Blist's new album, Endl Karticon

Not as good as the first s/t. The Flop-House scene's all about labels like Kimi nowadays.

It's better than Bright Eyes HAHAHAHAHA BRIGHT EYES

Oh and also the Pitchfork Media review of it is terrible OMG LEARN TO WRITE SUCKERS!!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

You didn't find the mix a little eggy? I always did have my doubts about Orgov Grellendot as a producer.

He's well known for his eggy mixing. A little on the cakey side. And what's with those looped oboes on the Soup Wound trilogy?

those aren't looped oboes, they're screwed and chopped samples of cattle in an abbatoir (Newsweek interview, 1/26/2005).

No, the track to which you're referring is Lacto-Ovo Vegetarian. Great track! However, the one I'm referring to is of course Arabella Please Come Out of the Vortex. The oboes in my view interfere with the screaming, creating a muddy midrange.

ROFFLE Mickey -- the idea that anyone at Pitchfork has even heard of Blist is riotous

it certainly was a controversial review. anyone know why they took it down?

If you burn this for me Col I will send you a pristine copy of the Grellendot produced - and never released - Farnsworth sessions. Then you'll hear cakey.

Maybe so, but Grellendot isn't always so cakey. Check out his work with Drunk Boxers, for example. The gelatinous drums lurch forward like a sticky bomb looking for a tank.

Anyone got a copy of that Pitchfork review?

it's up at lostmusik.ru but you have to use an anonymnous proxy to access the site

One of my friends said the electric fiddle loop on track 3 is from a Kastel outtake or B-side or something. True? Anyway, it's cool.

(and it would make sense, with the Grellendot connection)

I'm pretty sure they got C. Kihlstadt to play that for them at their home studio last time she was over there... I wish there were better liner notes, but I guess that'd be going against the vibe

Huh, I thought she had a falling-out with Jerzy.

i need to hear this NOW.

(btw I heard that Pitchfork withdrew the review after a very firm request from Harschell at Kimi. I have been on the recieveing end of such a request before when I played a prerelease of "Gargling mountain bread" on my long lost radio show. I keep a splinter in my skull as a reminder)

i'm getting a 404 from lostmusik now, wtf

wow, they were disappointed with a 9.2, huh?

x-post to gypsy, you're hardly wrong, the session was a long time ago... best revenge after a falling out is to sample old tapes. drag the ghost along. sick torture.

Pitchfork has a long-running feud with Kimi, since they gave the Axl Wotavator compilation such a crap review last year. The Blist 12 inches on Kartoffeln are priceless though.

the whole album's like a snuff film, really. but still somehow kind of disney. disney snuff!

Yeah, my little brother (who's way more into this stuff than me) calls it Death Pop.

(he's being ironic, but I know what he means)

Point your little bro towards Orgov Grellendot's Pipkins series then. "Hardly Here" and "Top Off" are as life-affirming as it gets.

Thanks to Mully for sending me the controversial Pitchfork review. I think one read of it is enough to explain why they took it down:

I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to describe Blist's third album, Endl Karticon, without making it sound repetitive and boring, two things it most certainly isn't. Whereas many modern Flop-house albums spill over with infectious beats and sci-fi sounds, and draw variety from a wide array of hired-in producers and guest spots, this does the opposite: It's the product of just three guys-- Torskvord, Grellendot and Neberlaks-- and the entire record is built around essentially a couple of simple beats with slight yet important variations - and, of course, those controversial looped oboes and cattle noises we've heard so much about, and quite possibly an uncrdited appearance by renowned fiddler C. Kihlstadt, if that is her distinctive string-snapping excesses on 'We Came to Prance'.
Blist have a knack for taking basic elements and sculpting them stupidly every time, a controlled, deliberate attack designed for pinpoint destruction and insight. They can turn a sheet of blistering, white-hot skree into a convincing hook simply by attaching it to the right part of the beat and controlling the volume and density of the noise, allowing Neberlaks's complex, incomprehensible, Estonian-inflected rhymes (largely about food and death) to weave their way through the tangle. Here, the harsh, cavernous textures coating the songs are ostensibly all dissonant, droning walls of noise cut through with scratches and samples of looped oboes and dying cattle.
The templates of Blist's tracks are augmented by an incredible wealth of detail in both their beats and backdrops. Cascading flumes of gutter noise torment the edges of "Hoots (Bloody Hoots)": They heave and bend, wavering in pitch and contorting into snatches of tortured melody. Close listening reveals that the squall is actually a tight cluster of dozens of drones, added and subtracted to mold the music into grit-teethed crescendos and dizzying passages of spiraling, exquisitely controlled chaos.
Neberlaks the MC spits head-spinning verses like "Is that a goat?? IS THAT A GOAT??!!" ("Kultur Masse Mensch") and "I eat, I eat, so what of it you fucker' ("Diet With Pride"). There's nary a nod to sex or personal enrichment, and in fact he opens the album by rapping, a cappela, 'Ten little monsters on my plate/ Which of you was the last one I ate?' a broad and open indictment of what he seems to see as Flop House straying from its early ideals.
Grellendot's production is eggy without being cakey. It's fascinating to observe the way he is able to fictionalise the mix, taking the sonic narative into reverse gear and stratifying the conceptual balance between the narrative and the disjunction of the narrative.
Crunching along in an endlessly meaningless and innovative fashion, Endl Karticon seems old-school in its simplicity, clarity and forthrightness, but sounds futuristic. Another powerful statement from one of modern Flop-House's greatest small group initiatives.

god that sucks that they didn't talk about the bonus track! Missy is tite on that one

I think you're talking about a Lance Lockarm bootleg, I've definitely seen it showing up as part of the album on soulseek but it's definitely not on the album... was on Lance's site about three days before Harschell's tin whiskered goons showed up.

but yeah, that track... it's like a magic Klaus Schulze / Gerogerogegege / Gillian Welch hybrid working one over

opps I goffed

milton if you were handsome i would kiss you - thanks so much I have it and am listening now.

first impressions - less cakey than, well, eggy. he has an uncanny ability to fictionalise the mix, doesn't he?

Yes, and of course he does like to taking the sonic narative into reverse gear and stratifying the conceptual balance between the narrative and the disjunction of the narrative.

haha yes Col: Pitchfork, eh? Neberlaks hasn't been in the group since the "Hokum Swords Impinge Ep" - and even then he's a trombone player not a rapper!

I've heard the "vocalist" is generated using pig and goat grunts, constructed with literally thousands of tape splices. Word has it Torskvord is somewhat anti sampler and computer - claiming they destroy integrity and feel. Ludicrous - but with results like these who would argue?

I actually like Dominique's stuff for Pitchfork usually, so that review is sorta disappointing.

Fools!

Apparently Torskvord considers quantum-computer manipulation to be analog at its essence. Supradigital, perhaps, but analog is analog...

I guess I thought that ILM would be totally done with Blist after that Thom Yorke interview in the Guardian where he couldn't stop talking about how "mind-blowing" they were.

Apparently that muffled scream on "The Harvester comes for clueless fucks" is Yorke!

Really? Hmmm. I can kinda hear it.

i love the relentlessness of that track. the overwhelming heaviness of it. the way a different sound of terror becomes enmeshed in it at each bar.

its just the way Grellendot fictionalises the mix i guess

hmm I'm not quite sure what's going on in this thread, there's a lot of active misinformation in these posts and not everyone seems to be taking it entirely seriously but at least most of the sentiment is positive.

mullygrubbr, you know that Nerve profile was a prank on me, right? not that I'm handsome or anything, but I definitely don't have a middle lip, unlike whatever that thing is in that picture. in any case I would agree that these almost aggressively fictionalized mixes are the Grellendot trademark.

Indeed. He has an uncanny ability to fictionalise the mix.

"Taking it seriously" would be kind of a mistake, wouldn't it? I mean, there's a certain doomy nod-winkishness to the whole catalog, kind of a brutalist slapstick, and that's certainly played up here. (And here's an Easter egg -- check the first and last letters of the song titles...anagram, is all I'll say.)

All of this discussion is irrelevant to the main story, however. For long before this album's few reviews entered into circulation, I had come to recognize this group, and all music, for what it is -- a red herring deliberately introduced by the mind parasites.

up all night milton...can't sleep...brain fizzing...grellendot...

no mully. not Grellendot.

From the Electrometric site:

Flopp Haus scene-leaders Blist are set to embark on a UK tour this April. Confirmed dates so far are:

3rd Apr - Kvak Shak, London
5th Apr - Brass Irie Club Night, Cinderella Rockafella's, Liverpool
6th Apr - Trades and Labour Club, Hull
10th Apr - Munter's, Glasgow
12th Apr - Sonic Pig-Pile, Leeds

More dates are expected to be added soon. Orgov Grellendot, who produced recent critically acclaimed album Endl Karticon, promised "a full live show, including 6-piece brass section, livestock and live video art from Norway's Hupi Bojangls. Plus, we might just bring a few special guests along for the intensity."

Blist's only previous UK appearance was at 2002's Glitch Leet festival in Doncaster.

Hey why don't you all shut up about my album??

three music mole do you fucking think I care what you will says? You better watch your back next time you roll up into Williamsburg

Woah

Was that Torskvord? He's well known to impersonate himself on the web in order to pick up furries.

Blist have been a little quiet of late. Is there new material? Last I heard they were recording in Liechtenstein with Rabbit Numnum El Tragedia, but that seems to have gone nowhere, no surprise.