reviews of mandolin records releases.here you can read a selection of reviews of mandolin records releases from
magazines and from the internet.
mando 0012 powder cagers - the slate
pipe banjo draggers
foxy digitalis online music magazine.
The Draggers are a London
based project of Andrew Rowe with a cast of revolving musicians,
instrument makers, and beer drinkers. This mix of field recordings,
homemade instruments, toys, all recorded on 4 track, have a lo-fi
ragged grace, combined with a subtle, ambient high art aim of
a Nurse with Wound. There is a sense of fun and wonder present
that is lacking in NWW, however, which makes the experiments
all the more satisfying. This sounds like a record made by a
group of drinking buddies with a great understanding of improv.
While the titles seem deliberately ill-mannered (“Food Me
and Meat To Find,” “Shenotmywoman,” “Bird
Head It Fall From Horse”) there are no Outsider or Freak
Folk conceits here. Each found sound, every scrap of metal or
wood that makes a cool noise makes sense and is used to create
a palette that the band likes hearing and wants to explore. Rowe
and friends seem to have an endless supply of sounds in their
head, and plenty of ingenious ways to figure out how to get them
to us. 8/10
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mando 0011 the inhibitionists things with wings
drowned in sound online music magazine.
Apparently, this album is meant to be representative of bird song.
I don’t know what kind of crazy fucking birds Christian
Kann (the member of long-distance-collaboration-based musical
project The Inhibitionists who wrote this album) has been hanging
out with lately, but they certainly don’t sound anything
like the ones in my garden. That said, the birds represented
on here (including the Smew, the Red-Billed Oxpecker and – guffaw,
nudge, wink, etc – the King Shag) aren’t as likely
to be found fluttering round East Anglia as, for example, a sparrow.
Oh, and it would appear from a brief sampling by means of the
Google search that they are, in fact, all real birds.
That’s the ornithology out the way. Now, what of the music?
Well… it’s actually more noise than music – one
of those deals where the musicians interpret the birdsong rather
attempting to imitate it, and thus create a noise that isn’t
particularly songlike. There’s a hell of a lot of static,
of radio interference and tube-train howling. There’s some
snatches of background music, a few violins, some operatic warbling
and a really rather disconcerting section that sounds like gremlins
scuttling about in the walls*. Chuck in some hissing steam, some
bubbling test tubes, the odd car crash and some pan-pipes suffering
from a bad case of wind, and you have…
Well, suffice it to say that if you buy this because you dig the
idea of listening to something that actually sounds like birds,
you’re going to be a tad disappointed: it’s a very,
very liberal interpretation. Attempt to use this recording as a
duck lure, and you’re more likely to end up netting the Creature
from the Black Lagoon. However, if you’ve a taste for surreal,
occasionally tuneful noise of the kind that appears soothing at
first and then suddenly reclaims your attention by dropping in
some really freaky or surprisingly pleasing effects, you might
well enjoy this weird, incoherent, free associative and occasionally
haunting album.
*Not, I hasten to add, that I hear gremlins scuttling about in
walls on a regular basis. But if I did, that’s definitely
what they’d sound like. 7/10
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mando 0010
children running from the village
foxy digitalis online music magazine.
Children Running From the
Village is a quartet featuring two of the Mandolin Records roster’s
signature acts: label head honcho Andrew Rowe (Slate Pipe Banjo
Draggers) and his brother Greg Johnson (Lord Mongo). Rowe is based
out of London, while Johnson and the other two members – Allan
Hutchison (Onechopwabbit) and Tim Jones (Pendro) – reside
in Manchester. Documenting the fruits of an improvised jam session,
this self-titled release is an unsettling collection of low-end
hum, found sounds and tribal percussion. This is music of a sinister
bent, stirring up the feeling that at any moment something dreadful
is bound to happen. The constant throbbing bass and extremely pronounced
echo teeter on the brink of leading us into goth-industrial territory,
but thankfully there’s enough variety in the other sonic
elements to keep the black make-up at bay. Ultimately, this recording
begs the question: just what are the aforementioned children running
from? It could just be a brazen monster from the woods near the
village, stirred up by the music of four Englishmen bent on using
their disconcerting sonic palette for nefarious ends. 8/10
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mando 0008
booze - lord mongo
foxy digitalis online music magazine.
I've always understood the U.K. to not just tolerate but celebrate
and propagate eccentricity in some of its citizens (maybe just
wishful thinking). Where oddity in North America is ridiculed,
medicated, or locked away our cousins seem more celebrating the
odd.
Enter Lord Mongo. While nowhere near to being completely off his
nut a la Ted Nugent, he does come off as a bit of a theatrical
madman on the stages of his hometown of Manchester. Pics I've come
across have him as a frontman gracing the stage with oversized
costumes, large one-dimensional masks, and cardboard & straw
heads. While it would appear the live Lord Mongo experience is
quite a kick, this release seems to be a little more restrained.
I thought I might be in for something that would have resulted
in a lab experiment involving a Spizz and Julian Cope mindmeld.
Nothing doing, I'm afraid. "Booze" is a collection of
solo home recordings over a four-year period (1999-2003) done as
Lord Mongo or Tudor Plasm. The majority of the songs seem like
rough instrumental sketches of late era Chrome & whatever UK
spacerock morphed into in the late 70s and tend to wander into
the darker recesses of current experimental/progressive/indie rock.
As you might expect from home recordings of a very underground & very
theatrical mind, the tracks are rough, jagged, raw, stupid, & proto-evil
blasts of returded urban punk dub decay. Surprisingly there is
little discord from one track to another even though it might be
expected given the tracks span a good deal of time, fidelity, and
even genre. Certainly one of the major strong points of "Booze" is
the consistency of quality from beginning to end. I wasn't too
sure of it at the outset, but I'm down with it now. 7/10
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mando 0003 seafo od recip es - the slate pipe banjo draggers
vanity project fanzine issue 14
Fascinating collection of tunes composed
from found sounds, acoustic/electric instruments, sampling, playing around
with toys and borrowing the talents of friends and relatives before mixing
it all up on the computer. It’s impossible to put a tag on this dark
brooding weird electronica collaged with live sounds, experimental snapshots
of lost moments. An album to listen to repeatedly and still be able to hear
things you didn’t notice before, I recommend a comfy cushion and pitch
black room to enjoy this trip; it may conjure up places in your mind you don’t
want to find but it’s one hell of a journey from the ‘Alpine Sin
Balloon’ via ‘the Ice Cap Cracks Jesus Puzzle’ to ‘The
Morning Chocolate Drowner’. foxy digitalis online music magazine
The Slate Pipe Banjo Draggers actually sound like their name; one gets the
sense that a few home-made noise generators were mishandled and/or abused in
the making of this CD-R. “Seafood Recipes” plays a like a catalog
of modern electro/post rock/noise maneuvers, and I mean that in the best possible
way. This is not some Tortoise-like belly-crawling muzak. A more accurate comparison
would be Third Eye Foundation; opener, “Alpine Sin Balloon,” combines
that sense of foreboding--skeletal rhythms, moody guitars and screaming nightmare
distortion--with big beats and skittering percussion. The spirit of the late
great Muslimgauze is resurrected in the trippy ethno pulse soundtrack of “The
Filth of Britain,” and may as well throw Nurse With Wound into the mix,
too. The Banjo Draggers have a penchant for exposing the beauty in dissonant
washes of distortion, samples, tinkling toy pianos, plaintive guitars, etc,
and to their credit, they do it with invention and style. The results are not
always pleasing, but then this stuff is as informed by industrial horror as
shoegaze bliss. The Slate Pipe Banjo Draggers conjure wailing walls of distortion
that invoke fearful cringes and hypnotic lulls, often at the same time.
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mando 0004 henrietta one and two - lord mongo and the slate pipe banjo draggers
the wire magazine august 2005
lord mongo and the slate pipe banjo draggers is a rather decent name for anything.
so it's useless to try and ignore henrietta one and two (mandolin 7" lathe).
the sonics are very subtle, however, so be sure you turn it up when you play
it. otherwise you might mistake the flowing interplay of hum, thud and boing
for something going on inside your own head. hard to tell exactly what the
instruments are in parts of this (especially the one that sounds like someone
squeezing a monkey), but lets assume they are manifestations of a more or less
standard post rock formulation and applaud this troupe for its ethic as well
as its moniker. smallfish records, london record shop
A very nice clear vinyl 7" here, that was hand delivered to us by the
people who made it. We like this sort of thing, especially when they are limited
editions (in this case only 40 copies), and you can tell the love for detail
that went in making this record. You get nice packaging, two very intricately
sculptured soundscape pieces of the darker variety, and even a little button
with the artists name. Very droney overall feel with dubby elements and certainly
enough deepness. Good if you are looking for something slightly more obscure
than usual.
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mando 0002 mandolin records compilation 2005
foxy digitalis online music magazine
An admirably diverse compilation of sounds – some soothing, many crazed – from
Mandolin Records. There’s not one song on here you could
play around your grammy, as even the ambient ones have something unsettling
going on – the disturbing mutated bleeps of Ouzel Music’s “Machiaishitsu,” for
example, or the nervy background noises in Red THumbs’ “Feed.” It’s
ambient music for a space in which something might jump out at you. Then there
is Lord Mongo’s aptly named “Sea Drone,” less a “song” per
se than a collection of evil-but-distant-sounding synth blasts. Memo to self:
do not fuck with Lord Mongo. Mr. Disconnected follows with the barely-there “Khat
Show Host,” while the Autechre-like “Body Clock,” by Illuminati
(! Of the Illuminati?) brings things back to a recognizable kind of electronic
piece. Xenis Emputae Travelling Band’s “Lichen Virgin” employs
an actual melody, a tremulous, beautiful one reminiscent of Vietnamese folk
music, while Phase IV’s “New Host” summons up Aphex Twin
with a folky guitar figure overlaid on scatter beats. The comp fades into diffuseness
again after that, with more video-game sounds, atmospherics, and groaning skronk.
These are good qualities and Mandolin Records knows how to find the people
and machines who can lay them down.
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mando 0005 woolfe - spoono
foxy digitalis online music magazine
Tolling, ebbing, electric like a pulsing breeze
blowing random natural and manmade objects in some desolate weed punctured
concrete corner. Englishman
Jack Allett pulls pokes and prods his electric guitar with varying degrees
of intensity on this short two part recording. His multi tracked strings
stretch and bend the first track into desolate soundscapes, bone thin improvised
melodies,
and abstract noisedrone. Track two features a heavily processed guitar pulse
around which acoustic picking, vocalized melodies, and anorexic electric
guitar drift and mutate. Spoono follows in the footsteps of a myriad of
solo guitar
experimentalists and steps just enough outside of the lines to establish
his own identity within the field. Hopefully longer recordings are to follow
and
he can fully blaze the trail that his guitar has cut for him. return to top
mando 0007 asilo de heteronimos - criadero en seres
foxy digitalis online music magazine
The machines are coming
for you. They announce their intent on “Los” as
churning, watery noise spirals upward in pitch and intensity until a strange
shouting starts, then crackle and static take over. On “Temas,” a
detuned something tries to drag helpless glitches into the scuzz and succeeds,
like "Confield"-era Autechre being eaten by Khanate, until the middle
of the (long) track, when the bleeps inherit the earth…but the drone
and scrape isn’t far behind and never exits completely. “No” groans
to life like a robot with a busted radio for a mouth having a heated
argument with a wind tunnel while crackhead synths stamp their feet and
wait to take
on the winner. I could go on and on like this but the point is: this
is some serious scrape that is sincere in its desire to crush your soul
or at least
grind your eardrums into a fine powder. Those who are up for it know
who we are.
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mando 0001 one aeroplane ep - the slate pipe banjo draggers
the leeds guide magazine no 97
if you're a fan of plugging your ears with your fingers to save bricking it
in front of horror films, steer clear of the slate pipe banjo draggers, whose
new single 'one aeroplane' (mandolin) will be the scariest thing you've ever
heard. Based in leeds and using 'found sounds, samples, acoustic and electric
instruments, toys, voices and a computer', the slate pipe banjo draggers manage
to produce underworldly noises uncannily like those in that scene in "the
ring" when the dead girl crawls out of the tv set. you'll want to tell
your friends about it... when you find your way out from behind the sofa.
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