Radere, aka Carl Ritger, is a pretty awesome droner (and active Soundclouder). He’s put only put out a handful of records, 2 of which are on Full Spectrum. His debut, A Process In The Weather Of The Heart released in early 2010, was outstandingly beautiful & minimal. Now, in the same year, he drops another intensely killer record on FS, this time taking things to the more extreme side of drone, getting downright rowdy.

A Season In Decline is a single 40+ minute track that’s unbelievably tender. It starts out with some snow crunching underfoot and lots of hiss, setting the mood for the wintery soundscape. The footsteps fade and are replaced by a subtle resonant guitar, floating around with the remnant flurries. Chilly & delicate, there’s hints of more organic recordings, all over a foundation of the hushed wind of nighttime snowfall.

Not one to blow his load all at once, Radere takes his time getting to the massive static beast on the latter half of the record. He waltzes through some moonlit forests, admiring the naked cheap prices for cialis tree branches weighing down with snow, content in introspective meditation. But FUCK, the chaos that unfolds afterwards, it’s like the whole time he was preparing to battle a demon snow dragon. 20 minutes of unnerving whirlwinds, clanging icicles, psych drenched howls from the underworld, walls of solid shoegazing bliss, heavenly textures glimmering in sheets of ice, the sun breaking through the brutal cold, all wrapped in a blanket of dense static warmth. Clearly, the battle is won. The snow dragon is defeated by the power of pure beauty.

The wonder of this piece is how smoothly it transforms from a sweet & lonely silent night into a wall of euphoric destruction. Of course it’s easy to tell the difference between the first 20 seconds and the last when you listen to them side by side, but over the course of the album, the change is so discrete. Definitely a winter wizard at work here. Radere may be somewhat of a newcomer, but damn if he doesn’t have the chops to take this shit to the next level.

This Once Silver Sky is some glacial ambience, frozen to the core with an acute awareness of all the cracks & whips of creaking ice and slowly swirling water. A deep muffled rumble expands, like a distant submarine motor kicking out sonar that’s long since faded in the abyss. Shifting icebergs roam the empty seas, occasionally bumping into each other resulting in glitching spikes & splashes. The dead wind perks up every now and then, a hidden digital whisper that coats everything with a beautiful texture. Then the sadness washes in, some emotional tones that drip somber, mixed with heavily obscured field recordings and a mini grandeur of subtle electronic static.

It’s a single half hour track where the layers continually build & reshape and the end is an entirely different beast from the beginning, with a dozen steps of doomed ambient drone glitch bliss along the way. It’s a sentimental rollercoaster, using all sorts of processed found sounds, grainy electronics, and smoothed out tones to get the job done. Nils Quak has made a ridiculously beautiful & highly compelling piece of music. Truly awesome stuff.

Trying to talk about the performance as a whole is hard because they jump genres every half second and use anything & everything as source material. So, obviously, this is rad as hell. There’s squawky electronics, bird chatter, synth patterns, squeaky balloons, hidden arias, ancient TV/radio broadcasts, high pressure crackle & hum, typewriter windchimes, indecipherable voicemail recordings, vacuum cleaners, and tape hiss galore. And that’s just a fraction of the sound sources, which get warped, twisted, rewound, slowed, shifted, and glitched in every way possible. They take tape manipulation to places I never thought of, ambient doom, grooved psych, gauzy pink bliss, debased spaced journeys, all with the help of impeccably juxtaposed random shit.

Echolalia is about as crazy & erratic as a record can get while still being fucking fantastic, exceedingly listenable, and coherent. I think part of my enjoyment of this comes from picturing the 11 people hunched over their own collection of tape loops while I listen to this. I love imaginging who’s doing what, trying to figure out how/if a certain sound has been altered or if it’s just been decayed by time.

This hot piece has ben transformed into vinyl by No-Fi, but only 500 copies were pressed. It comes with a digital download of the album (no biggy) but also an exclusive recording of Machinefabriek’s live solo tape set from the same night. FUCK YES. +10 cool points

The opening track is one of the best. Pretty much embodies the whole record. It starts out with a shrill static insect drone, kinda piercing. It goes on for a minute, you think it’s going to last forever and maybe you won’t be able to handle it, but then some youthful xylophone like synths come in and all of a sudden it’s a pop song, like American Analog Set noise for infants. It’s so charming & easy going, but so abrasive & stabbing, the combination of textures & tones is unreal.

And that’s what American Gothic is all about. Smoothing your dreams with the beautiful, subtle, & low-key while scouring your face off with the offensive, brittle, & hardcore. Slow static buzz drifts with digital clouds, mournful organs sound the arrival of new life while a blissful chaos unfolds in the heavens, and an insanely epic album closer where the sun fills you with majestic perfection and the universe crumbles at your feet. So fucking incredible.

Not that I needed it, but this has solidified my faith in Szczepanik as a truly great modern creator, and it has only made me hungry for more from Miller. Collaborations ran amok this year and I feel like they generally tend to get overlooked. Don’t let American Gothic slip by unnoticed because it’s honestly some of the best noise drone. Period.

The opening track is one of the best. Pretty much embodies the whole record. It starts out with a shrill static insect drone, kinda piercing. It goes on for a minute, you think it’s going to last forever and maybe you won’t be able to handle it, but then some youthful xylophone like synths come in and all of a sudden it’s a pop song, like American Analog Set noise for infants. It’s so charming & easy going, but so abrasive & stabbing, the combination of textures & tones is unreal.

And that’s what American Gothic is all about. Smoothing your dreams with the beautiful, subtle, & low-key while scouring your face off with the offensive, brittle, & hardcore. Slow static buzz drifts with digital clouds, mournful organs sound the arrival of new life while a blissful chaos unfolds in the heavens, and an insanely epic album closer where the sun fills you with majestic perfection and the universe crumbles at your feet. So fucking incredible.

Not that I needed it, but this has solidified my faith in Szczepanik as a truly great modern creator, and it has only made me hungry for more from Miller. Collaborations ran amok this year and I feel like they generally tend to get overlooked. Don’t let American Gothic slip by unnoticed because it’s honestly some of the best noise drone. Period.