BADU, ERYKAH New Amerykah, Pt. 2: Return Of The Ankh (Universal Motown) lp 16.98
ALSO ON VINYL!!
Erykah Badu is one of those singular artists who is able to create such a devotional and personal relationship with her listeners. Where New Amerykah Pt. 1 had a fiery political undertone, New Amerykah Pt. 2: Return Of The Ankh, is much more personal and relationship minded. But no matter what Erykah's songs are about, there is always a sense of authenticity and integrity that runs so strongly through them. In many ways this is the closest in sound and theme to her breathtaking debut Baduizm, as it shares a similar slow melting groove and such rich instrumentation that you just don't come by on many contemporary soul records. The amazing thing about Erykah Badu is how she is both so modern, futuristic yet an integral link to the history of powerful and spiritual soul. She doesn't rehash, or mimic, instead she's created a sound and style that is so totally her own.
New Amerykah Pt. 2 is as seductive as it is psychedelic. You can tell she has a deep love of pioneers like Ramp, The Rotary Connection, and Dorothy Ashby, but she has learned from her deep love of true hip-hop how to take from her influences yet create something totally new and unique out of it. There is no one like Erykah Badu around, she has proven she is a musical visionary, and her live shows only further prove that she is the real deal, capable of creating magic with her music that hits the soul in such deep and true ways. She also stands out in the way she is still very committed to the artform of the album. From start to finish this is a record that takes you on a journey that you want to revisit over and over again. The thing that makes Erykah Badu albums so remarkable is how they slowly seep into your subconscious. They are never about the latest trends or a quick fun ride, instead they are the kind of records you turn to at those crucial moments of your life and become a narrative that becomes as much a part of your journey as it is hers. These are songs that empower, comfort and challenge. Once again Erykah Badu has proven to be one of the strongest and most unique musical voices of our time!
MPEG Stream: "Window Seat"
MPEG Stream: "Love"
MPEG Stream: "20 Feet Tall"

BADU, ERYKAH Worldwide Underground (Motown) cd 13.00

BAGS Survive (Artifix) 7" 4.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

BAGS, THE All Bagged Up (Artifix) lp 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

BAGUNCA, PAULO E A TROPA MALDITA s/t (Discos Mariposa) cd 17.98
It's no surprise to learn that this album developed a strong underground following among Brazilian youth when it came out in 1973. With its forward thinking arrangements, perfectly played Moog and a merging of samba, afro-funk and American rock and folk, it was for sure a record that hinted at what smart weird pop music would sound like in the decades to come. Twenty years later in a different part of the globe groups like Olivia Tremor Control and the whole Elephant Six collective were playing this same brand of eclectic and oh-so-smart pop. But these guys were doing it way back in the seventies! You might remember Paulo Bagunca E A Tropa Maldita for their appearance on the Brazilian version of the Love Peace and Poetry series. Another nice reissue from Discos Mariposa. Good stuff.
MPEG Stream: "Grinfa Louca"
MPEG Stream: "Madalena"

BAHAMADIA Queen BB (Good Vibe) cd 9.98
Old school hip hop diva who's skills on the mic are still heavily in demand. She most recently appeared on Roni Size's records. Here's a budget priced seven tracks for your listening enjoyment, with new school guests Rasco, Planet Asia, Dwele, DJ Revolution, etc.

BAHIMIRON Southern Nihilizm (Moribund) cd 14.98
Sure, "You don't mess with Texas" is a cliche as old as the hills, one that has lost much of its import, but those are definitely words to live by if "messing with Texas" means messing with these guys. Houston's Bahimiron return with the aptly titled Southern Nihilizm, a furious slab of blasting grim blackness, that owes no small debt to the mighty Gorgoroth, giving that classic Norwegian sound through their own cracked Texan twist, the guitars are crunchy and buzzy, the drums are buried in the mix, but are wild and frenetic, and the vocals are seriously demented, going from processed guttural growls, to monstrous roar to almost Cradle Of Filth shriek, often in the same song.
The other weird thing about Bahimiron's sound is the production, tons of effects and what sounds like reverb, so everything is dense and noisy, and the riffs sort of blend into one another, turning a black buzz into a droned out buzzing blacknoize. There are some strange moments scattered throughout the record as well, the end of "The Cauldron Born" features a bizarre, awesomely out of place chromatic sort-of-guitar solo, "Agonist The Filth" has killer squiggly leads draped all over the place, "Chambers Empty" features deep bellowing clean vocals doused in effects that transform them into confusional speaking in tongues garbled mumbles then moments later into hysterical howls. The title track has a cool melancholy breakdown in the middle with a distorted guitar playing out a mournful minor key melody, before the band explodes into another blown out black frenzy. And "War Whiskey Sodomy" closes the record with a brief lumbering sludge soaked doom outro. But all that weirdness is deftly tangled up and tucked away in and within the band's furious noisy black metal buzz, making it just weird enough for us, but just grim and true enough for everyone else.
Cool cover art, the band's logo and evil goat image rendered in super subtle gloss black ink on a flat matte black booklet.
MPEG Stream: "The Cauldron Born"
MPEG Stream: "Shattered and Crowned in Deceit"

BAHLU, KALI ...Takes The Forest Children On A Journey Of Cosmic Remembrance (Kismet) cd 17.98
This week the Kismet label brings us two rare sitar infused flower power psychsploitation oddities: The 1971 sitar and electronics groove of Holland's Okko (reviewed elsewhere on this list) and this far-out mindwarping "children's" record for the hippie acid kids: Kali Bahlu Takes The Forest Children On A Journey of Cosmic Remembrance from 1967.
Incredibly strange music indeed! This album is 4 long drugged out sitar, flute and gong meditations narrated by the child-like Kali Bahlu as she talks (a bit ditzily, we might add) to leprechauns, trolls, gnomes, witches, devils and moonchildren about comic consciousness or something to that effect. If anyone is familiar with Lucia Pamela, the eccentric bandleader and musician who made the hopped up Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela album about an imaginary trip to the moon, Kali Bahlu sounds like Lucia Pamela if she had discovered marijuana, opium and acid at the same time and then soon after found God. We can definitely appreciate the exotic novelty of such a record, and this would be excellent and fun to sample in a DJ set or mixtape, but it might be a stretch to appreciate it for anything deeper than that.
MPEG Stream: "A Game Called Who Am I"
MPEG Stream: "Cosmic Remembrance"

BAIER, SIBYLLE Colour Green (Orange Twin) cd 17.98
Some of us here whose proclivities gravitate towards rare psych and folk have been bemoaning the recent flurry of "buried treasures" and "lost classics". It seems a day does not go by without a new release or re-issue of a forgotten or recently discovered artist rescued from obscurity passing before our attentive eyes and drooling mouths. Sometimes the "lost classic" status is not always deserved (not everything made in the sixties and seventies that didn't receive any attention is noteworthy, somethings are better off staying buried or lost), but it's sure keeping the reissue labels and revisionist musicologists busy as they map out an ever-growing expanse of the spheres of influence on music today. It's hard to keep up and also pay equal attention to all the great music that is being made right now. This makes us very happy on the one hand that amazing music continues to be discovered but it also drives us crazy us to see our paychecks quickly dwindling every week. Why just in the past month, we've seen re-issues from Bridget St. John, Kay Hoffman, John Jacob Niles, Kaleidoscope and Fairfield Parlour (all pretty amazing!) among others. And now on our plate are these previously unreleased home recordings of German underground folk singer, Sibylle Baier. We must admit when we first heard this, we suspected fraud. These recordings sound almost too contemporary to have been made in the early seventies. But after doing a little research, we found out this is no fraud. These intimate recordings fully deserve their "buried treasure" status, for whatever that's worth at this point. Baier, only previously known for a song on an early Wim Wenders film soundtrack, recorded these songs in her home from 1970-73 after a "spirit-renewing" trip through the Swiss Alps. She has the warm Sunday jam and tea voice reminiscent of Vashti Bunyan, but with the more spare guitar compositions and melancholy vocal delivery of someone like Chan Marshall. In fact, we sort of wish the new Cat Power or Beth Orton records were this good! Like Bunyan, Baier shunned what could have been a successful career in order to raise a family and it's because of her son, Robby, that these recordings are being heard at all. But unlike Bunyan, these songs don't derive from a back to nature hippie-folk aesthetic, but rather they come from a more delicate fragility where life's beauty and despair are interwoven with the tiny details of daily life. Beautiful! Totally recommended for seventies folk enthusiasts as well as fans of contemporary singer/songwriters.
MPEG Stream: "Tonight"
MPEG Stream: "I Lost Something in the Hills "

BAIER, SIBYLLE Colour Green (American Dust) lp 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
ONCE AGAIN AVAILABLE ON LP!
Some of us here whose proclivities gravitate towards rare psych and folk have been bemoaning the recent flurry of "buried treasures" and "lost classics". It seems a day does not go by without a new release or re-issue of a forgotten or recently discovered artist rescued from obscurity passing before our attentive eyes and drooling mouths. Sometimes the "lost classic" status is not always deserved (not everything made in the sixties and seventies that didn't receive any attention is noteworthy, somethings are better off staying buried or lost), but it's sure keeping the reissue labels and revisionist musicologists busy as they map out an ever-growing expanse of the spheres of influence on music today. It's hard to keep up and also pay equal attention to all the great music that is being made right now. This makes us very happy on the one hand that amazing music continues to be discovered but it also drives us crazy us to see our paychecks quickly dwindling every week. Why just in the past month, we've seen re-issues from Bridget St. John, Kay Hoffman, John Jacob Niles, Kaleidoscope and Fairfield Parlour (all pretty amazing!) among others. And now on our plate are these previously unreleased home recordings of German underground folk singer, Sibylle Baier. We must admit when we first heard this, we suspected fraud. These recordings sound almost too contemporary to have been made in the early seventies. But after doing a little research, we found out this is no fraud. These intimate recordings fully deserve their "buried treasure" status, for whatever that's worth at this point. Baier, only previously known for a song on an early Wim Wenders film soundtrack, recorded these songs in her home from 1970-73 after a "spirit-renewing" trip through the Swiss Alps. She has the warm Sunday jam and tea voice reminiscent of Vashti Bunyan, but with the more spare guitar compositions and melancholy vocal delivery of someone like Chan Marshall. In fact, we sort of wish the new Cat Power or Beth Orton records were this good! Like Bunyan, Baier shunned what could have been a successful career in order to raise a family and it's because of her son, Robby, that these recordings are being heard at all. But unlike Bunyan, these songs don't derive from a back to nature hippie-folk aesthetic, but rather they come from a more delicate fragility where life's beauty and despair are interwoven with the tiny details of daily life. Beautiful! Totally recommended for seventies folk enthusiasts as well as fans of contemporary singer/songwriters.
MPEG Stream: "Tonight"
MPEG Stream: "I Lost Something in the Hills "

BAILEY, BANKS Vibrations From The Holocene (Quiet World) cd-r 13.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Having contributed to a very nice collaborative drone record with Darren Tate and Ian Holloway about a year ago, Banks Bailey presents a solo offering of field recordings that mostly focus on the desert environs of his native Arizona. On this album, Bailey proves to be a very patient phonographer, as his recordings reveal a considered approach to choosing the sites to record and then waiting for those environments to erupt with sound. Anybody who has listened to Chris Watson's impeccable recordings and thought, "hmmm, I could do this too." has no doubt suffered from the frustration that such a task is far from easy. We'll be honest in saying that Bailey's aren't quite as good as Watson's (seriously, he's the best for a reason!), but don't take that as a swipe against Bailey's richly detailed sounds.
The first two tracks originate in Ohio, with the first investigating the delirious sounds of tree frogs and cicadas crosshatching their sustained buzzings into a wonderful humid ambience from a summertime bog. The second recording contains some of the only industrial and manmade sounds in the recording, as Bailey wanders through downtown Springfield, Ohio where the only sounds can be heard from incoming trains with bellowing steam whistles and rumbling motors. The remainder of the recordings were culled from various excursions into the Arizona wilderness, where the diversity of birdlife is plainly evident. Tweets, trills, and whistles emanate from one bird (which may be something as common as a sparrow, but we can't tell you what it is) whom Bailey has recorded while the bird was perched above a trickling stream. Later on, Bailey documents a very melodious and quite loud bird (again, no telling which one), whose song is reflected with a slight natural echo from the environment. A windstorm through a canyon seems to annoy a red-tailed hawk (now, we can get that one!), who screeches into the wind. Each of the tracks clock in about 8-10 minutes, and provide lots of details of the environment. Exactly what we want in our field recordings, in a micro-edition of 75 copies!
MPEG Stream: "Cedar Bog"
MPEG Stream: "Reservation Lake"
MPEG Stream: "Soldier Canyon"

BAILEY, BANKS / DARREN TATE / IAN HOLLOWAY Summerland (Fungal / Quiet World) cd-r 13.98
We sold out of this pretty quick when we first listed it, but we managed to get a handful of copies (maybe the last?) direct from Mr. Bailey. So here's what we had to say about it when we first listed it not too long ago...
We're not all that sure who Banks Bailey or Ian Holloway are, but Darren Tate has long proved to be a reliable source for long-form dronemusik thanks to his previous collaboration with Andrew Chalk as Ora and his ongoing work with Colin Potter in Monos. Not to mention the multitude of self-released cd-rs under his own name. Tate's aesthetic for sculpted drones through field recordings, pedal manipulation, and occluded processing is central to Summerland, as it has been noted that Tate proved the treated guitar drones with Bailey contributing some of the field recordings and Holloway reconfiguring everything at the end. Thick shadowy tones hover ominously alongside fluctuations of tactile crackle, sounding more like some of the earlier Ora recordings than anything that Tate has produced recently. Elsewhere, tin-strung guitars splutter with atonal resonance, which stretch, elongate, and blur into drifting dark ambience.
Summerland is a limited production. There are only 150 copies of these in existence, and Summerland is already out of print at the two labels who released this.
MPEG Stream: "Summerland 1"
MPEG Stream: "Summerland 3"
MPEG Stream: "Summerland 4"

BAILEY, DEREK Ballads (Tzadik) cd 15.98
John Zorn's Tzadik label presents legendary (notorious?) British guitar improviser Derek Bailey playing, like the title says, a set of classic ballads (recorded at the behest of Zorn himself). No, he's not taking the piss: these really are jazz standards from Bailey's youth, done in his certainly un-standard (but respectful) style, melding free improv with these sentimental melodies. He's applied his chaotic, spidery string manipulation to drum and bass, so why not Hoagy Carmichael? And if you think, like our Andee does, that Derek Bailey doesn't really know how to play the guitar, this might (might) change your mind. Bailey's stark, atonal takes on stuff like "My Melancholy Baby", "Georgia On My Mind" and "Body and Soul" creates a unique mood for sure. With liner notes by Marc Ribot.
RealAudio clip: "Laura"

BAILEY, DEREK Carpal Tunnel (Tzadik) cd 15.98
Here's the third solo Derek Bailey album released by big Bailey fan John Zorn's Tzadik label, and as the title sadly suggests, this disc is in part a document of the legendary (and now rather elderly) British free improv guitarist's bout with the painful condition that's the bane of office workers everywhere. Bailey didn't get it from too much mousing and keyboarding of course, it's the fretboard that did it to him. And that's no laughing matter, a guitarist suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome -- yet somehow you can imagine that if any guitarist could persevere through a crippling hand/wrist ailment, Bailey could. In fact, due to his usually rather abstract and atonal sound, some might (unfairly) say that we'd never notice... Certainly, despite the carpal tunnel, these tracks are full of all the stark, scrabbling, skeletal beauty that Bailey fans appreciate in his work. Ringing, scraping sounds with occasional alarming jumps in volume that threaten to feed back. Should we imagine gentle cries of pain?
The first track, "Explanation & Thanks", features Bailey's voice as well as his precariously plucked guitar. He's not singing, but rather speaking, in a very personal tone as if to some friends (who may have been present?). It's kinda nice, really, the feeling of his warm and halting talking perhaps influencing how you'll hear his guitar playing on this and subsequent tracks, full of human personality rather than being the alienating skronk for which some might mistake it.
MPEG Stream: "Explanation & Thanks"
MPEG Stream: "After 7 Weeks"

BAILEY, DEREK Guitar, Drums 'n' Bass (Avant) cd 19.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Back in stock and at a much more reasonable price thanks to the new domestic distribution of Zorn's Japanese Avant label... Again, this is the critically-disputed love-it-or-hate-it record featuring British guitar improv legend Bailey "dueting" with DJ Ninj (who some might recall contributed the beats to Buckethead's jungle disc). Probably -- heck, definitely -- a record that will appeal much more to Bailey fans than jungle buffs.

BAILEY, DEREK Improvisation (Ampersand) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Recording from 1975 originally issued in Italy of 14 short (each under five minutes) solo improvisations by Bailey. At the request of the artist, no historical liner notes have been included - instead there are four nice photos of Derek eating an apple. Ooh, now there's a selling point!

BAILEY, DEREK Pieces For Guitar (Tzadik) cd 16.98
Earliest ever recordings of legendary British free improv guitar dude Derek Bailey playing solo, circa '66/'67. Those who only know (and love or hate) Bailey for his later, freely improvised, spidery abstractions will find that these unreleased (until now) private practice tapes reveal more melodic, composed moods to Bailey's playing than you might expect, although "sparse" and "difficult" are still terms that would apply here. Really this is primarily of historical interest to Bailey fans, giving a window thru which knowledgeable, interested observers can perhaps see how his musical development at the time incorporated his disciplined jazz-based background, the new, free music of the day, and his obssession with the not-so-free music of Webern (as detailed in Bailey's liner notes). Others may find this interesting as well, as sorta pretty, kinda spooky, lo-fi guitar noodling.
RealAudio clip: "G.E.B."
RealAudio clip: "Improvisation On Guitar Piece No. 2"

BAILEY, DEREK Playbacks (Bingo) cd 12.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Wherein Derek Bailey, the measure by which other improv guitarists strive to equal, plays along to rhythm tracks created by: Henry Kaiser, John Oswald, Casey Rice, Tied and Tickled Trio, Jim O'Rourke, Bundy Brown, John French, Loren Mazzacane Connors, and more. There's been a bit of controversy involving Henry Kaiser, who has sent out a public statement complaining about the music being out of phase or something (he's really unhappy with the way the recording sounds), but Bailey puts the issue to rest with his own statement:
"Although you wouldn't know this, occasionally I play 'live' with DJs or tracks by DJs. I never go direct to the desk or anything else. Nor do I wear earphones. This kind of 'live' situation is what I wanted to replicate in the studio. No direct line, no earphones, a mike on the amp and one on the guitar; one take only on each track. Which is exactly what Toby did for me, to my complete satisfaction. In essence, Playbacks is a live recording, not a studio recording. There are a number of reasons why I do this but the main one is musical. I want a mix of ambient and non-ambient sound. Integration has to be musical NOT technological and obviously so. THE WAY THE RECORD SOUNDS IS THE WAY I WANT IT TO SOUND.
"Let me try and remove any possible ambiguity: The success or otherwise of this record depends almost entirely on the success of the playing. If I thought at the time that this end would have been better served by recording it in the street, I would have done so. These are what is known, in some circles, as artistic decisions. If I made a similar record again, I would do it in exactly the same way."

BAILEY, DEREK String Theory (Paratactile) cd 19.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Solo guitar album from maverick British improv legend Derek Bailey. The "electric" portion of the album features sustained feedback tones that vary from ever-so-slightly painful to actually quite beautiful. Indeed, for the most part, his more usual abstract spidery scribble of notes is absent from this recording, even on the three "acoustic" tracks, which are rather restrained and almost pretty. Towards the end of the album Bailey is joined by a female vocalist, and her singing doesn't sound much different from his electric guitar, making for some interesting duets! High-pitched bliss. Infinitely more appealing that most other Derek B. stuff, say Bailey doubters Allan and Andee...

BAILEY, DEREK & MIN XIAO-FEN Viper (Avant) cd 19.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

BAILEY, DEREK & ALEX WARD LOCationAL (Incus/Compatible Recording) cd 19.98
Six new tracks from guitar improv guru Bailey with clarinetist Alex Ward. Five of the tracks here were recorded in the studio in 1988-99 and one was captured live in October of 1998.

BAILEY, DEREK & EDDIE PREVOST Ore (Arrival Records) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The year 2000 saw this historic (what, you didn't see it in the paper?) first-ever duo meeting between maverick improv guitarist old man Derek Bailey and AMM's percussion master Eddie Prevost. Two of the UKs most legendary, then, doing the in-the-studio-improv thing, now available on cd for you to see how it went...

BAILEY, DEREK & THE RUINS Tohjinbo (Paratactile) cd 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
East-meets-west in unusual fashion as legendary free guitar improviser Bailey teams up with Min Xiao-Fen and her pipa on the relatively-delicate Viper, then really rips it up in his second meeting with Japanese progcore bass/drums duo Ruins on Tohjinbo, a worthy follow-up to their prior, equally out-there collaboration on Tzadik.

BAILEY, DEREK / JAMAALADEEN TACUMA / CALVIN WESTON Mirakle (Tzadik) cd 16.98
Britsh free-improv guitar legend
Derek Bailey (curmudgeonly, but adventurous in his collaborations) teams up with a rhythm section known for work with Ornette Coleman and James "Blood" Ulmer. So: a collision of skittering, abstract guitar skree and semi-abstract jazz funk of the "harmolodic" variety. Random, noisy, damaged grooviness. Pretty cool.

BAILEY, DEREK AND RUINS Saisoro (Tzadik) cd 16.98
Derek Bailey, one of the world's most innovative improvisers, with the Japanese bass-heavy Ruins.

BAILEY, DEREK WITH MIN TANAKA Music and Dance (Revenant) cd 14.98
Improv legend Bailey's live 1980 guitar accompaniment to a "percussive" dance performance. Sparse (with the sound of falling rain figuring prominently on one track) and beautiful. Brought to you by John Fahey's new Revenant label.

BAILIFF, JESSICA Feels Like Home (Kranky) cd 14.98

BAILIFF, JESSICA Hour of the Trace (Kranky) cd 13.98
Album number two finds Jessica again working with Alan from Low. This time around the songwriting has drastically improved, and the delicate yet dense washes of velvety guitar bear a remarkable resemblance to, yep, you guessed it, Low. Another beautiful release from Kranky. Recommended!

BAILIFF, JESSICA s/t (Kranky) cd 14.98
Whenever this album has been played in the store (which is plenty of times already!), folks have clambered to find out what the loveliness is. Well, it's the new Jessica Bailiff! She's singing a lot more this time around, and it's a welcome development. Her third full length is absolutely dreamy, quietly weaving together elements of spartan folk and spacious chamber music, with plenty of nods to fellow Kranksters Low (whose Alan Sparhawk produced her first album). Listening to this eponymous album almost feels like an intrusion, but each of her songs only draws you in further. These are the songs sung to the stars on a sleepless night. Quite often her softly murmured vocals are only accompanied by some hushed strings, piano or a barely strummed acoustic guitar - both hovering in the air like a frosty breath. And even when more sounds enter the stage - a sitar, a violin-uke, some digital effects - they're the sheerest of shimmering veils. Mesmerizing.
RealAudio clip: "Hour Of The Traces"
RealAudio clip: "Time Is An Echo"

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

BAIM, MATTEAH Death Of The Sun (DiCristina) cd 13.98
We weren't all that familiar with Matteah Baim really, other than the fact that she was one half of the Metallic Falcons, with Cocorosie's Sierra Cassidy. Death Of The Sun is actually not that sonically distant from the Metallic Falcons, however where that group was a sort of prog metallic folk, a patchwork of moody free folk, druggy rock, and lush choral arrangements, Baim's solo record is self described 'new age grunge', and thus much more subdued, intimate and personal. Her voice husky and raspy, sexy and sort of torch-singery, drifting over sparse and dark soundscapes, muted and murky, swirling and gently throbbing, the main melodies pecked out on a reverbed piano, simple but quite stirring. It's hard not to hear Cat Power in the vocals, but the arrangements are not that polished at all, instead, they're hushed and lo-fi, lush in their own homespun way. Imagine a countrified Grouper with Chan Marshall on vocals and you might be getting close. Abstract and dark, minor key and so so lovely.
Plus have a gander at the guests: Devendra Banhart, Jana Hunter, Rob Lowe (Lichens) and a bunch more...
MPEG Stream: "River"
MPEG Stream: "Dark Ship"
MPEG Stream: "Wounded Whale"

BAIRD, MEG Dear Companion (Drag City) cd 14.98
If Josephine Foster is the modern day equivalent of Shirley Collins, then Meg Baird would be the contemporary Anne Briggs. Here on her long-awaited yet sweetly low-key Drag City solo debut, Baird, who also fronts Philadelphia's Espers, has been channeling the old ghosts of British Folk (we got a glimpse on the disc of traditional numbers she recorded with Helena Espvall and Sharon Krause, a few lists back) through new and traditional numbers that feel contemporary and timeless without being too folksy or quaint. Sure the influence of folk music's past is anything but new these days, but Baird has been at it for a real long time, and while she has had some killer tracks on compilations now and again, including the ground-breaking "Golden Apples Of the Sun", it's nice to finally see a proper full length from this fair-headed lass who can strum a wistfully folky tune with the best of them. Lovely.
MPEG Stream: "Sweet William And Fair Ellen"
MPEG Stream: "All I Ever Wanted"

BAIRD, MEG Dear Companion (Drag City) lp 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
If Josephine Foster is the modern day equivalent of Shirley Collins, then Meg Baird would be the contemporary Anne Briggs. Here on her long-awaited yet sweetly low-key Drag City solo debut, Baird, who also fronts Philadelphia's Espers, has been channeling the old ghosts of British Folk (we got a glimpse on the disc of traditional numbers she recorded with Helena Espvall and Sharon Krause, a few lists back) through new and traditional numbers that feel contemporary and timeless without being too folksy or quaint. Sure the influence of folk music's past is anything but new these days, but Baird has been at it for a real long time, and while she has had some killer tracks on compilations now and again, including the ground-breaking "Golden Apples Of the Sun", it's nice to finally see a proper full length from this fair-headed lass who can strum a wistfully folky tune with the best of them. Lovely.
MPEG Stream: "Sweet William And Fair Ellen"
MPEG Stream: "All I Ever Wanted"

BAIRD, MEG Waltze Of The Tennis Players (Tequilla Sunrise) 7" 8.98
The female vocalist from Espers gives us a sweet taste of her solo work in anticipation of her upcoming debut. Covering "Waltze of The Tennis Players" by sixties folk obscurities, Fraser and Debolt on one side, and on the other, an acapella version of "Dear Companion", an ancient hymn like tune which will be featured on the full length record. Alas, such a little taste leaves us begging for more. Beautiful.

BAIRD, MEG / HELENA ESPVALL / SHARRON KRAUS Leaves From Off The Tree (Bo'Weavil) cd 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Meg Baird and Helena Espvall, the string players and female vocalists of Espers, team up with British folkie, Sharron Kraus for a hazy afternoon's recording of traditional English and Appalachian folk songs. Sung simply and played sweetly on guitar, cello, and dulcimer by a trio well versed in the dulcet timelessness of the folk cannon, these nine songs recall the best work of Shirley Collins, Sandy Denny and Shelagh McDonald. Lovely!
MPEG Stream: "Now Westlin' Winds"
MPEG Stream: "False Sir John"

BAJA Maps / Systemalheur (Still) cd 16.98
Baja is a German collective revolving around a composer by the name of Daniel Vujanic. By the sound of things, Baja see themselves in neither Germany nor Mexico, but in Chicago circa 1995 when Gastr Del Sol was deconstructing any number of musical tropes into their own rigid signature sound. Both of the two long-form Baja tracks are decentered compositions of angular guitar plucking, ECM jazz motifs, elliptical bass riffs, painterly splatters of multiple horns, and stumbled percussive rhythms.
MPEG Stream: "Maps"
MPEG Stream: "Systemalheur"

BAKAMONO Long Time Cain (Super8) cd 12.98
Local favorites, loud, raw, and crunchy, packaged in a pretty cardboard'n'gold digipak.

BAKER, AIDAN Book of Nods (Beta-Lactam Ring) cd 17.98
Another new Aidan Baker release, another sublime gem. And again, we find ourselves wanting to just review it with a single sentence. "New Aidan Baker. If you are a fan, you will love this. So buy it." But look at the rest of this list. If we had that sort of self control, and if we weren't so inclined to gush, this list would be a whole different beast.
But before we get into it, you might as well take our aborted abbreviated review to heart. If you are a fan, you WILL love this and should probably buy it. So fans can push the buy button and move on. Except for those fans who aren't so sure they need another Baker disc to add to the already-threatening-to-collapse Baker/Nadja cd shelf at home. You all can stick around, along with the folks who might somehow be asking "who the heck is this Aidan Baker guy and what's he all about?" The simple answer just requires a visit to the aQ website, and a quick search on either Aidan Baker or Nadja. There you can read all about it, and listen to almost everything we've carried by him/them. But as with all Baker releases, this one is a bit different, and bears a bit more of a description.
Book Of Nods begins with a 8 minute drift that sounds remarkable like a more subdued Necks jam. Simple piano figure repeated over and over, slowly shifting and changing, but looped and hypnotic and dreamily repetitive. Almost like a much more mellow and muted Lubomyr Melnyk, soft flurries of piano blurred into indistinct streaks, quite lovely. The 18 minute follow up is another sort-of-jazz sprawl, slow smoldering drones, super spare abstract percussion, warm and languid and laid waaaaay back, before the original slow motion drift is subsumed by some Pop Ambient washed out whir, giving the track a strange alien ethereal sheen. Track 3, "Obsession", is like a dubbed out hybrid of Low and Bohren, jazzy slowcore, allowed to slither and crawl, the drums a bit more skittery, some of the melodies effected, and flipped backwards, allowed to swoop and thhhhwp, there are even some fluttering flutes, again, bringing to mind a Necks style jazz jam, but give a bit of an electronic tweaking. The 15 minute closer, is yet another slow burning jazzy slowcore crawl, but here the drums are a bit harder, the mood is much more ominous and foreboding, everything wreathed in deep shimmering drones and distant rumbles, peppered with still more swooping backward beats, steaks of feedback, building to an intense, skittery, skipping coda, sounding a bit like Oval remixing the Necks. Nice.
And thus somehow, yet another Baker disc well worth owning! And not a bad place to start for the newbie, although the sounds here are unlike most of Baker's output.
Beautifully packaged in an oversized fold over textured paper digisleeve, with a dearth of information, just various Asian calligraphic characters. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
MPEG Stream: "Love"

BAKER, AIDAN Broken & Remade (Volubilis) cd 12.98
The Aidan Baker / Nadja musical onslaught shows no signs of letting up any time soon, but we're sure as heck not complaining. This week's Record of the Week is the blissy doom of Nadja's Touched, we also have the vinyl reissue of Bodycage, and then we've got this, Broken & Remade, a definite new direction for Baker, who for this disc, used 4 to 8 second samples of live recordings of analog instruments -- guitar, bass, flute, drums, violin, trumpet, and voice -- to construct these moody, almost jazzy soundscapes.
If you're not listening to close it does just sound like some modern jazz band, crawling through a particularly blissy and smokey jam, the Necks for sure come to mind, as does Bohren Und Der Club Of Gore. The drums shuffle, the guitars buzz, the melodies are serpentine and dreamy, the obvious looping is kept to a minimum, at least in the beginning. Imagine the Bad Plus covering Oval or some Fennesz / Necks remix and you might get a rough idea. The second track, is a bit more glitchy and obviously sampled, but it doesn't take Baker long to build a killer groove, turning all of those little sonic fragments into some sort of Spring Heel Jack, Boards Of Canada dreamy almost IDM shuffle. Even at its smoothest and most straight ahead, Baker laces the proceedings with little bits of digital filigree, a kick drum sputtering repeatedly, a simple lick chopped and reassembled into a little burst of stuttery fuzz, a note here or a drum beat there flipped backwards, it all adds subtle bits of weirdness to the proceedings.
Later in the record things get decidedly more aggressive and freaked out, with thick slabs of distorted sound turned into stuttering fuzz drenched drones, chopped into staggered sonic pulses over drifting mariachi trumpet. Intense post rock workouts gradually become more and more dense until they are dizzying squalls of skittering drums and tangled guitar melodies. Pretty far out, but the songs never become unhinged, this is not any kind of Shitmat style mashup, this is a lot more subtle than that, some seriously deft composition, creating an immensely appealing alien post rock jazz, unlike anything we've heard before.
While Baker fans and Nadja obsessives will NEED this, folks into Boards Of Canada, Spring Heel Jack, Bohren, the Necks, the Bad Plus, and even stuff like Portishead and other late night groove merchants might really dig this as well.
MPEG Stream: "Debra Modern Ken"
MPEG Stream: "Ab Mad Kern One Te"

BAKER, AIDAN Exoskeleton Heart (Crucial Bliss) cd-r 8.98
Another in the recent trilogy of new releases (along with Light Of Shipwreck and Luasa Raelon reviewed elsewhere on this list) from one of our favorite labels, Crucial Bliss, a dronier driftier offshoot of the Crucial Blast label. And as the names should make obvious, the stuff on Crucial Blast -blasts-, and the stuff on Crucial Bliss, is, wellÉ blissed out.
So here we have yet another release from the man who does not sleep. Ever. He couldn't possibly, he must spend every minute of every day and night doing nothing but recording gorgeous spaced out driftscapes (under his own name) and crushing slow motion pummel (as Nadja). This is release number ten in just about a year, and that's not even counting all the microreleases and limited editions that slipped by us completely. But as we've mentioned time and time again, it's all good. Really good. Great in fact. So as folks trying to review all this stuff, we definitely get overwhelmed, but for the listener, who in their right mind would complain about more amazing and mysterious soundsÉ
This new one, is all electric guitar, recorded live, and manages to merge Baker's two sonic sides. The dense and the airy, the heavy and the pretty, the delicate and the intense. Two half hour epics, the first track is a roiling swirl of deep reverberant whirring and soft buzzing, sometimes thickening into an almost SUNNO)))-y wall of sound, but just as often shimmering dreamily, peppered with some super chaotic stretches, where things get really intense, bordering on straight up noise, sounding almost like Total, massive ur-drone, speaker melting white noise, but somehow twisted into something pretty.
The second track is much grittier, the sound more raw and lo-fi, very industrial at the outset, but as the track progresses, strange melodies drift up from below, the sound gets smoother and more washed out, and then somehow, even as it gets prettier and prettier, it also gets heavier, the sound getting louder and more blown out, culminating in a gloriously blurred blast of in-the-red, white hot, blissed out buzz, the aural equivalent of staring into the sun. So nice.
As with all Crucial Bliss releases, the packaging is super swank, an oversized fold over thick cardstock sleeve, full color inside and out, the cd attached to a plastic hub affixed to the sleeve.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
MPEG Stream: "Interior"
MPEG Stream: "Anterior"

BAKER, AIDAN Figures (Volubilis) cd 12.98
It's tough not to joke about Baker's ridiculously prolific output. Same with Acid Mothers Temple. Every time a new record comes out, we don't really want to mention it at all, but we sort of feel remiss if we don't. It sort of comes with the territory, when you begin averaging a release a month, maybe more. But if you're anything like us, and it seems you pretty much are, then when you decide to love an artist, you want everything they put out. And like you, we've decided to love Aidan Baker, which means not only a million Nadja cds, but a million more released under his own name.
But like Acid Mothers Temple, we've yet to be disappointed, each Baker release is fantastic, similar sounding enough to be recognizable, but varied enough to keep it interesting.
This one is another full band record, the instrumentation is guitar, bass, drums, vocals, flute, violin, with someone credited with remix, but this one is a lot different than most anything we've heard so far from Baker. This is essentially a dreamy indie rock slowcore record, with bits of production fuckery here and there, but for the most part, this is slow, lovely, melancholy, lap steel, shuffling drums, sparse reverbed guitar, and vocals, mumbled indie sad boy vocals, drawled over the lilting dreamy depressive plod. Track three is where the slowcore gets sort of smeared and smudged into more typically Baker fare, a washed out low end shimmer, guitars blurry and indistinct, feedback pulsing and shimmering. The next two tracks are more of the same, that foggy, soft focus dreamlike blur Baker is so adept at. But by track six, we're back to a loping late night wander, circular guitar figure, simple and meditative, simple jazzy drums, barely noticeable bits of woozy ambience, distant smears of high end melody, dour and gorgeously mournful. That track is moments later muted and again spread into a thick blurry abstract, a single deep cavernous drone, rumbling and reverberant, but rife with mumbled melodies and fragmented instrumental shards, barely recognizable in the swirling blackened drift.
The big surprise is the final track, a Codeine worthy slowcore crawl, this time the guitars are heavier, electric, the vocals doused in reverb and drifting ghostlike over the dirge, always threatening to explode in a burst of Nadja like metallic bliss, but never quite getting there, instead opting for soaring sublimated drama, tangled high end psychedelic melodies over a constantly shifting swirl of fuzzy guitars and buzzing ambience, and that steady simple drumming, sounding like some long lost live fuzzy and blissy Galaxie 500 jam...
MPEG Stream: "Figures"
MPEG Stream: "Figure One"

BAKER, AIDAN Fragile Moments In Slow Motion (Universal Tongue) 3"cd-r 8.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Another new Aidan Baker, this one a brief 20 minute solo guitar piece, part of series of gorgeously packaged and super limited 3"cd releases on the Universal Tongue label (we got a handful of the Gnaw Their Tongues release, not enough to list, but if you want one, just ask, they probably won't last long).
Here Baker takes his electric guitar and transforms it into a soft noise generator, unleashing tranquil swells of deep dark resonant rumbles, layered and whispering softly at each other, like dangling your toes in some black sea, the soft sonics lapping at your feet. Near the halfway mark, the indistinct blurs coalesce into distinct pulses, throbbing softly in a swirl of distant buzz and dark whir, eventually spreading out again into a sprawling mass of thick viscous shimmer. Not sure what else to say. As always gorgeous and dreamy, Baker and Nadja fans will NEED this, drone obsessives will dig big time. But of course, we only got a handful, so these will no doubt be gone in a flash.
Packaged in a mini 3" dvd-style case, with full color artwork, and pressed on a black cd-r. LIMITED TO 101 COPIES!!!
MPEG Stream: "Fragile Moments In Slow Motion (excerpt 1)"
MPEG Stream: "Fragile Moments In Slow Motion (excerpt 2)"

BAKER, AIDAN Gathering Blue (Equation) 2lp 30.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
It's been a (little) while since we've had some brand new Aidan Baker / Nadja for the store, thankfully this week heralds two new releases. To be reviewed next time, there's long awaited Nadja all-covers disc (which we'll tell you right now is great), and then there's this, a brand new, limited double lp from Baker solo, and as always it's a doozy, sprawling and shimmery and expansive, that sort of blissed out ambient dronemusic he does so well. But it's far from more of the same. The first track we threw on was almost jungle, with skittery beats buried beneath softly undulating layers of warm whir and deep drifts of soft swirling sound. There's also a bit of Spacemen 3 like processed psych guitar, which gives way to some buzzing raga like blur, draped over still more dreamlike dronescapes, although here, it's laced with chunks of processed alien crunch, and weird little bits of scrape and fragmented riffage.
Long stretches of underwater Oval-like wooziness, shot through with streaks of space-y effects and muted bits of glitch and buzz, some of the most washed out and wondrous space (not quite) rock ever! Warped warbly organs are stretched and smeared into warped Philip Jeck like doomy drifts, one of which is apparently a cover of Joy Division's "Twenty Four Hours", although we could only tell by the vocals, and even then, they're so hushed and barely there, that any sense of the original seems to melt into a gorgeously oozing expanse of thrum and shimmer and softly warped rumble.
Another fantastic and gorgeous and of course WAY too limited chunk of droney dreaminess from Mr. Baker. Released on the always amazing Equation Records, who really go all out with the packaging as well. Thick swirled/splattered blue vinyl, thick full color gatefold jacket, and a printed full color postcard, each of which is hand numbered, LIMITED TO 444 COPIES! Just 2 left!!!

BAKER, AIDAN Green & Cold (Gears Of Sand) 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.
Aidan Baker is back, still vying for the most prolific man in show business award (well, at least underground, free drone show business) with a double shot of washed out dreamy droniness. There's the latest from Nadja, reflecting his more metal side, and then there's this, the follow up to last year's Pendulum, which was a fantastic slab of glistening disembodied dronemusic. Green & Gold follows suit but with an interesting twist. Vocals. Lots of 'em. Baker is no stranger to singing, his whispery croon has graced more than a few of his releases, but on G & C, the vocals are a big part of the songs, and the songs are actual songs, with drums, and verses and choruses and everything. Well, sort of.
Some tracks, like the untitled opener, are indeed still just wispy slow shifting expanses of fuzzy dreamlike sound, which we can NEVER get enough of, but others, like "Chainsaw", are actual lowercase, slow motion, dark and dolorous slowcore pop songs. Simple murky guitar riffs, wreathed of course in all manner of reverb and soft focus fuzz, hovering over stripped down shuffling rhythms, while Baker croons softly over the top, a hushed almost whisper, sounding not entirely unlike Iron & Wine's Sam Beam actually. Even the music sounds a little like a blissier tarpit version of Iron & Wine. There is some definite twang there, subtle, but it's there, nestled amidst the delicate folky strum and the glistening sonic glimmer. Imagine an even more somnambulant Low, or Spacemen 3 at 16 rpm, a ultra druggy (druggier?) Galaxie 500, each track a pop song mumbled and murky, a moonlit crawl through a hazy landscape of shuffle and shimmer, of strum and twang, all wrapped up in soft swirls of shimmer.
Essential for fans of all things Jeck and Tim Hecker and Jasper TX and Machinefabriek and Grouper and Troum and Main and the like, but also worth a listen for more adventurous fans of Iron & Wine, Spacemen 3, Galaxie 500, Low and other slowcore drugrock dreaminess...
MPEG Stream: "---"
MPEG Stream: "Chainsaw"
MPEG Stream: "Merge"

BAKER, AIDAN Green and Cold (Beta-Lactam Ring) cd 22.00
One of our favorite Baker discs, out of print on cd-r, now repressed as a proper cd and available again, and of course packaged in one of those fancy Beta-Lactam sleeves. Plus weirdly, it's LIMITED TO ONLY 300 COPIES!! Here's what we had to say about the disc first time around:
Aidan Baker is back, still vying for the most prolific man in show business award (well, at least underground, free drone show business) with a double shot of washed out dreamy droniness. There's the latest from Nadja, reflecting his more metal side, and then there's this, the follow up to last year's Pendulum, which was a fantastic slab of glistening disembodied dronemusic. Green & Gold follows suit but with an interesting twist. Vocals. Lots of 'em. Baker is no stranger to singing, his whispery croon has graced more than a few of his releases, but on G & C, the vocals are a big part of the songs, and the songs are actual songs, with drums, and verses and choruses and everything. Well, sort of.
Some tracks, like the untitled opener, are indeed still just wispy slow shifting expanses of fuzzy dreamlike sound, which we can NEVER get enough of, but others, like "Chainsaw", are actual lowercase, slow motion, dark and dolorous slowcore pop songs. Simple murky guitar riffs, wreathed of course in all manner of reverb and soft focus fuzz, hovering over stripped down shuffling rhythms, while Baker croons softly over the top, a hushed almost whisper, sounding not entirely unlike Iron & Wine's Sam Beam actually. Even the music sounds a little like a blissier tarpit version of Iron & Wine. There is some definite twang there, subtle, but it's there, nestled amidst the delicate folky strum and the glistening sonic glimmer. Imagine an even more somnambulant Low, or Spacemen 3 at 16 rpm, a ultra druggy (druggier?) Galaxie 500, each track a pop song mumbled and murky, a moonlit crawl through a hazy landscape of shuffle and shimmer, of strum and twang, all wrapped up in soft swirls of shimmer.
Essential for fans of all things Jeck and Tim Hecker and Jasper TX and Machinefabriek and Grouper and Troum and Main and the like, but also worth a listen for more adventurous fans of Iron & Wine, Spacemen 3, Galaxie 500, Low and other slowcore drugrock dreaminess...
MPEG Stream: "---"
MPEG Stream: "Chainsaw"
MPEG Stream: "Merge"

BAKER, AIDAN I Fall Into You (Basses Frequences) cd 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We're not sure how it happens really. We were joking in our review of the Nadja elsewhere on this list, that it wouldn't be an aQ list without a new Nadja. Then suddenly, we get an old Aidan Baker disc, one of our faves, reissued, then moments later, the mailman drops off another Baker disc, another reissue! So maybe we should alter our statement a bit, and say that it wouldn't be an aQ list without three or four discs by Baker/Nadja. Phew.Ê
We are really running out of things to say about Baker and Nadja. We definitely need someone to send us a new Nadja thesaurus. We do tend to like most everything he does. Baker has perfected a sound that definitely hits the spot, a dreamy dark droney one on his solo records, a blown out shoegazey metal one on Nadja discs. This disc originally came out as a cd-r on Public Eyesore way back in 2002, and is presented here as an actual cd, limited to 500 copies. And it's a good one.Ê
Back then there seemed to be a bit less space between the two sides of Baker's sonic personality. The opening and closing tracks here have doomy drums, everything bathed in a washed out woozy, glitchy and crackly, squiggly little effects, like it was some old old recording, moody and swoonsome and haunting, not really heavy, but more dense than most of Baker's more ethereal solo recordings.Ê
Between these sonic bookends, lie 3 tracks, 35 minutes of deep drifting tranquility, muted guitar strum, some distant drones, bits of glitch and hum, a stretch of shuffling jazzy drumming, and weirdly enough, some strange vocal samples.Ê
Obviously if you're a fan, and don't have this, or have the cd-r and want to upgrade, you'll definitely want this. And Baker newbies, this is as good a place to start as any.
MPEG Stream: "Lapse"
MPEG Stream: "Symbiosis"

BAKER, AIDAN I Will Always And Forever Hold You In My Heart And Mind (Small Doses) cd 8.98
Finally available again, now on actual compact disc instead of cd-r!!! Originally released in 2007, here's what we said about this then:
Another slab of blissed out dreaminess from AQ fave Aidan Baker. His umpteenth release this year, every single one of them fantastic. This one, titled like a Damien Hirst piece, I Will Always And Forever Hold You In My Heart And Mind, is one single 50+ minute piece, separated into 12 parts, one for each word of the title, all woven into a single expansive whole.
The opener took us right back to Oval's Diskont 94, a shuffling shimmering underwater swirl, but instead of skipping cds as source material, Baker seems to be using some sort of loping Three Mile Pilot like bass, chopped and looped and smeared over a wash of drawn out synth drones, totally tranquil and dreamlike, but with that bass, lending the track a bit of subtle forward momentum. In fact the whole disc seems to be rooted in the interplay between droning synths and that processed bass. It's a bit krautrocky at times, a little bit Popol Vuh, ambient and abstract but propulsive at the same time. Some of the tracks are more layered, with strange muted bits of percussion, or more distinct melodies (also muted), while others get more and more distorted threatening to crumble to pieces, and still others, remain austere and minimal, throwing a shimmering sonic cloak over the hypnotic circular melodies and slow shifting sonic swells.
What more to say? As always, totally beautiful and completely hypnotic. Another perfect late night soundtrack for spacing out and drifting off...
MPEG Stream: "I"
MPEG Stream: "Will"
MPEG Stream: "Always"

BAKER, AIDAN I Will Always And Forever Hold You In My Heart And Mind (Small Doses) cd-r 8.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
This super limited cd-r, which went out of print in a flash, is available once again, for a limited time, in slightly less elaborate packaging, but still with the same gorgeous music. Here's our review from when we first listed it:
Another slab of blissed out dreaminess from AQ fave Aidan Baker. His umpteenth release this year, every single one of them fantastic. This one, titled like a Damien Hirst piece, I Will Always And Forever Hold You In My Heart And Mind, is one single 50+ minute piece, separated into 12 parts, one for each word of the title, all woven into a single expansive whole.
The opener took us right back to Oval's Diskont 94, a shuffling shimmering underwater swirl, but instead of skipping cds as source material, Baker seems to be using some sort of loping Three Mile Pilot like bass, chopped and looped and smeared over a wash of drawn out synth drones, totally tranquil and dreamlike, but with that bass, lending the track a bit of subtle forward momentum. In fact the whole disc seems to be rooted in the interplay between droning synths and that processed bass. It's a bit krautrocky at times, a little bit Popol Vuh, ambient and abstract but propulsive at the same time. Some of the tracks are more layered, with strange muted bits of percussion, or more distinct melodies (also muted), while others get more and more distorted threatening to crumble to pieces, and still others, remain austere and minimal, throwing a shimmering sonic cloak over the hypnotic circular melodies and slow shifting sonic swells.
What more to say? As always, totally beautiful and completely hypnotic. Another perfect late night soundtrack for spacing out and drifting off...
MPEG Stream: "I"
MPEG Stream: "Will"
MPEG Stream: "Always"

BAKER, AIDAN I Wish Too, To Be Absorbed (Important) 2cd 15.98
At first we were a little put off by the idea of a double disc Aidan Baker 'greatest hits' collection. As avid readers of the list no doubt have realized, we average close to a new Baker record every two weeks. One a list! So collecting random tracks to create yet -another- release seems a bit like overkill. But as we dug deeper, we discovered that these two discs were culled from super rare and long out of print releases, spanning the years 2000 to 2007. So rare in fact that even the avid Baker / Nadja obsessives around here didn't recognize 90 percent of the releases these tracks came from. Which ultimately means that I Wish Too is essentially a whole new record, which is perfectly fine with us. The tracks are quite varied, seeing as they span almost a decade, and include vastly different instrumentation, and varying lineups, but it's all pretty great, from the delicate drift of "Element #1", not all that far removed from the Aidan Baker dreamdronedrift we know and love, to the lilting post rock chamber music of "K", with real drums, cello and violin, a dramatic Godspeed / Rachel's sort of meander, that is quite lovely, to the rumbling subterranean low end sprawl of "Merge", a deep shimmery drift that is draped with ethereal falsetto vocals, to the tribal ambience of "Calibrate" which sound a bit like a murkier Muslimgauze or a super stripped down, much dronier African Head Charge. And there's more, lots more. A glimpse at every sonic side of Baker: huge slow moving industrial whirs and glimmering abstract shimmer, stuttering looped soundscapes that sound like alien filed recordings mixed with minimal Raster-Noton jams, warm, washed out slow jam trip hop, with skittery beats over deep low end swells, and stretched out jazzy dirgescapes, shuffling drums, and muted trumpet, soft focus piano, all locked into ever expanding loops like a more abstract Necks. And that's just disc one. Just one disc! The second disc collects a whole 'nother hour+ of drones and drifts and loping meander and whirring shimmer, a pretty serious retrospective for sure.
Needless to say, Baker fanatics, even the most obsessive, will probably not have all this stuff, and newbies will definitely have lots to dig in to and discover. So once again, if your already overloaded Baker / Nadja shelf can handle the additional strain, RECOMMENDED!
MPEG Stream: "Element #1"
MPEG Stream: "Reversion"
MPEG Stream: "Summer Chill"

BAKER, AIDAN Letters (Basses Frequences) lp 12.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
Originally released as a cd-r in 2002, so limited we never managed to get ANY at all. So for lots of Baker fans, this will probably be your first chance to wrap your ears around Letters.
Really hard to know what to say about Baker anymore. He definitely has a sound, unlike his dirgier more metallic blissed out doom duo Nadja, his solo stuff tends toward the super minimal, the dark and droney and drifty, the hushed and shimmery, and Letters is no different. But within that somewhat well defined sound, there is in fact much variation, subtle as it may be.
On Letters, Baker offers up soft billows of sound, which are wrapped around a hushed vocals, more of a murmur actually, but instead of a drone record, it transforms the sound into some super minimal slowcore, the pop element sublimated to almost non existence, the vocal melody being the only thing keeping the track from sprawling out into abstract smears and blurs (not that we mind that either mind you). The instrumentation is simple, just guitars and cymbals, but deftly processed into something deep and sonorous, and surprisingly melodic. Streaks of high end drift in and out (guitar or falsetto vocal, it's hard to say), as the record drifts dreamily. The sound does change dramatically here and there, deep overlapping low end tones, soft squalls of spaced out effects, glimmering streaks of washed out doomic blur, stretches of almost symphonic shimmer, the guitars transformed into hushed string sections, but it all resolves in an extended outro of soft deep swells. As always, absolutely lovely.
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!!!!