Prometheus

... We pulled out our phones to take photos of all of it. As we aimed our shot, from the sky emerged these not supposed to say things approaching fast and smooth at a sharp diagonal with four whirling whirring pads like the feet of frogs and as I went to tap the screen I saw emit a bright white light precision pointed at me 

& I was aboard it. 

& Suddenly Everything Turned Sea Foam

Julien Neto - Los Cien Enamorados

from 'After the Flash Flood (Remixes)' [DIGITAL]
Denovali Records · den296
available for download at [http://denovali.com/prairie]
album available on all formats at [http://denovali.com/prairie]

Prairie is the project of multi-instrumentalist and producer Marc Jacobs, hailing from Brussels with roots in The Netherlands. He previously released an EP (I'm so in love I almost forgot I survived a Disaster - 2013) and an LP (Like a Pack of Hounds - 2015) on the Berlin imprint Shitkatapult. On stage, Prairie plays with two or three musicians and together they re-create a free association of musical ideas and atmospheres. Prairie has played in selected venues and festivals across Europe and toured with Apparat in 2016.

If the apocalypse was painted in several layers of pastel gouache, its soundtrack might be PRAIRIE's Flash Flood. Listening to the album, we drift through a series of frozen landscapes that gesture at a post-apocalyptic ambience. This is a kind of blackened music that has been left to sediment, excavated from traces in ice core samples. Flash Flood showcases a deep sensitivity to narrative and rich cinematic textures as Marc Jacobs returns with palimpsestic sonic layers. It has been three years since PRAIRIE's last release——the 2015 Cormac McCarthy-inspired Like a Pack of Hounds——and it is clear that it has been several years of pensive reflection. Now, PRAIRIE takes the sentiment of his 2012 debut, I'm So In Love I Almost Forgot I Survived A Disaster, several steps further: it is after the apocalypse, and no one has survived. And yet with Flash Flood, we can hear the hum of this impossible future.

'After the Flash Flood' introduces the sonic ruins of distorted guitars, field recordings, drum programming and synths that create the textures of the entire album. The melancholic and subdued black metal churn of 'Raindeath' becomes the cold backdrop for unnerving, paranoiac speech. The third track, 'Sisters', foregrounds this coldness while slowly moving away toward alternate vistas where the acoustic timbres of the saz-driven 'A Permanent War Economy' take over. 'Underwater Body Hunting' and 'Rabid Ibrahim' are hard hitting beat-oriented tracks that insist on burning slow. There is a patience with PRAIRIE's FLASH FLOOD that is difficult to deny. The lamentation of 'Elephants Will Rise Again' perhaps signals that it is not only the human that is lost after catastrophe. The album closes with 'Hard Water: Cracked Ice' and 'Hayashi Clock'. The former is a beautiful coalescence of clean harmonious tones and softly overdriven drums; while the latter brings us back to a meditative state, drifting through the final pastel tapestry.

"... his cosmos is located somewhere between Bohren & der Club of Gore and Sunn O))), ambient is as familiar to him as brachial sounds, and he is as much acquainted with guitars as with synths and modern technology" (GROOVE)

"... sounds like a requiem for this broken world." (SPEX)

"... Like Ben Frost, (Prairie) exudes a certain harshness while tempering his work with moments of sublime beauty. This isn’t club material; it’s music for the hammer in one’s hand, the confrontation of the demon, the soul-shattering revelation." (A Closer Listen)

"unusual trip into disturbing soundscapes... (the tracks) possess a broadness, drama and depth, which by far exceed any conventions" (Musikexpress)

After the Flash Flood Remixes

Prairie - Hard Water:Cracked Ice (Yves De Mey Remix)

From the album With Voices available January 18, 2019 from Western Vinyl.

With Voices is the newest recording by Dutch composer Rutger Zuydervelt under the moniker Machinefabriek. True to its title, the album’s eight pieces exhibit Zuydervelt’s use of cassette recorders, tone generators, radios, synths, and other hifi curio to construct bewildering aural architecture around vocal contributions from Peter Broderick, Marissa Nadler, Richard Youngs, Chantal Acda, Terence Hannum (of Locrian) and others. These human voices are featured as musical instruments rather than mere vehicles of lyrical content, resulting in a sub-linguistic mosaic of primordially stirring moods.

The initial spark of With Voices was kindled while Zuydervelt was in Taipei creating music for a dance company. In the final days of his trip, a dancer named Wei-Yun Chen caught Zuydervelt’s ear with an instagram video featuring a voice that turned out to be Wei-Yun’s own (she would end up on the album’s seventh movement, a piece that features dissected bits of Taiwanese poetry amid low-pitched murmurs and whispering fogbanks of static). The encounter stirred Zuydervelt to create a single 35 minute soundscape upon which each vocalist on With Voices was encouraged to improvise, be it talking, reading, singing, or wordless, guttural intoning. Such vocal smatterings were then used to determine how the other tonal elements should be arranged, dictating where each musical passage would ultimately lead. “The idea was for everyone to just do what came naturally” he recalls, “the element of unpredictability was important to me.” 

Indicative of this approach “III” (the tracks are simply titled with Roman numerals) slowly winds like ivy through staccato phrases spoken by Zuydervelt’s peer Peter Broderick, whose micro-incantations skip along mechanically only to telescope into monastic grandeur at the track’s midpoint; the vibrations of vocal cords are often stretched to a seismic hum to form the heavy implements in Zuydervelt’s toolkit. On “V”, tape recordings of Berlin electronic artist Zero Years Kid (aka Joachim Badenhorst) sputter with their own apparent intelligence like a faulty AI attempting to interpret reels of human speech in some ruinous library of the distant future. Finally, a siren-like Marissa Nadler leads the suite to its lullabic endpoint with overlapping wisps of harmony devoid of accompaniment ending the album on an angelic note.  

In these moments, like much of With Voices, warm-blooded arteries seem to have grown around bits of well-designed artifice to form something warmly alien, soberly futuristic, and inherently satisfying. More than simply an album of collaborative features, With Voices is a mutating collage of modern minimalism that challenges as often as it comforts. There is an alchemical, metallurgical quality that arises from Zuydervelt’s unique way of merging humanness with abstraction, harshness with beauty, and unintelligibility with familiarity on what may be the most affecting Machinefabriek release to date.

With Voices

Machinefabriek - "III (with Peter Broderick)"

Time is Local

We like We & Jacob Kirkegaard - Clotho

Robby's Theme

Rebecca Foon • "Dreams To Be Born"

from 'Doomjazz Future Corpses!' [CD|2LP|DIGITAL]
Denovali Records · den081
available on all formats at http://denovali.com/mountfuji

Reissue of the first The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation record from 2007. The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation is the much-noticed free-form, drone metal / jazz alter-ego of The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, the band formed by Jason Kohnen and Giedon Kiers.

Starting with free-form soundtracks to silent films such as Murnau's “Nosferatu” and Lang's “Metropolis”, The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble gave birth in 2006 to its first eponymous album. The downbeat ambient jazz of this first release was however only one avatar of this coterie, as demonstrated by the birth of The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation. The semi-improvised, dark, heavy, “sludgy” counterpart to the Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, the Corporation leaves all borders behind, focusing this time on mesmerizing, doom-ridden drones and melodies, combined with the jazzy grooves and melodies of the cello and saxophones. Recording live in Amsterdam in February 2007, “Doomjazz Future Corpses!” is a self-described “soundscape of barren wastelands, droning into memories of future's past”. If the The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble debut was paying homage to The Quay Brothers, this album awakens the third, twisted, twin. A snapshot of the band's free-form sessions, in which there is no solid structure or time frame but a focus on cataclysmic improvisation and feeling, this album stands as a captivating dirge of raw guitar drones, saxophone and trombones emancipated from their classic jazz boundaries and abysmal bass throbs. An highly disorientating yet convincing journey through the deep realms of murky drone jazz / metal, heavy, suffocating and unfettered.

Doomjazz Future Corpses!

The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation - Untitled 5

tracklist:
1. John Cage - Radio Music (00:00:08)
2. Nico - Frozen Warnings (00:00:50)
3. Ellen Fullman - Over and Under (00:05:05)
4. Dean Blunt - Need 2 Let U Go (00:06:24)
5. The Invisible String Band - A Very Cellular Song (00:08:51)
6. White Noise - Love Without Sound (00:21:47)
7. B. Rupp - Drifting Between Sleep (00:24:52)
8. Tod Dockstader - Water Music, Part 6 (00:32:18)
9. Avey Tare - Abyss Song (Abby's Song) (00:35:33)
10. Marja Ahti - Coastal Inversion (00:47:30)
11. Alastair Galbraith - Trees (00:59:50)
12. Nuno Canavarro  - Crimine (01:01:49)
13. Jack Briece - Seventh Heaven (01:04:23)
14. Laraaji - Unicorns In Paradise (01:11:07)
15. Autechre - Hub (01:20:43)
16. Max De Wardener - Foxtrot (01:27:37)
17. Swans  - In My Garden (01:29:54)
18. William S. Burroughs - Curse Go Back (01:35:20)
19. Ruth Anderson - Sum (01:36:24)
20. Ensemble Skalectrik - Outer Phase (01:43:56)
21. Fennesz - Paint It Black (01:47:57)
22. Kink Gong - Aono (01:51:50)
23. Dorine_Muraille - Dopees (01:53:26)
24. Kate NV - If Anyone's Sleepy (01:56:57)

The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation - Untitled 5

Denovali

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