Reviews
[Ace Weekly] [Babysue
Reviews] [Creative Loafing show preview]
[Creative Loafing mini-CD review] [Dead
Angel] [Exclaim!] [Pindrops
and Cathedral Bells] [Piero Scaruffi]
[Your Flesh]
- Ace Weekly - Febuary 1, 2001
A few months ago, in his cramped basement digs, my pal Jor-El
put on a rock'n'roll show. First there was a fab performance
by local goth-psych mavens, the Passengers. Then, have mercy,
came the headliners, Pineal Ventana.
Crammed into a ten by ten space, five lunatics thrashed on
guitars, an arsenal of drums, chunks of metal and themselves.
Synths droned and wailed like the shades of victims not yet
murdered. As eyes burned in the stench of lighter fluid set
aflame on the floor, a man all camp-survivor skin'n'bones gibbered
and growled, his face distorted and shiny beneath a mask of
rubber cement, once dancing like a narcoleptic robot to a tick-tock
trance, other times pounding giant drums, king of all cannibals.
A small woman with a tangled mane of raven hair helped him,
thin arms banging out the savage rhythms. She was the voice
behind the violence: Nemesis reading her rites to the perp
clutched in holy claws, a mad little girl in a red-stained
dress singing satanic nursery rhymes, a witch yowling curses
even as she burns, the Lami crooning lullabyes to her monstrous
brood.
The sound was huge, smothering, relentless, cleansing. It was
like watching the hordes of Hell storm through somebody's rec
room.
It was awesome.
Most of that set came from this disc, the latest from these
veterans of the Atlanta underground. Turn it up loud, set your
floor on fire, scare the bejeezus out of the neighbors and
it's the next best thing to being there. -Bill Widener - Babysue Reviews - November
2000
- Perhaps the best experimental rock band ever to emerge from
the often-times disappointing rock scene in Atlanta, Georgia...Pineal
Ventana continue to challenge and perplex (and probably alienate
most of) their audience. Hats off to Unit Circle Rekkids for
making the band's music available to a wider audience. P.V.'s
music consists of psychedelic drones...sometimes harsh noise
experiments...at other times weird combinations of the former
and the latter...and at still other times bizarre and often
times atonal musical experiments. Axes to Ice is one harsh
little puppy dog that most folks aren't going to want showing
up at their doorstep. Here, of course, that contorted little
puppy dog is always welcome...because we like to hear it's
screwed up howls and drug-induced screaming. We have enjoyed
this band's music in the past...but this just may be their
best (and most demanding) disc YET. Extremely alienated and
peculiar...yet hypnotic and throbbing with ultra rubber gusto...
Totally wonderful stuff indeed...!!! (Rating: 5+)
- Creative
Loafing - September 9, 2000
Pineal Ventana(1) are performing(2) at the Earl(3) on Saturday,
September 9. It's a CD(4) release extravaganza in honor of
their new CD Axes to Ice(5). The CD is a soundtrack to the
film by Chad Rullman called Kotoran Jiwa, in which members
of the group appear(6).
Notes:
(1) PV's brand of uncompromising noise-rock features continual
shape-shifting: longtime guitarist Kim Chee has left, but she
still administers the website (www.pinealventana.com). John
Whittaker, the bassist-cum-fulcrum-behind-Ben-Franklin-shades
has also left. They have been replaced by Lindell Todd on bass/drums &
guitar and Brain "major damage" Ginn on keyboards
and guitar. This shift has led the group to explore explosive
percussive possibilities.
(2) PV have been known to "perform" by playing poker
under a blue light; by splattering water-based paint on the
crowd while operating on a patient and wearing satanic masks.
There's a spirit of post-Fluxus performance art to their work.
A sense of invulnerability that copulates with a feeling of
profound inevitability.
(3) The club/restaurant on Flat Shoals Avenue in East Atlanta.
Local scenesters think it's cool 'cause most have never been
to New York.
(4) The music on the CD is a collection of uncompromising,
percussion-driven intervals of loud spaces, just sledgehammer
rock with some odd string arrangements and a rather melancholy
coda. PV integrates aspects of late '80s tribal rhythms with
post-'90s blitz-and-bang heaviness and the randomness that
routinely attacks listeners.
(5) On Unit Circle Rekkids, produced by the legendary Martin
Bisi at Brooklyn's BC Studios (the same place where their previous
Malpractice was recorded).
(6) Stills from the film decorate the record's sleeve. Vocalist
Clara Clamp holds a knife, the ritual cuttings of psychic youth
while Mitch Foy (also a CL contributor) hovers in the background
with a double-exposed mask. The film is an homage to Japanese
filmmaking and will have its premiere screening at the performance.
- Jim Hayes - Creative
Loafing - December 30, 2000
- PINEAL VENTANA, Axes to Ice (Unit Circle); cerebral art rock
with powerful rhythms and eerie vocals shows the inscrutable
quintet's constant improvement and inflexible integrity. (JA)
- Dead Angel - Issue #43
Remember the possessed li'l girl with the nasty mouth and
bad dietary habits in THE EXORCIST? Did you ever wonder just
what happened to the demon nibbling on her tasty popcorn soul
after the priest helpfully cast it out? Well, i know what happened
to the demon -- he took a long vacation on the Nile and then
came back to inhabit one Clara Clamp, the "vocalist" for
this here band (although calling Clara a "vocalist" is
about on par with calling the Unabomber
"mildly eccentric"... understatement gets you nowhere
in some cases, do you dig?). Either that or she's been coached
by Diamandas Galas, which practically amounts to the same thing
anyway. To say that Clara is intense is sort of like saying
the ocean has some water in it. It's not enough for the band
to sound like a manic fusion of punk, industrial, and metal
that frequently moves in three separate directions at once,
all of them loud and forbidding, no, they have to have Clara
floating over the whole catastrophic panorama of sonic immolation
like a floating harpy heaving poison-tipped harpoons at the
unwary. I could go on in this vein, natch, but i think you
get the idea... this band is not for the weak, okay?
This is the band's second offering on Unit Circle, following
last year's savage and bludgeoning MALPRACTICE, the disc on
which their years of sonic experimention finally coalesced
into something that not only lurches, explodes, and shrieks,
but actually swings. (Blame it on Martin Bisi, best known for
his work with the Swans, a connection that is not even remotely
coincidental given the importance of percussion to both Swans
and Pineal Ventana.) Bisi is back tihs time around to help
out again, and while the band has shed two members, their replacements
are so in tune with the swirling-shrapnel-mantra ethic that
you'd never even notice the difference. There is a progression
of sorts, though -- if the last album was where they finally
shaped their amorphous attack into something streamlined and
angular, this album is where they loosen their grip again,
unveiling songs that hold together at the core but are ready
and willing to splinter apart at the seams at any given moment.
Unlike most bands, Pineal Ventana are genuinely unpredictable
-- very little of what they do is built on the concept of "chord
progressions" leading to "obvious"
places. Their entire aesthetic is more like several bands colliding
at once, and with every album they've gotten better at making
this work without dissolving into sloppy chaos (it's harder
than it looks).
What i like on this album is that they've added metal moves
to their whirling attack -- occasionally, as on the downright
scary "Breech Denial,"
the band's cyclonic sonic murk is riven by bursts of flat-out
metal riffing in the vein of early Metallica or something similar.
(This could well be result of retaining a new guitarist; more
jagged riffing pops up in "Divide"
as well.) They don't do much of it -- this is definitely not
a metal album, although it's certainly heavy enough to meet
with approval in metal circles -- but when they do, it's like
lightning striking from the thunderclouds. In fact, the entire
album is strewn with moments like this, not all of them necessarily
metal, but spastic bursts of elements that blow into the song
for a brief moment before disappearing into the cyclone again.
Another thing that makes this album interesting is that their
roles are no longer as clearly defined as they once were --
everybody in the album plays more than one instrument, rotating
at will, and while Mitchell F. and Kim Chee are apparently
still the core musicians at the eye of the hurricane (along
with the growling, shrieking, chanting, wailing Clara, the
wild-eyed devil doll on steroids), they're all taking turns
and throwing new, interesting twists into the sonic omlette.
The result is not only a more varied and organic sound, but
a sound that's even harder to peg than ever before.
The album itself flows like one long, disjointed acid nightmare
-- although there are nine tracks, only five of them are actual "songs" in
the sense that most people think of songs, with the rest being
either short bits to introduce or bridge other songs ("Incarnia," "hark")
or thick slabs of pure otherworldliness (such as "One
Held the Key -- One Held the Sleep," a long train-wreck
of almost random sounds and samples and clattering and wordless
vocalizing and other sonic debris held together by an undercurrent
of amp noise and shuddering bass waves; somewhere in all of
this Clara sings of a little girl with a cut throat who might
be real, might be nightmare... who knows). The cryptic "S.S.S.
(The Land with no Heads)" opens with a peculiar phone
message, followed by a sample of some lovely televangelist
waxing nostalgic for the days when people beat the devil out
of their children, as droning static guitars rise out of the
background and come together in an orgy of hateful feedback.
The song ends with a thunderous, metronomic beat over more
of the phone sample, like an even more single-minded answer
to early Swans. The best tracks (or the more
"accessible" ones, anyway) are the ones that fuse
metal, punk, industrial, white noise, and gothic opera into
one blood-spattered auto accident in progress, like the aforemention "Breach
Denial" (in which, halfway through, the song devolves
into a breakdown with the band members spinning in several
different directions at once, almost to the point of complete
collapse, before coming together again to finish). "Control" is
also one of the more commanding moments, opening with Clara
chanting like a demented sprite before seguing into movements
of thundering metal, sink-drain noises, and thick walls of
percussion and guitar-driven fury. The preceding two tracks
alone, at high volume, are probably capable of fusing your
cerebellum into a toxic pile of melted grue. The end all comes
in the grinding broken-glass roar of "Axes to Ice," in
which Clara wails over an endless roar of sound and slo-mo
beats like she's being buried in a landslide. All in all, a
nice soundtrack for the invasion of the mongrel hordes... - Exclaim!
- March 5, 2001
- Nobody could ever accuse Atlanta's Pineal Ventana of being
conventional. Their recorded work ranges from the truly disturbing
to the merely experimental, merely. Their originality makes
it hard to put into words exactly what they do. Take "Control," an
eight-minute roller-coaster ride that starts off as a quiet
rumble then builds up slowly into a disconcerting percussive
cacophony, with guitars making the kind of noises that they
probably shouldn't make. And that seems to be the template
for most songs - they all have an element of improvisation
that adds to the overall chaos. But it is the vocals that are
really the icing on the cake. Clara Clamp's vocals are not
unlike those of Diamanda Galas - her range varies from a low
bass rumble to shrieks and screams. Mitchell F's vocals are
not quite as unorthodox, but are just as harrowing to listen
to. Production duties are shared by the band and ex-Swans member
Martin Bisi (who has also, not surprisingly, worked with John
Zorn), although part of me thinks that they just left the tape
running and waited to see what came out the other end. To be
perfectly honest, Axes To Ice is exhausting to listen to, but
maybe that's a compliment in its own way; to capture so much
energy and strangeness in the recording studio is no mean feat. Michael
Edwards
- Pindrops and Cathedral Bells
- i've not even owned this for 24 hours and have already listened
to the entire disc around 10 times! this is the second release
by pineal ventana on the avant label, unit circle rekkids ("malpractice" being
the first) and the genius of it all just completely overwhelms
me. "axes to ice" is a disturbing clinical exploration
of sound that deserves to be heard by the masses. re-inventing
themselves once more while still retaining a sound that is
unmistakeably their own, the band have created yet another
masterpiece of ritual drumming, heavy bass lines, frenzied
guitar, and anguished vocals. violin, keyboard, pianophone,
sax, loops, samples, and a childrens choir are also featured.
what sets this apart from their previous full-length is that
it's much more aggressive, less psychadelic, and includes a
larger amount of experimentation. there's no point in trying
to pick out my favorites here as each track is just as incredible
as the next and the cd works best when digested as a whole.
the packaging is quite exceptional as well with all photos
being taken from the chad rullman short film "kotoran
jiwa" starring p.v. members mitchell foy and clara clamp.
without a doubt, "axes to ice" is the embodiment
of absolute perfection. i wonder if it's possible to wear cds
thin like vinyl? if it is, i'll have to stockpile some extra
copies.
- Piero Scaruffi - The
History of Rock Music
The sound is even denser and darker on Axes to Ice (Unit
Circle Rekkids, 2000). The band has found its true voice in
a deragend form of rock and roll that leverages on tribal drums
and the singer's wild persona. Overall, the album is more emphatic
than ever. Neurosis and adrenaline overflow from the "danse
macabre" of Breach Denial, that features Sonic Youth-y
guitar strumming, tension-filled pauses a` la Type O Negative,
and a continuous quarrel between the male and female voices.
That emphatic exorcism drowns into Control's afflicted tale,
a Clamp's childish "la-la"
surrendering to her mate's angry rapping, while the music grows
into a spasmodic, thunderous heavy-metal merry-go-round. Loud
guitar distortions and electronic shocks tear apart the song,
while Clamp metamorphoses into Bjork. Pineal Ventana draws
from Cop Shoot Cop and Steel Pole Bath Tub to assemble songs
as sonic puzzles. The morbid rant of Divide borders on death
metal, but is devastated by drones of guitar and keyboards.
Whatever is happening to the playing and the singing, the sound
of tribal drums never lets go. Drums permeate on Pineal Ventana's
music like pipe organs rule over Catholic liturgy. The exception
is the most ambitious track, the 12-minute concrete suite One
Held The Key, an experiment in sound collage, a stream of mostly
dissonant and often distorted events. This album marks an impressive
progress in all directions: a broader sonic and stylistic palette,
dynamic and dramatic staging of vocal duets, refined arrangements,
psychological depth. - Your Flesh - Issue #45
- An Atlanta collective with a Crash Worship and Boredoms fixation
present the "creepy underbelly" of the normal world
via distorted bass, squealing sax noise, fuzz guitars, tape
loops, harmonized vocals and tribal drums. The funny thing
about the erroneously titled "postmodern era"
is the notion of anything retro-reverential for postmodernism
seems utterly redundant and toothless. However, Pineal Ventana
aren't without their finer moments, and the proto-industrial
lurch of this CD bears forth a reasonable cacophony of the
ominous sound that occasionally bobs above the surface of predictably
noisy and eerie saturation. While the subject matter and performances
are deft, their progenitors done it meaner. - Dave Clifford
|
