Natural Snow Buildings - The Centauri Agent (Vulpiano Records, 2010)

VULP-0013 is Natural Snow Buildings’ first release of 2010, the free-for-download double LP The Centauri Agent! On part one, the 41 minute “Our man from Centauri” sets the stage, a cosmic, sprawling opener with themes that continue on into “The accidental remote viewer”, before fizzling out into static. Part two is comprised of nine beautiful and intense tracks (particular stand-outs including “The Psychic Circle/Uchronia”, “The storm of resurrection”, and “Solar flares”). Lovely and intricately woven as ever, while frequently heading off into new and challenging sonic territory, Mehdi and Solange have created yet another very special work of musical art with The Centauri Agent!

Download here: http://www.mediafire.com/?ntdmwuu2o5e

—-Tracklisting—-

Part One:
1-Our man from Centauri
2-The accidental remote viewer

Part Two:
1-The Psychic Circle/Uchronia
2-Black holes
3-The storm of resurrection
4-Moscow signal
5-Phantom twin
6-Stuttering probe
7-Solar flares
8-Emergency network farewell broadcast
9-Memories found in a bill from a small animal vet

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Natural Snow Buildings - Ghost Folks (hinah, 2002)

1 Nuclear Winter / (Dispatches)
2 If I Can Find My Way Through The Darkness...
3 ... I Came Down Here
4 Sun
5 The Haunted Falls / (Let Us Now Praise Harry Powell)
6 Fallen Lords Were Riding Half Horses
7 With A Stolen Red Lipstick Bible On Her Side
8 They Are Still Hanging Around
9 (...)
10 Guns & Rifles
11 Nuclear Winter

Bizarrement, avant même d'avoir écouté l'album envoyé par Natural Snow Buildings, nous nous sentions déjà en terrain ami. Peut-être tout bonnement grâce à la simplicité des informations accompagnant leur album : une unique feuille de calque contenant les titres et les instruments, le tout tapé avec une fonte de machine à écrire. Et l'osmose n'a pas été démentie puisque nous avons craqué sur ces longs morceaux atmosphériques basés en majorité sur un trio guitare/boucles/violoncelle.
hinah

Funnily enough, without even listening to the album that Natural Snow Buildings sent us, we already felt on familiar ground. Maybe quite simply thanks to the plain information that came along with their album: just a sheet of tracing paper with the titles and the instruments, typed with a typewriter font. And the osmosis wasn't denied, as we fell for these long atmospheric tracks, mostly based on a guitar/loops/cello trio.
hinah

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Natural Snow Buildings - Night Coercion Into The Company Of Witches (self release, 2008)

1.01 Kadja Bosou (17:59)
1.02 Night Coercion (21:05)
1.03 Brooms, Trapdoors, Keyholes (29:44)
2.01 Gorgons (30:30)
2.02 Mirror Shield (21:05)
3.01 The Great Bull God (57:47)

Plus de trois heures de drone aux mouvements lents et particulièrement denses... édition limitée à 22 copies...

It is odd, but pretty safe to say that you don’t have this album and that you never will. A triple disc aural monstrosity, Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches (will be referred to as Night Coercion from here on out) was self released last year as an edition of 22 hand painted copies. It is absolutely insane to me that Natural Snow Buildings would put so much effort to create such a grandiose musical mega-behemoth only to limit its physical remnants to the seemingly irrelevant total of 22 copies. Just for the record, I also do not own a copy of Night Coercion. I pirated the thing and you should too. It is simply too amazing to be limited to those physical copies. Many of you may not be familiar with Natural Snow Buildings. I myself am no real expert on the band, but the proportions of their releases coupled with the unbending standard of their sound is simply beyond epic. Add to that an innumerable, sometimes untraceable discography and you got yourself the foundations of a myth my friend. Yet, somehow, the mysterious band lives up to, if not exceeds, the mythic swirl that surrounds them. Natural Snow Buildings are simply the purest form of DIY artistry in music that I have ever seen. I just could go on saying ‘wow’ all day. But what’s the point? Well, if you can manage to forget everything that surrounds the actual music, Night Coercion is probably one of the best drone based albums on the planet. Ha, that sounds so dramatic. And I’m not positive it is true, but it is definitely good enough to have me considering such a statement. The music here is dense. Thick layers of audio forestry that give one the sense of being lost in an enchanted jungle. The movement of the album’s compositional shifts are slow - like, Disintegration Loops slow - but Natural Snow Buildings pull it off as well as Basinski, it’s just where Basinski’s works were decaying, Natural Snow Buildings’ work seems to be growing ever so slowly out of control. Night Coercion stretches two and one half hours in running time and yet manages to stay completely engrossing from the beginning of first CD to the end of the third. I don’t know how it’s done, but Natural Snow Buildings definitely have enchantment on their side. Utterly astounding stuff.
Forest Gospel

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Natural Snow Buildings - Sung to the North (Students of Decay, 2008)

1 At That Time, It Was Always Winter (10:30)
2 The First Conjuror (59:42)
3 Sung To The North (9:28)

On ne présente plus... Folk et drone... Tirage limité à 100 exemplaires couplé pour la sortie de The Snowbringer Cult...

Limited to 100 copies. This CDR was available exclusively with the purchase of "The Snowbringer Cult".

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Natural Snow Buildings - The Dance of the Moon and the Sun (self release, 2006)

1.01		Carved Heart (1:06)
1.02		Cut Joint Sinews & Divided Reincarnation (15:19)
1.03		Interstate Roads (3:15)
1.04		Wisconsin (11:58)
1.05		Rain Serenade (3:21)
1.06		Dance Of The Moon & The Sun (6:26)
1.07		Felt Presence, Ghostly Humming (25:14)
1.08		Breaking Waters (2:46)
1.09		Eu Un Miroir, Obscurement (4:38)
1.10		The Cover-Up (5:09)
2.01		Tupilak (2:12)
2.02		Wandering Souls (3:48)
2.03		A Ten Guardian-Spirits Motherfucker (9:33)
2.04		Mary Brown (1:07)
2.05		Gary Webb (4:56)
2.06		Whose Eyes Are Flowers (5:23)
2.07		The Cursed Bell (2:16)
2.08		All Animals In The Form Of Water (4:39)
2.09		Lie There (3:37)
2.10		John Carpenter (12:06)
2.11		Away, My Ghosts (2:52)
2.12		My Bones Are Yours (4:47)
2.13		Search For Me (4:02)
2.14		Tunneling Into The Structure Until It Falls (7:04)
2.15		Remains In The Ditch Of The Dead (9:50)

French duo Natural Snow Buildings shame the world with this huge endeavor. ‘The Dance of the Moon and the Sun’ is a sleepy giant of a third release: two CDrs, each filled to the 80-minute brim with a complete genre of sounds. NSB runs closely alongside the catalog of the Franco-friendly Constellation and its American lesser-half Kranky, threading simple melodies between rich, swollen instrumentals. Made of Solange and Mehdi, the band enjoys the highest qualities of small collaboration and total mind-meld. Sung in modest, perfect English, the band’s littler songs are straight-forward contractions of the bigger forms which fill the bulk of the discs; nevertheless, the band has a skill for both styles, cramming as much into the velocity of a two-minute track that they do in twenty.

From the top, songs like the unofficial 15-minute opener “Cut joint sinews & divided Reincarnation” spell out the bands thesis “what was ‘Post-Rock’?”; this track in particular playing out like latter Tarentel with persistent, grounded percussion and smothering space-atmosphere. There is an equal distribution of droning raga-sagas and near-traditional downbeat pop songs, with the more condensed tunes acting as segues between moments like the spacious Sigur Ros of “Wisconsin.” Despite the diversity of tone and timbre from track to track, songs of both form notch into a progressive harmony like in the groove of an LP - such as when the title-track emerges from the stellar-feedback of the mounting predecessors, breaking open into a ghost-ship chorus uncannily reminiscent of Constellation’s HRSTA. The epic “Felt presence, ghostly Humming” is a total release in itself, with 25-minutes of black & purple Labradford-like kaleidoscope and slithering chords of electric guitar. Incredibly, the track evolves beyond all precedent, as the glistening washes come into focus with angelic chants and blooms of plucked strings. A handful of voice/acoustic sketches follow like the band resurfacing: a smear of melancholy, rainy-day melodies leading into the second disc.

“Tupilak” is a short yet sinister transition into the graying center of this opus, with lupine howls and winds buzzing in the murk. Windy & Carl are felt in the ancient rite of “Wandering Souls”, and like a global conniption of tribal spirit, the opening Tarentelic dance is reprised in “A ten guardian-spirits motherfucker” with the sequined percussion of bodies stomping the earth, bleeding into golden tones and exotic strings. “The cursed Bell” comes midway this side and rings out with clarity so sharp and a voice so sincere it hurts, following the fantasy which precedes it. “My Bones are yours” alights like a jet-rocket with a wall of glittery guitar that lifts the back of this album up above whatever higher ground it had settled itself to; “Tunneling into the structure until it falls” and “Remains in the Ditch of the Dead” exit this collection on high - despite the titles - disintegrating into the air, ready to reform and recycle into the first disc’s “Carved Heart”.

It is advisable to play the discs back-to-back (to back-to-back), as any seam is likely unintended and would falsely partition these 25 pieces necessarily recorded to two discs. Perhaps the most valuable citation would be last year’s fantastic ‘We Lowered a Microphone into the Ground' by Reigns; still, the breadth of ‘The Dance of the Moon and the Sun’ is so great and the emotion so vast, references inevitably fail to describe the experience. Printed labels on the discs, hand-printed, hand-assembled, hand-drawn covers and bound booklet with lyrics - this is an incredibly crafted work of art holding an even greater body of music. Tremendously recommended. The one pictured is red and I believe all gone, I’ve got a blue one in an edition of 19 and is surely disappeared by this point… there be rumor of a Time-Lag release (re-release?) in the future, so stay awake until that moment. (self-released dbl-CDr, that’s it)

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