New Hobo Cult Comps.

Frank from Hobo Cubes works fast. I sent him some tracks for a comp he was putting together and a week later he came out with two! Lantern is on comp 2.2 with a new track called "Don't Let Go."

So here they are, 3 hours of excellent underground music from all over! I know what I am going to be jamming to at work.

HC 2.1 by hobocultrecords

1) Eclipse Over a River - Élément Kuuda
2) Alpha Forms - Panabrite
3) Europa - Femminielli
4) Cosmogenesis - Hobo Cubes
5) Sailing Through A Lazer Storm - Citofono
6) 6th Cleaning - Relax and Sleep
7) Vibe Anthology - Body Rush
8) Weather Service Part 3 - THETLVMTH
9) Leurs Petites Mains Vident Mon Corps, Mon Sang sur Leurs Lèvres - Jean-Sébastien Truchy
10) fotoXr.eFE - M. Geddes Gengras
11) Transistor Blasts - Derek Rogers
12) Wormwood - Quiet Evenings
13) Distance - Bermuda Triangular
14) Blurd Wyndlines - Sundrips
15) Flowers Will Flourish At Your Feet - Flaming Rays of The Sun
16) Timetrip Theory - Sinequanon
17) Kecap Manis - Simon Frank
18) Logic Control - C V L T S
19) Plunderfonia - We Are Time
20) Grazed - Reedbeds
21) N Train - Manhattan Bridge - Dirty Beaches

HC 2.2 by hobocult

1) O Senta C - Spring & Pretender
2) Landscape No. 1 - Driphouse
3) Techo Phat Yeah - Coeur de Cire
4) March to Nowhere - Metis Yeti
5) Polyform - Charlatan
6) Here's to the Eight Year Old Boy in the Gas Station Staring at Condoms and Going umm chss umm chss umm chss - Video Nasties
7) De Plus sa Main Semblait Las et ses Yeux Brillaient - RL/JST
8) Kicking the Coals - Parallel Pyres
9) 1965 - Ryan Garbes
10) Travelling Sundown - White Wigs
11) Party in the Bathroom - Wonder Wheel
12) Cabeza Fresca - Ines Navarro
13) Milkfed - Chineselightbulb
14) Itchy Face - Thickly Painted Walls
15) Don't Let Go - Lantern
16) Lassie's Last Challenge - JLK
17) Five Minute Mile - Kellen Shipley
18) Volo Umano - Donato Epiro
19) Cubisme - Ricardo Lucchesi

Desert Metal Videos

Slayer's Seasons in the Abyss features the band riffing in front of Camels and the Pyramids. COOL!

 

Sepultura's politically charged video for Territory features the members in Israel rocking out in mudd and shredding solos in the desert.

If you get over Chris Cornell's over-the-top-too-high-too-much-vibrato vocals, this song fuckin' rocks. Kim Thayil is an amazing and really unique guitar player who, has on occasion, contributed and colabed with Sunn O))). The video features the band rocking out in desert with some trippy post production. 

It is no surprise that Kyuss has a music video in the desert. Guitarist Josh Holmes seems pretty fond of it. I believe his later and more famous project, Queens of the Stone Age, has a video of them head banging in the desert. Not too mention he was the brains behind the Desert Sessions.

While not an official video this is an video sync of highlights from Mad Max with Motorhead's The Ace of Spades. Like a shot of raunchy whiskey in the morning.

 

Lastly, again not a music video but very important to the development of the genre, is the opening credits to Easy Rider with proto-metalers Steppenwolf's Born to Be Wild. Let me know if you have any others out there. I get the feeling there are a lot. -Z

Lantern Music Video!!!

Our 1st music video by Jacqueline Lachance (Has worked with U.S. Girls, Slim Twig, Dog Day) and Alex Zhang Hungtai (Dirty Beaches) is now on Vimeo!!! Cool Acid Western Vibe, hope yall dig it! Thanks so much to Alex and Jackie for doing such a great job!

The track will appear on our bluesy debut EP Deliver Me From Nowhere... on Electric Voice.

MONO

Just bought a MONO tape duplicator and some 300 tapes. Now what to do? I think I might put out some splits with friends or make some mix tapes. Most of the tapes I got are long in length so if you got some long music let me know, maybe we could put something out...

-Z

Charles Cohen + Merzbow

Last Monday, Philadelphia arts organization ARSNOVA presented us a with the musical equivalent of a solar eclipse; a performance from Merzbow with drummer Balazs Pandi and local synth-guru Charles Cohen.

Cohen, I gathered from the crowd's excitement, is a local hero and to witness a solo show is quite a rare event. Cohen is a master of the Buchla Music Easel, an incredibly rare analog synthesizer with only a handful left in existence. Cohen created a very rich palette of extremely organic sounds, conjuring images of dripping water, bird calls, dolphin cries, wooden chimes, marimbas, kalimbas, and in particular seal cries. Anyone who has not seen this clip from the Werner Herzog doc Encounters at the End of the World, where it shows seals crying should definitely check this out. The sounds that these seals make easily compete with the most out there Cluster, or Tangerine Dream records.



Each of the sounds was well treated with delay moving from short bleeps and blips, to ambient interstellar passages that made the sounds physical as if watching some space ballet. Cohen moved about the instrument with ease and grace, much like a dance himself.

There is an awesome video below by Alex Tyson that gives a quick peak of what Charles Cohen does.



Afterward, Merbow.

Merzbow and death metal turned free jazz drummer Balazs Pandi ignite the stage with blistering noise. These tired adjectives battling to describe the onslaught that Masami Akita has been dishing out for over 30 years without any end in sight. Merz is plugged into his scrap-matal-tar blasting white-hot fuzz-wah through a JCM900. The music is hard to penetrate. I close my eyes and Merzbow's world unfolds...

The sound of the big bang. Giant waves of noise, of thunder, wash over me as my body is tossed and turned and reduced to particles. Stars bloom, blossom, and explode around me. Quasars open, the eye of God to the gnostic rhythms of Akita's pulsar. The drummer beating out the heartbeat of man, at the whim, the beck and call, of the hand of God, Merzbow.

I open my eyes. The crowd is hyponotized, shocked, disappointed, and divided. The thin lanky man, sheepishly exits the stage.

-Z

Homayun Sakhi - The Art of the Afghan Rubab

Inspired by my last post and the mandolin playing of Snehasish Mzumder I thought I would post one of my favorite records over the last few years, Homayun Sakhi -The Art of the Afghan Rubab on Smithsonian Folkways.

Sakhi is an Afghan ex-pat who relocated to San Fransisco which boasts one of the largest Afghan population outside Afghanistan. Afghani classical music is interesting given its geographical location, being a cross roads for many cultures. The music is especially groovy and works with smaller rhythmic cycles unlike its North Indian counter parts. It is amazing the amount of momentum and presence that this duo creates. Enjoy the music!

http://rapidshare.com/files/420446734/The_Art_Of_The_Afghan_Rubab.zip.html

-Z

Review on Weird Canada and move to Philadelphia.

I put out a few copies of this tape back in the spring for Wyrd Fest and the Obey Convention. I'll be making a few more once I get set up again here in Philly. If you want it in digital form though you can download it HERE.

As some of you may know I have left Canada for the "American Dream." The move has been interesting, exciting, and scary. Definitely a bit of culture shock. Philly at times looks and feels like Beirut (Or what I imagine it looks like as I have never been). I am staying in a beautiful loft with my partner's sister in Fishtown. We have a little spot in the corner till we get everything set up. I got a bank account after a bit of scare where I copied my social security number down wrong and it was looking like I wasn't going to get an account. I unfortunately had to go with Bank of America, as I was entering the bank there was a giant sign across the street that read, "I Hate Bank of America." It probably is an omen. I finally got a phone and each day is getting progressively better and I am slowly making friends. I am really worried about a job, I am not sure what to expect here and Philly's economy is the third worst in the country, seems you can't escape that. Today I am looking for more houses. I have been concentrating on writing more since I haven't had the opportunity, space, or privacy to write music. Lantern is sitting on about 20 songs write now and we'll have some upcoming releases, hopefully.


Some crappy pictures from my new AT&T cell phone.

My good friend and colleague Aaron Levin, the genius behind Weird Canada, kindly wrote some nice words of the I put out. I only made a few copies of this tape back in the spring for Wyrd Fest and the Obey Convention. I'll be making a few more once I get set up again here in Philly. Please get in touch if you would like a copy.

Best, and keep listening in!

-Z

From Weird Canada
With an unruly vocabulary for the avant-garde, the wild long-hair behind Omon Ra / Omon Ra II rips through your consciousness with six streams of free jazz, orchestral minimalism, and prepared minutiae. The unwieldy compositions are performed on-or-by everything (Arp2600, Dalhousie Brass Quintet, Saxophones, mixers, prepared piano, etc.) and mutate wildly in timbre; “Origins”‘ dense, synthetic dark-age scorches a sinusoidal path for the blissfully organic sequences; hear the strangely poppy Brass Quintet devastate “Prisms” and segue into the harrowing minimalia of “Long Tones and Lose Change.” It’s all a sharp reminder that underground reverberations are still produced in the dusty corners of academia. Bsc GRIP.