HOTOTOGISU (UK /NYC) aka Matthew Bower (Skullflower, Total, Sunroof!) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards, GHQ, Zaika)
THE SKATERS (SF)
PUMP KINN AND DON (New Pump Kinn release on Weird Forest!)
I'll let some other folks do the promo for this one...
Reviews of Hototogisu:
Hototogisu: Ghosts From The Sun 2CD ?Ghosts From The Sun is the latest set of electric devotional music to flash from the brains of Matthew Bower of Sunroof/Skullflower and Marcia Bassett of Double Leopards. Over the course of two super-heavy discs they draw dinosaur drones from various organic and inorganic sources, erecting huge windscreens of flesh and metal. This is noise music that sings like skeletons in storms, with tactile, inchoate blizzards of bowed, hair-raising strings and vocals as blasted and leery as Michael Morley circa The Dead C?s Trapdoor Fucking Exit. The first disc is one long track, somewhere between John Cale?s Stainless Gamelan and the best of American Tapes, while the second disc packs four slightly shorter pieces that build from a foundation of Faust-scale electronics up into huge wormholes of noise. This is the kind of out-of-nowhere recording that leaves whole new genres struggling for birth in its wake. Just staggering.? David Keenan, The Wire
Hototogisu: Green CD ?As Green is intense as early Burzum, and as dense as a battalion of Asian noise terrorists, the unspoken promise for the avant-garde to overtake Metal?s softening brand of confrontation is made good. Jourgensen meddled with Metal in 1992; Drumm dressed it in eternally combusting cacophony and likened it to vapors south of Heaven; Hototogisu take it one step farther. By clipping Metal of its now clich?d characteristics, its essence is readily available. And while the duck is quacking, its cry sounds more like ?Long Live the New Flesh.? Whether anyone recognizes this to be the case honestly matters little. Highly recommended.? Stewart Voegtlin, Stylus Magazine
Hototogisu: Swoon Scream 2CDR/Heavy Blossom Massive cauldrons of boiling drone goodness emanate from the stockpile that is the recent 2xCD-R from FUCKIN' MATTHEW BOWER's Hototogisu. Issued on lovely pink CD-Rs with graphics silkscreened in red, the nearly-two hour set is the perfect way to hypnotize yourself into a methodone haze. "Swoon Scream" and "Heavy Blossom" act as one album, though the overall length makes them difficult to take in at once. Unless you feel like melting your skull. Matthew Bower and Marcia Bassett (from Double Leopards) are the masterminds behind Hototogisu. Everything they do is thick and murky. They load these tracks down with distortion and explore the lowest frequencies they can with their guitars. The heavily phased aspects are an attempt to travel directly up your spine and into your cerebrum. Walls of feedback rain from the sky, drenching all of those with their heads in this mass of sound. It's as all-encompassing as any record I've heard this year, and that is impressive. Fans of Sunroof!, Double Leopards, etc. will surely want to get their hands on this set. There is always a lot of music similar to this floating around, but there is very little as good as this. FUCKIN' MATTHEW BOWER indeed.- Brad Rose, Foxy Digitalis
Hototogisu: Prayer Rug Exorcism CD Total total total frenetic holograms light bursting from the inside of the amplifier, vertical dynamics spreading holy word throughout the land. One, all-inclusive trip to the desert comprising four rituals, each spanning the depths (and heights) of monolithic catastrophe, blinding, benumbing, illuminating and cleansing. Matthew Bower and Marcia Bassett reap wild thunder from a collection of electronic relics, scattered haphazardly across devotional rugs, screams caught in hourglasses and shaken until their sound has integrated with broken air and muddy saliva, wrought flesh hidden behind walls and walls of an enormous backlit aquarium, and also the heavenly always ringing always stunning pierce of a sound that escapes from the maw and lifts itself, flailing, from the mass beneath. The Ghosts from the Sun have been caught, confessed as to the whereabouts of their followers and cohorts.
The sound of any weary, inadequate concept of ?noise music? being deconstructed and disintegrated. The sound of a thousand flowers reflecting the dying glare of a misty dusk.
Unmasked, disclosed and shaking, whatever ancient rites these two perform they are surely the intermediaries of forces above and beyond the cycles of days and record reviews. Gaping, swallowed air, regurgitated, pulsed, flecked with heady catharsism, thrown back at the void, not in disgust, not in fear, but with a steady hand, sure mind and conscious will. Eaten by the souls of the sun. Sacrificial guitars moan like exorcised banshees, like the tundra they inhabit. Underneath...and underneath...it's impossible to tell what's underneath, except that the underneath is not underneath, because there's so much going on beneath your ears and beneath your feet it would be foolhardy to try and second guess the elements churning down there. And then the screams...not screaming, but elated, open mouths flowing what flows between vocal chords and the void, joining a carnival of animalistic instinct, a cavalcade of rainbow color, shimmering hair, fields of burning soil, mountains of flame and every now and then the frailty of a moth flying into the sun. But then again, these screams...interlaced with the undercurrent, spliced with the drone, if it hasn't sunk already, grasping the warm air above the green ocean briefly, but beautifully. And upon this, the third listen, the completion of some sort of attentive trinity, comparison to anything other than other Hototogisu records is irrelevant, incomprehensible even, and the microphones are bleeding, the drum machine is bursting with amber, the guitars are strung with silver, and now even a perfunctory "is this or is this not better than "Ghosts from the Sun"" seems a waste of time that could be spent trying to think of more ways to transfer what I'm hearing to the written word, from the heard to the read, the language of the water-color fuzz-mouth giant bird giant cat great spectrum sound of awesome sky to the language of however-many out of ten, who cares, eat sky, open wide, stand tall, speak still, breath heavy, listen attentively, get truly wildly ecstatically lost.
Holy fucking shit I just found out ALL the jams from this CD were taken from four separate LIVE shows. This shit is LIVE and GROWING man?I can?t believe it?I was gonna give this 9/10, but imagine BEING there when these sounds are created in FRONT OF YOUR EARS. That?s it, I cannot say anymore.- Joe Luna, Foxy Digitalis