BENUMB By Means of Upheaval (Relapse) cd 14.98

BENUMB Withering Strands of Hope (Relapse) cd 14.98
Crushing political East Bay grind from the Bay Area's masters of blazing crustcore intensity. 32 tracks. Complex and heavy, right on lyrics addressing the sad state of world affairs, and as usual, a huge comprehensive list (with contacts) of all the cool bands and labels.

BENUMB / PIG DESTROYER split (Robotic Empire) 3" cd 9.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
West Coast vs. East Coast!! Grindcore tag team battle royale. Benumb offer up 3 tracks of grunted, growling metal/grind, with some cool strangely recorded sub-bass rumble (not sure if it's on purpose or not). The mighty Pig Destroyer spit out 7 tracks of pummelling, incredibly tight metallic grind, heavy and intense. Super distorted vocals and crushing riffs. Suypposedly them just fucking around, testing the equipment during the recording of their amazing 'Prowler...' record, but it sounds pretty serious to me. Even a blazing cover of the Dwarves' 'Fuck You Up And Get High.' 10 tracks in seven minutes. Fuck yeah!!
RealAudio clip: BENUMB "Path of the Righteous"
RealAudio clip: PIG DESTROYER "Fuck you up and Get High"
RealAudio clip: PIG DESTROYER "Black Centipede"

BENUMB / PREMONITIONS OF WAR split (Thorp) cd 10.98

BEPLER, JONATHAN Cremaster 2 (Bepler) cd 18.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Glacial drones, beautifully sung songs by/about a notorious killer, thousands of buzzing bees and a death metal cameo...all are elements of this gorgeous and bizarre soundtrack to one of the weirdest and biggest budget art/film projects ever, Matthew Barney's million-dollar "Cremaster 2".
We were lucky enough to get a hold of some copies of the rare soundtrack composed by Johnathan Bepler. For the most part, Bepler layers multiple atonal church organ chords with varying effects that tweak the underlying sound. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir makes an appearance as does some digitally bent country twang. But the mindblowing highlight (both here on the cd and in the film) is the massive blastbeat provided by ex-Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo as Morbid Angel's bass player and vocalist Steve Tucker sings into a phone while cloaked in bees, who also contribute much buzzing to the wall of sound.
Barney's "Cremaster" series is arguably the most important work to emerge from the artworld in the past decade. To discuss in depth Barney's convoluted symbolism and bizarre Lynch / Cronenberg / Greenaway imagery would take up far too much space even for this increasingly verbose new arrivals list, but we'll attempt a brief introduction for the uninitiated: Barney's sound / film / installation pieces are poetic and difficult allegories, centered on the growth of human sexuality and its psychological implications. "Cremaster 2" is actually the fourth in a five part series (the order went 1, 3, 5, and then 2), and is, quite crassly put, a really good dick joke. More critically put, Barney abstracts the life & times of the serial killer Gary Gilmore to portray an archetype for a pre-linguistic male figure who lacks the super-ego control over the id's proclivity for sex & violence.
Music has always played an important part in the Barney work, and Jonathan Bepler's score for "Cremaster 2" certainly does its best to support Barney's complex visual elements. If you haven't seen the film, this soundtrack will make you want to.

BEPLER, JONATHAN Cremaster 3 (Bepler) 2cd 23.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Without getting too much into the meta-narratives of Matthew Barney's masterpiece "Cremaster 3" which loosely has something to do with the history of Freemasons, the Guggenheim Museum, macho-minimalist Richard Serra hurling vaseline, a punk battle of the bands between Murphy's Law and Agnostic Front, video games, and multiple references to Chrysler (both the car and the building). However, we can get a little worked up about the "Cremaster 3" soundtrack composed by Jonathan Bepler (who scored the two preceding films "Cremaster 5" and "Cremaster 2.") Yes, the numerical sequencing of this series is supposed to be out of order, merely one of many convolutions of logic. As in "Cremaster 2," Bepler masterfully constructs his soundtrack out of pre-existing musical genres and recognizable codifications of sound. Gaelic bagpipes blurt a dissonant stream of polyphonic notes, theremins sadly pull a solitary croon from the ether, violins glide through sustained tones, lurid artnoir grooves further corrode Barry Adamson's dark application of be-bop, and the drones, oh the drones. Much like the Alan Splet score for David Lynch's "Eraserhead" and even some of the later Ligeti chorale pieces, Bepler dissolves all of these references into pools of droning sound which allow him to fluidly work in and out of the huge pastiche. As before, Bepler's work is totally amazing.
RealAudio clip: "Chrysler Chorale Overture"
RealAudio clip: "Initiate's Serenade"
RealAudio clip: "Crown's Overture"
RealAudio clip: "Rainbow Girls Idyll"

BEPLER, JONATHAN Cremaster 5 (BMG) cd 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
So many folks were enthused about the soundtrack to "Cremaster 2" that we thought we should also stock the soundtrack to Matthew Barney's "Cremaster 5", from a few years back. Unlike the soundtrack to "Cremaster 2", which featured speed metal drummer Dave Lombardo and other weirdness along with the classical elements, this one (released on a mainstream classical music label) is more of a straight classical styled piece, appropriate because "Cremaster 5" was conceived as a Hungarian opera, set in various locations around Budapest. The plot is loosely based on Shakespeare's "Prospero's Book," with the Prospero character (played by Barney) split into three distinct figures each representing the Freudian trilogy of the mind: ego, super-ego, and id (named by Barney as Diva, Magician, and Giant). The object of Prospero's desire is the Queen of Chain, played by the magnetic Ursula Andress. As with everything in the "Cremaster" series, it gets a hell of a lot more complex than this description can accurately convey.
Anyway, Barney employs Jonathan Bepler (who was responsible for the incredible score of "Cremaster 2") to score quite a melodramatic, tragic opera to be performed by the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra. Like all operas, you really go to "see" the opera -- not just hear it. Quite lovely for an opera, but without the context of Barney's vaseline 'n' prosthetic imagery, Bepler's music loses a great deal of power. Still Bepler/Barney fans may well want to add it to their collections.

BERAKI, TSEHAYTU Selam (Terp) 2cd 19.98
From the same label (The Ex's Terp label) that brought us the recent Konono No.1 live record, comes this amazing double cd release from legendary Eritrean singer Tsehaytu Beraki. Initially, the folks at Terp were just trying to help locate material for the Ethiopiques series, when people kept suggesting that someone should do something for Beraki, who was forced to flee from the turmoil of Eritrea and somehow ended up in Rotterdam. After some determined digging, Terrie from the Ex managed to track her down and began to discuss ideas for releasing a cd. It ended up that after years and years of performing and recording, very litte of Beraki's music had actually been recorded or released! So plans were made, and everything on these two discs was recorded in a modern state of the art studio with a handful of unlikely guests (free jazz drummer Han Bennink for one!) between 2000-2003. You'd be hard pressed to tell though, because the sound, the songs and Beraki's vocals are so perfectly timeless. Mostly performed on a krar (and occasionally a bass krar), a buzzing stringed instrument like a harp / banjo / sitar hybrid, these songs are gorgeous, with Beraki's warm, resonant vocals over a bed of buzzing strings, muted melodies, and a simple insistent and hypnotic rhythm. Every time we play this in the store someone comes up to find out what it is. Folks who dug the Ethiopiques series (especially Vol. 16) and the recent Konono No.1 will LOVE this. So beautiful.
MPEG Stream: "Atzmtom Keskisom"
MPEG Stream: "Hey Li Habelmalet"

BERAN, GRANT The Another Ones (Postmoderncore) cd-r 10.00
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
Any record bearing the legend: "All the music on this cd has been created using a very old record player, second hand microphones, discarded tape recorders and various bits of wire" pretty much has to be good. Well okay, maybe HAS TO is exaggerating, but at the very least that sort of description is enough to get us very intrigued.
And in this case, it is good, but at the same time nothing at all like we were expecting.
We had imagined some sort of washed out Philip Jeck style drones, or pixelated Tim Hecker-ish soundscapes, or even the sort of crackling slow decay of William Basinski's tape pieces, but instead, Grant Beran has taken old records and some junky beat up equipment and used them to create surprisingly rhythmic tracks, utilizing various cracks and pops, and skips to fashion almost-grooves, like a lo-fi DJ Shadow sort of. The opener is all fuzzy and buzzy, but with a super driving beat, a skipping record looped into a hypnotic groove, a little bit techno, a little bit hip hop, a little creepy Goblin soundtrack, and a lot fuzzed out turntable buzz. It's not hard to imagine some clever DJ adding huge beats to this and you'd have the most fucked up lo-fi dancefloor jam ever. But we don't want to exaggerate the 'dance' aspect, it's more like the soundtrack to some lost John Carpenter movie, dubbed from VHS to VHS to home stereo to microcassette recorder until it ended up sounding like this, groove and fuzzy and murky and awesome!
The second track is much more moody and atmospheric, the rhythms an afterthought, that seem to surface randomly, while the meat of the track is deep sonorous tones, throbbing and distorted, woven into some low end melody. The rest of the record is split pretty evenly between hushed whispery ambient drone, and weirdly distorted lo-fi grooves, standout's include the buzzy electro jam of "The Man In The High Castle", the cinematic krautrocky murk of "Double Star", the almost Chain Reaction dub of "Star Collector" and the droney buzz and grind of "Gleanings".
Falling somewhere between experimental turntable soundscapery and a moody cinematic DJ record, Beran has skillfully woven sonic straw into fuzzy, stuttery, groovy gold, taking turntables and dreamdrone ambience into rhythmic places until now, as far as we know completely unexplored! WAY recommended.
MPEG Stream: "My Own Private Tokyo"
MPEG Stream: "Sci-Fi Lullaby"
MPEG Stream: "Here At The Western World"

BERBER OX Minor Tranquiliser (Stunned) cassette 6.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We had never heard of the artist known by the strange monicker Berber Ox, but we got two different releases from this Australian soundscaper recently, whose music the man himself described as "weird-ass psychedelic drone/field recording/collage", which most definitely sounded right up our alley, a dizzyingly dark assemblage of sounds, found AND created, woven deftly into droney psychedelic ambience that definitely has us kicking ourselves for not hearing this stuff until now.
As Mr. Berber Ox spent much of the last few years in Japan, where most of the sounds on these two releases were in fact recorded, the proceeds from the sale of both will be donated to the Red Cross Japan Tsunami Fund, which is another reason to grab both before they're gone...
Like the Trounce cd-r, this tape finds Berber Ox taking raw field recordings and folding them into generated sounds, electronic and organic, rendering them unrecognizable for the most part, and blurring all of those into hazy atmospheric sprawls, on the surface a warm whir, a bleary shimmer, but within those seemingly slo-mo glacial streaks of layered sound lurk hushed melodies, mysterious overtones and subtle rhythmic shifts, with the field recordings occasionally revealing themselves, adding a whole 'nother vibe to the sound, humanizing the dark drift with voices or snippets of conversation, or further obscuring their provenance in the form of muted clatter, buzz, or soft industrial crunch, but even so, everything in the world of Berber Ox is further blurred into some sort of hazy otherworldliness, a muddied, murky, muted swirl of softly chaotic thrum and whir, shimmer and drift, hum and buzz, the sort of sound that is so easy to get lost in, a sonic gateway forged from dreamlike minimalism and hushed, sculpted softnoise, so darkly divine. And like the cd-r, recommended for drone explorers partial to Chalk, Coleclough, Ora, Mirror, Monos, Brendan Murray, Peter Wright and the rest...
Packaged in cool eye popping full color J-cards in bright blue tape cases, and LIMITED TO JUST 111 COPIES!! We got a very limited number of those direct from the man himself, and we might not be able to get more once these sell out.

BERBER OX The Great Parenthesis (Stunned Tapes) cassette 6.98
Latest release from this Australian soundscaper / dronologist, another collection of self described "weird-ass psychedelic drone/field recording/collage", and really, no matter how many ways of describing the oddly monikered Berber Ox, we have yet to come up with a more succinctly accurate description. But while that is a pretty accurate thumbnail descriptor, it doesn't really do justice to Berber Ox's dark and surreal dronescapes. Four lengthy tracks, the shortest, 7:41, the longest a whopping 28:07, the sourced field recordings are for the most part blurred into impressionistic smears, layered tones, lush drifts of muted electrical crunch fused to shimmery soft focus chordal whir, a deft balance of grit and gristle, thrum and drift, the opener begins with some strange grinding bits of low end, almost rhythmic, which are quickly stretched out and subsumed by a whirring flow of tangled tones and blurred ambience. There does seem to be some fragments of the original field recordings, bits of click and skitter, but those elements merely add texture to the tracks glacial forward momentum. The much longer second track, is another bit of breathless shimmer, all soft swells and softened edges, it's not until well into the track, where the vibe begins to feel mildly industrial, with the background whir and hiss gradually overtaking the more melodic hum in the foreground. Darkly dreamy and utterly meditative.
The flipside begins with another short one, the awesomely titled "Bear And Vortex", which unfurls an ultra minimal rumble, that sounds almost like the wind whooshing past a microphone (and could very well be just that), and doesn't really move much beyond that, a hushed murky murmur of a track, with other haunting incidental sounds creeping into the picture, the result much like the sound of exploring some old abandoned underground bunker, a low level thrum, distant reverb drenched barely there ghostlike echoes, all softly blurred into an ultra minimal expanse of hushed grey ambience.
Finally, the record finishes off with the nearly half hour long "Kong", which again continues Berber Ox's dark and delicate exploration of some otherworldly / subterranean sound work, another dark expanse of layered softnoise shimmer, and buried melodic fragments, the field recording are most noticeable here, the occasional clang, tolling bells, what could be animal sounds, everything wreathed in a foggy sonic haze, until about three quarters of the way through, when the fog seems to dissipate, leaving something much more overtly musical, melodies become more fully formed, the background noises, almost rhythmic, the tolling bells, woven into something lustrous and lovely.
Fans of all things dark and dreamy and droney will dig this, Berber Ox definitely deserves a spot on your shelf alongside Tim Hecker, Thomas Koner, Philip Jeck, Machinefabriek and the like, assuming of course you have a very strange way of alphabetizing your records...
Printed bright yellow cassettes, housed in super colorful J-cards, limited to just 111 copies.
MPEG Stream: "Do That Twice"
MPEG Stream: "Bicycle Thief"

BERBER OX Trounce (Install) cd-r 6.98
We had never heard of the artist known by the strange monicker Berber Ox, but we got two different releases from this Australian soundscaper recently, whose music the man himself described as "weird-ass psychedelic drone/field recording/collage", which most definitely sounded right up our alley, a dizzyingly dark assemblage of sounds, found AND created, woven deftly into droney psychedelic ambience that definitely has us kicking ourselves for not hearing this stuff until now.
As Mr. Berber Ox spent much of the last few years in Japan, where most of the sounds on these two releases were in fact recorded, the proceeds from the sale of both will be donated to the Red Cross Japan Tsunami Fund, which is another reason to grab both before they're gone...
Trounce is a super limited cd-r, released with minimal packaging on the esteemed Install label, home to Peter Wright, Gareth Hardwick, Horaflora and others. And Berber Ox sounds right at home, opening Trounce with with a thick humid cloud of sound, all rumbling whirring blacks and greys, shot through with all manner of field recordings, the thick thrum eventually recedes, leaving just a low level shimmer, laced with strange burblings, distant bird calls, that gradually builds and builds into what sounds like white noise surf, fading out in a blur of what sounds like canned mall music, leading directly into the hazy sonic gauze of the lengthy follow up, a nearly static drift of muted minimal hum, but within seems to lurk all manner of low end melody, subtle sonic shifts, all in their own way affecting the texture and timbre of the thick sound surrounding them.
And so it goes, the sounds tending toward the very minimal, long tones, draped over long tones, allowed to softly pulse, and gently undulate, creating ghostly overtones, and softly submerged almost-rhythms, these streaks and blurs infused with the chitter of insects, mysterious voices, snippets of traditional Japanese folk music, muted percussion, culminating in a final 20 minute sprawl of gently roiling gloom, beginning with a soft cacophony of tolling bells, one can imagine it's those bells that are blurred into Berber Ox's gorgeously murky gloom, a gloom that is transformed into what sounds like some sort of washed out doomgaze guitar buzz for the last few minutes, hypnotically heavy, yet still somehow hushed and dreamy.
Gorgeous stuff for sure. Recommended for anyone who digs lush, minimal drift and layered low end shimmer: Chalk, Coleclough, Ora, Mirror, Monos, Brendan Murray, Peter Wright et al...
VERY LIMITED, we got these directly from the man himself, and there's a good chance these will be the last copies we can get.
MPEG Stream: "1"
MPEG Stream: "2"

BERBERIAN, JOHN Expressions East (Mainstream) lp 16.98
We're lucky to get in this week not one but two mid-sixties LPs showcasing the amazing virtuosity and global grooves of master oud player John Berberian. These are beautiful 180 gram reissues on colored vinyl from Mainstream records who have been reissuing a lot of their amazing back catalog as of late. When you see the covers of Expressions East and its follow up, Oud Artistry, you can't help but think of the late fifties / early sixties "Exotica" craze with paintings of belly dancers in a modernist style and use of oriental-looking fonts. Of course this is not going to be a Hamza El Din record, but the American-born Armenian Berberian is no Martin Denny either. On these records, Berberian beguiles us with his frenetically intense jazz-like compositions occasionally featuring the haunting vocals of Bob Tashjian. Featuring an amazing band playing traditional instruments (canun, bongos, dudoog, dumbeg, def, guitar, clarinet and finger cymbals along with an array of other exotic percussion) performing mesmerizingly rhythmic tracks of Turkish, Armenian and Arabic origins. Berberian became better known for more rockish Middle Eastern projects later on in his career, but it's these early records that really showcase his masterful skills as an instrumentalist and performer. Both records are well-recommended!

BERBERIAN, JOHN Middle Eastern Rock (Acid Symposium) cd 17.98
Hey, all of you who've been digging the Middle Eastern '60s garage psych rock n' roll sounds of the "Hava Narghile" and "Turkish Delight" compilations, or that Devil's Anvil disc! We've come across another east-meets-west gem for your collection, the newly reissued "Middle Eastern Rock" from John Berberian & the Rock East Ensemble, a NYC-based outfit from the sixties that was quite a bit like fellow New Yorkers the Devil's Anvil group. Here's a quote from the original liner notes to the 1969 LP release: "Middle Eastern music and rock...two of a kind. The music of Armenia, Turkey, the Arab nations and Greece is about as nakedly emotional as you can get. The authentic music of the Middle East is the result of generations of hunger, persecution, frustration and suffering. It is explosively melodic...and incoherently mad with joy. It is filled with the heavy odor of animal magnetism. The motivations behind this music are all too familiar. They are the same very often repeated words and phrases that are used to describe the origins of the blues, of jazz and of soul. And all these kinds of closely related styles of music are the prime progenitors of the rock that we hear today." Out to prove these words true, Armenian-American band leader John Berberian's oud meets up with the acid rock guitar of Joe Beck right on the opening cut, the aptly titled "The Oud & The Fuzz". The Oud & The Fuzz!! What more do you need to hear? Well, they don't top that cut, but we do like the whole album. Berberian's band veers into jazzier territory on much of this disc, which is pretty great too. Taking a bunch of traditional Middle Eastern tunes and adapting 'em for the hip swinging young sixties crowd, these cats make some super-cool Middle Eastern jazz-flavored lounge music. This is certainly groovy belly dancing music, if not totally exotic garage psych rock n' roll like "The Oud & The Fuzz" promises. And, they do a track called "Iron Maiden"!
RealAudio clip: "The Oud & The Fuzz"
RealAudio clip: "Flying Hye"

BERBERIAN, JOHN Middle Eastern Rock (Cherry Red) cd 17.98
Now reissued again, via Cherry Red... Hey, all of you who've been digging the Middle Eastern '60s garage psych rock n' roll sounds of the "Hava Narghile" and "Turkish Delight" compilations, or that Devil's Anvil disc! We've come across another east-meets-west gem for your collection, the newly reissued "Middle Eastern Rock" from John Berberian & the Rock East Ensemble, a NYC-based outfit from the sixties that was quite a bit like fellow New Yorkers the Devil's Anvil group. Here's a quote from the original liner notes to the 1969 LP release: "Middle Eastern music and rock...two of a kind. The music of Armenia, Turkey, the Arab nations and Greece is about as nakedly emotional as you can get. The authentic music of the Middle East is the result of generations of hunger, persecution, frustration and suffering. It is explosively melodic...and incoherently mad with joy. It is filled with the heavy odor of animal magnetism. The motivations behind this music are all too familiar. They are the same very often repeated words and phrases that are used to describe the origins of the blues, of jazz and of soul. And all these kinds of closely related styles of music are the prime progenitors of the rock that we hear today." Out to prove these words true, Armenian-American band leader John Berberian's oud meets up with the acid rock guitar of Joe Beck right on the opening cut, the aptly titled "The Oud & The Fuzz". The Oud & The Fuzz!! What more do you need to hear? Well, they don't top that cut, but we do like the whole album. Berberian's band veers into jazzier territory on much of this disc, which is pretty great too. Taking a bunch of traditional Middle Eastern tunes and adapting 'em for the hip swinging young sixties crowd, these cats make some super-cool Middle Eastern jazz-flavored lounge music. This is certainly groovy belly dancing music, if not totally exotic garage psych rock n' roll like "The Oud & The Fuzz" promises. And, they do a track called "Iron Maiden"!
RealAudio clip: "The Oud & The Fuzz"
RealAudio clip: "Flying Hye"

BERBERIAN, JOHN Oud Artistry (Mainstream) lp 16.98
We're lucky to get in this week not one but two mid-sixties LPs showcasing the amazing virtuosity and global grooves of master oud player John Berberian. These are beautiful 180 gram reissues on colored vinyl from Mainstream records who have been reissuing a lot of their amazing back catalog as of late. When you see the covers of Expressions East and its follow up, Oud Artistry, you can't help but think of the late fifties / early sixties "Exotica" craze with paintings of belly dancers in a modernist style and use of oriental-looking fonts. Of course this is not going to be a Hamza El Din record, but the American-born Armenian Berberian is no Martin Denny either. On these records, Berberian beguiles us with his frenetically intense jazz-like compositions occasionally featuring the haunting vocals of Bob Tashjian. Featuring an amazing band playing traditional instruments (canun, bongos, dudoog, dumbeg, def, guitar, clarinet and finger cymbals along with an array of other exotic percussion) performing mesmerizingly rhythmic tracks of Turkish, Armenian and Arabic origins. Berberian became better known for more rockish Middle Eastern projects later on in his career, but it's these early records that really showcase his masterful skills as an instrumentalist and performer. Both records are well-recommended!

BERG SANS NIPPLE, THE Along The Quai (Team Love) cd 14.98
Tortoise-tronica! That's the one word which sprung to our mind after listening to the first few tracks on this album by this peculiarly named duo. The Berg Sans Nipple are Lori Sean Berg and Shane Aspegren, a couple of scruffy fellows who hail from France and Nebraska respectively. They take the jazz infused post-rock influence of that venerable band and funnel it through a primarily electronic focused instrument palette. Then they add some Notwist-y murmured male vocals, a little smooth soul, and the results are something fresh and new that sits just as comfily alongside Broken Social Scene and Air as it does the above mentioned Windy City veterans. Nice!
MPEG Stream: "Ghost"
MPEG Stream: "Of The Sung"

BERGRAVEN Dodsvisioner (Hydra Head) cd 14.98
Hydra Head, the home to lots of AQ faves, from Isis to Pelican to Khanate, has gradually been dipping their toes into much blacker waters, reissuing the Heresi record in the US, and signing USBM hero Xasthur, and now offering up the latest full length from Sweden's melodic black metal weirdos Bergraven.
These guys are tough to describe. A deliriously unpredictable listen. Dodsvisioner is not thrashing blasting grimness, although it is grim in its own peculiar way. The tempos are mostly mid, the guitars soar and warble and rumble and emit damaged atonal melodies, more than they actually buzz. The vocals are appropriately raspy and demonic, but when they are draped across strange clean reverbed guitars, or weird circusy keyboards, or even -- stranger still for black metal -- pedal steel, they take on a whole different vibe.
The closest comparisons that come to mind are Lifelover and Katatonia, if you somehow mixed those two bands, Katatonia's moody melancholia, and Lifelover's strange off-kilter blackened pop sensibility, you'd be close, but the music of Bergraven is it's own dark weirdness entirely.
It's melodic for sure, but the melodies are strange, almost alien sounding. And the arrangements are full of space, whether it's stretches of ambience, or loping post rock, clean guitars and simple mathy drumming.
Everywhere there lurk strange haunting minor key chords, and when keyboards do join the fray, they're strange and almost new wave-y sounding. The main guitar parts are gnarled and detuned, often not distorted, but clean and reverbed, eventually giving way to some dense black chug but even then, a lot of the time they're drenched in whooshy chorus or shimmering delay. Often those bits sound a little like Joy Division, but on a malfunctioning turntable. Weird and woozy. Elsewhere the guitars get all 'blue' and moody and smoky and sound like they were purloined from some Chris Isaak tune. The vocals are hushed dramatic whispers as often as they are anguished howls. Bursts of double kick underpin loping darkwave jangle, beautiful post rock rhythms get all washed out and smeared with layers of indistinct blackness, there's so much going on, and so much of it is not at all metal, but manages to sound dark and black and intensely grim. A gloriously tangled blackened sonic web for sure.
This definitely pushes a lot of our 'fucked' metal buttons, as well as our demented black pop buttons (bet you didn't think we had those!) and the more we listen to it the further we get sucked into Bergraven's damaged metallic black pop universe...
MPEG Stream: "Doende"
MPEG Stream: "Ondkall"

BERGRAVEN Till Makabert Vasen (Hydra Head) cd 15.98
After 2007's much lauded Dodsvisioner album, Sweden's Bergraven returns with another set of odd gothic-tinged post-rocking blackness. While the music of Bergraven definitely fits well within the realm of black metal with its overall mood and spirit, Till Makabert Vasen is a hard one to pin down. Things never get insanely over-the-top metal, at least not in a typical way, instead opting to create a decidedly eerie and disconcerting atmosphere with all the tension found in the build up. The instrumentation here seems to imply an expert awareness of restraint, and how effectively it can be used for achieving a certain uneasy feeling. Not that this bears any resemblance to the Doors, but think of "The Crystal Ship" to get an idea of how negative space can be used to create a powerful sense of focus without getting all aggro. The gruff vocals are upfront and strong, sounding pretty pissed, but as they are sung in Swedish we can only assume... But they are definitely very interesting, as black metal vocals are generally known for being shrieky or bellowing, often buried in the mix as just another part of the maelstrom. Here Bergraven mainman Par Gustafsson's voice retains a surprising clarity that you simply can't ignore. While the vocals never seem to get too frantic or out of control, they retain a forcefulness that, at the heart of it all, is pretty damn metal.
Another noteworthy aspect of Bergraven's approach is the seriously impressive musicianship and the overall song structures, which are just plain weird and quite unexpected. The guitars seem to have just as much to do with '90s indie rock heroes like Drive Like Jehu or Unwound as they do with black metal, while the Slinty rhythm section keeps things moving in a winding, snakelike manner with all sorts of mathy weirdness. The songs kind of swirl within their own self-contained world, never getting too expansive or wandering, but retaining a high degree of concentration. One is reminded at times of Lifelover, or even Deathspell Omega's weirder, jazzier moments from Fas, with sour, discordant guitar chords and plodding, sometimes sparse drumming helping to set the generally unwavering vibe that keeps this one flowing evenly.
Whatever it is that Bergraven sings about, one certainly detects a sense of isolation and loneliness. The artwork features strange images of an empty chair in a forest and a man, presumably Gustafsson, sitting in a cabin in front of a fireplace with his face blurred out, making it clear that you will never know too much about the mastermind behind the music.
With Dodsvisioner, everyone seemed a bit confused that Hydra Head was venturing into such dark waters, but to us, it makes total sense. That label has always championed a unique commingling of art and metal, and it is clear that Bergraven has no problems stepping outside the norms of its genre.
MPEG Stream: "Drommen Om Undersang"
MPEG Stream: "Asketens Enda Prydnad"
MPEG Stream: "Det Andra Liket"

BERIDZE, TUSIA The Other (Max Ernst) cd 16.98

BERING, JONAS Bienfait (Kompakt) cd 17.98
Jonas Bering's "Beinfait" represents a recent strain of German experimental techno which has been jacking up the tempo of the Chain Reaction sound just above the motorik speed of the Cologne sound (i.e. Wolfgang Voigt, Michael Meyer, Modernist, etc). With the quickly paced matrix of hardly stompin' beats, Bering elicts ghostly yet soulful melodies common in Carl Craig and even a few Giorgio Moroder synth arpeggiations. Excellent headphone listening...

BERING, JONAS Sketches For The Next Season (Kompakt) cd 16.98

BERIO, LUCIANO / BRUNO MADERNA Momenti, Thema - Omaggio A Joyce, Visage / Le Rire, Invenzione Su Una Voce (BV Haast) cd 19.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

BERKOWITZ LAKE AND DAHMER Contraception of the Gods (Fflint Central) cd-r 9.98
Yet another slab of crunching, crushing electronica from our friends at Fflint, brought to us (of course) by the so far infallible Berkowitz, Lake and Dahmer.
This time it's all about the drone, and no one here at AQ can argue with that. While some of the stuttering skitter and jagged glitch remain, they are surrounded by and occasionally overtaken by washes of speaker melting hum and foundation rattling rumble. Fucking amazing.
RealAudio clip: "Skeletal Articulation"
RealAudio clip: "Tones In Red"

BERKOWITZ LAKE AND DAHMER Drain Salmon Forgery (Fflint Central) cd-r 9.98
Fflint Central is a U.K. label run by two extraordinarily nice guys and darn fine hosts (good enough to befriend a sick and bedraggled on-tour Andee and buy him Cokes). Fflint specializes in experimental electronics and harsh abstract noise. One would think that there's enough, or too much of both, but the men from Fflint have that something special (fuck-you attitude? undefinable sound? sense of humor?) that makes these records way better and way more interesting than the majority of the 'electronica' we hear these days. Fans of VV/M, Lesser and other 'troublesome' electonica will dig this stuff. Affordable CD-Rs. Go ahead and take a chance. You may regret it...
Besides having the greatest band name ever, BL&D whip up a malfunctioning maelstrom of stuttering, fuzzed out synth and hiccupping bursts of skull pounding glitchery.
Sputtering clicks and oscillating low end rumbles are draped over chest rattling modulated pulses, creating some of the fiercest, coolest experimental electronica we've heard in a while. Like music for that video game the devil forces you to play in hell, for eternity. Awesome.
RealAudio clip: "Homunculus"

BERKOWITZ LAKE AND DAHMER Lunge Howler e.p. (Fflint Central) cd-r 7.98
Fflint Central is a U.K. label run by two extraordinarily nice guys and darn fine hosts (good enough to befriend a sick and bedraggled on-tour Andee and buy him Cokes). Fflint specializes in experimental electronics and harsh abstract noise. One would think that there's enough, or too much of both, but the men from Fflint have that something special (fuck-you attitude? undefinable sound? sense of humor?) that makes these records way better and way more interesting than the majority of the 'electronica' we hear these days. Fans of VV/M, Lesser and other 'troublesome' electonica will dig this stuff. Affordable CD-Rs. Go ahead and take a chance. You may regret it...
Record number two from the brilliantly named BL+D. This is a little more droney and hypnotic than the first Berkowitz record, but equally as fucked.
Spazzy organ solos degrade into super distorted, hypnotic pulsing, slowly evolving like a Charlemagne Palestine piece, albeit with a full battery of broken down machinery, malfunctioning effects, and distorted alien transmissions. Noisey but still musical, BL+D are like a thinking man's VV/M.

RealAudio clip: "Tinklebox"

BERKOWITZ LAKE AND DAHMER Tar Weasels (Fflint Central) cd-r 9.98
It's been almost three years now since our little musical community has been terorrized by everyones favorite serial dronesters Berkowitz Lake and Dahmer. And once again, the guys at Fflint Central, our favorite UK electronic / experimental / noise / drone label, have come up with an absolute killer (um...pun intended actually). BLD just so happens to be the duo of Barry and Tim, the men behind the Fflint curtain, and so it makes sense that BLD are probably the most musically powerful and fully realized Fflint entity. Tar Weasels is as good as anything BLD has done, the difference this time around, being that there seems to be much more of a focus on melody and texture, melodic swells, dreamy drones, gone are much of the abrasive noise and squelchy rhythms of past releases, with Weasels being a far more tranquil affair. There are rhythms, but they tend to be minimal little seismic events, or squeaking alien weirdness, present, but only in the background, while in the foreground, the world is a slow motion snapshot of an alien landscape, all shifting swirls and slow building swells, ambient, but an active ambience, static sheets of drone demarcated by little sonic imperfections, somehow wrangled into a marked musical path, guiding us through a dense and darkened world of crumbling drones, and billowing waves of rumble and rattle, a murky otherworldly vacuum, where each sound is frozen in time, and then hurled into a black hole, but instead of being swallowed up and lost, each sound is stretched into infinity, every sound pulled apart and stacked into a single, slowly slithering, gorgeously thick shimmer, occasionally cracking, sonic shards dropping onto the surface below, creating more barely-there, off kilter rhythms for BLD to bury under their warm thick blankets of bowed drones and reverberating fuzz. What else can we say at this point? If you're already a member in good standing in the church of Fflint, then you already know you need this latest Fflinty sacrament, and it you have yet to be converted, well, you can only resist for so long...
MPEG Stream: "Sky Burial"
MPEG Stream: "Cinnabar Grove"

BERKOWITZ, LAKE AND DAHMER Missionary District (Fflint) mp3-cd 6.98
Berkowitz, Lake & Dahmer have easily become our new favorite electronica renegades (having easily overtaken V/Vm, what with being more musical and less annoying (just barely) and not so concerned with inane 'concepts'). The 'Missionary District' cd is their newest offering and is only available though Aquarius. But be warned, it's not a normal cd, it's a rectangular credit card sized mp3 cd-r(om) with the new record, and a ton of other Fflint propaganda and goodies on it, and is only playable on your computer!!! That said, this is their best yet, weird and grating and beautiful and baffling. Since I don't have the technical know how to make these mp3s into real audio samples, i'll just describe each song for you in a sentence:
1. an indian soundtrack being overtaken by a bleeping hyper distorted techno marching band.
2. grinding scraping pulsing drone, like a small village being over run by snakes made out of bowed cymbals and broken samplers.
3. hissing ambience created by a choir of traecheotomy patients w/intercepted short wave transmissions interrupted by gunfire, only the bullets are Masonna cassettes.
4. skittery but smooth. like someone drugged Boards of Canada and then pushed them down the stairs, while outside BL+D tried desperately to start the getaway car.
5. shortwave, high pitch skree like a Skullflower / Sun City Girls pool party.
6. like laying prone in a pool of Rephlex 12"s while hundreds of 'electronica artists' piss on you from above.
7. ultra harsh noise over a strange man humming into a broken telephone, while Glen Branca and his orchestra try desperately to compete in the background.
8. unwrapping cellophane candies in a hyperbolic chamber, while little girls in tap shoes run laps around the room.
9. pipe fight and synthesiser fight double tag team. broadcast through a toy megaphone set on 'monster'.
So definitely, if you've bought anything or everything on Fflint, then this is obviously essential, and if you haven't yet, what the hell's wrong with you?! This is as good a place to start as any. Fucking great!

BERKOWITZ, LAKE AND DAHMER Without Chemicals He Points (Fflint Central) cd-r 9.98
The mighty Fflint Central again prove that they have cornered the market on subversive (and intelligent) electronic fuckery in the UK. Why listen to the retarded antics of V/VM or the pedestrian downtempo dreck of Boards Of Canada when you can get the best elements of both AND THEN SOME from almost any band in the Fflint stable?! The return of the 'killer' electronica threesome (actually a twosome, like the 3 piece Thompson Twins) and their imbalanced, dangerous and baffling electronica. Balancing noise and melody, BL+D craft noisy epics, with gurgling, sputtering synths, purloined Middle Eastern melodies. distant rumbles, screeching high end crunch, chopped and shuffled 20th century classical, ultra-abstract musiqe concrete, bursts of face melting noise, running water framing delicate far-away melodies, totally nonsensical, epileptic drum programming, and more strange and beautiful sounds than any two guys should be able to produce. Gorgeous, challenging, intense and completely original. If there was any justice in this world, Berkowitz, Lake + Dahmer would be the jewel in someone's electronic crown (Warp, Skam, Lo, etc...) They'll just have to settle for Andee's tUMULt label, who will be releasing their first non cd-r release towards the end of the year. In the meantime, don't miss out. You know you want to be able to say 'Oh yeah, I was into BL+D way back in February!' SO RECOMMENDED.
RealAudio clip: "Blighted Sump"
RealAudio clip: "Cyan Krilp Vipers"
RealAudio clip: "Graphic Tanquiliser"

BERMUDA TRIANGLE SERVICE High Swan Dive (self-released) cd 9.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
At times Bermuda Triangle Service's vocalist Cynthia Wigginton sounds a lot like Carolyn Mark, Kelly Hogan, Virginia Dare and Paula Frazer. Fans of those lovely ladies just might take a shine to this new combo. They make slow candlelit country with lots of graceful fiddle playin'. Very pretty. For their debut, they've enlisted the kind assistance of Josh Housh (Catalpa Boys and Our Lady Of The Highway). An engaging debut!
MPEG Stream: "Kukui Lei"
MPEG Stream: "Pokerhuntus Was Her Name"

BERNE, TIM The Sublime And. ( Thirsty Ear) cd 16.98
There was always something cool about Tim Berne. Not sure what it is. From the first time we heard him on the Spy Vs. Spy record with John Zorn, covering Ornette Coleman double time, we were totally intrigued. John Zorn was everywhere, so why weren't we hearing about Berne? Well, apparently he's been plugging away with his Science Friction ensemble making records, and judging from this double disc live set, kicking way more ass than Zorn lately. Like Zorn, Berne seems to work primarily in a sort of post-bop context, but unlike Zorn, the shrieking, the EXTREME!, and all that stuff is kept to a minimum, and the compositions/improvs are all the better for it. Motifs are stretched out and repeated, allowing for lots of dynamics and for the players to leisurely solo and explore. Very free, but also very composed feeling. From hard bop workouts, to dreamy moody ambience and back. The guitar playing is very reminiscent of Fred Frith at times which is nice, but it's Berne who makes it all happen. Emotional and intense, melodic but really loose and free, controlled but ocassionally wild if the song calls for it. We don't know enough about jazz to really dissect Berne and this record, other than to say we really really dig it!
MPEG Stream: "Van Grundy's Retreat"

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

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

BERNOCCHI, ERALDO & HAROLD BUDD Music For 'Fragments From The Inside' (Sub Rosa) cd 14.98

BERNSTEIN, DAVID W. (EDITOR) San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture And The Avant-Garde (UC Press) book+dvd 26.00
We apologize to tape music buffs near and far, but we shamefully snoozed on reviewing this awesome book about this music movement's seminal Bay Area based hub back in June of this year when it was first published. We thought that now would be a good time (what with the holiday gift-giving season just around the corner as well as the chillier stay-inside-with-a-good-book autumn and winter months) to give it a good ol' shout out! Better late than never, right?
Those already well acquainted will need no further explanation, but for those unfamiliar, in a nutshell, the San Francisco Tape Music Center was a vital cultural and educational meeting ground of adventurous pioneers in audio arts and science. The sonic explorations of composers Morton Subotnick (who performed an in-store presentation here a few years back), Steve Reich, Ramon Sender, Don Buchla, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley among others produced some of the most stunning and influential avant-garde sounds of the period in an utterly unassuming locale right here in SF. This creatively tangled web of tape-loop and tape-delay, analog synthesizers and various other electronic tentacles came into fruition back in the early '60s. These days, having been schooled by the wonderful reissued works of numerous seemingly like-minded audio renegade technicians of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, John Baker to name a few), we still can't help but conjure images of the electronic music artists of that decade donning lab coats with pocket protectors and bespectacled consternated gazes, but this 344-page book reveals just as much the kaleidoscopic opening of minds induced by sound (and in some cases substances). In fact, for those of you who were captivated by the revelatory glimpse of the LA counterculture in the '60s courtesy of the recent Source Family book (The Source: The Untold Story Of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa And The Source Family), this serves to some degree as a Bay Area counterpart (albeit perhaps somewhat less Hollywood tabloid scandalous). It's the first ever first-person retrospective of the SFTMC. Many a fond memory and occasionally a hair-raising tale were unearthed for this tome. Our current favorites include one involving wild escapades to keep the center afloat on a less than shoestring budget as well as a desperate search across a floor/sea of tape edit detritus to find an errant single note snippet using a dismantled reel-to-reel playback head!
An inspiring, fascinating and often entertaining document of interviews with and essays by all the key figures and more. This 322-page softcover tome is also packed with color and black & white photos, diagrams, drawings, and a comprehensive chronology. But wait, there's still more! A dvd is tucked away in the back which features video documentation from the 2004 Wow & Flutter: The San Francisco Tape Music Center, 1961-Now festival / reunion of sorts that took place in Troy, NY.
Highly recommended!

BERROCAL, JACQUE / DOMINIQUE COSTER / ROGER FERLET Musiq Musik (Fractal) cd 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Originally released in 1973 in France by Futura Records via their SON series (which also included the wonderful "Tacet" by Jean Guerin. Futura also released otherworldly tripped-outness from the likes of Red Noise and Mahogany Brain). Recorded between '71 and '72, "Musiq Musik" saw Berrocal's introduction of his Musik Ensemble on record, combining gamelan and free jazz splendour with restraint and droneful grace. An amalgamation of eastern instrumentation (bells, Tibetan shells as well as various percussion and wind instruments), western instrumentation (just some horns), and just plain wacky instrumentation (ropes, balloons, explosives (!)), the music itself is an imaginative, lyrical journey into the landscape of the mind.

BERRY, KEITH A Strange Feather (Twenty Hertz) cd-r 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
It's a mystery how we managed to miss the previous recordings from the British ultra-minimalist Keith Berry, because if there's any justice in the world, he should be mentioned alongside such blue-chip drone artists as William Basinski, Thomas Koner, Bernhard Gunter, and Akira Rabelais. Yeah, his work is that good! He's got the sublimely romantic melodicism of Basinski, the glacial pacing of Koner, the hushed restraint of Gunter, and, um well, he's got a copy of Rabelais' legendary Argeiphontes Lyre software in his repertoire. But Berry is no mere aggregate of previously mined aesthetics, there's plenty to his work that speaks of his own beliefs and agendas which all draw heavily from Zen philosophies. While Berry's previous work The Golden Boat (Trente Oiseaux, 2003) and The Ear That Was Sold To The Fish (Crouton, 2005) were both exceptional releases (with the Crouton album easily being the best smelling record of 2005!), each of Berry's albums makes small adjustments that add up to an improvement and refinement of his sound; thus A Strange Feather stands out a remarkable achievement. Like all of the previously cited composers, Berry's fundamental structure is the drone supreme into which he bends field recordings, subtle instrumental arrangements, and small tactile events. Like falling snow, his dreamy work drifts with a poetic chill and tranquil hypnosis through which peripheral elements tease the listener with subtle details. It's so damn beautiful.
MPEG Stream: "A Strange Feather (excerpt 1)"
MPEG Stream: "A Strange Feather (excerpt 2)"

BERRY, KEITH The Cartesian Plane (Elevator Bath) picture disc 17.98
It's been way too long since Keith Berry has put anything out. The last time we had one of his records in stock, it was the impeccable 2005 album The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish, which was housed in an oversized box filled with fragrant flower petals. On that album, Berry's somber ambient constructions looked forward to the hauntological wash of Leyland Kirby, but also ran parallel to Thomas Koner's isolationism and the miniscule musicality of the later works of Bernhard Gunter. There had been rumors of an album to appear on The Helen Scarsdale Agency; for reasons unknown, the album never surfaced. Outside of a compilation track here and there, this British artist has kept a very low profile until this breathtaking album, released as a part of Elevator Bath's ongoing series of picture discs. Berry presents five extended pieces of soft-focus ambience, whose elegant suspension of sound gently bends along a majestic orbit with huge expanses of sounds undulating with ghostly melodies transmitting from way back behind Berry's dense fog. Where Kirby imbues his work with a maudlin strain, Berry's casts an eye into heart of the sublime. Something beautiful is afoot here, and at same time, the feeling is darkened and just unsettled enough. Let's hope that it's not another 5 years between albums, as Berry is too good a composer to be forgotten about! Limited to 233 copies.

BERRY, KEITH The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish (Crouton) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
In case such a declaration matters in the grand scheme of things, The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish is my (Jim's) Record of The Year for 2005.
That said, there is a unique facet to Keith Berry's impressionistic masterpiece that I cannot fully enjoy. You see, I have a very limited sense of smell. I've always blamed it on my pyrotechnic stunts during my college days when I would light my paintings on fire; and as grandiosely stupid as this made me look, the sensorial failings of my nose is more the result of genetics than anything I could have done to it. So when I opened the box for the first time to Keith Berry's The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish, I got a small tingle as something perfumed and pleasant drifted from the contents of the box, which contained not only a CD and booklet but also a delicate pile of dyed flower petals. Those of you who are not sensorially damaged might be able to place the scent; but I simply cannot. Regardless, Berry (with the help of the fine folks at Crouton Records) engineered an amazing feat: an album with a fragrance.
For very obvious reasons, the smell-o-rama trick is not what attracts me to the record; it's the seductively restrained compositions for quiet flickerings, muffled rumbles, and whispered reverberations that truly captured my imagination. Berry defines his work through the teachings of Zen Buddhism and Sufi poetry, striving for an artform that could "unlock the mechanisms inside one's mind that leads to enlightenment." In doing so, Berry begins with a series of unremarkable sounds which fall somewhere in the hushed white noise territories, possibly including the sound of a gentle spring shower or the empty spaces on shortwave bands. He molds these hisses, crackles, and shadows into subtle repeating forms which do, in fact, lend themselves to any number of images, metaphors, and ideas. Given that he landed his debut album on Trente Oiseaux, Berry's work falls in the lowercase school of ephemeral electronics alongside Steve Roden and Bernhard Gunter; but there is an antiquated tactility to his albums which hint at the same temporal netherworld as heard in Philip Jeck's avant-turntable melodramas.
Given the packaging constraints, The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish is strictly limited to 300 copies.
MPEG Stream: "The Sun Rays Of Another Pale Afternoon"
MPEG Stream: "Cars Keep Passing By"
MPEG Stream: "My Backward Voyage"

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

BERSERKER, THE Animosity (Earache) cd 16.98

MPEG Stream: "Eye For An Eye"
MPEG Stream: "Purgatory"

BERTHET, PIERRE Extended Loudspeakers (Sub Rosa) cd 16.98
Belgium's Sub Rosa is one of those labels that's always worth checking out. Often, we have never before heard of the artists they put out, and may never hear of them again, but the discs they release quite often become favorites 'round here: Saule, Israel Quellet, Time Control, The Wild Classical Music Ensemble, Mace... Of course Sub Rosa issues stuff by plenty of better known names as well, like Philip Jeck, but the point is, when its someone we don't know on Sub Rosa, we have learned we'd still better pay attention, it might be amazing!
Which is all by way of saying that we had no idea who Pierre Berthet was or what to expect from him, except it was on Sub Rosa, and maybe the disc's title held a clue: Extended Loudspeakers. That sounds potentially cool, right? And it is, if you're into subtle, active droneworks! This is a recording of a sound installation from a Belgian art gallery, and while it would probably be really neat to witness Berthet's whole sonic apparatus in person, it's quite good as a compact disc recording too! We might as well quote the handwritten note printed inside the digipack, as Berthlet can probably do a better job of explaining his elaborate "extended loudspeakers" set up than we can: "An 'extended loudspeaker' is a loudspeaker with as less membrane as possible connected with long steel wires to a net of metal cans resonators. Inputs are sine waves, feedbacks and radio. At the end of the piece, steel wires are also vibrated with a small low tension electric motor equipped with a flexible fan." He also explains that "the piece starts with drops falling on small tin cans." And, additionally, there's helpful, and rather cute, simple stickfigure illustrations diagramming the thing visually. So now you know how these sounds were sourced, sort of, but listening to it, your imagination will doubtless delve further into the fantastical, because the overall effect of Berthet's creation is one of mysteriousness. There's passages of bell-like ringing, layered rainfall rhythms that beat with and against each other, accompanied by wavering, high-end drones, quite trance inducing. Elsewhere in the piece (which lasts for about an hour, arbitrarily indexed into seven tracks on the cd for listening convenience) the chiming, dripping sounds fade into something more spacious and abstract and arrhythmic, whilst the drone-tones of feedback grow more present and prominent, but still pleasant... it's beautiful stuff, calm, soothing, mesmeric. (But maybe only for drone-heads, I was playing this at low volume in the car, driving someplace with my dad, and he thought either something was wrong with the stereo or his hearing aid, but then again he'd say that about almost any music we like here.)
At times Berthet's cans, wires, membranes, fans, and drip devices conjure up the prayerful practice of meditative monks, or the massed rhythms of a Far Eastern percussion ensemble, or the delicate hum of Japanese onkyo experimentalists. Meanwhile his methods recall the resonating wires of composer Arnold Dreyblatt, and the unique "mechano" of another Pierre, Bastien (with both of whom Berthet has worked, it turns out).
So, glad we paid attention this time, 'cause actually this ain't Berthet's first disc for Sub Rosa we now realize, and he has another on Sonoris too, so we'll have to check those out as well, since this one really is one of the loveliest and most intriguing, ever-changing sound installation / drone recordings we've heard in a while.
MPEG Stream: "Part 1"
MPEG Stream: "Part 3"
MPEG Stream: "Part 6"

BERTOIA, HARRY Happy Spirit (Bertoia Studiio) cd 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Harry Bertoia's sound sculptures developed from years of work as both a commissioned furniture maker for Knoll and as an environmental sculptor who built large scale balancing kinetic pieces, usually out of bronze. But in the 1970s, Bertoia and his son Val began experimenting with resonant properties of metal itself with huge sculptures of vertical metal shafts that were affixed to a base. They discovered that at those lengths -- some upwards of 20' -- the metal was flexible enough to sustain an extended vibration that continued to resonate within the symphony of tiny strikes with the adjoining metal rods. Thus a slight brush against one of the Bertoia sculptures would trigger a massive swell of metallic drones. Bertoia made an incredible number of recordings in the barn that housed the majority of these sculptures, and produced 11 records from his favorite recordings. "Happy Spirit" features two tracks from the first record "Bellissima / Nova." If possible, it is highly recommended to try experience the Bertoia sculputures themselves. Val Bertoia does maintain the barn where his father kept these sculptures in Bally, Pennsylania... and I (Jim) got to play with one at the Cheekwood Museum in Nashville, Tennessee. But the recordings do make for a pretty good subsitute, and this is only the second Bertoia sculpture-music cd to be released (after one on Japan's PSF label some years ago).
Unfortunately, this reissue concludes with a folk-rock song from a member of the extended Bertoia family... it's really really awful. Why is it there? Val Bertoia should know better. Consider it a non-bonus bonus track and ignore, while enjoying the rest of this lovely disc.
RealAudio clip: "Nova"

BERTOIA, HARRY Unfolding (PSF) cd 17.98

BERTONCINI, MARIO Arpe Eolie And Other Useless Things (Die Schachtel) book + cd 50.00

BERZERKER, THE Dissimulate (Earache) cd 15.98

RealAudio clip: "Massacre"
RealAudio clip: "Intro Commentary / Isolated Vocal Tracks For The Song 'Massacre'"
RealAudio clip: "Reality"

BERZERKER, THE s/t (Earache) cd 15.98
Brutal and punishing scary monster drum machine grind from down under. Crushingly heavy, noisy and super complex grind/metal along the lines of Pig Destroyer or Agoraphobic Nosebleed. Techno metal with a Carcass fixation (there's even a cover of "Incarnated Solvent Abuse" on here). Live however, the Berzerker are another beast entirely, looking much more like Slipknot than some crusty grind band, decked out in matching jumpsuits and rubber demon masks. Scary stuff. So scary apparently that their video was pulled from Aussie MTV! This is a reissue of the Berzerker's original LP on Earache!
RealAudio clip: "Massacre"
RealAudio clip: "Intro Commentary / Isolated Vocal Tracks For The Song 'Massacre'"
RealAudio clip: "Reality"

BERZERKER, THE s/t (Earache) 2cd 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Brutal and punishing scary monster drum machine grind from down under. Crushingly heavy, noisy and super complex grind/metal along the lines of Pig Destroyer or Agoraphobic Nosebleed. Techno metal with a Carcass fixation (there's even a cover of "Incarnated Solvent Abuse" on here). Live however, the Berzerker are another beast entirely, looking much more like Slipknot than some crusty grind band, decked out in matching jumpsuits and rubber demon masks. Scary stuff. So scary apparently that their video was pulled from Aussie MTV! This is a reissue of the Berzerker's original LP on Earache and this time comes with a bonus cd. And while the first disc -is- great, it's the bonus disc that's the real keeper here. A sort of audio behind the scenes documentary on the making of this record, with live versions of songs, demo versions, as well as sneak previews of songs on the next record. But also included are commentary tracks as well as isolated drum/vocal/guitar tracks, giving us non-Berzerker types a glimpse into the creative process that yielded the album. The commentaries are delivered in a deadpan Australian drawl, recorded with plenty of "scary" reverb and delivered over a bed of dark and creepy drones, detailing the mics and amps used, what they did with their advance money and whatever else the Berzerker wants to talk about. Then there's the isolated tracks, which are really fascinating, letting us examine the individual parts in greater detail, exposing the guitar parts as way more complex and weird than they sound in the context of the song, and the vocal parts way more insane than they sound buried in the mix (suddenly his death metal burping sounds like some sort of aboriginal chant). All of which the Berzerker explains in the preceding commentaries. Pretty funny, but also really really cool. Belive it or not, this kind of makes us wish all cds came with a bonus disc of commentaries/bonus material/etc., DVD style.
RealAudio clip: "Massacre"
RealAudio clip: "Intro Commentary / Isolated Vocal Tracks For The Song 'Massacre'"
RealAudio clip: "Reality"

BERZERKER, THE The Principles And Practices Of (Earache) dvd 24.00

BERZERKER, THE World Of Lies (Earache) cd 14.98
Aussie technogrind outfit The Berzerker offer up their latest juggernaut of death on Earache, World Of Lies. This third time around they've removed their cool Slipknot-like monster masks but their music is still plenty scary. Peppered with bad-vibes samples, these downtuned tunes are vicious vehicles for The Berserker's indecipherable vocals, with which he spits out personal, angry, emo lyrics. Most striking, though, about this band's music is the absolute blasting speed of the drumbeats. It's insane. Truly berserk indeed. Whew. And no, it's not entirely human. Unfeeling machines are involved... so The Berzerker could be compared to a hyperspeed Godflesh. They are also very much Carcass-inspired. Thus it totally belongs on Earache, reminding us of the classic old days, and should please most fans of "extreme" metal today, pushing as it does at the envelope of velocity and violence.
MPEG Stream: "Committed To Nothing"
MPEG Stream: "Burn The Evil"