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Thanks to you I am enjoying trememndously the brilliant albums by the fabulous band Vortex.

 

 

Puzzle Punks - with Eye from Boredoms and Otake Noboru.

 

Here is what Andee of Aquarius store writes about them:

The Boredoms were always about rhythm, even if it wasn't overt, theirs was a sound based on rhythm. From the splattery chaotic hardcore of early records like Soul Discharge, to their later incarnation as a modern hippy drum rock jam band, every bit of their music was concerned with pulse and throb, it was propulsive and hypnotic, looped and cyclical, sometimes herky jerky and chaotic (but still precisely choreographed), other times serene and abstract, but always with some internal mechanism that tapped into all of the rhythms of life, which is precisely what made the Boredoms' music sound so alive and vibrant and often completely brilliantly baffling.
Last list we reviewed Budub, the 2nd album by Boredoms offshoot Puzzle Punks, which was the duo of Eye of the Boredoms and artist Otake Noboru. A fascinating very Boredoms-esque concoction of cracked rhythms and krautrock grooves, but super spare and stripped down. A garage rock This Heat maybe, traversing an abstract soundscape of loops and broken drum lines, pulsing and plodding, weaving skeletal song frameworks, and just leaving them like that, barebones and full of space. And the result was divine. Hypnotic and dreamlike. Some weird space rock broken down to its base rhythmic element, would up and allowed to stumble and lurch on its own.
Puzzoo was supposedly recorded right after that record, in secret, and recorded almost as you hear, not culled from hours and hours of jamming, rather a wholly realized organic musical happening, captured alive and kicking. Puzzoo finds the Puzzle Punks expanded to a trio, with the addition of an extra guitar, and includes some guest performances from two of the other Boredoms, one of them being Boredoms / OOIOO heartthrob Yoshimi. The result is like a much more beefed up Budub. A little more aggressive, a little more propulsive, but still stripped down and tripped out.
The opening three track salvo is worth the price of admission alone. A solid 40 minutes of damaged abstract spaced out krautrockiness. In fact, just the opener "Puzoo Lunch", a seventeen minute outer space tribal space jam was all we needed to hear. one of those tracks we wish would go on forever. And if the technology existed, we guarantee we'd spend the next 2 weeks listening to the extended 336 hour version, staying home from work, phone off, lights off, drapes drawn, just sort of drifting off in some body rhythm trance. But as it is we'll just have to continually press repeat on the cd player, and just imagine all that other stuff. But what kind of sound would have us in such a frenzy? Some some super bizarre seventies prog rock all tangled up in an alien percussive temple worship ceremony, like a roomful of deranged wind-up toys each given a little tiny set of drums and cymbals, rocking out in miniature to some acid fried psych rock guitar drift. The guitar weaves a deconstructed lo-fi garage rock, with angular no-wave riffs that drift over a motorik clangscape of clockwork thumps and a cacophony of tinkling bells and chimes and cymbals. Above it all hovers some blown out fuzzy blues guitar, weaving lazily in and out of the tangled rhythms. A dense swirl of warbling melodies and strange little sound effects wrap the proceedings in a mysterious spaced out conic cloak, the various guitar lines and melodies constantly mutating and shifting pitch. An impossible alien krautrock groove, an improbable junkyard space rock symphony, like some stripped down garage rock super jam with members of the Boredoms, This Heat, and No Neck Blues Band. Phew. And that's just the first track.
Track two, "Puzoout" follows a similar blueprint, but wraps its rhythms in fuzzy clouds of 8-bit video game sounds, whorls of primitive lo-fi synth and damaged guitar, all over a dizzying splatter of simple shuffle and propulsive skitter. Like a (more) outsider Acid Mothers Temple, but recorded on some sort of children's tape recorder. Track three, "Puzzub", the final part in the unbeatable one-two-three punch, is another druggy rhythmic workout, this time even more stripped down, a blissed out slow burning tribal jam, the main element being mouth harp which gets distorted and twisted, and stretched into a raga like buzz, in the background simple tablas and primitive metallic percussion, all wrapped in a super thick fuzzy veil of staticky haze, and warm warbling shimmer.
The final four tracks, ranging from under three minutes to a little over five minutes, are stunning little fragments of what must be (or could have been) monumentally epic lo-fi space jams, each one a dense little assemblage of deconstructed rhythms, melodic shards, fuzzy ambience, motorik propulsion, machine-like whir and druggy psychedelic atmospheres. All of them could have been stretched into hours instead of minutes without losing any of their mysterious power.
The sound of Puzzle Punks is very reminiscent of groups like No Neck Blues Band, Sunburned Hand Of The Man, but especially the Finnish contingent of the neo-tribal forest drone folk sound, Avarus, Kuupuu, Kemialliset, Anaksimandros, but infused with a distinctly Japanese xxx, as well as a gloriously unhealthy obsession with krautrock, space rock, This Heat and all of the various permutations of the word Puzzle (Puzunk, Puzzdozer, PuZZ-Top, ZZ-Topuzz) So dementedly recommended. As is the previous disc Budub, which we still have a few copies of...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Claire, I see you are listening to Ec-Nudes (in your sig).

I heard some samples and got hooked. WHat should I try and get?

 

 

Only heard of it when I once read about her projects, but had not had the chance to listen to it yet. Thanks.

 

I'll look in Wayside what's the price (funny, on Ebay there is nothing, or maybe I did not look to well).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To continue this path, I'd like to mention the Belgian band Traktor.

 

Samples:

 

Their bio from their website:

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