Praise for House of Low Culture / Mamiffer‘s Split from San Francisco’s aQuarius Records: Fantastic split release from this husband and wife duo, Aaron Turner, he of Isis, Hydra Head, and of course his solo project House Of Low Culture, and Faith Collocia, and her Mamiffer project (which also occasionally features Turner).
Mamiffer is up first, and their offering is a single 12+ minute track, constructed from piano, synthesizer, organ, tapes, field recordings, percussion, bass and effects, and it’s a beauty. Stately piano drifts atop a bed of smoldering shimmer and minimal low end thrum, haunting and hazy and a little ominous, soundtracky and cinematic. The piano eventually fading out, leaving a gauzy bit of layered drift, laced with muffled explosive booms. The organ gradually swelling up from the murk and mire, building into a squall of soft psychedelic noise, before fading out once again, leaving that strange reverbed boom, to ring out into empty black space.
House Of Low Culture is mostly Turner, but here he’s joined by his wife on guitar, and legendary percussionist Z’EV on, well, percussion. A hushed black ambient creep, drifting beneath dramatic multitracked vocals, everything wreathed in thick undulating black buzz. The sound switching from ambient soft noise to the vocal parts, that sound downright new wave / post punky, but those two elements bleed into each other, creating something more than its constituent parts. The track smoothes out, and becomes more and more ethereal, leaving just piano, to float in a field of hushed near silence, stately and mysterious and quite lovely, it’s not until the last couple minutes that the tranquility fractures, and the fissure unleashes a cloud of noxious, crumbling distortion, and heaving blacknoise, which too fractures and peels back leaving a brief bit of clean guitar riffing and then nothing at all.
At 40 years old, Aquarius is the oldest independent record store in San Francisco. We try to only carry music we love, and we’re always searching for more new, cool, weird and wonderful music. All of which we then share with you, our loyal customers.
Tags: Album of the day, Aquarius Records, House of Low Culture, Mamiffer
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 3rd, 2011 at 5:46 pm and is filed under 2011, 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.
No Responses to “Album of the day: House of Low Culture / Mamiffer – Split”