Blood Money - Blood Brotherhood CD NEW Ken Ueno Dalek

   1. Bloodlust
   2. Peri
   3. Secret Rapture
   4. Damascus
   5. Showa
   6. Black Nature
   7. Voice Untouched By Conversation
   8. Horizon

Ken Ueno - voice
Jon Whitney - 808
Thomas Worster - guitar, Nord Micro Modular

Recorded 2006 at Deadverse Studios by Oktopus.

The second full-length release from Blood Money is the first to be both conceived and recorded completely together. For this, the trio of Ken Ueno, Jon Whitney, and Tom Worster joined Dalek's producer/sound wizard Oktopus in the Deadverse Studios to commit to tape songs formed through dedicated rehearsals and perfected in their live performances.

In the three years since the debut, Axis of Blood, Ken Ueno has spent a year in Rome (winner of the 2006-2007 Rome Prize), had numerous orchestras perform his works worldwide, and has accepted the position of Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Tom and Jon remain in Boston and are now forced to collaborate over long distances.

Blood Brotherhood is notably more song-based yet stays very close to the heart of the group: the intensity of noise, the freedom granted through improvisation, the power of rhythm, and the humanity of introspection. While the introduction of a professional studio has granted them the ability to multitrack numerous layers the group has, for this recording, chosen to remain with its main instrumentation: vocals, Nord Micro Modular, and Roland 808, with very slight guitar added on one song.

Sometimes even avant-garde classical music doesn't afford the aesthetic freedoms that the truly restless hunger for. To that end, cigar-chompin' composer and academic Ken Ueno has joined up with Tom Worster and Jon Whitney to form Blood Money, a trio that attempts a meditative inversion of the power electronics aesthetic. "Blood Brotherhood" is not a linear or normal song-based record, but it is completely shorn of the tiresome masculine histrionics that permeates much noise music. In its place, with the barest of sonic tools, are songs mostly based around less than a smattering of accidental percussion, a thin lattice of electronic hums, whines and static buzzing, and the tightly simmering vocals of Ueno, delivering through clenched teeth and muted microphone, an otherworldly hybrid of Dionysio D'Arrington, Telepathik Friend, tuvan throat singing, Diamanda Galas and speaking in tongues. Some of the earlier numbers with just the spooky tom of a single drum, mosquito-like keyboard hum and vocals that seem to be attuned to an alien language, unsure of each syllable remind me of a summoning at midnight under the haunted walls of a hundred-years old fortress. Ghost ships pass through a fog-shrouded inlet. Metal snakes shed their skin and consume diamonds. Another time, stretching every syllable to the breaking point, Ueno proclaims a coming release, as the undulating noise pulses drop out, and all that is left is the flickering murmur of a cathedral organ. "Blood Brotherhood" is a bold symbiosis with silence, a joining of irreconcilable opposites for a haunted inner peace. As an art statement, in conception and execution, "Blood Brotherhood" often hedges close to stunning. Whether you'd want to listen to it repeatedly? Well, let's just say that there are handy pop-psych exams no farther than your internet browser far more qualified to judge that than I. - Matthew Moyer, Movement