research into Ethereal Goth and Dreampop (and other stuff for fans of early 4AD and Projekt)

Velour 100?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKSidApDmTc

Majesty Crush

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKZKBW752k4

Thanks to everyone (especially Sanpaku) for the contributions. Quite a few of them are already on my shopping lists but Hetchy Hetchy, Anymore, Breath Of Life, Skinner Box, Zambri and White Poppy are all new to me, thanks.

Does Hetchy Hetchy really have Michael Stipe's sister? Surely they would have been more famous for that alone?

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Rosewater Elizabeth's Le Petit Mort is far more unusual than it appeared to me at first. It has lots of nice recurring moments and I love the way the songs seem to emerge out a deep space; some really gorgeous sparkly moments in there. It does have one or two typical goth moments but it's actually quite avant-garde. I know people might say this about a lot of ethereal music but you can really sink into this album and lose track of time.
Looking forward to the earlier album, hope I can get it on cd but it is on mp3.

The Vyllies collection was really good. The sinister horror tracks are easily the best thing on it. Some of it is actually quite spooky.
It is all remastered but I've never heard the originals (they are very rare it seems). I know next to nothing about the techie side of music so I'm not sure if I find the production lacking or if the instruments aren't good enough but I feel like the song material had the potential for more and deserved better sound.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jymp9Jdy8T4

I was watching the latest new Trance To The Sun live video and I saw a band called Solemn Meant Walks down the sidebar. Pretty good stuff.

http://solemnmeantwalks.bandcamp.com/

Finished listening to STARE - Haunted.
Pleasingly murky/swampy with those virtuous heroine vocals you hear in goth and metal bands often(this band surely calls themselves Goths), a few tracks I really liked but otherwise passable/okay. It has a cover of a Glove song.

Glad someone mentioned Sol Seppy up above. I have that album (well, mp3s) and it's really intriguing. Know nothing else about her/them, seem to have vanished completely.

http://trancetothesun.bandcamp.com/

There's a limited edition EP with 2 exclusive tracks, one being a live version of an old song. The album is supposed to be out very soon.

Need more of this stuff in my life, I'll probably get This Lush Garden Within by Black Tape For A Blue Girl.

Can anyone tell me about the Black Tape For A Blue Girl EPs? If they're proper releases or just previews for albums or skippable alternate versions of songs.

IIRC, they're a mix of album samples, live tracks, and outtakes/ephemera. Same issues as with all the BTFABG: melodically thin, interchangeable guest vocals, glacial pacing. Rosenthal will be better remembered for Projekt, especially for defining the genre in its mail-catalog and its reissue program.

I really love the 5 BTFABG albums I have, and after several years of going into these genres I appreciate them all the more. I think a few of the guest vocalists were very good, especially the amazing guy who sung "I Wish You Could Smile", I've always wanted to know if he sung on any other recorded music, I could easily imagine him being theatre singer.

Oddly enough when I remember Portishead's "The Rip" sometimes I mistake it for BTFABG for a few seconds.

I have the Heavenly Voices comp box set somewhere which is full of this stuff

These guys, Oake, are more on the dark and electronic side of things (somewhere between Succour-era Seefeel and the stuff from the Chasing Voices thread), but I figured someone else might dig this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=370XllR0yBQ

I tend to think of BTFABG as a band that came after all the famous goth bands died down a bit. But I always have to remind myself that they started in 1986 but it's hard for me to picture their three 80s albums coming out at the same time as everything else that happened at that time (not that I'm disputing it).
I just think of all that stuff (including earliest Lycia and This Ascension) is hard to place in that time. It always feels to me like it was all happening in a separate world (that they weren't popular in either). I guess that might be a part of the appeal. Same goes for a lot of goth, industrial and oddball bands.

It has been written that David Lynch was a fan of BTFABG. In the unlikely event I ever meet him, that's the first thing I'll ask. I should have went to that Q&A years ago.

Certainly the only reason I checked BTFABG out in the early 90s is that 4AD's focus shifted from annual releases from gothy stalwarts (CT/DCD) towards a Pixie/Throwing Muses/UVS and related bands focus in the 90s. After tracking down fellow travellers like Area, Bel Canto, Strange Boutique things thinned out quite a bit. Even C'est La Mort had slowed its release schedule down a bit in the early 90s.

There were a number of Euro bands in the Projekt mail catalogs that hit my buttons in ways BTFABG never did. I recall Hyperium and Hall Of Sermon being akin to 80s 4AD, though with quality control issues that 4AD managed to overcome during its classic period.

Album by album Trance To The Sun reviews in this thread! Elon was one of my flatmates sophomore year of college at UCSB. He was a good guy. Very serious. Not surprised at all he's still going strong, guy was obviously in it for life. Always had quality sounds coming out of his room. This Ascension was ok but Trance was definitely when things clicked.

What a cool story! Small world, really.

Had a chance to finally hang out with Sam R. in Portland back in April for dinner. Great guy! Dry as hell sense of humor.

That is cool Milton! Trance To The Sun really are one of the biggest bands for me.
I've been thinking a lot about the sort of fantasy worlds that bands create, it'll be different for every listener but I think a lot of bands deserve more credit for creating unique fascinating worlds. Trance To The Sun stands out in that regard.

Sanpaku- can you remember the European bands? I always want more of this stuff.

I've always admired BTFABG because there seems to be either a defiance/rebellion or (perhaps preferably) an obliviousness about how much their extreme sensibility would be hated and mocked by most music journalists, but it's difficult to imagine many bands not having that awareness.
I wonder how the band would have coped if they had wide enough exposure to have been written about in the main music papers? They probably would have got it 10 times worse than Slowdive.

To anyone who hasn't heard them, I'd describe them as having an old-fashioned theatricality, romantic poetry tropes (many would say cliches), full on seriously and lovingly depicted depression, baroque elegance and spacious sumptuous dark ambience.

You always have bands who try to even it out and say "it isn't all sad stuff that we do, we're funny guys, we like to have a laugh too" but then you get slowcore bands that that unashamedly go for the sad stuff and don't care what people think. I think Black Tape are kind of like that.
I mean, Black Tape, Slowdive, Red House Painters and Low have shown they have a sense of humour (whether in the music or otherwise), but I don't think anyone should have to prove it in their music. I've never understood why people get so offended by complete seriousness in a piece of work or why that should suggest the artists have a dangerous lack of humour.

There is happiness in their music too though, just like most "sad" bands.

Love that song they did about the drowning sailor, that was really atmospheric.

I have the same feeling as Robert, the Projekt stuff seemed to exist in a parallel universe to the other alt music stuff back then... I liked college and indie stuff and mined the music press for information about it (pre-Internet), but the Projekt catalog was a totally separate thing. I didn't really *want* to see that stuff reviewed, because it seemed to come from another place entirely.

Sam is posting some really interesting stuff to the Projekt mailing list lately about the label's history and how it operates, how the Internet has changed things for record labels. Glad he's willing to share on the subject.

RAG: To be honest, my fandom departed to more easily grazed pastures after the early 90s. Shoegaze/Trip-hop/IDM etc. There are a few artists unmentioned so far in this thread worthy of spelunking expeditions. Speaking Silence, Aude, Boudoir, for example. For the most part though, this genre has unencouraging hit/miss ratio for me: too many operatic dropouts, too few clever sound engineers.

Thanks. I haven't heard of Boudoir or Aude. Speaking Silence is familiar.

Very pleased I managed to get a CD of Lycia's Quiet Moments (can't believe this came out 2013, it doesn't seem that long ago). It starts off much like 90s Lycia then becomes very different in most of the later tracks. Surprised this is basically a VanPortfleet solo album; Vanflower has backing vocals in one track then fully sings the final track.
So glad they finally used "The Soil Is Dead" because it was easily the standout of all the new tracks they shown on MySpace years ago.

There's a book on this type of music by David D'Halleine called La Croche Lune. In French only, so I can't read it.

Hmmm. Looking through the Amazon preview it's more like a book of lists. Looks easy enough to follow but I'm not sure this would offer much more than online databases.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sda-3rIPrYs

I've really been digging Isabel's Dream lately — Canadian dreampop with drum & bass beats, kinda reminiscent of Seefeel. they only released one EP (2000's Monomara) and one mp3.com release (Blue, which contributes 2 additional tracks), and nobody seems to know what became of them.

^^^ Nice song. Always weird when a band just disappears.

Chasms:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5PQNnRiSyQ

Finished listening to Black Tape For A Blue Girl - This Lush Garden Within. It's far more brooding, solemn, and at times oppressively humid than the previous albums. I don't remember the orientalist fantasy in the previous albums either. I bloody love Oscar Herrera.

http://chasmssf.bandcamp.com/

Chasms stuff is quite nice.

What about Ataraxia, Die Verbannten Kinder Evas, Dark Sanctuary, Elend, Ashram, Puissance, Autopsia, even some Wappenbund - darkwave for sure but perhaps not "ethereal" enough?

Thankyou, I'll have to look a lot of them up.

I have an Ataraxia album (Paris Spleen), it's pretty good, I believe they started more ethereal then later on shifted in various different directions, definitely some Dead Can Dance in them.

I've heard a bit of Elend, I think it was neoclassical stuff with kind of a folky flavour.

Can't recall what Dark Sanctuary sounds like.

A lot of it falls into neoclassical darkwave which I guess is where most of the Projekt/4AD fanbase ended up after the 90s. On the Cocteau Twins - Dead Can Dance axis all that stuff is firmly on the DCD side of things, not much "pop" in there.

Sixth Comm - Content With Blood (1987) also recommended btw, definitely falls into the "ethereal goth" category.

Relatively recent stuff like Chelsea Wolfe, Grimes, Eskimeaux, Breathless (old band but got much more 'ethereal'), Autumn's Grey Solace, The Eden House, Esben & The Witch, Sylvaine.

Sixth Comm, Eskimeaux and Sylvaine are new to me, thanks.

I've got the three Esben And The Witch albums and to be honest I only really like three or four songs.
Never dug Eden House or Chelsea Wolfe much.

Sixth Comm is/was basically Patrick Leagas who was a former member of Death in June. Content With Blood is the only thing I've heard by them and I like it very much, although it seems to me very much a follow-up to DIJ's Nada! album (which showed Leagas' influence to a great extent). It's more neofolk with some electronic beats than ethereal goth imho.

Yeah, never thought of 6th Comm in that category - indeed it's a continuation of the more eletronic side of mid-late 80's DIJ. Nothing earth-shattering

The Eskimeaux s/t could be yr cup of tea though - it was a bit of a one-off as her newer stuff isn't very ethereal or gothy, and neither is the old collage-type material before it.

Listening to some songs from Mors Syphilitica - Feather And Fate, "Hues Of Longing" and "Galatea" are totally stunning. One of my favourite albums in the genre. Really wish Primrose would get reissued, it's supposed to be one of their best releases.

Forgotten to mention ambient artist Dark Muse. She has one officially released album called Sounds From Beyond The Silver Wheel. She made a crazy amount of albums in a short time.
I remember when she had a MySpace and was sending out burned CDs but now she has a bandcamp.
http://darkmuse.com/
"Haunting etheral ritual dark ambient experimental"

Are there any of those you can actually listen to before you buy? I just clicked through like ten and none will play.

Don't know. Sounds From Beyond The Silver Wheel should have samples on Amazon.

Ah yeah there it is. Not bad!

Forgot to mention Heavenly Bodies, with one of my favourite This Mortal Coil vocalists Caroline Seaman.
Should have bought their Celestial album earlier because it's very pricy right now. I've wanted to hear it quite a while.

A thread for them here
am i the only person who still listens to that heavenly bodies album from 1988?

Finished listening to Lycia - Quiet Moments, it's very good. "Spring Trees" is such a happy optimistic song for them, really beautiful. The last four tracks are a departure, they're so crackly, distorted and noisy.

Ashrae Fax

Holy moly! I have A LOT to talk about in this thread! It's my favorite genre, and I used to consider myself an expert on it, but I've fallen out of touch with it in recent years.

Anyway, just a thought, I'm curious as to what band we might consider as the first fully realized ethereal one. If we agree that the Twins/This Mortal Coil/etc. were just laying the groundwork for Projekt, Hyperium, and so forth, then...

Ummm. Let's try an analogy, though I doubt there's enough crossover for most in this thread to understand it.

Heavenly Bodies : Schooly D :: Love is Colder Than Death : NWA

I guess Heavenly Bodies were the first fully realized ethereal band, but things only really got going with Love is Colder Than Death.
I mean, even early black tape were only playing around with gothy ambient at first - not completely realized ethereal.

(Yes, although all the ancient 4AD and related things are truly ethereal, I still consider it all a little more experimental in the first place. Kind of like how some say The Beatles were the first rock band.)

I have A LOT to talk about in this thread! It's my favorite genre

Cool, go ahead. I haven't heard Love Is Colder Than Death yet. I'd appreciate if you gave a breakdown on their albums and any other bands you want to talk about.

I haven't listened to much recently but soon I should be listening to the new Lycia album.

You're my bro, Robert! Thanks for starting this thread!

No time to post much right now, but: There was some talk upthread about Elysium, Orange, and Dewdrops records, and I would like to emphasize how important all of this is.
Everything you can get your hands on by Elysium and Orange is absolutely essential, though extremely obscure.

Elysium's album, 'Glisten', is wonderful. That chick just had such a beautiful voice, and it's similar to Lynn Canfield's of Area/Moon Seven Times. Well, the album is a little MOR for the ethereal genre, but the song, "Glistening Ganache" is a heart-stopper. It's one of my favorite songs ever, and it's the first song on the album -- the rest of the album is a very pleasant comedown.

Orange were like a happier, softer Cranes. Their eponymous album is just exquisite. The production's a bit lo-fi and dirty, but the songs themselves are as ethereal and poppy as imaginable. Start with "Starwheel" and "Feijoa" from that album. Also search their "Pearl/Grey Rooms" single. "Grey Rooms" is basically everything that early Cranes ever strived for. Wonderful.

Just for clarity: that Orange single is actually called 'Auto De Fé' (and it contains "Pearl" and "Grey Rooms").