BxC press: Burning Star-Core's "...Where Every Night Is New Year's Eve" is one of the most annoying electronic songs I have ever heard and really, besides the title, doesn't seem to make any sense on this record. However, with its continual stuttering beats and stalls, sonically, it's pretty damn cool. -- Various Artists The My Pal God Holiday Record My Pal God - CD Brian Sokel 1/1/1997 http://rocket-fuel.com/newsite_reviews.asp?review_id=57 "Reynols and American John(s) also played with two Cincinatti bands featuring one Spencer Yeh and compatriots: Death Beam, a gtr/elec/drm trio that kicks out excellent jams with occasional Russian vocals, and Burning Star Core, a violin/electronics/percussion trio that played one of the more elegant extended free-sounding compositions I've heard in a while. For some reason, I didn't get any Yeh-affiliated records, but I'm gonna. Heard the Death Beam CD-R on the drive home and it was as good as the live show. Here's links: www.dronedisco.com, or www.dronedisco.com/bxc/." * http://www.blastitude/10/pg9.htm BURNING STAR CORE: A Definitive Party Atmosphere/Teen Hearts? Theme Parks! CD-R Like the Roesing Ape disc just reviewed, this is a Cincinatti 'noise' band that starts their disc off with a 'pop song'. I saw Burning Star Core play at the historical Southgate House in Newport, Kentucky (right across the river from Cincinnatti) and they did this real elegant long-form electro-acoustic free composition stuff. Needless to say, this pop-song opening sounds NOTHING like that. Track two is a little more like the show, with arrhythmic drum-machine patterns blanketed by a squalling broken-speaker noise-stream, though a keyboard arpeggiating out minor-key chords does bring out a pop side. And with track three it's back to near-total pop, with more actual sung lyrics in English. This is good pop, with a great electric piano chord-groove, and electro-crackle to keep it real. Mellow but not soft, na' mean? Uh oh, track five is also a pop song! Echo-y quasi-Lydon punk vocals over a tarded bass line and more crunchy electro-sounds. I'm not so sure what I think of the chorus lyric: "Would you like? My serpentine?" -- What is this, Axl Rose? But the operatic background vocals behind the lyric are cool. This isn't the Burning Star Core I know at all...but it's an equally interesting band. This could probably pass for some lost 80s underground electro-punk album, like some avant-limey answer to Krautrock or a more chilled-out D.A.F. Woah! I interrupt this review to mention that there's a great Prince sample in track six, "Progress III." Okay, I've read up a little on this release at dronedisco.com and I've learned that this disc is a re-release of TWO albums, the first and fifth ever released by the label. Roesing Ape is the 40th, so these are understandably kind of old...then again, the recording dates are printed right on here: 1996 and 1997, five/six years ago, so "duh." The older of the two is recorded not in Cincy but in Evanston, IL, so I get it...Burning Star Core started as a college avant pop project, and, after a post-graduate (or dropout) move to Cincinnati, has evolved into a long-form instrumental space-prov type band. This is good stuff, but it makes sense that it's a few years old. Now I wanna hear some current Burning Star Core material, and I especially wanna hear some f***in' Death Beam recordings, all of which are apparently o/p at the moment....that's a pretty hot band there... http://www.blastitude.com/11/pg10.htm v/a - the My Pal God Holiday Record - (review by Andy Malcolm) "Burning Star-Core - an annoying electronica mess, featuring stupid sound fx. it does my head in. i can't listen to this." www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/7727/reviews/archive/december299.html BURNING STAR CORE A Brighter Summer Day (Thin Wrist) lp 9.98 Not having journeyed to the Dead C extravaganza in LA, I'm glad to see this LP by Burning Star Core, who opened that show. A project of C Spencer Yeh, whose name I've been seeing around for years, not knowing he was such a fine noisemaker. Side one of the LP is prime dronological beauty encased in fiery treated violin and carefully used electronics. The effect is a sizzling wall of noise but with lots of dynamic details: tinny reverberations and shimmering metallic whines. Really warm, yet towering. And hey, the song, titled "A Brighter Summer Day" is seemingly named after one of Windy's favorite movies of all time (it's by Edward Yang who also made "Yi Yi"). You can't lose. Side two is Yeh on computer and I sort of miss the violin but it's also good, unpredictable, and detailed. It seems like lots of people are stepping up to the drone plate these days, and it can be hard to sort the dilettantes still in search of their own style from the true dronemakers. Fans of the Sunroof! / Skullflower / Richard Youngs axis will like this. Limited to 500 copies. Recommended. www.aquariusrecordssf.com Burning Star Core - Background Sound & Applause (Drone Disco) CDR Quote....relive your favorite moments of trying to pick someone up while the BSC Trio annoyed your target from the stage. Well, guess what? We were simply playing your future love theme on violin, prepared guitar, and percussion! ....Unquote - BurningStarCore. This CD comprises of audio-taken-from-video of two recent BSC trio performances at the South Gate House Kentucky and Kaldi's Coffeehouse in Cincinnati. These guys create and improvise with gusto. Frantic violin squeals, rampant percussion, weird tonal shifts of guitar, it's hard to imagine such a wealth of sounds coming from just 3 people. Don't let the title decieve you though, for although the sonic quality of this recording places you right in the middle of the crowd, Burning Star Core don't make no background music. http://www.users.bigpond.com/bergerk/catalog.htm BURNING STAR CORE - BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (LP by Thin Wrist) This LP was given to me months ago when I was in the USA. It slept in a corner of the house for all these times, maybe because I expected some industrial music of the worst kind looking at the painted picture on the front of a skull. So when I finally got around to playing this, I felt bad for not doing so earlier. 'A Brighter Summer Day' lists CS Yeh on violin and electronics and Chris Rosing on 'additional climax electronics'. In almost seventeen minutes they unfold a hasty tapestry of noisy outbursts, set against the sampled rhythms of a drummer, and an underpinning drone that sounds like Tony Conrad on acid (or maybe not, who knows?). Surely improvised music from the underground, that fits the best traditions of labels as Fusetron, or band like Ashtray Navigations. The other side 'Baby It Wasn't Meant To Me' just lists Cs Yeh on computer and these are 'sleep deprivation experiments' - organ like sounds, minimal and peaceful, moving around in slow circles. A total contrast with the other side. Quite a surprise, really! (FdW) Address: www.thinwrist.com - Franz De Waard, VITAL You might remember Burning Star Core (from Blastitude 11) and the Thinwrist label (from Blastitude 12). Here's both at once (in Blastitude 13) with a pretty serious LP package. Thinwrist is a pretty serious label, which apparently only takes on a few projects in order to do them all well; they only have four edition-of-500 LP projects scheduled so far. Brighter Summer Day is their second of the four. It has a nice sturdy full-color jacket, printed on both sides, and comes with several inserts, all immaculately printed, apparently having never had to pass through a Kinko's once during their entire conception. There's even a sealed envelope, silkscreened with the "BXC" logo. You open it up, and there's a card inside that says "496/500" on one side with a little drawing of an eye and "fig. 43" on the other side, at which point you go, "Okay, maybe this packaging is getting slightly precious," but oh well, it's kinda fun too. The credits for the Side A track are a little odd: CS Yeh does "violin, electronics," and that makes sense because his portion is a high-volume Theater of Eternal Music throwdown. The thing that doesn't make sense is that Chris Rosing is credited with "additional climax electronics." Now Chris Rosing (I think it's actually spelled Roesing) is a very good drummer from Cincinnati, who plays with Yeh in the killer 'rock' band Death Beam. And on this track, Yeh's violin-drone throwdown is accompanied what sounds like a drummer going off. It doesn't sound like "additional electronics" because it sounds like real drums, played in what could pass for Roesing's style. Anyway, as minimalist jams go, this is as hard-rocking as anything I've heard so far on Alan Licht's list. Side two is Yeh solo on computer playing "sleep deprivation experiments conducted summer to winter 2000." I don't entirely understand computer music, but I recognize familiar ingredients in this piece: strange digital drones, lots of jump cuts, quiet humming parts. I really don't know if I can describe it further because of my lack of understanding about the entire computer music genre. It does make a nice mirror image to the killer jam on Side A. (A is 16:42 and B is 16:27. Recording artists should always consider the art of the flip- side, whether for 7-inches or 12-inches....or CDs, for that matter. Thanks to Yeh and Thinwrist, this handsome album is as much of a visual experience as it is audial.) (And I do like the computer music of Ilhan Mimaroglu quite a bit...) --Blastitude BLASTITUDE: BURNING STAR CORE: Revision CD-R (DRONEDISCO.COM) This is a nice little EP consisting of one 18-minute track. Though BXC can be anything from a quirky pop band to C.S. Yeh solo, this time it's an electro-acoustic trio, perhaps the same trio that I saw perform live in Southport, Kentucky last fall. The instruments are "violin, voice, computer, prepared guitar, percussion and objects" and the end result sounds like three guys tinkering with electronics and constructing loops in the middle of a closed runway that's being torn apart at a busy airport. ************************************** Burning Star Core Brighter Summer Day Thin Wrist LP Open City associate from Cincinnati, Spencer is a violin and electronics alchemist of the first water and this is a very fine debut in a mass produced edition (many previous CDR/cassette titles to track down later, kids!). You could easily lose whole days hiding under the bed with this on the turntable. I can't describe it better than the label, who say 'shifting darkness and cracked computer hypnotics'. Yeah. * Bruce Russell, Corpus Hermeticum Based in Cincinnati, Ohio, Burning Star Core has been releasing a flurry of semi-private documents on its own CD-R label Drone Disco. Brighter Summer Day is the first widely available full-length release by C Spencer Yeh's project and comes in the form of a luxurious heavy-duty LP from Thin Wrist. It features two side-long studio tracks, each focusing on a different aspect of BXC's music. "A Brighter Summer Day" is a rich multi-layered drone taking its source from Yeh's electronically-altered violin. Sawing at it in a trance-like state, he stacked up microtonic layers and the resulting overtones mesh up with the electronics to produce a convincing tapestry. Engineer Chris Rosing is credited for "additional climax electronics," which leaves the free-form drumming faintly heard under the violin soundscape near the end unaccounted for. Side B is filled by "Baybe It Wasn't Meant to Me." The spelling inversion can be explained by the fact that the piece results from "sleep deprivation experiments." The weapon of choice is the computer and the form of the attack is a suite. Sections of seemingly random sounds from a broken organ alternate with longer sections of digitally "stretched" drones and "stuttering CD player" derailments. The "sleep deprivation" tag can excuse the lack of coherence but that's just too easy. The piece is only mildly interesting (at times reminiscent of Koji Asano's computer works) and not half as good as the drone pressed on the other side. - François Couture, All Music Guide