[Moshe]

http://www.saucerlike.com/index.php

Blood Shadow Rampage
August 23, 2006

At last! The first Dream Aktion unit CD will be released by Volcanic Tongue on September 4th.

 

Here is the press release by David Keenan:

"Volcanic Tongue is proud to present the first ever release by the Dream/Aktion Unit, a free-thinking avant garage Ur-kestra based around the central kernel of guitarist Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), saxophonist Paul Flaherty and drummer Chris Corsano (Six Organs Of Admittance, Sunburned Hand Of The Man et al) and featuring Heather Leigh Murray (Taurpis Tula/Jandek/Charalambides) on pedal steel and vocals and Matt Heyner (No-Neck Blues Band/Test/Angelblood) on upright bass.

The Dream/Aktion Unit were originally birthed as a side-project to allow Thurston Moore and Jim O’Rourke to fully explore the kind of ecstatic power blues that their work in Sonic Youth repeatedly implied. The addition of legendary New England saxophonist Paul Flaherty and powerhouse drummer Chris Corsano provided them with an umbilical connection straight to the source of modern musical freedom, while working to liberate them from previously articulated modes of known rock-speak. As a quartet, the group tore through a bunch of the USA’s most winning festival spaces – their ground-levelling F/X pedal assault at the De Stijl/Freedom From bash in Minneapolis in 2004 being a particular landmark - with both guitarists drawing creative sustenance from the kind of ego-obliterating drums/horn interaction previously articulated by players like The Reverend Frank Wright, Glenn Spearman, Denis Charles and Albert Ayler.

Come 2005 – with sub-underground modes enjoying a particularly unlikely shot in the sun – The Dream/Aktion unit began to take on role of some kind spontaneous think-tank, with a revolving door policy towards membership and a commitment to the demands of the moment resulting in almost orchestral incarnations featuring members of Burning Star Core, Hair Police and Vampire Belt all pushing the hell out of the envelope.

In May 2005 Moore, Flaherty and Corsano brought the Dream/Aktion Unit to Stirling, Scotland, for the final Le Weekend festival to be curated by Volcanic Tongue. With O’Rourke permanently out of the picture due to various film and musical commitments, Matt Heyner aka Count Hejnowski of NNCK and Heather Leigh of Taurpis Tula stepped up. The results were mind-blowing, with the quintet tearing through a non-stop gush of energy/ideas without resorting to base musical concerns like dialogue or listening with your ears. This was pure simultaneity at some kind of peak of flux. Moore’s role was key. He would move from these kind of suggestive, shepherding chords that would work lubes of motion into the back line, where Corsano and Heyner hooked up to such a degree that it was hard to separate their individual tonal and percussive points. They sounded like a friggin combine harvester. Murray and Flaherty were floating on their own particular plane, one that worked to reconcile the insane pulse of blood from the base of their spine with the juice of pure vision. Flaherty’s sound touches on a whole bunch of jazz modes while re-situating the tradition somewhere way upwind of contemporary sound-as-thought while Heather Leigh’s exquisitely violent pedal steel stylings and free vocal improvisations seemed to touch on aspects of both Patty Waters, Lydia Lunch and Keiji Haino’s flesh-extensions while resolutely refusing anything approaching previously-articulated tongue. The whole thing was recorded and mixed straight to 24 track and the results are what you have in your hands. The first ever document of the collective thought of what’s easily the cream of the subterranean cup. Packaged in deluxe hard card gatefold sleeves with specially-commissioned eye-gouging video nasty-style artwork from Miss Karen Constance of Brighton aka Karen Lollypop of Blood Stereo/Smack Music 7/Chocolate Monk this is the first ever ‘real’ CD release from Volcanic Tongue after a run of limited and highly collectable art-edition CD-Rs".
Thanks Heather.

 

Moshe

[sonicl]

Scurries to VolcanicTongue.com...



EDIT: It's not there yet.

[Moshe]

Originally Posted by sonicl

Scurries to VolcanicTongue.com...

EDIT: It's not there yet.

HaHa.. You should have read my post first

[sonicl]

Well, I thought I might be able to pre-order

[greenlight]

thanks for info!

[Moshe]

CD release may be delayed until Sep 17th

[k-krack]

thank-you!!!

[Moshe]

The best album of 2006?
I think so!

http://www.volcanictongue.com/artist...%2FAktion+Unit

[krastian]

Love the album cover....anybody heard it?

[sonicl]

The CD dropped through my letter box yesterday, and I listened to it as I was driving around in the afternoon.

It's getting quite difficult to come up with an opinion on Thurston-related improv stuff recently, because the market's getting flooded a little bit. Hardly a week (okay, month) seems to go by without some new release coming out and they all seem to blur into one. This one is okay, but I can't say it's going to be a regular visitor to my CD player. The interplay between the instruments is good, particularly the way the saxophones mesh with everything else, and in short bursts it is exciting, but my problem is that it just seems to go on for too long and I found myself drifting away from it from time to time. Possibly the point is that improv is something best experienced live and not listened to - a recording is just too sterile. If you want to know, though, it's like Flaherty/Corsano, with Thurston doing his thang too.

I don't want to put anyone off buying this, it is a good recording, but I just find myself doubting whether buying recordings is really a worthwhile way to experience improvised music.

[racehorse]

i'm ordering this with the new blockaders record with thurston and jim o'rourke, some emiele bautlieu, angel corpus christ, and aaron dilloway. because i get money soon. isn't life wonderful.
tom

[whorefrost]

in a way i've already heard it cuz i was there man! sonicl you make some interesting points. i am definitely gonna pick this one up, i am curious to see how the CD holds up against my ecstatic memories of this gig.
On a related note, Text of Light in Dundee was one of my greatest gigs ever. When I got the metal box, I immediately played CD3 of said gig and it sounded kind of different... very good but... kind of more sterile in a way... i think the fact that being at the gigs you are immersed in the films of Stan Brahage and the immense live volume makes a big difference...
also, it was really fun seeing Dream Aktion Unit cuz we were right in front of thurston watching him do his thang, then he came out into the audience and it was crazy fun...

[sonicl]

I wonder whether DVD-R is a better way to document improv gigs?

[Jef Mertens]

Originally Posted by sonicl

I wonder whether DVD-R is a better way to document improv gigs?

Well, I think you might have a point there. When I taped the dramarama festival in January it struck me very immediate that the visual content for the likes of Fat Worm Of Error, Kites and especially Dreamhouse were just as important as the 'musical' content.
Also taping lots of Thurston related improv gigs gives a much better insight into what's happening and who's doing what.
I always wondered what Piece for Jetsun Dolma would LOOK like.

[Jef Mertens]

Originally Posted by Nefeli

dvd-rs would be lovely, and yes especially wherever thurston is involved, but on the other hand plain recordings, allows you to focus more on music and travel with it in your thoughts.

True that True that! That's why it's nice to sometime have a dvd-r to give you an idea of how a performance looks like and give perhaps new insight when traveling inside the mind listening to a record.

Speaking for myself: when I listen to those records of improv the visualisations in my mind are never really that abstract but more the idea of people-musicians moving and being in a zone themselves.
This I think for me is the reason I don't have the ability to perform music outside that of soundtrack sounds for my films.

[Moshe]

http://www.sundayherald.com/58223

How to launch a record label with a Sonic boom



David Keenan recently realised his dream of putting out a free jazz record … with a little help from Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth




AMERICAN underground music legends Sonic Youth were the first group to fully bring together everything I loved about rock music. Combining exhilarating blasts of de-tuned atonal guitar noise, primitive punk rhythms, extended passages of free improvisation and a passion for the more hamburger-and-horror aspects of popular culture, they simultaneously extended rock’s language while bolstering its most basic traditions.
I first saw them play live at Rooftops in 1987, a top floor venue somewhere in the lofts of Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street. They were so gloriously noisy they virtually tore my head off. The late rock critic Lester Bangs once confessed that he used Lou Reed’s notorious Metal Machine Music LP the way certain heads used LSD, taking it once a month in order to blow all of the crap out of his system. For me, it was always Sonic Youth.
A few years later , I began writing about experimental music for a living and while working as a journalist for The Wire I eventually got to know Sonic Youth guitarist and vocalist Thurston Moore. My partner, Heather Leigh Murray, even played with him in a group called Hot Asphalt, one of many Sonic Youth satellites birthed to satisfy Moore’s constant craving for free music jam situations.
Over the years, I began to order records from the Ecstatic Yod store, an incredible record shop and performance space run by Moore and underground music journalist Byron Coley, and later my partner and I played live in the store as part of our own group, Taurpis Tula. It was while hanging out after one of the shows, drinking beer and flipping through the most eye-boggling collection of rare psychedelic and free jazz LPs I’d ever seen, that I began to lament the fact that there was no comparable store anywhere in the UK.
Drunk on rock’n’roll – not to mention eight bottles of McNeill’s Big Nose Blond – I decided then and there to open up a record store when we got back. I bought a bunch of records from Yod to start us off, and two weeks later Heather and I were running Volcanic Tongue from our front room in Glasgow, with the kitchen as the dispatching room. Two years on and we now have a thriving mail order business as well as our own shop on Argyle Street, Scotland’s first – and only – record store dedicated to nothing but experimental and underground music.
Of course, it wasn’t enough. As a long term record collector/addict I had long harboured ambitions to run my own label, and soon after we opened the shop we began to release limited art editions of new music on our own Volcanic Tongue imprint. Parallel to all this activity, I had also been co-curating Scotland’s first experimental music festival, Stirling’s Le Weekend. The year 2005 was to be my last on the job so I was determined to finally bring Moore over to headline the festival. I dropped him a quick email. “Thurston, you wanna play Le Weekend?” He mailed back. “Sure.” I suggested putting together a version of the Dream/Aktion Unit, a group he had formed in order to more fully explore the kind of free jazz-inspired improvisations that his playing in Sonic Youth repeatedly implied. “Sure,” he said. This promoting game was easy.
In the event, second guitarist Jim O’Rourke was tied up with film work in Japan so we drafted in No-Neck Blues Band bassist Matt Heyner to replace him. Then on the night – two hours before they were due on stage – Thurston asked Heather Leigh, herself a formidable free improviser, if she wanted to join the group for the show. It was turning into a pretty momentous occasion, both personally and musically.
The gig was incredible, with Thurston invading the crowd and literally flipping an unsuspecting audience member onto his shoulders as he took a gnarly single-note guitar solo while Matt, Heather, saxophonist Paul Flaherty and drummer Chris Corsano huffed and roared in the background. We recorded the whole deal straight to 24-track and made up our mind right then and there that it would be the first “real” CD release for Volcanic Tongue. Over the next 12 months we ran up against the usual brick walls: lack of decent printing and pressing plants in the UK, the whole process of commissioning and designing the artwork, an endless back and forth over titles (Matt Heyner’s idea of naming it Third Reich From The Sun was eventually shot down), getting the disc mastered in the States – and then getting them all back to find the first pressing of the discs had the wrong colour on them and had to be scrapped. But we finally made it; with the end-result all dressed up in gory, video nasty-style artwork and packaged it in a gatefold sleeve with individually silkscreened discs.
It was truly a labour of love, a thanks to Moore and co for all of their liberating music, a committed fanboy’s dream come true and a coming full circle that went some way towards proving to friends and family that 20 years of collecting 10s of thousands of “unlistenable” noise records needn’t necessarily mean an adult life spent entirely in your parents’ basement, struggling with personal hygiene issues and drooling over obscure discographical titbits. Nowadays, I get to do it in my own shop.



Blood Shadow Rampage, the debut CD by Dream/Aktion Unit, is out tomorrow on Volcanic Tongue. www.volcanictongue.com 01 October 2006

[Moshe]

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review...ow-rampage.htm

 

ith the vigorous tag team nature of underground music at the moment, it seems to be only a matter of time before your dream team meets up to jam. Before this set was recorded Jim O’Rourke and Thurston Moore had previously helmed Dream/Aktion Unit as a focused but revolving shared exploration. With O'Rourke now concentrating on film work, the Unit has become a whoever-whenever collective with Moore at its head. At this providential May 2005 gathering at Scotland’s Le Weekend festival he was joined by Chris Corsano, Paul Flaherty, Heather Leigh Murray, and Matt Heyner (No-Neck Blues Band).

More often than not these happenings can end up a badly recorded CD-R mush of ultra-thick noise. This is not the case with Blood Shadow Rampage: luckily the show went straight to twenty-four track. As such, individuals retain their trademark superpowers while still managing to swing like the Plane Crash Big Band.

It’s unlikely any of the players were regarding this show in a competitive sense, but if marks need handing out, Paul Flaherty (picture Robinson Crusoe on Saxophone) would take the top spot. Still at the pinnacle of his game, Flaherty’s ever-searching playing reaches from lone moonlit jazz silhouette to frenetic feverish explosions of higher-end runs. The sheer life force of the man’s playing rivets Teflon into every track, not through force of volume, but raw open-eyed genius. His familiarity with Corsano through their duo work (and with Moore, to a lesser extent) means that none of Blood Shadow Rampage is wasted in the hesitant feeling out of player’s styles.

Blood Shadow Rampage isn’t all extended explorations with Flaherty clearing the way though. The shortest track here, “Your Missing Foot,” barely begins to form before it sinks. The scrambling melodies that cover “Buried Alive and Loving It” seem like red hot bugs, whilst “Never Never Nightcrawler” plays with swooping drooling-for-carrion drones. At times it seems like Murray and Moore have reunited after a raging tête-à-tête, their strings still knotted together, pouring forth combined runny lava lamp sounds. Her pedal steel tones give some songs a sidereal smile, notes scything warmly through the music pushing it a step closer to the cracked looking glass. For those who only want a toe-dipping tip, the whirring “Tales of Entrails” comes like a fifty-foot python of sound, an elongated trunk of sonic muscle.

The album’s zombiefied titles and Karen Constance’s gory Hammer Horror artwork, a gorgeous painted gatefold, deserves mention—but only really sync up with the music once. Towards the end of opener “Birth of a Ghoul” the noise bubbles over like some huge unmanned cauldron, the organic mass heaving and crying like some agonized slop birth. The sickly grisly trail of sound is like stuff that gets stuck in the drain under autopsy tables. With a closing title like “Here Come the Fucking Dead,” it’s a safe bet that the album will end in an explosion. Flaherty and Corsano soon sync in, percussive automatic gunfire raining across the track; only Moore’s choppy treble sticks its head above the bunker.

Blood Shadow Rampage never really seeks the full slasher/gore assault of its title, but bull-headed noise frenzies are becoming overrated anyway. As a live album, this does its job more than admirably. This must’ve been a hell of a gig.

[greenlight]

hmm, really must've been deadly gig, from what i can read.

[whorefrost]

picked it up on saturday... tremendous... took a couple of spins to work its magik but when it did... hell, yes! flaherty fucking kills it on this one... really digging heather leigh murray's stylings as well... the whole unit just gels, a lot nicer than the Corsano/Flaherty/Moore/Shoup CD from a few years back...

[Moshe]

http://www.digitalisindustries.com/f...php?which=1944

Dream/Aktion Unit "Blood Shadow Rampage"

Volcanic Tongue

9/10

Starting out on the right foot, UK distro house Volcanic Tongue has chosen a masterful set of frenetic energy music – courtesy of Thurston Moore and his cohorts in Dream/Aktion Unit – to release as its first professionally pressed CD. This particular disc features a scorching live set from Stirling, Scotland’s Le Weekend festival that took place in May of 2005. Moore formed the Dream/Aktion Unit to explore uncharted sonic territory with a cabal of able-bodied musicians who shared likeminded goals. New England saxophonist Paul Flaherty and drummer Chris Corsano (who I’m convinced was brought into this world drumsticks first), together with Moore on guitar form the nexus of the group. “Blood Shadow Rampage” features the addition of Matt Heyner (No-Neck Blues Band) on upright bass and Heather Leigh Murray (ex-Charalambides) on pedal steel and vocals.

A rollercoaster ride, a vibrator set to ‘stun,’ all synapses firing simultaneously: those familiar with the Moore/Corsano/Flaherty axis of evol probably know what to expect from this 50-minute romp through Satan’s turnip patch. Heyner and Corsano have a never-ending arm-wrestling match on the low-end of the musical scale – a battle of wits has never sounded so juicy. Moore and Flaherty take turns dancing like Cossacks over the airwaves, their instruments barely able to keep up with the extreme hilarity of the situation. The icing on the cake is Heather Leigh Murray, slicing up chunks of sound and flinging them around like a drunken pizza wielder. Her pedal steel work evokes a sense of impending doom, conjuring paranoid visions of smuggled dirty bombs and fatal stab wounds. This is indeed the end of days!

Particular mention must be made of the classic horror artwork, courtesy of Karen Constance (Blood Stereo). An Edgar Allan Poe short story come to life, the images and the gore-filled track titles (my particular favourite being “Here Come the Fucking Dead”) compliment the unearthly sonics contained on disc. “Blood Shadow Rampage” is a prime example of what the commercial music industry is lacking: exquisite packaging, originality, and good fucking music! 9/10 -- Bryon Hayes (11 December, 2006)