Aquarius Records: Search Results for Keyword: Nigel Wright
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IMPORTANT (Please read to avoid confusion):
Some items below may be tagged with a bold, red, all-caps "out of print/unavailable" notice. This does NOT mean that all other items not so tagged are, in fact, in stock -- or for that matter, in print and available, though there's a good chance they are. Some folks get confused on this point, and we can see why, so please read this for further clarification and other important before-you-order information. Unlike some mailorder websites, we don't have an electronic inventory system linked to our site, so you can't be sure of what we actually have or don't have in stock at any given moment without asking us -- please email our mailorder department for availability status -- or better yet, just go ahead and place your order using our shopping cart function and we'll get back to you with the status of each item. If you have general non-mailorder questions, email the store.


album cover WRIGHT, NIGEL Alleluya (Diagnosis...Don't!) 3"cd-r 10.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Another triple shot of sonic weirdness from Diagnosis... Don't!, the label run by AQ faves the Grey Daturas, this one comes courtesy of NZ guitarist Nigel Wright, whose two previous cd-r's were huge hits around here (and are gone gone gone so don't ask).
With a delicate combination of minimal guitar drones and subtle laptop manipulation, Wright weaves dark rhythmic soundworlds of creaking cricket like chitter, thick syrupy swells, ominous shimmer and rumbling guitar groan. Spare and desolate, with an underlying loveliness, but so very grim and austere. It's a lot like a Wolf Eyes record, with its suffocating oppressive atmosphere and dark dark ambience, but with all the clang and clatter and roar removed, leaving a more skeletal, mysterious and muted drift, all wrapped up in a strange otherworldly warmth. So nice.
Packaged in thick textured black paper mini 3" sleeves, with a printed (band name, label info, liner notes) Japanese style obi. Nice.
And as always, these are SUPER LIMITED, and odds are we won't be able to get more...
MPEG Stream: "Alleluya (excerpt 1)"
MPEG Stream: "Alleluya (excerpt 2)"

album cover WRIGHT, NIGEL Flotter (Gest) cd-r 9.98
There are so many tiny cd-r labels, and so many releases, it's basically impossible to keep up. We do what we can, sort of pick and choose the best we can find, and one of our favorites is NZ guitarist Nigel Wright. Unlike the legions of overproducers out there, we've only managed three Wright releases in 3 years. This one makes it four, and it's absolutely gorgeous. Gauzy and hazy, woozy and washed out, dense and dreamlike. Fennesz, Jeck, Tim Hecker, Wright travels a similar sonic path, creating gorgeous sun dappled soundscapes of softly blurred melodies, of buried notes, his guitar not so much expelling notes and chords, as much as unfurling lush sonic tapestries, soft focus, bleary eyed beauty, peppered with clouds of crumbling distortion, shards of delay, streaks of muted whir, but all deftly incorporated into Wright's constantly shifting soundworld.
Somehow the world at large needs to discover what Wright is capable of. C'mon Touch, swoop in and snatch this man up and give him some resources to make the record we know he's capable of. If he can make records this pretty with a guitar and a 4-track, the mind boggles...
MPEG Stream: "Widths"
MPEG Stream: "Killing Time"

album cover WRIGHT, NIGEL s/t (CMR) cd-r 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Fuck, first there was Celebrate Psi Phenemona, and then Pseudoarcana jumped into the fray, and now CMR is the latest label to start releasing super limited edition cd-r's from the New Zealand underground of improv free-noise, lo-fi drone scraping, and damaged sound art. Not to be confused with the Andrew Lloyd Webber associate of the same name, the Auckland based Nigel Wright focuses on loop-based systems which he transforms into miasmic drones. It's hard to say if those looping systems refer to feedbacking loops (which is possible as there is a cyclical sine-wave feel to many of Wright's sounds) or to a Terry Riley time-lag accumulation (which is also possible with all of the crystaline percolations that ripple through the dronescaping); regardless of the process, Wright's eponymous debut recording alternates between deadened electrical atmospherics and beautifully blissed out driftscapes. Fans of BJ Nilsen, Oren Ambarchi, and Jonathan Coleclough should take note! Limited to 100 copies only!
MPEG Stream: "01"
MPEG Stream: "13:40 (live at Canary Gallery 05/04/05)"

album cover WRIGHT, NIGEL Tapir (self-released) 3" cd-r 4.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We were first introduced to Mr. Nigel Wright (not to be confused with fellow dronester Peter Wright) via a super limited cd-r on the CMR label. A gorgeous assemblage of mysterious loop based systems. Totally hit the spot for fans of Coleclough, Ambarchi, Nilsen, Chalk and the like (like us!). Well, recently Wright got in touch with us to see if we wanted to carry his latest release, another super limited cd-r, this time a 15 minute 3" in crafty hand made packaging. Well, the answer was obviously "Hell yeah!" and thus we have this, another completely mesmerizing slab of warm fuzzy looped and drone drenched goodness. The first track comes on like some My Bloody Valentine William Basinski mash up. Thick gauzy waves of distortion wrapped around delicate glistening melodies, layered and looped into a haunting ebb and flow of pulsing drone and slow shifting buzz. The sound is very organic, rich and thick and multi-hued, almost like a warmer fuzzier SUNNO))). The second track pushes even further out in the same fuzzed out blown out ambient direction, the guitars (?) are even more corrosive, channeling the wall of skree sound of bands like Sunroof! but filtered through the doe-eyed innocence and romantic moodiness of bands like M83 or any of their like minded Gooom labelmates. Dreamy and ambient enough to be perfect for the drone obsessed, but enough like some avant rockdrone outfit to appeal to folks who have been digging Nadja, The Angelic Process, Hjarnidaudi, Jesu and the like. Awesome!
Not sure how limited these are but we're guessing VERY, so act fast. Packaged in tiny little plastic sleeves with colored paper covers and simple typed insert.
MPEG Stream: "All Talk"
MPEG Stream: "Cardboard"

album cover AM (ANTONY MILTON) Poerua Acid (Diagnosis...Don't!) 3"cd-r 10.98
One of three new discs in the latest series of lovingly hand made 3" cd-r's from the Grey Daturas' Diagnosis... Don't! label (the other two being Bonecloud and Nigel Wright, reviewed elsewhere on this list). Poerua Acid features two looooong tracks from beloved NZ noisemaker and PseudoArcana label head honcho Antony Milton, and is the perfect mix of his two sides of his sonic personality, one side lilting dreamy and melodic, the other, dense, muted and noisy.
The opening track begins with just guitar, all warbly and slightly out of tune, the tape speed shifting and changing speed, making it sound like the sound on one of those grade school film strips, warm and wreathed in reverb, underneath, strange little swells and swirls drift and shimmer. Over the course of the track, the delicate finger picked melodies sink deeper and deeper into the background, until all that's left is a blown out muddy dronescape of overlapping rumbles and haunting flute like melodies.
The second track is much less restrained, opening up with a thick wall of guitars, dense and tangled, thick with distortion, roiling and overblown, garbled vocals and all manner of mysterious melodies lurk ghostlike beneath an epic expanse of layered guitar grind, like a more blissed out and melodic Sunroof! or Hototogisu.
Packaged in thick textured maroon paper mini 3" sleeves, with a printed (band name, label info, liner notes) Japanese style obi. Nice.
And as always, these are SUPER LIMITED, and odds are we won't be able to get more. So don't dawdle...
MPEG Stream: "Part 1"
MPEG Stream: "Part 2"

album cover HUZUN s/t (Pseudo Arcana) cd-r 11.98
The name Huzun might not ring a bell, but for folks tuned into the experimental music scene in New Zealand or who are avid collectors of micro edition cd-r releases, you might know the names behind Huzun: Andrew Scott and Tim Coster. Andrew Scott is one half of the duo Nest, along with Nigel Wright, whose Flotter record has been a HUGE hit around here, and who shared a collaborative release last year with Mr. Coster.
So for Huzun, Scott teams up with Coster once again, this time minus Wright, for a disc of super minimal metallic melodic dronemusic. A 35 minute slow crawl through murky expanses of subterranean low end, dense clouds of slowed down whale call-like melodies buried beneath grinding swells of soft whirring blur, like exploring some lost underground city by torchlight, what sounds like bats fluttering overhead, strange sounds off in the distance like the buzz of insects, all over a deep dark rumbling like some sort of machine buried beneath the city. Haunting and harrowing, minimal and mysterious, at the same time subtly melodic and darkly mesmerizing.
More essential listening for all you dronelords and ladies...
MPEG Stream: "Untitled"

album cover INFINITESIMAL s/t (CMR) cd-r 14.98
Like the perenially amazing PseudoArcana and Celebrate Psi Phenonemon, the Auckland based art-noise-drone label CMR has taken to releasing super limited cd-r editions from relatively unknown New Zealand musicians. This eponymous album from Infinitesimal is the second cd-r release for CMR, following the exceptional feedback dronescraping of Nigel Wright. Of course, the Infinitesimal duo of Mark Sadgrove (from MHFS) and Paul Winstanley (from Sci Hi) has a couple of even smaller cd-r editions on even harder to find labels. Using no-input mixing board techniques and a self-triggering computer algorithms, Infinitesimal crafts a metal machine music where the machine does all the work and the technicians make sure things don't run too amok. Hence, this album bristles with fizzing blasts of white-hot electric noise sputter against leaden feedback drones. Super limited to 100 copies, of which we only have a handful!
MPEG Stream: "01"
MPEG Stream: "06"

album cover METAL ROUGE Calling Winter (self-released) cd-r 10.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
This duo (one half New Zealand, one half L.A.) played here last night, with AQ faves Expo '70 (we missed it, writing reviews you know, bad timing, list week, argh) but from what folks tell us, they surprised everyone by totally dominating, and entrancing everyone with their humid guitar ambience and shimmering metallic dronescapes. And hearing this cd it's not difficult to hear why. 
Metal Rouge is the duo of Andrew Scott (who you might remember as half of the duo Nest, with Nigel Wright) and Helga Fassonaki, who manage to work some pretty serious musical magic together. Plenty of bands do the drone thing, sometimes it's a static hum, other times it's a wall of guitar left to buzz and rumble, but it takes a special something to harness those sounds and sculpt them into something more, to coax emotion from them, to create tension, to turn sounds into actual songs. And Metal Rouge manage that task just fine.
Much like Expo '70, Metal Rouge owe as much to old school krautrock ambience as they do the modern makers of abstract noise. Their guitars and various sonic implements, unfurling slow pulses, motorik throbs, deep swells, a lush low end that seems to let all the other sounds gradually sink into it, melodies drift sleepily, the notes wavering and slowly shimmering, everything bathed in the reverbed glow of some hot late night, lit blue by the moon, the stars glistening like streaks of feedback beneath the roiling ambience. These are actual songs, like some old dusty 78 dipped in tar and played back as slow as it will go, pop music rendered glacial and effulgent. Bits of twang and strum floating lazily by on a slow moving black tide, an incandescent raga like buzz always glimmering in the background, Metal Rouge is like some heavily sedated version of Popol Vuh or Tangerine Dream, their lush, sultry shimmer washing over you and transporting you to some mysterious otherworld. Absolute bliss. 
Packaged in a super swank box, with printed insert under the cd, a fold out booklet, a black and white paste on cover (all of them different) and sealed in a thick plastic sleeve affixed with a strip of tape hand stamped with the name of the band.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Each one hand numbered.
MPEG Stream: "Calling Winter, Apologizing To The Earth"
MPEG Stream: "Dying Palms: New American Century"

album cover METAL ROUGE Three For Malachi Ritscher (Root Strata) cd 12.98
Metal Rouge is an unlikely combo, as the two members live half way round the world from each other making music that does not lend itself to digital filesharing. Andrew Scott is the New Zealand citizen in the group, having worked with Nigel Wright in the past as Nest; and the Californian of Metal Rouge is Helga Fassonaki, who seems to be the globetrotter of the two with huge amount of exhibitions and performances on both sides of the Pacific. Andrew and Helga declare their intentions as being "concerned primarily with pure thoughtless formless now and its expression through sound" or rather, they improvise toward the drone supreme with plenty of detours along the way. Andrew's tools are the pedal steel and guitar pedals; and Helga's instrument of choice is a Persian dulcimer jacked up through plenty of FX pedals as well. After a handful of tapes and cd-rs, Three For Malachi Ritscher appears to be their first proper cd, with kudos going to ever impressive curatorial hands at Root Strata.
From a strictly aesthetic / geographic axis, Metal Rouge is the perfect sum of its parts, situating all of the free-noise / freak-folk aspects that we love about both LA's Not Not Fun scene and NZ's PseudoArcana label. So, through the psychedelic damage of their pedal steel and dulcimer duets, Metal Rouge weaves a post-krautrock / Dream Syndicate atmosphere of thumbing drones built out of arcing layers of spectral tones and spidery pluckings. Tones glisten and vibrate with that unsettled narcotic feel of Pocahaunted's disembodied vocals and drug-drone mantras, but these are WAY better. The two also have clearly been listening to Matthew Bower as there's a few cut-the-power conclusions to the soaring heights of their drone stupor, leaving us hanging in a dizzying limbo at the moment of silence. Very nicely done.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!!!
MPEG Stream: "Anger, Awaken"
MPEG Stream: "Love, Awaken"
MPEG Stream: "Sorrow, Awaken"

album cover NEST / MHFS s/t (Gest) 3"cd-r 4.98
We have long been huge fans of New Zealand noisemaker Nigel Wright ever since we first heard him on a cd-r way back in 2005. Since then we've tried to carry everything we could get our hands on, but unlike his overproductive countrymen, it hasn't been much. We flipped over the recent Tapir 3"cd-r and only just recently got a handful of this disc.
Nest is a duo, featuring Wright and LA based sound maker Andrew Scott, and for this little 3" the two have teamed up with Mark Sadgrove (of MHFS and Infintesimal) and together these three kick up quite a din, huge distorted washes of sound that shift and pulse and twist and throb like something alive. Burning white hot and blown out, it's a glistening wall of supernova guitars, wreathed in a hazy cloud of dense distortion and buzzy reverb. Like a single shard of My Bloody Valentine psychrock blowout, looped and run through a busted up old distortion pedal. A gloriously crumbling, coruscating blast of face melting psychedelic free noise bliss.
Already out of print. We have about 25 copies, but these will probably go quick...
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 1"
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 2"

album cover NEST / TIM COSTER s/t (Gest) cd-r 9.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Last year we reviewed a cd-r by the duo Nest, guitarist Andrew Scott and NZ noisemaker Nigel Wright, where they teamed up with fellow kiwi MHFS, but for this latest outing, the duo has teamed up with yet another New Zealander, Tim Coster, and the results are again sublime. But in a much different way than the last collaboration. Where that one was distorted and heavy and buzzy, this new one is much darker and more introspective, guitars and laptops blurred into warm whirring blurs, soft distorted pulses smoother out into soft swells, a dreamy dark tranquil drift, that continues that way for much of the track's 25 minutes, but right around the 17 minute mark, the guitars grow a bit restless, the sound a bit more corrosive, over the continuous low end flow, soars streaks of coruscating high end, shards of feedback, eventually shedding the low end completely, leaving the sharper guitar to riff weightlessly and slowly transform into a fuzzed out chunk of slow swirling murk, that unfurls until the track's end. Good stuff. Fans of the usual abstract free drone stuff will dig this heavily!
MPEG Stream: "Untitled"

album cover UTON Highway Nation (Barl Fire) cd-r 11.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Quite possibly the most haunting and lovely record yet from these mysterious Finnish free drone explorers. While on other records, Uton have dabbled in more cacophonous noise rock and clattery free folk, Highway Nation is purely a dreamy drone record, deep, dark and utterly sublime. Each track a mysterious sonic drift through a slow shifting soundscape of barely shifting shimmer, Like sitting on a mist enshrouded mountain top, watching a huge freighter drift by, way out at sea, the churning sound of the water, and the thrum of the freighter's engines reduced to a murky murmur. Elsewhere, bits of bowed metal spread out into glistening sheets of upper register whir, dense with subtle overtones and buried melodies. So serene and delicate, abstract and ethereal. The sort of perfect ambient dronemusic that should most definitely appeal to fans of Coleclough, Chalk, Wright (Peter AND Nigel), Mirror, Seht, and similar minded sound sculptors...
SUPER LIMITED. Already out of print at the label. We have 20 copies, once those are gone, they are gone forever...
MPEG Stream: "One"
MPEG Stream: "Two"

album cover V/A Where In The World Is Wendy Broccoli? - A Collection Of Out Of Print Flying Nun Singles 1981-1996 (Flying Nun) cd 23.00
For a while, back in the nineties, AQ was THE place to get your underground New Zealand rock fix. Maybe one of the only stores in the US consistently singing the praises and slinging discs by the Tall Dwarves, the Cakekitchen, the Terminals, Wreck Small Speakers On Expensive Stereos, The Dead C, Bailter Space, Nigel Bunn, David Kilgour, The Clean, King Loser, The Great Unwashed, The Bats, Roy Montgomery, The Chills... and actually come to think of it, AQ is still that place, it's just that the landscape of the NZ underground has changed a bit, folks like Birchville Cat Motel, Omit, Pumice, The Dead C (still!), Peter Wright, Antony Milton, Brothers Of The Occult Sisterhood, Armpit, Black Boned Angel, Dean Roberts, The Futurians and loads more are now the ones making waves all over the world. The names may be different, and the sounds too, but the current crop owe a huge debt to those that came before, and the sound and energy of those legendary NZ bands most definitely live on through this new blood.
Every time we'd get a new disc from one of those modern NZ outfits, some part of us would begin hankering to hear some of the old shit, but it's been practically impossible to track any of it down, Flying Nun, THE New Zealand label, was still around and releasing records, but seemed to only exist within the confines of NZ itself. But finally after months and months of emailing we managed to find someone who would and could sell us Flying Nun stuff. Our box of NZ goodies finally showed up and we were transported right back to that NZ indie rock heyday, we've been blasting the Chills and Bailter Space, Chris Knox and Toy Love, The Gordons and David Kilgour... but most exciting of all, we were able to get two compilations we'd been hearing about but had been unable to get until now. One is the 25th anniversary Flying Nun 4cd box set, super expensive, but well worth it, we'll try to list it some day, although we do have a few (at the time of writing this review) if you're interested, the other is Where In The World Is Wendy Broccoli, a completely kick ass and mind blowing collection of long out of print 7" singles, released between 1981 and 1996, when Flying Nun were releasing all sorts of crazy cool weirdness on vinyl...
Not sure who Wendy Broccoli is, judging from the liner notes, it seems like maybe she was a Flying Nun A+R person, but it hardly matters, the important thing is, this collection is a knockout. A great overview of the label and the scene, from indie pop jangle to murky grungy free rock and pretty much every stop in between. Like most scenes, there were a handful of key players, NZ was no different, lots of names you would probably recognize: Roy Montgomery, Peter Stapleton, Robert Scott, David Mitchell, Peter Jefferies, David Kilgour, Denise Roughan, Chris Knox, Shayne Carter, Chris Heazlewood and a handful of others, who beyond recording in their own bands and under their own names, would often pair up or group together for one off recordings, single albums or even just a 7" single, that sort of freedom, and the ability to record a track or two and see it actually released, resulted in one of the most vibrant and varied scenes EVER. And the proof is right here...
The mopey, slowcore jangle of Rik Starrr, the cinematic countrified twang of the Renderers, the bass heavy new wave-y gloom of Pin Group, the murky Spacemen 3 like jams of Sssf, the glimmering indie K Records style soft indie pop of The Magick Heads, the minor key melodic pop dirge of Queen Meanie Puss, the gothy dreamy downer murk of The Children's Hour (sounding quite a bit like Joy Division or Interpol), the tripped out space rock of Celia Mancini,  the fuzzed out female surf rock of 25 Cents (covering a Sonics classic), that unmistakable Chris Knox lo-fi perfect pop, and that's just a handful of the twenty tracks here. 
Definitely one of our favorite 'new' comps of the last little while (it actually came out in 2005), and it's done exactly what great compilations are meant to, acting not only as the perfect mix, but also getting us all riled up to hear some of our old NZ faves (most of which sound just as good today as they did back in the day!!). SO RECOMMENDED!
MPEG Stream: PIN GROUP "Ambivalence"
MPEG Stream: SSSF "Catface"
MPEG Stream: DIMMER "Dawn's Coming In"
MPEG Stream: CHRIS KNOX "Under The Influence"

Showing results 1 through 13 of 13.

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