HARVESTMAN In A Dark Tongue (Burning World) 2lp 28.00
Finally available on vinyl, this AQ Record Of The Week from a couple years back...
Musical missive number two (or three if you count the sidelong Fear Falls Burning remix from a few years back) from Harvestman, the cosmic folk space raga alter ego of Neurosis' Steve Von Till.
The first Harvestman record, A Lashing The Rye, was a dizzying confluence of delicate seventies British style folk, shimmery spaced out drift, and glacial doomdrone sprawl, a constantly evolving, organic song suite that seemed to exist in some glorious blissed out otherworld. On In A Dark Tongue, the glimmering strands of traditional folk music that tethered the first record become even more tenuous. Before, even at its spaciest, Harvestman seemed grounded and earthbound, certainly with an eye to the stars, but the sounds evoking frosty mountainsides, deep forests, blackened skies, as much as strange shapes in the heavens and mysterious galaxies, the soundtrack to a strange terrestrial world, lit by the contrails of mysterious bodies streaking across the heavens.
Like Lashing The Rye, In A Dark Tongue is also a weathered megalithic sonic artifact of an unknowable culture, its symbols obscure yet magnetic, calling you into communion with its ancient spirit. Enduring, unnerving, moving. Evoking arcane rites, cold hazy sunrises, a god/dess visible only in the massive wheeling patterns of nature and sound. But Dark Tongue moves beyond its predecessor, creating a linked, yet wholly other sonic landscape, at once more abstract and ethereal, but also heavier and more dense, with a black hole intensity woven into the otherwise kaleidoscopic drift, the sound constantly shifting from woozy, bleary eyed psychedelia to loosely propulsive spacekraut groove, fluttery delicate thrum to wild metallic squall, all doused in effects, a warm fuzzy patina of gauzy blur and muted buzz.
It's almost as if the songs here are not so much songs as transmissions, broadcast from a lost land, messages from the original Harvestman, sprawling lysergic druidic rituals, wreathed in the sonic detritus of the sound's endless journey, a message home - or a message lost and drifting endlessly through the black expanses of time.
Recorded in the woods of Idaho, Harvestman draws from the surrounding landscape, unfurling softly buzzing spidery barely there melodies that hover in druggy expanses of Tangerine Dream warped guitar blur, druggy, woozy, hazy, delicate yet dark, an alien psych folk rendered in shades of space rock.
Soft whispery steel string strum gives way to ultra distorted ur-drone ragas, the guitars super saturated and crumbling, leads that sound more like bagpipes than guitars, the sound warped and blown out, but still warm and tranquil.
Fluttering mellotronic flutes flit dreamily around slow shifting sheets of soft swelling chords, smeared with streaks of glitch and whir. Slowly sprawling grooves underpinned by squalls of outer space FX and upper register feedback, all draped over brittle layers of jagged crunch, throbbing motorik beats wrapped in thick swaths of delay, decay and rumble, everything locked into hypnotic lurching loops.
The vocals are sparse, in fact on Dark Tongue the vocals creep to the surface on only one track, the brooding expansive "By Wind And Sun." Von Till's raspy croon, equal parts weathered Tom Waits-ian bellow and Neurosis style metallic howl, rough and raw, but still soulful and dramatic, a haunting ritualistic chant, although as the song progresses, Von Till's voice begins to transform and splinter into strange fragmented shapes, the various shards sent spinning into the ether, gradually evolving into another washed out and heavily effected layer of sound, that seems to melt into the swirling and whirling sounds all around it.
There's even one track with what sounds like a Koto, super spare and abstract, channeling Eastern classical music, but layered with slivers of minor key guitar growl, the whole thing eventually erupting into a malfunctioning electronic freakout. The whole record a constantly shifting sprawl of electric guitars and synthesizers, dulcimers and ring modulators, loops and vocals, delay and distortion. Members of the Grails and Om contribute, but here they play acolytes to Von Till's high priest, together invoking the spirit of German Oak, Amps For Christ, Can, Six Organs Of Admittance, SUNNO))), Faust, Growing, Amon Duul, their sonic shadows dancing on the looming stones assembled in the flickering firelight, beneath a sky of diamond and obsidian.
In A Dark Tongue is a gorgeous slow burning psychedelic song cycle, smoldering minor key epics, the sounds lustrous and organic, the guitars viscous and virulent, the atmosphere murky and mysterious, all the while strangely sun dappled and dreamlike. Strings soar and sing, melodic fragments are hurled into the abyss, monolithic guitar drones flow into fields of ephemeral stasis, a sound not heavy so much as darkly effulgent.
The two longest tracks appear to be the space rock centerpieces, channeling the extended heart-of-the-sun outros of Hawkwind and the smoked out stomp of old Monster Magnet into classic krautrock heaviness, each a mesmerizing soundtrack to some seemingly and perhaps ultimately doomed mission into the unknown, both rife with relentless rhythms, roiling psych drone tumult and thick warbly synths, underpinning moody meandering melodies and frictive soft focus textures.
While Harvestman most definitely exists within an esteemed sonic brotherhood, the sound here most definitely transcends, Von Till proving a master of more than massive pummeling heaviness, displaying a flair for the delicate, the tenebrous, the contemplative and the hallucinatory, having created with In A Dark Tongue a sound both portentous and elegiac, an arcane and esoteric bit of beauty, of dark hued mystery, of folk flecked abstraction and churning leviathan heft. A breathtaking and expansive glimpse beyond the firmament, into the soul of a sound, where the already blurred lines between drone and doom and drift and psych and kraut and space cease to exist at all.
Other RIYL: Expo '70, (early) La Otracina, Acid Mothers Temple, and the myriad of underground cd-r drone / drift / psych combosÉ
MPEG Stream: "Karlsteine"
MPEG Stream: "By Wind And Sun"
MPEG Stream: "The Hawk Of Achill"
MPEG Stream: "Carved In Aspen"

HARVESTMAN Lashing The Rye (Neurot) cd 14.98
Best known as the bearded, kinda imposing guitarist/vocalist/viking in the art-metal institution known as Neurosis, Steve Von Till is always working on other projects as well... Harvestman being his latest musical incarnation (with help from friends, including members of Amber Asylum), devoted to making psychedelic, electronic spacerock with a traditional folk heritage. It's like pagans were picked up at Stonehenge by an alien spaceship and deposited on some far off planet aeons hence to make music on futuristic instruments (that we call electric guitars and synthesizers). Lashing The Rye is mostly instrumental, with just two female vocal visitations and (on one song) the sampled voice of Bert Jansch. Also SVT "narrates" on one track, a la Current 93 or something. The twelve tracks here may have titles like "Scarborough Fair" and "Sheep-Crook and Black Dog" (Harvestman's renderings of those two inspired by versions recorded by John Renbourn and Steeleye Span, respectively) but while many of the tunes here may be traditional, Harvestman's interpretation and instrumentation sure ain't! Though there's some delicate guitar and piano (and searing bagpipe) this isn't all that "acoustic" -- there's also plenty of droning electronic spaciness and heavy waves of distorted electric guitar. It's calm, and quite pretty, but massive. Folk-drone for giants. Imagine Amps For Christ teamed up with Kinski. Parts even hint at the density of SUNNO))) or Boris. Recommended!
MPEG Stream: "The Burning Of Tara"
MPEG Stream: "The Sea Maiden"
MPEG Stream: "Jack Orion"

HARVEY MILK Anthem (Chunklet) 2dvd 18.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Well, this is bound to either piss people off, or get them psyched beyond all belief. Which is pretty much what Harvey Milk's music generally does anyway, so maybe that's just how this all was meant to go down.
Originally released about three years ago, THAT Anthem consisted of a dvd (included here) and a 3" cd (NOT included here). But in place of the missing cd, there's a brand spanking new SECOND dvd, this one, features two unreleased shows, one, the final show with old drummer Paul Trudeau, opening for the Melvins in 2006, the other from 2005, both pro shot, multiple cameras, the sound is stellar, the songs, of course RULE, there are apparently some hidden Easter eggs with some extra super secret bonus materials (the band performing their Special Wishes record in its entirety?), but we have yet to find them.
So HM freeks, you'll of course need to buy Anthem again, and newbies, don't blow it, this is limited to 500 copies, and features updated fancy shmancy Stephen O'Malley die cut sleeve, and revamped liner notes from Chunklet head honcho and long time HM champion Henry Owings. So here's what we had to say about the original Anthem, which was an aQ Record Of The Week:
So it took the rest of the world a while to catch on. Don't be too hard on them. Harvey Milk are one difficult proposition. Don't blame us though. We've been there all along trying to convince everybody just how brilliant this bafflingly bizarre sludge combo really was. Andee even reissued their seminal Courtesy And Good Will Toward Men album on his tUMULt label (later scooped up by Relapse). And don't blame Henry at Chunklet, the man responsible for this here document. In fact he was right there every step of the way, a one man Harvey Milk archivist and booster club. And of course we don't blame you, loyal AQ list readers, cuz we know you feel the same way we do, you just can't get enough of Harvey Milk's pummeling, crushing, obtuse and confusional heaviness. Well for you, and for us, and for the heavy music lovers of the world who have yet to discover the difficult joy of Harvey Milk, life is is about to get a whole lot sweeter.
Because of THIS. Four long years in the making, and it was worth every single second. Most of us who dig Harvey Milk, even those of us who might go so far as to say we are obsessed, never actually got to see the band play live back in the day. And this three and a half hour DVD collection of live shows spanning over 12 years is just as much a revelation as we knew it would be.
From super grainy early live footage, when the band was much more of a punk rock, Touch And Go / AmRep sort of beast, you can, out of the corner of your eye, see the sludginess and fuckedupness creep up through the music, slowly and subtly infusing every song and sound with some ineffable something, that helped turn Harvey Milk into a band that sounded unlike any other band, then or now. Theirs was a career trajectory based entirely on getting weirder and sludgier and more obtuse and WAY more difficult and fucked up, a bit like the Melvins, but without the unexpected mainstream success and major label deal. Harvey Milk also unexpectedly shifted gears for a while, letting their ZZ Top obsession take control, and becoming impossibly groovy and rocking, which only lasted a single record before the band returned EVEN MORE damaged and slow and brutal, as if that was even possible.
The band look so unassuming, frontman Creston Spiers just an every day Joe until he opens his mouth and unleashes that impossible low banshee-like howl, bass player Stephen Tanner, with his weird, fey, Doogie Howser look, goofy smile and even goofier sexy hip swivel. And the drums, the drummers... Harvey Milk's songs are so full of space, so slow and stretched out, the drums are often the only thing holding the songs together. Whether they are shuffling in the background, or pounding out a massive slow motion throb, it's the drums that allow the guitars to spin off into space and the songs to unfurl into confusing super spacious epics.
Probably the most amazing part of the disc is when Creston wields a sledgehammer, pounding an anvil in time with the downtuned bass and pounding drums, while howling in that anguished banshee wail of his. Normally it would be weird to see a band set-up like that -- bass, drums and sledgehammer -- but somehow, for Harvey Milk it seems perfect. Creston swaying back and forth, cradling the hammer like it was a guitar, while the band pounds out a sludgy dirge behind him. So good! Woven in to the older material are plenty of long slow drawn out moody post rockisms, with drifting simple mournful melodies, and mumbled crooned vocals that eventually build into the epic whirls of swirling sludge we hold so near and dear to our hearts.
The biggest surprise here is how much footage there is from the band's "ZZ Top period," a stretch that on record only lasted a single album, but live seemed to have spanned several years. A wild and hair twirling, head banging super groovy sort-of-Southern rock with howled and yelped superrock vocals, less obviously sludgy, but still ultra heavy. This was never really a favorite sound for lots of Milk fans (although it is Allan's favorite) but seeing these songs performed live is enough to convince us that maybe we were WAY off and this stuff is some of the best Harvey Milk EVER!!!
It sounds like southern rock filtered through the Melvins. Or Ram Jam played by Corrupted. It's just so awesome to watch with drummer Kyle Spence's massive Bonham-esque kit (complete with Bonham's logo on the bass drum head) a huge gong, just tearing it up Bill Ward style holding the whole thing together... And because of the film stock and the sound and the style, it's almost feels like watching some recently unearthed German television footage of some ultra heavy long lost proto metal band from the seventies, they even whip out a little "Pinball Wizard"!! Maybe we just weren't in the right frame of mind when it first came out, but now without a doubt that record utterly kicks our asses now!
After that, the band sort of drifted off and disappeared, before resurfacing in 2005, as a much grungier, hairier looking Milk, all jeans and long hair and Voivod t-shirts, and they sound like it too. A return to the impossibly glacial dirge of Courtesy, but even heavier and somehow more even more fucked up sounding. Like Sabbath at 16rpm, massive lumbering, blown out sludgerock divinity. How many ways can we say it. WE LOVE HARVEY MILK!!! THEY ARE WITHOUT A DOUBT ONE OF THE GREATEST BANDS OF THE LAST 20 YEARS!!
There's also a DVD Easter egg (thanks Jace!): just go to the credits menu and push up until "40 Watt '93" is highlighted, for some footage from an April Fool's show where the band tackle three R.E.M. covers, taken from a show where the band covered R.E.M.'s Reckoning in its entirety. Seriously! (They also once did a whole set of Hank Williams covers, let's pray someone has a tape of that stashed!) It's pretty dang cool to see one generation of Athens rock take on another. And they don't really sludge it up all that much, playing 'em pretty straight, but managing to make them -almost- sound like Harvey Milk originals!
And of course the packaging is breathtaking. Designed by Stephen O'Malley and Henry Chunklet, it's a gorgeous oversized DVD style, fold over interlocking cardstock sleeve, blue and black (the new version), with O'Malley's instantly recognizable graphic shards in gold, the title in embossed reflective metallic gold foil, inside copious liner notes from Henry printed in black on brown, the back has an angular H and M diecut, through which you can see the inside sleeve, a brown folded cardstock gatefold with silver metallic ink which houses both DVDs affixed to the inside on little nubs. So awesome!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!!

HARVEY MILK Anthem (Chunklet) cd + dvd 25.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
So it took the rest of the world a while to catch on. Don't be too hard on them. Harvey Milk are one difficult proposition. Don't blame us though. We've been there all along trying to convince everybody just how brilliant this bafflingly bizarre sludge combo really was. Andee even reissued their seminal Courtesy And Good Will Toward Men album on his tUMULt label. And don't blame Henry at Chunklet, the man responsible for this here document. In fact he was right there every step of the way, a one man Harvey Milk archivist and booster club. And of course we don't blame you, loyal AQ list readers, cuz we know you feel the same way we do, you just can't get enough of Harvey Milk's pummeling, crushing, obtuse and confusional heaviness. Well for you, and for us, and for the heavy music lovers of the world who have yet to discover the difficult joy of Harvey Milk, life is is about to get a whole lot sweeter.
Courtesy And Good Will is getting reissued again, on Relapse, any day now, there's a BRAND NEW Harvey Milk record due sometime in the next month or so, there are rumors of a deluxe reissue of the long out of print Harvey Milk debut, a serious holy grail, My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be, maybe with an extra disc, and then there's THIS. Four long years in the making, and it was worth every single second. Most of us who dig Harvey Milk, even those of us who might go so far as to say we are obsessed, never actually got to see the band play live. And this three and a half hour DVD collection of live shows spanning over 12 years is just as much a revelation as we knew it would be.
From super grainy early live footage, when the band was much more of a punk rock, Touch And Go / AmRep sort of beast, you can, out of the corner of your eye, see the sludginess and fuckedupness creep up through the music, slowly and subtly infusing every song and sound with some ineffable something, that helped turn Harvey Milk into a band that sounded unlike any other band, then or now. Theirs was a career trajectory based entirely on getting weirder and sludgier and more obtuse and WAY more difficult and fucked up, a bit like the Melvins, but without the unexpected mainstream success and major label deal. Harvey Milk also unexpectedly shifted gears for a while, letting their ZZ Top obsession take control, and becoming impossibly groovy and rocking, which only lasted a single record before the band returned EVEN MORE damaged and slow and brutal, as if that was even possible.
The band look so unassuming, frontman Creston Spiers just an every day Joe until he opens his mouth and unleashes that impossible low banshee-like howl, bass player Stephen Tanner, with his weird, fey, Doogie Howser look, goofy smile and even goofier sexy hip swivel. And the drums, the drummers... Harvey Milk's songs are so full of space, so slow and stretched out, the drums are often the only thing holding the songs together. Whether they are shuffling in the background, or pounding out a massive slow motion throb, it's the drums that allow the guitars to spin off into space and the songs to unfurl into confusing super spacious epics.
Probably the most amazing part of the disc is when Creston wields a sledgehammer, pounding an anvil in time with the downtuned bass and pounding drums, while howling in that anguished banshee wail of his. Normally it would be weird to see a band set-up like that -- bass, drums and sledgehammer -- but somehow, for Harvey Milk it seems perfect. Creston swaying back and forth, cradling the hammer like it was a guitar, while the band pounds out a sludgy dirge behind him. So good! Woven in to the older material are plenty of long slow drawn out moody post rockisms, with drifting simple mournful melodies, and mumbled crooned vocals that eventually build into the epic whirls of swirling sludge we hold so near and dear to our hearts.
The biggest surprise here is how much footage there is from the band's "ZZ Top period," a stretch that on record only lasted a single album, but live seemed to have spanned several years. A wild and hair twirling, head banging super groovy sort-of-Southern rock with howled and yelped superrock vocals, less obviously sludgy, but still ultra heavy. This was never really a favorite sound for lots of Milk fans (although it is Allan's favorite) but seeing these songs performed live is enough to convince us that maybe we were WAY off and this stuff is some of the best Harvey Milk EVER!!!
It sounds like southern rock filtered through the Melvins. Or Ram Jam played by the Corrupted. It's just so awesome to watch with drummer Kyle Spence's massive Boham-esque kit (complete with Bonham's logo on the bass drum head) a huge gong, just tearing it up Bill Ward style holding the whole thing together... And because of the film stock and the sound and the style, it's almost feels like watching some recently unearthed German television footage of some ultra heavy long lost proto metal band from the seventies, they even whip out a little "Pinball Wizard!" Someone needs to reissue The Pleaser now. C'mon!! Maybe we just weren't in the right frame of mind when it first came out, but we're pretty sure that record would kick our asses now!
After that, the band sort of drifted off and disappeared, before resurfacing in 2005, as a much grungier, hairier looking Milk, all jeans and long hair and Voivod t-shirts, and they sound like it too. A return to the impossibly glacial dirge of Courtesy, but even heavier and somehow more even more fucked up sounding. Like Sabbath at 16rpm, massive lumbering, blown out sludgerock divinity. How many ways can we say it. WE LOVE HARVEY MILK!!! THEY ARE WITHOUT A DOUBT ONE OF THE GREATEST BANDS OF THE LAST 20 YEARS!!
There's also a DVD Easter egg (thanks Jace!): just go to the credits menu and push up until "40 Watt '93" is highlighted, for some footage from an April Fool's show where the band tackle three R.E.M. covers, taken from a show where the band covered R.E.M.'s Reckoning in its entirety. Seriously! (the also once did a whole set of Hank Williams covers, let's pray someone has a tape of that stashed!) It's pretty dang cool to see one generation of Athens rock take on another. And they don't really sludge it up all that much, playing 'em pretty straight, but managing to make them -almost- sound like Harvey Milk originals!
Also included is a four song 3"cd containing previously unreleased, super rare tracks, one of which is their version of R.E.M.'s "South Central Rain"!!!
And of course the packaging is breathtaking. Designed by Stephen O'Malley and Henry Chunklet, it's a gorgeous oversized DVD style, fold over interlocking cardstock sleeve, greenish brown, with O'Malley's instantly recognizable graphic shards in dark brown, the title in embossed reflective silver, inside copious liner notes from Henry printed in metallic silver, the back has an angular H and M diecut, through which you can see the inside sleeve, a black folded cardstock gatefold with silver metallic ink which houses both the DVD and the 3" cd affixed to the inside on little nubs. So awesome!
LIMITED ONE TIME PRESSING OF 1000 COPIES!!!!!!!!
MPEG Stream: "Bubble Buster"
MPEG Stream: "South Central Rain"

HARVEY MILK Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men (tUMULt) cd 13.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The droning dirgelike beauty that is Harvey Milk's legendary Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men record, finally get's a deluxe digital reissue on our very own Andee's tUMULt label!
Crushing and pummeling majestic beauty, interspersed with delicate moments of hushed whispery strum. Lumbering down-tuned hyper-rhythmic skull crack dropped delicately into suffocating expanses of near silence. Delicate pointillist piano mutates into a dirgey exercise in tension that sounds like a lost Dario Argento soundtrack performed by the Melvins. Lilting and
melancholy near-ballads are disrupted by incessant and brutally heavy riffs. Amidst the pummel and beneath the negative space swirls a barely audible maelstrom of whispered vocals, warbling turntables and whirring vacuum cleaners, all adding to the confusional brilliance that was Harvey Milk. And their heart wrenching cover of Leonard Cohen's "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong" features what has to be the most tortured and anguished vocal performance ever recorded.
Too heavy to be post rock. Too weird to be metal. Too everything to be anything, Harvey Milk were unconventional and wholly unique, both structurally and sonically, touching on territory mined by the likes of Gastr Del Sol, Codeine, Queen, Husker Du, Man Is The Bastard, the Melvins, and ZZ Top, but slowing it down, making it HEAVY, and fucking it up. Making it more beautiful, while making it difficult to listen to at all.
Hypnotic, repetitive and jarring. Unpredictable, exhausting and perplexing.
Comes in a beautiful gatefold, letterpressed, silkscreened cover, replicating (in miniature) the LPs original cover.
2005 postscript: Harvey Milk freaks rejoice!! With the sudden surge in interest in all things sludge-y and doomy and drone-y, as well as loads of HM-specific attention, Harvey Milk have decided to reform, tour and record a brand new album!! FUCK YEAH!
MPEG Stream: "The Boy With The Bosoms"
MPEG Stream: "Pinnochio's Example"

HARVEY MILK Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men (Reproductive) 2lp 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Brutally heavy, painfully slow, and heartbreakingly beautiful! Amazing double lp of slow motion dirge and obfuscated experiments in rhythmic tension swaddled in old school Melvins style pummel, interspersed with the occasional whisper of a song, delicate and lilting. Beautiful double lp (cd to be released on our very own Andee's tUMULt label in a few months) in a die cut, hand colored, letter pressed, hand assembled sleeve. Even at it's intended speed (33), it almost sounds like you've accidentally set a 78 on the turntable and set the controls for 16rpm. Epic and absolutely essential.

HARVEY MILK I've Got A Love (Megablade / Troubleman) 7" 5.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Super limited single from the brand new Harvey Milk album. HOLY SHIT!! Did you hear that? BRAND NEW HARVEY MILK ALBUM!!! See elsewhere on this list for a review of HM's Special Wishes. This single features the killer first track from Special Wishes, "I've Got A Love", but the real reason to pick this up is the exclusive B side, a crushingly downtuned, utterly and breathtakingly beautiful dreamsludge version of Leonard Cohen's "The Old Revolution". HM fans already remember and cherish the heartbreaking version of Cohen's "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong" on Courtesy And Good Will Toward Men and thus know what HM can do with a Leonard Cohen song. Don't blow it. This is limited to 1000 copies and will be gone before you know it.
MPEG Stream: "I've Got A Love"
MPEG Stream: "War"
MPEG Stream: "Love Swing"
MPEG Stream: "Old Glory"

HARVEY MILK My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be (Chunklet) 2lp 22.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The first Harvey Milk album, available on vinyl for the first time EVER. Nice thick jacket, 180 gram black vinyl. Of course these will not be around for long. ONLY 680 COPIES AVAILABLE, we got a huge chunk of those, but as you might imagine, people have been freaking out and these are gonna fly out of here.
So... ONLY ONE PER CUSTOMER!!!
Here's our review of My Love when we first reviewed the cd a while back:
My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be. What an awesome title. And the record cover, a bull and a rooster and an ornate candle, the words Harvey Milk in tiny blue type over the rooster. On the cd, the text: "Harvey Milk is Cronos, Mantis, Abadon". Song titles like "Where The Bee Sucks, There Suck I", "The Anvil Will Fall" and "Merlin Is Magic". By now most avid AQ customers are very familiar with the mysterious sludge rock power trio Harvey Milk, but when we first laid hands on this disc, back in 1994, we had no idea what to think. As if the artwork wasn't enough to have us scratching our heads, the music inside was even more willfully difficult. And still is. Obviously borne of some serious Melvins worship, Harvey Milk, took the already difficult sound of the Melvins to new heights, or depths, crafting lengthy sludge jams, packed with as much space as riffs, long expanses of spastic John Bonham like drumming, vocals a whiskey soaked gravelly bellow, guitars thick black sheets. This was without a doubt some of the strangest music we had ever heard. But at the same time, somehow the most beautiful. The sound of Harvey Milk was some impossible blend of noise rock, math rock, post rock, punk rock, twentieth century composition and METAL. All tangled into one huge gnarled black hole of sound. A sound that crawls more than it rocks, but when it does rock, it blows away pretty much any other band in the land.
Lots of you no doubt already own Courtesy And Goodwill Toward Men, arguably one of the greatest records EVER, heavy, sludgy or otherwise. If you don't you need to stop reading for a second and go buy it right now. We'll wait...........
Okay, Courtesy was HM record number two, and found the band 'tightening' up their sound, taking the chaos of My Love, and crafting it into, well, more chaos. It's hard to say how they changed between these two records. My Love is a tiny bit faster. The best way to describe it is like this: My Love is to Courtesy, the way Nirvana's Bleach is to Nevermind, more immediate and raw, but with some of the best songs the band ever wrote, and like Bleach, it's a record that tons of fans continue to insist is the best thing they've ever done. And while we are of the mind that Courtesy is in fact the best Harvey Milk record ever (unless you ask Allan, who would probably say The Pleaser, the -other- HM reissue this week, a killer disc of Harvey Milked ZZ Top worship) returning to My Love has us maybe reconsidering. We can't actually decide. There are so many amazing songs on My Love that we had forgotten about, as good as anything on Courtesy. It would probably be more realistic to proclaim My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be / Courtesy And Goodwill Toward Men as the ultimate math-sludge-slow-motion-dirge-doom-whatever one-two punch EVER. Maybe the greatest first and second record combo of all time. Needless to say, if you're at all into the current crop of slow motion doom mongers, and have somehow missed out on these records, you will lose your fucking mind (and odds are loads of you have never heard My Love as it's been out of print for ages). It's no exaggeration when we say every song on My Love is darn near perfect. But a few of our favorites:
"A Small Turn Of Human Kindness" was the absolute first peep we ever heard out of HM, and it's brutal and beautiful, so utterly confusing and unlike anything ever. A frustratingly obtuse abstract jam, even calling it a jam is stretching the definition of the word jam, there's LOTS of space, the track begins with a minute of weird electronic noodling, a huge wash of cymbals and guitar scrape, a killer BIG drum fill, and then... nothing... a weird barely there buzz, some cymbal dings, a moaning cello.... How amazing is that?!?!? It isn't until halfway through the song before the riff finally kicks in, and even then, it's like pulling teeth to get these guys to let loose and rock. In fact, it's not until the last two minutes that the band really go for it. And it was worth the wait, but before you know it comes "Women Dig it", slowing everything waaaaaaaaay back down. A super drawn out exercise in tension and release, with long stretches of just drums, big Zeppelin style drums, accompanied by mewled vocal, but which features one of the most awesome riffs EVER, so much so, that when it kicks in, it makes you want to rock the fuck out, which you could do if it wasn't just played once every couple minutes.... oh the glorious frustration!!! It's the sort of riff most bands would not only kill for, but that most bands would repeat over and over and over and base a whole song around, whereas the Milk kick out that riff maybe twenty times, in the whole song, and all clumped together, with the rest of the song spent plodding and drifting and doing anything but locking into a killer groove. But that's what makes Harvey Milk so great, when that riff DOES drop, it's a ridiculous release, like an orgasm, this unbelievable rock-out relief, but like with most things it's the wait, the build up, that is the best part. Or at least the 'other' best part.
Another classic Milk track is "The Anvil Will Fall", a moody drifting whispery ballad, peppered by huge bursts of downtuned pummel, when out of nowhere, in come the strings, some patriotic hymn, an almost recognizable tune that Creston sings along too in his warbly raspy croon, even kicking it up into a wicked falsetto, before petering back out into the original hushed crawl, eventually launching into a super moving moody goddamned ANTHEM. The sort of song that should have sludge fans teary eyed with hat in hand, and hand over heart. And finally...
"Where The Bee Sucks, There Suck I", besides being the best song title maybe EVER, it's also one of the greatest songs ever, a really really fucking weird song, howled tortured vocals over a relentless tribal drum fill with occasional bursts of Zeppelin like riffage, before the guitar transforms into a static rumbling drone, and the drums just sort of do whatever the hell they want, for ever it feels like... and then the band launches back into it and it's some relentless bastardized groovy Southern sludge jam, but like all HM songs, they stop not long after to just sort of wander, and plod and wait, and pause, before doing it all over again....
We could go one and on, and get all mushy and fanboy about every single song on My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be, but you get the drift. This record is magical. Majestic. Freaked out. Furious. Heavy as anything you've ever heard. Strangely pretty. Mind meltingly difficult. Crushing. Confusing. Baffling. Brutal. And pretty much one of our favorite records ever...
MPEG Stream: "A Small Turn Of Human Kindness"
MPEG Stream: "Women Dig It"
MPEG Stream: "The Anvil Will Fall"
MPEG Stream: "Where The Bee Sucks, There Suck I"

HARVEY MILK Special Wishes (Megablade / Troubleman) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
It's funny, for years, you couldn't find a Harvey Milk record to save your life. Reissues, cd-r's, rumors about the band all trickled out and were lapped up by all of us ravenous doomdrone hounds desperate for more music from this mysterious Southern dirge rock behemoth. Then suddenly, a few years back, things began to change, Courtesy And Good Will Toward Men got reissued on Andee's tUMULt label, a cd compilation of singles came out, and then the Kelly Sessions. We were loving it. But then it all stopped. Nothing. Until we started hearing rumors again about reissues and more excitingly, a reformed HM and a new record!! And you know what? The rumors were true, the band is back together, and just released this here brand new album. Hot on the heels of the amazing DVD we raved about last list, and alongside a double disc reissue of Courtesy (with a bonus live disc!) reviewed elsewhere on this list, Special Wishes makes us want to just lay down and weep. That's how much we love this band. And how long we have been dreaming about this day. Very few bands can inspire such ridiculous loyalty and utter fanboy obsession. But Harvey Milk are pretty much unlike any band ever. When ranking the weirdest heaviest, GREATEST bands of all time in our heads, Harvey Milk are ALWAYS there, and almost always in the top 5, and depending on our mood, often in the number one spot.
With most bands, we tend to recommend older albums, you know, the new one is for fans only, but if you don't already own any records start with this other one. But even if you've never heard Harvey Milk, Special Wishes will undoubtedly convert you to the way of the Milk. And you WILL have a new favorite band.
The record starts with "I've Got A Love" a crushing pounding slow motion jam, with howled anguished vocals (that Allan thought sounded like Eugene from Oxbow) and thick walls of downtuned guitar, and some weird grinding background drone. SO heavy and glacial it makes the Melvins sound like Blink 182. OK, maybe that's not entirely true, but you know what we're getting at. The next two tracks are equally dirgey, and brutal and impossibly, infuriatingly slow and heavy. But then comes "Once In A While" a groovy classic rock / Southern rock jam, that sounds like Paw on 16 rpm, pretty and melodic, but somehow still way too heavy and creepily ominous. Up next is the appropriately titled "Instrumental" which combines HM's pummeling sludge, with some seriously acrobatic prog rock arrangements, like a super heavy Don Cab. Two more tracks of crushing glacial beauty, plodding brutality, pop hooks buried beneath two tons of guitar sludge, completely and mesmerizingly pulverizing. Then it's The One. Our favorite song of the year. A song so completely unlike anything Harvey Milk has ever recorded, but somehow a song that couldn't have come from anyone else. "Old Glory", the tale of a flag, or THE flag, a strangely beautiful pop song, finger picked acoustic guitar, gorgeous melodic crooning, and a sudden burst of lush psychedelic guitar harmonies, eventually the band kicks in, with massive guitars and probably the most kick ass classic rock guitar lead to ever grace an underground rock record. Full on "Freebird" shit. Wow. One of those songs that we listen to over and over and over. A song that sounded so totally out of place on first listen (although we loved it immediately) but became sort of the heart of the record for us. The final track is almost even weirder. "Mother's Day" is a massive and majestic epic, warm warbly organs, dreamy violin playing a mournful melody, with "God Bless America" melodies all over the place, when the band finally kicks in, it's like the underground doomdirgesludge version of that last song all cock rock and classic rock bands play live, huge soaring chords, everyone swaying back and forth, lighters held high, it sounds like a pisstake, but at the same time it sounds so fucking good. Which is pretty much an apt description of Harvey Milk in general. Confusing and confounding, crushing and majestic. But totally fucked up and emotional and brilliant, and still as far as we're concerned quite possibly the greatest band EVER.
MPEG Stream: "I've Got A Love"
MPEG Stream: "War"
MPEG Stream: "Love Swing"
MPEG Stream: "Old Glory"

HARVEY MILK Special Wishes (Megablade / Troubleman) 2lp 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
It's funny, for years, you couldn't find a Harvey Milk record to save your life. Reissues, cd-r's, rumors about the band all trickled out and were lapped up by all of us ravenous doomdrone hounds desperate for more music from this mysterious Southern dirge rock behemoth. Then suddenly, a few years back, things began to change, Courtesy And Good Will Toward Men got reissued on Andee's tUMULt label, a cd compilation of singles came out, and then the Kelly Sessions. We were loving it. But then it all stopped. Nothing. Until we started hearing rumors again about reissues and more excitingly, a reformed HM and a new record!! And you know what? The rumors were true, the band is back together, and just released this here brand new album. Hot on the heels of the amazing DVD we raved about last list, and alongside a double disc reissue of Courtesy (with a bonus live disc!) reviewed elsewhere on this list, Special Wishes makes us want to just lay down and weep. That's how much we love this band. And how long we have been dreaming about this day. Very few bands can inspire such ridiculous loyalty and utter fanboy obsession. But Harvey Milk are pretty much unlike any band ever. When ranking the weirdest heaviest, GREATEST bands of all time in our heads, Harvey Milk are ALWAYS there, and almost always in the top 5, and depending on our mood, often in the number one spot.
With most bands, we tend to recommend older albums, you know, the new one is for fans only, but if you don't already own any records start with this other one. But even if you've never heard Harvey Milk, Special Wishes will undoubtedly convert you to the way of the Milk. And you WILL have a new favorite band.
The record starts with "I've Got A Love" a crushing pounding slow motion jam, with howled anguished vocals (that Allan thought sounded like Eugene from Oxbow) and thick walls of downtuned guitar, and some weird grinding background drone. SO heavy and glacial it makes the Melvins sound like Blink 182. OK, maybe that's not entirely true, but you know what we're getting at. The next two tracks are equally dirgey, and brutal and impossibly, infuriatingly slow and heavy. But then comes "Once In A While" a groovy classic rock / Southern rock jam, that sounds like Paw on 16 rpm, pretty and melodic, but somehow still way too heavy and creepily ominous. Up next is the appropriately titled "Instrumental" which combines HM's pummeling sludge, with some seriously acrobatic prog rock arrangements, like a super heavy Don Cab. Two more tracks of crushing glacial beauty, plodding brutality, pop hooks buried beneath two tons of guitar sludge, completely and mesmerizingly pulverizing. Then it's The One. Our favorite song of the year. A song so completely unlike anything Harvey Milk has ever recorded, but somehow a song that couldn't have come from anyone else. "Old Glory", the tale of a flag, or THE flag, a strangely beautiful pop song, finger picked acoustic guitar, gorgeous melodic crooning, and a sudden burst of lush psychedelic guitar harmonies, eventually the band kicks in, with massive guitars and probably the most kick ass classic rock guitar lead to ever grace an underground rock record. Full on "Freebird" shit. Wow. One of those songs that we listen to over and over and over. A song that sounded so totally out of place on first listen (although we loved it immediately) but became sort of the heart of the record for us. The final track is almost even weirder. "Mother's Day" is a massive and majestic epic, warm warbly organs, dreamy violin playing a mournful melody, with "God Bless America" melodies all over the place, when the band finally kicks in, it's like the underground doomdirgesludge version of that last song all cock rock and classic rock bands play live, huge soaring chords, everyone swaying back and forth, lighters held high, it sounds like a pisstake, but at the same time it sounds so fucking good. Which is pretty much an apt description of Harvey Milk in general. Confusing and confounding, crushing and majestic. But totally fucked up and emotional and brilliant, and still as far as we're concerned quite possibly the greatest band EVER.
MPEG Stream: "I've Got A Love"
MPEG Stream: "War"
MPEG Stream: "Love Swing"
MPEG Stream: "Old Glory"

HARVEY, JONATHAN Bhakti (Montaigne) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

HARVIST He Who Rises (God Is Myth) 3"cd-r 7.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
This is volume two in God Is Myth's 3" cd-r series paying homage to the late great H.P Lovecraft. The first came courtesy of UK experimental black metal outfit Caina, this, the second comes via Appalachian heathen metal horde Harvist. Based, according to the label website, on awakening/conjuring of the "Outer Gods": Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath and Cthulhu (who is actually one of the Great Old Ones, according to our resident Lovecraft Mythos expert Allan). So what does that sound like? Well for Harvist, that sounds like relentlessly pounding black buzz, thick washes of overblown guitars, chugging downtuned riffs, killer blast beats and some seriously anguished howls. Also plenty of grunts and "uuuh"s. Wrest from Leviathan might call this "goat metal", but it's fast and black and furious, heavy and epic.
The first two tracks a straight ahead grim frosty old skool black metal. Raw and brutal. The third track adds keyboards and tolling bells, and is more melodic and moody, but it's track 4 that pushes this over the edge, an 'actual' Chaos Magic Ritual dedicated to the awakening of the essence of Cthulhu!! Lots of ambient sound, what could be surf (but also sounds like cars driving by), whispering wind, massive rumbling drones and of course, creepy processed vocals, reciting the unholy incantation to summon the mighty Cthulhu! Pretty weird. But the perfect tribute to the genius and legacy of Lovecraft.
Awesome cover painting of Cthulhu, and each disc includes an insert with information on Lovecraft as well as a killer creepy portrait.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. We only got 15 and it's already out of print from the label so once these are gone we will not be able to get more.
MPEG Stream: "He Who Rises From The Deep"
MPEG Stream: "Rites Of The Outer Gods"

HASUNUMA, SHUTA s/t (Western Vinyl) cd 14.98
The musical equivalent of a young leaf drifting along on a slow flowing brook. Shuta Hasunuma's music is as minimal yet richly expressive as a haiku -- stirring a collective "ahhhh" from all within earshot. Each track is composed from tiny fragments of field recordings that he captured in both rural and urban Japanese environments. Meditative. Contemplative. Beautiful.
MPEG Stream: "Green Repair"
MPEG Stream: "Morning Fanfare"

HASWELL, RUSSELL Live Salvage 1997 - 2000 (Mego) cd 18.98
Collected works (live, as the title states) from the man behind OR Records (responsible for a slew of excellent experimental / electronic discs from artists like Zbigniew Karkowski, Francisco Lopez, Farmer's Manual, CD_Slopper, etc.). You might recognize Haswell's name as he's remixed Merzbow (Scumtron) and Thurston Moore (Root) as well as collaborated with the former on a 12" put out a few years ago on Mego (now out-of-print, soon to be reissued by Meme on CD). The Akita connection alone should give you an indication of what Haswell has in store on this album: brutally aggressive laptop harshtronics, huge slabs of noise of the non-digital persuasion with a knowing nod toward Akita-san himself. Nice. Cover photo by Wolfgang Tillmans to go along with an acknowledgment list that's hip as fuck.

HATEWAVE Sexual Healing 2 (Apop) cd 12.98
Before Hatewave became a grinding mathy metal juggernaut (with a killer record on tUMULt), they were, well, THIS. Something much more fucked up and damaged. Retarded and demented. Still sort of metal, but way more lo-fi and noisy, splattery confusional and bizarre.
Before Weasel Walter was in the band, they were fronted by the mysterious and brilliantly demented Nondor Nevai. As the liner notes to this archival release so eloquently state: "Fuck metal." And indeed, most metalheads, even ones who dug the twisted blackmathgrind of the tUMULt recording, will find this stuff too tweaked and twisted.
The guitars are muddy smears, not so much riffing as spewing gouts of buzz and fuzz, gnarled melodies and sheets of lo-fi crumbling distortion, the drums, if they are real drums, are an avalanche of thuds, of splattery skittery chaos, the vocals howled and moaned and shrieked, this is some seriously fucked up stuff.
Probably the closest comparison would be Faxed Head. In fact, twice when we were listening to this, people came up and asked us if it was Faxed Head. But even compared to Faxed Head this stuff is grimier, more mental, a sick onslaught of furious relentless pound and grind and grunt and stumble and what-the-fuck.
Definitely might be too much for all but the strangest and most adventurous metalheads, but noiseniks and grind freaks and anyone into utter aural insanity should just go ahead and dig in.
Also be warned: super gnarly, somewhat problematic cover art, inside and out, nudity, blood, violation, and some awesomely shitty layout!
Recommended, but only for the sick, chosen few.
MPEG Stream: "Hate Your Guts"
MPEG Stream: "I Need You (My Vodun Goat)"
MPEG Stream: "Shitlist"

HATRED s/t (Ultra Eczema) lp 25.00
Hatred is another Wolf Eyes side project, this time, it's Nate Young of Wolf Eyes along with his special lady Alivia Zyvich, and if this record is any indication, the Young/Zyvich household must be one
The disc begins with what sounds like some ultra lo-fi Ryoji Ikeda style minimalism, with piercing high end tones and barely audible low end pulses, all woven into mysterious minimal harmonies and slowly shifting microscopic textures, before launching into a dense loopscape of what sounds like snatches of other songs, short sharp samples, chopped and sped up, distorted and bathed in effects, transformed into a glitchy hiccuping hiss-scape peppered with little bursts of sizzling percussion. But most of the record is taken up by a looooooong burbling swampy low end smear of sound, extended stretches of squelchy keyboard electronic grit and looped fuzz, with haunting distant bells shimmering way in the background. It sounds a bit like Italian creep-prog outfit Goblin being held underwater in the bathtub, or a super damaged noise rock record on Kompakt. Awesome.
Packaged in a MASSIVE fold out, thick paper poster, the outside adorned with black and orange monster faces, snarling and grimacing in a field of sloppy cross hatching and chicken scratch, inside, and eyeball melting monster head rendered in that sort of 3D without the glasses green and red, that moves every time you look at it and makes your eyes ACHE!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!! Already out of print and sold out at the label so these are the last copies ever...

HAUGHM, JOHN (AGALLOCH) +46 17' 36.30", -124 4' 20.13" (Anthem) 7" 8.98
From the same label that brought us the avant ambient dubstep of Clubroot and Swarms, comes the debut solo 7" from John Haughm, the guitarist for black metal outfit Agalloch. If that sounds like a weird mix, you might not think so as much once you've heard it, as this finds Haughm trying some spaced out solo guitar on for size. A looped bit of almost krautrocky kosmische mesmer. you can definitely hear some Agalloch-isms in the sound, and the mood and vibe does get dark and ominous, and you can almost imagine the band suddenly crashing in all chug and pound and howl, but it's not to be, this is just a gorgeous little chunk of hypnotic solo guitar, the sounds looped and layered, subtly processed, melodies intertwined, tones run through the computer and spit out a little bit Fennesz-y on the other end. The result is pretty dreamy, even for non-metalheads, or metalheads who don't really care for Agalloch, the only bummer is that it's so short, it's the sort of sound that once stretched out to the length of a cd, or a whole side of an lp, would be the ultimate loopguitar krautpsych bliss out. Let's just hope this is a teaser of more to come.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!! It's a one sided 7" with the B-side silkscreened and hand numbered, housed in a swank, super striking sleeve, with a download code to boot!
MPEG Stream: "+46 17' 36.30", -124 4' 20.13""

HAUNTED CASTLE Void Lake (Arbor) 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.
We have to admit, we don't know too much about Haunted Castle, other than they shared a killer 10" split with the band Grey Skull a while back (which featured a cut out and hairy (!) sleeve), and more recently collaborated with recent AQ faves Robedoor on a killer droney ambient lp. But on that record it was tough to tell who was doing what. Robedoor tended to be a noisier heavier proposition, so we just sort of assumed that Haunted Castle were the quiet ones, getting Robedoor to mellow a bit and bliss out. But based on Void Lake, now we're not so sure. Four lengthy, brutal and caustic face melting blasts of psychnoise guitar damage, ultra blown out, dripping with crumbling distortion, all downtuned, and strangely processed, wrapped in thick clouds of, well, more guitar we'd guess. Shimmery streaks of high end feed back and grinding growling guitar fug, bits of muted percussion, what sounds like bizarre vocals and little scrapes and scratches, but it's mostly guitar, squealing and strangled, beaten and mangled, the instrument's anguished cries a huge squall of musical pain and abject fury, with big crashing chunks of industrial clatter dropped into the melee here and there for good measure. It's like Keiji Haino jamming with Heavy Winged, Mouthus, Vulture Club, Burmese, Whitehouse and Liquor Ball, after a night of serious drinking and way too much horse tranquilizer, and maybe with some frontal lobotomies to boot. Damaged free form psych that should appeal to the Brooklyn hipster noiseniks as well as old school Japanoise fanatics and everyone in between.
Packaged in a hand painted collaged cardboard sleeve, the discs themselves hand painted as well, the sleeve nestled in a hand screened and hand sewn fabric bag. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each one hand numbered...
MPEG Stream: "One"
MPEG Stream: "Four"

HAUSCHILDT, STEVE (EMERALDS) Critique Of The Beautiful (Gneiss Things) cd-r 12.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
A 'repress' of a cd-r that we never got the first time around. Mr. Hauschildt is one of the three members of Emeralds; but unlike John Elliott and Mark McGuire, he doesn't seem to be as prolific in terms of solo and side projects, with less than a half-dozen tape and cd-r releases to speak of (compared to mountains of material from those other two). With The Critique Of The Beautiful, Hauschildt doesn't stray too far from the Emeralds sound of kosmiche dronescaping through analog synths and pedals. The album is dying to be made into a piece of vinyl, with the first four pieces acting as one suite that would be nicely matched by the lengthy finale. One of those first four - "What One Does To Another" - has almost a brightened Tim Hecker feel with percolating melodic phases piled below a thickened mass of warmly buzzed distortion. This is followed by "Runway" lovely post-Cluster track of pastoral synthesis built from a rhythmic arpeggiation anchored by a spiralling set of sequential notes and tone-bent phrases. And that extended finale opens with an oscillating flange of church organ minimalism, settling upon a melancholy melody which slowly shifts between just a few minor key notes which gradually wanders into zoned-out passages of electronic bubbling and fizzed textures. Very beautiful, very moving stuff.
Limited stock on this, so don't be surprised when this one sells out.
MPEG Stream: "What One Does To Another"
MPEG Stream: "Runway"
MPEG Stream: "Critique Of The Beautiful"

HAUSCHKA & HILDUR GUDNADOTTIR Pan Tone (Sonic Pieces) cd 19.98
Time to get swept away by some deep dreamy Icelandic beauty, as our favorite experimental cellist Hildur Gudnadottir teams up with composer and pianist Hauschka for a stunning collaboration. We already deeply smitten with the meditative music Gudnadottir has made on her own as well as in collaboration with Angel, BJ Nilsen, Mum, et cetera. But we hadn't spent much time with the music of Hauschka, but this pairing definitely has us wanting to hear more of his stuff. Together they create music that sounds like a solemn soundtrack for ghost towns, abandoned buildings, and isolated existence.
With elements in sound, composition and an overall feeling that reminds us of some of our favorite works by Gavin Bryars, Charlamagne Palestine, Harold Budd, Sylvain Chauveau, and The Rachels, this is one of those records we love playing early on a crisp winter morning or as it turns dark on a Sunday night and it's time to clear our heads of the distractions of the world, and start taking deep breaths and immersing ourselves in thoughtful introspection. Utterly beautiful and stirring.
MPEG Stream: "#283"
MPEG Stream: "Cool Gray 1"
MPEG Stream: "#304"

HAUSER, FRITZ Solodrumming (Celestial Harmonies) cd 16.98

MPEG Stream: "Disturbed Balance"
MPEG Stream: "Ocean One"
MPEG Stream: "Puzzle"

HAUSER, FRITZ & MICHAEL ASKILL Space: Music For Bells, Cymbals And Gong (Celestial Harmonies) cd 15.98

MPEG Stream: "3:05"
MPEG Stream: "5:17"
MPEG Stream: "5:44"

HAVE A NICE LIFE Deathconsciousness (Enemies List) 2xcd-r + book 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Let's just get it right out in the open, first thing. This should have been record of the week. It's beautiful, weird as fuck, mysterious, it's two whole discs of far out sounds, it comes with a massive photocopied book, filled with lyrics and text from some mysterious professor, and they're called Have A Nice Life...
BUT, the band decided to not make any more copies, and let us have their last 40. It will probably be available as a download or something in the future, but for now, these are the last 40 physical copies available EVER. And the only way, as far as we know, to get the book as well.
So what's the deal with Have A Nice Life? People are always emailing us about the new wave of shoegaze bands, nu-gaze as some folks like to call it (the same ones who now have us using the term metalgaze), and someone recommended Have A Nice Life, telling us the band was some sort of doom, metal, black metal, gothic, new wave, shoe gaze outfit, so obviously we were pretty curious. So we emailed the band. No response. Emailed the label. No response. Then we just happened to be going through piles of records, and found this one just sitting on the desk, where it must have been for weeks, a cool creepy cover, a color painting of a man's arm, bleeding, the words "the plow that broke the plains" on a black field above it. And it was bundled with a book. Hmmm. With the word Deathconsciousness printed on the front. And wham. It clicked. Those guys had already sent us a copy, which had somehow slipped through the cracks. So we quickly threw it on, and it was everything we had expected, everything we had hoped for, and more. We finally got in touch with the band, who told us they were not going to make any more, but would make one final batch for us.
So here they are.
Two discs, jam packed with dark blissed out shoegazey, new wave-y, slightly metallic nearly perfect pop. The songs insanely varied, but impossible cohesive. Some sort of sprawling bliss rock opera. Each track, perfect on its own, but even more perfect as part of the bigger whole.
The first disc is the prettier and poppier of the two. The opening track is a creepy stretch of Goblin like synth ambience, peppered with simple minor key acoustic guitar, haunting and lovely, which quickly gives way to thick ropy basslines, and reverbed electronic drums, a definitely Joy Division vibe, swirls of thick guitar, gorgeous melodies and heartfelt vocals, it's dirgey and doomy and depressive, but so catchy and poppy. The next track is a big blown out pop epic, all effected vocal harmonies and washed out watercolor guitars, reminding us quite a bit of M83. The rest of the first disc slips easily from gloomy goth pop, to minimal drone, to shimmery shoegaze, often all at once. The disc finishes off with a gloomy dirge, all downtuned grindguitar and pointillist piano. Softly crooned vocals, and a surprisingly catchy melody.
Which perfect leads into the second, darker and heavier disc, which begins with a track the boasts probably the greatest song title EVER: "Waiting For Black Metal Records In The Mail". But don't be expecting any black metal, instead it's a killer slab of eighties style indie doom pop, jangly guitar, propulsive drumming, and killer vocals, all wound into an awesome blast of hooky retro gloom, very reminiscent of the Comsat Angels. Hot on the heels comes another awesomely named song: "Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000", but again the title gives no clue that the song is a lilting mostly acoustic jam, with more piano, sad vocals, minor key melodies, a super reverby eighties production, all set to that Casio keyboard preset metronome rhythm. But about half way through, the track shifts and becomes a pounding rocker, the guitars thick and distorted, the drums pounding, but then all around synths buzz, vocals croon, the heaviness transformed into something much more dreamy and blissy. "The Future" is an aggro, almost no wave workout, all jagged guitars and shouted vocals, and more of that thick throbbing bass, but just like the rest of the tracks, it gets totally twisted around, his time by the addition of fake strings, and yet another killer and totally irresistible hook.
"Earthmover" finishes things off, but instead of being some dirgey doom epic, it's another blissed out popscape, lots and lots of fuzz and buzz, glistening melodies, minimal rhythms, all buried beneath layers of woozy whir and sun dappled sparkle. Almost like a much prettier and poppier Nadja.
And the thing about this record and these songs, is that, they all manage to be outrageously catchy, but not obviously so, and while they straddle about a million different genres, they manage to weave them all seamlessly into each other, making Deathconsciousness feel less like a rock band's collection of songs, and more like one massive organic mass of blackened dronepop jangle-goth bliss. Which as far as we're concerned it actually is.
The packaging is amazing. A slimline dvd case, two cd-r's each hand spray painted, full color cover, super spare and striking, and then there's the book. A dvd sized 80 page book, filled with lyrics, liner notes, woodcuts, engravings, illustrations, and a massive amount of text on the soul, spirituality, death, sorcery, Medieval heresy and more, all supposedly penned by an East Coast professor and scholar.
So awesome!
MPEG Stream: "Waiting For Black Metal Records To Come In The Mail"
MPEG Stream: "Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000"
MPEG Stream: "Bloodhail"
MPEG Stream: "The Big Gloom"
MPEG Stream: "Hunter"

HAWD GANKSTUH RAPPUHS MC'S WID GHATZ 2 Hype 2 Wype (WordSound) cd 14.98
Oh yeah! Finally, a full length from the best worst rap group EVER. God Albino, Duke Crapmore and Flybot Van Damn are three skinny white guys who absolutely destroy on the mic. Fuck Paul Barman and his wacky 'college guy' shtick, this is the shit. Stupid and funky and juvenile and offensive and so so funny. HGRMWG are like the Geto Boys, if the Geto Boys were immature, whiny, skinny white art-school drop outs. We've been following these guys for a while -- they've contributed standout tracks to all three of the WordSound comps as well as cameos on the Spectre records. Primitive loops, lo-fi recording, ridiculous fake voices, and lots and lots of skits! And ANYONE who bought a Steven Schultz record off the last list, HAS to buy this. In fact, I'm just gonna go through the files and send out copies to those people. You know who you are...

HAWK AND A HACKSAW, A Darkness At Noon (Leaf) cd 14.98
... is noneother than Elephant 6 Collective member Jeremy Barnes (of Neutral Milk Hotel and Bablicon). We know very well the degree of creativity and craft that goes into all of the E6 family's musical endeavors, and Barnes' latest musical pursuits are no exception. This is his second release under this moniker, and it picks up right where his self-titled debut left off, traversing the great expanse of folk music from around the globe (of which he's done his fair share of exploring in the past year). However, whereas he made his first AHAAH album all by his lonesome, for this one he recruited a full band. Heck, we can see why! In typical E6 fashion, he's encorporated an overflowing mixed bag o' acoustic instruments (various horns, bagpipes, accordion, ouds, piano, harp and assorted percussion). Barnes invites seemingly divergent elements from distant plains to entwine on Darkness At Noon. Keep your ears peeled for moments influenced by klezmer, flamenco and mariachi as well as interludes seemingly inspired by Carl Stalling, Steve Reich, and the solo accordion work of Lars Hollmer (member of Swedish prog rock greats Samla Mammas Manna). Like musical ivy, they creep and wind their way in and around each other. Very much in a similar film soundtrack-y vein to Tin Hat Trio's most recent album, the gorgeous Book Of Silk. The lead-off track "Laughter In The Dark" is a fitting entrance point. The seven minute long, richly atmospheric piece gradually lures you away from the lights and roar of the city towards more fire-lit enchanted surroundings. Barnes allows his adventurous spirit to run free, and we're fortunate to have a front row seat on his musical caravan.
MPEG Stream: "Laughter In The Dark"
MPEG Stream: "A Black And White Rainbow"

HAWK, GERALD King Of The River Canoe (Abduction) cd 13.98
I believe that this is the first recording for Gerald Hawk, who managed to land this recording on the Sun City Girls' Abduction label. I have to say that this is more interesting than the recent series of monthly Sun City Girls releases, sounding much more like the solo recordings from either of the Bishop brothers. Simple off key acoustic guitar strum with a Jandekian vocal meandering that often has a ghostly double as an ominous whisper. Certainly for fans of No Neck Blues Band and the aforementioned Sun City Girls.

HAWK, GERALD The Honey Guide Bird (Abduction) cd 14.98
Second album from Gerald Hawk on the Sun City Girls' Abduction label. As on his first recording, King Of The River Canoe Mr. Hawk continues to delve deeper into his unique mumbling, psycho-sexual, angry-Jandek folk. However, on The Honey Guide Bird brooding experimental folk takes a back seat to dark soundscapes. Using looped recordings, guitar, processed keyboards, short wave radio blasts (even some snippets of numbers stations recordings), field recordings and ring modulated vocals this album sound much more like Zoviet-France than No Neck Blues Band.
MPEG Stream: "Bought You A Lollipop Store Just To Watch You Suck On Things"
MPEG Stream: "The Southern Mediterranean Giants"

HAXAN CLOAK Excavation (Tri Angle) cd 14.98
It seems Haxan Cloak has gone through a bit of a reinvention. Up until now, we would have classified Haxan Cloak as psychedelic folk, their previous records darkly ritualistic, with urgently strummed acoustic guitars, swirling black ambience, chanted monk like vox, moaning cello rumbles, a fluttery folkiness that seemed more in keeping with industrial neo folk outfits like Death In June. Which raises the question, how did they end up on Triangle, and how did they end up sounding like Burial and Vessel and Raime? Not that we're complaining. We can't get enough of this new strain of slo-mo soul, dubbed out minimal electronic murk, and that's pretty much what Haxan Cloak deliver on their Triangle debut. Sure much of the moodiness and black ambience of their previous sound carries over, but then that's the perfect delivery system for spare, skeletal, glitched out rhythms, and Excavation definitely straddles the line between new and old Haxan Cloak, peppering black drifts of deep rumble, and keening sine wave tones, with weird sampled voices, and shimmering Tibetan bowls, but soon that tell tale Burial style wood-block snare sound comes in, all echoey and reverbed, and the song transforms into a blackened electro creep, the background sounds swooping ominously, soft swells of hiss and grit wreath the rhythm, the mix a bit warped as well, the sound pulsing, laced with thick bursts of ominous thrum cranked WAY louder than everything around it, creating a secondary rhythm, one that's even more woozy.
Which is pretty much how the rest of the record plays out, and perhaps exactly what you might expect from a formerly psych folk / black ambient technician gone electronic. In fact, strip away the beats, and this would be some harrowing black ambience, but it really is all about the beats, as much as the textures and moody ambience. In some places, the sound slips into an almost dubstep, but a hellish ultra minimal, avant dubstep, a swirling swath of fractured blurred samples, glitched out beats, and rib cage rattling low end.
The shorter tracks here seems to drift back toward the Haxan Cloak of old, with scraped cello string rumbles, keening distant melodies, echo drenched industrial plod, ominous minor key piano stabs, but the two 2-part epics here definitely have the new sound on full display, channeling a Burial like minimal dub, and the more spare haunting minimal abstract beatscaping of recent aQ faves Raime, filtering it through Haxan Cloak's sinister black ambient industrial filter, the results might be one of the darkest, meanest sounding electronic records ever. The second half of the record finds some melody filtering through, the second half of "The Mirror Reflecting", is almost pretty, although still fractured and fucked up, but it builds to a seriously psychedelic coda, before the relatively brief "Dieu" delivers the most straight ahead electro jam here, but it's really relative, freaky vocal snippets, swirling strings, buzzing bass thrum, fragmented rhythmic skitter, ominous pulsating melodies, it's almost like an intro for the massive 13 minute closer "The Drop", which ditches beats completely for the first half of the track, instead, weaving a lush undulating landscape of shimmering chiming melodies, moaning strings, deep bass pulsations, lysergic chordal swirls, everything hazy and washed out, the beats do eventually surface, but they're more like processed low end throbs, looped beneath the song's haunting almost orchestral sounding swirl, the beats becoming almost Kompakt worthy for the last half, but the blackened surrounding sounds, and the weirdly static churn of the main single beat rhythm, keeps the track from getting at all 'dance-y', the beats merely adding texture to the song's blurred and blackened abject sonic sprawl. The sort of seriously sinister, cinematic soundscaping that transform any dancefloors into a crushing, harrowing, black pit of sonic despair. Awesome!
MPEG Stream: "Excavation (Part 1)"
MPEG Stream: "Excavation (Part 2)"
MPEG Stream: "The Mirror Reflecting (Part 2)"

HAYNES, JIM Eraldus / Eravaldus (Elevator Bath) picture disc 23.00
HERE ARE THE VERY FINAL COPIES OF THIS VERY LOVELY PICTURE DISC!!!
Yup, we do love picture discs. They may not sound the best, but they look so amazing. Especially with the right images embedded in that there vinyl. We all definitely have a little treasure trove of picture discs that we hang on to just because they're so goddamn beautiful. It's just a bonus when the music is good too. Especially when the music actually benefits from the limitations of the picture disc format.
The latest release from our very own Jim Haynes is the inaugural release in Elevator Bath's picture disc series and they couldn't have chosen better. For those of you who have never seen Haynes' artwork, he rusts things (as he always so reductively describes his process), but the truth is he coaxes impossible textures and patterns from chemicals and metals, often letting nature determine much of a pieces final look. And they are simple amazing, deep oranges and browns, streaks and smears, strange shapes where metal has rested on other metal, drips and layers where the chemicals have pooled or allowed to shift, inconsistencies in the metal revealed after having some of it's surface eaten away. The process is almost as amazing as the outcome, but needless to say, Jim's pieces are total industrial-wasteland-decay eye candy.
The two images chosen for this picture disc are no exception. And knowing that some of Haynes' music was also created utilizing the process of rusting, it's nice to think that the sounds within are in fact produced from chemical and metal interacting, the picture disc the literal visual analogue to the resultant sounds on the recording. But the sounds here are way too lush and varied to be produced so simply, so the images are left to spin, only somewhat removed from the sounds to which they are linked.
Eraldus / Eravaldus is probably Haynes' most varied and lush recording to date, whether on his own or with sound artist Loren Chasse in Coelacanth. The chirping of birds and the rustling of leaves, underpin what sounds like an airplane passing overhead, but the sound remains, too static to be an airplane, soon revealing itself to be manufactured, gradually melodies take shape, bits of glitch and little shards of electronic interference surface, tiny little sonic events pepper the slow shifting rumble. But those little sonic events eventually blossom into thick streaks of high end, which not soon after transform into strange scraping and whirrings. The rest of the record drifts from mysterious soundworld to mysterious soundworld, dark dronescapes rife with clicks and hiss and grit, like a recording of some swamp late at night, gritty landscapes of reverbed percussion, blurred into droney smudges, smeared static becomes long expanses of slow shifting sound, that slips effortlessly from corrosive to shimmery and back again. Quite nice!
LIMITED TO ONLY 260 COPIES!
MPEG Stream: "Eraldus"
MPEG Stream: "Eravaldus"

HAYNES, JIM Kamchatka (Contour Editions) cd-r 12.98
Here's the latest from our very own Jim Haynes, dronologist, soundscaper, recorder of rusting metal. These two pieces both represent impressions of Kamchatka, a Russian province often referred to as the "Siberia of Siberia", which speaks to its utter isolation, which Haynes manages to evoke magnificently in the opening track "Lilith", which is a 21 minute sprawl of intercepted shortwave broadcasts, captured and reworked into brittle buzzing textures, swirling masses of crumbling sonic shimmer, and deep morasses of subterranean rumble, the sky full of tinkling chimes and blurred static, beneath it fragmented melodies drift below the surface of a tranquil sonic sea. The track seemingly drifts between two extremes, thick layered dronescapes, and spare stretches of Geiger counter like chitter, those sparse passages draped over what sounds like field recordings of boats rubbing against docks, the clatter of oars, or perhaps the slow decay of nature. Somehow these mysterious purloined sounds are captured and recontextualized as a strange field of scrape and rumble, of creak and groan, all beneath soft focus billows of distant shimmer, and those skittery Raster-Noton cricket-like chirps. Haunting and ominous, the track finally seeming to blossom into the blurred bleary final movement, an ethereal wash of blissful thrum and strangely, an almost aquatic shimmer, that evokes images of some placid body of water, surrounded by miles and miles of emptiness.
The second track, "Rocks Hills Plains", a slightly reworked version of a soundtrack Haynes performed for a film by Paul Clipson at the ATA in 2008, seems culled from the same source material, opening with a gauzy cloud of static, over a softly undulating sea of low end rumble, and continues in a similar manner, all of the rough edges and more clattery elements of the first piece here, smoothed into a swoonsome sprawl of hushed murky mesmer, haunting and cinematic, the sounds creeping and oozing ominously, until the begin to recede, leaving in the foreground a field of softly percussive scrabbling, sounding like strange ghostly rubbings against the microphone, those sounds slowly growing more ethereal and soon transforming into still more cloudy shimmer. Eventually, the sound of the whole track begins to coalesce into something much more pure tone, seeming to shed any vestiges of the low fidelity with about 7 minutes to go, the sound building to something softly caustic, with some serious sonic heft, on the recording it's still comparatively quite, but live through the proper sound system, it's easy to imagine the sort of sonic energy this passage might emit, lush and layered and darkly dense, a powerful (but still minimal) coda, which quickly subsides, winding down as a barely there bit of ambient thrum, laced with disembodied field recordings, a hushed outro that quickly becomes silence.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES. Each one hand numbered, housed in super swank, silkscreened, oversized 6 panel sleeves.
MPEG Stream: "Lilith (Excerpt)"
MPEG Stream: "Rocks Hills Plains (Excerpt)"

HAYNES, JIM Magnetic North (The Helen Scarsdale Agency) cd 13.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Feedback, shortwave, wasps! Perhaps that's all we need to say to get you to click the "add to cart" button, but let's go on...
Our own Jim Haynes may be primarily a visual artist, working within a self-actualized aesthetic of rust and decay (a small sample of which you'll get with the each-one-unique cover to this release). But his love of music, especially of the 'dronological' variety, of sound art and field recording and experimental glitchscapes, has led him to accompany his recent art shows and installations with soundtracks of his own making. He's also been collaborating with AQ-fave Loren Chasse in the duo Coelacanth, who just released the very nice Glass Sponge disc (reviewed last list), so you know he knows what he's doing. This Magnetic North cd is the audio portion of an installation of the same name and is a despairingly lovely drone-scape, constructed from feedback, shortwave radio static, and recordings of wasps, as we said. Like his visual art, it's just a little spooky and discomforting, evoking ghostly transmissions from the void. It's quiet, wind-tunnel drone that could be a wordless EVP recording of a paranormal haunting, and then begins to sound like the haunting is being itself haunted! Jim's solo work seems less microscopic in focus than what he and L. Chasse do in Coelacanth. It can be claustrophobic, but conversely also spacious and even somehow incorporeal, phantasmal. One track features sparsely chopped clips of feedback, but we like best the tracks that drift endlessly without making the listener consider the physical sound-making process. Definitely for fans of Mirror, John Duncan, Francisco Lopez, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson...or for anyone willing to plumb the abyss suggested by this sound-work.
MPEG Stream: "track 1"
MPEG Stream: "track 2"

HAYNES, JIM Okno Non Konec cd-r 9.98
AQ's own Jim put this disc of rather spooky and evocative drone/glitch music together as a soundtrack to his recent art installation, but even without his excellent visuals, Jim's music on this cd-r conjures the atmosphere of rust and decay that his art is all about. Down-pitched bass-rumble, eerie Conet Project samples, and looping clicks make for an impressive first release that would be at home on Trente Oiseaux or Raster. Very nice!
RealAudio clip: "(excerpt)"

HAYNES, JIM Sever (Intransitive) cd 9.98
We listed this recently as a double disc limited edition, unfortunately that is now out of print, but the single disc is well worth the price of admission. Here's our review attesting to that...
Much like his art, the music of Jim Haynes is based on, and is a continual exploration of the act of decay, an imagining of natural (and un-natural) processes rendered into sound, a world of crumbling landscapes and of microscopic worlds collapsing. While he has yet to figure out a way to actually record the process of metal rusting, Haynes has managed to create a soundworld that sounds precisely how he, and perhaps we, might imagine it.
The process of decay, and erosion, found on and in Sever, is some sort of sprawling sonic time lapse, each track as much about the sounds as the sources, as much about the arrangements as the process of listening, as much about texture as timbre, as much about the tiny details, and the expansive whole, the opening track for instance, is all clatter and crunch, chiming and tinkling, to these ears it sounds like wandering through a ruined world, a dead planet, the sun drying every living thing to husks, these sounds are the dried carapaces, hung from rotted fence posts, rubbing against one another in what little breeze is left under a harsh midday sun. The sound of footsteps, the crunch and scrape of a despondent trudge, a death march, but all of this is carefully blurred and smeared, the obvious references are blunted, so the sound evokes all of the above, yet as if it were a dream, the edges a bit fuzzy, the sounds slightly gauzy, the colors hazy, the sound almost underwater sounding at times, a feverdream in sound.
The rest of the tracks explore a different world altogether. A world of darkness and blight, of grim emptiness and eternal blackness, three variations on the darkness beyond, varying shades of grey and black, ominous, haunting, threatening, abject, deep and so very dark. Almost as if the listener from the first track, stumbled into the cool darkness of a cave, sheltered through the sun, only to find his or herself wandering through an endless labyrinth of tunnels and caverns, the sound massive and bottomless, but simultaneously hushed and intimate, the blackness rife with buried melodies, with warm whirring textures, the haunting clang and clatter of bells? Some sort of metal on metal. Crunch and crackle adds grit to Haynes' subterranean drift, the sound growing ever more ominous, the low end shimmer transformed into a grinding hiss, a black hum, wreathed in clouds of effervescent static, beneath it all, an unlikely pulse, a barely audible throb, a machinelike anti-groove buried beneath, a slow swirling noxious obsidian haze.
The final track explodes with what sounds like the grind of stone against stone, whirring processed textures, that slowly shift and are pulled apart into strands of greyed melody, a whirring, gritty expanse of softly intertwined layers, that seem to extend forever, the various bits of grit and grime worn away as the track progresses, the sounds getting smoother as they grow darker, as if the sounds are dragging the listener further down into the dark, the light from above fading, becoming a warm orange glow, then a smudge of red, before any and all color is swallowed up, leaving just the echoes to ring out before they too disappear.
MPEG Stream: ":"
MPEG Stream: "::"

HAYNES, JIM Sever / Severed (Intranstive) 2cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
What the hell? We thought these had long disappeared, but a handful of the super limited edition 2cd version of Sever / Severed were just discovered. These will most likely be the final copies we'll see of this... As for the record, here's what we had to say about it when we first reviewed it:
Much like his art, the music of Jim Haynes is based on, and is a continual exploration of the act of decay, an imagining of natural (and un-natural) processes rendered into sound, a world of crumbling landscapes and of microscopic worlds collapsing. While he has yet to figure out a way to actually record the process of metal rusting, Haynes has managed to create a soundworld that sounds precisely how he, and perhaps we, might imagine it.
The process of decay, and erosion, found on and in Sever, is some sort of sprawling sonic time lapse, each track as much about the sounds as the sources, as much about the arrangements as the process of listening, as much about texture as timbre, as much about the tiny details, and the expansive whole, the opening track for instance, is all clatter and crunch, chiming and tinkling, to these ears it sounds like wandering through a ruined world, a dead planet, the sun drying every living thing to husks, these sounds are the dried carapaces, hung from rotted fence posts, rubbing against one another in what little breeze is left under a harsh midday sun. The sound of footsteps, the crunch and scrape of a despondent trudge, a death march, but all of this is carefully blurred and smeared, the obvious references are blunted, so the sound evokes all of the above, yet as if it were a dream, the edges a bit fuzzy, the sounds slightly gauzy, the colors hazy, the sound almost underwater sounding at times, a feverdream in sound.
The rest of the tracks explore a different world altogether. A world of darkness and blight, of grim emptiness and eternal blackness, three variations on the darkness beyond, varying shades of grey and black, ominous, haunting, threatening, abject, deep and so very dark. Almost as if the listener from the first track, stumbled into the cool darkness of a cave, sheltered through the sun, only to find his or herself wandering through an endless labyrinth of tunnels and caverns, the sound massive and bottomless, but simultaneously hushed and intimate, the blackness rife with buried melodies, with warm whirring textures, the haunting clang and clatter of bells? Some sort of metal on metal. Crunch and crackle adds grit to Haynes' subterranean drift, the sound growing ever more ominous, the low end shimmer transformed into a grinding hiss, a black hum, wreathed in clouds of effervescent static, beneath it all, an unlikely pulse, a barely audible throb, a machinelike anti-groove buried beneath, a slow swirling noxious obsidian haze.
The final track explodes with what sounds like the grind of stone against stone, whirring processed textures, that slowly shift and are pulled apart into strands of greyed melody, a whirring, gritty expanse of softly intertwined layers, that seem to extend forever, the various bits of grit and grime worn away as the track progresses, the sounds getting smoother as they grow darker, as if the sounds are dragging the listener further down into the dark, the light from above fading, becoming a warm orange glow, then a smudge of red, before any and all color is swallowed up, leaving just the echoes to ring out before they too disappear.
The bonus disc features recordings previously thought to originate from a sound installation, but which is in fact the reworked source material of his performance opening for Nurse With Wound back in 2009.
Totally recommended!
MPEG Stream: ":"
MPEG Stream: "::"
MPEG Stream: "::::"

HAYNES, JIM Telegraphy By The Sea (The Helen Scarsdale Agency) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Uh oh. These are the very last copies of this cd by our own Jim Haynes to be found. As for the possibility of a repress, the label has unequivocally said "No," given the amount of work that was put into the letterpress & silkscreen packaging. Here's what we had to say about the record a couple years back...
We like to think that the music we all make and release would be just the kind of stuff we love to listen to and sell, and just the kind of stuff you all like to listen to and buy. And such is the case with our own Jim's new record Telegraphy By The Sea, an album he's been working on for several years now, cobbled together from material culled from various elements used in installations and performances in New York, Australia and various locations in between.
The disc is lovely, all wrapped in an ominously blackened but totally beautiful package of silkscreen and letterpress that could at first glance be mistaken for another Jesu or Godflesh album with its telephone poles smeared into moire patterns.
The music inside is just as lovely. Rust, drones, shortwave, drones, acid rain, drones, a big pile of rocks, drones, a small pile of rocks, and more drones. Drones and drones. But like all of those great drone artists we freak out about (Chalk, Koner, Basinski, Organum, blah blah blah...), Jim's not one to let the drone settle as a terminal pool of inactivity. This is a dynamic album, bristling with texture amidst the shifting passages, dramatic shifts, and evocative soundscapes. The visual side of his installations has this weird eeriness as he builds dense layers of rust and debris on top of corroded photographs of abandoned buildings and desolate landscapes. Those same metaphors of abandoned, desolate spaces are musically represented in Telegraphy By The Sea. In these spaces, time is accelerated with things rusting, falling apart, getting covered in moss, and being washed away by the ocean. Scrapes and gurgles from all of those bits of metal, bricks, and rocks dissolve through radioactive sinewaves into a gorgeous magnetic wall of grey-slab tones, gradually building through half-melodic phrases, a clatter of monochrome, and squalls of crackling static. All of this snaps in an instant at the end of the album, giving way to a wondrous nocturnal ambience cobbled from luminous bell-tones and detuned shortwave radio communications.
One of Jim's good friends and collaborators Loren Chasse, said it better than we could, "A telephone cord in the sand? A message taken down using an alphabet of sea-glass, shell and carapace? It all makes sense in the last 11 minutes!"
MPEG Stream: "Telegraphy By The Sea (excerpt 1)"
MPEG Stream: "Telegraphy By The Sea (excerpt 2)"

HAYNES, JIM The Decline Effect (The Helen Scarsdale Agency) 2lp 25.00
Another mysterious sonic missive from our very own resident dronologist Jim Haynes, another excursion into the sound of decay, this time in the form of four sprawling sidelong epics, each its own self contained soundworld, culled from various field recordings, vibrating strings and other sonic errata. Recorded over the last three years, these recordings require headphones to truly explore their depth, and once strapped on, it's easy to get lost in these strange lands of decay and declines.
The A side was originally a commissioned soundtrack for a pair of films that screened at the Hauntology exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2010, and while we've yet to see either of these films, the smoldering slow moving "Ashes" does evoke a certain ontological sonic dread, the core of the sound is of course the drone, but that drone is pulled taut, and the sound seems to fray as the track progresses, shedding sonic detritus in the form of fractured melodies, strange clicks and muted buzz. At times, this begins to sound like perhaps Haynes' most overtly musical record, but that musicality is eventually picked apart, the remaining elements litter the landscape like bits of some sonic wreckage, but then the edges are smoothed, and the stray shards are reigned in, the sound is truly beautiful, whether a deep sonorous drone, or a lush layered stretch of celestial shimmer.
Named for the performance space at which the piece was debuted, "Terminal" is another sidelong soundscape, the majority of the sounds sourced from field recordings of geysers and thermal vents, the opening few minutes unfurling like a raw field recordings, playing out like some obscure scientific document, unearthed from some dusty box filed away in a warehouse, chronicling some lost expedition. The sound doesn't necessarily grow more musical, but instead, seems to blossom and display more texture, and more depth, as if more sounds were introduced and then layered or woven into one another, streaks of blurred hiss, peppered with the sound of wind on microphone or the trickle of water, the white noise of eruption balanced by the hushed murmur of calm before and after.
Side three finds Haynes exploring radioactive decay, unclear what the sound sources are, we'd like to think, that it's indeed recordings of Strontium or Uranium, the radioactivity causing the tape to warp and curdle, but in fact, it sounds more like an assemblage of intercepted short wave broadcasts, and deep bellows of bowed metal, lush chordal swells washing over strange effects, muted glitches, lush tones and surprisingly dreamy overtones, bell like chimes, chittering cricket like clicks, Geiger counter like bleeps, all blurred and smeared into a gorgeous hazy of soft focus shimmer, those clicks coalescing into an almost-rhythm, while the surrounding sounds seem to lose cohesion, the edges softening, all bleeding into one another and drifting like blackened clouds of whir and thrum.
And finally, the last movement in this crumbling sonic tetraptych is the wire recording sourced "Cold", in which Haynes captures the sympathetic buzz of wires and plays them like some sort of abstract harp, at least that's how we picture it, a huge stone room, with metal wires running across in wild tangles, Haynes at the center, wildly bowing and striking wires, creating this delicate crystalline symphony, another blurred buzzscape, that peppers the lush layered shimmer, with creaks and clatter, skitter and crunch, but those errant sounds are quickly subsumed by the warm whirls of hushed bleary drift and an unexpected eruption of caustic blown out noise, a psychedelic squall that acts as the record's coda, before the inevitable decline, the sound slipping into nothingness. Gorgeous stuff.
LIMITED TO 350 COPIES!! Housed in a luxurious full color gatefold sleeve, and pressed on nice thick black vinyl. Includes a download coupon as well.
MPEG Stream: "Ashes"
MPEG Stream: "Cold"

HAYNES, JIM The Incident With A Ghost (Hooker Vision) cassette 8.98
After killer releases from Motion Sickness Of Time Travel, Grant Evans, Quiet Evenings, Afterlife and a bunch more, the Hooker Vision label gives us a brand new recording from our very own Jim Haynes, who seems to move well beyond his "I rust things" method of sonic alchemy, creating what in Haynes' world is about as close to a minimal avant garde shoegaze as we can imagine. And in fact, we had wondered if Haynes might try something more overtly melodic for his first Hooker Vision outing, and while perhaps The Incident With A Ghost isn't strictly melodic, it's much more lush and warm than past release, seemingly trading in some of the grey austerity he often traffics in for something more organic. The first side opens with a strange rhythmic tangle made up of what sounds like the warm rhythmic patter of rainfall on clay pots, geiger counter crackle and the snap of crackling fires, those sounds form the core of what becomes a slowly expanding sonic sphere, all softly swirling reverberations, lush tonal thrum, and strange pulses and pulsations. The vibe is definitely some underwater world, or the surface of some alien planet. The sound is stormy, that rhythmic crackle blurring into shapeless whorls, beneath which tones shimmer and churn, before a sudden glitch, sends the track into much more tranquil territory, a deep slow building rumble, that begins to smolder, and transform into a sort of soft focus dream-noise, eventually giving way to some Caretaker like creep, all gauzey longform tones, and timestretched ballroom dreaminess, which billows into thick droney clouds that border on serious shoegaze blissout. Maybe the prettiest thing we've heard from Haynes yet!
The flipside is much less active, a sprawl of blackened ambience, pocked with all manner of micro sonic events, scrapes and thumps, rumbles and whirs, the sound a series of slow swells, hazy and haunting, downright tranquil until the last 5 minutes or so, when those tranquil sounds begin to grow corrosive, exploding into a raw, grinding howl of sound, wrapped in junk metal clatter, and jagged shards of static, only to suddenly dissipate, unfurling a haunting outro, all mysterious sounds, voices and machines, buried beneath slow shifting layers of bleak glowing shimmer, a woozy, wraithlike drift.
Nice metallic silver packaging. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
MPEG Stream: "From Wasps"

HAYNES, JIM The Wires Cracked (Editions Mego) lp 22.00
Latest from our very own Jim Haynes, and his first for the esteemed Editions Mego label, and like releases past, Haynes immediately delves into a world of decay. As a visual artist, he often jokes that his art consists simply of 'rusting things', and rust is definitely a large part of his visual aesthetic, but it's evident that in some ways his goal is similar in the music making process, to take sounds and corrode them, to treat them in such a way that they crumble, and decompose, revealing whatever mysteries lurk within, those subsequent sonic mysteries also decaying, as if the process was akin to nesting dolls, layer upon layer of sound, peel one away and fall deeper into the abyss, one that seemingly has no termination point.
The source sounds here are quite varied as always (most notably this time around a particle accelerator), but Haynes tends toward the greys and browns, static and hiss molded into streaks and shimmers, melodies subverted and melted down into textures, the opening track on The Wires Cracked (another nod to decay), begins with a hushed rumble, an accretion of thrum and hum, pocked with bursts of static, and shards of granular buzz. As the track progresses, the melodic component, becomes more pronounced, but subtly so, still merely a show beneath Haynes' churning windstorm of sound, a blurred, muted squall that manages to whip up billows of caustic noise, but then tamps them down into something much more malleable.
The sprawling "X-Ray" lays down a field of field recorded crackle and spatter, foot steps on snow, broken glass, hard to say precisely, but that gristled crackle hovers beneath an opening blast of noise, before giving way, to a hushed creep, a distant keening shimmer beneath a series of near microscopic sonic events, headphones most definitely required, a hazy, gauzy expanse of windblown emptiness, the sonic approximation of a wintery tundra, transformed into sound, and again, wreathed in Haynes's slow shifting textures, and peppered with insectoid like chitter. The track seems to seesaw between thick, billowing soft noise swirl, and breathless minimal near nothingness, tense and intense, a sonic travelogue through some lost land, or perhaps as the title infers some strange network of inner pathways, not hard to imagine being shrunk down, injected into a human body, and traversing a series of blood vessels and capillaries, the previously silent sound of the body's inner workings, now rendered terrifying and overwhelming, an organic machine pulsing and throbbing, the listener lost in a world of darkness, with only these mysterious sounds as proof that the listener still exists.
The whole of the second side is taken up by the near 18 minute "November", which unfurls like ghosts in the machine, deciding to dismantle the machine before our very ears, again, the sound is seemingly being pulled apart, Haynes there to chronicle its gradual decay, the most active of the three tracks, reminding us in places of the Conet Project, not the recited numbers, or the snippets of music, but the sounds in between, the various bits of static and hum, the tense interludes between sounds, here allowed to become sounds themselves, erupting into huge droning tangles of crunch and crumble, wrapped in keening high end shimmers, occasionally dipping into serene stretches of bleary ambience, the eye of the sonic storm as it were, the sedges of the sonic field still corrosive and crumbling, lending an air of impending doom to these otherwise tranquil passages, but the hammer never falls, instead, the sounds gradually dissipate, the clouds of noise clearing, revealing a hushed landscape of whistle like tones, smoothed out into a blurred susurrus of streaked shimmer, pocked with what sounds like the rasp of stone on stone, a final moment of decay, before the record itself crumbles into silence.
MPEG Stream: "Oscar"
MPEG Stream: "X-Ray"

HAZARD Land (Touch) cd 16.98
BACK IN STOCK!!!
The Swedish sound artist B.J. Nilsen recorded under the moniker Hazard from 1996 up until this 2002 record as a means of investigating the physical and psychological effects that natural sounds hold upon the human body. (He's continued recorded in a similar vein albeit using his given name). The pursuits of sonic research are refinements of Nilsen's Industrial heritage which began with a handful of epistemologically grim albums as Morthond for Cold Meat Industries and has continued with the Janitor collaboration with Baby Doll Lima of Deutch Nepal. Unlike those projects, Hazard engages a stronger poetic sensibility in the digital processing of field recordings from snow, ice, water, wind, etc. The resultant cold, cold, cold drones dappled with rich, textured detailing always imply a malevolence within natural phenomena.
As on the Hazard album with its self-evident title Wind, Land finds Nilsen collaborating with respected field recordist Chris Watson to capture source material worthy to be run through the Hazard bank of DSP patches. Again, it's wind that Nilsen is after, transforming the violent whippings of Arctic winds into huge rumblings of low frequencies that burst into climatic squalls of rushing drones crackling with a rough-hewn digital grit. As the album progresses, the sense of foreboding and dread which opens the album dissipates and reveals brighter tonalities that are worthy of comparison to Eno's ambient recordings.
MPEG Stream: "Substation"
MPEG Stream: "Church"
MPEG Stream: "Kissing Gate"

HAZARD North (Ash International R.I.P.) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
BJ Nilsen (the individual hiding behind this disc's grey packaging and the name Hazard) may also be hiding from his former Cold Meat Industries moniker Morthound. While the overall isolation and dispair of Swedish winters is found in both of Nilsen's projects, Hazard has shed the Satanic/Catholic themes of Morthound in favor of post-structuralist abstraction that results in shivering grey drones striated with a variety of scrapes and shimmers. We'll agree with the evocative description the Wire's Ian Penman came up with for this: the sound of a stealth bomber thinking to itself 'I'm getting too old for this shit, and I'm heading for the far away places to shiver and rust'.

HAZARD Wind (Ash International) cd 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Having difficulties in making wind recordings for his new project, Benny Jonas Nilsen (aka Hazard) asked field recording specialist Chris Watson for some help. Coincidentally, Watson had just finished, of all things, a radio program all about wind for the BBC (isn't the BBC cool!), and was happy to supply his tapes to Nilsen. With the incredible clarity of Watson's recordings and Hazard's own raw documentations made using much less professional gear (mostly contact microphones on branches and grass to produce an eerie glistening crackle), Hazard had the material to create this new disc, "Wind".
Following the approach of juxtaposing natural acoustic phenomena with synthetic computer based processing that he utilized on his "North" and "Wood / Bridge / Field" albums, Hazard here generates a wide miasmic range of deep drones and dark looping passages from the manipulated wind recordings, but not overly-structuring the material, instead favoring an organic presentation of the sounds. The addition of Watson's pro recordings add a great deal of color to Hazard's otherwise cold grey timbres, with his dynamic recordings of wind whistling through creaky window frames, environmental recordings of westerlies whipping around mountainous peaks, and violent thunderstorms! The result is a fantastic record on par with Andrew Chalk's "East Of The Sun" or Zoviet France's "Mohnomische."
RealAudio clip: "Stream"
RealAudio clip: "Anemo"
RealAudio clip: "Sough"

HAZARD Wood / Bridge / Field (Ash International R.I.P.) cd+lp 20.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Hazard's third album sprawls across a cd and an lp, packaged together as one cohesive body of work. Moving further and further away from the industrialist tendencies that Hazard's B.J. Nilsen employed for his previous work on Cold Meat Industries as Morthound, Nilsen deftly manipulates field recordings made in various Swedish forests to evoke an unforgivingly barren Swedish landscape that normally doesn't translate so well on field recordings (unless you're Chris Watson). Hazard's grey sweeps of electronic dronescapes are sparsely punctuated by residual scrapings of what could be wood, leaves, and dirt for a spectacularly chilling work.

HAZARD / FENNESZ / BIOSPHERE Light (Touch) cd 15.98
"Light" is an all-exclusive precursor to the 2001 Touch Tour with Hazard, Fennesz, and Biosphere. Unfortunately, that tour is only taking place in England, so the rest of us will have to make do with this CD. Hazard's track is an eerie drone that rises quickly into ringing tones punctuated by periodic field recording glicthes, rounded drones, and quick digital edits of rain, deep in the background. Fennesz offers more of his warm digital deconstruction of guitar noise, with popping edits of different layers of sound to form melodic if wholly distorted chords. Biosphere offers two remixes from his "Cirque" album of his atmospheric downtempo electronica.
RealAudio clip: FENNESZ "C-Street"

HAZARD, GRANT Genus Euphony (QPM) cd 14.98
Some of you may know Grant Hazard from Oakland-based band The Very Hush Hush, whom we have carried records from in the past. For his first solo effort, Hazard gives us an instrumental cd of icy cool but beautifully melodic ambience. Comprised mostly of minimalist solo piano inflected with spacious textures and droning loops, Hazard's classically-trained musicianship serves him well in recalling the dulcet tones of impressionist composers such as Debussy and Satie, the modern day minimalism of Brin Eno and William Basinski, and touches of the dark-natured cinematic temperaments of Bohren & der Club of Gore. Limited to 500 copies. An excellent debut!
MPEG Stream: "Marionette"
MPEG Stream: "Trepanning"
MPEG Stream: "Shards"

HBK TRIO Wallpaper (self-released) dvd-r 12.98
It's a bold move to offer a debut recording as a DVD; but that's what the East Bay improv / drone / noise HBK Trio has issued forth. Well it's DVD-R; but still! This trio features such stalwarts of the Bay Area sound community as Jim Kaiser (Petit Mal, NF Orchest, French Radio) on his trusted bowed bicycle wheel and other slabs of metal, Angela Hsu (NF Orchest) on violin and electronics, and Adrian Bayless on horns and electronics. As an ensemble, the three capture the spirit of AMM or even some of the Fonal adventurousness (minus the freak folk attributes) with all of the intertwining gestures and expressive bouts of sustained tones and softened noise generated acoustically and tempered with effects. The film comes in two distinct variations; but both of which document the biodiversity of the many creatures living in the East Bay: wasps, beetles, ravens, blackbirds, ants, and bees seen amongst the hurricane fencing, train tracks, and telephone wires. Shot digitally in video, the film enjoys some very nice static shots of insects scurrying about, then with rapid cuts of ravens marauding in the sky. You might ask yourself, is this limited? Hell, yes!

HEADBOGGLE s/t (Spectrum Spools) lp 22.00
Headboggle is an aptly named project from Bay Area product Derek Gedalecia, who landed this polydactile, outsider/avant-electronic album on the always impressive Spectrum Spools imprint. Like much of what we've heard from John Elliott's label, Headboggle filters a historical aesthetic through a contemporary-DIY lens with pretty reliable results, and Gedalecia has a pretty different take on that agenda by looking not so much to the cosmic / post-psychedelic era of progressive electronics. He's one to apply a huge amount of studio techniques and references including Tod Dockstader, Francoise Bayle, Nurse With Wound, Caroliner, Stockhausen, as well as Dilloway, Nate Young, and much of the post-noise synth wranglers, although Gedalecia is much more keen on dumping all sorts of odd samples and live instruments into densely packed, yet wholly decentered collages. Yup, he too has the suitcase full of cassette releases that have been spilling forth over the past three or four years, with a few of those popping up in the tape case here at aQuarius even. This self-titled lp is full of way-out there synth jams - citing six or seven synths in various interviews and whatnot, that give the record an 'everything-at-once' sort of overload bursting with candy-colored tones and bright-lite plastic luminosity, all topped with erratic banjo plucks, atonal harpsichords spluttering, and ragtime piano passages. What a trip!

HEADBOGGLE Serge In Dualmono Part Two (Greedmink) cassette 6.98

HEADDRESS Turquoise (Totem Songs) cd-r 11.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Formerly known as Worship (they released a small cd-r pressing under that moniker), the elusive group who now answer to the name Headdress continue their dusk lit creep through the enchanted wilderness. On Turquoise they craft a beautiful loosely woven tapestry of ivy-like guitar tendrils, lichen-encrusted percussion, solemn mossy male vocals that reside somewhere between Jandek and M. Ward. The album's fifth song "Babylon" sounds strangely like a deconstructed folk rendition of America's "Horse With No Name". Whether intentional or not, the glinting familiarity of the latter's central melody adds to the existing subtle hallucinatory atmosphere of the proceedings. The crowning jewel of rough hewn Turquoise though is the sixth track titled "Moon Of Shedding Ponies". It's a frayed, meditative instrumental populated with generous turns of a rainstick and what sounds like howling wolves or banshees.
If you dig the rustic, abstracted psych-folk sounds of Wooden Wand & The Vanishing Voice and the many bewitching branches of the Jewelled Antler Collective, don't miss this!
MPEG Stream: "Babylon"
MPEG Stream: "Moon Of Shedding Ponies"

HEADS OF PAGAN Under The Tall And Darkened Arches (Faunasabbatha) 3" cd-r 5.00
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
**LAST COPIES**
In a world full of tiny labels, it takes a lot to stand out, whether it's some amazing and mysterious sounds or super unique and hand made packaging. And if anything RuralFaune as shined in both respects, a crazy collection of some of the weirdest noisemakers in the world, and some seriously amazing, and in many cases, fragrant, packaging. Hand printed, painted, folded, pasted, held together with string or wire, often filled with branches or flowers, scraps of paper, seeds or bits of plant matter, many of them very strong smelling, all of them amazing.
Well, Bruno, the man behind RuralFaune, was really getting into heavy music, and decided that maybe RuralFaune was not the place for such musics, so he started FaunSabbatha, a new label dedicated to heavy, creepy, dark music, metal, metallic, or just plain evil. Four new releases, each one outrageously limited, gorgeously hand packaged, and gone before you know it.
Heads Of Pagan are a duo, just voice, guitars and effects, but their 21 minute track sounds more like a tangle of crumbling downtuned basses. Low rumbling, thunderous riffs, slowed way down and allowed to pulse and throb, reverberate and whir, slightly percussive, the sound of pick hitting string is quickly swallowed up by black billows of rib cage rattling sound, very abstract and murky, muddy and mysterious, which over the course of the track grow in intensity, becoming thicker, more grinding, more distorted, the notes and melodies becoming less indistinct, transforming into a roiling black bass drone, only occasionally offering up fragments of melody, sharp bolts of feedback entering the fray, eventually building into a full on Merzbow style noise track, but with the basses becoming fuzzy and alien, sounding instead like synths, oh but they're guitars so it's even stranger, buzzing warbly confusional chaos smeared into a dense blackened low end blur. Heavy but not metal, brutal but still sort of ambient. Definitely for fans of the sloooooow and looooooow.
LIMITED TO 66 COPIES. In a mini 3" sleeve with a mini 3" printed insert.
MPEG Stream: "Under The Tall And Darkened Arches (excerpt 1)"

HEALTH Get Color (Lovepump United) cd 14.98
Health just keep getting weirder and weirder, and thus better and better. This is record number three, and all the elements that made us fall in love with these guys are still present, feral jittery rhythms, sharp angular guitars, wild chaotic drumming, spaced out effects, a sort of fractured no wave new wave dancefloor destroying post punk, and here, on Get Color, they've reigned in their propensity for freakouts, and expanded their sound dramatically, whereas before, they were more about energy and sound and mood and texture, about beats and cool effects, and while there were pop songs buried in there, or at least fragments of pop songs, they were often pretty hard to separate from the chaos around them.
Get Color is indeed still plenty chaotic and frantic, but there definitely seems to be more of a focus on songs. Opener "In Health" is a sub two minute introductory blast, but even then the song opens up revealing some dreamy vocals and some subtle hooks. But "Die Slow" is a killer rhythmic psych pop dance jam, equal parts the Boredoms, Fischerspooner and Gang Gang Dance, super melodic, and in some alternate universe this would be as big as LCD Soundsystem. "Nice Girls", is all drum driven, with more ethereal vocals, burst of jagged crunch and squalls of effected percussion, the whole thing woozy and dreamy and super hypnotic. Some of the tracks get all new wave, with low slung Joy Division basslines jacked up and distorted, with angular post punk guitars, but still all wrapped around those frenetic beats, while others are just totally far out, like record closer "In Violet" a strange soundscape of looped, chopped, clipped synth tones, swirling shimmering high end streaks, more hushed wispy vocals, the rhythm, and the whole song really constructed from digital skips and strange glitches. So awesome, dance music for only those with a super abstract idea of what dance music is, for the rest of us, total head spinning headphone bliss!
The cd (not the vinyl, sorry) might just include one of 66 handmade tickets, each redeemable for some sort of prize, the grand prize is a three night trip to LA to hang with Health, but other prizes include care packages, posters, baby photos, crank calls, knitted scarfs, astrological readings, test pressings and who knows what else. A regular post punk new wave Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. Good luck!
MPEG Stream: "In Heat"
MPEG Stream: "Die Slow"
MPEG Stream: "Nice Girls"