Having already introduced Diamond Terrifierhere, I’ll strike the heart of the matter: Sam Hillmer’s debut solo album is one of the most transcendent pieces I’ve heard all year. Simultaneously an abstract yet tactile experience, Kill The Self That Wants To Kill Yourself is dark and beautiful and weirdly refreshing.
The first sound heard on the titular opener is a warming synth pad straight from Brian Eno‘s playbook. Dream sequence, loving eulogy or triumphant reunion; it’s a lifting wind over which Hillmer solos to melodic catharsis. Arresting in its direct simplicity, this track eases us into the unshackled gravity of romantic disorientation. Slipping on a shattered cloudy fabric Oneohtrix Point Never might wear, he never lets the human presence or real instruments drift out of mind. As the album deepens it never loses grip on the tangible reality of its construction: guitar, handclaps, cymbals and the commanding saxophone are practically visible, yet even the drone swells and programmed drum bits crackle and hum right before me. There is so much life stabbing outward from the perceptual dervish at the center of this album. Kill The Self That Wants To Kill Yourself, beyond being one of the greatest titles ever, feels like the beginning of a new fruitful path for Hillmer. I just hope this doesn’t preclude growth (and future albums) in his main band. Zs are, after all, one of the most interesting bands I perpetually neglect to share.
I will rectify this.
Here’s a track from the album. Like I said yesterday, it works best as a single piece.. this is still great.
Diamond Terrifier is the solo project created by saxophone destroyer Sam Hillmer, as a vehicle for the exploration of more nuanced territory than the blast furnace his day job in avant-jazz-noise group Zs embodies. He’s got a new album out which I’ll get to in a moment.
For now, check this:
Twenty seven minutes of otherworldly bliss. I’ve now listened three times in a row. Each set bringing something new to the fore, shifting around the sweet spots. Each time a novel element flashes brighter: the swarming Pharoah Sanders and Don Cherry echoes in the horn play, the primitively menacing percussion, the psychotic guitar threatening to derail everything at one point, even the familiar ghosts hissing between the cracks (hello, He Loved Him Madly). It begins in earnest with Hillmer laying out a lyrical solo somewhere between siren and whale song and progresses to a full band tsunami where we have a synthy bass pulse emerging at times like a ship refusing to sink, only to rise in full sail near the end in a sax-and-laser maelstrom.
This incredible piece is just a taste of what this man creates, something taken to a much more personal and direct place on the new album, Kill The Self That Wants To Kill Yourself. There’s a stream of one of the tracks on the Diamond Terrifier soundcloud, though I believe it works much better as part of the whole.
There it is. Get it at Northern Spy. They have great prices and (seriously) fast and helpful customer relations.
For fans of: John Coltrane, Terry Riley, Boredoms, Colin Stetson, Anthony Braxton, Ultralyd, adventures
In 2011, like every year since I’ve discovered how to harness the power of the internet (and a handful of discerning friends) to expand my horizons and unveil whole dimensions of music, has been an incredible year for listening: another slab in my monument to Why You Should Pay Attention. I held crushes on a number of albums and fell deeply in love with a select few. All deserve acknowledgement but only the most striking motivate me to gush at length. With a little luck, I can turn people on to something which will enrich their lives and change perceptions in small or significant ways. Or maybe even sell an album for one of these deserving artists!
So I know I’ve been sluggish this year with Optimistic Underground. I relish being able to share the music enriching my life with you. I hope to rectify this laziness starting now, with The Psychic Paramount and their (hopeful) breakthrough album II.
I had this whole through-line about jet engines and surgical instruments and LSD and This Heat and Les Rallizes Dénudés and Miles Davis and cathartic volume levels… but I got caught up, slack-jawed and blasting this album again. It’s almost like a psychedelic brillo pad, carving clear my thought channels and surrendering my body to oblivion. A therapeutic breakdown of cogent narrative, this thing blasts away the outside world and disconnects me, sets me free in a way only the most blissed out Lovesliescrushing or hard droning Boris album can. It strikes an unknown sweet spot, defying gravity while splaying my brain with crushing heft. Crucial to this power is the flawless production, zooming in on every microscopic detail yet capturing the panoramic magnitude these songs inhabit. A dizzying high wire act of wide-eyed clarity, this album satisfied me in places only a fellow Swans or John Coltrane or Fennesz fan would recognize.
Second track DDB, opening with one of the more gentle passages on II, grows like marshmallows in the microwave, devouring 9 minutes in a wild-fire.
While I’m dropping names, I should mention that if you like Boredoms, Eternal Tapestry, Lightning Bolt, Fushitsusha, or anything within orbit of those bands, you will find yourself punch drunk and melting to this album.
STAR is the latest and easily most accessible project from longtime Chicago noise purveyor Scott Cortez, pulling both the most rhythmic and sensual threads from his Astrobrite and Lovesliescrushing projects and twisting it up in a heavy coctail of feral shoegaze.
Not for the faint of heart or those looking for something on the pretty end of the genre spectrum, this album has all the feedback and grit of Loveless, paired with structures so direct, pounding, and straightforward they’d make the White Stripes‘ eponymous debut blush. Not content to simply burnish a menagerie of effects pedals (ahem, A Place To Bury Strangers), the band crafts a tight little set of addictively hummable songs that shine clear and bright through the storm of amp worship. It’s fun, active, and humbly brilliant. Devastator is an unassuming foray into hazy rhythmic stomp and groove love anthems; it’s the kind of album to drive alone at night with, or simply relax with a glass of whiskey and some headphones as company.
Fuck Buttons released one of the most interesting and polarizing albums of 2008, one of several named on my end of the year list (which would undoubtedly have been published here if Optimistic Underground was running at the time) and a perennial physical overload to unwitting passengers in my car. This October the English duo are set to blow faces off and disintegrate non-believers with the sonic asteroid they’ve named Tarot Sport.
Using the word epic to describe this music is beyond moot; it’s simply a given at this point. Yet this fact does little to temper the unshakeable urge to invoke it – and feel it – on every listen. This is the sort of thing epic was coined for. Kicking off with the dancefloor earthquake of Surf Solar, expanded to 10 minutes from its early incarnation as a 7″ single, the album shouts its thesis from a mountaintop and gets moving at a breakneck clip. With an insistent four on the floor beat and stocatto-spliced vocal clips there’s no wonder which of debut Street Horrrsing‘s tracks was the launch point for this sophomore triumph: shining, atmospheric, ass-shaking standout Bright Tomorrow. Every track, though submerged in the same industrial crunch mana Fuck Buttons are known for, feels more breathable, open, dynamic and most of all catchy, than anything they’ve yet created. Third track The Lisbon Maru gently (and subtly) conjures the pulsing power-surge key stabs from the debut’s stellar opening (and most popular) track Sweet Love For Planet Earth, swaddling the backbone in vacuumed reverb and what sounds like hundreds of damaged violins compressed into a small wind tunnel and dialing up the velocity throughout its run.
After this point the album transforms into pure, blissed out, pounding noisy nirvana. Fourth track Olympians blasted its way to the top of my list, where it reigns with impunity, after only my first two listens. Not content with merely teasing their dancefloor intentions or continuing to shy away from unabashed melody, this striking 10 minute centerpiece showcases everything Fuck Buttons do well and then some. Finally delivering on the ambitious promise suggested all along, the moment is a revelation: a band fully coming into their own as artists and hitting an undeniably assured stride. Nothing feels remotely tentative about the syncopated big beat drums beamed through the tonal cloud this song is born in, nor the manner in which every element seems to gather up, tightening into a coiled rhythmic outburst in anticipation of the mythical organ swells beginning three minutes in. It’s a gorgeous night sky colored with soaring waves of heartrending resonance and shimmering supernovas, exploding out of the mix like galactic pop rocks – a transcendent meteor shower as close and tangible as the ‘play’ button.
Topping that monster would be difficult, if not impossible; the guys instead turn and unleash a funky blast of head clearing noise bop in a (relatively) concise 5 minutes, before diving into sonic rollercoaster Space Mountain (appropriately titled) with driving tribal percussion and twinkling keyboards ablaze. A nearly-clean guitar tone drives the action, disintegrating in the atmosphere, enveloped in feedback, before giving way to the final push: closer Flight of the Serpent and its destructive martial stomp. Swooning UK post rock guitar moves over a clattering speed-march rhythm section, bursting with feedback at just the right moments and sharing the spotlight with a romantic organ pulse grown from Olympians‘ seed. Feeling almost like a burly reprisal of that apex, the swarm of drone flies suddenly drop away at the halfway point, exposing the skeletal drum pattern and letting it hang, galloping along unadorned for several moments. Thankfully, majestic crests of oceanic keyboard melody and shattering light beams of narcotic bliss return to guide the album to a satisfactorily dizzying end.
Watch this clip with the volume cranked to whet your appetite if my words haven’t already.
[and make sure to preorder the album at boomkat, norman records (vinyl!), or rough trade – or make your purchase at a local record shop when it drops on October 12]
Black Dice are one of the most interesting noise fetishists of this decade, crafting everything from burned out near-ambient soundscapes to rumbling sample-melting inverted party anthems – all with a jagged outré sensibility about how songs are crafted.
Imagine aliens descending on the earth eons after humans abandoned it. The cities are crumbled and in an attempt to understand us, they rebuild everything – not as originally intended, but the way they imagine it to be. The bits and pieces are placed together via extraterrestrial logic, ignorant of the traditions and established methodology of physical construction on this planet. The result is something utterly fascinating and strange, with underlying familiarity in its makeup but complete disregard for the way this long-gone race decided things should be.
Then imagine the aliens are the members of Black Dice, and the cities are a thousand shattered records lying on their studio floor.
Broken Ear Record starts off with a deep brass thump, nearly the last recognizable instrument, and proceeds along through a wiggly, pulsating river; occasionally jarring, the overall effect is trance-inducing. Smiling Off continues this with a more rhythmic pounding and crescendoing structure thoughout its 9 minutes. The rest of the album springs from the opening duo’s template, adding percussion, subtracting the drift, and working itself into an occasional frenzied burst of cathartic melody. Oh, and it’s dancey too, in a sorta flailing-seizure-in-a-metal-body-cast way. There is something truly hypnotizing about this particular beast; it’s like a full giant computer full of instruments rolling downhill until all the crunching and bending and chaotic crashing coalesces into a consistent beat that becomes a straightforwardly pleasant listen. One only has to surrender to its will and give it some time. By the end of the second track, its claws will dig in. By the end of the finale, Motorcycle, they’ll be down to the bone. Understanding and bewilderment attained in the same wild instant.
Believe me, I was a doubter at first. Now I can’t stop the momentum.
Optimistic Underground 