Customer Reviews

Disembodied

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The first song I heard off Disembodied was the song Embalmed and I was throughly impressed. This and its precursor Dreamatorium as well as the new CD Tunnel are quite frankly some of the best CDS out there. The freaky sounding guitar is brought to you courtesy of guitar god Buckethead and bass is provieded by the one and only Bill Laswell. Both instruments float about like upset ghosts, and all the noises that scared you as a kid are back to haunt you again. Just by looking at the album cover art you know what to expect. If death had a soundtrack then this would be it.

This is not quite industrial, not quite ambient, but rather experimental. This albums (and its precursor, Dreamatorium) seem to exist for the purpose of proving that noise can be an effective rythmic tool. Some of the "songs" have nothing other than mechanical churning providing the rythmic foundation, upon which layers of noise are added. Occasionally Bucketheads guitar surfaces with a spooky yet somewhat jazzy tone. Hanging Gallow's has some of the best of Bucketheads more relaxed electric guitar work. Totally worth the money if you are into pushing the boundaries of what is accepted as music. Interesting, absorbing, fascinating and hypnotic...

I purchased this not really knowing what to expect, since all Buckethead's projects differ greatly, and I have to say I'm impressed. There's not a whole lot to be said, this cd is about 40-50 minutes long, has only guitar and bass, and is five tracks long. Most of this is a lot of ambient noise, or creepy guitar sounds played for brief amounts of time. The guitar and bass are almost indecipherable under all the effects, but the droning creates kind of an eerie, yet relaxing feel. In fact, there's a good chance you'll fall asleep listening to this, the reason I can appreciate this is because me and my friends do a lot of recordings just like this one for fun. The most important thing is that Buck and Bill truly enjoy the music they do, such as this record. They put a lot of creativity into it, and pretty much whatever is on thier minds will show up in their work. Pure Imagination, (which Buck covers, coincidentally).So check this out, I'm sure you will enjoy it to some degree.

Listen to this alone in a dark basement. Then ask yourself if its good

What a true treasure we all have found in buckethead and bill laswell's doings!who would've thought that what george clinton began so many years ago would eventually mutate into somthing so drastically voided and tragically hip?!I absoultely love putting this in my xbox or ps 1 and looking at the trippy visuals on it,and the first cube cd even has a cd extra with some dated-but still cool -visual "buisiness" for track 1.For a real hallucinatory smorgasborg buy both these cd's and splice them together onto one disc using your pc.get the dvd "begotten" along with these and play the 2 cd's while the movie is playing.It's like the alice in wonderland/dark side of the moon thing x10!!!my only gripe is that the cd's are both only about 40 minutes long each,but I gave them both 5 stars so you know that's not a problem what-so-ever!If the times are a problem for you(maybe you need like 15 hours of atmosphereric music for a long "trip")I can't say enough about steve roach's "mystic chords and sacred spaces",buckethead's"colma"and"electric tears",shakuhachi flute for meditation,robert rich "stalker",bill townsend "celestial voyage",terry riley"in c",aphex twin"ambient collection",ravi shankar,some brian eno(hard to tell the truly ambient ones though.music for airports is good),steven molpern "spectrum",micheal stearns "sacred sites",angelo badalamenti's scores for "the straight story" "the elephant man" and "the beach",etc,etc,etc.if you like chillin' out do yourself the favor of getting this opus ode to buckethead's arch nemisis-the mighty death cube k world devourer!

I love ambient, and even darker ambient as in some of Laswell and Buckethead's projects, but this album went off the deep end into menace and depressing gloom. One exceptional track - Maps of Impossible Worlds - and the rest feels like noodling on a very bad trip. If you find yourself too happy or positive in life, then play this to bring yourself down and give yourself nightmares. Otherwise, stay away. You've been warned.

You have to listen to it more than once, Its a different CD but if you ever run a haunted house This is the album you want

I think this cd is just a bunch of noise, and I was listening to it, waiting for some type of guitar to enter, but i was dissappointed when i heard some guitar come in at the third song. I really dont like this cd, unless it was halloween, cause its just creepy and too ambient for my taste. I like buckethead when he plays actual music. Too weird for Buckethead, if that's possible, and definately too weird for me.

I play it LOUD every year at Halloween for the neighbors...

Death Cube K consists of Mr Bill Laswell, a man and bassist, and Mr Bucket Head, a man and guitarist. The impression I get is that Bill Laswell decided to work with Mr Bucket because that's the kind of thing he does; and, having done so, he realised that Mr Bucket's talents were limited, which explains why Death Cube K aren't a going concern any more. I'm still here, and so I get to write the book on Death Cube K.

Like a lot of the stuff Bill Laswell breathes on, 'Disembodied' is a mixture of very good and tastelessly awful, as if the man's musical bone was in the grip of a perpetual, slow-motion epileptic fit. On this record 'Disembodied' and 'Hanging Gallows' are the high spots, the former sounding like 'Zeit'-era Tangerine Dream, the latter a lengthy guitar solo which sounds a bit like Pink Floyd's more ruminative moments. 'Terror Tram' is a bad thing to call a piece of music, because trams are not frightening. Nonetheless it is also very much like early Tangerine Dream, and makes me suspect that either Bill Laswell or Mr Bucket have heard some of Tangerine Dream's early albums, back in the early days, their albums, early ones.

'Embalmed' sounds like cheap, poor-quality horror film soundtrack music, almost a parody of mysterious 'illbient', ruined by over-the-top guitar noodling. Being the second track, it's easy to ignore it and assume that Laswell and Bucket were having a bad patch. 'Pre Hack', the final track, is worse, such that it makes one wonder if the two players are chancers who were coasting on luck and front. It's just a lot of random, hyperactive guitar noodling and I hate it. I don't come away with a favourable impression of Mr Bucket. God knows what the rest of his stuff is like. Both these tracks dare you to laugh, because they're so juvenile.

So then, the title track, 'Hanging Gallows' and 'Terror Tram' are excellent great decent in that order, 'Embalmed' and 'Pre Hack' are offensively awful in that order. If the album didn't have the latter two tracks it would be twenty-three minutes long but really good; you could play it twice in a row, perhaps, to bring it up to album length. I can recommend James Brown as well, he's really good too.