♫♪  Ensemble Pearl - “Painting on a Corpse”

Tier 1: OMFG guys, did you hear about this new SuperGroup called The Pearl Ensemble or something??? It’s the dude from Sun Oh and some japanese dudes and I think also some dude related to Werner Herzog?? I’m not really that into this sort of thing but I know you love this droney baloney bullshit — you def need to check this out.

Tier 2: Ensemble Pearl is truly stacked, man. Stephen O’Malley (sunn o))), Khanate, KTL, innumerable projects) on the Travis Bean reverb worship; Michio Kurihara (Ghost, Boris) tape delaying treble-blasted leads into oblivion; Atsuo (Boris) in full-on doom dub crawl percussion, delay on the snare, plus some gong atmospherics; Bill Herzog (Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter) keeping it all grounded with steady, mountainous bass work. You know you’re going to love this, man — like, it’s basically the Dead Man soundtrack on crack.

Tier 3: Four musicians who have proven themselves masters of contemporary extreme music apart and in previous collaborations get together in Japan to hash out a soundtrack commission received by O’Malley. The project, however, evolves into another beast entirely: a quartet experimenting together in the studio, their idiosyncratic tones combining into compositions of the most elemental variety. On “Painting On A Corpse,” our first taste of Ensemble Pearl’s self-titled album on Drag City, we hear isolated guitar leads swell and collide across spacious mixes, inhuman drones coaxed from sound sources we thought we knew so well, a rhythm section rattling out a perfectly ill-at-ease backdrop, maximum atmosphere yielding maximum results.

Pre-order Ensemble Pearl from Drag City. It will ship to your home on or around March 19th, and you will fall deep into it.

• Stephen O’Malley: http://www.ideologic.org
• Atsuo: http://fangsanalsatan.com
• Michio Kurihara: http://www.discogs.com/artist/Michio+Kurihara
• Bill Herzog: http://www.discogs.com/artist/Bill+Herzog?noanv=1
• Drag City: http://www.dragcity.com

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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