Thorns - Thorns

2001; 8 tracks (48:11)

Mesmerizing piece of music similar to The Work Which Transforms God. What else can I say? Just listen.

Download.

Blut Aus Nord - The Work Which Transforms God

2003; 12 tracks (51:40)

A must hear infinite times album. Listen in the dark for best results.

777

Samuel Barber - Piano Music

1998; 20 tracks
Daniel Pollack, pianist

Samuel Barber was an American composer who is sadly only known for his Adagio for Strings. His piano music is both lyrical and romantic, but it can also be very challenging.

This CD collects all the published piano music of Samuel Barber, including the highly regarded masterwork Sonata, Op. 26. The Sonata, in four movements, goes from the severe in the first movement to the openly joyous in the second; the third movement builds slowly to a mighty grumbling before just as slowly resigning itself to a quiet resolve. The final movement is all energy, requiring great technical prowess, which pianist Daniel Pollack has. It's an excellent performance.

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Supreme Dicks - The Emotional Plague

1996; 11 tracks

Supreme Dicks were among the most intriguing followers of the aesthetics that equates "creative" and "primitive". The kind of drunk, dissonant folk music of their debut evolved towards the avant-garde and psychedelia on The Emotional Plague, an ambitious work that resorted to sparse, dilated and warped structures.

What a fucking astounding album. I can't imagine anything more perfect, seriously. It is very lo-fi but has some psychedelic and kraut-rock influences. Some projects that came to mind while I listened to this album were Jandek, Acid Mother's Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O., Ash Ra, Slint, and even Why? at times. It is very dissonant music. I can't quite describe it as well as I'd like but... it made me think of the color gray. in The Emotional Plague there are infinite shades of gray floating all around. This may seem a limited variety, but for Supreme Dicks, it is enough. Their various styles morph together to create multi-faceted but utterly crushing songs of dissonance and warped otherwordliness.

here

Kingston Wall - II

1998; 10 tracks; 1:02:37

II is up there in my favorite albums of all time. Each track is heavily dynamic with their progressing eastern style music. There are many moments that sound very Pink Floyd-like but are exponentially better than the latter. I could not ever find anything wrong with this album even if I listen to it a billion times.

To realize that we are two of a kind

Coil - The Restitution of Decayed Intelligence

2003; 2 tracks

These are two tracks full of music (or noise, rather) reworked from The Remote Viewer. This is quite a bit less "melodic," and much more experimental, but still very Coil-y and awesome.

Both sides of the 10" use the same basic sounds and techniques, but the sculpturing takes different forms on either side. "The Restitution of Decayed Intelligence I" introduces the sound palette: a chorus of digital buzzes, stutters and skips that occupy the soundfield at different pitches and volumes. This music is very dimensional, seeming to fly into one's ears at a myriad of different angles. Soon, the high-end stutters are joined by a series of quasi-rhythmic metallic throbs, like the alternating whirr of a flying saucer engine. These elements are then edited, overdubbed and sculpted into dramatic convergences of sound that alternately pierce, arouse and frighten. So many faintly recognizable sounds can be heard in this midst of these abstractions, but the listener cannot discern which are placed there intentionally and which are an accident of subjectivity. A chorus of bone saws, a squeaking hinge, high-pitched shrieking, a mutated voice, swooping metallic shards, granular static: all of these sounds sneak out of the noise over the course of the piece. "The Restitution of Decayed Intelligence II" uses the same set of aural phenomena, but this time snatches of recognizable melody become obvious as the piece unfolds. Jhon Balance's warped vocal hiccups from track two of The Remote Viewer are re-used, albeit in a completely inscrutable form, sounding like a swarm of bees frantically trying to communicate with the human race. Halfway through, there is a shocking increase in volume and intensity as the piece gains momentum. It is here that we see Coil's personality come through; this piece, however chaotic, has the same epic sweep as their Love's Secret Domain-era acid house excercises, and all of the dark, hedonistic atmosphere.

Download.

Dornenreich - Durch Den Traum

2006; 8 tracks

This, my friends, was the first album I'd ever heard that was even remotely close to the genre "black metal." It was my first encounter with the German band Dornenreich, and my first true experience with music. By that, I mean that it really took me somewhere. The title Durch Den Traum, or "Journey Through a Dream," was just that - a journey. Nothing in Dornenreich's discography sounds like this, for these 8 chilling tracks of darkness are unlike anything I've ever heard before. This album is incredible. The majority of it is soft, whispered, and at times frantic - the instruments seemingly wound to their fullest potential and mournfully wailing achingly heartbroken sounds. There are parts to the album, however, that are absolutely mindnumbing in intensity and passion. Dornenreich's atmospheric and mysterious style of black metal is what I find the most appealing.

The second half of the second track (around 4:15) is absolutely one of the most amazing transitional parts of any piece of music I've ever heard (even more so than Jesu's "Ruined")!

"It is very hard, maybe even impossible, for one to properly understand the experience that is Durch Den Traum without having listened to it first hand. The band plays atmospheric black metal but in a way that is unique only to them. Their combination of soft, distorted chords; folky breaks and dissonant, heavier sections are arranged in such a way as to create something that has a lot of the same ingredients as other releases but sounds nothing like any of them. The atmosphere on here can be best described as dreamlike. The calm spoken words section quickly giving way to the more nightmarish shouted parts (and I do say shouted as there are almost none of the traditional black metal shrieks). So come experience something unique in a genre where you thought you had heard it all."

Are you asleep?
Am I awake?
Are we a dream?
The world and I?