underwater peoples presents a winter review

Underwater Peoples Presents a Winter Review

1. julian lynch - es's

2. pill wonder - restless

3. ducktails - apple walk

4. fluffy lumbers - adoration

5. big troubles - former selves

6. andrew cedermark - ad infinitum

7. frat dad - totally afraid

8. dana jewell - my t-train girl

9. air waves - sweetness

10. family portrait - killer statements

11. alex bleeker - these days

12. mountain man - dog song

13. real estate - orchard

14. rainbow bridge - rain nair

15. liam the younger - please see

http://www.underwaterpeoples.com/

owen pallet - heartland

owen pallet - heartland

Owen Pallett (born Michael James Owen Pallett-Plowright, on September 7, 1979) is a violinist and singer from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and winner of the inaugural Polaris Music Prize. On December 18th, 2009, Pallett announced that he would be retiring his old artist name, Final Fantasy, and would be henceforth releasing his material under his own name. Previous albums released under the Final Fantasy name are planned to be re-packaged and re-released under the new name of Owen Pallett.

http://www.myspace.com/owenpallettmusic

be good to the earth this season - reverend green/drawlings 7"

be good to the earth this season - reverend green/drawlings 7"

This highly limited split 7" is Paw Tracks' Yuletide offering for 2008, pooling the talents of Brad Truax (from Home and Jah Division), Antony Hegarty, ex-Mùm star Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir (aka Kria Brekkan), Abby Portner of Rings and Dave Portner from Animal Collective. As you'd probably hope from such a release, this 7" is brimming with pseudo-vintage, festive weirdness, decked out with old-fashioned 78rpm-style sound effects and crazed sleigh bell antics - it's just how you'd imagine Christmas round at the Paw Tracks ranch. 'Be Good To Earth This Season' takes stuttering old vinyl samples and intricately re-structures them into something new and rather beautiful, providing a musical backdrop for Antony and Kristín to warmly intone their goodwill-spreading duet. On the flipside 'Wolfie's Christmas' combines chiming glockenspiel and sleigh bells with bizarre recordings of horses neighing and birds taking flight while Abby Portner imparts her own brand of seasonal cheer. A superior christmas single if ever there was one. - boomcat

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros - Up From Below

2009 - Up From Below

Birthed by Mouth in the year two-thousand and five, young Edward Sharpe had to wait nearly two years before he was to grow his arms and legs and fingers and toes.
Immaculately conceived, his father (a Robot who had magically become a real boy…but that’s another story) declared his undying devotion to the creature. He perched the fleshy bust upon a teetering pedestal fashioned from stacked cereal boxes and positioned the display at his window for all the town to see. Young Edward soon proved no ordinary boy.

Though his father had figured him deaf for his unresponsiveness to sounds, he in fact had the universally unique condition of being deaf from hearing too much or, more correctly put, too well. In plain words, he heard EVERYTHING AT ONCE.
At first it proved rather painful like a wretched whining winding all hours, but very soon those who whisper visited young Edward and revealed to him the Tricks and Truths, the Ways and Plays, the Chords and Dischords of the Universe.

He did not need to eat but the color of the sun, which was F#, and moved his bones to grow.
His arms and legs and fingers and toes grew ‘til the tower of boxes collapsed and he laughed. He moved thru the door which was C over B# and ran thru the village hearing ALL of its music! The workers and children and painters of buildings and dogs barking madly and trees bristling softly and OH!!

Okkulte Stimmen - Mediale Musik: Recordings of Unseen Intelligences 1905 - 2007

3 disc box set of paranormal phenomena including "trance speech, direct voices, clairvoyance, xenoglossy, glossolalia including ethnological material, paranormal music, 'rappings' and other poltergeist manifestations as well as so-called 'Electronic voice phenomena'" dating from 1905-2007

Disc 1

I Trance-Speaking and "Direct Voice"

Voices from possessed children (1978)

Exorzismus an Anneliese Michel (1976)

Rita Goold as "Russell" (1983)

Jack Sutton contacts dead airmen (1980s)

Minnie Harrison & the Christmas party (1954)

Leslie Flint as Oscar Wilde (1957)

Leslie Flint as Charlotte Brontë (1973)

Leslie Flint as Winston Churchill (ca. 1980)

Mrs Leonard & her spirit-control "Feda" (1932)

Mrs Leonard with Reverend Thomas (1933)

Einer Nielsen, Phantom-Stimmen (ca. 1950)

Stimme des Geistes "Hänschen" (1965)

Rudi Schneider: Trance-Breathing (1933)

The Final Houdini Séance (1936)

II Precognition

Hanussen: Die hellsehende Schallplatte (1932)

Disc 2

III Xenoglossy

"Banta" Trance Speech (1948)

"Rosemary" (Ivy B.): The Speech of Ancient Egypt, 18th Dynasty (1938)

Aleister Crowley: The Call of the First and Second Aethyr (ca. 1920)

Prophezeiungen der Aloisia Schinkenmaier (1966)

Zaubergesang zur Krankenheilung (1905)

Gesang des Zauberarztes (1912)

Tanz der Könige: Austreibungsritual mit

Scheich Muhammad Gabir (1984)

Rahmi Oruc Güvenc und "Tümata":

Zikir aus der Rufai-Tradition (1980)

Kara Ool: Bittender Gesang um Gesundheit (2006)

Larissa: Suche nach verunglücktem Mädchen

IV Glossolalia

Theodor Spoerri: Sprachstörungen bei

Psychosen (1963)

Sitting with "Betty" (1987)

Prophecies, Pentecost Community (1960s)

Pentecost Community Oklahoma (1980s)

Disc 3

V Medial music / Paranormal Music

Rosemary Brown in Conversation (1973)

Rosemary Brown: Grübelei, transmitted by Franz Liszt (1969)

Wynford: Prelude in A minor, transmitted by Frederic Chopin (1993)

L. B.: Romance in Ab major, transmitted by Frederic Chopin (2007)

Leo: E lucevan le stelle from Tosca by Puccini, transmitted by Caruso (1993)

VI Raps and Haunting Phenomena

Spukfall O.: Akustische Überraschungen (1974)

Spukfall Rosenheim (1967)

Spukfall Pursruck (1971)

Der "Klopfgeist" von Thun (1967)

Spukfall Schleswig (1968)

Exploding Cup, Charlton House (1995)

VII EVP

Friedrich Jürgenson, Einspielungen

Girl’s Voice, Singing (1974)

Piano trill (2002)

Marcello Bacci and Luciano Capitani: Chorus I + II

Paranormale Musik (1968)

Paranormale Stimme auf dem Anrufbeantworter

Paranormale Stimme durchs Telefon (1983)

William O’Neill and Dr. George J. Mueller (1981)

The voice of André Malraux (1986)

Female Entities (1970s)

Copies are still available for purchase at the Supposé site here.

Flash Lights - Eckords

Eckords

"Eckords" is the first release by Flash Lights, the duo of Liz Harris (better known as Grouper) and Bay Area sound sculptor Jorge Behringer. Here, Liz's spectral vocal transmissions (the ones that blew our collective minds on last year's superb opus "Way Their Crept") are augmented by disorienting field recordings, bubbling electronics, meditative guitar lines, and Jorge's angelic, processed viola. Each piece is unique and bursting with vibrant, otherworldly energy, running the gamut from almost poppy (!) songforms, to distant choral ghost codas, and moving effortlessly from seering blasts of electronics to calm, glacially evolving, painstakingly wrought towers of dynamic vocal murk. Beautifully mastered by Pete Swanson, presented in a sleeve adorned with Liz's wonderful black and white artwork.

-SoD

the fresh & onlys - grey-eyed girls

the fresh & onlys - grey-eyed girls

When Tim Cohen told Shayde Sartin he was writing a song called "Be My Hooker," the Fresh & Onlys bassist looked at the singer/guitarist and said... "'There's no way we're gonna have a song with that title, dude,'" explains Sartin. "But sure enough, he laid a riff down and I was like, 'Jesus christ, I can't believe you pulled something meaningful out of such a stupid line.'" Welcome to the push/pull dynamic that's fueled the Fresh & Onlys' steady stream of releases over the past year, including last spring's self-titled LP (Castle Face) and this fall's Grey-Eyed Girls (Woodsist). And to think it all started the old-fashioned way" with Sartin and Cohen simply hanging out after work, playing their favorite punk (Buzzcocks, The Mekons) and classic rock (Country Joe and the Fish, cued up alongside slabs of psych from the group's homebase, San Francisco) records alongside a growing collection of empty beer cans. "I can't really explain what happened or why," says Sartin. "I guess we listened to records until we were on the same page, and from that point on, we never stopped recording." As simple as all of that sounds, the duo first bought a tape machine five years ago. When that failed to produce any concrete cuts, Cohen focused on his previous avant-pop band, Black Fiction, and Sartin split his time between session and live work for such bands as the Skygreen Leopards, Papercuts and Citay. Not to mention his close friend Kelley Stoltz, who ended up releasing the first Fresh & Onlys 7" (the limited Imaginary Friends EP) in early 2008. With so much music hitting shops in such a short time (Sartin says the band already has boxes of backlogged tapes), you might think the Fresh & Onlys camp have a problem with quality control. Quite the contrary; Sartin and Cohen are very careful about what they release. And while the duo writes and records the band's songs, the arrangements are usually fleshed out with guitarist Wymond Miles, drummer Kyle Gibson, and backup singer Heidi Alexander. "If we take a song into the studio or a live setting and it doesn't have wings," says Sartin, "Then we just ditch it and keep the charming demo version." The final mix of Grey-Eyed Girls sounds like a natural bridge between the raucous garage rock of the group's debut and the full-on studio record they plan on wrapping for In the Red later this year. That goes for the galloping grooves of "Happy To Be Living," the shadowy post-punk of "Invisible Forces," and the firework finale freak-outs that drive "The Delusion of Man." Not to mention a stack of hook-slinging tracks that nix any 'shitgaze' assumptions you may have. "We're not trying to hide melodies or do the blown-out thing," says Sartin. "A lot of those bands are great, but I don't want to ever cater to what's popular. It's not that I'm being reactionary; we're just trying to make recordings that are as rich and ear-friendly as possible." It's working. - Woodsist

http://thefreshandonlys.com/

http://www.myspace.com/thefreshonlys

Caethua - The Long Afternoon of Earth

2009 - The Long Afternoon of Earth

The latest Preservation release hails from the USA's Midwest, featuring a double helping of songs from multi-instrumentalist and lo-fi folkster Clare Adrienne Cameron Hubbard. Although each CD is only an EP's length, the two sets of songs have been divided to denote the stylistic differences between sets, even though Hubbard's songwriting tone remains steady throughout. On the first disc Caethua evokes the raw intimacy of Diane Cluck, occasionally augmenting her spindly acoustic guitar accompaniment with some appropriately out of tune orchestration (put to best use on the wholly excellent 'Sons Of The Hounds'). Taking on a more esoteric character, the largely piano-driven spook-echo of the second disc proves to be a quality turn, occasionally sounding like Magik Markers in one of their more eerie, contemplative moments, or possibly Women & Children. If you're not already fully sold on Hubbard's work based on the first batch, then this second one will surely seal the deal. It transcends the rickety naivety of the first, coating the songs in a rather dark and introspective atmosphere - good stuff.

-boomkat

zola jesus

the spoils

new amsterdam

Zola Jesus is the band name of American singer/songwriter Nika Roza Danilova (born on 11 April 1989). She currently lives in Madison, WI. Zola Jesus is one of the leading members of the Crimsonwave movement, as well as one of the most important figures in the rising trend of Lo-fi Goth.

Her live band consists of Dead Luke on synths, Lindsay Mikkola on bass, and Max Elliott on floor tom.

“Zola Jesus hearkens back to sounds of that diverse SF label from way underground. A German online rag slotted her between Lydia Lynch and Kate Bush. Fair enough, but I don’t know how much Lydia was concerned with dancing and Kate would wither under the “Sturm und Drang” of Zola Jesus.”-Die Stasi

http://www.zolajesus.com/

http://www.myspace.com/zolajesus

tickley feather - hors d'oeuvres

tickley feather - hors d'oeuvres

Having recently relocated to her home state of Virginia from Philadelphia, Annie Sachs (a.k.a. Tickley Feather) has recorded her newest album Hors D'oeuvres. Recorded in an old dilapidated farmhouse in the Shenandoah woods, Hors D'oeuvres brilliantly captures Annie's Southern Gothic meets Existential Hillbilly vibe. Focused around a sense of joy, the new material is a marked change from her previous work and its sense of moodiness and oppression. Imbued with a purposeful anthemic quality, these songs reach out to the listener embracing a hauntingly beautiful tension, enhanced by a patina of 4 track scuzz.

http://www.myspace.com/tickleyfeather

The Books

The story of The Books began in 2000, when Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong met through a friend in New York City. Sharing similar interests but different backgrounds in acoustic music and found sound, Zammuto and de Jong took their sonic experiments to the studio. Eventually, with some urging by Tom Steinle of Tomlab Records, they created what would become their debut record, Thought for Food, in 2002. Within a year, the Books relocated to Hot Springs, NC, and recorded and released The Lemon of Pink. With a lot of favorable word of mouth and critical buzz from the first two records, the Books relocated again in winter of 2004 and recorded in an old Victorian home in North Adams, MA. With the release of Lost and Safe in April of 2005, the Books prepared to tour with their unique blend of samples and acoustic music. All three Books albums were released on Tomlab Records.

2002 - Thought for Food

2003 - The Lemon of Pink

2005 - Lost and Safe

2006 - Music for a French Elevator and Other Short Format Oddities by the Books