Tara VanFlower "My Little Fire-Filled Heart" CD silber039
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Experimental-ambient recording artist Tara Vanflower, best known for her work on keyboards and vocals with darkwave artists Lycia, has a history in music performance and writing dating back over 10 years. Blessed with a multi-octave voice capable of many diverse forms and an eclectic writing style, Tara has created selected ambient works showcasing the darker side of her compositional skills.
The long-awaited follow up to her debut solo album, This Womb Like Liquid Honey, is entitled My Little Fire-Filled Heart. This release was composed, performed, and produced entirely by Tara using her talented voice, traditional and improvised percussive instruments, and some guitar work. This album is very ambient and organic. Her vocal ranges from the playfully seductive to the passionately aggressive. Utilizing loops to fill out the background, Tara has created a blissful wash of echoing chimes, throbbing basses, and howling choruses.
The pieces on this album are very free form in tempo, but blissfully appealing to ears attuned to more "experimental" artists such as Einstuerzende Neubauten, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound. In songs such as “I Lost The Moon," for example, Tara creates a musical piece that is more "textured" than "composed." A soft choir of heavy breathing duels with an improvised guitar track and Tara’s aching voice for control of the listener.
This album features an excellent rendition of Death In June’s “The Honor Of Silence”, as well as the traditional piece “A Conversation With Death”. Spanning 10 tracks, this release is certain to provide hours of blissful sonic seduction.
A fantastic album by Tara - who works with Timothy in Black Happy Day. Highly recommended
Mike VanPortfleet "Beyond the Horizon Line" CD silber034
Mike VanPortfleet's post-Lycia debut is an ambient album built from the ground up with loop sources & effects into shimmering walls & minimalist soundscapes. Crystalline harmonic washes resonating from the cold depths of mind & matter. Glacial rhythms & serenity through fathoms of uncharted seas. If Brian Eno collaborated with Justin Broadrick it might sound like this. Majestic & heart breaking.
Mike VanPortfleet is best known for his band Lycia which officially formed in 1988 & officially ended in 1999. In 2004, armed with new recording technology & an aggressive ambient edge only hinted at in Lycia, Mike recorded his solo debut, "Beyond the Horizon Line."
Beyond The Horizon Line is somewhat of a concept record, involving a growing fear of the sky & it bringing the end of the world over the course of a 24-hour cycle, from sunrise to just before dawn with the fear the sun will never rise again. The only lyrics sum up the main overall theme; scanning the horizon, sensing something unknown, and feeling the change taking place.
Wildlife "six" CD CBR64
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Heavy, crunchy riffage rolls over celestial FX freakout and gang choral voices: part gluey pop hallucination, part psychedelic blast furnace, part metalloid skullcrush. Super melodic and catchy but vaguely menacing and dark at the same time: this is WILDILDLIFE. Their debut full length Six follows up a fistful of CD-R and vinyl documents and summons a wicked whirlpool of dense distorto crunch and freaky singing, raging metallic percussive pummel, tribal rhythms and crushing effects-soaked guitars, subdued floatational drones and ecstatically gorgeous melodies, all let loose in a series of psychedelic slowcore eruptions and swirling cosmic sludge. Going back and referencing a review that Terrascope Magazine printed about one of the band's earlier CD-R releases, this sounds vaguely like Black Sabbath and Butthole Surfers jamming together with ancient forest mystics, an experience both brutal and beautiful, and which proves that Wildildlife have already established themselves as serious purveyors of blown-out mindmelt heaviness.
Kirk Withrow
"Yesterday Will Be Better" CDr hollr271
An exceptional album of homegrown old-time music played on homemade instruments. 12 songs, mostly traditional, culled from Withrow’s Kentucky upbringing and delivered in a style which both harkens back to the grandfathers of the genre (Dock Boggs, Roscoe Holcomb, Frank Proffitt, Fred McDowell) while adding Kirk’s own style into the mix. Played on cigar-box banjos, diddly bows, cigar-box guitars, and something called the “voodoo box.” Primitive Americana with mojo to spare.
track listing:
1. Yesterday Will Be Better
2. Cluck Old Hen
3. Satan, Your Kingdom Must come Down
4. Old Joe Clark
5. She Lied to Me
6. Frosty Morn
7. Sourwood Mountain
8. Shady Grove
9. March of Boru
10. Kirkpatrick's Lament
11. Sinner Man
12. With Signs Following (Dance of the Snake)
(note: hand printed covers may vary from image shown above)
