Esoterica Landscapes 7 – Hokmah Nistarah LP FULL DOWNLOAD
Bonnie McNairn, Factor E. Ofone, Jim Wilson comprised Esoterica Landscapes 7, and they were like a sick group of scientists trying to compose their way out of a world war, releasing three albums or so in 1990 and then, from what I can gather, disappear like Kevin Spacey’s “poof” scene in Usual Suspects: The world never heard from them again as a unit, though two of them popped up again in Voice Of Eye and the other went on to form Pleasure Center and Awfull Records.
Maybe that’s for the best; we weren’t ready. Hokmah Nistarah was astonishingly ahead of its time and even now feels like a blind drop into a synth-coder sugar-spin of flying cars and analog-everything. I have no idea how kids cobbled together their noise in ’90, but there’s obviously pitch-bending, oscillations galore, echo, delay, drone — all the techniques we’ve come to know and alternately love and despise. What sets EL7′s music ahead is their keen use of instrumentation to guide their space-y star-slides into oblivion.
The average dipspit might hear the title track and call its contents a bunch of effects slapped together. The average dipshit, of course, is eternally wrong — holding all of these tracks together is a steady march of guitar. No matter how ghost-ridden the lazerquest becomes, there’s an anchor to hold onto, and it comes in handy.
That’s when the trio are at their best, as a matter of fact: When they start off with a slow, resounding bass note, for example, the random forest-buzzes and alien ear-tweaks make that much more sense. There are times when things threaten to fall apart, particularly at Side B’s beginning, out of tune guitaring making you wonder what you signed up for. “Arotic Chaorder” is an aberration, thankfully — the proceedings turn sharply back to haunting string plucks and screaming electronics soon enough.
It’s energizing to locate albums like Hokmah Nistarah, chiefly because it’s encouraging to know indie musicians were creating such flash-fried swamps of pure machine-metal madness back when I was 12 and before I was born and WAY before I was born. It means there’s still more to explore and always will be, know what I’m sayin’?
In Esoterica Landscapes 7 you’ll find the exoskeleton for all sorts of ideas coming together years down the line, including:
- the proggy guitar noodling of Landing
- the creepy-crawly excesses of Spires That In The Sunset Rise
- the mad-scientisms of Sean McCann
- the percussive campfire squall of Raccoo-oo-oon
- the slow-loping waves of Sun Araw
- guess who!?! Starving Weirdos!
- Mudboy, baby (more on him later)
- Pink Priest, fool (ditto)
- C. Spencer Yeh / Burning Star Core (in fact that might be the closest connection; “I’ll Die For My Own Sins” is like Papercuts Theater walking slowly on a thin sheet of ice)
- Book Of Shadows (another group that mixes live instruments in with improv/noise/drone)
- Smegma (but far less eclectic song-to-song)
- older Sylvester Anfang, before they became Sylvester Anfang II and got more post-rock-y
- the between-song DJ-ing of Racebannon
You get the idea right? Make sure you download this one above — it’s an almost despicably enjoyable recording. PARTY LIKE IT’S 1990!!!
