Album of the day: Burning Star Core – Papercuts Theater

Praise for Burning Star Core’s Papercuts Theater from San Francisco’s Aquarius Records: A new Burning Star Core record, but not exactly a NEW record, more like a NEW record made out of OLD records, as in 4 loooong tracks, assembled and edited from 66 live recordings from the years 1997-2008. A pretty cool idea for sure and it definitely suits BSC, their songs are long anyway, but here they’re transformed into epic space drone collages, a plunderphonic chunk of psychedelia.

The first part is a dense chaotic sprawl of total space rock, the drums wild and blown out and frantic, all of the other instruments in a frenzy of swirling effects and in-the-red freakout, which gives way to some glistening upper register ur-drone, like Sunroof! or Pelt, or heck, even Burning Star Core.

The second half of the first part is yet more abstract drift, dense layered sound, streaked and blurred and smeared into giant swells of fuzzed out rumbles, peppered with bits of percussion and electronic glitch, finally finishing up with some murky industrial thump. Part two explodes with some super distorted psychrone freakout, the drums so in the red they distort and change shape, the violin and / or guitar grind and scrape and squeal and howl and shriek.
The drums a chaotic cacophony, like a dozen free jazz bands battling it out in an empty swimming pool, before things get a bit more mellow, the band slipping into something a little more Dead C, a meandering dirgey noise rock stumble, that works its way through still more space rock, and several clouds of crunch and clatter and creak.

Part three begins with some garbled processed sort of beatbox vocals, which gradually get more and more effected before things get noisy again, bleats and skronks, quickly subsumed by a thick wall of crumbling buzz, a thick skull rattling thrum, that dissolves into still more abstract free noise damage and haunting ambient drift.

The final part opens up with some whirring drones beneath creaks and clatters, deep bass pulses, which slowly build into some sort-of-free-jazz, which in turn transforms into some blown out industrial rumble, only to finally finish up in a blurred buzzy tangle of spidery violins and groaning low end drones. Phew.

Pretty intense stuff, and while you can’t necessarily HEAR the 66 source tapes, these tracks do feel dense, as if you can FEEL the fact that 66 tracks were somehow cut up and crammed and layered into just 4. Heavy, heady, trippy, noisy and psychedelic, a cool way to experience the last 11 years of Burning Star Core in just 66 minutes…

Tags: album of the day, Aquarius Records, Burning Star Core, drone, No Quarter Records, Papercuts Theater

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 20th, 2010 at 5:58 pm and is filed under Album of the Day, Roadburn Recommended . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.