BULL TONGUE
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore
from Arthur No. 28 (Mar 2008) [available from The Arthur Store]
Stream: [audio:http://www.arthurmag.com/magpie/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/kites_final-worship.mp3|titles=KITES – “Final Worship”]
Load has dropped a warm totem pole of new guh, most notably the fourth release by Kites called Hallucination Guillotine/Final Worship. Kites is the solo sound art project of Providence, RI’s Chris Forgues and it’s always a curiosity where this cat is gonna land. His last record Peace Trials had him delivering weird and exciting song-based ideas but this one has him not so much returning to noise form as refining it in a more succinct, minimalist way. The musicality of harshness is achieved in an impressive and contemporary style. Kites is almost considered old school these days in the hyperventilating world of noise but this is some new juice.
Chris also has a new art book issued by Picturebox called Powr Mastrs which is the beginning of a ten-part journey through the mystic world of a psycho-warrior tribe. If you can dig the exquisite graphic vibe to his record covers then you definitely need to score this.
Stream: [audio:http://www.arthurmag.com/magpie/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/yellowswans_our_oases.mp3%5D
Another new one on Load is At All Ends by the West Coast duo Yellow Swans. It’s their most thought-harmonic release we’ve heard yet and we’ve heard quite a bit from these drone squall pups. Awesome sweet chug with considerable cooze flow.
mp3: MOUTHUS – “Your Far Church”
Stream: [audio:http://www.arthurmag.com/magpie/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/mouthus_yourfarchurch.mp3%5D
Yellow Swans had an early autumn tour in the USA with Brooklyn’s magnificent Mouthus. Mouthus we continually rave about and their fistful of self-released CDs have been always welcome whippets of dense blacked-out snort tone but we were fully unprepared for the royal roar of their new Load load Saw A Halo. The heaviest of rock-mind meltdown engorged by buckets of brain fry amp smoke and experimental percussion in its most NOW of sound states. Proves Mouthus to be at the forefront of what we hoped and desired from a post-Dead C factory of art/magic. Fucking sweet.
mp3: SWORD HEAVEN – “Town Hag”
stream: [audio:http://www.arthurmag.com/magpie/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/swordheaven_townhag.mp3%5D
The amazing slamming sweatpig sensuality of Ohio’s Sword Heaven is in full flesh-thumping effect on their Load LP Entrance. The duo of Aaron Hibbs and Mark Van Fleet is one of the most crucially hardcore bizarre performance ritual acts since post-early Swans intensity. Finally a record is out which captures their brutal meat. In excellent b+w gatefold sleeve.
“Television is great. The wind blows across a screen in Nevada, Utah. That’s great, greater than Utah…” – an excerpt from a collaboration between New York poet Ron Padgett with Larry Fagin and Bill Berkson, two contemporaries of Padgett’s and all three from a long history of late 20th-century St. Mark’s Poetry Project and beyond poetics. Continue reading
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