from Smooth Assailing
loopool
[2007, jk tapes]
if you liked loopool's courtesy run rampant twelve inch from last year, you'll like these offerings as well. that's not to imply that these two releases sound the same; there's none of the piano flourishes, nor the noisier ones, but spells also stands as a quality release in garnier's oeuvre.
what you will get on this cassette is loopool's trademark darkness; a kind of meshing of dark ambiance with a faint industrial influence. his erudite lyrics, which tend to waver between science, spirituality and the conscious, are often delivered in a manner which distorts them (overdubbing, reverberation and various other affects). jean-pierre's spoken word style, along with those manipulations, will play perfectly into the gloomy mood.
the opener, at least one thing in common, is one of two pieces of music on spells where the lyrics are pretty understandable (a lyric sheet is included, though), he'll compliment that with a nice choppy drone in the background and a mechanically repetitious synth track. that was alright, but things will start to look up with be shamed. as with nearly all of the tracks on this tape, it features minimal electronic work and a background element that establishes a cold and hopeless tone. it just happens that the synth layer is more memorable in this instance. i like the reverb to the vocals as well, which gives them a haunting quality. for you is an interesting piece, the main layer of vocals is a slightly distorted whisper, but at the same time there's a slowed down creepy sounding one. the only electronics are a subtle, vacillating hum, but what i like the most is the moaning female choral vocals that give off a gothic atmosphere (not in the let's dress like edward scissorhands sense). become god is another nice track, while the lyrics (throughout) are my least favorite part of the loopool experience, even when they're as clearly delivered as they are here, i can't deny the memorable (and minimal) synthesized foundation of become god. the final (listed) track, i want my mother back, has the vocals so affected that i can't make out a single word. everything comes together in a noisy, yet, still ethereal blur. spells ends with a fifty-one second slowed down reprisal of become god which abruptly ends when the tape does.From Stylus
Robedoor/Loopool
Blood Trance
[Not Not Fun, 2005]
This tape is a summertime creation I’m told. Worthwhile information; otherwise I would have dragged out the glacial metaphors for yet another attempt at drone exposition. Definitely ritualistic, this one. One needn’t peek at the Julian Cope-esque insert to get the idea. Loopool’s infinite dirge and desperate death mews would convince you quickly enough. If this sound be summer, it be summer in the desert, surrounded by bones, the only moisture around the gummed blood oozing from recent victims of the brutal sun.
Every drone group I’ve encountered consists of relatively normal folk flaying guitars, twisting knobs, and stomping pedals. For once I’d like to see the players match the sound. This would require that Robedoor be a mob of skeletons with faceless lumps of desiccated flesh atop the vertebrae. On their side, the undead band anticipates Halloween, sacrificing slow-beating hearts to electric rumble gods and moaning ur-language gurglers. While the fragility of Robedoor’s decayed persons might complicate the music-making process, finally I would find an answer to my question: How is it that alien sound emits from ordinary people?
Ha ha! It was supernatural all along!
This tape hits the spot. No high-profile, years-in-the-making work will satisfy me more than this $3 buy. Drone passes at the speed of consciousness, and when I slip into its time, I feel as if I’ve entered a chopped and screwed version of my own mind.
Loopool/ Oneirothopter
S/T
[Audiobot, 2006]
A real nightcrawler, this one. Need a slimy parasite to latch on to your torso and leak digestive acid through your skin? Pick up this split. In sound, akin to Double Leopards with far less dynamics and noise and far more toxic stagnation. This is swampland murk to be sure. No, the fog won’t clear, the mud will suck off your shoes, and all that foliage you think might be poison ivy, is poison ivy.
I’ve gotta play the imagery card for all its worth, because instrumentation proper over these forty minutes is damn near unidentifiable. Maybe if I lurked nearby while the group scuttled over their various knobs, patches, and cords, I could get some technical semblance of what’s going on here. But given our separation (blasted miles! One day Loopool…), I’ll have to go with impressions. The usual drone signifiers rear up: windy, lonesome blasts, creeping digital hiss, submerged gongs, all towards the usual goal: the sleep unto death. Loopool and Oneirothopter don’t separate themselves from the pack, but they create hefty gloomscapes to rival the bigger names.
Don’t fall asleep to Loopool, chums, or all your childhood bedside baddies will revive, the shadows will reanimate, and a ghastly plot will unfold whilst you’re captive in the bosom of slumber. Dreams should not be radiation-drift sci-fi gore flicks. Those are nightmares. No one wants nightmares. Play with the lights on.
[Bryan Berge]
From Ruido Horrible
Loopool - Stop the Revolution (Sycophanticide, Sycophanticide#006, 2005)
Loopool es una mortífera máquina de ataque armada y ejecutada a precisión. 'Stop the Revolution', cdr para Sycophanticide, posee elementos que podrían vincular su sonido con el dark ambient, el noise o el mismo industrial sin necesariamente ofrecer un aspecto fijo que le pueda definir a complitud. Empleando samplers y loops para resolver su propio rompecabezas de figuras mecánicas, Loopool coordina atmósferas de tintes cinematográficos y elusivas percusiones sintéticas con secuencias extraídas del azar de la electrónica y beats marcados, que incluso apuntan por momentos al EBM('Aftermath'). Por momentos, el disco se vuelve intensamente visual y agresivo; en 'Chipped' los coros de ovejas son vueltos loops que siguen al caos desatado en los taladreantes golpeteos amplificados. En algunos otros, la música adquiere una cualidad un tanto más experimental,
posted by Ruido Horrible 6:26 PM
loopool
courtesy run rampant one-sided 12"[2006, not not fun]
los angelean jean-paul garnier is a tough dude to pin down, and with courtesy run rampant, that task becomes even harder. i've heard four or so of loopool's albums and it seems to me that he puts together his best material when not not fun's putting it out. the first thing that i'd heard from him was the blood trance split tape with robedoor a few years back and i liked that a lot. then, recently, i'd checked out a bunch of his albums on (seattle's) sycophanticide and was kinda left scratching my head. at first, i didn't even think that it was the same guy (there is another loopool, in turkey, who makes ambient techno), but after some research, i was assured that all of it was the efforts of the same person. those albums contained either piano-based or chilly minimal electronic experiments. his stop the revolution disc is depths of outerspace frosty, but worth the time if you're down with that kind of music.the first track, outright rejection, is loopool exercising his billy joel demons with a good, albeit fairly brief, piano piece. then, without any kind of segue, we're catapulted into the tumultuous nowadays. over distortion and much welcomed noise we're privy to jean-paul's anguished ranting. no idea what he's so pissed about, probably the government. oh wait, here's the lyrics, lemme see...nope, not about the government this time. this is the noisiest that i've heard loopool ever get and it's a fine exhibition. more plz. the final track, the preliminary work, clocks in at twelve and a half minutes and it's a beaut. slow and plodding musical arrangements, ambient noise in the background as well as repetitious manipulated vocals from garnier. at about three minutes into it there's new vocals (as the original loop keeps on looping) which are delivered in a kind of moaned, haunting, manner (accentuated by the overall feel of the track), still, they're really not the attention grabber, that belongs to the music itself. i think this was the most that jean-paul's vocals have been on display. if this is a new musical direction for him, it'll be an interesting one to keep an ear, or two, out for.while the shortness of courtesy's running time might stir hesitancy in some people, it is packed with other goodies. when i pulled the lp out of its sleeve, at first i was bummed by the color that i saw: black. black?! a not not fun twelve inch that doesn't have a cool color?..then i flipped it around and holy crap...the etching on it is fucking amazing. click on the picture to get a bigger size so that you can see the detail. it's quite nice. plus, there's an hour long bonus cd-r entitled looks to feudalism. it's a minimal droner, but the fact that you're getting two albums for one has to make you feel a little better.
from RazorCake
LOOPOOL:
Stop the Revolution: CD
When I was a tiny eighteen year-older, I managed to find a copy of Throbbing Gristle’s “2nd Annual Report” in a little record store in St. Augustine, Florida on the way to Disney World with the family (I also had a fellow Disney World patron greet me with a “Flex your head!”, but I'll save that one for another time). The night we got back to West Virginia, I put on the TG record as I was going to bed and ended up having to get up and take it off after the light was out, it creeped me out so thoroughly. This here Loopool would likely do the same thing if I weren’t now all growed into a giant thirty-eight year-old. Built mostly on a foundation of swelling and ebbing feedbacks or synth tones or something, and then decorated with various crackly or echoey or boomy samples (even the one that sounds like a table tennis match manages to be vaguely unsettling, in context, especially when it gets interrupted by the one that sounds like machine gun fire), these ten tracks are like concise nightmare soundtracks. –Cuss Baxter (Sycophanticide)
from Foxy Digitalis
This is one or the only things i can effectively elucidate about the quality of stop the revolution, and the indecisive style of this here album is what makes the evocations a sundry proposition for those listening. Each song presents a unique disposition and urges the listener to realign their headspace every 2-4 minutes rendering it something not easily disentangled from your utmost attentiveness. from what I can guess is bred from a cache of synthesizers, samplers and tapes, loopool weave their aural chronicles with restraint, illuminating the windowsills, overhang tiling and cosmic tents of circumstance, alluding to alchemical reinforcements. This is ominous shit that encompasses the attempted vacuuming of an aneurysm-inflicted doe, world war three synthesized by the incidental cackle of nuclear thunder chasms; uprise met with muscle shirt defiance and helicopter bedspread suggestions. Let’s say this lays waste to collateral bedfellows, wastebasket excluded… 8/10 -- Andrew Zukerman (10 July, 2006)
from Animal PSI
Loopool’s “Army of Meat”, while not the Bjork cover I had hoped, is a welcome left-field entry: over grand piano bedlam, a narrator exposits on nightmare worlds in dark, Current 93/Vincent Price-on-“Thriller” style which curtsies smartly into the fantastic, sinister impressionism of Quilts, whose soundscapes carry on with images restricted to the sensual world.
from Empty
Loopool ‘dunes soon’-sycophanticide-3” CDR still the format of the gods
/”Whether from above or below, oil will make the land a desert”. That could be a motto for a documentary about the wasteland awaiting us if we all keep on being as careless as we are now –careless enough to only see the light in the expendable and careless enough to only consider genius what’s closely or remotely akin to dogshit. And this, of course, could be the soundtrack to it. Like slowly drifting guitar ambient or like slowly shifting synth ambient.
from Dusted Featues
Loopool
Courtesy Run Rampant one-sided 12”
(Not Not Fun)
Noisy, detached musings for drone and noise ensemble, courtesy of one Californian mystery man. Flyblown, scorched earth vibes permeate the three tracks here, the last offering “The Preliminary Work” reaching the sort of tweaked, long-form highs experienced in one’s final acts. Please look after him and his conspiracy-addled record. Excellent shadow-corp etching on the B-side; edition of 200 numbered copies in spraypainted sleeves. Like watching a boat sink.
(www.notnotfun.com)
<!--[if gte vml 1]-->
bravenet.com