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Thank you for your interest in Sound Animal.

SA has two albums with from Kryrart and self-releases singles and EPs. The band's habitat is Berkeley, CA, though collaborations happen through the air.

Sound Animal experiments with found sound objects like tennis rackets, plays instruments in strange and unusual ways, like violin bows on dulcimers that are run through effects pedals and. The first album, NewSoundLand is a kind of Dark Ambient this is made with instruments rather than being electronic. It's all tone-stories about locations, for example a bell tower in a storm (the storm sound made by shaking a container of tennis balls and waving a plastic sheet.) 

The second album, Death of Ages, a dark Avant-Garde is about death and destruction.

On this page, you will find, in order: downloadable photos, a voice clip, downloadable one page file and images, excerpts from interviews, contact info, influences, label link, link to page of responses to the music, about the album, link to song, talking points, favorite bands, press photos (more are available in the EPK for radio), a video, contact form.

More information is in the EPK for Radio and in the introductory EPK page -- more photos there as well.  Contact for a link to download the songs. If you're doing podcast interviews and want to claim one of the photos on the site, let me know.

Press photos

By Sound Animal

Sound Animal's art is the logo

Album to be released by Kryrart Ambient label in Germany

By Sound Animal

By Sound Animal

Oct 2021

Sound Animal

Album to be released by Kryrart label

Sound Animal's art is the logo

Excerpts

Sound Animal band's album NewSoundLand is forthcoming from the international Kryrart Ambient label. Guitar, bodhrán, dulcimers and lap steel slide played with bows, double shepherd's flute, silver flute, voice, electric tennis racket. Singles out in Neo-psych, Avant-Garde, Psychedelic Doom and more... The habitat is Berkeley, California.

Website

Excerpts from Interviews:
 

"Can you tell us who or what inspires you? 

I’m most inspired by current bands in genres like Drone Metal. I don’t play like him, but the guitarist who influences me most with the fully committed passionate state I get into, like when playing solo guitar tunes, never taking the moment for granted, is Paul Kossoff, the guitarist with Free and Backstreet Crawler in the 70s. The intensity of love for each note and how deep he dug to express fully – that’s where I like to be." Ross Beattie interviewing Sound Animal for It's Psychedelic, Baby! magazine.
 

 

"What sort of pedal setup do you use? 

I want to do a wry music video where, while the listener hears the long song, you see me getting ready to play by disentangling the wad of cables. When the song is ending, I’m finally ready to get started playing. 

I sort of fetishize pedals. When I passed by a giant wall of shelves of them the other day, I had to hold myself back from licking the glass." Blog post copy from his blog.

music details


Contact.

Influences: Romantic Era, modernist composers, British Blues Rock, Neo-Psych, Stoner, Experimental, Hard Rock, Atmospheric Black Metal, Avant-garde Metal, Doom, Drone Metal, Noise Metal

Album to be released by Kryrart Ambient, parent label Kryrart Records. Like the EP Pandemonium Assistance, which is similar to the painful atonal modernism of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, the album is a relatively small work for an avant-garde nice. Some singles are also niche, while others are less so. Forthcoming albums however, are much more accessible for a wider audience.

Interview style: Playful or just relaxed and straightforward. Please contact before using any photos not on the EPKs. The photos here can be downloaded. There will be more later high res.

What do people say about the music? The responses are catalogued in this blog post, First Responders.
 

Longform Bio

Sound Animal plays whatever it takes to get the Noise, including electric tennis racket, or a dulcimer played with a violin bow and run through distortion pedals.

Earliest influences include Romantic Era composers like the Russians Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, German Beethovan, Austrian Schubert (Winteirresse is proto-Doom), Norwegian Grieg, Finish Sibelius, Czech Dvořák incorporating folk tunes. These traditions gave way to the atonal Schoenberg, Webern and Berg and industrial Cage. Playing Romantic Era music on silver flute led to a scholarship. First Place at State contests singing Lieder in German with songs like Schubert's "Farewell, Our Love to Sever" and "Der Todd und das Machen."

Later, Krautrock became a particularly relevant influence for this album, because like some favorite Romantic composers, it was born in Germany, which is where the Kryrart label is based, though its founder is from the Ukraine and they often release music by Russians. While influences come from music from all over the world, the November album with that label has an icy timeless Eurasian folk tone.

NewSoundLand is forthcoming from its sub-label, Kryrart Ambient, which that releases international bands such as the excellent Sigil of Time and Alchon. Kryrart favors elements such as some harsh dissonance when appropriate amidst hypnotic melancholy slow beauty, aching for the sanctity of pristine wilderness. Since the parent label includes quite a bit of Black Metal, if you have assumptions about that that you haven't looked into much, here is a site that provides context to how many musician calling themselves Satansists may look at it, which is different from other forms associated with a more controlling approach to the world stage.

Anton from Russian Kryrart label band Train to Elsewhere said in this fantastic interview: "The pagan traditions are an archetypical part (in a sense that Carl Gustav Jung would describe it) part of our collective unconsciousness, our culture. In a way they have been repressed for centuries, thus leading to trauma. Our idea is to free those archetypes." That got me thinking about freeing specific locations of events that remain there hovering like ghostly imprints. I realize that it's a strange goal for me to create the drama through imagination and then free it by imortalizing it, but there you have it! The dramas are representational of real things that expand beyond. The songs on that album all are mimicking painful but beautiful location-specific dramatic representative events.

Another album forthcoming is about death and destruction, with a strong Romantic Era background, is a response to our current dystopia. And EP Epigenetic Roadtrip comes from tuning into the DNA stories my ancestors tell, and they include the Melungeons: Native American/African/Celtic mixed blood.

Some favorite bands are Noise/Drone: Earth from Olympia, Washington, German Caspar Brötzmann Massaker, California's Ty Segall and Japanese Boris.

Some others are Psychedelic Stoner Spanish Arenna, Australian Psychedelic Doom Comacozer, Greek Folk Doom Villagers of Ioannina City, Swedish Space Doom Yuri Gagarin, Russian Post Metal 1000Mods, Chicago Post Metal Pelican, Russian Doom Juice Oh Yeah!, Australian The Marlbourgh Men, the Russian Psychedelic Doom Dog Chasing Man.

Also Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Black Angels, Gary Clarke Jr., Wooden Shjipps, My Sleeping Karma, Causa Sui, Godspeed You! Black Emporer, Wand, Clouds Taste Satanic, Husky (Circle the Wagons), Pearly Goats, Steinsopp, Barn Owl, Wet Cactus.

Unrestrained by genre, the semi-feral Sound Animal is Post-Everything, with elements among the wide range of tunes including Drone Metal, Noise Rock, Avant-Garde Metal, Psychedelic Stoner Doom, Experimental Dark Ambient, Neo-Psych, Post-Metal and more. The poignantly simple guitar marches and dirges are countered by complex layered songs with explosions and soaring flutes, ominous monsters dimming the sun and trapping the world. Tunes drop you into the worlds of folk demolitions and ice-harvest dances under the Aurora Borealis. Have a world-is-doomed party and let out the digs!

Contact: flameflower@runbox.com

Album

NewSoundLand

Sound Animal

Slow down for a magic carpet ride as each Lo-Fi tune transports you to an exotic state of mind in a dramatic location mimicked by the instruments. You're not a tourist here. You inhabit each place like a dream, a lifetime.

Released by Kryrart Ambient label in Germany. The album is subtly different from much ambient in that it's not electronic, no

Slow down for a magic carpet ride as each Lo-Fi tune transports you to an exotic state of mind in a dramatic location mimicked by the instruments. You're not a tourist here. You inhabit each place like a dream, a lifetime.

Released by Kryrart Ambient label in Germany. The album is subtly different from much ambient in that it's not electronic, no samples or synths. But an electrified tennis racket played with a rock.

The lengthy Avant-Garde Dark Ambient Instrumentals are created always with a Gibson Paul II guitar, and also dulcimers played with a bow, silver flute, double shepherd's flute, pungi, jaw harp, electric tennis racket, overtones, melodica, harmonica, bodhrán and found objects.

Guest appearance by Steve Gilmartin on "City!" playing guitar.

The pressured feeling of the self about to burst in a work camp seems endless. The dissonance of honest labor of harvesting ice is broken by a folk dance under the Aurora Borealis. Architecture and nature make music together during a potent storm in a tower, the brave guitar-bell ringing. The nun's meows spiral up the columns. The ocean is strong enough as it rolls you around in it that you're ready to surrender to nothing but nature. The birds are calling you. The city's industry goes dark.

Listen to ten second preview clips below of each of the ten tunes.

Read more…

Video