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

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

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

SALEM King Night (IAMSOUND) cd 13.98
Before we get into our usual wordy meandering, hyperbolic gushing and tangential ruminating, we oughta come right out and say it first thing, this record is fucking incredible. One of the coolest weirdest records we've heard in ages. Twisted and blown out, weirdly melodic and groovy, dense and washed out and otherworldly and fucking bizarre, equal parts blissed out hypnogogic shoegazey drift, lurching, chopped and screwed style Southern crunk, majestic choral dreaminess, blurred beat heavy collaged electronica, and sample heavy blown out synthbuzz epicness. In some alternate universe alien world, THIS is the music that comes blasting out of booming systems in tricked out lowriders, some sort of glorious, blindingly blissy club music that fuses stuttery stumbly beats, to crumbling distorted low end, and thick swaths of synths so blown out the whole record sounds like it might collapse, mix in soaring operatic vocal samples, low slung bass buzz, jittery drum skitter, and mush mouthed slowed down 'rapping', smear and blur it all into one glorious, warped and warbly cough syrup fever dream epic, and that's basically Salem's King Night.
By now, most folks have at lest heard of 'witch house' a new 'genre' that Salem seem to represent, willingly or not, it's hard to say, but alongside other groups like oOoOO, witch house has received the sort of blog hype (and mainstream press) that immediately turns us off, and made us want to hate it, but so far, everything we've heard, we've dug, big time, but nothing has kicked out ass as much as this Salem record. It's so weird, and twisted and bizarre, it's sort of hard to believe that THIS is the record people are talking about, it makes sense that we'd love it, and that it would be an aQuarius Record Of The Week, but the New York Times? John Q. Public? Fuck it, like we always say, we'd way rather here stuff like this on the radio anyway. But regardless of the hype, or the backlash, or any of the nonmusical stuff, it all boils down to how ingenious and utterly OUT THERE this is. Just check out the title track, some weird garbled voices, some skittery drum machine, some ravey synths, choral voices, and then BAM, the song explodes, the bass a throbbing slab of rumbling crunch, the drum machine weirdly awkward, but the perfect compliment to the tangled melodies, and those soaring distorted operatic voices, the track a total epic, building and building, like the score for some insane alien sci-fi slow motion dancefloor martial arts battle, you can almost visualize fishtanks exploding into galaxies of exploding glass shards, while bodies fly threw the clouds of glistening sparkle, everything seemingly floating weightless. So good. We could listen to this track FOREVER (and pretty much have since we got it). But then comes "Asia" with its fat stuttery beat, and girlish vocals buried beneath a miasma of crumbling distorted crunch, and woozy synth melodies and confusional drum programming, sounding a bit like some over the top M83 jam gone haywire, or maybe some lost Cocteau Twins B-side remixed by Alec Empire and Black Moth Super Rainbow, everything fuzzy and washed out and gauzy, murky and dark, but still suffused with a weird sort of sunshininess. "Frost" is more of the same, even prettier and blissier, taking Sigur Ros and dipping it in a vat of gristly distortion and Carpenter sci-fi synths, and then stretching it out into a billowing sheet of diaphanous dream pop.
It's not until "Sick" that we get a glimpse of Salem's other side, their chopped and screwed, sippin' sizurp, alien slow motion shoegaze hip hop side, the music remains essentially the same, maybe not quite as dense, still swirls of female vocals, a strange otherworldly chorale, but over the top of this sonic cotton candy , a 'rapper' delivers his mutated pitch shifted flow, mouthful of marbles, finger on the record slowing it do a crawl, creating a weirdly dreamy draggy druggy hip hop / dream pop hybrid. And the rest of the record seems to drift lazily between those two sounds, "Release Da Boar" finds Salem offering up another cloud of dopesmoke dreaminess, fuzz drenched dirge pop bliss, which gives way to "Trapdoor", another slow motion, DJ Screw style cough syrup remix, laid over a warm warped and warbly bit of lysergic ambience and buzzing rave synth swirl. "Hound" is like the title track redux, so thick and crumblingly distorted, but so blown out and beautiful, "Tair" is a gloriously weird spaced out, handclapped chunk of shoegaze rap, and "Killer" sounds like Joy Division or Interpol run through a million distortion pedals, and set to a Casio keyboard drum machine beat, only to shrug off some of the crunch and warble, leaving a gorgeous stretch of plaintive low slung doom pop, that hints at the poppiness that lurks beneath the surface on King Night, only to finish the record in a squall of synth buzz, mumbled vox and drum machine chaos.
Wow. What else can we say. This sounded so good in the store, and even better in headphones, but it wasn't until we got in the car, and cranked this as loud as it would go, that it finally sunk in, and suddenly, we were bouncing up and down in a tricked out lowrider on some alien planet in some alternate universe, our booming system BOOMING, getting totally lost in these twisted and gorgeously damaged sounds. WAY WAY recommended.
MPEG Stream: "King Night"
MPEG Stream: "Asia"
MPEG Stream: "Trapdoor"
MPEG Stream: "Redlights"
MPEG Stream: "Killer"

PURE ECSTASY Tour Tape (self-released) cassette 8.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Along with the Sleep Over split, we managed to pick up a few copies of Pure Ecstasy's latest tape which shows off the bands more experimental side, a side we haven't seen as much on their pop singles. The bands slow motion grooves are in tact, but the overall effect is more collage-like, chopped in a blender style. Sometimes veering into hazy dub experimentations a la Sun Araw, or lo-fi distortion squalls, murmured voices, and pretty ambiance. Two ten minute sides. Super limited!

LOWER DENS Twin-Hand Movement (Gnomonsong) lp 14.98
We've been fans of Jana Hunter's from her first split with Devendra Banhart a few years back. Here with her new band project, Lower Dens, Hunter shakes off her usual singer-songwriter mode and gives us a more beautifully atmospheric indie-rock side that we just can't stop listening too. With big crunchy distorted dueling guitar riffs, driving rhythms and reverbed vocals that have a more urgent and energetic feel sort of like vintage PJ Harvey fronting early Deerhunter, while occasionally veering down a hazy and somnolent path giving off a Low or Galaxie 500 vibe. Plus some of the song titles are hilariously vivid, especially the last one, "Two Cocks Waving Wildly At Each Other Across A Vast Open Space, A Dark Icy Tundra". How can you not be curious? Probably one of the most rocking and energetic albums we have heard on this label. Solid!
MPEG Stream: "Completely Golden"
MPEG Stream: "Hospice Gates"
MPEG Stream: "Two Cocks..."

DEUTSCHE WERTARBEIT s/t (Medical Records) lp 19.98
We can probably count the major female figures of Krautrock on one hand. Most of them like Rosi Mueller of Ash Ra Tempel, Renate Knaup from Amon Duul II, Djong Yun from Popol Vuh, or Sabine Merbach from Gila were either singers or muses for their male-led bands. And don't even mention Clara Mondshine, which was a pseudonym for Walter Bachauer, a very real actual man. But even among those women, you don't find too many female krautrock composers. Actually, we really couldn't think of any, offhand. Can you? If so, please enlighten!
Thankfully, the brand new reissue label, Medical Records, who has bolted out the gate running with not only one but two amazing (and amazingly limited!) vinyl-only reissues, sets the record straight! The other reissue, Alexander Robotnick, reviewed elsewhere on this list, is a weirdo Italo-disco / French electro classic we've known about for awhile and we're super psyched to see finally reissued. But this one, Deutsche Wertarbeit , the solo project of Dorothea Raukes, is altogether completely new to us and what a fantastic discovery it is!
Released on Sky Records in 1981, Deutsche Wertarbeit was Raukes' first solo effort after years of being the singer for a German Progressive band we're not familiar with called Streetmark, who started in 1968, and released 4 lps between 1976 and 1981. Two of those were also released on Sky Records and one of them was even recorded in collaboration with Wolfgang Riechmann, the same year he was murdered. What? Really? Why didn't we know of this already? Just goes to show, there are still many treasures to be unearthed.
And if you dug Wolfgang Riechmann's Wunderbar reissue, that we raved about awhile back, or Klaus Schultze, Tangerine Dream, Cluster, Peter Baumann, or even some of the later Manuel Gottsching recordings such as New Age of Earth, then add Deutsche Wertarbeit to the essential kosmiche synthscape canon. But while she definitely fits in with those artists, she carves out her own defining sound of warm minimal hypnotic rhythms and vocoder voicings that display a joyous exhuberance you don't see as much in artists like Schultze or Baumann. In fact this would fit in well with the stuff on that Dirty Space Disco comp, as it sounds like a mystical combination of Vangelis and Popol Vuh, expansive and cosmic, upliftingly propulsive while keeping it all beautifully reigned in.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, each 180 gram colored vinyl and hand-numbered. We're not sure how long we'll have these, so don't wait too long. Highest Recommendation!!!!!!
MPEG Stream: "Guten Abend Leute"
MPEG Stream: "Auf Engelsflugeln"
MPEG Stream: "Der Grosse Atem"

COCONUTS s/t (No Quarter) lp 15.98
The quietly menacing, and curiously mesmeric, NYC-by-way-of-Australia trio Coconuts (that's plural, not to be confused with SF band Coconut, singular... nor should it be confused with what you probably THINK a band called Coconuts might sound like, either!) offer up what we'll assume to be their debut, on the always interestin' No Quarter label (home to Burning Star Core, Circle, Psychic Paramount, and many other faves). This self-titled disc comprises 5 tracks, mostly all but one of 'em pretty long (but not in the double digits or anything), 34 minutes or so total. When it's on, though, you'll sink pretty deep into their sounds, that it'll seem like it would take much longer to swim back to the surface, helplessly drifting with the wave-action of their heavy plodding rhythms, Coconuts' semi-skronked, but not un-melodic, keening guitars like the plaintive calls of homeless, strung-out whales...
We noticed they thank Blues Control, we can see how they'd fit in with those guys, this has got an abstract, similarly droned-out vibe, darker though, and more spare, maybe like void-travelling Moon Duo, stripped down and spooky, a downer-dosed slo-mo krauty psych groove, spacey and druggy. The vocals are hushed moans, drafty exhalations to go with the droney murk and mope of the music, which slowly throbs and buzzes, the percussion an echoing thud, the electric guitar an avant acid blues wash... The confusional element of all this is perhaps accentuated by the digipak packaging, which is oriented with the spine on the longer side, what's normally the top, or bottom... some of us here (ok, it was Allan) griped that this means when you file it on a standard cd shelf, you won't be able to fit it there with the spine facing out, you'll have to have it facing either up or down, so the name of the cd won't be visible, which is normally one of the functions of the spine, but whatever, not a big deal, at least it fits on a cd shelf at all unlike a lot of other cd packaging options. In any case, it's a cool disc!
MPEG Stream: "Lost Bitches"
MPEG Stream: "Dark World"
MPEG Stream: "Dean's Blues"

COCONUTS s/t (No Quarter) cd 13.98
The quietly menacing, and curiously mesmeric, NYC-by-way-of-Australia trio Coconuts (that's plural, not to be confused with SF band Coconut, singular... nor should it be confused with what you probably THINK a band called Coconuts might sound like, either!) offer up what we'll assume to be their debut, on the always interestin' No Quarter label (home to Burning Star Core, Circle, Psychic Paramount, and many other faves). This self-titled disc comprises 5 tracks, mostly all but one of 'em pretty long (but not in the double digits or anything), 34 minutes or so total. When it's on, though, you'll sink pretty deep into their sounds, that it'll seem like it would take much longer to swim back to the surface, helplessly drifting with the wave-action of their heavy plodding rhythms, Coconuts' semi-skronked, but not un-melodic, keening guitars like the plaintive calls of homeless, strung-out whales...
We noticed they thank Blues Control, we can see how they'd fit in with those guys, this has got an abstract, similarly droned-out vibe, darker though, and more spare, maybe like void-travelling Moon Duo, stripped down and spooky, a downer-dosed slo-mo krauty psych groove, spacey and druggy. The vocals are hushed moans, drafty exhalations to go with the droney murk and mope of the music, which slowly throbs and buzzes, the percussion an echoing thud, the electric guitar an avant acid blues wash... The confusional element of all this is perhaps accentuated by the digipak packaging, which is oriented with the spine on the longer side, what's normally the top, or bottom... some of us here (ok, it was Allan) griped that this means when you file it on a standard cd shelf, you won't be able to fit it there with the spine facing out, you'll have to have it facing either up or down, so the name of the cd won't be visible, which is normally one of the functions of the spine, but whatever, not a big deal, at least it fits on a cd shelf at all unlike a lot of other cd packaging options. In any case, it's a cool disc!
MPEG Stream: "Lost Bitches"
MPEG Stream: "Dark World"
MPEG Stream: "Dean's Blues"

HADEWYCH s/t (Tuchtunie) cd 13.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We first heard about these guys via the awesome Hammer Smashed Sound blog, described as "black rituals for the vastness-appreciative", the band listing their influences as "Movement of woods, rocks, plants & nature as such - plus the vastness of it all. Abyssal fear, fire, wholeness, monolithic things, megaliths, human insignificance, occult systems of cosmology & meaning, open systems of cosmology & meaning, clean violence, swift violence, enlightenment..." PLUS there's the fact that this, their debut record, came housed in a hand crafted leaf encrusted wooden sleeve, so we were pretty much already sold. Thankfully, their blackened sonic rituals more than live up to those obtuse and abstract descriptors, and the stunning packaging.
Black ambience might be too reductive when trying to describe Hadewych's mysterious soundworld, but it's a start. Occultic, ritualistic, grim, mysterious, haunting, all of the tracks here exist in some sort of moonlit nether region, the whole record some sort of fantastic journey, rendered in abstract sound, huge heaving swells of dense drone, muted pits of abstract percussion, softly crumbling bits of ambient whir, the sounds clipped and layered and assembled into lumbering skeletal rhythms, deep processed vocals, intoning some strange prayer, while a bleak black melody plays out in the background, and some super freaky demonic vocals surface, belch out some wordless filth, before splintering and collapsing back into the swirling blackness below.
Dense walls of SUNNO)))-ish rumble dissolve into some skittery almost-electronica, wrapped around more of those freaky belchy vocals, and some shimmery choral vocals overhead, before the record switches gears, and sprawls into some softly glitched pop ambience, all shimmer and drift and hover, laced with haunting strings and whispered vox buried in the mix, chimes ring out, voices are stretched out into warm whirling sun dappled streaks of sound, layered acoustic guitars explode into squalls of blown out psychedelia, infused with intercepted radio broadcasts, a woozy washed out cloud of lumbering crunch and majestic soft noise, only to dissipate into another sprawling bit of rhythmic ambience, with warm soft focus guitars drifting over skittery electronics, and more hushed vox, giving way to a blown out, muffled in-the-red black folk drone, the notes and chords so saturated they sound almost percussive, and the more you listen, the more the various sounds ooze and blend and bleed into one.
Lilting echo drenched folk leads us toward the end of our journey, atonal and buzzy, the steel strings soon fade out, leaving a gorgeous low end stretch of looped and layered tones, a sort of murky minimal pulse, haunting and ominous, and totally hypnotic, a quick burst of clatter and crunch leads us into a field of dense harmonium drone, hissing and wheezing, a gloriously textured expanse of warm whirs, peppered with strange field recordings, the crunch of footsteps, the panting of panicked breathing, which finally leads us to the black path, leading to an emptiness in the center of the black forest, the sound emanating from that void a deep rib cage rattling rumble, shot through with bits of glitch and hiss, and long streaks of some mysterious reverbed rasp, tendrils of feedback, fragments of melody, the shimmer of vibrating steel strings, tolling bells, all gradually blurred into blackness. So intense. Epic and cinematic, like the score to a life lived beneath the looming shadows of the great black oaks, or the soundtrack to a doomed expedition to the underworld, mysterious and evocative, and so so hauntingly beautiful.
LIMITED TO ONLY 165 COPIES, housed in a red felt lined handmade wooden case, with four double-sided cards, the whole thing packed in incense-dried Norway maple leaves. Wow.
MPEG Stream: "Ava"
MPEG Stream: "A Forest For Riss"
MPEG Stream: "Prone"
MPEG Stream: "Bordun"
MPEG Stream: "Gentle Art Of Incineration Pt. 1"

CHERRY, DON Brown Rice (A&M / Jazz Heritage) cd 17.98
We don't believe this is a new reissue, but it's one of our favorite jazz records ever, a real classic, and this is the first time we've been able to get a bunch to list. Perhaps it's even our most favorite Don Cherry album, which is saying a lot since there are so many of his records we love (this is the third we've made a Record of the Week) and there's been much spirited discussion around here between this one and Orient, a former record of the week from, egad, eight years ago! But hell, they're both really amazing so if you dug Orient, or the collaboration with Latif Khan we made Record of the Week a year ago, you'll definitely want to get this, and if you have no Don Cherry in your collection, you might as well start right here. Why we've never been able to list this before is a huge mystery, but let's just make up for lost time and tell you why this is so great.
Released in 1975 on the A&M label, Brown Rice is just 4 songs clocking at about 39 minutes. It's as focussed as Orient was sprawling, mining the same African, Indian, and Arabic influences, but in much tighter and dynamic, almost rock-oriented arrangements. Penetratingly deep on a spiritual level but also engaging and propulsive in its accessibility, Brown Rice is a record that gets right to the point the second the opening electric piano riff and female wordless singing of the title track begin. With wah'd out guitars and electric bongos building up into a groove, this is Cherry at his funkiest with ghostly trumpet shrieks off in the background, vocalised rhythm syncopations and Charlie Haden's underscoring bass swirling around Cherry's whispered chanting. "Malkauns", the longest track at 14 minutes lays down a lackadaisical vibe with tamboura and bass slowly unfolding a wide ground for Cherry's plaintive trumpet to eventually arrive and build up momentum with Billy Higgins' drumming pushing the proceedings upward and outward, eventually floating down back to earth. The third track "Chenrezig" begins deep and solemn with bass rumbles, chimes and Cherry's low and shaman-like vocals sometimes delving into Tuvan throat level buzz and whispering, augmented by high piano tones and lilting trumpet trills before the energy unleashes, not so much in a blind fury as it is a concentrated and feverish ritual extraction of sound. The final track, "Degi-Degi" brings us back to the driving rhythms and grooves of "Brown Rice", with Cherry's whispered chants and some of his brightest and most lyrical trumpet playing really feeling the space.
We can't help but wonder how much of Cherry's soundtrack work for the film Holy Mountain had an influence on his direction for this record, as Brown Rice is that rare hybrid of jazz, rock and film score, one we could easily see visualized on film. In the same line as Bitches Brew, Herbie Hancock's Sextant, or the recent Love Cry Want reissue, but also with the same sort of deep spiritual core we treasure so much in records by Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra. Essential!
MPEG Stream: "Brown Rice"
MPEG Stream: "Malkauns"

FUQUGI Gransofa + Nightingale (Plop) cd 17.98
Sometimes we need to hear the kind of music that just lets us float away. Away from our stress, problems, thoughts, anxiety, etc. Fuqugi have made the perfect record for those times, when you just need to be lifted off, freed to drift and daydream, with a breeze of sound that feels like it's drifting down from the sky and lifting you up to hover in soft comforting clouds.
Hailing from southern Japan, Fuqugi is the work of Daiki Sakae, who uses his guitar with elegance and patience, to create majestic sounds that conjure images of soft waves, gray skies and and that special moment in-between being awake and asleep. At times running his guitar through delay and layers of effects but always with such a tender touch. We're reminded a lot of early Durutti Column as well as Robin Guthrie and the moods created by Harold Budd. In fact Gransofa + Nightingale reminds us quite a bit of the amazing collaboration that Budd and Guthrie created on their score to the excellent film, Mysterious Skin. These songs have such an amazing languid quality, never beating you over the head with an emotion yet always slowly taking you to such comforting and mournful states of being. We also hear a kindred spirit evoked by Fuqugi's sounds in the new solo outing by Danny Paul Grody, as they both conjure up such a blissed out state, infused with a patience and restraint that pays off in the form of an ever shifting cloud of hushed dreamlike sound. If Kompakt were ever to make a Pop Ambient record dedicated to folks who use guitar more then electronics then we think Fuqugi could be the star of that album. Highly recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Dandelion"
MPEG Stream: "Nightingale"
MPEG Stream: "Narcosis"

SCHMIDT, IRMIN & THE INNER SPACE Kamasutra: Vollendung Der Kiebe (OST) (Crippled Dick Hot Wax) cd 17.98
Wow, it's definitely Christmas around here and how can we tell? Well, for one thing we got this amazing new soundtrack reissue that we never realized until now we have been looking for most of our adult life. It's on Crippled Dick Hot Wax, one of our fave reissue labels that we haven't heard from in years and had feared they disappeared for good. And it's another lost gem from the proto-Can universe of The Inner Space, the same early group incarnation that gave us the soundtrack to the unreleased surreal-politico film, Agilok and Blubbo!
One of our favorite Krautrock obscurities compilations from years and years ago was called Kraut Demons Kraut and two of the tracks were credited to The Can, but didn't sound like Can at all. These were pastoral and pretty with flutes and guitar, one featured very folky female vocals by Margareta Juvan called, "I'm Hiding My Nightingale", the other track was called "Kama Sutra" (billed here as "Indisches Panorama I"). We had always wondered where those recordings had come from, and how they related to Can. It wasn't until someone put this on in the store after we just got it in that it all came rushing back. Those songs were from a rare 1968 German erotic film by Kobi Jaegar called Kamasutra: Consumation Of Love and were arranged and performed by Irmin Schmidt & The Inner Space, whose then lineup of Jaki Leibeziet, Malcolm Mooney and Michael Karoli was essentially the same line-up of Can's debut full length, Monster Movie.
But much of this is different from the Can we know (though the Malcolm Mooney-sung "There Was A Man" points at what Can was to become, and Michael Karoli's simmering electric guitar lines are as signature as ever), it even sounds very different from the other Inner Space release, Agilok and Blubbo. That soundtrack was more exploratory, improvisational and experimental, while Kamasutra is much more focused and musically gorgeous. Lots of sitars, flutes, acoustic and electric guitars playing slow-burning compositions with loping repetitive rhythms. Occasionally rocking out a groove, but more often wandering through many pastoral raga-tinged extrapolations. This is the most psychedelically kosmiche recording we've ever heard from this outfit, which of course gives it our highest recommendation!
MPEG Stream: "Indisches Panorama I"
MPEG Stream: "I'm Hiding My Nightingale"
MPEG Stream: "Im Tempel"
MPEG Stream: "In Orient II"

SCHMIDT, IRMIN & THE INNER SPACE Kamasutra: Vollendung Der Kiebe (OST) (Crippled Dick Hot Wax) 2lp 22.00
Wow, it's definitely Christmas around here and how can we tell? Well, for one thing we got this amazing new soundtrack reissue that we never realized until now we have been looking for most of our adult life. It's on Crippled Dick Hot Wax, one of our fave reissue labels that we haven't heard from in years and had feared they disappeared for good. And it's another lost gem from the proto-Can universe of The Inner Space, the same early group incarnation that gave us the soundtrack to the unreleased surreal-politico film, Agilok and Blubbo!
One of our favorite Krautrock obscurities compilations from years and years ago was called Kraut Demons Kraut and two of the tracks were credited to The Can, but didn't sound like Can at all. These were pastoral and pretty with flutes and guitar, one featured very folky female vocals by Margareta Juvan called, "I'm Hiding My Nightingale", the other track was called "Kama Sutra" (billed here as "Indisches Panorama I"). We had always wondered where those recordings had come from, and how they related to Can. It wasn't until someone put this on in the store after we just got it in that it all came rushing back. Those songs were from a rare 1968 German erotic film by Kobi Jaegar called Kamasutra: Consumation Of Love and were arranged and performed by Irmin Schmidt & The Inner Space, whose then lineup of Jaki Leibeziet, Malcolm Mooney and Michael Karoli was essentially the same line-up of Can's debut full length, Monster Movie.
But much of this is different from the Can we know (though the Malcolm Mooney-sung "There Was A Man" points at what Can was to become, and Michael Karoli's simmering electric guitar lines are as signature as ever), it even sounds very different from the other Inner Space release, Agilok and Blubbo. That soundtrack was more exploratory, improvisational and experimental, while Kamasutra is much more focused and musically gorgeous. Lots of sitars, flutes, acoustic and electric guitars playing slow-burning compositions with loping repetitive rhythms. Occasionally rocking out a groove, but more often wandering through many pastoral raga-tinged extrapolations. This is the most psychedelically kosmiche recording we've ever heard from this outfit, which of course gives it our highest recommendation!
MPEG Stream: "Indisches Panorama I"
MPEG Stream: "I'm Hiding My Nightingale"
MPEG Stream: "Im Tempel"
MPEG Stream: "In Orient II"

ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER Russian Mind (No Fun Productions) lp 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Russian Mind is the third piece of vinyl to be released in 2009 by Daniel Lopatin's ever-amazing Oneohtrix Point Never, following Zones Without People and Betrayed In The Octagon. All three of these LPs have recently been collected on the Rifts anthology, also released through No Fun, and this week's Record Of The Week!
The ideas of a forgotten future had been recently employed by Leyland Kirby on the driftscape trilogy Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was; but where Kirby pegged his lost future as somewhere in the early portion of the 20th century, reclaimed through downpitched and blurred 78s, Lopatin firmly pegs his lost future as the one perceived from the time period between 1975 and 1985. Given the title of this album, Lopatin's retro-garde zone-tripping looks back to the former Soviet Union. Such is also the case for some of Lopatin's appropriated video work, which features '80s Russian commercials with all sorts of a wonderfully corn-ball, lazer-clad video effects. Furthermore, he claims this album was "transcribed by the Material Eye Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Universitetskaya nab. 1, St. Petersburg, 199034, Russia." Nope, there is no such institute at the Russian Academy, but it makes for a good piece of fictional context.
A set of gaseous ambient chords opens Russian Mind, and could have been lifted from an early Boards Of Canada release, although the lack of IDM-rhythms in the Oneohtrix Point Never's electronics steer this work in an entirely different direction. His bright chimes of arpeggio poly-synth tones build asymmetrical waves that are as compelling as they are cheesy. But that's always been the point, to terminally obliterate the lines between a high-brow piece of Terry Riley minimalism and a lowest common denominator of sub-Eno ambient drivel. Russian Mind tends to be a bit more stratospheric in nature, with these sublime arcs of vapor trails passing through moonlit nightscapes, all redrawn in neon hyperdelic colors. A marvelous record for sure.
MPEG Stream: "Russian Mind"

BRIGGS, ANNE Nottinghamshire Tales (Lilith) lp 26.00
When we first saw this, we were excited that perhaps more lost recordings of UK folk singer Anne Briggs had been discovered, but this is actually the first vinyl release of Sing A Song For You, Briggs' final recording from 1973 that wasn't properly released until 1996 on The Fledg'ling label. Why this has a new title and new artwork is curious, but the record's liner notes give some insight to the singer's ambivalence about this recording and why she retired at such an early age. She was pregnant with her second child at the time and wasn't satisfied with the quality of her singing. Plus playing the bouzouki with its convex back against her pregnant belly was difficult! When the original photo session for the album cover didn't work out and she was asked to do it again while she was preparing for a move to Scotland, it pretty much sealed the final rejection of the project. She finally allowed it to be reissued in 1996 and now we have the 180 gram vinyl version with much better artwork than the cd! As much as we love Anne Briggs, we never paid much attention to that cd, thinking it was older recordings of more traditional material, never really knowing the back-story. But after listening to this, we were wrong to dismiss it! It's definitely a continuation of the much fuller sound from her last officially released record, The Time Has Come. Ten songs here, half she wrote, half traditional interpretations played mostly with Ragged Robin as the back-up band, the only time she has ever worked with a full band, and it really sounds amazing, like a true lost folk record should!

COLLINS, WILLIAM FOWLER Perdition Hill Radio (Type) cd 15.98
We were big fans of William Fowler Collins' debut album, Western Violence & Brief Sensuality, so we're very happy to see that his follow-up, Perdition Hill Radio is being released on one of our favorite experimental labels, Type. Fitting right at home between Koen Holtkamps's dreamy effervescent drift and Svarte Greiner's darkly spectral shipwreck atmospherics, Collins offers an intense nocturnal Western counterpart to the unrelenting Southwest heat of his debut. And from the image of a dim moon behind a dark looming hill on the cover, it's obvious this is a much more doom-laden outing than before. Like slow motion black holes opening in the dark desert sand, the guitar drones that Collins conjures undulate and pull us down into a nether world of enveloping starless night, the air electric with magnetic activity and static radio transmissions that churn and dissipate in an infernal ebb and flow of sonic waves. Like moving indiscernible shapes in the dim light, uncertain sounds peek out through the din, prowling animal growls, ghostly disembodied dialogue like EVP transmissions buried under sheets of noise that at times conjure images of passing trains, horse-led stagecoaches, mysterious Native American rituals, and swarms of flies. The song titles like "Grave Robbing In Texas" and "Slow Motion Prayer Circle" only add to the dread and mystery of what those fleeting sounds could allude to. On the album's 21 minute centerpiece, "Dark Country Road", the far-off echoing twang of a slide guitar can be heard fading into the distance before a mountainous dronescape rises out of the still air and crests tunnel-like into an inky pool of uneasy shimmer for much of its length (the vinyl version ends in a locked groove!). Only on the last song, "The Ghosts of Eden Trail", does the sound brighten up into a beautifully levitating and expansive drifting ambience offering just a glimpse of torturing hope. The limited double vinyl version contains a side-long bonus track, "Saturnine Reverie" not on the cd. We have often said that Earth's later records are Cormac McCarthy novels in song, but Perdition Hill Radio is the closest comparison to an imagined soundtrack for The Road that we have ever heard, and that of course means this has our highest recommendation!!!
MPEG Stream: "Grave Robbing In Texas"
MPEG Stream: "Dark Country Road"
MPEG Stream: "On Perdition Hill"

COLLINS, WILLIAM FOWLER Perdition Hill Radio (Type) 2lp 23.00
We were big fans of William Fowler Collins' debut album, Western Violence & Brief Sensuality, so we're very happy to see that his follow-up, Perdition Hill Radio is being released on one of our favorite experimental labels, Type. Fitting right at home between Koen Holtkamps's dreamy effervescent drift and Svarte Greiner's darkly spectral shipwreck atmospherics, Collins offers an intense nocturnal Western counterpart to the unrelenting Southwest heat of his debut. And from the image of a dim moon behind a dark looming hill on the cover, it's obvious this is a much more doom-laden outing than before. Like slow motion black holes opening in the dark desert sand, the guitar drones that Collins conjures undulate and pull us down into a nether world of enveloping starless night, the air electric with magnetic activity and static radio transmissions that churn and dissipate in an infernal ebb and flow of sonic waves. Like moving indiscernible shapes in the dim light, uncertain sounds peek out through the din, prowling animal growls, ghostly disembodied dialogue like EVP transmissions buried under sheets of noise that at times conjure images of passing trains, horse-led stagecoaches, mysterious Native American rituals, and swarms of flies. The song titles like "Grave Robbing In Texas" and "Slow Motion Prayer Circle" only add to the dread and mystery of what those fleeting sounds could allude to. On the album's 21 minute centerpiece, "Dark Country Road", the far-off echoing twang of a slide guitar can be heard fading into the distance before a mountainous dronescape rises out of the still air and crests tunnel-like into an inky pool of uneasy shimmer for much of its length (the vinyl version ends in a locked groove!). Only on the last song, "The Ghosts of Eden Trail", does the sound brighten up into a beautifully levitating and expansive drifting ambience offering just a glimpse of torturing hope. The limited double vinyl version contains a side-long bonus track, "Saturnine Reverie" not on the cd. We have often said that Earth's later records are Cormac McCarthy novels in song, but Perdition Hill Radio is the closest comparison to an imagined soundtrack for The Road that we have ever heard, and that of course means this has our highest recommendation!!!
MPEG Stream: "Grave Robbing In Texas"
MPEG Stream: "Dark Country Road"
MPEG Stream: "On Perdition Hill"

MRTYU Ornate Shroud (Tipped Bowler Tapes / Faunasabbatha) lp 12.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
Latest bit of obscure musical alchemism from the mysterious cave dwelling horde known simply as Mrtyu, but around here, also known as Antony Milton, head honcho of the Pseudo Arcana label, and the man behind numerous musical endeavors we dig BIG time: Street, Nether Dawn, Claypipe, With Throats As Fine As Needles, The Stumps, we could go on and on...
Mrtyu was always Milton's outlet for his darker side, a sort of blackened drone metal behemoth, never full committing the the black buzz, always sort of skirting the grim true BM sound, taking elements of that sound and fusing it to his more abstract, folky dronemusic, the results invariably kick ass. On this latest slab, the Mrtyu sound is markedly different, for all the noise and skree and buzz and general heaviness, it's also probably the prettiest Mrtyu yet. As if the ever raging battle between his folkier dronier 'good' side and his buzzier sludgier 'bad' side, has finally tipped to the side of good. But not too good, fear not.
Unlike some of the more grim noise drenched rituals of the past, the first side could almost be one of Milton's other projects. Sure there's plenty of guitar skree, sheets of feedback, and dense layers of soft chaos, but beneath it all lurk gorgeous lilting melodies, each avalanche of crumbling distortion can barely disguise the weirdly pretty, woozy, spidery, dreamy melodies within. Swirled smears of muted buzz wrap around delicate jangle and simple strum, dense cacophonous walls of sound tumble beneath crystalline chordal streaks.
It's not until the B side that things get seriously heavy. A gorgeous little Middle Eastern sounding tangle of melodies drifts over a soft layer of muted feedback, the strings sawed intensely, then suddenly, a buzzy blown out riff comes in, locked and looped, a mesmerizing lurching groove beneath the ever intensifying tangle of melodies, a twisted metallic Easter drone raga (or something) that could have taken up the whole record and we would have been psyched. Thankfully it takes up half of the second side.
The record finishes off with more abstract blackened folkiness, vocals enter the fray, a weird effected mewl, over rumbling distortion and shards of feedback, more squiggly little melodies, and some warm almost tranquil sounding guitar shimmer underneath.
Perhaps not so much for the weirdo metal obsessives anymore, this Mrtyu record will probably find a home with the more avant folk / abstract drone / free noise freaks, although truly adventurous metalheads should definitely not be dissuaded.
LIMITED TO 350 COPIES. Pressed on 180 gram vinyl. Housed in hand screened linen paper sleeves. NICE!

GOG Mist From The Random More (Utech Records) cd 14.98
In a world (our world at least) full to overflowing with drone records, dirge records, doom records, and yes, dirgedoomdrone records, the mysterious Gog have somehow always managed to transcend. From their very first release, the subtly spectacular Noriah Mills, Gog have continued to mine similar territory as so many other soundmakers, but with the resultant whole so much more than its constituent parts.
The music of Gog, while on the surface, perhaps seemingly simple, minimal, abstract, is the sort of sound that requires deep listening, upon which, the guitars then reveal themselves as so much more than electronic tone generators, the long strands of feedback and the layers of dense billowy buzz, so much more than just texture and timbre. And while on past releases, the band hinted at something a bit more black, their occasionally blissed out ambience drifting into darker and darker greys, on Mist From The Random More, the band have fully committed, creating what for them is a haunting otherworldly black metal suite, a droned out, blissed out, buzz drenched, almost static expanse of smoldering grimness, shot through with glimmering glistening effulgence, a bit like wrapping a black gauze around an exploding sun, the results, again, transcendent.
The record begins with a gorgeous, slow burning bit of guitar drone, that owes more to the kosmiche sounds of krautdrone than the downtuned glacial fug of more doom-ed entities. These guitars soar and shimmer, warm gouts of feedback enfolded by deep rich sheets of coruscating soft focus heaviness, any other band would stretch this out to fill up a whole album, and rightfully so, we'd probably be gushing just as much if Gog chose to do the same thing, but these Sunroof-ian solar sonics are only part of Gog's grand vision for Mist From The Random More.
The title track, taking up the bulk of the record, finds Gog fully immersing themselves in black metal, or at least their (very) loose approximation of what black metal is, or could be. The sound is grim, and frosty, but only in the sense that it reflects much of the black metal that came before, in every other way, it's anything but, the guitars glow, the riffs are fluid, organic, wrapped in a soft burnished buzz, that reminds us a bit of Jesu or Nadja, but the arrangement is more Necks. In fact, a shorthand descriptor might be "a black metal Necks", which if you're anything like us, would be all it would take. Simple skittery minimal drumming, almost looped sounding if it weren't so abstract, beneath a roiling cloud of layered guitars, grinding and whirring and hissing, and within that cloud, some gorgeously melancholic low end melodies, difficult to describe the strange blend of loveliness and heaviness, but there it is, a distinctly lovely heaviness, washed out and blurry, and hypnotic and epic and melodic, within this seemingly static structure, the sound swings and slips through various incarnations, moving from total blurred buzz, to a more slowcore lope, always wreathed in swirling clouds of blackened shimmer, until the end, when the track explodes in climax of effects drenched psychedelic churn.
The closing track offers a chance to decompress, a strange assemblage of soothing tones, shot through with streaks of feedback, very cool and clinical, almost a Raster-Noton sort of sound, there's a brief burst of super distorted crumbling sonic chaos, almost Merzbowian in its intensity, transforming into a haunting post industrial doomscape, before again returning to the relative tranquility of the first few minutes, eventually leaving just a single upper register tone, which also finally fades into the shadows.
Another fantastic record from Utech (after a whole mess of incredible releases, including last list's Aluk Todolo Record Of The Week), gorgeous packaging, an abstract skull, rendered in some kind of white dust (cocaine?), on a spare black background, a gatefold with printed liner notes inside, and yes, probably limited...
MPEG Stream: "Night Zoe"
MPEG Stream: "Mist From The Random More"

PESTE NOIRE Ballade Cuntre Lo Anemi Francor (De Profundis / Rosenkrantz) cd 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Pretty much as soon as we heard this, we knew it was going to be Record Of The Week, and not just black metal record of the week. In the past, Peste Noire seems to have always been unfairly categorized as an Amesoeurs / Alcest sideproject (we plead guilty of that as well) due not only to the presence of Neige, the mastermind behind both Amesoeurs and Alcest, but the seemingly shared membership between all three bands, and while Neige did no doubt contribute much to Peste Noire's sound, it seems Peste Noire was much more the brainchild of only remaining original member, Famine, whose other main musical outlet is the almost equally twisted Valfunde, and as if to prove the validity of the above claim, has assembled an almost entirely new lineup (although Audrey from Amesoeurs contributes some vocals) and cobbled together the most damaged, most fucked up, most gloriously bizarre Peste Noire record yet. Which if you've heard any of the other records is definitely saying something!
The record is weirdly arranged, five proper songs, with 2 minute or shorter song fragments and interludes, some that play like proper songs themselves, only truncated, others that act as intros or just totally tweaked unhinged sound experiments, but somehow, songs and non-songs alike hold together beautifully, and bafflingly, the band having created some sort of crusty, blackened, melancholy, depressive French folk flecked classic metal.
The intro begins with sizzling shimmering cymbals, simple percussion, eventually joined by beautiful ethereal female vocals, as well as some raspy blackened not-really-harmony vocals, then the riff comes in, and damn if it isn't a riff from Star Wars, but super distorted and blown out, pounding, crusty, epic and majestic, the rasped vocals over a haunting military sounding speech. And then straight into the first 'proper' track, which begins as some sort of sea shanty like French folk song, but with the addition of some hellish black vokills, you can almost imagine a table full of French soldiers, and one dripping slimy otherworldy beast, all singing along, glasses raised to the sky. Then in comes a very classic sounding metal riff, but the guitars muted and woozy, the tempo lurching and seasick, all manner of different vocals, crooning, shrieking, howling, then an awesomely weird squiggly bit of low end, super tripped out and psychedelic but somehow subtle and buried in the mix. Guitars soar and sing and jangle, wrapped around equally dramatic vocals, a total French folk crust anthem.
The follow up track begins all dark acoustic guitars and birdsong, martial percussion, eventually exploding into a super buzzy distorted march, pounding away, midtemp and melancholy, before returning to a super gorgeous, hauntingly depressive gothic crust almost-ballad, blackened and distorted, but also post rocky and strangely emotional and moving.
The 'interludes' include some warped and warbly haunted house piano, doused in hiss and crackle, ghostly female vocals drifting amidst the warm whir, sinister laughter, squalls of maniacal shrieks, dueling male / female vocals, almost operatic, soon joined again by that monstrous blackened croak, warm woozy calliopes, soundtracky keyboards and the sound of storms, tons of reverb and delay, tape hiss and softly crumbling distortion, all creating perfect segues between loping depressive midtempo blackened post metal lurch, super blown out in the red almost D-beat pounding buzz, those vocals transforming from hellish howl to deep moan, there's even some wheezing harmonica, all leading up to the final track, "Soleils Couchants", which begins with birdsong again, and an awesomely angular and beautifully twisted guitar part, paired up with a gorgeous minor key harmony, before slipping into a moody downtuned creep, complete with weird frog like vocals, and a looped bit of beeps and chirps, total post-doom weirdness, literally like nothing you've ever heard, it sounds a little like that first part of the Pirates Of The Caribbean ride at Disneyland, where you're just floating through the dark bayou, lit only but slivers of moonlight and the flickering light of fireflies, it's like a soundtrack to that, swampy and doomy and mysterious, until the band launches into a strangely melodic black doom midtempo jam, the guitars minor key, multiple vocals merging into raspy otherworldly harmonies, before breaking down into a long stretch of just guitars and vocals, the guitars twisted and spidery but still melodic, the voices tortured but super passionate, yet again infusing the fucked up twisted blackness with pathos and emotion, keeping it from being weird for weird's sake, this is something else entirely. What sounds like a child's voice joins in, twisted around that hellish vokill, all draped over a gorgeously catchy riff, reminding us a bit of Katatonia or Lifelover, before spiraling and sprawling into a seriously melodic blackened post rock jam, and then finally returning to the doomy lurch that began the song some seven minutes earlier.
Peste Noire have (again) managed the seemingly impossible, creating a record both totally twisted and damaged, but also lovely and moving and melodic, a record that ranks up there in our pantheon of most bizarre and fucked up black metal records ever, while somehow appealing to even the not so metal inclined, a confusional mix of black and crust and pop and folk, all twisted and tangled up and forced through Peste Noire's cracked musical sensibilities, the result, a record fucked up and fantastical, and this review not withstanding, almost impossible to describe.
MPEG Stream: "Neire Peste"
MPEG Stream: "La Mesniee Mordrissoire"
MPEG Stream: "Ballade Cuntre Les Anemis De La France"
MPEG Stream: "Soleils Couchants"

NADLER, MARISSA Little Hells (Kemado) lp 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The fourth record from Boston's most enchanting female songstress has left us breathless and almost at a loss for words! Ms Nadler really hits the nail on the head with this effortless marriage of hauntingly rich vocal cascades and captivating song writing. Quite the magnificent album, Little Hells features Nadler joined by a full band whose rhythmic weight anchors each song as her reverb-shrouded vocals drift into the dawning sky. If you've a penchant for lonely country charm with a gothic twist, and melancholic hymns possessed by a familiar nostalgia, this is soooo for you! Conjures visions of Victorian churches on golden plains at midnight, flickering shadows in hallways of rickety old barns. As far as production goes, we've never heard Nadler sound so dense and layered with such an array of instrumentation embracing the core slide guitar, bass and drums. And yet for all the gothic folk elements at the heart of this record, Little Hells is perhaps Nadler's poppiest release to date. Stunning!
MPEG Stream: "Loner"
MPEG Stream: "The Hole Is Wide"
MPEG Stream: "River of Dirt"

HARVESTMAN In A Dark Tongue (Neurot) cd 14.98
Musical missive number two (or three if you count the sidelong Fear Falls Burning remix from a few years back) from Harvestman, the cosmic folk space raga alter ego of Neurosis' Steve Von Till.
The first Harvestman record, A Lashing The Rye, was a dizzying confluence of delicate seventies British style folk, shimmery spaced out drift, and glacial doomdrone sprawl, a constantly evolving, organic song suite that seemed to exist in some glorious blissed out otherworld. On In A Dark Tongue, the glimmering strands of traditional folk music that tethered the first record become even more tenuous. Before, even at its spaciest, Harvestman seemed grounded and earthbound, certainly with an eye to the stars, but the sounds evoking frosty mountainsides, deep forests, blackened skies, as much as strange shapes in the heavens and mysterious galaxies, the soundtrack to a strange terrestrial world, lit by the contrails of mysterious bodies streaking across the heavens.
Like Lashing The Rye, In A Dark Tongue is also a weathered megalithic sonic artifact of an unknowable culture, its symbols obscure yet magnetic, calling you into communion with its ancient spirit. Enduring, unnerving, moving. Evoking arcane rites, cold hazy sunrises, a god/dess visible only in the massive wheeling patterns of nature and sound. But Dark Tongue moves beyond its predecessor, creating a linked, yet wholly other sonic landscape, at once more abstract and ethereal, but also heavier and more dense, with a black hole intensity woven into the otherwise kaleidoscopic drift, the sound constantly shifting from woozy, bleary eyed psychedelia to loosely propulsive spacekraut groove, fluttery delicate thrum to wild metallic squall, all doused in effects, a warm fuzzy patina of gauzy blur and muted buzz.
It's almost as if the songs here are not so much songs as transmissions, broadcast from a lost land, messages from the original Harvestman, sprawling lysergic druidic rituals, wreathed in the sonic detritus of the sound's endless journey, a message home - or a message lost and drifting endlessly through the black expanses of time.
Recorded in the woods of Idaho, Harvestman draws from the surrounding landscape, unfurling softly buzzing spidery barely there melodies that hover in druggy expanses of Tangerine Dream warped guitar blur, druggy, woozy, hazy, delicate yet dark, an alien psych folk rendered in shades of space rock.
Soft whispery steel string strum gives way to ultra distorted ur-drone ragas, the guitars super saturated and crumbling, leads that sound more like bagpipes than guitars, the sound warped and blown out, but still warm and tranquil.
Fluttering mellotronic flutes flit dreamily around slow shifting sheets of soft swelling chords, smeared with streaks of glitch and whir. Slowly sprawling grooves underpinned by squalls of outer space FX and upper register feedback, all draped over brittle layers of jagged crunch, throbbing motorik beats wrapped in thick swaths of delay, decay and rumble, everything locked into hypnotic lurching loops.
The vocals are sparse, in fact on Dark Tongue the vocals creep to the surface on only one track, the brooding expansive "By Wind And Sun." Von Till's raspy croon, equal parts weathered Tom Waits-ian bellow and Neurosis style metallic howl, rough and raw, but still soulful and dramatic, a haunting ritualistic chant, although as the song progresses, Von Till's voice begins to transform and splinter into strange fragmented shapes, the various shards sent spinning into the ether, gradually evolving into another washed out and heavily effected layer of sound, that seems to melt into the swirling and whirling sounds all around it.
There's even one track with what sounds like a Koto, super spare and abstract, channeling Eastern classical music, but layered with slivers of minor key guitar growl, the whole thing eventually erupting into a malfunctioning electronic freakout. The whole record a constantly shifting sprawl of electric guitars and synthesizers, dulcimers and ring modulators, loops and vocals, delay and distortion. Members of the Grails and Om contribute, but here they play acolytes to Von Till's high priest, together invoking the spirit of German Oak, Amps For Christ, Can, Six Organs Of Admittance, SUNNO))), Faust, Growing, Amon Duul, their sonic shadows dancing on the looming stones assembled in the flickering firelight, beneath a sky of diamond and obsidian.
In A Dark Tongue is a gorgeous slow burning psychedelic song cycle, smoldering minor key epics, the sounds lustrous and organic, the guitars viscous and virulent, the atmosphere murky and mysterious, all the while strangely sun dappled and dreamlike. Strings soar and sing, melodic fragments are hurled into the abyss, monolithic guitar drones flow into fields of ephemeral stasis, a sound not heavy so much as darkly effulgent.
The two longest tracks appear to be the space rock centerpieces, channeling the extended heart-of-the-sun outros of Hawkwind and the smoked out stomp of old Monster Magnet into classic krautrock heaviness, each a mesmerizing soundtrack to some seemingly and perhaps ultimately doomed mission into the unknown, both rife with relentless rhythms, roiling psych drone tumult and thick warbly synths, underpinning moody meandering melodies and frictive soft focus textures.
While Harvestman most definitely exists within an esteemed sonic brotherhood, the sound here most definitely transcends, Von Till proving a master of more than massive pummeling heaviness, displaying a flair for the delicate, the tenebrous, the contemplative and the hallucinatory, having created with In A Dark Tongue a sound both portentous and elegiac, an arcane and esoteric bit of beauty, of dark hued mystery, of folk flecked abstraction and churning leviathan heft. A breathtaking and expansive glimpse beyond the firmament, into the soul of a sound, where the already blurred lines between drone and doom and drift and psych and kraut and space cease to exist at all.
Other RIYL: Expo '70, (early) La Otracina, Acid Mothers Temple, and the myriad of underground cd-r drone / drift / psych combosÉ
MPEG Stream: "Karlsteine"
MPEG Stream: "By Wind And Sun"
MPEG Stream: "The Hawk Of Achill"
MPEG Stream: "Carved In Aspen"

NADLER, MARISSA Little Hells (Kemado) cd 13.98
The fourth record from Boston's most enchanting female songstress has left us breathless and almost at a loss for words! Ms Nadler really hits the nail on the head with this effortless marriage of hauntingly rich vocal cascades and captivating song writing. Quite the magnificent album, Little Hells features Nadler joined by a full band whose rhythmic weight anchors each song as her reverb-shrouded vocals drift into the dawning sky. If you've a penchant for lonely country charm with a gothic twist, and melancholic hymns possessed by a familiar nostalgia, this is soooo for you! Conjures visions of Victorian churches on golden plains at midnight, flickering shadows in hallways of rickety old barns. As far as production goes, we've never heard Nadler sound so dense and layered with such an array of instrumentation embracing the core slide guitar, bass and drums. And yet for all the gothic folk elements at the heart of this record, Little Hells is perhaps Nadler's poppiest release to date. Stunning!
MPEG Stream: "Loner"
MPEG Stream: "The Hole Is Wide"
MPEG Stream: "River of Dirt"

NORTHERN VALENTINE The Distance Brings Us Closer (Silber) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
So this is one of those records where the cover totally gives away what's hiding inside. These Philadelphia drift-heads sent us this disc a few weeks ago, and we were totally blown away. The music so nicely reflects the cover photograph: beautiful, expansive oceanic horizons, almost glowing with a looming grayness. With keyboards, violin, three electric guitars and a bass, this five piece really hone in on a super liquidity, an organic, fluid type of drone composition. Their third album out of four, The Distance Brings Us Closer resonates with long, lush tones and delicate melodies that seem to blend and form chords in mid air. Always moving and turning like fog creeping along the forest floor, Northern Valentine has a distinct sound that kinda reminds us of a more darkened and coastal Windy and Carl playing with Rameses III in some giant cathedral. Very dark and mysterious, the record travels through blissed out walls of trance inducing drones and into more textural noisy Fennesz-like atmospheres. Though they call themselves a post-rock band, the guitars and instruments used are so dripping with reverb and delay that it might be more accurate to describe Northern Valentine as a dark and drifting ambient group. At least that's how they sound on this particular record, as word on the street is their other albums have drums and are more propulsive and less drifty. Either way we dig what they're doing A LOT, and couldn't wait to share it with all of you! If you like anything Type records related or that recently reviewed Elegi, you'll love this too! Completely and utterly recommended!!
MPEG Stream: "Born Yesterday"
MPEG Stream: "Escaping Light"

RITCHIE, JEAN Ballads From Her Appalachian Family Tradition (Smithsonian Folkways ) cd 16.98
We've been meaning to carry some Jean Ritchie for a long while. Our Appalachian folk cupboards seeming to be bone-dry bare without her exquisite interpretations of British traditional ballads of love, death and the supernatural filtered through the high lonesome rural-ness of the Kentucky mountains. Like fellow Kentuckian, John Jacob Niles, she was early on a noted student of musicology and folklore (as well as an amazing lap dulcimer player,) and keenly interested in the British roots of the songs she learned as a young girl. This anthology covers her interpretations of many of The Child Ballads, one of the first and most extensive catalogs of British traditional songs and their American variants put together in the late nineteenth century by Francis James Child, which includes songs with roots as far back as the thirteenth century, and deal with plenty of dark, gruesome and ghostly themes. Standouts on this anthology are Ritchie's version of one of our favorite morbid ballads, "Sweet William and Lady Margaret", also known just as "Lady Margaret" which was also featured on Karen Dalton's Green Rocky Road. So Beautiful!!!
MPEG Stream: "The Merry Golden Tree"
MPEG Stream: "Sweet Wiliam and Lady Margaret"
MPEG Stream: "The Unquiet Grave"

ROSE, AJA & GABRIEL SALOMAN Lightning/Spider/Grey (Herjazz Noise Collective / Diadem Discos) cassette 9.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
As if we weren't totally blown away by their first release, Aja Rose and Gabriel Saloman (who is one half of the late Yellow Swans) have once again conjured up some of the most shimmery and gorgeous lo-fi ambience around. Two sides of live collaborations recorded last year in Portland, distant voices and guitar passages ring out, the faint sound of haunted bell towers ringing miles away, glowing horizons warm with evening's fading light. Really captivating stuff here, mysterious clanging and ominous reverbed hush, a band of ghost gypsies passing through the darkened woods. So good. Too bad it was LIMITED TO 50 COPIES. Of which we have about 8 left. Gorgeous handmade packaging you sort of have to see to believe. Each one hand numbered.
Apparently this will be reissued on vinyl later this year, we'll relist it then and give it a bit more love and more of an extensive description, for now, quickest on the draw gets the prize...

ULAAN KHOL II (Soft Abuse) cd 14.98
It may be odd to single out one component of a series for Record Of The Week, especially when it's the second of a proposed three record trilogy. It's not that we didn't love the first installment, we did very much! And it's not like the Academy Awards where we're belatedly acknowledging the first installment by rewarding the second. It might be just that we didn't realize at the time the magnificent depth and far reaching direction in which Steven R. Smith would take his latest project. And as we have heaped tons of praise on his past work, we wanted to single out this project and particularly this installment as something utterly amazing and wholly breathtaking.
Despite the tons of killer music that goes in and out of the aQ doors, it's not everyday we get an album that really lifts us out of our seats and straight into an alternate dimension. The latest release under the Ulaan Khol moniker is a celestial trip into desolate plains where the water rises and the skies are ripped open.
A prominent member of the Jeweled Antler family, Steven R. Smith has been seriously influential in defining the California psych/drone sound for over a decade. We've mentioned it in plenty of reviews, so folks gotta be by now pretty aware of Smith's extensive discography, ranging from countless solo records to his releases as the Eastern European-tinged Hala Strana or with the famed JA flagship act Thuja.
The first Ulaan Khol record, though made up of nine untitled tracks, felt like one spacious drifting piece of big fuzzy distortion and fragile drone bliss. Something like the gorgeous feedback-laden free music of Les Rallizes Denudes or others from the Japanese Underground scene. We loved it a lot, but didn't go into extensive detail about it, probably because we had also just reviewed his Owl record (released under his own name) around the same time.
On II, we hear a lot more range. There are still the big swaths of massively distorted psych heaviness, but the eight untitled tracks feel more distinct and structured. Some tracks have faster Spacemen 3-like tempos and fuller driving progressions with pummeling drums mired way deep in the mix, while others feature more calm, drifty drones made up of intimate guitar, electric violin and organ passages that conjure up gorgeous swells of luminous sound. The pieces are more varied and layered, dense yet melodic and at times more rock-ish. The majestic guitar radiance Smith manages to create is not unlike the solo work of Kawabata Makoto or Tom Carter, but here we also hear shades of Roy Montgomery, Flying Saucer Attack and even Asa Osbourne from Zomes and Lungfish (Zomes being a recent Record Of The Week too).
As with the first disc, there are no liner notes, just an abstract painted cover, this time in bleak blue-grey winter tones. And inside the sleeve is an awesome painting of a lamp-holding monk (perhaps the same skull contemplating monk from the first disc) at the mouth of a giant cave! Yes!
MPEG Stream: "Untitled 1"
MPEG Stream: "Untitled 3"
MPEG Stream: "Untitled 4"

PUSSYGUTT She Hid Behind Her Veil... (20 Buck Spin) cd 13.98
A brand new single-track of sprawling blackness from this mysterious Idaho duo, offering up their own version of the template laid down by Earth way back around their album 2. Which as you probably already know means, metal riffs slowed down to tarpit tempo, the various notes struggling to move forward through a field of crumbling distortion and near static buzz, the riffs allowed to ring out and fade away almost completely, before the next one comes lumbering up behind it.
The strange thing is that live, Pussygutt are a full on band, much more traditionally heavy, with a drummer and everything, even on their last record the epic double lp Sea Of Sand, the band was a lurching doomic behemoth, bordering on the industrial at times, but here, their sound is stripped way way down, and it suits them. They're able to evoke all sorts of moods with their carefully constructed downtuned ambience. This is some seriously sinister shit for sure, sweeping and darkly cinematic, the soundtrack to the eventual collapse of the universe, the sound of dying stars, or of some long slumbering beat awakening after millennia, or maybe Goblin at 16rpm, some haunted house music way too scary for any haunted house you'd ever want to visit.
It's not all heaviness though. Long stretches of sound dip into hushed shimmer here and there, while elsewhere the low end slips away leaving a creepy string section do drift spectrally, like some secret Satanic classical music, but even these moments are always tense with the knowledge that right around the corner, could be lurking another churning black wave of slow motion doomdrone crush. Really fantastic, and more than most of this stuff, infused with a deep otherworldly beauty.
Definitely require listening for folks whose cd racks/record crates/iPods' are packed with Earth, SUNNO))), Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, To Blacken The Pages, Hum Of The Druid, Expo '70, Nadja, Vulture Club, Hjarnidaudi, Monument Of Urns, Fear Falls Burning, Half Makeshift, Tunnels, Seconds In Formaldehyde, KTL, Light Of Shipwreck...
MPEG Stream: "She Hid Behind Her Veil... "

HELIOS Caesura (Type) cd 15.98
You can't always judge a record by its cover. But after one look at the cover of Caesura, disc number four from Boston's Helios, we could pretty much tell this would be a wondrous escape into some heavenly realm of ambient goodness. Between the latest Grouper release and the cosmic psychedelia of the recent Alps disc, Type seems to have tapped into some infinite well of dream pop specialists. And Helios is one of the most outstanding members of this cast of dream weavers. Boston's Keith Kenniff, the man behind Helios, has crafted an album of delicate, gorgeous compositions shrouded in winter's haze. Light and somber guitar passages stepping along side sparse electronic beats and percussion to create a lush wreath of pop ambiance. Unlike some pop ambient records that too easily meander into the dreary corners of space, Caesura remains anchored to earth. Invoking images of quiet pines and blissful isolation, there's a captivating relationship between the more industrial, electronic backbone of the record and the droning, organic melodies that hover above. Caesura is the perfect soundtrack for gazing out at the morning fog on lonely winter mornings. Need we say much else?
MPEG Stream: "Hope Valley Hill"
MPEG Stream: "A Mountain of Ice"

AQUARIUS T SHIRT Special Limited Artists Edition #1: Justin Bartlett (Size: 2XL) T shirt 22.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Finally! The first in a series of super limited, artist designed aQ T-Shirts, featuring original art by some of our favorite artists, who just so happen to be loyal aQ customers as well! Each one will be super special, totally unique, and will only be available for a limited time, as we're only making a finite amount of each.
The first shirt design is by aQ pal and infamous killustrator Justin Bartlett, whose style many of you no doubt will recognize. He's done tons of drawings for Oaken Throne black metal magazine, as well as record covers for grim groups like SUNNO))), Moss, Nadja, Pentemple and loads more. His style is incredible, super detailed, pen and ink with tons of stippling, lots of skulls and guts and demons and various crusty oozing offal. For aQ he's designed a super creepy and super evil mother and child, heads in bags, their rotten innards spilling out, skulls on spikes, and "Aquarius Records" carved into the stone archway in the background. It looks amazing, and will for sure get some eyes a popping as you wander through the grocery store or sit in church (heaven forbid).
The back features a small aQ logo up near the collar, the shirts are white on black, they are Hanes heavyweight T's, 100% preshrunk cotton, and we have sizes all the way from Youth Large (for kids and little ladies) all the way up to XXL (for the big guys).
We will only be selling these for a couple months, so don't miss out. Once they are gone, they won't be reprinted. EVER.
Future aQ Artist Edition T's will include designs by Savage Pencil, Stephen O'Malley, Aaron Turner and more more more!!!

AQUARIUS T SHIRT Special Limited Artists Edition #1: Justin Bartlett (Size: Extra Large) T shirt 22.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Finally! The first in a series of super limited, artist designed aQ T-Shirts, featuring original art by some of our favorite artists, who just so happen to be loyal aQ customers as well! Each one will be super special, totally unique, and will only be available for a limited time, as we're only making a finite amount of each.
The first shirt design is by aQ pal and infamous killustrator Justin Bartlett, whose style many of you no doubt will recognize. He's done tons of drawings for Oaken Throne black metal magazine, as well as record covers for grim groups like SUNNO))), Moss, Nadja, Pentemple and loads more. His style is incredible, super detailed, pen and ink with tons of stippling, lots of skulls and guts and demons and various crusty oozing offal. For aQ he's designed a super creepy and super evil mother and child, heads in bags, their rotten innards spilling out, skulls on spikes, and "Aquarius Records" carved into the stone archway in the background. It looks amazing, and will for sure get some eyes a popping as you wander through the grocery store or sit in church (heaven forbid).
The back features a small aQ logo up near the collar, the shirts are white on black, they are Hanes heavyweight T's, 100% preshrunk cotton, and we have sizes all the way from Youth Large (for kids and little ladies) all the way up to XXL (for the big guys).
We will only be selling these for a couple months, so don't miss out. Once they are gone, they won't be reprinted. EVER.
Future aQ Artist Edition T's will include designs by Savage Pencil, Stephen O'Malley, Aaron Turner and more more more!!!

AQUARIUS T SHIRT Special Limited Artists Edition #1: Justin Bartlett (Size: Large) T shirt 22.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Finally! The first in a series of super limited, artist designed aQ T-Shirts, featuring original art by some of our favorite artists, who just so happen to be loyal aQ customers as well! Each one will be super special, totally unique, and will only be available for a limited time, as we're only making a finite amount of each.
The first shirt design is by aQ pal and infamous killustrator Justin Bartlett, whose style many of you no doubt will recognize. He's done tons of drawings for Oaken Throne black metal magazine, as well as record covers for grim groups like SUNNO))), Moss, Nadja, Pentemple and loads more. His style is incredible, super detailed, pen and ink with tons of stippling, lots of skulls and guts and demons and various crusty oozing offal. For aQ he's designed a super creepy and super evil mother and child, heads in bags, their rotten innards spilling out, skulls on spikes, and "Aquarius Records" carved into the stone archway in the background. It looks amazing, and will for sure get some eyes a popping as you wander through the grocery store or sit in church (heaven forbid).
The back features a small aQ logo up near the collar, the shirts are white on black, they are Hanes heavyweight T's, 100% preshrunk cotton, and we have sizes all the way from Youth Large (for kids and little ladies) all the way up to XXL (for the big guys).
We will only be selling these for a couple months, so don't miss out. Once they are gone, they won't be reprinted. EVER.
Future aQ Artist Edition T's will include designs by Savage Pencil, Stephen O'Malley, Aaron Turner and more more more!!!

AQUARIUS T SHIRT Special Limited Artists Edition #1: Justin Bartlett (Size: Medium) T shirt 22.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Finally! The first in a series of super limited, artist designed aQ T-Shirts, featuring original art by some of our favorite artists, who just so happen to be loyal aQ customers as well! Each one will be super special, totally unique, and will only be available for a limited time, as we're only making a finite amount of each.
The first shirt design is by aQ pal and infamous killustrator Justin Bartlett, whose style many of you no doubt will recognize. He's done tons of drawings for Oaken Throne black metal magazine, as well as record covers for grim groups like SUNNO))), Moss, Nadja, Pentemple and loads more. His style is incredible, super detailed, pen and ink with tons of stippling, lots of skulls and guts and demons and various crusty oozing offal. For aQ he's designed a super creepy and super evil mother and child, heads in bags, their rotten innards spilling out, skulls on spikes, and "Aquarius Records" carved into the stone archway in the background. It looks amazing, and will for sure get some eyes a popping as you wander through the grocery store or sit in church (heaven forbid).
The back features a small aQ logo up near the collar, the shirts are white on black, they are Hanes heavyweight T's, 100% preshrunk cotton, and we have sizes all the way from Youth Large (for kids and little ladies) all the way up to XXL (for the big guys).
We will only be selling these for a couple months, so don't miss out. Once they are gone, they won't be reprinted. EVER.
Future aQ Artist Edition T's will include designs by Savage Pencil, Stephen O'Malley, Aaron Turner and more more more!!!

AQUARIUS T SHIRT Special Limited Artists Edition #1: Justin Bartlett (Size: Small) T shirt 22.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Finally! The first in a series of super limited, artist designed aQ T-Shirts, featuring original art by some of our favorite artists, who just so happen to be loyal aQ customers as well! Each one will be super special, totally unique, and will only be available for a limited time, as we're only making a finite amount of each.
The first shirt design is by aQ pal and infamous killustrator Justin Bartlett, whose style many of you no doubt will recognize. He's done tons of drawings for Oaken Throne black metal magazine, as well as record covers for grim groups like SUNNO))), Moss, Nadja, Pentemple and loads more. His style is incredible, super detailed, pen and ink with tons of stippling, lots of skulls and guts and demons and various crusty oozing offal. For aQ he's designed a super creepy and super evil mother and child, heads in bags, their rotten innards spilling out, skulls on spikes, and "Aquarius Records" carved into the stone archway in the background. It looks amazing, and will for sure get some eyes a popping as you wander through the grocery store or sit in church (heaven forbid).
The back features a small aQ logo up near the collar, the shirts are white on black, they are Hanes heavyweight T's, 100% preshrunk cotton, and we have sizes all the way from Youth Large (for kids and little ladies) all the way up to XXL (for the big guys).
We will only be selling these for a couple months, so don't miss out. Once they are gone, they won't be reprinted. EVER.
Future aQ Artist Edition T's will include designs by Savage Pencil, Stephen O'Malley, Aaron Turner and more more more!!!

AQUARIUS T SHIRT Special Limited Artists Edition #1: Justin Bartlett (Size: Youth Large) T shirt 22.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Finally! The first in a series of super limited, artist designed aQ T-Shirts, featuring original art by some of our favorite artists, who just so happen to be loyal aQ customers as well! Each one will be super special, totally unique, and will only be available for a limited time, as we're only making a finite amount of each.
The first shirt design is by aQ pal and infamous killustrator Justin Bartlett, whose style many of you no doubt will recognize. He's done tons of drawings for Oaken Throne black metal magazine, as well as record covers for grim groups like SUNNO))), Moss, Nadja, Pentemple and loads more. His style is incredible, super detailed, pen and ink with tons of stippling, lots of skulls and guts and demons and various crusty oozing offal. For aQ he's designed a super creepy and super evil mother and child, heads in bags, their rotten innards spilling out, skulls on spikes, and "Aquarius Records" carved into the stone archway in the background. It looks amazing, and will for sure get some eyes a popping as you wander through the grocery store or sit in church (heaven forbid).
The back features a small aQ logo up near the collar, the shirts are white on black, they are Hanes heavyweight T's, 100% preshrunk cotton, and we have sizes all the way from Youth Large (for kids and little ladies) all the way up to XXL (for the big guys).
We will only be selling these for a couple months, so don't miss out. Once they are gone, they won't be reprinted. EVER.
Future aQ Artist Edition T's will include designs by Savage Pencil, Stephen O'Malley, Aaron Turner and more more more!!!

LASCOWIEC Asgard Mysteries (Dark Hidden Productions) cd 8.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
We sold out of these pretty quick, so for those of you who may have missed out, here's another chance...
We've been meaning to review something from this SF duo for a while now, the mysteriously monickered Z.V.H. and V.J.C, who make up the equally mysterious Lascoviec (formerly Angkor Vat). But their demos disappeared before we had the chance, and we've yet to receive the forthcoming split with Hungarian black metal masters Marblebog, but thankfully, Dark Hidden Productions has compiled their first two demos, Gesamkunstwerk and Gunshots Ring Out Over Vinland Streets, both originally released in 2006, onto one cd, and added a few bonus tracks to sweeten the deal.
Lascoviec traffic in droning, hypnotic, trance like black metal buzz, the guitars long washed out streaks, the vocals a distorted croak, often sounding like another layer of static, the melodies are melancholy and sorrowful, some tracks have programmed drums, pounding away machine like under a buzzy blurry blanket of epic majestic chordal whir, others are harsh and chaotic, with the drums lost int he mix, leaving just a thick undulating sheet of acid riffing and tortured vokills. There are plenty of clean guitars, and tranquil folky interludes, but just as many grinding ultra raw blackened dirges, the guitars thick and viscous, the vocals more of a animalistic hiss, the drums a buried throb, here and there dreamy washes of synth surface, but far from being tranquil, they're fuzzy and distorted, and slightly ominous, with a definite Tim Hecker or Philip Jeck vibe. Elsewhere the band craft weird sort of new wave sounding reverbed guitar jam, but still subtly creepy and haunting. Swirls of strings build ominous tension before exploding into super sharp jagged shards of weirdly blown out clean guitar riffing over relentless blastbeats.
And that's sort of what's so amazing about these guys, their sound varies so dramatically, from record to record, but even from song to song, sort of like the EEE stuff, the texture and the production are as critical as the songs and the riff, some are muted and murky and bassy and lo fi, others are sharp and angular, the guitars sonically are all over the place, sometimes soft and subtle, sometimes downtuned and sludgy, sometimes buzzy and brittle, the drums more often than not are buried WAY down in the mix, but that just makes the songs sound freer, as if they could fall apart or drift away at any moment.
Grim and gorgeous, twisted and intense, dramatic and a bit fucked up, long sheets of buzzed out bliss butted up against short sharp raw blasts of true blurred blackness, often getting all tangled up within the same song. What's not to like, this is some seriously amazing shit. Buzzy and black enough for the grimmest of warriors, but tripped out enough for folks into freaky outsider blackness.
Fair warning: Lasoviec are on Dark Hidden Productions, a label with dubious political leanings, and with definite ties to the Pagan Front, the hub for all things NSBM, aka National Socialist Black Metal. Although the band seem to be more concerned with themes cosmic and spiritual, nature and mythology, there are definite racist implications, the link is undeniable, so regardless of the band's stance, the label's is clear, and thus, another instance where the listener has to decide if the music trumps the possible unpleasant politics.
MPEG Stream: "I"
MPEG Stream: "II"
MPEG Stream: "Borghild Darkened"
MPEG Stream: "Outro"

TEENAGE FILMSTARS Star (Art Pop!) cd 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
By now, pretty much everyone knows who Kevin Shields is. He of shoegaze pioneers My Bloody Valentine. Who over the course of the last 20 years or so have released all of THREE records. But what about Ed Ball. A musical contemporary of Shields. A man Shields described as "A sensitive soul from another planet. A modernist musical alchemist", going on to say "Where other people struggle, Ed Ball plays what we're thinking." Ball, over the last 20 years, has released close to 40 records, a whole mess of amazing discs with UK mod popsters The Times, a handful under his own name, and a bunch with power poppers the Boo Radleys, among others. But what Ball is most famous for, at least around these parts, is releasing three of the most perfect, and perfectly fractured genius shoegaze blisspop records EVER, as Teenage Filmstars: Star, Rocket Charms and Buy our Record Support Our Sickness. Each a kaleidoscopic blurred and blown out avant pop fantasia of sound, mixing in gorgeous melodies, with all manner of found sounds, backwards loops, ethereal vocals, studio fuckery, with very little regard for form or function, for the rules of pop. Instead, seemingly feeling their way through a totally tactile world of sound, everything bristly or buzzy or fuzzy, smeared or blurred, wah guitars wrapped around roaring motorcycles, Spectorish wall of guitars spread over, skittery almost Stone Roses-y rhythms. The most obvious reference is My Bloody Valentine. And at the risk of receiving an avalanche of hate mail, Teenage Filmstars are better. They may not have invented the sound, and they definitely didn't perfect it, instead, they fucked it all up, twisted it and chopped it and doused it in FX, and flipped it backwards, and let it sprawl and spin out of control, wrapped tightly into perfect pop gems one second, then let loose in unhinged squalls of sonic whatthefuck meltdowns the next. Each of the three records growing continually more abrasive, more intense, heavier, more backwards, more fractured and freaked out, and somehow only getting better and better and better.
Star is the first proper release from Teenage Filmstars, and was released a year or two after MBV's epochal Loveless. Opener "Kiss Me" is TOTALLY cribbed from Loveless, but it sounds like it was recorded on a busted 4-track, the rhythm track supplied by a fluttery backwards loop, the guitars super distorted but also brittle, woozy and wavery, all wrapped round the main hook, a guitar / vocal harmony that is just incredible, soaring and wistful but sort of super rocking, the whole thing dripping in effects, Loveless filtered through DIY bedroom pop, and then filtered through the twisted musical mind of visionary sonic alchemist Ball. The track crumbles near the end, the guitars disappear, motorcycles zoom by, the drums all distorted, snippets of classical piano, the twitter of birds, disembodied voices, one intoning "this just might be the finest composition I ever wrote", which it might have been, if it weren't for the follow up "Loving", which follows a similar template as "Kiss Me", with the main hook, a hushed wordless vocals crooning along to a slithery guitar line, all over a looped tribal rhythm, and tripped out wah guitar all over the place. If this was just a single, "Kiss Me" / "Loving", A side B side, it would be hands down one of the greatest singles ever! But we've barely just begun. And it only gets weirder and weirder.
"Inner Space" predates the fuzzy gauzy drift of Fennesz and Jeck and Tim Hecker by 20 years, unfurling sweeping vistas of sound, intertwined with buried melancholy vocals, muted rhythmic skitter, and deep whirring strings. "Apple" is all sixties strum and whirling effects laden swoosh, simple pop stretched out and blurred and distorted into something slightly alien, a warm dreamlike missive from beyond the stars. "Flashes" is a strange sort of electronic calypso, with a subtle techno throb beneath divine female vocals, propulsive krauty drums, and of course loads of FX. "Kaleidoscope" returns to the more MBV style rocking of the openers, and does indeed sound like a shoegazing fuzzrock kaleidoscope, a swirling dizzying space pop jam, the sounds slipping from speaker to speaker, the drums relentless and hypnotic, the vocals buried, but the main guitar melody soaring over the wavery sonic swirl beneath.
Then comes a three song suite of tripped out avant weirdness, drifting fuzzy almost melodies, strange intercepted radio broadcasts, a super deconstructed version of "Kiss Me", looped and flipped backwards and transformed into something else entirely, deep whirling drones, weird voices, samples, deep black ambience, shot though with streaks of glimmering buzz, the sounds of engines, choir like vocals, damaged effects laden rhythmscapes, flange and chorus and delay and reverb all wrapped around little sonic events, laced into a delicate framework of tripped out sound. Until the closer, "Moon", a gorgeous explosion of distorted pop effulgence, thick warbly organs, epic melodies, the guitar so distorted they almost sound like white noise, almost proggy keyboards, the whole thing fracturing into a brief falling apart coda of drum freakout, and skipping lurching guitars. Holy Shit.
So maybe it's not that Teenage Filmstars are -better- than My Bloody Valentine. Just weirder, more fucked up, more spaced out, more fractured, more challenging, more out there, less like ANYTHING you've ever heard, more... oh fuck it, okay... BETTER!!! Bring on the hate mail!!
This reissue tacks on three bonus tracks, all good enough to have been on the record proper, but with way more of the backwards production that would come to define their sound on future records, blissed out fuzzy shoegazey power pop, but crumbling and often in reverse, and thus fantastic. Also included lengthy liner notes, as confusing and obfuscated as the music itself.
The other two Filmstars discs are getting reissued soon, and will definitely also be Records Of The Week, so immerse yourself in Star while you can, cuz it only gets better and weirder from here on out...
MPEG Stream: "Kiss Me"
MPEG Stream: "Loving"
MPEG Stream: "Inner Space"
MPEG Stream: "Apple"

SONIC YOUTH / MATS GUSTAFSSON / OG MERZBOW Andre Sider AF Sonic Youth (SYR8) (SYR) cd 10.98
Recorded live at the 2005 Roskilde Festival in Denmark, this latest installment of the self-released SYR series chronicles the monolithic collaboration between Sonic Youth, Japanoise master Merzbow, and Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson. Even Jim O'Rourke re-joins the band for this hour long improv sesh that results in a smoldering heap of damaged free jazz. These dudes really had to bring out the big guns here, considering they were opening up for Black Sabbath (!!!) on this particular night of the festival, not an easy task. On one level, this record sort of shows that improvising isn't exactly what Sonic Youth does best, although there is a charm in the clumsy nature of the collaboration that ends up being really cool and unpredictable. Merzbow and Gustafsson really shine here, conjuring a sea of noisy textures that are harsh and cataclysmic but never over the top or indulgent. "Andre Sider Af Sonic Youth" is the perfect addition to the SYR series and a must-have for any fan of free noise sorcery.
MPEG Stream: "Andre Sider Af Sonic Youth Excerpt 1"
MPEG Stream: "Andre Sider Af Sonic Youth Excerpt 2"