OCF 15 - Caregivers

Shearwater Records is pleased to announce the fifteenth in a series of weekly – more or less – releases in their virtual seven inch “OCF” series.

Caregivers – OCF 15

Active since the mid-2000’s, Caregivers were a band from Martha’s Vineyard who were originally lumped in with the New Weird America. Certainly, they had both social connections and some points of aesthetic convergence – loose, jammy, improvised song structures, varied instrumentation and membership, ritualistic live performances, and an overall feel that put them on the darker side of the psychedelic experience. That said, there was always a bleaker and more electronic edge to their music that meant they were more likely to soundtrack Solaris or Silent Running than The Blair Witch Project.

A notorious tour in 2009, promoting the album Pensublie Bloc, saw them play a series of narcotics-fuelled descents into chaos in construction sites, parks, empty warehouses, silos and abandoned factories that culminated in a show in a half-built nuclear power station in Wichita. A two year hiatus followed.

In 2011 they returned to public life with the release of the excellent Simone Gold’s Poison Chalice. Several members had been shed, and the remaining core trio of Nick Johnstone, Daniel Drake and Ngu Yen Gi moved to a more industrial, sample driven sound, combining loping basslines with ethnoforgery and sheets of electronic noise. A recent show by the three at New York’s Pale Turd club apparently terrified a reviewer for Pitchfork into (appropriately enough, given the name of the venue), literally shitting his pants in public.

Here’s two examples of their new sound. Primitivist Velvets style bass underpins keyboards, sampled Japanese drumming and – on the first track – a vocal loop that sounds like PJ Harvey having her teeth extracted. On the second track a recording of Ngu Yen Gi’s aunt’s traditional singing floats serenely over his band-mate’s chaos. A new Caregivers album with live tracks and a jam with deconstructionist sax player Turner Blake Miles will be released on UK label Roadscape in a couple of months.

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 9.53 Mb.

http://www.divshare.com/download/18002675-a9b

This and previous releases are archived at http://shearwaterrecords.blogspot.com/

OCF 14 - Union of Sleep

Shearwater Records is pleased to announce the fourteenth in a series of weekly – more or less – releases in their virtual seven inch “OCF” series.

Union of Sleep - OCF 14

A few months ago we went for a long drive up the line with my in-laws, looking for unplundered op-shops to scavenge. We ended up in pretty much Whothefucknowswheresville, a tiny town we’d never heard of with a dairy, two pubs, a primary school, a junk shop in what had clearly been the post office, and a small group of disaffected fourteen year olds in really peculiar clothing, with an old-school ghetto blaster rocking the Futurians’ ‘Spock Ritual’. What…the…….POXRIDDEN FUCK we said, and went over to be like, ‘Hello’, and, ‘That’s our friends’ band’, and ‘This is quite odd!’. They turned out to be the local teenage weirdos, and – as all Futurians fans are – they couldn’t have been nicer people. They also had a band of their own, called Union of Sleep, based on YouTubed No Wave videos and the records that Aiden, one of the guitarists, had inherited from his grand-dad. His grand-dad (who had been the local high school art teacher) had been some kind of ginormous hipster in the Little Band scene in Melbourne in his youth; his pristine copy of ‘Confusion is Sex’ was their favourite record back in their last year of PRIMARY SCHOOL. PRIMARY SCHOOL.

We found this out all in about five minutes; we exchanged emails, and in the course of time they sent me a link to some recordings they’d uploaded. Here’s some I’ve picked more or less at random – cheap guitars, cheap bass, a cheap laptop loaded with drum samples because a kit is too expensive, played through cheap amps – the sound of a group of people in the first throes of discovering the fact that, when you don’t know any chords, the music that you make is far more exciting that the lame shit the rugby-heads around you listen to.

The other kids at their school hate them and pretend that Genevieve, the bass-player, must be a boy; their parents are mostly confused. But I love their crazy, beyond good and bad music, it’s beautiful and hilarious and joyful and pained, just like adolescence… and I’m really, really stoked to be releasing this, my favourite of the whole OCF series.

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 11.9 Mb.

http://www.divshare.com/download/17814491-244

This and previous releases are archived at http://shearwaterrecords.blogspot.com/

OCF 13 - Obsidion Gaze

Shearwater Records is pleased to announce the thirteenth in a series of weekly – more or less – releases in their virtual seven inch “OCF” series.

Remember when your noise friends went metal? We grew beards, dressed like Ringwraiths, and were in bands that sounded like burnt tree stumps slowly being lowered into pools of lead. Those days are gone now, and the rate of cultural change has accelerated to the point where the memory of them is only faintly distant...

Well, some of us have remained true believers, and here’s something for those of you who are sick of being fed with that happy clip-clap yip woot crap…. Because, frankly, there’s nothing more satisfying when winter finally breaks and the weather is pleasingly grim than providing it with a commensurately grim sound track. For your severe weather warning, I give you Obsidion Gaze. The band formed in 2007 when founding members B. and M. met in Christchurch and bonded over M.’s Metallic Corpses t-shirt. A few years later they followed the gold dollar to Perth, where the weather is not grim exactly, but still unendurable. Since then, they have also played, together or separately, in a host of such other bands as From The Mouths Of Ill Men, Snake Priest, Blasted Exhumations, Bloodraven and Purity Raised From Ashes, but, along with the addition of Malaysian guitarist R., it’s as Obsidion Gaze that they’ve become mainstays of Perth’s virulently unhealthy Doom scene. They have toured Europe and South Asia a couple of times, playing Dutch squats, Filipino tea-houses, and once in an otherwise empty soccer stadium to a small group of enthusiastic Basque skater punks.

Despite all this activity, they have until now remained unrecorded, so I’m very pleased to present this, their first official release. Huge swathes of black despairing guitar and synth are layered over your ears for eternity. I don’t know about you, but I love this kind of thing: there’s always something gratifyingly calming about borne along by music which is so stripped of everything except its essential intent. This is great stuff – for fuck’s sake, someone call Southern Lord now!

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 12.8 Mb.

http://www.divshare.com/download/17635185-908

This and previous releases are archived at http://shearwaterrecords.blogspot.com/

Here you go, to make up for my slackness recently in getting Shearwater product to your hard drive: ‘37.2 degrees le matin’, an entire album by Conni Stadft. You may remember that they’re a duo from Auckland who have been making small scale sound artefacts for a couple of decades now. Until recently their work was split neatly into two – what they called ‘poohbum’ music, scatological satires on a range of alternative music styles, and plunderphonic collages called, after Nerys Treacy, ‘innappropriations’ – the theft of art of dubious nature detourned to your own purpose.

This is in the second group, a melancholic, atmospheric re-imagining of the soundtrack to that early 90’s shocker of French art-film misogyny, Betty Blue. Apparently the pair would, as pseudo-Bohemian early twenty-somethings, obsessively play the oriiganl after imbibing industrial amounts of poppy tea. Stadft  freely admits that they had an ‘unhealthy identification with the self-harming and extremely shaggable female lead. Oh well.’  Some considerable time later and after finding a copy of it in a thrift store, they were disappointed to discover that, straight and as adults, the music is actually diabolically banal. Hence this, an attempt to regain the wasted beauties of their early youth.

You can download it here: http://www.divshare.com/download/17587309-94a

 And it’s on the website, here: http://shearwaterrecords.blogspot.com/

OCF 12 - Another Ordinary Day

Shearwater Records is pleased to announce the twelfth in a series of weekly – more or less – releases in their virtual seven inch “OCF” series.

Another Ordinary Day – OCF 12

Now, if you’re reading this you most probably know all about the supergiant ‘Improvised Music from Japan’ collection, and you may be interested to know that the germination of the project that has blossomed as Shearwater Records occurred when I illicitly obtained a copy it in digital form six or seven years ago. Flash forward to the present time and many, many iterations later, I can only hope that the results have been decorating your hard drives and aural cavities.

Why is this relevant? This week’s release is by two genuine Japanese musicians, who have genuinely been in Japanese bands – and now they are resident in a crazy Stepford Wives gated set-up in suburban Raumati.

Their names are, apparently, Yoshimi Youthcult and Akira Youthcult, and they met – I love this – as teenagers on exchange to Australia at a Birchville/Sandoz gig in Sydney. Akira Youthcult comes from Japanese avant-garde aristocracy (his father having played in Group Ongaku), and he’s been a key player in such bands as 10 Lips Strike, Xerokillerx and Pig Fuck Pig. Yoshimi Youthcult was a member of Alice Sister, a group of young women who rejected the machismo-bound nature of experimental music gigs in their home town and preferred instead to make home recordings and play in small, salon-style situations in each others’ living rooms and apartments. (Pundits may note that one of my favourite artists, Yuko Nexus6, comes from a similar scene).

The two have played together as Another Ordinary Day since meeting, and have received very strong reviews for their previous self-releases on their label 2 Plum Dogs: this is their first release on another label, and also their first one since moving to New Zealand in 2010. Their earlier work combined Yoshimi’s manipulations and reworkings of 80’s pop tunes with Akira’s aggressive Gameboy-generated Techno: this sound is now long-gone. Instead the couple have consciously attempted to place themselves in the tradition of Japanese experimental music. A spinning coin introduces a gorgeous, shimmering field of sine tones, underpinned by off-kilter percussion, mysterious bass pulses, Kaosilator blips and heavily vocodered vocals. It’s one of those great recordings where time seems to stop and the sound floats out of the speaker and pools in the corners of the room. A lovely little release by a band destined for great things.

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 12 Mb.

http://www.divshare.com/download/17580935-9b3

This and previous releases are archived at http://shearwaterrecords.blogspot.com/