Rites Wild

With some mildly unnervingly field recordings serenading Goodgod’s spinning mirror balls Rites Wild took the floor and proceeded to weave some intoxicating, pulsing electronic kosmiche tracks that sounded like the soundtrack to a dystopian analog future. Her long and spacious tracks delivered immersive and engaging results with some wonderful synth lines dancing and droning over pseudo-industrial rhythms. Stacey Wilson’s vocals have a distant, droning quality that perfectly complement her compositions. - Doubtful Sounds

Stacey Wilson of Rites Wild just hooked us up with this single from her forthcoming debut EP, which is sitting nicely alongside our recent luv, Maria Minerva, and old faves like Fabulous Diamonds and Nite Jewel. Wilson cloaks the ritualistic minimalism of "Thieves" in foggy casio drones, stony delivery, and lush synth delays-- definitely mining that dreamed-out, dusty luxury mode we're into so much here at RQ. --Shea Bermingham, Rose Quartz - Altered Zones

There was a lot of excitement and mixed emotions going around this week with Austin, the release of mind-blowing collaborations and, most importantly, major world events. If you’re like us and found it all a bit much to take in, throw on your headphones and zone to these droned-out casio jams from Rites Wild. There’s nothing else we’d rather do on this gloomy New York Monday. Grab the entire Rites Wild EP for free.
- The Fader

- The Rites Wild universe is a deceptively simple yet strangely mystical one. Listening to it is a subconscious trip into the familiar unknown, filled with the promise of cosmic truths and a renewed sense of self. A solo project of prolific Melbourne based musician Stacey Wilson, Rites Wilds 'Ways Of Being' is a challenging listen at first, a seemingly impenetrable electronic fortress. Everything is drenched in reverb and delay, no sound escapes a heavily industrialised treatment. Tempos are slow moving, with no need or rush to be anywhere but in some kind of otherworldly present. Vocals are sparse and appear without fanfare in the distant background. Drum machines and synthesizers ricochet off each other in a hazy blur. 'Ill Health' is an early highlight, opening with a low drone of pure doom before giving way to a truly affecting melody. 'Seasonal Shine' features a lurching beat overlaid with hypnotic atmospherics. This is music best listened to late at night through headphones. Defiant loners everywhere can unite over this record as it perfectly encapsulates the firm yet costly independence that comes with the territory.
Rites Wild create powerful moods and imagery - walking alone through a dark mechanical forest, or travelling through the vast emptiness of space in a ship filled with nitrous oxide instead of oxygen to a final destination of nowhere. Ways Of Being is a lonely journey that revels in its own alienation. This is dance music for the introverted, comforting only to those who know how to be alone. Gaining strength from personal solitude is a message felt at the albums core. It is a subtle yet heavy concept that shows the intelligence of the creator. There is thought behind everything on this album, no sound feels accidental or improvised. These are tightly written minimalist compositions that although sound detached and distant, feel achingly personal and direct. 'Ways Of Being' is a powerful and unique experience that stands out as one of the best examples of modern musical art to have come out of Australia this year. - 4ZZZ

As it played out on the night, however, the progression of styles made much more sense. Rites Wild involves sounds that shift between largely de-structured drones and a sort of oddball, broken dance music almost reminiscent of Fever Ray, which went down well enough, but failed to create the stir Terrible Truths did subsequently. - Vulture Magazine

Stacey Wilson is someone you'd call productive. GSD. Gets shit done. The Adelaide musician now based in Melbourne runs the Heavy Lows label (which includes Beige Abrasion and Major Crimes) makes up one third of post punk funkers Terrible Truths and is the brains/ears behind both the monochrome synth-based Regional Curse and the languid darkness of Rites Wild.

So it makes sense that a track on the new Rites Wild album Ways of Being is called 'Work Ethic'. While the vocals themselves are near indecipherable, drenched in reverb and delay like some kind of rum-saturated sonic trifle, you get the feeling that Wilson is not comfortable unless she has some musical task at hand. Woozy, almost dubbed out rhythms fill the album. Like a day spent not speaking to anyone, the overall sound is detached and distant.

Performed, home recorded and mixed by Wilson and released on revered US label Not Not Fun (LA Vampires/Holy Balm), Ways of Being is a good introduction into the Rites Wild universe, one that is deceptively simple yet strangely mystical. I'm not sure if 'meditative' is the right word but the minimalist compositions found on 'Detached Living' and 'Seasonal Shine' feel achingly personal and direct. - The Thousands

As far as theme songs go, "Rites Wild Theme" would be hard pressed to be any more spot-on, as it encapsulates the vibe and ethos that pervades the debut LP by Australian solo artist Stacey Wilson in one mesmerizing groove. The decidedly lo-fi recording techniques emanate a familiar and approachable warmth, with copious amounts of reverb and delay smearing every drum machine and organ sound.

Stacey Wilson's softly resonant voice is buried underneath the fog of natural tape distortion, the three-note bassline's mantric drone, and the din of sprawling percussion. It all loosely recalls Peaking Lights' dubbed-out repetition and the smoky mysticism that haunts Sleep 8 Over's subtle hooks, but Rites Wild seems less interested in applying those sounds to a pop format. Instead, she rides the waves of energy which ripple out from her music's heavy pulse until they wash away in a cascade of cosmic clatter and crystalline melody. - Pitchfork

It's likely, to say the least, that Pets With Pets didn't put much thought into the name of their debut LP, but for anyone who has followed this group closely over the last five years it'll probably make sense. At heart, this Melbourne two-piece is a simple rock group with all the benefits and trappings of being alive and aware in 2011: you could pin them with the kraut tag, with the psych tag, with the dayglo electro-rave tag, and you'd probably be right every time. But ultimately it's the vague associations and the cumulative force of this group's conflicting tendencies that make them special.

Because Pets With Pets transcend the many rigid tropes they appropriate: they bunch and mush them together in a way that sounds spontaneous and sickeningly foreign. Theirs is a mish-mashed formula that would look wrong on paper. How often does a song like 'Pixie Child', which gallops at a blurry tempo alongside a vocalist who sounds like a Hanna-Barbera cartoon troll, become strangely wistful and sad? How frequently does a band marry unrelenting energy and force to a song whose melodic foundations are as familiar and manipulative as a nursery rhyme, without sounding gauche or plain silly?

That's one of Pets With Pets' successful (anti-)formulas: snail paced, sentimental synth lines soaring over a beat whose tempo attempts to keep time with your imagination as it ticks away, over and over again, wondering, “Where have I heard that before and what am I meant to be feeling?” During moments like this, Pets With Pets share a closer affinity with the ethereal fringes of ’90s UK drum and bass than they do any rock mongrel, in the way a primitive heart-seizing simplicity is fashioned with sonic addendum that completely warps the song's context.

But 'Pixie Child', along with the group's incredible 2009 single 'We Only Found This Place', are the only tracks in their catalogue which pull these moves and seize - firmly from both sides of the emotive rope - two forces struggling for the dark and blindingly light. Combined with Zayd Thring's slimy vocals, Pets With Pets' sound is the aural equivalent of candy anthrax: bright, innocent, forcibly “happy” colours shrouding something lethal, like a force beckoning you, only to betray.

Saturday Aquatic is spread over six tracks. There are only three tracks here that resemble a “song”, but they seem to abiogenically sprout from the sonic detritus that surrounds them: you have the option to take this record as three outstanding pop songs surrounded with filler, or three outstanding pop songs that stand as alluringly tropical destinations in an otherwise greyscale environment. For a band whose live performance has always been a sensory-overload of light and movement, it's remarkable how well they bolt these moves into an album-length narrative without sounding like a rock band with throwaway “experimental” or “noise” leanings. Saturday Aquatic Pixie Acid is an album in every sense of the term: its force is communicated by the way each climax, each invigorating pop pulse, emerges from the sea of noise that cultivates it. These songs seem like the accidental spawn of a mulched and overloaded rock sensibility. It's almost like the noise is writing them.

When 'Aquatic Life' finishes – a droll tribute to stationary living (like fish in a tank, maybe?) - it's as if this war between competing dynamics (the quick and the sluggish, the calm and the hysterical) can only collide for so long until they implode into a lingering aftermath of static and silence. Pets With Pets sounds like a chance meeting of a fistful of sonic possibilities forced to gel with and corrupt one another. It doesn't make perfect sense until you realise that it's lack of sense is exactly why it works. - Mess+Noise

At its best, drone music can wash away all that pesky structure so valued in most other genres. More than a palate cleanser, it can feel like a full immersion in some ancient mineral spring, lifting free the detritus of countless verses and choruses. That’s the general effect of this debut album by cryptic Melbourne duo Pets With Pets (Viscount Zayd Thring and Jonox Edmonds), who mingle drone with post-punk, Krautrock, and other eccentric elements to form a nebulous, intuitive whole. And yet it’s strangely pop-driven; never so unwieldy that it’s solely challenging, no matter how far down a wormhole the band ventures.

Named by combining different song titles, Saturday Aquatic Pixie Acid opens with the bravura, 15-minute ‘Saturday I Died’. It hooks in early with bleary noise and endless-sounding drums, before adding vocal harmonies and yelps. The drumming starts to break down, along with everything else, after 10 minutes, and from there it dies down gradually in a clutter of guitar and the indecipherable. Also seeming born from an earthy improv jam, the shorter ‘Aquatic Life’ begins with pulsing drum machine under a drone, then accumulating growling guitar and chanted vocals. It’s rhythmically quite intense, and overall it feels more – for lack of a better word – song-like than the opening track. Still, it ends with a two-minute afterthought of drones and ephemera.

The sparkling haze of ‘House Wolf’ is more of an interlude, after which the terrific ‘Pixie Child’ mingles tight drumming, faltering synths, and squeaky, lurid singing. Like something Clinic might have dreamed up early on, it’s strangely catchy. The channel-surfing instrumental ‘Whalevolcano’ then enlists samples, ticking beats, and other distorted colours and rumblings. ‘Acid Girls Make the Best…’ pairs kooky animal noises with sharper guitar lines than usual and half-mumbled, repetitious vocals. There are a few more piercing yelps, Suicide-style, but the track closes the album on an unassuming note compared to the free-for-all that came before.

Existing somewhere between the scene-stealing madness of Bum Creek and the reality-blurring hypnosis of Fabulous Diamonds, Pets With Pets find beauty in the rumble other bands would leave behind. These songs are a natural outgrowth of constant experimentation, combing the oddest corners on the way to transcendence. Between this debut album and a new collaboration single with labelmates Love Connection, the duo has made a two-fold first impression that should prove lasting.

Doug Wallen - The Vine

It was raining bucket-loads the night Moon Duo played at the Northcote Social Club, supported by Pets with Pets and Tiger Choir. But that didn’t stop a fairly sizeable turnout to see Ripley Johnson of Wooden Shjips fame, teaming up with Sanae Yamada to create their signature psychedelic whirlpool sound.

Arriving just in time to coincide with the start of Pets with Pets set, we enjoyed their steady noisy jams with pedal-laden vocal. Fitzroy fraggle rock? Perhaps. Zayd Thring’s vocals ranged from a baritone thrum to the occasional high pitched scream – there was enough happening in the supporting instruments of drum, guitar, bass and organ to hold a yell, guttural word or string of half formed sentences, which Thring emitted in turn.

With a residency coming up at the Tote, Pets with Pets are worth poking your toe into, especially if you like tight drumming and drone rock with a nod-to-noise. - ToneDeaf

Pets With Pets will be familiar to many Melbournians and after their recent support of Moon Duo, we felt compelled to catch them during their October residency at the Tote. We’re quite glad we did as we were rewarded not only with a delightful night out, but one that included party bags full of sugar sticks, stickers and free download links.

As the supports got underway, the audience dotted itself across the floor of the Tote bandroom, sitting cross-legged like an attentive primary school class.

First to the stage was Leigh Hannah’s solo project, the Townhouses. Armed with a Macbook, drum pad, guitar and distorted vocals, Hannah was able to create a cleansing, sample-based electronica that made you feel like you’re stepping into a luxurious, warm bath of sound. I felt like I’d been baptised or cleansed or something. Heavy. His ambient chillwave has a similar feel to that of Disney remix producer Pogo, but obviously minus the princesses.

Next up was Darren Sylvestor. At first I was unsure whether I liked him or not but after a song or two I was sufficiently tuned in. A friend turned and said ‘it’s like everything that wasn’t shit about the 80s’. As much as I don’t hate on the 80s to the same degree, I couldn’t help but feel the same way. Darren managed to cross from Eagles-esque soft rock to Bryan Adams and then even a hint of Bowie and Roxy Music. He just managed to capture and emit this perfectly ’80s film clip vibe through appearance and song. I was also very much a fan of his angular dance moves, and his live loop recordings were impressive. I would have liked more honey-toned vocals, but that’s just personal preference (It might have even just been the sound system).

People filtered from the smoking area and those that had been sitting stood up as Pets With Pets' signature feedback signalled the start of their set. Headed by Zayd Thring, the now four-piece create post-punk krautrock with a series of pedals, synths, guitars and drums. It’s noisy and consuming. Zayd hung a strobe light around his neck for a few songs and played his guitar with what I’ve decided is called the ‘Shiny-ferris-wheel-light-twizzle-stick’. I couldn’t help staring at it. That’s what it sounds like too, a hypnotic shiny-ferris-wheel-light-twizzle-stick. Zayd’s vocals are like a banshee but in a good way. He might occasionally sound like he’s being exorcised, but at least he’s having a good time, and his banter is genuinely funny. As he thanked everyone for coming down, including his dad, he followed this with, Hey dad, this next one’s called “Rape Song.” Papa must be so proud. There are promises for new material on its way and the taster Pets With Pets gave last Wednesday has us excited. - everguide