AFRICAN GHOST VALLEY “AAM” C20 (Jollies Records)

Mangling our preconceived distinctions 'twixt beat and texture, texture and drone, drone and loop, loop and beat, AGV kick up some modular dust and glue that flurry of gyrating particles all back together to form spacious, lofty soundscapes for us all to wade on through, in hazy dream time.

Whether or not that crackle was organically harvested or digitally contrived isn’t something to discern anytime soon cz all the other sonic posits keep pouring over us in arhythmic & fleeting patterns at critically timed paces. 

Yeah, it’s heady, disorienting, and all around pretty fucking great!

https://jollies.bandcamp.com/album/aam

and/or

http://www.jolliesrecords.com/

—Jacob An Kittenplan

AFRICAN GHOST VALLEY “Ercamescz” C20 (Oreille Gardée)

As harsh as African Ghost Valley’s shredded electronic tones are, there’s a strange gentleness that infiltrates at points, hinting at melody, offering flashes of vulnerability in the midst of the dense, angst-laden song cycle. Yes, one of the tracks is called “Breathing Mud,” and that’s exactly the sense of what listening to “Ercamescz” really feels like, at least from an aural perspective: it’s the audio equivalent of breathing mud. Which you can’t do or else you’ll die. So … there’s a bit of tension here in AGV’s work.

(Oddly enough, “Breathing Mud” kind of sounds like smashing up a hotel room.)

Shouldn’t be a surprise. African Ghost Valley has dropped several excellent releases over the past few years, and “Ercamescz” is no exception. A “mini album,” this mad little tape positively sizzles with anxiety, acting as a portal to your woolliest fears, chilly and frightening and a quick tip of the mental scales away from full-on madness. But there’s still those moments of clarity, of glistening hope amid the darkest passages. There aren’t many of them, but they’re there. They probably get swallowed up completely in the end though.

https://soundcloud.com/african-ghost-valley

https://oreillegardee.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

AFRICAN GHOST VALLEY “Yhvasca” (Jungle Gym Records)

African Ghost Valley is a Canadian/European electronic duo that produces self-described “heavy, loud and floating landscapes.” On YHVASCA, the group’s first effort for Jungle Gym Records, listeners are presented with six concise dark ambient numbers that act as “a soundtrack for post-apocalyptic suburbia.”

YHVASCA opens with “APO IIXII,” a constantly shifting piece with loops and synth drones fading in and out of the mix, competing for space. Some other favorites include “WARMA”—which sounds like the remnants of a song crushed to bits and buried beneath electronic murk—and the title track “YHVASCA”—featuring waves of foreboding noise and light, twinkling chimes lurking in the background.

With YHVASCA, listeners are offered a brief glimpse into the universe that African Ghost Valley inhabits. The enigmatic and ever-shifting nature of the album, coupled with its run time of just over twenty minutes, lends itself to repeated listens. Check it out, and let YHVASCA be the soundtrack to your droning dystopian nightmare.

Jungle Gym FB
Jungle Gym Bandcamp
African Ghost Valley FB
African Ghost Valley Soundcloud

-- Brandon Spaulding

AFRICAN GHOST VALLEY “Dark Tropicals” (Entertainment Systems)

Dark Tropicals is a dense vision from African Ghost Valley, the duo irradiating jungle landscapes with their noxious sonics, enveloping territories with complete twilit atmospherics. To remove oneself from the concept of Dark Tropicals would be wasteful – the words have meaning, whispered under breaths as totemic mantras, each syllable a powerful spell cast on listener and vicinity alike. Life creeps, burdened by poisons unleashed by humans. Life recedes, all of it, as intelligences higher than ours increase the concentration of our chemical annihilation so that we, too, succumb to the encroaching uninhabitability. I’m such a downer today.

But dang, turns out if you let all this icky-sticky-ness leak into your mainframe, the resulting output sounds pretty cool, at the very, very least. Maybe this mass eradication is the cure for what ails the ol’ planet, or at least it’s the last gasp before we turn our top-of-the-food-chain-status certificates, the ones we all have laminated and stored neatly in our home offices, over to the hyperintelligent machines doing all that eradicating. The tropics have rotted, life is on the brink. It’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but without the happy ending! (I forget – did T2:JD have a happy ending?)

African Ghost Valley is anticipating the end. Bass bubbles form the foundation, and synthesizers pierce them with impunity. Dark Tropicals decays and rots before our ears. Become enmeshed in the decline.

African Ghost Valley

Entertainment Systems

--Ryan Masteller

AFRICAN GHOST VALLEY "ARA" (Hyle Tapes)

Mystery is often inherent with tape labels. It would seem at least double that for those issuing

very limited edition electronic music tapes. This one certainly falls in line in this respect. A Google search of label Hyle Tapes took me to a one page website which in turn led me to  Facebook and Bandcamp pages. Nothing unusual with that, except nowhere did I learn anything more about African Ghost Valley than the tape itself offered-which was next to nothing.

So, let the music speak for itself. I'm all for that and sat down to initiate repeated listenings to the four tracks that comprise the offering. I was pleasantly surprised. Pure electronics with a healthy dose of effects enlighten "songs" like "Dunesl Ceremonies" and the title cut. Stylistically, it is clearly cohesive and the music blends well from track to track. An added perc is the quality of the production itself. This tape is very well recorded and sounds great both through my system and headphones.

Flipping the tape brought the real gem here. "Always Eat What You Kill" consumes all of the B side and is a provocative and sometimes challenging listen. The best electronic music serves to do more than provide background drone, which if poorly done it can easily become. This tape and particularly this cut provide everything this genre can hope for. This is, in a nutshell, excellent stuff.

I would be curious to hear a full length album from this outfit, and for that matter, more of the releases from Paris-based Hyle Tapes.

www.hyletapes.com

-- Bob Zilli