I'm sorry it took me a while to write this review, but sure in the meanwhile I've had the time to dedicate many listenings to this weird band coming from Poland. Brasil & the Gallowbrothers Band reminded me of some open musicians' collective operating here and there and with their roots stably planted in the seventies. We're not talking about freak-rock or anything close, this music is much closer to ambient/new age music or to movie soundtracks and i dare you to deny it's not easy to imagine a movie during fifty minutes length of this work. This band consists of four multi-instrumentists playing harmonica, flute, voice, guitar, marimba, synth, samples and several other things. The cd is a really freaky experience, the instrumental interventions come in and go out really gently and are well melted with the field recording, despite their psychedelic nature they never become too old-fashioned. After a twenty minutes opening track that grows like an acid trip, the surprise comes from a pop-psychedelic folk tune with vocals and a quite simple melody. The third song brings back to a quasi kraut atmosphere while the fourth episode has a particular song structure and brings the band into a diluted atmosphere. The closing episode reminded me a lot of Faust and by some means I'm tented to say these musicians have a lot in common with them and Can above all for what concern the musical approach to a "whatever feels good" idea. A soft and old-fashioned trip, nice.

One of the first human being speaking about the "black snow" was presumably Anaxagoras: this notorious Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher on the basis of the diaphaneity of the water mantained even snow was black as black colour is tantamount to the absence of all colours. Likewise if the premises originating a concept is wrong and there is nothing mistrusting the opposite premises on the logical path, it's possible to be wrong in obtaining some results. This concept has fascineted a lot of artists and could be the conceptual framework of this Black Snow Epoch, the second sonorous calving coming from the reproductive session (just musical one!) between Henrik "Nordvargr" Bjorkk, a Swedish sound adulterator - maybe some of you have already listened something signed under other pseudonyms such as MaschinenZimmer 412, Hydra Head 9, Folkstorm or Toroidh (my favorite one, maybe for some musical nuances close to Raison d'Etre releases) -, quite famous for his artistic fruitfulness in the so-called "grey area" for being one of the first sound-artists dealing with the so-called "black industrial" music (something which some reviewer names "dark ambient" as well nowadays), whose nickname means "northern wolf", and the American noise artist Andy O'Sullivan aka Goat, whose researches are more noise-oriented as well, giving to birth this freaky creature called Goatvargr - you can imagine some bestial character, whose body is half-goat and half-wolf... -, which musically could stand as a sort of alternative path towards the thick woods of power electronics, black metal and cinematic ritual drones.

If you already have listened to their self-titled debut album, you'll easily notice this time the noise sounds more "organized" - just some parts such as the deafening Wall of Wolf tread on noises in a cacophonic way - as whereas this two beasts don't pummel each other, the atmospheric grips intertwined with heavily dragged metallic marches have been preferred so that they finally emphasized the suggestions and somewhat sinister fascination of this gloomy record, alternating the feral gaits of those animals and the disquieting glacial silence with terrific buzzing or quartering through voices which sometimes sounds human, sometimes turn into more brutish timbres (have a listen to the initial Goatsbane/Scapewolf - nice wordy trick for a title! - for a thorough sample of such a transmutation...) and reaching the highest peak in the almost solemn final anthem of A Black Drum Droning. By rewording sleevenotes printed on the booklet (you can turn it into a poster with the drawing on front-cover by French), "during the black snow epoch, the true hunters will pursue"...

Seven That Spells is a Croatian Psychedelic Space-Rock band with elements of Math Rock and Avant-Garde jazz, at least on this album. Formed back in 2003 by guitarist/keyboardist Niko PotoÄnjak, aboard on this trip are: saxophonist Lovro ZlopaÅ¡a; drummer Stanislav MuÅ¡kinja; and Narantxa on bass. My first experience with STS was on the Beta-lactam Ring compilation 'Music For Personality Disorder' which I reviewed a little while ago. The track on the comp was 'Terminus Est' which is on this album as well. I described it thusly: 'Imagine latter day King Crimson, Gong, and John Zorn thrown in a blender and set to puree. Totally chaotic and dissonant. Fans of obscure outfits like Amalgam should love this.' Well that was an off-the-cuff description, accurate to some degree, but certainly not the whole picture of this album. In order to get a little musical background on the band, I went back through some of their tracks on previous albums and discovered that 'Future Retro Spasm' isn't a whole lot like some of the stuff they've done before. My general impression of their prior work was a less focused group, maybe in part due to the influence of Acid Mothers Temple's Kawabata Makoto. In any event, 'Future Retro Spasm' is an album that you can't just take blissfully lying back and expect it to waft over you. It will hit you on the head'¦HARD.

Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel's most famous amp may go to 11, but these guys' amps start at 11 and go to ??? 'Olympos' begins with Lorvo's frenetic sax riffing crazy arpeggios over an 'Astronomy Domine' style bass & drums until the Gong strikes'¦then a simple ascending motif begins and the band riffs off that on the improv. It is clearly Lorvo who is showcased here, although MuÅ¡kinja and Narantxa have their manic moments. Just when you thought it seemed like going to die down, it comes back FULL FORCE like an unstoppable freight train. Imagine LPD on STP and a totally freaked out Niels van Hoorn and you get some idea of what's going on.

'G' begins with a single repeating note anchor of guitar and sax before Muškinja and Narantxa strike up a tight Wetton-Bruford era King Crimsoid rhythm while the guitar holds down the single repeating note and the sax riffs off it all. It gets better when Niko abandons the annoyingly repetitious note and lays down a fast Fripp-like guitar pattern which the sax plays off of. There are some moments of magic here, and when Niko's guitar takes off into the stratosphere things really heat up. Absolutely wild in its semi-controlled chaos.

I've described 'Terminus Est' before but that description isn't entirely accurate. Sure, comparisons could be made to King Crimson and John Zorn (and his various offshoots), but there are also elements of Philip Glass and Steve Reich in the repetitive riff cycles employed on this track. It has the power and fury of a herd enraged charging elephants, as the sax squealing often gives the impression of the trumpeting cry of wild beasts. 'The Abandoned World of Automata' slows it down for a calmer psychedelic atmosphere, with repetitive heavily verbed guitar arpeggios as the bass moves in melodic lines. Eventually the sax sneaks in for a bit of laconic Eastern noodling, which goes on for a good while. And that's the problem with this track. At the halfway point of this 14 and a half minute opus, the guitar switches to an ascending 8 note scale patterns before taking off into cosmic territory. I suppose they were trying to build up into it, but it just took too long to get there. It is something else though in terms of psychedelic improvisation when they finally arrive. This track could have been shorter by a third, maybe even half.

'Death Star Narcolepsy' is sheer, uncompromising manic freneticism with a Middle Eastern bent, and it's well over five minutes they keep it up before there's a break. When it does come, it turns into a mad dervish dance ending in the inevitable chaos that follows. Last track, 'Quetzalcoatl' is the shortest on the album but in a certain sense the most varied, and a definite melding of Zorn and Crimson on amphetamines. Yikes!

I'm kind of ambivalent about 'Future Retro Spasm'; what Seven That Spells lacks in finesse they try and make up for in exuberance. It's that lack of finesse that bothers me though, as it seems that control (and structured songwriting) isn't this band's strong suit and the music often comes across as heavy handed, with little in the way of subtlety. As far as the improvisation goes, there are many passages of absolute brilliance, and incredible musicianship, and if that's ultimately what you're looking for, you just may find it on 'Future Retro Spasm'.

Leaving Cocteau's esthetics and way of thinking our of consideration while reviewing this catching soundtrack for his first movie, Blood of a Poet, proposed by Steven Severin, bass player and co-founder of the legendary and seminal band Siouxsie & The Banshees, could be unfair in my opinion. It's known that the Frenck artist was an admirer of the underestimated Erik Satie, inspiring the so-called Les Six, a group of six musicians claiming the musical inheritance di Satie as well and supported from the conceptual framework Cocteau erected in the aphoristic essay Le Coq et L'Arlequin. Cocteau's admiration for Satie could be explained by referring to the intent to go beyond the dicotomy between a style featuring a certain unaffected plainness so that it could appear close to the daily dimension of everyday life and the intricacy of the Absolute, an intent whose paradoxicalness was solved by the simple structures of Satie's compositions and its constant tension towards a mystical and somewhat cabaret dimension and its non-sense titles could tightly fit and undo this knot. ''All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.'', Cocteau stated in that essay.

After this premise and after listening to his issue - I warmly reccomend to listen to it while watching Le Sang d'un Poète as Steven is trying to do during his live performances all over different stages in USA, Canda and UK -, I could say that Mr.Severin has ideally joined this groups of eclectic French musicians in their favorite bar, La gaya in the heart of Montparnasse, for some absynthe sips. Not a rookie with this genre of issue, having already composed other imaginary soundtracks for movies such as The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari and The Seashell and The Clergyman or real scores, among which the superb one for London Voodoo, Steven manages to underscore the dramatic tension and the powerful symbolism of that film through a sort of alchemical synaeresis leading to an entrancing distillate of suspended melodies, immersive atmospheres, thinned organs, crambled keyboards, reversed carillon-like sounds, hypnotical pitched tones and some delicious tensive crescendo, all truly inspired and wedging in each sequence of the movie exalting the symbolic cloud of Cocteau's vision; in this magnetic magma of cinematic thrills I mostly appreciated the frightening suspense of L'Hotel des Folies-Dramatiques, evoking the nightmares of the poet after he accepted the invite to enter into the mirror - maybe the most famous scene of Le Sang d'un Poète, a recurrant and highly meaningful theme in Cocteau's Orpheus as well - coming from the statue, awaken after the poet himself tried to free himself from his own mouth, impressed on the palm of his hand like a wound, as well as the pathos seeping out of the tones of tracks such as Glory Forever or The Desecration Of The Host or the evoked cheating transhumanation during the card game against his muse, his glory and his destiny during which the poet acts as a swindler taking from his childhoos what it's expcted to grab from his insight in the track entitled The Card Sharp & The Angel and the final redeemed self-condemnation inside the fatal ennui for the eternity in the closing track The Lyre. Moving stuff also for philosophical journeys of the mind!

This the repress of what I think is the unavoidable recording of Petit on Beta Lactam Ring is a sort of rework/reinterpretation of the Eraserhead soundtrack which I'm sure you know it's a cult movie but above all a real must a real must for my "alternative generation". The basic idea is not that far from many works Petit has done later therefore if you're fans of the French artist I'm sure you know what I'm speaking about and above all you know some of his early materials you also know they were basically drone based. I prefer it way more if compared to other works by this French dj/label owner/musician has put out, this' considerably different from his releases with String of Consciousness this cd/ (now)lp has that same dark feel you can hear in his collaboration with Pietro Riparbelli and with some of his other darkest recordings. Sure, we're dealing mostly with dark sounds, but to define it a drone-based release wouldn't be correct since it features some rhythmic quasi-industrial beats, some electronic sounds and the average atmosphere of this work is oniric and somehow melancholic. With these last words I just wanted to say if you're looking for the average dark ambient recording you're probably out of place but if drone based music with a high evocative feel and with a electronic feel it's your cup of tea, this will probably kill you for good. This cd features several long tracks that flow like a stream of consciousness (ah,ah...c'mon what an obvious joke!!!..;-), they pass from long and dense parts to quasi-ambient movements where you hear a piano, maybe horns and some feedbacks well melted in a nocturnal but yet gloomy magma. This repress is worth the price of the ticket, one of the best Petit's releases from his early days.