The Master Musicians of Bukkake

Here are psychedelic drone Master Musicians of Bukkake live on the coast of Sardinia.  I believe this is 2013,  if this actually happened at all and isn't just a fevered hashish dream of some djinn.

The Sundowner (Natural Snow Buildings)

OMG!  Just when we thought we had a handle on Natural Snow Buildings as this sort of neo-hippie, post-rock/ambient/folk-drone outfit, all of a sudden we hear They Raise The Dead, Don't They? from  The Sundowner EP.  It's as if Fleet Foxes were suddenly transformed into Nine Inch Nails or Ministry.

The rhythm on They Raise The Dead, Don't They? is familiar enough - the drum-circle percussion, the bells and finger symbols, but instead of strummed guitar or a bowed cello, the dominant sound creating the drone is a gloriously loud, squealing wall of low-end electronic feedback and noise.  And it's not just a short bracing dose of dissonance before they get to the main portion of the song or a set-up for a quieter passage to come - the impenetrably dense sonic monolith continues for the full, nearly 12-minute track.  Also, great stereo effects - listen to this on headphones if at all possible.

I'll be honest here - if it weren't for tracks like this, I wouldn't be following Natural Snow Buildings through this pandemic shutdown, and I wouldn't be promoting them and encouraging you to listen as well.  They Raise The Dead, Don't They? is not an "easy" listen, especially the first time through, but it's dark texture and complex layers (it sounds like I'm describing a coffee!) ultimately make it a rewarding experience. 

The Sundowner is one of two 2008 EPs that record label Students of Decay included as bonus discs, along with the 2-CD, 2½-hour long Sunlit Stone album, for their reissue of NSB's The Dance of the Sun and the Moon, making it, in effect, a 6-CD box set.  The music on The Sundowner, like the other bonus CDs, was recorded at the  same time as TDotMatS, and documents some of the band's sonic experiments between 2005 and 2008.  Technically, The Sundowner is disc 4 of the full TDofMatS box set and the companion EP, The Moonraiser, is disc 3,  but I figured we'd listen to The Sundowner first to get ourselves acclimated to the more confrontational side of NSB.

I've talked in the past about the barriers one encounters in exploring NSB's vast discography.  The first barrier to overcome is the sheer number of recordings and the lengths of the albums and many of the songs.   Their dark, spooky, and even occasionally ugly tracks are the second barrier.  But even if you make it through those first two barriers, you're confronted by the wall of sound of They Raise The Dead, Don't They?  You'll feel trapped, like a mosquito trying to bore its way out from inside an iron bell, but keep listening.  Just as one can enjoy metal or industrial music or noise, there are pleasures to be found in these dark, heavy tracks.  It's just a little . . . different.

Here are the song list and starting times for the video above:

1. They Raise the Dead, Don't They? (0:00)

2. Trench (11:52)

3. Dawn Celebration (14:35)

After the pulverizing density of Raise the Dead, you'd think NSB would ease up a little on the second track, but Trench is another musique concrete sound experiment, a sea of electronic haze.  It's like listening to a track underwater or at the bottom of the ocean (the Mariana Trench?).  Dawn Celebration teases a return to "normal" with the tribal percussion and bells, but the 1-2-3-rest, 1-2-3-rest rhythm is soon overpowered by a droning harmonium with heavy reverb for the rest of the piece.

Overall, the structure of the EP resembles a Hellraiser-style horror film with no escape from the hellish realms despite fleeting glimpses of a sliver of hope.  The Sundowner cover art continues the Aztec theme of Sunlit Stone - I believe it's Ozomatli the monkey-god - but I have no idea what the song titles represent, or if they're meant to be representational at all.

I can see why these tracks weren't included on TDotMatS - it's nothing to do with quality, but they would have overpowered the rest of the album, and stood out more than otherwise warranted. TDotMatS would have sounded merely like a couple of intense noise tracks with 2½ hours of pretty "filler" material.

All of a sudden, the NSB discography just got so much more interesting.  Knowing the band has the ability to create these heavy pieces in addition to the prettier sounds of their other works makes all of their subsequent recordings so much more unpredictable.

Julianna Barwick

Sunlit Stone (Natural Snow Buildings) - Part 2

And he led her through the fields and through the valleys so deep
'Til at length lovely Mary began for to weep
"Willie, handsome Willie, you've led me astray
Through the fields and the valleys, my life to betray."

We're now on the second CD, disc 2 titled Sun, of Natural Snow Building's 2008 Sunlit Stones.  Like Moon, the first CD of the set, Sun contains songs recorded by NSB during the period of 2004-2005 while they were producing their classic The Dance of the Moon and the Sun.  Here's the Sun track list:

1. Lucifer Morning Star (2:27)
2. Kill To Please (7:18)
3. Dreaming Place (6:44)
4. Grey Skies (2:43)
5. Bloodletting (18:02)
6. Willy Brown (3:46)
7. Stay Behind to Ruin the Underworld (3:50)
8. The Satellites (5:06)
9. A Net to Lift the Room (4:31)
10. Dead Man Eyes (2:45)
11. Hunted Was My Brother (11:10)
12. You're Not Even Back (2:34)
13. We Don't Want You There Anymore (5:05)

Just like Moon, Sun contains two long tracks, Bloodletting (track 5) and Hunted Was My Brother (track 11).  Bloodletting meanders a bit too much for my personal liking and takes too long to resolve, although you may feel otherwise.  Personally, my favorite track on this CD is Hunted Was My Brother (above), another long, tribal, drum-circle drone similar to Witches All Around on the Moon disc.  I couldn't find the song on YouTube, Bandcamp, Soundcloud or Spotify (or Amazon and iTunes either, for that matter).  You can stream the entire 2½-hour Sunlit Stone album here, but to fill the void on the internet for Hunted Was My Brother, I uploaded a copy myself (above - see what I do for you?).  

"It's true what you say to me, it's just the truth you say
For late, late last night I was a-digging your grave
Your grave that is open, and spade standing by
And down in the grave your fair body must lie."

Like many NSB compositions, Kill To Please (below - not my upload) goes through several movements and passages before it's complete.  As in the case of many NSB tracks, transitions within single songs on this album are more pronounced and noticeable than transitions between songs.  Kill To Please starts with a string ensemble but soon dissolves into the white noise of static before emerging again as a quiet study for guitar.  Eventually, the ambient sounds make room for a quiet song backed by a shimmering, echo-laden guitar.  

And he stabbed her, he stabbed her, 'til the red blood did flow
And into the grave her fair body he did throw
And he's buried her so neatly and he's covered her so sound
Not thinking this murder would ever be found.

Overall, the Sun disc doesn't seem to have the Aztec references found on the Moon disc.  However, among the other horror themes in the NSB universe are Appalachian ghost and witch stories; 2004's TDotMatS had an instrumental track titled Mary Brown named for a character in The Blair Witch Project.  Willy Brown on Sunlit Stone is a murder ballad and ghost story that furthers the tale of Mary, sung in duet in a fairly straightforward manner without a bridge or instrumental break.  The titular Willy lures the pregnant Mary out to a remote countryside locations, kills her, and buries her body in a grave he had dug the night before. But before he can return to town, her avenging ghost appears and tears him into pieces.     

But as he was a-going and turning around
He spied lovely Mary, she was dressed all in brown
And she's snatched at him, and she's cut him, and she's tore him in three
Saying,"That's for the murder of my baby and me!"

And there you have it - another 2½ hours of drone and psychedelic horror folk from Natural Snow Buildings, or if you will, a second whole helping of TDotMatS.  Along with Two Sides of a Horse, Ghost Folks, The Winter Ray and TDotMatS, we're now about 8 hours into the NSB discography.

Only 42 hours more left to go.

The Evolution of Silver Mt. Zion

The evolution of Thee Silver Mt. Zion band - Friday we uploaded a bootleg video of a 2001 performance in Paris and on Sunday, another Paris performance but from 2010. 

In 2001, they were a post-rock chamber ensemble playing mostly instrumentals off of the debut album He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts of Light Sometime Grace the Corners of Our Rooms.  By 2010, they were a full-fledged rock band playing songs off their sixth LP, Kollaps Tradixionales.

Let's now look at a point half-way between those two performances. Here that are in 2006 at Le Grand Mix in Tourcoing, France, near Lille and the Belgian border, performing songs from their 2005 album Horses In the Sky, probably my favorite Silver Mt. Zion recording.  This performance captures them at the half-way point between a chamber ensemble and a rock band.  Very impressive, to say the least.

The first five songs, before the drone that closes the set, are from Horses In The Sky, while the encore songs are from 2008's 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons (Blind, Blind, Blind, introduced as "a new song"),  2001's Born Into Trouble As the Sparks Fly Upward (Take These Hands and Throw Them in the River, an "old song"), and the 2004 EP Pretty Little Lightening Paw (There's a River in the Valley Made of Melting Snow).  The set list and starting times for the songs are as follows:

1. God Bless Our Dead Marines (0:00)
2. Mountains Made Of Steam (18:55)
3. Teddy Roosevelt's Guns (31:49)
4. Horses In the Sky (48:17)
5. Ring Them Bells (Freedom Has Come and Gone) (58:10)
6. (Untitled Drone) (1:13:40)
7. Blind, Blind, Blind (1:23:41)
8. Take These Hands and Throw Them in the River (1:39:47)
9. There's a River in the Valley Made of Melting Snow (1:53:43)

Here's a picture of Le Grand Mix in case you're curious.

A CGtGi NSB - Part 7

Okay, here we go - we're about to start the deep plunge right here.  It's probably a good thing we're all on lockdown with this virus thing right now so that we have the time for this.  But before we take that plunge, let's just quickly remind ourselves of where we are in the Natural Snow Buildings discography.

In 2000, NSB self-released a cassette tape, Two Sides of a Horse, followed by their first release on a label, the post-rock album Ghost Folks (2003).   In 2004, they self-released a second album, the two-CD The Winter Ray.  Nothing was released in 2005, and then in 2006, they self-released the cult favorite, The Dance of the Moon and the Sun.  Four albums over six years, for a total of six and a half .hours of music.  That's what we've covered here so far.

And then, after another year off in 2007, they released a whopping 12 albums in 2008 alone, most of them their typical hour- to two-hour long marathons.  Sixteen hours of music released that one year alone.  That's a lot to take in.  Fortunately, at least several of the albums can be grouped together, and all of the music was  not necessarily recorded in 2008.  

We'll start with the two-CD Sunlit Stone.  Due to the cult following that was forming behind the self-released TDotMatS, a Cincinnati record label, Students of Decay, reissued the album on CD.  As a promotion, they included Sunlit Stone, two additional CDs of material recorded in 2004 and 2005 during the TDofMatS sessions, as a pre-order bonus.  The 2-CD. Sunlit Stone set totaled 2½ hours, the same duration as TDofMatS.  Only 120 copies of Sunlit Stone were ever made, and it was only available as a TDofMatS pre-order bonus.

Actually (full disclosure), Students of Decay also included two additional EPs with the pre-order bonus as well, The Sundowner and The Moonraiser, for another 45 minutes of TDotMatS-period material, making the album a 6-CD box set.  The Sundowner and The Moonraiser are technically discs 3 and 4 of the 6-CD set and the two CDs of Sunlit Stone are discs 5 and 6, but for reasons that will be apparent later we'll listen to Sunlit Stone first.

Like TDofMatS, one disc of Sunlit Stone was subtitled Moon and the other Sun.  It can almost be argued that Sunlit Stone is sort of like a parallel-universe TDotMatS.  The sound and feel are similar, both albums alternating between folkish vocals sung in near monotone as if in a cultist trance and extended drones that combine multiple layers into sometimes blissful, occasionally contemplative, often menacing universes.  The songs pride themselves on their slow development, creating the impression of descending down through uncharted depths, past hidden cavities and chambers that you will never unsee once experienced. It would be a mistake to dismiss Sunlit Stone as merely an "outtakes" album, although it does contain an alternate, demo version of The Cursed Bell that frankly isn't as good as the version on TDotMatS.    

The $200 copy of TDotMatS for sale online is the full 6-CD set including Sunlit Stone, but other than that, I have no idea where one could purchase a copy of the album today.  Fortunately, it was uploaded to YouTube so you can stream the whole thing there in all its 2½-hour glory, or else look around for pirated files to download (which is what I did).  

Here's the tracklist for the Moon disc (CD-1 or -5 depending on whether you're looking at Sunlit Stone as a standalone album or as part of the box set):

1. Sunlit Stones (3:55)
2. The Cursed Bell (1st Version) (3:51)
3. Falls Into the Otherworld (4:49)
4. An Isolated Place for Target Practice (14:27)
5. Drowned (1:42)
6. These Stories About After the Revolution (7:53)
7. Cloud Scroll (3:32)
8. Tlacloc Blacktransformer (8:10)
9. Witches All Around (14:04)
10. Moon Paddler (5:54)
11. Milky Way Skirt (8:09)

The two 14-minute drones (tracks 4 and 9) are both excellent.  An Isolated Place for Target Practice has a very  ethereal, spacey vibe to it, and is as close to ambient music as NSB gets.  My favorite, Witches All Around, resembles Cut Joint Sinews & Divided Reincarnation from TDotMatS with its tribal-sounding percussion and exotic instrumentation before it resolves into one of their better vocal performances.  Strings squeal, percussion rattles, and feedback hisses, and the track contains at least four different passages (a tribal drum circle, a cello drone, a mysterious folk song, and a Mideastern-sounding dance) as it evolves through its various incarnations.

The spoken words in These Stories About After the Revolution, another stand-out track, are from the book Moving by the poet Bernadette Mayer.  

Tlaloc Blacktransformer references the Aztec god of rain, fertility, and water, and the Aztec theme is also represented on the gruesome cover drawing of an Aztec human sacrifice.  I don't know if the full album or even the Moon disc is supposed to be Aztec themed or not, but song titles Drowned, Cloud Scroll, and Moon Paddler, not to mention Fall Into the Otherworld and even Milky Way Skirt, are evocative of the rain and water god.   Tlaloc is usually depicted with goggle eyes and fangs. Although he was considered a beneficent giver of life and sustenance, he was also feared for his ability to send hail, thunder, and lightning, and for being the lord of the powerful element of water.  

The track Tlaloc Blacktransformer itself is very cinematic and resembles the soundtrack for a horror or suspense movie; at times, I'm reminded of Popul Vuh's soundtracks for 1970s Werner Herzog films.  NSB are known for their use of horror imagery and lyricism, and they definitely have a dark streak.  With Sunlit Stone, we can add Aztec religion to the themes of witchcraft, Inuit legends, and low-budget horror films that run through their work.

The lesson here is that the sheer number of recordings released by NSB in 2008 is a little less intimidating if one considers three of them, the Sunlit Stone album and The Sundowner and The Moonraiser EPs, as part of the larger, The Dance of the Moon and the Sun from 2006.  That leaves only 9 "new" albums for 2008, which is still a lot, granted, but as we'll see, some of those can also be grouped together into more manageable groups.

We'll go over CD-2 of Sunlit Stone, the Sun disc, next.

I Built Myself A Metal Bird. I Fed My Metal Bird the Wings of Other Metal Birds.

The evolution of Thee Silver Mt. Zion band - Friday we uploaded a bootleg video of a 2001 performance in Paris, and now here they are, back in Paris in 2010. 

In 2001, they were a post-rock chamber ensemble playing songs off of the debut album He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts of Light Sometime Grace the Corners of Our Rooms.  By 2010, they were a rock band saying that they wished they were Teenage Jesus and the Jerks from NYC and playing songs off their sixth LP, Kollaps Tradixionales.

As you'll learn from the video, the song doesn't take long to evolve from a punk-rock stomper into post-rock territory.

Very impressive, to say the least.