VELOSO, CAETANO s/t (Irene) (Lilith) cd 21.00
It is with no small significance that we end this year highlighting one of our very favorite artists of all time, Caetano Veloso. If we were anything like Time Magazine, we could definitely see ourselves making him Man of the Year, because indeed, it has been a stellar year for Veloso. Not only have some of the many highlights of his extensive back-catalog been made available once again, but he also began the year, at age sixty, releasing one of the best rock albums of the year (Ce) that has made many of our top ten lists. If you were lucky enough to catch his performance at this year's San Francisco Jazz Festival, he shocked and delighted the audience by performing with just a stripped-down rock band, three young men on electric guitar, bass and drums, barely over a third of Veloso's age, his voice in amazing form, running from one side of the stage to another working the audience into a frenzy, causing a seemingly endless string of female (and one male) fans to jump on the stage for a quick kiss. Here was someone who could of easily just sat on his laurels and played his popular hits with the kind of over-orchestrated band you see in concerts on PBS, but instead embraced his forward-thinking musicality playing mostly new songs with a tight killer band and still managed to sway his oldest fans to cheer along. One of the best shows of 2007 for sure!
Years ago, when we first discovered the sounds of Tropicalia, it was through the more blatant psychedelic spectacle of Os Mutantes and their first three well-beloved records. But while we were aware of Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil being the main songwriters and architects of the movement, most of their songs, until recently, we got to know through compilations and cover versions rather than through their full length records. While we have seen in the past couple of years so much amazing music being dug out of the far reaches of that fertile period and the post Tropicalia boom from Alceu Valenca, Jorge Ben, and Lula Cortes, as well as the amazing Soul Jazz comp, Brazil '70, it's been nice to see some of the best full length albums from Gilberto Gil and Veloso becoming available again. Earlier this year, Lilith reissued Veloso's first solo record from 1967 and his post-exile experimental jaunt from 1972, Araca Azul. So for a year that began with a return to musical form from this beloved Brazilian musical master, it's even more fitting that by years end we see the reissue of arguably the most important and most essential album of his vast discography, the second self-titled solo album from 1969.
Notice the blank cover with just a signature? Much different from most of Veloso's records which almost always feature his picture. That's because when he recorded this album, Veloso and Gilberto Gil were in captivity by the Brazilian Government for violating recently imposed orders against artists performing non-nationalistic music or expressing any statements that could be perceived as antigovernment. While confined, their long hair was shaved off, hence the decision to not display a picture. Allowed to play acoustic guitar and record songs through a masterful use of the media to keep a connection with the public for fear of being "disappeared" or tortured, both Gil and Veloso recorded albums (Gil recorded his masterful 1969 album as well at this time) using just voice and guitar and then sending the tapes to Rogerio Duprat, who added all the arrangements: electric guitars, strings, flutes and rhythm tracks. For such a strange and backwards production process, what results is a fervently articulate statement of politics and personal freedoms, with some of his first songs sung in English, namely the very pointed, "The Empty Boat".
Of course with time, it may be difficult to understand how radical the situation was, especially with the language barrier. Album opener "Irene" may seem like a pastoral groover with its opening flutes and guitars, but when he sings in Portuguese, "I want to see Irene laughing", it's rumored that the "Irene", he was referring to was the name of the machine gun of Tenario Calvacanti, a robber famously celebrated in leftist circles. While "Os Argonautas" is based on the belief that all oppressive dictatorships are fated to be temporary (Let's hold on tight to that belief!). The penultimate track "Acrilirico" is Veloso's response to the Beatles' "Revolution #9", a track very fitting to be on Veloso's own white album.
Like most Tropicalia albums, the urgently emotional song writing is tempered by a need to unite multiple populist musical forms together. So there are bits of Fado, Tango, Carnival music, psychedelic rock, with lyrics sung in English, Spanish as well as Portuguese. Veloso through the Tropicalia movement understood that the politics of freedom are best communicated through the musical language of the people. This record is more prescient than ever!
MPEG Stream: "Irene"
MPEG Stream: "The Empty Boat"
MPEG Stream: "Nao Identificado"

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A FASHIONABLE DISEASE s/t (My Pet Goat) 7" 4.50
Totally ass kicking and weirdly fucked brutality fills this little 7" from Santa Cruz's own, A Fashionable Disease! Another one of those what the fuck, seemingly impossible combinations of influences, synthesized in such a unique and successful way, that makes us kind of scratch our heads and lament that we haven't been turned on sooner. How do you describe this? Maybe filthyfreejazzcrustyfiedsatanicdamagedgrindpunkavantskronk? Or maybe just Crass meets Ayler meets Pig Destroyer meets Sun Ra meets Schoenberg meets Anal Cunt meets Mahavishnu. We don't fucking know, but it rules! Super demented, ultra damaged grind-jazz, complete with horn section! Putrid angular metallic guitar discordance, feculent terrorist manifesto screeched vocals, growling horns, blasting drums. The first cut, "Veal Medallions" starts with a blast of feedback before hurling into a psychotically chromatic guitar and piano line, ending up in a blasting tumult of throat tearing vocals and frenetically crazed drumming! Some of the lyrics from this number kind of sum up what these fellas are about... "skulls converge ruins/ rainbows ejaculate onto your face/ quiet in the piss-stained evening/ spring wind blows perfume of 1,000 rotting carcasses...". Fuck yes. The rest of the 7" is just as killer. Totally fucked and totally great! For fans of Zorn, Bathtub Shitter, Rudimentary Peni, Crass, Coltrane, Dystopia, Cecil Taylor, or anything filthy, proggy, grindy, avant-jazzy, and totally shredding! Recommended!

ACRIMONY Tumuli Shroomaroom (Leaf Hound) cd 16.98
A few lists back, we reviewed a newly released collection of odds and ends from stoner doomlords Acrimony, a UK band, who combined all the best parts of many of our favorite bands, Electric Wizard, Kyuss, Monster Magnet, Hawkwind, Church Of Misery, Boris, Bongzilla, that list alone should have many of you already leaping for the 'buy' button, and that's as it should be. These guys destroy. Unbelievably heavy, crazy catchy, killer riffs, hooks galore, and plenty of spaced out druggy drone.
But YEARS before that comp, Bong On- Live Long!, we were already huge fans of this here disc right here, Tumuli Shroomaroom, now reissued with new improved sound, maybe one of the best stoner rock records EVER. High praise indeed, but not unwarranted we think. The guitars are massive, downtuned and crunchy, spitting out groovy Sabbathy riffage, but way more psychedelic, plenty of wah guitar, streaks of wild leads, all over a super dense rhythmic foundation. The drums heavy as fuck, pounding away, the bass throbbing and buzzing and holding it all together. The vocals a rough raspy, but melodic caterwaul. And the songs, as catchy as they are heavy, super charged and blown out, like someone took perfect pop songs, dipped them in LSD, rolled them in broken shards of Monster Magnet, wrapped them in thick sheets of Hawkwind, lit them on fire and smoked them, and then picked up guitars and this was the result. Not sure why these guys weren't huge.
Besides being a kick ass band, heavy and catchy, they also have a serious thing for repetition, and drone, most of the songs have long stretches of churning riffage that just repeats and repeats, mantra like, mesmerizingly headbanging, lots of them also lock into some sort of endless groove near the end, the song often transforming into an ultra heavy hypnorock workout, looped over and over, repeating sometimes for minutes, and then sometimes unexpectedly slipping right back into the song. Definitely part of what gives them such a druggy vibe. The best example of that is the track "Motherslug (The Mother Of All Slugs", a massive stoner rock jam, that is constantly locking into perfect looped grooves, so tight and hypnotic they almost sounds like the cd is skipping, a single riff churning again and again, so completely trancelike, while all around the main riff, other guitars swell and swoop, shimmering in little squalls pf psychedelic FX, sort of like those kick ass spaced out Hawkwind outros but way less spacey and more relentlessly and repetitively rocking, until the track suddenly and effortlessly slips back into the main groove again, eventually drifting apart into some awesome spacious doom jam, the guitar and drums locked in big crashes, spaced way far apart, the guitar chords crumbling and fading almost completely before the next crash comes, finally fading into some throbbing drone, buzzy and muted, maybe a didgeridoo or faux throat singing or something, finally fading out into the space-rock Sabbath riff that opens the next track.
Hard to know what else to say, one of our favorite heavy records ever, every track on here is a killer. Heavy and groovy, droney and hypnotic, druggy and spaced out, the ultimate stoner rock doom disc for sure. As we mentioned above, folks into Monster Magnet, Sleep, Electric Wizard, Ufomammut, Orange Goblin, Kyuss, Black Sabbath, Spiritual Beggars, Nebula, Bongzilla, Green Machine, Boris, Lowrider, Spirit Caravan, Solarized, Fu Manchu, Dozer and Mammoth Volume and have somehow made it this far without hearing Acrimony, might just have discovered their new favorite band.
MPEG Stream: "Hymns To The Stone"
MPEG Stream: "Million Year Summer"
MPEG Stream: "Vy"

ALCEST Souvenirs D'un Autre Monde (Northern Silence) lp 24.00
This amazing chunk of blissy black metal jangle, a HUGE aQ fave, is now available on vinyl, for a SUPER limited time. It is limited to 999 copies, 333 on each color, three different colors, the colors are random, so you'll get what you get, please don't ask for a specific color, but fear not, all the colors are cool, and we ONLY got colored vinyl, so it should work out just fine for vinyl freeks and everyone who had been holding out for the lp version of this amazing disc. And as always with stuff like this, ONE PER CUSTOMER!!!!
We've been gushing over French black metal outfit Ameseours for a while now. Their amazing blend of buzzing blackness and indie jangle. Like nothing we'd heard really, but was exactly what we always wanted, nay needed to hear, just didn't know it. As we mentioned in our review of their record, various members of that group also do time in the much more black metal Peste Noire, whose most recent record FolkFuck Folie we also reviewed recently, and in both reviews we lamented the fact that we were never able to get the ep by yet another related band, the even less metal, more blissy Alcest. And while that 2 song disc does in fact seem to be out of print, this here is the brand new full length, and besides being amazing, and one of the prettiest records of the year, it's absolutely and entirely not the least bit metal. AT ALL. 
Which is in no way a bad thing, it's just perplexing that black metal folks have been touting this as one of the best metal records of the year, even ever. Much like Ameseours, Alcest is all about indie jangle, and blissed out shoegazey pop, but where Ameseours, mixes that sound with a more traditional buzz and blast, resulting in some strange blackened hybrid, a sort of indie jangle black metal, Alcest, jettison the metal entirely, leaving nothing but gorgeous, dramatic, epic, blissful pop perfection. And this is simply that, perfect pop. The guitars are still distorted and slightly heavy, and there is some double kick drum action, but that stuff is so wrapped up in dense smears of glistening chordal thrum and breathy emotional vocals, simple acoustic guitar picking and buzzing fuzzed out grooves, that it just sort of gets absorbed into Alcest's divine dreamy drift. 
We talked about Justin Broadrick channeling the spirit of early nineties shoegaze pop in Jesu, but Alcest sound like they were transported directly from that era, yanked from a field of similarly minded sonic explorers like My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Ride, Swervedriver, Chapterhouse, and the like. It almost seems pointless to mention anything about the band's black metal pedigree, since if you were going on sound alone, you would be hard pressed to not imagine this was some legendary college rock record from 1992, each track glorious and glistening, the guitars soaring, epic and majestic, all major key, a walls of sound, rich and thick and lustrous, the bass mirroring the guitar, simple subtle harmonies, everything tangled into lilting bliss pop epics, while over the top drift soft fuzzy vocals, both male and female, that almost even more than the music recall that specific musical era.
Absolutely the finest slab of blissed out, post My Bloody Valentine dreampop indie jangle drift we've heard in forever. Just listen to the sound samples and we think you'll be just as smitten as we are... 
MPEG Stream: "Printemps Emeraude"
MPEG Stream: "Souvenirs D'un Autre Monde"
MPEG Stream: "Les Iris"

ANGEL EYES ...And For A Roof A Sky Full Of Stars (Underground Communique) cd ep 6.98
Another awesome sonic document from Angel Eyes, one of our favorite of the new breed of metallic post rock outfits, a la Pelican, Isis, Minsk, Conifer etc...
This latest two song ep, gives us more of what we loved about their debut Something To Do With Death, long (two tracks that sound like movements of a bigger whole, one 16+ minutes, the other 10 minutes) slow building epics, spacious and expansive, dark brooding drifts that grow into roiling crashing chaotic heaviness. Whereas a lot of these sorts of band seem to have begun drifting one way or the other, ditching much of the metal in favor of a more ambient dark post rock sound, or alternately ditching a lot of the atmospherics and getting more and more metal, these guys still manage to deftly combine the two. The slow builds are super intense, gorgeously shimmering, the guitars fuzzy blurs, the drums a distant shuffle, the heavy parts are HEAVY, the guitars churning and downtuned and distorted, the vocals an anguished metallic wail, but even when Angel Eyes are at their heaviest, their sound is still streaked with gorgeous melodies, and sweeping cinematic heft, like Neurosis scoring the denouement of some amazing epic adventure film, it's almost impossible to not envision huge walls of flame engulfing whole cities, or a skyline gradually collapsing, or a planet crumbling and drifting apart, so totally evocative and intense and moody and emotional, just the way it should be. And the slow parts are gorgeous, brooding and darkly dreamy, a bit of Morricone twang, a bit of Calexico, a bit of Scenic, Godspeed of course, the various spidery melodies seeming to transform and become entangled before our very eyes, like the soundtrack to a time lapse film of the end of the world.
The second 'movement' is the more intense, like a more metal Explosions In The Sky, only allowing the listener a few brief respites between soaring sonic dramatics, the guitars keening and wailing over shimmering fields of sizzling cymbals and dense squalls of tribal pound, the melodies haunting and emotional, all woven into the roiling metallic swirl, eventually fading into a droning whirring fade out...
Packaged in a cool fold over ecopak, all hand silkscreened, the lyrics printed on the inside.
MPEG Stream: "Untitled 1"

BAILTER SPACE s/t (Flying Nun) cd 23.00
Bailter Space by now is all but defunct, with most of their records released through Matador in the US now deleted and unavailable. That's unfortunate, as the short lived career of this late '80s and early '90s New Zealand droned out, art-rock band offered a brilliantly unique parallel to the English shoegazing scene (dead ringers sometimes for Swervedriver) and Seattle's nascent grunge community.
Bailter Space was a trio, whose members performed as NZ legends The Gordons in the early '80s, developing a cantankerous post-punk sound whose short-fused riffs, off-kilter bursts of noise, and rhythmic teeth-gnashing had been one of the many influences on Sonic Youth. After their dissolution in the mid 80s and subsequent resolution as Bailter Space in 1987, the trio had softened some of the rough edges creating a signature sound that perfectly brought together Joy Division and the Velvet Underground within the bleary-eyed charm that seemed almost natural to every one else on Flying Nun (e.g. The Chills, Pin Group, This Kind Of Punishment, etc.).
It's a bit hard to figure out what's going on with this record, a compilation actually of tracks from other releases, a greatest hits sort of, there's no real info, and the album doesn't even say which track came from which album -- just a track listing and the legal stuff, that's it. Needless to say, they all rule, and it makes us want to listen ot ALL those records again. As we mentioned, all of their US albums are out of print (and it's unclear if the NZ releases are still available); so this anthology is certainly a welcome return for a band that had long been a favorite of Aquarius all the way back to our days on 24th Street. Here you'll find the spry rhythms of "Tanker" (which was the title track from their 1988 album) darkly forecasting the shimmer and drone of Ride and Slowdive; there's also the narcotic tunes of sci-fi shadow and murk from their last great album Vortura (e.g. "X" and "DarkBlue"); and plenty of distorted-then-blurred extended passages of drone guitar which really sound like they must have been the template for Justin Broadrick's Jesu. We love this band, we have for years, their Robot World record is one of Andee's ALL TIME favorites. If you don't know this band, you need to. And this is a pretty great way to discover them for the first time, and even if you're already a fan, it's a pretty bad ass Bailter Space mixtape.
MPEG Stream: "Robot World"
MPEG Stream: "SoLa"
MPEG Stream: "Tanker"

BAKER, AIDAN & BETA CLOUD An Open Letter To Franz Kafka (Laughing Bride Media) cd-r 10.98
Another new Aidan Baker record, another new collection of soft sonorous ambience (as opposed to another new Nadja record, another collection of crushing fuzzy blissed out doom), either way, this guy continues forward with the latest in his seemingly never ending, near monthly release schedule, and assuming one has the dough and the diligence to keep up, one shall continue to be rewarded in gorgeous sonic shimmer and whispery blurred ambience.
This newest release is a collaboration with Beta Cloud, whom we had never heard of until now, and while we don't know what BC sounds like on his own, he does seem a perfect match for Mr. Baker. The instrumentation is quite strange, Baker on flute, Beta Cloud aka Carl Pace on trumpet, synth and guitar, but you might now know it from the sound. Present of course are the thick clouds of ambient blur, the soft flurries of smeared distortion, and the slow shifting slabs of staticky whir, but on the first track of An Open Letter, there is a haunting melodic component, spare piano like melodies, drifting sprite like above the low end swirl, very hypnotic and almost new age-y sounding (in a good way), the notes wreathed in reverb and sent rippling into the ether, very reminiscent of Ambient Eno for sure, but with a much darker edge. Everything cloudy and grey, soft edged buzzing smoother into shimmering swells.
The other three tracks (all four tracks are loooooong) aren't quite as ambient and blissful, instead, they roil and seethe, like the sea beneath an impending storm, still dark and soothing, but pregnant with a subtle malevolence, laced with melodic fragments and strange sonic shards. There are a few moments, where the intensity builds to a fever pitch, causing us to briefly wonder if we hadn't accidentally thrown on a Nadja record instead, and here and there, the sound thickens into deeply resonant chordal washes or slips into what sounds like thick streaks of bristly solar flare guitar feedback, but always seems to settle back into a much more subdued, almost hushed drift, albeit one with an ominous edge, a brooding sonic intensity, always just below the surface...
MPEG Stream: "Brief An Den Vater"
MPEG Stream: "Brief An Felice"

BURMESE Monkeys Tear Man To Shreds, Man Never Forgives Ape, Man Destroys Environment (Enterruption) lp 10.98
Originally released on tUMULt way back in 2000, this primal slab of dual bassed downtuned sonic mayhem, may still rank as one of the heaviest, most vitriolic chunks of sound this city ever produced. A prime slab of chaotic grind, laced with Whitehouse like noise, and bursts of metallic fury, not to mention a black hole entropy that found most songs falling apart into long stretches of broken amp feedback or crushed drum kit clatter.
So this record is finally available on vinyl, BUT, these are not the same recordings. The same songs yes, but recorded in their practice space just before the album proper was recorded, so while it's still heavy and furious and freaked out, it's also even more raw and blown out and most definitely damaged. Also included is a killer cover of Black Flag's "I've Heard It Before', even fiercer and more fucked up than the original (we sacrilegiously proclaim!) originally released on the band's now long out of print Treaties Of Greed And Filth 7".
As with all things Enterruption, the packaging is gorgeous and over the top. The sleeve is silkscreened, with all of the visual elements from the cd packaging represented (the dead elephant, the leafless etc.) The inside of the sleeve is printed with various live band shots, the vinyl is THICK and pressed on red wax, housed in a thick inner sleeve, printed with song titles and liner notes, also included are various show flyers from back in the day, reproduced on nice thick heavy cardstock. LIMITED TO ONLY 500 COPIES!!! Here's our (slightly altered) review of the cd when it first came out in 2000. And while these are different recordings, this description is still pretty apt, just add your own "harsher"s and "noisier"s and "more blown out"s here and there and it'll be perfect.
If you lived in San Francisco, circa 2000 you may have seen these local ne'er do wells playing live (this incarnation at least), with set times ranging from 30 seconds to 15 minutes, often covered in blood, writhing on the floor in a heap of destroyed instruments, charging wildly through the crowd, smashing tables and chairs (and playing with other club destroyers the Black Dice and Arab on Radar). So you'd be forgiven for expecting a messy sloppy record that is nothing without the live show. But boy, would you be wrong. Burmese's debut is a dense, ultra heavy, super low end (they have 2 basses and no guitar after all) crushing and pummeling onslaught.
The opening track is an intense free noise explosion of rumbles, feedback, and spastic drumming. The next 20 tracks take the grind of Drop Dead, drop it a few octaves, and add some seriously fucked arrangements. The last track is an epic drone ala EARTH: waves of subsonics weave in and out of malfunctioning electronics until the whole thing dissolves into a wash of turntables and instrument hum. Somewhere between DROP DEAD and EARTH circa Earth 2, this is some of the craziest, heaviest, noisiest low end grind/sludge we've heard in forever.
Again, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!! So get it while you can...

CHAOS MOON Languor Into Echoes, Beyond (Ars Magna Recordings) cd 11.98
From the grim frosty twilight of Tennessee, comes this amazing disc from Chaos Moon, a mysterious duo whose black metal, on first listen at least, is a thick smear of classic Norwegian buzz, but on closer listening reveals all sorts of stuff going on, a whole 'nother dark soundworld, where traditional black metal is spread out into expansive soundscapes and infused with all manner of distinctly non-black elements, resulting in a sound that is super unique while remaining troo and grim.
After reviewing so many black metal records, and sure this is probably true of any genre, but especially with black metal which has such a predescribed core sound, it gets tougher and tougher to describe the sound no matter how original it is. We often find ourselves wishing for a black metal thesaurus. A customer once emailed us to let us know that in one review we used the word 'buzz' 20 or 30 times. But what can you do, when a music's main element is the buzz, and it's how a band creates and shapes that buzz that makes it special.
So Chaos Moon, who are also obviously masters of the buzz, and this, their second disc is rife with buzz, furious washed out dense slabs of grinding guitarfuzz, shaped into alien insectoid riffs, and spread over thrashing blast beats, and some of the most awesomely anguished vocals we've heard in ages. So yeah, that would be enough for us to dig this disc, proclaim it worth owning, and give it repeated listens. But thankfully it's a lot more than that.
The core sound of black metal, that buzzing blast, is just such a perfect sound, we sometime wish a band would surface that just played one riff, with the drums locked into a looped blast beat, and remained that way, static for the length of a disc, of two discs, ten discs!! So when we talk about black metal and buzz, we're biased cuz we just love that sound, but some records truly do take that buzz and reimagine it, reinvent it. And those are the records that stand out. And while parts of this record are pure old school black metal buzz, the rest of the record, blossoms into something totally new and amazing, using that buzz as it's anchor.
The opening track is furious and fast, like older Satyricon, super dense and complex, spread out to fill up a whole disc we'd be sold big time, but even here, the songs is laced through with dense gnarled tangles of melody, and weird almost post rock sounding breakdowns, long tripped out dronescapes, seasick melodies, and some subtle but serious hooks.
But it's about halfway through where Chaos Moon transform into something entirely new, thick glistening smears of synth spread out into gauzy dreamscapes, drifting and shimmering, a constant fuzzy backdrop to the buzz and blackness above, often threatening to subsume the metal component entirely, and the two distinct melodies, engaged in some complex harmony, the rapidfire jagged guitar lines and the smooth flowing synths, somehow blending into some impossible dreamy buzzy swirl, separated by long stretches of hushed muted murmur, and barely there soft focus drones, even some cool, Godspeed like post rock interludes, the guitars a clean jangle, strings soaring, the drums loping amidst this epic sonic swoon. Even the pure black tracks are swathed in thick layers of high end synthesizer whir, and washed out whirls of minor key melody, turning what might have been just some moody melancholy black metal into glorious, super dramatic, emotional black metal epics, like Godspeed and Sigur Ros backing up Leviathan, or Immortal scoring a Coen Brothers film, or an alternate black metal score to some super intense harrowing tragedy, just gorgeous chunks of complex, cinematic black metal post rock majesty.
MPEG Stream: "De Mortalitate"
MPEG Stream: "Abstract Tongues"
MPEG Stream: "Countless Reverie In Mare"

CIRCLE Rakkenus (Ektro) cd 14.98
You've probably already know this, 'cause you heard it from us, or from a friend, or you were there, or you saw it on Youtube (see http://youtube.com/watch?v=rkDGd28Kxm8 or http://youtube.com/watch?v=4FWftvvaVok for some examples) but let's just say it again: CIRCLE ARE AN AWESOME LIVE BAND. Their recent US tour last fall was the most recent proof of that. During their stop in San Francisco they did an fantastic Aquarius in-store, ruled at the Bottom Of The Hill, and utterly destroyed playing in the enclosed confines of our friend John's bus. Hopefully you saw 'em. If you did, you know you want this new live cd, recorded on that very tour (in Charlottesville, Virginia at a place called Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar). If you didn't see 'em, at least don't miss this chance at the Circle live experience, as captured on cd. It'll make a believer out of anybody foolish enough to doubt reports that some weirdo Finnish proggers could have created such an urgent and infectious hybrid of rhythmic, krautrocky minimalism and tongue-in-cheek, leather-n-spikes ass kickery, that's for sure. Such a hybrid (which itself is only a part of the wider range of Circle's music) is in full effect all over this hour-long disc, right from the get-go. A disc, by the way, that includes LOTS of material that we're pretty sure Circle has never previously recorded on any of their many previous studio albums.
Actually track one "Uusi Uhraus" (which is one of the several songs here that appear to be unique to Rakennus) starts innocuously enough, an introductory stretch of pretty, burbling synth a la Terry Riley mixed with the random anticipatory noises of the crowd, talking and laughing. Then, boom! at almost the three minute mark of this nearly 11 minute-long track, the "New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal" riffage kicks in, Circle's nervous "circular" chugging getting your head banging as Circle's vocalist/keyboardist/all-purpose madman Mika Ratto begins to bizarrely babble and screech like a homeless Rob Halford... "Shake shake shake / six six six" are some of the only words in English we (think) we can make out. And then, getting weirder (and cooler) still, at about two-thirds of the way through the song, someone else in the band starts honkin' way on the harmonica!
The second track, "Nopeuskuningas", comes from their classic album Sunrise, and rocks even harder, with more unhinged, Judas Priest riffed, motorik metal. They continue on "Breaking The Law" Circle-style with the equally metallic track three, "Tulilintu", originally off of Tulikoria, which boasts another harmonica solo. And by now, when/if you can hear the crowd at all, they're not talking, they're screaming and shouting and and hooting and clapping wildly, as this album/live set reaches an early, energetic peak.
Everybody takes a breather for the lovely ten and a half minutes track four, "Tuhat". It's a laidback jam with lots of meandering, Miljard or Tower-style electric piano and smoothly percolating percussion. Mika does deliver some expressive vocals here, but nothing in comparison to what he unleashes on the very next track, "Virsi", a song marked by bombastic prog-rock organ fanfare and crashing percussion, and especially Mika's over-the-top singing, sounding not unlike an even more extreme and dramatic version of Peter Hammill of Van Der Graf Generator -- a tall order, any fan of VDGG will concur! Triumphantly, Mika leads the band onward into old, old favorite "Point" (originally appearing on a Bad Vugum 7" from back in 1992, before they even had an album out) which demonstrates that the NWOFHM is no new thing they just thought up. And then "Murheenkryyni" is even heavier, yet more melodic and grandiose, and certainly left the band and their Charlottesville audience (and perhaps you the listener at home) totally spent and drenched in sweat. That's the final song of the set -- except of course they get brought back for an encore, wrapping things up with a version of "Kaappikellon Kummitus" which originally appeared not on a Circle album, but on a disc by Mika and bassist Jussi's side project, Ratto Ja Lehtisalo. It's a nice, mellow, piano-grooved and hand-clapped coda to a pretty darn intense show! Whew!
Rakennus is pretty much an essential document of something you don't see everyday, a band tearing the roof off playing music unlike anything else on the planet. Insane vocals! Harmonica leads! Spacey synth zappery! A prog-splosion of energy and tripped out bliss both... transcending all the elements of pastiche that color their music, the combination of riff-rockin' abandon and precise minimalism a truly hypnotic thrill ride. It's also something never quite to be recreated on any of their studio discs, another dimension added by their live prowess and choice of material.
And by the way, the live recording sounds fantastic, like you were there in the flesh, basking in Circle's vibrations, clear and powerful. The way the crowd noises are mixed in is not only the hallmark of a true live album but also seems to work as an extra texture with the music, like something Circle might have attempted in the studio anyway, mutterings reminding us of the Sunburned Circle set at times...
As always, this cd package features some nice graphics work, the booklet full of what appear to be snapshots of "Americana" from Circle's on-tour viewpoint. Also, Circle fans be aware that pretty soon (most likely for our next list) we'll have ANOTHER assuredly mind-blowing live Circle document, the DOUBLE LIVE cd Telescope recorded in Germany. So stay tuned...
MPEG Stream: "Uusi Uhraus"
MPEG Stream: "Murheenkryyni"

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

COFFINS / OTESANEK s/t (Parasitic) cd 15.98
We listed the lp version of this a list or two back, another killer slow and low matchup, this time it's Japan's doom sludge crustlords Coffins, versus Philadelphia's masters of doomic ultra slow motion trudge, Otesanek, but now we've got it on cd, so for those of you sans turntable, or those who prefer your brutality digitized, now's your chance...
Coffins blow through three tracks, spending most of their time pounding out downtuned nineties Earache style crust, like Carcass or Napalm Death or Discharge only at 16rpm, thick sludgy guitars seriously scary ultra low guttural vocals, blasting chaotic drumming, with all three tracks occasionally bursting into full on furious pummeling black thrash, but those blasts usually settle right back down into more lurching and pounding brutality (with a bunch of killer old school leads tossed in as well!). They even finish off with a Goatlord cover! How cult is that?
Otesanek counter with a seriously looooooooooong stretch of 3 rpm slow motion, glacial ultra doooooooooom. Think Khanate, Bunkur, Moss, but then think slower, meaner, maybe even weirder...
Guitars roar and then ring out forever, the buzzing crumbling riffage drawn out until the next crushing blow, huge drum plods are spaced miles apart, the vocals are sick and super harsh (one of the vocalists is a woman too, both sound demonic and fucking frightening!), angular grinding guitars, occasional stumbling chaotic drum fills, haunted tortured voices way off in the distance, bits of scrape and hiss, squealing feedback, all draped over Otesanek's grim bleak sonic landscape. This is about as slow and low, harsh and hateful, crushing and brutal as ultra doom can get before it just grinds to a complete halt. Awesome.
MPEG Stream: COFFINS "Evil Infection"
MPEG Stream: OTESANEK "Narcotic Hues"

COVER STORY (Wax Poetics) book 19.95
OK, album cover aficionados, record jacket freeks, and all lovers of the esoteric and rapidly dying artform known as the lp sleeve. This is the book for you.
A massively thick, 7" by 7", 288 page tome, jam packed with some of the most far out, the most beautiful, the most striking, the sexiest, the most baffling and the most what-the-fuck record covers of the last however many years. Brought to us by the fine folks at Wax Poetics, whose magazines are always packed with some of the best photos around, this is book number two (after the recent Wax Poetics compendium) and it's a doozy.
You don't even have to like records, hell you don't even have to like music to freak out over some of these amazing images. Lots of mustaches, T+A, cartoons, kung fu, awesome clothing, wild live shots, plenty of bare bottoms, some amazing old school collages, some super tripped out druggy doodlings, a bunch of all time classic covers, plenty of embarrassing photos, a handful of lps that have been reissued on cd and become big time AQ faves, it's endless. Lots of the covers are all worn too, the visual version of record crackle that we all love so much.
Such an amazing book, and sadly, the more we move into the digital age, the more this stuff feels like a glimpse into some fantastic lost world. Includes an introduction and an essay by Dave Tompkins, the covers separated into sections, organized by the collectors who supplied the lps.

DAISIES OST (Finders Keepers) cd 23.00
Following the rabidly received reissue of the soundtrack for Jaromil Jires' early '70s treasure Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders, the folks at Finders Keepers keep the Czechoslovakian cinema adoration flowing. Here is the freshly reissued soundtrack to Cup's all-time favorite film -- Vera Chytilova's 1966 Czech New Wave masterpiece Daisies (aka Sedmikrasky)! It's an eye-popping work that incorporates an astoundingly broad variety of art styles Dada, absurdist, pop, cut-ups, collage, psychedelia, and so much more... all while delivering a potent commentary on the dark state of the world (which is as valid today as it ever was!). Genuinely radical and so ahead of its time, 'tis the Czech way that beneath a seemingly light-hearted, dreamy and charming exterior, lies a black wit and a mighty subversive heart.
The Daisies soundtrack commences with the insistent, pinched sound of a high-pitched horn and militant snare drum introduction, then just like the two main characters, the music tumbles and frolics and raises a giddy ruckus in a Technicolor kaleidoscope of fleeting melodic vignettes. Along with traditional instrumentation -- brass, woodwinds, strings, vocals, etc -- keep an ear out for the musique concrete scissor snips and a conversation between a typewriter and reedy woodwinds. They are definitely two particular highlights of both the film and soundtrack. Accompanied by processional/funereal march formalities, jazzy escapades, classical choral geysers, dainty minuets, Stalling-esque cartoony themes, and rambunctious surfy shimmy pop, the two female leads kick up their tipsy heels in a supper club effectively disrupting a ragtime flapper dance number, play with their food and toy with stuffily suited elder gentlemen, leave suitors hanging on the telephone, cram themselves gleefully into the tight spaces of a dumbwaiter, and... oh we don't want to give any more away. Must see! Must see! Nevertheless, taken sans the film's visuals, this soundtrack makes for a deliriously delightful, discombobulating listen all on its own! Ultra artful and fun! Feverishly wonderful, and fervently recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Sedmikrasky"
MPEG Stream: "The Juggler"
MPEG Stream: "Man With A Typewriter"

ENSEPULCHERED Suicide In Winter's Moonlight (Autopsy Kitchen) cd 13.98
There aren't a whole lot of grim black metal hordes who call Indiana home as far as we know. In fact we can't think of any, other than this here trio, Ensepulchred. But these guys don't really sound like they're from Indiana at all. In fact they don't really even sound like they're from Norway. Or Sweden, Or Finland, Or any other nation of renowned musical blackness. They sound a whole lot more like they're from Italy, and from the mid seventies. Where they spend all their time wandering in fog shrouded graveyards, lurking in crumbling old cathedrals, terrorizing nightgown clad boarding school girls, digging up dead bodies, AND SCORING IMAGINARY SEVENTIES BLACK METAL ITALIAN HORROR MOVIES!!
Ensepulchred weave their buzzing blackness from thick walls of horror-movie synth, so much so in fact that most of the time, we're hard pressed to hear any guitar at all. Little bits of buzz here and there, but the riffs are mostly handled by keyboards. A creepy midnight world of gauzy, dramatic and cinematic Goblin like sweeps and swells, over simple programmed beats, howled harsh vocals, the melodies haunting and minor key, evoking all sorts of chilling atmospheres and blood curdling ambience. Suicide In Winter's Moonlight indeed. Dark depressive, doomy, but eyes closed, this is the sound of some misty moor, some darkened castle, a haunted bog, the world painted red with blood, the air alive with the terrified screams of dying virgins, the rattle of bones and the whispering wind, the sound of death, and dying, of misery and hopelessness, the sound of panic and mayhem and terror and horror. Ever wonder what a black metal Goblin might sound like... Or if Argento had Nortt or Xasthur score Suspiria...
MPEG Stream: "Sorcery"
MPEG Stream: "Eyes And Shadows"
MPEG Stream: "Asylum"
MPEG Stream: "Silent Gates"

ES Sateenkaarisuudelma / Maailmankaari / Pianokaari (Fonal) 2cd 18.98
Originally released back in 2005 as a double lp, this amazing record is finally available on cd from the kind folks at Fonal, who perfectly reproduced the awesome lp art in miniature as well.
Now a double cd, each disc housed in a printed paper sleeve with art on one side and liner notes on the other, housed in a mini cd gatefold, with the lp's trippy dreamlike oil paintings of the various band members looking as gorgeous as ever. And in the middle, a big fold out full color poster collage. The whole thing sealed, in typical Fonal fashion with a Japanese style obi.
Here's what we had to say about the record (and a little bit more) when we first listed the double lp:
Yet more transmissions from the wonderful world of Finland, from a name most AQ list readers should be familiar with by now, Es, the group headed by Sami Sanpakkila, who happens to run the amazing Fonal label who has brought us releases from Kemialliset Ystavat, Islaja and Paavoharju, and featuring luminaries from other Finnish free rock outfits like Avarus, Kemialliset and Anaksimandros. This 2cd release, like the 2lp before it, compiles an entire discs worth of newly recorded material, as well as another long piece from a few years back and live on the radio recordings from the 2002 Es tour of the States.
The newer tracks are as lovely as anything we've heard, Christmas carol like harmony vocals, lilting and folky, delicate tangles of steel string guitar and tinkling piano, that slowly untangle into wispy smears of droney dreamy psych folk. Long languid organ drones laid across a field of tape hiss and record crackle, while hovering just beneath are squeaking reeds, quavering strings, plonked piano, all so gorgeously lovely. The final track on the first disc is an epic drone, that took up a whole side on the lp release, a crumbling staticky bliss scape of Lubomyr Melnyk like piano flurries, reverberating steel shimmer, swoonsome minimal melodies, soft washes of burred and hushed ambience, all glimmering, glistening and wrapped in a soft focus Tim Hecker like haze.
The live on the radio tracks sound like some lost pagan artifact, deliberately strummed guitars (but only strummed on the neck of the guitar, no touching of the strings, and with gentle brushes of the knobs), insistent rhythms, an angelic chorus of female vocals all with a distinctly krautrock style pulse beneath.
So fantastic, and so absolutely RECOMMENDED!!!
MPEG Stream: "Sateenkaarisuudelma II"
MPEG Stream: "Sateenkaarisuudelma III"
MPEG Stream: "Harmonia, Rakkautta"

ETZIONY, YAIR Flawed (Spekk) cd 17.98
Another gorgeous mysterious little gem from Japanese label Spekk, who also released the Texture In Glass Tubes And Reed Organ reviewed elsewhere on this list. As we mentioned in that review as well, Spekk has staked out a nice little niche, a surprisingly varied one, including releases by free folk SF collective The Alps, a solo disc from Jefre Cantu of Tarentel, as well as a killer comp of electronic lullabies.
This disc by Yair Etziony, as the title might suggest, embraces mistakes and malfunctions, turning them into music both haunting and lovely. Even the track title point to some sort of assemblage of misfires: "Corrosion", "Broken", "Flawed", "Dirt" etc. but if you weren't aware of the genesis of these tracks, it's very unlikely you would assume they were borne of mistakes.
Instead, the sounds here are dark and brooding, muted and underwater sounding, hovering in some ghostly realm situated right in between the aquatic skipping cd-scapes of Oval, the glimmering gauzy shimmer of Pop Ambient, and the murky pulse of Chain Reaction. Most of the tracks shimmer dreamlike, some hushed and ephemeral, others more skittery and spidery, the various tracks peppered with bits of glitch and crackle. The prettier tracks remind us of a super tranquil Boards Of Canada, the darker tracks have a definite Oval via Chain Reaction vibe, with some parts splintering into super abstract dubbed out drift, others locking into looped motorik pulses, others still like some mysterious haunted house music, creepy and atmospheric, but always bleary eyed and softly blurred, layers of fuzz and whir wrapped around delicate melodies and barely there beats. Super nice.
Packaged in a cool, sleek oversized digipak style folder.
MPEG Stream: "Corrosion"
MPEG Stream: "Broken"
MPEG Stream: "Flawed"

EYES LIKE SAUCERS Still Living In The Desert (Last Visible Dog) cd 13.98
Urdog was one of our favorite groups, a primitive psych folk ensemble, hypnotic and heavy and surprisingly prog, with a bit of space rock and a whole lot of drone. What was not to love?! The band called it a day a while back, but then a year or two later this little gem surfaced, a solo record from Eyes Like Saucers, which just so happens to be ex Urdog-er Jeff Knoch. But For ELS, Knoch has abandoned all the trappings of a proper rock band (ie drums, bass, guitar, etc), and he and his faithful canine companion took off in a VW van for the desert, armed only with an Indian harmonium, a toy piano, a glockenspiel, an oscillator, a Farfisa minicompact organ, a ukulele and presumably some sort of recording device.
The results are much how you might imagine from the instrumentation, long warm, warbly whirring dronescapes, the organ(s) pulsing, and wheezing, the chords shifting subtly, dense and layered, and drifting slowly, contemplative and dreamlike. Super obscure reference: reminds us a bit of NZ outfit Wreck Small Speakers On Expensive Stereos, but blurred into something much more static and meditative.
The record begins with a twinkling field of bells and chimes (the toy piano we're guessing) a playful high end field of plinks and plonks, melodies like sunlight through icicles, but then quickly the record gets slower and lower, transforming into a glorious shamanic drone record. Some of the tracks are rich and melodic, almost playful, jaunty, a bit like sea shanties (or desert shanties in this case), while others are lugubrious slow crawls, all whirring shimmer and blurred slow motion slither, some are peppered with the chiming toy piano percussion, or laced with Knoch's buried in the mix monotone vocals, others are left unadorned, just the notes and the melodies, the timbre and the tone, tangled into soft smears, drifting like a warm evening fog over the wide open sands of the desert.
So great. And there's even a Robert Wyatt cover! Quite recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Ideas Of Reference"
MPEG Stream: "Sea Song"
MPEG Stream: "Delusion Of Reference"

KASNER, STEPHEN Works: 1993-2006 (Scapegoat Publishing) book 38.00
Most of you probably won't be familiar with the name Stephen Kasner, but most readers of the AQ list, and therefore very likely owners of many weird and obscure and heavy records, will most definitely recognize his work. A well respected visual artist, Kasner is probably best known, at least to us, as the man responsible for lots of iconic album cover art, having created covers for Sunn 0))), Khylist, Integrity, Ruhr Hunter, Himsa, Trephine, Rotting Christ, and tons more.
His art is amazing. Very striking and quite haunting. Bleak, austere, dark, and nightmarish. Mysterious figures, faces and shapes, animals and figures, signs and symbols, all suspended in fields of washed out browns and greys, blacks and off whites, strangely lit, weirdly textured, each image looking like some old parchment, recovered from the ruins of an ancient temple, the images at once hellish and horrific, lovely and utterly entrancing. Layered and textured, incredibly detailed, but subtly so, you can gaze into Kasner's paintings and feel like you're falling in, or being dragged in.
Record cover fetishists will definitely dig, but art freeks into photographers like Joel Peter Witkin, Max Aguilera-Hellweg, and visual artists like Francis Bacon Odd Nerdrum, H.R. Geiger and AQ customer Justin Bartlett (who's done many of your favorite heavy records as well).
It's a gorgeous cloth covered hardback book, 10.5"x10.5", 160 pgs, beautifully laid out, includes text from Dwid of Integrity, Seldon Hunt and more...
ps: Coming soon: a new series of releases on Utech, all with original Kasner artwork and featuring such aQ faves as Skullflower, Aluk Todolo, Vulture Club and more. Can't wait!

LILYPAD Twin Holes (Arbor) 2x3"cd-r 14.98
Weren't sure what to expect from this mysterious little musical object, two paint splattered 3" cd-rs, each in their own little thick vinyl sleeve, nestled in a fold out poster, all metallic ink and trippy futuristic landscape, the cds and the poster housed in a little cardboard box, each individually hand painted, with another image of that futuristic landscape pasted on the front, and of course LIMITED TO ONLY 50 COPIES!! All we knew was that these two discs were the work of some spaced out solo synth loner, and to be honest we were expecting something noisy and harsh, or at least creepy and dark, but instead, our ears were treated to softly shimmering, smooth sonorous drones, looooong resonant tones, overlapping, intertwining and gently lapping like some dreamy sonic sea.
This is the sound of drifting through an outer space bathed in the light of a million alien suns, everything warm and rich, a fuzzy thrum that pulses almost imperceptibly, the various tones woven into chords, but chords only visible from the lithosphere, hovering miles above a strange world of slow shifting sounds, down in it, looking at the chords from within, from beneath, the chords are so expansive, the notes stretched so far apart, it's like laying in warm sand and staring at a sky full of washed out melodic blurs. Totally captivating and hypnotic.
For fans of Expo 70, Popol Vuh, Tangerine Dream, Destructo Swarmbots, Tunnels and other practitioners of slow blissy drift.
And again, we only have 15 or 20 of these, OF THE ONLY 50 MADE!! So once these are gone, we won't be able to get more...
MPEG Stream: "Twin Holes (excerpt 1)"
MPEG Stream: "Twin Holes (excerpt 2)"

LONGMONT POTION CASTLE 6 (D.U.) cd-r 12.98
The return of the always hilarious Longmont Potion Castle!!! If you're like me (Matt), you missed LPC the first time around, and are super stoked to have a disc from this side splitting and incredibly aggravating (to his victims) prank call mastermind! The most amazing thing about these calls is how long these people on the other end stay on the phone! Most of the calls consist of LPC picking fights with mall employees and local business owners, trying to sell dog bowels to a pawn shop, and requesting Orange Julius employees to feed him grapes while he's interviewed for a job. There's also a lot of fucked up editing and sample based pranks on this disc that are sometimes more creepy than they are funny, like the fucked up effected speech impediment of "Can O' B.S.". The receivers of these pranks range from confused elderly folks to aggro townie redneck dudes, all of whom get super pissed and usually end up threatening some sort of beatdown. It's interesting and hilarious to realize how many people love a good verbal tussle, and out of frustration how many people are willing to actually fight assuming the prankster "comes on down there...". LPC's delivery is totally dry and deadpan, almost stoned sounding, but the things coming out of his mouth are so completely absurd and absolutely hysterical! The best is when the delay pedal is implemented over the phone for extra confusional hilarity. LPC records are by far the most consistently funny, clever, bugged out, annoying, and ultimately excellent pranks on disc EVER!!! If you have 1-5 (compiled in a now out of print boxset), 6 certainly stands up, and for those of you have never checked LPC out, this is a great place to start! It's a bit hard to describe how great this stuff is, but it's one of a kind, So funny and super recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Dog Gnash"
MPEG Stream: "Citation"
MPEG Stream: "Sandyman"

MINORU SATO (M/S, SASW) + ASUNA Texture In Glass Tubes And Reed Organ (Spekk) cd 17.98
Wow, so many cool little labels all over the world. Each with it's own strange little niche. None stranger than Japan's Spekk label, who we first discovered when they released a compilation of out of print demos by local outfit the Alps (featuring our very own Scott). In the process of getting Alps cds, we also discovered they had released a cd from Jefre Cantu of Tarentel, as well as an amazing compilation of Small Melodies, featuring a handful of AQ faves composing gorgeous lullaby like tunes. They were also responsible for an old out of print disc from AQ fave William Basinski.
So we were more than a little excited to get wind of a new batch of Spekk releases, especially when we heard about this one, Textures In Glass Tubes And Reed Organ, by Minoru Sato and ASUNA. The liner notes are a little too dense for us to truly understand what was going on when this music was created, but the vibe we got, was similar to that of another AQ fave, Toshiya Tsunoda, who records the sympathetic vibrations running through huge objects, bridges, pieces of metal, docks, handrails, wind...
For the first track, five harmonic states were recorded separately, using a chord organ to cause sympathetic vibrations in glass tubes, or something like that. Regardless, the result is a dense, subtly shimmering near static drone. Five tones, each layered upon the other, woven into a reverberating tapestry of sound, a glistening dreamlike blur, very Niblock like in it's swirl of subtle overtones, the various tones beating and pulsing almost imperceptibly, 38 minutes of pure glimmering sun dappled soft static bliss.
The second track, utilizes an entirely different method for producing the sound, still with chord organ and glass tubes, explained in detail in the liner notes, but still a little dense for us to truly understand the method, it almost doesn't matter, this track too is a gorgeous slab of slow shifting minimalism, a muted hum, streaked with various subtle tonal variations, again the multiple layers of sound pulsing and rippling, giving the track some sort of invisible propulsion, the sound of light traveling through water, shimmering, shifting, sparkling, but sort of suspended and frozen in time, moving but so slowly it appears to just be vibrating in place, and just like the first track, total bliss out minimalist mesmer.
Packaged in a cool, sleek oversized digipak style folder, with photos of the instruments and extensive liner notes on the creation of the music within.
MPEG Stream: ASUNA "Superposing Five Harmonic States"
MPEG Stream: MINORU SATO (M/S, SASW) "Weaving Seven Resonances; with Raw Stereo Material"

MORDRAANETH The Taverns In The Land Of Ashes (Skulls Of Heaven) 2cd-r 19.98
ATTENTION TROLLMANN AV ILDTOPPBERG faithful. Trollmann maybe e dead and gone but fear not...
Avid AQ list readers and doomlords worldwide should be well aware of our love of mysterious doom duo Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg. Four full lengths, a live record and a live dvd-r, each a sprawling lugubrious brew of fuzzy spacey keyboards, Skepticism-like slow-crawl riffs, rumbling demon vocal gurgles, as blessed out and darkly ambient, as they are heavy and crushingly ominous. For those new to Trollmann, it's not just the amazing and mysterious music, it's the whole world Trollmann have created, or the world they call home. The records are called Forest Of Doom, Arcane Runes Adorn The Ice-Veiled Monoliths Of The Ancient Cavern Of The Stars, Dark Clouds Blacken The Sky On The Eve Of The Thousandth Sacrifice, Tolling Beyond The Tombs Of Ancient Grimnity, the band members are depicted on their record covers, drawn, never photographed, one a little hairy elf on a toadstool, the other a huge bruiser of an ancient caveman, armed with a massive axe, the instruments used to make this music: "Cosmic keys to gates unknown," and "Rumblings Of Doom, Prophecies Of Times To Come." Hell yeah!
Just bass and keyboards, the duo managed to weave lush and truly haunting soundscapes, doomy drones and slow motion heaviness, like a black metal Tangerine Dream crossed with a much more ambient Thergothon. So we were pretty heartbroken when we discovered earlier this year that the band had called it quits. Their mysterious partnership dissolved, and our portal to that alien sonic dimension sealed forever. Or maybe not!
We arrived to work to discover a huge fissure in the floor of the store, some sort of fog or smoke drifting from below, an unearthly glow emanating from the murky abyss, the bravest among us braved the unknown and reached into the crevice, feeling around, it was warm, and moist, and gritty, the air a completely different quality, until they grasped something, a cloth sack, tied with rough twine, when pulled from the dark, spilled open just as the fissure miraculously closed up. What was in this sack? Some bits of ancient treasure, a handful of bones, some dirty cloth stained with something resembling blood, and THIS! The debut disc from Mordraaneth, aka Belegur from Trollmann, who over the course of these two discs, has thankfully taken up his cosmic keys to gates unknown, and opened up a new gateway, allowing us to return, at least aurally, to the glorious sonic landscapes of Trollmann, drones and dirges, smears of murk and shimmer, dark ambience and black doom. The sound familiar enough that anyone into Trollmann will find this essential, but different enough to remain mysterious and magical.
The opening track is a long meditative keyboard suite, layers of throbbing whir and pulsing chordal washes, the notes and overtones beating against one another, subtle rhythms and textures beneath the tranquil dreamlike drift. Definitely reminiscent of Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, but with a vibe at atmosphere much more ancient, and timeless, the music of crumbling castles, of blackened underground passages...
The second track introduces vocals, a buried in the mix demonic rasp, and a thick layer of buzz, some subtle percussion, a strange slow motion martial fantasy fanfare, wreathed in hiss and static, the distortion crumbling, the track peppered with bits of grinding growl and blown out fuzz, but somehow still hypnotic and dream like, the keyboard running through it, it's melody entrancing and so pretty. The rest of disc one drifts along lazily, like floating down some black river that runs beneath the Earth's crust, winding through lost civilizations and abandoned villages, eye glimmering in the darkness here and there, a permanent midnight. Haunting and ominous and soporific.
The second disc is two looooong tracks, beginning with what sounds like harpsichord, once again transporting us back to some ancient court, you can almost imagine Lords and Ladies, doing some strange dance, beneath a huge stone edifice, lit by firelight and the stars above, the whole disc, all 58 minutes of it, is a weirdly festive medieval folk, like a much more haunting and fucked up Renaissance Faire music, or some sort of ancient new age, imagine Kitaro and Brian Eno in full corpse paint, scoring a film about knights and dragons. Medieval fantasy ambience. Playful and lilting, glimmering and glittering, a gauzy sun dappled cloud of music box melodies, slightly smeared and blurred into a dreamy drift.
Can't wait for Thundarr, the other half of Trollmann, to return with his Rumblings Of Doom and Prophecies Of Times To Come, but for now, we're perfectly happy to revel in the blissy ambient dreamusic of Mordraaneth!
MPEG Stream: "Entombed In The Ancient Halls Where No Light Reaches"
MPEG Stream: "The Horn Howls As The End Draws Near"
MPEG Stream: "The World Of Ashes"

MRWEBI, GWIGWI Mbaqanga Songs (Honest Jon's) cd 17.98
An amazing release in this new series from the always kick ass Honest Jon's label. An offshoot of the equally amazing London Is The Place For Me series (which we've yet to review, but we're working on it!), Gwigwi Mrwebi is a sax player from Johannesburg, who moved to London in 1960 to appear in the musical King Kong (!) and who back in South Africa had recorded with Hugh Masekela among other jazz luminaries. We've been listening to this for months and months and are only now finally getting it reviewed and listed!
Mbaqabga Songs is a reissue of an impossible to find lp, and is totally delightful, groovy, jazzy, danceable, playful, rambunctious, a bit boppy, super happy and most certainly sets the toes a tapping. While this definitely has some African elements and will appeal to fans of all things Ethiopiques and Zanzibara, it's much more of a straight jazz record, performed in the Kwela style popular in Africa at the time, a happy, lilting, jazzy bounce with a definite fifties big band vibe (we even hear some rocksteady in there too), the melodies exuberant, the playing smooth and crisp, just so fun with a totally carefree vibe. It's easy to imagine a warm summer evening, the sun setting on an outdoor dancefloor, strung with multi colored lights, Mrwebi and his band playing on late into the night, everyone dancing and drinking and celebrating life. So great!
Beautifully packaged in a 8 panel digipak, packed super extensive liner notes from Steve Beresford.
MPEG Stream: "Good News"
MPEG Stream: "Nyusamkhaya"
MPEG Stream: "Lily Express"

MURMUR Fermata - The Dixie Brewery Fermentation Tank Session (Backporch Revolution) cd-r 9.98
It's been raining Murmurs lately. Or Murmers. Or both. The last little while has given us the dark dronemusic of UK based Murmer aka sound sculptor Patrick McGinley. Then there's the dubstep pop ambient of the group Murmur with a 'u' that just came out (to be reviewed here soon). And there's definitely at least one other Murmer... and now we have -this- Murmur, also with a 'u', and we actually got an email from these guys about all the Murmurs and Murmers and they were talking about actually trying to do a three way collaboration! Cool.
This Murmur, is a loose collective of sound makers who gathered in an old decrepit brewery in New Orleans, where one of the players worked, and helped the others gain after hours access. The quintet dragged their instruments up into an old metal fermentation tank, dark and dank, with SO much natural reverb, that they couldn't even talk amongst themselves as the sounds would echo and overlap and turn into blurry smears of sound that would drown out the conversation. And so it was with any sound, the group had to barely play, barely breath, as every movement, every shuffle of the foot, would result in another layer of strange echoing sound. The building that housed the tank was subsequently damaged in Hurricane Katrina, then looted, and still stands abandoned and crumbling to this day.
Thankfully the resulting sounds are as fascinating as the story behind their creation. Using just acoustic guitars, harmonium, a tamboura-zither box, dobro, cymbal, Tibetan bells and vocals, the group, coaxed hushed sounds from their instruments, letting them interact with the alien acoustics of the tank around them. The various stringed instruments, their metallic buzz, billow into thick swells of reverberating low end, that occasionally transform into buzzing rhythmic pulses, always fading back into tranquil shimmers.
The organs wheeze, the vocals hum, the cymbals spread out like ripples in a pond, the percussion clatters and tinkles, the background rife with thumps and rattles, moans and creaks, but it's not just wispy drones and barely there rumbles, the band occasionally locks into some NNCK style shambolic freefolk, the guitars unfurling lazily, a constantly expanding smear of stumbling atonal riffage, drifting through a cloud of jangle and reverb, almost like a super lo-fi disembodied krautrock, the whole thing laced through with a nearly constant dronelike buzz, a sitar sounding shimmer that holds all the drifting sonic slabs together.
MPEG Stream: "Discovery Of Mother Voidness"
MPEG Stream: "Description Of The Between"

NUIT NOIRE Fantomatic Plentitude (Armageddon) cd 9.98
The return of our favorite faerical blasting punk rockers, France's new wave black crust dynamic duo Nuit Noire. We went nuts for this band the first time we heard them, expecting some sort of grim black buzz, seeing as they were signed to a black metal label, were distributed by black metal distros, etc., but instead we had our blocks knocked totally off, by their furious short sharp bursts of super tweaked angular riffing, flurries of chaotic drumming, and some of the most tweaked damaged whiny yelpingly brilliant vocals ever! All tangled up into a confusional blackened aggro metallic pop, part punk rock, part grim buzz, part no wave, part new wave.
In the past we described Nuit Noire as sounding like a black metal Rudimentary Peni, but we're also hearing plenty of Christian Death, Joy Division, Crass and weirdly enough, on this new one more than ever, the Toy Dolls, mostly due to vocalist Tenebras' voice which is a dead ringer for the Toy Dolls' Olga.
This new disc is half new tracks, half older classics recorded live. All of em fantastic of course. The new tracks are even shorter and poppier and more fucked up than before. Take the second track "I Am A Fairy", a crusty gloomy jam, with a killer main riff, streaks of high end new wave squiggle, and the vocals, just repeating the title over and over and over, super fast, then drawn out and crooned, while the music beneath shifts from hooky and poppy to blasting and buzzing. Or how about "I Love You", another furious eighties crust punk jam, but with some black buzz spread over the top, and a totally strange, but incredibly catchy vocal line, sung sort of like "I love yooooooooooooo, I love yooooooooooooou". The rest of the tracks range from loping eighties grooves to washed out dreamy murk to chaotic old school punk rock to full on lo-fi grim black metal, usually all in the same song.
It's really hard to describe the sound, we're pretty surprised this stuff appeals to black metallers at all, there is some buzz and some serious riffing, but it's way more punk, and way more new wave, and the vocals are so strange and high and hysterical and freaked out and over the top, they sort of define Nuit Noire's sound, and are definitely the element that will make it or break it for you.
The live tracks are awesome. And if we didn't know it would have been hard pressed to even realize they were live. Almost the exact sound quality (maybe they're just live in the studio, but then why re-record old songs?) heavy and buzzy and furious and catchy as fuck. Even a wicked version of their "Faeries Of Paper" a song we proclaimed to be one of "the best songs EVER" with one of the greatest catchiest weirdest riffs we've ever heard. A few of the other live tracks we hadn't heard before and are just as good, if not even better than the songs we already loved.
Need more reasons to love these guys? Howabout the cool pencil drawings of the band members, one depicted as a huge monster-armed drumming demon, head cloaked in shadow, the other a faerie, in tunic and cape, big eyes and pointed ears, mic cable wrapped around a broadsword stuck in the ground. Or howabout the photo on the back of the cd, a very skinny, nearly naked band member, clad in a loin cloth and a cape, holding a guitar aloft in one hand, a sword in the other, cape spread out like the wings of a bat.
C'mon!!! How much more perfect can a band be? So goddamn recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Les Fees Volent Dans La Nuit"
MPEG Stream: "I Am A Fairy"
MPEG Stream: "Fantomatic Plentitude"
MPEG Stream: "Nuit Blanche"

OTOMO YOSHIHIDE Modulation With 2 Electric Guitars and 2 Amplifiers (Doubt Music) cd 16.98
A carefully crafted, sculptural sonic study in amp buzz and feedback and stereo soundwave interaction, one of Japanese experimentalist Otomo Yoshihide's more extreme offerings of late. The last few albums we're heard from this maverick composer and guitar/turntables improviser have been more on the jazz tip, including two live discs with his New Jazz Orchestra. Sure some noisy stuff got woven into those, along with quiet "Onkyo" sounds and plenty of trad. jazz standard-bearing, but here, though, there's nothing "jazz" at all (unless perhaps the existence of smooth-jazzer Pat Metheny's infamous and atypical Zero Tolerance For Silence album has allowed such metal machine music stylings into the jazz canon). Even Otomo's previous solo guitar album on Doubtmusic, while quite skronky at times, included lovely takes on Duke Ellington's "Mood Indigo" and Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman". Whereas Modulation With 2 Electric Guitars And 2 Amplifiers consists of one track, 40 minutes and 16 seconds of the noisy abstraction the title suggests: droning hums, piercing tones, the crinkle-crankle of electrical excess. If Otomo's Fender amps were made of flesh and blood you'd imagine that veins would be standing out on their anthromorphic-amplifier foreheads, bulging with the constantly building pressure exerted by his feedback array... Though there certainly are parts of this disc that do achieve a sort of placid serenity, a steady state of soothing molecular vibrations. Of course it could be that by those points one's senses have been numbed, this disc when played loud enough having an auditory-overload effect. And Otomo does suggest it should be played loud ("at the highest possible volume"!), through speakers, "to obtain the desired results". This recommendation (or requirement) is made specifically because the conceptual, compositional goal here has to do with making music that exists as a physical presence in the space in which it is played, in three dimensions. Otomo explains: "Feedback sound issues from two amplifiers, each connected to one of two guitars placed on a tabletop.
Due to this stereo effect, the feedback mutually interferes, producing beatlike fluctuations, creating black holes into which the sound suddenly disappears, sounding completely different depending on the position of the ears, creating the illusion that the sound is coming from only one speaker when the listener is in certain locations, and so on, thus turning into truly interactive music.
Because these effects cannot be obtained unless the sound coming from the two amps mutually interferes, we recommend listening without earphones or headphones, through speakers, with the sound as loud as conditions allow. Depending on the positions of the speakers, the interference effect and sound image will surely differ as well." Of course, anybody could hook up a couple guitars and amps and make some noise, the key here is the "Modulation" in the title, something that Otomo has a deft hand (and foot on pedals) with, making this an interesting (if extreme!) listen -- unique repeat listens, in fact, as you experiment yourself with the positioning of both your speakers and your ears.
MPEG Stream: "Extract 1"
MPEG Stream: "Extract 2"
MPEG Stream: "Extract 3"

PRURIENT / KEVIN DRUMM All Are Guests In The House Of The Lord (Hospital Productions) cd 13.98
You might think that the results of a collaboration between Prurient and Kevin Drumm would be nothing but a seriously noisy and speaker destroying affair, but then you'd be underestimating these guys, and the extent to which they've pushed the noise music envelope.
The last few Prurient records have been less about caustic abrasion and more about dark soundscaping, more about drones and darkness less about shrieks and blinding fury, and well, Drumm has always been capable of a soft touch, and often tempers his brutality with gorgeous melodicism.
With that said, both of these guys are perfectly capable of whipping up serious squalls of crumbling chaos, and do so here and there on All Are Guests, but the key in noise music, at least for us, is dynamics, and these bursts and blasts of sonic fury that pepper the landscape are perfectly balanced by long stretches of subtle drones, field recordings, whirring atmospheric buzzscapes and creepy vocals.
The opening track sets the stage and is a strange one, a dark, lugubrious crawl, with slowed down ominous vocals, reminds us quite a bit of AQ faves Burial in fact! But with a bit more Whitehouse mixed in. A lurching low end slither underpinning haunting disembodied vocals, you can't help but expect some stuttery dubstep beat to drop, although it never does of course.
"On This Slab" is more a proper noise track, with howled distorted vocals, crunchy blown out electronics and glitched out malfunctioning buzz, but all chopped up and arranged into a strangely melodic noisescape, laced with little bits of melody, and dense grinding chunks of almost-melodic buzz, not to mention some spare tranquil stretches. The there's "There Died Venus", a washed out super distorted slab of crumbling blissdrone, gorgeous melodies buried beneath a roiling sea of ultra blown out crunch and buzz, strange rhythms surfacing amidst the constantly shifting layers of whirring sound, in the background a near constant upper register shimmer, wouldn't be all that out of place on a Tim Hecker disc. "Though The Apple Is Rotten" sounds almost like a straight field recording, the sounds of children playing, footsteps, wind random clatter, but in the background there's a lot of other sonic stuff going on, hard to tell if it's just tape hiss, or if the band has woven a delicate backdrop, either way, it's quite cool.
"In Long Rows" is a 10+ minute chunk of minimal dark ambience, think Lustmord, Coleclough, Chalk, but with a bit more grit, a bit more hiss, maybe slightly more lo-fi, and with a brief resurgence of those murky pitchshifted vocals from the first track.
Finally, the last track finishes things off with, well, not a bang, but a burst of grinding whirring, mechanical chaos, like several Wolf Eyes jamming at once, a rumbling rusty metal beast, busted gears and blown speakers, a giant unholy machine designed to do nothing but make this glorious noise, a deep resonant distorted voice, speaking beneath the din, buried below ground in some ancient hellish oratory, the sound seeping up through black cracks in the ancient soil. And even then, as the duo expel a cloud of noxious drone and buzz, they still manage to make it sound almost dreamlike and dangerously close to pretty.
MPEG Stream: "First Memory Of Pain"
MPEG Stream: "On This Slab"

RADIOHEAD In Rainbows (TBD) cd 13.98
Never before has a record been so completely overshadowed by it's delivery method. Unless you've been living under a rock for the last year, you no doubt have read or heard about Radiohead, offering their album for download, at any price the customer deemed appropriate, whether it be $20 or nothing at all. Needless to say, this sort of thing can't really be pulled off unless you're one of the biggest bands in the world, but since Radiohead ARE, it seemed to be an unmitigated success. They haven't revealed how many copies they sold, or what the average price paid was, but it's probably safe to assume, they made out okay.
And then there are the Radiohead fans who don't like downloads, and who want every bit of music that they can get, and thus shelled out $80 for the deluxe double lp, double cd set, with a whole extra cd of outtakes and unreleased tracks (at least one aQ-er did! As did lots of aQ customers). We personally thought, for a band like that, it almost would have been cooler to NOT release an MP3 version, have it ONLY available in stores. After all, without indie stores they wouldn't have been where they are today. People are so worried about record sales, imagine if a handful of bands skipped the online release entirely, and you HAD to buy it in an actual store. Sure, we're sort of biased, but hell, we love records and cds and tapes, and even if we didn't have a store, we'd feel exactly the same way.
Well, look at that, we were just talking about how everything BUT the music on the new Radiohead has been discussed to death, and we go and spend the first half of our review doing the very same thing...
Anyway, now available on cd, and as a regular lp, Radiohead's latest, in case you haven't heard it in one way or another, is actually really quite good. Not immediately experimental, and a bit more rocking, with lots of fan favorites that have been in the works for years, the sound reminds us a lot of Hail To The Thief, but with definite nods to Kid A and Kid B (Amnesiac), it's hard to imagine these guys making a BAD record. They have such a distinct sound, and such a way with sonics, and melody, whether rocking furiously, or drifting dreamily. And In Rainbows covers pretty much all the bases, the opener, "15 Step", begins with an Autchre-ish electronic skitter, but then in comes Thom Yorke's falsetto croon, and soon the band is shuffling through swirling guitar melodies and children's voices, strange FX and dubbed out drums. "Bodysnatchers" is a serious rocker, and is one of the oldest songs here (we think), with a killer crunchy riff, distorted bass, a very motorik Neu!-like rhythm, and big chiming U2 like guitars. "Nude" is a hushed whispery ballad, but just weird enough to stay interesting, a haunting high end drift, with a super gorgeous vocal line. The rest of the record seems to slip back and forth, from rock to ballad, from swoonsome epic crashing bombast, to hushed intimate whisper. Finishing off with the amazing "Videotape", a slow soft piano dirge, with another delicate and haunting vocal melody, but underpinned with some weird muted electronic drum loop, the whole thing so hypnotic and repetitive and dreamlike.
But who the heck needs to review a Radiohead record anyway? Especially this one. If you didn't download it, you're probably already gonna buy the cd or lp. And in fact, we bet half the people who downloaded it are also gonna buy the physical version. Radiohead are one of the few bands with such a crazy universal appeal, regular folks dig 'em, indie rockers of course, lots of metalheads do too, and loads of 'experimental' and 'avant' music lovers like them as well. Which makes sense, cuz, hell, they're a great band, they write great songs, they're not afraid to experiment and take regular songs and twist them all up, and this is just another great Radiohead record.
Comes in cool 'green' packaging, designed so you can take the various parts and stickers and stick them in a RECYCLED jewel case and voila!
MPEG Stream: "15 Steps"
MPEG Stream: "Bodysnatchers"

RADIOHEAD In Rainbows (TBD) lp 17.98
Never before has a record been so completely overshadowed by it's delivery method. Unless you've been living under a rock for the last year, you no doubt have read or heard about Radiohead, offering their album for download, at any price the customer deemed appropriate, whether it be $20 or nothing at all. Needless to say, this sort of thing can't really be pulled off unless you're one of the biggest bands in the world, but since Radiohead ARE, it seemed to be an unmitigated success. They haven't revealed how many copies they sold, or what the average price paid was, but it's probably safe to assume, they made out okay.
And then there are the Radiohead fans who don't like downloads, and who want every bit of music that they can get, and thus shelled out $80 for the deluxe double lp, double cd set, with a whole extra cd of outtakes and unreleased tracks (at least one aQ-er did! As did lots of aQ customers). We personally thought, for a band like that, it almost would have been cooler to NOT release an MP3 version, have it ONLY available in stores. After all, without indie stores they wouldn't have been where they are today. People are so worried about record sales, imagine if a handful of bands skipped the online release entirely, and you HAD to buy it in an actual store. Sure, we're sort of biased, but hell, we love records and cds and tapes, and even if we didn't have a store, we'd feel exactly the same way.
Well, look at that, we were just talking about how everything BUT the music on the new Radiohead has been discussed to death, and we go and spend the first half of our review doing the very same thing...
Anyway, now available on cd, and as a regular lp, Radiohead's latest, in case you haven't heard it in one way or another, is actually really quite good. Not immediately experimental, and a bit more rocking, with lots of fan favorites that have been in the works for years, the sound reminds us a lot of Hail To The Thief, but with definite nods to Kid A and Kid B (Amnesiac), it's hard to imagine these guys making a BAD record. They have such a distinct sound, and such a way with sonics, and melody, whether rocking furiously, or drifting dreamily. And In Rainbows covers pretty much all the bases, the opener, "15 Step", begins with an Autchre-ish electronic skitter, but then in comes Thom Yorke's falsetto croon, and soon the band is shuffling through swirling guitar melodies and children's voices, strange FX and dubbed out drums. "Bodysnatchers" is a serious rocker, and is one of the oldest songs here (we think), with a killer crunchy riff, distorted bass, a very motorik Neu!-like rhythm, and big chiming U2 like guitars. "Nude" is a hushed whispery ballad, but just weird enough to stay interesting, a haunting high end drift, with a super gorgeous vocal line. The rest of the record seems to slip back and forth, from rock to ballad, from swoonsome epic crashing bombast, to hushed intimate whisper. Finishing off with the amazing "Videotape", a slow soft piano dirge, with another delicate and haunting vocal melody, but underpinned with some weird muted electronic drum loop, the whole thing so hypnotic and repetitive and dreamlike.
But who the heck needs to review a Radiohead record anyway? Especially this one. If you didn't download it, you're probably already gonna buy the cd or lp. And in fact, we bet half the people who downloaded it are also gonna buy the physical version. Radiohead are one of the few bands with such a crazy universal appeal, regular folks dig 'em, indie rockers of course, lots of metalheads do too, and loads of 'experimental' and 'avant' music lovers like them as well. Which makes sense, cuz, hell, they're a great band, they write great songs, they're not afraid to experiment and take regular songs and twist them all up, and this is just another great Radiohead record.
Comes in cool 'green' packaging, designed so you can take the various parts and stickers and stick them in a RECYCLED jewel case and voila!
MPEG Stream: "15 Steps"
MPEG Stream: "Bodysnatchers"

SKULL DEFEKTS, THE Blood Spirits and Drums are Singing (Conspiracy) cd 15.98
Fuck yeah! Another Skull Defekts record. Hard to believe they were once one of those super obscure bands with practically no releases outside a cassette or a cd-r or two, considering now it seems like every decent label around wants a piece of these guys. And for good reason. SD are a total AQ sonic dream team, heavy and hypnotic, looped and rhythmic, clattery and chaotic. Usually we get a bit fed up when a band suddenly releases record after record after record, but in some cases, we're willing to make an exception, and we'll of course make one for these guys, since we're dying to hear more and more. Every label around wants a piece of these guys and that's just fine, cuz every disc we've heard we love, and this one is no different.
Well, no different in that respect, but sonically, there is a big difference. Whereas all the other records we've heard have been super abstract affairs, rooted heavily in rhythm for sure, but mostly ambient and drone-y and looped, with the various rhythms part of a bigger whole, dark soundscapes of creaks and groans and rumbles and whirs, all held firmly in place by fragmented rhythms, and looped percussion, this one sounds more like the work of a band. A -rock- band. Not to say it isn't still dark and hypnotic, looped and rhythmic, it's just this time, there's, well, there's singing for one, and while vocals may have been present on the other discs, here's it's as much a part of the music as the riff or the r