CLAIR CASSIS Luxury Absolute (Khrysanthoney) 10" 26.00
NOW ON VINYL!!! LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, EACH ONE HAND NUMBERED. AND LUXURIOUSLY PACKAGED!!!
Record number three from this drug driven blurwave blackgaze Velvet Cacoon offshoot. Longtime readers of the aQ list are no doubt already familiar with that Northwestern horde, whose exploits, sonic and otherwise, included a ridiculous band backstory (eco-terrorists?), made up instrumentation (diesel harp?) some purportedly plagiarized sounds (a whole record supposedly stolen and redone as VC), not to mention a whole mess of angry, bitter and confused black metallers in their wake. And while we bought into it all, when the truth was revealed, that VC was in fact, just a guy and a gal, taking lots of drugs and making some blissed out black buzz, we actually thought it was funny. The for some strange reason, VC mainman Josh decided to disband Velvet Cacoon, and immediately created Clair Cassis, a band that was quite sonically similar, the same sort of washed out buzz, droney black mesmer, the biggest difference being that CC trafficked in WAY shorter songs, and those songs were WAY heavy on the bass (infamous for its absence in almost all black metal) and traded in much of the drone and drift for something distinctly more poppy. And we were, and are, pretty into it. Dense thick whirling hazy black metal, formed into dark almost new wavy chunks of blackbuzzpop, sure still black and buzzy on the outside, but strap on some headphones, and the basslines become sinewy and serpentine, the melodies and buried hooks reveal themselves, step back and its a glorious blackened blur.
After two self titled eps, comes this, Luxury Absolute, another short (ish) collection of CC's unique brand of black and buzzy, midtempo dronegaze doompop, the sound here though even more tripped out and psychedelic than on past releases, with the bass MASSIVE, even moreso than usual, with the sound so blown out and in the red, that the sound continually peaks, and clips, the sounds distorting and crumbling, adding a strange sort of bleary, blurry decay vibe to the already woozy minor key proceedings. Just check out opener "Antique Sea Smoke", a warped lumbering almost dirger, with the guitar melodies swirling amidst grey clouds of whir and thrum, the bass thick, and driving, the drums distorting like crazy, all of that overblown sound pushing CC even further into shoegaze territory.
The rest of the record follows suit, barring a few creepy stretches of haunting rumbling black ambience, the rest of Luxury Absolute unfolds as a series of brief dreamlike black blurs, melancholic and mesmerizing, the drums a lurching programmed pound, the vokills a demonic croak, but the guitars, so warm and whirling, thick and layered, the doom vibe is huge here too, partially because of the tendency toward dirgery, but also cuz the sound is so thick and viscous, imagine diSEMBOWELMENT or Skepticism trying their hand and shoegaze cold wave, and you might be getting close. Either way, this is some awesome stuff. Occasionally frustrating, cuz the songs are so short (longest 3:31, shortest 1:51, 19 minutes total), and we would love to hear these jams stretched out into tranced out dronepop blackbuzz epicks, but the brevity seems to reinforce that in their own twisted and fucked up way, these really are just pop songs, albeit, buzzy, and sludgey, and dirgey and BLACK. Might be our favorite CC yet. Hope it's not their last.
MPEG Stream: "Antique Sea Smoke"
MPEG Stream: "Rosewater Take"
MPEG Stream: "The Royal Nocturne"

CLARINETTE Clarinette On DNA: Jazz Impressions Of DNA On DNA + Retrospekt (Cassetto Editions) 2xcd-r 14.98
The latest from local soundmaker Dan Vallor, whose last two releases we could barely keep in stock, including one that came housed in an actual tape player, and that tape player wrapped in a melted/warped vinyl record! We had long been a fan of Vallor's mysterious music, a music that eventually found him more than one home away from home on labels like Celebrate Psi Phenomenon and Ecstatic Peace!, so it's easy to imagine the sort of spaced out minimal abstract soundscaping and tripped out droneworlds Vallor has conjured up on past releases, although this new one is something else entirely.
As the title suggests, DNA on DNA is a track-for-track reimagining of DNA's legendary DNA On DNA record, and, as the cover art hints, Vallor is paying homage to those songs in the form of abstract freeform solo piano(!), with each track the same length as the original, but here, it really is just piano, and it's pretty fantastic. Not sure if DNA fans will necessarily dig this, but hell, some probably will, Vallor weaving strange, mysterious, and quite lovely landscapes of twisted melody, of lush shimmer and bombastic chordal pound, plenty of atonal free jazz freakout, it is after all meant to pay homage to one of the cornerstones of No Wave, but for every burst of dizzying minor key splatter, there are gorgeous stretches of contemplative moodiness, the sound shot through with subtle drones, swirling overtones, very minimal and spare, lots of space, the sound drifting, slipping into wild squalls, and then settling right back down again.
Included as a bonus, is a second disc called Retrospekt, which sonically falls more in line with other Clarinette releases, which makes sense since it is in fact a greatest hits of course, sampling tracks from EVERY single Clarinette release, as well as including a handful of previously unreleased songs. The sounds as you might imagine are quite varied, from experimental bursts of crunch and rumble, to beautiful sprawls of swirling shimmer, from spaced out psychedelic drift, to echo heavy distorted crumble, and from ethereal almost pop ambience, to dizzying modern minimalism a la Reich Or Riley. If you weren't a fan already, this disc will change that for sure.
LIMITED TO 125 COPIES, each one hand numbered, and housed in a super striking full color printed transparent plastic sleeve, adorned with some super cool (and funny) Peanuts / DNA artwork.
MPEG Stream: "You & You"
MPEG Stream: "Little Ants"
MPEG Stream: "Egomaniac's Kiss"
MPEG Stream: "Grapefruit"

CLARINETTE Nul (Cassetto Editions / Cassetto Homemade) 2xcd-r 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We sold a ton of the last Clarinette release, which not only came as a double cd-r, but also in a crazy limited cassette run, with each cassette housed in actual Walkman tape player, and then that tape player wrapped in a warped and melted colored vinyl 7", each and every one hand sanded and silkscreened. And the music inside was definitely worth all that extra effort. So now we have yet another double album (no over the top tape edition for this one sadly), from Mr. Dan Vallor, aka Clarinette, this one according to the liner notes, dedicated to sixties Dutch art collective Nul, who in turn were influenced by the German Zero Movement, based on, again according to the liner notes "Working with a mono- or di-chromatic palette" and embracing "repetition and reproduction, seeking to validate reality by isolating its parts and displaying them without form, context or subjective judgment".
Thankfully, you don't actually need a degree in art history to dig into Clarinette's gorgeous minimal soundworld, fans of the now out of print The Clarinette Anti-Cassette Act Of 2012 will definitely want to grab one of these before they're gone, and anyone into spaced out minimal abstraction, and lush layered dronescapery will find much to love here, long tones, lush landscapes of subtly shifting overtones, dark and soporific, thick and heavy in a slow motion black whole drift sort of way, funereal and elegiac in places, blurred and blackened in others, and almost blissed out and kosmische in still others. The final track on the first disc unfurls a sprawl of low end that given the proper stereo might just set off car alarms several blocks away, a dense pulsing thrum that even in headphones is so deep and thick it almost makes you dizzy.
The second disc offers up more epic longform dronescapes, and listening to them here, it's easy to understand why some early Clarinette records ended up on Campbell Kneale's Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label, definitely a Birchville vibe going on, a sort of smeared softly psychedelic blissed out raga, that on one track can explode in a prismatic burst of high end Sunroof!-like skree, while on another, gradually blossom like a time-lapse filmstrip of a dying star.
Gorgeous hypnotic stuff. And again, ULTRA limited. Only 105 copies, each one hand numbered, and housed in striking hand painted green sleeves.
MPEG Stream: "()"
MPEG Stream: "[]"
MPEG Stream: "-"

CLARINETTE Ready Set Disengage 2013 (self-released) cd-r 14.98
Ready Set Disengage is a brand new, and super limited release, created especially for aQ for this year's Record Store Day (the title a play on the abbreviation for Record Store Day, you'll notice), and unlike a lot of the RSD releases, we DO have a bunch of these, for all you loyal aQ-ers who couldn't be here in person on the big day. That said, this is SUPER limited, just FIFTY copies total, each one beautifully hand packaged and numbered by the band/man himself, and available ONLY from aQ!!
We'd long been a fan of Clarinette, aka Dan Vallor, long before it was revealed he was actually a local, his releases tended to find their way onto faraway micro labels, like Campbell Kneale's Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, so we always sort of assumed that he was in fact from NZ, and in many ways, Vallor's mysterious sprawling psychedelic noisescapes did nothing to dissuade that notion, sounding right at home amongst groups like Birchville Cat Motel, 1/3 Octave Band, Omit, With Throats As Fine As Needles, RST, and lots of other aQ NZ faves. This latest is yet another mysterious missive from this audio alchemist, a fantastical collection of deftly linked, meticulously designed miniature sound worlds, and while there is definitely a sonic thread tying it to those past releases, it definitely forges its own distinctive path.
Opening with a haunting collage of effected pianos, swirling ominously, darkly cinematic and dreamily melancholy, panned heavily, the sounds drifting from speaker to speaker, Vallor is like a slo-mo Lubomyr Melnyk, adding lots of space and dousing the notes in a blurred dubbiness, all underpinned by a sinister low end melody, we would have been happy if the whole record had just been an hour long version of the first track. And in a way, it is, with that smeared dubby piano the focus of many of tracks here, but Vallor adds skittery drums, and glitchy skipping melodies, to turn one track into a sort of abstract cut and paste Necks, all looped and mesmeric, a loose tangle of melodies drifting above a slipstream of slow shifting layers and a dark jazzy shuffle, reminding us a lot of some of the jazzier recent releases from Aidan Baker. Elsewhere the sounds are layered into thick billowing clouds of swirling notes and bleary chords, the comparisons to Melnyk particularly apt on tracks like "A New Reason For Existence", that essentially sounds like a psychedelic collage of multiple skipping Melnyk cds, there's a bit of an Oval vibe as well, but the piano continues to lend even the most abstract moments a hint of jazziness.
At one point, deep into the record, those sounds melt and ooze into swaths of crumbling blackness, hazy washed out melodies buried beneath heaving slo-mo swells of dense low end thrum, sounding almost like the Caretaker at 16rpm, crackly, and warbly, and gorgeously gauzy, then the sound shifts once again, becoming a dizzying bit of tranquil ambience, all disembodied guitar strum, sampled birdsong, warbly rumbling drones, the various sounds a bit atonal and detuned, giving the sound a definite creepy, almost carnivalesque vibe, once again, very cinematic, before bleeding into the 20 minute closer, an epic brooding sprawl, that mesmeric Necks feel returns, but this time way more minimal and blackened, the piano sounds drifting in fields of rumble and hum, dense black pulsations, an epic slowly unfurling blackened classical creep, hazy and droney, dense and tense and bleakly beautiful, an abstract ambient dronescape that should definitely hit the spot for all you dronelords, and anyone obsessed with the slow and low, will likely find themselves playing that track (and this whole record) over and over and over...
LIMITED TO FIFTY COPIES, ONLY AVAILABLE AT aQ!! The cd is housed in a textured paper inner sleeve, housed in a printed, stickered, and hand numbered envelope!
MPEG Stream: "Invisible Currents"
MPEG Stream: "Aglaia"
MPEG Stream: "A New Reason For Existence"

CLARINETTE The Clarinette Anti-Cassette Act Of 2012 (Cassetto Editions / Cassetto Homemade) 2xcd-r 12.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We always just assumed Clarinette was from New Zealand, probably because our first exposure to this one man soundscaper was via Campbell Kneale's Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label (although before that he had released an lp on Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace label) but in fact the man behind Clarinette, aka Dan Vallor, comes from right here in the Bay Area. The sound of Clarinette might throw you off as well, as Vallor takes gorgeous layered drifts of mutated field recordings, deftly processed loops and all manner of noise making devices and weaves them into something darkly expansive and hauntingly mysterious. This awesomely titled double cd-r / cassette offers up two sprawling sidelong tracks, the first, uses as its focus, what sound like a field recording of a train (much like the recent Chris Watson record El Tren Fantasma), but here the chugging of the train is blurred and smeared and looped into a blackened expanse of rhythmic thrum, over which foghorn tones moan and bellow, those tones constantly shifting and mutating, occasionally coalescing into almost-melodies, but just as often keening mournfully and then fading out. The whole side is based on this chugging softly churning mesmer, but throughout, Vallor introduces all manner of sonic subtleties, whether it's some krautrock like motorik drumming, some wah-wah-ed chordal swirls or some blackened soft focus shimmers, the whole track remains at a constant low level thrum, sans headphones it's a soothing washed out drone, but closer listening reveals a depth to Vallor's sonic construction that is quite breathtaking.
The second disc/side is much more abstract, with Vallor moving deftly through various drone permutations, starting out with a dense squall of hissing swirl, the sound soon shifts to dizzying echoey shimmer, and then more looped mesmer, the timbre changing in many cases more than the actual sound, slipping from caustic and crunchy, to muddy and murky, to glistening and shimmery, to dense and droney, the noisier parts rife with a sort of unhinged psychedelia, while the quieter parts darkly contemplative, a hushed blurred drift, that more often than not slowly blossoms into something much more intense. The whole track constantly seesawing between the two polarities, dragging the listener along on a harrowing hypnotic sonic journey, that again, benefits greatly from headphones, Vallor's sound world deep and dense and well worth getting lost in.
The packaging on both formats is incredible. The cd-r version comes in a cool silkscreened transparent sleeve, a green vinyl record printed on the front, seemingly to mirror the cassette packaging which is more expensive for a reason, not only is it more limited, but the cassette comes INSIDE ITS OWN WALKMAN STYLE CASSETTE PLAYER, then that cassette player is wrapped in a melted colored vinyl record, warped in a way that makes it act as a sort of stand, and that record is then silkscreened. WOW! The cd-r is limited 50 copies and hand numbered, the tape/tape player/warped record version is also hand numbered, but limited to just SIXTEEN copies!!!!
MPEG Stream: "A Reflective Kind Of Tension (excerpt 1)"
MPEG Stream: "A Reflective Kind Of Tension (excerpt 2)"

CLARINETTE The Clarinette Anti-Cassette Act Of 2012 (Cassetto Editions / Cassetto Homemade) cassette + tape player + melted record 27.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We always just assumed Clarinette was from New Zealand, probably because our first exposure to this one man soundscaper was via Campbell Kneale's Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label (although before that he had released an lp on Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace label) but in fact the man behind Clarinette, aka Dan Vallor, comes from right here in the Bay Area. The sound of Clarinette might throw you off as well, as Vallor takes gorgeous layered drifts of mutated field recordings, deftly processed loops and all manner of noise making devices and weaves them into something darkly expansive and hauntingly mysterious. This awesomely titled double cd-r / cassette offers up two sprawling sidelong tracks, the first, uses as its focus, what sound like a field recording of a train (much like the recent Chris Watson record El Tren Fantasma), but here the chugging of the train is blurred and smeared and looped into a blackened expanse of rhythmic thrum, over which foghorn tones moan and bellow, those tones constantly shifting and mutating, occasionally coalescing into almost-melodies, but just as often keening mournfully and then fading out. The whole side is based on this chugging softly churning mesmer, but throughout, Vallor introduces all manner of sonic subtleties, whether it's some krautrock like motorik drumming, some wah-wah-ed chordal swirls or some blackened soft focus shimmers, the whole track remains at a constant low level thrum, sans headphones it's a soothing washed out drone, but closer listening reveals a depth to Vallor's sonic construction that is quite breathtaking.
The second disc/side is much more abstract, with Vallor moving deftly through various drone permutations, starting out with a dense squall of hissing swirl, the sound soon shifts to dizzying echoey shimmer, and then more looped mesmer, the timbre changing in many cases more than the actual sound, slipping from caustic and crunchy, to muddy and murky, to glistening and shimmery, to dense and droney, the noisier parts rife with a sort of unhinged psychedelia, while the quieter parts darkly contemplative, a hushed blurred drift, that more often than not slowly blossoms into something much more intense. The whole track constantly seesawing between the two polarities, dragging the listener along on a harrowing hypnotic sonic journey, that again, benefits greatly from headphones, Vallor's sound world deep and dense and well worth getting lost in.
The packaging on both formats is incredible. The cd-r version comes in a cool silkscreened transparent sleeve, a green vinyl record printed on the front, seemingly to mirror the cassette packaging which is more expensive for a reason, not only is it more limited, but the cassette comes INSIDE ITS OWN WALKMAN STYLE CASSETTE PLAYER, then that cassette player is wrapped in a melted colored vinyl record, warped in a way that makes it act as a sort of stand, and that record is then silkscreened. WOW! The cd-r is limited 50 copies and hand numbered, the tape/tape player/warped record version is also hand numbered, but limited to just SIXTEEN copies!!!!
MPEG Stream: "A Reflective Kind Of Tension (excerpt 1)"
MPEG Stream: "A Reflective Kind Of Tension (excerpt 2)"

CLARINETTE There Is No Word Tender Enough To Be Your Name. (self-released) cd-r 9.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
This is a special musical valentine from aQ pal Dan Valor, aka Clarinette, to all the aQ customers out there (actually it's to his wife, but he decided to share it with us, and you!). This Valentine's Day release is only available from us, and only as long as this single batch lasts (a single batch of just 18 COPIES!), which we're guessing won't be long. And you should definitely not sleep on this, cuz it's a doozy. Not necessarily romantic in the traditional sense, but we're guessing this heaving slab of lush layered drones would be a lot more exciting than a bunch of chalky candy hearts, the first track here, mixed live on WFMU, finds Vallor taking what has to be his thickest and darkest piece yet, originally on his cd-r Nul, and recontextualizing this swirling psychedelic tangle, near metallic in places, but shot through with multiple melodies, a murky expanse of blackened shimmer that should have all you aQ dronelords in heaven. Nearly sixteen minutes of undulating low end, and constantly shifting longform tones, the overlapping sounds producing all manner of pulses and pulsations, giving the sound a sort of spectral momentum, that is utterly entrancing. Then about nine minutes in, the voice of Gertrude Stein surfaces, drifting atop the churning drones, delivering her spoken valentine to her friend, the writer Sherwood Anderson, the perfect valentine, celebrating a strange and unlikely friendship, as all the best friendships are. The voice soon fades, leaving the drone to play out to the end, augmented for the last few minutes by the sounds of machinery, a gorgeous mechanized dreamdrone collage.
The second track seems to harken back to Vallor's recent piano tribute to DNA, delivering a sonic valentine to his true love in the form of "Crepuscule With Shannon", a gorgeous stretch of abstract piano, wreathed in reverb, flurries of notes, billowing above more subtle melodic constructs, haunting, and elegiac, minor key, wistful and yeah, kinda romantic.
Comes housed in a die cut, two part, hand made paper sleeve, the inside part printed with liner notes, credit and minimal artwork, viewed through the outside sleeve, in red and pink of course, and again, EXTREMELY LIMITED! ONLY EIGHTEEN COPIES and THAT'S IT!! And only available here...
MPEG Stream: "/"
MPEG Stream: "Crepuscule With Shannon"

CLARINETTE Transmuting Fall (Celebrate Psi Phenomenon) cd-r 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Listening to Clarinette, is kind of like listening to a speed metal band called Tuba, or some intense drum and bass DJ called Piccolo. You're just gonna have your head spun if you're expecting the band to sound like the name. Several years after releasing an lp on Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace label, Clarinette aka Dan Vallor returns with a weird and wild, sonically expansive cd-r for Campbell Kneale's Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label. This is beautiful challenging stuff, all over the place, but no hint of clarinets that's for sure....
Gorgeous heavily affected solo piano, crumbly, grimy slabs of distorted fuzz chopped and delivered in strange stuttery melodies, fuzzy lo-fi drones, angular free jazz piano freakouts, gentle pastoral almost new age soundscapes of piano and lots and lots of echo, in fact we're tempted to think Mr. Vallor is in fact a piano player. This could be like George Winston and Cecil Taylor getting together, dropping acid and playing through a very bad trip, jamming with some equally doped up noiserock friends. The whole thing a tripped out, druggy and dreamy soundscape, all wrapped in pillows of thick reverb and every note dipped in ECHO and flung into the musical pond sending out ripples that go on forever. SUPER LIMITED AS ALWAYS!! NOT SURE WE'LL BE ABLE TO GET MORE WHEN THESE ARE GONE!
MPEG Stream: "Parallel Lines"
MPEG Stream: "A Shining Cord"

CLAYPIPE Wayside (Jewelled Antler) 3" cd-r 5.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Just when you were thinking that the next installment in the Jewelled Antler Library was, um, overdue, comes this new 3" cd-r in the series. Volume 8 hails from New Zealand -- it seems Jewelled Antler have found some kindred souls Down Under, no not Gandalf and Frodo but in this case Antony Milton (who runs a cd-r label himself, Pseudoarcana) and Clayton Noone (C.J.A., Armpit) who together are known as Claypipe. Repetition and drone and field recording grit coexist with lovely acoustic guitar -- it's real nice. With wistful, earnest vocals, some distorted and layered, this is neither indie-pop nor environmental ambient, but a hybrid that totally fits with Jewelled Antler 'groups' like the Blithe Sons and Child Readers, while possessing that special New Zealand magic we all adore. Seven tracks, 20 minutes, and you're left wishing it were longer.
MPEG Stream: "The Math of Random Fractures"
MPEG Stream: "Midnight at Mangawhai Beach (Skeleton)"

CLAYPIPE / PEKKO KAPPI / THE BLITHE SONS The Amazed Map (The Music Fellowship) cd 12.98
Here's the long-awaited follow up to Windswept Trees And Houses and Heat & Birds, those being the two previous, and now long out of print, "friends and family" compilations of music and field recordings (two things not mutually exclusive in the methodology of these artists for sure!) from the Jewelled Antler camp. Now that Jewelled Antler isn't the prolific cd-r label it once was (though the various members of the so-called Jewelled Antler Collective are still quite active) the Music Fellowship label has stepped in to release this new disc, as a proper cd by the way, and it's a terrific third in the "series", bringing together the fantastical sounds of three far-flung artists: Claypipe (New Zealand), Pekko Kappi (Finland), and The Blithe Sons (California). It's an "amazed map" indeed that links those people and places, all so magical from the musical standpoint as we're sure most Aquarius customers will concur. NZ/Finland/California, the current psych-folk-drone axis of awesomeness! Several tracks of nature sounds field-recorded by Tony Endless and (former AQ'er) Byram Abbot also appear here, adding some extra ecological, dronological mystery to a disc hardly lacking in such, acting as purely environmental interludes between the rather diverse yet linked-in-spirit works of the three main musical artists. First up are New Zealanders Claypipe, a duo of consisting of Antony Milton (overlord of the PseudoArcana cd-r label) and Clayton Noone (CJA, Armpit, Futurians), whose tracks here range from lo-fi almost indie-pop to droned-out experimentation. Then Pekko Kappi (Lau Nau, Paivansade) invites listeners to a campfire concert wherein he and his trusty horsehair lyre perform a wonderful set of traditional Finnish folk music, for us perhaps the highlight of this disc, itself a highlight on our list. Finally this disc's unofficial hosts, Jewelled Antler's Blithe Sons (Loren Chasse and Glenn Donaldson) wrap things up with their murky yet microscopically detailed, indoor-outdoor mix of lovely song-like drones, drone-like songs. It's the first we've heard from this collaboration since their Arm Of The Starfish cd on Family Vineyard a few years ago and we hope it's not the last.
If only Music Fellowship could also arrange to reissue on cd this disc's two cd-r prequels, which featured the likes of Avarus, Kemialliset Ystavat, Markus, Golden Hotel, Franciscan Hobbies, The Floating Birthday Children, Hala Strana, Thuja, Of, The Blithe Sons & Daughters, Child Readers, Entlang, Silt, and The Billy Crosby's amongst others! And by the way, that also reminds us -- when are all the out-of-print Jewelled Antler "Library" series of 3" cd-rs going to be compiled into a cd box set or something? We're pretty sure lots of folks are dying to get their ears on those...
MPEG Stream: CLAYPIPE "Water Fence"
MPEG Stream: PEKKO KAPPI "Yhta Kirottua Helvetin Tulikekaletta"
MPEG Stream: THE BLITHE SONS "Morning At Night"

CLAYTON, KIT Lakte (Orthlorng Musork ) 12" 5.98
"Lakte" is definitely something completely new from Kit Clayton, whose last few recordings delved deep into the melancholic dub of Pole and Monolake. Clayton himself describes this 4 song ep with the following: "Scraping your head against the ground, you hear sounds you do not tend to find while scurrying amongst carefully constructed and willfully digested worlds. Puddles of knobs, twigs, paperclips, loose change, and other items unnamed. What you were listening for is sidestepped by environmental residue's unwavering determination to be heard. Background and foreground are reversed. And reversed again. And again." Mostly arrthymic and atonal, "Lakte" is a willfully difficult piece of avant-electronica recalling the likes of '60s tape-music pioneer Tod Dockstader much more than current artists like Autechre.

CLEANING WOMEN Aelita - The Queen Of Mars ( BV2 Productions) cd 17.98
The return of Finland's premiere troupe of music making, crossdressers, who perform all gussied up, you know in makeup, housecoats, stockings and everything, and whose instruments of choice are modified and mic'ed up clothes racks and every day household appliances. That's right, it's the Cleaning Women, whose first record was a runaway hit here at AQ a few months back, so we're super psyched to be listing the even better follow up "Aelita - The Queen Of Mars", a record inspired, according to the liner notes, by the Russian film "Aelita" directed by Jakov Protazanov in 1924. And some of it definitely sounds like it...
Sonically similar to their debut, bit somehow more varied and fully realized, "Aelita" is a dizzying schizophrenic travelogue through a million different musical personalities. the opener is a brooding Arabesque soundscape, all soaring strings and playful percussion, Eastern guitars and strange fuzz guitars. Then all of a sudden, the second track kicks in, a dark brooding bass heavy groove, with whispered vocals, and lo and behold the Cleaning Woman sound a little like Tool, albeit with some strange homemade percussion, but just like a Tool track it builds to a super heavy chorus and then slips back into a moody groove. Hot on the heels of that track is a sort of croony Spaghetti Western style number peppered with gypsy strings and angular guitar. Later on they bust out some super heavy mathy shit that sounds like it could be NoMeansNo or Victim's Family. But for the Cleaning Women, it's all about rhythms, so every track is rife with all sort of rhythms. Some tracks are defined by the rhythm, some are nothing but the rhythms, others incorporate the rhythms subtlely into the bigger picture. But no matter how they do it, each track is a delight. Dizzying and confusional, wild and weird as fuck. The best tracks are the ones where everything drops out and the band go completely nuts on their various rhythmic devices, which must be amazing to see live, it's like the Blue Man Group crossed with Stomp, only if they were transvestites, and were meaner, and less blue, and WAY more punk, armed with fuzz guitars and a stage full of washing machines and dishwashers.
Needless to say, SO recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Aelita"
MPEG Stream: "Secret Passenger"
MPEG Stream: "Teknigrad"

CLEANING WOMEN Pulsator (BV2) cd 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
INSANE FINNISH MUSIC ALERT!!! Yeah sure, Circle can get pretty darn weird, and Aavikko are completely nuts, and of course Keukhot definitely exists in some seriously damaged alternate universe, and that whole forest folk scene, Avarus, Uton, Anaksimandros, Tivol, and all the rest, very very strange indeed.
But then there's the Cleaning Women. A power trio of crossdressing Finns, makeup, housecoats, stockings, the whole bit, you know, CLEANING WOMEN, who play an arsenal of customized clotheshorses, drying racks, and household appliances. Woah. That would almost be enough right there, but thankfully these sort-of-ladies have the chops to back it up.
But how to describe what this sounds like is a whole 'nother problem. The core sound is the insane processed percussion produced from wildly beating on the mic'ed cleaning implements. Funky and chaotic. Like some sort of gamelan gone haywire. Complex rhythm and polyrhythms all over the place, the beats changing pitch sometimes mid beat. Totally wild. Definitely some nods to the manic energy of Aavikko. But then add in some super distorted fuzz bass, some squelchy analog synths, some crunchy garage rock guitar here and there, and then some truly strange very dramatic crooned vocals, in Finnish of course, sounding like some mix of Circle's Mika Ratto and the vocalist from Midnight Oil, weaving theatrically in and out of the dense tribal rhythmscapes. And while the record hews pretty close to a maniacal rhythms / fuzzy riffage combo, the songs and sounds are pretty dang varied, from groovey blown out percussive dirges, to fuzzy metallic sambas, weird tribal chants, to weird blurpy Beefheartian jams, to killer electro analog grooves. And the opening track "Ricewestern" might just be the catchiest transvestite tribal kitchensink psychedelic fuzz jam ever!!
MPEG Stream: "Ricewestern"
MPEG Stream: "Za Bounakh"
MPEG Stream: "Speed-O-Machina"
MPEG Stream: "Hyper Cleaner"

CLEANING WOMEN U (Cobra) cd 17.98
We're a sucker for pretty much anything Finnish. The weirder the better. So when we discovered Cleaning Women, a trio of Finns, who dressed up like ladies, housecoats, stockings, the whole nine yards, and who performed on an assemblage of customized kitchen appliances and household items, stoves, ironing boards. drying racks, clothes horses, we were sold before we even heard a note.
Luckily they had the music to back up their eccentric presentation, a strange chaos of wild percussion, blown out fuzz bass, and crooned vocals. Their second record was a soundtrack of sorts, and ended up being way more varied and schizophrenic than their debut, and once again, for record number three, the simply titled U, they've shifted gears again, and really hit their stride. Where as before, it seemed like the music was secondary to the concept, here, the music is dark and brooding and hypnotic, poppy and melodic, minimal and mesmerizing, they even seemed to have ditched the drag, if the band photo is any indication, they're still glamorous, and odd looking, but in a sort of Euro vampire glam rock way. But the music. Wow. Everything we loved about the first two records distilled and compressed into something magical.
The opening track is like a super minimal junkyard Circle, with its endlessly repeating main riff, the clanky percussion, the woozy seasick rhythm, there's even a creepy interlude partway through, with tolling bells, booming metallic rumbles and mysterious reverbed whistles, before the band launch back into it, this time adding vocals, the Circle comparison becoming even more apt, like an industrial Circle covering Morricone or something? However you slice it, it's amazing.
The second track almost sounds like an analog Kraftwerk, with it's blooping bassline, and motorik melody, mix in a little twangy guitar, swirling synths, super cinematic and dramatic. The third track is a pop gem, with it's dreamy vocal melody, and softly propulsive rhythm, and pizzicato strings, it almost reminds us of Uz Jsme Doma, but way more mellow and shimmery.
"The Miners' Song" sounds like a warped Pink Floyd outtake, until the main riff kicks in, fuzzy and fierce and downright heavy, and suddenly we're back in hypnorock territory, but with a distinctly playful pop edge.
The second half of the record is more of the same, from super minimal bowed string dronescapes, rife with surfy twang and delicate shimmer, to strange otherworldly cabaret pop, with xylophone like percussion, and cool Eastern melodies, to clattery math pop workouts that sound like some mad mix of Nomeansno and Sparks, to the eight minute closer "Scythians", which again veers into Circle territory, spidery looped melodies over simple motorik rhythms, reverbed and softly woozy, before shifting gears, introducing chanted vocals and slipping into a super dramatic slow build, culminating in a cool hauntingly harmonized choral outro.
Absolutely WAY recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Quartarius"
MPEG Stream: "Across The Void"
MPEG Stream: "Scythians"

CLEANING WOMEN U (Cobra) lp 24.00
We're a sucker for pretty much anything Finnish. The weirder the better. So when we discovered Cleaning Women, a trio of Finns, who dressed up like ladies, housecoats, stockings, the whole nine yards, and who performed on an assemblage of customized kitchen appliances and household items, stoves, ironing boards. drying racks, clothes horses, we were sold before we even heard a note.
Luckily they had the music to back up their eccentric presentation, a strange chaos of wild percussion, blown out fuzz bass, and crooned vocals. Their second record was a soundtrack of sorts, and ended up being way more varied and schizophrenic than their debut, and once again, for record number three, the simply titled U, they've shifted gears again, and really hit their stride. Where as before, it seemed like the music was secondary to the concept, here, the music is dark and brooding and hypnotic, poppy and melodic, minimal and mesmerizing, they even seemed to have ditched the drag, if the band photo is any indication, they're still glamorous, and odd looking, but in a sort of Euro vampire glam rock way. But the music. Wow. Everything we loved about the first two records distilled and compressed into something magical.
The opening track is like a super minimal junkyard Circle, with its endlessly repeating main riff, the clanky percussion, the woozy seasick rhythm, there's even a creepy interlude partway through, with tolling bells, booming metallic rumbles and mysterious reverbed whistles, before the band launch back into it, this time adding vocals, the Circle comparison becoming even more apt, like an industrial Circle covering Morricone or something? However you slice it, it's amazing.
The second track almost sounds like an analog Kraftwerk, with it's blooping bassline, and motorik melody, mix in a little twangy guitar, swirling synths, super cinematic and dramatic. The third track is a pop gem, with it's dreamy vocal melody, and softly propulsive rhythm, and pizzicato strings, it almost reminds us of Uz Jsme Doma, but way more mellow and shimmery.
"The Miners' Song" sounds like a warped Pink Floyd outtake, until the main riff kicks in, fuzzy and fierce and downright heavy, and suddenly we're back in hypnorock territory, but with a distinctly playful pop edge.
The second half of the record is more of the same, from super minimal bowed string dronescapes, rife with surfy twang and delicate shimmer, to strange otherworldly cabaret pop, with xylophone like percussion, and cool Eastern melodies, to clattery math pop workouts that sound like some mad mix of Nomeansno and Sparks, to the eight minute closer "Scythians", which again veers into Circle territory, spidery looped melodies over simple motorik rhythms, reverbed and softly woozy, before shifting gears, introducing chanted vocals and slipping into a super dramatic slow build, culminating in a cool hauntingly harmonized choral outro.
Absolutely WAY recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Quartarius"
MPEG Stream: "Across The Void"
MPEG Stream: "Scythians"

CLEANSE Succumb / The Prince (Hospital) lp 16.98

CLEAR PEOPLE Clarity (Manhand) cd-r 8.98
Managed to get a little handful of these super limited gems back in, but they won't last long...
Like all Sunburned Hand Of The Man releases, this is another fleeting glimpse into the mad, sonic abstract sound world of these psych rock ne'er do wells. And like all SHOTM releases, we grabbed as many of these as we could from the band when they were drifting through, probably never to get more.
Not a SHOTM record proper, this is some sort of Sunburned offshoot, featuring mainman John Moloney and a few other folks, using mostly voices and electronics, a bit or percussive clatter and some grinding guitar fuzz, to cobble together a bizarre growling, grumbling, squeaking, skronking, belching, squeaking, swirling soundscape of abstract vocalizations, mysterious buzz, kitchen sink clang, and instrument buzz and whir. Pretty far out even by already damaged SHOTM standards.
Packaged in that instantly recognizable brown cardstock sleeve with color artwork affixed to the front, and two inserts, one xeroxed and one a little transparency.
MPEG Stream: "The Blow Me Down Syndrome"
MPEG Stream: "Clearance"

CLEARED Breaking Day (Immune) cassette 6.98
Breaking Day is record number two from Cleared, the duo of Steven Hess (Locrian, Haptic) and Michael Vallera, and much like their self titled debut (reviewed elsewhere on the aQ site), this record finds the duo weaving longform landscapes of rhythm and sound, texture and noise, drawing influence from abstract ambient electronica as much as lo-fi floor-core noise. In fact, in many ways, Breaking Day feels like a continuation of that first record, touching on many of the same elements, but here having honed those elements into something spectacular.
Born of live performances in the studio, employing both live drums and sampled percussion, as well as atmospheric guitar work and all manner of droned out soundscaping, Cleared create gorgeous expanses of minimal krautdrone noise-dub, that weds rhythmic mesmer to lush layered minimalism, churning hypnorock throb to gauzy softly caustic ambience.
Opening track "Rogues" is pretty much all we've been listening to lately, a slow building sprawl of chiming soft focus shimmer, peppered with squalls of white noise, and wreathed in washed out sine wave tones, the bursts of static building a barely there rhythm, that gradually solidifies into a Necks style jazzy skitter, the sounds growing more and more dense and intense, and when the rhythm proper comes in, it's epic, a simple stuttery pulse, but it changes the whole tone of the piece, giving it some serious heft and momentum, mix in some dubbed out snares, add layer after layer of hiss and hum, and it's total psych-jazz-kraut-noise bliss. Ten minutes is way too short. This could have been the whole record, had they stretched it out to 40 minutes and it STILL would have been Record Of The Week.
The group explore similar territory on the rest of the record, but in smaller chunks, "Sighted" is a churning expanse of tinkling melodies, wavery low end thrum, and buzzing static, blurred into some seriously mesmerizing (and subtly propulsive) ambience, the title track veers into a sort of This Heat beholden post rock / post punk, all big chiming brittle guitars, woozy rhythmic churn and gloomy atmosphere. "No Path To Claim" revisits the vibe of the opener, creating a sort of soft noise raga, laced with chimes and bells, the churning low end miasma lush and textured, the track's propulsion more implied than explicit, finishing off with a haunting swirl of psychedelic guitar drift and woozy low end pulsations. "Quartz" lays down a gorgeously dense stretch of grinding minimal dronemusic, thick and viscous, but weirdly warm and hypnotic, underpinned by soft shimmery chordal swells, and the record finally finishes off with "The Harvest", the most abstract of the bunch, and one which sounds strangely like another one of this week's Records Of The Week, the bowed reindeer antler music of Hornorkesteret, with its creaking and rumbling, dark swirls of rumble and drone, distant keening melodies, what sounds like field recordings of clatter and shuffle, hints of some creaking ship abound, it's haunting, atmospheric and very evocative of some ancient mysterious ritual. Fantastic stuff!
MPEG Stream: "Rogues"
MPEG Stream: "Sighted"
MPEG Stream: "The Harvest"

CLEARED s/t (Immune) lp 16.98
We've been consistently impressed with past Immune releases including Expo 70's latest Where Does Your Mind Go? and Steven R. Smith's Cities. So it's no surprise this debut release from Chicago duo Cleared is another noteworthy addition to the Immune catalog. Cold, bleak and utterly gorgeous long tone music from Steven Hess, a member of On, Haptic and Ural Umbo, and Michael Vallera, a solo artist who has released numerous recordings on Complacency Records and Catholic Tapes, to name a few. Champions of the blurred, electronic soundscape, the duo patiently craft five carefully composed pieces that recall the melodic density of Wolfgang Voigt's GAS in cahoots with the percussive, noise-dub antics of the late Yellow Swans. Sweeping washes of white noise, field recordings slowed down and filtered through an opaque haze, veils of distant synth tones reflecting white light and cold tones into the night air. Chiming bells and glistening echoes offer a gentle lull into an utterly grey world. Cleared certainly deliver the dense, gleaming walls of droney, melodic wash that we can't get enough of, but there is a fragile quality to this self-titled debut, an attention to melodic detail. This focus on detail, in combination with a keen rhythmic sensibility filtered through an industrial lens, results in what we'll call spectral dub. A disoriented pairing of urban decay against fog-shrouded landscapes, visions of grey, snow covered roads and ghost inhabited warehouses, abandoned suburbia under a moonless sky.
While most of the album's percussive elements remain masked in distortion, reverb and filth, "False Mornings" reveals the only shinning glimpse of an apparent drum kit. Rolling toms, splashing cymbals, hypnotic repetition and creepy synth-craft guide the slow-paced procession into the bleak caves of the 'Occult-kraut' underworld. Limited to an edition of 500 lps on top quality white vinyl, don't miss out on this ghostly gem.

CLEMENCO, ISHAN Afterlight (Noma Gallery) 10" 25.00
San Francisco based visual artist and composer, Ishan Clemenco, in conjunction with a show at NOMA Gallery has released this special edition 10" on dandelion-yellow color vinyl. Consisting of two pieces, the first, "Afterlight (for Henning Christiansen)" is a 7-minute fragment of a longer work for found pianos. Taken from recordings of pianos found in old churches, music rooms and theaters and atmospherically clustered in soft-focus overlapping arrangements, the cloudlike acoustical effects of layered random pianos creates a gentle building upon of harmonic overtones in an almost raga-like structure that is really quite beautiful.
The B-side, "Untitled (Typewriter)", is dedicated to Samuel Beckett and is like the title implies, a work based on the rhythms made on an Hermes "baby" typewriter. Recorded during a residency at The Headlands Center For The Arts, the rhythms of the the taps, spaces and returns (ding!) of the old analog typewriter, based on karnatic musical structures, bounce against the former military bunker walls in beautiful reverberations. So nice! Limited to 50 copies, this is a bit on the expensive side, but it is basically a limited edition artwork and they won't be around long. Beautifully packaged with an essay by artist Dean Smith.

CLEMENCO, ISHAN Afterlight (Noma Gallery) 10" 25.00
San Francisco based visual artist and composer, Ishan Clemenco, in conjunction with a show at NOMA Gallery has released this special edition 10" on dandelion-yellow color vinyl. Consisting of two pieces, the first, "Afterlight (for Henning Christiansen)" is a 7-minute fragment of a longer work for found pianos. Taken from recordings of pianos found in old churches, music rooms and theatres and atmospherically clustered in soft-focus overlapping arrangements, the cloudlike acoustical effects of layered random pianos creates a gentle building upon of harmonic overtones in an almost raga-like structure that is really quite beautiful.
The B-side, "Untitled (Typewriter), is dedicated to Samuel Beckett and is like the title implies, a work based on the rhythms made on an Hermes "baby" typewriter. Recorded during a residency at The Headlands Center For The Arts, the rhythms of the the taps, spaces and returns (ding!) of the old analog typewriter, based on karnatic musical structures bounce against the former military bunker walls in beautiful reverberations. So nice! Limited to 50 copies, this is a bit on the expensive side, but it is basically a limited edition artwork and they won't be around long. Beautifully packaged with an essay by artist Dean Smith.

CLEMENTI, ALDO Punctum Contra Punctum (Die Schachtel) cd 27.00
More '70s Italian avant-garde composition nicely reissued by the Die Schachtel label.

CLIFFSIDES Spirit In The Mountain Temple (Hooker Vision) cassette 8.98
Cliffsides is the solo work of Ryan McGill, a Georgia native currently residing Brooklyn who is half of the kosmische synth project Afterlife. Where Afterlife tightly wound itself around the post Manuel Gottsching / Klaus Schulze ethos that led into so many of those great Emeralds related projects, McGill's solo work is all sleepwalking sprawl and narcotic mist. Bubbling abstractions, big sweeping oscillations, and lazer-shot synth tones work through the variable curtains of delay and echo effects that McGill pours over all of the synthesized sounds. Vast empty spaces with distant vocal and guitar signals cascade through those delay patterns creating a 'floating in outerspace' vibe from the onset, only to glide into a very choice step sequence of Schnitzler-esque melodicism.
By the second side, McGill offers forth some midnight electronica / sci-fi worship channelling Tangerine Dream's Zeit only to turn that into a very dark set of ambient passages, complete with ritualized chanting and industrially grim sawtooth synth lines. There's lots to cover on this tape, as McGill sprawls and drones for over 80 minutes here. Nice that somebody is using the long form medium of the cassette to its fullest potential! Limited to 100 copies; and like most everything on Hooker Vision, this will not last long.
MPEG Stream: "La Maison Dieu"

CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS 5 Cents A Piece (Abduction) lp 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Maybe it's a good thing that the Climax Golden Twins don't put out a lot of records. That way, when one of their damaged recordings of post-everything psychedelia marred with hallucinatory sound collages does come our way, we can savor it all the more. Along comes 5 Cents A Piece, and we couldn't be happier. Yup, this is a fucking great record. Is it their best? Maybe. But it most certainly ranks as one of the musical triumphs of 2007.
In many ways, the Twins have operated on parallel tracks to their geographical / spiritual brothers from the Sun City Girls, with the Twins mining more from the underbelly of Americana than the esoterica of South-East Asian pop. But Messrs Taylor and Millis are not without an appetite for such eccentricities, as Robert Millis continues to be an occasional contributor to the always exceptional Sublime Frequencies series. That said, the Twins are no longer a duo as they had been for so many years; here, on 5 Cents A Piece they've added the talents of percussionist Dave Abramson to their lineup. His quick turns from cosmo-rock hammerfist to free-jazz tumble down the stairs to plinkering vaudevillian backbeats make for the perfect foil to the twin guitar splatter of Taylor and Millis. As much as Abramson's presence is noticed on 5 Cents A Piece, the auditory dementia of Taylor and Millis steers the album (if it can be called 'steering,' that is). At times, they throw themselves

CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS Dream Cut Short In The Mysterious Clouds (Meme) cd 18.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Climax Golden Twins specialize in the avant-garde pastiche, in which the band cuts up deep drone hypnosis, Raster-esque sinewave manipulation, and improv rock fragments. Much like the early 80s mail art projects of Bladder Flast or P16.D4.

CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS Eerie Fragrance (Etude) lp 15.98
The Climax Golden Twins have always had their hands in as many cookie jars as they could; and all of the records are true adventures in sound that could include fucked-up collages of old 78s, thudding art-rock that has earned them opening spots for Sonic Youth, blissful ambience for narcoleptic art-installations, clattering urban gamelan presentations, and plenty more. Eerie Fragrance hits all of these marks and then some, having originally been released as a cassette back in 1995. The original title to the cassette was Eyeless Formation, but has been redubbed as Eerie Fragrance for the vinyl reissue. There's also a couple of extra tracks which didn't appear on the original cassette which had appeared on compilations from around the same time period.
The album quickly revolves through a collage of improvised bursts that accelerates up to an unsettled loop of a woman possibly in the midst of a breakup repeating her pleas over a turgid thrumb of static and rumbling drone which spills out of a series of peculiar squeaks and squiggles. As such, these moments have more in common with Nurse With Wound than their geographical and spiritual neighbors in the Sun City Girls; but is certainly well within the scope of CGT's esoteric collages. Noirish loops and raucous crowd noise tumble out of the beginning of the flipside, with guitar plucks that sound more like rubber bands snapping in the distant. Artifacts of tape noise and crusty debris inhabit a set of overlapping loops topped with gnarled scrapes on the guitar. Crunches of leaves and thick industrial field recordings give way to seasick wooden creakings, laughing gulls, and bellowing foghorns. As disconnected as all of these elements appear after the fact, they all work rather effortlessly in the context of this recording. Really great!
MPEG Stream: "excerpt"

CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS Imperial Household Orchestra (Scratch Recordings) cd 14.98
Another brilliant, corroded, and demented facet of the Climax Golden Twins is found on the reissue of their 1996 debut full-length cd. From the release of this album, it became clear that the Sun City Girls were no longer the only game in town, when it came to fucked-up deconstructions of noise-rock propulsion with South East Asian overtones and painterly freeform improvisations. In a lot of ways, this album is a slightly more focused version of the Sun City Girls' 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda, sans the Bollywood punk tunes blurted out by Alan Bishop. Yeah, it's that good!
The principle Twins (maestros Robert Millis and Jeffery Taylor) invited eight musicians to join them and producer Scott Colburn for a series of studio driven improvisations, which were in turn sculpted into this "epic masterpiece," as Colburn later quipped and to which we can certainly agree. The urban gamelan infused improvisations meander through rhythmic tinklings upon metal bells and vibraphones, which provide a queasy Martin Denny air of tropical sicknesses abundant in every buzz, rasp, and clang of the ensemble's polyphonous scatter. As much as these elements do recall the equally skittering moments of the Sun City Girls, the Climax Golden Twins growl with the best of the post-hardcore noiseniks on Blast First (e.g. Sonic Youth, Big Black, A.C. Temple, Head of David, etc.) with some volatile, Mack-truck riffage scraping across lumbering backbeats with ample amounts of amplifier mangling distortion. Fucking great, we say!
MPEG Stream: "Untitled 7"
MPEG Stream: "Untitled 10"
MPEG Stream: "Untitled 14"

CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS Lovely (Anomalous) cd 13.98
Of the three or four records that I've heard from The Climax Golden Twins, this idiosyncratic Seattle trio of sound experimentalists seem to re-invent themselves with each record, offering fractured field recordings, cannibalized ethno-rock (a la Sun City Girls), surgically creepy soundtracks (as in their 'Session 9' score), and now a sleepytime album of ambient pleasantries in "Lovely." According to the Twins, this album was recorded "sometime ago and then forgotten," only to resurface in a number of different forms, first as a sound accompaniment to some artwork at a Seattle gallery, then as a CD-R on Gravelvoice, who packaged the album with a pillow, and now with a more pragmatic package thanks to Anomalous Records. Like Robert Rich's Sleep Concerts, "Lovely" intends to lull its listeners to sleep; but fortunately, the Climax Golden Twins do not saturate their work with new age sentimentalism or factory pre-set synth sounds. While their methods are not entirely clear, it appears that the Climax Golden Twins use drone guitars, long stringed instruments, and tons of effects boxes looped back upon themselves to create a sweeping atmosphere not far from the Aeolian String Ensemble or Nurse With Wound's "Soliloquy For Lilith."
RealAudio clip: "Lovely"

CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS s/t (Conspiracy) lp 29.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Our pals at Conspiracy Records, a label/distro based in Belgium, who in the past have brought us records by Boris, Jesu, Shora and more, are this year celebrating their 10 year anniversary. A decade of amazing music. From a bedroom based punk rock label, to one of Europe's most important and influential labels and distros, all we can say is HURRAY! And HUZZAH! It's always so exciting, when a bunch of folks get together to spread the word about great music, great WEIRD music, and survive, even thrive. Such is the case with Conspiracy. And as if that weren't already enough, just knowing that some great people were selling some amazing music, those sweeties at Conspiracy have decided to share the love with us. And you.
To celebrate their 10th anniversary, they've decided to do a super limited subscription series, 12 records over 12 months, each limited to somewhere between 200-500 copies, ONLY available to series subscribers. EXCEPT, they've decided to let AQ have 20 copies of each, we're the only store with copies of these subscriber only lps, and for a brief moment, we can offer them to you, our loyal AQ customers. Needless to say we are thrilled, as the series lineup reads like a who's who of AQ faves, as well as including a handful of lesser knowns. All pressed on super thick vinyl, and packaged in killer hand screened original art sleeves. But be warned, we only got 20 of each, and we will run out fast and we will not be able to get more. When we do run out, there is a chance you can still get one from Conspiracy direct, but what that means is act fast and prepare to leave empty handed.
We knew the Climax Golden Twins were a strange lot. Their records were totally unpredictable, lovely and dreamlike one moment, damaged and demented the next. This just may be the strangest one yet. Two sides, both drastically different, each side has a mysterious etching in the runoff groove, one side says "Vintage Pulchritude", the other says "Ambient Caveman", which should have been our first clue!
The first side is a woozy assemblage of sounds, seemingly drawn from old films, bits of dialogue, snippets of music, all bizarre when taken out of context and butted up against another random bit of speech or sound. But the various snippets are deftly woven into a dreamlike surreal whole, wrapped in crystalline clouds of record crackle, tape hiss, sine waves and various other random ambient influences. Really gorgeous to listen to, but truly haunting and bizarre.
The second side starts on much more familiar CGT territory, with gentle lilting folks, melancholy melodies, left to drift through soundscapes of fuzz and hiss, distant muted percussion, thumps and shuffles, a sort of abstract freak folk that sort of just hovers and drifts. But then all of a sudden, the band launches into a fully rocked out jam, that sounds more like math metal than anything. Hard to say if it was played or sampled, but it quickly dissipates into more abstract dreaminess. But they're not done fucking with us yet. The record closes with another wild jam, this time it's a old school echoey Stoogesy garage rock stomp, raw and propulsive, super distorted and ultra rocking. Cool stuff. Definitely hard to pin down, and we always seem to be knocked for a loop, but that's exactly why we love these guys so much.
Gorgeous hand screened cover and nice thick vinyl. These two will be gone before you know it...

CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS s/t (Locations) (Fire Breathing Turtle) cd 13.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
This is a record that shouldn't be around; yet, against the odds, we have a handful of these discs in stock for the moment. The Climax Golden Twins refer to this eponymous CD as Locations although we can't find any reference to that title on the all white, embossed folding cardstock. In recent years, Robert Millis of the Twins has produced some of the finer contributions to the Sublime Frequencies series of obscure ethnomusicology, including the Phi Ta Khon DVD and the Harmika Yab Yum compilation from Tibet. And, had this 1998 collage of field recordings and shortwave radio transmissions been released in this day and age, it surely would have warranted a Sublime Frequencies release, as it fits so closely within their agenda. Yet, it remains a Climax Golden Twins production, and given CGT's radically eclectic aesthetic sensibility (Victrola 78 collages, cannibalized psychedelia, horror soundtracks, long-form dronemusik, etc.), why not call this a Climax Golden Twins record? So what we have here is an interwoven collage from unspecified locations, with some of the locales being more obvious than others. The temple gongs and bells getting banged about with jubilant indeterminance are from South-East Asia (probably being Javanese Gamelan), the deeply reverential incantations set against clouds of crickets could be from any Muslim temple in Asia, and only an etymologist could pinpoint where in the world those cicadas could be residing. Altogether, a mighty fine collage of phonography before such a term was coined.
MPEG Stream: "Track 1"
MPEG Stream: "Track 2"
MPEG Stream: "Track 3"

CLINE, NELS / DEVIN SARNO Buried On Bunker Hill (Ground Fault) cd 11.98
This new release from AQ fave avant-guitarist Mr. Nels Cline sees him teamed up with his old compatriot Devin Sarno, the avant-bassist who records solo under the name Crib. An exploration in ambient, instrumental, percussion-free postrock, Buried On Bunker Hill is labeled as being part of the Ground Fault label's Series I, which supposedly means "quiet" experimental music as opposed to loud and noisy experimental music (it's a three-tiered system, with Series III being the extreme end of sheer power electronics noise, and Series II somewhere in the middle). But hey, a lot of that has to do with where you set the volume knob on your stereo! So don't get the idea that these abstract, presumably improvised guitar/bass duets are in any way tame, though they are quite pretty, and yes, sometimes quiet, at which points you'll recall for a moment that Nels is supposed to be a jazz guitarist. But then the volume swells to room-filling heights... These four tracks (totalling 55 minutes) are gorgeous, detailed drone works, soothing but active and dynamic. If this is 'experimental music', the experiment in question was undoubtedly a success. Recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Swinging London"

CLOAK OF DISPLACEMENT Ritual (KV & GR) cd-r 6.98
It's been a while since we've heard from one man, lo-fi, outsider, doomdrone, blacknoise weirdo Cloak Of Displacement, and fans of any of the other CoD cd-r's we've raved about in the past know just what to expect, which is to NOT know what the fuck to expect. This time around, it's three tracks, all dramatically different, the first hint being the instruments listed on the sleeve: guitar, knife, drums, vocals, and POWER SAW. Hell yeah.
And the first track, the epic 21 minute "Torture Beckons Me" definitely follows through on the implied promise of sonic whatthefuck. A spaced out abstract ultra doom crawl. But instead of heaving avalanches of blown out downtuned riffage, and massive pummeling beats, the reality is way more bizarre and baffling, tons of space, occasional swells of muted guitar buzz, some SUPER abstract drum thump and plonk, and some seriously SICK vokills, super skeletal and minimal and in its own way sort of hypnotic. Like a way less harsh, way more spaced out blackened Khanate maybe? The riffs pulled so far apart they're more like occasional squalls of thrum, the track nearly free of momentum or propulsion, more an ooze or drift, the vibe ritualistic and primitive and totally fucking strange.
The second song picks up the pace, but if anything gets even WEIRDER, with some muted rhythmic riffing, lots of seriously stumbling drumming, and twisted freaked out hysterical vox that make the dude from Lifelover sound like Neil Diamond. The song weaves and wobbles drunkenly, reminding us a bit of Varghkoghargasmal or a more brain damaged Hypothermia. And finally, the saw make an appearance, the brief closing track / outro, that plays like the bloop bleep of ambient Burzum, but the whole thing is wrapped in the harsh buzz of the power saw, which is presumably being used, at least judging from the song title, in the "Disposing Of The Body".
MPEG Stream: "Torture Beckons Me"
MPEG Stream: "The Session"

CLOAK OF DISPLACEMENT This Is The Only Way (self-released) cd-r 8.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Some of you might remember Gargotheron, whose cd-r we reviewed a while back, a blurred baffling black metal horde from Arizona, whose sound was grim and raw, primitive and pummeling, spastic and hyper kinetic, octopoidal drumming, insectoid riffing, we described it as "Bone Awl meets Lightning Bolt", so what might we expect from Cloak Of Displacement, a strange ritualistic avant doom offshoot of the mighty Gargotheron? How about long expanses of processed downtuned guitar drone, gurgled distorted vocals, abstract riffage and clouds of glitch and buzz and electronic interference, brief bursts of in-the-red ultra distorted noise drenched black metal. And more fucked up weirdness. We're tempted to describe it as a black metal Faxed Head, but it's not quite so purposefully damaged, although it's plenty demented. There are stretches of almost prettiness, in the guise of sprawling low end buzz, a little Earth (circa 2), a little Khanate, a pinch of SUNNO))), but filtered though some sort of sick Abruptum like sonic ritual, in fact ritual is an apt description, as the performance was literally part of a REAL ritual, with a real live witch performing incantations and spells, at one point snipping locks of hair from the various band members while they recorded, even the packaging, sealed with wax, have been cursed, so open at your own peril!
Grim and fucked up, mysterious and abstract, definitely essential listening for ambient noise metal freeks into stuff like Abruptum, Emit and the like, but also might hit the spot for the slow and low obsessed, Khanate, SUNNO))), Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Vulture Club and other purveyors of minimal blackened filth.
Packaged in a hand stamped black envelope, sealed with wax, hand numbered, LIMITED TO ONLY 45 COPIES! We took most of those, inside a hand written missive from Cloak Of Displacement, to YOU.
MPEG Stream: "Storm Conjuring Improvisation"
MPEG Stream: "The Dissident"

CLOAK OF DISPLACEMENT Vernal (self-released) cd-r 9.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We originally discovered Cloak Of Displacement, via baffling black metallers Gargotheron, whose cd-r we went a little nuts for when we had it way back when. But it didn't take long for CoD to win us over, transforming the "Bone Awl meets Lightning Bolt" sound of Gargotheron into something filthier and blacker and doomier, a downtuned crusty blackened sprawl that seemed to ooze evil. Totally not typically black metal, or even metal really, more a chaotic stumbling super distorted electronic flecked blacknoize. Needless to say, we were down with the Cloak.
So we waited patiently, for going on two years now, and finally it's here, actually, THEY're here, two new discs from the mysterious Cloak Of Displacement, both of these are ultra limited, and we mean ULTRA, as in there are ONLY 24 COPIES!!!! That's it, and of those 24, we got TWENTY of them. So you know what that means, first 20 evil bastards to jab a gnarled claw into that add to cart button, will be feasting on CoD's grim black sonic banquet(s). And yeah, you're probably gonna want both, cuz they're both way different...
Vernal is all ambient, a 43 minute black ritual, that finds the man behind CoD, teamed up with two other players, one who simply wields "magick", while the other two handle guitar, keyboard and percussion. Guitars throb and drone, low end rumbles reverberate ominously, sheets of feedback undulate, layers and tones lock into a sort of Niblockian drift, super hypnotic and intense, eventually, the drone begins to fragment, pelted by FX and various shards of buzz and hum, seemingly crumbling to pieces but always coalescing back into something heavy and hypnotic, thick throbbing pulses, over shards of high end skree, bits of abstract minimal almost doom, barely there rhythms, strange processed crunch collides with lush doomdrone riffage, bursts of distorted rrrooar, strange clunks and creeps, definitely less metal and more abstract free drone weirdness.
Way recommended for sure, and not just for weirdo metalheads, dronelords and ambient explorers will find a lot to dig here too...
Once again, these are crazy limited, and handmade, each one comes with a hand-glued sleeve (made from the very evilest of construction papers, and in various grim shades) each with a pasted on front and back cover image, burned around the edges by the flames of hell...
MPEG Stream: "Vernal (excerpt)"

CLOAK OF DISPLACEMENT / BLOOD ESCUTCHEON split (KV&GR/Recs) cassette 4.50
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Another release from the newly launched KV&GR/Recs label, run by weirdo black metal one man band Cloak Of Displacement. All of the releases so far (Mavra, Edasi) criminally limited, and this one is no different. LIMITED TO JUST 20 COPIES, of which, we got ALL twenty. But judging from the last batch, these will likely be gone in a flash, so don't dawdle.
Cloak Of Displacement, a long time aQ outsider black metal fave, offers up another set of twisted low fidelity blackened what the fuck, murky warbly riffs, primitive recording, stumbling damaged drumming, and some of THEE weirdest vocals ever, slipping from goofy grunt to croaking quack, the sound itself stumbling from abstract drift, to pounding dirge and back again. Occasionally within these three tracks, the sound does explode into a sort of blast, but it's a lurching lumbering blast, on the verge of total collapse, a chaotic careening black weirdness that sort of rule. Elsewhere the sound shifts to something more abstract, a sort of spaced out doom, a demented detuned creep, all warbly chords and rehearsal space drum splatter, and those creepy alien vox. Folks who loved past CoD releases will NOT be disappointed.
The flipside is taken up by another one man band, the mysterious and oddly monikered Blood Escutcheon, whose sound is more of an ambient blacknoize, riffs stretched out into layered drones, warm and whirling one second, caustic and buzzy the next. The side opens up with some dreamlike ambient drift, that slowly builds to a blowout of Merzbowian noise, infused with fragmented riffage an strange disembodied heavily effected vocals, which leads directly into a super creepy stretch of processed vocal dronemusic, a sea of hiss and static, underneath which a super processed voice drift creepily, before the sound blossoms into some blurred blown out almost Skullflowery noise, which with headphones strapped on, reveals all manner of sonic weirdness lurking below the surface, the side ending with some cool, softly distorted industrial crunch, blurred out and smeared into something much more soft focus and ambient.
And again, we only have 20 COPIES of these, and there are in fact ONLY 20 copies, so act fast.
Includes killer cover art from Blood Escutcheon mastermind Thaniel Lee. Each copy hand numbered.
MPEG Stream: CLOAK OF DISPLACEMENT "Seasoning The Lamb"
MPEG Stream: CLOAK OF DISPLACEMENT "Hymn To Eostre"
MPEG Stream: BLOOD ESCUTCHEON "Untitled"

CLOAKED LIGHT Creek (Monorail Trespassing) cassette 6.98
Crank this album all the way up at the beginning and slowly begin to back down the volume on this, lest you want to set off car alarms outside your building or trigger seismic sensors or just have this recording be way too fucking loud. On the first side of Creek, an ominous hum rises out of icy silence, following the path set forth on Kevin Drumm's unsettled ambient opus Imperial Distortion or even some of the Eliane Radigue constructs. These are sounds that could hail from field recordings of massive tanker ship engines or a bank of oscillators tuned to be as low as possible or the thrum of feedback from a bass guitar slumped over an amplifier. Very little happens in this arcing, darkly meditative offering; but that's exactly the point. The second side picks up exactly where the first left off, with a similarly oppressive tone exhibiting some minute ripples and variations on the theme. No idea who or what Cloaked Light happens to be, but he/she/they managed a cassette on Monorail Trespassing. And that always causes us to perk our ears up a bit. Limited to 125 copies.

CLOAKS A Crystal Skull In Peru (Athiests Are Gods) cd-r 9.98
Those guys in the Starving Weirdos have been kicking our asses with one amazing release after another. And as if that weren't enough, now they've started signing other like minded noisemakers to their Atheists Are Gods label.
The first release comes from Cloaks, aka Spencer Doran, who for his first readily available domestic full length release, offers up two gorgeous lengthy pieces, one for piano, tapes, zither and bells, the other for electric guitar and piano with harmonium and electronics. The result is lush and spellbinding. The closest comparison that even begins to come close is Lubomyr Melnyk, with his dense flurries of notes, creating dizzyingly intricate swirls of melodic fragments that while ultra complex are so intricate they seem to melt into long dreamlike drifts.
Such is the case with Cloaks. And then some. The opening track begins with a strange jumble of chaotic percussion, weird boings, effects drenched squiggles, sounding like something that could be a bit goofy for our liking, but after a burst of record crackle and needle on vinyl static, the track settles into a gorgeously sun baked, glistening shimmer, a fine mist of notes enveloping the listener like a warm fog, multiple abstract melodies drifting into one another becoming gloriously intertwined, hovering ghostlike over soft drifts of smeared piano in the background. It almost sounds like Oval's Diskont, but with soft shimmery piano instead of skipping cds. Fluid and organic, softly swelling, so many notes... you know how you can sort of blur your eyes and make everything look all fuzzy, well imagine you could blur your EARS, it's like listening to Reich or Riley or Palestine with blurred ears. Soft focus and indistinct, every once in a while bits of melody coming into view but quickly fading into the sounds around it. So pretty. One of those rare tracks that we wish went on forever and ever...
The second track is a subtly different beast but with a similar vibe. Beginning with spare spidery electric guitar, suspended in a wide open expanse of near silence, a sort of skeletal post rock, which quickly slips under a gradually building wave of dense Wave-Lox like piano. Thick roiling low end squalls of reverberating rumble and rich overtones, very lush and intense. Near the final few minutes little bits of electronic glitch and grrr begin to surface, slowly wrapping themselves around the piano flurries, eventually surrounding it completely, becoming a dense buzzing electronic drone with almost no trace of the piano remaining...
Packaged in super striking silkscreened digipaks with pasted on textured paper, full color art, and with a hand screened insert.
MPEG Stream: "A Crystal Skull In Peru"
MPEG Stream: "Grass Pillow"

CLOAKS Serene (Students Of Decay) cd-r 10.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
It's been a while since we've heard from the Cloaks, aka Spencer Doran. But the first Cloaks cd, A Crystal Skull In Peru, is still a steady seller, and for good reason. Two tracks of piano, electronics, guitar, zither and bells, all woven into lush dreamlike soundscapes. The Starving Weirdos released that first one on their label, which made a lot of sense, as they two seems to share a distinct aesthetic, but with the SWs taking the darker path, while Cloaks path was dappled with sunlight, and would around grassy knolls and windswept vistas.
We're pleased to report, that on this latest release, another two tracker, Doran and his Cloaks haven't altered the formula too much. Another couple of fuzzy, gauzy, washed out dronescapes, the first rich with flurries of muted piano, and processed guitars, the emphasis on the piano, which, much like the first disc, reminds us of continuous music guru and master pianist Lubomyr Melnyk, albeit less frenzied. Instead, the clouds of notes emerge from the piano and drift like motes of dust, swirling in the slightest breeze, surrounded by bits of glitch, and crumbling effects, backwards melodies, soft swaths of buzz and whirring shimmer, delicate and crystalline, but so warm and rich and soporific, 35 minutes of dense, swirling soft focus bliss, utterly mesmerizing and hypnotic, yet another one of those tracks that should go on forever and ever.
The second track is much more brief, and acts more as a sort of addendum. A dark, languorous avant Appalachia, dark notes tumbling from the guitar, soft swirls of steel string shimmer, the subtle buzz of deftly fingerpicked melodies, minor key and melancholy, hovering over a backdrop of watercolored whirs, a near static drone beneath the gorgeous little tangles of guitar, laced with spare, spacious piano melodies, a gorgeous late afternoon drift, that near the end, builds to a swirling, densely layered, subtly kinetic coda. So nice.
Packaged in a beautiful full color sleeve, hand stamped and numbered cd-r's, photocopied inserts, LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES...
MPEG Stream: "Dream Tape Number One"
MPEG Stream: "Improvisation For Guitar And Piano"

CLOAMA At The Mountains Of Paranoia (Turgid Animal) cd 13.98
It's been almost 5 years since we last heard from Dead Reptile Shrine black ambient offshoot Cloama, the two records featuring Cloama alongside another mysterious entity called Blutleuchte (or perhaps that was just some sort of affectation, and not actually another person/group?) being big favorites with the drone obsessed aQ-ers, the sound on those records weirdly ritualistic and industrial, expansive blackened soundscapes, minimal yet strangely and hauntingly lush. So what has changed since 2008?
A lot actually. In fact, right out of the gate, Cloama unfurl not some dark lugubrious rumble, but instead, a soaring sort of almost shoegazey swirl, a coruscating crumbling distorted droned out shimmer, over which a vocalist howls abjectly, buried in the mix, while all around, sounds chime and buzz, the whole thing laced with subtle melodic flourishes, and lush textural shifts, it's a heady bit of psychedelic ur-drone soft noise, that leads directly into a sound much more Cloama-like, a grinding crumbling bit of low end, wreathed in thick streaks of feedback, sprawling and oozing in another near static buzz drenched blur, underpinning more bellowed vox, the sound of Cloama seeming to have shifted closer to the power electronics / blackened industrial axis that the black ambience that used to define their sound. Drums surface sporadically, or perhaps it's just bits of percussion, crunch and clatter, a weirdly hypnotic, droned out stretch of crumbling rumbling mesmer, which is how the rest of the record plays out, a series of industrial dronescapes, that sound like Wolf Eyes crossed with Whitehouse, the song shifting occasionally into something much more restrained, the sounds muted and washed out, the various bits of percussion locked into a stumbling abstract rhythm, while elsewhere, the sound blossoms into a sort of late period Skullflower psychedelic noise freakout, Merzbowic in intensity, but more textural and densely layered, rendering even the most caustic sounds weirdly mesmerizing and hypnotic. Another deep listening record that reveals a whole other microscopic sonic world lurking just below the roiling blown out surface.
Fans of the old Cloama discs might find this too abrasive, but anyone into dense psychedelic noise and experimental blackened soundscapery will definitely dig, although it definitely requires an appreciation of noise. And the last song is a creepy surprise, a choir of female voices harmonizing over streaks of low end buzz and pipe fight clang and clatter, peppered with little bursts of grinding distorted guitar crumble, and booming distant percussion, epic and haunting and strangely cinematic.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
MPEG Stream: "Clenched Dimension"
MPEG Stream: "Through The Fog Of War"
MPEG Stream: "At The Mountains Of Paranoia Part I"

CLOAMA + BLUTLEUCHTE From Wasteland Mausoleums (Old Sentinel) cd 14.98
By now, most readers of the AQ list should be quite familiar with our unfettered love for Finnish outsider black metal horde Dead Reptile Shrine (who have a new double cd coming out eventually on Andee's tUMULt label!), a band whose sound, while ostensibly black metal, seems to be more damaged folk, black ambient, and demented metallic psychedelia. Which is precisely why we're so obsessed with them.
So when we discovered that there was a related band, featuring member(s) of DRS, we were definitely intrigued, and we did manage to get a couple releases, but never more than one or two copies. So here we have the very first proper release from Cloama + Blutleuchte, not sure if that's the name of the band, or if this is indeed a collaboration between Cloama and Blutleuchte, but what we do know is it's very dark and very strange, and really goddamn amazing.
The music of Cloama + Blutleuchte is some haunting mysterious primal drone ritual, equal parts shimmering dark ambience, the low end rhythmic explorations of fellow countrymen Tiermes, jumbled Dada-ist soundscaping and damaged and disembodied free folk drift, it's scary and mysterious, but weirdly subdued and lovely as well.
The cover is black and white, adorned with spiders, and a gorgeous crest, the title and credits in a handwritten scrawl, the song titles are strange hinting at the mysteries within: "Archean Quartzite Hammer", "Arcjaic Waters Enshrine The Seer", "Lord Of The Equinoctical Fountain", the book is peppered with mysterious diagrams and illustrations, photos and drawings, lyrics and this haunting passage: "That glimpse of left eye is distorting my right eye. Sparce [sic] exhaustive dimension, misguided enrichment. Usually sharp model at the lower right. The line of sight operates the automatic systems positions. Those shattered lights, occupational dysfunction. Characterized by sight cycling and shifting. Curvatory illusion is dependent on a adjacent edge. Eyeless. A contempt of legislative compulsion." Woah. But strangely enough, that's sort of what the music sounds like. Perplexing and confusional, with some damaged internal logic, that almost has you convinced that this is what sound is -meant- to sound like. That these are not songs, but messages, missives from the past, or the future, or the beyond, in musical code, hiding secrets as old as the earth, as the universe.
Long drawn out stretches of cavernous rumble, the distant whir of machinery, voices wrapped in reverb, drifting amidst black swells, creepy melodies muted and stretched into mysterious pulses, glitched out electronics like pesky insects, funeral horns over abstract far off clatter, thick corrosive bursts of crumbling distortion, slowed down vocals, huge arcs of buzzing hiss over strangely mournful layers of keening feedback, throbbing bassline strung across undersea caverns, glistening and lit with some strange un-natural light, lurching industrial percussion like some damaged alien procession, creepy angular guitar leads suspended in a cloud of swirling hiss and whir, epic swaths of blackened guitar buzz, like some black metal track stripped down to its very essence and blurred into a strange funereal lament, all of these various sounds and occurrences, woven into some haunting black ritual, ancient and timeless, as fucked up and freaked out as it is hypnotic and beautiful.
MPEG Stream: "Blackbird's Den"
MPEG Stream: "The Tower Covered In Frozen Ectoplasma"
MPEG Stream: "Morbid Sentinel"

CLOSER TO CARBON II (Out Of Round Records) cd 12.98
It makes perfect sense that Closer To Carbon would qualify their experimental-chamber-pop opus II as 'scores for unmade films.' All of these instrumental numbers enjoy a theatrical sentiment, as expressed through a variety of strings plus a cavalcade of junkstore objects whose offkiltered quirkiness add many a Tom Waits / Sleepytime Gorilla Museum reference. When not exploring the eccentrically cinematic, Closer To Carbon finds themselves in much darker waters, more comparable to the maudlin Victorian waltzes of Rasputina.
MPEG Stream: "Odessa Steps Incident Part IV"
MPEG Stream: "Tiny + The Albatross"

CLOSING THE ETERNITY Northern Lights Ambience (Drone) 7" 9.98
We love Drone records. And their series of ultra limited, hand assembled 7"s. There's even a forthcoming 2cd on Andee's tUMULt label collecting a handful of the early long out of print 7"s. We can only ever manage to get a tiny handful of these singles since they're so limited, but when we do we try to list them, and it's definitely lucky for the tiny handful of you who are quick on the buy-it-now trigger. Some of the best drone and dark ambient music around.
Closing The Eternity sound like some lost dusty old tape, slightly warped from laying unused in an old box a the bottom of some forgotten crawlspace. Warped and warbling whirs, a bit like some old William Basinksi 78 played on a rickety old turntable, with a damaged speed mechanism, causing the tempo to fluctuate and subtly shift. Eventually, this antique warble is overtaken by dense melodic washes of more and more drone, layer after layer, a huge dense drift of sound. The B side is a bit more abstract, a sound much more cavernous and haunting, a delicate slow burning whir.
First Edition. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! Clear swirled blue vinyl. Plain black sleeve with a little silver metallic plastic emblem affixed to the front. Includes liner notes and insert.

CLOUDLAND CANYON Born Blonde / Sea Cycles (Trensmat) 12" 14.98
Latest from these long time aQ faves, a heady blast of kosmische kraut-synth bliss, released on the always ruling Trensmat label, and like the last few records, this new 12" finds them continuing on in their deep space-ward trajectory, the sound minimal, but simultaneously dense and driving, a relentless cascade of pulsating synths, swirling sequenced melodies, like the best bit of the Logan's Run soundtrack, looped and layered, and distorted and sent swirling into the ether. It's like the soundtrack to some tripped out sci-fi art film, totally hypnotic and WAY psychedelic, new age cranked to 11, at least until about 6 minutes into the first track, where programmed drums come crashing in, bringing with them, a thick pulsing bassline, and dreamy ethereal female vox, the resulting hybrid a rad mix of dubbed out electro pop and swirling kraut-drone synth-wave.
The flipside is more rhythmic and industrial, a sort of looped and lumbering robo-kraut, crunchy beats, jagged melodies, super distorted buzz drenched bass rhythms, swirling sci-fi shimmer over the top, dense and driving, and relentless, less dancefloor groove, and more fever dream freakout. These guys just keep getting better.
The lp includes a download of the two tracks on the record proper, as well as two extra bonus tracks, nearly fourteen minutes, the first some seriously dreamy celestial new age, all swirling synths, and woozy rhythmic pulsations, the second a dense tangle soft chaos, a roiling cloud of intertwined melodies, swooping effects and processed synth squelch, dreamily hypnotic and cosmically psychedelic.
Already out of print and sold out at the label, we got a bunch, but once we sell out, we may not be able to get more, so best grab one before they're gone. Packaged in super striking, hand screened pink on white jackets.
MPEG Stream: "Born Blonde"
MPEG Stream: "Sea Cycles"

CLOUDLAND CANYON Fin Eaves (Holy Mountain) cd 13.98
Cloudland Canyon always seemed like some impossible classic krautrock / noise rock hybrid, their records equal parts German Oak, Faust, Amon Duul, My Bloody Valentine and the Dead C, a washed out sonic world of gritty hypnotic haze, of lumbering psychedelic grooves, of twisted FX drenched drift and looped druggy ambience, as likely to explode into a super rocking fuzzed out dronejam as they were to emit thick billowing clouds of swirling blurred psychdrone shimmer, but always, at the core of their sound was pop. Little hooks buried in the murk and the mire, catchiness subtly woven into the fabric of every bit of spaced out crush or raga-like skree, the thread that held their sound together was spun from melody and harmony, no matter how much those elemental forces were obscured.
Recently CC shared a split with Citay, both bands paying homage to fuzzy dream poppers Galaxie 500, CC's version was especially fantastic, drugged out and hypnotic, somehow transforming the original into what could have been a proper Cloudland Canyon jam, and in the process, revealing, more explicitly than ever, the warm glowing pop heart, that beat inside the buzzing, lysergic krautrock chest of Cloudland Canyon. Which it seems, lead to this, Fin Eaves, a fully realized exploration of pop music, filtered through CC's gloriously cracked kraut/drone/noise filter, the result, one of the fuzziest, most washed out, dreamiest noise pop / dream pop records in recent memory.
Every track a swirling morass of druggy effects, of muted melodies, of buried reverbed vox, of subverted jangle, muddy grooves, subtle hooks, a soft focus collision between My Bloody Valentine, Teenage Filmstars and Galaxie 500, a three way pileup where the various elements simply sink into one another, blurring and smearing into fantastically new shapes, a little bit of looped hypnotic Spacemen 3 style drug rock here, a little super distorted minimal Jesus and Mary Chain stomp there, slipping seamlessly from gauzy soft pop shuffle, to dense crumbling popnoise damage, to hushed loping slowcore haze, to soaring prismatic space psych bliss, each and every track is dense and spacious and layered, the various sounds constantly shifting, transforming, pealing melodies sloughing off only to reveal even more subtle melodies beneath, streaks of electronic glitch and clouds of warm whirling hiss drift amidst deep thrummed bass, and simple motorik rhythms, gorgeously out of focus vocal harmonies, and all manner of texture and timbre, a rare record as much about song as sound, strip away the sound, and you'd have a surprisingly perfect pop record, take away the songs, and you'd still have some fantastically abstract sonic earcandy, but combine the two, and you have this, an utterly gorgeous disc of otherworldly noise drenched lysergic dream pop. Fans of Teenage Filmstars, Beach House, Jesus & Mary Chain, Flaming Lips, Galaxie 500, Spacemen 3, Candy Claws, Mercury Rev, School Of The Seven Bells, and other psychedelic dream poppers, this is your new favorite record.
MPEG Stream: "No One Else Around"
MPEG Stream: "Fin Eaves"
MPEG Stream: "Sister"
MPEG Stream: "Pinklike / Version"

CLOUDLAND CANYON Fin Eaves (Holy Mountain) lp 14.98
Last week's Record Of The Week, now arrives on vinyl!!
Cloudland Canyon always seemed like some impossible classic krautrock / noise rock hybrid, their records equal parts German Oak, Faust, Amon Duul, My Bloody Valentine and the Dead C, a washed out sonic world of gritty hypnotic haze, of lumbering psychedelic grooves, of twisted FX drenched drift and looped druggy ambience, as likely to explode into a super rocking fuzzed out dronejam as they were to emit thick billowing clouds of swirling blurred psychdrone shimmer, but always, at the core of their sound was pop. Little hooks buried in the murk and the mire, catchiness subtly woven into the fabric of every bit of spaced out crush or raga-like skree, the thread that held their sound together was spun from melody and harmony, no matter how much those elemental forces were obscured.
Recently CC shared a split with Citay, both bands paying homage to fuzzy dream poppers Galaxie 500, CC's version was especially fantastic, drugged out and hypnotic, somehow transforming the original into what could have been a proper Cloudland Canyon jam, and in the process, revealing, more explicitly than ever, the warm glowing pop heart, that beat inside the buzzing, lysergic krautrock chest of Cloudland Canyon. Which it seems, lead to this, Fin Eaves, a fully realized exploration of pop music, filtered through CC's gloriously cracked kraut/drone/noise filter, the result, one of the fuzziest, most washed out, dreamiest noise pop / dream pop records in recent memory.
Every track a swirling morass of druggy effects, of muted melodies, of buried reverbed vox, of subverted jangle, muddy grooves, subtle hooks, a soft focus collision between My Bloody Valentine, Teenage Filmstars and Galaxie 500, a three way pileup where the various elements simply sink into one another, blurring and smearing into fantastically new shapes, a little bit of looped hypnotic Spacemen 3 style drug rock here, a little super distorted minimal Jesus and Mary Chain stomp there, slipping seamlessly from gauzy soft pop shuffle, to dense crumbling popnoise damage, to hushed loping slowcore haze, to soaring prismatic space psych bliss, each and every track is dense and spacious and layered, the various sounds constantly shifting, transforming, pealing melodies sloughing off only to reveal even more subtle melodies beneath, streaks of electronic glitch and clouds of warm whirling hiss drift amidst deep thrummed bass, and simple motorik rhythms, gorgeously out of focus vocal harmonies, and all manner of texture and timbre, a rare record as much about song as sound, strip away the sound, and you'd have a surprisingly perfect pop record, take away the songs, and you'd still have some fantastically abstract sonic earcandy, but combine the two, and you have this, an utterly gorgeous disc of otherworldly noise drenched lysergic dream pop. Fans of Teenage Filmstars, Beach House, Jesus & Mary Chain, Flaming Lips, Galaxie 500, Spacemen 3, Candy Claws, Mercury Rev, School Of The Seven Bells, and other psychedelic dream poppers, this is your new favorite record.
MPEG Stream: "No One Else Around"
MPEG Stream: "Fin Eaves"
MPEG Stream: "Sister"
MPEG Stream: "Pinklike / Version"

CLOUDLAND CANYON Requiems Der Natur 2002-2004 (Tee Pee) cd 16.98
This record totally knocked us for a loop. And the thing is, I'm not entirely sure we can explain why. This is one of those rare records that is darn near indescribable. The label suggest Cloudland Canyon would appeal to fans of Boards of Canada, Animal Collective, The Dead C., Ash Ra Tempel, This Heat, Gong, most of which we can definitely see (maybe not the Boards Of Canada), there is a definitely a far out krautrock vibe, some classic long lost, extra damaged super freaked out sixties or seventies psychedelia, but filtered through modern technology. It's almost like some super computer a million years in the future began picking up these strange transmissions from the old Earth, German Oak, Faust, Amon Duul, but after traveling billions of miles and being interpreted by some alien machinery, those songs and sounds came out sounding, well, completely fucking nuts!!!
It's like some sort of laptopped Dead C / Ash Ra mash up. Rich clouds of metallic shimmer surround looped guitars, creepy chanted vocals are submerged in demented spacey FX, dense deconstructed pop songs emerge from the chaos, rife with swirling vocals, and layer after layer of drone and processed harmonies, fuzzy shopping mall synth warbles beneath straining lo-fi vocals, the whole thing run through some intense stereo panning. Suddenly the band burst into some stomping propulsive psych rock jangle before the whole thing splinters into a gorgeous expanse of tranquil ambience, beneath delicately finger picked guitars, everything always within a cloud of mysterious sonic events. Dense cinematic soundscapes of keening high end and minor key pizzicato strings melt into super fuzzed out classic rock jams, with horns and pulsing basslines, but buried in a dense swirl of My Bloody Valentine haze, with relentlessly squiggly riffing, buried vocals, a dizzying array of chaotic sound, tinkling chimes and little bits of percussion. Strange collages of warped warbly sound drift into weird seventies circusy prog with calliope like organ, moody riffing, and awesome male / female vocals, like some totally drug drenched unhinged Fleetwood Mac. Nearing the end of the sonic journey, the record devolves into huge stretches of squiggly analog synth, tangled and intertwined into fuzzy warped low end drones, squirming and buzzing with the different layers constantly shifting and slipping in and out and around each other. Woah. Gorgeously and incredibly fucked. And thus completely recommended!!
MPEG Stream: "Opening / Ice Of Rift"
MPEG Stream: "Clearlight Intry"
MPEG Stream: "Carolina Foxtail / Sea Chirp"

CLOUDLAND CANYON / LICHENS Exterminating Angel (Holy Mountain) cd 13.98
This is a match that makes perfect sense. As Lichens and Cloudland Canyon have both been making some of the most compelling and rewarding crystalline soundscapes of the last few years. One long track clocking in at around a half hour "Exterminating Angel" does sound like the sum of both of these artists' parts. With the first half sounding much more like Lichens, gorgeous deep in space hazy explorations while the krautier leanings of Cloudland Canyon come into focus in the second half of the track propelling the sounds into their kosmiche orbit. Fans of mid-late '70s Tangerine Dream and early Heldon will for sure want to jump aboard this cosmic adventure.
MPEG Stream: "Babylon"

CLOUDLAND CANYON / LICHENS Exterminating Angel (Holy Mountain) lp 14.98
NOW ON VINYL!
This is a match that makes perfect sense. As Lichens and Cloudland Canyon have both been making some of the most compelling and rewarding crystalline soundscapes of the last few years. One long track clocking in at around a half hour "Exterminating Angel" does sound like the sum of both of these artists' parts. With the first half sounding much more like Lichens, gorgeous deep in space hazy explorations while the krautier leanings of Cloudland Canyon come into focus in the second half of the track propelling the sounds into their kosmiche orbit. Fans of mid-late '70s Tangerine Dream and early Heldon will for sure want to jump aboard this cosmic adventure.
MPEG Stream: "Babylon"

CLOUDS We Are Above You (Hydra Head) cd 14.98
The first Clouds record, the project of Cave In guitarist Adam McGrath, was a freaked out hodgepodge of stoner rock, hardcore, prog rock and seventies boogie rock with definite nods to Beefheart, Zappa, Comets On Fire, the Cave In mothership, it all worked, the result a heavy slab of FX laden riff heavy RAWK with lots of twisted detours.
If anything, this newest Clouds disc takes all that same stuff a little further, with a bigger focus on the riffrock aspect, and a huge infusion of POP. Not always obviously so, but some of these hooks slay. Think the beefy lumbering almost grunge of Scissorfight, melded to the pounding retro metallic pound of Karp or Big Business, some of that Cave-In magic and voila!
The second track, "Feed The Horse" sounds like it was yanked off a late era Cave-in disc and given a serious metal makeover, while the opener "Empires In Basements" gives Torche a run for their sludge pop money.
And then the band go all strange and angular and off kilter with "The Bad Seat", sounding almost like Randy Newman if he was 20 years old and signed to Hydra Head, and we know that sounds weird, but it's actually quite cool.
The record is all over the map for sure, exploding into frenzied punk rock as often as sprawling out into huge lumbering sludgey doom, offering up soaring metallic pop gems, or stripping it down to chugging classic rock grooves, but no matter what these guys do, or what sound they're tackling and making their own, the songs rule, and the band kick out the jams big time. And like we've said before, in a perfect world, instead of Green Day and the Foo Fighters, you'd be hearing Torche and Clouds all over the radio. Ahhh, maybe some day...
MPEG Stream: "Empires In Basements"
MPEG Stream: "Feed The Horse"
MPEG Stream: "The Bad Seat"

CLOUDS We Are Above You (Hydra Head) 2lp 21.00
NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL!
And like all Hydra Head stuff, the packaging is amazing, incredibly beautiful printed sleeves, the the jackets SO heavy, the vinyl nice and thick, holding one of these in your hands, it has weight, and heft, it's absolutely an objet d'art, in addition to being a kick ass record!
The first Clouds record, the project of Cave In guitarist Adam McGrath, was a freaked out hodgepodge of stoner rock, hardcore, prog rock and seventies boogie rock with definite nods to Beefheart, Zappa, Comets On Fire, the Cave In mothership, it all worked, the result a heavy slab of FX laden riff heavy RAWK with lots of twisted detours.
If anything, this newest Clouds record takes all that same stuff a little further, with a bigger focus on the riffrock aspect, and a huge infusion of POP. Not always obviously so, but some of these hooks slay. Think the beefy lumbering almost grunge of Scissorfight, melded to the pounding retro metallic pound of Karp or Big Business, some of that Cave-In magic and voila!
The second track, "Feed The Horse" sounds like it was yanked off a late era Cave-in disc and given a serious metal makeover, while the opener "Empires In Basements" gives Torche a run for their sludge pop money.
And then the band go all strange and angular and off kilter with "The Bad Seat", sounding almost like Randy Newman if he was 20 years old and signed to Hydra Head, and we know that sounds weird, but it's actually quite cool.
The record is all over the map for sure, exploding into frenzied punk rock as often as sprawling out into huge lumbering sludgey doom, offering up soaring metallic pop gems, or stripping it down to chugging classic rock grooves, but no matter what these guys do, or what sound they're tackling and making their own, the songs rule, and the band kick out the jams big time. And like we've said before, in a perfect world, instead of Green Day and the Foo Fighters, you'd be hearing Torche and Clouds all over the radio. Ahhh, maybe some day...
MPEG Stream: "Empires In Basements"
MPEG Stream: "Feed The Horse"
MPEG Stream: "The Bad Seat"