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| Action attack helicopter | Man, Kurt sent me some pretty fucking cool CDs to review, this time. Tungsten 74 is an instrumental band. Being that I'm not too versed in music without vocals, I'll try and describe them, by sound, instead of comparisons. Driving is the first word that comes to mind. It's not one of those instrumental bands you put on in the background. It's one you put on to feel progressive. It's tough. It has balls (there's actually a motorcycle at the end of one of the songs). It doesn't whisper or meander. It has intent and it's audible. One band you could liken it to, is Hovercraft. I couldn't find the info, but it sounds like bass, drums, guitar, keyboard. The usual, but creatively and aggressively done.
Summary: Instrumental music that kicks some ass
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| Splendid E-zine | .........a casual stroll through Await Further Instructions takes you down the proggish pathways of Beefheart and the mind-expanding spatial explosions of Flying Saucer Attack. This swirling mass of mind-boggling genre twisting embraces tasteful improvisational skills, freaky percussive rolls and ambient drones, single-mindedly focused on blowing you away without blowing your interest in the band's atypical style of music.
Tungsten's capable instrumental explorations are powerful enough to engage your mind in some musical gymnastics, but are equally comfortable lounging in the background, providing like-minded listeners with choice ambience after a rough day of dealing with the suits. Now if I could just figure out why the band keeps returning to the wasteland that is Amarillo, TX to record its material, everything would make much more sense..........
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| Philadelphia citypaper | There's nothing wrong with adding some steroids to your space-rock meds in order to enhance performance. Bands like Th' Faith Healers, Bardo Pond and, more recently, Couch and SubArachnoid Space have been known to play artistic, atmospheric music that happens to rock out every once in a while. There's nothing wrong with that, and so there's nothing wrong with Brooklyn's Tungsten 74. While the band's Await Further Instructions (Technical Echo) is interspersed with unauthorized sound bites, synth bleeps and backward loops that evince art rock, many of the mostly improvised tracks lock in on a groove and try to make an art of rocking. And they even do it without singing. Looser than math rock, tougher and less studio tweaked than kraut rock, it's what happens when a few guys with some talent, a sense of humor, a good record collection and some performance enhancers decide to play whatever the hell comes out.
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| Muddle | Very cool record here blurring the line between improvisational indie rock and electronica/ambientmusic. Each song meanders across the realm of thoroughly interestingand be damned if you miss a second, and drowning on endlessly wondering if the song will ever end. Either way, it's a fun listen.
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| Signal Drench (the late, great music website) | There's a wonderful balance and rotation between the three key elements of Tungsten74's music - slowly driven instrumental rock passages, truly odd sound collages, and television excerpts with musical undertow. Whirring guitar dramatics are married to persistent rhythms, and the songs search out and explore from there.
Tungsten 74's longer songs spread themselves out rather than congeal into a furious whole with length, showing a little prog-rock under the covers. Every once and awhile the songs will recall of Turing Machine or Ennio Morricone, but the combination of the parts and the arrangement doesn't lend itself well to comparisons.
This is an exceptionally interesting step out of the normal bounds of "post-rock" or what have you. It won't hit you the first time, since you're likely to be wondering what in God's name all this racket is about, but as a springboard to more focused work, this is making more and more sense.
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