NO-CORE

Realicide - Detroit 2009

Everyone loves free mp3 albums right? So maybe you’ve already found these, but it can’t hurt to spread the good word. The gabber/noise/omni-core group Realicide have made a whole bunch of music available for you. They’re frequently compared to Atari Teenage Riot, which is not far off the mark, except they often make ATR sound like, I don’t know… Jesus Jones?

Anyway, you can get no less than THREE collections of stuff, a mega-mix of samples from the latest album with live stuff and b-sides here:

http://www.lunaticfringe.org/~schizoid/dtrashrecords/digitaldownloads/135.html

and a 20-minute tape of misc. live material turned digital release, directly linked here:

http://ia311020.us.archive.org/1/items/Wild063-Realicide/Wild063-Realicide-DigitalScraps2008.zip

and basically a whole live album, with interviews and photos! This one’s pretty awesome. Here:

http://www.digitalvomit.com/dvr048

Rose for Bohdan

And next up, Brian of Foot Village/Deathbombarc pointed out in the comments to another post that his band Rose For Bohdan’s last album was made available as a free download, but since I figure few people saw it there, I’m reiterating it here. 3 members of Foot Village, recently reviewed, were also in this band. Get it here:

http://deathbombarc.com/sound/r4b/creepingmoraldecay/creeping.htm

The last time I wrote something about the infamous 4-drummer/vocalist band Foot Village, I said that they reminded me of one of those weekend project bands that would normally play one show and be forgotten. Somehow or other I had in fact forgotten that I actually WAS in a percussion-and-vocals-only band called The Old Joe Smiths. It was formed on a weekend and did play exactly one show.

But wait, this is not one of those self-absorbed reviews where I just talk about me, I have a point about Foot Village. As soon as the Old Joe Smiths band concept was born, it immediately expanded to include multiple odd percussion instruments, including glass bottles with varying amounts of water to make a crude xylophone. Foot Village on the other hand, has a much stronger purity of vision. If someone tells you that a band is made of 4 drummer/vocalists, you might picture some kind of world music group with bongos, bells, vocal harmonies, etc. Heck, even other multi-drummer noise-rock groups like Aa or current Boredoms go in for this stuff.

Foot Village? None of that. Four matching rock drum kits. Kick, tom, snare, hi-hat, crash. Times four. Pounding and screaming. That’s what you get. They allow themselves exactly one additional “instrument” – the megaphone. I suspect the tone in “Death of the Endless” is megaphone feedback and the sirens in “National Jamthum” and “Chicken & Cheese 2″ are a default sound created by the same megaphone. In addition to these restrictions, Foot Village also operate within an established concept – they are building their own nation. This album, “Anti-Magic,” is vaguely about their first war, with the forces of mysticism and magic. The album art shows Foot Village tribe members – all nude – fighting wizard types with sticks, spears, and bombs. I thought this concept might be about the battle between superstition and rationalism, but if so it comes across vague and playful, not political.

You might think the tight restrictions would make things boring, but no. It just forces Foot Village to push the creativity of their composition and interaction. There is one small deviation from this plan, the half-way point track “Grace’s Death” which is mostly vocal, then veers into some kind of remixed/electronic segment. A nice little break, then back to the drums. Also, the album closes with the track ”Chicken & Cheese 2,” which turns into a relay race of rad underground bands covering the song, one after the other. The results are extremely varied and it’s a super-fun way to close things out. In fact, each edition of the album: CD, vinyl, cassette, and digital – has a different collection of bands doing the covers.

One last thought: It is really hard to capture multiple drums in a recording. I don’t know if it always sounds like there are 4 drum kits here, but it almost always sounds like there’s more than one. The drum-layering works best when there are lots of fast rolls going on, like those in “Reggae War Zone.” The “heavy” all-together pounding moments sound much more impressive in a live setting, which is really how you ought to experience Foot Village. Still, none of that changes the fact that this is a great and super-entertaining album. (But maybe they should put out a Dolby 5.1 version too).

Free mp3 sample download: Foot Village – Reggae War Zone

Foot Village website
Foot Village on last.fm
album can be bought here

And not just from some unknown punks neither, but some danged “luminaries.”

XBXRX have made their new album, “Un Usper,” available for “FREE” download direct from their website:

http://www.xbxrx.com

This album is a nice mish-mash of punk rock moves, noise-rock attitude, free-jamming, synth sounds, and is that a xylophone? Nice.

Those quotes around free are, however, intentional. While you are permitted to download it for free, XBXRX ask that you make a donation in return. I know that sometimes it feels like digital music should be completely free, but I reasoned with myself as follows: I would blow 4 bucks just to make a round-trip subway ride to the record store, and that’s more than most bands on a label get from each CD sale, so heck, it seems reasonable to throw those few dollars to XBXRX and support really, truly DIY music. But hey, don’t let me discourage you from donating more… or less…

Next up, AIDS Wolf “Pas Rapport”:

It’s a tour-only tape of improv jams, or maybe they’re not totally improvised. The boombox quality recording is not too much different from the blown-out sound on their album proper and the tracks are all punctual full-band jams. So if you liked the albums, you will definitely want to grab this while the download link still works.

Get it here!

AIDS Wolf ask for nothing in return, but you might consider following their blog (http://aidswolfs.blogspot.com) so you can find out about things like this, and of course go see them when they come around on tour!

ENJOY.

As a policy, I avoid writing about things here that I’m actually involved in. But this is such an odd album, and since I was only one of 100 people to contribute some sound to this, and since you can download it for free*, I figured this was worth mentioning.

I also don’t usually have any interest in Phish, or jam bands of that ilk, but here we have some kind of rare Phish concept album, covered in its entirety. Nat Hawks, mastermind of the Little Fury Things record label, got the idea to take a recording of this Phish piece, chop it into 100 segments of about 15 seconds to a minute and a half each, and get 100 different artists to cover each chunk.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I have not heard much Phish and the chunk I heard sounded pretty indistinct. Random noodling without much of a tune to speak of, and some kind of rambling story being spoken over the top.

So it’s kind of strange to me that the final result actually seems pretty cohesive and is a really enjoyable listen. I am willing to bet it’s about a million times better than the source material. I don’t know how much it turned out this way due to the selection of artists, or if everyone really did a decent job of keeping the vibe from the source material intact. Almost everyone is doing something experimental, ranging from loose rock to free-folk to electronic to ambient to whatever, but it all turns out pretty chill and trippy and a little edgy. Which happens to be the vibe of Little Fury Things in general also.

Many of the tracks blend smoothly into each other, some have distinct breaks in-between. At times I wish they were all merged and blended together a little more completely, but it would have been difficult since some artists seem to have covered their piece of music as though it were a stand-alone song, with a beginning and an end. I’m amazed this whole thing actually got completed, and I sort of suspect that several of the credited artists might actually be Nat under different aliases, but even if so, there are a huge variety of sounds and approaches at work here. Just a few of the credited names that seemed familiar to me: Scissor Shock, Holzkopf, say no to architecture, Teeth Mountain, Video Hippos, Robe., Yellow Crystal Star, Sperm Whales.

Anyway, this is a huge and totally weird project and I recommend checking it out.


Download it here.

Read more about it at Little Fury Things on MySpace.

And about that asterisk next to the word “free” above: Nat suggests that if you appreciate this, you might make a 5 or 10 dollar donation to Explore Charter School’s (Brooklyn) trip fund http://www.firstgiving.com/exploretrips

I got this press release from Philadelphia label Badmaster Records specifically stating that this compilation would be released as a free download on Thursday, Feb.26th. So it only makes sense to post something about it on Feb.26th and see if we can overload their bandwidth.

If “it’s free!” isn’t enough of a reason to go download the comp, then here’s why else it’s cool. Philly has one of the best music scenes going on right now. All the current artists I know from there (and those I learned about on this comp) are totally DIY, unpretentious, sincere, hilarious, and good-natured. I mostly know about the noise/weirdness scene, but there’s also plenty of bleed over into punk, indie, art-rock, etc. – which is also a reason that the scene is cool. And this comp covers some examples from all of the above mentioned genres. “Something for everyone” also means “not everything’s for everyone” and there are a few tracks here which I’m not personally into, but I’m also not into doing negative reviews so I’ll just mention some of the highlights for me. Besides, it’s a free mp3 comp! Just delete the tracks you’re not crazy about!

First of all, this is worth downloading for the new Mincemeat or Tenspeed track, which is a top-notch example of his stuff and has these bizarre melodies that crop up which you almost feel you could sing along to. Noise music you could sing to! A bunch of bands fall into the category of “noise-pop” which falls nicely (for me) on the noisy side, for example Hot Guts and U.S.Girls. (Hot Guts would probably be way too heavy for most to classify as noise-pop, but I call it like I hear it, and that’s a pop hook!) Pretty much all the bands share some kind of element of noisiness or a lo-fi edge. The prog/noise-rock band Satanized does a cool cover of NON’s “Total War.” There are a handful of bands which fall into some kind of post-Unsane sludgy-noise-rock category, like Talk Me Off, The Blacks And The Blues, and Rawar. I might have believed someone if they told me that the Birds of Maya track was Guitar Wolf – except that guitar solo was a little too fancy. The track by Fun Dogs was a cool surprise, being really hard to pigeonhole with elements of metal, noise-rock and post-hardcore, with a strong melodic sense – closest thing I can think of might be Killing Joke. There’s also something from a personal favorite, Drums Like Machine Guns, a weird little song by them which leans more heavily on electronic beats than noise. No Tickley Feather track, but we do get the Serpents of Wisdom, who lives in a similar foggy Casio-goth world.

There’s more too, but hey, free download. Check it out for yourself. Go to the Badmaster website:

http://www.badmasterrecords.com

Oh yeah, and someone did a smart mastering job on the whole thing so that you don’t have to hover over the volume control as you listen, which is much appreciated in a comp.