December 13, 2013

Quiet Lunch Video: Path Finder with Mark Dorf

Photo by Kareem Gonsalves/Quiet Lunch Magazine
QL:
Photographer Mark Dorf, from Louisville, KY, manipulates his 
images in a little white box in Bushwick, Brooklyn. He focuses on the wide-open spaces of nature and how they shift in an increasingly tech-first world. The environments he creates are bound with a sheen of lucidity. Continue to video at Quiet Lunch:
Photo by Mark Dork/Mdorf.com

December 11, 2013

REVIEW: "HAG" by Professor Divebomb


Professor Divebomb cuts and pastes together HAG

     HAG, the new album from psychedelic, lo-fi artist, Professor Divebomb, is a swallowing cave of loose and disgruntled sound. It’s noisy and harsh, but also hypnotizing and druggy. The 16-track album is 44-minutes of swelling sonic carnage and curving tunnels of dark noise. It’s unpredictable and experimental in the most far-fetched meaning of the word–a weird record of doomed psychedelia.
     HAG was self-released in October on Professor Divebomb’s Bandcamp. Three EPs, Bynes, Greyg V and V Ceiling, were released in the preceding months. Divebomb’s last full-length was Greengold Workshop in 2010. According to Bandcamp, “Divebomb…carefully manipulates the sounds discovered in a plastic PC mic and from broken down keyboards, drum parts, punk dishes, etc.” The project, in that sense, is very experimental. It’s not songs you’re hearing, but manipulated and compressed sounds threaded together. Sometimes they interlock in strange, haunting harmony, and sometimes they do not, and a ruptured note sparks loudly.
     The tracks on HAG are mostly made up of cut loops and scraps of found sound with a garnish of hasty keyboard and guitar. First track, “Bald Oattern,” stretches slowly out creeping along with bells freezing and ringing against a walloping low-end tide. It’s a calm, indeterminate wave to the beginning of a very off-kilter junkyard of an album.
     “Huge Tongue” and “Intestinal Track” barrage the ear canals. Fortunately, neither run over two minutes and work more as padding to the greater whole. HAG doesn’t flow like a stream, but more like a churning, stagnant swamp of sound. “Thread Of The Noose,” which sounds like a plank of metal slowly coming alive, is too warped for comfort. Divebomb’s lo-fi recording technique can, at times, show a few scars.
     When everything runs together in fluid embrace, though, it’s a drooling, incompetent experience. A prime example of this is “Saliva Of The Tooth.” Held down by a wonky boom-clap beat, the song is loopy with hypnotic guitar strands that summon until it drops off into a slur of syrupy sound trails.
     “Faces Of The Ceiling” rides low on a meandering down tempo beat until melting into another time frame. Wounded feedback circles around the brain on “Dark Penetrations” until an avalanche of rigid guitar limps into the abyss. The two together make up HAG‘s Bermuda Triangle. The raw vibrations make glossed-over eyes fall directly to the back.
     The recordings are sparsely peppered with cut-and-paste audio particles from muffled nobodies. The scrambled dictation offers the only phraseology on the album and it injects strange visions. The voices are lost, poking through the noise. On “Slow Tattoo” an echoed organ walks in the twilight, pierced with snippets of hooting and hollering. It’s two minutes of serene buzz before crashing and morphing into “Plastic Bag,” a collapsing structure of chopped noise and harrowing inverted guitar.
     The final track on HAG, “Blood Of The Hoof,” drips like morphine through an I.V. with a loop that freezes you in place. It’s a welcomed breather after an album of scatter-shot sound lacerations.
     HAG is available for stream and for download, with Art Of The Hag, at Professor Divebomb’s Bandcamp page.


Key Tracks: "Saliva Of The Tooth," "Faces Of The Ceiling," "Dark Penetrations," "Slow Tattoo"

December 10, 2013

Year 2013

Greatest Music Releases of the Year 2013

Year-end Feature from Independent Music Promotions

From a "supergroup" expanding to a rock-and-roll legend, read our picks of 2013's best records.

REVIEW: "Excavation" by The Haxan Cloak


The Haxan Cloak conducts waves of doom on Excavation

     The music of The Haxan Cloak could be the internal soundtrack in Walter White’s head as he runs around Albuquerque covering his tracks. It’s dark, foreboding and urgent; the monotonous heartbeat of waking demons.
     Excavation, released this year on Tri Angle Records, is a jet-black pack of drone and ambient suspense. It doesn’t really exist as a set of songs, but more as a lurching morass of chemical sound. There are metallic thrusts of bass and industrial-grade beats. The sound constantly moves in and out of place, mimicking the slow and steady breathing of external beasts.
     The man behind the blackened soundscapes is Bobby Krlic, of the UK, and one has to wonder what working on music of this nature does to the solid mind. His last full-length album was 2011′s The Haxan Cloak. Excavation continues his slip into the sludge. It rises very slowly over the opening tracks, until suddenly the sound is everywhere.
     The swelling strings on “Mara” create killer-around-the-corner horror movie suspense. Play this, unknowingly, in the middle of the night and anyone sleeping will surely wake suddenly, fearing an approaching death. It’s dramatic and horrendously climactic.
     “Miste,” halfway through, opens the record a bit, allowing some pale color to leak in. A slithering bass line creaks along as the speakers fill up with the noise of dark matter. A slight rip comes through the black tarp on “The Mirror Reflecting (Part 2).” As the track cranks up a little bit of sonic light pierces the veil with pitched swirling tones.
     The structures, at times, are reminiscent of the IDM brain-fuck lacings of Autechre, but with less bells and whistles, and an even bigger expansion of space. Silence plays as pivotal a role here as the noise. Krlic labors over creating something that mentally draws the listener into its grasp, then leaves them on the side of the road, bracing for the next creeping composition.
     “Dieu” pulsates darkly. It sounds like a bundle of leftover loops coming together and rebelling like the buckets and brooms in Mickey Mouse’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The final track, “The Drop,” defies most descriptors. I’d like to think there is an appropriate term to describe the song, but as it played over its twelve-plus minutes, I fell deeply into a state of psychosis and it’s debatable, yet, if I’ve pulled myself from it.

Key Tracks: "Miste," "Mara," "The Mirror Reflecting (Part 2)"

from: IMP