To dispel any concern that I am exclusively a dour grump groaning about the political inevitable, I am introducing some new themes to the blog (HINT: the next serial will also be audial). This will make FGPlex more of an esoklektik -- Greek: esoterikos + eklektikos, both cognates -- clearinghouse and less a whizbang of writing, for which someone must be grateful.I've enjoyed almost a year of trawling for deleted albums with the help of Discogs.com, Wikipedia and countless music blogs the breadth of which is encyclopedic. The internet has made possible the preservation of commercially-suicidal sound on a massive scale; blogs like Zero G Sounds, Sickness (Still) Abounds and Nostalgie de la Boue are lovingly maintained libraries of the vanished. I have some bits to pool in this collective curatorial effort, but not enough for my own dedicated blog.
{D'Elite} is my contribution of the best market-unviable, deleted sound art to the informal interarchive. I will chiefly present things I could not find elsewhere; on some occasions, they won't be the best albums, but I will provide links thereto.
This effort is also a paean to my salad days of going to record stores and buying whatever was used and looked interesting, then sharing as I could. That was how I found so much of the music I still treasure: brume, zoviet-france, Controlled Bleeding, and Clair Obscur are just a few examples -- not to mention U Lovemore Majaivana, the first Zimbabwean band I'd ever heard and my favorite choral popmusic.
I start with Inanna because ORDER OV FECUNDATION is the finest ambient industrial I've heard. I spent months dredging the digital seas for this recording on the web rather than master the very difficult levels that are so high on the tape, which required sensitive EQing in the transfer to digital.
This was played from the source tape on an Onkyo deck @ DolbyC through an Allen&Heath Xone:32 mixer, balanced and leveled before the record out to a Cowon S9 at 256kbps (regrettably the Cowon only records in .wma), then re-encoded to .mp3 at 192kbps.
These recordings are provided for information when determined with reasonable effort to be unavailable elsewhere. If any artist wishes to have their work removed from this blog, please contact me directly. So without further dithering --
Inanna: ORDER OV FECUNDATION
Mikael Stavöstrand is better known for his excellent minimal techno or his releases with (and as) Archon Satani. Inanna could have been just another casualty of the microlabel tape era, but hyperarchivers like Sickness Abounds have kept pieces like SODOM, limited to 200 copies, in circulation. Not.hing and Day ov Torment are still available on emusic, but those albums have more of a digital feel that doesn't seem sincere after the oft-muddy mastering of Sodom and Order.
Inanna is dark ambient industrial from Sweden, with a Satanic influence that is subtle enough to ignore on this release. The soundscapes on this album vary from subterranean sheetmetal banging to all kinds of tubing clangs, distorted strains of horns from Aida (Grand March, Act 2, Scene II), and treated tapeloops warbling over murmuring submerged chants. Occasionally it verges on abrasive but never distorts, even when the levels are red hot. It's not overtly dark or brooding, purple titles notwithstanding -- of Sodom, Not.hing and Day ov Torment, it's the least glowering and demonic by far. The feedback resonance narrative shot through "Tunrida", which sounds as though it's echoing around a sunlit canyon, is filmic in its vaulted beauty, and has been very moving to me for almost 20 years. I'm honored to present it, ripped from its Old Europa Cafe C60.
A1 Order Ov Fecundation. 1 11:03
A2 Annihilate Them 5:55
A3 God's Order 6:16
A4 Daughters Of The Mildewed Minds 8:29
B1 Order Of Fecundation. 2 11:03
B2 Tunrida 6:10
B3 Without Blemish 7:11
B4 Order Of Fecundation. 3 7:16
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