AUTECHRE s/t (LP5) (Warp) lp 18.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Autechre's sad little melodies over angular electro breakbeats have taken on the very distinctive trait of deceleration, as the pulsing electronica speed through dystopic conduits only to hit vacuums within the digital spaces causing vertiginous slow motion freefalls. With every release Sean and Andy successfully redefine electronica while maintaining their exquisite signature. Highly recommended.

BANNLUST Digital Tensions (Sabotage) cd 16.98
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Grabbed this off of Jim's favorites shelf, this is what he had to say about it: "As Sabotage gets a criminally small amount of press, there will be virtually no hype for Bannlust...which is a fucking shame, as thousands of trainspotters will pass this up looking for that long gone Autechre album when they should be listening to this...as good if not better than recent Autechre and/or Skam recordings!!!"

BASTRO Diablo Guapo (Homestead) cd 13.98
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Wow, Homestead reissues two of Andee's favorite records ever (see The Frogs, below). There was a time, pre-Tortoise and pre-Gastr del sol, when John McEntire and David Grubbs rocked. I mean really ROCKED. Hard to believe, but in 1989, those guys were making some of the meanest, noisiest (barely indie) rock around as Bastro. Nasty Albini-ish high end guitar assaults, hammering rhythms, and howlingly furious vocals, made them Slint's bigger and meaner noise rock brother. Awesome.

BLONDE REDHEAD In An Expression Of The Inexpressible (Touch & Go) cd 14.98
The Japanese/Italian trio's last album Fake Can Be Just As Good should have been the album Sonic Youth made right after Daydream Nation. Fortunately, their latest album proves that they are no longer a Sonic Youth rip-off band. And for that matter, what they've grown into is quite something to behold. On In An Expression Of The Inexpressible, the band's fourth full length, lead female vocalist Kazu Makino has honed her pipes into a distinctly expressive wonder... taming its former shrillness into something very childlike and otherworldly. Noisy melodies of angular guitars, modest keyboards, and a tight rhythm section come across as desperate yet beautiful epics. Very highly recommended.
RealAudio clip: ""

BLONDE REDHEAD In An Expression Of The Inexpressible (Touch & Go) lp 17.98
The Japanese/Italian trio's last album Fake Can Be Just As Good should have been the album Sonic Youth made right after Daydream Nation. Fortunately, their latest album proves that they are no longer a Sonic Youth rip-off band. And for that matter, what they've grown into is quite something to behold. On In An Expression Of The Inexpressible, the band's fourth full length, lead female vocalist Kazu Makino has honed her pipes into a distinctly expressive wonder... taming its former shrillness into something very childlike and otherworldly. Noisy melodies of angular guitars, modest keyboards, and a tight rhythm section come across as desperate yet beautiful epics. Very highly recommended.

CRESCENT Collected Songs (Roomtone) cd 13.98
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Due to Bristol's rather incestuous pool of avant rock bands, Crescent's name often appears in conjunction with Flying Saucer Attack, Movietone, Third Eye Foundation, and Amp. As it should, since members of Crescent have performed with all three of those groups. It is a tad disheartening to see customers buy Crescent records with the hope of hearing a cosmic drone of blissful feedback, only to find an antithetical abject muck, and then selling them back.
And you know what, there's absolutely nothing wrong with an abject muck, actually we really like abject muck. If you listen closely to the tracks that Matt Jones (Crescent's mastermind) has appeared on in Amp and Movietone, you'll realise that everything he touches ends up with a gritty lo-fi quality. And for Crescent's third album, he has taken up residence in a Bristol church to capture a rather humid, almost rusting sound on top of his very loose songs. A gothic (NOT in the Trench Coat Mafia definition) sensibility of decaying atmospheres, permeates the slow moving waves of sonorous basslines, loose hammond organ semi-improvisations, and skittering rhythms, somewhere between jazz and krautrock.

DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE Something About Airplanes (Elsinor/Barsuk) 2cd 15.98
Here's there review we wrote about Death Cab's debut way back when (we made it Record Of The Week in 1998), we don't want to change a word, it's funny though since they're so huge now....
At the risk of slipping into hyperbole, which we try avoid at all costs (snicker...), this is hands down, one of the best (and possibly most overlooked - we almost missed it ourselves, gasp!) indie rock records ever. Landing somewhere between There's Nothing Wrong With Love and Perfect From Now On, Death Cab craft a Built-to-Spill-ian universe, full of lazy sad pop, intricate compositions, jangly melodies, shifting structures, odd time signatures, and haunting cellos (and none of that solar malevolence that Doug Martsch and our very own Jim are so fond of.)
This record has been an unbelievable hit in the store. We don't think it's ever been played without at least one person buying it, sometimes 2 or 3!
The version we have now, is the limited, numbered, slipcased 10th anniversary edition, with expanded booklet and bonus disc of DCFC's first show in Seattle, on February 25th, 1998, titled Live At The Crocodile Cafe. Nice!!
MPEG Stream: "Bend To Squares"
MPEG Stream: "President Of What?"
MPEG Stream: "Your Bruise"

FUCKHEAD The Male Comedy (Mego) cd 16.98
Calling this an industrial record certainly does this record no justice... Although Fuckhead's overblown testosterone laden angst is clearly presented through digital technology, thankfully none of the dated Front 242 or Rammstein references appear. Instead dense hyperactive sampling and digital noise processing dominate the album. Certainly an odd choice for digital electronica saboteurs Mego to release, but nonetheless an brutal and beguiling album. Recommended.

I AM SPOONBENDER Sender / Receiver (Gold Standard Laboratories / Mint) cd 11.98
The debut album from the San Francisco avantgardists I Am Spoonbender is quite a brilliant fare, in which the telephone operates as metaphor to semiological, aural, and sidereal transmissions (Andee's interpretation: "They sing into phones"). But this object finds itself in need of repair, disrupting and re-interpreting the original signals of This Heat and Gary Numan into mutant grooves propelled by Dustin Donaldson's post-Jaki Leibezeit percussion and Brian Jackson's prog bass angularity. On top of all of this rhythmic disruption, Cup's delicate vocal / synth melodies fall somewhere in between the tropes of late '70s new wave and Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy For Lilith. Yeah, I already run the risk of making this review far more advanced than it really need be, so I say that this -- the aural equivalent of Avital Ronell's Telephone Book -- is one of my favorite records of the year. No shit.


MPEG Stream: "Replaced By Toys"
MPEG Stream: "Waking Dream Seance"
MPEG Stream: "Mr. Knife Miss Fork "

LABRADFORD E Luxo So (Kranky) cd 13.98
The fifth studio album from Labradford finds the band incorporating instrumentations of dulcimer, string section, and tape loops alongside their atmospherics for guitar, bass, and piano. Labradford may have beaten Andee (in his first solo project after A Minor Forest, Pee, and Tic War) to the punch with a blatant appropriation of George Winston / Shadowfax / Windham Hill onto a record for Kranky.
Beautiful, none the less.

LABRADFORD E Luxo So (Kranky) lp 10.98
The fifth studio album from Labradford finds the band incorporating instrumentations of dulcimer, string section, and tape loops alongside their atmospherics for guitar, bass, and piano. Labradford may have beaten Andee (in his first solo project after A Minor Forest, Pee, and Tic War) to the punch with a blatant appropriation of George Winston / Shadowfax / Windham Hill onto a record for Kranky.
Beautiful, none the less.

MAEROR TRI Hypnotikum I (Soleilmoon) lp 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Almost entirely overlooked by 'post-rock' journalists for their fascination with industrial culture, Maeror Tri (now disbanded though Stefan and Martin have continued as Troum) have nevertheless constructed some of the most beautiful and simultaneously terrifying drone rock, complete with delicate melancholic melodies sublimated beneath glacial guitar washes. These tracks were culled from the backing tapes Maeror Tri performed with on their last European tour. Opens up a can of whup-ass on Windy & Carl and Labradford. A pretty limited piece of vinyl from Soleilmoon.

MAEROR TRI Language of Flames and Sound (Old Europa Cafe) cd 16.98
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MB (BIANCHI, MAURIZIO) Symphony for a Genocide (EEs'T / Alga Marghan) cd 16.98
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In the liner notes, a smug Maurizio Bianchi (aka MB) included a quote from Genesis P-Orridge who described MB's early 80's industrial noise records as 'boring, meaningless, pathetic'. I'd agree with MB in claiming that Gen was jealous, as MB was able to construct brutal hallucinatory recordings of electronic noise that offer metaphors of microscopic anyeurisms which collapse the body from within. Bleak chilling drones that are reminiscent of Conrad Schnitzler's most neurotic, Nurse With Wound's most droning, and Whitehouse's least annoying. MB's very prolific career in the early 80's with a more than a dozen records was cut short in 1984 at which time he joined a monastary.
Some of my favourite 'noise' records that have been gratefully reissued, thus sparing me from shelling out the $120.00 that I've seen the vinyl editions of these records going for!

MCGREEVY, STEPHEN P. Electric Enigma (Irdial) 2cd 22.00
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From the same label that brought us the truly disturbing Conet Project comes Stephen P. McGreevy's VLF recordings. With a knowledge of basic radio telescopics, a few choice geographical / atmospheric anomalies, and a good ear, McGreevy records the earth's electromagnetic signature generated through such phenomenon as the Alaskan Northern Lights. Delicate whistles streak over loud crackles, that bring to mind Id Battery's fascination with recorded fire, or John Duncan's shortwave radio experiments. Word of caution, one of our faithful customers complained that this created rather deleterious psychosomatic effects.

NURSE WITH WOUND Second Pirate Sessions (United Dairies) 2cd 26.00
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There was an old Nurse With Wound LP which Steve Stapleton (the madman behind NWW) sold to the old Rough Trade distribution in the UK for $99.99 simply because he knew of glitch in the accounting system that would cause the whole system to crash when anyone bought his record. Not quite as maddening a prospect here, but still he has released all of the unused tracks from the Rock 'n' Roll Station sessions across a double cd and a single piece of vinyl... Yes, there are different tracks on the vinyl and the cd (the 2nd disc is the complete Rock 'n' Roll Station album), making the consumer decisions of which to buy (if not both) somewhat problematic. Musically, it is 'rock' as NWW probably will ever get, with a solid recognizable pulse that punctuates the dadaist noises that is oddly similar to a Joe Meek with a drum machine. Easily one of the best releases from NWW in a very long time... and if it matters... of the AQ staff, Byram and Marc took home the CDs and Jim got the vinyl.

NURSE WITH WOUND Second Pirate Sessions (United Dairies) lp 23.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
There was an old Nurse With Wound LP which Steve Stapleton (the madman behind NWW) sold to the old Rough Trade distribution in the UK for $99.99 simply because he knew of glitch in the accounting system that would cause the whole system to crash when anyone bought his record. Not quite as maddening a prospect here, but still he has released all of the unused tracks from the Rock 'n' Roll Station sessions across a double cd and a single piece of vinyl... Yes, there are different tracks on the vinyl and the cd (the 2nd disc is the complete Rock 'n' Roll Station album), making the consumer decisions of which to buy (if not both) somewhat problematic. Musically, it is 'rock' as NWW probably will ever get, with a solid recognizable pulse that punctuates the dadaist noises that is oddly similar to a Joe Meek with a drum machine. Easily one of the best releases from NWW in a very long time... and if it matters... of the AQ staff, Byram and Marc took home the CDs and Jim got the vinyl.

OMIT Interior Desolation (Corpus Hermeticum) cd 16.98
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With dozens of self released tapes, a 3cd boxset, and a handful of collaborations with Dead C/A Handful of Dust guitarist Bruce Russell, this New Zealand reclusive misanthrope returns with more dark & claustrophobic dronescapes. Found sounds, homemade instruments, & barely perceptible rhythms are forced into Omit's mostly broken 8-track in the form of tape loops which shift and pulse ominously. Plus the recurrent motif of squealing pigs. An absolutely stunning record!!!

PLASTIKMAN Consumed (Novamute) cd 15.98
After the early 90's incarnation as F.U.S.E. making some of the heaviest cybernetic techno stomps to come from Detroit, Richie Hawtin has continued to devolve techno along a trajectory of minimalism. The monochromatic pulsing beats appear more as the afterimage of techno than as some club floorfiller. Brilliant in its paradoxical expansive claustrophobia.

PLASTIKMAN Consumed (Novamute) 3lp 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
After the early 90's incarnation as F.U.S.E. making some of the heaviest cybernetic techno stomps to come from Detroit, Richie Hawtin has continued to devolve techno along a trajectory of minimalism. The monochromatic pulsing beats appear more as the afterimage of techno than as some club floorfiller. Brilliant in its paradoxical expansive claustrophobia.

THIRD EYE FOUNDATION Fear Of A Wack Planet (Domino) cd 7.98
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Once in a blue moon an absolutely perfect single drops from heaven onto us mere mortals. It's almost unheard of that this phenomenon would be realized by the same band twice. Yet Matt Elliot, Mr. Third Eye Foundation first gave us the brilliant "Semtex" single... and now "Fear Of A Wack Planet".
Majestic choral voices delicately float as haunting historical texts to a Baroque past with elegantly simple breakbeats forming the basic structure. Yes, this is the same alchemic formula that Enigma has been boring the world with for some time now, yet Third Eye Foundation's ability to manifest the sublime provides that elusive transcendental quality that makes this one of the most beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard.

THIRD EYE FOUNDATION Fear Of A Wack Planet (Domino) 12" 8.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Once in a blue moon an absolutely perfect single drops from heaven onto us mere mortals. It's almost unheard of that this phenomenon would be realized by the same band twice. Yet Matt Elliot, Mr. Third Eye Foundation first gave us the brilliant "Semtex" single... and now "Fear Of A Wack Planet".
Majestic choral voices delicately float as haunting historical texts to a Baroque past with elegantly simple breakbeats forming the basic structure. Yes, this is the same alchemic formula that Enigma has been boring the world with for some time now, yet Third Eye Foundation's ability to manifest the sublime provides that elusive transcendental quality that makes this one of the most beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard.

V/A Mission Two: Connecting Electronix Network (Nature) cd 18.98
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NOW AVAILABLE ON CD!!! This is a brilliant compilation of a lot of electronica outfits which are pretty obscure... Only V/VM and D'Archangelo are the really familiar artists here. Nonetheless, the tracks (which are mostly Italian in origin) share a similarity to Skam's or Rephlex's output of nu-skool electro and warped electronica. As a result we've been tracking down singles from A Credible Eye Witness, Phoenecia, and Vendor Refill.

V/A Mission Two: Connecting Electronix Network (Natural) 2lp 16.98
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A brilliant compilation of fucked electronica, with tons of outfits none of us had ever heard of. Only V/VM and D'Arcangelo are the familiar names here. Mostly Italian, the tracks sound quite similar to SKAM's output in Manchester, and Rephlex in London. Nu-skool electro and warped electronics. If you like Autechre or Aphex, pick this up, you won't regret it!

MAGAZINE Real Life (Vinilisssimo) lp 27.00
Finally a long overdue, and totally necessary reissue of the first album from quintessential art-punk outfit Magazine. Howard Devoto founded the band in 1977, after parting ways with the Buzzcocks. Less than a year after the Sex Pistols exploded onto the world stage, Devoto recognized the problematic cliches of punk and sought to remedy the trad-rock banalities and the limitations of just being able to play a couple of chords. Real Life applies the energy of the punk rock that's full of piss and vinegar to the glammy dynamics of early Roxy Music and David Bowie. Surrounding Devoto were bassist Barry Adamson (later one of Nick Cave's Bad Seeds and accomplished solo artist in his own right) and John McGeoch (one of the longer serving guitarists for Siouxsie & The Banshees). The opening track "Definitive Gaze" defines what it means to be angular, with its catchy if choppy basslines, spryly jittery snare fills, and sci-fi synth leads punctuated by sneered vocals from Devoto. This track along with the two singles off the album - "Shot By Both Sides" and "The Light Pours Out Of Me" - mark three of the high water marks of what could be defined as post-punk. The album as a whole jerks itself between restless arm-flailing mania, tempestuous emotional outbursts, and melodic croons whose ghosts would eventually haunt the likes of Radiohead, Kaiser Chiefs, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs many many years later...
MPEG Stream: "Definitive Gaze"
MPEG Stream: "Shot By Both Sides"
MPEG Stream: "Recoil"

RED TEMPLE SPIRITS s/t (Independent Project Records) 3cd 34.00
We have loved this band since we were in high school, when we first picked up a copy of the Red Temple Spirits' first record. That album - Dancing To Restore An Eclipsed Moon - became something we've returned to over and over again. Then, it was a more adventurous, post-apocalyptic, and lysergically tainted take on the British post-punk / goth-pop albums of my youth. You know, Love & Rockets, Siouxsie, The Smiths, The Cure. But later, upon discovering the Syd Barrett fronted Pink Floyd records, Twink's Think Pink, and the Outsiders' CQ, Red Temple Spirits seemed less to fit in with their contemporaries and more of a feral updated expression of psychedelic awakening of those bands from the '70s. The basslines from Red Temple Spirits may have been lifted wholesale from Steven Severin of Siouxsie & The Banshees, and the guitars could hit the jagged, sparkplug bursts of Gang Of Four or even Crime (but for the most part, they paralleled the dark-eyed jangle of the Abecedarians); but the arrangements were far more convoluted - at times shambolic and rambling, and at others ritualistically intense.
The band emerged out of the LA goth-punk scene in 1987, when bassist Dino Paredes departed Psi-Com, which was fronted by none other than Perry Farrell (who would go on to form Jane's Addiction) only to find another amazing frontman in the form of William Faircloth. This British ex-pat was equal parts doomsayer and acid casualty, eagerly waxing poetic about the latter through the lens of the former. Many of these visionary tales mapped out a basic philosophy of universalist gnosticism - "The Light Of Christ" addresses a common gnostic precept that an inner wisdom is trapped within the human condition and can be tapped through meditation, invocation, rigorous study, whatnot, but not before passing through allusions to Buddhism and animism. Vocally, Faircloth sounds a hell of a lot like Black Francis / Frank Black trying to do a Syd Barrett impersonation - a demonic, tonal yelp with a faint trace of a British lisp.
The band produced two albums, the aforementioned Dancing To Restore An Eclipsed Moon (1988) and the nearly impossible to find If Tomorrow I Were Leaving For Lhasa, I Wouldn't Stay A Minute More (1989). The bulk of copies of the latter all seemed to end up in Greece for whatever reason, and given the prices for the album online, must have been single handedly supporting the Greek economy. The debut is an astonishing album that sprawls from languid dirges to frenetic punk-pop songs all lead in dramatic fashion by Faircloth. The second album attempts to tighten up some of the more unhinged aspects, with a few more conventional psych-rock songs but when they hit the cover of Pink Floyd's "Set The Controls To The Heart Of The Sun," it really is a twisted acid trip launched beyond Earth's orbit, through pounding tribal rhythms, Keith Levene-esque guitar scratchiness, and Faircloth's belted vocals. Both of those albums are present in their entirety here, along with some choice bonus tracks (including a really tripped out version of 13th Floor Elevators' "Rollercoaster") as well as a third disc of demos.
This 3cd set also marks the reinvention/reactivation/resurfacing of Bruce Licher's Independent Project Records, complete with the amazing letterpress folios he was creating back in the '90s. Faircloth was actually one of Licher's press technicians after Red Temple Spirits broke up, and Red Temple Spirits and Licher's Savage Republic were certainly coming from the same headspace. The major difference being that Red Temple Spirits was actually a way better band, if criminally under-appreciated. Very highly recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Waiting For The Sun"
MPEG Stream: "Dark Spirits"
MPEG Stream: "Meltdown"
MPEG Stream: "In The Wild Hills"
MPEG Stream: "Set The Controls"

CONTROL UNIT In A Frame (Alt Vinyl) lp 27.00
Control Unit are the Italian duo of Sylvia Kastel and Ninni Morgia, the latter having done all sorts of scattered psychedelic projects including a prolonged stint in La Otracina. But in teaming up with the uncompromising Sylvia Kastel for Control Unit, his expository tendencies are tempered in the heavy sourness of Control Unit's grim electronics. In A Frame is their second lp and perfects the bad-drug cocktail of early '80s Italian industrialisms and the narcotic / narcoleptic vibes of Factrix and Mars which they first began to manufacture a couple years back. Kastel and Morgia employ monotone guitars, beatboxes, and cheap synthesizers cast through ghostly delay patterns and a zombified / exhumed production grit that alternates between abstracted decompositions of Hansen records styled electrical damage and tracks which could almost be considered songs with their step sequenced skeletal rhythms haunted by Kastel's vocalizations. These more structured elements seems to corrode from within, as the geiger-counter rhythms and ticking pulsations misfire and palpitate amidst the crosshatching loops and erratically fired patterns. Even with all of the cold/minimal/wave revivalism going on, Control Unit are dialed into a very specific historical reference of most death-obsessed electronica circa 1982. Creepy, horrifying, chaotic dirges for the industrially minded. Limited to just 275 copies!
MPEG Stream: "In A Frame"

TWINK Think Pink (Sunbeam) lp+cd 29.00
THIS RECENT RECORD OF THE WEEK, NOW ON VINYL! First time we've had a vinyl reissue of this old fave, in fact. And, it comes with a free copy of the cd version tucked into the jacket, which means you do get all the bonus tracks described below, even though they didn't fit onto the vinyl itself. Here's what we said other other day when we listed the cd:
Along with the revamped Conet Project, here's another no-brainer for a Record Of The WeekÉ We've listed it before, years and years ago, when there was a cd version on Akarma, but this is a much nicer, expanded, official reissue and it's good to give it a proper review for the first time (back then, we merely quoted The Seth Man from Julian Cope's Head Heritage website, waxing rhapsodic about this record, now we'll do it ourselves).
Oh boy. Do you like psychedelia? DO YOU HAVE THIS ALBUM? If not, you're in for a treat, a mindblowing treat. Think Pink was the brilliant solo effort from former Pretty Things drummer John "Twink" Alder, and it's an all-time aQ fave, an all-time underground psychedelic masterpiece, right up there with the essentials from the likes of Amon Duul II, Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, Sam Gopal, Kaleidoscope, and Tyrannosaurus Rex, and it's just been properly reissued on cd by the UK's Sunbeam label, with a whole bunch of bonus freakery added on. Not that this album NEEDS any bonus freakery, it's about as freaky as you can get to begin with, packed with droning chant, druidic prophecy, spaced-out psych jams, weird twisted pop, and acid-folk ramble. But, too much is never enough, right? So heck, we're happy to have the eight bonus tracks too. More on those later. First, let's discuss the original album itself. As we said, Twink played drums for The Pretty Things, but before that had his own sixties R&B outfit the Fairies. After that band, he was in Tomorrow ("My White Bicycle") with future Yes guitarist Steve Howe, around 1967. Twink then briefly formed a duo called The Aquarian Age, before joining up with The Pretty Things and appearing on their concept-album classic S.F. Sorrow in '68, another aQ fave. At that point, for some crazy reason (things were different/better back then) Twink was offered a deal by Sire to do a solo album, and Think Pink was the glorious, if at the time somewhat unheralded, result, recorded in 1969 with Mick Farren of The Deviants producing. Released in 1970 in the US & Europe, but not 'til '71 in the UK, it's been called the first Pink Fairies album, and in a way it is, as soon after making it, Twink did team up with several ex-members of The Deviants, most of whom played on this, to form that infamous proto-punk outfit. And several tracks here feature contributions from what's credited as "The Pink Fairies Motorcycle Club & All Star Rock & Roll Band".
Also participating are several of Twink's Pretty Things bandmates, his girlfriend Silver Darling, and Steve Peregrin Took, Marc Bolan's partner in Tyrannosaurus Rex and early T-Rex, who plays, among other things, "pixie horn". And one of the most crucial contributors to Think Pink, besides Twink himself, has to be guitarist Paul "Blackie" Rudolph, who really lets loose, earning a hallowed place in the annals of distortodelic guitar wrangling for his work on this album alone (though in the course of his career before and after, he also played with The Deviants, Pink Fairies, Hawkwind, Robert Calvert, and Brian Eno).
Eastern-tinged opener "The Coming Of The Other One" sets the scene, pulling us deep into its trippy Aquarian Age fantasy zone, with a solemn voice reciting Nostradamic verses ("In the year 1999 and seven months, from the skies shall come an alarming powerful king...") accompanied by tablas and sitar. Then comes Think Pink's biggest "hit" as far as we're concerned, an utterly perfect slice of stonery psych called "10,000 Words In A Cardboard Box", just listen to it! That's followed by "Dawn Of Magic" with its raga-like vocal ahhhaaaaahh sounds as if Pandit Pran Nath were on the mic, which suddenly segues into the space-out sike-pop of "Tiptoe On The Highest Hill", a lovely pastoral song that eventually builds into a howling guitar blow-out of the highest order. Then the trippy "Fluid" chimes into being, with its sexy heavy breathing and slinky, springy grooves, making us think of the acid-fried hippy orgasms of krautrockers Brainticket's classic Cottonwood Hill (released later on, in '71, we should also note).
Side two (track six here) opens with the martial fuzz-freakout of "Mexican Grass War", all chanting freaks and wild FX like early Amon Duul and Edgar Broughton Band. The freaky vibes continue, quite weird and wonderful, with the glammed up jam of "Rock An'Roll The Joint", the mellow morbid acoustic strum of "Suicide" and the maniacal "Three Little Piggies", before the album ends with the intense edgy psych pop of "The Sparrow Is A Sign", a song with a malevolent, sinister side to it that reminds us a little bit of Comus - and strangely too of the Sun City Girls, perhaps due to the vocals, provided by Steve Took.
Then, there's all those bonus tracks, the first two of which are actually from the lone 7" single released in '68 by The Aquarian Age, the immediate precursor to the Think Pink project. There's the A side, being the original version of "10,000 Words In A Cardboard Box", and the B side, an amusing number called "Good Wizard Meets Naughty Wizard", which displays just the sort of twee, hippie British humor the title suggests. It's great to hear both of those, and the bonus tracks proliferate further with unreleased, alternate versions of more Think Pink material, somewhat heavier or rawer or definitely different, including two takes of "Fluid" and another version of "10,000 Words...", which we can't get enough of anyway.
All in all, a nicely done reissue, as this deserves, with pages and pages of newly-written, informative liner notes, plus lyrics, credits, vintage photos & graphics. Plus, unlike that previous Akarma version, this is a fully-legit release, done with the participation of Twink himself ("issued under exclusive license from Mohammed Abdullah John Alder, February 2013" it says here, and there's even a picture of him today too - apparently he's become a Muslim, and looks quite happy).
By the way... Nobody here at aQ can think about Think Pink, though, and not also think about our "customer" whom we call The Twink Think Pink Guy. We don't believe he's ever actually bought anything, but he's this older guy that comes in once in a while (and has for years) and always, always, ONLY asks about Think Pink, whether we have it in stock or not, and then talks at great length to anyone who will listen about how great it is. It's his favorite record apparently, but don't let that dissuade you, if you get this you probably won't end up like him. Probably.
Message for The Twink Think Pink Guy, if you're reading this: we expect to see you soon!
MPEG Stream: "10,000 Words In A Cardboard Box"
MPEG Stream: "Tiptoe On The Highest Hill"
MPEG Stream: "Fluid"
MPEG Stream: "The Sparrow Is A Sign"
MPEG Stream: "Good Wizard Meets Naughty Wizard"

UNCLE ACID & THE DEADBEATS Blood Lust (Rise Above) lp 39.00
Hell yeah, at last! When this now-semi-legendary album was first released by UK heavy psych doom metal specialists Rise Above in 2011, it came out in an ultra limited edition of just three hundred vinyl-only copies, which proved almost impossible to come by. That first edition sold out instantly and those lps started trading for seriously ridiculous amounts of money on eBay and elsewhere. Even though, really, who the heck were Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats? Well it wasn't just the cool band name generating a buzz, the music was awesome, as we later were able to ascertain. Eventually Rise Above did a repress, of which we were able to get a few, though those were expensive too and we were never able to get enough of 'em to actually list. But, we did figure out why this record was in such demand (as we'll discuss in more detail in a moment). We also learned that Blood Lust had also come out on compact disc, but oddly enough via a small Finnish label instead of Rise Above, and again we never were able to get enough of those to list, either. But we had hope that someday, somehow, we'd be able to review this for you, 'cause eventually most Rise Above stuff gets released in the USA by licensees Metal Blade, and while its been a damn long time, we're now pleased to, ta da, finally have Blood Lust on cd at a domestic price. Record Of The Week? You bet!
So, what we thought we were in for, way back when all we knew about band was their name & label, was some lysergic sludgey doomy jamming, like maybe Electric Wizard (another Rise Above band) or UFOmammut. Which we would have been perfectly happy with, of course. But, instead, Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats proved to be a lot more song-oriented and more melodic than we expected, with a kind of poppy '60s garage psych rock side to 'em, amidst their heavy fuzz-filled riffage. The singer (that's ol' Uncle Acid himself, natch, also on guitar in this power trio, and mellotron and synths too) croons his twisted tales of witchburning, black magic, and murder, in a languid whine, his voice nasally pinched and reverb effected, reminding us a bit of Kyle Thomas of aQ faves Witch (and King Tuff and Happy Birthday too by the way). His delivery lends a delicate, decadent touch to the band's brand of both despondent plod and swinging catchiness, able to render lines like "I was born a bitter man, no hopes or dreams / I get my kicks from torturing and screams / I lust for womens blood, and their evil ways / I twist my words to what the good book says" with sick sincerity -and- showmanship, in a way that is surprisingly not very much metallic, instead staying (despite the music's undeniable heaviness) more in the pop realm, though one obsessed with vintage horror films.
These rollicking, but dread-infused tunes are further full of ripping fuzz guitar leads, and lumbering downer riffs. Without a doubt, doom originators Black Sabbath are a major factor in this band's sound, but they're doing something rather different with that particular inspiration than most do. And we're also reminded of some other British '60s/'70s proto-metallers like Stray, High Tide, T2, and May Blitz, who were quite heavy but psych-pop catchy as well. Perhaps very early, very psychedelic Alice Cooper could be added to Uncle Acid's roster of influences too, we're thinking of the way the song "Ritual Knife" marries a pounding tribal beat and urgently chugging ominous riffery with glorious bursts of shining melody come chorus time.
One much more recent band that these guys also remind us of, is Swedish occult rock sensations Ghost, another act whose "pop side" is so effective as to possibly threaten their "metal cred" among the more closeminded. We'd also recommend Uncle Acid to fans of that other recent, equally retro stunner from Rise Above, Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell. And, like last week's Record Of The Week by Golden Void, this has that laidback classic sounding '70s psychrock vibe, immediately familiar, though Uncle Acid comes across as much more dark and sinister to be sure. And lastly, fans of Witchcraft should pay attention - we'd rank this up there with that band's celebrated Rise Above debut, we're pretty sure this is gonna be considered a classic too. We're sooooooo glad they didn't just press only those 300 vinyl copies and leave it at that!! You will be too.
This cd reissue includes a bonus track not on vinyl, which provides a nice coda to the record proper, relinquishing the fuzz guitar for acoustic strum and hand percussion, Uncle Acid doing their doom-pop-psych in a more folky style a la, say, Bolan's Tyrannosaurus Rex.
MPEG Stream: "I'll Cut You Down"
MPEG Stream: "Curse In The Trees"
MPEG Stream: "13 Candles"

ZOVIET FRANCE 7.10.12 (Alt Vinyl) lp+10"+7" 54.00
No need to belabor the point on this one. This is the first Zoviet France record in 13 years. It's a triple vinyl set with a 12", a 10", and a 7". This is the second pressing mind you, as the first sold out in less than a day when it was published back on October 7, 2012 (a fitting date for the format!). We can safely report that the droning loops are as good as anything that Zoviet France did in during the latter part of the Robin Storey era (e.g. Shadow Thief Of The Sun, Shouting At The Ground, Look Into Me, etc.). Storey and Ben Ponton were responsible for the best work for Zoviet France from 1981 to the early 90s, producing beautiful hypnogogic sounds, looping passages, and ethnomusicologically unhinged instrumentation all cast through tape delay effects and time-lag accumulation. Storey left unceremoniously in 1992 taking with him Zoviet France's prolific work ethic, but never really achieved the full glory that Zoviet France once had. Ponton continued on with the project in fits and starts, but he never seemed to find the right chemistry... until now. If you know Zoviet France's work even in passing, you will NOT be sorry. At the same time, we are not all that confident we'll be able to stock this in the future. Delay picking this up at your peril.

BRAINTICKET Cottonwoodhill (Cleopatra) cd 15.98
A couple years ago, when an expensive import vinyl (+cd) version of this came out, we realized, good golly, we've never listed this before, really??? So we were glad to finally get to do so, 'cause Brainticket's Cottonwood Hill has been a trippy AQ fave for long, long time.
Now it's just been domestically reissued on cd, without the extraneous vinyl component, so anyone who missed out on it before can get it, and more cheaply too!
This album, originally released in 1971 (that's right!), the debut from Swiss krautrockers (we think you can call 'em that) Brainticket, is simply one of the freakiest, LSD-trip inspired slabs of groovy mu-sick ever. Up there with Funkadelic's Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow, even.
The first two tracks on side one, "Black Sand" and "Places Of Light", ease you into it, being laidback groovers laced with stabs of distortion... then the true "trip" begins, the utterly over the top, three-part "Brainticket", that starts on side one and spreads over all of side two, dense and propulsive and repetitive, with orgasmic female vocals and all kinds of intense psychedelic throb. It's the perfect soundtrack to goin' completely mad. In addition to wah-wah guitar, organ, flute, tabla, and sci-fi electronics, there's layers of musique concrete "samples", tapes of rainfall, clanging bells, clattering trains, cheering crowds, all sorts of chaotic noise panic...
Quite a overdose of LSD-enthusiasm, that even today still seems more likely to scare folks off from trying drugs than encourage 'em to do so. But then, who needs to actually drop acid when you can just listen to this? Fans of the likes of A.R. & Machines, Amon Duul II, Siloah, Tangerine Dream's Electronic Meditation, and other cosmic trips (as well as hippie kitsch) this is another one you need to get turned on to if you haven't already. Oh, and as a footnote, the drummer went on to play in proto-metallers Toad.
Packaged in gatefold digi-sleeve.
MPEG Stream: "Black Sand"
MPEG Stream: "Brainticket Part I"

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

VERTONEN 11 22.4'N 142 35.5' / HACE/26,250' (Misanthropic Agenda / Crippled Intellect Productions) lp 15.98
The depths of the ocean and the heights of the mountains. As poetic as these subject matters are for Blake Edwards, he seeks to describe the existential danger inherent in exploring such places. To ascend Mount Everest may be the most exhilarating experience in one's life, but the possibility of death is very, very real. The same can be said for plunging to the bottom of the sea. Manifesting such existential threats has been part and parcel of Edwards' project Vertonen. Recently, he's embodied a slipperiness between a tonal, electro-acoustic beauty and undercurrents of industrial violence lurking from within; and that holds true on this album as well. The coordinates of the first track refer to the location of the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean; and appropriately enough, that track plummets through a series of aqueous, yet ominous electronic percolations coming to rest at a blackened pressurized hum, amounting to a great piece of bleak, industrial strength dronemuzik. A lurching heartbeat rhythm guides the first half of "HACE/26,250", whose title refers to the altitude at which the condition known as High Altitude Cerebral Adema begins to impact the human body negatively through the lack of oxygen getting to the vital organs and causing the collapse of brain activity. And thus, amidst this slow somatic rhythm, harsh sinewave electronics and squalls of tempestuous noise beckon from the nether regions behind a glacial pall of cold cold drone. Eventually, these actionist gestures dissolve alongside the heartbeat rhythm into a shimmering, snowblinding drift of minimalism, a portrait of a mountaineer gazing over the horizon from the top of the world while his or her body shuts down. Horrifyingly great.
MPEG Stream: "11 22.4'N 142 35.5'"

ATKINSON, FELICIA Visions / Voices (Umor Rex) 2lp 23.00
The gloomier the day the more perfect to listen to this album from Belgian abstractionist Felicia Atkinson, who also records under the moniker Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier. Her work often draws parallels to the likes of Natural Snow Buildings or Motion Sickness Of Time Travel in terms of the narcoleptic atmosphere that drifts through song and drone alike - one that's perfect for late winter fog or cold damp mornings of early spring; but Atkinson's work is probably even darker, more somber, and drearier than from either of those other artists. She deftly moves from song-based arrangements for guitar, voice, to lots of effects and broad ambient gestures of elongated fragments, loops, and pastoral passages. Visions / Voices showcases these multi-faceted aesthetics from Atkinson, collecting tracks from the various micro-edition cassettes and cd-rs she's produced over the years, none of which have made their way through aQuarius we should add.
The first cut on the album "This Impermanent Gold" is a sodden avant-folk number sporting a Jandekian open-chord, atonal strum on an acoustic guitar with bleakly windswept clouds hovering behind the gasping, non-verbal vocalizations. She counters this track with a rapturously billowing drone piece that has all of the compositional trappings of one of Tim Hecker's ambient excursions, through the rich tapestries of interwoven drones and darkly radiant hypnosis. "All Roads Are Circular" is an aptly named track of once brightly strummed guitars burnished down to a dull iron finish and set into loosely organized loops and off-set shoegazing patterns. Twinkling synths form constellations of downer melodies on "The Owls" bringing her closest to the Motion Sickness Of Time Travel sound of murkily cosmic introspection. But when she gets to "Franny," things get downright spooky with a rasping antique piano slowly creaking a low-register dirge whose ominous, suffocating vibe comes to the surface through a violent smolder of deep rumbling tectonic drones and corroded amplifier distortion, definitely giving Chelsea Wolfe a run for her money when it comes to ghastliness.
Easily some of the best material we've heard to date from Atkinson under either her name or Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier! And is there a download card? Yes!
MPEG Stream: "The Hooves Drummed"
MPEG Stream: "The Owls"
MPEG Stream: "Franny"

WATSON, CHRIS El Tren Fantasma (Touch) cd 15.98
This awesome Watson disc, now repressed and back in stock!
Preeminent field recordist Chris Watson returns with a bit of a twist on El Tren Fantasma. Pretty much all of his work up to this point (outside of his contributions to Cabaret Voltaire and The Hafler Trio way back when) has been audio verite. Even such albums as Weather Report, which edit field recordings from the African savanna (for example) into a condensed journey, are pristine, realist documents codified through the exquisite, lush details in Watson's environmental sounds such as that of a lion panting after a successful hunt. El Tren Fantasma is much more engineered, imagined, and processed than anything else in his solo career; and this fictionalized Watson is no less compelling, no less dramatic, and no less awesome.
El Tren Fantasma - The Ghost Train - traces a now-defunct passanger rail line which ran from the Pacific Coast of Mexico to Veracruz on the Atlantic Coast. Watson had the opportunity to make this journey while working as a sound recordist for the BBC for their Great Railway Journeys. His compositions work with extracts from that excursion travelling across Mexico along with archival recordings whose origins are not specified. As he's stopping throughout the Chihuahuan Desert, Watson does capture the stunning chorales of chirping frogs, buzzing insects, and the blaring call of a California Quail (whose syllabic chortle is often mnemonically transcribed as "chi-CA-go" as if it were seeking a more temperate climate); but it the train's power and mass that provides so much of the impact for Watson's album. By the fourth track "El Divisidaro," Watson captures a series of loops of the train - with the bellowing horn pitched back and forth into a sustained symphonic tone and the clatter of the train's engine becoming an ersatz rhythm track, which in turn gets tricked out with some Martin Hannett styled, phasing delay work. It's easy to get lost in the majesty of this track, much like the expressive electronica that Wolfgang Voigt produced on Konigsforst as Gas. What a brilliantly simple transformation executed to perfection! "Mexico D.F." reprises this strategy with rhythmic churns building out of the grinding brakes and the roiling tumult of steam blasting through the train's pipes, becoming an almost militant thump on a lone drum. The train's horn drifts suitably in a cloud of reverberation at the end of the album, dissolving into the ghostlike apparition Watson intended it to be. As brillliant as this work is, we should also point out that Watson is not alone in composing such fictionalized scores purely through environmental sound. We would be remiss if we failed to point out the work of Australian composer Tarab, whose deft psychogeographical albums share the scope and execution with Watson's El Tren Fantasma. So great!
MPEG Stream: "Sierra Tarahumara"
MPEG Stream: "El Divisidaro"
MPEG Stream: "Mexico D.F."

MAIN Ablation (Editions Mego) cd 16.98
Now here on cd too!!
It's been a very long time since Robert Hampson has released a Main album and an even longer time since he's produced a *great* Main album. Ablation changes that, although those who would be expecting the deconstructed hypno-rock of Motion Pool or Hydra-Calm will be disappointed; but those who had followed Hampson's trajectory starting with the last few Main records about a decade ago into spatialized electro-acoustics only to rediscover his infatuation with the drone which finally brought him back to the guitar as a principle instrument will certainly understand where this record is coming from. Hampson is still working at the storied GRM studios in Paris, and there is an infusion of the classic aesthetic of what came out of GRM within Ablation (notably Parmegiani and Ferrari), but at the same time he does link it back, if in a subtle way, to the mesmerism which girded the Main productions in the '90s. That said, any connections to his former group, Loop would be quite a stretch indeed.
On Ablation, Hampson has recruited Stefan Mathieu - a brilliant drone technician in his own right whom we've not heard from in ages - and the pairing works seamlessly, even as it clearly slants towards Hampson's vision of a cold disconnection dispensed in overlapping hissing layers and hypnotic patterns of abstracted sound. The percussive klank of a prepared piano on "I" is a bit of a red herring for what's found throughout Ablation especially on "II" and "III", is a series of slow ellipses of churning guitar drones and golden tonal coronas drifting with all of the uneasy beauty of an android's dream. The closing track "IV" bends along a radiophonic arc with ether crackle and metallic rasping and slow motion pixelations from a sharply rendered synth that forms the coda to the album. Organic. Liquid. Electric. Motorized. Bleak. Holy. All of those adjectives apply to this fantastic album. Welcome back, Main!
MPEG Stream: "II"

CONET PROJECT, THE Recordings Of Shortwave Numbers Stations (Irdial Disc) 5cd+book 78.00
The Conet Project, originally released in 1997, has attained near mythical status around here. Many folks associate The Conet Project inextricably with our store itself. Which makes sense. We championed the Conet Project relentlessly, everyone here is obsessed, most of us owning multiple copies, some of us incorporating sounds from The Conet Project into our own music, and The Conet Project still ranks as probably THEE best selling release ever at aQuarius. Even more remarkable for the fact that it's not really music at all, at least not in the typical sense, and it is and always has been pretty expensive, as a deluxe 4-cd set initially, and import to boot. In fact until it went out of print for the last time a few years back, we had sold close to one thousand copies, and that's just in our little store. We even used to have a big chart on the wall, where we kept track of the sales, and for a while, we were even taking Polaroids of people who bought the Conet Project to display in the store, a snapshot of them holding what we can only imagine would become their new favorite record (buyer #382: Mike Patton!). Which all leads to the question some of you may have, what the heck is The Conet Project, and why are we (and many of you) so obsessed with it? And so thrilled that it's finally available again?! Yes, available again and obviously a big time Record Of The Week.
Basically, the Conet Project is a now FIVE-cd compilation (more details on the new 2013 edition's additional fifth disc is down below, near the end of this long review!) of recordings of mysterious shortwave radio broadcasts, known as "numbers stations". These numbers stations are generally believed to be encrypted spy transmissions, but no concrete evidence has ever surfaced proving that supposition. However, no credible *alternate* explanation has ever been demonstrated, either. For years (ever since the start of the Cold War), amateur radio enthusiasts have come across these sinister signals, and they continue to this day, broadcast in many languages all over the world (the theory is that some are CIA, some are KBG, some are Mossad, etc).
In general, the transmissions consist of a deadpan voice (sometimes an old man, sometimes a young woman, etc.) reading a seemingly random, meaningless series of numbers over and over. Sometimes the broadcasts are preceded by a musical cue (the "Swedish Rhapsody" music box one being a favorite of ours), and sometimes the numbers are not conveyed by voice but by even more cryptic electronics (as with "The Buzzer", and other noisy, abstract stuff found mainly on disc four).
Needless to say, hearing those amazing and baffling sounds collected on these cds is an unnerving experience. Not only does knowledge of the supposed purpose of these transmissions imbue them with a disturbing quality, but the repetition of the numbers combined with the background of shortwave radio static makes for a aurally hypnotic experience. If merely regarded as a piece of experimental ambient sound sculpture, The Conet Project would be a brilliant and affecting piece of work, yet with the added context of international intelligence and conspiracy theory, it becomes even more intriguing and creepy. Lots of information is included that provides a great deal of description of, and speculation about, The Conet Project. Which is possibly the most incredible, and weirdest, item of sound art/documentation that we've EVER had here at aQuarius. Mesmerizing, fascinating, unique, massive, scary, but sometimes even soothing. 100 percent recommended to the adventurous listener ('cause it's not for everyone!). And once you have it you'll understand why it had to be so many cds - being overwhelming is part of the obsessive allure of this Project. And it's not just us, The Conet Project has popped up in lots of unlikely places, most notably it was sampled on Wilco's breakthrough Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album, the title of which in fact comes from The Conet Project itself. Wilco were also famously sued by Irdial, the label who released it, and they lost! Some sounds from the Conet Project also popped up in that Tom Cruise movie Vanilla Sky, and over the years, we've heard it in various films and on various records, it shouldn't be surprising that so many weird music obsessives love The Conet Project.
Really, as we said, if there's one recording that seems to be most identified with aQuarius recOrds, or that at least we mention most often when trying to explain to people what it is that we're all about here, it's most definitely The Conet Project, and yeah, over the years there have been plenty of others, including Sounds of North American Frogs, Os Mutantes, Burzum's "Filosofem", Comus' "First Utterance", Boris, Circle, Philip Jeck, Village of Savoonga, and loads more since, many other records near and dear to our hearts (for instance, hearing the first Neutral Milk Hotel album always makes us nostalgic for the old 24th street store). But for some reason it's The Conet Project that really seems to sum it all up. It's all the things we really love: completely ridiculous (4, no, now 5 cds!), completely fucked (secret government spy transmissions), droning, weird. It's just so interesting and evocative on so many levels, both musical and totally non-musical, as a listening experience and also as a geopolitical cold war and beyond artifact. Definitely an all time perpetual aQ fave: Allan's got the whole thing on his iPod, so does Andee, he also owns multiple copies of the set, many of which found their way into his old band A Minor Forest's live performances, Jim has steadfastly maintained that this is the greatest record of all time, and who are we to argue? If it's not obvious, we all are a little bit obsessed.
And what this is all leading up to is that YES, finally after literally YEARS of being out of print and unavailable, The Conet Project, has been reissued AGAIN, but this time, with a WHOLE EXTRA DISC, with its own jewel case and booklet!! That's right, the new Conet Project is FIVE discs, not four, and if you're big Conet nerds like most of us, you might just have to buy a second (or even third!) copy. The new disc is not just another numbers station disc though, instead it's a collection of "noise stations", which essentially sound just like the numbers stations MINUS the numbers. So it's a series of gorgeous buzzes and strange hissing fields of blurred melody, lots of crunch and crackle, buried rhythms, whistling tones, strange textures, in fact, much of it is downright musical, so much so that we were musing, hmm, what if this new disc is in fact a hoax, a series of number/noise station like soundscapes created by some electronic musicians like Hrvatski? Naw... But there was in fact talk of a Conet remix project for years now, so it's not that far fetched, and in a way, if it WAS a hoax, it would be even cooler. But as far as we can tell, and according to our resident numbers stations / shortwave expert Jim, these are in fact that kind of weird alien sounds you can hear, tuned in to these mysterious stations. As much as we love the other four discs of The Conet Project, this new one is pretty exciting, and we have to say, definitely makes a case for buying it AGAIN! But for all the rest of you who have yet to discover the bizarre sonic mysteries of the Conet Project, there is no higher recommendation we can give, an all time unanimous aQ fave, our best selling record EVER. Sonically, and conceptually mind blowing. We never made it Record Of The Week before for some reason, but in our hearts, it has always been, and always will be, a perpetual aQ Record Of The Week!!! FOREVER.
BTW, this counts as a "box set" for shipping, it won't fit in the USPS flat rate box we use, so it'll have to go media mail or UPS if you're mailordering it domestically.
MPEG Stream: "Swedish Rhapsody"
MPEG Stream: "5 Dashes"
MPEG Stream: "Iran/Iraq Jamming Efficacy Testing"
MPEG Stream: "Magnetic Fields"
MPEG Stream: "Tyrolean Music Station"
MPEG Stream: "The Buzzer"
MPEG Stream: "Data Bursts, 5.201kHz (USB And AM) [Disc 5]"
MPEG Stream: "Exotic Cipher, 6.215kHz/AM October 5th, 2008 19:27 GMT [Disc 5]"
MPEG Stream: "Descending Jammer, 7.969kHz/USB [Disc 5]"
MPEG Stream: "Drone, 17.964kHz [Disc 5]"
MPEG Stream: "Oscillating, 5.178kHz, March 12th, 1997 [Disc 5]"
MPEG Stream: "348|10|13|36|19|21, 11.573kHz, 19:17 GMT [Disc 5]"

IRR. APP. (EXT.) The Other Side Is Blank (Equation) 12"+7" 30.00
Not much point in belaboring the issue too much on this one. There's only 100 copies. Most of them are gone. But, FUCK, if this isn't the best Organum record ever made, even if it wasn't made by David Jackman. Instead, we have a brilliant homage to the turgid acoustic dronescaping and thoughtfully composed noise arrangements of David Jackman's best period of Organum (circa 1988 - 1994), produced by the less-than-sensible irr. app. (ext.) / Matt Waldron. Quite literally, this was the album of his dreams, as one night in 2011, Waldron was overcome by a vision of encountering Jackman at an indoor shopping mall in California, where he was selling a brand-spanking new Organum LP which featured a strange bear drawing on one side and an even stranger fox drawing on the other, with the rather explanatory "The Other Side Is Blank" as the title, pointing out that the lp was a one-sided lp. While we are not all that sure if such a strategy ever came up in Organum's back catalogue, he was known for releasing 7" singles with a mere minute and half of sound on both sides. In the five tracks (four on the one sided lp, and one very short cut on the one sided 7"), Waldron dutifully creates fantastic, industrial blurs of vibrating metal, acoustic rattlings, and infernal roars of very tactile noise all very much within the aesthetic of Jackman's Organum project. Pretty fucking brilliant and pretty fucking stupid at the same time. A perfect record for aQuarius! But grab one before they're gone for good...
MPEG Stream: "Harrow"
MPEG Stream: "Rind"

RV PAINTINGS Samoa Highway (The Helen Scarsdale Agency) lp 15.98
BACK IN STOCK!!!
Two brothers from Humboldt County are RV Paintings - one is Brian Pyle, whose name should probably strike a chord as one of the principals in Starving Weirdos and recently has been generating some impressive work under his solo Ensemble Economique moniker; the other is Jon Pyle, who occasionally makes a guest appearance in the Weirdos but also operates in Nudge with Honey Owens, Paul Dickow, and Brian Foote. For all of the method acting from the brothers Pyle in getting stoned and jamming, they have been remarkably consistent and consistently good in all of their ruminations, with RV Paintings probably the best that they've mustered. The RV Paintings debut on Root Strata is three years out but is still a timeless, gorgeous dronesmear of bowed metals and elongated guitar; this was followed by a well-suited split with Taiga Remains on Blackest Rainbow, and now, they've got this stunner on Helen Scarsdale.
RV Paintings speak about, to, and from their own immediate surroundings: the moss, mushrooms, and mycelium of the awe-inspiring redwood forests, the heavy fog that hangs at the coast and from their bongs, and the weightiness of the Pacific Ocean just off to the west. The title Samoa Highway gives the impression that the two brothers were on their own trip during a cold, wintery day, gazing off to the southwest and pondering the warmer climate of American Samoa. But no, the Samoa Highway is located in Humboldt County, connecting Eureka with the small community of Samoa on the other side of the bay which was thought to resemble that of Pago Pago in the mid-19th Century. It's also the bridge that would get you to the Arcata/Eureka Airport.
So, the album begins with field recordings of airplanes lifting off on the jawdropping track "Millions," as sitar-like harmonics and ghostly, levitating drones emanate from the distance. It's a perfectly narcotized smear of echo and drift, hanging in space as the remnants of a particularly lucid dream or the foggy headspace from an afternoon of smoking pot and staring at the sun. This is a track that could spiral onward forever. So nice! Samoa Highway continues with "Mirrors" driven by melancholy looped melody from a cello that dissolves into a flurry of shimmered guitar fuzz, whose shoegazed mantra has been submerged under centuries of felled trees and lichens. Cyclical patterns of samples from dark yet pastoral orchestral passages rounds out the album. If it weren't for the delicate freeform clamor of the drumkit, tracks such as this wouldn't be that far removed from the 'pop ambient' cuts by Gas. Citations of Taj Mahal Travellers, Organum, Grouper, Barn Owl, and The Caretaker certainly hit the mark. Music for airports? More like Music for California airports! Fuck yeah!
And a download coupon is tucked within the sleeve as well!
MPEG Stream: "Millions"
MPEG Stream: "Mirrors"
MPEG Stream: "As Far As We Could See"

TWINK Think Pink (Sunbeam) cd 17.98
Along with the revamped Conet Project, here's another no-brainer for a Record Of The WeekÉ We've listed it before, years and years ago, when there was a cd version on Akarma, but this is a much nicer, expanded, official reissue and it's good to give it a proper review for the first time (back then, we merely quoted The Seth Man from Julian Cope's Head Heritage website, waxing rhapsodic about this record, now we'll do it ourselves).
Oh boy. Do you like psychedelia? DO YOU HAVE THIS ALBUM? If not, you're in for a treat, a mindblowing treat. Think Pink was the brilliant solo effort from former Pretty Things drummer John "Twink" Alder, and it's an all-time aQ fave, an all-time underground psychedelic masterpiece, right up there with the essentials from the likes of Amon Duul II, Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, Sam Gopal, Kaleidoscope, and Tyrannosaurus Rex, and it's just been properly reissued on cd by the UK's Sunbeam label, with a whole bunch of bonus freakery added on. Not that this album NEEDS any bonus freakery, it's about as freaky as you can get to begin with, packed with droning chant, druidic prophecy, spaced-out psych jams, weird twisted pop, and acid-folk ramble. But, too much is never enough, right? So heck, we're happy to have the eight bonus tracks too. More on those later. First, let's discuss the original album itself. As we said, Twink played drums for The Pretty Things, but before that had his own sixties R&B outfit the Fairies. After that band, he was in Tomorrow ("My White Bicycle") with future Yes guitarist Steve Howe, around 1967. Twink then briefly formed a duo called The Aquarian Age, before joining up with The Pretty Things and appearing on their concept-album classic S.F. Sorrow in '68, another aQ fave. At that point, for some crazy reason (things were different/better back then) Twink was offered a deal by Sire to do a solo album, and Think Pink was the glorious, if at the time somewhat unheralded, result, recorded in 1969 with Mick Farren of The Deviants producing. Released in 1970 in the US & Europe, but not 'til '71 in the UK, it's been called the first Pink Fairies album, and in a way it is, as soon after making it, Twink did team up with several ex-members of The Deviants, most of whom played on this, to form that infamous proto-punk outfit. And several tracks here feature contributions from what's credited as "The Pink Fairies Motorcycle Club & All Star Rock & Roll Band".
Also participating are several of Twink's Pretty Things bandmates, his girlfriend Silver Darling, and Steve Peregrin Took, Marc Bolan's partner in Tyrannosaurus Rex and early T-Rex, who plays, among other things, "pixie horn". And one of the most crucial contributors to Think Pink, besides Twink himself, has to be guitarist Paul "Blackie" Rudolph, who really lets loose, earning a hallowed place in the annals of distortodelic guitar wrangling for his work on this album alone (though in the course of his career before and after, he also played with The Deviants, Pink Fairies, Hawkwind, Robert Calvert, and Brian Eno).
Eastern-tinged opener "The Coming Of The Other One" sets the scene, pulling us deep into its trippy Aquarian Age fantasy zone, with a solemn voice reciting Nostradamic verses ("In the year 1999 and seven months, from the skies shall come an alarming powerful king...") accompanied by tablas and sitar. Then comes Think Pink's biggest "hit" as far as we're concerned, an utterly perfect slice of stonery psych called "10,000 Words In A Cardboard Box", just listen to it! That's followed by "Dawn Of Magic" with its raga-like vocal ahhhaaaaahh sounds as if Pandit Pran Nath were on the mic, which suddenly segues into the space-out sike-pop of "Tiptoe On The Highest Hill", a lovely pastoral song that eventually builds into a howling guitar blow-out of the highest order. Then the trippy "Fluid" chimes into being, with its sexy heavy breathing and slinky, springy grooves, making us think of the acid-fried hippy orgasms of krautrockers Brainticket's classic Cottonwood Hill (released later on, in '71, we should also note).
Side two (track six here) opens with the martial fuzz-freakout of "Mexican Grass War", all chanting freaks and wild FX like early Amon Duul and Edgar Broughton Band. The freaky vibes continue, quite weird and wonderful, with the glammed up jam of "Rock An'Roll The Joint", the mellow morbid acoustic strum of "Suicide" and the maniacal "Three Little Piggies", before the album ends with the intense edgy psych pop of "The Sparrow Is A Sign", a song with a malevolent, sinister side to it that reminds us a little bit of Comus - and strangely too of the Sun City Girls, perhaps due to the vocals, provided by Steve Took.
Then, there's all those bonus tracks, the first two of which are actually from the lone 7" single released in '68 by The Aquarian Age, the immediate precursor to the Think Pink project. There's the A side, being the original version of "10,000 Words In A Cardboard Box", and the B side, an amusing number called "Good Wizard Meets Naughty Wizard", which displays just the sort of twee, hippie British humor the title suggests. It's great to hear both of those, and the bonus tracks proliferate further with unreleased, alternate versions of more Think Pink material, somewhat heavier or rawer or definitely different, including two takes of "Fluid" and another version of "10,000 Words...", which we can't get enough of anyway.
All in all, a nicely done reissue, as this deserves, with pages and pages of newly-written, informative liner notes, plus lyrics, credits, vintage photos & graphics. Plus, unlike that previous Akarma version, this is a fully-legit release, done with the participation of Twink himself ("issued under exclusive license from Mohammed Abdullah John Alder, February 2013" it says here, and there's even a picture of him today too - apparently he's become a Muslim, and looks quite happy).
By the way... Nobody here at aQ can think about Think Pink, though, and not also think about our "customer" whom we call The Twink Think Pink Guy. We don't believe he's ever actually bought anything, but he's this older guy that comes in once in a while (and has for years) and always, always, ONLY asks about Think Pink, whether we have it in stock or not, and then talks at great length to anyone who will listen about how great it is. It's his favorite record apparently, but don't let that dissuade you, if you get this you probably won't end up like him. Probably.
Message for The Twink Think Pink Guy, if you're reading this: we expect to see you soon!
MPEG Stream: "10,000 Words In A Cardboard Box"
MPEG Stream: "Tiptoe On The Highest Hill"
MPEG Stream: "Fluid"
MPEG Stream: "The Sparrow Is A Sign"
MPEG Stream: "Good Wizard Meets Naughty Wizard"

CROOKED COLUMNS Chemical Mysticism (Black Horizons) cassette 8.98
Another choice slab of gnarled industrial dekompositions from Black Horizons! Crooked Columns is a new project to us, hailing from Portland, Oregon with handful of equally unknown ancillary projects from the various members. Searing synth tones, crushing noise concoctions, and an occasional rhythmic outburst of militaristic aplomb set the stage for a cassette that could easily be passed off as something with origins dating back to 1984 from some armpit town in sodden England or from some death-obsessed Italian miserably enduring the Mediterranean sun. Even with all of the noise and grind and toxic bloom, Crooked Columns muster some intriguing variations on their core strategies of loops and noise. Sure there's plenty of references to MB's mechanical lurchings from back in the day, but that extended track with pronounced rhythms has more of a Konstruktivists feel topped with atonal horns and plenty of scabrous blurts of noise. Warbling loops and heart-beat pulses lead into smashed amplifier destruction on the second side of the tape, with plenty of horror-score sound design vibes tossed in for good measure. Really great stuff, we have to say. And as is the case with all of the Black Horizons tapes these days, very nice packaging with gold offset printing on metallic blue paper. Careful though of the drug-sized baggie tucked away inside the J-card. Supposedly, the rusted metal has been dosed with tetanus. Don't tempt fate, please. As with all the Black Horizons tapes... LIMITED TO 100 COPIES.

WAX IDOLS Discipline & Desire (Slumberland) cd 12.98
The title Discipline & Desire refers to Wax Idols' Hether Fortune's day-job (or rather night-job) as a dominatrix, before her tenure in the San Francisco garage-punk scene. In other words, fuck with her at your peril. Fortune's also to be found in the beloved distorto-punk-pop trio Blasted Canyons, whose two albums on Castle Face have long been favorites around these parts. With the first Wax Idols record on Hozac, Fortune didn't wander too far from what she was doing in Blasted Canyons with the short barked punk numbers; but on Discipline & Desire, she's painting her nails black and digging out the old Bauhaus t-shirts from back in the day, for a much darker, death-rock vibe. As such, she's continuing in a line of strong-willed, goth-inflected female fronted bands from San Francisco over the past couple of decades. Obviously, one can look all the way back to Romeo Void and The Avengers, but also more recently to Veronica Lipgloss, Subtonix, and The Vanishing. The songs are driven by Fortune's ice-queen demeanor through which she bellows impassioned tales of lust and fury on top of the buzzsaw drones and primitive rhythmic propulsion. Think X-Mal Deutschland, early Siouxsie, and Killing Joke's Night Time... and you're getting pretty close. Wax Idols also got some production assistance from Marc Burgess of The Chameleons, adding some true black-clad cred to the album. It's a record that's been on pretty heavy rotation here at aQuarius.
MPEG Stream: "Sound Of A Void"
MPEG Stream: "When It Happens"
MPEG Stream: "The Cartoonist"

WAX IDOLS Discipline & Desire (Slumberland) lp 14.98
The title Discipline & Desire refers to Wax Idols' Hether Fortune's day-job (or rather night-job) as a dominatrix, before her tenure in the San Francisco garage-punk scene. In other words, fuck with her at your peril. Fortune's also to be found in the beloved distorto-punk-pop trio Blasted Canyons, whose two albums on Castle Face have long been favorites around these parts. With the first Wax Idols record on Hozac, Fortune didn't wander too far from what she was doing in Blasted Canyons with the short barked punk numbers; but on Discipline & Desire, she's painting her nails black and digging out the old Bauhaus t-shirts from back in the day, for a much darker, death-rock vibe. As such, she's continuing in a line of strong-willed, goth-inflected female fronted bands from San Francisco over the past couple of decades. Obviously, one can look all the way back to Romeo Void and The Avengers, but also more recently to Veronica Lipgloss, Subtonix, and The Vanishing. The songs are driven by Fortune's ice-queen demeanor through which she bellows impassioned tales of lust and fury on top of the buzzsaw drones and primitive rhythmic propulsion. Think X-Mal Deutschland, early Siouxsie, and Killing Joke's Night Time... and you're getting pretty close. Wax Idols also got some production assistance from Marc Burgess of The Chameleons, adding some true black-clad cred to the album. It's a record that's been on pretty heavy rotation here at aQuarius.
MPEG Stream: "Sound Of A Void"
MPEG Stream: "When It Happens"
MPEG Stream: "The Cartoonist"

MAIN Ablation (Editions Mego) lp 22.00
It's been a very long time since Robert Hampson has released a Main album and an even longer time since he's produced a *great* Main album. Ablation changes that, although those who would be expecting the deconstructed hypno-rock of Motion Pool or Hydra-Calm will be disappointed; but those who had followed Hampson's trajectory starting with the last few Main records about a decade ago into spatialized electro-acoustics only to rediscover his infatuation with the drone which finally brought him back to the guitar as a principle instrument will certainly understand where this record is coming from. Hampson is still working at the storied GRM studios in Paris, and there is an infusion of the classic aesthetic of what came out of GRM within Ablation (notably Parmegiani and Ferrari), but at the same time he does link it back, if in a subtle way, to the mesmerism which girded the Main productions in the '90s. That said, any connections to his former group, Loop would be quite a stretch indeed.
On Ablation, Hampson has recruited Stefan Mathieu - a brilliant drone technician in his own right whom we've not heard from in ages - and the pairing works seamlessly, even as it clearly slants towards Hampson's vision of a cold disconnection dispensed in overlapping hissing layers and hypnotic patterns of abstracted sound. The percussive klank of a prepared piano on "I" is a bit of a red herring for what's found throughout Ablation especially on "II" and "III", is a series of slow ellipses of churning guitar drones and golden tonal coronas drifting with all of the uneasy beauty of an android's dream. The closing track "IV" bends along a radiophonic arc with ether crackle and metallic rasping and slow motion pixelations from a sharply rendered synth that forms the coda to the album. Organic. Liquid. Electric. Motorized. Bleak. Holy. All of those adjectives apply to this fantastic album. Welcome back, Main!
MPEG Stream: "II"

PALE REVERSE Words of Ash, Walls of Smoke, Minds of Glass (Petit Mal Music) 3" cd-r 5.98
Words of Ash, Walls of Smoke, Minds of Glass is the debut solo release by the Bay Area avant-rock denizen Gregory Hagan, whose languid violin and tempestuous guitar work was prominently featured in one of our favorite local outfits Common Eider King Eider. He's also active in the Thomas Carnacki performances / recordings as well as in the post-MX-80 project Grale. But as Pale Reverse, he sets down the strings in favor of analogue electronics and a four-track to build this elegantly creepy piece of nocturnal dronemuzik. A ghostly rumble introduces the 20 minute piece which slowly morphs into radiant, shivering oscillations of guilding tones suspended with hiss, mist, and fog. Subtle melodies flicker with beautifully singing overtones echoing throughout the electronics, eventually amassing into a holy crescendo of interlaced dronescapes snapping back to the industrial pall which opened the proceedings. At loud volumes, the tape detritus from multiple overdubs and erasures become all the more obvious and lend more than a few complimentary comparisons to William Basinski. But fans of the BJ Nilsen / Stilluppsteypa collaborations, the latter day works from The Hafler Trio, and even the Caretaker would be well served to check this out. Limited to 73 copies!
MPEG Stream: "Words of Ash, Walls of Smoke, Minds of Glass"

CHILD, ANTHONY The Space Between People And Things (NNA Tapes) lp 19.98
Certainly one of the best thing we've heard to date from the hip electronica label NNA Tapes, and it comes from Anthony Child, better known under his techno moniker Surgeon, as well as for his brutalist British Murder Boys collaboration with Karl O'Connor. Sadly, we've not carried much in the way of the Surgeon catalog, but his variation on techno structuralism is informed by an industrial tension that balances force, control, and rhythm without much melody to get in the way of his graceful yet claustrophobic trax, many of which are on par with the likes of Plastikman and Wolfgang Voigt's first album as Gas. On very rare occasions, Child records under his own name, under the auspices of eschewing the techno underpinnings in favor of tonal abstractions. That's what we've got here on The Space Between People And Things, which opens with a Spartan, if highly squelchy step sequence that rotates between white hot slabs of accelerated white noise. He follows this with an elegant oceanic piece that alternates between several shortwave radioteletype frequencies, which produce the skittering electronic patterns in the delivery of encoded data from radio-linked terminals. It's an outmoded means of communication for sure, but one that you still hear on shortwave today mostly from the US Coast Guard and some governmental organizations. It's still a very eerie sound, with plenty of paranoid X-files overtones, all of which Child happily mines on this album. The second side of the album could actually be something that he might have produced for Surgeon, but with the heavy beats entirely removed. Here's an arpeggiated ambient swath of analog electronics that have all of the deep-space cosmology you'd get from Tangerine Dream's Alpha Centauri or those Eno & Cluster records. There is a bit more of a cybernetic sheen to Child's production than the prog-synth smoothness of his predecessors; and he pushes this toward the end of side two with some sharply rendered swells of sinewave oscillations which follow a similar oceanic patterning from the shortwave work on side one. This would be one for fans of Daphne Oram, Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy For Lilith, and BJ Nilsen. Recommended for sure!
MPEG Stream: "Side A (extract)"
MPEG Stream: "Side B (extract)"

NURSE WITH WOUND / ORGANUM A Missing Sense / Rasa (United Dairies / RRRecords) cassette 6.98
Originally released as a split LP, then later reissued on separate anthologies of each project, this is the cassette version of the classic Nurse With Wound / Organum split from 1986.
The Nurse With Wound side is "A Missing Sense" which is a brilliant homage to the ultra-quiet /proto-lowercase composition "Automating Writing" by Robert Ashley, which is a very subtle composition of cut-up vocals and gasps with distant rumblings all of which flutter just at the event horizon at the edge of perceptibility. Stapleton's construction was originally designed as a private tape to which he could drop acid to, as everything in his huge record collection was far too shattering for his lysergic states. "A Missing Sense" like Automatic Writing is very quiet, with small vocalizations and sexualized gasps punctuating the muffled incidental sounds of what could very well be somebody vacuuming their carpet upstairs. Very subtle for sure, but there's plenty of room to take in the absolute strangeness of Stapleton's visionary work.
Here's what we had to say about Organum's "Rasa" which was featured on the now out of print Volume One collection released through Robot Records: The timeless, acoustic drones that make up the music of Organum could have been made for the beginning of the world or for its final breath; yet Jackman has always avoided assigning any specific metaphors to his work. Instead, this is music that attempts to exist purely within its own context, unconcerned with anything beyond its self-defined borders. Grinding motorcycle engines, steel strung instruments, bowed metal, and Japanese flutes are the instruments that continuously reappear throughout Organum. However grim, Industrial, grating, dissonant, or punishing Organum could be with such instrumentations, Jackman always manages to arrange his work to emphasize the dynamic and often beautiful tonalities of those sounds.
MPEG Stream: "A Missing Sense"
MPEG Stream: "Rasa"

NURSE WITH WOUND Automating Vol. 1 (United Dairies / RRRecords) cassette 6.98
Now, a limited time, we have this classic NWW recording on cassette!
Automating Volume 1 is a collection of recordings that Steven Stapleton made for compilations between 1981 and 1986. The album starts out on a really wacky note with "Duelling Banjos" (from the United Dairies compilation "Hoisting The Black Flag" released in 1981.) An uptight drum machine relentlessly chuggs alongside whimsical farts and blurts of archetypal NWW sounds (as heard on "Alas The Madonna Does Not Function" and "A Missing Sense"). The second track, "Stick That Chick & Feel My Steel Through Your Last Meal" (from the 1986 Laylah compilation "The Fight Is On"), is a Fluxus-esque composition of creaky noise making, with spurts of groans, more fart sounds, party favors, zithers and percussion objects (a lot of the material found on "Homotopy To Marie" can be found here). The third track, "Nana Or A Thing of Uncommon Nonsense", is another silly track (featured on the 1983 X-tract compilation Elephant Table Album), starting out with a tasteless racial joke and then sputtering through a random collage of bongos and football chants (plus, a lot of the polka loops on the Sylvie & Babs lp are used on this.) The album then turns to Stapleton's dark side with his very creepy submission to the Come Organisation album Fur Ilse Koch (1982) on which a little German girl pleads for her father accompanied by an ever intensifying psychoacoustically irritating high frequency drone. What may in fact be more disturbing than this track is to hear my co-worker Byram muttering the little girl's words as syntatical anomalies in his already idiosyncratic vocabulary.
The remainder of Automating Vol. 1 revolves around Stapleton's fascination with Robert Ashley's compositions in one form or another. "I Was No Longer His Dominant", taken from the 1982 United Dairies release An Afflicted Man's Musica Box is a creepy homage to Ashley's "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon". The aforementioned Ashley piece is an unsettling meditation on muffled conversations and muted electronics which mysteriously express a psychosexual overtone. Stapleton's homages to Ashley are a fortunately less academic sounding and pack more of a punch.
Certainly, this work stands with Homotopy For Marie and 150 Murderous Passions as the records to document Stapleton's formative years.
MPEG Stream: "I Was No Longer His Dominant"
MPEG Stream: "Fashioned To A Device Behind A Tree"

NURSE WITH WOUND Homotopy To Marie (United Dairies / RRRecords) cassette 6.98
Now, a limited time, we have this classic NWW recording on cassette!
Of all of the Nurse With Wound records (and we like a bunch of them!), this is quite possibly our favorite. Perhaps because it makes the least 'sense,' with a textbook definition of how Surrealism can be accurately applied in an aural context. Within Homotopy To Marie, Steven Stapleton (the proprietor of Nurse With Wound) addresses most of Andre Breton's qualifications of Surrealism as "pure psychic automatism, by which an attempt is made to express, either verbally, in writing or in any other manner, the true functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of all control by the reason, excluding any aesthetic or moral preoccupation." In many respects, John Cage took Breton's theories to one possible logical end; but Stapleton wanted to bridge contemporary musical production techniques (musique concrete informed by Industrial culture) with the original Surrealist fascination with Victorian imagery applied to Freudian definitions of fetishism, thus offering a version of Surrealism that fits better with how Breton may have thought Surrealism would sound. References to culture and the world as we know it abound in this record, but in such a convoluted way as to appear perfectly normal next to something that would normally be aurally incongruous. The title itself certainly refers to this. Often utilized within the highly specialized vocabularies of genetics and chemical engineering (you think that *we* get verbose!), a homotopy (as best as we could determine) is the relationship between a specific object and the fundamental characteristics that define the family in which that object belongs. Who Marie could be is perhaps best left between Stapleton and Marie.
Homotopy To Marie is Stapleton's finest audio collage, culled from various studio sessions, found sounds, and unknown media samples. Proceeding along at a stately pace, this album is certainly not a quiet affair, yet each sound within the album is given plenty to hold its unique place with the collage at large. It opens with "I Cannot Feel You as the Dogs are Laughing and I am Blind" -- a close investigation of shards of glass with a gated volume filter on it to accentuate the brittleness and fragmentation of the sound, followed by a period of snoring (presumably from Stapleton) which shifts to various screams, maniacal laughs, and hysterical utterances as if from an asylum. The title track is an amazing collage of a multiple gongs with the tonal rings augmented by occasional backwards masking and manipulated attack. The rest of the album is a clutter of nondescript distortion, feedback from guitar buzz, microphones overloaded by megaphones screaming into them, broken by backwards dialogues in Spanish, rag time pianos, and clattering horns finally explode into a whimsical polka but have a weird aura surrounding them like when Hermann Nitsch uses polkas as punctuations to his orchestral drones.
Homotopy To Marie is a confounding album that matches its psychological instability with its dexterity in its composition, that leaves you not with a recognition of sound within an organized context, but the feeling of unidentifiable unease. An absolute masterpiece.
MPEG Stream: "I Cannot Feel You As The Dogs..."
MPEG Stream: "Homotopy To Marie"

DUNCAN, JOHN John See Soundtracks (RRRecords) cd 9.99
BACK IN STOCK, AT A LOWER PRICE!!! In the early '80s, John Duncan moved from Los Angeles to Tokyo where he began a number of very interesting works with grandiose agendas of destabilization and transgression. One facet of his Toyko period was his pirate radio station using the frequency of NHK 1 after that station signed off at night. But perhaps the most infamous work was the pornography that Duncan produced under the pseudonym John See. Part of the intention of the John See series was for this work to be used by the viewer as source material for any video collage work; of course, Duncan was also going for sexual titillation as well. During that time Duncan shot five films for the adult film company Kuki - Doll, Fallen Angel, Inka, Aidayuki Passion, and Power Love. There are some distinctly unconventional aspects to these films, as Duncan often layered multiple images and early video effects during the build up to the money shot. But most of the sex and the "scripting" around those sex scenes tended to be pretty standard fare. What's most bizarre about Duncan's porn is the soundtrack that he uses. Instead of the funk grooves and wah-wah guitar workouts, he recontextualizes the ecstatic gasps and moans from his own footage alongside sterile drones culled from shortwave. If anything his use of sound is the most provocative element to the John See films.
In 1994, Duncan returned to the John See series, remastering several of the scores as well as remixing others in new compositions (which fit into his original idea that this work should be recycled for the viewer's use). The John See Soundtracks is a quintessential document of Duncan's early styles which ruptured violently with shortwave static and sexual outbursts in direct contrast to the cauldron of somatic fluctuations and electrical drones.
MPEG Stream: "Breathchoir Mix"
MPEG Stream: "Power Love"
MPEG Stream: "Move Forward"

NURSE WITH WOUND & WHITEHOUSE 150 Murderous Passions (United Dairies / RRRecords) cassette 6.98
Now, a limited time, we have this classic recording on cassette! It is a little unfortunate that we've never reviewed this album, although it has graced the aQuarius shelves from time to time. 150 Murderous Passions sometimes designates the name of the 'band' and sometimes, it's the name of the album penned by Steven Stapleton (aka Nurse With Wound) and William Bennett (aka Whitehouse) in 1981. Regardless of how anybody wants to qualify the album, there are two distinct variations on these recordings, with both producers offering up their own take on the original source material. Bennett scoffed that the version Stapleton produced lacks the in-the-red intensity he envisioned for the album; and to be blunt, Bennett is totally fucking wrong. Stapleton (who published his through his own United Dairies, with Bennett's getting a Come Productions make-over) definitely offers the superior version, with Bennett -- despite all of his infamy in the late 70s and early '80s -- really not coming into his own until some five or six years afterwards. Yes, power electronics do require some finesse. But that's not to say this is a walk in the park for a Nurse With Wound album; there's plenty of atonal metal screeches, echolocation rhythmic patterns of klanging noise, stabs of feedback, and unholy screams which get collaged into a very claustrophobic, demented composition. Anyway, all of the other versions of these recordings are totally out of print, with their future reissue probability being a big question mark. So, if you don't have this awesome album already, get the tape. Now.
MPEG Stream: "150 Murderous Passions"

SUN CITY GIRLS Eye Mohini: Sun City Girls Singles Vol. 3 (Abduction) cd 16.98
The second volume in the ongoing series of singles compilations from legendary outfit the Sun City Girls was one of the many duds that frustrate so much of the die-hard SCG fanbase. It was especially frustrating given that the first volume - You're Never Alone With A Cigarette (which as of spring 2013 is sadly out of print) - was so fucking good, mostly due to the fact that much of that material was made up of tracks that were left off the group's masterpiece, Torch Of The Mystics. At one time, TOTM was slated to be a double lp set with the Girls working towards fleshing out the whole album with a bunch of similar sounding tracks. So when the album dropped just as a single slab of wax, all of the remnants ended up finding their way onto various singles back in the early '90s. As Volume One did feature many of those leftovers, Volume Three thankfully completes the task, with two of those discarded Torch tracks culled from the Three Fake Female Orgasms 7" (released on Majora in 1991) as well as all of the cuts from the Eye Mohini and Borungku Si Derita singles (both released through Majora in 1992 and 1993 respectively, the latter featuring a different version of "Esoterica Of Abyssynia" from Torch Of The Mystics, just to make things all the more confusing). There's also a different version of "Kickin The Dragon" from the other SCG masterpiece 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda, as well as a live version of another Torch classic, "The Flower".
The title track here in particular is a classic Sun City Girls jam, with Richard Bishop's desert-blues inspired fingerpicking seamlessly shifting from Arabic flourishes to Southeast Asian folk-pop and the more commonplace No Depression styled Americana, all with brother Alan plaintively sounding out syllabically a maudlin melody that may or may not be complete nonsense or some polyglot of languages dialed in by the Girls' esoteric antenna to all sorts of wild and wonderful songs from around the world. "Gum Arabic" is a terse re-interpretation of heavy Turkish psychedelia which would certainly foreshadow Sublime Frequencies eventual reissue collection of Erkin Koray's works. "Abydos Carousel Tapsel" has a bad-ass south-of-the-border vibe which shifts into an unhinged jubliant psych-folk in "Borungku Si Derita" which strangely sounds a lot like Comus! With so much of the Sun City Girls catalogue terminally out of print, getting a hold of anything from the band is a cause for celebration; but getting an album as great as this, even a collection, maybe especially a collection, is all the more reason to rejoice. And for those uninitiated into the demented psych-punk weirdness of SCG, this is a really great place to start.
MPEG Stream: "Eye Mohini"
MPEG Stream: "It's Ours"
MPEG Stream: "Kal el lazi kad ham"

ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE The Vastness Is Bearable Only Through Love (Shelter Press) lp 19.98
If there was any artist who deserved to be covered on aQ List #420, it would have to be Brian Pyle. Even though we've heard rumors that the man from Humboldt county gave up smoking pot - even if it just for a short amount of time - the residual THC levels in his bloodstream and around the synapses of his brain are so strong that when 4:20 rolls around, the rhythms and the rituals of the long-term stoner seem to have permanently ingrained a daily jolt of chemically induced mind-expansion. Mr. Pyle is of course one of the drivers behind such aQ favorite projects as the Starving Weirdos and RV Paintings, with his solo work designated as Ensemble Economique, although all three projects do share a ramshackle, atonal aspect that tosses absolutely everything into the mix of horror score sound design, avant-drone hypnosis, no-fi pop madness, and woozily looped psychedelic constructions all stained with a stoner touch.
The title is an allusion to Carl Sagan, with Pyle showing much more restraint in his schizoid ambience than we've ever heard from him. A tense two note piano loop cycles through the side long title track, with icy shivers of time-stretched electronics casting wave after wave of late-night Videodrome vibes. Hissing repetitions gird "All That Remains Is The Night Sky" with analog synths dialed into zoned-out cosmic buzzings with shimmering melodies flickered in the distant and atonal harmonics that could almost be Tibetan horns if they weren't so electronic. Wind-swept field recordings scrape across a golden radiant drone broadcast through Pyle's synths on the minimalist long-form closer "Something New Is Happening" whose uncanny tones suspend time amidst its whisps, swirls, and flurries. More brilliant stuff from Brian Pyle, to whom we say "you're welcome" for getting him on to list 420. We just had to do it.
400 copies, on blue vinyl.
MPEG Stream: "The Vastness Is Bearable Only Through Love"

XENAKIS, IANNIS GRM Works 1957-1962 (Editions Mego) lp 24.00
Iannis Xenakis took up residence in the GRM studios in 1957 during the time when it was run by Pierre Schaefer. Over the next five years, Xenakis composed a handful of works, most of which have made their way onto this Editions Mego produced anthology, including "Concrete PH" (1958), "Orient-Occident" (1960), "Diamorphosis" (1957-1958), and "Bohor" (1962). Commissioned as the sound design for the 1958 Phillips Pavilion constructed by the acclaimed architect Le Corbussier, "Concrete PH" was sourced entirely from the sound of burning charcoal, with the crackling sounds being sped up and overdubbed via tape to enhance its brittle tactility in a dense cloud of tumbling sound. This simple piece of audio construction doesn't even reach 3 minutes in length, but is one of those early pieces of electronic music that has inspired countless adventurous musicians over the intervening six decades. Take your pick: Faust, Einsturzende Neubauten, Small Cruel Party, Scott Walker, etc. "Orient-Occident" is a recomposed extract from the soundtrack that Xenakis provided to UNESCO commissioned film by Enrico Fulchignoni. Here, Xenakis builds his piece through the sounds of bowed gongs, with aggregated crescendos of dense metallic reverberation which he intuitively balances with ambient rumblings and radiophonic sine-wave flutterings. Again, this is a very instructive piece of electronic music, not only an obvious precursor to Nurse With Wound's Homotopy To Marie but also to Stockhausen's Mikrophonie which was begun a few years later in 1964. "Diamorphosis" is probably the closest that Xenakis ever came to producing a true musique concrete piece with its jagged start-stop assemblage and almost formalist, spider-web like passages whose loose interpretation of serialism serves him very well. "Bohor" was the last piece that Xenakis composed at GRM, and he dedicated the piece to Pierre Schaefer, who did not appreciate the piece whatsoever. Do keep in mind that Schaefer also didn't care of Eliane Radigue's work with feedback and minimalism, so the attack-softened clamorings from various tuned pieces of metal into a static amalgam is actually not that far from the maximalist / minimalist approach of Organum and the denser moments of early Andrew Chalk. Again some three decades before either were beginning their careers! Much of this work has been long out of print, even on CD, so kudos to Editions Mego for reintroducing these seminal recordings.
MPEG Stream: "Concrete PH"
MPEG Stream: "Orient-Occident"
MPEG Stream: "Bohor"

JE SUIS LE PETIT CHEVALIER Dark Morse (Shelter Press) cassette 10.98
Dark Morse is a super limited cassette from the brilliant Belgian drone-songstress Felicia Atkinson aka Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, a moniker snatched from Nico's Desertshore album. Her synth, reverb, and vocal concoctions earn her favorable comparisons to Motion Sickness Of Time Travel and Grouper; but she's continuing to delve into deeper waters away from any psychedelic inclinations and toward a darkly psychological sentiment. Dark Morse is based on the Don Delillo collection of short stories The Angel Esmeralda, whose thematic arcs and intertwining narratives bristle with rape, murder, and surreal miracles popping up on highway billboards. Atkinson's condensation of Delillo's work adheres to a suitably sinister atmosphere. Shadowy, occluded sounds of ghost-clattering rhythms, narcoleptic vocals, and ill-tempered drone-melodies sprawl across the 38 minutes as shape-shifting amalgams that come in and out of existence through an ectoplasmic ambience. The witchiness of it all makes us think that this wouldn't be too far out of place alongside the Demdike Stare associates / affiliates of Anworth Kirk, Slant Azymuth, Suum Cuique, and David Orphan. While 200 copies may seem like a beefy production run for a cassette, this is too good to be sitting around for long.
MPEG Stream: "Extract 1"
MPEG Stream: "Extract 2"

BISCHOFF, JOHN Aperture (23five Incorporated) cd 14.98
BACK IN STOCK!
Currently a faculty member in the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, John Bischoff has been composing music with computers and electronics since the mid 70s, and has always focused his compositions towards malleable forms that best suit live performances. Within this context, Bischoff seeks to position the construction of sound far beyond the common perception of synthetic music as a mere simulation of the intrinsic sounds of traditional instruments. Instead, Bischoff qualifies his work as the realization of a "reflective intention," where he determines sonic structure not only through the predetermined elements which go into a piece, but also through the active process of listening to the music as it happens and responding accordingly. During the '70s when programming involved crude systems of binary code, Bischoff's vision of the possibilities for computer-based composition fused to performative agency seemed implausible; yet in hindsight, his artistic imperatives were incredibly prescient of contemporary tools such as the nearly omnipotent audio synthesis language Max/MSP, which has been at the core of Bischoff's recent work. An aptly named set of compositions, Aperture opens the possibility for multiple readings through a series of diverse techniques ranging from additive synthesis to FM synthesis to sampled-based processes. Each of the pieces on the album was recorded in real-time with no overdubs. Aperture introduces itself with clusters of samples that sprawl with the deliberate pacing of Morton Feldman's later period, yet Bischoff renders what might be recognizable citations of a piano or percussion as pointillist condensations of digitized pixels and precise plastic details. Over the course of the following pieces, Bischoff unleashes coarse streams of electrons which flange and pulse within the caustic firestorm of divergent timestretching, giving the impression that Bischoff is quite literally tearing the fabric of sound. Bischoff also offers a collaboration with Kenneth Atchley and complements the oversaturated physical noise of Atchley's water fountain sculptures with short digital articulations that ride on the top of Atchley's dense textures.
This is Bischoff's first recording in quite sometime, and has been well worth the wait!
MPEG Stream: "Piano 7hz"
MPEG Stream: "Immaterial States"
MPEG Stream: "Sealed Cantus"

FERIAL CONFINE (ANDREW CHALK) The Full Use Of Nothing (Siren Records) cd 21.00
This marks the second reissue of these recordings from Andrew Chalk's early noise-junk project Ferial Confine. The Full Use Of Nothing was originally a cassette self-released back in 1985 and was most likely one of the recordings that piqued the interest of Broken Flag to eventually release some of Chalk's more gnarled constructions. While the Ferial Confine records are definitely noise albums, there is a thread which ties these into the drone-centric work for which he's best known, in the gradual evolution of the compositions that shift from one set of demolished sounds into another. The process seems to find Chalk beginning with metal-bashed percussion recorded at very slow speeds on a 4-track then bounced to a different track at very high speeds with swarming synth / reverb saturated dronescraping draped beneath the volatile squeaking and dissonant klanking aktionism. One can hear some of the early Merzbow and / or Yeast Culture noise-junk recordings and most certainly the frenzied clamour of The New Blockaders (who had in fact worked with Chalk around this same time period), but it's that phasing, slippery drone miasma suspended as a backdrop to all of the tactile noise that gives this a very Andrew Chalk feel. Even working with noise, Andrew Chalk proved himself much better than many of his contemporaries! The cd reissue of The Full Use Of Nothing is the first in a triology of Ferial Confine recordings which will include the Broken Flag cassette Meiosis (1985) and a second pressing of the First, Second, And Third Drop (1986, unreleased until a cd version came out in 2008).
MPEG Stream: "Introduction"
MPEG Stream: "Part Three"
MPEG Stream: "Part Four"

DURUTTI COLUMN LC (1972) cd 14.98
Now reissued on cd!!
There are those certain records for all of us that just change things when they enter your world. For a few of us here, this 1981 album by Durutti Column is one of those records. An album that showed that music could be sparse and majestic at the same time. D.I.Y., yet and grandiose in how it evokes emotion, memory, longing and desire. The work of Vini Reilly, Durutti Column emerged out of Factory Records yet their sound was something completely of its own world. Merging impeccable guitar playing with subtle drum machines, soft vocals and a golden warmth that makes this one of those albums that makes you melt every time you put it on.
Pastoral and blissful, LC is filled with both perfect restraint and full on flowing beauty. You can hear how traces of the more blissed out side of Krautrock influenced him, merging that with the stripped down emotional quality of British folk and placing it into a very modern moment. While not an obscure band by any measure, we are still blown away though by how many people who would love Durutti Column have never heard them. And with the reissue of their first two lp's we hope that so many of those folks finally do. We could go on and on listing folks whose music we love and who have undoubtedly been influenced by Durutti Column, and this record in particular: Felt, Fuqugi, Danny Paul Grody, Colleen, James Blackshaw, Ducktails, Fennesz, Manuel, A.R. Kane, My Bloody Valentine, and on and on. One of our favorite records of all time, so if you didn't have this before, now's the time!
MPEG Stream: "Messidor"
MPEG Stream: "Never Known"
MPEG Stream: "The Missing Boy"

JESUS & MARY CHAIN Barbed Wire Kisses (1972) lp 15.98
Even though it's the outtake and b-sides album (which often mostly exists as an excuse for an artist to get out of a contract by tossing together some unrelated castoffs), Barbed Wire Kisses showcases the most volatile and most dynamic facets of the Jesus & Mary Chain, when they would unleash all of their hurricane fury of distortion and amplifier destruction on one b-side, and for another, they'd cut a beautiful acoustic rendering of one of their tunes from Psychocandy, still clad in jet-black reverb. Sure Psychocandy is a non-stop thrill ride; but the introspective moments of Barbed Wire Kisses make the screamed noise loosely adhering to a dum-dum '60s punk anthem all the more visceral. The surf references which greased Psychocandy are even more pronounced in these tracks, from the lead track "Kill Surf City" to the cover of the Beach Boys' mega-hit "Surfin' USA", completely laden with gloom and grit, compounded by the fact that the Brothers Reid probably never saw any sunlight. The more sedate tracks are found in "Don't Ever Change", which sounds so much like an outtake from Darklands, because it WAS an outtake from Darklands; and then there's the acoustic version of "Taste Of Cindy" which we alluded to earlier and may be the highlight of the album with a prettiness rarely associated with JAMC and sounding sorta similar to those Dave Pajo covers of the Misfits. It should be noted that this reissue reproduces the tracklisting from the original vinyl pressing, and does not include the 4 bonus tracks found on the cd version. If you never picked this up back in the day, now's your chance to grab a CLASSIC.
MPEG Stream: "Upside Down"
MPEG Stream: "Sidewalking"
MPEG Stream: "Taste Of Cindy (Acoustic)"

VERONICA FALLS Waiting For Something To Happen (Slumberland) lp 14.98
Now here on vinyl...
Oh, how we waited for this album! The British quartet's eponymous album from 2011 had become a staple here at aQuarius, hitting all the right sweet spots of jangly, retro indie rock with super catchy girl/boy harmonies that fit perfectly next to old favorites like Unrest, Heavenly, Beat Happening, and whatever your particular favorite C86 band might have been. There was probably a stretch of time when it would be an anomaly if that album *wasn't* being played in the middle of a Saturday afternoon at aQ.
So, Waiting For Something To Happen is an album that undoubtedly has really big shoes to fill; and admittedly, the first couple of listens found us wondering what happened to the tension between the sourpuss punk and the giggly twee, which left us with such a warm and fuzzy feeling on that the first album. Instead, the band has settled into a melancholy jangle that pushes towards those brilliant arrangements John Squire penned on the first Stone Roses record (sans the Madchester grooviness, Veronica Falls still champion the VU minimal-motorik-mono beat) or maybe those tunes Vini Reily wrote for Morrissey's first solo record, proving to be a deft replacement for Johnny Marr. Veronica Falls may have pulled the tempo down a bit, but they are filling in the gaps with a few more baroque flourishes (like something close to a guitar solo, which was entirely absent on the first album); but seriously, do yourself a favor if you loved the first record, pick this up and give it a few spins to let the songs sink into your skull. You'll be rewarded mightily!
MPEG Stream: "Broken Toy"
MPEG Stream: "Waiting For Something To Happen"
MPEG Stream: "My Heart Beats"

SHOEMAKER, MATT Erosion Of The Analogous Eye (The Helen Scarsdale Agency) cd 14.98
BACK IN STOCK!
A very prescient, and very good, record by the sound-artist / field recordist Matt Shoemaker, Erosion Of The Analogous Eye pushes his work of tonal exploration and exaggerated found sounds into the neighborhood of many of the post-noise cosmic explorers who have been blossoming in every corner of the US it seems. At the same time, this is very much a Matt Shoemaker record, following a trajectory set forth through his acclaimed work on the once-mighty Trente Oiseaux label.
An ur-drone of analog synthesis opens the album, obviously harkening to '70s kosmische activities certainly a muscular revisitation of Schulze or even an extraction from Richard Pinhas. Such a lazerbeam of a drone has a lysergic sunrise feel to it, with the light and shadow brought into sharp relief, the colors shifted and separating into spectral bursts of yellow, red, pink, and orange. Yet, slowly, Shoemaker introduces atonal drones which clash with that introductory suspension. At first, the metallic slashes have almost an Andrew Chalk and Jonathan Coleclough feel, but Shoemaker quickly dispels those notions with a layer of field recordings of insects ravenously scurrying about. That introductory tone, which still continues through this first track, bends like a divebombing plane with Doppler tones trailing behind, descending in a series of bell tones. All of this in a seamless 17 minutes. A steady rhythm of gamelan bell tones opens the second track with accumulated complimentary drones shimmering and vibrating while harmonic dissonance abounds, collapsing into a quiet stream of percolating textures. Spread across 24 minutes, this track seems ancient and sounds beguilingly beautiful. Bellowing rumbles amplify out of recordings of rain, mud, and water and steadily arching through a metallic rattling of various pipes and gongs for the final track, which eventually gives way to an uneasy set of recordings of birds in a rainforest whose calls echo through the trees.
As with all Helen Scarsdale releases the packaging is stellar. Letterpressed text with hand-dyed paper. Each are different, each are quite special. Oh yeah, limited to a mere 300 copies!
MPEG Stream: "Erosion A"
MPEG Stream: "Erosion B"
MPEG Stream: "The Analogous Eye"

TURMAN, ROBERT Beyond Painting (Fabrica) 2lp 35.00
Beyond Painting displays another facet of the enigmatic Robert Turman. Way back in the late '70s, he founded the seminal noise project NON with Boyd Rice, who soon adopted the name for his own work, with Turman seemingly disappearing from the public realm for well over three decades. There were just a smattering of self-released cassettes which emerged in the '80s, but it wasn't until John Elliott unearthed the beautifully hypnotic patter of Turman's 1981 cassette Flux on Spectrum Spools, that people began to really pay attention to Turman's work. Then the slew of Turman 'reissues' began to emerge, although it's really hard to call them reissues as the original editions were utterly minuscule. Beyond Painting dates back to 1990, but wasn't released for another 20 years as a self-released cd-r in an edition of just 100 copies; and thankfully gets a proper 2lp reissue via Fabrica. While Turman is often associated with noise culture, all of the work we've been able to hear (outside the early Non recordings) has steered clear of an aggressive tone with Flux adopting an introspective minimalism and with Beyond Painting taking a somber approach to ambient music with a distinctly postindustrial touch (e.g. Zoviet France, Cranioclast, etc.).
Spectral hues and back-masked synth notes interlock for the introductory "Soft Self Portrait" which ends up being austere, bleak, and self-negating if in fact it is a self portrait. A slow-motion, post-punk dubby bass line girds the stalker atmosphere of "Al Qa'ida" with its buzzing, harmonic synth lines. The name of this track in 1990 wouldn't have had the cultural weight that it does now, but there is a desperation and abjection to the desolate melodies that pushes through the lens of 9/11 right on through today. Another masterfully done piece is found in "Relux" whose eerily sci-fi / narcoleptic melodies predating what Aphex did on Selected Ambient Works II, but way creepier, or even what Burzum did on the ambient half of Filosofem. Yeah, it's that good! The second LP holds more of a Zeit era Tangerine Dream vibe with deep cosmic swells and hypnotic patterning through resonant tones and melancholy coloring. Who knows what other hidden recordings may emerge from the vaults of Robert Turman? Please keep 'em coming!
MPEG Stream: "Al Qa'ida"
MPEG Stream: "Reflux"
MPEG Stream: "Subterra"

VERONICA FALLS Waiting For Something To Happen (Slumberland) cd 12.98
Oh, how we waited for this album! The British quartet's eponymous album from 2011 had become a staple here at aQuarius, hitting all the right sweet spots of jangly, retro indie rock with super catchy girl/boy harmonies that fit perfectly next to old favorites like Unrest, Heavenly, Beat Happening, and whatever your particular favorite C86 band might have been. There was probably a stretch of time when it would be an anomaly if that album *wasn't* being played in the middle of a Saturday afternoon at aQ.
So, Waiting For Something To Happen is an album that undoubtedly has really big shoes to fill; and admittedly, the first couple of listens found us wondering what happened to the tension between the sourpuss punk and the giggly twee, which left us with such a warm and fuzzy feeling on that the first album. Instead, the band has settled into a melancholy jangle that pushes towards those brilliant arrangements John Squire penned on the first Stone Roses record (sans the Madchester grooviness, Veronica Falls still champion the VU minimal-motorik-mono beat) or maybe those tunes Vini Reily wrote for Morrissey's first solo record, proving to be a deft replacement for Johnny Marr. Veronica Falls may have pulled the tempo down a bit, but they are filling in the gaps with a few more baroque flourishes (like something close to a guitar solo, which was entirely absent on the first album); but seriously, do yourself a favor if you loved the first record, pick this up and give it a few spins to let the songs sink into your skull. You'll be rewarded mightily!
MPEG Stream: "Broken Toy"
MPEG Stream: "Waiting For Something To Happen"
MPEG Stream: "My Heart Beats"

GROUPER The Man Who Died In His Boat (Kranky) cd 14.98
Grouper's Liz Harris seems to be settling in comfortably on the Kranky label, with the release so far of the two AIA lps on cd for the first time, the debut from Mirrorring (Harris's duo project with Jesy Fortino from Tiny Vipers), and this "new" release, The Man Who Died In His Boat, which has come out in conjunction with a lp and cd reissue of her 2008 record Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, an AQ favorite. The release/re-release of both records together is no coincidence as the tracks on The Man Who Died In His Boat were recorded during the same sessions as Dragging A Dead Deer, and the new record has a long lost twin feel that we haven't heard on subsequent Grouper records since then. While she still employs the waves of foggy reverb and layered far away voices, there is a reappearance of fully formed songs and a sheen of less-filtered clarity. Both records are informed by key childhood memories, this one by a discovery with her father of beached sailboat, and their speculation about the man who disappeared sailing it. The ocean roar, swelling waves of reverbed sound, and the far away sadness of acoustic sea shanties pour throughout the release creating a moving hypnotic spell which invariably holds us helpless in its grasp. Beautiful!
Currently, we only have the cd version, but the vinyl versions of both this and the reissue of Dragging A Dead Deer are supposedly alredy being repressed.
MPEG Stream: "Vital"
MPEG Stream: "Difference (Voices)"
MPEG Stream: "The Man Who Died In His Boat"
MPEG Stream: "Living Room"

SCHNITZLER, CONRAD Ballet Statique (M=Minimal) cd 26.00
An album that launched thousands of better known records, Ballet Statique is Conrad Schniztler's masterpiece. Schnitzler, of course, was a maverick in the Krautrock community, having been an original member of both Tangerine Dream and Kluster, and later developing an expressive language of tape collage and electronic synthesis which expanded upon his early studies with Joseph Beuys. His most influential works, however, came out in the late '70s following an almost serialist body of work based on the poetics of various colors through electronic sound, eventually leading to Ballet Statique. It was originally released with the title 'Con' back in 1978 through the Barclay funded Egg Records, Ballet Statique is a skeletal distillation of progressive electronics into a bleak hypnosis of rotating melodies, atonal slashes of synthetic noise, and proto-techno rhythmic propulsion. While this album has been reissued a few times since it's original release, the current infatuation with late '70s electronics - especially through the psychedelic and minimal-wave sensibilities - make this reissue especially timely. "Electric Garden" is one of those elegantly simple pieces of electronica with an abstracted, almost random melody guiding Schnitzler's rigid step sequence cast in a cosmic shower of delay ripples with bent electro-shock noises sliding up and down against his motorik drum machine. From a track like this, one can see where Aphex Twin would have been able to make such a profound break from rave culture with these head-spinning sequences. "Metall 1" is all space-dust and comet debris hung weightlessly through Schnitzler's ominous undulations of bright synthetic shimmers and lurching rumbles of metallic low-end, clearly the inspiration for pretty much everything that John Elliott of Emeralds has ever touched. The deep-space sonor pulses of "Black Nails" reprise the tone-bent noises Schnitzler produced on "Electric Garden," looking forward to the robotic bleakness of Monoton, Dome, and Omit. It's pretty shocking how good this record is, and how timeless it sounds, even with the current strain of '70s revivalism.
This new cd reissue of Ballet Statique comes with a 30 minute bonus track edited from the Red Cassette, which is essentially an extended jam on the sound sources found on the album's cut "Zug," which is pretty awesome to hear in long-form context. So highly recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Electric Garden"
MPEG Stream: "Metall I"
MPEG Stream: "Red Cassette"

NURSE WITH WOUND Insect And Individual Silenced (Expanded Edition) (United Dairies) cd 14.98
BACK IN STOCK!!!
Steve Stapleton has always viewed Insect And Individual Silenced as a monumental failure. So much so, that he had resisted every attempt by friends, colleagues, and other labels to convince him to reissue this album. Yet, with this reissue, he's finally been convinced to the contrary. Insect And Individual Silenced emerged as the fourth Nurse With Wound album back in 1980, and found Steve Stapleton out on his own as the principal soundmaker for the ensemble. Yet he had convinced Jim Thirlwell (Foetus) and Trevor Reidy to join him in the studio, just to see what would happen. According to the liner-notes, the studio sessions found Thirlwell fucking around with his amplifier, cable buzz, and the jack-plugs; Reidy brought in a drum kit, which he skitters across on one of the three original cuts on the album; and Stapleton had his arsenal of junk, toys, and tapes. Through the aid of drugs and alcohol, Stapleton mixed and mastered the album; and quickly sent it off to get it pressed. When the albums arrived, he admits being horrified by the results, qualifying it as "a dismal failure, a dreadful pressing, and an appallingly carefree mix - in fact a seriously misguided project altogether." So he vowed to never reissue the album by burning the masters.
Yet some 25 years later, a confluence of events forced Steve to reconsider his position, and as Steve finally returned to the work, he now admits being "pleasantly surprised." That said, Insect was reissued through Raash Records in 2007, with that label dissolving amidst unseemly rumors; and now the album gets a proper reissue through Stapleton's United Dairies, complete with a lengthy bonus track that was commissioned for a unpublished 'suitcase edition' through Raash.
Insect is an album guided by the slice of a razor, as tape edits had to be done by hand. Stapleton's collage techniques have always been deft in their erratic disruptions and maniacal detours, and Insect is no exception. The first track "Alvin's Funeral" is a wonderful and wild ride through demented sounds all going in multiple directions at once, which make it easy to get lost in this maze of distortion, sound effects, and splattered guitar noise. There's an urban gamelan of springs and bowls with the varispeed being fucked with as the tape drags across the recording heads; there's the screeched sound of metal dragged against the floor, overblowing what the magnetic tape could handle (ah, what a lovely sound compared to the ugliness of digital peaking!); there's a sampled scream from Disney's Haunted Mansion lp; and then some surprisingly sublime moments where a collaged section of distant female vocals duet with a string of shells being shaken. But the jump cuts and quick edits of dynamic volumes between the quiet and loud that keep this moving at a frantic pace. The second piece seems to have much more of that aforementioned studio session present with skittering drums and searing white hot guitar noise grating against the ears. The third track is a precursor to the screeching metal collages of Organum, albeit far more feral and atonal. This brings us to the the bonus track "Tooth, Teeth, Milk, Teeth, Skin" which is very much a contemporary collage of eerie female vocals looped into a mesmerizing ambience blown apart by harsh, musique concrete jump-cuts.
It's obvious that what Steve Stapleton may view as his own personal failure is greater than most everything that's come afterward from any of the post-industrial soundscapers.
MPEG Stream: "Alvin's Funeral"
MPEG Stream: "Absent Old Queen Underfoot"
MPEG Stream: "Mutiles De Guerre"

UN FESTIN SAGITAL Bestias Solares (Black Horizons) cassette 8.98
Holy shit, this is so fucked up, but in all the right ways. And thus, becomes our first ever CASSETTE Record Of The Week! One of those records that had EVERYone here sorta freaking out. And on it's first spin in the store, had all the folks in the back rushing up front to see what the heck was playing!
Un Festin Sagital are an occult prog-metal / angular post-punk / psychedelic free noise / black ambient orchestra out of Santiago, Chile that can strip down to the touring essentials of just flute, acoustic guitar, and voice, when need be, in bellowing their complex tales of a forthcoming lysergic apocalypse. But here, it's the full sonic onslaught of Satanic chanting, frenzied tribal rhythms, heavy anthemic riffs, acid-crazed arrangements, and witch/warlock vocals that sound as if they were recorded at the wrong speed, all dotted with some rather pretty moments of psychedelic impressionism. Diabolically strummed flamenco guitar riffs erupt into blisteringly rhythmic assaults of start/stop rhythms that are equal parts King Crimson, Comus, and Uz Jsme Doma. Or imagine Dutch punks the Ex crossed with aQ Record Of The Weekers Yamantaka // Sonic Titan!! A sound that somehow simultaneously reminds us of bedeviled Eastern European peasant folk songs that could very well be possessed gypsy curses from some remote old world village in a muddled sonic palette that also evokes the Art Bears mixed with ritualistic Hindustani vocal modulations, or the Vietnamese girls on Holgar Czukay's "Boat Woman Song". The sound washed out under layers of tape decay and warble, the music seemingly patched together and reassembled in beautiful, yet twisted psych-folk interludes which meander between the volatile rhythmic outbursts with wah-wah inflected, acidic guitar lines and long dizzying sprawls of cinematic creep and kosmische electronics, creating spellbinding atmospheres and gorgeously stunning modern avant heaviness. Strange, fucked-up stuff. Supposedly a new full length is in the works from Beta-Lactam Ring. C40. Limited to 100 copies! And so totally recommended!!
MPEG Stream: "Madre Bestia"
MPEG Stream: "Devocion"
MPEG Stream: "El Final (Tango Fallido)"
MPEG Stream: "El Asesino Del Sol"

SLEEP RESEARCH FACILITY Stealth (Cold Spring) 2cd 22.00
Even though we have yet to review anything on the aQ list from this deep listening black ambient drone technician, most of the drone lovers at aQ were already big fans, how could we not be? Sleep Research Facility, aka Scottish soundscaper Kevin Doherty, specializes in an ultra minimal, spaced out black ambience, weaving sprawling landscapes of hushed thrum and sinister murmur, often manipulating field recordings and processing them beyond the point of recognition, assembling them into bleak, epic, haunting, somnambulant drifts. We were particular taken by this most recent missive, which finds Doherty working exclusively from a selection of field recordings, samples collected from a B-2 Stealth Bomber, at a US Air Force base in the UK, and if there was ever a more appropriate sound source for this sort of hushed sonic mystery, it's the military's most mysterious aircraft.
And while these recordings are obviously not the sounds of the aircraft in flight, it's easy to imagine that this modern marvel of technology was in fact THIS stealthy, emitting just a strange series of hushed rumbles, a deep shimmery thrum, laced with the telltale sounds of radio transmissions, tinny voices from the ether that sound almost like EVP recordings, ghostly and wraithlike. Doherty's manipulations are subtle, weaving the original sounds into gentle pulsations, layering multiple recordings into lush textures, weaving strange sine wave tones and staticky gristle into the proceedings, blurring and smearing everything into hazy, darkly psychedelic sonic shadows.
The mix of abstract low end ambience, and strange transmissions, can't help but remind us of all time aQ fave the Conet Project. It definitely has that same vibe, the clouded provenance of these sounds, the pure musicality of the distinctly non-musical, but Doherty does work his magic, adding subtle swaths of melody, and giving the tracks here, no matter how minimal, a sense of propulsion, beneath the murk and the droned out whir, a barely there rhythmic pulse, while at the same time sculpting the various sound sources into sprawling fields of moody mesmer, a tranced out minimalism that is at once, soothing and darkly tranquil, this record quickly becoming one our favorite records to drift off to in the evening, and yet at the same time, crackling with energy, infused with not just the sounds themselves, but the implied weight of those sounds, borne of this strange machine, one that was devised to inflict violence, the ultimate delivery system for our collective bloodlust, the sounds of which, when at rest, are strangely lovely, albeit rife with a tension implicit in the source, and speak to an alternate purpose, one where this machine, even in repose, becomes less a means of destruction, and instead is involved in the creation of something beautiful and darkly transcendent.
The record proper is accompanied by a second disc, which is the 'source' material Doherty used to create his dark droney vision, and the most interesting thing is how musical that material already is. And while these aren't the raw unedited recordings, they are the 'pre-mix' versions, which are meant to represent those source sounds, and while they are definitely much less processed, they still possess a dark musicality, with much of the grit and gristle of the finished record stripped away, leaving just deep tones, and long shifting layers of thrum and hum and whir, like the record itself, occasionally the true source sounds do reveal themselves, whether it's the clang and clatter of work in the hanger, or the squelched blurts of radio static, but ultimately, the source disc is simply another version of Stealth, one that we actually find equally enthralling. Essential modern dronescaping from this master of the dark sonic arts!
MPEG Stream: "Stealth 1"
MPEG Stream: "Stealth 2"
MPEG Stream: "Stealth 3"
MPEG Stream: "Source 3"

MARSFIELD (ANDREW CHALK, ETC.) The Towering Sky (Faraway Press) cd 21.00
BACK IN STOCK!!!
Marsfield is a project featuring the premier UK drone artist Andrew Chalk along side Vikki Jackman, Robin Barnes, and Brendan Walls. This collective recorded The Towering Sky back in 2005, only to see if released some five years later. Given the gap in recording to release, we have to wonder what else Mr. Chalk has buried in the vaults of his Faraway Press that one day might see the light of day.
The recordings reflect the strategies of David Jackman, who had employed the talents of a much younger Andrew Chalk many many moons ago in his Organum ensemble. The Marsfield participants have all gathered various pieces of resonant metal (maybe a large piece of sheet metal, maybe a long stringed instrument, probably a gong or two, and definitely a singing bowl or four) and extracted sustained textures, prolonged scrapes, deep bellowings, and elegantly warbled tones in a large reverberant room. With all of the room noise with its spectral echoing, damp reflections, and incidental ambience, the Marsfield sessions sound as if they could have been recorded in some abandoned factory somewhere in the Northeast of England. The first Isolde record that Chalk and Barnes had constructed a few years back is not all that dissimilar to The Towering Sky, with the first half of this record appearing as shape-shiting ghosts of corroded, droning haze, and shifting into the latter half of the record pocked with distant plucks and small hand bells that dissolve into field recordings of English rain showers. As with all of the Faraway Press titles, this is beautifully packaged; and as with all Andrew Chalk releases, this is very highly recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Marsfield Cathedral"
MPEG Stream: "Marsfield Common"

MEIRINO, FRANCISCO Untitled Phenomenas In Concrete (Cave 12) cd 15.98
The Swiss electro-acoustic tactician Francisco Meirino has proven a deft hand in cajoling caustic jolts of static and searing chunks of noises from electro-magnetic sources, growing leaps and bounds from his earliest recordings as Phroq to the intensely dynamic output he's been steadily releasing under his own name over the past couple of years. This album's title refers to the UPIC system developed by Xenakis as a means of drawing on a digitizing tablet which provides vector coordinates to a program controlling particular sound sources, which for Meirino's purposes include snow falling, bones cracking, magnetic field disturbances, and insect noises. As interesting as Xenakis' UPIC system is, it's reassuring that Meirino treats the device as just another tool in his arsenal to direct his own aesthetic and not let the tool itself speak any louder than necessary. Radioactive streams of static electricity and piercing sinewaves ground the scattered tactile events which at times sound more like resonant gongs and small scraps of metal whose trailing decay undulates in rippling patterns that parallel Nurse With Wound's Homotopy To Marie. Throughout the 37 minute piece, Meirino returns to the densely phased, atonal concoctions of sinewaves and static that accelerate and deflate out of pockets of agitated acoustically sourced sources. Where those cracking bones are in the mix is anybody's guess, as he adheres a sharply toxic aura to all of his sounds. Like Dave Phillips and G*Park, he's at the vanguard of contemporary Swiss electro-acoustic malevolence. Limited to 350 copies.
MPEG Stream: "Untitled Phenomenas In Concrete (excerpt 1)"
MPEG Stream: "Untitled Phenomenas In Concrete (excerpt 2)"

MAEROR TRI Emotional Engramm (Zoharum) cd 17.98
Originally released in 1997 on the now defunct Iris Light imprint out of England, Emotion Engramm was the final album from Maeror Tri - the haunting, post-industrial drone trio that was the precursor to the equally haunting, post-industrial drone DUO Troum. This record - more so than any of the other Maeror Tri albums - engaged the complex structures that Troum would later push through their interlocking, shadowy melodies and slow-motion, effects-heavy drone. At the same time, the concepts that went into Emotional Engramm are more closely related to the clinical psychological themes of the Maeror Tri albums Multiple Personality Disorder or Language Of Flames & Sound, as referenced by the titular engram (purposefully misspelled in the title), a Scientology term for a mental image embedded into the brain by any type of trauma - physical, emotional, psychic, or otherwise. Far from prescribing the teachings of Scientology, Maeror Tri uses that concept as a jumping off point in conjuring "resonance of control, impact, fortuity, the randomly instigated yet inedibly etched emotional memory: Kodak ghosts." It's easy to read particular passages within the frozen din of washed-out guitar noise, spectral melodies, tectonic bass rumblings, and metallic slashes of grim electronics as the seizures within the psyche that might get caught in an infinite loop for the inner-mind. Some of those images provide an emotional resonance that's deeply sad and full of despair, while others are enraged with a blackened hostility. As we mentioned, many of the ideas and strategies that went into this album continued to develop through Troum; but even so, this stands as one of the best albums that either Maeror Tri or Troum had produced.
MPEG Stream: "Secunda Figura: Sublimis"
MPEG Stream: "Quarta Figura: Vadum"
MPEG Stream: "Septima Figura: Sphaira"

FERRARI, LUC Presque Rein (Recollection GRM) 2lp 32.00
Self-deprecatingly qualified by Ferrari as a "poor man's concrete music," Presque Rien is a brilliant piece of Spartan tape music that Ferrari began in 1967 with four variations on the Presque Rien theme composed over the next three decades. The first version was originally released in 1970 through Deutsche Grammophon, the next found its way through INA-GRM on vinyl in 1980, the third (composed in 1989) ended up on a cd compendium of the first three Presque Rien suites released through INA-GRM in 1995, and now the fouth chapter (completed in 1998) sees the light of day with the other three version thanks to the Editions Mego subsidized Recollection GRM project. Thus, this complete version makes a hell of lot more sense than the previous INA-GRM version which tacked on a densely claustrophobic and politically charged collage track at the beginning of the disc, setting an entirely different context for how Presque Rein was heard. Each of the four suites operates in a very spacious framework with long passages of placid sounds from nature being ruptured by short aggressive bursts of tape noise, proto-industrial machinations, and psychologically charged fragments of sound. Like Robert Ashley's ultra creepy "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon", Ferrari intertwines fragments of various whispered narratives with the steady buzzings of choral cicadas, as if each narration were that of a voyeur spying upon the intimacy of nature. It's easy to hear the influence that Ferrari's masterpiece had on a young Steven Stapleton and a pre-pop Jim O'Rourke, as well as pretty much every field recordist / phonographer that picked up a digital recorder... but Ferrari started this way back in 1967. The new 2lp was cut to perfection by D&M at 45rpm. Normally, we'd be all over playing this at the wrong speed, but this is an album really does sound way better at the correct speed. There, it's brilliant.

TARAB Shards Of Splinters - Fragments Of Scratches (Semperflorens) cd 14.98
Too long has passed since we've heard anything new from Tarab - the solo project of Australian sound artist Eamon Sprod. His process involves the recontextualization of field recordings into dense collages of acoustic noise, natural disruptions, violent crackling, and grandiose crescendos of activity bracketed by periods of a unsettled calm. In listening to each of his records, we can easily see how much time and attention he puts into these increasingly complex compositions; so it's no wonder it can take two to three years for a new album to emerge. Sprod collected all of the sounds for Shards Of Splinters while on a month-long residency at MoKS in Estonia. He purposefully chose to go to Estonia in the middle of a very cold, very bleak Baltic winter, in stark contrast to the fire-season and sweltering temperatures he would have found at the same time in his native Australia. As with his small back catalogue, Shards Of Splinters navigates along the boundary between the natural and the industrial - where factories had been left to collapse and to be consumed by vegetation, where tin sheds were torn asunder by hurricane force winds, where rusted pipes eerily resonate chorale drones from unseen cisterns deep under the surface of the earth. Many a field recordist and sound ecologist uses this boundary space to collect a beguiling array of recordings, but Sprod focuses almost entirely on mapping an apocalyptic poetry through his profoundly broken sounds. The unforgiving cold of the Estonian winter threads his recordings of slushing ice, crumbled concrete, and scraped metal that he deftly arranges into ruptures and disturbances that churn through tactile squeaks and metallic vibrations. There is a violence front and center in Sprod's work as if he's forecast the globe itself waking from hibernation to exterminate humanity once and for all. Aesthetically, Shards Of Splinters finds common ground with Eric La Casa or the more narrative work of Chris Watson; but conceptually, Sprod takes a much darker approach akin to Small Cruel Party or G*Park, that gives his recordings a magnificent depth. Brilliant.
MPEG Stream: "Shards Of Splinters 1"
MPEG Stream: "Shards Of Splinters 2"
MPEG Stream: "Shards Of Splinters 3"

BARK PSYCHOSIS Hex (Vinilisssimo) lp 27.00
This is an album that should have been huge, or at least an album that should sit next to Slint's Spiderland or My Bloody Valentine's Loveless as a seminal record from the early '90s. In fact, this was THE record that inspired music critic Simon Reynolds to first coin the term 'post-rock', when reviewing this record back in the day. But as it happened, Bark Psychosis was perhaps three or four years ahead of the curve, with Tortoise really stealing all of Bark Psychosis' thunder through the sculpted sounds melded by exquisite engineering, spacious arrangements, and careful consideration of forms past (e.g. that aforementioned Slint album, Miles Davis' more contemplative moments, and for Bark Psychosis, the latter day Talk Talk albums). Bark Psychosis also disbanded shortly after the release of Hex, which never really helped their cause in achieving greatness through this record.
That said, the band's beginnings were quite interesting, as they started out aping Napalm Death, whose short blasts of grindcore are the absolute antithesis of what Bark Psychosis would be known for - subtle, quiet, and beautiful scores of nocturnal music. Where their first handful of singles (which were later collected on the Independency compilation) pushed a post-punk intensity that was considerably effective (and still miles away from Napalm Death), they reached a whole new level on Hex with a lush atmospheric moodiness that's quite special.
A somber piano interlude starts the album off on "The Loom" which shifts into dubbed out orchestration for strings, electronics, and Graham Sutton's emphatic whisper of a voice. "A Street Scene" opens with one of those intricate bass / guitar concoctions that Pinback would lay out on Blue Screen Life, but with more of a cinematic, noirish approach to the construction of a sad pop-tune. "Fingerspit" opens with a graceful Durutti Column-esque melody settling on top of a slinky, deconstructed rhythm section skitter for piano, bass, and drums that erupts with a very Slint like jangled chord emphasizing Sutton's maudlin vocals. The bright ringing guitars cycle through a hypnotic chord on "Eyes & Smiles" as the rest of the band builds the tension upon Necks-style rhythmic crescendo. For all of the jazz conceits on the album, Bark Psychosis never faltered like so many of the British post-punks who attempted to dabble in the cool waters of jazz (e.g. Dif Juz, A.R. Kane, etc.), and it's pretty much because they realized that they needed to keep it as simple as possible in terms of the flourishes and let the complications speak through their songwriting and not a desire to jam. Yeah, it's an album that's definitely a precursor to Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die and Village Of Savoonga's Score. Brilliant.
MPEG Stream: "The Loom"
MPEG Stream: "A Street Scene"
MPEG Stream: "Eyes & Smiles"

JUPPALA KAAPIO Rewound Groves (Omnimemento) cd 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Yes, that is faux-fur sprouting from this cd by Juppala Kaapio! As we mentioned before, this duo has a Finnish name and shares a Finnish freak-folk ritualism, but neither participant is Finnish. They are in fact the husband / wife pairing of Carole and Hitoshi Kojo, who bring extended technique vocals, bleary instrumentation from smoke & mirror, and lots of liquid nirvana electronic processing to the source material. Where their earlier works had 'jammed nature' along the Jewelled Antler / RV Paintings / Kemiallyset Ystavat axis with a wistful crunchiness, Rewound Groves marries the golden-summer glow of high-latitude pagan liturgy and the rapturous blur of Andrew Chalk's contributions to Organum or even some of the Taj Mahal Travellers broadcasts to nowhere. The vocals from both Hitoshi and Carole wax and wane on the opening number "Sewing Through Twigs" amongst a richly patterned undulation of glistening drones from what might be bells, might be flutes, might be guitars, might be the sparkle of twilight stars. Watery textures and backmasked tape bridges these sounds with the :zoviet*france: like haze of "Mycophiles And Pebbles" with spectral loops and holy mesmerism sprawled throughout the soft-focus layering of sound. Probably the best thing that Juppala Kaapio has released to date; and given the artwork this is justifiably limited to 123 copies. Brilliant.
MPEG Stream: "Sewing Through Twigs"
MPEG Stream: "Mycophiles And Pebbles"
MPEG Stream: "A Germ From The Sun"

NILSEN, BJ & STILLUPPSTEYPA Goda Nott (Editions Mego) lp 22.00
The first three records from BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa were a trilogy dedicated to alcohol, and wintery drones, as semi-fictions about getting really drunk sometime in December and nearly passing out in a snowbank while gazing up at the northern lights. Goda Nott is something of an extension of these ideas, except maybe for the alcohol part. Sometime in the winter of 2011 / 2012, this trio found themselves snowed in at Stilluppsteypa's Icelandic studio with no food or water; and no way of getting out until the snow began to melt away. While they did sleep as much as they could to pass the time, they also busied themselves with recording the sounds of the snow, ice, and wind, attempting to monitor what - if any - activity may exist beyond their frozen enclave. The possibility of any existence beyond their own became uncertain, where any rustling of the snow could be a footstep or a resonant tone could be a snowplow. Through their indeterminant amount of time in that studio, they smeared these field recordings into rumbling drones and static tones that mirrored the onset of their collective madness, made audible in the crazy sounding whistling that one of them fastens to the blustery isolationism of the first side of Goda Nott. The second side is even more desolate than the first, rivaling Kevin Drumm's Imperial Distortion for the most empty, most gasping, most claustrophobic slab of audio bleakness we've ever heard. This is a radical turn away from the melancholy kosmiche electronica of their previous two albums Space Finale and Big Shadow Montana; but they are also rendering something wholly new to the bad-ass dronescaping they mastered early on. So fucking good.
MPEG Stream: "Goda Nott 1"
MPEG Stream: "Goda Nott 2"

CHALK, ANDREW The River That Flows Into The Sand (Faraway Press) cd 21.00
Here's a nice find as we had thought this album to be totally out of print, but a small batch was uncovered in Andrew Chalk's studio and passed on to us! Recorded and released in 2005, The River That Flows Into The Sand was the second album that Chalk self-released for his Faraway Press imprint. Immediately before the release of this album, Chalk was working with Christoph Heemann in the very prolific project Mirror, which released 20 records during a 5 or 6 year period. Since then, Chalk retained the impressive workload found in Mirror. The River That Flows Into The Sand is the second album in as many months to emerge from Andrew Chalk's own Faraway Press. Like it's predecessor Shadows From The Album Skies, this album is a reissue of a cd-r originally released in a very small edition. However, Chalk has decided to truly develop Faraway Press into a viable cottage industry, encasing all of his work in elaborately hand-packaged constructions, that rival the original Zoviet France assemblages in terms of innovative design. How he managed to print these is a bit of a mystery, perhaps some form of decalcomania, in which an image is delicately transferred from one surface to another. Regardless, it doesn't hurt that Chalk again has produced an immaculate drone album housed within the beautiful packaging.
For many years now, the guitar has been the instrument of choice for Chalk's minimalist explorations; and here on The River, he's tightroping between the ghostly impressionism of Keiji Haino's Nijiumu project from many moons ago, the narcoleptic atmospheres of Maeror Tri / Troum, the oceanic ambience of Boris' Flood, and the time-reversal qualities of Eliane Radigue. Undulations of extended sounds cascade from his guitar, occasionally rippling with beautiful half melodies. This is a a drop dead gorgeous album, and may even be better than the aforementioned Shadows From The Album Skies. We can't recommend this album enough!
MPEG Stream: "One "
MPEG Stream: "Two"
MPEG Stream: "Three"

SLAVES, THE Ocean On Ocean (The Helen Scarsdale Agency) 2lp 24.00
Fuck, yeah! Here, we have the double lp reissue of the aQuarius favorite Ocean On Ocean by The Slaves, the Portland duo of Birch Cooper and Barbara Kinzle. We got the cd-r of this album back in early 2011, upon the enthusiastic request from the former aQ-staffer Jon Porras, known to some as one half of of drone-doom duo Barn Owl. The rough sound of the cd-r has been considerably improved via remastering by James Plotkin, with the vinyl cut at 45 rpm so that all the heavy / dreamy / shoegazy loveliness is even richer and more radiant. Still one of our favorite albums, made even better!
We love bands whose music-making formula appears, on the surface, simple and intuitive, yet the sounds they create are huge, engulfing and seemingly complex. Using two synthesizers and echoing vocals, The Slaves inhabit a sound that is as lush and dense as it is mysterious and minimal. Their debut album, Ocean on Ocean, is the perfect showcase of a group that can conjure up bountiful sounds within a restrained approach. Honestly, we can't get enough of Ocean on Ocean, something about those enormous, dreamy, engulfing songscapes just leaves us wanting more. Their oozing brew of minimal pop melts and blurs with the melodic thickness of MBV's Loveless or early Slowdive, but surrenders to a contemplative mode that falls somewhere between Gregorian hymn and pagan ritual. The duo spin a radiant web of sustained vocals and heavy synth, each chord drawn out and smeared into a neon haze while indecipherable lyrics suggest longing, loss and submission to oblivion.
"Seventeen" unfolds with a slow arching chord progression that grows and dissipates like a coastal tide. Female vocals creep into the oceanic haze while fluttering noise and cosmic wash hover in obscurity. And though the rhythm-less wash may appear to be aimless improv, a close listen reveals a defined structure beneath the veil of long tones and heavy atmospherics. And yes, The Slaves are heavy. And it's not a "down-tuned guitars through a wall of amps" kind of heavy. It's more evident in the slow movement of the songs, and the visceral effects felt by each musical gesture. The duo have perfectly crafted a searing offering of "soft doom", so gorgeous and mesmerizing we've had Ocean on Ocean on repeat for the past week. "Shadows" is another noteworthy track. We love the push and pull of heavy synth and whispery vocals, whirls of female voice echo into the night then dissipate into huge swells of HEAVY distorted synth. Crumbling low end amid ethereal dream chants, what else could we ask for?? One of our favorite records in recent memory and highly recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Seventeen"
MPEG Stream: "Sweet High"

UNCLE ACID & THE DEADBEATS Blood Lust (Rise Above / Metal Blade) cd 14.98
Hell yeah, at last! When this now-semi-legendary album was first released by UK heavy psych doom metal specialists Rise Above in 2011, it came out in an ultra limited edition of just three hundred vinyl-only copies, which proved almost impossible to come by. That first edition sold out instantly and those lps started trading for seriously ridiculous amounts of money on eBay and elsewhere. Even though, really, who the heck were Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats? Well it wasn't just the cool band name generating a buzz, the music was awesome, as we later were able to ascertain. Eventually Rise Above did a repress, of which we were able to get a few, though those were expensive too and we were never able to get enough of 'em to actually list. But, we did figure out why this record was in such demand (as we'll discuss in more detail in a moment). We also learned that Blood Lust had also come out on compact disc, but oddly enough via a small Finnish label instead of Rise Above, and again we never were able to get enough of those to list, either. But we had hope that someday, somehow, we'd be able to review this for you, 'cause eventually most Rise Above stuff gets released in the USA by licensees Metal Blade, and while its been a damn long time, we're now pleased to, ta da, finally have Blood Lust on cd at a domestic price. Record Of The Week? You bet!
So, what we thought we were in for, way back when all we knew about band was their name & label, was some lysergic sludgey doomy jamming, like maybe Electric Wizard (another Rise Above band) or UFOmammut. Which we would have been perfectly happy with, of course. But, instead, Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats proved to be a lot more song-oriented and more melodic than we expected, with a kind of poppy '60s garage psych rock side to 'em, amidst their heavy fuzz-filled riffage. The singer (that's ol' Uncle Acid himself, natch, also on guitar in this power trio, and mellotron and synths too) croons his twisted tales of witchburning, black magic, and murder, in a languid whine, his voice nasally pinched and reverb effected, reminding us a bit of Kyle Thomas of aQ faves Witch (and King Tuff and Happy Birthday too by the way). His delivery lends a delicate, decadent touch to the band's brand of both despondent plod and swinging catchiness, able to render lines like "I was born a bitter man, no hopes or dreams / I get my kicks from torturing and screams / I lust for womens blood, and their evil ways / I twist my words to what the good book says" with sick sincerity -and- showmanship, in a way that is surprisingly not very much metallic, instead staying (despite the music's undeniable heaviness) more in the pop realm, though one obsessed with vintage horror films.
These rollicking, but dread-infused tunes are further full of ripping fuzz guitar leads, and lumbering downer riffs. Without a doubt, doom originators Black Sabbath are a major factor in this band's sound, but they're doing something rather different with that particular inspiration than most do. And we're also reminded of some other British '60s/'70s proto-metallers like Stray, High Tide, T2, and May Blitz, who were quite heavy but psych-pop catchy as well. Perhaps very early, very psychedelic Alice Cooper could be added to Uncle Acid's roster of influences too, we're thinking of the way the song "Ritual Knife" marries a pounding tribal beat and urgently chugging ominous riffery with glorious bursts of shining melody come chorus time.
One much more recent band that these guys also remind us of, is Swedish occult rock sensations Ghost, another act whose "pop side" is so effective as to possibly threaten their "metal cred" among the more closeminded. We'd also recommend Uncle Acid to fans of that other recent, equally retro stunner from Rise Above, Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell. And, like last week's Record Of The Week by Golden Void, this has that laidback classic sounding '70s psychrock vibe, immediately familiar, though Uncle Acid comes across as much more dark and sinister to be sure. And lastly, fans of Witchcraft should pay attention - we'd rank this up there with that band's celebrated Rise Above debut, we're pretty sure this is gonna be considered a classic too. We're sooooooo glad they didn't just press only those 300 vinyl copies and leave it at that!! You will be too.
This cd reissue includes a bonus track not on vinyl, which provides a nice coda to the record proper, relinquishing the fuzz guitar for acoustic strum and hand percussion, Uncle Acid doing their doom-pop-psych in a more folky style a la, say, Bolan's Tyrannosaurus Rex.
MPEG Stream: "I'll Cut You Down"
MPEG Stream: "Curse In The Trees"
MPEG Stream: "13 Candles"

V/A Archaic Variations : Localization (Obs / Observatoire) cd 12.98
An impressive survey of the curatorial aesthetic from the Russian imprint Observatoire, which has grown in leaps and bounds over the past couple of years with some great releases of cracked dronology and mangled field recordings. The concepts on Archaic Variations slant toward crude electro-acoustics, psychogeography, obsolete technologies, and improbable strategies all mapping out tactile soundfields with variable degrees of manipulation and deconstruction. The first handful of tracks (Emmanuel Mieville, Richard Garet, and Takanobu Noshino) are relatively hushed compositions of shadowy drones, distant vocalizations, and raw field recordings lending an air of clinical detachment. Chris Whitehead's elegaic piano and field recording piece addresses a rural British ceremony that dates back to the 12th Century, recalling the piano laced impressionism of Andrew Chalk and Cindytalk. The latter half of the disc tends toward claustrophobia and decay, introduced by none other than our own Jim Haynes, whose chainsaw drones and swarming radio bursts transmit through thickets of scabrous noise dialing up comparisons to Kevin Drumm's more noxious facets. The Russian artist Radioson maintains the shortwave theme with an paranoiac set of hypnotic melodies revolving around repeating beacon tones and gray masses of static. Gonna have to dig into this project more for sure. The compilation concludes on a very bleak note with a track from Francisco Meirino, the brilliant, if under-recognized electro-acoustic tactician here jettisoning razor-sharp errata of EMF interference across pierced feedback shards, and the finale from another Russian artist Dasein, compacting distorted synths and tortured vocals into a more nuanced take on the early Whitehouse / Ramleh axis. 300 copies, only.
MPEG Stream: RICHARD GARET "R.O.U / Tristan Narvaja - Villa Biarritz"
MPEG Stream: JIM HAYNES "Iodine"
MPEG Stream: RADIOSON "Life Of Neron"
MPEG Stream: FRANCISCO MEIRINO "What Remains Of All That Misery"

YEAST CULTURE IYS (Art Into Life) lp 37.00
So, we raved about Small Cruel Party a few months back, being an unheralded genius of tactile minimalism hailing from the Pacific Northwest; and now we have the reissue of the Yeast Culture album IYS, in many ways, a document originating from the same time and place that's even more cryptic and more obsessive than Small Cruel Party all the while achieving similarly cracked abstraction of sound-art. Yeast Culture was the brainchild of an artist named Abo, who set up shadowy installations, performances, and even a record shop in an abandoned building in Seattle. The days of such romantic squatting are surely over in Seattle, but they provided the context of damp concrete, rusted rebar, and festering mold. Through collaboration and in piloting the ship himself, Abo steered Yeast Culture into a strange beast of DIY musique concrete, self-immolating electro-acoustic strategies and dangerous field recording situations, amidst all that rubble and decay. While there were only a handful of releases to coincide with the seemingly rich history of activity through that space, the 1989 album IYS is the Yeast Culture masterpiece. An enigmatic smear of crumbling events, metallic scribblings, aerosolizing hiss, poltergeist-like clunks of grey noise, and strange whirring machines caught in their last dying breath. What little information that can be found on the record is that the source material was entirely taken from a three day session on an island in the Puget Sound, after which Abo quite literally ripped those recordings to shreds and painstakingly reassembled the artifacts. Like Small Cruel Party and Organum, Yeast Culture's constructions are densely layered and aggregated, with the compositional strategies keeping to a blank linearity. The sounds themselves have the feeling of being an amplification of the wood beetles gnawing through oak trees or an invasion of mechanical insects adopting a scorched earth policy in miniature or perhaps some unwritten noise symphony for Jan Svankmajer's films, full of disembodied teeth chewing incessantly on cutlery and old furniture. As if that weren't enough to entice, there's the artwork - a densely silkscreened poster that wraps around an equally densely silkscreened inner sleeve with multiple belts of paper holding everything in place. As chaotic as the heavily overlaid silkscreens look, the packaging is quite elegant and perfectly reflects the sounds on the grey / splattered vinyl. While the artwork on the original was pretty stunning, it's even better here on the reissue. Yeah, it's pricey; but when you get your hands on this, you'll realize that the price is totally justified given the amount of work that went to each album. Of course, it's super limited and so fucking recommended!

KORZYNSKI, ANDRZEJ Possession OST (Finders Keepers) cd 17.98
A lot of the soundtracks we review, are for movies we haven't actually seen. In some ways that's sort of liberating, at least from a purely musical standpoint, hearing the sounds solely for what they are, instead of having those sounds inexorably linked to specific images. And in a lot of cases, we have discovered some incredible films via their soundtracks, and not the more common other way around. We got this soundtrack to this 1981 French horror/thriller (directed by Polish director Andrzej Zulawski, and scored by his longtime collaborator Andrzej Korzynski, also Polish, but more on that in a second) in a few months ago, and instantly, become totally obsessed, spinning it multiple times a day, inevitably folks in the store would ask what it was, because it's so goddamn good. And creepy, and twisted, and pretty much the perfect score, but for what, we weren't sure, as we had not seen the movie. And while are obsession proves that you needn't see the movie to love this, once we actually DID see the movie, we flipped for that too, wondering how the hell we could have missed out on it all these years. It's literally one of the weirdest, most fucked up films EVER. And the soundtrack we had become so familiar with over the last several months, finally viewed in the contest of the film, made both even more bizarre and amazing.
So the film itself, banned until 1991, and at the time classified as a "Video Nasty", stars an American, Sam Neil, who becomes convinced his wife, Isabelle Adjani, is cheating on him, which she is. Neil hires a private investigator, eventually meets the lover, and the lover's mother, but there's so much more to the story, there's a crazily neglected child in the mix, some truly twisted parenting, and SPOILER ALERT!!!! Some sort of super gross oozing monster that lives in an abandoned building that Adjani is in love with, or is at least having sex with? There's tons of screaming and hitting and fighting, and one of thee most dramatic freakouts EVER, with Adjani losing her mind in a tunnel, and ending up spewing and oozing all sorts of weird fluids, there's a particularly psychedelic denouement as well, lots of crazy scenery chewing, the whole thing is utterly and unabashedly over the top. Even right after seeing it, we weren't sure what the fuck just happened. But we did know, we loved the movie, and suddenly, loved the soundtrack EVEN MORE.
Korzynski's soundtrack is a series of short cues, most less than a minute, that find the composer experimenting with synthesizers, drum machines, primitive electronics. It's actually quite progressive, and in places is reminiscent of Carpenter or Goblin, especially in the movie's 'theme'. Check out the opening track "The Night The Screaming Stops", and it will be stick in your head forever, the tense strings, the pulsing rhythmic throb, the mysterious percussion, the swirling synth, and the creepy sci-fi sound effects, not to mention the melody. It's so haunting and creepy, but in the film, it's over the most innocuous sequence, and it's that juxtaposition that makes it so effectively chilling. Seriously if this soundtrack was 2 minutes long, and consisted of that first track, we'd still want a copy!
But dig in, there's plenty more, haunting swoonsome strings, drifting over a lilting organ melody, dreamy and drifty, but so subtly ominous, there's some full on synth prog, again revisiting that opening melody, but with more heft, as the soundtrack unwinds, there's lots of percussion, shakers, little flurries of synth shimmer, deep drones, the orchestral theme is particularly stirring, a refrain of the opening credit sequence, but so much more creepy and hauntingly stately. There are also lots of brief blasts of synthy psychedelia, appropriately titled things like "Detective's Desserts" or "Bloody Embrace", and part of the reason these cues are so short, is that much of the movie is sans incidental music, so the cues come in to accentuate certain events, the sonic equivalent of jump-scares, but super effective, and they add a whole other level of surreal psychedelia to the proceedings, very 'Euro' for sure. The series of "Kreuzberg" variations are particularly freaky, sinister and mysterious, grim ambience and super tense orchestral weirdness. Oh did we mention "The Man With The Pink Socks"? Another perplexing plot point, and one that here gets the bookending closing sequence, revisiting "Meeting With A Pink Tie". Adding some extra wah guitar, and both revisiting that opening theme.
Listen to the sound samples and see if you can resist. But really why bother? You won't be sorry. Even removed from the movie, this score is fantastic, psychedelic, orchestral, proggy, tripped out and bizarre, and no doubt will have you headed to the video store to experience the baffling brilliance of the film, once your sated on the equally baffling and brilliant score.
Like all B-Music / Finders Keepers releases, includes a huge booklet with lots of liner notes and tons of rare photos.
MPEG Stream: "The Night The Screaming Stops (Opening Titles)"
MPEG Stream: "Opetanie 1"
MPEG Stream: "Anna Rewards Mark"
MPEG Stream: "Possession - Orchestral Theme 1"
MPEG Stream: "Kreuzberg 1"
MPEG Stream: "Kreuzberg 4"
MPEG Stream: "What Is it?"

KORZYNSKI, ANDRZEJ Possession OST (Finders Keepers) lp 25.00
A lot of the soundtracks we review, are for movies we haven't actually seen. In some ways that's sort of liberating, at least from a purely musical standpoint, hearing the sounds solely for what they are, instead of having those sounds inexorably linked to specific images. And in a lot of cases, we have discovered some incredible films via their soundtracks, and not the more common other way around. We got this soundtrack to this 1981 French horror/thriller (directed by Polish director Andrzej Zulawski, and scored by his longtime collaborator Andrzej Korzynski, also Polish, but more on that in a second) in a few months ago, and instantly, become totally obsessed, spinning it multiple times a day, inevitably folks in the store would ask what it was, because it's so goddamn good. And creepy, and twisted, and pretty much the perfect score, but for what, we weren't sure, as we had not seen the movie. And while are obsession proves that you needn't see the movie to love this, once we actually DID see the movie, we flipped for that too, wondering how the hell we could have missed out on it all these years. It's literally one of the weirdest, most fucked up films EVER. And the soundtrack we had become so familiar with over the last several months, finally viewed in the contest of the film, made both even more bizarre and amazing.
So the film itself, banned until 1991, and at the time classified as a "Video Nasty", stars an American, Sam Neil, who becomes convinced his wife, Isabelle Adjani, is cheating on him, which she is. Neil hires a private investigator, eventually meets the lover, and the lover's mother, but there's so much more to the story, there's a crazily neglected child in the mix, some truly twisted parenting, and SPOILER ALERT!!!! Some sort of super gross oozing monster that lives in an abandoned building that Adjani is in love with, or is at least having sex with? There's tons of screaming and hitting and fighting, and one of thee most dramatic freakouts EVER, with Adjani losing her mind in a tunnel, and ending up spewing and oozing all sorts of weird fluids, there's a particularly psychedelic denouement as well, lots of crazy scenery chewing, the whole thing is utterly and unabashedly over the top. Even right after seeing it, we weren't sure what the fuck just happened. But we did know, we loved the movie, and suddenly, loved the soundtrack EVEN MORE.
Korzynski's soundtrack is a series of short cues, most less than a minute, that find the composer experimenting with synthesizers, drum machines, primitive electronics. It's actually quite progressive, and in places is reminiscent of Carpenter or Goblin, especially in the movie's 'theme'. Check out the opening track "The Night The Screaming Stops", and it will be stick in your head forever, the tense strings, the pulsing rhythmic throb, the mysterious percussion, the swirling synth, and the creepy sci-fi sound effects, not to mention the melody. It's so haunting and creepy, but in the film, it's over the most innocuous sequence, and it's that juxtaposition that makes it so effectively chilling. Seriously if this soundtrack was 2 minutes long, and consisted of that first track, we'd still want a copy!
But dig in, there's plenty more, haunting swoonsome strings, drifting over a lilting organ melody, dreamy and drifty, but so subtly ominous, there's some full on synth prog, again revisiting that opening melody, but with more heft, as the soundtrack unwinds, there's lots of percussion, shakers, little flurries of synth shimmer, deep drones, the orchestral theme is particularly stirring, a refrain of the opening credit sequence, but so much more creepy and hauntingly stately. There are also lots of brief blasts of synthy psychedelia, appropriately titled things like "Detective's Desserts" or "Bloody Embrace", and part of the reason these cues are so short, is that much of the movie is sans incidental music, so the cues come in to accentuate certain events, the sonic equivalent of jump-scares, but super effective, and they add a whole other level of surreal psychedelia to the proceedings, very 'Euro' for sure. The series of "Kreuzberg" variations are particularly freaky, sinister and mysterious, grim ambience and super tense orchestral weirdness. Oh did we mention "The Man With The Pink Socks"? Another perplexing plot point, and one that here gets the bookending closing sequence, revisiting "Meeting With A Pink Tie". Adding some extra wah guitar, and both revisiting that opening theme.
Listen to the sound samples and see if you can resist. But really why bother? You won't be sorry. Even removed from the movie, this score is fantastic, psychedelic, orchestral, proggy, tripped out and bizarre, and no doubt will have you headed to the video store to experience the baffling brilliance of the film, once your sated on the equally baffling and brilliant score.
Like all B-Music / Finders Keepers releases, includes a huge booklet with lots of liner notes and tons of rare photos.
MPEG Stream: "The Night The Screaming Stops (Opening Titles)"
MPEG Stream: "Opetanie 1"
MPEG Stream: "Anna Rewards Mark"
MPEG Stream: "Possession - Orchestral Theme 1"
MPEG Stream: "Kreuzberg 1"
MPEG Stream: "Kreuzberg 4"
MPEG Stream: "What Is it?"

LYNCH, DAVID & ALAN SPLET Eraserhead OST (Sacred Bones) lp+7" 31.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We've been trying to get these for ages now, a super deluxe, extravagantly packaged lp+7" reissue of the soundtrack to David Lynch's Eraserhead. They came, and went, and now it's apparently been repressed, but those are going fast too, limited to 1000 copies. We managed to get just ten, and aren't sure our supplier has any more now. So, if you want one, grab one quick before they're gone.
Before we get to the actual music though, it's probably best to come clean, and admit that the person writing this review (as well as at least a couple other people at aQ) has NEVER actually seen Eraserhead! A travesty we know, not sure how we managed to make it this far without seeing it, we always meant to, and we WILL, especially now that we've gotten an earful of this amazing soundtrack. Much more abstract and noisy, droney and minimal than we expected. The first few minutes, all blurred noise, and rumbling low end, a smeary bit of ambient drift that sounds like Organum or Lustmord. Sinister and a bit harrowing, eventually all sorts of subtle sounds enter the mix, distant calliope melodies, like from a carousel way off in the distance, fog horns, all smeared into the smudged grey thrum that oozes across side one. Eventually, that low end is dialed back, leaving more of that mysterious organ music, this time wreathed in an insectoid hum, like a sky full of crickets, laced with Raster Noton like glitches and clicks, having not seen the movie, but being of course familiar with much of the iconic imagery, these sounds seem like the perfect sonic accompaniment, the score is peppered with strange dialog, and swirling hissy swooshes, sinister swells of blackened thrum, keening feedback, muted into minimal melodies, the sound noisy and industrial, and almost like some weird field recording flecked experimental drone record you might hear on Type or Blackest Rainbow, all wreathed in a sort of otherworldly hazy, which gives the whole thing a creepy, darkly psychedelic vibe.
The flipside begins with what sounds like a field recording of a couple in bed, creaking springs, rustling covers, which is soon swallowed up by a huge wheezing wall of atonal chords and layered tones, all draped over the sounds of choking, driven by a strange percussive pound. A long stretch of hiss and hum, gives way to haunting church organ, then cavernous rumbles, the whole second half of the soundtrack a wild, noisy chaotic collage of dense drones and crumbling noise, of whirling wind and fractured melodies, lots of buzz and crunch, creak and howl, it sounds less like a soundtrack and more like some lost record by Nurse With Wound, or Psychic TV or Throbbing Gristle. Super rad, and even removed from the visuals, this is a killer slab of lo-fi musique concrete, abstract free form noise and post industrial dronescaping.
The bonus 7" features "In Heaven (Lady In The Radiator Song)", which is some gorgeously creepy organ driven balladry, with woozy falsetto vox and lots of warble and buzz; it sounds a little bit like a dronier, doomier Daniel Johnston, and there's even a little note on the sleeve about how this specific track came to be. The B-side is a never before release bonus track called "Pete's Boogie", which is anything but a boogie, instead it sounds like it oozed right off the soundtrack, all buried organ melodies, hissing shimmer, and wheezing looped rumbles, creepy and haunting and seriously freaky. Which pretty much describes the whole soundtrack, and yeah, we know, the whole movie as well.
The packaging is totally swank, with a thick black and white gatefold sleeve, the singe to housed in a heavy sleeve, both adorned with images from the film, inside a huge booklet with still more photos, as well as several photographic prints, AND a download code.
Super awesome, and again SUPER LIMITED. This is probably your last chance to snag one of these at a somewhat reasonable price. As they say, buy now, or cry later.
MPEG Stream: "Side A (Excerpt)"
MPEG Stream: "Side B (Excerpt)"

SMALL CRUEL PARTY Three Simple Eyes Of The Insect Ancestor (Kaon) cd 16.98
Small Cruel Party turns up again, just a few weeks after the release of the impeccable 3cd anthology An Accident In Substance released by Harbinger Sound. As we mentioned in the review of that set, Small Cruel Party was the obscurant sound-art project for then Seattle-based Key Ransome, who applied the grandeur of minimalism to the sodden detritus of his surroundings, creating a brilliant amalgamation of texture, noise, drone, atmosphere, tension, bombast, industrial euphoria, and mystical threat. Three Simple Eyes Of The Insect Ancestor was an early cassette by Small Cruel Party, released by Apraxia in 1992 in a package smeared with wax and oversized sticks that would have surely fallen off merely by looking at it sideways. In a rare piece of text accompanying these recordings (found on the Kaon website, and not the cd), Ransome describes a considerable difference in the sound quality between the original cassette and remastered cd, the latter of which negated the former's overblown mulched sound from faulty replication providing 'clarity' for the murky sounds found within. Ransome admits a lack of memory when it comes to the recording of the first track "Crowd Of Small Things" - but the dank atmosphere that hangs on a mysteriously motorized droning erratically hums amidst a slow arcing crescendo of ever-increasing tactile crunches. If anything, it's an existentially bleak soundtrack to an environmental disaster, with the damp forests of the Pacific NW suffocating under the slow ooze of a bunker oil spill. The second track "Tank Ecstasy Between Floors" features recordings make with the members of Yeast Culture in the reverberant stairwell of the Seattle Public Library. Those huge thumps and klangs from the SCP/YC industrial pipe fights are set against a shimmering stream of aquatic field recordings processed with a dreamy delay & reverb combination. In the final mix, Ransome balances the menace of those heavy-handed, thunderous booms in the stairwell with the rapturously hypnotic calm of the watery recordings. A classic Small Cruel Party strategy that's as brilliant as ever.
MPEG Stream: "Crowd Of Small Things"
MPEG Stream: "Tank Ecstasy Between Floors"

LINEA ASPERA s/t (Dark Entries) lp 15.98
One of the rare contemporary bands to be released on the ever exceptional Dark Entries label, typically known for reissues of classic and / or obscure minimal wave and post-punk electronics from the late '70s to mid '80s. But this is an album that's firmly grafted to the aesthetic that Dark Entries has honed through their fine curatorial ear; so much so that if we were told that Linea Aspera were some rare Sheffield band from 1981 featuring an undiscovered Anne Clark on vocals, we wouldn't be surprised one bit. The sequenced electronics, drum machines, and minimalist melodies are ice cold in their production thanks to the engineering prowess of Ryan Ambridge, who taps into the darker synth wrangling of Chris & Cosey, Psyche, Soft Cell, Human League, and even the Eurythmics in an experimental mood. That Eurythmics reference is furthered along by the full-throated vocals of Allison Lewis, whose poetics of despair and sexual miserablism are couched in the industrialist appropriation of neuroscience and various medical pathologies. There's a considerable amount of dark tension between the cold electronics and Lewis' vocals that really makes this record quite special and worthy of being included in the hallowed Dark Entries pantheon. To be completely honest, this is really what Xeno & Oaklander *want* to sound like if either of those Anglophiles could really rise above their well crafted electronic starkness. Kudos, once again to Dark Entries for introducing us to another great minimal wave find!
MPEG Stream: "Synapse"
MPEG Stream: "Fer-De-Lance"
MPEG Stream: "Malarone"

SEXTON, GEOFFREY 197 Black Pendulums (Hooker Vision) cassette 8.98
Fucking hell. Where did this guy come from? And why the hell haven't we heard anything else that he's done? To answer the first question, Sexton hails from the quaint hamlet of Franklin, Tennessee and had travelled up the road to Nashville to collaborate in the (now defunct) outsider noise-junk collective Horsehair Everywhere - another project we've not heard, but by all accounts conveyed a psychedelic violence through stoned happenings for collaged film, scabrous dronemuzik, and stoned antics. Sounds a hell of lot like The Starving Weirdos to us; and Geoffrey Sexton seems to be taking a page out of the Brian Pyle playbook with his underappreciated acoustic-dronology project RV Paintings. Sexton's prepared guitar drones ooze with a subterranean murkiness, growling and undulating towards dramatically dense codas on each side of this tape. The scraping textures give the impression of Sexton rummaging around some crumbled farmhouse, generating resonant frequencies out of antebellum glass and earthen rumblings from piles of rounded bricks all sweating in the humid Southern summer heat. Think Parson Sound, Thuja, and yup RV Paintings and you're getting somewhere close to what Sexton is doing here on 197 Black Pendulums. Fucking great.
MPEG Stream: "197 Black Pendulums"

SPECTRUM TICKETS Anyajegy (Hooker Vision) cassette 8.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The last time we heard from Mike Haley, it was in the guise of Wether on Monorail Trespassing, offering up a headsplitting noise cassette of powerdrone synths and sawtooth aggression. Here, recording under the moniker Spectrum Tickets for Hooker Vision, Haley dials those electronics into a glimmering pop ambient type of ethereal drift that certainly does muster favorable parallels to Hooker Visionary Rachel Evans' solo project Motion Sickness Of Time Travel. The stabbing John Carpenter arpeggiations are central to his science fiction electronica built out of swooshing fundamental drones with Radiophonic / Oneohtrix melodic flourishes, peppered with burbling electronics and strange fuzzing static. There's just enough paranoid android in Haley's electronics to keep things interesting, making this tape recommended for anybody whose enchanted by the like of Rene Hell, Oneohtrix Point Never, and much of the oddities found on NNA Tapes. As with all Hooker Vision titles, this one is super limited.
MPEG Stream: "Anyajegy"

ETAT BRUT Mutations Et Protheses (Sub Rosa) lp 16.98
Can't really tell you much about Etat Brut, other than the limited information provided by Sub Rosa. EB were an obscure industrial duo from Belgium operating between 1978 and 1983, with connections to the transgressive collective Club Moral and the Cabs-inspired Pseudo Code. Supposedly, both of the individuals in Etat Brut were named Phillipe and went on to become science teachers after leaving all of this junk, noise, and squalid rhythm behind. But that's all the information we could dig up, which is a bit disappointing, as we'd love to know more about these guys, we imagine Club Moral must have published something about the group in their Force Mental zine. Anyway, for those keen on the more brutal / guttural / abject side of industrial culture (e.g. TG's Second Annual Report, Factrix' Sheintot, or SPK's Leichenshrei), this is a very compelling document of primitive sound-demolition with an equally primitive approach to deconstructing music into its rawest elements - noise, rhythm, screams, more noise, and plenty of aggro / provocateur antics. The post-punk monochord basslines and drum machine anti-groove of "Homme Nus" is a compellingly bleak track of Frankensteinian proportions, where "Crash" conveys a dehumanized atmosphere through grim blorping electronics, musique concrete techniques, and cut-up dialogue that could very well allude to JG Ballard if only we understood French. Crumbling tape machinations, rhythms looped from shortwave radio beacons, fucked-up noise, and guttural vocalizations fill in the blanks, very prescient of what Atelecine is attempting to recreate nowadays and holding up very well against the better known projects we listed earlier.
The cd comes with two bonus tracks not found on the vinyl, btw.
MPEG Stream: "Hommes Nus"
MPEG Stream: "Douce Nuit"
MPEG Stream: "Bande Sonore Du Film Paysage Mental "

SILENT SERVANT Negative Fascination (Hospital Productions) cd 15.98
Silent Servant's dour techno emerges from the now defunct Sandwell District collective of techno-heds keen on bending the Detroit / Berlin axis to allow for the grim pathologies of Industrial culture and all of its post-punk offshoots to infiltrate the boom-boom-boom of a 909 drum kick. Sandwell's Karl O'Connor is certainly the most vocal, hardlined, and aggressive of the District's members through the brutalist techno that he's produced over the years. His DJ sets are notorious for dropping Whitehouse and other power electronic squalor amidst furiously hard breakbeats. Juan Mendez (aka Silent Servant) strikes a gloomier pose than O'Connor through the Sandwell District and carries this over into the ethereally witched-out Tropic Of Cancer. Silent Servant's Negative Fascination drops from Hospital Productions, whose ghastly noise aesthetic parted once before for Cold Cave's gritty synth pop, making room for head honcho Dominic Fernow to follow suit with his own adventures in rhythm (e.g. Vatican Shadows, Christian Cosmos). If one were to imagine what Dom would want out of a techno record on Hospital, Negative Fascination is exactly what comes to mind - Chain Reaction's dub-inflected heroin house, Clock DVA's cybernetic futurism, and the atmosphere from the mournful dirges of New Order's first album.
A fine grit coats the production of Negative Fascination, and it's something that electronic purists may find off-putting, but it suits the bleakness and dystopian overtures that Mendez injects into his production. Acid-like gurgles propel the minimalist techno thump of "The Invocation Of Lust" and "The Strange Attractor" both of which rise and fall through a complex sequence of churning rhythms and shifting drones. "Temptation & Desire" lifts a taut rhythmic stab straight from The Sisters Of Mercy circa Body Electric and mutates it into a punchy minimal wave number with appropriately coldly theatrical drones hovering in the distant. The finale "Utopian Disaster" is right out of the Sandwell playbook of modulated techno sequencing, Chain Reactive dubby rhythms, and stealth bomber vibes. A fucking great record.
MPEG Stream: "Invocation Of Lust"
MPEG Stream: "The Strange Attractor"
MPEG Stream: "Utopian Disaster (End)"

ALVARIUS B s/t (2nd) (Abduction) 2lp 30.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Fucked up minstrel-tunes, misogynistic murder ballads, and world-weary blues played by a man who's too smart and too talented to play everything straight. Yup, it's Alan Bishop of the Sun City Girls in his singer-songwriter guise of Alvarius B. Alan's poetics of cruelty and black humor are highlighted most egregiously on this eponymous album (not to be confused with another self-titled record from 1994), and if anyone is expecting the puckish tunes from Bishop's acclaimed 2011 album Baroque Primitiva with its Morricone, John Barry, and Beach Boys covers will be shocked by all of the dead whores and vulgar epithets that come a mile a minute from Bishop's venomous mouth. Bishop's arrangements typically find the man scraping and rapping his bloody knuckles across his steel-strung acoustic guitar with a violent aggression that splutters out of stolen blues progressions, always punctuating his deranged lyrics. As was the case with the Sun City Girls, Bishop's solo work teases with moments of musical ecstasy thanks to some downright brilliant songwriting that get all twisted and fucked up with those gnashed acoustic chords or subverted by a peyote visions (e.g. "he sucked all of Arabia from a herbivore's labia") or downright mean spirited lyrics (e.g. "Fucking maggot, you're in the way!").
Originally released as a double lp 1997 on Abduction, the album went out of print quickly only to fetch small ransoms on eBay. The double cd sports six bonus tracks including the Sun City Girls classic "CCC" from 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda. It's pretty fucking recommended, but only if you don't mind getting sonically slapped in the face every other song.
MPEG Stream: "Cooking With Satan"
MPEG Stream: "Hippie Conglomerate"
MPEG Stream: "The Great Fuck Inaccessible"

ALVARIUS B s/t (2nd) (Abduction) 2cd 16.98
Fucked up minstrel-tunes, misogynistic murder ballads, and world-weary blues played by a man who's too smart and too talented to play everything straight. Yup, it's Alan Bishop of the Sun City Girls in his singer-songwriter guise of Alvarius B. Alan's poetics of cruelty and black humor are highlighted most egregiously on this eponymous album (not to be confused with another self-titled record from 1994), and if anyone is expecting the puckish tunes from Bishop's acclaimed 2011 album Baroque Primitiva with its Morricone, John Barry, and Beach Boys covers, they will be shocked by all of the dead whores and vulgar epithets that come a mile a minute from Bishop's venomous mouth. Bishop's arrangements typically find the man scraping and rapping his bloody knuckles across his steel-strung acoustic guitar with a violent aggression that splutters out of stolen blues progressions, always punctuating his deranged lyrics. As was the case with the Sun City Girls, Bishop's solo work teases with moments of musical ecstasy thanks to some downright brilliant songwriting that get all twisted and fucked up with those gnashed acoustic chords or subverted by a peyote visions (e.g. "he sucked all of Arabia from a herbivore's labia") or downright mean spirited lyrics (e.g. "Fucking maggot, you're in the way!")
Originally released as a double lp 1997 on Abduction, the album went out of print quickly only to fetch small ransoms on eBay. The double cd sports six bonus tracks including the Sun City Girls classic "CCC" from 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda. It's pretty fucking recommended, but only if you don't mind getting sonically slapped in the face every other song.
MPEG Stream: "Cooking With Satan"
MPEG Stream: "Hippie Conglomerate"
MPEG Stream: "CCC"
MPEG Stream: "The Great Fuck Inaccessible"

TONIUTTI, GIANCARLO Qwalsamtimutkw?italuc'ik (Alluvial Recordings) cd 12.98
BACK IN STOCK!!! And, it's about fucking time! During the past two and half decades, this uncompromising Italian sound artist released only two solo records and a handful of noteworthy collaborations, all of which earned him a reputation for incredible compositions nestled within an intellectual framework dealing with semiotics, esoteric languages, psychogeography, cosmology, and plenty of other topics that are way above the heads of 99 percent of everybody else. For all of Toniutti's highfalutin' ideas, his sound design isn't nearly as obtuse as you might think. There is an expressionism to Toniutti's work that you might also find in Xenakis' electronic works or Chris Watson's high quality field recordings, although Toniutti's idiosyncrasies make it difficult to draw apt comparisons. So with the release of Qwalsamtimutkw?italuc'ik, Toniutti has finally issued something new. Almost 19 years after the last proper full length album, and 11 years since the last major collaborative project. There have been entire careers that have risen and then fallen during that span of time, and Giancarlo quietly toiled away with his research into dying languages and an occasional flurry of recording which only now has been resolved. The title itself translates from Nuxalk, an indigenous Canadian language.
As for music, Toniutti built an instrument which he calls a 'rattle-harp' out of a large piece of found metal, several long thin pieces of wire, and some bones. The sounds that emanate from this instrument are haunted drones and rattles which create an unsettled ground of activity that is anything but static. Sure, the surfaces of these shadowy subharmonic hums and oceanic tone bursts could fall into the darkened ambient category that we love so much; but as Toniutti slips the layers against each other, unnerving ruptures in frequency provide a woozy feel to these occluded drones. Even at low volumes, these tectonic rumblings can be very potent.
MPEG Stream: "Qwalsamtimutkw?italuc'ik"

ETAT BRUT Mutations Et Protheses (Sub Rosa) cd 16.98
Can't really tell you much about Etat Brut, other than the limited information provided by Sub Rosa. EB were an obscure industrial duo from Belgium operating between 1978 and 1983, with connections to the transgressive collective Club Moral and the Cabs-inspired Pseudo Code. Supposedly, both of the individuals in Etat Brut were named Phillipe and went on to become science teachers after leaving all of this junk, noise, and squalid rhythm behind. But that's all the information we could dig up, which is a bit disappointing, as we'd love to know more about these guys, we imagine Club Moral must have published something about the group in their Force Mental zine. Anyway, for those keen on the more brutal / guttural / abject side of industrial culture (e.g. TG's Second Annual Report, Factrix' Sheintot, or SPK's Leichenshrei), this is a very compelling document of primitive sound-demolition with an equally primitive approach to deconstructing music into its rawest elements - noise, rhythm, screams, more noise, and plenty of aggro / provocateur antics. The post-punk monochord basslines and drum machine anti-groove of "Homme Nus" is a compellingly bleak track of Frankensteinian proportions, where "Crash" conveys a dehumanized atmosphere through grim blorping electronics, musique concrete techniques, and cut-up dialogue that could very well allude to JG Ballard if only we understood French. Crumbling tape machinations, rhythms looped from shortwave radio beacons, fucked-up noise, and guttural vocalizations fill in the blanks, very prescient of what Atelecine is attempting to recreate nowadays and holding up very well against the better known projects we listed earlier.
The cd comes with two bonus tracks not found on the vinyl, btw.
MPEG Stream: "Hommes Nus"
MPEG Stream: "Douce Nuit"
MPEG Stream: "Bande Sonore Du Film Paysage Mental "

SWANS The Seer (Young God Records) 2cd+dvd 22.00
Swans, Version 2.0 continues with The Seer, and how could it not be monstrous, epic, and utterly all-consuming? When Michael Gira reactivated the Swans several years ago, he did so with the intent of constantly touring the band, who furiously and methodically pounded through every set with Gira devilishly commanding to his band "More, you fuckers, MORE!!!" The songs which dominated the universally acclaimed 2010 album My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky became grotesquely engorged during the live sets, with each track telescoping in length and straining with each note, each rhythmic smash made more intense than the previous one. The shows were exhausting from the perspective of the audience, and Gira's marathon-length sprint must have been hell on the band, but unlike previous incarnations of Swans, it was obvious that Michael Gira was full of joy in orchestrating all of this controlled havoc.
So, we come to The Seer - an album devised as a template malleable to the pressures of the Swans live performances. How these songs will sound at the end of the Swans 2012 tour, who the hell knows? Even outside the context of the forecasted mutation, The Seer is a beast of an album. The opening number "Lunacy" is a brightly charged march through dissonant guitar monochords and militaristic snares, before giving over to a wild-eyed chorale featuring the vocal talents of Mimi and Alan Sparhawk of Low. With Gira in charge, the emotional fragility that's emblematic of Low becomes lupine in its collective howl. "Mother Of The World" reprises the jackbooted rhythms found on the first Swans records, with a jagged guitar chord scraping bloodily against the unrelenting groove. The title track itself is a 32 minute piece that lesser bands would have used as an entire album with its massive crescendos of drone-rock pummel crashing down to a doomic plod and extended passages of slumped distortion, as something of a breather before ripping into another frenzy of gleeful obliteration.
Disc two opens with the much ballyhooed appearance of Karen O on the brief, lilting number "Song For A Warrior." It's more of an intermission for the band to shake out their arms and ears before Gira launches into another lengthy percussive workout, which is exactly what he does on "Avatar" - lockstep grooves for drums and bells rise up through a drone-rock ascent of guitars, bass, and vocals uttering languid melodies throughout before Gira commands the drummers into an furious crescendo of control, power, and noise. "A Piece Of The Sky" slowly unfurls through a shimmering drone density with plenty of Ligetti references but is probably also a thoughtful homage to Gira's amphetamine driven deconstruction on the brilliant Body Lovers cd from 1998, with a temperate Swans lurching forward into a near symphonic ballad. The finale "The Apostate" is a 24-minute vehicle for the screeching drones of lapsteel player Kristof Hahn, emitting divebombing raids across the throttled basslines, yelped vocals, and of course those interlocked rhythms.
We've got the limited 2cd combo which comes with a bonus dvd of live material from the last tour, during which Swans worked through variations of tracks that made their way on to this album, including "Avatar," "The Apostate", and "The Seer", with two gems from Children Of God and a few from My Father Will Guide Me...
And yeah, The Seer is just as good as everybody has been saying.
MPEG Stream: "Mother Of The World"
MPEG Stream: "The Seer Returns"
MPEG Stream: "Avatar"

SWANS The Seer (Young God Records) 3lp 25.00
After having gone out of print almost immediately, the vinyl version of the most recent opus from the mighty Swans is FINALLY available again!!
Swans, Version 2.0 continues with The Seer, and how could it not be monstrous, epic, and utterly all-consuming? When Michael Gira reactivated the Swans several years ago, he did so with the intent of constantly touring the band, who furiously and methodically pounded through every set with Gira devilishly commanding to his band "More, you fuckers, MORE!!!" The songs which dominated the universally acclaimed 2010 album My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky became grotesquely engorged during the live sets, with each track telescoping in length and straining with each note, each rhythmic smash made more intense than the previous one. The shows were exhausting from the perspective of the audience, and Gira's marathon-length sprint must have been hell on the band, but unlike previous incarnations of Swans, it was obvious that Michael Gira was full of joy in orchestrating all of this controlled havoc.
So, we come to The Seer - an album devised as a template malleable to the pressures of the Swans live performances. How these songs will sound at the end of the Swans 2012 tour, who the hell knows? Even outside the context of the forecasted mutation, The Seer is a beast of an album. The opening number "Lunacy" is a brightly charged march through dissonant guitar monochords and militaristic snares, before giving over to a wild-eyed chorale featuring the vocal talents of Mimi and Alan Sparhawk of Low. With Gira in charge, the emotional fragility that's emblematic of Low becomes lupine in its collective howl. "Mother Of The World" reprises the jackbooted rhythms found on the first Swans records, with a jagged guitar chord scraping bloodily against the unrelenting groove. The title track itself is a 32 minute piece that lesser bands would have used as an entire album with its massive crescendos of drone-rock pummel crashing down to a doomic plod and extended passages of slumped distortion, as something of a breather before ripping into another frenzy of gleeful obliteration.
Disc two opens with the much ballyhooed appearance of Karen O on the brief, lilting number "Song For A Warrior." It's more of an intermission for the band to shake out their arms and ears before Gira launches into another lengthy percussive workout, which is exactly what he does on "Avatar" - lockstep grooves for drums and bells rise up through a drone-rock ascent of guitars, bass, and vocals uttering languid melodies throughout before Gira commands the drummers into an furious crescendo of control, power, and noise. "A Piece Of The Sky" slowly unfurls through a shimmering drone density with plenty of Ligetti references but is probably also a thoughtful homage to Gira's amphetamine driven deconstruction on the brilliant Body Lovers cd from 1998, with a temperate Swans lurching forward into a near symphonic ballad. The finale "The Apostate" is a 24-minute vehicle for the screeching drones of lapsteel player Kristof Hahn, emitting divebombing raids across the throttled basslines, yelped vocals, and of course those interlocked rhythms.
And yeah, The Seer is just as good as everybody has been saying.
MPEG Stream: "Mother Of The World"
MPEG Stream: "The Seer Returns"
MPEG Stream: "Avatar"

SMALL CRUEL PARTY An Accident In Substance (Harbinger Sound) 3cd 26.00
An obscure project with an obscure agenda. Small Cruel Party was the brilliant / difficult sound project of Key Ransome, who operated in and around the Incubator warehouse in Seattle from the early '90s up until he left for Paris around 2003 when he became a vegetarian chef and shed much of the contacts with his former life. But back during his most prolific periods, Small Cruel Party managed over 30 releases (including a disproportionate amount of seven inches) and contributed to nearly as many compilations. But since he left, nothing. The precipitous cessation of Small Cruel Party can appear to have all of the trappings of Maurizio Bianchi's demonstrative retirement back in the early '80s, but where Bianchi might have cracked under the existential weight of his depressive electronics, Small Cruel Party may have transcended itself out of existence. In a rare piece of text accompanying the almost Dada-ist titles of his pieces, Ransome speculated that Small Cruel Party "... focused on the inherent mysterious and beautiful quality of sound itself, with the emphasis on noninstrumental sound sources, the source itself not being readily apparent. Work generally involves manipulation of physical objects in acoustic space and a great deal of concentrated activity. Even in pieces involving dense sound at high volume the resultant effect is one of intense calm." Even as one hears the haptic sounds from rocks, sand, bells, scribblings, strange whisperings, electrical hums, sodden field recordings, and barren drones, the raw sounds are given over to a ceremonial austerity whose liturgy is completely unknowable. The work is certainly informed by minimalism, but more from a context of sculptural physicality through the barest of materials instead of the musical forms of Phill Niblock or LaMonte Young. A Small Cruel Party composition is often just two or three sonic elements, with Ransome creating subtle shifts in the orbits of those elliptical sounds or mustering an ectoplasmic glow around a formless tone that ominously lifts out of nowhere to the foreground.
Accident In Substance is a wholly impressive document, collecting a bunch of those compilation and seven-inch tracks and presenting them in chronological order based on when they were created (and not necessarily when they were released). The earliest piece "Even The Lives Of Our Grandfathers" may be the most musical with a hypnotic, Terry Riley-esque repetition on a couple of piano notes, Ransome layers such with scabrous textures and breathy whispered utterances devoid of any specific words. It's eerie, beautiful, and sublime. While Ransome eschews the melody on every other track since, that haunted, hidden sensibility strengthens throughout his body of work. Thickets of acoustic noise and thudding rumbles find strange bedfellows with a chorus of handbells on the dramatically intense track "Home Borders" all of which cascade like a grim kaleidoscope of urban refuse. Those same bells blossom into a Ligetti-like swarm of linear dissonace on the blindingly glistening track "Iron Moment." Stuttering electrical pulses murmur as distant beacons amidst the field recordings of unknown actions in dank warehouse spaces on the "Second Honor" and "Ceremonies of Memory." The sense of mystery that hangs on Small Cruel Party's recordings is really something to behold. Our own Jim Haynes claims Small Cruel Party as a huge influence on his rusted sound-art, to the point where one of the tracks on his 2009 album Sever is an homage to SCP. Accident In Substance is required listening for anybody whose been smitten by AMM, John Cage, Daniel Menche, Zoviet France, Organum, Loren Chasse, and Steve Roden. Yeah. It's that fucking good.
MPEG Stream: "Even The Lives Of Our Grandfathers"
MPEG Stream: "Some Movements"
MPEG Stream: "Home Borders"
MPEG Stream: "Iron Moment"
MPEG Stream: "La Poussiere Des Murs Detruit Le Passe"

BORGHESIA Clones (Dark Entries) lp 15.98
Here, Dark Entries reissues the terminally obscure second album from the Slovenian minimal-wave quartet Borghesia. The band formed in 1982 during the death throes of the fractious Yugoslavian republic, operating in a liminal space between the art world and the underground punk scene, through their own club Disco FV. During these early years, the quartet produced video installations and performances alike, with the sound design being an instrumental, hard-edged variant on new wave sensibilities. By the mid '80s, the project stripped down to a duo and took up a sweaty DAF-inspired muscularity of industrial funk. But here on Clones (originally self-released as a cassette in 1984), we find Borghesia doing their best work. All instrumental trax of hypnotic, pulsing electronics with some very forward thinking 808 drum programming that foreshadowed the reductionist strategies of Detroit electro and techno, albeit within a context that favored the darker sounds of The Human League and Soft Cell. The A side features spry and punchy tracks with plenty of elliptical arpeggiations and ramped up BPMs, whereas the B side is more pastoral and slower, sporting an eerie, melodic homage to Cindy Sherman. Clones, indeed!

NEPHILA Subcutaneous Memory (Monorail Trespassing) cassette 6.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Subcutaneous Memory is the debut recording for Nephila, the solo project of Shannon Kennedy - better known as the cellist / electronics sorceress from Pedestrian Deposit. Just as she brought a spooky sense of calm to balance the infernal noise manifest of Jon Borges' side of the Pedestrian Deposit equation, this is a super creepy tape made of and for the dark arts. The first side was all crafted on a zither, which she's plucked into haunting, slow-motion cycles of creepy melodies interspersed with atonal slashes and contact mic noises that look back to those apocalyptic collages from Current 93's early days. The second features haunting incantations looped from a "branch fiddle", wood, and voice, creating a hypnotic miasma of arboreal wooziness. Another fantastic tape from Monorail Trespassing, and we certainly hope to hear more from Nephila!

RECCHION, TOM Proscenium (Elevator Bath) lp+7" 24.00
Tom Recchion has been making weird and wonderful sounds since the 1970s as one of the leading figures in the Los Angeles Free Music Society. In a constant rotation of projects and bands, he cranked out ear-damaging skree, zonked tape collages, anti-musical comedies, and all sorts of other illogical strategies for making fucked-up sound. Compared to pretty much everything he's done previously, Proscenium - his first record in nearly seven years - is downright sensible; and one that fits neatly alongside all of the other releases from Elevator Bath, a label which specializes in rarified dronemuzik and oblique ambience (e.g. Keith Berry, Matt Shoemaker, Rick Reed and even our own Jim Haynes). The album began as the musical accompaniment to Janie Geiser's play "Invisible Glass" itself an adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe short story, with Recchion attempting to craft a moody atmosphere that slowly creeps into the audience's unconsciousness. Strange melodies emerge through a shimmering hum at the onset of the record, sounding like an underwater version of Aphex Twins' Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Recchion smudges everything beyond recognition, although the thrumming of a piano does seem to peek from behind the veil of his aqueous mystery. Dense applications of reverb are common throughout, as is a strange echoing ripple that has a funhouse, helter-skelter vibe - probably the only commonality with anything from LAMFS! Whatever melodic phrases Recchion might have started out with have blurred into oceanic swells of nocturnal droning that by the end of side two morphs into an algae bloom of dread. The tracks on the seven inch are somewhat different from what's found on the lp, with a Dada-inspired splatter of haptic rhythms on one side; and a slow-crawling calliope slashed with sporadic gasps of noise on the other. While the seven inch follows Recchion anti-aesthetic through LAFMS, the ambient horror of the lp tracks are the true prize of the set. Think Basinski. Think Koner. Think Nurse With Wound. And, then you're getting close to where Recchion might be coming from.
MPEG Stream: "The Mesmerized Chair"

PIN GROUP, THE Ambivalence (Flying Nun) cd 13.98
The recently re-issued / re-released discography from this NZ dour eighties dronerock gloompop combo now also available on cd (sadly missing the live bonus tracks that were included with the lp version, though)!
The entire musical aesthetic of the storied Flying Nun label can be traced back to the first two singles. On the exuberant and triumphantly cheerful side, you've got The Clean's "Tally Ho!" with its uptempo jangle and sloppily melodic power pop chords; but on the other side, there was the gloomy drone-rock of The Pin Group who actually released the very first Flying Nun single "Ambivalence" back in 1981. According to the liner notes by The Dead C's Bruce Russell, the late '70s and early '80s spawned quite a lot of bands in New Zealand trying to cop the Velvet Underground's gritty rock minimalism, including The Pin Group, a trio featuring Roy Montgomery (yes, THAT Roy Montgomery!), Ross Humphries (who later played in Bailter Space and The Terminals), and Peter Stapleton (who seemed to be the only guy in New Zealand with a drum kit, as he played with everybody). "Ambivalence" certainly had a black-leather minimalism filtered through the Velvets, but with strangled basslines and dour vocals from Montgomery, The Pin Group also shared more than a few passing glances at Joy Division. By the time The Pin Group got to their second single "Coat" (released later in 1981) the Velvets jangle had been engulfed in a black-hole of nervous gloom that hints at Montgomery's drone-rock impressionism from the early '90s onward. That single sported a clever Andy Warhol ripoff by replacing the Velvet Underground banana with a pop-art sequence of Kiwis, but the B side to that single, "Jim", situates the band at their bleakest, with a puritanically dark punk sermon that foreshadowed the emotionally draining dynamics of Slint by about a decade.
Ambivalence marks the second anthology of The Pin Group's short but hugely influential career which lasted less than 12 months. Everything from the first anthology (an eponymous cd released on Siltbreeze back in 1997) is reprised here, including the two covers - the smartly chosen "Hurricane Fighter Plane" and the unwise "Low Rider." Don't let the latter spoil the majesty of the rest of the album. Recommended? You bet your ass!
MPEG Stream: "Power"
MPEG Stream: "Jim"
MPEG Stream: "Ambivalence II"
MPEG Stream: "When I Tell You"

PIN GROUP, THE Ambivalence (Flying Nun) lp + cd 15.98
The entire musical aesthetic of the storied Flying Nun label can be traced back to the first two singles. On the exuberant and triumphantly cheerful side, you've got The Clean's "Tally Ho!" with its uptempo jangle and sloppily melodic power pop chords; but on the other side, there was the gloomy drone-rock of The Pin Group who actually released the very first Flying Nun single "Ambivalence" back in 1981. According to the liner notes by The Dead C's Bruce Russell, the late '70s and early '80s spawned quite a lot of bands in New Zealand trying to cop the Velvet Underground's gritty rock minimalism, including The Pin Group, a trio featuring Roy Montgomery (yes, THAT Roy Montgomery!), Ross Humphries (who later played in Bailter Space and The Terminals), and Peter Stapleton (who seemed to be the only guy in New Zealand with a drum kit, as he played with everybody). "Ambivalence" certainly had a black-leather minimalism filtered through the Velvets, but with strangled basslines and dour vocals from Montgomery, The Pin Group also shared more than a few passing glances at Joy Division. By the time The Pin Group got to their second single "Coat," (released later in 1981) the Velvets jangle had been engulfed in a black-hole of nervous gloom that hints at Montgomery's drone-rock impressionism from the early '90s onward. That single sported a clever Andy Warhol ripoff by replacing the Velvet Underground banana with a pop-art sequence of Kiwis, but the B side to that single, "Jim", situates the band at their bleakest, with a puritanically dark punk sermon that foreshadowed the emotionally draining dynamics of Slint by about a decade.
Ambivalence marks the second anthology of The Pin Group's short but hugely influential career which lasted less than 12 months. Everything from the first anthology (an eponymous cd released on Siltbreeze back in 1997) is reprised on the vinyl of Ambivalence, including the two covers - the smartly chosen "Hurricane Fighter Plane" and the unwise "Low Rider." Don't let the latter spoil the majesty of the rest of the album, which also features a bonus cd of a live show from July 1981 with a couple of tracks that had been unreleased elsewhere. Recommended? You bet your ass!
MPEG Stream: "Power"
MPEG Stream: "Jim"
MPEG Stream: "Ambivalence II"
MPEG Stream: "When I Tell You"

SLAVES, THE Spirits Of The Sun (Digitalis) lp 19.98
Last year, when we listed the Paradigms cd of Grey Angel by The Slaves, we lamented that the band had already ceased to exist. They had only produced two full albums (the aforementioned Grey Angel and the currently out of print Ocean On Ocean, which will get reissued on 2lp in early fall 2012) and a mini-cassette, all of which were thoroughly brilliant amalgams of ethereal shoegaze and doom-tinged heaviness, akin to Lovesliescrushing genetically re-engineered to sound like Barn Owl. Fortunately, the declaration of the defunct-ness of The Slaves was indeed premature, as the Portland duo of Barbara Kinzle and Birch Cooper have returned and released this epic lp Spirits Of The Sun for Digitalis! The hiatus (which, seemed to be the result of the, um, romantic disentanglement betwixt the two) didn't change The Slaves' sound all that much, with elegantly fuzzed out synth melodies girding the liturgical, somber heaviness suspended upon the slow-motion crawl of the songs. Both Kinzle and Cooper intertwine wordless vocals around the fundamental tunes, which emote with the best of sound poems from Grouper but also align with plainsong chants from forgotten cathedrals. On top of all of this, they thoroughly smother everything in a beautifully luminescent blur of dream-pop / shoegazed noise. The album's opener "III" explodes with a dense accretion of guitar noise that pops in stark relief against the languid vocal chorales. "River" and "The Field" melt together with "III" to form the first side of the album with its oceanic heaviness of synth and guitar dronescaping. "Born Into Light" is a side long majestic epic that blossoms with much more blistering guitar noise searing through the melodic synth backbone, all of which deflates back to a nocturne of vocal incantations. Totally beautiful and totally recommended!
MPEG Stream: "River"
MPEG Stream: "Born Into Light"

THOUGHT BROADCAST s/t (Olde English Spelling Bee) lp 22.00
Quite the student of the obscure & forgotten histories of synth punk and industrial culture, Ravi Binning's Thought Broadcast firmly embraces the primitive technology and the vacated zeitgeist from 1979-1983. For Binning, the musical universe may have ceased to exist after SPK's major label dalliance on the unforgivably bad "Metal Dance," but he still carves out plenty of room to operate alongside The Units, Factrix, and Club Moral. As we heard last on the super limited Phaserprone 7" released earlier in 2012, Binning has at his disposal a collection of primitive monosynths and drum machines, possibly of vintage origin, possibly reverse engineered through modern technology, possibly new circuits designed to sound old. No matter what the means of production might be, his sound is decidedly primitive, with the simplest of minor-chord melodies, the most zombified of arpeggiations, and the tinniest of mechanical rhythms filtered from Conrad Schnitzler through TG and MB, all of it swamped with tape hiss and scabrous noise errors. How could Binning not record this on the shittiest of 4-tracks? Highly compressed, garbled vocals bark in distant monotone at erratic intervals, with crude tape-delay manipulation further obfuscating whatever apocalyptic, anti-social, damaged epithets Binning may be uttering. It's brilliant in its bleakness and its re-animatation of that peculiar hollowed-out industrial sound.
MPEG Stream: "Fortune Teller"

COLECLOUGH, JONATHAN & MURMER Husk (ICR) cd 15.98
It's been far too long since we've heard anything new from the venerable British drone composer Jonathan Coleclough, so we figured we'd grab a few more copies of the his brilliant collaboration with Murmer (aka Patrick McGinley). Back in the early oughts, Coleclough began making regular contributions to McGinley's weekly radio series Framework for Resonance FM in London; and their continued communication sparked the interest for a collaboration. Much of the music found on Husk originated from semi-improvised sessions using source material as refrigerators, thunderstorms, sheep, car horns, ferryboats, windblown sand, and crackling charcoal; and it's a crap shoot to discern which of these electrically blurred drones hails from an overheating kitchen appliance or from farm animals. Not that any of that really matters, as the art of Coleclough and McGinley is in their alchemy, transforming the commonplace into the celestial (albeit, a very dark and very cold heavenly body). Throbbing drones of low end harmonics are joined by secondary sustained timbres which undulate as polyamorous tangles, spreading rhizomes, and slippery knots bristling with tactility and spotted with plenty of hints of the organic. Each of the four tracks proposes a variation on glassine drones counterpointed by rasping textures, at times hedging for the subdued drama of smoldering crescendos and others the sublime stare at glacial immobility. Coleclough's work has always been exceptional, and his collaboration with Murmer is no different! Highly recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Husk"
MPEG Stream: "Fieldwork"
MPEG Stream: "Germ"

JE SUIS LE PETIT CHEVALIER Age Of Wonder (Shelter Press ) lp 22.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The monicker of Felicia Atkinson's solo project hails from Nico's Desert Shore, that mysteriously bleak 1970 album by the Velvet Underground's troubled chanteuse; and a similarly poetic mysteriousness oozes from Atkinsons' deconstructed songs. Age Of Wonder is the second piece of vinyl for Je Suit Le Petit Chevalier, strengthening her work through a handful of limited cassettes and cd-r out of an amorphous droning psychedelia and into a smoldering intense alchemy of allegorical post-ambience. On this spooky, hypnotic, and harrowing album conjured through ever-shifting, ever-blossoming, ever-defalting soundscapes, she references the psychotropic holiness of Fursaxa, the deep-sleep surrealism of Motion Sickness Of Time Travel, and the expository minimalism of Taj Mahal Travellers. Voice, synths, loops, and electronics are the tools at her disposal, which she uses to build sprawling passages of sodden drones brightened by twinkling synths playing half-melodies and accentuated by her narcoleptic vocals cycling through wordless, but emotively sad lullablies alternating with spectral bellowings swathed in deep, washed-out reverb. The layered accretion of plainsong vocalizations and dank atmopsherics opaquely reimagines that which is natural, mystical, metaphysical, and/or mundane, always positioned as something of a mirror looking back to the human psyche as unknowable and existentially sublime. Brilliantly done.
MPEG Stream: "The First Forest"
MPEG Stream: "Fever Dunes"

DEATH AND VANILLA s/t (Hands In The Dark / Kalligrammofon) lp 23.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
BACK IN STOCK! We thought these might be out of print, and we probably scored the very last copies of this brilliant album, which has bafflingly eluded the hype-machine.
Death And Vanilla are a Swedish haunted-pop duo who have found themselves caught in the vortex of retro-futurism circa 1969. On the one hand, they've got a good grip on the baroque psychedelia of the United States Of America, Free Design, and even some of the more woolly tracks that Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg produced; and on the other, they're keen on the whole library music phenomenon augmenting their songs with plenty of sparkling synths, crackling radiophonic samples, EVP recordings (yup, that is Raymond Cass, we hear!), and tripped-out-to-space production tricks that would be right out of the Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire playbooks. There's even a track on this album called "Library Goblin"! If you might think all of this seems like the same strategy that Broadcast employed on their highly acclaimed collaborations with The Focus Group back in 2009-2010, you'd be pretty spot on. Even the unnamed female vocalist for Death And Vanilla sounds an awful lot like Broadcast's Trish Keenan, with her breathy delivery and unexpected melodies which soar above the monochromatic lullaby of many of the songs. As sacrosanct as it may seem, Death And Vanilla may be better songwriters than Broadcast; their cinematic pop gem "Cul-De-Sac" should be in the running for poptune of 2012 for sure with its complex interweave of harpsichord, vibraphone, fuzzed guitar, strutting basslines, and shuffling rhythms all driven by the vocal harmonies, which transitions rather deftly into the far more experimental avant-pop number "Sombambulists" which drifts aptly towards a dreamy headspace of loping basslines and percolating synths all bathed in sound-dissolving reverb. The filmic references also abound on tracks like "The Unseeing Eye" and the aforementioned "Library Goblin" as sublimely revisionist '60s pop numbers with bubbly vibraphones and seductive vocals amidst electronic filigree and charming synth blorp, before disintegrating into an otherworldly interlude of ethereal radio noise and cosmic vibrations. As such, it's a pretty irresistible album for any fan of Broadcast, Ghost Box, and Stereolab. The lp has already gone through a couple of pressings, but hopefully, we'll be able to keep this one in stock for a while. It's totally worth it!
MPEG Stream: "The Unseeing Eye"
MPEG Stream: "Cul De Sac"
MPEG Stream: "Rituals"

AUBRY, GILLES s6t8r (Winds Measure Recordings) cd 11.98
BACK IN STOCK! Up until we got a hold of this disc a while back we'd never carried anything from Winds Measure Recordings; but that will certainly be changing, as this is a label with an excellent ear for the finer points of dronesmear sound-art and an equally excellent eye for letterpressed packaging. So, we started with the stellar manipulated field recording work from Swiss-born / Berlin-based sound artist Gilles Aubry, who ran a space in Berlin dedicated to experimental music called Stralau 68. The space unfortunately closed in 2007, but it seemed to have been a nexus of activity for noise, aktionism, avant-rock, live-wire electronics, and whatnot. Perhaps as a final act within the emptied space, Aubry recorded the resonance of the room, capturing all sorts of resonant drones, tones, hums, and buzzes intrinsic to the space outside of its former use as a performance venue. The first of three pieces on this album centers on the rasping frequencies from the industrial air vents matching wind-blown recordings from within what sounds like a huge concrete structure. Here Aubry's work attains the acousmatic aesthetic that the finest Francisco Lopez pieces of minimalism seek. The second piece is far more dynamic, with thrumming rumble grounding an interwoven drone of pierced frequencies and jarring movements from creaking metal doors, bellowing hisses of infernal air, and scrabbling textures. It's unsettled and ominous, something of a hybrid between the end-times collages of Tarab and the late period bleakness of Lustmord. The final piece continues with the scraped abrasions and elongated drones of toxic environmental frequencies. Absolutely brilliant stuff!
As we mentioned, Winds Measure's packaging is a thing of beauty, here with an elegant folio of letterpressed text on thick white paper with a set of abstracted smears printed precisely in a pale pale grey. Some of the finer letterpressed work we've seen! Put it all together in a small edition of just about 300 copies. Highly recommended!
MPEG Stream: "part 1"
MPEG Stream: "part 2"
MPEG Stream: "part 3"

SCHICKERT, GUNTER Uberfallig (Bureau B) lp 23.00
YES! We're big fans of lesser-known krautrock guitarist Gunter Schickert (who also did production work with Klaus Schulze, like, for Japan's Far East Family Band). As soon as we heard that his Uberfallig album was getting a new reissue, we knew it was going to have to be a Record Of The Week. We've been in love with this record forever, referencing it and Schickert plenty of times in other reviews when we want to cite something incredibly atmospheric and minimalistically trance inducing from deep in the krautrock zone. There was a previous cd edition of this we stocked years ago, but that's been out of print for ages. Now Germany's industrious Bureau B label have stepped in and added this rare late-krautrock masterpiece to their ongoing, essential series of reissues of essential kraut / kosmishe albums. And it's on both digipak cd *and* vinyl now as well!
Uberfallig was Schickert's second album, originally issued in 1979 on the Sky label, the follow up to his 1974 Brain debut Samtvogel. It's hard to believe somebody this good didn't record more, or with other people, but we're only aware of a couple later recordings that have ever surfaced. Here on Uberfallig, Schickert's exceptionally hypnotic space-echo guitar work, similar to Manuel Gottsching of Ashra, is matched by fascinating rhythmic pulsations, at times recalling prime Can-like velocities or the circular bubbliness of aQ faves AR & Machines, and some Pink Floyd Meddle era pastoral psych vibes as well. And it's mostly just Schickert (guitar, voice) and a few friends (drums and vocals) plus nature sounds, deftly deployed.
Opener "Puls" is worth the price of admission alone. It does indeed pulse, for nearly 16 epic minutes, building from calmly rhythmic beginnings to pure hypno-guitar bliss, mixed with subtle, splashy, sploshy field recordings - evoking the idea of Schickert and his drummer colleague Charles M. Heuer wading upstream in the wilds somewhere as their music plays. That begins the recurrent watery theme found on this album, an ever present liquid watery ambience, the sounds of wind and rain and surf and babbling brooks woven in among the "actual" instruments. The cover image of an intense looking Schickert suggests this too, his visage overlaid with what looks like the play of light on the surface of water.
The second cut, "In Der Zeit", is a shorter, folkier number, with more surf-sounds and bird calls and a gentle, hushed female vocal, accompanying Schickert's pleasant, repeating acoustic guitar motif. So nice.
Track three, "Apricot Brandy II", as some may guess from the name, is a sequel to the first track on Schickert's debut Samtvogel (wish we still had a reissue of that - maybe Bureau B will do something about that, too). Again with a watery intro, then the nervous ticking of drumsticks, heralding a quietly unfurling, slightly sinister and suspenseful 12 and a half minute, gently percolating proto-post-rock trip. We're hearing some Can circa Tago Mago, and Tortoise and Circle, too, especially with the murmuring vocals chanting "Apricot Brandy" amidst other drones and moans. It's all druggy and delicate, moody and mesmeric. Quite the tour de force, coming to a close with strange samples and lovely crackling.
If that wasn't enough, the album ends with even more haunting mesmer, the aptly titled, the 8+ minute long "Wanderer", slow and spooky at first, with more of that tick-tock drumming and watery splashes. It's got a twilight sound to it, so beautiful and mysterious and mesmeric, like this whole amazing, organic, echo-laden album.
Includes, along with credits and lyrics, new 2012 liner notes from Schickert's contemporary Asmus Tietchens, in both English and German, and also an interesting note from Schickert, explaining that some of this music was used on the soundtrack to a film about the gay community in New York called Brooklyn 11238, which we'd never have guessed...
While we'll state that this is reissue definitely something crucial for fans of Agitation Free, AR & Machines, Moebius & Rodelius, Michael Rother, You, Ashra, and latter-day krautrockers Village Of Savoonga, we should also make clear that this is NOT just for krautrock collector nerds - even if you've NEVER heard a krautrock record before, we'd still recommend this one, obscure as it is. It's that good.
MPEG Stream: "Puls"
MPEG Stream: "In Der Zeit"
MPEG Stream: "Apricot Brandy II"

KONER, THOMAS Novaya Zemlya (Touch) cd 15.98
Novaya Zemlya is a grand statement. But then again, Thomas Koner doesn't operate in any scale other than monumental. All of his albums (barring the somewhat lackluster La Barca from 2003) speak through the gasping drones of a bleak existentialism. For Koner, the human condition is mirrored in the environment around us, especially those rugged, barren locales at the poles, with his isolationist smears of grey sounds alluding to water, ice, permafrost, wind, radiation, and vast empty spaces above the Arctic Circle. The environmental site for this album is a suitably inhospitable Russian archipelago jutting far out into the Arctic Ocean toward the North Pole. During the arms race of the Cold War, the Soviet Union used Novaya Zemlya as a nuclear test site, dropping the Tsar Bomba in 1961 on the landmass, which was permanently scarred by the largest atomic detonation in the history of the world. The thin layer of nuclear fallout which has buried itself in the frozen tundra of Novaya Zemlya commingles with radioactive isotopes from poorly managed storage facilities, sunken reactors, and scuttled submarines.
Koner describes this landscape through its hazardous potential, which is so much worse than the current situation. With global warming, the methane gas spewed from a melted permafrost will lift all of that radioactive material into the atmosphere and send that along the prevailing winds across western Russian over Scandinavia and into continental Europe. Perhaps, a greater catastrophe than Chernobyl. In speaking to that potential, Koner manifests pockets of near silence throughout the album with his signature tectonic rumblings and stealth-bomber frequencies gliding beyond the event horizon into the realm of the audible. Darkened crumblings of earthen material pocks the beginning of the first in a trilogy of tracks, sounding almost like slabs of ice thunderously collapsing into the sea. Drones swell and collapse into pools of resonant emptiness, broken on the second track by a disembodied shortwave radio transmission of garbled voices. The album returns to those cold, contemplative sounds until the end of the album draws near, when Koner introduces a few elegant, melodic plucks from what might be a harp. For all of the foreboding that looms throughout, the end is almost hopeful that humanity might just sort out this global warming puzzle. But then again, we might not; and then, we're fucked.
An easy contender for 2012's album of the year.
MPEG Stream: "Novaya Zemlya 1"
MPEG Stream: "Novaya Zemlya 2"

MOTION SICKNESS OF TIME TRAVEL s/t (Spectrum Spools) 2cd 23.00
NOW AVAILABLE ON CD!!! Double cd in fact.
Rachel Evans brings her humid, oozing synth explorations to Spectrum Spools, which has become quite the launching pad for a wide array of outsider electronics as curated through the judicious ear of Emeralds' John Elliott. The name of Evans' project is lifted from William S. Burroughs' novel The Soft Machine; and with her decentering, liminal drift of half-formed / half-dissolved constructions, she finds herself peering between the kudzu-encrusted fields of her native Lagrange, Georgia and the imagined soundscapes of a primordial Gondwanaland (time-travel for her seems to go backwards in time, not forwards). After close to a couple dozen releases (mostly in the micro-edition format), she's either gotten the doseage right on the Dramamine, or she's acclimated to the queasy side effects of jumping between time and space, as this eponymous record isn't nearly as woozy and narcotized as her previous work. "The Dream" starts out quite dark, with backward-masked slashes that parallel the thickets of razored noise from Current 93's early collage work; but she quickly escapes from these bad vibes into a lengthy daydream of shimmering ambience laced with bright, effervescent sequences and some rather Vangelis-like triumphant synth stabs. "The Center" spins around a latticework of crystalline sequences that blur into massive, oceanic pools of rippling sound, with her voice looped and smeared into an ethereal bliss. "Summer Of The Cat's Eye" is a mellow impressionist piece of synth jamminess akin to Tangerine Dream's wanderings across the keyboard. "One Perfect Moment" is very reverential of John Elliott's work in Emeralds and all of his solo projects, with a sequenced glissando streaming beneath the slow unfurling of bittersweet tonal chords and Evans' pleading vocal delivery. Easily, the most arresting track she's recorded to date, rounding out another fantastic album from Evans' Motion Sickness Of Time Travel.
MPEG Stream: "The Center"
MPEG Stream: "One Perfect Moment"

SCHICKERT, GUNTER Uberfallig (Bureau B) cd 17.98
YES! We're big fans of lesser-known krautrock guitarist Gunter Schickert (who also did production work with Klaus Schulze, like, for Japan's Far East Family Band). As soon as we heard that his Uberfallig album was getting a new reissue, we knew it was going to have to be a Record Of The Week. We've been in love with this record forever, referencing it and Schickert plenty of times in other reviews when we want to cite something incredibly atmospheric and minimalistically trance inducing from deep in the krautrock zone. There was a previous cd edition of this we stocked years ago, but that's been out of print for ages. Now Germany's industrious Bureau B label have stepped in and added this rare late-krautrock masterpiece to their ongoing, essential series of reissues of essential kraut / kosmishe albums. And it's on both digipak cd *and* vinyl now as well!
Uberfallig was Schickert's second album, originally issued in 1979 on the Sky label, the follow up to his 1974 Brain debut Samtvogel. It's hard to believe somebody this good didn't record more, or with other people, but we're only aware of a couple later recordings that have ever surfaced. Here on Uberfallig, Schickert's exceptionally hypnotic space-echo guitar work, similar to Manuel Gottsching of Ashra, is matched by fascinating rhythmic pulsations, at times recalling prime Can-like velocities or the circular bubbliness of aQ faves AR & Machines, and some Pink Floyd Meddle era pastoral psych vibes as well. And it's mostly just Schickert (guitar, voice) and a few friends (drums and vocals) plus nature sounds, deftly deployed.
Opener "Puls" is worth the price of admission alone. It does indeed pulse, for nearly 16 epic minutes, building from calmly rhythmic beginnings to pure hypno-guitar bliss, mixed with subtle, splashy, sploshy field recordings - evoking the idea of Schickert and his drummer colleague Charles M. Heuer wading upstream in the wilds somewhere as their music plays. That begins the recurrent watery theme found on this album, an ever present liquid watery ambience, the sounds of wind and rain and surf and babbling brooks woven in among the "actual" instruments. The cover image of an intense looking Schickert suggests this too, his visage overlaid with what looks like the play of light on the surface of water.
The second cut, "In Der Zeit", is a shorter, folkier number, with more surf-sounds and bird calls and a gentle, hushed female vocal, accompanying Schickert's pleasant, repeating acoustic guitar motif. So nice.
Track three, "Apricot Brandy II", as some may guess from the name, is a sequel to the first track on Schickert's debut Samtvogel (wish we still had a reissue of that - maybe Bureau B will do something about that, too). Again with a watery intro, then the nervous ticking of drumsticks, heralding a quietly unfurling, slightly sinister and suspenseful 12 and a half minute, gently percolating proto-post-rock trip. We're hearing some Can circa Tago Mago, and Tortoise and Circle, too, especially with the murmuring vocals chanting "Apricot Brandy" amidst other drones and moans. It's all druggy and delicate, moody and mesmeric. Quite the tour de force, coming to a close with strange samples and lovely crackling.
If that wasn't enough, the album ends with even more haunting mesmer, the aptly titled, the 8+ minute long "Wanderer", slow and spooky at first, with more of that tick-tock drumming and watery splashes. It's got a twilight sound to it, so beautiful and mysterious and mesmeric, like this whole amazing, organic, echo-laden album.
Includes, along with credits and lyrics, new 2012 liner notes from Schickert's contemporary Asmus Tietchens, in both English and German, and also an interesting note from Schickert, explaining that some of this music was used on the soundtrack to a film about the gay community in New York called Brooklyn 11238, which we'd never have guessed...
While we'll state that this is reissue definitely something crucial for fans of Agitation Free, AR & Machines, Moebius & Rodelius, Michael Rother, You, Ashra, and latter-day krautrockers Village Of Savoonga, we should also make clear that this is NOT just for krautrock collector nerds - even if you've NEVER heard a krautrock record before, we'd still recommend this one, obscure as it is. It's that good.
MPEG Stream: "Puls"
MPEG Stream: "In Der Zeit"
MPEG Stream: "Apricot Brandy II"

CHASSE, LOREN & MICHAEL NORTHAM The Otolith (The Helen Scarsdale Agency) cd 14.98
BACK IN STOCK!!
Throughout the Marin Headlands just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, the coastal mountains are dotted with countless bunkers which were built during World War II in anticipation of the Japanese invasion that never came. Nearly 70 years later, these bunkers have been weathered by wind, fog, rain, and of course the sodden folks who tromp through the Headlands on a daily basis. These concrete structures with small portals facing the Pacific all have amazing reverberant qualities; and it shouldn't be a surprise that the more frequented bunkers and passageways inevitably echo with the sound of children dying to hear their own voices tossed back to them. The Headlands have been a favored destinations for Loren Chasse, who has sought many of the lesser known and lesser travelled environs for field recordings and jam sessions that would eventually work their way into all things Jewelled Antler (Thuja, Franciscan Hobbies, The Blithe Sons, Of, Ov, etc.). In his recordings, Chasse extracts a profound mystery and grand sense of wonder from that echo, the bunker's grit, the soft recurrence of surf bleeding through those walls, and the distant bleat of a foghorn.
Back in 2005, Chasse took his fellow globetrotting wanderer Michael Northam to the Battery Townsley where the two set up long string wires and various handheld instruments to begin a series of recordings which took a few years to complete after Northam left California. The two did manage to meet up once again in Estonia, there exploring the Soviet industrial ruins that pock the Estonian landscape with similar intentions. Out of the bramble of overgrown weeds, rebar, concrete, dirt, rock, wind, and water, Chasse and Northam straddle those psychedelic leanings of Jewelled Antler and the more studied aspects of minimalism.
The Otolith begins with an acoustic clamor, as if billions of iron filings were brushing against each other under the direction of a couple of hefty magnets, before shifting into a harmonium blur of sustained tones hinting at a melody well beneath these clouds of tousled energy. Softer drones and Aeolian fragments flutter forth out of bowed strings and gently tapped gongs amidst a golden hue of opiated atmospherics. Scrabblings across the surfaces of leaves, rocks, mud, and metal fuse with field recordings of wind and water, as a continuing demonstration of Chasse's alchemy with naturalist sound to bring forth stately ragas and dreamtime psychedelic lullabies. Chasse and Northam work amazingly well together, having produced this thoroughly amazing album. Think Popul Vuh, Parson Sound, Pandit Pran Nath, Harry Bertoia, and Erc La Casa. Totally beautiful and mesmerizing.
MPEG Stream: "The Broken House"
MPEG Stream: "Spinning Cloth"
MPEG Stream: "The Spectral Harvest"

CHROMATICS Night Drive (Deluxe) (Italians Do It Better) 2lp 22.00
BACK IN STOCK AT LONG LAST!
So stoked that this awesome album by the Chromatics is available on vinyl now and with a whole side filled with unreleased tracks.
Ooooh Ahhhhh! This one has been sizzling in our ears pretty much on endless repeat since it showed up at the store. Chromatics have undergone a pretty radical change from their early herky-jerky no-wave inspired beginnings, as showcased on the amazing and scene defining After Dark comp that we recently listed, and are still so in love with. Chromatics now have a sound that is much more sensual, subdued and spaced out. And we have to say we are loving this new direction. I definitely suits them so much more naturally than their noisier punky past.
With a sound much more rooted in early drugged out disco and '80s Euro-pop, Night Drive is sparse and melancholic enough to reel in folks whose taste usually falls on the darker end of the spectrum yet with songs so damn sexy and enticing that those of us with dance and pop leanings are seduced by their sound as well. With Ruth Radalet's vocals sounding like they are being delivered in a dark room filled with fog and smoke, there is such an intoxicating late night vibe that Chromatics tap into which feels so vacant and so sexy in the best possible way. They take on the daunting task of covering Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" and manage to make it their own, no small feat as that is a song with such deep meaning for so many of us. So damn good!
MPEG Stream: "Night Drive"
MPEG Stream: "The Killing Spree"
MPEG Stream: "Running Up That Hill"

COLLEY, JOE Anthem (Misanthropic Agenda) lp 23.00
Anthem collects two sets of long out-of-print 3" inch singles from Joe Colley's earlier days, right after he shed the Crawl Unit moniker in the early oughts. There's the titular track which was originally released on C.I.P, which came out in 2001 and which we had been able to stock back in the day through Mr. Colley himself. The flipside contains all of the material from the uncomfortably packaged triple-business-card cd-r entitled Triptych For Paranoia Calibration, released through the terminally underground California noise label Banned Productions. The first side, subtitled "Static For Empty Life", lifts itself out of deep rumblings with streaming, cold gray ribbons of electrical fizzings that subtly phase across the stereo field. These physically active drones build up to a sublime chorus of electrical field hummings, that deflate into silence before throbbing mechanical stabs of low-bit-rate noise drive to the end of the piece. Where moments of "Anthem" are relatively placid and almost pretty (for a Joe Colley track, that's saying something!), "Triptych" is a torturous affair of brutalist squiggles, damaged circuit-bending techniques, mistreated electronics, and dead-line tones, all of which get caught in out of phase tape loops. Brilliantly toxic work, as always. Limited to just 200 copies.

MEIRINO, FRANCISCO & MICHAEL ESPOSITO Ghosts Of Case File 142 (Firework Editions) cd 13.98
EVP research is commonplace within the catalog of Firework Editions, a Swedish label run in part by the conceptual artist Leif Elggren. One of Elggren's more infamous projects is the Kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland which occupies a liminal political space between the boundaries of countries; but within the magisterial constitution, Elgaland-Vargaland annexes the psychic realm of dreams and even goes so far as to abolish death. With this proclamation, the kingdom offers citizenship to ghosts, spirits, and apparitions; and seeks communion with such entities through EVP - Electronic Voice Phenomenon - whereby voices of unknown origin mysteriously appear on the electronic mediums of tape, radio, and digital recorders. EVP researchers like Chicago's Michael Esposito claim these voices to originate from spirits beyond the grave; and there's quite of lot of late night entertainment coming from their spooky if questionable paranormal research. Esposito seems to hold more of a metaphysical and poetic agenda in his work, by reaching out to the sound art community as a crucible for his admittedly unnerving recordings. He's collaborated with the aforementioned Elggren, fellow Elgaland-Vargaland cohort CM von Hausswolff, John Duncan, FM Einheint, and now Francisco Meirino.
Esposito's role in this collaboration with the electro-acoustic artist Francisco Meirino is that of a taxonomist, with Meirino doing most of the heavy lifting on the album. Meirino made a series of field recordings in a former school of anatomy in his native Switzerland; and upon hearing something odd in the recordings, he passed everything onto Esposito, who in turn discovered over 30 incidents of EVP in Meirino's original recordings. Those discovered events became the inspiration and source material for Meirino's composition which blisters with static bursts of noise, caustic flares of electricity, and hissing fields of magnetic disturbances. Amidst these jarring events (which come together as a something not dissimilar to the Hafler Trio, Joe Colley, or G*Park), Meirino cycles through the EVP material in repetitive phrases. It's still not all that easy to hear what Esposito claims to be in these recordings, but the mechanoid repetitions lend to a very cold and disembodied aesthetic which couples perfectly with Meirino's splinterings of electro-acoustic sound. Esposito may have been the inspiration for the album; but it's Meirino who makes it all sound so damn good.
MPEG Stream: "Ghosts Of Case File 142 (excerpt 1)"
MPEG Stream: "Ghosts Of Case File 142 (excerpt 2)"
MPEG Stream: "Ghosts Of Case File 142 (excerpt 3)"

D.A.F. (DEUTSCH-AMERIKANISCHEN FREUNDSCHAFT) Produkt Der Deutsch - Amerikanischen Freundschaft (Bureau B) cd 17.98
Ah-ha! The first D.A.F. record! And boy, was it quite a surprise to hear this one. D.A.F. began in 1978 as a post-krautrock outfit from Dusseldorf, with Robert Gorl, Kurt "Pyrolator" Dahlke, Wolfgang Spelmans, Michael Kemner, and Gabi Delgado originally calling themselves You; but with another German band snatching up the name and releasing the mighty fine album Electric Day in the same year, they decided upon Deutsch-Amerikanischen Freundschaft as the new name. A couple of band members were not all too pleased with Gabi Delgado's vocals and lyrics, and he was promptly sacked after their first attempt in the studio. Delgado returned to the band a year later when a few of his detractors left, and he became the iconic frontman for the stripped down D.A.F. with Robert Gorl. That incarnation of D.A.F. spawned an aggressive synth-punk sound that dominated the more abrasive side of new wave throughout the '80s; but this instrumental, motorik album is an entirely different beast. While electronics do make some interesting punctuations to the D.A.F. sound, they were fundamentally a damaged art-rock band with a rhythm section well versed in the classic Can, Neu!, and early Kraftwerk records from earlier in the decade, but they also exploded with slashing guitars, pummelling basslines, and an aggressive angularity that responded to the American contemporaries like DNA and Pere Ubu. Could this influence from American degenerate art-rock be an explanation for the name of the band? In any case, threads of this first D.A.F. record certainly look forward to the likes of Sonic Youth and Circle. The album is a collection of 22 untitled extracts from what seemed to be an exhausting recording session of constantly accelerating rhythmic marches with jagged-toothed guitar riffs that get pretty heavy and churning at times (even reminding us of instru-metallers Gore!), with plenty of interludes of amplifier feedback and spark-plug noise bursts. Part krautrock, part no-wave and new-wave, all rad. Not what we would have expected from their first album, but this is totally an excellent record!
MPEG Stream: "Untitled 14"
MPEG Stream: "Untitled 16"
MPEG Stream: "Untitled 18"

VESTALS Forever Falling Towards The Sky (Root Strata) lp 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Some folks may know Lisa McGee from Barn Owl side project, Higuma, or her vocal work on Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's Love Is A Stream, or perhaps even Portraits, the zen-minded supergroup of Bay Area improvisationalists. Truth is, McGee has been a muse behind a lot of great recordings in that circle so it's really nice to see her finally in the spotlight via her debut solo effort, Vestals. In some way McGee is channeling Rachel Brook from early nineties Bristol bands, Flying Saucer Attack and Movietone, in her ethereal noise-pop laden songs replete shimmering electric guitar, and featuring Trevor Montgomery's bass and partner Evan Caminiti's bowed guitarscapes. The atmosphere of desolate spaciousness and the smoldering shoegazed distortion that ripple through the Higuma recordings are certainly present; but in Vestals, McGee pushes the song-writing to the forefront with chiming hypno-drone-rock bliss akin to Roy Montgomery channelling the Velvets, which thrums and drones most prominently on the album's lengthy mantra "Of Ripples." But she can also shift into quite the chanteuse, as on the crushed-velvet noise-pop of "Forever Falling" and "In Waking Dreams" where McGee's voice carries the songs to stratospheric crescendos through a hook-laden bliss. A gorgeous debut that limited to a mere 300 copies!
MPEG Stream: "Forever Falling"
MPEG Stream: "Between Worlds"

GATE The Dew Line (MIE) 2lp 34.00
A long while back we listed this on cd, easily one of our favorite noise-rock / noise-pop records ever, a mesmerizing noise-pop-drone gem from the Dead C's Michael Morley, an improbable mix of NZ noise whir and skree, minimal drifting drone and lilting indie pop. Think the Dead C at their very poppiest, crossed with Sentridoh at its most minimal and raw, a slab of lush, sculpted melody-infused indie rock rendered as something much more abstract and avant, but with a core that's pure pop genius. Originally released way back in 1994, and reissued again on cd a few years ago, we're not sure this has ever been on vinyl before, at least until now. And this new version, besides being remastered and packaged in a swank heavy gatefold jacket, also tacks on FIVE bonus tracks, all of which sound like they could have been included with the original version, and make this well worth buying again, even for those of us who already own an extremely well worn digital version. And if you've never heard the Dew Line before, you are in for a serious, perhaps life altering, sonic treatÉ
Gate's Golden record, a singles collection, was one of our favorite 'noise' records ever, and we do hear a lot of that Golden 'noise' in this chunk of damaged deconstructed pop. Long drawn out expanses of crumbling guitars, buried-in-the-mix sad boy vocals, all very raw and lo-fi, but strangely lush and heavy in that way only blown out bedroom recordings seem to sound. It's a little like Lou Barlow if he was raised on Throbbing Gristle and Suicide instead of indie rock. Guitar jangles transformed into thick sprawling atonal riffage, verse chorus verse transformed into verse verse verse, and the vocals adding a strange sweet sadness.
Dense clouds of electronic glitch and amp buzz seem to surround everything on The Dew Line, the riffs more textural than melodic, long stretches of whirring lo-fi organ, mournful and almost funereal, strange haunting minimal percussion, drifting alien FX, disembodied guitars unfurling crunchy textures and barely there melodies. Many of the tracks are vocal-less haunting guitarscapes, riffs and layers, looped and repetitive, extended into grinding washed out mantras. Cyclical and gorgeously hypnotic. Which makes the tracks with vocals sound all the more poppy.
Especially "Have Not", which is essentially a single, super catchy, languid distorted guitar riff, looped and cyclical, minor key, sounding a bit like a slowed down drum-less Rein Sanction, with drawled Neil Young / Dinosaur Jr. style double tracked vocals, laid back, emotive, and hauntingly monotone. Nearly 13 minutes long, a single riff, a subtly changing vocal line, but it's just so mysterious, sad and perfect, the whole record could easily have been a 70 minute version of this track only and we would have been just as happyÉ
But then we would have missed out on the melancholy minimalism of "Needed All Words", a lonely vocal line, drifting above a glacial sea of organ drone and fractured effects, or the looped stuttering industrial buzzscape of the title track, or the divine washed out crumbling grind of "Triphammer", the final song, which manages to turn 3 minutes of abstract distorted riffage, into a dense chunk of dark moodiness.
And even sans the newly added bonus tracks, this would still be absolutely required listening and a shoe-in for Record Of The Week, but the nearly twenty minutes of extra stuff only seals the deal. There's "Sunshine", a crunchy, distorted chunk of detuned dirgery, the vocals plaintive, and way up in the mix, the drums stumbling, the guitars thick and corrosive, the whole thing sounding like some live Sonic Youth B-side, while "Ives" is a sprawling expanse of churning rhythmic murk, laced with streaks of electronics, wild squalls of psych-noise guitar, all dragged along by a seriously 'rawk' riff, although that riff is buried beneath an avalanche of noise and skree. "Sadness Sings" is another one of those impossibly noise drenched guitar heavy indie rock/noise pop dirge, like a looser more abstract take on the above mentioned "Have Not", the same sort of sad boy bedroom broodiness, which is pushed even further on "Bitcher", which slows it waaaaay down, adds a little Jandek-y outsider detuned warble, but Morley delivers some sweetly crooned vox, which balance the surrounding sounds, which seem to be melting, a warped drone-pop dirge, heavy on the flanger, and the crumbling dying-battery distortion, and then finally, the awesomely titled "Tuba Is Funny", a brief bit of effects drenched field recorded acoustic guitar driven balladry, that would have sounded out of place on some old Sentridoh record.
Obviously, WAY recommended. This record is old enough that for many of you, we're probably already preaching to the converted, but those extra tracks are some serious music nerd buried treasure, and the record sounds incredible, and again, if you're one of those people who somehow managed to miss out on this entirely, here's one more chance to sink deep into Morley's mysterious musical miserablsim.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Housed in a super swank heavy gatefold jacket!
MPEG Stream: "Millions"
MPEG Stream: "Needed All Words"
MPEG Stream: "Have Not"
MPEG Stream: "Sadness Sings [Bonus]"
MPEG Stream: "Bitcher [Bonus]"

ALOONALUNA Bunny (Hooker Vision) cassette 8.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Funny to discover a project from San Francisco by way of LaGrange, Georgia; but that's the way it goes some times. Aloonaluna is the one-woman project of Lynn Fister who landed her first cassette of thoroughly drugged-out drone-pop on the thoroughly drugged-out imprint Hooker Vision (run by Grant and Rachel Evans, of Nova Scotia Arms and Motion Sickness Of Time Travel respectively), and it's a warped gem of twisted psychedelic lullabies that seem to bridge the damaged tape resurgence with a Jewelled Antler style miasma of half-dreamt songs and half-remembered drones. She loops bells, guitars, field recordings, gristly synths, her own voice, and whatever else she can find into hazy, atmospheric songs that turn inward on many tracks (a la Grouper) but at times like on "Watercolor Rabbit" she breaks out a punchy drum machine to turn her somnambulant, stumbling songs into giddy, lo-fi dance numbers (sorta like Kwjaz remixing Julee Cruise). "Antarctica" could almost be her homage to Richard Pinhas' "Iceland" in terms of coldwave synth propulsion. Twelve tracks in all over this 45 minute tape. Nice stuff, but unfortunately this tape is already sold out at the source... so what we got now is all we'll ever get!

LINDSTROM, MATS Mig (Ideologic Organ) lp 22.00
The Swedish composer Mats Lindstrom is the studio director for the storied EMS studios in Stockholm, whose mission for the advancement of electro-acoustic music and sound art began way back in 1964. BJ Nilsen, Kevin Drumm, Brian Lustmord, and Stephen O'Malley all passed through the studios in their respective careers, alongside a plethora of more composerly types who we're not all that familiar with. While the connection was never made all that clear, it was probably during O'Malley's residency at EMS when he first met Lindstrom and became familiar with his work, which is now anthologized for the first time on O'Malley's imprint Ideologic Organ. Lindstrom's aesthetic harkens back to the classic era of musique concrete and post-serialist electronic composition from the '60s (e.g. Pierre Schaefer, Xenakis, Nordheim, etc.), playing with the metaphors of his sounds much more than the semantic detachment that usually embodies such acousmatic practices. Take for example the title track, which must refer to the Russian fighter jet, as the track was commissioned for an aviation museum in St. Petersburg and races forward and backward with jet engine roars, possibly simulated, possibly recorded, all of which is surgically cut with mechanical clank and industrial hum. The two IBM tracks clatter away with the anachronistic sounds of typewriters, rigorously collaged with bizzaro scrapes, gratings, and atonal tactile events more in keeping with the irr. app. (ext.) / Nurse With Wound realm of sonic fuckery. The finale is a demonic tape-piece of continuously ascending violin notes that could practically be a brilliant reworking of the 5000 Fingers of Dr. T soundtrack in the style of Penderecki. Excellent stuff!
MPEG Stream: "Mig"
MPEG Stream: "IBM I"
MPEG Stream: "Children Of Paradise"

MY BLOODY VALENTINE Isn't Anything (Sony UK) cd 24.00
Once again, the holy grail(s) / canon of 'shoegaze' indie rock, gets yet ANOTHER series of reissues, although these are THE ONES. As in the ones we've all been waiting for, the ones Kevin Shields has been slaving over for years, the ones that by now we can assume are PERFECT. Or at least perfect as Shields sees them, which is really all that matters when it comes to his music.
Whether anyone needs another copy of Isn't Anything is infinitely debatable, whether everyone needs at least one copy is absolutely not. A fantastic indie pop / shoegaze record, an album that will always be overshadowed by Loveless, the record to follow, but one that in its own way, is really just as good, sonically not as lush, but with some of the best songs MBV ever wrote. This new version doesn't contain any extra material, and no bonus tracks, so of the three MBV reissues it might be the least essential, at least in terms of replacing your old copy, but again, if you somehow DON'T have this, buy it now, you won't be sorry.
In the name of revisionist history, Isn't Anything stands as the transition album between the gilded jangle of Ecstasy and Wine and the radioluminescence of Loveless. My Bloody Valentine had begun to bury much of their emulation of '60s psychedelic pop in Sonic Youthish Mack-truck riffage and intertwining guitar haze that upstages the Velvet Underground strum-as-drone. Tracks like "Feed Me With Your Kiss" and "Sueisfine" thickly blur the sad lullaby vocals from Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher through overblown bass distortion and strangely uptempo rhythms. Yet, My Bloody Valentine will instantly glide out of these into the shoegazing drone-pop of something like "Lose My Breath" with its tone bending extended chords and lack of pronounced rhythms. Only a couple of the songs on Isn't Anything are as instantly memorable as those found on Loveless, but there are plenty of swirling dreamy-pop gems that make this album essential for shoegazing fans!
Housed in a mini lp style gatefold sleeve.
MPEG Stream: "Soft As Snow (But Warm Inside)"
MPEG Stream: "Lose My Breath"
MPEG Stream: "Cupid Come"
MPEG Stream: "(When You Wake) You're Still In A Dream"

MY BLOODY VALENTINE Loveless (Sony UK) 2cd 24.00
Once again, the holy grail(s) / canon of 'shoegaze' indie rock, gets yet ANOTHER series of reissues, although these are THE ONES. As in the ones we've all been waiting for, the ones Kevin Shields has been slaving over for years, the ones that by now we can assume are PERFECT. Or at least perfect as Shields sees them, which is really all that matters when it comes to his music.
Whether anyone needs ANOTHER copy of Loveless is infinitely debatable, whether everyone needs at least one copy is absolutely not. One of THEE most perfect indie rock records EVER, which pretty much single handedly defined 'shoegaze' and continues to influence band after band all these years later. This latest / ultimate reissue features TWO different versions on two different discs, one the original master from the analog tapes, the other from the DAT master, both nearly identical as far as we can tell, and to be honest, we didn't hear much difference between either of these new versions and one we already have, yet we still felt like we needed this new version, to hear it as it was 'meant' to be heard. Regardless, if you've managed to miss out on Loveless until now, might as well grab one and discover just what it is you've been missing. And if you're already a fan, well it depends on your nerdiness/obsessiveness, but if there WAS a record worth buying over again (and again), this would definitely be it.
Loveless stands at the pinnacle of the UK shoegazer movement of the early '90s also populated by Ride, Slowdive, Blind Mr. Jones, Lush, and dozens of lesser knowns on Creation and Cherry Red Records. Almost all of these bands were enthralled by '60s pop, extending Phil Spector's wall of sound into thick tapestries of distortion and reverberation that almost completely buried their distinctly pop structures. My Bloody Valentine was no exception, but were certainly the most adventurous in terms of production techniques and most definitely the best songwriters of the lot (though Ride and Slowdive did write some amazing songs) culminating with their masterpiece (and swansong) Loveless. Led by the intertwined guitars and vocals of the bleary eyed duo of Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher, My Bloody Valentine blurred what would normally be punk-as-fuck distortion into a velvety wash of sleepwalking sound, soothed further by their hushed lullabye vocals. Yet, My Bloody Valentine weren't just interested in lulling their audiences to sleep, as Loveless borrows more than a few tricks from the contemporary Manchester sound (Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, etc.) with their brilliant track "Soon" filled with rolling basslines and spry breakbeats.
That track along with the equally groovy-yet-dreamy Glider ep had been the basis for Simon Reynolds curious thesis that My Bloody Valentine had produced some of the earliest jungle tracks. More plausible was that MBV were one of the first rock bands to actively incorporate sampling into their production techniques. My Bloody Valentine had resampled their guitar feedback digitally to created strangely warbling layers of sound and allow for additional tools to build their bittersweet, melancholic melodies. Loveless may remain the final testament to the musical prowess of My Bloody Valentine, as Kevin Shields continues to state the claim that another album is in the works... well it's been in the works for well over a decade and has no signs of ever being realized. Nevertheless, this album *still* sounds totally fresh and wholly superior to all of the bands that have attempted to revive the My Bloody Valentine sound (Lilys, Swirlies, Flying Saucer Attack, Third Eye Foundation, Fennesz, Chessie, etc., etc., etc.).
Perhaps our opinion was best stated by a former aQuarian: "If you don't own it, we won't be mad, but you will certainly earn our pity." An earthshattering record. Period.
This new version comes housed in a swank mini lp style gatefold.
MPEG Stream: "Only Shallow"
MPEG Stream: "I Only Said"
MPEG Stream: "Sometimes"
MPEG Stream: "Soon"

DIMMER Ascent (Isounderscore) cd 12.98
Holy shit! This is a frightfully good piece of dark minimalism on par with Roland Kayn, Eliane Radigue, and the late period works from The Hafler Trio.
Dimmer is the collaborative project between Bay Area experimentalist Thomas Dimuzio and LAFMS icon Joseph Hammer, who have toured together on a semi-regular basis up and down the West Coast for the past decade or so. The two previous Dimmer albums were collected and edited from the numerous live gigs, documenting the real-time electronic synthesis from Dimuzio coupled with Hammer's tape loop manipulations. As impressive as Dimmer has been live and on those edited live recordings, we were completely floored by Ascent - their first collaborative venture into the studio. Restricting their sources to vintage analogue gear, Dimuzio and Hammer generate swarms of harmonic drones that they in turn filter through the abstracting tools of choice. For Dimuzio, it's his gear-junkie arsenal of digital samplers and sequencers; for Hammer, it's the humble tape deck. On the first couple of tracks, Dimmer issues deep cosmic tones with strange / strangulated fibrillations from Hammer's tape tricks that elongate, expand, and collapse in accordance with a grand, if slightly sinister vision of miniaturized symphonies for the birth and death of the universe. Gasping drones billowing with toxic fumes stream rapidly out of blackened voids with Dimuzio and Hammer making prolonged descents into near-silence, before rocketing forward with another grandiose swell of ever darkening compaction of processed synth tones. Where the album begins in the shimmeringly majesty of a Klaus Schulze composition, it ends much closer to something monstrous and cavernous like Lustmord. This is easily the best we've heard from either of these two stalwarts of the California avant-garde! Limited to 300 copies.
MPEG Stream: "Part Two"
MPEG Stream: "Part Five"
MPEG Stream: "Part Eight"

SWANS We Rose From Your Bed With The Sun In Our Head (Young God) 2cd 23.00
Swans are one of the few bands whose live recordings should be paid attention to; and in their lengthy career, a smattering of semi-authorized bootlegs and Gira-sanctioned live recordings trickled in and out of print, including the epic Feel Good Now 2lp documenting their Eastern European tour for Children Of God, the Swans Are Dead recordings from the final tour with Jarboe on board, and the charmingly titled album Public Castration Is A Good Idea. After the Swans Are Dead album was released, Michael Gira called it quits for a while; but his thirst for heavy pummelling percussion and discordant slabs of guitar noise proved greater than his desire to write beautifully plaintive country numbers. Swans reformed in 2011 with a magnificent fury evidenced on the album My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky; and Gira issued the marching orders shortly thereafter for Swans to head out on the road, a crew that included his original guitarist Normal Westberg. The tour was as relentless as Swans' music, with Gira and company crossing the globe in support of the album.
To support the record to follow My Father Will Guide Me, Gira issued a limited edition set of live recordings from that tour exclusively through the Young God Records website. That edition sold out so quickly that he issued a second pressing in a handsome double digipack with a much greater distribution. While the recording quality is exceptional, what's truly impressive is the brutal precision that Gira directs his band to pursue through the entire Swans catalogue. On this recording, there's also a great distribution of older material alongside most all of the cuts from My Father Will Guide Me. The highlights include the surging drone-rock groove of "Apostate" with Gira barking above his natural baritone and the Nietzchean commands that Gira bellows during the doom-thud of "Sex God Sex." The prettiest and most restrained number is "Your Property" originally written back in 1984 for the seminal album Cop, which would never be mistaken for being pretty or restrained. The difference in listening to Gira now as opposed to Gira some 15 years ago is that he had a huge chip on his shoulder needing to prove to the world that he was worth something. Now, he's fully confident in his abilities and in the choices he's made for his artistic career. He knows that Swans are awe-inspiring and terrifyingly great. So should you.
MPEG Stream: "Apostate (Live)"
MPEG Stream: "Sex God Sex (Live)"
MPEG Stream: "Eden Prison (Live)"

LOVESLIESCRUSHING Shiny Tiny Stars (Handmade Birds) lp 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Shiny Tiny Stars is another collection of archival, unreleased material from the deconstructed bliss-pop duo Lovesliescrushing. A couple years back, Projekt released a beautifully packaged 2cd entitled Girl Echo Suns Veils (it came housed in a silkscreened wooden box!), with half of the material culled from the demos that predated their first album and the other half being newly constructed pieces. The recordings here were created from 1991-97, obviously a very prolific period for the duo of Scott Cortez and Melissa Arpin-Duimstra; which also begs the question, will we ever again see any new recordings? It probably matters not, as any Lovesliescrushing material is welcome around these parts!
The Lovesliescrushing sound blossomed from a classic shoegaze template, but stuck to a decidedly lo-fi approach, layering and overdubbing soft noise, reverb, more soft noise, more reverb, all on a 4-track instead of something more akin to Kevin Shields' meticulous productions for Loveless. With the limitations of just 4 tracks, Lovesliescrushing swept the legs out from underneath the shoegaze 'song' - removing the bass and drums entirely, leaving the vocals and guitars suspended vertiginously in mid-air. More so than anywhere else in Lovesliescrushing's back catalog, they sound a hell of lot like Grouper with the vocals creating the fundamental melody which cycle woozily through blurred motifs while the guitars dreamily drift in oceans of reflective echo and drone. Beautiful stuff, for sure; and like all Handmade Birds titles, it's painfully limited, this time to 300 copies.

DARK DAY Window (Dark Entries) lp 15.98
To coincide with the reissue of another Dark Day lp, this former Record Of The Week is BACK IN PRINT, AGAIN!!!
So cool! And cold wavey. A wonderfully produced piece of vinyl to replace those crappy downloads which have been bouncing around the internet for the past five or six years. Dark Day was the project spearheaded by R.L. Crutchfield who first worked with Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori in the earliest incarnation of the seminal No Wave band DNA in the mid '70s. By 1979, Crutchfield was striking out on his own as Dark Day; and at first, this band was an intentional reversal of roles within the trad-rock band with two women playing guitars and drums and a man behind the keyboards. The ladies for that incarnation were Nancy Arlen of Mars and Nina Canal of Ut; and they managed a few gigs and one hell of a great single - "Hands In The Dark" - which appeared many years later on a Soul Jazz No Wave compilation and has been covered spectacularly by the Chromatics. Canal and Arlen weren't terribly interested in continuing in the project, leaving Crutchfield to find likeminded folks to work with. The second (and last) Dark Day record was recorded in 1982, with Crutchfield going into the studio with a bunch of cheap electronics and toy synthesizers with Bill Sack to flesh out the accompaniments on similar instruments. Their interlocking arpeggiations are punctuated with blooping electronics that are equal parts Trio and Kraftwerk with an underlying dread to the spiralling songs that detoured from Kraftwerk's utopian vision of man-machine hybrids and down a paranoid vision of man being at the mercy of his machines, no matter how innocent their intent. Dark Day's songs are insistent and catchy despite their utterly simple structures. "Metal Benders" and "Danger / Dance" are probably the closest thing to being 'hits' on the album as weird / anti-romantic variations of Young Marble Giants with whip crack rhythms and spectral pre-X-Files electronic whistling melodies. Coming out of the NYC No Wave scene helped craft Dark Day into a something other than neo-Romantic post-punk outfit with electronics. This was a wholly unique band, who never got the attention that many of their contemporaries. Kudos to Dark Entries once again on a splendid reissue!

KTL V (Editions Mego) 2lp 32.00
As the title no doubt led you to believe, this is in fact the fifth release in the ongoing collaboration between Stephen O'Malley (SUNNO))), Khanate, etc.) and Peter Rehberg (Pita), and like IV before it, V was realized as a stand alone record, unlike the first three releases, which were all conceived and composed to accompany art installations. And again, like IV, the sound does not seem to be dramatically effected by this shift, although there does in fact seem to be a bit of a shift from IV to V, with V seeming, to our ears at least, to be a bit more academic, with an ear toward twentieth century classic and modern minimalism, further evidence which may be found in the two tracks here "Phill 1" and "Phill 2", which we presume are an homage to the master dronelord Phill Niblock, but of course done in their own inimitable style, with "Phill 1" opening up a thick gaseous dronescape, that is pocked with glitch and skitter, woven into the fabric of the tracks woozy undulations, and softly moaning choral shimmer. Where on past records much of the sound was barely there, and required close listening, "Phill 1" is much more immediately rewarding, lush and lustrous, thick and warm, and layered, the sort of minimalism that would probably still appeal to fans of O'Malley's SUNNO))) project. The track is definitely active, with plenty going on beneath the surface, and in the spaces surrounding the drone, be they thick slabs of blurred buzz, shards of computer glitch, and all manner of sonic detritus.
"Phill 2" finds O'Malley and Rehberg teaming up with the Prague Philharmonic, where they are joined by Johann Johannsson, who helps with the orchestration, the track transformed into something haunting and symphonic, yet still dark and droney, the sound even more rich, and somewhat cacophonous, a glorious noisy ur-drone, that definitely casts the orchestra as something much more chaotic and abstract that they are perhaps used to, the results are stunning.
In between these tracks, O'Malley and Rehberg do explore more minimal soundscapes, "Study A" features long tones, deep buzzes and sine wave like high end shimmers, stretched out into near static layered mesmer, allowing the two tones two subtly interact, and create all manner of overtones, gradually building in intensity, and at times sounding down right cinematic and psychedelic. "Tony" is another thick minimal dronescape, this one focused around a distorted stretch of slow shifting buzz, surrounded by warm melodic tones, and strange echo drenched percussion, the main drone ever shifting, creating a gorgeous slow motion melody, the background sounds lush and lustrous, maybe the prettiest thing we've heard from KTL yet. And finally, the record finishes off with the 20+ minute "Last Spring: A Prequel", which introduces text, a haunting spoken word, draped over a hissy shimmer, the breath urgent in the microphone, the vibe dark and claustrophobic, the music itself more like old KTL, ultra minimal, high end hiss, minimal static hum, bits of glitch laced throughout, the track all about the dramatically delivered vocals, which grow more and more agitated, more heavily effected, the music subtly following suit, like some strange abstract play, with some of the creepiest sound design ever, courtesy of KTL.
Housed in a super striking 6 panel digipak, with original artwork by Mark Fell. Meanwhile the vinyl comes in an equally colorful gatefold sleeve.
MPEG Stream: "Phill 1"
MPEG Stream: "Study A"

COLLEY, JOE Lonely Microphone (Senufo Editions) lp 21.00
Some 10 years ago, there was Joe Colley hulking over a four-track on the floor of 964 Natoma - a performance space in San Francisco that hosted the monthly Field Effects series by Aaron Ximm (aka Quiet American). Ximm populated the very large loft in that converted autobody shop into one of the best places to experience live music, by encouraging the audience to sprawl out on futons, couches, bean bags, and pillows in order to better zone-out and focus on the sounds at hand. While much of the work that Ximm would curate focused on sound ecology and phonography, he would bring in some more intense acts such as R.H.Y. Yau & Scott Arford's legendary Infrasound, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, and Joe Colley. At the time of this performance in 2002, Colley was just starting to record under his own name after a stint using the far more abject moniker Crawl Unit. As the explosive and negating power of his earlier noise constructions matured into complex, more conceptual pieces, Colley began to develop into something akin to the Bruce Naumann of sound art - with repetitive, occasionally self-destructive actions that investigated psychological, behavioral, and cultural codes.
"Lonely Microphone" is a reconstruction from the original tape-piece that Colley presented at 964 Natoma; and our memory of the night doesn't recall much more than the view of the lumbering Colley crouched over his gear and the impact of his signature jolts of sonic juxtaposition. Here, Colley masterfully puts together an album that looks to the woolly electronic scrabblings of David Tudor, the expressive environmental collage work of Eric La Casa, and the dead-line feeds of CM von Hausswolff. Ugly buzzes from gutted consumer electronics, terse piezo chirps, blasts of wind-shearing noise, monstrous din from some infernal machine belching beneath the San Francisco urbane crust, and plenty of watery field recordings threatening to short out Colley's haphazardly constructed microphones and hand-soldered circuits. That sense of threat is a constant in Colley's work, the threat of disaster, the threat that nothing will be resolved, the threat of another dead end, the threat that 'no' might be the only answer. "Lonely Microphone" is one of the more subtle presentations of Colley's work, and more self-contained than the post-structuralist ellipsis of his opus "Disasters Of Self." Recommended as with pretty much everything he's ever done.

DARK DAY (R.L. CRUTCHFIELD'S) Exterminating Angel (Dark Entries) lp 14.98
Synth punk at its best! Here is the long overdue reissue of Dark Day's homage to the Luis Bunuel film of the same name. Dark Day was the project spearheaded by R.L. Crutchfield who first worked with Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori in the earliest incarnation of the seminal No Wave band DNA in the mid '70s. By 1979, Crutchfield was striking out on his own as Dark Day; and at first, this band was an intentional reversal of roles within the trad-rock band with two women playing guitars and drums and a man behind the keyboards. The ladies for that incarnation were Nancy Arlen of Mars and Nina Canal of Ut; and they managed a few gigs and one hell of a great single - "Hands In The Dark" - which appeared many years later on a Soul Jazz No Wave compilation and has been covered spectacularly by the Chromatics. Canal and Arlen weren't terribly interested in continuing in the project, leaving Crutchfield to find likeminded folks to work with.
On Exterminating Angel (originally released in 1980 on the Lust/Unlust imprint Infidelity), Crutchfield recruited Phil Kline and Barry Friar to flesh out the Dark Day sound. At the time, Kline was an emerging composer who had worked with Glenn Branca and at least here, he styles himself after Mark Ribot or Arto Lindsay with his expressive shards and bends of guitar melody; and Friar follows the tom-heavy patter that Nancy Arlen brought to Dark Day on the "Hands In The Dark" single. But Dark Day is truly Crutchfield's vision, with his heavily syncopated synth chords, elliptical repetitions, and spiral staircase ascensions in lieu of the traditional verse-chorus song. Crutchfield preferred to keep a very restrictive use of synth tones and filters, all the while crafting a very claustrophobic, horror-laden atmosphere. The inventiveness of his minimalist melodies and twisted lullaby-like structures are all the more impressive, perhaps only matched by Young Marble Giants or Suicide. Motorik yet stumbling, Dark Day's songs are stark and bold in their poetry about freaks, suffocating anxiety, and the toxic life of contemporary society circa 1980. "Trapped" was a strange song to be the single for the album, as it's an epic, spiralling number with those ominous synths and siren-like blurts from a distant saxophone. Many of the other songs on the album were short and condensed, jabbing the grimly simple melodies deep into the ear-canal and then moving on. Like "Trapped" the album's finale - "No, Never, Nothing" - is another lengthy track, appropriating a Moroder like disco-syncopation to a sinister, nihilistic collage of texts taken from a children's book about raising unusual pets such as squirrels and chimpanzees. The more the song spins through it's punchy chords the creepier it becomes.
Exterminating Angel is the high-point of Crutchfield's recorded works, and stands also as one of lost gems of the No Wave era. This should have been released long ago, so we have to commend Dark Entries once again for their reissue campaign.
MPEG Stream: "Chameleon"
MPEG Stream: "Flightless Birds"
MPEG Stream: "No, Never, Nothing"

POTTER, COLIN Ancient History (Ultra-Mail Productions) 4cd 48.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We discovered Colin Potter many years ago, through his heady production and sound design in Nurse With Wound, Ora, and Monos; yet like so many pioneering electronic musicians in the '80s, he released a slew of cassettes overflowing with various sonic experiments and audio excursions. Ancient History collects four of Potter's tapes charting his output from 1979 to 1989, including A Gain, Two Nights, and Recent History Volumes 1 & 2. Back in this time period, Potter was working in a post-kosmische aesthetic with a small arsenal of synths, step sequencers, drum machines, guitars, and effects. He had yet to incorporate the heavy-lidded drone and field recording component which he's been associated with as of late; but those tapes positioned his sound not too far from the Moebius / Schnitzler / Schulze axis of progressive electronics with a healthy dose of Chris Carter's DIY aesthetic tossed in for good measure.
A Gain was released in 1982 through his ICR imprint and is a culmination of work dating back to 1979. The opening number to this album is a bright hypnotic piece for glockenspiel and synthesizer, which builds upon elliptical phrases on those instruments with greater and greater density and kaleidoscopic fervor, snugly situated between Terry Riley's A Rainbow In Curved Air and Cluster's percolating motorik electron-pop. Elsewhere on A Gain, Potter pulls out the guitar to augment the synth blorp and drive with some fine Manuel Gottsching-esque explorations. Two Nights from 1981 is probably the cream of the crop here, not to belittle anything else on the set; but this is a great piece of futuristic electronics that is a must have for anyone keen on John Carpenter and Goblin soundtracks! The two original side long pieces both extend from the cosmic swoosh into dynamic kraut-disco jams with incremental sequences accelerating through drum machine, neon-lit synth cascades, and more heavily phased guitar solos. Potter adds a third lengthy bonus track of similar material to round out this fantastic disc.
The Recent History discs compile various Potter projects from 1986-1989, and find him in more of a darker, somber mood with ritualized ambience drifting about his more earthen sounding sequences and sodden acoustic guitar melodies. While there's much of the same instrumentation, Potter's production also becomes far more complex with more of the shadowy, occluded techniques that he would later master during his tenure in Nurse With Wound. As such, these tracks tend to parallel some of the work of Coil and O Yuki Conjugate, and even predates some of the melodic aspects of the ambient side of IDM that would emerge five or six years later.
This is quite different from the song-based minimal wave album of early Colin Potter material released on Vinyl On Demand; but certainly showcases just how great all of those early tapes of his were and how well they hold up today!
MPEG Stream: "You Tell Me"
MPEG Stream: "All Reel"
MPEG Stream: "8th June 1982"
MPEG Stream: "Ships That Pass In The Night"

APHEX TWIN Selected Ambient Works Volume II (1972) 3lp 34.00
Selected Ambient Works Volume II has been required listening since the album was originally released in 1994 right as the Aphex Twin was poised to capture the world's imagination with his mutant electronica, self-immolating techno, and acid laden drill 'n' bass. Here, the second chapter of Aphex's ambient works (sadly, no third volume followed this) is exactly what is claims to be, a brilliant collection of ambient works that re-engineered and re-interpreted Brian Eno's definition of ambient as a convoluted Phillip K. Dick cosmology of dreaming androids and quixotic sentient machines. This album stands at a crossroads of a number of musicological strains, with Aphex Twin's Richard D. James self-aware and self-conscious of the broader implications of making not just a collection of ambient music, but in making *this* collection of ambient music at *that* particular time. In the post-rave aftermath in the UK of the early '90s, chill-rooms were the zones for all sorts of lightweight collages of directionless new age musics and much of the 'ambient' music that was being produced around those chill-rooms was essentially amphorous techno that tempered the rhythm to a soft pulse and added a bird song here or there (e.g. The Orb, Future Sound Of London); but an ambient music that spoke to a community that was beginning to shape their digital / virtual selves was lacking.
Enter Richard D. James and the Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume Two. The album follows the direction of Eno's Music For Airports with 24 vignettes that ascribe to a constant atmosphere of gilded tones and lugubrious rhythms, which are more often sequenced patterns and cybernetic echoes through mercurial pools of sound. Tracks glisten, lurch, dissolve, morph, materialize, crystallize, bloom, and collapse amidst a subtle latticework of beguiling electronic melody, something that the Aphex Twin has always had in spades. It was a brilliant record when it came out, and it's still brilliant today. This is especially true with the resurgance of new age wallpaper music, as this album outshines pretty much everything on the current landscape.
For nostalgia's sake, we'll reprise what we wrote nearly twenty years ago about this record: "James sonically replicated the post-slumber / pre-waking state when sunlight first strikes the dream riddled eye within the memory banks of his rewired samplers. A beautiful, synaesthetic and haunting post-techno ambient album that really must be heard!" How true. How true.
MPEG Stream: "Untitled"
MPEG Stream: "Untitled"
MPEG Stream: "Blue Calx"

MONOS Above The Sky (ICR) cd 15.98
BACK IN STOCK!!!
Over the past few years, Darren Tate has been wandering into some wildly weird electronics, broadening the scope of his aesthetic beyond the seminal recordings he made with Andrew Chalk (amongst others) as Ora, and more recently through Monos. For the most part, Monos has been a collaborative project between Tate and Nurse With Wound engineer extraordinaire Colin Potter, but at other times, we're pretty sure that Tate is the only one behind the wheel. For Above The Sky, the Monos line-up includes Tate, Potter, and fellow British dronescraper Paul Bradley; and this record is a top notch, vintage sounding Monos disc for sure.
The extended pieces found on this album were culled from the one and only live Monos gig in 2006, the handful of recordings from that gig were processed, recreated, forgotten about, rediscovered, and processed again throughout various starts and stops over the next four years. The resulting album is surprisingly coherent, presenting itself as a sinewy mass of undulating drones dappled with various textures, shadowy events, field recordings, subtle instrumentation, and then some. The ghostly ambience that introduces this album is sublimely beautiful, like the druggy drones of Nurse With Wound (e.g. Soliloquy For Lilith) or the permafrost laden expanses of Thomas Koner or even a darker version of Leyland Kirby's much-lauded hauntological ambience. Distant sound elements of scraped metal echo to the foreground, as the latent sounds from some occluded ritual in some forgotten place. Shimmering acoustic clouds of resonance peel away into field recordings of numerous birds flitting about. Later on, semi-melodic phrases hover near the event horizon dominated by ominous electrical vibrations and dilated drone fields. Seriously, this is fantastic stuff!
MPEG Stream: "A Place Of Voices"
MPEG Stream: "Cloudless Day"

CLEANERS FROM VENUS Vol. 1 (Captured Tracks) 3cd 33.00
Originally released as a deluxe 5lp boxset for this year's Record Store Day, this amazing collection, gathering up the first three albums from this seminal eighties indie pop outfit, is now also available as a triple cd set (and as individual lps, which we'll list/review soon), and reveals once again, to a whole new audience hopefully, what an amazing and influential band Cleaners From Venus really were.
Bandleader Martin Newell, who was bitter after some bad record label experiences with his previous band, became obsessed with doing everything himself (a real DIY band for sure), which meant recording records on a 4 track in his bedroom, dubbing the tapes himself, and releasing those tapes in super limited editions, of course distributed by Newell himself, which probably has a lot do with why these guys didn't get more attention than they did. But masterful pop music like this with such incredible songwriting was bound to work its way to the surface, and this stuff did manage to make its way into the ears of obsessive pop nerds, and quickly attained a cultlike status, and for good reason. Listening to this stuff now, it's easy to hear what a huge influence these guys had, and that their lo-fi pop was years ahead of groups like Ariel Pink, who would trawl the same sonic territory, albeit a bit more ironically. Jangly outsider pop, with strange homebrewed production weirdness, bizarre edits, twisted little intros and outros, brief snippets of conversations, sudden fade outs, that inexplicably fade right back in, the programmed drums, gorgeous vocal harmonies, hooks galore, definitely a product of the early '80s, with a different production and a less skewed take on pop, it's not hard to imagine this stuff on the radio or on MTV alongside groups like the Style Council or Human League or any of the other bands popular at the time, but Newell's Cleaners had it's own twisted take on the sound of the time, channeling Elvis Costello, XTC and the rest, but transforming that commercial pop sound into something much more personal and urgent, and without any restrictions, or any hopes of mainstream popularity, Newell never shied away from trying anything, no matter how weird it may have seemed, and the results definitely speak for themselves.
The first record, 1981's Blow Away Your Troubles, is the rawest of the bunch, and might still be our favorite, it's definitely the weirdest, with even this meticulously assembled reissue replete with those weird edits and damaged tape dropouts, all of which merely adds to the mood and mystery of the music. The second record, 1982's On Any Normal Monday, might be objectively the best record though, for a home recorded album, it sound incredible, still rife with all sorts of weirdness, whether that meant dubbed out snares, or strange spoken word segments, thick sinewy basslines or xylophone melodies, the sound is lush, and so fully realized, and the songs, catchy and meticulously crafted, in different circumstances, another instance where some of these songs definitely could have been hits.
The final record in the set, Midnight Cleaners, also from 1982, found the band's sound shifting once again, the vibe a bit more new wavey, the recording still polished, but but a bit more raw than On Any Normal Monday, still warped and weird, and reminding us a LOT of Guided By Voices, who seemed to fancy themselves a sort of imaginary Cleaners From Venus, a lost unsung genius pop band, GBV would after all manufacture a sort of faux Britishness that definitely approaches the Cleaners dreamy eighties pop sound, especially on Midnight Cleaners. Some of the songs here had us seriously thinking GBV might owe these guys some heartfelt thanks, if not actual royalties.
We had been subsisting for years on a worn out mix tape of Cleaners tracks, so it's thrilling to have all these songs in one place, many of which we're only hearing now for the first time, and we have been gleefully immersing ourselves in The Cleaners From Venus' twisted pop world, and we're hoping that the designation that this is in fact volume one, means that volume two is on the way...
MPEG Stream: "Night Starvation"
MPEG Stream: "A Girl With Cars In Her Eyes"
MPEG Stream: "Living On Nerve Ends"
MPEG Stream: "Swinging London"
MPEG Stream: "Modern TV"
MPEG Stream: "Time In Vain"
MPEG Stream: "Only A Shadow"

MEDICINE Shot Forth Self Living (Captured Tracks) 2cd 14.98
Shot Forth Self Living was the 1992 debut from this legendary LA shoegaze / dreampop outfit, and was recently included in a massive, super limited 5lp boxset collecting Medicine's first two albums (as well as an ep and TONS of extras) that came out for Record Store Day 2012, but has now also thankfully been released on its own, as a deluxe double cd, with a whole mess of bonus tracks and rarities.
One of the few American bands to be on the Creation label, Medicine spent the early nineties crafting some of the most glorious and gloriously blissed out experimental psychedelic shoegaze pop EVER. Their sound simultaneously heavy and tripped out, experimental and impossibly catchy, the guitars thick and lush and layered, soaring and so gloriously melodic, like a soft focus My Bloody Valentine, the vocals ethereal and washed out, definitely of the same era as Smashing Pumpkins, but where the Pumpkins had their sights set on arenas and mainstream acceptance, Medicine seemed to spurn such things, taking perfectly perfect pop songs, and pulling them apart, stretching out two minute gems into six minute psychedelic blowouts, their music as much about texture and arrangements, experimentation and exploration as songcraft. But excelling at both in a way few have since. Fans of experimental pop groups like Teenage Filmstars, Disco Inferno, Seefeel, Bark Psychosis and the like will definitely fall in love, if they weren't already. Hearing this stuff now, it sounds as fresh as ever, and groups like M83, A Place To Bury Strangers, Alcest, Health, Serena-Maneesh, Jesu, Phoenix, and all the rest, most definitely owe Medicine royalties big time. And heck if that list looks like your record collection, and for some reason you DON'T have these Medicine records, now's the time to right that wrong.
We could go through both 1992's Shot Forth Self Living and 1993's The Buried Life, and describe our favorite tracks, but we'd most likely end up describing every single track. Even now, we don't hear a weak track in the bunch, and what sounds cool and strange and experimental now, must have sounded revolutionary and downright insane in the early nineties, especially for a major label band, and it just may have been what kept Medicine from achieving Pumpkins like fame, although we like to think it was cuz they just didn't give a fuck, and refused to play the game, and instead concerned themselves with making some of the weirdest, coolest, most tripped out pop music they could conjure up. Which is exactly what they did.
MPEG Stream: "One More"
MPEG Stream: "Aruca"
MPEG Stream: "Defective"

MEDICINE Box Set (Captured Tracks) 4lp Box + cassette 80.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Of the seemingly hundreds and hundreds of Record Store Day releases, we figured that probably most folks were gonna be dying for that Flaming Lips collaborative double lp (reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), but we found ourselves being way more excited about the Medicine box, a massive 5 lp set collecting the first two albums (as well as an ep and TONS of extras) from this legendary L.A. shoegaze / dreampop outift. One of the few American bands to be on the Creation label, Medicine spent the early nineties crafting some of the most glorious and gloriously blissed out experimental psychedelic shoegaze pop EVER. Their sound simultaneously heavy and tripped out, experimental and impossibly catchy, the guitars thick and lush and layered, soaring and so gloriously melodic, like a soft focus My Bloody Valentine, the vocals ethereal and washed out, definitely of the same era as Smashing Pumpkins, but where the Pumpkins had their sights set on arenas and mainstream acceptance, Medicine seemed to spurn such things, taking perfectly perfect pop songs, and pulling them apart, stretching out two minute gems into six minute psychedelic blowouts, their music as much about texture and arrangements, experimentation and exploration as songcraft. But excelling at both in a way few have since. Hearing this stuff now, it sounds as fresh as ever, and groups like M83, A Place To Bury Strangers, Alcest, Health, Serena-Maneesh, Jesu, Phoenix, and all the rest, most definitely owe Medicine royalties big time. And heck if that list looks like your record collection, and for some reason you DON'T have these Medicine records, now's the time to right that wrong.
We could go through both 1992's Shot Forth Self Living and 1993's The Buried Life, and describe our favorite tracks, but we'd most likely end up describing every single track. Even now, we don't hear a weak track in the bunch, and what sounds cool and strange and experimental now, must have sounded revolutionary and downright insane in the early nineties, especially for a major label band, and it just may have been what kept Medicine from achieving Pumpkins like fame, although we like to think it was cuz they just didn't give a fuck, and refused to play the game, and instead concerned themselves with making some of the weirdest, coolest, most tripped out pop music they could conjure up. Which is exactly what they did.
This boxset contains super deluxe double lp versions of both Shot Forth Self Living and The Buried Life, each record expanded with tones of bonus tracks, B-sides and demos, also included is the Sounds Of Medicine EP from 1994, here with two live bonus tracks not included on the original, there's also a pin and a photo, as well as a live 90 minute cassette called Always Starting To Stop, a collection of live recordings captured between 1992-1994 at various shows in the US and the UK, all housed in a super swank printed black and red box. This was a Record Store Day release, and was thus EXTREMELY limited, and is in fact already out of print. We have just FOUR copies of this box remaining, and once those are gone, they are gone for good!
MPEG Stream: "One More"
MPEG Stream: "Aruca"
MPEG Stream: "Defective"
MPEG Stream: "The Pink"
MPEG Stream: "Baby Doll"
MPEG Stream: "Slut"

GARET, RICHARD Silver (Observatoire) cd 13.98
Richard Garet is on quite a roll with his latest two albums! Earlier in 2012, he presented us with the eerily beautiful album Areal (which we made a Record Of The Week!), and now there's the discordant blurs of Silver. Garet's work centers on the errata from deconstructed and cracked consumer electronics. In dismantling radios and speakers, Garet unleashes a Pandora's box of noise, static, chaos, and dissonances that he then meticulously sifts, culls, and abstracts to arrive at atonal frequencies, electro-magnetic cracklings, or attenuated broadcasts from the other side of the world which happened to be caught in his network of wires, photocells, and electronics. Though this process, Garet renders those ill-tempered noises as hollowed-out drones and vacant ambiences populated with desolate scrabbling textures. His is a deep and haunted sound, akin to the work of John Duncan, Mika Vainio, and Joe Colley; but where those three use noise as a metaphoric tool of psychic and psychological aggression, Garet prefers to sublimate his noise as if they were ghosts communing through an electromagnetic seance.
Silver glides through 4 movements, the first of which was originally part of 23five's radio broadcast series for their annual Activating The Medium festival from 2011. Here, the smoldering grit of dead-space static hovers amidst cathode ray tube drones and well-timed razor edit compositional techniques that look back to John Duncan's masterpiece River Of Flames. Garet's other three pieces follows suit with passages of intense sinewave purity that slowly dissolve into nebulae of smeared buzz and hiss, thoroughly obliterated from whatever source material he may have been using. Fantastic work that parallels those aforementioned artists as well as the more abstract work from Tim Hecker and William Basinski. Limited to 300 copies.
MPEG Stream: "Pulse"
MPEG Stream: "Gray"
MPEG Stream: "Mobility"

MURMER What Are The Roots That Clutch (Helen Scarsdale) cd 14.98
In looking at his discography alone, Patrick McGinley (aka Murmer) might not seem to be such a prolific artist; although he's certainly dedicated his entire existence to the pursuit of the field recording, its use in composition, and avant-garde sound practices in general. Each week, McGinley produces the ever enlightening Framework radio series dedicated to those very topics, starting out of Resonance FM in London with syndication now reaching several dozen adventurous radio stations across the globe. He's also active in curating a quarterly series of small cd-r editions of sound ecology, phonography, and field recording based sound art; and he also is an active participant in the Estonian avant-garde, as he's currently planted himself in the university city of Tartu. What Are The Roots That Clutch is his first full album in nearly seven years. Has it really been that long? That said, McGinley did work on a brilliant collaborative project with John Grzinich and Yannick Dauby, and he released a 3"cd-r for Taalem, both of which came out earlier this year in 2012. McGinley quips that he put the recordings aside to this record for well over a year, which may account in part for the delay; but ultimately, all of the recordings from Murmer are timeless. What Are The Roots That Clutch is no exception.
The field recordings that McGinley collects hedge towards disturbances in any given sound ecology, as found in the abrasive textures from a busted exhaust vent comingling with the Aeolian harmonics from the sustained gusts streaming down from the North Sea. McGinley does include two relatively unaltered field recordings (probably some minor filtering, but that's all) within the thoroughly abstracted and droned out compositions. One of these features a very eerie fundamental harmonic drone, obviously being activated by the wind and coupled with a glistening rattle and an unfurled flapping. The three elements here make for a surprisingly musical, if totally alien sounding piece that's akin to the Alan Lamb wire recordings. The album's 17 minute centerpiece is a slow building blur of industrial resonance and densely layered aquatic filigree that melts into chunks of clattering ice (it could be wood or glass... but ice is just so much more poetic to consider given the context); but the album's finale is where McGinley really gives us something to sink our teeth into. A comparatively harsh stutter of electrical abrasion builds up to a crescendo through water-tank rumblings and fire and / or water textures. At the peak, McGinley snaps to a downright psychedelic raga of back-masked belltones, harmonium drones, and percussive clatter that all comes together in a minimalist chorale on par with anything that Angus Maclise mustered in his dervishes and mantras.
As great as McGinley's last record was, What Are The Roots That Clutch might be even better. Handsomely packaged in letterpress artwork whose ochre-yellow hue matches the color of an Estonian farm house he's quite fond of. Limited to 400 copies.
MPEG Stream: "What Are The Roots That Clutch 3"
MPEG Stream: "What Are The Roots That Clutch 4"
MPEG Stream: "What Are The Roots That Clutch 5"

CARLTON MELTON aQ Hits (aQuarius recOrds) cd 12.98
aQ Hits is a new collection from beloved SF psychedelic space rock minimalists Carlton Melton, and is our second annual official aQuarius recOrds Record Store Day release. Last year's was a live disc called Black Valleys, a document of a killer aQuarius instore by NY psych rockers White Hills, and that one sold out in a flash. This year's looks to do the same - if you like White Hills, you like Carlton Melton, right?!
It's a super limited (just 300 copies) compact disc, collecting a handful of rare, and now out of print vinyl tracks, from various singles and split lps from the last couple years, including one super extended version.
Let's run through the various tracks... "Bottle Of Heat [Extended Version]", is, as you can probably tell from the title, the aforementioned alternate cut, which takes "Bottle Of Heat", originally released on the 2011 Agitated Records 12" comp I'm So Convoluted!, and offers up the unedited full-sprawl recording, stretching out to more than 19 minutes, thick smoldering clouds of soft focus psychedelia, drifting and blissed out, free form and abstract, a meandering epic of lush chordal swell and shimmery FX drenched swirl, all over a shuffling hypnotic and motorik kraut-psych beat. "Handling Snakes" is the A side from the group's Valley King 7" single, and is a jolt of heavy hypno-blues a la Wooden Shjips, but in the hands of Carlton Melton, somehow even heavier with wailing riffs and pummeling drums.
The next two tracks are from Carlton Melton's split 12" with Empty Shapes, originally released on Mid-To-Late Records in 2010: "Call and Response" is an epic (and originally nearly side-loooong) blowout, beginning with a heavy rumble of monolithic sludge eventually progressing into a slow wave of burnt-out blues riffage a la early Comets on Fire, that churns and steeps into a gnarly brew of molten fuzz. While "Purer", is more cosmic and dreamy, built on a layer of percolating synth drones that give way to a more uplifting space rock jam trajectory, total heart-of-the-sun zoner blissout.
And finally, the last two tracks are from CM's split 12" with Qumran Orphics, also originally released on Mid-To-Late Records, that one in the beginning of 2011. "March Of The Cicadas" is a glorious ten minute slab of psychedelic heaviness, that sounds exactly like the title implies, a slowmotion dirge over martial rhythms with buzzing electronic hisses and stratospheric guitar leads. And things finish off with "Murder Ridge", a noirish Bardo Pond-like spiral of burning sonic embers and sustained decay, a gorgeous hazy stretch of blurred lysergic drift, the perfect final movement, psych-drone comedown.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, each one hand numbered, the artwork is printed on metallic silver cardstock, everything housed in a slim dvd style case, only available here!
MPEG Stream: "Bottle Of Heat [Extended Version]"
MPEG Stream: "Handling Snakes"
MPEG Stream: "March Of The Cicadas"

KORPSES KATATONIK Oeuvres Completes (Klanggalerie) cd 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The Austrian post-industrial provocateur Michael DeWitt attained notoriety in the mid-'80s for his project Zero Kama whose sole album was sourced entirely from human bones and skulls, with plenty of smoke and mirror production techniques to arrive at a Crowleyian sound parallel to the likes of early Current 93, Coil, and Psychic TV. Beyond the one album as Zero Kama, DeWitt released another obscure recording in 1982 under the moniker Korpses Katatonik. This cassette - sometimes referred to as Sensitive Liberated Autistiks, sometimes as Subklinikal Leukotomy Aphrenia Spasmophilik Lyssophobo Asphyxia Sinister Lethal Anorex - delved into parallel concerns of societal pathologies and death-obsessed transgressions through very dark electronics. It's very much in step with the classic industrial productions of SPK (when is anybody going to reissue those records again?) and the pre-Brighter Death Now project Lille Roger, with blackened squalls of grim noise belched through slow-grinding rhythms and an ominous proclamation that "we're all fucked." Such doomspeak from Industrial Culture was commonplace, but DeWitt's Korpses Katatonik said it with just as much brutalist force and conviction as SPK, TG, and Cabaret Voltaire at their most zombified. All of the tracks from that cassette and a compilation track make up the entire body of work for Korpses Katatonik, which have been remastered and repackaged for this anthology. The template for much of what Wolf Eyes did later is found here. Terrifyingly great.
MPEG Stream: "Nekom"
MPEG Stream: "Kcock Transplant"
MPEG Stream: "Chronozon"

PEDESTRIAN DEPOSIT Kithless (Arbor) lp 15.98
Spring of 2010, the stalwart San Francisco sound arts organization 23five hosted their annual Activating The Medium festival, commissioning a handful of experimentalists, noise technicians, and field recordists to present work based on the theme of Ice. While G*Park's allegorical plunge into an ice cave and Cheryl Leonard's dripping icicles with Antarctic recordings and bowed penguin bones were thoroughly compelling, Pedestrian Deposit's performance was terrifyingly amazing. PD has transformed itself over the past decade or so from a harsh noise project into one of the most accomplished electo-acoustic outfits of our time, bringing languid cello tones and buzzing harmonics to a well-versed pedal-driven electronic arsenal of rumbles, drones, and noisy grit. A duo of Shannon Kennedy (cello, electronics) and Jon Borges (noise, electronics), Pedestrian Deposit tours constantly through the noise underground; and that time on the road has served them well in terms of delivering the goods. For their 23five commission, their set began in a familiar mode to those who've witnessed Pedestrian Deposit before, Kennedy crafting hypnotic patterns through loops on her cello while Borges hinted at something far more ominous through tectonic rumblings of feedback and black noise. Upon the dissolution of this spellbinding movement balancing noise and grace, Kennedy set her cello down and climbed into a wash basin which was positioned at the front of the stage. The basin was filled with ice water which she poured over her head in slow repetitive fashion, while a microphone captured the sounds of her chattering teeth and frigid gasps as she began a process of self-induced hypothermia. For what seemed like an eternity, Borges did nothing, allowing the raw human gasps from his partner to be the only sound they presented. Eventually, a glacial semi-melodic drone worthy of a BJ Nilsen or a Deathprod recording slowly emerged beneath Kennedy's shivering for a superb coda to such an abject piece of electro-acoustic theater. Kithless features the whole performance as the A side, and even without the physical presence of Kennedy dumping ice water on her goose-pimply skin, the recording is a powerful document and certainly stands on its own. The B side "Under A Veil Of Living Light" is a worthy companion to the live document with Borges building a crunched, tactile noise crescendo out of pools of sonorous hum and rasping buzzed cello. A magnificent accomplishment!
MPEG Stream: "Drift Gently Down The Frigid Tides Of Sleep (extract 1)"
MPEG Stream: "Drift Gently Down The Frigid Tides Of Sleep (extract 2)"

V/A The B-Music Of Jean Rollin (B-Music / Finders Keepers) cd 16.98
Another Finders Keepers / B-Music treat here, folks! A collection of kooky, creepy, very cool music from the films (many of them about vampires, and many of THOSE about sexy lesbian vampires!) by French underground auteur Jean Rollin, circa 1968-1979. The late Rollin has been proclaimed the "father of European Horrortica". On the freaky fringes of free jazz and psych rock, the tracks found here are the perfect accompaniment to the director's sexy, surreal cinematic phantasmagorias. And unless we're much mistaken, we recognize one of the tracks here, Acanthus' theme to "Le Frisson Des Vampires", as having been surreptitiously covered in heavier fashion by drugged-out doomlords (and horrortica fans) Electric Wizard on their Witchcult Today album!
Another one of note is Pierre Raph's aptly-titled "Gilda & Gunshots", a track of consisting of excited percussion, jazzy bass and pretty trumpet, overlaid with whipcrack-like gun shots, girlish whimpers and cries. It could almost be some noir-jazz experiment by the Boredoms. What the heck was happening in the film scene this scored, we don't know...
We could go on describing this track by track, but there are 31 cuts in all on this disc! With great titles like "Abstract Procession", "Bizarre Cult 2", "Crotch Batterie", "Crimson Gates", and "Violent Library", these vary widely and weirdly, encompassing spooky theremin-like tones, chamber music drones, somber choirs, flute-laced grooves, melodic reveries, arrhythmic interludes, all sorts of stuff. It's a real cornucopia of suspenseful strangeness and freeform avant-rockin'. Composers/performers responsible include the aforementioned Acanthus and Pierre Raph, along with many more by Phillipe D'Aram, Yvon Gerault, Francois Tusques and others. Much of this is previously unreleased. And of course Finders Keepers provides plentiful, fully illustrated liner notes in the cd booklet.
By the way, we also have a couple copies each of the soundtracks to Rollin's films Requiem Por Un Vampire (1972, composed by Pierre Raph) and Fascination (1979, Phillipe D'Aram) on import 10" vinyl, reissued by Finders Keepers as well (key tracks from which appear on this cd collection, naturally).
MPEG Stream: ACANTHUS "Le Frisson Des Vampires"
MPEG Stream: PIERRE RAPH "Gilda & Gunshots"
MPEG Stream: ACANTHUS "La Chateau"
MPEG Stream: PIERRE RAPH "Jade Lake"
MPEG Stream: YVON GERAULT "Blue Quadrant"

KOJO, HITOSHI Omnimoment (Omnimemento) cd 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Gorgeously packaged, gorgeous dronemusik!
Hitoshi Kojo is a Japanese sound artist and drone-centric expressionist who has recorded in the past under the moniker Spiracle and performs in the jubilantly psychedelic but still quite droned-out project Juupala Kaapio. Omnimoment is a collection of edits from Kojo's sound installations and site-specific work dating from 2006 - 2009, all of which extract and manipulate elemental forces of wind, fire, water, metal, wood, sand, etc. into blossoming thrums of sublime minimalism which run parallel to the works of Andrew Chalk, Loren Chasse, and John Grzinich. "Shiranui" was originally conceived at the MoKS residency program in Estonia, sourced mostly from the blades of an abandoned Soviet turbine left inexplicably out in the countryside. Kojo extracts pensive, metallic overtones from those blades that sound more like an ancient gong than some hulking industrial machine; and he amasses those sounds into semi-melodic phrases and ritualized acoustic dronings that Organum mastered in the mid-'80s. "Sea Migration" is an excerpt from an installation involving a feedback system and a bunch PVC pipes that hung from the top window of Germanic castle, looking sort of like a weird plastic octopus playing the part of Rapunzel. Those pipes captured the sound of the wind and the various frequencies of that feedback system creating a tactile, generative composition of pure tones and haptic events not too far from those far more composed works from Andrew Chalk's once prolific project Ora. The last three tracks demonstrate Kojo's ongoing strategies involving found objects through a process which he calls 'molecular communication' where extended vibrations and dense beds of accreted drone broadcast outward from Kojo's scraped metals, clinked glass, and rubbed sand. There's definitely some type of alchemy at work in Kojo's sound design, with mysterious energies transforming the commonplace into something sublime, otherworldly, or divine.
This is the limited art-edition of Omnimoment, which comes in a thick cardstock folio with a 24-page book and die-cut artwork. Certainly on par with what Faraway Press has done in their packaging department! Limited to just 88 copies! We most likely won't be able to restock the limited version, but will have the standard version soon.
MPEG Stream: "Shirunai"
MPEG Stream: "Sea Migration"
MPEG Stream: "Seeding Planets"

KOJO, HITOSHI Omnimoment (Omnimemento) cd 17.98
BACK IN STOCK! At a lower price (in slightly less extravagant packaging, but only just slightly!)
Gorgeously packaged, gorgeous dronemusik!
Hitoshi Kojo is a Japanese sound artist and drone-centric expressionist who has recorded in the past under the moniker Spiracle and performs in the jubilantly psychedelic but still quite droned-out project Juupala Kaapio. Omnimoment is a collection of edits from Kojo's sound installations and site-specific work dating from 2006 - 2009, all of which extract and manipulate elemental forces of wind, fire, water, metal, wood, sand, etc. into blossoming thrums of sublime minimalism which run parallel to the works of Andrew Chalk, Loren Chasse, and John Grzinich. "Shiranui" was originally conceived at the MoKS residency program in Estonia, sourced mostly from the blades of an abandoned Soviet turbine left inexplicably out in the countryside. Kojo extracts pensive, metallic overtones from those blades that sound more like an ancient gong than some hulking industrial machine; and he amasses those sounds into semi-melodic phrases and ritualized acoustic dronings that Organum mastered in the mid-'80s. "Sea Migration" is an excerpt from an installation involving a feedback system and a bunch PVC pipes that hung from the top window of Germanic castle, looking sort of like a weird plastic octopus playing the part of Rapunzel. Those pipes captured the sound of the wind and the various frequencies of that feedback system creating a tactile, generative composition of pure tones and haptic events not too far from those far more composed works from Andrew Chalk's once prolific project Ora. The last three tracks demonstrate Kojo's ongoing strategies involving found objects through a process which he calls 'molecular communication' where extended vibrations and dense beds of accreted drone broadcast outward from Kojo's scraped metals, clinked glass, and rubbed sand. There's definitely some type of alchemy at work in Kojo's sound design, with mysterious energies transforming the commonplace into something sublime, otherworldly, or divine.
This new version replicates the packaging of the out of print deluxe art edition, and again comes in a thick cardstock folio with a 24-page book and die-cut artwork. Still on par with what Faraway Press has done with their packaging! Exquisite!
MPEG Stream: "Shirunai"
MPEG Stream: "Sea Migration"
MPEG Stream: "Seeding Planets"

PORTER RICKS Biokinetics (Type) 2lp 27.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
BACK IN PRINT!!! THIS TIME ON BLUE TRANSPARENT VINYL (or so we've been told, didn't open 'em)...
Techno is a genre of self-quotation and unrepentant appropriation, always looking in the rearview mirror at what just happened to predict what will be the hot-shit trend on the dancefloor tomorrow. So to be able to trace an entire strain within techno's taxonomy to a specific record is quite rare. The 1996 album Biokinetics by Porter Ricks is one such record, setting the stage for pretty much every electronic artist who would flock to the banner of Chain Reaction through a stylized hypnotic, narcotizing techno haunted with deep atmospherics, dub murkiness, and subaquatic allusions. Porter Ricks was the duo of Andy Mellwig and Thomas Koner, who pursued "techno as a nautical sound experience." By the time the first Porter Ricks single emerged in '96, Koner had already developed his signature isolationist approach to slow-motion sound-design blustering with arctic metaphors through the dronemuzik classics of Nunatak Gongamur (1990) and Permafrost (1993). So when Koner began exploring techno with Mellwig, the approach to techno was less about 64-bar measures and more about constructing an evolving atmosphere girded to quintessentially German techno engineering that could be taken for a sonic portrait of tidal flows, map coordinates, sonar blips, and the vastness of the deep blue sea.
Biokinetics opens with the magnificent "Port Gentil" whose steady techno pulse coalesces through overlapping patterns from muffled pulsations of white noise and distant locomotive rhythms, later topped by a radiant metallic drone. The somatic oscillations of "Biokinetics 1" hardly makes for a techno track at all despite the insistent rhythms, but the eerie heartpulse dub of "Biokinetics 2" takes an isolationist reproach to everything adding its own desolate pulse and some subterranean reverb. Granulated hiss and slippery drone shimmer blossom through the final tracks "Nautical Nuba" and "Nautical Zone" that look forward to what Wolfgang Voigt would produce on his seminal Gas albums Zauberberg and Konigsforst. It sounded awesome in 1996, and it sounds awesome today.
MPEG Stream: "Port Gentil"
MPEG Stream: "Biokinetics 2"
MPEG Stream: "Nautical Zone"

DEMDIKE STARE Elemental (Modern Love) 2cd 26.00
We would have made Demdike Stare's sprawling quadruple vinyl 12"s epic Elemental our Record Of The Week had it not been for a few things. One, the four records were released over the course of several months, two, the combined cost of all those records ended up being nearly $100, and three, we knew it was eventually gonna come out on cd. So now that the cd version is here, we can finally make this twisted hauntological epic our Record Of The Week, which is great news for everybody, EXCEPT maybe crazy completists, who will be dismayed (or perhaps perversely thrilled) to discover, that not only does the double cd version tack on a bunch of extra tracks (nearly 33 minutes worth!!), but it also features alternate versions of some of the tracks from the 12"s. So it's really up to the folks who already shelled out for all four 12" if they want to buy it all over again, but for everybody else, we can't recommend this highly enough. More on the bonus tracks at the end, but let's talk about Elemental proper first...
Elemental was probably one of the most anticipated records around here recently, the sprawling epic from hauntological duo Demdike Stare, a four part songsuite, Chrysanthe, Violetta, Rose and Iris, the duo's new sound seriously dark, much more industrial sounding, the vibe blackened, the sounds layered and way more dense.
Chrysanthe opens with "Mephisto's Lament", which is all foghorn buzz, deep whirring drones, keening high end melodic fragments, murky buried rhythms, peppered with creepy synth squelches, and when the song gets rolling, it's almost like a hauntological SUNNO))), the same sort of roiling downtuned heaviness, but here stretched into something a bit more sinister and abstract, almost like the soundtrack for some subterranean factory, all rumble and clang, all shadows and very little light. "Kommunion" is up next, a lush looped slow build, all repeated piano motifs wreathed in chanted vocals, and all blurred into fuzzy soft focus swells, the sound suddenly expanding into a blisteringly blown out in-the-red buzz, a swoonsome melody hidden in there somewhere, the sound slipping from caustic and crunchy to blurred and murky, before switching gears completely, lacing a sprawl of staticky hiss to a skeletal trip hop pulse, extra percussion provided by found sounds, clatter and crunch, atonal piano, all woven into a strange almost Art Of Noise sounding beat. Then comes "Unction", a super creepy stretch of undulating lowend, demarcated by a strange sonar ping rhythm, one that is quickly augmented by a twisted effected croaking frog skitter, and another beat seemingly assembled from the sounds of workman scraping and dragging, a crunchy noisy lurching groove, that is soon overtaken by another cloud of reverberating pianos, which finishes off the side with a coda of swirling minimal washed out thrum.
The second part, Violetta, begins with "Mnemosyne", a blissed out sun dappled bit of witch house-y skitter, all hazy and gauzy and dreamlike, until a sudden burst of clattery noisy rhythmic crunch changes everything, and then assembles itself into a strange lumbering cacophonous beat, the sound eventually underpinned by some Eastern style folk music, which drifts briefly, before that clattery beat crashes back in, now accompanied by that Eastern melody, sounding like a weirdly stuttery bit of gypsy electro. Which leads directly into "In The Wake Of Chronos", which opens with some distant mysterious melodies, some sprinkler like textures, some super minimal skeletal skitter, and some seriously deep bass thrum, the minimal drift soon peppered with short sharp bursts of metallic crunch, clipped bits of hiss and skree sculpted into a sort-of-beat, also soon joined by tinkling melodies, wreathed in echo, the sound gradually expanding, and becoming more and more lush, that beat drifting off, leaving the various other sounds to shimmer and hover ethereally over a blackened backdrop of blurred hum. And finally, Violetta finishes off with the title track, a soft cacophony of pounded piano, the chords allowed to ring out and slowly fade, all subtly warped, an ominous sort of avant classical doom, laced with little sonic squiggles, and wreathed in clouds of hiss and static, soon those little squiggles transform into beats, a wild chaotic looped rhythm, which is strangely at odds with that funereal piano, still pounding away in the background, a twisted bit of hauntological IDM, the piano subtly replaced by a hazy sprawl of synth simmer, which is left to fade out once the beat drops off, a thick swirling final movement, washed out and woozy.
Part three is Rose, and begins with a churning industrial chug, grinding through a woozy washed out haze, wreathed in a distant ethereal vocal drift, looped and mesmerizing, the sound is most definitely epic and cinematic, the sound laced with bits of clatter and crunch, and than BAM, the track is transformed into a gorgeous stretch of Middle Eastern string laden groove, all wrapped around that opening industrial rhythm, sounding like a more dense, more psychedelic Muslimgauze! The second track is more murky and dubbed out and spacey, anchored by a muted slo-mo house beat, buried in the murk, the beats wreathed in soft metallic billows, the surrounding sounds swirling dreamily, hazy melodic streaks and blurred background shimmers, clouds of tripped out drift, through which that industrial flecked rhythm soldiers druggily on.
The third track begins as a gauzy, ethereal thrum, that seems to hover wraithlike, before suddenly in drops an impossibly dense and heavy ribcage rattling bass pulse, accompanied by cool spare tabla like rhythms, that Muslimgauze vibe is definitely huge here too, a keening high end sine wave tone flutters over fragmented chunks of dubstep bass wobble, all drifting in the sonic ether.
Finally comes part four, Iris, which might be the grimmest and darkest of the bunch. Opening with buzzing cellos, and swirling blackened drones, which are soon joined by a plodding doomy rhythm, laced with streaks of prismatic feedback and hauntingly melodic harmonies, all the whole in the background, textures and layers softly swirl and undulate, the result is definitely creepy and cinematic, but also a bit blackened and industrial. The second track dials it down even further, unfurling a hushed, blurred thrum, a wash of hazy shimmer, a dubbed out murk laced with mysterious industrial percolations, reverbed clatter, and strange squelches, like a field recording of an old abandoned office building with all the air conditioners and printers and computers whirring away, a creepy disembodied hum which is soon enveloped by crunchy caustic high end, keening shards of buzz and skree, growing ever more dense and noisy. Next up some surfacing sonar pings, over a skittery, skeletal beat, shuffling through clouds of effects swirl, droned out bass warble, and more of that unidentified background shimmer, the sound is cavernous and hypnotic, the background sounds gradually solidifying into sheets of chordal whir, all wreathed in a cowl of soft buzzy sonic gauze, all the while that rhythm churns relentlessly, and that bass thrum stretches out into a strangely undulating low end drone.
Obviously, that should be more than enough to sell you on it, but folks who are after the bonus tracks will not be dissappointed, more than a half hour's worth minutes of extra music, six tracks, the first of which, "New Use For Old Circuits", opens up the set with a blast of psychedelic noise, before oozing into something much more liquid and murky, a sort of subaquatic space dub, a little bit like Chain Reaction style 'heroin house', but instead of hearing the music through a wall, we're hearing it through the thin steel walls of a submarine, stranded in the inky blackness of the deepest sea. "Shade" is a short stretch of gauzey high end shimmer, a haze of blurred melody and buried plink plonk piano, while "10th Floor Stairwell" is a fantastic chunk of thrumming low end pulsations, a minimal blackened drone that slwoly blossoms into something more tonally colorful, eventually becoming a sort of blackbuzz raga. "Metamorphosis" takes a field recording of voices and wraps it in soft swirls of static and tape hiss, soon introducing more of that impossible low end, the voices locked in a chant-like loop, while that skull rattling bass tone, pulses ominously, eventually introducing some throbbing 4 on the floor house music, but all murky and muddy, as if blasting in an upstairs apartment, just the rhythm oozing though the walls, a darkly propuslive slab of late night housemusic murk. "All This Is Ours (Sunrise)", unfurls soft swells of new age synth shimmer, a crystalline drift that soon sinks into a thick layed morass of crumbling bass-synth squelch and gradually intensifying distorted crackle, before finishing off in a squall of soft noise and sc-fi FX swirl, and finally, "We Have Already Died", strings some tribal skeletal skitter into a looped almost Muslimgauze sounding groove, all draped over an ominous sprawl of post industrial hum and layered swirls of blurred ghost-grey ambience.
Packaged much like the last Demdike Stare, in an oversized six panel digi-sleeve, with original Andy Votel artwork, mirroring the artwork from the original quadruple gatefold sleeve that housed all four 12"s...
MPEG Stream: "Mephisto's Lament"
MPEG Stream: "Kommunion"
MPEG Stream: "Mnemosyne"
MPEG Stream: "Erosion Of Mediocrity"
MPEG Stream: "Dauerlinie"
MPEG Stream: "New Use For Old Circuits"

HAFLER TRIO, THE How To Reform Mankind (Korm Plastics) cd 15.98
BACK IN STOCK!!
How To Reform Mankind marks yet another entry in the reissue campaign of The Hafler Trio's early research into sound and its effect upon the human psyche. It was the third in what now stands as the first of many untitled "triologies of three," standing as the final chapter to the series featuring Kill The King and Mastery of Money. Within the entire catalogue of the Hafler Trio, How To Reform Mankind (1994) represents one of the last records that Andrew McKenzie produced before drastically slowing down his activities in the middle and late '90s. In many ways, this album is also an exceptional culmination of the ideas that McKenzie propagated throughout the '80s, which reflect a considerably different perspective upon his work, his life, and the world in general. The early Hafler Trio albums revelled in the miscommunication, the recycling of information within new contexts, and a disorientation caused by the play between what is real and what might be real. In recent years, The Hafler Trio's idioms have suggested a revelation / obfuscation of truth in the grand traditions of ancient Gnosticism.
Psychoacoustics and the psychological impact of sound have both figured heavily into all of the Hafler Trio's work, and these areas of research are profoundly present on How To Reform Mankind. Subtle flutterings of shortwave data have been processed into rarified air; low volume, resonant frequencies colliding with the body for a chest-cavity massage; the clunky piano from McKenzie's Negentropy album returns as a post-serialist leitmotif; and desolate sonar plinks slam against metal walls to astounding effect. McKenzie's uncompromising drive for his art has made the Hafler Trio one of the greatest artistic endeavors of the last two decades; and How To Reform Mankind stands close to the top of his best recordings.
Due to circumstances beyond our control, we cannot offer sound samples of the Hafler Trio's work. Oh well.

ECTOPLASM GIRLS TxN (Ideal Recordings) lp 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
First of all, be warned, these took nearly six months to show up from Sweden; and we will most likely not be restocking these when we sell out of this batch, or if we do, it could very well take ANOTHER six months. But back in the late summer of 2011, we caught wind of what seemed like a really fascinating piece of damaged, witchy pop narcotic from the Swedish sisters Nadine and Tanya Byrne (aka Ectoplasm Girls). Shortly, there after, The Wire raved about the album; and then we simply waited for the box to show... Fortunately for a lucky few of you, that box did indeed finally arrive!
The Byrne sisters could very well be ghosts from the mid-80s cassette culture of DIY electronics, industrial antipathy, and corrosive psychedelia. As half-formed / half-forgotten songs of deconstructed piano, looped abstractions, and bad vibes, the Ectoplasm Girls arrangements aren't too dissimilar from those that Zola Jesus primitively sketched on her earliest recordings. Like Zola Jesus, voice is also key to the hauntological pop that the Ectoplasm Girls create, although they take it in an entirely different direction. At times, they adopt a baby-faced atonal lunacy with shrill lullabies above their murky tunes, abstracted rhythms, and macabre electronics; and at others, they utter mantras in dull monotone as if these strangely seductive passages were culled from their own exorcisms. "Sexodrome" takes all the right cues from Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, with vocal fragments orbiting a skeletal rhythmic plod that's all gotta reference Cronenberg in some way shape or form. It's too creepy not to! A blast of hurricane noise launches "If Your Mother Asks" which surges forward through driving techno stomp akin to TG's ceaseless march "Discipline" and complementary slashes of noise and vocal gaspings.
If we thought we could get more, we might expound more on the subject of the Ectoplasm Girls; but as it stands, we've got less than a dozen. So, delay now and perhaps delay forever.

GARET, RICHARD Areal (23five Incorporated) cd 14.98
Oh, we love art made from glitches, errors, surface noise, smudges, corrosives, and just plain mistakes. Just look at how we've championed Caretaker, Phillip Jeck, William Basinksi, and Oval, and how many times we applaud something for sounding antiquated, garbbled, warbling, or just utterly fucked-up. Which brings us to New York based sound artist Richard Garet and his atypical electronic systems involving lo-tech circuits, radio transmitters, and dismembered speaker cones, we seem to have found yet another artist whose beautiful demolition deserves our attention.
Back in 2011, Garet presented an audio-visual live piece at SFMOMA, which involved a wildly stroboscopic, flickering projection that triggered jittery noises from his table top of toy walkie-talkies and bits of circuitry. With the potential for gnarled interference and ugly distortion that the cross-currents and bare wires might impart, Garet's performance was somehow instead jaw-droppingly elegant, drawing a taut line from minimalist drone & crackle through John Duncan's psychoacoustics and back to David Tudor's Rainforest excursions, but shifted just slightly towards a hauntological mesmerism with ghosts of melody seemingly buried within. Areal works in the same way as that piece; and dates back to a different installation Garet presented at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, where he flooded the space with fog and shot color-field projections into the space swirling together with the eeriely divine drones. The music on the disc in all likelihood is a distillation of the Issue Project Room extravaganza, heightening the drama and intensity of the sounds without having the benefit of a fog and light show. Garet cites radio as a source material for Areal, but damn if he doesn't get the device to sound like a Rhys Chatham guitar symphony, a field of chromatic density and shivering heaviness blossoming from supple tones and crunched noises. The album's lush atmospherics wax and wane with variable degrees of intensity, with ethereal drifts collapsing into scrabbled texture later to be engulfed in a harmonic cauldron of buzzing thrum. Garet reveals his hand at the end of the 50-minute composition with some unkempt radio interference that snaps to a sudden conclusion. You may hear bits of Tim Hecker and bits of Phill Niblock in Garet's work. Everything Garet has done up until this album has been very good; but with Areal, he's taken it to another level. Absolutely required dronemuzik listening!
MPEG Stream: "Areal (extract 1)"
MPEG Stream: "Areal (extract 2)"
MPEG Stream: "Areal (extract 3)"

SCHAFER, HELMUT Thought Provoking III (23five Incorporated) cd 14.98
The Austrian noise artist Helmut Schafer died in 2007, leaving behind only a handful of recordings despite his constant travels to music / art festival around the world, including appearances at ARS Electronica and Documenta back in 1997. His work dealt mostly with psychoacoustic principles of intense frequencies at intense volumes, as such he found a sympathetic ear in Zbigniew Karkowski - who became a longtime friend and often collaborator. Yet, beginning around 2003 he came across some dismantled church organ pipes and began experimenting with alternative ways of activating the tones and timbres of those pipes, including a contraption of hairdryers that pushed small currents through the pipes to generate hushed, muffled tones. In building compositions through this system of organ pipes, he radically shifted away from the searing noise and towards a very quiet, contemplative electro-acoustic sound, involving violin, electronics, percussion, and ample pockets of empty space. Thought Provoking III is Schafer's final recording dating back to 2006 when he employed percussionist Will Guthrie and violinist Elisabeth Gmeiner to perform the piece in a Vienna church. In fact, Guthrie stitched this recording together from the rehearsal sessions and the performance itself, attempting to keep true to Schafer's wishes. The proceedings are solemn excursions in electro-acoustic mark-making built around those bellowing hums from Schafer's organ pipes amidst intermittent percussive flourishes, subtle gong overtones, sustained violin trills, and fizzling electronics. The non-repetitive clustered events sound akin to anyone from the Miasmah roster taking up the task of remaking late period Morton Feldman. For the final track of the album, Zbigniew Karkowksi took up remixing elements of Thought Provoking III into a piece reflective of Schafer's more volatile compositions. While full of the frigid vibration and electric toxicity, Karkowski shows considerable restraint in his remix, and constructing a poignant tribute to his lost friend.
MPEG Stream: "Thought Provoking III"
MPEG Stream: "Averaging Down 20xx By Zbigniew Karkowski"

SCHNITZLER, CONRAD Live '72 (Further) 2lp 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
First, before we get into the review, we should mention that this double lp is housed in an oversized French paper hand silk-screened jacket. While it's a beautiful package, the combination of its oversized shape and the delicacy of the material means it's prone to damage in shipping, and of course all the copies we have received arrived a bit bent up. The label has no replacement covers so this is all we're going to get. We've taken a couple dollars off the price to compensate a bit, but those who are more fastidious about the shape of their vinyl sleeves, might want to steer clear of this, as we won't be able to replace them. Sorry about that!
But WOW!, this is a beautiful double lp live set from 1972 by the late experimental kosmiche composer, Conrad Schnitzler. Salvaged from decaying tapes of a performance for an art exhibition, the sounds on this are like a multifaceted sci-fi ballet. The coordination of individual electronic sounds operating in harmonic tandem of each other showcases a brilliant array of synthesis and restraint, while at the same time emanating a warm centrally vibrant core. For some reason in some of our minds we always have this impression that Conrad Schnitzler was the most abstract and cold of the German musicians of this period, but lately with each new reissue that becomes available, that impression is proven wrong time and time again. This is a gorgeous set, as essential as any of his key recordings from this era. And as usual, crazy limited, ONLY 1000 COPIES and at this point almost gone so act fast!

DAUBY, YANNICK, JOHN GRZINICH, & MURMER Lind, Raud, Aastaajad (Invisible Birds) 2cd 16.98
If anything, the Estonian countryside is quiet. The clockwork schedule of the network of rural buses and the cackle of a black swan racing high above the trees is about all that you'll hear. I (Jim) had the pleasure of experiencing this Estonian quietude a few years back, and I have to say that Yannick Dauby's collection of field recordings is way more active than any i actually encountered. Estonia is known for its avian diversity, although when I was there during the brief transition from summer into winter (literally, three weeks!), the birds had all flown south... so Dauby must have been there in later spring or summertime as he does capture a number of chittering sounds from those birds passing through from Russia and Finland to Southern Europe and North Africa (or vice versa). Between these avian recordings, Dauby documents another common denizen of the Estonian countryside - the giant chunks of metal dumped unceremoniously by the Soviet agricultural industry. Even without much wind, these abandoned grain silos and oil tanks resonate with thick rumblings and subtle overtones, which Dauby dutifully records with contact microphones. These thrumming drones recall the Alan Lamb wire recordings as much as they do Thomas Koner's deep gong recordings.
Disc one of this two disc set features Dauby's "songs for birds and metal" while the second features reworkings of Dauby's source material by John Grzinich and Murmer (aka Patrick McGingley), both of whom have exceptional catalogues of electro-organic compositions based often on phonography. Grzinich's two lengthy pieces are quieter and more subtle, focusing on the patter of dripping water and melting ice with flickering drones and harmonics forming arctic halos around those aquatic textures. The two Murmer tracks intensify things comparatively against Grzinich's lowercase work, with thick drones amassed around what sounds like somebody trekking through the deep snow. Those Coleclough / Koner drones manifest ominous black clouds and unsettled vibes, not heard elsewhere on the album and turning that Estonian quiet into something haunting. All in all, a magnificent piece of manipulated field recording and sound ecology.
MPEG Stream: YANNICK DAUBY "Raud 07.06.03 Saaropera"
MPEG Stream: YANNICK DAUBY "Lind 07.06.21 Mooste"
MPEG Stream: JOHN GRZINICH & YANNICK DAUBY "Talv"
MPEG Stream: MURMER & YANNICK DAUBY "Kevad"

CARETAKER, THE Patience (After Sebald) (History Always Favors The Winners) cd 17.98
Leyland Kirby has been on a real roll lately! Not only recently releasing two of our favorite albums from last year, Eager To Tear Apart The Stars and The Caretaker's An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, but also three installments of synth and sound experiments in his Intrigue and Stuff series. And now we have this beautiful and elegiac new Caretaker recording which is a soundtrack to a new documentary by Grant Gee on the German writer, WG Sebald and the influence of his most renowned book Rings of Saturn. It's an apt fit as both Kirby and Sebald have both been concerned with themes of memory, time, loss and decay (both individually and historically) and the attempts to reconcile with them in both literary and musical terms. We got a limited amount of the now out of print vinyl of this a couple weeks ago, not nearly enough to list, and those are surely gone now, but at least now here's the cd version!
Sebald's book mixed history, travelogue, fiction and memoir into a meditative account of the personal and public histories of Suffolk. The essayistic documentary takes a similarly multi-layered and nonlinear tact by tracking the same locations and landscapes, which is greatly aided by Kirby's score, which instead of using the prewar ballroom music of his last two Caretaker albums, sources a 78 rpm recording of a song cycle by Franz Schubert from 1828 called Winterreise. One of Schubert's last compositions before his death, Winterreisse was based on the poems of Wilhelm Muller, a soldier intrigued by the miraculous and grim cycles of nature, and stands as one of Schubert's most melancholic and dark compositions. In his notes for the song cycle, Schubert describes the setting: "Early on the wanderer sings about his lost beloved. As the song cycle develops he sings of abject loneliness, longing for death, and glimpses of delusional hope." Certainly sounds about right for a Caretaker album.
In true Caretaker fashion, Kirby sources snippets of melodic piano loops and wreathes them in a sheen of murky hiss, and weaves them into repetitive sonic layers. Sometimes a snippet of vocal can be detected before being cut off when the loop restarts putting the piece in a constant flux of promise and denial. The distant resonance of romantically wistful piano reverberations culminate in a seemingly rapturous fog of rained out daydreams. While Winterreise is largely a vocal cycle, Schubert saves most of the emotional heft of the composition for the piano, using it as the voice of the poet moreso than the vocal elements. Kirby fashions his composition much the same way, filtering or burying the vocal elements until the final track, where the ghostly chorus of voices slightly slowed, comes out in full force for a deeply moving climax.
This is a gorgeous score that is beautiful on its own even removed from its source or ignorant of its inspiration, but it has also made us equally excited to see the documentary, read the book, listen to the original Schubert piece as well as read the poems that inspired them. Enthralling!
MPEG Stream: "Everything Is On The Point Of Decline"
MPEG Stream: "As If One Were Sinking Into Sand"
MPEG Stream: "Approaching The Outer Limits Of Our Solar System"
MPEG Stream: "When The Dog Days Were Drawing To An End"
MPEG Stream: "Now The Night Is Over And The Dawn Is About To Break"

DEAD LUKE Meanwhile.... In The Midwest (Moon Glyph) lp 11.98
We first caught Dead Luke's name on an older Zola Jesus album, back when it was all about the murk, grit and lo-fi griminess of her sound. Wisconsin was home to both artists at the time; but she soon left for Hollywood on a meteoric rise for goth-diva fame, and Dead Luke stayed behind inoculating himself from Midwestern boredom with his spring-reverb saturated, outsider psychedelia. With a name like Dead Luke, you might half expect a suitably depressive lo-fi goth thing (especially with a couple of singles on Sacred Bones along with that former connection to Zola Jesus); but Dead Luke's downer vibe is the result of being a stoner rather than an occultist, with his awesomely lazy psychedelic numbers that channel 13 Floor Elevators through the heavily sedated period of Spacemen 3. Contemporarily speaking, this album plants itself right between the rockabilly minimalism of Dirty Beaches and the shambolic retro-blast of Thee Oh Sees. Dead Luke tangles those archetypal blues chords and strutting basslines with overblown fuzz, lo-fi crunch, and swampy spring-reverb excess, with his songs always devolving out of the verse / chorus structure of the song and into a hypnotic groove rippling with melodic yet droned-out organs, as a nod to the Perfect Prescription era bleariness from Spacemen 3. He even does an old Bo Diddley number in "I'm A Man," albeit all mumbled and narcotized. "Paranoia Is A Flower Of The Mind" must be an ode to the side effects of altered states, even as the song is a sprawling, ramshackle number of drugged out American psychedelia. Yeah, it's that good. No download code, though.

PORTER RICKS Biokinetics (Type) cd 16.98
Recently reissued on vinyl (which sadly, went quickly out of print), now available again on cd!!
Techno is a genre of self-quotation and unrepentant appropriation, always looking in the rearview mirror at what just happened to predict what will be the hot-shit trend on the dancefloor tomorrow. So to be able to trace an entire strain within techno's taxonomy to a specific record is quite rare. The 1996 album Biokinetics by Porter Ricks is one such record, setting the stage for pretty much every electronic artist who would flock to the banner of Chain Reaction through a stylized hypnotic, narcotizing techno haunted with deep atmospherics, dub murkiness, and subaquatic allusions. Porter Ricks was the duo of Andy Mellwig and Thomas Koner, who pursued "techno as a nautical sound experience." By the time the first Porter Ricks single emerged in '96, Koner had already developed his signature isolationist approach to slow-motion sound-design blustering with arctic metaphors through the dronemuzik classics of Nunatak Gongamur (1990) and Permafrost (1993). So when Koner began exploring techno with Mellwig, the approach to techno was less about 64-bar measures and more about constructing an evolving atmosphere girded to quintessentially German techno engineering that could be taken for a sonic portrait of tidal flows, map coordinates, sonar blips, and the vastness of the deep blue sea.
Biokinetics opens with the magnificent "Port Gentil" whose steady techno pulse coalesces through overlapping patterns from muffled pulsations of white noise and distant locomotive rhythms, later topped by a radiant metallic drone. The somatic oscillations of "Biokinetics 1" hardly makes for a techno track at all despite the insistent rhythms, but the eerie heartpulse dub of "Biokinetics 2" takes an isolationist reproach to everything adding its own desolate pulse and some subterranean reverb. Granulated hiss and slippery drone shimmer blossom through the final tracks "Nautical Nuba" and "Nautical Zone" that look forward to what Wolfgang Voigt would produce on his seminal Gas albums Zauberberg and Konigsforst. It sounded awesome in 1996, and it sounds awesome today.
MPEG Stream: "Port Gentil"
MPEG Stream: "Biokinetics 2"
MPEG Stream: "Nautical Zone"

SOFT CELL The Bedsit Tapes (Some Bizarre) cd 23.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We managed to miss this one when it was released a while back in 2005, but we figured we weren't the only ones to let this import cd slip through the cracks. The Bedsit Tapes is the officially released collection of the early demos, escapades, and excursions from the megawatt new wave pop stars Soft Cell. These DIY recordings date back to 1978 when David Ball was attending Leeds Polytechnic, where he made full use of a makeshift recording studio consisting of a couple of reel-to-reel tape decks and a mixing board. Upon wiring up a Korg synth and primitive drum machine, Ball started to make "weird little tunes," one of which caught the ear of fellow student Marc Almond who asked if he could use one of those songs for his performance art shows. The two began refining those electronic blorps and bleeps into arty synth-pop numbers, snarling with contemporary punk energy and technological primitivism. Almond already had developed a charismatic persona, which he jubilantly expressed upon the wide vistas of grandiose theatricality, from the crooning balladeering of "L.O.V.E. Feeling" to the switchblade slashes on the uber-ironic "Bleak Is My Favorite Cliche" to the ominous bark of "Occupational Hazard" and onto the fucked-up delirium of their frenzied cover of Black Sabbath's "Paranoid." Yeah, you heard us right: Soft Cell covered Sabbath!
Given the stripped down arrangements and trial-by-fire approach to the technology at hand, Soft Cell certainly benefited from Almond's larger than life persona. Such is what gave the 'pop' elements of Throbbing Gristle and Reproduction era Human League their iconic status, and it certainly set the stage for the anthemic '80s hits that Soft Cell would produce later on. While many ordinary Soft Cell fans might be put off by the roughness of these tracks, it's precisely that fucked atonality, that avant-punk electricity, that giddy nervousness, those warbled, sci-fi effects and those ominous drones which make us totally dig this collection. Anyone into the whole "Messthetics" scene, and/or the current revival of retro new wave electronica old and new, should also dig.
MPEG Stream: "L.O.V.E. Feelings"
MPEG Stream: "Science Fiction Stories"
MPEG Stream: "Paranoid"

KAHN, JASON On Metal Shores (Editions) lp 24.00
As we've mentioned before, American ex-pat and former hardcore drummer Jason Kahn made a radical shift away from the SST punk style jams he was kicking out during the '80s toward an avant-drone-noise-improv type of career that has taken him to Zurich, Switzerland. Yeah, it is a career for him, but the price one has to pay for having a sound-art career is a constant tour / exhibition schedule. Rock'n'roll may have its fortune seekers, but a steady paycheck through sound-art? Not very likely. Yet, Kahn has done it; and done it by producing work that is incredibly refined through his own take on electro-acoustic strategies, modular synth exploration, holy minimalist composition, and an occasional percussion flourish in ghostly deference to his former life as the drummer for Leaving Trains. With all of the touring and exhibitions (seriously, his schedule is fucking insane!), solo releases from Jason Kahn can be fleeting (although he's very prolific with his collaborative contributions). So, this new production from Kahn is something that could be celebrated simply because the man somehow found the time to get this out in the world; but that would be selling it short... as On Metal Shores is a brilliant piece of shimmering, gasping minimalism that glides out of acoustically-sourced drone reminiscent of Andrew Chalk and Organum, the metallurgically organic swells of Alan Lamb's wire recordings, and the graceful minimalism of Eliane Radigue and Roland Kayn. Kahn writes at great length in the liner notes about some of the situations for the source recordings, including the nice image of Jason Kahn tapping on a resonant hand-railing near Lake Zurich as local birds would congregate and take off depending on the volume of Kahn's rhythm-n-drone. These elements along with long-thin-wire instruments attached to transducers, the thrum of giant water tanks, drainage pipe raspings, and much more get worked into Kahn's shifting drones that accrete into swollen crescendos of complex shimmered noise and harmonic interplay. This stunner of an album is limited to 250 copies, hand numbered, and hand-painted.

VAN HOEN, MARK The Revenant Diary (Editions Mego) cd 16.98
Recording as Locust back in the late '90s, Mark Van Hoen produced a signature post-IDM electronica that was sublime in mood but was fraught with overly complicated rhythms and portentous song cycles that weighed far too heavily on what might have developed into something on par with Biosphere or Bowery Electric. As a result, much of his output is immediately attractive but has failed to rise above the overwrought production he endlessly piled on to his sounds.
Fortunately, recently Van Hoen came upon an experimental tape piece he made at the precocious age of 13, when he was remastering some of his earlier tracks from the '90s. That archival track centered on a mashed-up banal pop song with garbled vocals and backwards recordings of church organs, creating something quite spooky and arresting. Van Hoen took the simplicity of that process to heart (but not the track itself, drat!), recording much of The Revenant Diary on a 4-track, which is pretty much unheard of in this day and age of Ableton. The results find Van Hoen at his absolute best, shorn of those implausible complexities which troubled his earlier recordings, rendering an album that should warrant plenty of comparisons to Demdike Stare as a very well executed piece of hauntological electronica.
The warbly, decaying drones from those 4-track levitate in an uneasy fashion at the beginning of the album, suffocating what was once a vigorous drill-n-bass workout into fizzling skitter amidst the shadow, grain, and hiss of "Garabndl X", leading into the hypnotic "Don't Look Back", whose looping female vocals intoning the track's title, orbit a strutting, dubbed-out, mid-tempo rhythm that wouldn't seem out of place on Tricky's Maxinquaye. "No Distance" glides two streams of reverberant ambience along a computer-mad sequencing as a meeting between Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II and Oneohtrix Point Never's Returnal. While all of this may be simple from Van Hoen's perspective, The Revenant Diary is a richly textured album that dynamically jumps from vertiginous ambient passages into throbbing, post-dubstep explorations of rhythm. Let's hope that Van Hoen keeps it this 'simple' for the next record!
MPEG Stream: "I Remember"
MPEG Stream: "Where Were You"
MPEG Stream: "Don't Look Back"

VAN HOEN, MARK The Revenant Diary (Editions Mego) 2lp 30.00
Recording as Locust back in the late '90s, Mark Van Hoen produced a signature post-IDM electronica that was sublime in mood but was fraught with overly complicated rhythms and portentous song cycles that weighed far too heavily on what might have developed into something on par with Biosphere or Bowery Electric. As a result, much of his output is immediately attractive but has failed to rise above the overwrought production he endlessly piled on to his sounds.
Fortunately, recently Van Hoen came upon an experimental tape piece he made at the precocious age of 13, when he was remastering some of his earlier tracks from the '90s. That archival track centered on a mashed-up banal pop song with garbled vocals and backwards recordings of church organs, creating something quite spooky and arresting. Van Hoen took the simplicity of that process to heart (but not the track itself, drat!), recording much of The Revenant Diary on a 4-track, which is pretty much unheard of in this day and age of Ableton. The results find Van Hoen at his absolute best, shorn of those implausible complexities which troubled his earlier recordings, rendering an album that should warrant plenty of comparisons to Demdike Stare as a very well executed piece of hauntological electronica.
The warbly, decaying drones from those 4-track levitate in an uneasy fashion at the beginning of the album, suffocating what was once a vigorous drill-n-bass workout into fizzling skitter amidst the shadow, grain, and hiss of "Garabndl X", leading into the hypnotic "Don't Look Back", whose looping female vocals intoning the track's title, orbit a strutting, dubbed-out, mid-tempo rhythm that wouldn't seem out of place on Tricky's Maxinquaye. "No Distance" glides two streams of reverberant ambience along a computer-mad sequencing as a meeting between Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II and Oneohtrix Point Never's Returnal. While all of this may be simple from Van Hoen's perspective, The Revenant Diary is a richly textured album that dynamically jumps from vertiginous ambient passages into throbbing, post-dubstep explorations of rhythm. Let's hope that Van Hoen keeps it this 'simple' for the next record!
MPEG Stream: "I Remember"
MPEG Stream: "Where Were You"
MPEG Stream: "Don't Look Back"

DOME 1-4+5 (Editions Mego) 5lp 170.00
After producing three seminal art-punk records from 1977 to 1980 that moved in rapid trajectory away from the short-sharp economy of Pink Flag to the tongue-twisting surfaces of 154, Wire dissolved for the first time. Call it a hiatus, call it an acrimonious break-up, call it a fuck-you to the major label that signed them; but regardless of what may or may have transpired in 1980, there were just too many ideas in those four blokes to be contained in the trappings of a four-piece punk band. Given what came immediately after 154, it's pretty clear where all of those radical shifts came from - Graham Lewis and Bruce Gilbert. Sure, Colin Newman produced a pretty decent solo record in A-Z, but in all of the projects that Lewis & Gilbert produced, there was a torrent of amazing material that included Duet Emmo, Cupol, P'O, and what proved to the best of the lot - Dome.
In quick succession, Dome produced four albums between 1980 and 1982, all of which now are just referred to by their numerical order, although Dome 4 was originally released under the title Will You Speak This World. As much as these records were explorations of deconstructing the punk song into drone, atonality, minimal synth abrasion, and polyglot perversity, Lewis & Gilbert would also tease with hints at what Wire had previously manifested. This audience baiting was also demonstrated on Wire's live lp Document & Eyewitness which condensed the classic Wire songs "12xU" down to 15 second fragment that never launched into that pogo-punk beat. As such, Dome would build songs out of repetitive guitar & bass patterns that would parallel one of the exuberant numbers like "Outdoor Miner" or "Mannequin" but the song would then detour into ellipsis with alien drones and discordant counterpoints. "Here We Go" from Dome 1 was a prime example of this punk-tease, furthered by tracks like the wild-eyed delirium of Lewis' ranting on "Cancel Your Order" also from Dome 1. The much ballyhooed highlight from that first record is the sublime track "Cruel When Complete" sung by Angela Conway, who coos breathily over an elegant if very cold electronic pattern with quintessential minimal wave detachment. Dome 2 continues along the convoluted art-punk abstraction through the two part "Red Tent" framed by plenty of abstracted electronic fragments and rhythmic work-outs that parallel what This Heat was doing at the same time.
Dome 3 found the duo hitting their stride, where the synthetic rhythms and loops play a central role in the arrangements accompanied by weird percussion, distorted vocals, feverish minimalism, abstractionist drones, and industrial overtures. All of the tracks are given names more fitting to Kurt Schwitters "Ursonate" such as "Ar-Gu," "Roos-An," and "An-An-An-D-D-D," providing more of a connection to Dada than to punk. Through these synthetic noises, Dome find them the perfect bridge between Throbbing Gristle and Zoviet France. Dome 4 stretches out the fragmentary brilliance of Dome 3 into longer, more thoughtfully composed pieces such as the archaic sounding folk-hymnal "To Speak" where Lewis' baritone intertwines with a languid violin and lots of cathedral reverberations.
Jump some 8 years to when Wire had reformed to produce a couple of fantastic art-pop records, when Dome also reconvened with the aid of late-80s technology: samplers and MIDI sequencing (as opposed to the tape loop and primitive synth work of the early recordings); and they recorded an album entitled Yclept which didn't get released for another decade. Here, the machined rhythms, repetitive noise collages, and loping basslines rejoin the realm of the song, albeit fractured somewhere between Aphex Twin, Greater Than One, and SPK, with Lewis crooning as he would occasionally do in Wire and on his under-appreciated He Said solo projects.
These 5 lps come packaged in large box filled with photographs, posters, and liner notes plus the requisite download coupon and inexplicably a box of matches. Don't set yourself on fire, please.
MPEG Stream: "Cruel When Complete"
MPEG Stream: "Danz"
MPEG Stream: "Ar-Gu"
MPEG Stream: "To Speak"
MPEG Stream: "Because We Must (Version 1)"
MPEG Stream: "Virtual Sweden (V.S.#1)"

STOTT, ANDY Passed Me By / We Stay Together (Modern Love) 2cd 24.00
Before we had actually heard Andy Stott, we had a procession of folks come into the store and tell us how incredible his stuff was, and how we should definitely get whatever we could, and yet, with every 12" release, they disappeared before we could get any copies at all, and before we knew it they were gone. We did manage to hear bits and pieces, enough that when we discovered that two of the records were being reissued together as a double cd, we could barely wait, and once it arrived, well, pretty much everyone here has been playing it nonstop. UK producer Stott seems to have taken the minimal downtempo soul of Burial as a jumping off point, taking that same sound and slowing it down even further, adding more grit and grime, creating a sound now twice removed from the dancefloor, a soporific, somnolent techno that fuses murky dirgey slo-mo soul with abstract house music creep, conjuring up a music that is both haunting and sinister, mesmeric and minimal, an array of looped melodies, melded to skeletal thumps and heartbeat like pulses, fragmented samples woven into the mix mostly to provide texture and melody, but for the most part all of the various elements are recruited to either become rhythms themselves, or to be blurred and smeared into a grim washed out backdrop, over which the rhythms slither and skitter. The dub element is huge, but it's a muted sublimated dub, only really showing itself, when a voice escapes the gravitational pull of Stott's black hole dub, the swirl of effects dragging it right back down into the murk, quickly disappearing into the inky blackness, leaving just the churn and lurch, and it's that balance, a delicate one to be sure, that makes Stott's sound so special. Too much rhythmic murk, and it's monochromatic and dull, too much melody, and sonic filigree and suddenly it's not nearly so dark and mysterious. Stott deftly negotiates the middle ground, dragging the more melodic elements into the dark and repurposing them, using them to infuse his sonic black energy with life. The bonus tracks on Passed Me By, are much more active, the pulsing house-y "Stitch House" sounds like Stott covering The Field, still all fuzzy and washed out and Pop Ambient, but much more rhythmic, and less murky, while "Love Nothing" lets the rhythms come front and center, skittering and shuffling over a rubbery low end melody, and swirling synthy chordal swells, not to mention a deep dramatic croon. It almost sounds like a sketch for a future song that would find the various elements dipped in pitch, slowed down and blackened.
The second disc does dial back the murk a bit, instead focusing on the rhythmic component, wrapping everything in a Pop Ambient haze, but letting the beats break free of the whir and thrum, opener "Submission" is all hazy swirls, the only rhythm a sort of echo drenched dubbed out ripple, very dreamlike and abstract, before slipping into "Posers" which at first sounds very much like something off Passed Me By sampled water gurgles beneath a muted techno thump, but soon, fog horn like melodies drift in, and the beat blossoms into something much more active, a shuffling crunch anchored to a house-like pulse, processed vocals drifting over the top, the vibe groovy, but still washed out and druggily abstract. Which is how the first half of We Stay Together plays out, but then about half way through, the sounds begins to veer back toward the murk, "Cherry Eye" being a fantastic bit of muddied minimalism, even at its most propulsive, it's still a muted creep, as is "Cracked", although it does crank the beat a bit, conjuring up a sort of slow motion shimmy, that remains looped and mesmerizingly motorik.
The bonus tracks on We Stay Together, in some ways mirror those on Passed Me By, in that they actually sound more like their opposite, "Work Gate" is super minimal and sketch-like, a little dubby and darkly Portishead-y, while "We Stay Together (Part Two)" begins life as a hushed blur, but gradually blossoms into another Field like chunk of looped techno mesmer.
Released on the same label that gave us all the Demdike Stare records, which should give you an idea that while this might technically be techno, it's some murky dubbed out hauntology that transcends any sort of genre classification. A brand new unanimous store fave, and definite contender for Record Of the Year!
Packed in a super striking oversized gatefold sleeve, with a different cover for each album depending on which way you're holding it, both stunning black and white photos culled from the pages of National Geographic.
MPEG Stream: "North To South"
MPEG Stream: "Intermittent"
MPEG Stream: "Dark Details"
MPEG Stream: "Submission"
MPEG Stream: "Posers"

RADIGUE, ELIANE Geelriandre / Arthesis (Senufo Editions) cd 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
A much needed reissue of two magnificent pieces of Holy Minimalism from Eliane Radigue! Much of Radigue's classic work from the late '60s and into the '80s had never been presented outside the context of live playback, due to the simple fact that vinyl couldn't handle more than 25 minutes to a side without serious loss of fidelity. So with the advent of cds, the vast archives of her reel-to-reel tapes of very-long form compositions and stasis-oriented dronemuzik began to see the light of day well after the work had been completed and shelved. Radigue had studied composition in the INA-GRM studios in the mid-'60s and was one of many artists who became enamored with the potential of feedback as a tool within composition. The long sinewy drones of a controlled feedback loop became a signature of her earliest works, with synthesizers gradually enveloping those sounds with their greater control and tonal palette.
Composed in 1972 and 1973 respectively (though these recordings were made several years later), "Geelriandre" and "Arthesis" represent some of the earliest work demonstrating Radigue's maturation as a minimalist. "Geerlriandre" - for prepared piano and Arp synthesizer, ripples with a melancholia through a beautiful chorus of tightly oscillating electric drones occasionally punctuated by the sustained yet muffled resonance of the piano, anticipating what Brian Eno would present many years later on Thursday Afternoon albeit with none of the romanticized impressionism. "Arthesis," using the Moog, is a more ominous affair, whirling back and forth between low end frequencies amidst a glacial progression of bleak ambience. This album isn't only good for historical documentation, but also is an exceptional precursor to the drone-tastic pursuits of current artists like Thomas Koner and Andrew Chalk.
Originally released about ten years ago on Giuseppe Ielasi's Fringes, and Ielasi wisely reclaimed these recordings for his new imprint Senufo. If you didn't get it the first time, you should certainly pick this one up now!
MPEG Stream: "Geelriandre"
MPEG Stream: "Arthesis"

CAN Tago Mago (40th Anniversary Edition) (Spoon ) 2cd 19.98
Nice!! One of our favorite Can, nay krautrock, nay any-kind-of albums ever (that is if you don't ask Andee, who for some insane reason doesn't like Can at all), given a fancy 40th Anniversary reissue! What's so fancy about it you ask? Well, first the packaging, it's in a nice gatefold miniature lp style sleeve, with the original art of the German lp edition that came out back in 1971 (yay, 1971!). That's nestled inside a cardboard wallet-like folder which bears the cover from Tago Mago's UK release in 1972, a movie still of singer Damo and drummer Jaki on stage, in action, dramatically lit. For some reason they made big deal about this alternate cover being used on this reissue, it's cool to have it but we're happy the original art is also present and accounted for on that gatefold sleeve. Also inside the folder, a thick booklet with vintage photos and plenty o' detailed liner notes, including some by the guy from Primal Scream.
More importantly though, what makes this so special is that it includes a whole extra disc, a previously unreleased, 48 minute live performance from 1972! They do "Mushroom" and "Halleluwah" from Tago Mago, as well as "Spoon" from that year's equally amazing Ege Bamyasi, that song here stretched out to almost a half hour in length! Any true Can fan will want this just for the live disc, even though you probably already have one or more remastered versions of Tago Mago proper. But yeah, with the live set and the nice packaging, this is definitely worth getting, it's an upgrade all right.
For those of you who aren't big Can fans already, this would be a fine place to begin your love affair with this amazing band (c'mon, Andee!). Here's what we wrote about Tago Mago when it was last reissued:
1971's Tago Mago double album was Can's third full-length release, and their first with expatriate Japanese singer Damo Suzuki (whom they discovered busking on the street outside a club). It's truly a sprawling masterpiece of krautrock. Witness the weird noise/drone stuff on the 17 minute "Aumgn", or the totally hypnotic rhythmic psych groove of the equally side-long "Halleluwah". Again, we probably don't have to say much more, you already have this, right? But if Can's new to you, we'd recommend this (as well as Monster Movie and Ege Bamyasi and Soundtracks) as among their best efforts. PS: If you like Circle and you don't have this record, get it!!
MPEG Stream: "Mushroom"
MPEG Stream: "Oh Yeah"
MPEG Stream: "Spoon (Live 1972)"

TARAB Wind Keeps Even Dust Away (23five) cd 14.98
BACK IN STOCK!!!
Wind Keeps Even Dust Away is the second album from the brilliant Australian sound artist Tarab (aka Eamon Sprod) originally released in 2007; yet in his small discography of manipulated field recordings and agitated objects, he's proven himself a masterful sound artist, on par with all time aQuarius favorites Chris Watson, Toshiya Tsunoda, Matt Shoemaker, and Loren Chasse. In comparison to those esteemed artists, Tarab's work is considerably darker; and he has mentioned in a rare interview a somber sympathy for the views of extreme ecologists who posit that the world would be better off if humanity were to succumb to nuclear annihilation. As such, his albums loom as sonic harbingers of the end of the world. He builds all of his work through the overlay of multiple field recordings, augmented by the complementary sounds of Sprod rustling leaves, flaking rust, crumbling dirt, and shattering glass, all of which get mulched into seamless compositions swollen with expansive low end drones and electrocuted vibrations. Wind Keeps Even Dust Away navigates barren landscapes between the industrial wasteland and the wilderness of the outback, whose epic suites wander through the exploded view of locust swarms transmogrified into an electro-static hiss coupled with wind-borne drones and thrumming metallic vibration. Toward the end of the record, Tarab hits an ecological density through his arid sources that would imply the monumental forces of the Amazonian rainforest, but where Lopez seeks to pummel, Tarab is far more subtle in his approach, being inclined to show that weird beetle scurrying through the loose soil. He'll also make you aware of that bug's toxic qualities well after it has already crawled up and down your arm. Brilliant!
MPEG Stream: "Wind"
MPEG Stream: "Keeps"
MPEG Stream: "Away"

IRR. APP. (EXT.) Flux / Crayfish (Errata In Excelsis) cassette 9.98
It has been a while since we've heard from the hermetic M.S. Waldron and his ignoble project irr. app. (ext.), and now he's released two cassettes through his Errata In Excelsis imprint, continuing his slippery alchemy of surreal collage, spiraling drone, and cracked intention.
If that title looks a little familiar (as well as the cover), it is in fact an homage to the 1987 split album between AMM's Eddie Prevost and Organum, entitled Flayed / Crux which sported a bizarre mandala of Victorian-era clip art as cover art. But it's not just the title and the cover that Waldron is riffing upon, he's created two stellar 'covers' of those two lengthy tracks. The originals found Organum's David Jackman accompanying Prevost for "Flayed" with a signature acoustic drone from Jackman's bowed cymbal underlying a reverb-saturated, free-falling excursion around Prevost's drum kit. The irr. app. (ext.) reinvention in "Flux" is nearly flawless in keeping up with Prevost's polydactyl splutter and tempestuously rolling drum fills, while building an equally impressive simulacrum of Jackman's bowed cymbal thrumm of surging electrified friction.
As good as both Prevost and Waldron's tracks are, the best work is reserved for the flipside. The original of "Crux" featured an all-star Organum line-up with Jackman surrounded by Andrew Chalk, Dinah Jane Rowe, and Steven Stapleton who's credited performing on "chair." Waldron does list the objects that went into the formation of his reinterpretation entitled "Crayfish" including the enigmatic use of a "chair" in the assembling of this rebirthing drone-construction. Was the chair particularly squeaky? Did Stapleton drag it around to create a muffled texture somewhere in the mix? Did he just sit down and get high? Those same questions can be asked of Waldron, in his use of the piece of furniture in this beautiful swarm of acoustic drones from sustained cymbal drones dappled with shortwave radio detunings and a ritualistic flute that hangs sadly above all the droning surfaces. Waldron's version rings true with the eerie, yet beautiful atmospheric construction that Organum mustered during the height of their career, with the notable differences found in Waldron's use of squishy textures and squeaks that dot the heavy-droning swarm. That said, both the original and this cover should be lauded alongside those magnificient pieces of holy minimalism by Tony Conrad, LaMonte Young, and Charlemange Palestine. Yeah, it is that good! As you know, tapes like this are usually limited, so don't wait around on this one!
MPEG Stream: "Flux"
MPEG Stream: "Crayfish"

THROBBING GRISTLE 20 Jazz Funk Greats (Industrial Records) 2cd 23.00
The cover for Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats is a marvelous piece of subversive design. The four members of Throbbing Gristle look quite dapper, Genesis dolled up in a tailored white suit jacket, Cosey smiling happily in her pert miniskirt, and Chris & Sleazy both wearing rather conservative sweaters, but they had situated themselves on the cliffs of Beachy Head (a notorious suicide spot on the south coast of England) with a rented Range Rover in the distance and in a variation of this scene, a nude male body lies at their feet in the grass, presumably dead. This design (executed by Sleazy through his day job at Hipgnosis Design) was a sneering act of contempt for British society that failed to see the horrors and injustice which boiled just under the surfaces of congeniality and civility.
Both Second Annual Report and D.o.A. were ostensibly compilations of recontextualized material both from the studio and extracts from live recordings, but 20 Jazz Funk Greats - the third proper album from Throbbing Gristle - feels like a conceived album from beginning to end, even with all of its dead-ends and contradictions. The album opens with the title track, where a slow-motion drum machine and synthesized bass tones strut with a mechanical swagger with Cosey's discordant cornet blurts in the distance and predatorily whispered vocal extracts of what could be some smooth jazz DJ trying to set the mood - with that mood being a sickening, menacing threat. Such is also the case, with the lugubrious "Tanith" whose atonal rolling basslines churn against strange electronic blorp and tinkling chimes, which leads into "Convincing People" - whose metronomic synth sequencing became the signature for nearly every 'industrial' band that claimed TG as an influence. The detuned and distorted guitar from Cosey smears the mechanical edges while Genesis wailed through the lyrical repetitiveness which articulated to the effect that if you say it enough, people will start believing you. A hammer might help too. The minimalist club hit "Hot On The Heels Of Love" is one of the most memorable TG songs, and for very good reason as TG offered a much-imitated disco frugality through their insistent drum machine, squiggling sequencing, and Cosey's whispered vocals. Immediately following this is a nightmarish narration of the aftermath of a night of partying too much in "Persuasion", as disembodied female yelps of sexualized horror sporadically punctuate a slithering Genesis donning the role of a low-rent pornographer. "What A Day" is another 'industrial' template with a corrosive loop of cybernetic thumps forming the only backdrop to Genesis barking as loud as he can in a diabolical take on a footballer's chant. The finale "Six Six Sixties" finds Cosey's monochord guitar awfully prescient of Sonic Youth and Bailter Space in the drone intensity through distortion and rhythm, with Genesis reciting a suitably bleak monologue above, rounding out what is arguably the best of the Throbbing Gristle albums.
The cd version contains a bonus disc with live material extracted from the numerous live cassettes (and some of these versions apparently appear on the 24cd boxset of live TG material, although we've not cross referenced these facts yet). The two versions of "Discipline" (which were released as a 12" on Fetish Records in 1981) suitably conclude this disc, as that was the track that TG also performed at the end of their sets, with the heavy drum machines whipping the crowd into a frenzy and Genesis barking hysterically for some order. Such were the wonderful contradictions of Throbbing Gristle. About as a high a recommendation as we can give.
MPEG Stream: "20 Jazz Funk Greats"
MPEG Stream: "Persuasion"
MPEG Stream: "What A Day!"
MPEG Stream: "Discipline (Berlin)"

DISCO INFERNO The 5 EPs (One Little Indian) cd 15.98
Wow! Given the acrimonious break-up of Disco Inferno after their aesthetically fraught album Technicolour in 1996, we're a little shocked, yet totally stoked to see anything from Disco Inferno back in print, let along the rare EPs reissued here. This London trio formed in 1989, releasing three albums and seven eps that amounted to a brilliant mish-mash of sample-based technology, post-punk intensity, and a profoundly British mope that hangs throughout their catalogue. The first recorded forays by Disco Inferno found the group wearing their influences proudly on sonic sleeves - Joy Division, Wire, Durutti Column, and The Smiths - with the band twisting those influences into a narcotized torpour through an elliptical rhythm section that grounded the suitably delay-riddled, arppegiations and repititions from guitarist / vocalist Ian Crause. The band quickly took to MIDI technology, often sampling Crause's own guitar and alchemically rendering those into percolating satellites of effervsecent sound that orbit the song with peculiar trajectories and angles. Over time, the sampling became more and more of the focus in the band, appropriating sounds outside of their studio and fracturing all of those sounds into a more and more bizarrely splintered electronica that mutated into something grotesquely baroque, all the while hanging onto the core principles of the pop-art melody. This emphasis on sampling was an obsession for Crause after reading what David Stubbs and Simon Reynolds were championing in NME, as those two fixated on a technological thread that ran through My Bloody Valentine, Public Enemy, and The Young Gods. Crause was single-minded in his pursuit of figuring out how technology could be seemlessly integrated into the context of a British art-rock band, in frantic anticipation of what anybody might be doing elsewhere in the world. As such, Disco Inferno and Robert Hampson's post-Loop project Main were at the vangarde of ostensible pop bands disintegrating themselves before their audiences' eyes and ears. Where Hampson did achive escape velocity from rock's heavy gravitational pull with little to show for it after Motion Pool, Disco Inferno's internal disputes over where that technology needed to go caused so much strife as to destroy the band, with none of the members doing anything memorable since.
The 5 EPs featured here showcase that transition from an artful post-punk project conjuring the ghost of Martin Hannett into a complicated electronica ensemble that predicted how Christian Fennesz would deconstruct the spirit of The Beach Boys, but without the benefit of granulating laptop tricknology. We mentioned above that the band released seven EPs, the first two of which were compiled with their first album on the anthology entitled In Debt. The first EP in this anthology is "Summer's Last Sound" from 1992 and features two tracks that sparkle with harsichord-like patterns from the sampedelica, pulled back down to the ground by the thickly strummed bass from Paul Willmot, not to mention Crause's wistful, unpretentious vocal delivery of his deeply sad lyrics. "A Rock To Cling To" from 1993 finds the band in more of a traditional rock mode with guitars, bass, and drums, whose repetitive groove is offset by soaring bursts of sampled vocals that stretch like vapor trails glowing in moonlight. The B-side to that EP, "The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea", introduces a sample that would become common place in the ever-abstracting repetoire of Disco Inferno, that of shattering glass whose tinkling fragments of sound lock into an elegant Terry Riley patterning of minimalist rhythms. "The Last Dance" (also from 1993) features two versions of the title track, where Ian Crause has penned a damn good song that could have fit neatly in with the Johnny Marr songbook of The Smiths, but with jittery electronics and melancholy appropriations of schoolyard song puncturing Crause's crisp guitar lines. The B-side of "D.I. Go Pop" (the name of their second record, which didn't feature this track, oddly enough) is a manic affair of tape-revving guitar noise, threatening to unravel and unhinge as a spastic dervish. "Scattered Showers" is the other B-side, a beautifully poetic abstraction of British melancholy through sampled motorcycle engines forming the patterned tension beneath Crause's rain-drenched guitar strum. This EP and the next, "Second Language" from 1994, stand as the best material in Disco Inferno's short-circuited career. The title track of the latter single finds the band recycling Crause's sparkling Vini Reilly guitar into enchanting, hypnotic echoes out of which Crause concludes the track with a triumphant Brit-rock riff obviously alluding to the comtemporary bombast of Oasis. "At The End Of The Line" follows the aforementioned "Scattered Showers" as Disco Inferno's penchant for beautiful miserablism cast through refracted guitar lines into shoegaze bliss. The final single "It's A Kids World" finds the band at odds with itself, creating a jubilant kaleidoscope out of the drum crash from Iggy Pop's "Lust For Life" with Umbrellas of Cherbourg-esque flute trills of baroque pop guiding this atypically uptempo number. The B-side "A Night On The Tiles" is a Felini-esque collage of vaudevillian records, screaming girls, and smashed glass coming across more like a diabolical Nurse With Wound track than anything else found in their catalogue. Whew!
If you've just so much as glanced in the direction of Stereolab, Notwist, Fennesz, My Bloody Valentine, Spiritualized, and/or Animal Collective, you really owe it to yourself to check out Disco Inferno. They really are that good! We can only hope that D.I. Go Pop and In Debt (both of which are long out of print) will see the light of day once again, given the inevitible interest that will come from this anthology from one of the pioneers of avant-rock.
MPEG Stream: "A Rock To Cling To"
MPEG Stream: "Scattered Showers"
MPEG Stream: "Second Language"
MPEG Stream: "It's A Kids World"

TAJ MAHAL TRAVELLERS August 1974 (Phoenix) 2lp 34.00
Made the latest cd reissue of this a Record Of The Week last time, now the same label has also done a fancy double vinyl version!!!
Not sure how we never made this our Record Of The Week before, considering most aQuarians would probably rank this as one of their all time favorite drone records. Or all time favorite Japanese psychedelic records, heck, it's pretty much just one of our all time favorite records ever PERIOD. We've listed it in the past as a pricey import double cd, and an even pricier double lp, and maybe we thought it a bit too expensive before, but now with this new, more reasonably priced reissue, it seems like a no brainer to finally bestow the Record Of The Week honors on an album that has deserved it ever since we first heard it years and years ago. For those who have yet to discover the mysterious psychedelic beauty of Taj Mahal Travellers, you are in for a treat, and most likely a new musical obsession...
We love this record so much. The Taj Majal Travellers are so utterly mind blowing. This is a double cd reissue of this legendary Japanese psych ensemble's second album which has been sporadically available over the years, and when we did have it in stock, if anyone asked about drones, this is the record we would always suggest. One of the most hallowed artifacts of the psych-rock collector scum scene (originals on vinyl could set you back more than $1000!), this album is an epic higher key improvised drone extravaganza, all performed live on beaches and deserted hills in Sweden, India, Iran and England. Slow, complex, irregular throbbing waves of sound, broadcast through distant loudspeakers and recaptured and reincorporated. Feedback, time-space lag, horns, echo machines, and primitive handmade electronic devices all contribute to the ever shifting clouds of sound. So unbearably awesome. And this is not electronic music, or studio based carefully constructed drone music, this is massive and organic, dreamy and natural, waves of sound drifting through sun and sky, rain and fog, trees and electrical wires, the shape of the earth, the temperature, the wind, all affecting the sound, changing the timbre ever so slightly, band members spaced out over hundreds of yards, improvising on an impossibly grand scale, the earth as their stage, nature as their recording studio, a deliriously abstract sound world of subtle drones and drifting ambience. Imagine some long haired seventies Japanese psych rock combo, but filtered through the Jewelled Antler Collective, jamming with Chris Watson, set up on sandy dunes, grassy knolls, forest glades, each not necessarily -playing- their instruments, but instead coaxing sounds from within the instruments, setting those sounds free and sending them skyward, watching them drift downwind, where a bandmate snatches the sounds and coaxes complimentary sounds from his own instrument, sending a sonic response, these messages, these billows of abstract shimmer and steaks of lush reverberation weaving into and around each other, the sky full of warm warbly mysterious sound. Psychedelic for sure, but more a sort of eyes closed, mind open dream drift drone psychedelia. One of the most hauntingly mysterious and utterly beautiful drone records we've heard, and one of our all time favorite records!, Gatefold packaging, 180 gram vinyl.
MPEG Stream: "1"
MPEG Stream: "2"

WOLFE, CHELSEA Apokalypsis (Pendu Sound) cd 11.98
NOW AVAILABLE ON CD!!!
The apocalypse has come to mean 'the end of the world' but its original Greek definition is that of 'revelation,' albeit a really fucking heavy revelation of how the world is going to end. The differences between the pop-cultural definition and the biblical definition are somewhat semantic, but it's apt to mention in regards to Chelsea Wolfe's second record which situates the title in the context of the Greek alphabet. It's pretty clear that the revelations that Chelsea Wolfe spills across her brilliant doom-folk album don't aspire to the allegories and mystical visions pronounced by David Tibet, rather she seems to be clamoring about the conditions leading up to the end of the world. With demonic possession, toxic wastelands, and haunted sexuality being so prevalent in her ghastly world view, it's no wonder she's bellowing that the end is near.
Wolfe's first record - The Grime And The Glow - was a home-recorded affair, whose tape murk added to the choking-on-smog atmosphere of the dour songs. The sparse arrangements aggressively strummed on acoustic guitar shot all of the attention back on Wolfe's beguiling voice which takes cues from PJ Harvey, but way darker and witchier. The songs did liken themselves to the early apocalyptic folk aesthetics of Sol Invictus and Current 93; and that's still the case for Apokalypsis, although she has fleshed out her sound with a full band, capable of delivering minimalist Goth ballads, swamp-rock menace, and harrowing bursts of distortion to match the mood of her songs. Wolfe twists the fairytale beginning of "Tracks (Tall Bodies)" into gritty depressive dirges, reflective of the goth sound of her native LA some two decades ago (e.g. Abecedarians, Kommunity FK, etc.). She also reprises two songs from The Grime And The Glow, including the infernal barnburner "Demons" and the antebellum blues number "Moses" which retains its minor-key mope and slavehouse misery. The stalking-in-the snow pace of "Pale On Pale" lurches at a pace even slower than that of True Widow, with Wolfe's mournful voice lifting above the churning, blackened guitars. There's a grit and a severity to Chelsea Wolfe that makes her a very compelling figure in contemporary music, almost like a musical reincarnation of The Process Church in neo-goth form. Very highly recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Mer"
MPEG Stream: "Tracks (Tall Bodies)"
MPEG Stream: "Demons"
MPEG Stream: "Pale On Pale"

WOLFE, CHELSEA Apokalypsis (Pendu Sound) lp 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The apocalypse has come to mean 'the end of the world' but its original Greek definition is that of 'revelation,' albeit a really fucking heavy revelation of how the world is going to end. The differences between the pop-cultural definition and the biblical definition are somewhat semantic, but it's apt to mention in regards to Chelsea Wolfe's second record which situates the title in the context of the Greek alphabet. It's pretty clear that the revelations that Chelsea Wolfe spills across her brilliant doom-folk album don't aspire to the allegories and mystical visions pronounced by David Tibet, rather she seems to be clamoring about the conditions leading up to the end of the world. With demonic possession, toxic wastelands, and haunted sexuality being so prevalent in her ghastly world view, it's no wonder she's bellowing that the end is near.
Wolfe's first record - The Grime And The Glow - was a home-recorded affair, whose tape murk added to the choking-on-smog atmosphere of the dour songs. The sparse arrangements aggressively strummed on acoustic guitar shot all of the attention back on Wolfe's beguiling voice which takes cues from PJ Harvey, but way darker and witchier. The songs did liken themselves to the early apocalyptic folk aesthetics of Sol Invictus and Current 93; and that's still the case for Apokalypsis, although she has fleshed out her sound with a full band, capable of delivering minimalist Goth ballads, swamp-rock menace, and harrowing bursts of distortion to match the mood of her songs. Wolfe twists the fairytail beginning of "Tracks (Tall Bodies)" into gritty depressive dirges, reflective of the goth sound of her native LA some two decades ago (e.g. Abecedarians, Kommunity FK, etc.). She also reprises two songs from The Grime And The Glow, including the infernal barnburner "Demons" and the antebellum blues number "Moses" which retains its minor-key mope and slavehouse misery. The stalking-in-the snow pace of "Pale On Pale" lurches at a pace even slower than that of True Widow, with Wolfe's mournful voice lifting above the churning, blackened guitars. There's a grit and a severity to Chelsea Wolfe that makes her a very compelling figure in contemporary music, almost like a musical reincarnation of The Process Church in neo-goth form. Very highly recommended.

DUNCAN, JOHN / Z'EV / MICHAEL ESPOSITO There Must Be A Way Across This River / The Abject (Fragment Factory) lp 24.00
Really fucking spooky! Of course, we wouldn't expect much less from John Duncan, whose sound research specifically seeks out the most intense of psychological states. As the most infamous case, Duncan's Blind Date performance piece tells of his presumed experience with necrophilia as a masochistic ritual for depositing his last seed in a dead body before undergoing a vasectomy. While the audio documentation of Blind Date is cold and precise in what it says, Duncan neither confirms nor denies any of the details beyond what is told in that recording. It could have been a fabrication; but he plants the idea that he *might* have broken the most significant taboo of human civilization. Since then, Duncan's psychological research through sound, visual art, and performance has become far more sophisticated in approach and content. For example, there's his convoluted Pynchonesque album Our Telluric Conversation with CM von Hausswolff, and there's the masterful recapitulation of the sounds from the Stanford Linear Accelerator into The Crackling - a cavernous, sublime electric chorale which magnify the smallest of particles into massive discordant drones.
There Must Be A Way Across This River was a performance / installation that Duncan presented inside a refrigerated basement at a performance hall in Bologna, where he presented a slow-developing soundtrack of arctic drones layered with darkly vibrating shortwave patterns, whispered declarations from Duncan himself, and these strange violent bursts of electronic noise. While he never stated this to be the case, we wonder if he demanded that the audience be naked, as he has done for a handful of his other claustrophobic, black-box performances. That might have been even too cruel for Duncan! The sounds of There Must Be A Way Across This River are relatively subtle for Duncan's catalogue of work, but they are darkly evocative, eerie, bleak, and ominously threatening. Another very strong piece in his ever impressive body of work.
The flip side of the record is a strange collaboration between Duncan, Z'ev, and the EVP hunter Michael Esposito. Originally, Esposito, Duncan, and the medium Heidi Harman set out to make recordings in Duncan's childhood home outside of Chicago. Despite making arrangements with one of the occupants at the house, they were refused access, all the while Esposito was recording their conversations. During those recordings, 18 EVP invocations occurred, one of which addresses Duncan by name - an allegation that Harman confirmed through her own psychic contact. These 18 invocations were then given over to Z'ev who manipulated them into a suitably frightening set of interwoven drones and spectral undulations. If that particular EVP citation of Duncan's name is on these recordings, Z'ev has thoroughly eradicated the syntax into a slippery, ectoplasmic sound. It's one of the best things we've heard from Z'ev outside his kinetic percussive assaults, and rounds out a terrifyingly great piece of wax!

CALDERA LAKES Arranged (Ecstatic Peace) cassette 9.98
Kevin Shields! There's a name that garners a lot of attention; and it's pretty obvious why Eva Aguila uses that moniker for her scalding noise ventures which she has broadcast up and down the West Coast. We're sure that a few must have stumbled into grimy warehouse noise shows expecting The Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine to be slumming it, instead to find a woman behind a table of pedals and some weird typewriter looking thing, all of which sizzle and shriek with a blaring electricity. So, if the ruse has ever drawn anybody in, were they pissed? Bemused? Hard to guess, but in addition to her activities as Kevin Shields, Aguila also records and performs in the duo Caldera Lakes with Brittany Gould. Here, they swing between deconstructed dream-time, avant-folk meanderings and full-on noise mode. Everything on this tape is swimming in a suitably lo-fi soup that could be the shittiness of this cassette (ostensibly a 'professional' duplication job) or the antique haze purposefully grafted onto the production. Detached folksongs strummed in monotone on guitar, with spluttered events, eerie tones, and haunted voices that drone-on creating a vibe that's not too far from those of Christina Carter or Grouper; but as these tracks proceed, convulsive noises ramp their activity from minor overloads on a four-track into concussion bomb explosions muffled through the constant gauze of tape hiss. Elsewhere, percussive scrabblings trickle through a multitude of delay pedals, forming stoned / hypnogogic patterns in keeping with some of the early experiments by Zoviet France (e.g. Eostre, Signal Gesture Threat, etc.). Static electricity cracks the ether around these phasing delays gradually building into another swelling cloud of ominous charged particles. Limited to 100 copies!

SLEEP OVER Forever (Hippos In Tanks) lp 16.98
Finally, we got enough of these to list, the darkly dreamy lp debut of Stefanie Franciotti's hazy and gauzy solo outfit, Sleep Over. A new light in the field of female-led synthesization, a la Laurel Halo and Maria Minerva, Sleep Over is a stunning mix of Grouper's washed out and oceanic distortion, Cocteau Twins-ish pop romanticism and uncanny gothic dream soundtrack. We've been fans of Franciotti since her days as singer in aQ faves, Silver Pines, but in Sleep Over she has found her true calling as an experimental sound composer, synthesizing voice and sound in chillingly bright sonic environments and ambient textures. Gorgeous!
MPEG Stream: "Romantic Streams"
MPEG Stream: "Casual Diamond"
MPEG Stream: "Cryingame"

REED, RICK The Way Things Go (Elevator Bath) 2lp 25.00
BACK IN STOCK!!!
The Way Things Go is a very impressive electro-static drone anthology documenting a bunch of barely released material from the Texas gear junkie Rick Reed. This is a man who's been tinkering with vintage synths, shortwave radio, and sinewave generators for well over 25 years, work from the classic progressive electronic sound of the likes of Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler, through the nihilism of the post-industrialists (e.g. MB, Arcane Device, John Duncan, etc.), and into post-noise constructs of liquid psychedelia from Emeralds and all of their satellite projects. In so many ways, this could have found a nice home on John Elliott's Spectrum Spools imprint, but Reed stays with the ever impressive Elevator Bath.
There is some overlap between this collection and the self-published Celestial Mudpie album that Reed issued a couple years back. In particular, there's Reed's very evocative and chilling soundtrack to the Ken Jacobs film Capitalism: Child Labor that is an intense piece of tonal vibration, slipping from Andromeda Strain styled pulses upon rotating layers of a atonal hums, arching drones, and nervous lines of analogue static. Another high profile soundtrack is "Hidden Voices Pt 1." which was composed for the Hermann Nitsch gallery exhibit "The Orgies Mysteries Theater" in Houston back in 2005. This track contains the bloodcurdling atonality that Nitsch composes for his own aktions, but Reed twists the stratified dissonance with deep space blorp, shards of Birchville-esque distortion, and shortwave SSB detunings. The whole album follows suit with muffed static cracklings amidst radioactive clouds of analogue fired tone float, sulking at times into a melancholy atmosphere but always immensely complex. Very highly recommended stuff, and yes this does come with a download card. Nice.
MPEG Stream: "Capitalism : Child Labor"
MPEG Stream: "Hidden Voices Part 1"
MPEG Stream: "In A Hazy Field Of Green & Grey"

CRONIN, MIKAL s/t (Trouble In Mind) cd 11.98
Yay, after a brief delay, last week's Record Of The Week is now available on cd!!! (And it's now a proper cd, not a cd-r like they pressed originally, though the packaging is fairly no-frills.)
Here's what we said: Up until now, SF garage popper Mikal Cronin seemed to exist mostly as sideman, his name usually following an ampersand, which in turn seemed to typically be preceeded by the name Ty Segall. Thus most of our experiences with Cronin had been the duo of Segall & Cronin, and everything we had heard we dug, a LOT, but it was hard to tell what exactly Cronin was bringing to the table, but listening to this now, seems the answer is EVERYTHING! And as much as we love Ty Segall, we're thinking that maybe much of that garage pop magic was coming from the other side of the ampersand, cuz WOW is this record totally great. Anyone at all into the SF garage pop scene, Thee Oh Sees, the Fresh & Onlys, Ty Segall, Bare Wires, etc, will go absolutely nuts for this. And if this record doesn't immediately catapult Cronin into the spotlight, then there's something very very wrong with the world. A perfect blend of sunshiney jangle, garagey fuzz, paisley pop and noisy psychedelia. And for all the warped fuzz and reverbed drunched lo fi crunch of his peers, it seems Cronin has much more of a pure pop heart. That pure pop is however gloriously corrupted by little bits of wild flute flecked freakouts, strange horns, noise rock jams, and whatever else struck Cronin's fancy it seems, yet whatever sonic weirdness Cronin adds to the mix, it never sound gratuitous, it always sounds like an organic part of the song and the sound, and without fail, the song is crazy catchy, and the sound is fantastically lush and psychedelic and utterly ruling.
The first track manages to sum it up pretty perfectly. Starting with some dreamy Beach Boys a cappella harmonies, then some big distorted guitar crunch, pounding drums, before slipping right into some dreamy almost folky jangle, acoustic guitar strum, fuzzy bass, sweet vocal harmonies and HOOKS FOR DAYS, like the best song the Fresh & Onlys never wrote, but a little bit more twisted and a little bit more Byrds / paisley pop, but with plenty of crunch and fuzz, a little bit proggy in its arrangement, and then out of nowhere, with about a minute left, the song explodes into a double time pounding psych rock blow out, complete with jagged guitar crunch and a wild flute freakout (coutresy of John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees). We've probably listened to that song 50 times since we got this in.
But once we dug deeper, we realized that pretty much every song here is an absolute gem, "Apathy" with it's start/stop acoustic strum, wild feedback, and total classic pop hooks (reminding us melodically of The Olivia Tremor Control actually), "Green And Blue", with it's thick crunch droned out guitar buzz, dirgey drumming, thick blown out wall of sound and wild tangle of psychguitar freakout, "Get Along", which is another acoustic guitar driven chunk of practically perfect dreampop, rife with sweet harmony vox and some cool tripped out backwards psych guitar melodies, "Slow Down", a lo-fi, organ driven ballad, all stretched out drones and fuzzy reverbed vox, "Gone", another crunchy, riff heavy rocker, that should have Thee Oh Sees fans frothing at the mouth. And so it goes, the perfect mix of modern garage pop and classic indie jangle, and some of THEE best songs EVER. This week's list is chock full of contenders for pop record of the year, but if any of the other ones are gonna come out on top, this is gonna be the one to beat.
MPEG Stream: "Is It Alright?"
MPEG Stream: "Green & Blue"
MPEG Stream: "Apathy"
MPEG Stream: "Get Along"

ENGLISH, LAWRENCE The Peregrine (Experimedia) lp 19.98
Peregrine falcons are impressive birds of prey that can be found in almost every ecosystem, known for their extreme speeds in flight sometimes reaching over 200 miles per hour. Being quite adaptable, they are often found in urban areas where the pigeons are plentiful; and it can be quite spectacular to see these birds streaking through the skyscrapers of San Francisco reducing the pigeon population one at time with a precision that's the envy of any military campaign. The Australian ambient-laced sound artist Lawrence English came to his appreciation of the Peregrine by way of a book of the same title by J.A. Baker who obsessively mapped the daily activities of a pair of peregrines in England with a purported magical lyricism in his writings. English's ornithological portrait is all about flight and soaring - it's unclear whether English took after Baker by seeking out these birds on his own or if English's work is solely articulated through the lens of Baker's prose. But, English has long been able to express a poetic simplicity through the fog of sound; and he's proved once again how deft he can be. Smeared synth drones and grey-tone ambience streams through each of English's tracks, with subtle melodic interludes of low-end bass tones girding the compositions, coming across as something between Popul Vuh and Tim Hecker. A beautiful record for sure, and one that captures a sublime element of the majesty of the nimble falcon. Limited to 500 copies and comes with a download card.

V/A The Hidden Tapes (Minimal Wave) lp 26.00
Now here on vinyl too, we know you want it!!
Lost Tapes, then Found Tapes, and now Hidden Tapes. As good as many of the reissues that Minimal Wave has released, it's their compilations that really shine. Here, those obscurant new wave / post punk obsessives offer a great collection of urgent synth blorp from all over the world and all dating from the early '80s. Very few of these tracks had much in the way of distribution or fanfare whatsoever, and that makes the discovery all the better. There's only a couple of the acts that we had any familiarity with, and we're probably not alone in that assessment. The opening number by SS-Say is one of the tracks we had heard, being featured on the CD reissue of the Pesteg Dreg album, as both bands were led by the Danish synth-mastermind Martin Hall. "Care" is a mega-watt anthem of oversaturated synth lines and euro-pop danceability that lusts after the New Order production of Blue Monday with more cocaine and dark theatricality tossed in for good measure. Every thing else on the compilation is considerably more understated in terms of production quality (and following the branding of 'minimal wave' all the more), with high caliber tracks offered on the Normal / Human League anxious bleep from the Yugoslavian project Oskarova Fobija and the insistent synth-chanting of Danton's Voice. The British duo Robert Lawrence and Mark Phillips take up a friendlier version of early SPK / Nocturnal Emissions monophunk sequencing with transitor radio vocals and speed-simulating circuitry. Things turn toward the ultra-minimal side with the bittersweet melodicism of The Fast Set and Reserve's proto-italo disco number, sporting an icy vocal detachment that would make Johnny Jewel jealous. The CD features two bonus tracks not on the vinyl including Gary Allen's weird science sequencing and goofy lyricism that looks to Devo and Oingo Boingo. Another tip of the hat goes to Minimal Wave for this one!
MPEG Stream: SS-SAY "Care"
MPEG Stream: DANTON'S VOICE "I Hear The Bells"
MPEG Stream: ROBERT LAWRENCE + MARK PHILLIPS "Computer Bank"
MPEG Stream: RESERVE "Destination Pour L'Inconnu"

BEE MASK Elegy For Beach Friday (Spectrum Spools / Editions Mego) cd 16.98
NOW ON CD!!!
Here stands the monumental sonic anthology, culled from the numerous cassettes and cd-rs that Chris Madak has released over the past decade or so, under the moniker Bee Mask. Like Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never, Madak is single-minded in his retrogarde aesthetic for synthesized compositions based on a vintage 1970s' cosmology. But where many of the '70s synth revivalists have coyingly adopted a full-fledged new age aesthetic through effervescent prettiness and soft-focus ambient swirl, Bee Mask offers up his own dysptopic take on psychedelic electronics through a crucible of cracked circuits, tape splutter, infernal field recordings, and a hell of a lot of sustained synth drones oscillating into crescendos of dissonant thumming. The zoner tracks on Elegy For Beach Friday (and there are a number of them) never sit in the background seeking a sublimated hypnosis, rather Madak zooms in on the placid pools of sound to unveil intense percolations and swarming vibrations. There's a scientific rigor to his pieces that finds Bee Mask orbiting around the dense, alienating electronics from Matt Shoemaker, Rick Reed, and Bernard Parmigiani. But, Madak is also one to tease with the subtle swelling melodies that harken to the more emotive works from Omit and Emeralds. If his work shares anything with the retro electronic tapestries that are the forgotten soundtracks for a summer sunset, Madak would rather blind the audience with the intensity of the sun, complete with blisters on the skin and technological mishaps from sunspots. Brilliant!
MPEG Stream: "Deducted From Your Share In Paradise"
MPEG Stream: "Askion Kataskion Lix Tetrax Damnameneus Aision"
MPEG Stream: "Stop The Night"
MPEG Stream: "Scarlet Thread, Golden Cord"

HTRK Work (Work, Work) (Ghostly International) cd 12.98
It's a bleak world for HTRK, as tragedy and death has surrounded this outfit which has only been around for a couple of years. In 2010, the band's bassist Sean Stewart committed suicide and the producer of their haunted album Marry Me Tonight, Rowland S. Howard died of cancer a year earlier. All of these elements make a connection to The Birthday Party almost inevitable, especially given their historical mirroring in relocation from Melbourne to Berlin and the manifestation of the id through a very raw sound. But where The Birthday Party was an expression of violence, HTRK are in constant search of desire, occasionally finding it only to have it frustratingly fizzle out before anything ecstatic can be achieved. As a result, HTRK's sensual bleariness is in an emotional feedback loop that never can spiral beyond the longing for sex, love, a relationship, etc, without anything ever attained. HTRK's existential portraits of being trapped by one's own desires are in direct opposition to the hedonism found in most electronica. Here on Work (Work, Work), the band parallels some of the horror-affected reverberation of the flash-in-the-pan Witch House crowd; but instead of drawing on unremembered memories of the forgotten '80s, HTRK has profound pain to draw upon... and they want their audience to feel that too.
The band had been shifting their sound even before Stewart's death, with a greater reliance on electronics and subharmonic tones girding the spindly guitar work from Nigel Yang and the self-composed breathiness of Jonnine Standish. They were moving away from the rock trio and towards a miasma of voice, guitar, bass, and electronics with boundaries between these sounds far more permeable. The closest references to HTRK's sound would be Ike Yard and Dome, although HTRK are much more interested in building tension with their teasing melodicism through their droning electronics. The first track on the album features a weird collage that Stewart had made of late nite TV sex ads in Berlin amidst slow-motion sighs caught in a half-melodic drone and crawling drum machine pulse. "Eat Yr Heart" ramps a quarter-speed Giorgio Moroder sequence above heroin paced rhythm with Jonnine crooning a sultry melody counterpointed by breathy exhalations. Sexually charged yes, but more of a downward spiral into dejection rather than release. "Poison" is more in keeping with the bass and guitar structures found on Marry Me Tonight, with Sean Stewart's bass clearly present next to the twilight flickering drone-riffs from Yang. "Body Double" overhauls Suicide's classic sound of metallic synth / drum interplay with undulating melodies that stretch into a magnificent coda of cascading melancholy for what amounts to a masterful album. Highly recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Ice Eyes Eis"
MPEG Stream: "Eat Yr Heart"
MPEG Stream: "Poison"
MPEG Stream: "Body Double"

HTRK Work (Work, Work) (Ghostly International) lp 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 a bleak world for HTRK, as tragedy and death has surrounded this outfit which has only been around for a couple of years. In 2010, the band's bassist Sean Stewart committed suicide and the producer of their haunted album Marry Me Tonight, Rowland S. Howard died of cancer a year earlier. All of these elements make a connection to The Birthday Party almost inevitable, especially given their historical mirroring in relocation from Melbourne to Berlin and the manifestation of the id through a very raw sound. But where The Birthday Party was an expression of violence, HTRK are in constant search of desire, occasionally finding it only to have it frustratingly fizzle out before anything ecstatic can be achieved. As a result, HTRK's sensual bleariness is in an emotional feedback loop that never can spiral beyond the longing for sex, love, a relationship, etc, without anything ever attained. HTRK's existential portraits of being trapped by one's own desires are in direct opposition to the hedonism found in most electronica. Here on Work (Work, Work), the band parallels some of the horror-affected reverberation of the flash-in-the-pan Witch House crowd; but instead of drawing on unremembered memories of the forgotten '80s, HTRK has profound pain to draw upon... and they want their audience to feel that too.
The band had been shifting their sound even before Stewart's death, with a greater reliance on electronics and subharmonic tones girding the spindly guitar work from Nigel Yang and the self-composed breathiness of Jonnine Standish. They were moving away from the rock trio and towards a miasma of voice, guitar, bass, and electronics with boundaries between these sounds far more permeable. The closest references to HTRK's sound would be Ike Yard and Dome, although HTRK are much more interested in building tension with their teasing melodicism through their droning electronics. The first track on the album features a weird collage that Stewart had made of late nite TV sex ads in Berlin amidst slow-motion sighs caught in a half-melodic drone and crawling drum machine pulse. "Eat Yr Heart" ramps a quarter-speed Giorgio Moroder sequence above heroin paced rhythm with Jonnine crooning a sultry melody counterpointed by breathy exhalations. Sexually charged yes, but more of a downward spiral into dejection rather than release. "Poison" is more in keeping with the bass and guitar structures found on Marry Me Tonight, with Sean Stewart's bass clearly present next to the twilight flickering drone-riffs from Yang. "Body Double" overhauls Suicide's classic sound of metallic synth / drum interplay with undulating melodies that stretch into a magnificent coda of cascading melancholy for what amounts to a masterful album. Highly recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Ice Eyes Eis"
MPEG Stream: "Eat Yr Heart"
MPEG Stream: "Poison"
MPEG Stream: "Body Double"

PESTEG DRED / SS-SAY 1981-1985 I Have Seen You Through The Years, Worn By Different Faces (Optik) cd 15.98
Martin Hall appears to be the figure who defined the Danish New Wave scene, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that any of the projects he worked in found much traction outside of Denmark. Ballet Mecanique was one such project, And Then Again was another; of course, there were a couple of solo outings too. Both Pesteg Dred and SS-Say were very short-lived projects in the early '80s. Pesteg Dred was a trio that revolved around Hall in 1981 with electronics wrangler Per Hendrichsen and vocalist Inge Shannon. During one weekend, the three landed in a studio and banged out an album but didn't have the ability to pay the bill. So the tapes sat until Hall could negotiate something with the owners of the studio. A cassette of the material surfaced as a bonus with an art magazine in 1985, but otherwise, the recordings languished while all three members went onto other projects.
The dark storm of post-punk had certainly come to Denmark, with Hall admitting an early infatuation with Cabaret Voltaire and A Certain Ratio (well, he did name one of his later projects And Then Again after an A Certain Ratio tune), but The Pop Group and The Ex must have made a big impact as well. The band is essentially a mutant rhythm section of rumbling, discordant funk basslines and unschooled percussive fills that showcase way more fury than skill, with a series of weirdly skittered electronics flushed between the rhythms with murky modular sweeps, distorted drones, and delay-rippled bloop. Inge's vocals are a cold monotone bellow that aren't too far from Bettina Koster of Malaria, making a perfect fit for the darkly, cacophonous agit-punk of Pesteg Dred. The lengthy "Light, More Light" is very much in the vein of the best A Certain Ratio, with breakneck post-disco rhythm, neck-strangling basslines, jittery guitars, and even some atonal blurts from a trumpet.
SS-Say released only one single in 1985, and that material rounds out the cd. Here, Hall is working again with Inge Shannon, for a more baroque, anthemic number wrought with Siouxsie-esque operatics and wah-wah guitar scratching above the catwalk disco rhythms. With its cocaine strung synths, "Care" is definitely the gem amongst the SS-Say tracks, which showcase much more polish as a Studio 54 / Batcave hybrid than Pesteg Dred, but with just as much post-punk bombast.
The Pesteg Dred material was reissued by Dark Entries on vinyl in 2010, and now it's available on cd for the first time with the SS-Say tracks that didn't appear on the lp reish.
MPEG Stream: PESTEG DRED "Salt"
MPEG Stream: PESTEG DRED "Cold Impressions Of Perhaps"
MPEG Stream: PESTEG DRED "Almost"
MPEG Stream: SS-SAY "Care"

CINDYTALK Hold Everything Dear (Editions Mego) 2lp 29.00
Prior to Hold Everything Dear, the resurrected Cindytalk had been the work of Gordon Sharp sitting down at his computer by himself to experiment with digital glitches and abstracted electronic drones. The Crackle Of My Soul from 2009 felt more like the first fruits of Sharp wrangling with his ideas in a digital environment with a few too many compositional rough edges that were in need of refinement. Up Here In The Clouds was a marked improvement through the glassine drones and fizzing noise; but Hold Everything Dear is the first Cindytalk album that truly feels like it has a connection to those brilliant post-punk records from the early '80s. While Sharp hasn't returned to the noise-rock abjection of Camoflage Heart and he has yet to sing on any of these recent albums, the fragmented smears from bowed metals, haunted clanging bells, watery field recordings, and impressionist piano of Hold Everything Dear harken to those post-noise ambient constructions found on the Eno-esque album Wind Is Strong and which concluded In This World. Many of the cavernous sounds on the album are probably sourced from the late Matt Kinnison, who had been Cindytalk's bassist since 1982 and who died in 2008. Sharp has cast a bleary atmosphere throughout the album through subterranean passages of sodden drones, cobwebbed dark elegance, and decayed textures. Sharp pocks this album with plenty of piano interludes whose somber half melodies and shadowy ambience are pulled from the same mold as those earlier piano works. They were beautiful then, and they are still beautiful now.
MPEG Stream: "In Dust To Delight"
MPEG Stream: "Fly Away Over Here"
MPEG Stream: "From Rokko-San"
MPEG Stream: "I See You Uncovered"

BESTIAL MOUTHS Hissing Veil (Dais) lp 21.00
The bloodletting goth-punk of LA's Bestial Mouths is likely to find black-clad company with contemporaries like Zola Jesus and Chelsea Wolfe, but this outfit harnesses a creative dualism between voice and drums that's a unique take on what Siouxsie and Budgie had done so brilliantly for so many years in the Banshees and Creatures. Vocalist Lynette Cerezo shrieks, barks, and howls between the operatic vibrato that reaches for the atavistic bellowing that's something of a cross between Diamanda Galas and Rozz Williams of Christian Death. Ebrahim Saleh's percussion is hardly the death-disco that's so often heard from goth drummers, but more of a splattercore punk likened to a No Wave version of Crass regressing at times to caveman pummelling. Christopher Myrick's synths fill in the blanks, and often do get upstaged by the spiralling dynamism between Cerezo and Saleh with all of their car-crash stops and thunderous stomps. Where many of the songs on Hissing Veil are short sharp blasts of feral energy, Bestial Mouths settles into an effectively infernal dirge that's equivalent to Lydia Lunch ripping apart The Cure's Pornography and leaving the parts ugly and abused in some forgotten alleyway. A great addition to the Dais catalogue of recordings!

BERNIER, NICOLAS Usure.Paysage (Hronir) cd 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
This hot shit musique concrete album is now available on cd! There are so many stuffy compositions and constructions that look back to the salad days of tape experimentation in the '50s and '60s. Works can get so conceptual with each sound being meant to allude to some particular phrases of Beckett or recapitulate the Merz of Schwitters that the interplay between this found sound and that electronic blorp is totally lost amidst a dull and boring concoction that serves little more than an execution of a grant application. This is certainly not the case for Canadian composer Nicolas Bernier, whose dexterous yet ominous concrete album has landed in the good hands of Hronir, a label which has a small catalog of brutal collage artists (e.g. Sudden Infant, Raionbashi, GX-Jupitter Larssen) to accompany more oblique voices from the academic world. While Bernier's work isn't nearly as toxic as those jackbooted noiseniks, his compositions are wholly discomforting, and we mean that in the best possible way. Within the avant-garde pantheon, Bernier's work follows that of Michel Chion and Luc Ferrari doing their finest work, through dynamic juxtapositions blurting concrete sounds (bellowing car horns, steam engine growls, leaden explosions, etc.) against unsettled atmospheres and spackled dronings that start and stop with a series of repeating punctuations not unlike the strategy that Nurse With Wound mastered on Homotopy To Marie. He's aware of the cinematic urge for acousmatic works, and pushes "Les chambres de l'atelier" towards a Lynchian noir with a soft-focus melody warbling in the background to a series of crunched abrasions and eerie footsteps, ruptured by ghostly noises. Excellent, through and through!
Oh! The cd is super limited to 150 copies (and no, it's not a cd-r!), comes with a 9-minute bonus track (not listed on the artwork, though), and is housed in the same 12" sleeve as the LP.
MPEG Stream: "Paysages Articules No. 4"
MPEG Stream: "10 Passages"
MPEG Stream: "Les Chambres De L'atelier"

RODEN, STEVE ...I Listen To The Wind That Obliterates My Traces: Music In Vernacular Photographs 1880-1955 (Dust-To-Digital) 2cd + book 49.00
With the first track on this anthology being a recording of wind from a 1935 sound effects record, AQ beloved sound artist Steve Roden makes a very literal introduction to I Listen To The Wind That Obliterates My Traces. Released by Dust-To-Digital, this beautifully constructed hardback book filled with images both from and ephemeral to Roden's collection of 78s, as well as two discs worth of sounds from that antique vinyl. Yeah, the idea is pretty much the same as what the Climax Golden Twins presented via Dust-To-Digital on their also-awesome Victrola Favorites anthology a few years back; but Roden's collection trends more to the mid-part of the 20th Century and is focused on Americana (including a couple of Hawaiian tracks made before the islands were granted statehood). Following that crackled recording of the wailing wind from that sound effects record, is the unmistakable voice of John Jacob Niles, the 'mountain tenor' whose spooky falsetto and maudlin melodic wanderings predated Devendra Banhart by a good 60 years... Afterwards, there's plenty of bluesmen, blueswomen, gospel belters, Appalachian balladeers, and barbershop crooners, many of which seem quite world-weary in singing their tales of lust, money, and liquor (or the lack thereof). Some of the names are familiar to us (e.g. Clara Smith, Roy Smeck, Sol Hoopii), but there are plenty of anonymous recordings from home-cut discs as well. The arrangements for many of the songs tend to be very sparse, just voice and guitar is pretty much all you get on every track; and the album is dotted with tracks from antique sound effects records of birds, ice, and even "night noises!" For those of you aware of Roden's own compositions of understated field recordings, quiet ruminations on found objects, and soft looping techniques, this shouldn't be a big surprise.
The vintage photos inside this 184 page book are completely lovely, with all of their rumpled edges, ruddy patinas, and cracked surfaces, with some far more poignant - such as the shot of a bunch of violas suspended outside in the sun perhaps to allow a coat of shellac to dry. There's the silhouette of G.J. Jessup decked out in his one-man drum and bugle corps regalia, and the glum looking fellow with the unkempt mustache leaning against his Funnygraph contraption (sadly, there's no corresponding recording for either photograph). Pages and pages of interesting images to provoke curiosity and evoke reverie. Altogether, Roden has compiled over 150 photos and 51 tracks for this stunning document of sonic obsession from Dust-To-Digital! Hard to imagine NOT wanting this.
MPEG Stream: HMV WEATHER EFFECTS "Wind"
MPEG Stream: JOHN JACOB NILES "John Henry"
MPEG Stream: ANONYMOUS HOME RECORDING "Mandolin"
MPEG Stream: GENNETT SOUND EFFECTS "Rainfall And Thunder"
MPEG Stream: CLARA SMITH "My Good Fur Nuthin' Man"

OMIT Interceptor (The Helen Scarsdale Agency) 2cd 17.98
BACK IN STOCK!!! Omit is the longstanding project of New Zealand's finest electron technician Clinton Williams, who dropped out of high school close to two decades ago and holed himself up in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere New Zealand to wrangle with analogue synthesizers, 8-track tape decks, unruly drum machines, and a small army of effects pedals. There was a time in the '90s when Williams' output was ridiculously prolific, through countless cassettes in tiny editions and a handful of lathe-cut singles. His work caught the attention of the Dead C's Bruce Russell, who was so taken by Williams' work that he collaborated with the man as Dust/Omit and released a handful of discs through Russell's seminal Corpus Hermeticum imprint. Upon the release of the 1997 3cd boxset Quad, Williams' Omit project began to slow down tremendously. The quality of work had certainly continued, but the wealth of releases was considerably diminished. In 1999, there was Interior Desolation, brilliant with its squealing pigs adding to electronic claustrophobia. Then Anomalous released Rejector in 2002; and Helen Scarsdale had the honor of releasing the epochal darkness of Tracer (2005), and now the skeletal rhythmicist drones on Interceptor.
Working in isolation has lead Williams to develop a language which is entirely his own, yet exhibits a curious convergent evolution with many of the other greats in DIY electronics - most notably Chris Carter from his days in Throbbing Gristle, Mika Vainio and his early hyper-minimal phaseshifting experiments in post-techno, and the gaping proto-industrial paranoia of Klaus Schulze. His work is simultaneously ponderously huge and effortlessly simple, as his sounds hover along intertwining sweeps of synthetic ambience grafted to simple rhythmic structures. The saddest melodies in the world poke through Omit's cold and barren surfaces, accenting the isolationist tendencies already inherent in these sounds. Interceptor is a slight detour in the Omit aesthetic, and the detour was by design as Williams had ventured outside of his hometown of Blenheim in search of a job. But he also brought two suitcases of gear with him to continue his recording. The frustrations he felt in his failure to secure employment are matched in the bleak gestures found on Interceptor. Williams had stripped away much of the grandiose sweeps of ambience and shadow, leaving behind a life-support system grid of overlapping, phase-shifted blip and click. An undertow of hypnotic tonalities pulls those rhythms towards a crepuscular gloom, which as with all of Omit's work are effortless in their compositional appearance. Anybody, and we mean ANYBODY, who has a passing interest in electronic music - contemporary, historic, surreal, arcane, Warp-ish, Kompakt-ish, or otherwise - has got to do themselves a favor and investing the time into Omit. The rewards are infinite from this under recognized, autodidactic genius.
MPEG Stream: "LockNut Shadow"
MPEG Stream: "POD 4 Lander"
MPEG Stream: "Loop ReBounder"
MPEG Stream: "SkiMMEr"

SHOEMAKER, MATT Tropical Amnesia One (Ferns) cd 15.98
In the handful of exceptional records from concrete/drone composer Matt Shoemaker, the field recording has been central to his work. Take the aggregate tumblings of minerals from Groundless or the woozy humidity from Spots In The Sun, Shoemaker's use of the field recording in his pieces is miles apart from the pastoral use of bird songs or a gentle rainstorm to offer something 'natural' for an electronic ambient record. No, Shoemaker amplifies the more threatening aspects of nature with insects emitting nightmarish chorales, beetles aggressively scurrying towards hapless prey, and the air of a landscape so heavy and pungent with decay as to be impossible to breathe. For Shoemaker, the world may be nasty, brutish, and short; but he's discovering a weird beauty way out there amidst the grotesqueries of the world.
On the last two records from Shoemaker, a greater emphasis on synthesized psychedelia shot through his tense drone constructs; so with Tropical Amnesia One, Shoemaker has built an album that's just field recordings, without much of the atypical filtering, gizmos, and effects that turn Shoemaker's studio into a scientific laboratory. All of these recordings came from a two week residency Shoemaker spent deep in the Amazon forest, where silence was never afforded amidst the constant buzz of insects, torrential cloudbursts, and burbling streams all teeming with life. Watery sounds introduce the first 20 minutes to this album with all sorts of sodden creaks, slurping movements, and mud-sucking events amassed together. It's as if the vantage point to Shoemaker's sounds were just below the surface of a stagnant body of water next to a muddy embankment, crawling with leeches, skin-breaching worms, and any other parasitic creature that might come to mind. Shoemaker then shifts his attention for the remaining 44 minutes upward to the tops of the trees, where the insects have conspired to broadcast an ominous nocturnal hiss worthy of horror film sound design. A few insects and birds puncture the swarming noise, making the environment seem a lot less threatening than Shoemaker has contextualized it to be. A powerful, sublime recording, and what looks like to the be first in a series of recordings from the Amazon.
MPEG Stream: "Tropical Amnesia One [excerpt 1]"
MPEG Stream: "Tropical Amnesia One [excerpt 2]"
MPEG Stream: "Tropical Amnesia One [excerpt 3]"

MOTION SICKNESS OF TIME TRAVEL Luminaries & Synastry (Digitalis) lp + cd 24.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Motion Sickness Of Time Travel is the spellbinding synth and voice project of Georgia's Rachel Evans. Up until late 2010, she had released a bunch of tiny edition cassettes and cd-rs through her Hooker Vision imprint, after which her work caught the attention of Digitalis, who released the highly acclaimed album Seeping Through The Veil Of The Unconscious. So acclaimed in fact, that all of three pressings of that album went out of print before we had a chance to wax poetic about the record on our list. It's easy to hear why Motion Sickness Of Time Travel would cause such a stir, as there's something to the easy quip that Rachel Evans is a synth version of Grouper. Evans deconstructs an ethereal pop down to hypnotic looping synth structures and her own whispering voice, all the edges are blurred and softened to a heavenly, glowing gaseousness. Her synth applications typically build from glistening arpeggios and sustained church organ tones, giving many of her arrangements a levitating, Kosmische touch considerably more vaporous in her psychedelic visions than the likes of Emeralds and Oneohtrix in her Cluster fixation. Yet, tracks like the aptly named "Day Glow" eagerly appropriate tone-bent melodies and acid-squelchiness from post-rave ambient engineers (think back to Future Sound Of London), suspended amongst the reverb glide of her breathy vocals. Then there's the oceanic and mysterious drone-waltz found on the lysergically titled "The Walls Were Dripping With Stars" which flickers with backmasked vocalizations and intermittently dubbed out whisperings. Luminaries & Synastry is a real gem; and if past performance is indicative of anything, this album will not be around terribly long. The lp comes with a cd of all the material found on the vinyl, plus a couple of a extra tracks.
MPEG Stream: "Late Day Sun Silhouettes"
MPEG Stream: "Day Glow"
MPEG Stream: "Like Dunes"

BEE MASK Elegy For Beach Friday (Spectrum Spools) 2lp 27.00
BACK IN STOCK!!
Here stands the monumental gatefold double vinyl anthology, culled from the numerous cassettes and cd-rs that Chris Madak has released over the past decade or so, under the moniker Bee Mask. Like Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never, Madak is single-minded in his retrogarde aesthetic for synthesized compositions based on a vintage 1970s' cosmology. But where many of the '70s synth revivalists have coyingly adopted a full-fledged new age aesthetic through effervescent prettiness and soft-focus ambient swirl, Bee Mask offers up his own dysptopic take on psychedelic electronics through a crucible of cracked circuits, tape splutter, infernal field recordings, and a hell of a lot of sustained synth drones oscillating into crescendos of dissonant thumming. The zoner tracks on Elegy For Beach Friday (and there are a number of them) never sit in the background seeking a sublimated hypnosis, rather Madak zooms in on the placid pools of sound to unveil intense percolations and swarming vibrations. There's a scientific rigor to his pieces that finds Bee Mask orbiting around the dense, alienating electronics from Matt Shoemaker, Rick Reed, and Bernard Parmigiani. But, Madak is also one to tease with the subtle swelling melodies that harken to the more emotive works from Omit and Emeralds. If his work shares anything with the retro electronic tapestries that are the forgotten soundtracks for a summer sunset, Madak would rather blind the audience with the intensity of the sun, complete with blisters on the skin and technological mishaps from sunspots. Brilliant!

RAIONBASHI / DANIELA FROMBERG & STEFAN ROIGK Der Strick / Blowing Up The Master's Workshop (Senufo Edition) lp 23.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
When the fuck is Raionbashi going to release a proper album again? Daniel Lowenbruck (aka Raionbashi) has been releasing his work on various splits over the past couple of years following a 2006 lp on Hanson that nobody seems to have anymore. Even then, much of his output has been released in tiny editions, and this split on Senufo Edition is in an edition of 280 copies. Raionbashi operates within the transgressive art collective Schimpfluch-Gruppe alongside Sudden Infant, Dave Phillips, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, and G*Park, all of which mine the nether regions of the id for intensely claustrophobic collages of grim noise and post-Viennese Aktionism. For this split, Lowenbruck slumps into an occult almost doom-laden piece of ritualist gong strikes that certainly look back to Coil's How To Destroy Angels, but Lowenbruck slowly ramps up a smoldering, hypnotic squallor of discordant strings and uneasy field recordings with snippets of muffled vocals which seem in the midst of an unknown criminal act. Brilliantly creepy.
Daniela Fromberg & Stefan Roigk are multimedia artists hailing from Berlin, although little can be found regarding their intentions beyond their mutually crappy websites that only sport pretty pictures of their un-contextualized installations. Whatever these people are up to, it's a damn effective piece of acousmatic collage work, reflective in classic sound collage techniques found on Nurse With Wound's Homotopy To Marie, through the various bumps in the night and funhouse sound effects turned horrific and nightmarish. Arcane, oblique, haunting, and captivating. Fromberg & Roigk are an excellent foil to Raionbashi's dark ritual, and certainly should muster something else in the near future. Regardless, this is an excellent album of foreboding musique concrete.

V/A The Hidden Tapes (Minimal Wave) cd 19.98
Lost Tapes, then Found Tapes, and now Hidden Tapes. As good as many of the reissues that Minimal Wave has released, it's their compilations that really shine. Here, those obscurant new wave / post punk obsessives offer a great collection of urgent synth blorp from all over the world and all dating from the early '80s. Very few of these tracks had much in the way of distribution or fanfare whatsoever, and that makes the discovery all the better. There's only a couple of the acts that we had any familiarity with, and we're probably not alone in that assessment. The opening number by SS-Say is one of the tracks we had heard, being featured on the cd reissue of the Pesteg Dreg album, as both bands were led by the Danish synth-mastermind Martin Hall. "Care" is a megawatt anthem of oversaturated synth lines and Euro-pop danceability that lusts after the New Order production of Blue Monday with more cocaine and dark theatricality tossed in for good measure. Every thing else on the compilation is considerably more understated in terms of production quality (and following the branding of 'minimal wave' all the more), with high caliber tracks offered on the Normal / Human League anxious bleep from the Yugoslavian project Oskarova Fobija and the insistent synth-chanting of Danton's Voice. The British duo Robert Lawrence and Mark Phillips take up a friendlier version of early SPK / Nocturnal Emissions monophunk sequencing with transistor radio vocals and speed-simulating circuitry. Things turn toward the ultra-minimal side with the bittersweet melodicism of The Fast Set and Reserve's proto-Italo disco number, sporting an icy vocal detachment that would make Johnny Jewel jealous. The cd features two bonus tracks not on the vinyl including Gary Allen's weird science sequencing and goofy lyricism that looks to Devo and Oingo Boingo. Another tip of the hat goes to Minimal Wave for this one!
MPEG Stream: SS-SAY "Care"
MPEG Stream: DANTON'S VOICE "I Hear The Bells"
MPEG Stream: ROBERT LAWRENCE + MARK PHILLIPS "Computer Bank"
MPEG Stream: RESERVE "Destination Pour L'Inconnu"

WOLFE, CHELSEA The Grime And The Glow (Pendu Sound) cd 11.98
NOW AVAILABLE ON CD!!!
Yeah, she covered a Burzum song before releasing this album, but there's a hell of lot more to Chelsea Wolfe than copping a few moves from Mr. Vikernes. This Los Angeles minstrel has quipped she writes "spiritual realm funeral songs," and that's a pretty apt description given the acoustic guitar dourness, doom-laden atmospheres, grimy production values, and witchy goth-folk vocals that come together as the perfect hybridization of Zola Jesus and PJ Harvey. Her arrangements are pretty stripped down with little more than acoustic and / or electric guitar occasionally fleshed out with a rhythm section. She puts an outsider folk spin on her songwriting, as if she were penning acoustic black metal songs channeled through the freak-folk mysticism of Topanga Canyon. This also has a lot of similarities to the apocalyptic folk stylings of Death In June / Sol Invictus / Current 93 circa 1992 although Chelsea Wolfe is far less precious with the song and is not afraid to let some blood spill as she violently scrapes her knuckles on the guitar strings. In so many ways, what she does is so much better than what Douglas P and Tony Wakeford could conjure through their cryptic folk songs. The haunting "Cousins Of The Antichrist" is one track that effortlessly exceeds the songwriting achievements of those aforementioned British esoteric musicians, with the urgency of the violent strum on her acoustic guitar stuck in minor chords buttressing the soaring vocals.
Similarly, "Deep Talks" works its blown out 4-track recording of her grab-every-string-on-the-guitar-and-pull method of playing along with her wordless vocal delivery that's as impressionistic as Grouper, but with Grouper's narcolepsy replaced by night terrors. "Moses" (a track which interestingly follows "Cousins Of The Antichrist") plays on stomping Southern spirituals but turned ashen and turgid in pace and demeanor. And the album's closing number "Widow" is a bleak, half-whispered song mired in morose atmospheres and just the right amount of narcotic smoke and exhumed-from-a-swamp 4 track production values, sounding a lot like the criminally underappreciated Corpses As Bedmates (whose sole album was reissued under an entirely different band name - Venus Handcuffs, probably worsening things for the band, but we digress). The short of it is that Chelsea Wolfe's The Grime And The Glow is fucking great and marks another killer release in the growing catalogue of witchy releases by Pendu Sound, following an lp from Sasha Grey's Atelecine and a single from witch house maven Mater Suspiria Vision. Highly Recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Advice & Vices"
MPEG Stream: "Cousins of the Antichrist"
MPEG Stream: "Moses"

WOLFE, CHELSEA The Grime And The Glow (Pendu Sound) lp 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Back in stock, just a few last copies!!
Yeah, she covered a Burzum song before releasing this album, but there's a hell of lot more to Chelsea Wolfe than copping a few moves from Mr. Vikernes. This Los Angeles minstrel has quipped she writes "spiritual realm funeral songs," and that's a pretty apt description given the acoustic guitar dourness, doom-laden atmospheres, grimy production values, and witchy goth-folk vocals that come together as the perfect hybridization of Zola Jesus and PJ Harvey. Her arrangements are pretty stripped down with little more than acoustic and / or electric guitar occasionally fleshed out with a rhythm section. She puts an outsider folk spin on her songwriting, as if she were penning acoustic black metal songs channeled through the freak-folk mysticism of Topanga Canyon. This also has a lot of similarities to the apocalyptic folk stylings of Death In June / Sol Invictus / Current 93 circa 1992 although Chelsea Wolfe is far less precious with the song and is not afraid to let some blood spill as she violently scrapes her knuckles on the guitar strings. In so many ways, what she does is so much better than what Douglas P and Tony Wakeford could conjure through their cryptic folk songs. The haunting "Cousins Of The Antichrist" is one track that effortlessly exceeds the songwriting achievements of those aforementioned British esoteric musicians, with the urgency of the violent strum on her acoustic guitar stuck in minor chords buttressing the soaring vocals.
Similarly, "Deep Talks" works its blown out 4-track recording of her grab-every-string-on-the-guitar-and-pull method of playing along with her wordless vocal delivery that's as impressionistic as Grouper, but with Grouper's narcolepsy replaced by night terrors. "Moses" (a track which interestingly follows "Cousins Of The Antichrist") plays on stomping Southern spirituals but turned ashen and turgid in pace and demeanor. And the album's closing number "Widow" is a bleak, half-whispered song mired in morose atmospheres and just the right amount of narcotic smoke and exhumed-from-a-swamp 4 track production values, sounding a lot like the criminally underappreciated Corpses As Bedmates (whose sole album was reissued under an entirely different band name - Venus Handcuffs, probably worsening things for the band, but we digress). The short of it is that Chelsea Wolfe's The Grime And The Glow is fucking great and marks another killer release in the growing catalogue of witchy releases by Pendu Sound, following an lp from Sasha Grey's Atelecine and a single from witch house maven Mater Suspiria Vision. Highly Recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Advice & Vices"
MPEG Stream: "Cousins of the Antichrist"
MPEG Stream: "Moses"

DRUMM, KEVIN Imperial Distortion (Hospital) 3lp 47.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
There had been rumors this album would get reissued on vinyl; thankfully, those rumors have proven true, as Kevin Drumm's epic Imperial Distortion is now on wax, pressed as a thick triple LP! Here's what we had to say about the album a while back...
In recent years, Chicago's Kevin Drumm has unleashed an impressive cacophony through a handful of recordings of gnarled distortion and tempestuous noise. Having collaborated with the black-clad noisemonger Prurient and the power electronic technician Lasse Marhaug, having released an album for Hanson Records, and having composed a kick-ass disc called Sheer Hellish Miasma should be enough to let you know what the man is capable of. But listen closely to each of those albums, you'll find hints of glinted melody and a subtle beauty just below the surface of the chainsaw buzz. Here on Imperial Distortion, Drumm focuses entirely upon the contemplative and introspective gestures in the form of the huge longform drones similarly embraced by Eliane Radigue, Andrew Chalk, BJ Nilsen, etc. Gone are the attack, the aggression, and the noise; but the dark, the doom, and the hellishness are what remains in these icy drones. His strategy is pure hypnosis through slippery layers of elongated electronic drones and bell-tone like resonance. On "Guillain-Barre," the subterranean gong clatter soaked in reverberation could easily tear themselves apart into digital chaos, but Drumm molds the gritty klank into an ominous dronedirge. This softening of potentially destructive sounds becomes Drumm's modus operandi, with each modulation toward excess pregnant with malcontent energy reigned in for a severely dark moodscaping. With the two parts of "Snow," Drumm sets up soft transmissions from controlled feedback undulating with a slow moving rhythmic pulse, which gradually doubles upon itself into a topographical drone with all of the same-but-different patterns of wind swept sand. Here, Drumm most recalls the unnerving minimalism through refined feedback manipulation that Nurse With Wound concocted on Soliloquy For Lilith. By the end of the record, the shadow and disease which could be read into some of the tracks at the front end of the album dissolve into a shimmering ambience that's just damn pretty.
Imperial Distortion was easily one of the best drone records of 2008.
MPEG Stream: "Guillain-Barre"
MPEG Stream: "More Blood And Guts"
MPEG Stream: "Snow (Part Two)"

CICCIOLINA HOLOCAUST / SERMONIZER Albeit Albeit / Sibelius Spiders (Forced Nostalgia) lp 21.00
Enter Forced Nostalgia - a label mining the post-punk underground of dark electronics. Judging from this release and their upcoming programming for "a wayward selection of often unreleased, mostly unheard and overlooked material from tape music to industrial, from bossa-pop to proto-techno, and from drone to out and out analogue experimentation," Forced Nostalgia looks to be something wholly different from Vinyl-On-Demand, Minimal Wave, and Dark Entries. The bands here are two terminally obscure Italian industrial outfits who made these recordings in the early '80s with a clear aesthetic framework set forward by the Industrial Records model of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Clock DVA, and Cabaret Voltaire. Cicciolina Holocaust's woozy cornet buried in the mix of murky rhythms and electronic arpeggiations certainly draw their inspiration from the early productions of Chris & Cosey (think Heartbeat and the collaborative single with John Duncan) and of course there's plenty of TG to be heard in the mix. There are a couple of exceptional minimal wave numbers with clockwork nocturnal techno modulations and super creepy windswept dronings, all of which have been expertly remastered and sound really amazing on this piece of vinyl. Sermonizer harkens from the same realm of spooky electronics, with weirdly plucked guitars working through tape-delay splutter which is more Illitch than TG. Cold radio detunings, dark meanderings of synth warble, and highly sexualized moans and groans flush out Sermonizer's contribution to the split. All of these tracks seem to have come from private cassettes handed out back in the day. This is an amazing find and whets our appetite for what else Forced Nostalgia will be offering in the years to come.

BERRY, KEITH The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish / Turn Right A Thousand Feet From Here (Infraction) 2cd 17.98
The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish was released back in 2005 by Jon Mueller's now defunct label Crouton, and it came packaged in slightly oversized cardboard box filled with dried flowers drenched in a silken perfume. While devoid of this smell-o-rama trickery, the much-needed reissue of Keith Berry's masterpiece of hallowed drone does come with an unreleased body of work as a bonus disc, which is just as good of The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish.
Here's what we had to say about the album way back when, and these words still ring true today: Berry defines his work through the teachings of Zen Buddhism and Sufi poetry, striving for an artform that could "unlock the mechanisms inside one's mind that leads to enlightenment." In doing so, Berry begins The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish with a series of unremarkable sounds which fall somewhere in the hushed white noise territories, possibly including the sound of a gentle spring shower or the empty spaces on shortwave bands. He molds these hisses, crackles, and shadows into subtle repeating forms which do, in fact, lend themselves to any number of images, metaphors, and ideas. Given that he landed his debut album on Trente Oiseaux, Berry's work falls in the lowercase school of ephemeral electronics alongside Steve Roden and Bernhard Gunter, but there is an antiquated tactility to his albums which hint at the same temporal netherworld as heard in Philip Jeck's avant-turntable melodramas. These seductively restrained compositions for quiet flickerings, muffled rumbles, and whispered reverberations truly captured our imagination.
Not to be confused with a track on his Twenty Hertz album whereby he instructs the listener to veer left, Turn Right A Thousand Feet From Here is a far more nocturnal album than The Ear with its enveloping shadows, snowblinded mirages, and slow-motion tumbling of obfuscated noises into half-melodic passages. One would be forgiven for thinking these recordings to be a lost Thomas Koner record around the time of Kaamos or Daikan. Both discs are completely mesmerizing and come with our highest recommendation.
MPEG Stream: "The Sun Rays Of Another Pale Afternoon"
MPEG Stream: "Cars Keep Passing By"
MPEG Stream: "My Backward Voyage"
MPEG Stream: "Untitled II"

KAHN, JASON Vanishing Point (23five) cd 14.98
Strange that we, of all people, didn't realize this before - the Jason Kahn who has been producing extraordinary minimalist compositions and beautifully subtle sound installations in recent years is the same Jason Kahn who had stints as the drummer for mid-'80s, SST bands Trotsky Icepick, The Leaving Trains (one of Andee's all time faves!), and Universal Congress Of. Believe it! Around 1990, Kahn moved to Europe, dropping out of the US art-punk / post-hardcore scene and effortlessly transitioning into the avant-garde improv community in Zurich. He soon began experimenting with feedback systems resonating within the architecture of his drum kit, discovering a vocabulary of noises that have become the building blocks for his current body of work. A man of numerous collaborations (Gunter Muller, Ralph Steinbruchel, Asher, Steve Roden, Kevin Drumm, Jon Mueller, Toshimaru Nakamura, etc.), solo Jason Kahn records don't happen ever so often; and this one on 23five is exquisite!
On Vanishing Point, Kahn's techniques shift a little bit from the feedback bouncing around the innards of his drum kit to a series of colored noises generated from his custom built, patch-bay synth. The album reveals itself as a subtle and hypnotic elegy for rattling metals, timbral vibration, gossamer static, hissing field recordings, and those aforementioned softened noises. Soon into the piece, Kahn introduces a flickered ghost of melody whose luminous tones manifest ever so slightly against his contrails of noise. The upper register hiss and statics of these layered noises slowly drop in pitch and frequency over the duration of the piece, revealing subharmonic rumblings and an oceanic current that tugs at the agitated textures of Kahn's surface noises. This glacial, minimalist shift renders Vanishing Point elegant and meditative.
For those familiar with the 23five catalogue, this fits snugly next to those awesome records on 23five from Jean-Francois Laporte and Tim Catlin, and for those who are not, the calm surfaces of Kevin Drumm, the crackled surface noise of Loren Chasse's Hedge Of Nerves, the spectral reflections from Alan Lamb's wire recordings, and even the placid side of Taiga Remains could be good sonic reference points for this excellent album.
MPEG Stream: "Extract 1"
MPEG Stream: "Extract 2"

VERTONEN We Had A Few Sprinkles Today, But Not Enough To Help Out In The Garden (Crippled Intellect Productions) cd 10.98
Chicago's power acoustician Blake Edwards has been recording as Vertonen for years now, with plenty of caustic noise and atonal hums that draw parallels to the likes of John Duncan, CM Von Hausswolff, and Joe Colley (who has released a number of works through Edwards' own C.I.P. imprint). Yet, this album is easily the most subtle production for Edwards, and it's almost as it he's gone out of his way to burnish away almost every plausible signifier to this album, leaving behind a stately drone construction of phased vibrations and bellowing rumbles. All he provides from the outset is a statement that his source material was culled from a tape made in 1979. While he doesn't come outright and say who made the tape, if you were to ask him (we did), he would honestly say that the tape was from Jonestown; and the title itself comes from the People's Temple book of shortwave radio codes, which is code for "this is not a code." His obfuscation of the source material was intended not to shroud the material further in occluded transgression, but an attempt to remove the potent sensationalism around the Jonestown massacre all the while trying to articulate his own metaphors of horror, control, and fear through an act of negation. The slowly developing passages of flickering, long-stare drones is thick with a creeping sense of dread, even as Edwards makes plenty of compositional gestures to the likes of Eliane Radigue and Roland Kayn. It's as if Edwards has erased everything from that Jonestown tape, except for feelings of tranced-out exhaustion and sun-bleached humidity from the People's Temple members who had left everything behind in the US to embark upon a utopian project that had already turned ugly but soon was to become tragic. This is probably Vertonen's best work to date and certainly comes recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Invocation"
MPEG Stream: "Jackal"
MPEG Stream: "High Silence Into The Winds"

V/A BART: Bay Area Retrograde (Vol. 1) (Dark Entries) lp 17.98
A few years back, Minimal Wave offered some choice crate digging collections of nearly forgotten darkwave and post-punk electronics through their Lost Tapes and Found Tapes collections, highlighting the differences between the European and American models of underground new wave. Dark Entries produced this anthology in that same tradition, focusing even more tightly on the geography of the Bay Area. As Johnny Ray Huston so rightly points out in the liner notes, San Francisco in the '80s had its own unique crucible of local events that shaped the Bay Area's particular sound (e.g. the assassination of Harvey Milk, the growing AIDS epidemic and the fear surrounding the disease, etc.). While there's none of the art-damaged abstraction filtered from The Residents, Snakefinger, or Tuxedomoon in an obvious lineage to the artists featured here, BART (named after the subway that connects Oakland, Berkeley, and other parts of the East Bay to San Francisco) is a great collection of quirky minimal wave electronics, with a fair amount of unreleased material from obscurant Bay Area new wave bands.
Nomimal State opens the compilation and was from the suburban hamlet of Danville, recording this demo 1983 with a militantly uptempo drum machine and urgent synth lines. It's a track that easily fits next to the likes of The Units and Nervous Gender in terms of manic, punkish use of electronics. Speaking of The Units, they round out the compilation in contributing their sci-fi pop anthem "Mission," which is still bitchin' after all these years! Voice Farm is the other 'big name' to appear on this compilation, contributing a sinewy darkwave number from their 1982 album "The World We Live In." Batang State, Quiet Room, and Necropolis Of Love offer more Joy Division / Wire / Kraftwerk atmospheric post-punk number with considerable panache. The Wasp Women were a crossdressing trash-punk outfit, whose demo featured a wastoid lo-fi number and had appeared in the 1982 film "What Ever Happened To Susan Jane." Danny Boy & The Serious Party Gods offer a fabulously campy disco number with suitably over-the-top raunchy lyrics that ramble on and on against anthemic synths. If there's one track that you need to hear from this compilation it's this one! But the whole collection is very well done, and comes highly recommended as with everything that Dark Entries releases.
MPEG Stream: NOMINAL STATE "Middle Class"
MPEG Stream: UNITS "Mission"
MPEG Stream: DANNY BOY & THE SERIOUS PARTY GODS "Castro Boy"
MPEG Stream: VOICE FARM "Voyeur"

CRYSTAL STILTS In Love With Oblivion (Slumberland) lp 14.98
Most folks around here have been pretty obsessed with Crystal Stilts, since their self titled 2008 debut on Woodsist. But there's definitely a been holdout or two among us. Who, while appreciating that Crystal Stilts were a decent band, didn't necessarily understand what the fuss was all about. That all changes with In Love With Oblivion, and those folks are definitely gonna have to reassess their opinion on those older records too, cuz EVERYone here has gone totally nuts for this new record. Including the previous nonbelievers. Not sure what exactly it is, their sound hasn't changed so dramatically, but there's just something about this record that's totally magical. Dark and brooding, low slung slithery gloom pop, that while lumped in with the current crop of Sacred Bones / Captured Tracks outfits, to these ears are way more beholden to Aussie groups like the Celibate Rifles, the Lime Spiders, the Scientists, the Saints, Radio Birdman, even the Hoodoo Gurus, maybe especially the Hoodoo Gurus. Which is weird, cuz these guys are from Brooklyn. But they have that twangy surf guitar, the Fuzztones style wheezing garage rock organ, everything hazy and reverby, and of course the vox, that's what really does it, deep and dramatic, commanding and intense but still melodic. Opener "Sycamore Tree" is a perfect example, a dead ringer for some lost Celibate Rifles jam, a minimal woozy groove, the percussion a propulsive shuffle, the guitars thick with twang and reverb, the bass dense and driving, and the vocals, the sort of singing that would go on to define noise rock outfits from down under like Lubricated Goat and Kingsnakeroost, eyes closed it feels like being in some dingy club in Australia in the early eighties, packed in like sardines, the sound deafening, the crowd rapt and sweaty, moving to the music, total zoner gloom pop post punk bliss.
Then there's the other side of the band, like on "Through The Floor" where they channel classic girl group sounds, but add their own twist, those deep crooned vox, the whirring organ, lots of sweet back up harmonies, and of course plenty of buzz and reverb. And so it goes, the band switching from shimmery sixties jangle, to dark brooding eighties post punk gloom pop, often melding the two. And while we love both sides of the band, it's the darker side that we find the most mesmerizing. Like on "Alien Rivers", a creepy crawl, all thick undulating organs, shuffling snares, spidery guitars, the vocals especially heavy with reverb and echo, the sound droned out and druggy, divinely hypnotic. And there's the woozy groovy stomp of "Prometheus At Large", classic rock and roll wrapped in murk and grit and grime, a sort of classic fifties style pop transformed into something much more sinister. Elsewhere there's plenty of jangle and shimmer, shuffle and buzz, "Flying Into The Sun" sounds like a lo-fi indie pop Interpol, "Precarious Stair" sounds like some fantastic union of Thee Oh Sees and the Vivian Girls, but with those crooned post punk vox, all the songs buzzy and hooky and heavy in their own way, slipping easily from indie pop to new wave to indie jangle but always infused with the Stilts' dark brood, and fuzzy wall of sound reverby shimmer, and all held together by some impossibly great and catchy songs, and of course those fantastic vocals.
Definite contender for record of the year, and a new unanimous aQ fave for sure!
MPEG Stream: "Sycamore Tree"
MPEG Stream: "Through The Floor"
MPEG Stream: "Silver Sun"

IMPLODES Black Earth (Kranky) lp 14.98
The debut album from Chicago's Implodes is a quintessential Kranky release. It's a darkly beautiful production of pop narcotic smeared in layers of shoegaze distortion, monochromatic psychedelia, and slumping atmospherics, harkening back to Kranky's early releases from Bowery Electric, Amp, and maybe even the first Labradford record. That said, Implodes does fit nicely in with the current Kranky roster of Belong and Tim Hecker as well, and moreso Disappears, as Implodes is a conventional rock quartet crafting their tuneful sludge balanced with radioluminosity through pedals and amps. Throughout the album's humid, smoldering fuzz and droned distortion, Black Earth perpetuates the creeping violence and midwestern depression, spoken through the album's cover art, a creepy photograph of a woman's silhouette brandishing a knife in a rather hostile pose. The suitably downer melodies and androgynously murmured vocals flicker amidst the muffled guitar haze like the best of all shoegaze acts, but unlike most who reference My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, or Ride, Implodes is more attuned to Flying Saucer Attack, Bailter Space, or even the desolate drone-rock of Higuma. Tracks like "Screech Owl" and "Experiential Report" slowly burn from downer acoustic strumming into the plodding rhythms and intertwining male / female vocal mumblings buried beneath the narcoleptic atmospheres of muffed guitar haze. But if there was to be a 'hit' on the album it would be "Meadowlands" with its disco-ping synth notes that must be a reference to Joy Division's "She's Lost Control" instead of anything remotely hedonistic. Out of all this fuzz and distortion, sad melodies and muffled androgynous vocals sing of woe and heartache with a psychic conviction that doesn't need anything explicit like lyrics. The music is perfect in delivering this bleak mood all on its own.
MPEG Stream: "Marker"
MPEG Stream: "Screech Owl"
MPEG Stream: "Meadowlands"

NILSEN, BJ & STILLUPPSTEYPA Big Shadow Montana (The Helen Scarsdale Agency) lp 16.98
Collaborations in the experimental scene come and go, so it's so great to see one that has some longevity. This is album number seven from BJ Nilsen and Stilluppsteypa, and the fourth released by the discerning Helen Scarsdale Agency label. Since this trio (Benny plus Sigtryggur and Helgi of Stilluppsteypa) unleashed their drunken drone trilogy through the aforementioned Agency, they've been venturing into all sorts of delirious bouts of murky psychedelic collages and imagined soundtracks. There were the weird ruminations upon a found cassette, turned into a mondo filmscore on Man From Deep River; and then the sci-fi opus of synth meanderings found on Space Finale. Now what may be the best to emerge since that earlier alcohol-inspired trilogy is this, the mercurial and hauntological album Big Shadow Montana. Two long-form pieces make up the album, with the A side standing as a hallucinatory foreshadowing of what is to come on the flip. Here, ghostly drones broadcast directly out of the haunted ballroom from The Shining, flickering with half-received transmissions, bumps in the night, and any number of other worldly sounds. Bits of structure emerge in this slow-motion churning of drone, shadow, and filigree coming across somewhere between the fucked up collages that seem to bring all of the Teenage Filmstars records to a close and the subterranean drone-rock sensibility of German Oak. When the record flips, a cosmic stream of vintage synths slump toward oblivion paralleling what has been done by Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never (both of whom have released work alongside this trio on Editions Mego), but before this can venture any further down the rabbit hole of Schnitzler and Schulze references, Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa slip into a faux-exotica guise with cheap Casiotone melodies swaying to and fro through old Les Baxter and Martin Denny records. It's a signature move for Stilluppsteypa, if anyone remembers how they mustered a similar strategy on The Best Possible Yet back in 1997. But the maudlin organ harmonies and percolating tone-bloop oscillations are much more confident here, emerging perfectly out of the drone fog like those organ-led numbers on that Deathprod boxset, only to slip into a twin engine thrum of inner-space expansion. In listening back to the second side of the album, it's clear that the first is a lengthy dub of the second, recast and recontextualized as a percussive ghost. Totally captivating through and through, and with a damn trippy cover sporting a vibrantly hypnotic, candy-colored mandala. Yup, it does have a download card. Yup, it is limited. Yup, it is highly recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Big Shadow Montana 1"
MPEG Stream: "Big Shadow Montana 2"

IMPLODES Black Earth (Kranky) cd 14.98
The debut album from Chicago's Implodes is a quintessential Kranky release. It's a darkly beautiful production of pop narcotic smeared in layers of shoegaze distortion, monochromatic psychedelia, and slumping atmospherics, harkening back to Kranky's early releases from Bowery Electric, Amp, and maybe even the first Labradford record. That said, Implodes does fit nicely in with the current Kranky roster of Belong and Tim Hecker as well, and moreso Disappears, as Implodes is a conventional rock quartet crafting their tuneful sludge balanced with radioluminosity through pedals and amps. Throughout the album's humid, smoldering fuzz and droned distortion, Black Earth perpetuates the creeping violence and midwestern depression, spoken through the album's cover art, a creepy photograph of a woman's silhouette brandishing a knife in a rather hostile pose. The suitably downer melodies and androgynously murmured vocals flicker amidst the muffled guitar haze like the best of all shoegaze acts, but unlike most who reference My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, or Ride, Implodes is more attuned to Flying Saucer Attack, Bailter Space, or even the desolate drone-rock of Higuma. Tracks like "Screech Owl" and "Experiential Report" slowly burn from downer acoustic strumming into the plodding rhythms and intertwining male / female vocal mumblings buried beneath the narcoleptic atmospheres of muffed guitar haze. But if there was to be a 'hit' on the album it would be "Meadowlands" with its disco-ping synth notes that must be a reference to Joy Division's "She's Lost Control" instead of anything remotely hedonistic. Out of all this fuzz and distortion, sad melodies and muffled androgynous vocals sing of woe and heartache with a psychic conviction that doesn't need anything explicit like lyrics. The music is perfect in delivering this bleak mood all on its own.
MPEG Stream: "Marker"
MPEG Stream: "Screech Owl"
MPEG Stream: "Meadowlands"

PETERLICKER Nicht (Editions Mego) lp 21.00
Why the hell would you call your band Peterlicker? And even if you did give yourself such a terrible name, why would you keep it after you broke up over 20 years ago, especially when the band in question hardly even managed a couple of practices and maybe one gig? These are the important questions we ask here at aQuarius, and perhaps we can feel justified in asking these questions, since they themselves admit theirs is a stupid band name following the tradition of the Butthole Surfers and Throbbing Gristle.
So, with that discussion out of the way, here at last is the debut LP from Peterlicker, a monstrously good electro-doom-dirge-noise-rock quartet featuring Peter (Pita) Rehberg. While Pita's brain-drilling power electronics are a component of the crawling noise structures in Peterlicker, it's clearly not just his project. F. Hergovich is the vocalist in the band, whose ominous deepthroating vocalizations loom over the entire production, timestretched into undefinable gaping bellows and monstrous Lustmordian howls. C. Schachinger takes his cues from Swans' stalwart guitarist Norman Westberg, in his bent atonal screeches, gritty crackling of white-hot distortion, and dive-bomb arcs of noise that settle upon the ever crawling post-doom basslines of G. Weissegger. Pita and Weissegger fill in the gaps with plenty of crunched noises that buttress the grim arsenal of crusty noise. Imagine Godflesh, if Broadrick forgot to bring his drum machine to the studio, or Swans (circa Cop and Filth) with Gira even more amped up on amphetamines and taking his vocals on a really fucked godhead trip. Needless to say, Nicht is pretty fucking brilliant, regardless of what they chose to call the band.
MPEG Stream: "Always Right"
MPEG Stream: "C-Slide"
MPEG Stream: "Schleim"

SCHNITZLER, CONRAD Ballet Statique (M=Minimal) lp 16.98
An album that launched thousands of better known records, Ballet Statique is Conrad Schniztler's masterpiece. Schnitzler, of course, was a maverick in the Krautrock community, having been an original member of both Tangerine Dream and Kluster, and later developing an expressive language of tape collage and electronic synthesis which expanded upon his early studies with Joseph Beuys. His most influential works, however, came out in the late '70s following an almost serialist body of work based on the poetics of various colors through electronic sound, eventually leading to Ballet Statique. It was originally released with the title 'Con' back in 1978 through the Barclay funded Egg Records, Ballet Statique is a skeletal distillation of progressive electronics into a bleak hypnosis of rotating melodies, atonal slashes of synthetic noise, and proto-techno rhythmic propulsion. While this album has been reissued a few times since it's original release, the current infatuation with late '70s electronics - especially through the psychedelic and minimal-wave sensibilities - make this reissue especially timely. "Electric Garden" is one of those elegantly simple pieces of electronica with an abstracted, almost random melody guiding Schnitzler's rigid step sequence cast in a cosmic shower of delay ripples with bent electro-shock noises sliding up and down against his motorik drum machine. From a track like this, one can see where Aphex Twin would have been able to make such a profound break from rave culture with these head-spinning sequences. "Metall 1" is all space-dust and comet debris hung weightlessly through Schnitzler's ominous undulations of bright synthetic shimmers and lurching rumbles of metallic low-end, clearly the inspiration for pretty much everything that John Elliott of Emeralds has ever touched. The deep-space sonor pulses of "Black Nails" reprise the tone-bent noises Schnitzler produced on "Electric Garden," looking forward to the robotic bleakness of Monoton, Dome, and Omit. It's pretty shocking how good this record is, and how timeless it sounds, even with the current strain of '70s revivalism. So highly recommended, it's actually embarrassing that we've not written about this record sooner.
MPEG Stream: "Electric Garden"
MPEG Stream: "Metall I"

CRYSTAL STILTS In Love With Oblivion (Slumberland) cd 12.98
Most folks around here have been pretty obsessed with Crystal Stilts, since their self titled 2008 debut on Woodsist. But there's definitely a been holdout or two among us. Who, while appreciating that Crystal Stilts were a decent band, didn't necessarily understand what the fuss was all about. That all changes with In Love With Oblivion, and those folks are definitely gonna have to reassess their opinion on those older records too, cuz EVERYone here has gone totally nuts for this new record. Including the previous nonbelievers. Not sure what exactly it is, their sound hasn't changed so dramatically, but there's just something about this record that's totally magical. Dark and brooding, low slung slithery gloom pop, that while lumped in with the current crop of Sacred Bones / Captured Tracks outfits, to these ears are way more beholden to Aussie groups like the Celibate Rifles, the Lime Spiders, the Scientists, the Saints, Radio Birdman, even the Hoodoo Gurus, maybe especially the Hoodoo Gurus. Which is weird, cuz these guys are from Brooklyn. But they have that twangy surf guitar, the Fuzztones style wheezing garage rock organ, everything hazy and reverby, and of course the vox, that's what really does it, deep and dramatic, commanding and intense but still melodic. Opener "Sycamore Tree" is a perfect example, a dead ringer for some lost Celibate Rifles jam, a minimal woozy groove, the percussion a propulsive shuffle, the guitars thick with twang and reverb, the bass dense and driving, and the vocals, the sort of singing that would go on to define noise rock outfits from down under like Lubricated Goat and Kingsnakeroost, eyes closed it feels like being in some dingy club in Australia in the early eighties, packed in like sardines, the sound deafening, the crowd rapt and sweaty, moving to the music, total zoner gloom pop post punk bliss.
Then there's the other side of the band, like on "Through The Floor" where they channel classic girl group sounds, but add their own twist, those deep crooned vox, the whirring organ, lots of sweet back up harmonies, and of course plenty of buzz and reverb. And so it goes, the band switching from shimmery sixties jangle, to dark brooding eighties post punk gloom pop, often melding the two. And while we love both sides of the band, it's the darker side that we find the most mesmerizing. Like on "Alien Rivers", a creepy crawl, all thick undulating organs, shuffling snares, spidery guitars, the vocals especially heavy with reverb and echo, the sound droned out and druggy, divinely hypnotic. And there's the woozy groovy stomp of "Prometheus At Large", classic rock and roll wrapped in murk and grit and grime, a sort of classic fifties style pop transformed into something much more sinister. Elsewhere there's plenty of jangle and shimmer, shuffle and buzz, "Flying Into The Sun" sounds like a lo-fi indie pop Interpol, "Precarious Stair" sounds like some fantastic union of Thee Oh Sees and the Vivian Girls, but with those crooned post punk vox, all the songs buzzy and hooky and heavy in their own way, slipping easily from indie pop to new wave to indie jangle but always infused with the Stilts' dark brood, and fuzzy wall of sound reverby shimmer, and all held together by some impossibly great and catchy songs, and of course those fantastic vocals.
Definite contender for record of the year, and a new unanimous aQ fave for sure!
MPEG Stream: "Sycamore Tree"
MPEG Stream: "Through The Floor"
MPEG Stream: "Silver Sun"

O'ROURKE, JIM & CHRISTOPH HEEMANN Plastic Palace People Vol. 1 (Streamline) cd 14.98
Plastic Palace Alice? Let's hear it for Scott Walker, first of all; but the mad genius of baroque pop has nothing in common with the long-form stupor and granular synthesis that these stalwarts of the avant-garde produced way back in 1991. At that time, O'Rourke was a recent graduate of music school with a head full of knowledge about vangarde composition, the whole Luc Ferrari back catalogue, and an standing invitation to perform / record within Chicago's preeminent postindustrial ensemble Illusion Of Safety; and Heemann was in the process of dissolving his seminal dada-montage project H.N.A.S. The two began a correspondence that led to him travelling to Germany where they jumped into a heady collaboration in Heemann's studio. Why none of these recordings have yet to see the light of day is anybody's guess, but here's what may be the first in a series of archival recordings produced by O'Rourke and Heemann.
A buzzsaw drone gradually introduces the first of three long-form pieces of stratified minimalism. As the piece grows and blossoms, an uneasy set of harmonic overtones dominates the stage, holding a firm grasp on the psychoacoustic properties that an epic Eliane Radigue or Phill Niblock piece can achieve. The track collapses through a weird gurgling of electronics only to swell back again with a chorus of LaMonte Young inspired drone-vocalization rasped through electronics and / or coupled with sympathetic drones from a guitar, only to mutate into a spasmodic explosion of electronic granularity and sine-tone modulation. Really amazing stuff, for sure! The second track, picks up with what we'll assume to be O'Rourke's buzzing guitar drones giving way to a devilish montage of vocalized growling, suffocating gaspings for air, and other grim sound poetics that look forward simultaneously to the lupine babbling of Sudden Infant and the tortured incidental black-metal ambience of Spektr. The profound spookiness of the second track dissolves into the pools of shimmered tone and radiant beauty of the third, as something of a harbinger of where Heemann would direct the Mirror project with Andrew Chalk almost a decade later. So nice!
Again, we have to wonder why the hell did it take so long for these recordings to come out? They are simply too good to have been sitting dormant on some shelf!
MPEG Stream: "Track 1"
MPEG Stream: "Track 2"
MPEG Stream: "Track 3"

GARET, RICHARD & ASHER THAL-NIR Melting Ground (Contour Editions) dvd-r 17.98
Here's a beautiful dvd-r from Richard Garet and Asher Thal-Nir. While Garet's greysmear minimalism has hypnotized us via his previous releases, it's his visual sensibility that provides the sublime, slow-motion drama here. Asher, too, is an exceptional understated composer whose signature lines of soft-focus static gird his musical accompaniment to Garet's film. There are only a few interlocking elements to the sounds and visuals for Melting Ground, with Garet providing a single tracking shot of a series of Alaskan glaciers viewed from above by way of helicopter; and Asher's piano interludes look back to the delicate compositions of Satie, hovering above that audio snow that he so often uses within his work. The treatment that Garet gives to his film is quite remarkable, as he really does an excellent job in simulating the antique patina of a hand-cranked camera whose imperfect motion creates a pulsing flicker with overexposed flashes of bleaching white and Rorschach blots of underexposed inky blacks. Coupled with a fine coat of fabricated film-dust, scratches, and debris, the film itself has the bruised visual corollary to so many of the sounds generated out of Phillip Jeck's vintage turntables. The pacing of the film is deliberately slow, panning across enormous mountains of crumpled earth jutting out of looming banks of suspended fog and vast patterned surfaces of ice. The effect is one of a found-piece of film, uncovered from somewhere deep within one of those glaciers as an artifact from a lost team of explorers. The elegiac timbre of Asher's composition supports a similar antiquity, given the early 20th century references he seems to be making. Even the softened static that grounds all of his clustered piano notes, seem to have been extracted from the surface noise of a wax cylinder from that same time period. There is a sense of wonder, awe, fear, and beauty to this piece, one that parallels Leif Elggren's minimalist abstraction Arranging for an Opening of a Teleport to Shangri-La, which appropriated Frank Capra's early film Lost Horizon into a smear of drone and slow-burning visuals. Melting Ground's magic lantern approach to the material gives it more of a haunted, excavated aesthetic, with all of it addressing an allusion to the perils of climate change, especially in its impact upon the glaciers which hold so much of the world's fresh water. Limited to a mere 150 copies, and nicely packaged in an oversized folio.
MPEG Stream: "Melting Ground (audio extract)"

RODEN, STEVE Three Roots Carved To Look Like Stones (Sonoris) cd 13.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Here's a 2003 release that we've never stocked before, from one of our favorite sound artists. Steve Roden built this album originally as the sound design for an installation back in 2000, with all of the sounds sourced from three musical instruments found in a Chinatown giftshop, including a toy wooden flute, an aluminum wind chime, and a paper accordion. Where so many musicians would take these instruments and render their sounds cute, cheeky, or ironic, Roden has always been an artist with a profound sensitivity for his source material; and he deftly extracts harmonically rich and emotionally resonant hues and tones from all of those instruments. The first piece, sourced from the wooden flute, elegantly weaves sustained wisping tones out of a deep, almost sinewave-sounding thrum of down-pitched low-end rumbling. The looping hypnosis of this track harkens to the pre-digital smears of flutes that Zoviet France created on such albums as Shouting At The Ground or Shadow Thief Of The Sun - in other words, haunting, sublime, and gorgeous. The second track is adopted from the aluminum wind chimes, collects an aggregate of variably pitched sounds of those chimes, with deep resonance, metallic textural scrapes, and chittery clicks coming into the mix. The pacing of this track is quintessentially Roden, deliberate and hypnotic, becoming all the more engrossing the further one engages with the track. The final composition is for the paper accordion, whose spare notes evolve into a beautiful elegy of lilting tones that overlap and loop with each other, upon sets of miniature abrasions and a thick set of low-drones, which must have been designed to simulate those on the first track. Like much of Roden's work, this is a lovely piece of introspective minimalism, slowly germinating into a beautiful ambience.
MPEG Stream: "8 Breaths Of Different Lengths"
MPEG Stream: "Hands Moving, Slowly"
MPEG Stream: "Air Chamber With 4 Holes"

BERNIER, NICOLAS Usure.Paysage (Hronir) lp 24.00
Hot shit musique concrete found here! There are so many stuffy compositions and constructions that look back to the salad days of tape experimentation in the '50s and '60s. Works can get so conceptual with each sound being meant to allude to some particular phrases of Beckett or recapitulate the Merz of Schwitters that the interplay between this found sound and that electronic blorp is totally lost amidst a dull and boring concoction that serves little more than an execution of a grant application. This is certainly not the case for Canadian composer Nicolas Bernier, whose dexterous yet ominous concrete album has landed in the good hands of Hronir, a label which has a small catalogue of brutal collage artists (e.g. Sudden Infant, Raionbashi, GX-Jupitter Larssen) to accompany more oblique voices from the academic world. While Bernier's work isn't nearly as toxic as those jackbooted noiseniks, his compositions are wholly discomforting, and we mean that in the best possible light. Within the avant-garde pantheon, Bernier's work follows that of Michel Chion and Luc Ferrari doing their finest work, through dynamic juxtapositions blurting concrete sounds (bellowing car horns, steam engine growls, leaden explosions, etc) against unsettled atmospheres and spackled dronings that start and stop with a series of repeating punctuations not unlike the strategy that Nurse With Wound mastered on Homotopy To Marie. He's aware of the cinematic urge for acousmatic works, and pushes "Les chambres de l'atelier" towards a Lynchian noir with a soft-focus melody warbling in the background to a series of crunched abrasions and eerie footsteps, ruptured by ghostly noises. Excellent, through and through! Limited to 300 copies as well.
MPEG Stream: "Paysages Articules No. 4"
MPEG Stream: "10 Passages"
MPEG Stream: "Les Chambres De L'atelier"

BEE MASK Canzoni Dal Laboratorio Del Silenzio Cosmico (Spectrum Spools / Editions Mego) lp 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Chris Madak is the man behind the Bee Mask, a project with several dozen cassette releases issued over the past couple of years. Madak should also be noted as the principle behind the exceptionally curated Deception Island tape label, which had the foresight to release Oneohtrix Point Never's Betrayed In The Octagon as well as a handful of killer Emeralds related side projects. That said, not much from Bee Mask's own discography has made it through here, with blister popping electrical noise and synth sequencing seeming to be par for the course. Yet through those circuit bent experiments, Bee Mask emerges fully evolved as a master synthesist of all things elekronische and kosmische circa 1975. Canzoni Dal Laboratorio Del Silenzio Cosmico is a wonderfully varied album whose hallucinatory narratives speak to a purposeful and thoroughly intelligent design in its creation. Throughout you'll hear distinct references to the likes of Roland Kayn, Tangerine Dream (e.g. Electronic Meditations), Jean-Claude Eloy, Francoise Bayle, anything from Sky Records you could think of in the mid to late '70s, and even the more bombastic electronic interludes offered by Pink Floyd for that matter. The album opens in a more studied fashion through a sequence of carillion bell tones backmasked with a series of soft vocal grunts and gradually building set of electronic percolations, but all of this is engulfed in a tidal wave of polydactyl synth sequencing and brainfried electronic percolations only to morph again into a cavernous expanse of elongated tone and drone. The album's numerous detours and labyrinthine structures twist and devolve constantly across both sides of the record, delving into melodic phrasing in the electronic sequences only to shift deftly into plunging electrical vibrations of pulsing synth noise and delirious crescendos popping throughout.
The fact that John Elliott of Emeralds has brought this to vinyl after a release on Gift Tapes a while back should not go unnoticed. Spectrum Spools is his new imprint, released through Editions Mego, and this should be a label not to be missed. Certainly not this release, that's for sure.

SLAVES, THE Ocean On Ocean (Debacle) cd-r 9.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We love bands whose music-making formula appears, on the surface, simple and intuitive, yet the sounds they create are huge, engulfing and seemingly complex. Using two synthesizers and echoing vocals, The Slaves inhabit a sound that is as lush and dense as it is mysterious and minimal. Their debut album, Ocean on Ocean, is the perfect showcase of a group that can conjure up bountiful sounds within a restrained approach. Honestly, we can't get enough of Ocean on Ocean, something about those enormous, dreamy, engulfing songscapes just leaves us wanting more. Their oozing brew of minimal pop melts and blurs with the melodic thickness of MBV's Loveless or early Slowdive, but surrenders to a contemplative mode that falls somewhere between Gregorian hymn and pagan ritual. The duo spin a radiant web of sustained vocals and heavy synth, each chord drawn out and smeared into a neon haze while indecipherable lyrics suggest longing, loss and submission to oblivion.
"Seventeen" unfolds with a slow arching chord progression that grows and dissipates like a coastal tide. Female vocals creep into the oceanic haze while fluttering noise and cosmic wash hover in obscurity. And though the rhythm-less wash may appear to be aimless improv, a close listen reveals a defined structure beneath the veil of long tones and heavy atmospherics. And yes, The Slaves are heavy. And it's not a 'down-tuned guitars through a wall of amps' kind of heavy. It's more evident in the slow movement of the songs, and the visceral effects felt by each musical gesture. The duo have perfectly crafted a searing offering of 'soft doom', so gorgeous and mesmerizing we've had Ocean on Ocean on repeat for the past week. "Shadows" is another noteworthy track. We love the push and pull of heavy synth and whispery vocals, whirls of female voice echo into the night then dissipate into huge swells of HEAVY distorted synth. Crumbling low end amid ethereal dream chants, what else could we ask for?? One of our favorite records in recent memory and highly recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Seventeen"
MPEG Stream: "Sweet High"

GANG OF FOUR Entertainment (Rhino / Warner Bros.) lp 24.00
NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL, ONCE AGAIN!!!
The roots of Gang of Four can be traced back to 1976, but from opposite ends of the globe. In their native England during that year, The Sex Pistols, The Damned, and The Clash dropped the bomb that was punk whose shockwaves can still be felt to this day through music, literature, art, politics, fashion, etc. In China also in 1976, a renegade faction of communists staged a leadership coup after the death of Mao Zedong, holding out for 10 days and calling themselves the Gang of Four. Back in England a year later, a punk band began as four art students from Leeds appropriated not only the name but also the insistance upon bold ideological stances from those Maoist revolutionaries. After achieving considerable success with their debut Damaged Goods EP on the remarkably prescient Fast Productions (who also signed The Mekons early on as well), Gang of Four landed a deal with EMI which resulted in Entertainment. This album - like Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures and the first three Wire albums - transformed punk with its ingenious marriage of intelligence, angst, politics, and aesthetics, and has not been improved upon since, despite the best efforts from a crowd of post-punk revivalists (i.e. The Rapture, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, etc.).
Gang of Four were Andy Gill, Jon King, Dave Allen, and Hugo Burnham; well at least for Entertainment and the two follow up records. Entertainment's politics have been at the center of most of the reviews you'll find praising this record, but those politics wouldn't have been heard had Gang of Four not been a fucking tight band, with Gill's rapid fire guitar arpeggios, Allen's agitated funk-punk basslines, and Burnham's explosive post-disco rhythms. Every thing that has been written about Gang of Four in the past is true, especially from those kind people at Pitchfork who sneered at the end of their review of Entertainment that "anyone who says it's played out is a douchebag." Truer words have not been spoken.
MPEG Stream: "Damaged Goods"
MPEG Stream: "At Home He's A Tourist"
MPEG Stream: "Anthrax"

INFINITY WINDOW Artificial Midnight (Arbor) lp 14.98
Out of print for quite a long time, Infinity Window's Artificial Midnight is now back in print. This was the first project we heard from Daniel Lopatin, who's better known as Oneohtrix Point Never. Here, he was working with Taylor Richardson, one time member of Sunburnt Hand Of The Man, although this is much closer to the classic OPN sound of liquid synth ambience and polyhedron step sequencing. The two parted ways shortly after this record came out, and well before OPN's breakthrough album Returnal. Here's what we had to say about this way back when:
Armed with a bunch of analog synths and an alliance of effects pedals, Infinity Window conjures a deep cleansing slab of new agey bliss. In the same droney vein as Emeralds, Infinity Window delve deep into the divine world of heavy synth wizardry to unveil two sides of all-encompassing aural blitzkrieg. To say their sound is thick would be a total understatement. These guys know how to lay it down heavy, but there is a lighter side to their heaviness, not really a dooomy type of heaviness, more a melodic and shimmering type of heavy that reminds us of the earlier Growing albums. Both sides build from wondrously minimal, video game-y bleeps and bloops to huge walls of trance inducing, glacial radiance. Like staring directly into the blaring sun, these tracks are celestial and huge but damaged and textured. Fuzz and noise subtly encapsulate the reverberating tones to swiftly steer away from any new-agey cheesiness.

XEX Group Xex (Dark Entries) lp 17.98
Xex was the experimental synthpop creation of three high-school misfits living in central New Jersey during the mid-'70s, having survived their teen years of suburban boredom with plenty of drugs and eye-opening excursions to New York. Liberated by the spirit of punk, this outfit - pseudonymously known as Waw Pierogi, Thumbalina Gugielmo, and Alex Zander (later joined by Jon-Boy Diode and David Anderson) - took up the task of infusing a smarty-pants cynicism to hyper-primitive arrangements on a small assortment of synths and drum machines. No guitars whatsoever, the sound of Xex is one of skewed melodicism and incessant repetition. This combined with a typically monotone vocal sensibility put Xex in the same synthpunk orbit as The Units and Crash Course In Science. It's a very American sound, to look back upon all of these records. In Europe, the new wave and synthpop was far more self-possessed, even amongst the DIY circles, but for a certain subset in the States, the nerds had become emboldened in punk to use science and math as a spasmodic, future-shock means for nihilist poetics and cathartic release - hence, Devo, Dark Day, Nervous Gender, the aforementioned Crash Course In Science, and Xex. With the exception of Primitive Calculators and Severed Heads in Australia, there's hardly a parallel anywhere else in the world to this synthpunk sound; and Xex were certainly exceptional at it.
Group Xex was the only record they released, although the band recorded a second album but never released it (unfortunately the tapes of that second album had deteriorated beyond repair). Self-released in 1980, the album was sold pretty much exclusively in Manhattan and North Jersey, with an edition of a 1000 copies disappearing quickly. The album did get a cd reish in 1995 after Tom Smith championed the record after discovering it in the vaults at WFMU. It's a very quizzical album of purposefully simple electronic tunes played upon whipcrack drum machines and minimally percolating synths matched by the alternating female and male vocals, which are always thin, reedy, and metallic. Thumbalina's girly vocals bounce through the motorik synthpop ditty "Fashion Hurts" whose singsonginess is immediately countered by the unwavering robotic monotone that Pierogi presents on the cybernetic "You Think", and the grim, paranoiac poetry on "SNGA" (which stands for Soviet Nerve Gas Attack).
Another great find from the always impressive Dark Entries label! Definitely for fans of Devo and the Units. Limited to 500 copies with a great looking new wave booklet with lyrics, a band history, and some amusing tidbits thrown in for good measure.
MPEG Stream: "Fashion Hurts"
MPEG Stream: "You Think"
MPEG Stream: "Sgna"
MPEG Stream: "Party"
MPEG Stream: "Holland Tunnel"

ALVARIUS B Baroque Primitiva (Poon Village) cd 17.98
Here's the much anticipated cd reissue of this way-too limited Alvarius B album which came and went on vinyl in a matter of days early in 2011. Alvarius B is the solo project of Alan Bishop, better known as one of the Sun City Girls - a project which dissolved after over twenty years following the death of drummer and fellow provocateur Charles Goucher. The Girls (a trio rounded out by Bishop's brother Richard) were specialists in frustratingly brilliant psychedelic-punk, damaged with free jazz, Southeast Asian pop, and fucked-up beat poetry. They were notorious for their designed lack of editorial constraints in situating brilliantly over-charged weirdo-pop melodic crescendos often hybridizing the likes of Ennio Morricone and Vietnamese songwriter Trinh Cong Son next to an uncomfortably misogynistic rant from Alan Bishop's slimy Bukowski parody as Uncle Jim. Even the most die-hard Sun City Girls fans who could stomach and perhaps grow to love their confrontational affronts will undeniably say that it's Torch Of The Mystics or 303,003 Crossdressers From The Rig Veda that are the masterpieces of borderless songwriting.
So with the Girls no more, where would Alan Bishop take his own work? The Sir Richard Bishop records have been uniformly brilliant in their fiery elliptical fingerpicking, exploding the Takoma handbook; and Alan has often given off the appearance of being a trickster figure, presenting himself as a minstrel with an immense emotional range only to pull back the mask to reveal a devilish, blackened heart intent on causing misery upon all who hear. With all of this as a preamble, we can say that Alan has followed where the Sun City Girls ended their career on Funeral Mariachi, with this gorgeous record in the form of Baroque Primitiva.
The album is rich with covers, although an Alan Bishop cover would certainly amount to a delirious transfiguration. The man has long been obsessed by Ennio Morricone, and this expertise has been applied to some of the best compendiums of Morricone's best work during the '60s and '70s. And 6 of the albums 12 songs are attributed to Morricone, or "Maestro Padre Supremo" as Bishop describes him in the liner notes. These songs enjoy the lilting yet complex melodies that Morricone had been so known for, with Bishop crooning all of the wordless oohs and ahhs that Morricone had originally penned for a female vocalist. Bishop has long been known for his ability to hit sharp falsettos in the Girls. Even though he does bend many of the notes towards atonality, he is quite reverential towards the Morricone text. In fact, the contrast between Morricone's ecstatic songs and the many cracks in Bishop's deliberately lo-fi production (think Sebadoh's four-track recordings with just multi-tracked voice, guitar and chord organ) serves to heighten the drama of these recordings. There are a couple of Bishop originals, "Humor Police" is very much a manic carnavalesque number and "Well Known Stranger" is a classic downer jam of strum and vocal mope that sounds like it could be a lost Neil Young tune, but done way better. The two other covers on the album are also quite noteworthy: the only song to emerge from his aborted album of John Barry covers in the form of "You Only Live Twice" and one hell of jubilant romp through the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows."
This is very nicely packaged in the form of a 30 page hardback book, featuring various close-ups of the nude mandala artwork photographed by Kristen Anderson, to sweeten the deal. Already proving to be one of the best albums of 2011. So don't let the cd pass you by, if you didn't have the good fortune of getting hold of the vinyl already.
MPEG Stream: "Well Known Stranger"
MPEG Stream: "Funny Thing Is..."
MPEG Stream: "God Only Be Without You"
MPEG Stream: "Humor Police"

EVIL MADNESS Super Great Love (Editions Mego) lp 21.00
To look at the personnel line-up of Evil Madness, you probably wouldn't know what to expect. There's the melancholy composer Johann Johannsson with a number of acclaimed cinematic records on 4AD. There's the bleak-minded drone specialist BJ Nilsen and his long-time collaborators Stillupsteypa. And there's another Icelander dude named Petur Eyvindsson, who has some oddball releases under the name DJ Musician. Given that, the punchy discotheque grooves of Evil Madness are way out of left-field and totally great. Italo disco, minimal wave / EMB, anthemic Detroit techno circa 1988, John Carpenter's paranoiac synth arpeggiations, lots of analogue synth worship, and pre-fab electronic beats all come together underneath the stoic yet tongue-in-cheek banner of Evil Madness. We suspect that Sigtryggur from Stilluppsteypa has quite a lot to do with this one, given the electro-breaks that would occasionally slap in the face of his seriously minded crackled dronemuzik; no matter who's responsible, both sides of Super Great Love are brilliantly hedonistic mash-ups of vintage synth stabs, stupidly good anthemic electronic melodies, and plenty cybernetic Moroder sequences, spiralling upon techno, disco, and electro rhythms. Super Great Love is actually the fourth record by Evil Madness, with their other releases coming out through the poorly distributed 12 Tonar label and the dada-fetish imprint Ultra Eczema, so this album on Editions Mego should garner a broader audience for Evil Madness (they'll be releasing a cd version eventually too). Fans of Majeure, Umberto, K-X-P, and the Oneohtrix Point Never sideproject Games would be well served to check this out!

SLUG GUTS Howlin' Gang (Sacred Bones) cd 13.98
With a name like Slug Guts, you might expect some ugly ultradoooooom from this band, but they express their misanthropy and disgust in another genre, as these punks Slug Guts are in fact Aussie underground garage rock wranglers, swampy and sinister in the grand tradition of Nick Cave & The Birthday Party, also sharing deviant DNA with the likes of Bird Blobs, King Snake Roost, Lubricated Goat, The Scientists, and other degenerate Down Under gutter crawlers of that ilk, from over the years...
We'd first heard 'em on their import-only debut Down On The Meat a couple years back, and are stoked that Sacred Bones have added them to their fine roster for this sophomore outing. Even if we hadn't heard of 'em before, the SB seal of approval (and the band name!) would have gotten us onboard.
Plus we love this sort of thing, being big fans of the bands mentioned above, so we're primed for Slug Guts' insidiously catchy caterwauling and late night, whiskey soaked dirgery. Perhaps not quite so noisy/nasty as Down On The Meat was, here Slug Guts show off their pop side, such as is, the record being a rollin' and tumblin', slow drunkard's stagger consisting of eerie guitar jangle, low-slung bass, and deep, drawled vocals, all bathed in loads of reverb, and menace. Opener "Howlin'" has a bit of a sinuous "Painted Black" vibe and indeed the entire album is cloaked in damnation and darkness.
MPEG Stream: "Howlin'"
MPEG Stream: "Cold Bones"
MPEG Stream: "Chrome Crucifix"

SLUG GUTS Howlin' Gang (Sacred Bones) lp 14.98
With a name like Slug Guts, you might expect some ugly ultradoooooom from this band, but they express their misanthropy and disgust in another genre, as these punks Slug Guts are in fact Aussie underground garage rock wranglers, swampy and sinister in the grand tradition of Nick Cave & The Birthday Party, also sharing deviant DNA with the likes of Bird Blobs, King Snake Roost, Lubricated Goat, The Scientists, and other degenerate Down Under gutter crawlers of that ilk, from over the years...
We'd first heard 'em on their import-only debut Down On The Meat a couple years back, and are stoked that Sacred Bones have added them to their fine roster for this sophomore outing. Even if we hadn't heard of 'em before, the SB seal of approval (and the band name!) would have gotten us onboard.
Plus we love this sort of thing, being big fans of the bands mentioned above, so we're primed for Slug Guts' insidiously catchy caterwauling and late night, whiskey soaked dirgery. Perhaps not quite so noisy/nasty as Down On The Meat was, here Slug Guts show off their pop side, such as is, the record being a rollin' and tumblin', slow drunkard's stagger consisting of eerie guitar jangle, low-slung bass, and deep, drawled vocals, all bathed in loads of reverb, and menace. Opener "Howlin'" has a bit of a sinuous "Painted Black" vibe and indeed the entire album is cloaked in damnation and darkness.
MPEG Stream: "Howlin'"
MPEG Stream: "Cold Bones"
MPEG Stream: "Chrome Crucifix"

INDEX Black Album / Red Album / Yesterday & Today (Lion Productions) 2cd 25.00
Index was a band like thousands throughout the '60s, encouraged by the birth of rock 'n' roll a decade earlier and fueled by the waves of British bands that would hit the American shores. This quartet was born in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe in 1967, at a time when the country was beginning to experience the pangs of turmoil and Detroit itself could be seen almost as a microcosm of the social unrest that was beginning to unfold. The heritage of Index is certainly notable, as the lead guitarist of the band was one John Ford. While the liner notes penned by drummer Jim Valice never overtly state that John's family was THE Ford family which spawned the automotive empire; the implication is quite clear that it is. While the affluence of John and fellow guitarist Gary Francis certainly helped in getting some great gear and recording equipment, the sound of Index is one of adolescence entering adulthood with an awakening disbelief that so much could be wrong in the world. At least on their first album, Index played with an urgency that sounded like the end of the world was near, as an underlying horror of bleakness lies beneath Index's punchy garage-pop beats and spring-reverb overloaded distortion. Their amateurish production that stumbled upon a cavernous sound certainly helps with this assessment. Think Jandek trying to mimic the sound of Martin Hannett's classic production sound for Joy Division.
The band drew from the '60s songbook, covering the Byrds' "Eight Miles High", The Supremes' hit single "You Keep Me Hanging On", and The Bee Gees "I Can't See Nobody", and the band claims Hendrix as a huge influence on their sound, with an incendiary feedback encroaching into their beat pop tunes, at times coming across like Davie Allan and at others looking forward to Ron Asheton's work on The Stooges' first album. All of this came to fruition on what would become known as The Black Album, which was recorded with a single microphone in a large empty ballroom, whose acoustics gave the album its unusual sound. The spring reverb drips upon the overdriven guitar leads and forceful rhythmic guitar jangle, which for 1967 would have been pretty damn heavy. The vocal duties of Index rotated from song to song, occasionally finding all of the members singing these emphatic, if monochordal harmonies that oozed with bittersweet energy and late-teen angst. This is typified on one of Index's best songs "Fire Eyes" and furthered along through their cover of "Eight Miles High". Another great highlight of note is the proto MC5 oil'n'motorcycle grind found on the instrumental track "Feedback".
When Index recorded their second album in 1968 later pegged as The Red Album, they had picked up a sound-on-sound cassette recorder, which seemed to be something of precursor to a 4-track. Unfortunately, in this technological jump, Index lost the cavernous murk of that single microphone recording in that ballroom, but they still managed some great songs dominated by Ford's spring-reverb soaked guitars, including a reprise of "Eight Miles High". "Paradise Beach" is a wonderfully downer, '60s pop number, and "Break Out" is a spry instrumental with a fine backbeat lifted from Booker T & The MGs. The band stumbles with the one boogie-rock blues number, but otherwise, The Red Album makes for a great listen.
The second disc of this set is a collection of tracks from an unreleased third album in 1970, recorded mostly by Ford and Vallice. A paisley-pop jangle settles into the mix with less of the expressive feedback that drove so much of The Black Album, and the songs show a maturation in the vocal harmonies as well. But the band broke up with the various members torn by their commitments with college, girls, and work. So the world turns.
A highly recommended find!
MPEG Stream: "Eight Miles High"
MPEG Stream: "Fire Eyes"
MPEG Stream: "Feedback"
MPEG Stream: "Paradise Beach"
MPEG Stream: "It's All In Your Mind"

BASINSKI, WILLIAM A Red Score In Tile (Streamline) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The tape loop that William Basinski sources on A Red Score In Tile, dates back to 1979 during that manic period in Basinski's life when he was cataloguing shortwave radio noises, bittersweet sounding moments in muzak's mood engineering, and various piano extracts - all of which ending up on tape loops in the way that a lot of people build photo collections of the events, people, and places around them. But beginning around 1998, Basinski began to transcribe those tape loops digitally, finding an immense source for his future compositions that all heavily incorporate the slow-motion, sleepwalking murkiness of those original tape loops to their fullest advantage within his elliptical hypnosis of emotive tone and drone.
He actualized A Red Score In Tile first in 2003 for a piece of vinyl issued by the Chalk / Heemann label Three Poplars; of course, it quickly went out of print. This new cd version is a slightly different mix (only in that the piece isn't split over two sides, tracking instead about 45 minutes or so).
But for that tape loop, we're told the sole source is a piano, but it could have easily come from some of the bleak incidental music that Lalo Schifrin composed on the Rhodes for Dirty Harry. It's also incredibly prescient of the blackened 'horror jazz' from Bohren & Der Club Of Gore. This loop might only be cycling through an endless repetition, but it really doesn't sound that way. An atmosphere of urban decay hangs upon these broken notes, amplified by the vaporous reverb that oozes in, through, above, and below Basinski's sound. Of course, Basinski's music has long spoken of the elegant corrosion of sound, spoken most concisely through his epic Disintegration Loops series. But where the physical act of disintegration mirrors that of the sound itself, the sonic decay of A Red Score In Tile is spellbindingly subtle, and might actually be a grand illusion sparked by Basinksi's part works and deft ability to make a simple tape loop sublime. As a result, A Red Score In Tile is a stunning disc, one that ranks very highly within Basinski's always impressive catalog of recordings. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
MPEG Stream: "A Red Score In Tile"

RIDE Nowhere (Sire) cd 8.98
My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, Slowdive's Soulvaki, Mazzy Star's So Tonight That I Might See - there are just some records that stand especially tall amongst the pantheon of shoegaze's finest moments. Ride's album Nowhere belongs right there too, as one of our all time favorites, a truly perfect album from start to finish, that has most definitely stood the test of time. While Ride made some other cool records, they never were able to duplicate the genius of Nowhere. A record that soars and floats with such emotional honesty as well as that dazed 'n glazed vibe that has made it one of those records we've turned at so many different times in our lives. It came out in 1990 and really served as a perfect extension of what folks in the '80s like The Jesus & Mary Chain, Spacemen 3, The Durutti Column, Loop, and The Cure were doing, infusing that sound with an even deeper emotional quality as well as lots of psychedelic undertones, creating music that soared and floated with dreamy ease and driving force.
No matter how hyperbolic we get, we simply can't even get close to describing how much this record means to so many of us. We've turned to it in moments of despair, we've cranked it with windows down on endless drives with crushes and close friends, we've shacked up alone in our bedrooms with this playing during intense moments of loneliness, we've lain in beds with the ones we love lingering in ecstasy as it plays. It's a record that has and will continue to be such a constant source of pleasure for our ears and minds, hearts and souls.
Rhino recently reissued the vinyl and there have been rumors about a special deluxe double cd edition but those haven't yet surfaced here. But we were able to get our hands on the original Sire cd release of Nowhere at a special low price and if you don't have it YOU NEED THIS!
MPEG Stream: "Vapour Trail"
MPEG Stream: "In A Different Place"
MPEG Stream: "Seagull"

RIDE Nowhere (Rhino) lp 19.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, Slowdive's Soulvaki, Mazzy Star's So Tonight That I Might See - there are just some records that stand especially tall in the pantheon of shoegaze's finest moments. Ride's album Nowhere belongs right there too, as one of our all time favorites, a truly perfect album from start to finish, that has most definitely stood the test of time. While Ride made some other cool records, they never were able to duplicate the genius of Nowhere. A record that soars and floats with such emotional honesty as well as that dazed 'n glazed vibe that has made it one of those records we've turned at so many different times in our lives. It came out in 1990 and really served as a perfect extension of what folks in the '80s like The Jesus & Mary Chain, Spacemen 3, The Durutti Column, Loop, and The Cure were doing, infusing that sound with an even deeper emotional quality as well as lots of psychedelic undertones, creating music that soared and floated with dreamy ease and driving force.
No matter how hyperbolic we get, we simply can't even get close to describing how much this record means to so many of us. We've turned to it in moments of despair, we've cranked it with windows down on endless drives with crushes and close friends, we've shacked up alone in our bedrooms with this playing during intense moments of loneliness, we've lain in beds with the ones we love lingering in ecstasy as it plays. It's a record that has and will continue to be such a constant source of pleasure for our ears and minds, hearts and souls.
Long out of print, we are SO stoked that Rhino has stepped up to reissue this classic on vinyl now! YOU NEED THIS! (There's also supposedly a special deluxe double cd edition on Rhino that includes a whole mess of bonus tracks, we haven't been able to get our hands on that yet, however.)

MB (BIANCHI, MAURIZIO) Technology X (Mirror Tapes) cassette 11.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The entire MB back catalogue is a daunting encyclopedia of industrial noise, bleak abstraction, and internalized struggles with abjection and salvation. Bianchi has been known to recycle titles for considerably different compositions, with Symphony For A Genocide being truncated for a different work called SFAG. The same goes for Technology, as this was the name of a double cassette originally released in 1981 with several bootlegs to follow until an official 2cd set was made available through At War With False Noise in 2009. Technology X is an entirely different composition, although much of the same electronic gear was obviously used in both sets of recordings (and throughout all of the MB recordings in the early '80s for that matter). Similarly, the track titles are slightly different ("Techno-X" vs. "Techno" and "Logy-X" vs. "Logy"); at the same time, the tracks on Technology X are considerably more caustic than those tracks on the original Technology.
Bianchi has long been an obsessive composer and documentarian of his work, which emerged in birth pangs of Industrial Culture in 1980 through the first of many self-released cassettes. His neurotic drones, turgid noises, and bleak electronics recognized influences from the Kraut-electron-magicians of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream; but Bianchi was far more interested in revealing his own theories on the disintegration of the human mind, body, and soul through the encroachment of technological and informational warfare. Technology X, like the aforementioned SFAG album, is a very bleak undertaking of abstracted blorping electronics distorted and mangled through a number of effects giving the impression of a scorched battlefield rumbling with numerous panzer divisions, raked machine-gun fire, and various experimental weapons decimating whoever might be unfortunate enough not to have died in the first wave of dive-bombs and ballistic missiles. His compositions are known for their many turns and twists, moving from mind-wiping lazer shots to engine-revving accelerations of noise and into weirdly militant musical moments of atonal stabs on his synthesizer. It's altogether an exhilarating and claustrophobic recording; and one that's limited to a little over 200 copies. The cassette also comes with an MB / Technology X button!

CHRIS & COSEY Songs Of Love & Lust (CTI) lp 21.00
Album number three from the electronic pioneers Chris & Cosey is Songs Of Love & Lust, which originally came out on Rough Trade back in 1984. It was on this album that the signature sounds of Chris & Cosey really developed as something other than what they managed to produce in Throbbing Gristle. It may not be a surprise that this was also around the same time that the other former TG members began to really flourish in their own projects with Psychic TV's masterful Dreams Less Sweet and the epic Scatology record by Coil. Here, on Songs Of Love & Lust, Chris & Cosey were polishing their electro / minimal wave surfaces with hypnotic cascades of arpeggiating synths, plucky drum machinations, and outright majestic swells of electronic wash. A handful of these tracks clearly became anthemic floorfillers that inspired acid house in Chicago, EBM in Belgium, and the Detroit / Berlin axis of techno. "Walking Through Heaven" is one such track with its soaring sustained electronics counterpointing all of the scintillatingly brilliant sequencing. Chris Carter had long been a non-ironic fan of Abba, and yes, he was responsible for the cold-sex disco TG classic "Hot On The Heels Of Love" which essentially eviscerated the Abba structures of baroque disco down to a skeletal rhythm with an uncomfortably breathy sensuality thanks to Cosey's vocals. And the ghosts of "Hot On The Heels Of Love" and "United" (another stellar Carter engineered TG song) emerge within this album (e.g. "Love Cuts," "Chiron" and "Driving Blind"), although they are wholly detacted from the grand guignol commentaries of TG. Rather, Chris & Cosey spoke more of a cybernetic sensuality, embracing the technologies around them as a means of expressing, well songs of love and lust. This album has held up remarkably well, and is required listening for anybody who's been gobbling up anything on Dark Entries, Minimal Wave, Anna Logue, or Vinyl-on-Demand.

PEAKING LIGHTS 936 (Not Not Fun) lp 14.98
We've dug pretty much everything we've heard from this Wisconsin husband and wife duo, the lp on Night People, the split with Wet Hair, those records found the group unfurling thick slabs of murky dronepop, twisted psychedelic dub, blurred hypnotic riff heavy space drone, psychedelic space boogie, all wound into a roiling sonic stew, seriously warped and druggy and occasionally blown out and noisy, but on this new record, they've ditched much of the heaviness, a lot of the noisiness, and toned down much of the murky psychedelia and instead crafted something much poppier and dreamier. The first track is a bit misleading with this in mind, as it's a lysergic bit of distorted dubbed out riffage, with some programmed beats, buried under chiming melodies and a heaving bass buzz, kaleidoscopic and hazy and with the potential to explode into something much heavier and noisier, but instead it gives way to "All The Sun That Shines" which sort of lives up to its title, a dubby reggae flecked bit of woozy skitter, programmed beats, swirling effects, loads of reverb and delay, and hazy ethereal female vox, some spidery Morricone-esque guitar twang, and an almost calypso groove are woven into the proceedings too, the result though is indeed hazy and sunshiney and gloriously washed out.
"Amazing And Wonderful" is up next, and while featuring a similarly murky Skaters-esque rhythm, it ditches the dubbiness, and sets a sort of abstract post punk into a much more dreampoppy realm, all tinkling chimes, descending melodies, multi tracked vox, all wrapped in a gauzy patina of swirling reverby whir. "Bird Of Paradise Dub Version" is another abstract swirl of druggy space pop, the 'dub version' aspect embodied by the delayed drums and the softly swirling clouds of blurred effects and heavy heavy echo. And so it goes, the rest of the record unwinds similarly, an ever shifting collection of murky, lo-fi programmed-beat driven dub pop, muddy, and murky and warbly, plenty of buzzing low end, shimmery effects, hushed dreamlike vox, a little bit of synthy new wave here and there, some stripped down low slung trip hop every once in a while, and even some fragmented off kilter synth pop strangeness, but overall, way less damaged then their past outings, and more akin to a group like Pigeons, that same sort of downtempo electronic pop, albeit with a much more murky, warped and experimental bent. Which as far as we're concerned translates into really really cool!
MPEG Stream: "Synthy"
MPEG Stream: "All The Sun That Shines"
MPEG Stream: "Birds Of Paradise Dub Version"

PEAKING LIGHTS 936 (Not Not Fun) cd 13.98
We've dug pretty much everything we've heard from this Wisconsin husband and wife duo, the lp on Night People, the split with Wet Hair, those records found the group unfurling thick slabs of murky dronepop, twisted psychedelic dub, blurred hypnotic riff heavy space drone, psychedelic space boogie, all wound into a roiling sonic stew, seriously warped and druggy and occasionally blown out and noisy, but on this new record, they've ditched much of the heaviness, a lot of the noisiness, and toned down much of the murky psychedelia and instead crafted something much poppier and dreamier. The first track is a bit misleading with this in mind, as it's a lysergic bit of distorted dubbed out riffage, with some programmed beats, buried under chiming melodies and a heaving bass buzz, kaleidoscopic and hazy and with the potential to explode into something much heavier and noisier, but instead it gives way to "All The Sun That Shines" which sort of lives up to its title, a dubby reggae flecked bit of woozy skitter, programmed beats, swirling effects, loads of reverb and delay, and hazy ethereal female vox, some spidery Morricone-esque guitar twang, and an almost calypso groove are woven into the proceedings too, the result though is indeed hazy and sunshiney and gloriously washed out.
"Amazing And Wonderful" is up next, and while featuring a similarly murky Skaters-esque rhythm, it ditches the dubbiness, and sets a sort of abstract post punk into a much more dreampoppy realm, all tinkling chimes, descending melodies, multi tracked vox, all wrapped in a gauzy patina of swirling reverby whir. "Bird Of Paradise Dub Version" is another abstract swirl of druggy space pop, the 'dub version' aspect embodied by the delayed drums and the softly swirling clouds of blurred effects and heavy heavy echo. And so it goes, the rest of the record unwinds similarly, an ever shifting collection of murky, lo-fi programmed-beat driven dub pop, muddy, and murky and warbly, plenty of buzzing low end, shimmery effects, hushed dreamlike vox, a little bit of synthy new wave here and there, some stripped down low slung trip hop every once in a while, and even some fragmented off kilter synth pop strangeness, but overall, way less damaged then their past outings, and more akin to a group like Pigeons, that same sort of downtempo electronic pop, albeit with a much more murky, warped and experimental bent. Which as far as we're concerned translates into really really cool!
MPEG Stream: "Synthy"
MPEG Stream: "All The Sun That Shines"
MPEG Stream: "Birds Of Paradise Dub Version"

RAIONBASHI / KRUBE. Anatze Zum Taumel (Hronir) lp 24.00
We don't know if there's anything like an official membership form or some sort of fucked-up ritual one has to endure before joining the inner circle of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe, but this Swiss / German collective of malcontent noise makers and tape splicers might just increase their ranks through the diabolical collage work from Krube. Schimpfluch (whose members include Sudden Infant, Dave Phillips, G*Park, Raionbashi, and Rudolf Eb.er) began in the early '90s as an aggressive / primitive hybrid between the Viennese Aktionism of Hermann Nitsch & Rudolf Schwartzkogler and the sharp collage techniques of the French musique concrete pioneers. Performance is often a critical component to the Schimpfluch aesthetic involving all sorts of transgressive theatrics, audience baiting tactics, and maybe a dead fish or two; but the recording output of Schimpfluch and associates has been exceptional throughout their history. Perhaps with all of those performative gestures hidden in the recording process, the resultant squeaks, bangs, grunts, and scrapes begin to disassociate from their origins and become all the more bizarre, more obscure, and more damaged.
This is definitely true for the work of Krube, the project of a German sound-artist by the name of Alexander Schneider. His techniques begin in snipping various sounds from who knows what. The label Hronir tells us its everyday objects, body openings, and non-definable machines; but by the time Schneider is done with his digital razor blade, what's a fart and what's a piston is not terribly discernible. These sound are quickly jettisoned in squadrons of battering sounds that collide with each other in clusters of events that splutter and bristle like a punk version of Pierre Henry's classic Variations Pour Une Porte Et Un Soupir.
Raionbashi's side long composition is comparatively sublime affair, more in keeping with the underappreciated G*Park sound of atonal ambience, creepy as hell field recordings, and generalized disturbances. Daniel Lowenbruck is Raionbashi, and a relatively recent addition to the Schimpfluch-Gruppe, having run the exceptional Tochnit-Aleph label and the rumpsti pumsti shop in Berlin. His track begins with a bellowing piano chord which elongates into a desolate drone, marked with scurrying vermin like noises, backward scrapings, and indeterminate swells of grey noise. That same piano returns throughout the piece with an incremental build of anxious black energy seeping through every quiet gesture and gurgling rupture. Like the work of G*Park, the more you let yourself into the details of this piece, the more terrifying it becomes. Truly exceptional!

ROSENQVIST, DAG & SIMON SCOTT Conformists (Low Point) lp 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Now, here's one hell of a good collaboration! These are two incredible abstractionists of the song in their own right, both known for their protracted dronesmear pocked with eerie melodies and ghost-echo structures. Rosenqvist is the man behind the Jasper TX project with tons of incredible records of blackened murk, nocturnal ambience, and the tactile grit of antiquity, while Scott may be best known as the former drummer of Slowdive, although he's released a couple of stunning shoegaze instrumental records over the past couple of years. This album is ostensibly a soundtrack to a short film directed by Juriaan Booij. The film itself is just about 20 minutes long, but the soundtrack is nearly twice that in length. There seemed to have been a number of complications with production that caused innumerable delays for Booij, but this worked to the advantage of Rosenqvist (the original choice of Booij) as he was able to take his time with the concept that the filmmaker had presented to him and in turn consult his confidante Simon Scott about a possible collaboration. Without much of a deadline or even the indication that the film would be completed (in fact, it was and has screened at various film festivals around the globe), Rosenqvist and Scott composed an incredible album of luminous sound that glows through an endless bank of sonic fog.
A rasped buzz emerges from an oceanic current of tonal guitar swell as the intro to Conformists. A collage of cracked ether, electrical static, and crunched surface noises from what could be from old 78s amass into a small crescendo of noise that collapses just as gracefully as it emerges. Out of this, Scott and Rosenqvist follow up with gasping set of radiator drones which swirl around cavernous swells, all dark, metallic, and ominous. A more enveloping, less threatening drone develops next, with somber flickers of a melody buried somewhere in the mix only to succumb to another passage of prolonged shadow and desolation. It's all very haunting and very evocative.
The flipside takes up a beautiful set of twin guitar drones with subtle half-melodies barely flickering within their mutual undulations, gradually overtaken by a soft buzz of distant distortion and bass-heavy thrum, transitioning toward the glacial centerpiece of this side of the record, a track called "Monuments." Here, a slow electrical pulse repeats ad infinitum, almost like an old ringback tone on a telephone with nobody on the other end picking up, laden with glacial bursts oversaturated chiming guitar noise that flood the soundfield like high-beam headlights cutting through a wintery darkness. The album descends and fades away into another beautiful crushed velvet drone. Epic!

SHOEMAKER, MATT Spots In The Sun (The Helen Scarsdale Agency) cd 14.98
Have a glance back at our most verbose descriptions about anything from the avant-garde fringes of music making, and you'll most likely find a common metaphor of specific locations, or rather the memories that the author attributes to that space -- good, bad, holy, abject, transcendent, etc. Upon listening to Spots In The Sun, we find ourselves returning to the well-trod linguistic device of comparing sound to the detached memories of place; however, Shoemaker's exploration of psychogeographic sound never grounds itself upon a specific location -- like a crumbling hospital, reclaimed World War II bunkers, or even his own favored locations of the jungles of Indonesia. Rather, Shoemaker drops the listener into a sunbleached environment, where heat, humidity, jetlag, fatigue, and general environmental claustrophobia prevent any of the specifics to make themselves known. While Shoemaker's landscapes are openly hostile toward the listener, these swarming masses of sound are incredibly alluring, drawing us in even though we may know better than to enter these openly toxic spaces. Shoemaker is always teasing us with small hints as to where we might be, with screeching birds, temple bells, and the patter of rain; but before we can begin to triangulate a position, Shoemaker rips us from our locale with a ruptured crescendo and drops us somewhere else. It is through the drone that Shoemaker achieves all of this and more, his swarming monochrome morphs from complex vibrations into radioluminescent clouds. Spots In The Sun is an exquisite manifestation of abstracted field recordings pushed to the point of grotesque minimalism, and is indeed some of the finest that we've heard (comparable to the likes of BJ Nilsen, Machinefabriek, Loren Chasse, Philip Jeck's Surf, and mnortham).
MPEG Stream: "1. ..."
MPEG Stream: "3. ..."
MPEG Stream: "4. ..."

OUTSIDERS, THE CQ (Jackpot ) lp 23.00
Cool, our friends at Jackpot made a good choice here to do a vinyl reissue of this 1968 gem by sixties Dutch rockers The Outsiders, an album beloved by many collectors, critics, and us...
It's kind of a concept album describing multiple perspectives of an unrequited romance, with the father of the girl disapproving of the boy in the scenario. However, The Outsiders, being boys themselves, show considerable favor to the plight of the jilted boy in the story, which ends with that protagonist snapping in psychotic violence. Fortunately, The Outsiders spent just as much time composing an economical psych / garage / beat-punk score as they did on the story itself; thus, each track is a solid pop entry of jangly melodies and punchy basslines, occasionally repeating leitmotifs somewhat like the Leaves / Standells version of "Hey Joe" or Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd. The concept album element also puts us in mind of SF Sorrow by the Pretty Things. And anyone into other Nederbeat bands like Q65 and The Motions ought to like this too. Certainly worth checking out!
Limited edition, deluxe gatefold vinyl-only reissue, with silver foil cover artwork as per the original, and liner notes from Mike Stax of Ugly Things, including a recent interview with The Outsiders' lead guitarist Ronnie Splinter.
MPEG Stream: "Misfit"
MPEG Stream: "C.Q."
MPEG Stream: "Doctor"

CHROMATICS IV: Night Drive Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Deluxe) (Italians Do It Better) cd 13.98
REPRESSED!!! Now including the "lost side" of unreleased tracks featured on the recent deluxe vinyl version.
Ooooh Ahhhhh! This one has been sizzling in our ears pretty much on endless repeat since it showed up at the store. Chromatics have undergone a pretty radical change from their early herky-jerky no-wave inspired beginnings, as showcased on the amazing and scene defining After Dark comp that we recently listed, and are still so in love with. Chromatics now have a sound that is much more sensual, subdued and spaced out. And we have to say we are loving this new direction. I definitely suits them so much more naturally than their noisier punky past.
With a sound much more rooted in early drugged out disco and '80s Euro-pop, Night Drive is sparse and melancholic enough to reel in folks whose taste usually falls on the darker end of the spectrum yet with songs so damn sexy and enticing that those of us with dance and pop leanings are seduced by their sound as well. With Ruth Radalet's vocals sounding like they are being delivered in a dark room filled with fog and smoke, there is such an intoxicating late night vibe that Chromatics tap into which feels so vacant and so sexy in the best possible way. They take on the daunting task of covering Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" and manage to make it their own, no small feat as that is a song with such deep meaning for so many of us. So damn good!
MPEG Stream: "Night Drive"
MPEG Stream: "The Killing Spree"
MPEG Stream: "Running Up That Hill"

MURRAY, BRENDAN Inveterate (Arbor) cassette 9.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Brendan Murray, we salute you! You get the reason why there should be a cassette resurrgence - the 90 minute tape! So many noise / drone / floorcore tapes have been released in recent years as 8, 12, 15, 20 minute running times, and it's totally baffling. If you're gonna put out a cassette, let's have the full 90-minute experience as was the norm for any self-respecting mixtape in the '80s and '90s.
So, yes the Boston-based minimalist has cranked out a stunning, slow-crawl tape of suspended tone, that was originally commisioned as some sort of installation thing at Weird Records. The A-side is a brain-drain smear of brass instruments turned into a brash atonal undulation that sounds more like a symphony of junkyard car-horns rather than french horns or trumpets (the more likely culprits). As a result, Murray's piece becomes this glacial recapitulation of a Hermann Nitsch style sonic violence, whose speed is crushingly slow but impossible to avoid. There are also similarities to Murray's highly acclaimed Commonwealth album and its long-stare contest of inevitable decline. If you sit and listen for anything to change there's nothing noticable in the perpetual shimmer and consummate drone; but get up leave the room for a couple of minutes and something will be different - a slight variation in timbre, a repeating form either added or subtracted, a lumbering rhythm oozing from the depths, etc. The B side is not an exact replica of the first, promoting more compositional leaps and starts. In reality these shifts are quite subtle, but given the anesthetizing affect of the A side, any transition is gonna appear like a huge mountain range on a flat surface. Put this up there with LaMonte Young and Charlemange Palestine. Limited to 150 copies of professionally dupped cassettes.

SOFT MOON, THE s/t (Captured Tracks) cd 13.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Ok, bear with us here... Might anybody remember Steve Trecasse? We're guessing the answer is no. He has been a small-time music producer, who worked at a time for MTV way back in the mid-to-late '80s. He was responsible for all of the music on the shortlived MTV gameshow Remote Control, but he also composed the theme song for the first incarnation of 120 Minutes. The show grew into a rather banal rehash of major label sponsored "alternative" music, but the early years had some genuine underground acts showcasing their videos. Live Skull, Swans, Sonic Youth, and Loop were some of the more atypical groups to get their videos on the air, alongside more conventional college rock favorites like The Sugarcubes, Love & Rockets, and They Might Be Giants. But that theme song hedged toward the darker, grittier sound through a throbbing electronic underbelly girding an air-raid siren guitar swarm which was not too far from a Skullflower (circa Birthdeath & Form Destroyer) / Sigue Sigue Sputnik / Joy Division hybrid as bafflingly awesome as that may seem. Another weird piece of trivia about that theme song was that it was performed by Trecasse with Doug Di Franco (who might just be Double Dee, turntablist Steinski's partner in crime) and Josh Braun (who seems to be the same dude who played keyboards in Circus Mort, which was Michael Gira's band before Swans). Anyway, that theme song proved to be more haunting and menacing than anything else that 120 Minutes dared to broadcast. It is a bit strange that a song that good, that dark, and that bleak would make it as a theme song for anything, much less for MTV. While that track is clearly something for somebody to dig up beyond an odd YouTube clip here or there, the fact remains that The Soft Moon has unintentionally arrived at this exact same psychic, sonic environment, nearly 25 years later, in an act of convoluted convergent evolution.
The Soft Moon is the post-punk / minimal wave project fronted by Oakland's wunderkid Luis Vasquez, whose eagerly awaited debut album is the perfect extension of his two teasing singles which emerged on Captured Tracks earlier in 2010. Guitars, bass, keyboards, drum machines, and a whispered vocal delivery all come together in a series of monochromatic, mechanical, and gloomy propulsions that fit within the current resurgence of Factory inspired alienation through sound. Amongst his death disco vibes and downer post-punk dirges, Vasquez has a knack for an icy noise quotient that glides through the springy basslines and taut rhythms. Layers drift throughout each song, building never as anything so garish as a solo, but more as a scabrous doppleganger of the songs arching mood. These are tonebent squalls of atonal screeches exhumed from a lo-fi murk and rinsed in pools of reverb, very much like those really early Skullflower recordings when Gary Mundy and Stefan Jaworzyn provided the twin guitar attack. Where Skullflower had a drug-fuelled nihilism at their core, The Soft Moon is more of an alchemist of gloom, doubling rhythms with staccato electronics and downtuned Killing Joke-ish basslines to what would have been a standard Goth plod. In many ways, it makes perfect sense that The Soft Moon has landed on Captured Tracks, as he's mining the same aesthetic surfaces of Blank Dogs, but where Blank Dogs holds back with a subtle irony, The Soft Moon fully embraces the gloom of this music; thus making this one of the best records of 2010 that everybody will be hearing in 2011. Awesome.
MPEG Stream: "Breathe The Fire"
MPEG Stream: "Circles"
MPEG Stream: "Out Of Time"
MPEG Stream: "Tiny Spiders"

SOFT MOON, THE s/t (Captured Tracks) lp 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Ok, bear with us here... Might anybody remember Steve Trecasse? We're guessing the answer is no. He has been a small-time music producer, who worked at a time for MTV way back in the mid-to-late '80s. He was responsible for all of the music on the shortlived MTV gameshow Remote Control, but he also composed the theme song for the first incarnation of 120 Minutes. The show grew into a rather banal rehash of major label sponsored "alternative" music, but the early years had some genuine underground acts showcasing their videos. Live Skull, Swans, Sonic Youth, and Loop were some of the more atypical groups to get their videos on the air, alongside more conventional college rock favorites like The Sugarcubes, Love & Rockets, and They Might Be Giants. But that theme song hedged toward the darker, grittier sound through a throbbing electronic underbelly girding an air-raid siren guitar swarm which was not too far from a Skullflower (circa Birthdeath & Form Destroyer) / Sigue Sigue Sputnik / Joy Division hybrid as bafflingly awesome as that may seem. Another weird piece of trivia about that theme song was that it was performed by Trecasse with Doug Di Franco (who might just be Double Dee, turntablist Steinski's partner in crime) and Josh Braun (who seems to be the same dude who played keyboards in Circus Mort, which was Michael Gira's band before Swans). Anyway, that theme song proved to be more haunting and menacing than anything else that 120 Minutes dared to broadcast. It is a bit strange that a song that good, that dark, and that bleak would make it as a theme song for anything, much less for MTV. While that track is clearly something for somebody to dig up beyond an odd YouTube clip here or there, the fact remains that The Soft Moon has unintentionally arrived at this exact same psychic, sonic environment, nearly 25 years later, in an act of convoluted convergent evolution.
The Soft Moon is the post-punk / minimal wave project fronted by Oakland's wunderkid Luis Vasquez, whose eagerly awaited debut album is the perfect extension of his two teasing singles which emerged on Captured Tracks earlier in 2010. Guitars, bass, keyboards, drum machines, and a whispered vocal delivery all come together in a series of monochromatic, mechanical, and gloomy propulsions that fit within the current resurgence of Factory inspired alienation through sound. Amongst his death disco vibes and downer post-punk dirges, Vasquez has a knack for an icy noise quotient that glides through the springy basslines and taut rhythms. Layers drift throughout each song, building never as anything so garish as a solo, but more as a scabrous doppleganger of the songs arching mood. These are tonebent squalls of atonal screeches exhumed from a lo-fi murk and rinsed in pools of reverb, very much like those really early Skullflower recordings when Gary Mundy and Stefan Jaworzyn provided the twin guitar attack. Where Skullflower had a drug-fuelled nihilism at their core, The Soft Moon is more of an alchemist of gloom, doubling rhythms with staccato electronics and downtuned Killing Joke-ish basslines to what would have been a standard Goth plod. In many ways, it makes perfect sense that The Soft Moon has landed on Captured Tracks, as he's mining the same aesthetic surfaces of Blank Dogs, but where Blank Dogs holds back with a subtle irony, The Soft Moon fully embraces the gloom of this music; thus making this one of the best records of 2010 that everybody will be hearing in 2011. Awesome.
MPEG Stream: "Breathe The Fire"
MPEG Stream: "Circles"
MPEG Stream: "Out Of Time"
MPEG Stream: "Tiny Spiders"

GROUPER Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill (Grouper Records) lp 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The THIRD repress of this exquisite album on vinyl. If you missed it the last two times, don't expect this one to last any longer! The only difference is the black & white artwork, but the musical content is the same. Here's what we said way back when...
Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill opens with an entirely characteristic yet coy swell of effected elemental smear, crumbling delicately yet forcefully, until giving way to what is, to date, and here is the coy part, Liz Harris' most songwriterly and structured album. As opposed to the rich swaths of drone that up until now defined her sound, Harris has shifted from the abstract towards a more distinct and figurative sound. True to the title, the record unfolds like a sort of mysterious and morbid fairytale, innocent in its clear and elegant melodies, yet creepy and highly abstract in its more droney and sublime interludes. For the most part, her guitar playing is laid bare, removed from the dense fog of effects that typically occlude them. And what we discover is actually a pretty strummy record, with plenty of clean guitar articulation though certainly the aroma of her previous tech heavy approach remains in what is relatively speaking still pretty effected. At times she even reverts back to the gorgeous icey crunchy string attack of some previous efforts. With so much space liberated in the absence of drones, we also get to hear her stunning voice. Furthermore, the occasional audible lyric creeps to the surface, one standout fragment being "Love Is Enormous," a somewhat shockingly affirmative sentiment from an otherwise darkly mysterious and abstract persona. From start to finish Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill lulls you into its graceful murmurings and hypnotic thrumming. An exquisite addition to an already compelling discography. Recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Disengaged"
MPEG Stream: "Heavy Water/ I'd Rather Be Sleeping"

NO JOY Ghost Blonde (Mexican Summer) cd 13.98
These days noise pop bands are a dime a dozen. And we could count the number of shoegaze bands popping up on one hand, if that hand had about thousands fingers, and to be fair, it's a sound we love, and so in many cases, we can be less than discerning, we just love hearing those thick coruscating guitars, the soaring melodies, the lush walls of sound, spaced out and dreamy and fuzzy and buzzy and blissy. So what is it exactly that makes a band stand out from the pack? Songs, sure, you can't be a pop band of any stripe without songs. But it's more than that. Something ineffable. Songs sure, and the sound, of course, but just as importantly there are a handful of intangibles that all have to fall into place perfectly. Or at least perfectly IMperfectly. And more often than not, it's not something that can be created consciously. All a band can really do, is to follow their hearts, create the sound they hear in their heads, and try their best to realize that sound, to render that sound in all the glorious shades and colors and textures it needs to become more than just music, to transcend and become something magical, something special.
And that happens more than one might think, or expect, enough monkeys with typewriters as the saying goes, or in this case enough punk rock kids with guitars and a 4 track. Most recently it was the amazing record by Bay Area outfit Weekend, whose record captured everything we love about this sound, and now there's this, the debut full length from female fronted shoegaze noisepoppers No Joy, which moniker be damned, is about the most gloriously joyful record we've heard in ages.
In some ways, No Joy's Ghost Blonde is the perfect compliment to that Weekend record, a distinctly feminine variation of the same formula, the overall sound is more dreampoppy and hazy, the vocals ethereal and ephemeral and is the perfect counterpoint to the bands thick wall of sound, infusing clean guitar jangle, a distinctly nineties indie rock vibe, all wound into a pretty perfect chunk of pure pop JOY.
If you're anything like us, it should only take about the first 60 seconds of album opener "Mediumship" thick crunchy jangle guitar wrapped in a field of wild tangled feedback, the vocals drifty and pretty, and then when the song kicks in, we're totally transported, crunchy, fuzzy, hooky, heavy, shoegazey-y, plenty of ooooh's and aaaaah's, the sort of song you never want to end, and that you'll find yourself playing over and over and over. Which pretty much applies to every track here.
There are definitely some broodier moments, and some abstract psychedelic ambient drift, even some slightly atonal Sonic Youth inspired guitar tangle, but those elements are smoothly woven into the group's hazy, softly noisy, girl groupish, crunchy, jangly shoegazey dream pop bliss.
Definite contender for pop record of the year, and a record which will no doubt send lots of folks scrambling to redo their prematurely finished year end lists! Rightfully so!
MPEG Stream: "Mediumship"
MPEG Stream: "Heedless"
MPEG Stream: "Maggie Says I Love You"

NO JOY Ghost Blonde (Mexican Summer) lp 24.00
These days noise pop bands are a dime a dozen. And we could count the number of shoegaze bands popping up on one hand, if that hand had about thousands fingers, and to be fair, it's a sound we love, and so in many cases, we can be less than discerning, we just love hearing those thick coruscating guitars, the soaring melodies, the lush walls of sound, spaced out and dreamy and fuzzy and buzzy and blissy. So what is it exactly that makes a band stand out from the pack? Songs, sure, you can't be a pop band of any stripe without songs. But it's more than that. Something ineffable. Songs sure, and the sound, of course, but just as importantly there are a handful of intangibles that all have to fall into place perfectly. Or at least perfectly IMperfectly. And more often than not, it's not something that can be created consciously. All a band can really do, is to follow their hearts, create the sound they hear in their heads, and try their best to realize that sound, to render that sound in all the glorious shades and colors and textures it needs to become more than just music, to transcend and become something magical, something special.
And that happens more than one might think, or expect, enough monkeys with typewriters as the saying goes, or in this case enough punk rock kids with guitars and a 4 track. Most recently it was the amazing record by Bay Area outfit Weekend, whose record captured everything we love about this sound, and now there's this, the debut full length from female fronted shoegaze noisepoppers No Joy, which moniker be damned, is about the most gloriously joyful record we've heard in ages.
In some ways, No Joy's Ghost Blonde is the perfect compliment to that Weekend record, a distinctly feminine variation of the same formula, the overall sound is more dreampoppy and hazy, the vocals ethereal and ephemeral and is the perfect counterpoint to the bands thick wall of sound, infusing clean guitar jangle, a distinctly nineties indie rock vibe, all wound into a pretty perfect chunk of pure pop JOY.
If you're anything like us, it should only take about the first 60 seconds of album opener "Mediumship" thick crunchy jangle guitar wrapped in a field of wild tangled feedback, the vocals drifty and pretty, and then when the song kicks in, we're totally transported, crunchy, fuzzy, hooky, heavy, shoegazey-y, plenty of ooooh's and aaaaah's, the sort of song you never want to end, and that you'll find yourself playing over and over and over. Which pretty much applies to every track here.
There are definitely some broodier moments, and some abstract psychedelic ambient drift, even some slightly atonal Sonic Youth inspired guitar tangle, but those elements are smoothly woven into the group's hazy, softly noisy, girl groupish, crunchy, jangly shoegazey dream pop bliss.
Definite contender for pop record of the year, and a record which will no doubt send lots of folks scrambling to redo their prematurely finished year end lists! Rightfully so!
MPEG Stream: "Mediumship"
MPEG Stream: "Heedless"
MPEG Stream: "Maggie Says I Love You"

K-GROUP / OMIT Storage (Fusetron) lp 14.98
Here's a piece of wax that came out back in 2002, and it's a title that we thought was long discontinued by Fusetron. But, luckily, somehow, a handful of copies still exist, and if you're keen on the stun-drone / brain-zonk electronics currently blasted by the Emeralds axis, you NEED to investigate everything that Omit has ever released. Our words from way back when...
Both K-Group and Omit have been longtime aQuarius favorites from the New Zealand experimental noise scene; but unfortunately, they've been pretty quiet in their respective outputs during the past couple of years. K-Group is the solo project for Paul Toohey, who has also worked in the (defunct?) Surface Of The Earth, both of which centered around low-frequency tectonic drones coaxed from abused amplifiers. Clinton Williams has taken up the Omit moniker for his creepy, tape loop compositions loaded with bleak sci-fi / psychotic imagery. This collaboration between Williams and Toohey is actually their second, if you count a 7" which came out ages ago. In running Williams' battery of analog synths through Toohey's cabinets, they've constructed an eerie album of deep rumblings that are on par with anything that Coleclough, Koner, or Troum have managed to release. As the K-Group / Omit drones ripple with a gritty amplifier buzz often lacking in the driftwork of those aforementioned artists, "Storage" pulses with a subterranean heaviness, pushing this closer towards the Earth / SUNNO))) terrain. A really wonderful album!!!

DEMDIKE STARE Tryptych (Modern Love) 3cd 28.00
AT LAST, REPRESSED!!
Finally, Demdike Stare's dark and dizzying, murky and mysterious hauntological black dub triptych, previously available via three separate slabs of now very out of print vinyl, is now available on cd, gathered up into a single, nicely packaged triple disc set. And loaded with bonus tracks (nearly 40 minutes extra all told), which makes this pretty much a shoe-in for Record Of The Week...
Demdike Stare are one of the few bands who seem to be a unanimous aQ favorite, everyone here LOVES these guys, and judging on how many of the various lps we've sold, everyone out there does too. Which makes sense, when you consider, DS basically create a kind of black metal dubstep, or as we (and others) like to describe it, a blackened dub record on Chain Reaction. Either one should give you an idea of the sort of dark sonic energy these guys conjure up. Thick claustrophobic atmospheres, skeletal rhythms, thick throbbing bass, skittering dubbed out beats, disembodied voices, stuttering minimal sort-of-dubstep, looped and processed African folk music (??), swirling glitched out electronics, deeeep pulsing dronemusic, reverb drenched post-rock-via-techno skitter, all woven into a swirling organic mass of dub flecked blacktronica, dark and sinister and dubby, and weirdly house-y, sprawling and epic and creepy and so totally sweeping and cinematic.
The first disc, Forest Of Evil, was originally two sidelong tracks, the first starts out all deep shimmer, with a softly melodic buzz, spidery acoustic guitars, long stretches of billowy black ambience, bits of shuffly jazzy drift, peppered with thick shards of buzzy fractured dub bass and Kompakt style skitter, giving way to glistening late night techno, whirling pop ambient, and blissed out ethereal dronemusic, while the second is darkly dramatic, epic and majestic, like some lost Italian soundtrack, big drums, orchestral and ominous, looped samples, blurred melodic smears over deep pulsing bass, whirling clouds of cymbal shimmer, insectoid FX buzz, jumbled atonal melodies (hints of Bernard Herrmann), the vibe tense and haunting, with some dubstep bass buzz, that slowly dissolves into a Caretaker like outro, all layered strings wreathed in hiss and crackle, hazy and druggy and divine. The bonus track "Quiet Sky" conjures up just what the title implies, a quiet sky, but a dark, bruised midnight sky, flecked with stars, soft swirls of metallic shimmer like gauzy clouds, the song gradually developing a strange minimal hiccuppy rhythm, underpinning the deep melancholic swells, a strange almost industrial tinged bit of pop ambience.
The second disc, Liberation Through Hearing, is thematically related to the Book Of The Dead, and focuses on the space between death and rebirth. Rendered in greys and blacks, in buzz and rumble, beginning with some woozy late night Portishead style downtempo trip hop, low slung looped skitter and swell, lush swirls of cinematic strings, ghostly choirs, a softly lurching rhythmic stutter, a deep cavernous throb, sounding like a ghostly stripped down dubstep. Which gives way to heaving expanses of black tidal thrum, muted scrapings, all wound into hypnotic pulses of dark energy, laced with distant chiming melodies, a haunting, gauzey faded memory in sound, drawn from radios with dying batteries and gradually slowing turntables, a soft focus symphony of creaks and rumbles and blurred low end shimmer. The first half finishes with a swoonsome smear of looped ambience, like a field recording of an after hours nightclub captured in a temporal loop, warm and druggy and fuzzy, strangely hypnotic and rhythmic, totally trancelike, a creeped out wasteland soundscape, mysterious and chilling, which is eventually augmented by thick slabs of corrosive low end, and heavily reverbed industrial clatter, which eventually emerges into a strange sea of crackle and hum, of warbly rhythms, chiming bells and distorted crunch, sounding a bit like Jeck spinning Pole record, abstract and spaced out and hauntingly lovely.
The second half opens with thick streaks of ghostly mesmer, all washed out and slowly decaying, underpinned by thick swaths of dubstep style bass wobble, but muted and smoothed into soft smears of undulating blackness. Subtle skitter surfaces, as do distant voices, the sound getting more and more dubby, a bit like a Caretaker record on Chain Reaction, that sort of hazy abstract drift, but anchored to barely there beats, the buzz building to an intense coda, all the while wrapped in throbbing woofer punishing low end.
Some super stripped down rhythms are laid over a swirling ghostly backdrop of fragmented melodies and a buried house music thump, tangled and blurred strings wrap the proceedings in a veil of softened reverb and subtle echo, the almost Eastern sounding pulse and swell reminding us a bit of the late great Muslimgauze.
Finally, the record collapses into some sort of melancholic sonic reverie, a hushed ambient outro, a tranquil sea of soft swirling swells, clouds of echo and reverb, a dreamy darkness, a blackened bit of blurpop minimalism, laced with muted streaks of fuzz and hiss, but all gradually sinking into Demdike Stare's endless trancelike billowing blackness.
The bonus tracks on this one (3 of them, clocking in at nearly 20 minutes) continue the record's surreal sonic journey, spidery rhythms, and chiming melodies are looped and layered over a simple pulsing propulsive groove, the whole thing slightly warped and warbled, as if recorded onto an old piece of tape, and played back on some dusty old ramshackle tape player, ghostly, but surprisingly playful at first, before slipping into some seriously creepy, deeeeeep droning rumbles, wreathed in shimmering solar winds, softly billowing sheets of hiss and static, eventually shedding all of that, leaving just a thick morass of softly undulating low end, shot through with a slo-mo house music pulse, only to have the hiss and whir return, this time relegated to the background, until the track finishes surprisingly with what sounds like a bit of African style funkiness, before disappearing in a brief cloud of swirling hushed buzz.
Finally, the third disc, Voices Of Dust, unveils the Tryptych's final movement, opening with "Black Sun", a short stretch of some super minimal electronic dronemusic, all layered overtones and strange sonic shadings, which gives way to the chopped and looped and stuttery vocal driven "Hashshashin Chant" which takes tribal drums and traditional folk music vocals, and twists them all up, and tangles those elements with strange percussion, industrial buzz, the whole thing a dizzying chunk of hypno-electronic collaged psychedelic mashup weirdness, before slipping into the much murkier and minimal "Repository Of Light", which unfurls like some sort of Hawkwind-meets-Pole spaced out digi-dub drift. And so it goes, the sound flitting between impossibly realized miniature sound worlds, cinematic electronic ambience, ominously pulsing low end rumble, hazy glitchy dubbed out Jeckian smears, super blown out electronic big beat bombast, almost industrial sounding avant big band abstraction, roiling corrosive soft noise, bellowing foghorn-like melodies, warped and woozy scratchy old lp warblescapes and beyond.
The bonus tracks are the perfect, hazy, ghostly coda, the first, a warm, whispery bit of keening abstract melody and thick pulsing thrum, all very washed out and space-y and dreamlike, a constantly vibrating living thing, a throbbing organic expanse of minimal space drone psychedelic ambience, until finally, the whole disc is laid to rest with 9 minutes of heaving, glacial, metallic creep and creak, wreathed in record crackle, the final sounds unfurl like some old dusty Tim Hecker 45 spinning at 16rpm, mournful moaning melodies, buried rhythmic thumps, shimmery sitar like buzz, all hazy and smeared and lysergic and mysteriously murky, the perfect slipping-into-darkness, leaving-this-world-behind finale...
Gorgeously evocative, creepy and cinematic, abstract and otherworldly, druggy and dreamy, fantastically haunting and utterly spine tinglingly stunning. And thus, absolutely recommended.
Packaged in a super swank, oversized, hardcover book style digipak.
Matt's addendum: "Really feeling this collection of tunes these days. Love blasting this spooky dub-collage REAL loud in the shop! Thee neighbors get upset, but they need to chill cuz it has to be MASSIVE!"
MPEG Stream: "Forest Of Evil (Dusk)"
MPEG Stream: "Caged In Stammheim"
MPEG Stream: "Eurydice"
MPEG Stream: "Regolith"
MPEG Stream: "Hashashin Chant"
MPEG Stream: "Repository Of Light"
MPEG Stream: "Rain And Shame"

ATELECINE ...And Six Dark Hours Pass (Dais) lp 19.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
At the beginning of December we made the latest aTelecine lp our Record Of The Week. A fantastic slab of twisted collaged industrial weirdness, blackened and warped and freaky and far out and weirdly beautiful. We sold tons, and were super psyched to discover that there was in fact a previous record, so we tried to order a bunch, but were only able to get a handful, so here it is, the debut lp from aTelecine, the avant industrial drone collage project of porn star Sasha Grey, and her band aTelecine, and like A Cassette Tape Culture, which we made our Record Of The Week, ...And Six Dark Hours Pass is just as dark and creepy and gorgeous and essential. Unfortunately, only a handful of folks will manage to get their hands on one of these. Anyone who loved the first one, is definitely gonna want this one too, layered samples, warped effects, disembodied voices, detuned guitars, dense rumbling drones, crumbling riffage, alien vocals, minimal murky percussion, hazy almost shoegazey drifts, hushed low end thrum, crackle and hiss and whir and hum and shimmer, stuttering looped rhythms, creepy gauzy driftscapes, all blurred and smeared and stretched and tangled into a psychedelic songsuite that melts before your very ears, the songs all oozing into one another, the melodies wrapping themselves around layered textures, the textures decaying and revealing hidden sonic treasures, those treasures blossoming into sounds way more sinister than expected and so it goes. Totally recommended. Even if you missed out on the first one, this stuff is so good. Regardless of the Sasha Grey hype/stigma, both of the aTelecine records are fantastic, grab one of these while you can. Sorry we couldn't get more...
MPEG Stream: "Very Small Friends"
MPEG Stream: "Sky Then Trees Then Birds Then Nothing"
MPEG Stream: "Sixth Pass"

CHOP SHOP Oxide (23five) cd 14.98
LAST COPIES AVAILABLE!!! When we heard that one of our favorite noise albums was nearly out of print, we grabbed a bunch. If you've not gotten a hold of this album, this is probably your last chance! Here's what we said about it a while back...
Akita. Menche. Blankenship. Dilloway. These are the men of noise with discographies the size of small town phone books, proving their might in the international noise community by the sheer audaciousness of their output. But then again, you might really only need a single testament to stake your claim as one of the greatest noise musicians. Chop Shop has chosen the latter tactic, with Oxide being that sole document, after a relatively tiny back catalogue of cassette only releases, a couple of cd-rs, and two infamous 10"s. Both released through RRR, the first was the Steel Plate 2x10" that was literally bound to a steel plate; and the second was a split 10" with Small Cruel Party that was literally cut in half, making playback a dangerous proposition for the needle on your record player. Both of those releases have long been out of print; and despite the hushed respect that those 10"s demand, Chop Shop has kept a low profile. A very low profile. Hence, after a career that has spanned nearly two decades, Oxide is his first proper cd. And it's stunning.
The sole proprietor of Chop Shop is New York based noise technician Scott Konzelmann, whose audio demolition revolves around speaker constructions forged out of hammered plate metal and disfigured commercial grade pipes, which focus particular frequencies and resonant overtones into swarming orchestras of rust, noise, drone, and static. Tape has long been Konzelmann's medium of choice for recording; and like William Basinski before him, Konzelmann endures the self-disintegration of the medium whilst transcribing the sounds of Oxide digitally. Where Basinski's vocabulary of decay is all romance and melancholy, Konzelmann's is muscular and urgently present. Oxide offers a metallurgist's din where compressed air strikes hard steel and machine vibrations generate noxious resonant frequencies in neighboring vents. Konzelmann composes the old school way, with a razor blade and pieces of tape, generating jump cut edits alongside the self-generated debris from the magnetic literally falling apart. These grey, dead-tech drones thus rupture and explode along the faultlines of those edits, and Oxide emerges as a forceful, dynamic album without resorting to puerile shock tactics. This is a seriously great noise album for anybody with a passing interest in Broken Flag, Hansen Records, or early Hafler Trio.
MPEG Stream: "Oxide (extract 1) "
MPEG Stream: "Oxide (extract 2)"
MPEG Stream: "Oxide (extract 3)"

ATELECINE A Cassette Tape Culture (Pendu Sound) lp 10.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
LAST COPIES! Now OUT OF PRINT, except for this small handful. All the remaining copies have slightly damaged covers (mostly bent corners), hence the reduced price, vinyl is pristine, last chance to pick up one of these twisted beauties...
Most people probably know Sasha Grey for what she is most (in)famous for, and that would be for being a porn star. Even folks who don't know porn stars might still know Grey as an actress, who recently starred in Steven Soderbergh's film Girlfriend, and has been on HBO's Entourage, but few probably know her as a musician (although aQ customers might remember she sang on a Current 93 record!). And we're not talking cheesy club diva, a la Tracy Lords, crooning terribly over bad house music, no we're talking as a proper musician, one who apparently has been making music since she was a teenager (influenced by KMFDM and Throbbing Gristle), and whose current group aTelecine is some sort of blackened industrial avant drone sound collage thing, that would put most of the current crop of experimental musicians to shame. The label hypes Grey's music as being heavily indebted to groups like Nurse With Wound and Coil, and while we're tempted to think this is just the label trying to make the band seem 'cooler' and more authentic, it only takes a few minutes listening to aTelecine's new full length to realize, it's not all that unlikely. This stuff is dark, and corrosive, haunting and fierce, otherworldly and intense, a little bit industrial, a little ambient, a little witch house-y, a little black metal, doomy and new wavey and seriously dark, a dizzying churning cauldron of field recordings, samples, loops, electronics, distorted guitars, programmed beats, FX drenched vocals, throbbing basslines, plenty of glitch and clang and rumble and buzz.
If you're anything like us it'll just take a single song, the first one we heard (even though this is aTelecine's 3rd or 4th record), the super creepy, super intense "I Came, I Sat, I Departed", a lumbering blackened industrial creep, all downtuned chug, low slung slither, laced with some seriously fucked up and freaky hissed whispery vokills, the sound crunchy and glitchy, but super hypnotic. The song gets more and more chaotic, with anguished howls, more distortion, the song seeming to crumble before our ears into a hellish reverb drenched miasma. Terrifying and incredible.
The rest of the record stacks up pretty well too. "A Cassette Played" is all woozy low end and rumbling bass over snippets of crowd sound, a sort of collaged dark wavey drift, with some super minimal skittery Autechre style fractured beats, a sprawling expansive dronescape, laced with skitter, and ominous synth swells, strangely cinematic keyboards, the sound becoming almost John Carpenter-esque near the end, before slipping directly into "Chroeg Xen", which sounds like Steve Reich or Terry Riley as interpreted by the current crop of retro futurist sci fi new wavers. "Elijah's New Sun" is a fluttering field of hiss and static, of shortwave interference, buried synth pulses, strange processed vocals, and minimal synth melodies way off in the distance.
"It's All Write" is an avalanche of song fragments, woven into a woozy, series of melodic swells, streaks of buzz, bits of sampled voices, a minimal barely there beat, slowly unwinding like some out of focus sonic charnel house. "Kitchen Light" is a surprisingly lovely bloopy bleepy bit of spacey synthiness, while "Never Was A Dreamer (vox)" is a swirling synthy crawl, all whispered tangled voices, and layered shimmery drones. "She Is Beautiful" is another bit of sci fi synthery, which leads into the short closer "Some What Daft", a gorgeous creepy glitchscape, of muted melodies, fractured drones and alien squelches, all over a sort of krauty pulse, the sort of track that we would have loved to see go on way longer. Which is pretty much how we feel about almost every track here.
Sure, the fact that aTelecine is Sasha Grey's band is the hook, but it hardly matters really, besides bucking the convention of actresses turned terrible musician, or certainly porn star gone pointlessly mainstream, this stuff is incredible, dark and dense and extremely well crafted, occasionally playful and mysterious, but more often fucking chilling and intense, and definitely makes it plain for all to see, that if Grey ever did decide to give up her day job, as sad as that would be, at least we'd have more of this amazing music to look forward to.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
MPEG Stream: "I Came I Sat I Departed"
MPEG Stream: "A Cassette Played"
MPEG Stream: "It's All Write"
MPEG Stream: "Some What Daft"

GAMES That We Can Play (Hippos In Tanks) 12" 11.98
The duo known as Games presented themselves as chillwave mutants on the Everything Is Working 7" which came and went a couple months back, but this long EP / short LP (depending on how you wanna look at these six tracks) proves that Games is an entity existing between a number of dichotomies: Now vs. Then, East vs. West, ironically uncool (thus making it cool) vs. unfashionably gauche, etc. It shouldn't be a surprise then that half of Games is the sci-fi trickster Daniel Lopatin, who's better known as Oneohtrix Point Never. There's plenty of the Lopatin infatuation with polygon melodies, allusions to Russian technocracy, and dreamtime slippages into the forgotten futures of the past; but Lopatin's partner, Joel Ford, brings a mash-up aesthetic of Italo-Disco sensuality, mid-'80s Fairlight sampling mimesis, and plenty of trashy Euro-pop tropes. Unlike Lopatin's Oneohtrix project which seeks to capture a sound which never existed in the '80s but is an extract of a bleary selective memory from all of the data that's been left behind, Games is far more concise in what it's referencing - the mid-'80s synthpop / tropes of bands like Animotion and Ministry. No, we don't mean the "Jesus Built My Hot-Rod" era of Ministry, but the period that Mr. Jourgensen seems to want to forget: the swooning romanticism of With Sympathy and the cross-pollinated electronica album Twitch. The track "Strawberry Sky" is a Top 10 single that should have been released in 1986, with a magnificently catchy vocal chorus delivered by Laurel Chartow atop faux-flute synth pads, darkly washed electronic arpeggiations, thumped drum machines, and a coked-up production sensibility. The auto-tuned vocal utterances that drive "Shadows In Bloom" compliment an acid flashback of an arrangement seemingly lifted from one of Bel Biv Devoe's skittered grooves. Couple that with all of the new wave synths, and it's a downright awesome track! The Gatekeeper Remix of "Strawberry Sky" steps up the Ministry / Twitch references with more of a cybernetic flare to the punchy EBM rhythms and American Anglophilia. Recommended.

ASHER & UBEBOET Cell Memory (Winds Measure Recordings) 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.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Intentional or otherwise, Asher Thal-Nir and Ubeboet (also known as Miguel Tolosa) have created a near perfect soundscape for winter. While Cell Memory is not nearly as isolated and grim as the classic Thomas Koner records that looked to Greenland for inspiration, the hushed noises and barren drones of Cell Memory capture a similarly cold environment. The album is split almost evenly between two near 20 minute tracks. "Alter" echoes a muted howl across a billowing mass of radio snow, nocturnal hallucinatory gestures, and soft focus noise, all of which has been muffled into a long-stare miasma of ghostly repetitions flickering against a fog-laden horizon line. While the mood of "Alter" has something akin to being awakened at 3am by a snowstorm, the second track "Nullus" is more of a subterranean, bunker recording, with flecks of static dropping on the cavernous subharmonic drones like seeped water from the ceiling into a massive concrete cistern. Electrical murmurings and accreted layers of smeared textures ebb and flow against the near constant background hum. Beautifully chilling impressionism that would fit very well next to Jonathan Colecough, Mirror, Murmer, Bernhard Gunter, Steve Roden, and the aforementioned Thomas Koner.
As with all of the Wind Measures Recordings, Cell Memory comes in an elegant folio, letterpressed by WMR's Ben Owen. It's a professionally duplicated cd-r and is limited to 150 copies.
MPEG Stream: "Alter"
MPEG Stream: "Nullus"

CHRIS & COSEY Heartbeat (CTI) lp 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Throbbing Gristle ceased to exist (for the first time) in 1981, shortly after the transgressive industrialists performed in San Francisco in May of that year. TG were deft in their manipulation of media, ominously stating that "The Mission is terminated," with the 'mission' referring to their numerous stark proclamations against society at large conjoined with their adventurous manglings of noise, rhythm, and atonality. But there's another rather self-evident historical fact: that TG's Genesis P-Orridge broke up with fellow bandmate & long-term partner Cosey Fanny Tutti. Shortly thereafter, Cosey and fellow TG member Chris Carter struck out on their own (with a romantic partnership not far behind), and later on in 1981, Chris & Cosey released their first solo project, the minimal wave / synthpunk masterpiece Heartbeat. In TG, Carter's propensity for beguiling electronic melodies and disco rhythms could be heard on such classic tracks as "United" and "Hot On The Heels Of Love." Both of these were signature tracks for Carter's aesthetic, which espoused an economic proto-techno approach to drum machine rhythms and heavily sequenced electro pulse melodies. Such has been the template for Chris & Cosey's sound since.
"Put Yourself In Los Angeles" opens the album with a dizzying percolation of flanged electronics which snaps into a militant march of Cosey's gnashed guitars locked against barked samples of a lunatic radio host and insistent rhythms. At least on this track, it's easy to hear the influence that Chris & Cosey would have on the likes of Front 242, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails. Other tracks such as the metronomic spiralling of "Voodoo" and the downright pastoral birdsounds of "Moorby" looked back to the Krautrock electronic meanderings of Cluster. "Just Like You" is one of Chris & Cosey's finest tracks, oozing with paranoia and dread throughout the slashed noises and found dialogue haunting the minimalist techno-horror sequencing and sustained minor-key melodies. The title track completes the album brilliantly by looking forward to any number of Detroit-inspired techno trax with double timed rhythms emerging out of maudlin, if cybernetic melodies and electronic-pop propulsive sequencing that really does act as a bridge between the realm of Kraftwerk and the British new wave that was bubbling up around Chris & Cosey back in the day. An absolute classic!
MPEG Stream: "Put Yourself In Los Angeles"
MPEG Stream: "Just Like You"
MPEG Stream: "Heartbeat"

FALL, THE This Nation's Saving Grace (Beggars Banquet) lp 14.98

PESTEG DRED Years Of Struggle Against The Lies, The Stupidity And The Cowardice (Dark Entries) lp 15.98
Martin Hall appears to be the figure who defined the Danish New Wave scene, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that any of the projects he worked in found much traction outside of Denmark. Ballet Mecanique was one such project, And Then Again was another; of course, there were a couple of solo outings too. Pesteg Dred was a very short-lived project, as the trio that revolved around Hall got together in 1981 with electronics wrangler Per Hendrichsen and vocalist Inge Shannon. During one weekend, the three landed in a studio and banged out an album but didn't have the ability to pay the bill. So the tapes sat until Hall could negotiate something with the owners of the studio. A cassette of the material surfaced as a bonus with an art magazine in 1985, but otherwise, the recordings languished while all three members went onto other projects. We've never heard of any of Hall's other projects; but if any were half as good as Pesteg Dred, they'd be worth the price of admission.
The dark storm of post-punk had certainly come to Denmark, with Hall admitting an early infatuation with Cabaret Voltaire and A Certain Ratio (well, he did name one his later projects And Then Again after an A Certain Ratio tune); but The Pop Group and The Ex must have made a big impact as well. The band is essentially a mutant rhythm section of rumbling, discordant funk basslines and unschooled percussive fills that showcase way more fury than skill, with a series of weirdly skittered electronics flushed between the rhythms with murky modular sweeps, distorted drones, and delay-rippled bloop. Inge's vocals are a cold monotone bellow that aren't too far from Bettina Koster of Malaria, making a perfect fit for the darkly, cacophonous agit-punk of Pesteg Dred. The lengthy "Light, More Light" is very much in the vein of the best A Certain Ratio, with breakneck post-disco rhythm, neck-strangling basslines, jittery guitars, and even some atonal blurts from a trumpet. Death disco? You bet!
Dark Entries scores yet again with a really great re-discovery on Pested Dred.
MPEG Stream: "Salt"
MPEG Stream: "Cold Impressions Of Perhaps"
MPEG Stream: "Almost"

TAIGA REMAINS / RV PAINTINGS split (Blackest Rainbow) lp 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Blackest Rainbow has been pretty damn consistent in their survey of the pharmacologically tainted realm of dronemusik, releasing great albums from Aidan Baker, Barn Owl, Elm, Tom Carter, Jazzfinger, more recently that Bong / Quttinirpaaq split, and certainly this incredible split between Taiga Remains and RV Paintings. The former is the work of Alex Cobb, who also runs the equally great label Students Of Decay; and the latter is a side project of the Starving Weirdos. Both sides of the LP dwell heavily upon reverb saturation grafted onto acoustic dronings from various sources - probably guitar, certainly some bells, maybe a long-stringed instrument. Such is a typical strategy for RV Paintings, but is somewhat novel for Taiga Remains, whose driftscape sensibility tends more towards the smooth surface arcing for tone and harmony. If Blackest Rainbow hadn't etched the names of each artist into the surface of the wax, you'd have a 50 percent chance of guessing who was doing each side. Perhaps Cobb was deliberately trying to coax more of a RV Paintings sound from his gear and vice versa. The major difference in these two sides only becomes apparent when RV Paintings begins to gently tap across sheet metal, gongs, and a drum kit a la Eddie Prevost from AMM. The drone is still the central feature, and the percussive serves to levitate and propel the drone forward. Really great stuff to be found here, and limited to a mere 400 copies.

IMAGINARY SOFTWOODS s/t (Digitalis) lp 33.00
All right. Yet another great homage to the transcendent, cosmological sounds of mid-'70s progressive electronics by way of John Elliott, better known as one of the synth dudes in Emeralds. The number of Elliott's solo / side projects is pretty staggering, with Imaginary Softwoods being the eighth that we're aware of, outside of Emeralds. Given the vast back catalogue from the Elliott / Emeralds axis, it shouldn't come as surprise that this 2lp set has gone through several permutations as well. First on cassette (three of 'em!). Then on vinyl. A cd-r came and went. Now, this remastered set appears once again on vinyl. There is a reason for all of the various editions of this album: it's a damn good record!
The first side opens with a cold void atmosphere of filter sweep tones and metallic sawtooth vibrato, reminiscent of Elliott's recordings as Outer Space with more of slant toward the languorous, flanging drones that come by way of Maeror Tri or Cranioclast, minus the post-industrial framework. Elliott settles into a series of tone cluster of rounded synth notes whose cycling phrases have an elegant restraint and somber mood, as if Morton Feldman were to score a isolationist sci-fi soundtrack. Side two offers more of the liquid abstraction that became an Emeralds' signature on What Happened, sprawling through gentle oscillation and bittersweet half-melodies. A church-organ like set of rainy-day impressionism settles onto the third side, before Elliott reprises the cold flanging isolationism and Feldman-like tone clusters noted on the first side. The album drifts into a minor-key oblivion that descends over the course of the three final tracks on the fourth side of the album, tumbling into maudlin suspended tones and drones. So so nice!

JATOMA s/t (Kompakt) cd 16.98
Ah, Kompakt! The current kingdom of electronic music has produced another exceptional album from one of its citizens. There's not much to be said about Jatoma, as this Danish trio seems to be flaunting an air of mystery through a half-hearted attempt at anonymity. Regardless of their backstory, Jatoma are impressive magicians when it comes to their eccentric techno productions that recall the best of Four Tet, Matthew Herbert, and even Matmos from time to time.
With an opening sequence of sparkling digitalia on "Little Houseboat" that teases at a precious melodic phrase in the same way that Oval captured our imaginations with his impeccable Diskont 94 album, Jatoma is clearly onto something quite special. This becomes obvious when they push through a jumble of electronic squiggles and clockwork clicks into the soft whump of a techno pulse and accompanying bass groove that fleshes out just the first number on the very impressive debut. References to Animal Collective have been offered in comparison to Jatoma, but their sound relies less on lithium-addled bubblegum electronica and more on a chimerical synthesis of Pop Ambient dreaminess and the tech-house dramatics of build-and-release. It's no wonder that Kompakt signed them! "Durian" and "Bou" are both curious anthems with their auto-tuned, chill-wave melodies and warbled acid motifs fused onto thumped deep-house rhythms and hi-hat swing. While there are distinct tracks which stand on their own as the singles amongst the album, Jatoma take the time to subvert the iPod listening experience with very short interludes, codas, and intros of transitional squelches and tuned melodies that bridge the moods and atmospheres of Jatoma's varied tracks. Yup, it's an album that works best when listening from beginning to end!
Like many of the recent Kompakt releases, the vinyl comes the cd of the same material found within.
MPEG Stream: "Little Houseboat"
MPEG Stream: "Bou"
MPEG Stream: "Paper Lights"
MPEG Stream: "Permafrost"

SHOEMAKER, MATT Soundtrack For Dislocation (Elevator Bath) cd 12.98
Undeniably, this is a Matt Shoemaker recording. This Pacific Northwesterner has long been a favorite dronologist here at Aquarius with his ominous recordings spawned from electro-acoustic feedback systems, humid field recordings, tonebent mood engineering slanted toward audio hallucinations, dense guitar swarms, and elongated, zoner synth passages that give John Elliott a run for his money. Soundtrack For Dislocation is a self-evident title for Shoemaker, given how his work fractures temporal / psychogeographical planes, teleporting the listener from one opiated mirage to another. His process is just as interesting as the sounds that he produces, as he drives and controls feedback through a system of slinkies that act like something of a hybrid between a stereo spring reverb unit and an omnidirectional microphone, with Russian synths, VCO filters, and noise-aggregators positioned at various points on the feedback loop track. We had once thought that the pre-digital Merzbow recordings had developed into something of an organism that thrived on electricity, had an intelligence that dictated the course of the noise, and begrudgingly entertained a relationship with Masami Akita. Shoemaker's electro-acoustic contraptions seem to be approaching this Frankensteinian, electric organism on par with Merzbow's, although the architects of both projects have very different designs.
Hence, this is not a torrent of distortion, but a vertiginous path of drone, hiss, blur, shadow, grit, and decay. Placid atmospheres shimmer at times with all of the cinematic grandeur of Stars Of The Lid, only to dissolve, mutate, and crumble into hallucinatory slippages where flecks of environmental sounds breaking through, twisting once again into a metallic resonance on par with the most haunting of Nurse With Wound constructions. Thrumming tones pulse into skittering vibrations that build to rupturing crescendos that snap into near-silent voids of disquieting rumble. All of this comes together in another magnificent album from Mr. Shoemaker. Highly recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Arrival"
MPEG Stream: "Fuse Error Phantom"
MPEG Stream: "Circulation Within The Elemental Drift"

CANTU-LEDESMA, JEFRE Love Is A Stream (Type) lp+cd 22.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Before we blather on like we so often do, it seemed like it might be good to just toss out a first impression of Love Is A Stream, the fantastic new record from Root Strata label Head Honcho Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, his first for the Type label. And heck, that first impression might be all you need:
Lovesliescrushing meets Flying Saucer Attack.
There. Hard to argue with that. Warped warbly, blurred shoegazey drift, long stretches of incendiary psychedelic guitar drone, streaks of soft noise, buried melodies, ethereal vocals, lush layered textures, dense and explosive, expansive and dreamily hazy, and in its own way, gorgeously heavy.
A new side of Cantu-Ledesma for sure, whose past records seemed to hover in a much more tranquil serene otherworld, unfurling hushed landscapes of whispery minimalism, of delicate crystalline shimmer, and of barely there soft focus ambient drift. Love Is A Stream is anything but, a fiery, fierce, yet ultimately lush and washed out series of bold shoegaze dreamnoise experiments, not so much pop songs swathed in distortion and effects, as carefully crafted sonic impressions, a series of gorgeous miniature epics, each a brief expanse of prismatic hypnogogic psychedelia, every one a unique a roiling concoction of fuzzpopbliss and murky melodic churn. On the surface, the record plays out like a series of textures, from warm whirling hum, to crumbling blown out white noise blur, to grinding muted pulse and throb, to gauzy bleary haze, to thick billowy low end rumble, to superdistorted effects-drenched synthnoise, and yeah, you're reading right, this is in fact a noisy record, but it's an artfully crafted, carefully sculpted noise. A thick, billowing, warm and gloriously enveloping melodic noise, like sinking into a swirling sea of burnished muted crush, a nearly overwhelming avalanche of whirling swirling crumbling throb and thrum, beneath it all lurk delicate melodies, tendrils of minor key guitar, ghostly voices, whirring synths, they rise to the surface here and there, but for the most part exist as shadowy impressions, infusing the noisy textures with a melodic core, a warm glowing sonic heart, which is what transforms these heaving slabs of shoegazey heaviness into something divine, and divinely dreamy.
There are brief moments, where the surface noise, and the distortion, and the walls of effects peel back, and we get to peek behind the curtain, which reveals the lush minimal underpinnings of the songs, a brief melodic smear here, a hushed little fragment of guitar there, but a glimpse is all we get, and really all we want, because it's how those bits of minimal songcraft interact with the intense sonic effulgence that is truly the magic that Cantu-Ledesma wields in conjuring up the sounds here. And like all magic, the joy is not in how it was done, but it how it makes us feel.
The lp version comes with a bonus cd, a collaboration with Type label mainman Xela, who took source material provided by Cantu-Ledesma, and fashioned his own bit of ambient dronemusic. Nearly 50 minutes of haunting drift, after a short burst of caustic super distorted crunch, Xela settles into a slow burning sprawl of washed out chordal shimmer, deep rumbling thrum and lush streaks of shoegazey buzz, a few moments as dense and psychedelic as the record proper, but for the most part, more of a chill out wind down coda, the perfect addendum to an already practically perfect record. Really quite lovely.
MPEG Stream: "Stained Glass Body"
MPEG Stream: "Body Within Body"
MPEG Stream: "River Like Spine"

HORRID RED Empty Lungs (Holidays) lp 11.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
An offshoot of Teenage Panzerkorps / Der TPK, Horrid Red is described by the band's Glenn "Edmund Xavier" Donaldson as a militant new wave project somewhere near the likes of Death In June circa Nada. A beloved album of Death In June fans for sure, but Nada was a very clumsy attempt at bringing an occult obliqueness and right-wing imagery to the more romantic strains of new wave - Donanldson's recapitulation of '80s stark post-punk is WAY better.
The name Horrid Red might also be a play on the peculiar, forgotten new wave iconoclast Snowy Red, who sort of fell between Suicide and Fad Gadget; this was a band that Donaldson once professed considerable admiration for. That said, Horrid Red doesn't fall that far from the TPK sound, especially since Bunker Wolf is very present in delivering his booming Teutonic vocals with megaphone volume and clarity. Donaldson's arrangements are more stripped down than in TPK, but no-less spiky with their propulsive basslines, and also feature these sad, melodic leads that certainly look back to his earlier work in the Knit Separates and early Blithe Sons. But then there are the minor-key, haunted synths that take a page out of the Blessure Grave / Zola Jesus playbook and the minimal wave rhythms that gird almost every song. Released on Holiday Records, who seem to be the Sacred Bones of Italy. A necessary album for all fans of the recent wave of new goth. Limited to 300 copies!

SUN CITY GIRLS Funeral Mariachi (Abduction) cd 17.98
Yay! Repressed and back in stock!!
This recent Record Of The Week, NOW AVAILABLE ON CD!!! Packaged in a mini-lp style sleeve.
We had long heard rumors that the Sun City Girls had been working on a cinematic album as something of a follow-up to Torch Of The Mystics and 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda, two of our all-time favorite, classic albums from the Girls' idiosyncratic catalogue of punky psychedelia dissolved through Southeast Asian pop, free jazz, and Ennio Morricone soundtracks. But with the tragic death of drummer, poet, and polyglot savant Charles Goucher in 2007, it seemed that the Girls would end their career with the grand tease of an album of this sort never to be released. Fortunately, those recordings were not the stuff of urban legend or of unfounded fantasy, and the Sun City Girls' Alan Bishop has finally completed the album with the help of long time SCG cohort Scott Colburn! So here it is, the final SCGs album, and it's a worthy (and really quite accessible) capstone to their idiosyncratic discography.
Morricone has long been an influence and inspiration for the Sun City Girls, and especially Alan Bishop. In fact, he's been responsible for some of the best Morricone compilations issued over the years (i.e. Morricone 2000 and the Crime & Dissonance 2cd on Ipecac). As much as Bishop had been infatuated with Morricone, the homages to Morricone had been heavily disfigured and mutilated within the playfully murderous aesthetic of the Sun City Girls, where nothing is sacred and everything is fair game with the Girls' crosscultural appropriation. But for Funeral Mariachi, the Morricone riffs are situated in beguiling songs wholly devoid of the Sun City Girls' curmudgeonly fuck-you stances. In other words, Funeral Marachi is a damn good record. So good that it will probably invite a lot more people to investigate the wonderfully frustrating and woefully inaccessible back catalogue of the Sun City Girls.
Introspective, haunting, and at times beautiful, Funeral Mariachi opens with "Ben's Radio" where the Bishop brothers breakthrough a mid-tempo spy thriller number with a staccato duet of call and response avant-weirdness coupled with blurting atonal horns. Unmistakably Sun City Girls. In "Black Orchid", the group turns in the first of many Morricone references, where the Girls' are equally enamored by the incidental vocal melodies that worked throughout all of his scores. Here the Girls' offer a sad ballad for Richard Bishop's always stunning acoustic guitar and Alan's falsetto vocals bellowing his polyglot language. "Blue West," with its high-lonesome chorales, bad-ass guitar licks, and a mournful arrangements, could have been straight out of a John Ford movie. "Holy Ground" might as well be the Girls' answer to Pink Floyd's "Set The Controls to the Heart of the Sun" with Alan's caterwauling voice droning behind the diabolically chanted vocals, beautiful guitar leads, shadowy atmospherics, and weirdly playful calliope melodies. "Mineral Wells" and "El Solo" turn towards the more saccharine moments of the Morricone oeuvre with loungy piano, reverb whistled melodies, and actual female vocals (and not Alan mimicking a woman's voice). "Come Maddalena" is in fact a Morricone cover, from the 1971 Italian film Maddalena, perhaps known only for its soundtrack. Again, a rather moody atmosphere is set for plaintive, yet fuzzed out guitar melody. So fucking good!
MPEG Stream: "Ben's Radio"
MPEG Stream: "Black Orchid"
MPEG Stream: "Blue West"
MPEG Stream: "Come Maddalena"
MPEG Stream: "Funeral Mariachi"

PEDESTRIAN DEPOSIT East Fork North Fork (Monorail Trespassing) cd 11.98
Pedestrian Deposit have relentlessly toured the United States for as long as we can remember; if your hometown has some shithole warehouse space or a couple of dudes who host noise shows in their house, chances are that PD have been there. Given their constant touring in a car with a tape player, it makes perfect sense that the cassette would be the preferred media for PD; in fact, PD's Jon Borges has released a shitload of noise and drone tapes over the years through his Monorail Trespassing imprint. East Fork North Fork did in fact come out as a cassette earlier in 2010, only to disappear before anybody really got to get a hold of it; but the tape has been usurped by the cd for the reissue of this pretty fucking awesome record, with two new unreleased tracks as a nice bonus.
The days of Pedestrian Deposit abusing soundsystems with deleterious feedback and earscraping noise are pretty much gone. Nowadays, Borges is working with his partner Shannon Kennedy in constructed a frightening, haunting set of recordings for cello and electronics, thick with echoing drones and ghostly shadows that creep out of the woodwork. The amount of empty space on East Fork North Fork is notable, with Borges and Kennedy layering backish abrasions of rusted objects on contact microphones, distant pluckings of cello looped into seasick passages, heartbeat thumps coupled with subterranean scrapings, and hauntological half-melodies pushing to the foreground. Everything appears tuned as to announce the possibility of a huge surge of punishing noise, much like the atmosphere that Michael Gira built on Children Of God; and Pedestrian Deposit does allow for one such explosion on the album. But for the most part, it's the post-noise threat of audio holocaust that gives East Fork North Fork its sense of drama.
This is easily the best thing that Borges has released either through Pedestrian Deposit or through his solo Emaciator project.
MPEG Stream: "A Blessing"
MPEG Stream: "Strife/Meridian"
MPEG Stream: "Cycle Of Combustion"

COLLEY, JOE Desperate Attempts At Beauty (Auscultare) cd 12.98
Here's one of the finest albums from one of California's best sound+noise artists. Since the album came out in 2003, Colley's only released a handful of releases, including one that was awarded a Grand Prix at Ars Electronica. He's also the proprietor of the Issues magazine shop in Oakland, which you should check out if you're in the neighborhood or even if you're not. Anyway, Colley's recorded works and performances continue to amaze even after many years. Here's what we had to say about this one, way back when.
If you hold the cover at just the right angle, a misanthropic and self-loathing text emerges from what might appear at first to be simply just another austere, all white package housing another austere album of micro-glitch minimalism. This well-executed design strategy (courtesy of Randy Yau) works to complement Joe Colley's transgressive agenda, which might even end up undermining his own intentions. For all of the macho posturing of the text (e.g. "REMEMBER HOW WE DESTROYED THE THINGS THAT MADE US HAPPY AND HOW WE STILL DO? LETS DAMAGE EACH OTHER BEYOND REPAIR..." and so on) and the opening 8 second jolt of unnecessary noise, Colley's sound constructions speak of an inquisitive spirit. Throughout this record, Colley pokes and prods various sonic-making situations that often hold fascinating textural detailings. The most obvious example of this is found in his recordings of water being absorbed by modeling clay, which results in a dense chorus of tiny squeaks and squiggles. Colley almost allows himself to be seduced by these sounds; but just before he does, that misanthropic urge deep within his being instructs him to obliterate those curious textures though harsh digital noises, piercing arpeggiations, and noxious jump-cuts. This strategic hammering of sound certainly keeps the listener alert to what may be coming next; thus making the intricate detail work far more enjoyable... if "enjoyable" can in fact be a description attributed to Colley's solo output or his earlier, bruitist work as Crawl Unit.
MPEG Stream: "January Broken Statis"
MPEG Stream: "Claysound 07.02"
MPEG Stream: "Headache (Diagnostic Testpulse For Blown PA)"

MARSFIELD (ANDREW CHALK) Three Sunsets Over Marsfield (Faraway Press) lp 33.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Here's the second release from Andrew Chalk's Marsfield project, even though these recordings date back to 2002 well before the 2010 release of The Towering Sky. At that time, Chalk was still engaged with the sublime Mirror collaboration with Christoph Heemann, producing a vast collection of impressionist drones that certainly set a gold standard for anyone looking to dive into the dronemuzik category. Enter Brendan Walls, an Australian ambient practitioner who also moonlights in the slugfuck-noise outfit the Menstruation Sisters (although there's nothing of the Sisters' scattered noise that enters any of the Marsfield recordings). Walls had released a few albums through Heemann's labels of vaporized hum and oceanic tonefloat, including a 2004 collaboration with Mr. Chalk on Three Poplars. Whatever the relationship of the collaboration between Chalk and Walls might have been, Three Sunsets Over Marsfield has the fingerprints of Andrew Chalk all over it: smeared texture into elongated drone and shimmering resonant tones coalescing into thrumming hypnosis. What is unique to Three Sunsets in relation to the Chalk catalogue, is that there is a peculiar backstory about a retired British soldier who had been able to receive and amplify radio transmissions through a metal plate in his skull. It's easy to imagine that Chalk and Walls set out to create a sublime piece of music, best suited for playback within the skull of an old soldier, sick of listening into whatever the BBC might be broadcasting. Chalk and Walls compact and compress numerous layers of psychedelically-bent guitar drones into a gorgeous, mid-frequency stream of flutter, shimmer, and mirage, not unlike what Chalk would later reprise on Shadows From The Album Skies. To say that this album is mesmerizing is undoubtedly an understatement!
Andrew Chalk vinyl is a rare commodity indeed, and Three Sunsets Over Marsfield is no exception, being printed in an edition of 300 copies in an extraordinary package of embossed metallic paper with an obi sporting the title in Japanese.

FEMININE COMPLEX, THE Livin' Love (Rev-Ola) cd 15.98

HECKER, TIM Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again (Substractif) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
This long time aQ fave is finally available on vinyl! And still available on cd! And heck, it's been years since we reviewed this the first time around, so odds are some folks missed out on this completely, which is a serious shame, cuz this record is BRILLIANT!!
Long before every one and their mother began releasing washed out gauzy soundscapes of pixelated abstractions and dreamy hazy otherwordly drift, we got an earful of Tim Hcker's Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again, which at the time was a huge stylistic shift from his previous work as Jetone on Force Inc, we dug that Chain Reactive, techno-minimalism, but this was something else. A gorgeous sprawl of epic swirling blurred beautiful
sonic abstraction. "Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again" was the first in a series of releases that would establish Hecker as a master of abstract sonic conjuration, along with fellow sonic abstractionists like Philip Jeck, Fennesz, Jasper TX, Machinefabriek, Belong, Hecker was, and is, capable of creating super evocative soundscapes, manipulating and treating sound, and molding these effected sounds into something living and breathing and organic.
Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again was clearly inspired by Christian Fennesz' earlier recordings ("Hotel Parallel" and "+47 Degrees 56' 37" - 16 Degrees 51' 08"), a guitar driven digital synthesis, Hecker blurred a monochromatic palette of fractured samples into expansive washes and textural drones, but never forgot the basic tenets of composition in melody and rhythm. As sublime and very subtle forms, delicate melodies of just a few slowly repeated notes swell out of the digital drones only to quietly retreat amongst the album's many diaphanous folds of sound. The rhythmic elements of the album are mostly in the form of the staccato time stretching of samples into brittle repetitive chunks that also flicker in and out of the dense rumbles. This is a cinematically grand album in its exaggeration of minute details, and is required listening for those enthralled by the work of Stephen Mathieu, Oval, Ekkehard Ehlers, and the other above mentioned artists, and sounds as good today as when it was first released nearly a decade ago, and listening to it now, it's easy to see how much of the modern music we love was foreshadowed by this record, and how many of the new soundscapers and drone creators are beholden to Hecker and his gorgeous hazy soundworlds...
MPEG Stream: "Music For Tundra"
MPEG Stream: "Arctic Lover's Rock"
MPEG Stream: "The Work Of Art In The Age Of Cultural"

SWANS My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky (Regular) (Young God) cd 14.98
Michael Gira has made his point that Swans has been reactivated, and that this is not a reunion. The distinction may be important to Gira, but it's pretty clear that he doesn't want the world to think he's jumping on the bandwagon of every cool band from the '80s and '90s getting back together again. But the fact remains that Swans dissolved back in 1997, and Gira took some of the musicians from those Swans gigs and sessions to form his grizzled folk ensemble Angels Of Light. Given the acoustic songs that Gira would sometimes wrangle as a counterpoint to Swans' signature brutality, the transition for Gira from Swans into Angels was a logical one. Over time, Angels developed into a lush ensemble with twinkling psychedelic aspects of a bright baroque aesthetic never revealed in the harrowing, abject tracks from Swans.
In early 2009, Gira embarked on a solo tour, showcasing a bunch of new material that seemed to be harkening back to the sound and fury of Swans, in spite of their minimalist presentation through just acoustic guitar and voice. On more than one occasion Gira quipped that he was thinking of making another Swans record. And that brings us to My Father Will Guide Me, ushered forth by a squadron of atonal guitars and lumbering percussive crashes. The album really does sound like it could have been produced in 1999, right after Soundtracks For The Blind, which was thought to be the final studio record for Swans. Sure, there's no Jarboe (for obvious reasons), but Gira did recruit guitarist Norman Westberg to return to the fold, as he was responsible for the guitar sound for the band from Filth up through White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity - in other words, the most brutalist period for the band. That buzzsaw rasp which Westberg produced is very present in Swans resurrection, cutting through the thug-fist basslines and lockstep drum rolls. The sound of Swans is very much intact, but Gira's songwriting has constantly grown, with his booming voice still wailing doom and gloom through the lens of an American apocalypticist. Devendra Banhart also makes a guest appearance on a track equally noted for its discordantly brash trombones and trumpets with their resembles to divebombing arcs. If only every band that got back together could make a record with this much intensity, drama, and power. Utterly brilliant.
MPEG Stream: "No Words / No Thoughts"
MPEG Stream: "My Birth"
MPEG Stream: "You Fucking People Make Me Sick "
MPEG Stream: "Eden Prison"

SWANS My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky (Vinyl) (Young God) lp 15.98
Michael Gira has made his point that Swans has been reactivated, and that this is not a reunion. The distinction may be important to Gira, but it's pretty clear that he doesn't want the world to think he's jumping on the bandwagon of every cool band from the '80s and '90s getting back together again. But the fact remains that Swans dissolved back in 1997, and Gira took some of the musicians from those Swans gigs and sessions to form his grizzled folk ensemble Angels Of Light. Given the acoustic songs that Gira would sometimes wrangle as a counterpoint to Swans' signature brutality, the transition for Gira from Swans into Angels was a logical one. Over time, Angels developed into a lush ensemble with twinkling psychedelic aspects of a bright baroque aesthetic never revealed in the harrowing, abject tracks from Swans.
In early 2009, Gira embarked on a solo tour, showcasing a bunch of new material that seemed to be harkening back to the sound and fury of Swans, in spite of their minimalist presentation through just acoustic guitar and voice. On more than one occasion Gira quipped that he was thinking of making another Swans record. And that brings us to My Father Will Guide Me, ushered forth by a squadron of atonal guitars and lumbering percussive crashes. The album really does sound like it could have been produced in 1999, right after Soundtracks For The Blind, which was thought to be the final studio record for Swans. Sure, there's no Jarboe (for obvious reasons), but Gira did recruit guitarist Norman Westberg to return to the fold, as he was responsible for the guitar sound for the band from Filth up through White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity - in other words, the most brutalist period for the band. That buzzsaw rasp which Westberg produced is very present in Swans resurrection, cutting through the thug-fist basslines and lockstep drum rolls. The sound of Swans is very much intact, but Gira's songwriting has constantly grown, with his booming voice still wailing doom and gloom through the lens of an American apocalypticist. Devendra Banhart also makes a guest appearance on a track equally noted for its discordantly brash trombones and trumpets with their resembles to divebombing arcs. If only every band that got back together could make a record with this much intensity, drama, and power. Utterly brilliant.
MPEG Stream: "No Words / No Thoughts"
MPEG Stream: "My Birth"
MPEG Stream: "You Fucking People Make Me Sick "
MPEG Stream: "Eden Prison"

RODEN, STEVE Transmissions (Voices Of Objects And Skies) (In Between Noise) cd 12.98
Scores for sound installations often have a way of not really translating when heard outside of the installation. Steve Roden is one of the few sound artists who has perfected the balancing act of creating a sublime sonic experience through his installation work which also translates equally as well on disc. Transmissions (Voices Of Objects And Skies) was originally commissioned by the Fresno Art Museum, and found Roden creating a metonymic environment that bridged childhood wonder with the rough technologies of tin-can telephones and daydreams of space travel and NASA. The installation itself was an 8 channel sound piece spread over 64 speakers which were all mounted within tin cans and suspended from the ceiling alongside countless other tin cans that housed low wattage colored light bulbs, creating a fantastic chandelier of muted light that was perfect for the delicate compositions. Roden states in the liner notes that the source material for the album was recordings of satellites by amateur astronomers from the 1960s through the 1980s; and through Roden's impeccable reductivist filtering and manipulation, he arrives at a slow-motion collage of electronic bleeps which might have more in common with a distantly flickering flute than anything electric in origin. Nevertheless, Roden turns these sounds into looping lullabies and subtle declinations of sound. It's one of the best pieces we've heard from Roden and is certainly recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Transmissions (excerpt 1)"
MPEG Stream: "Transmissions (excerpt 2)"

V/A Mission Two: Connecting Electronix Network (Natural) 2lp 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
A brilliant compilation of fucked electronica, with tons of outfits none of us had ever heard of. Only V/VM and D'Arcangelo are the familiar names here. Mostly Italian, the tracks sound quite similar to SKAM's output in Manchester, and Rephlex in London. Nu-skool electro and warped electronics. If you like Autechre or Aphex, pick this up, you won't regret it!

HECKER, TIM Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again (Alien 8) 2lp 26.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
This long time aQ fave is finally available on vinyl! And still available on cd! And heck, it's been years since we reviewed this the first time around, so odds are some folks missed out on this completely, which is a serious shame, cuz this record is BRILLIANT!!
Long before every one and their mother began releasing washed out gauzy soundscapes of pixelated abstractions and dreamy hazy otherwordly drift, we got an earful of Tim Hcker's Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again, which at the time was a huge stylistic shift from his previous work as Jetone on Force Inc, we dug that Chain Reactive, techno-minimalism, but this was something else. A gorgeous sprawl of epic swirling blurred beautiful
sonic abstraction. "Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again" was the first in a series of releases that would establish Hecker as a master of abstract sonic conjuration, along with fellow sonic abstractionists like Philip Jeck, Fennesz, Jasper TX, Machinefabriek, Belong, Hecker was, and is, capable of creating super evocative soundscapes, manipulating and treating sound, and molding these effected sounds into something living and breathing and organic.
Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again was clearly inspired by Christian Fennesz' earlier recordings ("Hotel Parallel" and "+47 Degrees 56' 37" - 16 Degrees 51' 08"), a guitar driven digital synthesis, Hecker blurred a monochromatic palette of fractured samples into expansive washes and textural drones, but never forgot the basic tenets of composition in melody and rhythm. As sublime and very subtle forms, delicate melodies of just a few slowly repeated notes swell out of the digital drones only to quietly retreat amongst the album's many diaphanous folds of sound. The rhythmic elements of the album are mostly in the form of the staccato time stretching of samples into brittle repetitive chunks that also flicker in and out of the dense rumbles. This is a cinematically grand album in its exaggeration of minute details, and is required listening for those enthralled by the work of Stephen Mathieu, Oval, Ekkehard Ehlers, and the other above mentioned artists, and sounds as good today as when it was first released nearly a decade ago, and listening to it now, it's easy to see how much of the modern music we love was foreshadowed by this record, and how many of the new soundscapers and drone creators are beholden to Hecker and his gorgeous hazy soundworlds...
MPEG Stream: "Music For Tundra"
MPEG Stream: "Arctic Lover's Rock"
MPEG Stream: "The Work Of Art In The Age Of Cultural"

SWANS My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky (Deluxe) (Young God) 2cd 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Michael Gira has made his point that Swans has been reactivated, and that this is not a reunion. The distinction may be important to Gira, but it's pretty clear that he doesn't want the world to think he's jumping on the bandwagon of every cool band from the '80s and '90s getting back together again. But the fact remains that Swans dissolved back in 1997, and Gira took some of the musicians from those Swans gigs and sessions to form his grizzled folk ensemble Angels Of Light. Given the acoustic songs that Gira would sometimes wrangle as a counterpoint to Swans' signature brutality, the transition for Gira from Swans into Angels was a logical one. Over time, Angels developed into a lush ensemble with twinkling psychedelic aspects of a bright baroque aesthetic never revealed in the harrowing, abject tracks from Swans.
In early 2009, Gira embarked on a solo tour, showcasing a bunch of new material that seemed to be harkening back to the sound and fury of Swans, in spite of their minimalist presentation through just acoustic guitar and voice. On more than one occasion Gira quipped that he was thinking of making another Swans record. And that brings us to My Father Will Guide Me, ushered forth by a squadron of atonal guitars and lumbering percussive crashes. The album really does sound like it could have been produced in 1999, right after Soundtracks For The Blind, which was thought to be the final studio record for Swans. Sure, there's no Jarboe (for obvious reasons), but Gira did recruit guitarist Norman Westberg to return to the fold, as he was responsible for the guitar sound for the band from Filth up through White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity - in other words, the most brutalist period for the band. That buzzsaw rasp which Westberg produced is very present in Swans resurrection, cutting through the thug-fist basslines and lockstep drum rolls. The sound of Swans is very much intact, but Gira's songwriting has constantly grown, with his booming voice still wailing doom and gloom through the lens of an American apocalypticist. Devendra Banhart also makes a guest appearance on a track equally noted for its discordantly brash trombones and trumpets with their resembles to divebombing arcs. If only every band that got back together could make a record with this much intensity, drama, and power. Utterly brilliant.
The second disc of the limited edition deluxe set is totally... fucking... awesome. This revisits Gira's capacity for relentlessly punishing dronerock, which had been clearly missing during his Angels Of Light period over the past decade. But this disc seamlessly emerges out of the slowburning crescendos from the aforementioned Soundtracks For The Blind and the amphetamine riddled noise mantra Number One Of Three that Gira produced as The Body Lovers. In many ways, this *could* be Number Two Of Three, as the Body Lovers project was supposed to be a trilogy of deconstructed Swans guitar swarm, chorales of car horns, and brute atonal fury. A single track spanning 46 minutes, Swans present a series of powerdrone movements with bass and rhythm guitar locked into militant marches that guide an scathing crosshatching of atonal guitars and electronics. The infernal nature of these sounds brings the scores of Hermann Nitsch's aktions to mind, and even some of Glenn Branca's guitar symphonies at their most punishing.
This double disc set is quite limited, we've sold a whole bunch already and are down to only about 10 copies, and then that'll be it (though the regular single disc version is in stock, and that one's on sale for the next 2 weeks). If you're ordering this deluxe one, and we run out, let us know if it's okay to send you the normal standard version...
MPEG Stream: "No Words / No Thoughts"
MPEG Stream: "My Birth"
MPEG Stream: "You Fucking People Make Me Sick "
MPEG Stream: "Eden Prison"
MPEG Stream: "Look At Me Go (Bonus Disc)"

ROCKET SCIENCE AND THE NIGGER LOVING FAGGOTS s/t (Vulgar Tango) lp 8.98
Pretty provocative name huh? These problematically monikered nineties Bay Area improvised noise makers, in fact, boasted a pretty surprising and stellar pedigree, the duo included Kelvin Pittman now of Portland Bike Ensemble, and Kyp Malone, of fellow SF noiseniks Iran and now of... TV On The Radio!!? Huh? Yep, long before Malone was playing huge festivals and helping send Pitchfork into conniptions, and releasing solo records, and impressing the indie rock throngs with his impossible and impressive facial hair, he was in fact one half of Rocket Science, a raucous, blasting, psychedelic combo, who spit out a wild fusion of free jazz and free noise, and this was their only record, released on Vulgar Tango way back when, along with the debut Iran lp reviewed elsewhere on this week's list. The Vulgar Tango dude discovered a stash of records (both Iran and Rocket Science) that had been hidden away for close to a decade, and decided to let us have them!
So yeah, we always sort of wondered why in all the articles about TV On The Radio, they never ONCE mentioned Kyp's time in RSATNLF, although we can sort of guess. Which is too bad, cuz these guys ruled. Nothing at all like TV On The Radio of course, or Iran really (except for some of the noisiness), Rocket Science took guitars and bells and drums and some 'singing' and wound 'em all up into a super charged take on that SST jazz sound, filtered through a warped SF noiserock filter. Sometimes surprisingly melodic and tranquil, but more often than not, fierce and free and heavy and loud, skittery percussion, tangled grinding guitar gnarl, some serious psychedelic crunch, lots of feedback, all woozy and warped, chaotic and off kilter, brief squalls of splattery atonal skronk, give way to warbly drone psych squiggles, which gives way to drum-kit-down-the-stairs cacophony, which then gives way to some almost metal chug and thud, which always seems to blossom into a crumbling mass of swirling sound and amp damaging free-rock delirium. Gloriously ramshackle and seriously challenging, an extremely noisy and loud look back at one of our favorite unsung outfits that helped define the SF underground in the early 2000s...

GARET, RICHARD L'avenir (Winds Measure Recordings) 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.
The title of Richard Garet's exemplary piece of lowercase tonefloat and crackle refers specifically to what Jacques Derrida saw as a profound difference between the future that has been mapped out and a future that is unpredictable and can shatter the continuity of the present. L'avenir is defined in French as the latter of the two, with Garet describing this through oblique shifts of electronic drones suspended quietly upon a backdrop of hushed activity and near silence. The album opens with a slight crackling that sounds like a ill-tempered radio transmitting from somewhere outside, whose particulate pocks of activity quietly burst in the distance. From these, radioluminescent tones grow and collapse within a flickering glow of a haunted melody, just barely announcing itself through the overlapping of rarefied frequencies. After a noticeable crack from a short and sharp tactile event -- somewhere between a hammer, a creak, a sigh, and a jolt - Garet fleshes out the sinusoidal drones with what could be field recordings or maybe some low-voltage electronics, which elicit the nocturnal stillness of hidden motors creating their own chorus of phase-shifting hum. Some 30 minutes into the 49 minute piece, the relative placid mood which Garet has carefully crafted shifts towards a something comparatively menacing before everything dissolves into a quiet mass of radioactive snow.
Garet's methods are reductive in nature, stripping away everything that isn't essential; but there's also a subtle, but certainly noticeable flair for the dramatic that comes across L'avenir. Through his signals and gestures, Garet is easily on par with the finest work of Richard Chartier, Steve Roden, Keith Berry, and Bernard Gunter. L'avenir comes to us by way of Winds Measure Recordings, who has housed these professionally duplicated cd-r's in a very elegant oversized, and letterpressed folio. Limited to just 150 copies, and very recommended!
MPEG Stream: "L'avenir 1"
MPEG Stream: "L'avenir 2"
MPEG Stream: "L'avenir 3"

LETHE Catastrophe Point 7 & 8 (Invisible Birds) 2cd 19.98
Here's the regular (and much more reasonably priced!) edition of the ultra deluxe Lethe 2cd set we reviewed a few weeks ago.
For many years now, Kuwayama Kiyoharu (aka Lethe) had been recording the resonance of various abandoned spaces, first around his native Japan and more recently from sites far far away. He seeks out an old warehouse, airplane hanger, the hull of a ship, or any massive slab of architecture shaped by concrete and/or steel which happens to have an open door (or broken window) and a choice amount of natural reverb and resonance. There he collects whatever he can find within the space to use as source material to resonate those industrial spaces: slabs of metal, empty water tanks, sodden wood, broken glass, small bones, and the flotsam that had collected on the floors after years of neglect. Out of these found objects, Kuwayama has an uncanny knack for producing natural, acoustic drones which hold a haunted aesthetic amplified through the cavernous reverb of those crumbled cathedrals to industry. Given the seemingly surreptitious nature of Kuwayama's wanderings, these recordings are swaddled in the darkness of night with only candles or a bonfire somewhere in the far corner of the building as his illumination. It has to be said that Kuwayama does overlay and edit all of his recordings into composition, following liked minded artists such as Tarab, Eric La Casa, or John Grzinich.
Catastrophe Point 7 begins with this process at a site deliciously referred to as Arsenic in Lausanne, Switzerland. Well, it turns out that Arsenic is a contemporary theater space in current use, and despite his non-feral residence, Kuwayama offers an incredible assortment of acoustic drones, noises, and textures. Bellowing tones emanate from a variety of long plumbing pipes, replicating the circular breathing strategies of Yoshi Wada; and around these leaden flutterings, he scrapes uneasy textures and builds clattering crescendos. The point about Arsenic not being a totally disused space comes to the forefront about halfway through Catastrophe Point 7 as he rolls a piano into the empty theater space and sets forth a melancholy series of clustered piano tones, much like his one time collaborator Jonathan Coleclough produced on his signature album Period.
Catastrophe Point 8 was recorded in an abandoned space. This time, it's a former power station in Scotland. A mournful acoustic drone, perhaps from a similar set of plumbing pipes heard in the Swiss recordings opens this disc, with small crumblings of wood, glass, and concrete positioned close to the microphone. Set in spatialized contrast to these closely miced sounds, Kuwayama captures various clanks, thumps, and other bumps in the night all decaying in the prolonged reverb of that power station. It's a much more Spartan affair than the first disc, but just as effective in its haunted sensibility. Highly recommended listening!
MPEG Stream: "Catastrophe Point 7.2"
MPEG Stream: "Catastrophe Point 8.1"
MPEG Stream: "Catastrophe Point 8.3"

MCGUIRE, MARK Off In The Distance (Cylindrical Habitat Modules) lp 23.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Yes, it's another solo album from Emeralds' guitarist Mark McGuire, and yes, it's totally awesome. Off In The Distance was originally a cassette that came out briefly back in 2008, but had been so beloved by the dudes who put out the tape that vinyl became a necessity. And it's a perfect format for McGuire's kosmische zoner jams, with all his continued allusions to Ash Ra Tempel, Gunter Schickert, Michael Rother, Popul Vuh, and Achim Reichel that stretch into grand movements of psychedelic melancholy. Slow-motion, aquatic bubblings of analog synths percolate upon an undulating bed of guitar drones muffling the growls from a distortion box. All the while, McGuire layers his signature elliptical guitar arpeggiated melodies that snap into locked grooves only to mutate effortlessly into doubles and triples of themselves, resulting in the passages of spaceship lift-off on a exploratory mission towards the heart of glowing nebulae. Towards the end of the first side, McGuire transitions into a particularly maudlin riff of intertwined and overlaid guitars, making some of us here think back to that incredible Dreamies album of symphonic psychedelic mope. Off In The Distance strikes that balance found in so much of the Emeralds / McGuire axis of music making, that of the inner-cosmonaut in pursuit of transcendence and/or tranquilization on one hand, and on the other, he channels something profoundly sad as McGuire's aware that such pursuits can only be fleeting at best. Undoubtedly beautiful stuff from McGuire. Limited to 500 copies.

WITCHFINDER GENERAL Death Penalty + Friends Of Hell (Buried By Time And Dust) 2lp box set 38.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Oh yeah! We've been eagerly awaiting this ever since we heard Buried By Time And Dust was putting it out. A deluxe box set containing 180g vinyl reissues of this cult NWOBHM band's original two full-length albums, 1982's Death Penalty (featuring classics like "Free Country" and "No Stayer") and 1983's Friends Of Hell (equally cool, with such songs as "Love On Smack" and the under-rated "Music"). Part Sabbathy doom, part psychedelic punk, and part party metal. Initially best known for their risque album covers, featuring topless witches/wenches in tableaus that combined "historical reenactment" with Page Three Girl cheesecake, WfG's lasting legacy has more to do with their Sabbathy sound, they being one of the first (and few) bands in the '80s to so overtly worship Ozzy, Tony and Co., and establish the "doom metal" genre, along with Saint Vitus, Trouble, Pentagram, and Candlemass.
With this collector's set, you get not just the two lps, and nice box to keep 'em in, but also a huge 20 page booklet featuring unpublished outtakes from those infamous album cover photo sessions, plus full lyrics, liner notes from guitarist Phil Cope, newspaper clippings, and more previously unseen photos (live and promo shots), making this quite a treat for all true WfG fans.
Here's what AQ's Jim Haynes (not our usual metal reviewer!) had to say about these two albums when we first listed compact disc reissues some years ago...
Death Penalty is one of the lost metal albums from the early '80s, falling victim to its own indecisiveness, not that such is a bad thing. Never really staying "true" either to the glam metal of Hanoi Rocks, Fastway, and Motley Crue or to the shocking horror shows of Ozzy and Iron Maiden, Witchfinder General alternated between both worlds, with the first half of Death Penalty being rowdy party numbers about drinking beer and dropping acid. These songs followed standard blues based rock, but as Witchfinder General was pretty amped up on the aforementioned substances, they were quite a bit more distorted and quick tempoed. By the time Witchfinder General gets to their anthemic "Witchfinder General," this album takes an impressive turn down the dark path of mythologically laden proto-doom metal, loaded with super-heavy (for 1982) Sabbathy grooves and aggro lyrics mostly about killing witches. They also throw in some grave robbing, just to prove how evil they are. A confused classic... Witchfinder General's second album Friends Of Hell picks up right where Death Penalty left off, with an album split evenly between the party rock elements from the New Wave of British Metal back in 1983 and their undeniable influence from Sabbath. Just as bipolar (between comical and evil) as the first album, and just as great. One of Jim's (!) favorite metal bands, and that goes for most of the rest of us here at AQ too.
Not that probably if you're in the market for this, you need US to tell you that Witchfinder General is great. Though, we were shocked, shocked, to find out not long ago that one of our good friends and customers, who shall remain unnamed, had not only never heard any Witchfinder General but had never heard OF them, despite being a huge fan of Sabbath specifically and stoner, doom, black and other metal music in general! We were like WTF? How can you not know WfG??! What are you, -not- high?
MPEG Stream: "Free Country"
MPEG Stream: "Witchfinder General"
MPEG Stream: "Love On Smack"
MPEG Stream: "Shadowed Images"