ENDGAME is one of the musical projects of the Freeman brothers; longtime progressive rock experts, owners of the Ultima Thule shop & mail-order, publishers of Audion magazine and authors of the "Crack in the Cosmic Egg" kraut rock encyclopedia.
Conceived as a vehicle for their post-industrial and more ambient aural explorations, ENDGAME are their most prolific project to date. These 2002 "Unreleased Recordings" are to be found as a bonus material on their 2006 "Petri Perplex" release and were intended for a never accomplished vinyl edition. Here the trio of Alan Freeman, Steve Freeman and Jim Tetlow in their Tachyon studio, are tripping on alien landscapes and the experience is otherwordly yet strangely familiar… 
The journey begins in a relaxed ambient mode, then the electronics unfold in a constantly growing spooky atmosphere, haunted by the seemingly endless echo. Slowly the band is locked in an early CLUSTER teutonic groove, betraying their krautrock influences. Finally the ritual twists and turns in so many different directions it gradually consumes itself.
Get it here…
…and check for their releases there.
No massmirror?
ReplyDeleteShane - haven't you been paying attention? You have been a visitor to this blog for a really long time and NEVER, NEVER has spacefreak ever used anything but Rapidshare.
ReplyDeleteYou're acting like something has changed when it has not.
Hope you don't take offense at this Spyros (it's absolutely no slight to you), but I gotta admit....the amusement value was quite high for me here, what with discovering that VDO's nastiest and harshest critics are in fact purveyors of generic cosmic backwash. Really puts their character asssasinations of us in perspective, as after hearing this, I wouldn't deem them worthy of judging our bowel movements.
ReplyDeletehaha--ouch :)
ReplyDeleteNo offence here Eric of course. I do believe that 90% of the vast ENDGAME output is repetition of the same influences over and over again, sometimes successful and most times uninteresting. Not that I 've listened to everything by them, simply 5-6 albums out of some 40 releases, as they seem to edit every session of theirs on CDR (and that's a major problem, you have to be ascetically selective above all). That's why I describe the experience of their sound as familiarly "otherworldly".
ReplyDeleteHowever the particular unreleased recordings rank among their early and more interesting phase (2000-2002 in my opinion) and I decided to post these as an example of what they are doing as sonic manipulators (and not artists nor musicians because they are not).
PS. I will agree that if their review of their work (not only as ENDGAME but also as TRIAX, ALTO STATUS etc.) was as harsh as some of their Audion criticism, some 80% of their recordings should never see the light of day.
Curious this, as I don't think I've ever been harshly critical about anyone. I may express disappointment sometimes in Audion, and I've never been able to see the point of blatant noise just for the sake of it. I always try to be objective.
ReplyDeleteAs to Endgame's output, we've only ever issued about a quarter (maybe less) of what we've recorded in sessions. We are in fact very choosy and try to conceptualise things when possible, some of it is cosmic ooze, some is deliberatly repetition, via Krautrock on to purely avant-garde and industrial
Seems I've offended someone here in the past, sorry, hard to be a critic and musician without sometime getting a bit picky.
Endgame music? Judge for yourself...
http://home.btconnect.com/ultimathule/tachyon/endgame/menu.html
free listening at...
http://endgame.bandcamp.com/
I would love to know what "their character asssasinations of us" refers to? To my knowledge, the only thing I've ever written about Vas Deferens in Audion is as follows...
ReplyDeleteTekito Communications
In the highly unlikely city of New Orleans there's a bustling underground of avant-rock experimentalists. Yes, believe it, not all music from New Orleans is ragtime jazz. Tekito's products all look very "home made", with gaudy colours the order of the day, or real tacky primitiveness. The same goes for the music, which is broad-ranging and often totally outlandish. Their press release says "Unhinging minds is our business, and business is good". Here's a brief summary of the first six releases...
Tekito 1: Electric Company and Vas Deferens Organisation MORE PELVIS WICK FOR THE BOLONEY BONERS comes from those people behind the "Musik Von Tonefloat" CD, but is completely different in that it seems to be almost entirely sampled and Midi composed. I could be wrong, as it has all the clichés of your usual pop record done this way, except that they take it all to excess, as a mad and funky selection that's really far too freaky for its own good. Tekito 2: Getting madder and even more diverse are the related band Sound, whose DRUNK ON CONFUSION is often totally potty, as a kind of lop-sided pop/jingle music played at far too fast a speed. There are also unusual synth excursions, tracks that sound like more recent stuff from The Residents, and a real storming space-rock number. Tekito 3: Also related (with Frankie Teardrop, aka Doug Ferguson from Ohm and Tonefloat) are Muz, whose BANANA IN PORTUGUESE I didn't get on with at all. It all seemed very oppressive and in-yer-face masses of sampling, Midi files and techno. Tekito 4: Vas Deferens DRUG TROUBLE - I didn't get on with either, although it starts out nicely avant-spacey. It's that techno element again! Tekito 5: Electric Voodoo STAYIN POWERS is some sort of weirdo Afro trance. Ahem, next! Tekito 6: The most home-made of the lot (a CDR in vivid yellow/green case) again takes us towards The Residents, or as they say in the press blurb - that LAFMS vein, most notably popularised by Negativland - and then becomes more and more a mixture of everything Zappa did before getting dangerously close to thrash metal.
So, an interesting label for those into the weirder cruder end of modern experimental music, especially if you're not fussy about (or even like) techno edges or unlikely other musics that get thrown in on these.