Funk / 1998)
Groove Armada – lightsonic
(Soundboy rock / 2007)
Brazilian Girls – cross-eyed & painless
(More than Pussy Ep / 2007)
Ripperton – Siboney
(Siboney 12″ / 2007)
Wolf & Cub – This Mess (Serge Santiago Dub)
(This mess 12″ / 2007)
!!! – A new name
(Myth takes / 2007)

Playlist starts on a chilled note with old-school dnb (not for purists, though) and then continues with some ocassional electro textures, fuzzy guitars and more pan-global rhythms than you can throw a stick at. I believe the shift between song styles on this one sounds pretty natural and effortless but my head’s been full of erotic garbage lately and I only slept 4 hours last nite.
Also, this might be the third or fourth time I post an excerpt from Lunar Baedecker on the motel, revealing Mina Loy as my favorite north american poet and Lunar Baedecker as my favorite book of hers. I cannot recommend you enough to give it a read. Perhaps one day when summer arrives.

On some positions a coward has asked the question is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.

– Martin Luther King Jr., November 1967. (via dkos)

.

“ New Form ”

01. Martin Luther King – Apathy (Peter Gabriel remix)
(Internet release)
02. Medeski Martin And Wood – Bloody Oil (web)
End Of The World Party (Just In Case) (2004)
03. Joshua Redman’s Elastic Band – Blowing Changes
Momentum (2005)
04. Aughra & Mosh Patrol – The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same
Is There Anyone Else OutSide? (Magic Bullet Records, 2007)
05. DJ Cam – Sang-Lien
Mad Blunted Jazz (Shadow Records, 1996)
06. Digable Planets – Pacifics
Beyond The Spectrum The Creamy Spy Chronicles (2005)
07. Roni Size & Reprazent – New Forms
New Forms Disc 1 (1997)
08. Dalek - Abandoned Language
Abandoned Language (Ipecac Recordings, 2007)
09. Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto – Trioon II
Vrioon (Raster Noton, 2002)
10. Spanish Prisoners – Some Among Them Are Killers (myspace)
Songs to Forget (Exit Stencil, 2007)

note: Well here we are. Another MLK day, and the war still goes on. Anyway, I tried to combined different hip-hop texture. Minimalist, electronic and rhythm flow. There is still rhyming, lyrics and tracks, but with different proportion, sparse and far more focus on words itself rather than clever rhyming. It underlines the message. Overall the list is tense and unsettling, at least I think it is. Cheers, and keep the words out. -sq

see also: Martin Luther King (wiki)
Image: christine allan

Image credit: unknown

“The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite.”

~ Jules Verne / 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea ~

This series – consisting of three parts – pays tribute to the supernatural ambience of the ocean’s deep end as referred to in the above quote. A vastly serene atmosphere, delicate pieces and only minor mood changes hopefully make for a listening experience that is both peaceful and intense at the same time. My guidance for making this series came from how Q Magazine described Stuart Dempster’s masterpiece Underground Overlays from the Cistern Chapel:

“Luminous, serene and full of quiet intensity that borders on the spiritual.”

A wonderful description of an album that has a remarkable story behind it. It was recorded in an enormous cistern near Seattle with a diameter of 186 foot, a space that has some very unique acoustic characteristics. Most notably it has a very smooth reverberation time of 45 seconds without echo. The reverberation also takes over seamlessly from the original sound source at it appears to begin at the same decibel level. Because of these characteristics it is virtually impossible to tell when the artist stops playing and the reverberation takes over. The sound of the track that is featured in the playlist below is completely real and natural, no electronic simulation or any other aids were used. What you hear on this track is nothing but ten trombone players reinventing sound on the spot in almost supernatural surroundings that breaks with every frame of reference we might have for acoustic characteristics.

This series – named after the closing track of Harold Budd’s album Avalon Sutra – basically is an extended version of a mixtape I made for a friend last year. The original fourteen track version was too long to post at once so I’ve decided to cut it in half and add another seven track part in the middle. Take a deep breath before descending into the infinite and stay tuned for the next two parts.

1. Harold Budd – As Long As I Can Hold My Breath
   Avalon Sutra (Samadhi Sound, 2004)
2. Marsen Jules – Aile D’Aigle
   Herbstlaub (City Centre Offices, 2005)
3. Andrew Chalk – Temperance
   Time of Hayfield (Faraway Press, 2007)
4. Stuart Dempster – Secret Currents
   Underground Overlays from the Cistern Chapel (New Albion, 1995)
5. Arvo Pärt – Berliner Messe: Agnus Dei
   Te Deum (ECM, 1993)
6. Andrey Dergatchev – Piano
   The Return (ECM, 2005)
7. Erik Satie/Reinbert de Leeuw – Gymnopédie No. 1
   Satie: The Early Piano Works (Philips, 1998)

Stream playlist