TARAB Take All The Ships From The Harbour, And Sail Them Straight Into Hell (23five Incorporated) cd 14.98
With a huge clamorous slash of metal grinding against metal, Eamon Sprod (aka Tarab) introduces the aptly titled album Take All The Ships From The Harbour, And Sail Them Straight Into Hell. This Australian sound artist has in the past already deeply impressed us with his incredible albums of field recordings interspliced with found object manipulation. In previous recordings, Tarab has exhibited sleights of hand in turning the sounds of the dry scrub lands outside of Melbourne into watery, sinewy compositions with haunted ambience lurking throughout. Here, Tarab activates the resonance of abandoned spaces (including a handful of recordings made at Angel Island with all of its crumbling beauty housed here in the San Francisco Bay); and the watery details, which emerged as illusion before, are pronounced in an ominous rumble of surf, rain, and wind rattling the undercarriage of this album. An album of extreme dynamics, Take All The Ships evolves quite effortlessly from that opening metallic klang through a series of softened white noises culled from oceanic sources and cutting into a quiet passage of vacant spaces with sand and pebbles pushed slowly across the stereo's surface. Through these events, Tarab presents his album with a cinematic grandeur and an orchestral pacing, despite the fact that all of the sounds are derived from those field recordings and found objects. Aside from a few choice backwards masked tracks and the timbral emphasis of EQ, there's no apparent electronic manipulation in his sympathetic layering of sound. The details have all of the presence of the best sound ecologists (e.g. Chris Watson, Douglas Quin, Eric La Casa, etc.), and have been enhanced through the unveiling drama of Tarab's compositions. This is best noted in the album's concluding 15 minutes which gradually build out of a concoction of insect chorales, piles of tumbling sand, and corroded metal handrail being coaxed to emit a gong-like resonant drone. A series of ramped accumulations of sound are cut away to reveal a thicker set of reverberant drones and humid ambience which swell and grow more in keeping with those minimalists we love so much (Chalk, Coleclough, Svarte Greiner, Xela, Peter Wright, etc.). As infernal as the opening of the album is and as prophetic as the title is, this coda to Take All The Ships is uncannily beautiful, almost hallowed, and certainly imbued with melancholy. A damn great record!
MPEG Stream: "Excerpt 1"
MPEG Stream: "Excerpt 2"
MPEG Stream: "Excerpt 3"

DRIVE LIKE JEHU Yank Crime (Swami) cd 13.98
AT LONG LAST, AGAIN BACK IN PRINT!! Here's what we said seven years ago when Swami first reissued this (and we made it a Record Of The Week):
Sometimes it's hard to believe that certain records just go out of print. I mean who would let the Conet Project go out of print, or Souled American, or the Incredible String Band. It's even weirder when the record is not old or obscure. Then it's usually some bureaucratic red tape or major label bullshit that keeps people from hearing some great record. Such is the case with the second, ultimate release from San Diego's Drive Like Jehu, originally released on Interscope in 1994. A record Allan and Andee and Jim and Sadie and Windy and quite possibly the rest of the AQ staff would rank as one of the best rock records ever! Easily as good/important as Slint's Spiderland. For those who don't know, Drive Like Jehu was fronted by John Reis of Rocket From The Crypt (who has now reissued Yank Crime on his own Swami label) and featured vocalist Rick Farr (his rock name, he's also known as Eric Froberg) who later went on with Reis to play in the Hot Snakes. Drive Like Jehu also just happened to have one of the tightest rhythm sections EVER. E V E R! Yank Crime is a tightly wound record of 'post rock' (before post rock meant watered down instrumental indie rock bullshit) with head nodding, repetitive grooves, propulsive, ultra concise drumming, and some of the most inventive guitar playing we've ever heard. All topped off with Farr's distinctive high pitched vocals (familiar to all you folks who dig the Hot Snakes). The songs are looooong and hypnotic but never boring. The band locks into totally intense, static grooves, that can go on for minutes before exploding into mayhemic bursts of controlled fury. So goddamn good. Anyone who likes the Hot Snakes MUST own this record. Drive Like Jehu is like a hyper charged, heavier, more intense and complex, MUCH BETTER Hot Snakes. Anyone who likes Feuhler or Don Cab or Slint or Engine Kid or almost any post rock will discover what all those other comers had been shooting for. This is IT. Trust us. An automatic AQ "record of the week" selection as soon as we heard it was finally being re-released - with three bonus tracks to boot! ("Bullet Train To Vegas" and "Hand Over Fist" from their Merge label 7", and the original version of "Sinews" from a Cargo/Headhunter compilation.) So even if you have the original you might want to get this reissue for those.
MPEG Stream: "Do You Compute"
MPEG Stream: "Sinews"

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

LOOP A Gilded Eternity (Reactor) 2cd 16.98
The final two installments in the long overdue comprehensive Loop reissue campaign are finally here. World In Your Eyes, the newly expanded 12" collection, reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, and this right here, the final proper Loop album, A Gilded Eternity.
Contemporaries of legendary drug rockers Spacemen 3, Loop took the same sonic influences but rocked a little harder, opting out of the extended soporific drifts the defined the Spacemen, (although they were perfectly capable of blissing out with the best of them) and instead creating looped, krautrock spacejams, that were downright heavy, as well as being space-y, druggy and surprisingly catchy. Guitars were fuzzed out, vocals way down in the mix, reverb and delay EVERYWHERE, riffs often processed into stuttering textures and looped rhythms, the drums alternatingly motorik and skeletal, and pounding and explosive, all wreathed in a glorious otherworldly haze.
A Gilded Eternity, their final record, originally released in 1990, might just be their heaviest and most rocking yet, definitely their tightest, album opener "Vapour" has one of those riffs TO DIE FOR, the main melody is so completely catchy, the song a woozy, repetitive chunk of gloriously propulsive dronerock, less space-y than much of what came before, but definitely more rocking and relentless. the next track "Afterglow" pushes that new heaviness even further, sounding not unlike Swervedriver, big crunchy distorted guitars, pounding tribal drumming, the arrangement a lurching start stop, that slips into cool washed out breakdowns, before exploding right back into the stuttery groove. And so it goes, the band unfurling their masterwork, in a career of masterful works, "Blood" is total abstract minimal krautrock, the guitars stripped away, leaving just a super spare drum part, wrapped all up in processed vocals and swirling effects, another jam that easily could have gone on for 10 more minutes. But then just like that, the band slip back into "Breath Into Me", whipping up another killer riff, the track a looped space garage groove that rivals record opener "Vapour". The record proper ends with the nearly 10 minute "Be Here Now", the Loop version of a slow jam, beginning with some strange processed guitar, the band ease into a languorous groove that drifts druggily through soft focus clouds of lysergic buzz, brief squalls of wild wah guitar, but remaining locked and looped, the weary vocals drifting above the warm endless buzz.
A Guilded Eternity comes with a bonus disc as well, perhaps the least critical of the bonus material, considering it contains 5 demo tracks and 3 Peel Sessions, BUT, it also includes the Loop track "Shot With A Diamond", which happens to be Jim's favorite Loop track alongside "Arc-Light." This track provides the perfect sonic segue between Loop and the sounds guitarist Robert Hampson would later explore with his post Loop solo project Main, an ominous bit of electronic sample laced dronemusic, creepy and haunting and so fucking awesome. Previously only available as a 7" single, and as a bonus track on the original cassette version. Essential!
In fact, all four of these Loop reissues are absolutely required listening for anyone with even the mildest interest in sounds space-y, druggy, metallic and psychedelic!!!
MPEG Stream: "Vapour"
MPEG Stream: "Afterglow"
MPEG Stream: "Be Here Now"
MPEG Stream: "Shot With A Diamond"

UNITS History Of The Units (Community Library) cd 14.98
Moog-enabled synth punk subversion straight outta San Francisco in the late '70s/early '80s, entertaining n' agitating electronic New Wave action excavated and reissued! And it's totally timely considering how many bands in today's scene would so love to sound like this.
We won't pretend we were familiar with The Units before this fantastic anthology album showed up. Perhaps we'd heard the name before (or maybe we were confusing 'em with ol' Jandek's 1978 debut album, also under the name The Units), but we knew nothing about this band 'til we heard this disc a few weeks ago. And as soon as we did, it went into heavy rotation here at the store. These Units were definitely a important piece of San Francisco punk/new wave history, but just a bit before our time. Well, not Aquarius's time, just us folks who work here now! Actually, a close reading of the thanks list in the cd booklet will find a shout out to Aquarius, 'cause (if you didn't know) Aquarius was THEE punk/new wave record store in San Francisco in the '70s... (Which reminds us, we've got to get more of our history up on the AQ website.) And, in fact, The Units' debut lp Digital Stimulation was the very first release on seminal SF indie 415 Records (who had their biggest hit with Romeo Void), a label run in part by Aquarius' owners at the time. So this most certainly isn't the first time that The Units music has been blasting regularly in the Aquarius shop, it's just been a few years, is all.
Putting things in proper place/time/scene perspective, this archival disc starts off with an audio snippet of the late SF punk "godfather" Dirk Dirksen on stage at Mabuhay Gardens, good-naturedly mocking both The Units (accidentally referring to them by the name of another band, the Zeros) and their cheering fans (with the sardonic comment "obviously, people with as little taste as yourself would become ecstatic over such average talent"). Then, making us ecstatic, twenty tracks of prime Units music follows, The History Of The Units containing most all of the tracks from their 1980 415 Records album Digital Stimulation as well as a handful of stuff taken from early 7"s and demo tapes, as well as more experimental pieces recorded for film soundtracks and art happenings and other ephemera.
Not unlike Devo, The Units had a concept thing going, all about a critique of alienated modern industrial society, dehumanizing conformity, and corporate culture, with songs like "Cannibals" and "Work". Perhaps perversely choosing to use machines to make their point, The Units tried to take the human element out of the rock band equation, preferring for instance to project their own propaganda films rather than allow the audience to focus on a frontperson. And yes, they do also sound quite bit like Devo at times, which is way okay by us!
Their synth-obsession was also in part an anti-guitar thing, a reaction to the mainstream. In fact, they took their anti-guitar philosophy to the extreme of not only having a "stamp out guitars" logo, but also making fake guitars out of plywood to smash on stage, while letting their synths play on "cruise control". So definitely The Units were highly conceptual, art schoolish, but not academic - the liner notes are clear that the idea was to be an all-synth band that "kicks ass" (the full quote being: ""I wanted an all synthesizer band... and not some fucking polite, socially acceptable electronic experiment in academia. I didn't want a doctorate in electronic doodling. No, I'm talking about a synth band that kicks ass!") and according to what we're hearing here, they succeeded. And they were not without contemporaries. There were The Screamers, Nervous Gender, and of course Devo; all of whom wanted to take the synthesizer into punk. For many of the Units tracks, it would very easy to replace the lead synth lines with guitars and have an equally kick ass rock song, but the fact is that these are Moog-powered cuts which do oscillate between a quirky sensibility with angular chops and a full-throttle punk car-crash. If you would think the former finds the Units sounding like Devo and the latter like the Screamers, you'd be right!
Yes indeed, the songs on this disc range from urgent Devo-esque pop punk and Screamers-y rants to moody proto-'80s dance tracks to more abstract, instrumental, rhythmic/textural electronic pieces like "Tight Fit" and "East West". There's loads of electric energy, some goofy humor, and certainly serious intent. So many gems here, incorporating buzzing droning distorted synths, propulsively skittering drum beats, and monotone vocals (both male and female).
Their incredible singles "Cannibals" (a tempestuous, driving song that was pure '70s punk), "High Pressure Days", and "Warm Moving Bodies," are prominently featured here, all of which were impressively catchy. Their ability to write these hooks earned them a deal with Epic, who released two seminal 12" singles (which couldn't be licensed for this compilation) and has been sitting on another collection of recordings since 1983. But beyond the hook, the Units were plenty weird, as seen in their peculiar lullaby melodies on "Red" which almost comes across like a Rodd Keith song-poem with a very sparse arrangement. Despite the band's curses toward academic music, a few choice intertwining moments of the Units minimalist grooves come awfully close to sounding like a punked out Terry Riley! Hardly polite music!
Other selections here include the cold wave weird science of "Digital Stimulation", the gloriously grinding downer melody of "Contemporary Emotion" (apparently a cover, a song by some contemporaneous hard rock band we've never heard of called Trakstod Station), and there's even an ode to our very neighborhood, "The Mission Is Bitchin", with lyrics about burritos and marijuana!
Of course it's all a bit dated, of its era, and that's part of the charm... but like we said, a lot of this also sounds like it could be put out by a band today, since everything old is new again and the '80s New Wave / synth thing is a current retro craze. Definitely this is a good time for The Units to be reissued!
And Community Library have done a really nice job of it, the gatefold cd sleeve containing a thick 32 page cd booklet with elaborate colorful collage style liner notes by bandleader Scott "Dr. Tex Nology" Ryser, a Units manifesto of sorts, he also talks about the wild and crazy San Francisco of the '70s/early '80s era, and also there's several pages of old fliers for Units gigs at the Fab Mab and other SF punk venues... we noticed one for the Warfield too, with The Units opening for OMD and Gary Numan. Also shows with Romeo Void, Dead Boys, Soft Cell, Psychedelic Furs, Dead Kennedys, Crime, Screamers, Iggy Pop, the Police, Tuxedomoon... Definitely makes us young 'uns wish we'd been around in SF back then. (Another note about the packaging, it says copyright 2007 on the back but that that's a mistake, it's when the artwork was initially prepared, this is indeed a brand new 2009 release, with also a vinyl version upcoming as well, not sure when, though.)
MPEG Stream: "Cannibals"
MPEG Stream: "Warm Moving Bodies"
MPEG Stream: "i Night"
MPEG Stream: "East West"

SHOEMAKER, MATT Erosion Of The Analogous Eye (Helen Scarsdale) cd 14.98
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"

KAHN, JASON Vanishing Point (23five Incorporated) 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 jumping off points into this excellent album.
MPEG Stream: "Extract 1"
MPEG Stream: "Extract 2"

PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED Second Edition (4 Men With Beards) 2lp 22.00
NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL!!!
It's a little bit of aQuarius history that none of the current staff have been here long enough to remember, yet stories about the initial arrival of the Sex Pistol's Nevermind The Bollocks LP at aQuarius recOrds back in 1977 occasionally arise in conversations with our old school customers. By now it's probably as factual as any urban myth; but as it makes for such a great story, we're not going to question it. Here it is, and there may be a grain of truth in here somewhere...
With record distribution back then even less streamlined than it is today, aQuarius resorted to using an importer to ship copies of Nevermind The Bollocks from England. For some reason they were flown from London to Los Angeles, not SF, and thus someone had to drive the boxes up from LA. This shipping detour gave the store the opportunity to throw a big party in anticipation of the record's arrival, with attendees rumored to include Crime and the Residents (in full Eyeball costumes squeezed the confines of aQuarius' then Castro Street location). To heighten the suspense, aQuarius had arranged with the driver of the truck to stop and call up the store periodically to let everybody know the eagerly anticipated punk album's progress up the I-5: "Just passed Bakersfield." "Made it through Coalinga." "Yup, I'm in Tracy."
Yet, we feel the story could end with the truck crashing somewhere near Pleasanton, as we've never felt that The Sex Pistols' music lived up to their massive cultural cache and spectacular publicity stunts. John Lydon's uncomfortable fixed stare, sneered cultural heresies, and theatrical madness (which, in fact, was lifted from Richard Burton's performances as King Lear) always appeared to be destined for greater things than the Pistol's musically thuggish simplicity. Within The Sex Pistols, John Lydon had control over the Pistol's syntax, spewing threats against royalty and decent society at large; but there was little room (and even less ability) to explore the far more challenging proposition of igniting the sound of Lee Perry and Can with the powderkeg of punk. Internal politics and Malcolm McLaren aside, Rotten needed to form Public Image Limited.
Flanked by Keith Levene on guitar and Jah Wobble on bass, Lydon began PiL with two perfectly complementary musicians to pursue his aesthetic goals, as Levene's spindly shards of metallic guitar splatter acted as the textural counterpoint to the rhythmic centrality of Wobble's low-slung dub basslines. While this line-up inevitably imploded (and with it the success of Public Image Limited), the Lydon / Levene / Wobble core for PiL reached its creative apex during their second album, originally released back in 1979 as a 3LP housed in a metal film container. PiL's second, more economical pressing of the self-evidently titled Metal Box garnered an equally self-evident title Second Edition. As a whole, this album hasn't easily been upstaged in its synthesis of dub production techniques, stealthy disco grooves, and punk antagonism bathed in Situationist critique. Second Edition opens with Wobble's huge rolling bass in "Albatross" which finds Lydon straining to sing with a swooping baritone to match the song's unwavering plod. Yet Lydon's viperous snarl returns for the rest of the album, which picks up the pace considerably in building their signature 'death disco' sound. All around Second Edition is an unnerving, complex album that was never the cultural force Nevermind The Bollocks was but is clearly the artistic masterpiece in Lydon's career and one of the quintessential post-punk albums.
Thus, Second Edition is highly recommended, if not required listening.
MPEG Stream: "Albatross"
MPEG Stream: "Careering"
MPEG Stream: "Memories"

LOOP World In Your Eyes (Reactor) 3cd 22.00
Finally!! Ever since the first two Loop records got the deluxe multidisc reissue treatment, we've been anxiously awaiting the last two, their final record A Gilded Eternity, and this one right here, many folks around here's favorite, a compilation of 12"s called World In Your Eyes. Originally released in 1987, the updated World In Your Eyes is even better, a TRIPLE disc collection of 12"s, 7"s, bonus tracks, unreleased tracks, demos, and covers.
Seemingly always (unfairly) overshadowed by their sonic brethren the Spacemen 3, Loop managed to give the drugged out drone rock thing their own distinct spin, infusing some serious krautrock mesmer and some metallic muscle into their slow burning drones and effects drenched psychrock workouts. Slipping easily from super dreamy one riff blown out hypno rock, to in-the-red space garage pound, to hushed soft focus inner space drift, Loop were masters of modern psychedelia.
Take the 10 minute drug drift of "Burning World", with its processed guitar chug, the swirling clouds of effects, the blooping bass, the motorik drums, like the perfect mix of Can and Hawkwind. Or "Brittle Head Girl", which sounded like a spacier more tripped out Galaxie 500, its lazy drawled vocals, and woozy guitar hook, and that irresistible bassline. Or "I'll Take You There", a super fuzzed out bit of garage-y space groove, the band easily out spacing the Spacemen themselves. We could probably go track by track, every one here is a gem, and the extras! Holy shit. Where to start? Besides a plethora of demos, live tracks and the like, this collection also includes some incredible covers, A spaced out version of a Pop Group track, Neil Young's "Cinammon Girl", Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" and Can's "Mother Sky (which Andee sez is better than the original, yeah we know, we know). Then there's the Arc-Lite 12" that takes up the first half of the third disc, one of our favorite Loop eps, and the track "Arc-Lite (Sonar)" is one of the best Loop jams ever, with its relentless riffing, it's strange flurries of tribal drumming, the echo drenched vox and the swooping streaks of effects, a 4 minute song that could easily have been ten times that. The song is reimagined as the "(Radar)" version, getting sort of supercharged, heavier and fleshier, less spare and skeletal and jangly than the original. There's a third version still, that gets all remixed into something less space rocky and more tripped out and dizzying. Let's not forget the ten minute "Sunburst", a sprawling bit of lysergic minimal krautdrone, woozy and druggy and slow burning. There's also the legendary live Prisma Europa Live 12", and finally, to top it all off, Loop's Godflesh cover, from their Loopflesh split 7", where each band covered the other, one of our Holy Grail 7"s, if anyone out there has one they can part with, we will be forever in your debt, and of course it's a killer, Godflesh's "Like Rats" transformed into something much spacier but no less menacing, in fact, it's most definitely the heaviest meanest slab of Loop-age ever, while still retaining plenty of that Loop-ed FX drenched shimmer. So goddamn GREAT.
These reissues have been shuffling tracks around enough to cause a little confusion, as some of the tracks on the original issue of WIYE are left off here, but are tacked on elsewhere on the other reissues, and disc 3 here seems like it could have been included on the Gilded Eternity disc as this disc highlights one of our favorite Loop tracks, the above mentioned Arc-Light, originally a 1989 single, which was lumped onto the cd edition of A Gilded Eternity which came out a year later in 1990. But who really cares, as long as it's all here, and it's ALL here, and then some. Space rock and drone rock and psychedelic rock fanatics should buy all four, one of the most supremely transcendent and kick ass bodies of work in rock. Hyperbole? We think NOT.
Killer packaging, three paper sleeves with various reproductions of the included 12"s, all housed in a slipcover, with a booklet that includes track listings credits, but sadly, not much in the way of liner notes.
MPEG Stream: "Head On"
MPEG Stream: "Burning World"
MPEG Stream: "Mother Sky"
MPEG Stream: "Pink Moon"
MPEG Stream: "Cinnamon Girl"
MPEG Stream: "Arc-Lite (Sonar)"

INFINITE BODY / EMACIATOR split (Monorail Trespassing) lp 11.98
This is a really nice split LP from two up-and-comers in the ever blossoming US post-noise scene. Infinite Body is the work of Kyle Parker, who constructs sustained swarms of sun-blinding guitar noise that sparkles upon undulating surfaces from crosshatched delay patterns. Belong and White Rainbow stand as Parker's closest neighbors, yet his crystal cracked noise enjoys a knife sharpening quality to the overblown distortion that nudges the work just a little bit outside the realm of post-shoegazing psychedelics. A brief Devendra Banhart-like falsetto recorded on a crappy tape recorder emerges between two extended fuzz tracks as a teasing piece of emotional excess despite its brevity of barely 15 seconds.
It's nice to hear more from Emaciator (aka Jon Borges), who had blown us away with his Reflection 2lp not that long ago. Like Parker's Infinite Body, Emaciator transmits a constant stream of overblown noise, but sourced from analog synth and crusty filter boxes. Deftly transitioning through his distorted, shimmering drone with a dense harmonic interplay and almost subliminal melodic passages, Borges creates an entrancing and hypnotic piece that's equal parts Birchville Cat Motel and LaMonte Young. As his blizzard of electricity draws to an end, Borges picks up the guitar with a sadly elliptical chord that winds down gradually.
Excellent stuff to be sure!

ALUK TODOLO Finsternis (Utech Records) cd 14.98
It's been two long years we've been waiting for this, another mysterious rhythmic communique from French blackened post krautrock alchemists Aluk Todolo. But it's not like they've been idle. Since 2007's Descension, two thirds of Aluk Todolo have recorded a record and toured the world as Gunslingers, and all of Aluk Todolo do double duty in French black metallers Diamatregon, who recently released a new full length on tUMULt called Crossroad.
But as much as we love those other two bands, and we do, there will always be something magical about the strange sonic world Aluk Todolo are able to conjure up. Especially considering they're a three piece, a power trio, drums, guitar, bass. Nothing else, no synths, no strings, just the basic rock band instruments. It's testament to the power these three wield, that they can do so much with so little. Or more accurately, so little with so little. As the music of Aluk Todolo, is disarmingly simple, subtle and minimal, but in its minimalism, lies its power. The power of rhythm, of texture, of mood, these five long pieces are so evocative, so expressive and strangely emotional. Even at its most spare and skeletal, the sound is palpable, almost a physical presence, which is surprising again considering just how stripped down Finsternis actually is.
Descension, Aluk Todolo's debut, was heavy and space-y and rhythmic, we described it as a buzz-less black metal, some of the songs were thick and caustic, others were loping and motorik, but on Finsternis, it's as if the band decided to strip away all the extraneous sounds, leaving just the core, the root, the heart of the music, and that heart beats out a simple, hypnotic rhythm.
The record is split into 4 parts, with a brief interlude, but those four parts are split into two distinct movements. The first, which comprises the first two parts, is much of what we described above, simple skeletal rhythms, surrounded by minimal guitar whir, bursts of grinding distortion, fragmented jangle, keening feedback, but it's all about the rhythm. After a brief burst of mathy chaos, the track reverts to its initial rhythm, this time the bass more prominent, fuzzy, distorted, woozy and mesmerizing, the band locked in tight, the bass and drums solid and unwavering, while the guitar sings in the background, moaning and keening and howling, giving the track an ominous otherworldly vibe, a trudge across some hostile alien landscape, a weary, washed out deathmarch.
Then the interlude, a haunting abstract percussive sprawl, simple percussive thuds set amidst a sea of warped distorted low end, bits of glitch and hiss, and grinding shards of industrial clatter, which gives way to the second, noisier movement, the drums transformed into a simple machinelike pound, snare and cymbal crashing over and over and over, the guitars whipped into a frenzy of blurred buzz and warped swirling blackened chaos, what at first sounds noisy and harsh, soon reveals itself as strangely textural, and as hypnotic as the more stripped down first movement, the guitars slip from monochromatic whir, to insectoid black metal riffing, constantly swirling around the motorik pound and pummel, the final track finds the guitars slipping into ever higher registers, blissing out, laced with feedback, smoothing out into warm smears and blurs, before a brief deconstruction, and a surprisingly tranquil last few minutes, the drums back to a woozy lope, the guitar offering up warm swells and shimmering thrum, the bass throbbing beneath, eventually stumbling to a halt in a cloud of creaking metals and static-like tape hiss. Woah.
Just like Descension, Finsternis is an intense and emotional journey through sound, a haunting and hard to describe exploration of rhythm, mood and texture, a slow shifting otherworld defined by This Heat, Geronimo, Laddio Bolocko, Can, Faust, accessible only via the three shadowy figures that make up Aluk Todolo, whose magic and mystery has been rendered in these glorious black rhythms.
Housed in a multi panel jacket with super striking original artwork by Stephen Kasner, on the always impressive Utech label (whose other two new releases, from Gog and Olivier Dumont, we'll review on the next list, although we do have both in stock if you want 'em, and we're fairly sure you do!).
MPEG Stream: "Premier Contact"
MPEG Stream: "Deuxieme Contact"
MPEG Stream: "Totalite"

FIELD, THE Yesterday And Today (Anti / Kompakt) cd 15.98
The Field's 2007 album From Here We Go Sublime caught many people by surprise, and we were happy to find ourselves included in that crowd of Field supporters. This was a minimal techno record playing the part of a pop album, through sleights of hand that extracted the sappiest moments of the '80s without appearing the part of the ironist. In pixel-painted blurs of entrancing melodies and soothing ambient warmth, The Field offered nostalgia without having a damn Lionel Richie song stuck in your head. Yup, one of the more memorable samples from From Here We Go Sublime was a wistful guitar lead from Richie's "Hello." In a lot of ways, The Field reached a pinnacle for Kompakt's Pop Ambient strategies, easily surpassing perhaps the album that started it all: Gas' Pop.
Jump two years down the line and several trips around the world, The Field returns with a second album that shouldn't disappoint those who were held rapt by the debut. Yesterday and Today has much of the restrained crescendos of velvety hypnosis grafted onto the steel girds of German engineered techno. Yes, we do know that The Field's Axel Willner is from Sweden, but the heart and soul of the motorik pulse is firmly rooted in Germany. Neu!, Kraftwerk, Cluster, Basic Channel, and of course, Kompakt are the obvious references in the formal structures of The Field, with his source material being those misty-eyed remembrances of music's past. If there are specific samples to be recognized in Yesterday and Today, they are not overt and obvious; but the sentiment is still the same. Nice.
The vinyl version includes a cd of the album as well!
MPEG Stream: "Leave It"
MPEG Stream: "I Have The Moon, You Have The Internet"
MPEG Stream: "Yesterday & Today"

FIELD, THE Yesterday And Today (Anti / Kompakt) 2lp+cd 19.98
The Field's 2007 album From Here We Go Sublime caught many people by surprise, and we were happy to find ourselves included in that crowd of Field supporters. This was a minimal techno record playing the part of a pop album, through sleights of hand that extracted the sappiest moments of the '80s without appearing the part of the ironist. In pixel-painted blurs of entrancing melodies and soothing ambient warmth, The Field offered nostalgia without having a damn Lionel Richie song stuck in your head. Yup, one of the more memorable samples from From Here We Go Sublime was a wistful guitar lead from Richie's "Hello." In a lot of ways, The Field reached a pinnacle for Kompakt's Pop Ambient strategies, easily surpassing perhaps the album that started it all: Gas' Pop.
Jump two years down the line and several trips around the world, The Field returns with a second album that shouldn't disappoint those who were held rapt by the debut. Yesterday and Today has much of the restrained crescendos of velvety hypnosis grafted onto the steel girds of German engineered techno. Yes, we do know that The Field's Axel Willner is from Sweden, but the heart and soul of the motorik pulse is firmly rooted in Germany. Neu!, Kraftwerk, Cluster, Basic Channel, and of course, Kompakt are the obvious references in the formal structures of The Field, with his source material being those misty-eyed remembrances of music's past. If there are specific samples to be recognized in Yesterday and Today, they are not overt and obvious; but the sentiment is still the same. Nice.
The vinyl version includes a cd of the album as well!
MPEG Stream: "Leave It"
MPEG Stream: "I Have The Moon, You Have The Internet"
MPEG Stream: "Yesterday & Today"

HOLLOWAY, IAN She Loves Looking At The Sky (Quiet World) cd-r 13.98
From the onset of this choice release, British drone-centrist Ian Holloway engages in a long-staring contest upon the horizon. Through his undulating sustained tones that gradually contort and shift in timbre and clarity, Holloway sets his attention on sun-flecked hazes upon faraway vistas, watery mirages, and sunblind hallucinations. These tones are more on par with the best work from the Ora / Monos axis, which is not surprising considering that Holloway has worked with Darren Tate on a number of occasions in the past. But not before long, he plunges this piece deep into the center of the earth, with cavernous reverberations of actionist gestures that have some of the acoustic doom properties that we have come to expect from Svarte Greiner and Xela. The sinewy tones give way to these heavy clanks and jarring noises swaddled in the long-decay reverb of what we could imagine to be a subterranean sewer, or perhaps a massive cave chamber, or some abandoned industrial warehouse. As Holloway puts aside his bricks and chunks of metal, the earlier gilded tones make their reprise amidst a distant set of bird songs and softly struck hand bells. One of the better pieces to emerge from Holloway's own Quiet World imprint, and this one is limited to just 80 copies.
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 1"
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 2"

EMACIATOR Reflection (Accidie) 2lp 17.98
Emaciator is the work of LA floorcore miserablist Jon Borges, who previously spat out gnarled cassettes galore as Pedestrian Deposit and Monorail Trespassing; and as Emaciator he's got a couple releases on Students Of Decay and Not Not Fun. But damn, this is the one for sure as Borges channels the psychic wasteland of Southern California through these four sides of vinyl for dour drones laced with ghostly melodies and grimly rendered distortion. The first side could be the logical extension of the shortened program that Emeralds gave us on Solar Bridge with an earthmoving hum emanating throughout the track amidst the linear movement of radioscopic static and a mournful loop of descending melodies. Throughout the track, these elements intertwine, build, fade, collapse, resurface, and self-immolate all at once. Quite stunning. Side B radiates with a fluorescent glow of simmering white noise softened just enough to take the edge off while uneasy rippled of low end frequencies push to the surface. The third side gets far more toxic in the blistering analog synth tones pushed through distortion boxes, but Borges still manages to push forward one of his urgent yet depressive phasing tones through the heavy wall of static. Very much on par with the classic Broken Flag sound. The fourth is a reprise of the first side (get it, the title is Reflection), with that looping melody at first appearing like a Basinski piece of hypnogogia, but gradually Borges suffocates that loop through at atomizing cascade of distortion. One of the most exhilarating if tragic pieces of noise+drone we've heard in quite a long time. Limited to a mere 300 copies!

COLD CAVE Etsel And Ruby (What's Your Rupture?) 12" 11.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
On one end of the Cold Cave spectrum, there is the blistering terror of low-fi electronics with sparse hints of new wave flecked through a sound better suited to Wolf Eyes; and on the other, Cold Cave can effortlessly toss out a darkly pop-eyed, minimal wave gem that wouldn't out of place next to Depeche Mode or Gary Numan. So far, Cold Cave (aka Wes Eisold) has not done us wrong no matter what he ends up producing. The hyper limited Etsel And Ruby 12" is of the latter, poppier sensibility, in the footsteps of the terminally catchy single The Trees Grew Emotions And Died from 2008. The production values here are a little higher than the gutter-punk scratchiness found on the Cremations collection; and while punchier drum machines and upfront vocals give Cold Cave a gloss with a broader appeal, we seriously hope that he doesn't leave the nastier sound behind.
The A side "Love Comes Close" is a jangly, jaunty number that could very well be a lost track from The Cure's The Head On The Door, with Eisold's croon almost sounding like Stephin Merritt. The first of two B sides finds Eisold handing over the vocal duties to an unknown female singer, whose detached, cold vocals fit perfectly with the Cure / Joy Division basslines laced around the darkened electronics. The cut is like the best Fad Gadget song you've never heard before, with an insistent electroid melody that builds and builds throughout the track. Great stuff. Limited to 300 copies!!! Available only from the label and right here at aQ!

COLD CAVE Cremations (Hospital) cd 14.98
Cremations is a collection of previously released tracks from the darling noisenik / minimal wave project Cold Cave, the bulk of which had been so painfully limited that they might as well have not been at all. The first three cuts should be familiar to most Aquarius readers, being from Cold Cave's awesome 7" single Painted Nails. The other tracks came from a cassette and an LP, both of which Cold Cave's Wes Eisold released through his Heartworm Press as editions of 100 in 2009 and 2007 respectively. The description we gave to the Painted Nails single is still apt: a morose and melodic blast of blown out noise-wave, a corrosive chunk of Cure-meets-Whitehouse or New Order-meets-Wolf Eyes. The tracks that follow the Painted Nails single on this collection certainly live up to the hype of that single, standing as lo-fi, scribbled new wave tunes for simple bass-synth lines, eerie-as-hell melodies, tinny drum machines, and alienated vocals with plenty of megaphone noise and 4-track scratchiness embedded into the mix. Cold Cave also tosses in some incidental music tracks which sort of sound like the interludes from Christian Death's Elektra Descending redone for Brian Eno's Music for Airports. It should be noted that none of the tracks here have been fleshed out like the incredible The Trees Grew Emotions And Died 12" which came and went a couple months back, and we don't mean that as a negative. Seriously, how many times have we championed the shittiest recordings on the crappiest media: flexi-disc, microcassette, wire recordings, shortwave, etc. And much of Cold Cave's grit and grime on Cremations appeals to that very aesthetic of ours. In fact a lot of these tracks remind us of some of our favorite electronic punk acts of the new dark age: The Screamers, Primitive Calculators, early Severed Heads, Dark Day, etc. You won't just be hearing it from us: this is incredible!
(This IS coming out on vinyl too, eventually, but we have no date for that yet...)
MPEG Stream: "Sex Ads"
MPEG Stream: "Heavenly Metals"
MPEG Stream: "Gates"
MPEG Stream: "Swallow The Sun"

HTRK Marry Me Tonight (Blast First Petite) cd 17.98
When was the last time anyone made a Sisters Of Mercy reference and meant it as a wholehearted compliment? Well, that's definitely the case for HTRK (pronounced Haterock, FYI) as this Melbourne trio adopts a bleaker than black stance through their psychosexual dirges. With slinky Goth basslines, ghostly coldwave electronics, and skeletal slow-mo drum machine pulses, HTRK's arrangements mirror those that the Sisters Of Mercy produced for The Reptile House EP (which found them at their slowest, creepiest, and most anti-pop). But instead of Andrew Eldritch and his affected baritone, the singer for HTRK is Jonnine Clementine Standish whose comatose droning is seductive and compelling in its own right. She adopts the roles as the co-dependent, the broken-hearted, the addicted, the master, the servant, and the lonely, all delivered in Lydia Lunch's "I Fell In Love With A Ghost" dispassionate, zombified mantra. On the track "Rent Boy", Standish breaks out of that montone delivery, bellowing this dark ballad that comes across more like PJ Harvey than before. We have to wonder if the title is a reference to the These Immortal Souls track "Marry Me," penned by the former Birthday Party guitarist Roland S. Howard who happens to have produced this record and has sprinkled his narcotized swamp rock guitar throughout. No matter if it is or if it isn't, Howard's voodoo production for HTRK certainly gives them that Birthday Party feel. Great, very dark stuff for sure!
MPEG Stream: "Ha"
MPEG Stream: "Rent Boy"
MPEG Stream: "Fascinator"

MURRAY, BRENDAN s/t (Students Of Decay) cd 23.00
It's always exciting to get a new disc of droning mystery from soundmaker Brendan Murray. We went pretty nuts for past releases, which is saying something as it takes a lot these days for a drone record to really get to us. And for a drone artist to consistantly hold our attention record after record. Of course we love drones, so as a sound, we're as likely to be entranced by a huge humming piece of machinery as a meticulously crafted chunk of ultra minimalist dronemusic (hmmm, what exactly does that say about us?), but we're of course partial to the artists who can deftly fashion drones into new and fascinating shapes, or who create music using drones as just one of many elements.
Which is precisely what makes Murray's music so special, just that, it's incredibly musical. He's perfctly capable of kicking up a SUNNO)))-like wall of downtuned dirge, or fashion a skeletal bit of hushed murmur, but even then he infuses those all to common sounds with strange melodies, and abstract textures, transforms simple tones and chords into strange sprawling beasts, sounds become actual songs, with melodies and parts, distinct beginnings and ends, each song is a journey, through thick fields of warm hissy blur, caustic crumbling crunch, chiming crystalline shimmer, deep machine-like industrial whir, clangy and clattery abstract angular guitar flecked noise rock, very Dead C here and there, gorgeously murky and lo-fi, and weirdly looped sounding, intense wall of pink noise whir and billowing clouds of near static organ hum. Dark and dense and mysterious and intense, but always so so gorgeous.
While they last, we have the limited version, that comes with a bonus cd-r, featuring a 30 minute live performance recorded last year, a super intense, ultra heavy exploration of some seriously woofer destroying bassiness. Deep rumbling whirs, sprawling into massive reverbeating slabs of black hole low end. Wow.
MPEG Stream: "Sleeprunning"
MPEG Stream: "From The Melted Past"

IRR. APP. (EXT.) Kreiselwelle (The Helen Scarsdale Agency) cd 14.98
Kreiselwelle is the conclusion to a superb trilogy from irr. app. (ext.) who used the words, philosophies, and eccentricities of Wilhelm Reich as the springboard into a realm of post-Surrealist, post-industrialist, post-drone arena of sound design. While a prominent European psychoanalyst, whose ideas could be seen as an occasional counterpoint to those of Freud, Reich may be best known for his parascientific research into Orgone energy, which he claimed was central and unifying force of life throughout the universe. Much of this latter research has been discredited and unfortunately shed a cloud of incredulity upon his psychoanalytic work. While Reich's claims of cloud-busting and orgone therapy offer particularly strong metaphors, M.S. Waldron - the principle architect to irr. app. (ext.) - has looked more to the psychological aspects of Reich's work. Kreiselwelle translates from the German as spiral wave or gyroscopic wave, and points to the similarities which Reich had noted in the structures of microscopic organisms, turbulent wave patterns, and spiral-arm galaxies.
Through this trilogy (which also includes Ozeanische Gefuhle and Cosmic Superimposition), Waldron mirrors Reich's early cosmology through a compositional fluidity that alludes to contemporary drone fascination, constructed through overlapping collages, occluded field recordings, sustained tones from atypical instruments, and crosshatched synthetic noises. All three of these albums were sourced from the same set of field recordings, but each detours into its own particular wandering. Kreiselwelle begins with a very slow hypnotic strum across a detuned guitar with liquid tactility and a warped distance buzz filling in the gaps. Grand sweeps of slashing drones that could originate from an echoing chainsaw deep in the woods forms an unlikely crescendo with sympathetic tones, only to collapse into the softened white noise of cars passing by. Soon after, a rhythmic tapping of agitated electronics forms a motorik rhythm against the tapestry of audio fluidity, with all of the electro-shock bursts of a tesla coil. This in turn morphs into a cauldron of slow locomotive rumbling, which beget one of many glassine drones that float throughout Kreiselwelle. For fans of any of work of Nurse With Wound (after all Mr. Waldron is in the NWW touring ensemble!), H.N.A.S., and the more esoteric recordings of Organum; and certainly of note for those of you taken by Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words, Xela, Svarte Greiner, Expo '70, Emeralds, or any of the darker, weirder, more fucked-up drone ensembles of recent days. Very highly recommended!
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 1"
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 2"
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 3"

DEAD LETTERS SPELL OUT DEAD WORDS Lost In Reflections (Ideal / Fang Bomb / Release The Bats) lp+7" 22.00
NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL!!! This recent Record Of The Week now on lp, lp AND 7" to be exact, as it was too much music to fit on a single lp. Fancy packaging, thick vinyl, very swank, and of course very limited!
For years now, the cryptically (and coolly) monickered Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words has been quietly and consistently releasing some of the most haunting and beautiful minimal dronemusic we've heard, a blend of soft skittery glitch, brooding guitar loops, deeeeeep drone, dreamy drift, and experimental post-everything soundscaping, that is as good if not better than anything produced by the legion of overhyped sound makers constantly fawned over by the public and press alike. We've only managed to review two DLSODW releases so far, both sadly out of print now, but the release of this new one, quite possibly his best, seemed like the perfect opportunity to finally throw our weight behind Dead Letters, and hopefully open some ears to these mysterious and wondrous sounds, and reveal to the hordes of dronelords and free music freeks just what they've been missing.
Dead Letters is the work of Swedish musician Thomas Ekelund, and over the years, his music has drifted from extreme near silent ultra minimalism, to warm whirring dronescapes to muted crunch and clatter to shimmering underwater ambience, but on Lost In Reflections, all of those elements are present, in lesser amounts, the perfect distillation of a lifetime of sounds, here presented more as background then the main event, that main event here being the guitar. Each of the six tracks, however distorted or refracted or fragmented or obfuscated, seems to be borne of the guitar, with Ekelund working his mysterious alchemy and transforming those buzzing steel strings into wholly new shapes.
The opener, "This Room Seems Empty Without You" held us spellbound from the very first few seconds, a bit of reverby guitar, moody and minor key, very post rock, slow core and abstract, the notes hovering in a dark expanse of overtones and deep low end shimmer, the guitar unfurling gradually, subtly processed, peppered with a strange percussive glitch, that gives the music a sort of downtempo vibe, still droney and abstract and free, but with a little Portishead or Bowery Electric mixed in. The glitches coalesce into an almost-rhythm, the end result is some strange minimal instrumental downtuned Galaxie 500 mixed with the brooding barely there drift of Bohren, and a sort of late night lugubrious skitter.
The next track, "Lost & Losing", takes a whole 'nother tack, beginning with bits of scrape and creak, amp buzz, muted harmonics, a subtly percussive textural soundscape, quietly and slowly surrounded by a gorgeously hazy sea of sun spots and solar flares, taking the shoegaze-y shimmer of Nadja and Jesu and dialing it way back, until it's a glimmering sheet of prismatic buzz, all the while those strange sounds from the song's beginning continuing to weave a buried barely there rhythm, everything locked into deep woozy bleary eyed swells.
We have the tendency to go song by song, describing the sound of each, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but often it's not just the sound, it's the mood and the vibe and the feel and the deft and delicate arrangement of those sounds. And Ekelund is a master, taking simple strummed guitars, and wrapping them in a gauzy patina of blur buzz, locking the original riff into a loop, and then gently adding bit of melody, bits of texture, turning something simple into something complex and gorgeous, there are hints of Earth all over Lost In Reflections as well, a particularly abstract bit of fuzzy drift, will suddenly part to reveal a dark elegiac guitar line, slowed way down, creating some sort of underwater blues, while elsewhere, the twang and pluck of the guitar strings is wreathed in sonic sunlight, the sounds allowed to overlap and tangle up, the notes and melodies all wound up, spinning slowly and spitting out sparks, bits of glitch and high end tones, streaks of feedback, until those sounds are smeared into one long undulating stretch, and over the top a string of chiming notes are hung like Christmas lights on a tree, the, guitar often disappearing completely, leaving just a bit of twang to hover and then fade away.
The final track is a monster, nearly 20 minutes, imagine Nadja, Merzbow and Tim Hecker covering Arvo Part, and you might be close. This is some sort of soft noise, blindingly effulgent upper register ur-drone chorale, the streaks and shards of guitars sound like voices, the distortion thick, the effects crumbling and swirling, a glancing listen reveals a wall of sound, but headphones are like a diving bell, allowing us to sink into this roiling sonic sea, that seems to stretch out forever, bottomless and endless, part way through, the song changes shape, that which constituted the whole of the sound up until that point is relegated to a background for these new sounds, a sweeping, loping epic bit of post rock, still washed out and woozy, but with a simple propulsive rhythm, and a gorgeously melodic chiming central riff, darkly fervent and slightly ominous and hauntingly epic, the swirling sounds around those new elements growing more frenetic, thickening, while the song just grows and grows, sprawls and expands, as if any second the heavens will open and the song will become the sonic manifestation of the rapture. So totally intense and powerful and moving and majestic, and simply breathtaking.
MPEG Stream: "This Room Seems Empty Without You"
MPEG Stream: "Lost & Losing"
MPEG Stream: "What I Wouldn't Give To Feel Alive"

CULTURAL AMNESIA Enormous Savages Enlarged (Klanggalerie) cd 21.00
Cultural Amnesia would have certainly disappeared entirely, but one of the band's earliest supporters was an 18 year old kid named Geoff Rushton, who later changed his name to John Balance when he formed Coil in 1983 (the same year that Cultural Amnesia ceased activities). Cultural Amnesia managed three cassettes, some compilation tracks, and a half-finished album during that time period, with one of those cassettes being released through Rushton's Hearsay And Heresy label. In all likelihood, Coil completists had come across these cassettes and brought them to light over two decades later. Vinyl On Demand was responsible for one of the anthologies of Cultural Amnesia material, but the better collection was Enormous Savages first released on vinyl by Anna Logue in 2006. This cd version through Klanggalerie flushes out the comp with five tracks recorded in recent years, now that they've gotten back together.
Had it not been for their early demise, this was a band that could have followed in the footsteps of Throbbing Gristle, Clock DVA, Dome, and Cabaret Voltaire circa 1981, as a blank austerity followed through the eccentric darkness grafted onto post-punk songs bristling with inventive if cheap electronics. Choppy sparkplug guitars influenced by Keith Levene's work on PiL's Metal Box punctuate the synthetic melodies, drum machinations, and motorik electronics. Lyrically, these are abject tales of blood, scars, alienation, and British misery, with some of the lyrics penned by Rushton himself. Those painfully eloquent songs are prescient of what Rushton was to bring to Coil's early work on Scatology, but they serve Cultural Amnesia very well on their own. The band had reformed in 2000, and offered 5 new tracks, which actually seem to pick up right where they left off, moving more towards the Pop Group's muscular grooves and fidgety funk, with the same Spartan tape recording which dominated their early work. A very welcome document from Britain's cassette culture.
MPEG Stream: "Repetition For This World"
MPEG Stream: "Blind Rag"
MPEG Stream: "Fetish For Today"

TONIUTTI, GIANCARLO La Mutazione (Klanggalerie) cd 21.00
Giancarlo Toniutti has certainly increased his activity around the turn of 2009, having released two new compositions after going almost a decade between records; and now, he's authorized a hefty overview of his early work, with a forthcoming boxset on Vinyl-On-Demand and this cd reissue of La Mutazione, originally released on Broken Flag back in 1985. Toniutti is earnestly long-winded in his academic defense of his work, speaking in highly technical terms and with willfully obscure references (i.e. the semio-cosmologist Rene Thom and the idiosyncrasies of the Athabascan dialect, seriously); and cd booklet of La Mutazione comes with a signature essay from the man on how this work came to be and what theoretical ideas revolve around these sounds.
The three tracks on this disc (the two original cuts on the LP and a unreleased bonus track) harken to
the early '80s as Toniutti darkened of cosmic electronics from the likes of Cluster, Tangerine Dream, and Conrad Schnitzler through the lens of Whitehouse, Nurse With Wound, and Throbbing Gristle. At the time, Toniutti had just matriculated from the Conservatory of Venice with a heady amount of education in Stockhausen, Schaefer, etc. These three musical poles come together in this dark, dark, dark construction of layered static, analog synth explorations, and even some field recording. The totemically named track "The Tree" situates upon an oppressive drone of low frequencies scraped by waves of radio static, which parallels the early work of John Duncan in many ways. Throughout "The Tree," Toniutti injects a lugubrious bubbling of synthetic notes with similarities to the untrained atonalism that Maurizio Bianchi had grafted to the cancerous power electronics of Regel and Das Testament from the early '80s. Those same synth notes snap into a morose two note melody on the aptly named "Nekrose," which is even darker in atmosphere and creepy intensity than the first. The bonus track "Apoplettica" is a darkened delay exploration with clanking loops and unsettled harmonic drones that foreshadows the guttural psychedelic blackening that Mark McGuire alludes to in Emeralds.
A triumph back then, and a triumph now.
MPEG Stream: "The Tree"
MPEG Stream: "Nekrose"
MPEG Stream: "Apoplettica"

MURMER We Share A Shadow (The Helen Scarsdale Agency) cd 15.98
BACK IN PRINT! We thought this gem from the Helen Scarsdale Agency was going to stay out of print forever, but due to a fortuitous pressing plant glitch (when are those ever fortuitous?), a small second pressing has now been made available! Here's what we've said about this album when it first came out in 2007:
Proprietor of the Framework radio show on Resonance FM for many years now, Patrick McGinley has implored his listeners to "open your ears and listen" to the world at large, presenting an impeccable series dedicated to field recordings and its use in composition. So, it goes with out saying that the field recording and the found object are commonplace within McGinley's own sound art constructions which he records under the moniker Murmer (and not Murmur, mind you!). Given his predilection for wandering throughout the European countryside for all that it has to offer (not just limited to environmental sound), his recorded output has been somewhat limited. We Share A Shadow is his first proper solo album in almost three years, although his collaboration with Jonathan Coleclough did stand out as one of the dronemusik highlights of 2006. Consisting of two very long pieces, We Share A Shadow is a notably restrained album whose dark beauty reveals itself with a slow and deliberate pace. The first untitled piece opens with sheets of cold rain scuffing the smooth arcs of bowed metals, whose Feldman-like swell and collapse recalls the late period work of Bernhard Gunter. As the rain gently fades, a composite drone emerges out of those rasps and vibrations from the bowed metals and intensifies through dissonant timbres subtly agitating the shimmer and filigree of the gilted drone. Throughout, windswept debris ricochets across the stereo field casting an ominous cloud onto the sustained tones. The second piece is an even darker affair with a motor grinding against a piece of metal in the distance while a somber, almost doomscape piano plods in the foreground. With plenty of low frequency rumbles and spectral activity lingering in the background, this piece is almost like KTL remixing Xenakis at 16 RPM. Needless to say, this is an incredible album.
Gorgeously packaged in hand water-colored / letterpressed sleeves, SECOND PRESSING ONLY 175 COPIES!!
MPEG Stream: "Track 1"
MPEG Stream: "Track 2"

DUNCAN, JOHN & EDVARD GRAHAM LEWIS Presence (All Questions) cd 17.98
BACK IN STOCK!!!
The bulk of John Duncan's exceptional catalogue of sonic provocation and sublime post-minimalism has been collaborations. CM Von Hausswolff, Francisco Lopez, Bernhard Gunter, Asmus Tietchens, Peter Fleur, Max Springer, Giuliana Stefani, and Elliott Sharp have all worked with Duncan in recent years; yet at the same time, each of those collaborations exhibits the inescapable gravitational pull of Duncan's conceptual and aesthetic agendas. This collaboration with Edvard Graham Lewis is no exception. Lewis, of course, is the legendary bassist / vocalist from Wire and has often ventured into the netherworlds of the avant-garde with fellow Wireman Bruce Gilbert in various guises. Like Duncan, Lewis is quite comfortable with the role of collaborator.
The human voice has been the springboard for a number of Duncan's records including the recent collaborations with Tietchens and Sharp. Not surprising, the most obvious contributions that Lewis makes on Presence are a few choice spoken word bits highlighting his elegantly sinister baritone voice (which in our opinion is more interesting than Colin Newman's). Broken into variable streams of timestretched anxiety during the album's introduction, Lewis' voice slips away beyond recognizablility, falling into an abyss of shortwave hum and crackle that have long been the divining rod for Duncan's epistemological inquisitions. The centerpiece of the album is a 30 minute piece fusing those same gray timbers of shortwave with monochromatic vocal compositions, presumably birthed from Lewis' lips and later manipulated by Duncan. Even if Lewis did have a greater hand in the mix, Presence sounds much like Duncan's masterpieces Phantom Broadcast and Palace of Mind, which is not a bad thing at all. The album ends with Lewis' unmistakable voice offering a naked piece of advice: "Take a step forward and tell the truth." As narcotizing as the album becomes, this whispered text booms out of the speakers as a startling conclusion to this excellent album.
MPEG Stream: "Purpose Stimulated"
MPEG Stream: "Fall"

BLACK TAMBOURINE Complete Recordings (Slumberland) cd 10.98
As of late 2008 and early 2009, there's been some serious hubbub over Slumberland, the stalwart indie label of Brit-inspired, shoegazing bliss pop, thanks to a couple of kick ass records from Crystal Stilts and Pains Of Being Pure At Heart. So a revisitation into perhaps the quintessential Slumberland outfit seems appropriate. Black Tambourine was a shortlived project featuring two of the guys from Velocity Girl, a chanteuse named Pam Berry, and Slumberland label boss Mike Schulman. They only released three singles, contributed a track or two to compilations, and played less than five shows before breaking up in 1991. Go figure that Complete Recordings anthologizes all of these tracks plus an unreleased single.
Black Tambourine's songs begin as jangly, melodic pop which gets tousled about in a blur of amplifier distortion piled onto reverb piled onto more amplifier distortion and just a little more reverb. Yup, it's the same wonderful sound that was also broadcast from the Shop Assistants, My Bloody Valentine (circa Isn't Anything, well cuz Loveless hadn't been released yet!), Jesus & Mary Chain, the Pastels, and almost any given band on Creation circa 1988. But no matter how great that all consuming shoegaze sound can be, the band has gotta have good songwriting chops; and Black Tambourine had 'em for sure. At times, there's that ramshackle quality of good old American DIY indie pop, but for the most part, the songs are effortlessly catchy and melodic with a swagger pushed forth by Pam Berry's reverb drenched and melancholy vocals. Still sounds great after all these years!
MPEG Stream: "Black Car"
MPEG Stream: "Pack You Up"
MPEG Stream: "Drown"

PARIS 1942 s/t (Majora) lp 9.99
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
"This past August, I was in Nashville on vacation listening to WRVU, the 'alternative' radio station affiliated with Vanderbilt University. For thirty minutes or so, they were playing this amazing avant-garage-drone track by 'The Legendary Dave Cloud'... needless to say, it was a friend of the DJ who had recorded this track on his 4-track earlier that day. Until I find any of his recordings (hopefully he has sent some demos to Drunken Fish or Majora, who should appreciate this hidden talent), there's this kick-ass album from Paris 1942, which includes Rick & Alan Bishop (of the Sun City Girls) and Moe Tucker! They only played together 4 times but had enough sense to record at least an album's worth of lo-fi improv garage-punk tracks. Highly Recommended!" - Jim, AQ staff guy who would love any info / demos on the aforementioned Dave Cloud.

INFINITY WINDOW Artificial Midnight (Arbor) lp 15.98
Armed with two analog synths and an alliance of effects pedals, this NY duo conjure forth a deep cleansing slab of grim new agey bliss. In the same droney vein as newcomers 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.

BLANK DOGS On Two Sides (Troubleman) lp 12.98
Back in 2007, Mike Sniper started recording again, after digging out the 4-track he had back in high school that he hadn't used in about a decade. Since then, Sniper has been on a tear with his one-man darkened fuzz-pop machine Blank Dogs, earning him a whole slew of invitations for records, singles, cassettes, and whatnot. Admittedly, we didn't catch wind of Blank Dogs until his amazing album The Fields arrived on our doorstep just in time for Christmas 2008. So we've dug up the On Two Sides LP, a vinyl only edition which Blank Dogs released on Troubleman earlier in 2008; and damn, if it isn't a fantastic album as well.
On Two Sides may be more of a paisley punk pop record for Blank Dogs; but fear not, there's plenty of bouncy goth references to take us back to The Cure and Joy Division. Just think Head On The Door and Love Will Tear Us Apart as the pinnacles of conveying mopiness within a bouncy dark pop song. Sniper's spiky guitars are often coupled with springy basslines that really seem to hybridize Simon Gallup of The Cure and Peter Hook of Joy Division, as the bass often dictates the melody while the guitar lends to the atmosphere. In doing so, these songs enjoy a manic-depressive teen angst meets teen freedom vibe, but made all woozy as if buzzed from that first ever nicotine rush. Given all of the cheap electronics, tinny drum machines, trebly distortion, and overblown fuzz that are especially applied to the indecipherably garbled vocals, Blank Dogs also share plenty of that fucked-up demented pop genius that Ariel Pink and John Maus seem to have monopolized in recent years.
Really fantastic stuff!

MILLIS, ROBERT 120 (Etude) cd 13.98
One of our favorite bits of audio collage / field recording / amazing experimentation was Mr. Millis' 120 cd-r which came out late in 2008. It's now available once again, but this time as a proper compact disc!
Robert Millis is a man of many talents: a Climax Golden Twin, a collector '78s resulting in the impeccable Victrola Favorites book & compilation, purveyor of searing avant-scum-noise-rock in AFCGT, a world traveller in search of esoterica for Sublime Frequencies, a field recordist of frogs, birds, blue jeans salesmen, etc. etc. etc. Despite his many activities, Millis' recorded output has almost entirely been by way of collaboration, making this self-released gem of a solo album all the more special. This is closer related to the collage work that Millis has contributed to the Climax Golden Twins, bridging all of those aforementioned interests in a polyglot of psychedelic drone smear pocked with snippets of conversation, poetic extracts from his collection of '78s, and a judicious amount of vinyl crackling. An album such as this would easily be confused for the hermetic revelations that Philip Jeck extracts from his rough shod vinyl and turntables; but Millis seems to counterpoint the crackle and the clean with more drama than Jeck, almost positing the crackle like a punchline in a joke that breaks through one of Millis' blissed out shimmers constructed from loops and drones from guitar, bells, and glass harmonica, where haunted melodies from times long gone whisper through the mix. But at another instance, Millis leaps geographically from a field recording of loosely played Thai temple music into a shortwave burst of noise seamlessly mixed through a cloud of insects and back into one of his sleepy drones. The logic of the album may seem absurd from afar; but the internal logic is peculiarly sensible, as if Millis were tapping into some stream of consciousness that subcutaneously connects all of these intermingling sounds. Very highly recommended no matter how you slice it.
MPEG Stream: "Track 1"
MPEG Stream: "Track 2"
MPEG Stream: "Track 3"

NILSEN, BJ & STILLUPPSTEYPA Man From Deep River (Editions Mego) cd 17.98
Man From Deep River is another fantastic album in the ongoing Viking drone collaboration between BJ Nilsen, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, and Helgi Thorsson. Where their trilogy for Helen Scarsdale spoke the trials and tribulations of alcoholism through heavy minimalism, this one has a Mondo feel. The album is based upon a found tape from 1975, which served as the guide to their excursions; but even beyond this piece of audio verite, they frame the album as if it were the harrowing sound design for some fucked-up Italian pseudo documentary on any number of unsavory topics. The opening field recording of African mbira players and wood percussionists is tame enough, setting the stage for a narrative beyond their Scandinavian tundra. As these recordings degrade through incrementally increasing reverb, the signature Nilsen / Sigmarsson drone sound oozes forward amidst the chattering of European finches. Things quickly blacken with a Dracula haunting of carnivalesque organ chords played with heavy hands and minor keys. As all of this happens within the first 10 minutes, the album instantly has a very different feel than the alcohol trilogy's isolationism.
Deadly serious, flatlined tones emanate beyond this point, coupled with those same bird recordings which have now been deformed into mutating coos and slow-motion clucks as if refracted through a fun house mirror. Bits of spoken dialogue also creep forward presumably from that aforementioned found cassette, but swimming in deeper than deep reverberation and intermingling with warbling carnivalesque overtures spawned from the almighty drone. After a rasping collage of electrified field recordings, Man From Deep River concludes through a series of spectral arcs of modulating sound radiate the night sky like the northern lights filtered through auditory hallucinogenics. Only during these brief concluding moments do Nilsen & Stilluppstyepa allow for a sense of beauty to emerge from an otherwise terminally unsettling, if blackly psychedelic album.
MPEG Stream: "Part 1"
MPEG Stream: "Part 2"
MPEG Stream: "Part 3"

SVARTE GREINER Kappe (Type) cd 15.98
Originally only available on vinyl, now finally available on cd, another mysterious missive, broadcast as always from some dark sonic underworld, courtesy of the man known as Svarte Greiner (Erik Skodvin to his mother), following the equally haunting and mysterious Man Beard Dress lp from the end of last year.
As we've mentioned before, this is doom. But not doom as you know it. Not heavy and crushing and downtuned and distorted, instead, spectral and ghostlike, abstract and ambient, doom in vibe, intention, spirit, as much as in sound. It's not about riffs or beats, it's about mood and space and soul, and taking a cold hard look through the cracks into the crumbling wasteland that lies inside all of us.
The opening track deviates from SG's usual M.O., taking the soft blackened shimmers and distant foghorn like drones, and adding a layer of grit, a swirling skree reminiscent of Skullflower or Sunroof! Like rattling chains, or bits of rusty metal falling from decaying structures, this extra element turns acoustic doom into something far more harrowing, a soundtrack to the descent, of slick stone walls and flickering grey lights, of black clouds obscuring burning skies, everything fading to nothing as the music lowers us deeper and deeper into the abyss.
The second track is a bit less harsh, more spacious and sprawling, skeletal, soft swells of moaning minimalism drift through a wide open expanse of far away throbs, and muted pulses, ghostly voices lurk beneath the surface, the slow motion sound of decay and despair, pretty, but ominous, and sinister, and beautifully bleak.
Track three begins with another soundscape of space and soft sound, like a super abstract ambient Wolf Eyes, bits of feedback are streaked through hushed black whispers, creaking industrial whir wraps itself around desiccated barely there melodies, the sound of wandering through an empty and dead city, smashed windows like black eyes looking down from above, splintered doors like gaping mouths, the sky unleashing a cleansing rain of soft hiss, doing very little to combat the emptiness and loneliness evoked by Svarte Greiner's delicate doomic drift.
And finally, the record fades to black with the doomiest (and weirdly enough, prettiest) track of the bunch, a soft focus smear of effected black guitar shimmer, blurred into a throbbing dronescape, rife with fragmented melody and soft edged buzz, a strange and warm, almost ebullient sonic center, glowing faintly beneath the roiling lowend, a smoldering, crumbling, shadowy,and quite lovely doomdrone coda...
MPEG Stream: "Tunnel Of Love"
MPEG Stream: "Candle Light Dinner Actress"
MPEG Stream: "Last Light"

BODYCHOKE Cold River Songs (Relapse) cd 14.98
You might not expect a band featuring former members of Whitehouse and Sutcliffe Jugend to sound a bit like some twisted noiserock hybrid of old Today is The Day, the crushing bombast of the Swans, and the ominous brooding doom and gloom of Joy Division, but that's precisely what Bodychoke conjure up on this, their long out of print final album, circa 1998, now reissued by Relapse.
We always assumed we didn't like Bodychoke all that much, the other records we heard we really not that good, and their version of "Painted Black" was even left off the tUMULt comp featuring multiple version of that iconic song, but holy shit has this record knocked our fucking blocks off. There's plenty of noise for sure, jagged and processed and crumbling and crunchy and blown out, but noise is just one element here, the band in full on noise rock / post rock. Unfurling low slung bass lines, jagged riffing, some cool complex drumming, the arrangements super dynamic, the vocals slipping from ominous deep Michael Gira like croon, to strangled punkish wail.
Opener "Control" pretty much has it all, beginning with a weird cacophony of fractured fragmented noise, the band soon slip into a minimal bass groove, before the guitars kick in and lock in with the snares, the song transformed into a brooding almost Angels Of Light sounding jam, until the chorus, which EXPLODES, and the noise from the beginning returns, wrapping the churning loping crush in a swirling field of feedback and crumbling grit and grime. It's just so intense and heavy and weirdly catchy, and so much better than we ever remember Bodychoke being.
And so it goes, the rest of the record continues to display a sound that's almost more slow building post rock than noise, but most of the tracks are laced with heaping doses of caustic crunch. There's also a cello player in the band, who offers up some gorgeously moaning ambience, and subtle strings here and there. Many of the tracks spread way out, sprawling lugubriously, expansive minimal post punk soundcapes, skitter and whisper, burning slowly until the song is engulfed in tangled riffage and wild tribal pounding, and even the noise, it's so deftly crafted and well placed, it's hard to imagine anyone into heavy music being put off at all, it's just like another layer of heaviness, another level of dynamicism, it's weird, we all had the exact same response when this record came on. "Oh I don't like Bodychoke", but gradually, it seemed everyone was listening to this, ALL the time, even now, as this is being written, not only is it playing on the stereo in the back room, but also in the store, this record just slays. So dark and heavy and brutal and melodic and epic and AMAZING. Based on nothing but how often this gets played in the store and how often we've listened to this since it came in, we're beginning to think maybe we should have made this Record Of The Week, so consider this an EXTREME highlight, and thus overwhelmingly recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Control"
MPEG Stream: "Cold River Song"
MPEG Stream: "Your Submission"

COLD CAVE The Trees Grew Emotions And Died (Rais) 12" 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
In listening to the few releases from Cold Cave (to date, just this 12" and the "Painted Nails" 7" on Hospital), we can easily see Cold Cave becoming huge. Maybe not as megalomaniacally huge as Coldplay or U2; but maybe there's a Wire or XLR8R cover for Cold Cave to grace sometime in the future. The Trees Grew Emotions And Died predated the heavily acclaimed Painted Nails single; and like that single, this gem of crunched noise mingling with retro-garde synth pop has gone in and out of print several times. It's still a limited pressing of 500 copies, so be forewarned!
Cold Cave is the work of one Wes Eisold, who fronted a couple of East Coast hardcore bands before starting a collection of thrift store samplers and synthesizers. In wiring all of these half-functioning devices through various effects and distortion pedals, he's arrived at an abrasive minimal wave sound that has two feet firmly planted in the worlds of New Order and Wolf Eyes. Had Eisold added a guitar into the mix, Cold Cave might have ended up not all that far from those brilliant bliss pop mutations from Woodsist (i.e. Crystal Stilts, Blank Dogs, Wavves, etc.), but he's admitted that part of his frustration with hardcore was over his two-decade losing battle in learning the guitar. So, the synthesizer is the instrument of choice for Cold Cave. This three track EP showcases his pop genius with minor key melodies bobbing along insistent drum machines and sinister atmospheres. "Heaven's Gate" and "Our Tears Help The Flowers Grow" start with the minor-key synth melodies which buttress Depeche Mode's Violator and The Cure's Faith, with megaphone distortion crackling the detached male / female vocals. The title track is considerably up-tempo and up-beat with a bouncy melody that WILL get stuck in your head in all the right ways, like those incredible singles which made their way onto the first Adult. album. Very highly recommended!
MPEG Stream: "The Trees Grew Emotions And Died"

DUM DUM GIRLS s/t (Captured Traces) 12" 14.98
'Tis the season of fuzzed out greatness! We gotta say we love the recent movement of way lo-fi and blown out garage pop being pumped out by the likes of Wavves, Crystal Stilts, Blank Dogs, Vivian Girls, etc. Now we can add Dum Dum Girls to that rad list of bands, as this 12" has become permanently affixed to our turntable. With pop chops that rival the great Pains Of Being Pure At Heart but with a much more fuzzed out and dirty disposition this is totally hitting the spot! Like someone locked The Aislers Set in a garage and ruined all their equipment and thus they were forced to record on the shittiest gear possible but ended up with the most amazing results. We're also reminded of a much underrated Slumberland band of the past, Black Tambourine. With such a keen sense of melody underneath the fuzz, and a seriously in-the-red production also brings to mind some of the more raw and rocking moments of Yo La Tengo. As the musical world around us seems to get more slick and savvy it's kind of nice to be reminded that sometimes sounds that are raw and primitive and rudimentary are the ones capable of making the biggest impact.
MPEG Stream: "Catholicked"
MPEG Stream: "Yours Alone"

HANDFUL OF DUST, A Now Gods, Stand Up For Bastards / The Philosophick Mercury (No Fun Production) 2cd 16.98
Killer reissue of two long out of print full lengths from this long running New Zealand free noise duo, consisting of Bruce Campbell, he of the mighty Dead C, and longtime aQ fave Alastair Galbraith, shedding his usual songsmithery for something a lot more abstract and noisy.
The two have been performing on and off together since the early nineties, these two discs collect The Philosophick Mercury from 1994, and Now Gods, Stand Up For Bastards, from 1995. Both recorded live, utilizing guitars, violin, electronics and voice, with the occasional bit of drumming from yet another NZ noise luminary, Peter Stapleton, who's played in pretty much every NZ band of note, from Dadamah to Pin Group to Flies Inside The Sun to The Terminals.
The template for A Handful Of Dust seems to be long drawn out tones, plenty of space, loads of feedback, letting the amp and the body of the guitar and the room shape the sounds as much as the player. Later groups like Sunroof! would harness this same sort of free music energy, this primal ur-drone, but there's something about A Handful Of Dust, that makes the sounds seem more alive, more feral, dangerous and dense. There's plenty of scrape and skree, mostly high end, layers upon layers, overtones shifting and drifting and billowing up in huge clouds of static buzz and shimmering squiggles of violin. The pace is glacial, but this music is not about movement or momentum so much as space and time, when there are drums, they don't really propel the song, instead they offer up a sort of loose framework, a crumbling skeleton around which the various buzzing strings and howling amps hang their shimmering sheets of sound. It's hard not to hear some Dead C in the be-drummed tunes (there are only two), but the drums here are WAY more loose, almost free jazz in feel, lending a psychedelic vibe to a music already pretty fucking psychedelic.
A few of the tracks offer up some low end rumbles and deep drone, but those sounds are soon infused with streaks of jagged shriek and sharp hissy high end, the two sides not so much battling as swirling warily around each other eventually becoming one, and on rare occasions, melding into something almost rifflike. The closing track on No Gods begins as a total guitar destroying free for all, before transforming into some super tripped out buzz drenched psychedelic warped krautdrone, but only briefly, before it slips back into fractured deconstructed free noise once again.
No Gods is definitely the more refined of the two (but only just barely). Philosophick is way more brittle and bizarre, two 30 minute jams, the first features lots of amp buzz, and stuttery shards of feedback, plenty of Derek Bailey like scrabbling, strange processed vocals, some sort-of-chanting, very minimal and textureal considering how noisy it is. The second track is total chaos, a band going all out in a huge room, all the instruments rendered blurs and smears by the distorted amps and the room reverb, the long stretches of feedback and the low low low fidelity recording only add more hiss and blur and texture. The guitars sounding alternately like accordions or bagpipes, sometimes like lowing cattle, the pound of the drums a buried muffled pulse, the cymbals glazing the cacophony with another sizzly layer of sibilance.
Beautiful oversized Japanese style mini lp gatefold style packaging with new liner notes from Marc Masters.
MPEG Stream: "The Book Nature: Chapter The First"
MPEG Stream: "Oration On The Dignity Of Man"
MPEG Stream: "The Lullian Art"

KOJO, HITOSHI Ezo (Alluvial Recordings) 10" 13.98
Occasionally working in the past as Spiracle, Hitoshi Kojo presents this thoroughly amazing piece of ancient-sounding drone music. No doubt, Kojo's work will be compared to that of the classic Organum sound; but considering that very few have even come close to replicating the power and mystery of such classic Organum recordings as Ikon or Horii, such parallels should be taken as the highest praise. Kojo claims that all of the sounds originated from various found objects. He doesn't specify beyond that, but all of the objects must be metal in origin, probably large pieces of sheet metal, or flexible rods of steel, or long pieces of wire, or something equally resonant and with a dynamic timbral quality. Each of these objects is bowed in order to coax a controlled dissonance of metallic screeches, protracted tonal bellows, and various acoustic drones. The two compositions are simple in their moderate pacing of the ebb and flow between all of these sounds, not too slow... but certainly not too fast. Through these recordings, Kojo offers very little in the way of digital treatments or effects of any nature. Just a terse edit of one layer here, or a reversing of a metallic gong decay there. The results are a timeless set of interlocking metallic rasps and gasping drones that rivals what Harry Bertoia, Taj Mahal Travellers, LaMonte Young, and of course Organum had done so impeccably in the past. Beautiful, mysterious, and very highly recommended!

BURKE, DAN & THOMAS DIMUZIO Upcoming Events (No Fun Productions) cd 12.98
It's a little strange that there are only two collaborative albums from Dan Burke and Thomas Dimuzio, despite their long-standing working relationship which dates back well over a decade. On his numerous travels to California touring as Illusion Of Safety, Dan Burke has often found himself in the Bay Area to perform outside the Illusion Of Safety guise. Instead, Burke's dystopian electro-acoustic techniques have joined forces with the engineering prowess of Thomas Dimuzio (who is responsible for mastering many an IOS record); and during those performances, they've proven to be quite an amazing duo, avoiding many of the follies of on-again / off-again projects or open-up-the-laptop-and-go live collaborations. Dimuzio has an excellent ear and he manages to keep Burke from diving off into the cybernetic rhythms which can make some of the lesser Illusion Of Safety records so dodgy. At the same time, Burke's perpetual audio nihilism provides a solid framework for Dimuzio to add his talents.
Upcoming Events was in fact edited and reconstituted from three of their Bay Area performances from 2004. These recordings consist of electronically mangled drones, mechanoid field recordings agitated through digital means, pure tone manipulation, and unsettled noise culled from tactile crunches, all of which build to discordant crescendos that have the psychological intensity of David Lynch's sound design, certainly rivalling the best work that either Illusion of Safety or Thomas have done on their own.
Steadily increasing drones become a hellish orchestral hum punctuated by metallic screeches which sound like a belt fan on a motor that's just ready to snap off its fly wheel. Elsewhere, unsettling electronics bleat against the tactile rattling of sand crunched against the head of a mic condenser whilst a subharmonic tone ominously rumbles in the distance. With the cover photograph of the armed barricade outside the 2004 Republican National Convention, the album takes on the aura of the soundtrack of a police state. Burke founded Illusion Of Safety in 1983, inspired by the industrial attitudes and aesthetics of Throbbing Gristle. While TG's prescient insights of culture as the death factory may seem commonplace to the media savvy, Burke and Dimuzio render their take on the conspiratorial and paranoiac with remarkable success. Highly recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Deregulation"
MPEG Stream: "Upcoming Events"
MPEG Stream: "Operative"

EMERALDS What Happened (No Fun Productions) cd 12.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
In their brief career beginning in 2006, the Ohio based trio Emeralds has associated themselves with the grit and rust-stained noise that has erupted in the mid-western underground, often sharing the stage with Aaron Dilloway, C Spencer Yeh, and Hive Mind. Their two major releases have come by way of Dilloway's Hanson Records and No Fun Productions, which typically rank as releasing some of the most aggressive and brutal pieces of noise of the contemporary era. While live performances have reportedly embraced the noise community's full-force fury of maximum volume, Emeralds instead favors a sound that harkens back to the era of Cluster, Manuel Gottsching, Fripp & Eno, and Klaus Schulze.
Last year's Solar Bridge was a spectacular lazer blast of cosmic droning and inner-space meditation; but with that album clocking in less than 30 minutes, we were left wanting more. Fortunately, more is what Emeralds bring on What Happened. Collected from their seemingly non-stop sessions of improvisations for guitar, Moog, and Korg plus ample effects boxes, these 5 tracks spiral and snake around the same deep-space psychedelia found on Solar Bridge, pushing their sound beyond the two extended crescendos which populated that album. Monochord guitars pulse hypnotically against the overlapping tapestries of the sawtooth hum and modulating tones from the analogue synths. Throughout What Happened, Emeralds shift in mood from alien percolations of '60s sci-fi sound design to graceful swells of tonefloat majesty to purely physical vibrations which rip through the nervous system and strike numbly at the bone. There is beauty to be found here, but also a sublime unease that haunts these recordings. Yup, this one comes highly recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Up In The Air"
MPEG Stream: "Living Room"
MPEG Stream: "Disappearing Ink"

MOUNTAINS Choral (Thrill Jockey) 2lp 15.98
Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp are the men behind these Mountains. The two met in Chicago in 1999 and now live in Brooklyn; yet despite their urban living, Mountains long for the great outdoors. The big sky of Montana. The thunderclouds of the Arizona high desert. The forests of upstate New York. In their effortless blur of elliptically strummed acoustic guitars and elegantly sculpted ambience, Mountains celebrate the natural world, as leaves, rain, dirt, and snow all seem to speak through their beautifully monochromatic compositions.
Choral happens to be Mountains third full album and their first for Thrill Jockey. It also stands as their best album to date and even surpasses the almost universally beloved Field Rituals solo album by Holtkamp on Type. The brightly rendered guitar which gilded Holtkamp's solo record features prominently in the mix for Choral, but it has been tempered with gaseous effects and post-shoegazing processes that swaddle the guitar chords with equally rich drones and electrified mist. Melodica, analog synth, piano, hand bells, something that sounds like a hurdy gurdy, even more guitar, and found object scrabbing a la Jewelled Antler make their way through the soft focus blur of the digital treatments, which give evidence for comparisons in equal measure to Fennesz and Cluster. As the shimmering tones of finger-picked guitars trickle out of the slow pulsing drone of the title track, Mountains conjure images of the bright orange sunlight saturating wind-blown leaves at sunset. Halos of light burst around each glistening layer of sound, but there is a bittersweet aura to many of the melodies that slip beyond their transcendent ambience, as if the summer sun they portray in their songs is soon to be lost to the blustery winds of Autumn and the cold nights of Winter. The maudlin atmospheres continue on the insistent acoustic guitar chords of "Telescope," a near perfect bliss-out instrumental, on through the broken-hearted bells and deep tonal flutter of "Melodica."
If there's any justice, this will be universally hailed as one of the best records of 2009. And for vinyl freeks: the lp version of Choral enjoys two additional tracks not found on the cd!
MPEG Stream: "Choral"
MPEG Stream: "Map Table "
MPEG Stream: "Melodica"

BORG I (Phaserprone) cd 12.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Borg is a suitably anonymous project based out of Brooklyn, which has released two albums to date on Phaserprone. This is the first album, which was originally released back in 2007 and was thought to be out of print until Phaserprone uncovered a small (and we mean small!) stash of these for Aquarius. Dark, very dark techno that sounds like Chain Reaction heroin house as played through the Wolf Eyes suitcases of analog electronics and industrial stomp rhythm machines. Spooky atmospheres and really creepy samples from horror movies seem to emerge behind every bassbin crushing beat and every stalking bassline. This one is even better than Borg's 2009 I:A album, due to the shroud of darkness that envelops Borg's electronics. Just buy it. You won't regret it.
MPEG Stream: "Nancy Sang"
MPEG Stream: "Space Flight"
MPEG Stream: "Borg Rage"

TOUKASEIBUNSHI Meta-Inorganicmatter Meta-Newlon (PSF) cd 22.00
Even if this wasn't some terminally obscure project out of Japan circa 1988 (we're guessing on the date and PSF isn't telling), we would still be freaking out over this mind blowing drone-plus-noise album. But as it stands, Toukaseibunshi is a project that's about as mysterious as they come, and that intrigues us all the more. Toukaseibunshi was the pseudonym for one Hironari Iwata, who used to run a cassette label in the late '80s called Angakok. Through that imprint he curated a compilation that featured HNAS, Asmus Tietchens, Merzbow, Conrad Schnitzler, SBOTHI, Human Flesh, and a bunch of other artists we're not all that familiar with. As Toukaseibunshi, Iwata fluctuates between all of these aesthetic poles, pulling a blistering (if more restrained) use of squalid noise from Merzbow, the sustained electronic clusters from Tietchens and Schnitzler, and an unsettled weirdness from HNAS. Yet the same time, Iwata's distorted drone pieces foreshadow the same types of digital overblown pieces from Fennesz or Belong some 20 years later.
The album begins with a sprawling twenty minute piece "Glace" whose arches of softened feedback take on the hue of a post-MBV glide guitar grafted onto a static field of electricity and billowing ambient swathes that sort of have a Stars Of The Lid vibe, but with a lot more teeth in the mix. Mesmerizingly beautiful stuff. The rest of the album is split between five other tracks of variable length but are considerably nastier than the opening number. Iwata's crunched tape loops, actionist metal bashing thrust into the background, and squawking electronics have the feeling of the sounds of a construction site being tossed around the high rises of Tokyo. The reverb dislocated the sound amidst the din of the city; and despite the turmoil, Iwata seems intent on making these industrialized sounds meditative. That doesn't imply a lack of noise, cuz these tracks got plenty of bloodcurdling white noise buzzing about.
This album has been released in PSF's Japanese Avant-Garde Cassette Reissue Series. So, we can only assume this came out on cassette sometime in the late '80s and early '90s when Iwata was active; however, there's no information whatsoever. It's great to have this available, even as it leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
MPEG Stream: "Glace"
MPEG Stream: "Enthsiate"
MPEG Stream: "Glace 2"

MOUNTAINS Choral (Thrill Jockey) cd 14.98
Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp are the men behind these Mountains. The two met in Chicago in 1999 and now live in Brooklyn; yet despite their urban living, Mountains long for the great outdoors. The big sky of Montana. The thunderclouds of the Arizona high desert. The forests of upstate New York. In their effortless blur of elliptically strummed acoustic guitars and elegantly sculpted ambience, Mountains celebrate the natural world, as leaves, rain, dirt, and snow all seem to speak through their beautifully monochromatic compositions.
Choral happens to be Mountains third full album and their first for Thrill Jockey. It also stands as their best album to date and even surpasses the almost universally beloved Field Rituals solo album by Holtkamp on Type. The brightly rendered guitar which gilded Holtkamp's solo record features prominently in the mix for Choral, but it has been tempered with gaseous effects and post-shoegazing processes that swaddle the guitar chords with equally rich drones and electrified mist. Melodica, analog synth, piano, hand bells, something that sounds like a hurdy gurdy, even more guitar, and found object scrabbing a la Jewelled Antler make their way through the soft focus blur of the digital treatments, which give evidence for comparisons in equal measure to Fennesz and Cluster. As the shimmering tones of finger-picked guitars trickle out of the slow pulsing drone of the title track, Mountains conjure images of the bright orange sunlight saturating wind-blown leaves at sunset. Halos of light burst around each glistening layer of sound, but there is a bittersweet aura to many of the melodies that slip beyond their transcendent ambience, as if the summer sun they portray in their songs is soon to be lost to the blustery winds of Autumn and the cold nights of Winter. The maudlin atmospheres continue on the insistent acoustic guitar chords of "Telescope," a near perfect bliss-out instrumental, on through the broken-hearted bells and deep tonal flutter of "Melodica."
If there's any justice, this will be universally hailed as one of the best records of 2009. And for vinyl freeks: the lp version of Choral enjoys two additional tracks not found on the cd!
MPEG Stream: "Choral"
MPEG Stream: "Map Table "
MPEG Stream: "Melodica"

AFCGT (A FRAMES + CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS) s/t (Uzu) lp 19.98
NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL!!! This originally came out in early 2008 as a tiny self-released cd-r in an edition of only 50 copies. Of course, it disappeared instantly. But even so, it made the Aquarius Records best of 2008, and it even topped the charts of The Wire's Rewind for 2008. Well, now you have another chance to grab one of these. How good is it? Read on!
Holy shit, this is fucking great! And who would have ever thought that the A Frames and the Climax Golden Twins would make a record together? And who would have imagined that it would be this fucking awesome? It's all superlatives and all expletives in describing the first collaborative production from AFCGT. The A Frames had managed to raise some eyebrows here through their post-punk appropriations of early Wire and early Fall, but the vocals had always been something of a miss for them especially on the last Sub Pop album. But in working with the AQ-endorsed Climax Golden Twins who are a band accustomed to delivering exemplary instrumentals from literally every corner of the avant-rock landscape, the A Frames have the permission to shut the hell up and let the Climax Golden Twins dump the fucking kitchen sink all over A Frames rhythmic swagger. The album opens with a tumultuous blast of glue-huffing noise-rock, sort of like a fist fight between the Butthole Surfers and the Sun City Girls. Soon after, a series of bad-ass Birthday Party / Oxbow swamp rock riffs explode with spindly space-age gamelan leads; elsewhere, the No Wave ghosts of R.L. Crutchfield-era DNA emerge with of jagged chops across the guitar pick-ups, bloodied fingers and all. Fuck, it all sounds fucking great!
MPEG Stream: "New Punk"
MPEG Stream: "Old Spy"
MPEG Stream: "Thug"

DUNCAN, JOHN / MIKA VAINIO / ILPO VAISANEN Nine Suggestions (All Questions) cd 19.98
BACK IN STOCK!!! When John Duncan sent us this collaboration with the members of Pan Sonic, he warned us that the first two tracks would be a little hard to take on headphones. Oh yes, that warning should be heeded by all, headphones or not; especially if you're expecting the electric seduction of Duncan's Phantom Broadcast. But don't let the warning scare you off; as this is an incredible fusion of caustic electronics, shortwave radio signal manipulation, and the hammering arpeggiations which have become a trademark of the Finnish techno minimalists. So Nine Suggestions begins with some 15 minutes of white-knuckle noise tightly composed from siren squall electronics, volatile data streams from shortwave utility signals, and plenty of sawtoothed abrasiveness. In this introduction, Nine Suggestions harkens to the Pan Sonic masterpiece 4cd box set Kesto, which expressed plenty of noxious intensity in its rhythmic overload. Even as the album calms considerably in the expanse of the album, Kesto still stands the most accurate comparison as that album shifts from aggression and explosion to contemplation and eerieness. In the shadowy half-melodies, tectonic rumblings, nocturnal drones, dental drill vibrations, submariner sonar pings, and delicate modulation of electronic tones found within the latter two-thirds of Nine Suggestions, Duncan, Vainio, and Vaisanen have created something that really is as one would expect from these high-calibre artists. Highly recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Volume"
MPEG Stream: "Eliminated: The Stress"
MPEG Stream: "The Deepening"

SVARTE GREINER Kappe (Type) lp 19.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Another super limited vinyl only missive, broadcast as always from some dark sonic underworld, courtesy of the man known as Svarte Greiner (Erik Skodvin to his mother), following the equally haunting and mysterious Man Beard Dress lp from the end of last year.
As we've mentioned before, this is doom. But not doom as you know it. Not heavy and crushing and downtuned and distorted, instead, spectral and ghostlike, abstract and ambient, doom in vibe, intention, spirit, as much as in sound. It's not about riffs or beats, it's about mood and space and soul, and taking a cold hard look through the cracks into the crumbling wasteland that lies inside all of us.
The opening track deviates from SG's usual M.O., taking the soft blackened shimmers and distant foghorn like drones, and adding a layer of grit, a swirling skree reminiscent of Skullflower or Sunroof! Like rattling chains, or bits of rusty metal falling from decaying structures, this extra element turns acoustic doom into something far more harrowing, a soundtrack to the descent, of slick stone walls and flickering grey lights, of black clouds obscuring burning skies, everything fading to nothing as the music lowers us deeper and deeper into the abyss.
The second track is a bit less harsh, more spacious and sprawling, skeletal, soft swells of moaning minimalism drift through a wide open expanse of far away throbs, and muted pulses, ghostly voices lurk beneath the surface, the slow motion sound of decay and despair, pretty, but ominous, and sinister, and beautifully bleak.
The flipside begins with another soundscape of space and soft sound, like a super abstract ambient Wolf Eyes, bits of feedback are streaked through hushed black whispers, creaking industrial whir wraps itself around desiccated barely there melodies, the sound of wandering through an empty and dead city, smashed windows like black eyes looking down from above, splintered doors like gaping mouths, the sky unleashing a cleansing rain of soft hiss, doing very little to combat the emptiness and loneliness evoked by Svarte Greiner's delicate doomic drift.
And finally, the record fades to black with the doomiest (and weirdly enough, prettiest) track of the bunch, a soft focus smear of effected black guitar shimmer, blurred into a throbbing dronescape, rife with fragmented melody and soft edged buzz, a strange and warm, almost ebullient sonic center, glowing faintly beneath the roiling lowend, a smoldering, crumbling, shadowy,and quite lovely doomdrone coda...
Beautiful full color covers, pressed on thick vinyl, and once again, WAY LIMITED!!!

NILSEN, BJ & STILLUPPSTEYPA Vikinga Brennivin (The Helen Scarsdale Agency) cd 14.98
BACK IN STOCK!!! The first edition of Vikinga Brennivin came and went very very quickly, as it came with an elaborate insert cut from actual copper. We are pleased to say the second edition is equally beautiful with sparkly copper colored paper and the same silkscreened design. The musical program is exactly the same as the first. Here's what we said earlier:
The cold winter nights stuck above the Arctic Circle have become the perfect climate for extended bouts of intoxication for many a Scandinavian. As a result, the capacity for the Icelandic duo Stilluppsteypa to consume alcohol is the stuff of legend. Alcohol has soaked into every fiber of their being; but its manifestation in their music (and their personalities for that matter) is closer to the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde allegory, as a raging alcoholic squirms just beneath the surface of a stoic Scandinavian temperament. Of course, where these two personalities come into conflict is where the art of Stilluppsteypa is realized. A schizoid tension runs throughout Stilluppsteypa's impressive catalogue of terminal drones, sputtered rhythms, and atomic fractures; and often this tension is dished out with a smug dollop of black humor and Dadaist absurdity. So, it's hardly unusual to come across Stilluppsteypa celebrating Vikinga Brennivin, the stringent Icelandic alcohol that has undoubtedly killed some of their collective brain cells. Yet it was the stoic BJ Nilsen -- the Swedish electron wrangler whose best known for his work as Hazard -- who invited Stilluppsteypa to collaborate on Vikinga Brennivin. Their resultant collaboration is an existentialist allegory in which the three drunkenly stumble out in a Scandinavian winter night and spiral toward the inevitable point in which they blackout. Lest this be construed as a derelict piece of method acting, the craft that Nilsen and Stilluppsteypa brought to Vikinga Brennivin is impeccable, as the extended dronescapes breath with the majesty of distant fog horns and sparkle with the delicate light of countless stars cast down from the black heavens onto the frozen tundra below. Frightening and barren, yet hauntingly compelling, Vikinga Brennivin is an isolationist masterpiece.
MPEG Stream: "En Dare Kan Fraga Mer An Tre Visa Kan Svara"
MPEG Stream: "Det Ar Bast Att Jag Borjar, Annars Kommer..."

NEHIL, SETH & JGRZINICH Gyre (Cut) cd 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Seth Nehil and John Grzinich have been collaborating in various sound ventures off and on for well over a decade, back when the two met in Austin, Texas. Gyre marks the conclusion of a body of field recordings and agitated environments that the two began working on while travelling throughout Eastern Europe and later manipulated into installation soundtracks, arriving at three lengthy tracks. A constant fluidity of gray sounds wraps around the opening track of Gyre, which gives the impression of being deep underwater investigating the nether regions; yet the tactile sounds of various rubbings and cracked details contrast the subaqueous references with earthen found sounds of soil, stone, wood, and metal. The second piece acts as a call and response to the acoustics of some crumbling Soviet warehouse, with wooden tappings echoing from various parts of the space, presumably from the two participants. Gradually, a thick rumble of low end thrumb reverberates through additional layers of chattering birds which serves to counter the 'industrial' sound debris. The creaking from a high tension wire sets the stage for the final piece on Gyre, with ringing metallic vibrations amassing into a beautiful aura of hallowed droning. On par with the likes of Murmer, Loren Chasse, Tarab, Eric La Casa, and Small Cruel Party, Gyre is an excellent album.
Note! Jason Kahn has closed shop on his Cut label, meaning that the remaining copies we currently have are the last copies available.
MPEG Stream: "Cast"
MPEG Stream: "Weald"
MPEG Stream: "Glaze"

REED, RICK Dark Skies At Noon (Elevator Bath) cd 14.98
Somehow, we missed this one when it came out a few years back; but with Rick Reed's recent self-release from his archives dating back some 25 years, we figured you might also be as intrigued as we are in some of the other work that didn't make it onto Reed's massive and brilliant compendium Celestial Mudpie reviewed here a couple lists back. Reed hails from Texas, where he has been tinkering around with Moogs, shortwave radio, tone generators, and field recordings to construct his weighty drones. The title track on Dark Skies At Noon is an alternate version to a soundtrack that Reed composed for Ken Jacobs' film Seeing Is Believing. Jacobs, who has worked with Reed on numerous occasions over the past decade, had also used this same score for his Mountaineer Spinning film as well. The piece itself is grounded upon an industrial strength hum, the kind you would expect to hear in a nuclear power plant or some giant particle accelerator. Pierced tones, scabrous noises, and pure frequencies that have set up some unsettling standing waves here in the weirdo architecture of Aquarius all elegantly wax and wane across the surface of Reed's droning subtrata. Seeming infinite in slow-boiling currents of electricity and strangely psychedelic at times, somewhat like a cross between Emeralds and Troum. The second piece is a collaboration with former AMM member Keith Rowe, dialing in his shortwave to gather bits of static and garbled transmissions set against Reed's crawling set of analogue electronic drones. For all of Rowe's dynamic interplay of texture and noise, this is clearly a piece driven by Reed's sensibility. The finale to the album is the aptly named "Ghosts Of Energy" with its tone-bending vibrations, eerie wails of Forbidden Planet-esque electronics, and moire-patterns of sound grafted from dissonant frequencies. Altogether, this makes for an excellent collection! Elevator Bath tells us this is limited to just a hair over 300 copies.
MPEG Stream: "Dark Skies At Noon"
MPEG Stream: "Ceremony"
MPEG Stream: "Ghosts Of Energy"