Mimaroglu Music Sales
... this was the surprise of this early oesb batch ; while i was expecting some desultory/provincial basement scrabblings (based entirely on their name), pussygutt are, in fact, a well-oiled doom band with a unique bass / guitar / violin / tractor lineup that sets them apart from the wall of sunn o))) acolytes just nicely ...

i ended up loving all four monolithic side-length pieces, but i have to hand it to the detuned guitar / bass-blast & gypsy violin of “pavour nocturnus”
Crucial Blast Webstore
This mysterious duo from Boise, Idaho released what is one of the most shadowy, mysterious albums of 2007, a vinyl-only outre doom epic which has taken me several attempts to try to capture the strangeness of this music in writing. First, there's the name, Pussygutt. A weird name for any kind of band, let alone one that is this heavy and crushing, it comes from the old colloquialism for the strings for a violin or fiddle, a play on the myth that violin strings were actually created from cat intestines. Then there is the symphony of unlikely instruments that are used; Pussygutt's Blake Green and classical violinist Brittany McConnel craft a massive soundrealm of abstract doom and sub-bass ambience out of violins, synthesizers, bowed cymbals, gongs, organ, drums, clay pots, field recordings of forest sounds and ducks (!), electronic effects, crystal goblets (!?), and most prominently, what sounds like a towering Babel of guitar amplifiers reaching to the sky, emitting all kinds of deep, throbbing rumble, massive detuned doom metal riffage, and howling feedback. There's even a tractor that figures in here as well.
For Sea Of Sand, the band expanded to a three-piece with the addition of Garek Druss (Ear Venom/A Story Of Rats), and craft four sidelong tracks of seriously crushing and weird doomscapes. It's like a set of nightmare soundtracks, lost avant-garde horror film scores unearthed from a dusty film library and released into the world. The first track/side, 'West (Creature)', fades in with a black fog of deep rumbling feedback presence, shimmering gongs ringing through the blackness, the hum of electricity charging the air, huge cymbal crashes surging up and dissipating into the ether. A vast void of menacing, beautiful dark ambience, a haunting shimmering creeping blackness that reminds me of the most subdued moments of the Aural Hypnox collective, up until the black drift is rent apart by the sudden crash of plodding caveman drums and a crushing primitive doom metal riff, the lumbering doom metal that staggers groovily through an ever thickening haze of blackened static and blasts of spacey effects a la Hawkwind/Chrome until it once again recedes back into a rhythmic rumble of pitch-black bass drone and subterranean clatter.
The music takes an unnerving turn as we enter the second side. It opens with a swarm of high end violin skree that makes my skin crawl, and then morphs into the dense sound collage that makes up 'Winter Lights', a harrowing quilt of sound events that moves from rhythmic clanging of metal to the grunting rar of a tractor engine, howling winds and rumbling feedback, all of these sounds conjoined together and sewn into eerie loops and melodies, crawling through a dark realm of mysterious and sinister sounds, like a mix of horror film score, old school industrial, and Nurse With Wound. This eventually evolves into a blissed out droneslab of heavenly synths buzzing away in aeternum while rusted windchimes clank in dead winds, stalked by the growling of monstrous and cavernous strings like eldritch whale-songs reverberating underneath the earth's crust.
When we enter upon the third side, 'Pavour Nocturnus' greets us with layers of eerie violins that weep a vaguely Eastern European sounding melody across a canvas of creepy sonics. The violins sing over shimmering cymbal hiss and deep ambient rumbles, creaking hinges and groaning doors, and chunks of heavy guitar riffage gradually appear, subtly swirling with droning amp hum and electronics, over which slides a somewhat Western sounding guitar lead that all becomes a sort of abstract, blurry glacial crawl, almost reminding me of Earth's Hex crossed with some kind of Codeine/Low style slowcore and the ritualistic drone music of Sunn O)))'s last few albums, all fused with those gorgeous classical strings into a deeply moving funeral hymn.
The fourth and final side begins with distant gongs and muted bells ringing across a vast lightless expanse that becomes gradually filled with swirling hiss and floating metallic tones, huge blasts of distorted downtuned guitar and roaring amplifier drones, creaking metal sounds and plodding, stumbling drums dragging slo-mo beats through melted amber. Like the rest of the album, this is strange soundscapery, creepy as hell, but towards the end it turns into a strange pastoral coda of cosmic synth clouds and strings, geese honking in flight overhead, melodious chimes, woodland sounds and birdsong, the trickling of water, all merging into a collage of moonlit noctunal sound.
What a weird, darkly evocative album this is. Pussygutt's assemblage of musical sound, surreal sonics and crushing doom is hardly metal, but is unquestionably heavy. The packaging for this is just as amazing, too; the double LP was released by Olde English Spelling Bee in a limited edition of 550 copies, each one a hand-assembled package presented in a huge black heavy gatefold sleeve that has four spraymounted panels that were offset printed on silver stock with two coats of black ink, with full size inserts printed on vellum paper. http://www.crucialblastshop.net/




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.. Aquarius Records.. http://www.aquariusrecords.org/ PUSSYGUTT Sea Of Sand (Olde English Spelling Bee) 2lp 29.00 A mysterious duo from Idaho, here expanded to a trio, offer up 4 sidelong tracks of damaged and mysterious outsider doomdrone on the always reliable Olde English Spelling Bee label. We weren't too sure what to expect, and we missed their performance here a few months back unfortunately, but just have a gander at the list of instruments: bass, violin, crystal goblet, tractor, forest samples, clay pots, tubular bells, organ, synth, gong, drums, bowed cymbals, guitar, sound manipulations, electronics, LEAD guitar, amplifiers and feedback. Those last few are your first clue that this isn't just any old drone record. Although the first few minutes had us fooled. A gorgeous expanse of shimmering low end, glistening harmonics, and a soft distant doomic plod, little bits of static and hiss, a slow slithering blackness, which eventually builds to a stumbling groovy doom jam, with big boomy practice space drums, some seriously downtuned riffage and thick swirls of Hawkwind-ed FX, that lopes and lurches until it fades out into a long slowly unwinding smear of softly buzzing bass. The second side is a sprawling heavy industrial soundscape of collaged sounds, wind, that tractor mentioned above, all looped and layered, clanging percussion, everything constantly shifting and changing shape, a dark meandering journey through a black forest of sound, a bit like Nurse With Wound meets Wolf Eyes, a chunk of surreal dark ambience, haunting and ominous and while not heavy per se, still distinctly doomy... The second lp begins with creepy gypsy violins (one of the band members is a classically trained violinist) over a back drop of creaks and moans, a sort of haunted house mood music, beneath abstract riff fragments and random bits of effects building into a slowcore crawl, a mellow doom, each note ringing out and drifting off before the next one hits. Doomy, funereal, soft focus, with those strings a constant presence, super dark and emotional, adding a weirdly cinematic element to Pussygutt's sound. The final side is another doomy crawl, distant drums, massive slow motion slabs of downtuned guitar, very simple and hypnotic, dark and creepy, not so much heavy as moody and intense, finishing off with a harrowing Hitchcockian string outro which gives way to the sounds of the forest, birds and wildlife, all coming to life beneath the full moon... LIMITED TO 550 COPIES. Each one hand-assembled copies. Packaged in heavy-duty gatefold sleeves with four spraymounted panels that were custom offset-printed on silver stock with two coats of black ink for extra darkness, so much black ink in fact that, it almost makes your eyes water. Maybe a few huffs inside the sleeve will better prepare you for the mind altering weirdness inside...

Ruido Horrible: http://ruidohorrible.blogspot.com/2008/10/pussygutt-story-of-rats-sea-of-sand-old.html
El debut del dueto Pussygutt no es más que un lp doble. Enorme. Pesado. Un disco doble que, si bien podría buscar clasificarse como un ejemplo más de ese nuevo doom, prefiere optar por un sonido más que distante a la fácil definición.
Empleando un armamento de instrumentos, además de la colaboración de Story of Rats (Garek Druss) y de Chad Lefler, Pussygutt desandan un camino difícil desde "West (Creature)," primer corte del álbum. El drone que abre apunta al de un tinte más portentoso y oscuro, con una mezcla de platillos arqueados, feedback, percusiones minimales y los graves fondos de un órgano. Este inicio, que podría parecer más propio de bandas como Organum o Nurse With Wound, es destrozado de un martillazo guitarrero, con el comienzo de una pesada carga de riff lento, sucio, aplastante. El cierre, hacia una densa y obliterante atmósfera, es nuevamente subvertido al entrar en contacto con una cortina de cromático violín y una nota sintetizada que se quiebra como cristal y revienta la enorme burbuja de sonido que conjugara este track.
La contracara del primer track, otra monumental pieza llamada "Winter Lights" ve a Pussygutt explorando su faceta más arriesgadamente experimental. Secuencias impasibles marcan su distancia, ofreciendo imágenes tan abstractas y coartadas que bien podrían haber formado parte del elusivo mosaico sónico de "Spiral Insana." "Winter Lights" es uno de los cortes más sorprendentes del álbum gracias a su capacidad de ditanciarse abiertamente de culquier posible preconcepción y mostrando una impresionante capacidad de exploración.
"Pavour Nocturnes" abre con el dramático canto de un violín y que va armando, lentamente, una senda pieza plena de cavernosos graves y de un sentimentalismo fantasmal, nostálgico en guitarras y violín, reminiscente incluso a alguna estructura post-rocker; eso sí, sin las pretensiones y ganando mucho en profundidad gracias al afán de lograr en la ejecución un mayor peso mediante el notable desecho de la saturación elemental.
Y a pesar de que el cierre con la enorme "Daemon Lover" no deje de evidenciar el peso de Earth en sus influencias, la movilidad, la precisión con que alejan un contexto demoledoramente pesado para convertirlo en pura belleza angular es pasmosa. Delineada en preciosos drones y un bordeo ambient/clasicista, la complejidad de esta pieza resulta, en primera instancia, totalmente inesperada, y en segunda se transforma en el momento de más perfecto balance entre los universos que engloban el trabajo de este grupo de músicos.
"Sea of Sand," huelga decir, es un trabajo que aborda universos sonoros como pocos. Repleto de pesadez y belleza a partes iguales, éste es un lp a atesorar. (S.S.)
200LBU: http://200lbu.blogspot.com/2008/12/smoking-menthols-and-eatin-kobe-beef.html
Despite my undying love for the Virgin Prunes and the sporadic donning of black eyeliner before I head down to the local Key Foods, I'm not that 'dark' of a guy. Although I'm obviously down with the drone, Sunn and all their followers never made sense to me. It just seemed they took a great sound and dumbed it down for metalers and other mouth breathing types by adding alotta horseshit to it. Whenever I see a black record cover with silver ink, I usually fall asleep by the time I have a chance to laugh at the band name and/or record title. Hey...whatever floats your rod in the water and puts asses in the seats, I guess.



When and if I do throw some sounds on in this bunker these days, it's usually something I'm familiar with and/or something that doesn't require too much listener/sound participation. Alittle A.F. when the tub needs a hard scrub, some Dusty when some wine is being sipped and spilled, etc. New vibrations don't get too much spin time 'round here, but once in awhile someone will slip me something they think I'd like and I throw it on and by god, they're right to think I'd dig it. Such is the case with this double LP entitled 'Sea of Sand', a collaborative effort between Boise, Idahos' Pussygutt and Seattles' Story of Rats. I was firstly taken with how beautiful the package was. A jet black gatefold with paste-on artwork that must of been glued on by the most OCD person in the universe; totally immaculate. The sounds that take up both these slabs are certainly heavier than a two ton turd, but it's an effortless vibration that seems to just naturally permeate from the sound. The first record in the set sounds like it was one continuous jam spread out between the sides. For most of it, the amps humm and purr as if they themselves (not the humans in the room) are actually waiting for the riffs and drums to kick in. When they do show themselves, they're perfectly brief and direct and burrow back into the clouds of roar to await their next outing. Since I didn't look at the clock once while both of these sides heaved mighty grey smoke from their surfaces, I'm supposing this record must be good.

An actual violin played like it actually should be played opens Side C while field recordings of dry leaves crunch off in the distance. Somewhere down the line (Once again, I lost track of time) strings ring open and randomly hang/float, making me think more of the Dead C. than former members of False Liberty in bathrobes. Side D is heavy, slow and minimal but in a pretty engaging way. It might be that my ears are tuned differently, but when I hear this slow sludgy thing done right, I envision the songs that closed out both Infest 7"s going on forever like I wished them to all those years ago. Somewhere in all the strumming and clanging, in comes the ringing of bells and the quacking of ducks in the far distance and the record is over.

It's been awhile since I've actually got lost in a record; let alone a double set. These people have actually put together a record that's an experience; something you can't just make the bed and sweep the floor to. Put it on, sit down and take it in, chief.


P.S. -- Do not handle this cover after the eating of greasy foods. You'll just ruin it.
 
Killed in Cars (blog)