CRUELTY Presents:
Artist...: Kanalkrank
Album....: Kanalkrank
Label....: Centre Of Wood
Size.....: 61,8 MB
Source...: CDDA
Playtime.: 54:31 min
Genre....: Ambient
Release..: Aug-29-2008
Encoder..: LAME V3.97 -V2 --Vbr-New
Quality..: VBRkbps 44,1Hz Joint-Stereo
TrackList:
01 02:38 Track 1
02 05:00 Track 2
03 06:20 Track 3
04 02:54 Track 4
05 15:48 Track 5
06 08:53 Track 6
07 08:42 Track 7
08 04:16 Track 8
Release Notes:
No Track names available.
I just discovered the small Italian CD-R label Centre Of Wood, which
specializes in very limited, completely hand-made CD-R releases that
tend to lean towards the creepy drone end of things, and the few releases
that I've picked up from them so far have been pretty great. This disc from
Kanalkrank has eight tracks and is almost an hour long, and is packaged in a
grey toned cardboard sleeve that holds the disc on a plastic hub on the
interior, and is bound together with a long piece of twine. The sleeve is
minimally decorated, with a washed out, sepia-toned image of a desolate
woodland landscape stretching across the front and back. The delicate package
and strange images perfectly fit the mysterious droning ambience that this project
creates. Each one of these eight tracks crafts a foggy, distant landscape from
electric guitar and field recordings, gently layering delayed guitar notes and
deep, rumbling drones with keening feedback and really ominous sounding minor-key
melodies. These quieter moments remind me of the soft arboreal drones of the
Jeweled Antler Collective (I'm thinking of Thuja in particular) as well as
the slow moving guitar washes of Labradford, but then Kanalkrank will rend
the tranquil drones apart with grinding low-end distortion that comes close to
Earth/Sunn O)))/Nadja degrees of heaviness and crunch. And squirmy electronic
noises, shimmery whir of prayer bowls, and abrasive processed guitar sounds
begin to appear as the disc progresses, turning the dark, dreamy drift of the
earlier tracks into creepy, unsettling clouds of FX-noise and delayed strings.
But then the later tracks (they are all untitled) come in and manifest as dark,
krautrockish swirls of strings and deep buzzing drones, beautifully creepy a
la Popul Vuh, and hardly sounding like the music is even guitar generated
anymore. All in all, this is a terrific collection of dark heavy kosmiche
dronemusic, definiteloy the heaviest out of the Centre Of Wood CD-Rs that
we just picked up, and probably my favorite of the bunch. Hand-numbered
out of 80 copies.