This here's a mix I made about this time last year, a ballet about a man lost on foot in a mountain forest during a severe blizzard. Don't worry, the narrative's totally legible. Stay cold:
tracklist, as best I can: Mouthus - "The Duration Myth" Zs - "Concert Black" Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse - "Dark Night of the Soul" Tom Waits - "Falling Down" The See Through Boy - "Interview" John Wiese - "Circle Snare" Piotr Ilich Tchaikovsky - "Act I: Scene and Waltz of the Snowflakes" Mount Eerie - "Wind Speaks" The Fun Years - "The Surge is Working" Mount Eerie - "Lost Wisdom pt. 2" Frog Eyes - "Bushels" David Lynch and Alan R. Splet - "In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)"
Two seven-inches: four side of palette cleansing, junkyard raking, free-shoveled abrstractionism from the almighty Zs. This is the doom-laden interlude to the forthcoming Northern Spy onslaught, I assume, Zs being new to the roster. And I can't wait. The band, fresh off their monstrous beastly best, New Slaves, seen here stretching, popping the joints in their neck, cracking knuckles, rolling out the bones in their collective shoulders, rumbling clatterously: take heed, the beast is awake...
Essence Implosion! is the beast, cut belly to back to belly, twisted and pulled, stretching like a slinky, and losing its entrails and everything in the process. (As if the original New Slaves wasn’t gruesome enough for you.) Aptly titled, the follow up to 2010’s album-of-the-year is not merely a “remix” album, despite what the details imply. One almost wishes those cursory details didn’t exist for fear they would suggest this as bypassable; a novelty; a throwaway. Of course, those conclusions couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, though, the source material here is mined from that great and singular beast: New Slaves. However, indentifying those samples amidst the tectonic grumbling of Essence Implosion! is messy, approximating to picking through, by hand, the chaotic viscera twisted out of the beast. Like its predecessor – and very much unlike its predecessor – New Slaves II burrows into various guises, each equally maddening, each tied to the first with threads of muscle, each peppered with rust and grind. It’s a pretty grin-inducing affair and a wonderful compliment to the astoundingly versatile Zs album it apes.
40. Pigeons - Si Faustine
39. Ou Où - Baron Von Baron
38. Kemialliset Ystävät - Ullakkopalo
37. Forest Swords - Dagger Paths
36. Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Love is a Stream
35. Avey Tare - Down There
34. Chris Schlarb - Psychic Temple
33. The Last Dog to Visit the Center of the Earth - Colossus Archosaur
32. Caballos y Entusiasmo - Hidropony
31. Sufjan Stevens - All Delighted People
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30. TOMO - Butterfly Dream and Other Guitar Works
If you scroll down a bit, you'll see that I just recently reviewed this one. An absolutely gorgeous instrumental guitar/drone album with magical healing qualities for the body and soul.
Zs New Slaves
(2010, Social Registry)
RIYL = Aufgehoben, Kingdom Shore, Steve Reich
Zs is a unit of irregulars trained for piloting costumes of beastliness. New Slaves, their grand opera. It is the documentation of three costumings, mechanized, and of particular weight, with various sub-beastly machinery in tow. Part 1: “Concert Black” to “Masonry” – the first five installments find the troupes operating a web of interconnected brutes, partly organic, partly motorized, five dirge missives, jaws agape, wide shoulders and variously noisy purrs. This is the infantry. A list of monstrousness. Tattered with ballistics gone awry, but still functional, with a limp. “Acres of Skin” is perhaps the lead puppet in this procession, trailing bones of all the animals of Noah. Propelled, percussive. Part one is the initial assault to crumble the walls, the larger buildings, to set metal into the dirt and rearrange the livestock. Part 2: “New Slaves” – a single animal. Twenty minutes in length and height and width. The toil of Zs. Perhaps taller and lengthier than its timeframe. The engine. “New Slaves” is a series of multilateral parts pumping in conjunction, the bulldoze, correcting and reassembling part 1. Smoke is high in the air now, seen from miles. “New Slaves” is that new grind. Count the number of arms, the number of legs, tracks of tanks. An evolutionary force, part 2 is the flex and return, the new homemaking of charred marrow and bits of yellowed grass. Perhaps increasingly mechanized, but a distortion of mechanics. A perfunctory loop of mock celebrations and their loud wrist watches. The certain death and the certain intelligence of a cricked neck. Part 3: “Black Crow Ceremony,” parts one and two – the aftermath. These costumes tend more towards linens and ropes, lettuce, twigs, all in gallons of gasoline. Twin burnouts for the ghostly set, a mix of specters and the dismembered arms part 2. A milky ambience for the regiment of red-eyed drunkenness. Loosens the blood, though not without the fleshy mandibles and teeth of goats. Minotaurs circle these creatures warily. Two sentinel the after-Zs. Prepared by the shifts in the air. Part 3 is the shifts in the air that lift from the chaos. Collect your things. It’s time to go. The imperfect triptych, an immaculate corpse of sorts. Though not remotely similar to anything else you’ll hear this year, New Slaves is among the very best that sound has to offer this year, this new decade, this past century? The most concentrated aural workout I’ve had since, since…
Zs Music of the Modern White (2009, Social Registry) RIYL = Extra Life, Aufgehoben, Kingdom Shore
Zs is one of those bands that I’ve always heard about being whispered about as musical revolutionaries. Along with this idea was a semi-obscure mythology that I’m not so sure that I didn’t fabricate myself. Either way, the New York underground’s experimental music scene has to culminate with reference to this insatiably glorious troupe of free jazz noise pranksters. My first introduction to the crew was last year’s The Hard EP. With a single track clocking in at past fifteen minutes, Zs provided a schizophrenic/OCD composition that was the epitome of its name sake. It was simply a difficult listen. On Music ofthe Modern White I'm not even going to begin to pretend that Zs has somehow turned the corner toward accessibility, but for my dollar this is what educated free jazz/noise is all about. First off, Zs has cut their tracks into pop sized lengths for easier digestion. Secondly, well, the guys just kill it on every track. I don’t know what it is and if it is totally justified, but there is something about Zs’s approach to composing mind bending sound experiments that sounds classically informed. I can’t really put my finger on it, but Music of the Modern White feels like adept musicians creating beautiful ugliness at will rather than amateurish teenagers attempting to make a scary sounds tape for Halloween with whatever is lying around the house. Perhaps a part of this is the instrumentation. With (at various points) heavy handed, well recorded drums, brass (I’m thinking a saxophone) bleating and what sounds like soaring violins, Zs sound like a group of orchestral jazz expatriates. However, don’t let this provoke any thoughts of elitism in your little heads. With screeching electric guitars and handclaps, Zs bring everything full circle. There is legitimate punk rock n’ roll buried in the aesthetic of theses pieces. There are only six tracks on the album leaving things relatively short, but not without giving you full satisfaction at the completion. I think if there was much more audio destruction lingering in these tracks people might begin to suffer slight amounts of brain damage. However, just for the record, I wouldn’t mind. Super freakin' awesome!
