Frog Eyes "The Golden River" (Animal World, 2003)

Artist: Frog Eyes
Album: "The Golden River"
Release Date: 1 July 2003
Label: Animal World
Genre: Indie-Rock, Experimental-Rock, New-Wave, Post-Punk
Mood: Nihilistic, Manic, Angst-Ridden, Theatrical
Reminds Of: Destroyer, Captain Beefheart, 16 Horsepower
What People Think: AllMusicGuide, DustedMagazine
Definitely Worth Buying: InSound, Amazon

Tracklist
1. One In Six Children Will Flee In Boats
2. Time Reveals Its Plan At Poisoned Falls
3. Masticated Outboard Motors
4. Miasma Gardens
5. A Latex Ice Age
6. Orbis Magnes
7. Time Destroys Its Plan At The Reactionary Table
8. Soldiers Crash Gathering In Sparrow Hills
9. World's Greatest Concertos
10. Picture Framing The Gigantic Men Who Fought On Steam Boats
11. The Secret Map Flees From Plurality

It's unfortunate that imagination is so frequently seen as antithetical to sincerity. We expect personal truths and broad revelations from musicians, but we often expect these insights should be delivered through a mundane, relatable form of honesty. Sure, singers often borrow words, ideas and emotions from the experiences of others, ranging from friends and family to long-dead or non-existent cultural and historical figures. But these identities are almost always kept somehow separate from that of the singer, who in turn manipulates these secondary personas into acceptable personal statements and observations. Though Carey Mercer's voice is heard throughout The Golden River, the identity of the album's narrator always seems to be shifting and slipping. The album is less a work of cognizant storytelling than a fever dream. Personal and cultural memory bleed together, as Mercer spins fractured images lifted straight from the pages of Grimm Brothers fairy tales and Homeric Epics. And yet, nothing about The Golden River seems contrived or gratuitously literary: its otherworldly sonic and lyric richness is matched at every turn by the striking immediacy of Mercer's wide-eyed delivery. The result is a record every bit as stunning and imaginative as it is memorable and affecting, and one of the most unique and interesting I've heard in ages. "One in Six Children Will Flee in Boats" opens the album with a flimsy, strummed guitar figure that's immediately, strikingly overshadowed by Mercer's breathy gasp. Suddenly, a rich swell of guitar, drums, and keyboards evokes a grandiosity bringing to mind glam-era Bowie; Mercer captures the Thin White Duke's anthemic and melodic delivery, but couples it with a frenzied, grizzled intensity and the gruff, world-weary sensibility of Tom Waits. Mercer matches this intensity lyrically, singing "Over that ridge, a hunter lives/ Stake him out with broken gifts/ By the light, by the merry men/ Who gave his lives when he gave knives to children/ Raise him up, stake him up/ Grab the sun and drink his blood in cups!" Out of context, it may seem nonsensical, but the conviction with which Mercer sings renders it an unnervingly powerful image. After an ethereal instrumental break, "Time Reveals Its Plan at Poisoned Falls" plays up the operatic nature of Mercer's voice, as he rattles off funhouse mirror images of a royal court and hissed accusations of jealousy. Rather than simply sounding crazy, he conveys the doomed frenzy of a prophet. About halfway through the song, he sings as if possessed by the spirit of the monarch whose death he has forseen: "I'm the head of the queen/ I float around the night unseen/ And I know when to scream 'oh baby wake up!'" At a mere 1:29, "Time Reveals Its Plan at Poisoned Falls" is both a vivid fantasy and a desperate plea to return to consciousness and reality, a potent juxtaposition that Mercer hints at throughout the record. A procession of similarly strong songs follows, each one sonically rich and brimming with melody and imagination. Only "Orbis Magnus" temporarily shifts the tone of the record to one of unadulterated, introspective sadness. In a subdued mumble, Mercer intones: "You can have boyfriends, but not men/ You want your words to be penned/ There's women on the barge, on the waters that bend." Here, Mercer seems to embody the timeless trope of the lonely monster, his previous outbursts reduced to a barely-contained air of self-loathing. The Golden River closes with two of its strongest tracks. "World's Greatest Concertos" is a fit of gleeful self-destruction, as if Mercer has finally been driven mad by the images he has seen, shouting "Encapsulate the body and emasculate the body/ And hold the burning waters, the tubs of burning waters/ Holiday!/ The trees are bones and dipped in wazing burning cones and call a celebration/ The master's burnt in his burning station." Mercer's shrieking falsetto it segues into the sublime "Picture Framing the Gigantic Men Who Fought on Steam Boats", the most beautiful song on The Golden River and also quite possibly the most unsettling. The vocals are slightly more subdued here, cushioned by breathy backup singing provided by Carolyn Mark. Right before it ends, "Picture Framing" takes on a somber and ominous tone, as Mercer repeats, "I'll keep on sailing on/ Until the rosy-pink dawn," cleverly citing a Homeric epithet to suggest that his voyage will, in fact, never really end. It's a stunning moment of resignation, as the narrator accepts his place in this terrifyingly vivid fantasy world. This album seems to exist in a world apart from our own. From Melanie Campbell's insistent, simple, and often strangely cartoonish drumming to Carey Mercer's fantastical lyrics and overwrought delivery, The Golden River taps directly into your imagination, short-circuiting any traditional notions of what should constitute "sincere" and "emotional" music. These songs are the lost soundtracks to those frantic, epic dreams that you can never remember in their entirety, but stay with you for the rest of your life.

(source: PitchforkMedia)

“It is all about a world that is both idiosyncratically imagined and unsettlingly relevant...”

Manitoba "Up In Flames" (Domino, 2003)

Artist: Manitoba
Album: "Up In Flames"
Release Date: 3 April, 2003
Label: Domino
Genre: Indie-Electronic, Noise-Pop, Dream-Pop, Folktronica, Shoegaze
Mood: Detached, Hypnotic, Trippy, Ethereal
Reminds Of: Four Tet, Mercury Rev, Stereolab, My Bloody Valentine
What People Think: PitchforkMedia, AllMusicMedia, ShakingThrough
Definitely Worth Buying: Amazon, BoomKat

Tracklist
1. I've Lived On A Dirt Road All My Life
2. Skunks
3. Hendrix With KO
4. Jacknuggeted
5. Why The Long Face
6. Bijoux
7. Twins
8. Kid You'll Move Mountains
9. Crayon
10. Everytime She Turns Round It's Her Birthday

Canadian laptop whiz Dan Snaith is tired of "all this lazy, complacent, shitty electronic music" that has surfaced in recent years. This, coming from a guy who specializes in the cut-and-paste musical form otherwise known as IDM, or laptop, usually one of the coldest, soulless musical genres out there. Laptop artists like The Notwist and Four Tet's Kieran Hebden, though, excel at creating off-kilter, oddly beautiful sonic collages, but the genre really hasn't had the big breakthrough it needs, an album that would explode out of the artificial confines if its narrow pigeonhole and transcend all labels entirely. Well, that masterpiece is here, and it took a 24-year-old, London-based, Canadian math student from Dundas, Ontario to do it. Electronic music has had its share of great moments recently, but very few artists have managed to combine the precision and energy of the music with pure pop songwriting skill. Snaith, operating under the moniker Manitoba, abandons the conventions of laptop music on his new album Up in Flames, and plunges blindly with wide-eyed abandon in territory heretofore unexplored by his peers. He beats his buddy Hebden at his own game; with this stunning CD, he makes Radiohead look like a bunch of tuneless novices, he shows The Flaming Lips just how to combine electronic music with blissed-out pop in a way that would make Wayne Coyne envious, and above all else, he creates some of the most euphoric, mind-blowingly beautiful music we have heard in years. Remarkably, this album, which is so rich in texture and depth, was created on the same minimal computer set-up as his debut album, 2001's Start Breaking My Heart, with only the slightest additions of guitar, saxophone, glockenspiel, and keyboards. Despite being a largely electronic album, Up in Flames bears a remarkable similarity to My Bloody Valentine's 1991 classic Loveless; Snaith, along with his collaborator Koushik Ghosh (another budding producer from Dundas . . . what are they feeding their kids over there?), provide vocals on several tracks, but like Loveless, what exactly they're singing isn't nearly as important as the extra layer of melody the vocals provide. And like that record, Up in Flames offers up a revelatory experience every time you put it on; you always wind up hearing something new. "I've Lived on a Dirt Road All My Life" starts off furtively, with effects-laden, Stone Roses-style vocals by Snaith (any hint of this being an obsessively-crafted opus is shattered a minute in, when you hear Snaith cough in your right speaker), as the song explodes with layers of breakbeats as the vocal harmonies swirl around your head. There's a naïve, childlike innocence that runs through songs like "Skunks", whose happy, Byrds-style guitar melody is offset by a free jazz sax solo, and "Bijoux", a song that sounds like a joyous combination of The Beach Boys' Smiley Smile and The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin. The single "Jacknuggeted" sounds like a mystical collaboration between Nick Drake and Syd Barrett, a blend of gentle folk music and acid-laced psychedelia. "Twins" comes off as a mix of The Byrds' "Eight Miles High" and Fatboy Slim, with its simple Rickenbacker guitar riff and thunderous beats. The last 15 minutes of the album serves up a spectacular climax. "Kid You'll Move Mountains" is as uplifting as the title indicates, another trippy Stone Roses homage a la "Don't Stop", while "Crayon" has Snaith playing the happiest glockenspiel melody you can imagine as Koushik sings a dead-perfect Yo La Tengo impersonation. It's "Every Time She Turns Round It's Her Birthday", though, that steals the show. A nearly eight minute minute electronic epic that the Chemical Brothers could never match with all their gadgets, it combines every one of the album's myriad influences in one song, with a few more Beatles and Mercury Rev sounds thrown in as well, adding up to one mesmerizing piece of work. The song is an unabashed explosion of joy, the most uplifting music we've been privy to since Moby's Everything Is Wrong album in 1995. Allen Ginsberg once wrote a line in a poem that plainly said, haiku-like, "Heaven balanced on a grassblade." I can find no more perfect way to describe this music. It's so sublime, so organic, so achingly beautiful. For such a lush album, it's surprisingly economical, with a running time of only 39 minutes, but since the album is so intoxicating, you wind up hitting the repeat button and listening to it a few more times, and before you know it, two hours have passed. Never has a laptop album sounded so gloriously human; Snaith fumbles along at times, trying any new thing that comes to mind, having fun with his music, but it's that positive energy that greatly supersedes any technical flaws there might be. Up in Flames is easily one of the best albums of 2003 so far, an unequivocal treasure.

(source: PopMatters.com)

“Up In Flames is a record in love with music made by a music lover, futurepsychenoisebeatpop that reaffirms how much fun music can and ought to be.” [STYLUS MAGAZINE]

“There hasn't been a song-oriented psychedelic album that's had this sort of life-affirming, full-bodied roar since Mercury Rev's 1993 classic, Boces.” [ALTERNATIVE PRESS, June 2003, p.110]

“Approaches the psychedelic grandeur of Spiritualized or Mercury Rev at their finest while still offering a wealth of carefully placed sonic detail.” [THE WIRE, #229, p.71]

“Both adventurous and accessible, a record in love with the obliterating power of sound.” [UNCUT, Apr 2003, p.120]

“All of a sudden a cloud personified as a person personified as God personified as a giant pink bunny throws Easter eggs at our balloons and pops them one by one…”

Bell Orchestre "Recording A Tape The Colour Of The Light" (Rough Trade, 2005)

Artist: Bell Orchestre
Album: "Recording A Tape The Colour Of The Light"
Release Date: November 8, 2005
Label: Rough Trade
Genre: Post-Rock, Indie-Rock, Instrumental, Experimental-Rock
Mood: Ethereal, Suffocating, Brooding, Autumnal
Reminds Of: Arcade Fire, Godspeed You!Black Emperor, Rachel's, The Books
What People Think: SplendidMagazine, DelusionsOfAdequacy, AllMusicGuide
Definitely Worth Buying: Amazon, BoomKat

Tracklist
1. Recording A Tunnel (The Horn Plays Underneath The Canal)
2. Les Lumieres, pt. 1
3. Les Lumieres, pt. 2
4. Throw It On A Fire
5. Recording A Tunnel (The Horn Plays Underneath The Canal) (Continued)
6. The Upwards March
7. The Bells Play The Band
8. Recording A Tape...(Typewriter Duet)
9. Nuove
10. Salvatore Amato
11. Recording A Tunnel (The Invisible Bells) (Frost)

Recording a Tape the Colour of the Light is everything instrumental post-rock should be and nothing it shouldn't: it sounds live but hardly loud and is brimming with sound but uncrowded. Renouncing formulaic bombast, Bell Orchestre dazzles by finesse, not force. Call it blank slate music-- oceans of negative space awaiting colonization-by-imagination. Bell Orchestre, led by the Arcade Fire's Richard Reed Parry, sparks memories of critically maligned early-decade instrumentalists Ghosts & Vodka and Telegraph Melts-- bands derided, in part, for their lack of distortion. Bell Orchestre is more frictional than the former, less NPR-arty than the latter, but its general drift is similar. From the stertorous, semi-electronic horn swells of prelude "Recording a Tunnel (the Horns Play Underneath the Canal)", the album worms into focus. Less like rain than a slowly gathering fog, "Les Lumieres Pt. 1" builds from a murmur to a klaxon. To follow its development is to watch bacteria conquer a petri dish: New threads twist off somewhat chaotically from the brass nucleus-- an awakening string trill here, a gingerly bell flourish there. On "Les Lumieres Pt. 2" the ecosystem hits full flower. Sultry, echoing horns chafe against skittish strings and fast, charging beats, a textural contrast reminiscent of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. (The bands, as Recording demonstrates, also share a penchant for ungainly titling.) But Bell Orchestre are on a much happier tip. Where Godspeed ride an abandoned train through a miserable wasteland, Bell Orchestre gallops across rich, rustic landscapes. Like Lumen or Explosions in the Sky, it's all a bit fantastical, but the band goes easy on the symbolistic dalliances. Bell Orchestre is all about freeing our neural pathways, not directing them. And hey, here's an idea: concision. Five of Recording's 11 tracks undershoot four minutes. Despite a couple of longer, jammier pieces the album is a still a breezy listen. That's because, unlike lost siblings Do Make Say Think, Bell Orchestre largely avoids ambient pussyfooting. Voluminosity and slenderness rarely cohabitate in instrumental post-rock, but here both are integral. Nuggets "Recording a Tunnel" and the chilly "The Bells Play the Band", which imagines Boards of Canada piped through ham radio, would become boundless gorges of nothingness in the hands of many similar bands; Bell Orchestre wisely consigns its most shapeless passages to short stopgaps and segues. Meanwhile, instrumentally verbose songs like "Throw It on a Fire" are kept asteer by bedrock percussion. Recording is designed to underwhelm. It rewards repeat listens and nurtures those lulled by its intoxicating spumes. Whether the album achieves its titular synesthesia is debatable, but Bell Orchestre tap into a wide, mesmerizing range of the spectrum.

(source: PitchforkMedia)

“[Bell Orchestre] varies its cunningly sequenced, gratifyingly brief instrumental tracks with such old-fashioned amenities as textured melodies, pleasing dynamic shifts, and passages that, if they don't actually r-o-c-k, at least bound down the road in an excited manner.” [VILLAGE VOICE]

“Capacious, intimate and brimming with both whimsy and tension, Recording A Tape is what classical music might sound like from some advanced alien civilization.” [MAGNET, #70, p.86]

“A timely twinkle of apple crisp bells, hearth-warming handclaps and belly-rubbing brass.” [JUNKMEDIA]

“A simply devine collection of free-flowing pieces that range from voluptuous widescreen imaginary soundtracking to a cacophonous blend of instruments jammed in an arthouse basement…”

Lesbians On Ecstasy "Lesbians On Ecstasy" (Alien8 Recordings, 2004)

Artist: Lesbians On Ecstasy
Album: "Lesbians On Ecstasy"
Release Date: October 24, 2004
Label: Alien8 Recordings
Genre: Queercore, Electroclash, Punk-Revival, Indie-Electronic, Riot-Grrrl
Mood: Irreverent, Fiery, Playful, Rousing
Reminds Of: Le Tigre, Kids On TV, Peaches, Chicks On Speed
What People Think: PopMatters
Definitely Worth Buying: CdUniverse, Amazon

Tracklist
1. Intro
2. Parachute Clubbing
3. Tell Me Does She Love The Bass
4. Pleasure Principal
5. Kunstant Kroving
6. Bitchsy
7. Closer To The Dark
8. Queens On Noise (Bring Da Bunny)
9. Revolt
10. Summer Love
11. Manipulation
12. Superdyke! (Live)

The Lezzies On X are a plunder music project, taking inspiration from the lesbian back catalogue by referencing folk artists and punk bands alike, re-writing lesbian history for the dance floor. They use the source material in a musical collage that crosses a wide spectrum of musical styles, all within the dance genre. One of their obsessions has been to develop their own way of playing dance music live, using an electronic drum kit, bass guitar and an array of synths. The insistence on such a strong technological presence in their music serves to highlight the absence of technology in the majority of lesbian music, which privileges acoustic sound as authentic lesbian expression. Lately, L.O.E. are keeping the same concept, but diving deeper into the lesbian vaults. The new recordings are focused on womyn's music from the 70s, in both content and style. They are using this as an opportunity to explore the idealism and optimism present in early feminist theory and music and examine the ways in which these themes have disintegrated today. The Lesbians on Ecstasy are making electronic music of the lesbian variety. It's K.d. Lang, but it's different somehow... Lesbo folk songs, rebel songs and beats for the modern lesbian. Straights and dudes love it too.

It sounds like the sort of high concept joke that's funny once -- maybe. Lesbians on Ecstasy, as their name suggests, take feminist rock classics from the past and retool them for the modern-day dance floor. But their album doesn't just take the Olivia Records catalog in toto and put a house beat behind it; Lesbians on Ecstasy is more clever and subversive than that. Rather than actually covering these songs, the quartet takes elements from them and twists them in sly, suggestive new directions: K.d. Lang's torchy classic "Constant Craving" turns into the ironic Laibach-style industrial stomp of "Kundstant Kroving," for example, and the Parachute Club's cheerleading "Rise Up" becomes the suggestively throbbing "Parachute Clubbing." The best of the lot is the creepy-sexy S/M take on Rough Trade's sexual politics primer "High School Confidential." Provocative on a level somewhere between, say, Le Tigre and Peaches, Lesbians on Ecstasy have created a noisy, gleefully sloppy brand of dance-punk with brains and humour.

(Source: AllMusicGuide)

In 2005, The Advocate magazine chose Lesbians On Ecstasy as their 'Number One Album Of The Year'.

Booty shaking dance hits that maintain a politically infused edge...

Nymphomatriarch "Nymphomatriarch" (Hymen Records, 2003)

Artist: Nymphomatriarch
Album: "Nymphomatriarch"
Release Date: May 2003
Label: Hymen Records
Genre: IDM, Breakcore, Glitch
Mood: Energetic, Trippy, Complex, Volatile
Reminds Of: Venetian Snares, Hecate, Kid606, Doormouse
What People Think: Cokemachineglow, PitchforkMedia
Definitely Worth Buying: InSound, Indietective

Tracklist
1. Input
2. Blood On The Rope
3. Amaurophilia
4. Hymen Tramp Choir
5. Pervs
6. Outlet

The creative process that resulted in Nymphomatriarch is unavoidably eye-catching – Venetian Snares and Hecate had sex, recorded it, and made an album. It’s easy to be skeptical about the artistic necessity of projects like this, at least in terms of their presentation on a public scale. However, the premise in this case is far too juicy to be written off without being given a chance. As jaded as our popular culture has made us, Nymphomatriarch leaves Reign In Blood-era Slayer sounding tame and innocent, and that alone merits at least one listen. Hecate is Rachael Kozak, who first began composing dark electronic music in the mid-’90s and has adhered to a die-hard DIY attitude ever since. She has released music on Zod, Praxis, and primarily her own Zhark Records, which she founded in 1996. Last year saw the release of Hecate’s first full-length, The Magick of Female Ejaculation which displayed her penchant for creepy atmospherics and pounding, heavily distorted breaks. The obscenely prolific Venetian Snares, a.k.a. Aaron Funk, has put forth far too many releases at far too alarming a rate for any but the truly obsessed to keep track of, on labels such as Planet-Mu, Hymen and Isolate. In the last year or two he has grown into an international superstar on the post-jungle/breakcore scene (not exactly selling out arenas yet, but give him time). His superhuman release schedule has drawn him a good deal of attention, but his reputation owes most of its weight to his creative touch with faster-than-jungle jungle breaks, as well as his obsessively detailed and exceptionally dynamic compositional style. The premise of Nymphomatriarch is hard to ignore. The question is whether or not it can hold up beyond mere voyeuristic novelty, and intellectually speaking there is definitely some interesting material lurking beneath the Triple-X camp exterior. Unlike pornography, which objectifies people (read: women) and dulls the sexual imagination, the music on Nymphomatriarch does just the opposite. Sex is transformed and glorified through the imagination (that this is a collaborative effort is especially important to this point), and the end result is a sound world that stands on its own and yet is not alienated from its source. There are no images, thus no bodies to objectify. The track title “Amaurophelia” seems to play on this – the word can’t be found in Webster’s, but it probably refers to blindness as a mode of erotic fantasy. Perhaps it is a bit of inside information regarding one of the music’s creators, but the word applies at least as much to the listener. Musically, Nymphomatriarch is six tracks and a delightful 35 minutes. Though not much attention seems to have been paid to song structure, most of the music on Nymphomatriarch points towards a very clear sense of purpose. All the sounds are crafted to fall within a well-articulated and coherent sonic vision, and the sheer number of different sounds used is impressive to say the least. The album opens with the short, ambient “Input”, wittily associating hardware cable connections and sexual penetration: it is a new-age synth tone with a slimy underbelly, chasing its tail around delay effects through empty space. The sense of unnerving isolation on “Input” establishes a relentless eeriness that underpins the entire album. The percussive possibilities of sex are surprisingly vast. “Blood on the Rope” bristles with trademark Venetian Snares beats – awesomely fast, delightfully syncopated, hard, crisp, and programmed in 10/8 time. Only in this case the hits sound less like Amen snares than bare skin smacking against skin. Providing sonic (and erotic) juxtaposition to the staccato percussion assault, breathy vocalizations dart out of the empty spaces, their tonal characteristics heavily emphasized, while a dirty bass tone oozes slowly along the bottom following no fixed pattern. The production is quite subtle in many cases, creating a surrealist dream world that is drastically alien, yet never totally unrecognizable. Like “Blood on the Rope”, “Amaurophilia” and “Pervs” reflect Venetian Snares’ compulsive efforts to work outside of 4/4 time. “Amaurophilia” resonates with the sound of bodily fluids, sticky flesh and natural lubrication, a dubby bassline and a beat that sounds like Top 40 R&B in 14/8. All the beats ring of violence, but “Pervs” is especially sadistic. A brief early pause in the rhythmic onslaught is punctuated by a mumbling male voice asking, “Am I torturing you?” The question gets no answer before the pummeling beat breaks loose again, interspersed this time not with breathy ‘Oh’s’ but startled grunts and groans that walk a line between pleasure and pain. The beat drops out for some time and the album’s only real dialogue appears in the mix. The male voice returns, asking, “Does that hurt?” This time a female voice replies, “Yes.” The fine line is very apparent, taboo is ruthlessly taunted – the male voice asks, “Are you having a hard time with that?” to which the female voice answers with a “No” that devolves into thick laughter before the final, most hair-raisingly brutal percussion assault elicits cries of truly alarming pain. A sense of retaliatory cultural violence is essential to the breakcore scene, but the violence present on Nymphomatriarch is of a far more personal sort, the vulnerable humanity of its object amplified by the unshakable control and mechanical precision of the syncopated beats and sub-bass resonances. This is no conceptual violence – whereas much breakcore applies distortion to the drums (and everything else for that matter) to convey its sense of hostile abandon, it is vastly more unnerving to know that the beats rattling your speakers this time around are made from actual recorded collisions of flesh. “Hymen Tramp Choir,” stretching out at the heart of the album, is 14 minutes of haunting beatless ambience. It is certainly a surprising inclusion, in that it comprises nearly half the music on Nymphomatriarch, and if you are the sort of listener who wants the product to be focused, honed, and refined, with all unnecessary baggage left on the hard drive, you’ll probably find this particular selection a little off-putting. However, it would be my guess that no one who knowingly purchases this album is easily put off by anything. In exchange for a bit of patience, “Hymen Tramp Choir” vividly conjures a shadowy demon’s lair filled with unearthly gurgles and a mournful distant cry that may be a victim or may be the beast itself. Unfortunately, patience wears thin on repeated listening – my strongest criticism is that the album would feel less like a document, albeit a highly involved one, and more like a fully realized work of art if this sort of extended, absorbing ambience had been woven into the beat-driven tracks rather than left as one huge slab lying in their midst. For fans of Hecate or Venetian Snares, Nymphomatriarch is not to be missed. The first few listens are guaranteed to enthrall, especially for those who are beginning to want a change of pace from distortion, distortion, and more distortion. Beyond the shock value of those first few listens, there are indeed more rewards to be had here – though the compositional structures themselves seem to have gotten short shrift, the source material makes for some of the most surreal listening of recent memory on a purely sonic level, and the beats are hot enough to stop you in your tracks the moment they kick in. If, on the other hand, you are entirely new to the world of post-jungle speed breaks and are unfamiliar with both Hecate and Venetian Snares, Nymphomatriarch would make for the most bizarre introduction imaginable to the world of two already bizarre musicians. But who knows, that might be fun too.

(source: DustedMagazine.com)

"…anal and oral sex, straightforward copulation, and 'microphone insertion.'"