Embryonnck
(Staubgold) Used CD $8.00
New York mavericks and Munich-based Krautrock legends explore the indigenous urban music phenomenon on this collaboration from 2006, melding forays into experimental, blues, Middle Eastern, Turkish and African musics. “A sweet, innocent recording, with improvisations that pulsate with the warmth of breathing bodies, conjuring images of flower children and the haze of drugs.” Includes 24-page booklet with photos and liner notes.
Qvaris
(5 Rue Christine) Used 2xLP $12.00
“Their spooky blend of guitars, drums, strings, keyboards, and who knows what else results in improvisational, swirling psychedelic darkness,” says All Music Guide. “The tunes are short, focused, and somewhat direct. This is individualistic music that reflects, refracts, curdles, screams, and whispers from the various traditions, legacies, and lineages not just in music, but in the artistic freedom of the 19th and 20th centuries as it is brought to bear in the 21st. ‘The Doon,’ at a little over five minutes, is a droning, open-ended chant-like piece where electric guitars, percussion, shakers, and atmospherics snake around one another. But it changes subtly, shifting in tone, texture, and tension. By contrast, the skeletal funk in ‘Live Your Myth in Grease’ is almost accessible. But its primitive, skittering drums, repetitive, edgy six-string, plodding, fuzzed-out bass, and unnamable percussion instruments gradually build a super-steamy voodoo groove. Other pieces, such as ‘The Qvaris Theme,’ use strings, sawing and searing along with evil-sounding percussion, organs, and guitars to create a stark, tribal dread. There is sheer beauty here too, in the album’s longest track, ‘Lugnagall,’ which builds from percussive repetition to include guitars and a pump organ, and becomes a swirling frenzy of ecstasy-writhing female vocals and droned-out freak bliss. The groove and mantra-like trance pieces do not juxtapose so much as blend into the cosmic, free-form scatterations, uniting it all into a sublime, wondrous opening of the sonic skylight into the void. Far from the loose spectral jamming of some of their earlier releases, this is the most cohesive, enchanted music No-Neck have ever made on tape.”
Recorded In Public And Private
(Ecstatic Yod) LP $40.00
From 1994. ''This is the kind of thing you do in a basement in SoHo, not in a public park where people are trying to enjoy their food.... They had a permit to play jazz, but this isn't jazz.'' --Mike O'Neal, O'Neal's Restaurant on 64th Street opposite Lincoln Center.