Dylan Dempsey
I listen to this album when I'm in a bad spot mentally, usually when I haven't slept in a day or two. it doesn't require much if any brain power to comprehend these songs, just sick beats and massive riffage from the big riff himself, Dylan Carlson. this album goes well with my disorders. compared to Mr. Carlson's other works, this isn't as bad ass or face melting, but it sure as hell holds a special place in my heart as the album I can comfortably and calmly listen to when things go to sh!t.
Favorite track: Don’t Walk These Streets.
DJ Home Movies
An array of dark ambient soundscapes, with the occasional gritty beat, for a city decrepit and abandoned, or a desert devoid of a good lawful life. Great music for living out your dieselpunk, post-apoc, robo-west, or ghost town fantasies.
Favorite track: Hell A.
Akira Watts
Really bleak and really beautiful. Reminds me a bit of last year's Horseback album (one of my favorites of the year), but more focused and more immersive. Kind of fucking amazing, actually.
Favorite track: Broke.
Like master painters exploring a subject over a lifetime’s work, Kevin Martin and Dylan Carlson – The Bug and Earth, respectively – have each been mining and defining their genres for more than 20 years. They’re united by an interest in – really an obsession with – heaviness. They search for, examine and break the boundaries between beautiful and ugly, minimal and maximal, light and dark – but The Bug and Earth always make music that is heavy in the most thrilling of ways.
Earth, and its founding member Carlson, first appeared in the early ’90s, and came to prominence with their Sub Pop release "Earth 2". An exercise in SLOW distorted droning minimalist riffage, their debut was the blueprint for what Dylan coined at the time "ambient metal,” – a style still being pushed forward on his latest Southern Lord release "Primitive And Deadly.”
Kevin Martin's career spans the same timeframe. Techno Animal, Ice, God, Razor X, King Midas Sound, and of course the The Bug moniker. All of which explore(d) the fringes of experimental and heavy music. With his recently released "Angels & Devils" LP receiving high praise across the board, he once again put his sonic stamp on the here and now with his collaborators Liz Harris (of Grouper), copeland, Miss Red, Gonjasufi, Flowdan, Death Grips, Justin Broadrick (Godflesh/Jesu), and Warrior Queen.
These two uncompromising outsiders met via the visual artist Simon Fowler (Angels & Devils.) Simon arranged for Dylan to come to a King Midas Sound gig, but Martin’s trademark use of a powerful strobe light meant that the epileptic Carlson couldn’t enter the room. Undeterred, Carlson featured King Midas Sound’s music in a podcast, and the pair eventually decided to collaborate around “Angels & Devils.”
The anglophile Carlson had long admired Martin, and other British sonic experimenters like Spacemen 3 or Pentangle. In turn, Martin understood the genius in Carlson’s deconstruction of metal, and Earth’s boiling down of the genre to its core, elemental riffs. Martin saw that he and Dylan were both “wanderers,” and “misfits in the world we live in.” They were both huge fans of dub and the Velvet Underground, and they discussed how those influences could provide a combined template for something entirely new.
When they finally began to record, it quickly became apparent that the music they made together needed room to stretch out and “drone,” – to be its own thing. Two tracks eventually emerged, "Boa" & "Cold," and were released as a standalone EP, with Dylan's signature guitar sound weaving seamlessly around some of Kevin's most destructively heady bass explorations. Martin had decided to exclude those songs from ‘Angels & Devils’, as he felt “They had developed a singular life of their own, outside of the identity of that album.”
Ninja Tune asked The Bug and Dylan Carlson to perform live in LA around the label’s 25th anniversary, and Martin and Carlson took the opportunity to further the recording project in person. So The Bug vs Earth project holed up in Daddy Kev’s legendary LA studio, with DJ Nobody engineering, for two very long days. Those recording sessions have resulted in the masterpiece that is “Concrete Desert.” Inspired by J.G. Ballard’s urban dystopias, and the Californian dream capital’s sordid, fragmented underbelly, Martin says that the album is in some ways a Los Angeles-set companion piece to “London Zoo.”
The record’s beautiful, chiming melodies are like shards of sonic light, glowing in currents of heavy bass darkness. There are pulsing soundscapes, ambient pinks and whites, and irresistible grooves. This is music that grips you entirely, and catches you in its lava-flow – an astonishing, primal album of vast depth.
In making it, Martin decided to break from The Bug’s obsessive study of groove, tone and texture, and think more cinematically. The result is a wondrously visual album, akin to finding oneself wandering amongst the rocky red hills of the Californian deserts. In fact, he says, the album could be understood as reflecting a ‘mistrust of “Hollywoodisms,” and the shadow of Hollywood fantasy that looms large over life in LA, and the USA in general. “Dylan’s a master at amplifying the flavour of America,” he says, “but not the side we see in this Trump climate.” For Martin, the “American dream is like a nightmare under Trump” but Dylan captures the “best side of that dream, a utopian openess.” “I hear the writing of Cormac McCarthy in his music. His playing conjures deserts, and wide open spaces.’ In “Concrete Desert,” Earth’s sonic landscapes, its far horizons and vast spaces, are underpinned and propelled by Martin’s ear-worming rhythms and percussive genius.
With live shows for The Bug and Dylan Carlson planned for April 2017, this is just the beginning of The Bug vs Earth project. The record might be one designed to ‘document alienation,’ but one listen is enough to show it, equally, to be a brilliant meeting of two kindred musical souls.
The Bug is the only producer who can bring in the likes of Liz Harris (of Grouper), Copeland, Miss Red, Gonjasufi, Flowdan,
Justin Broadrick (Godflesh/Jesu), Mala, Death Grips, and Warrior Queen and make it seamless. End times need a soundtrack to prep for what's above and below, and this is it....more
supported by 121 fans who also own “Concrete Desert”
Dur de définir qu'elle est le meilleur album de GODFLESH, en fait ils ont tous leur singularité. Je trouve que sur cet album GODFLESH a atteint une sorte de perfection à leur musique, à la fois froide, brutale et industrielle mais aussi envoûtante et mentale. Cet album est un condensé du meilleur de GODFLESH, c'est pour moi l'album de la consécration. Je vais mettre "BE GOD" en titre préféré pour sa puissance, lourde et complètement mystique mais tous les titres sont excellents. gaston_macoute
Every sound here is made using Megan Mitchell's voice, even though the music often sounds more like Earth’s vibrations than a human singing. Bandcamp Album of the Day Mar 28, 2023
Deeply chilling and absorbing experimental music from Angela Edwards that feels like a long plunge into a cold, dark expanse. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 12, 2023
Imaginative synth-based psych-pop inspired by Maya Deren's avant-garde filmmaking from Italian duo Bono / Burattini. Bandcamp New & Notable Feb 27, 2023
supported by 102 fans who also own “Concrete Desert”
I love this series because it is so interesting and the first 3 stages are nice to listen to for studying. The music is sad and happy, distorted in parts but real throughout. keenan_bruce