HOOR-PAAR-KRAAT The Huntington Chapters (Small Doses) 3" cd-r 5.98
A brief burst of mysterious musical abstraction, from one of our favorite purveyors of strange sound and minimal dronemusic. Two tracks, clocking in at about 18 minutes total, this is another gorgeously abstract and spacious drift through some lost alien soundscape .
Thee first track is all tinkling melodies, glistening high end, strange rumbling fluctuations way off in the distance, bits of creak and scrape, everything bathed in foggy reverb and warm wet swirls of tape hiss and atmospheric whir. Melodies creep in and out, as do bits of field recordings, it all feels like some cinematic bleary eyed wander through a hazy druggy flashback, a washed out world of lost memories and fragmented dreams. Here and there guitars grind and reverberate, and strange percussive sonic events drift into earshot, like an even more abstract Wolf Eyes maybe. Quite gorgeous and dreamlike.
The second track starts out the same, a smear of high end shimmer, but instead of spreading out into languid pools of blurry sound, things get decidedly more abrasive, the high end becomes sharper, the percussion is more clattery and jarring, a disembodied voice intones some creepy monologue over the top, effects swirl and swoop, deconstructed riffs chug and churn, everything dizzying and disorienting, like the nightmare analogue to the opening track's dream. Cool cool stuff.
Limited to 153 copies! Packaged in a super deluxe mini sleeve. A die cut two sided thick colored paper sleeve, screen printed, folded around a full color vellum inner sleeve, the cd face, the vellum inner sleeve, and the outer sleeve all visible in a super striking layered affect, so nice.
MPEG Stream: "Welcomed, Fell The Imprisoned Rain"
MPEG Stream: "Species Of Angelic Possession"

HOOR-PAAR-KRAAT The Nagaraja Movements (Amorf) 3" cd-r 7.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Another way too limited cd-r release from the mysterious Hoor-Paar-Kraat, who we have been digging pretty heavily as of late. It's time for someone to step up and do a proper unlimited actual cd release for these guys, cuz this stuff is to dark and weird and cool to only be heard by a handful of folks. But for now, this is what we got. And what we got is the last 30 copies of this 16 minute 3" cd-r, a single track of slow moving, textural creepiness, ambient maybe, but there's a whole lot going on. Grinding distorted slow motion guitars lumbering glacially way off in the distance, murky mumbled vocals meandering amidst the tangled strands of low end buzz. Up front, still more low end, but sort of glistening and shimmering, nearly transparent, barely obscuring soft barely-there melodies drifting nearly inaudibly low in the mix.
The guitars build and build, a huge lumbering wall of slow motion riffing, the low end is gradually sucked out of the mix, leaving a snarling buzzing brittle wall of hissing fuzz and coruscating guitar grind, that becomes more and more noisy and muddy, eventually the buzz splinters into abrasive shards, and song collapses into blackness.
Easily the most aggressive thing we've heard from these guys, might appeal to fans of SUNNO))) and Birchville Cat Motel and other modern noiseniks as well as the ambient drone set...
LIMITED TO 40 COPIES!! WE GOT 30!!! After that they are gone for good....
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 1"
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 2"

HORDE CATALYTIQUE POUR LA FIN Gestation So`nore (Mellow) cd 15.98
Quiet/loud saxophone squealing and squawking, over a background ambience of ominous clatter and drone...piano, percussion, tape hiss...
Free jazz fairy tale music from France circa 1971. It's very moody and dark, but then there will be eruptions of Warner Bros cartoon music, almost. You could imagine a cartoon mouse tip-toeing around to some of this. A very scared little mouse. This ultra-rare Futura LP now sees cd reissue via Italian label Mellow, and fans of skronky Euro-improv as well as the more cosmic psych soundscapes of, say, Taj Mahal Travellers, should investigate.
RealAudio clip: "Gestation Sonore 4"

HORNS Horns, Halos & Mobile Phones (Conspiracy) lp 18.98
We discovered a little stash of these long out of print Conspiracy lps, we have between 5 and 10 of each left, and they're all sale priced, WAY cheaper than they were when we listen them a while back. So act fast, cuz these will be gone pretty dang quick, and obviously, once we run out that's it.
We pretty much blew through the rest of the super limited Conspiracy Records anniversary limited lps we reviewed last list, but we still have a handful of these left and they are KILLER! Read on...
Our pals at Conspiracy Records, a label/distro based in Belgium, who in the past have brought us records by Boris, Jesu, Shora and more, are this year celebrating their 10 year anniversary. A decade of amazing music. From a bedroom based punk label, to one of Europe's most important and influential labels and distros, all we can say is HURRAY! And HUZZAH! It's always so exciting, when a bunch of folks get together to spread the word about great music, great WEIRD music, and survive, even thrive. Such is the case with Conspiracy. And as if that weren't already enough, just knowing that some great people were selling some amazing music, those sweeties at Conspiracy have decided to share the love with us. And you.
To celebrate their 10th anniversary, they've decided to do a super limited subscription series, 12 records over 12 months, each limited to somewhere between 200-500 copies, ONLY available to series subscribers. EXCEPT, they've decided to let AQ have 20 copies of each, we're the only store with copies of these subscriber only lps, and for a brief moment, we can offer them to you, our loyal AQ customers. Needless to say we are thrilled, as the series lineup reads like a who's who of AQ faves, as well as including a handful of lesser knowns. All pressed on super thick vinyl, and packaged in killer hand screened original art sleeves. But be warned, we only got 20 of each, and we will run out fast and we will not be able to get more. When we do run out, there is a chance you can still get more (or even subscribe to the series) from Conspiracy direct, but what that means is act fast and prepare to leave empty handed.
Horns are a Belgian super group of sorts, drawn from all sorts of legendary outfits, not a single one we'd heard of. But this slab of freaked out sonic weirdness has us making lists of all these bands we need to track down. Cuz Horns are one mighty damaged super fucked up and gloriously noisy beast. The band describe their sound as "wild and free improvisations. 78 bpm wounded prog from hell's children's corner. An encyclopedia of fatal mistakes crammed into a power ballad's intro" or alternately a "dirty avantnoiseambientbitchesbrew", both of which come pretty dang close. A seriously demented outrock psychedelic free for all, super angular guitar, killer pounding Albini-ish drums, throbbing low end bass rumble, everything doused in swirling fuzzed out super distorted affects, a dense cloud of malfunctioning electronics and processed vocals. Like some insane tagteam match between Shellac, Whitehouse and Acid Mothers Temple while some misguided DJ keeps dropping in bits of black metal and Hawkwind, and another Dj does his best to scratch and beat match, using nothing but the two bloody stumps where his hands used to be. Awesome!
Original artwork by artist Jella Crama, who also hand silkscreened each copy. The LP's are pressed on super thick 180 gram vinyl and housed in thick plastic sleeves.

HORSCROFT, SCOTT 8 Guitars (Quecksilber) cd 16.98

HORSEBACK Impale Golden Horn (Burly Time) cd 13.98
Drone records are a dime a dozen these days. Not that we don't love drone records, we do. In fact, often we're way too easy on the purveyors of drone, since the very essence of that sound, is so simple, and yet so completely satisfying to listen to. A guitar against the amp, a handful of keys on a keyboard held down, a loop cycled over and over and over, almost any sound smeared into a near static drift, we could listen to that stuff forever, and often do. But it's the rare drone record that uses the drone as just the jumping off point, as a foundation upon which to build a fragile and ephemeral structure of minimal melody and movement, instead of the beginning AND end. Stars Of The Lid are a good example, as is William Basinski, Tim Hecker and a handful of others. 
Horseback too. We were sent this disc out of the blue and immediately fell in love. Only later to discover that this was the work of a faithful AQ mailorder customer by the name of Jenks Miller! Small world. Horseback is most definitely a drone record, but manages to incorporate plenty of not specifically drone-like sounds. At once massive and dense, dark and distorted, but also ephemeral and airy, soaring and dreamlike. The root of the sound is a guitar, or guitars, allowed to reverberate and ring out, unfurling billowing clouds of distorted buzz and whir, that settles on the speaker like a thick blanket of snow, glistening and blinding, but at the same time warm and enveloping. The guitars pulse and swell, melodies drifting in and out, streaks of feedback, all wound up into a huge softly roiling glowing orb of sound. 
It's almost unfair to call this a drone record, as it's so lush, and rich, and full of motion, sprawling out like some sort of sonic sunrise, the sounds gradually changing color, everything shifting and shimmering and transforming subtly as the record progresses. So much more than just a simple 'drone' record. In fact, it's easy to hear Galaxie 500, Spacemen 3, Loop, Flying Saucer Attack, that sort of spaced out doped up drift, all smeared into Horseback's haunting sun dappled world of slow burning sound.
Elsewhere piano drifts amidst the dense guitar swells, and rhythms are provided by pulsing guitars and various sounds beating against one another. Vocals hover way below the surface, barely audible, but adding another layer of lilting mystery, near the end, the guitars peel back gradually revealing a blurry expanse of swirling cymbals and splattery free jazz percussion, all spread out into a buzzy sizzling swirl, over which the final haunting piano notes drift and fade. So gorgeous. Absolutely one of our favorite new records, a practically perfect fade-out-drift-off-drone-dream-disc, and quite an auspicious start for this brand new label...
MPEG Stream: "Finale"
MPEG Stream: "The Golden Horn"

HORSEFLESH Journey To The East (Chambara) cd-r 6.98
It's frustrating how long it takes us sometimes to get around to reviewing stuff, especially when it's something we've had for a while and have been digging a lot. Such is the case with the strangely named Horseflesh, a one man band from right here in SF, who weaves some alchemical musical magic that sounds a little like a cross between Wolf Eyes and Expo 70, which is not a bad thing at all. Long tracks that are equal parts seventies space kraut, spare industrial ambience, and guitar based free noise dronemusic...
Opening with some murky minimal folk, with simple looped acoustic guitar figures, strange rattling percussion, all wreathed in a fuzzy smokey ambience eventually growing more and more droney and subtly blurred as the track progresses. The disc slowly mutates, each track setting up the next, warm smears of soft edged distortion draped over barely there guitar curlicues, shimmering resonant thrum, and streaks of muted feedback. A super reverbed soundscape of delayed scrape and grind, all washed out, looped metallic shimmer, that gives way to a lugubrious low end drift, all fluttering harmonics, distant melodies, muffled percussive chimes, and gradually become more and more distorted and becomes a dense Fenneszian buzz, a crunchy slow motion abstract doom, a plodding downtuned riff, pulled into long low strips strewn over the top of drunkenly keening jagged melodies that swoon and warble. A grinding hissy harsh landscape of stumbling percussion and processed guitar whir, swirling chaotic space FX and rumbling reverberant drones, like some noise band set up and performing in the crashing surf of some alien sea... The closer is a gorgeous lilting folky prog jam, with fluttering flutes, steel string guitars, summery melodies, that becomes less and less cohesive as the track progresses, the instruments dropping off one by one, until all that is left is a dreamy drifting super high end melody, a soft shimmer of feedback sculpted into something ethereal and lovely...
Packaged in cool hand screened chip board sleeves, with a photocopies insert. 
MPEG Stream: "The Hollow"
MPEG Stream: "Tectonic"
MPEG Stream: "Breathe Of Infinity"

HORSEFLESH Synthenesia I (Chambara) cd-r 6.98
Brand new disc from local kraut-drone dreamweavers Horseflesh, who in our review of their last record we compared to a cross between Expo 70 and Wolf Eyes, which is not so much the case anymore. They're still drone-y and dreamy, but here, the sound has been pushed even farther out, and from the opening few minutes alone, you know you're in for something different, a gurgling low end shimmer builds in pitch and intensity, faster and faster and louder and louder, until the band locks into a high end Ur-drone, a symphony of synthesized skree, Sunroof! set to stun, difficult and dense, bordering on full on noise, but handled so deftly, we almost don't want it to end. Thankfully, instead of ending, it just sort of changes, the high end drops out leaving a strange pulsing dynamic sea of synth notes, chords, whirring buzzy warbly throbs, creating a strange staggered rhythm, haunting and off kilter, but strangely arresting too, unlike almost anything we've heard but we dig it. This constantly shifting sonic field is anything but ambient, synths and guitars fade in and fade out, reverberating metallic shimmer becomes grinding industrial crunch, warm muted tones become a burbling sea of fragmented melody, it all sort of builds and intensifies into a churning doomdrone finale, dense and effulgent, and strangely majestic. Most bands would probably hang it up there and call it a day, but we're not even 1/3 of the way through yet.
The second track is much more spacious, the high clarion tones clear and resonant, ringing out like car horns and fog horns, the long notes beating against each other, occasionally slipping into strange distorted crunch, but slipping just as effortlessly back into swirling tendrils of warble and whir, the track continues to get more and more dense, the synths more and more like horns, more dissonant, the notes more rapid and closer together, resembling some sped up Hermann Nitsch piece or some other droning atonal chunk of modern classical.
The final track is much more melodic, at least in the beginning, deep washed out blissy tones wreathed in crumbling warm fuzz, the fuzz quickly dissipating, leaving another strange sea of almost chiming upper register tones, their color slowly shifting from whites and yellows and reds, to greys and browns and blacks, growing more ominous and more darkly clouded by the second, the layers peeling back one at a time, eventually leaving a single tone, that drifts and warbles and shimmers and whirs finally fades out completely.
Not nearly as krautrocky or dreamily drone-y as the last Horseflesh, but it would have been too easy to just make another same sounding record. Synthenesia is a much wilder collection of sounds, much more intense and inventive, challenging and difficult, and ultimately, because of that, even more magical and mysterious.
These cd-rs are packaged in super striking handscreened digipaks, with a printed cardstock insert and a sticker.
MPEG Stream: "Trials Of The Bee"
MPEG Stream: "Dividing The Divine"

HORTON, ROBERT Diamond-Beak-Hornet-Hell (Gold Soundz) cd-r 13.98
Sometimes we want to grab Robert Horton, and shake him like crazy, screaming "For God's sake man, slow down with the releases!!! Even if we listened to one very day for the rest of our lives, we're not sure we'd get to all of them!!" But sometimes, we want to grab Robert Horton, and shake him like crazy, screaming "For God's sake man, DON'T EVER slow down with the releases!!! We are going to listen to one every day for the rest of our lives, and we never ever want to run out!!" So by now, you're take on this latest cd-r (number 34,221 by last count) will depend on which sort of shaking you want to do. To be totally honest, we tend to lean toward the latter, sure, it's exhausting keeping up with this man's prolific output, but pretty much every thing we've heard has been absolutely fantastic. I guess that's why we have entire rooms of our houses dedicated to storing all of our records and cds. -sigh-
Anyway, Diamond-Beak-Hornet-Hell finds Horton employing the same bizarre array of soundmakers (including boot, vibrator, sex machine, raven, rubber band and more) to create his thick soundworlds. DBHH is a bit heavier than past outings, all of the swirling bits of sound coalescing into a seriously propulsive riff, like a less drifty Sunroof! but that's just the first track. The rest of the disc dabbles in deep drone, flecked with bits of disembodied slide guitar and what sounds like processed didgeridoo, swirling abstract psychedelia, thick warped rhythmscapes of warped backwards guitars and strange keening reeds and clattery deconstructed blues, transformed into some sort of almost industrial looped dronescape. Cool.
And we managed to make it through the whole disc before the next one was released. So now we're ready Horton! Bring it on!!!
MPEG Stream: "One"
MPEG Stream: "Two"

HORTON, ROBERT First Light (Onomato) cd-r 7.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Holy crap, we weren't kidding when we mentioned in the -other- Robert Horton review on this list, that this man has been busy busy busy. Releasing records for going on 30 years now, but everything we've heard has been absolutely amazing. So we're not complaining, we're just scrambling to keep up, and to make enough room on our shelves at home. You pretty much need a dedicated Horton shelf by now, but it's well worth it. As we said, everything we've heard has been great, and this latest release is no exception.
Horton seems to derive perverse pleasure in getting pretty sounds of some of the most unlikely sources. Even at his droniest and dreamiest, it's not uncommon to discover he was using vibrators and electric toothbrushes, vacuum cleaners or footwear. And this disc follows suit. He employs the usual array of soundmakers: Boot, sex machine, pump organ, dulcimer, vibrator, turntables, contact mics and on and on. Weaving all of the disparate sounds these items produce deftly into gorgeous dronelike shapes. This record in particular sound especially guitar heavy, one track with buzzing slipper slide, another with repetitive strum, over some deconstructed Appalachia, some weird blown out fuzzy psych, but these 'jams' are balanced by a delicate world of drone, pulses and shimmers, some truly lovely stuff. The most far out track has to be "Tern", where Horton performs solo on a barometer, creating a clattery clanging percussive workout. As always, super stuff!!
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!! Packaged in a screen-printed/photo cover, with a photocopied insert, pressed on cool black cd-r's and housed in a heavy vinyl sleeve.
MPEG Stream: "In On The Grass"
MPEG Stream: "Live Spring Dragonwell"

HORTON, ROBERT Just Before Setting The Sky On Fire (Barl Fire) cd-r 11.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
It's not always necessary to list all the instruments used in the construction of a record, but sometimes it's the only way to help wrap your head around the strange sounds found on a certain wonderful and mysterious recording. Just Before Setting The Sky On Fire was created using the following instruments and items: "guitar, boot, cassette recorder, sex machine, el barometer, casio mt-68, computer, theremin, vibrators, el toothbrush, dulcimer organ, dulcimer, prepared boot, sheep's toes, percussion, cd's, turntable, minidisk manipulations, sine waves, feedback circuit, soundedit loops, bells, practice bagpipe chanter, filters, and noise-canceling-head-phones-microphone." But as the saying goes, it's not only what you use, it's how! From the same label that brought us recent reissues from James Blackshaw and Rameses III comes this newest release from Robert Horton. To be honest we don't know a whole lot about Horton, other than he has a previous release on Finnish cd-r label 267 Lattajjaa and is apparently from right here in SF, but judging from this here record, that won't be the case for long. A curiously appealing mix of modern free folk, abstract drone, and twentieth century computer music, Just Before Setting The Sky On FIre is a warm dense tangle of steel string guitars, humming and wheezing drones, majestic Sunroof!-like skree, lilting neo-Appalachia fingerpicking, extended shimmering ragas, random tribal clatter, and delicately swoonsome ambience. So gorgeous. Will fit perfectly right there next to all your Jewelled Antler, Avarus, Pelt, No Neck Blues Band, Tower Recordings, Excepter, Jackie O Motherfucker and Sunburned Hand Of The Man! LIMITED TO 120 COPIES!!!
MPEG Stream: "Just Before Lighting The Sky On Fire"
MPEG Stream: "Pibrouch Morn"

HORTON, ROBERT Plateau:1985-88 (Archives Vol. 3) (Jyrk) cd-r 7.98
The Bay Area's very own Robert Horton has been a very busy beaver, and it hasn't just been lately, as is evidenced by this, volume THREE in the Horton archives, collecting various bits and baubles recorded between 1985 and 1988, all of it just as stunning on anything from the last few years.
The opener is a massive 12 minute epic utilizing 8 guitars, using just intonation, producing harmonics by vibrating the strings with vibrators and electric razors, the result a gorgeous keening high end drift, slow peals of upper register drone slowly shifting and shimmering. The rest of the tracks here are also drone based, with subtle variations, dancers swinging rocks together for percussion, various unlikely stringed instruments, chanted vocals, even horns, the results without exception, lovely and serene. It's frustrating sometimes, trying to keep up with the prolific output of many artists and labels today, now that putting out a cd-r is as easy as stopping at Office Depot on your way home from work, but whenever we almost give up, we throw a new disc on and are whisked away to some droney dreamy sonic wonderland and just drift away, wondering how the heck we could have been thinking about giving up...
Includes full color insert and extensive liner notes, Horton history and info on each track.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES. WE GOT 30 COPIES, ONCE THESE ARE GONE, THEY ARE GONE FOR GOOD, IT'S ALREADY OUT OF PRINT AT THE LABEL!
MPEG Stream: "Rastec"
MPEG Stream: "Strata"

HORTON, ROBERT Trees Rarely Move (Celebrate Psi Phenomenon) cd-r 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Another new record from Robert Horton, whose Just Before Setting The Sky On Fire cd-r we raved about recently. And even though we had never heard of him until that cd-r, he hails from right here in San Francisco. Which makes a lot of sense actuallly, as his sound is the perfect mix of New Zealand style free noise (hence his releases on CPsiP and other microlabels) and Jewelled Antler folk ambience (there's even a song on this disc titled "Jewelled Antler Basement", dedicated to the JA folks whom he recently performed with). Horton's music is truly lovely to listen to, and the strange sounds he uses to create those songs are at once totally familiar, but also completely perplexing. A quick look at the list of instruments used makes it obvious why: mbira, turntable, casio, wah wah pedal, bike pump trumpet, washing machine full of superballs, trash can lid, grass, leaf, bark, boot, vibrator, calliope, teasle, field recordings of hummingbirds, turntable-hurdy-gurdy-sexmachine, turntable-hurdy-gurdy-guitar and more. We could fill up a whole page with the stuff Horton used to make this record. In most hands all that crap would make a big ol' mess, but here's it's all carefully and delicately composed and laid out for maximum dreaminess and droniness. Every track is a smear of droned out bliss, with abstract folkisms and stretched out melodies, dense and challenging, but also simple and tripped out in that perfect close your eyes and drift off sort of way. One of the coolest and weirdest tracks is definitely the washing machine superball track, with the boinging rubber balls creating a furious tangle of free jazz rhythms, that are complimented by some REAL drums, skittering around and about the chaotic rubber balls, like a super distorted, sped up drum battle between Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. So cool.
SUPER LIMITED AS ALWAYS!! NOT SURE WE'LL BE ABLE TO GET MORE WHEN THESE ARE GONE!
MPEG Stream: "Trees Rarely Move"
MPEG Stream: "Jewelled Antler Basement"

HOSPITALS, THE I've Visited The Island Of Jocks And Jazz (Load) cd 15.98
What might one find on the Island Of Jocks And Jazz? You might be surprised to discover it's mostly amp buzz, and cord crackle, snare drums that sounds like someone throwing stones at a trash can lid from across a yard, vocals that sound like they were recorded from the bottom of a sheet metal pit, all that cacophany broadcast through a bank of 200 broken car speakers, recorded on a handheld cassette recorder, and then mastered to aluminum foil. WTF?!? The Hospitals make Guitar Wolf sound like the Osmonds. There are some killer riffs, some warbly organ, some almost dubby rhythms, even some hooks, but they're all barely discernible, wrapped in sonic barbed wire, lit afire and set careening down an obstacle course of empty metal trash cans, aluminum shed siding and all matter of rusty scrap metal. Ultra chaotic and wild and scuzzy screechy blown out garage rock blur. Just the thing for all of you mourning the end of SF's Coachwhips, and will probably also tickle the ruined eardrums of folks who love stuff like the Country Teasers, The Fall, Black-Eyed Snakes, Liquor Ball, Guitar Wolf and any of that acid fried, amp melting speaker blowing garage trash-n-roll!
MPEG Stream: "Bands"
MPEG Stream: "Rich People"
MPEG Stream: "Olympic Ghost"

HOTEL ALEXIS Goliath, I'm On Your Side (Broken Sparrow) cd 11.98
It was never any big secret that AQ faves Hotel Alexis sounded a LOT like Sparklehorse. How could it be really. After all, both groups crafted gorgeously lush low key country soundscapes, more whisper and hum than twang in most cases, with sweetly crooned vocals, nestled among rich worlds of minor key misery and soft lonely blues. And Hotel Alexis' Sidney Lindner (brother to Flying Canyon's Cayce, who both play together as Golden Hotel) has a voice that's a dead ringer for Mark Linkous from Sparklehorse. But for every similarity, there are some crucial differences. Lately, Sparklehorse has moved on, Danger Mouse production, super star guest spots, and a new sound closer to a countrified Flaming Lips, which is great, don't get us wrong, but it's not the sound we fell in love with. Lindner and his Hotel Alexis still wander those same rain swept streets, are still lost and alone, recording by lamp light, finding solace in each lonely note. The sound is similar, but there is definite progression.
Lindner has continued to look inward, expanding his dark personal universe, getting more and more lush and expansive certainly, but without losing the hushed intimacy that made the debut, The Shining Example is Lying On The Floor such an absolute gem. If anything, Goliath, I'm On Your Side is even better, which is saying a lot considering how much we LOVED the first record.
The sound is simple: strummed steel string guitars, heavily reverbed piano, Lindner's sweetly soulful vocals, brushed shuffling percussion, occasional flourishes of vibraphone, mellotron, lap steel, but the magic is in the songs, and the arrangements. These are the kind of songs that would sound just as good plucked out on a beat up old acoustic guitar by a crackling fire as they would recorded with a symphony orchestra at Abbey Road. Maybe even better. The sound is crisp and alive, it sounds like Lindner is right there, head on your shoulder, singing right in your ear, melodies drift and swoon, sometimes thick and vibrant, other times muted and mumbled.
Every song on Goliath, I'm On Your Side is practically perfect, but the centerpiece has to bee the nearly 20 minute long blissed out FX drenched countrified space rock epic "Hummingbird / Indian Dog". Beginning with a vocal mantra repeated over and over amidst swirling keyboards, a sing songy melody and whirls of murky whir, the song eventually transforms into an ambient soundscape of backwards guitars, field recordings, running water, barking dogs, snippets of conversation lifted on the wind, hushed breathless vocals wrapped in reverb and buried in the mix, insistent atonal guitars, struggling to be hear over the muted whir, everything building into a super druggy blown out space rock drift, guitars warp and warble, buzzing and pulsing over the same swirling backdrop, splattery percussion drifts in and out of the mix, eventually fading out into a twangy No Neck sort of tribal drift, barely there vocals, simple hand drums, steel string buzz, some sort of indie twang "Revolution #9". And it's that sort of spirit, that pervades even the most straight forward song on Goliath, I'm On Your Side. What on first listen might sound like just a sweet country ditty, is more often than not, rife with unlikely melodies, strange sonic subtleties, and deep dark emotion. But then again, more often than not, most of these songs don't actually sound like just sweet country ditties, instead, instead, they tend to be lush worlds of soft focus twang, druggy dreaminess and sweet melancholy bliss.
MPEG Stream: "Soft Soft War"
MPEG Stream: "San Diego Backslide"
MPEG Stream: "I Will Arrange For You To Fall II"
MPEG Stream: "Our Good Captain"

HOTEL ALEXIS, THE The Shining Example is Lying On The Floor (Broken Sparrow) cd 14.98
It's always frustrating when we get an amazing cd-r, that we all buy, and then later have to buy again when it comes out as a proper cd. We try to make sure we know about those sort of impending plans before listing limited cd-r's. But sometimes it just happens, not much you can do. And in the case of a record as fantastic as this one, all we can do is be grateful that it is finally getting properly released, and urge all of you who missed out last time to buy it now! And as a consolation for those of us who already own the first version, the new packaging may be quite spiffy, but it's not as sweetly and nicely handmade as the cd-r's.
This is the first solo record from Sidney Linder, who plays in AQ faves Golden Hotel (with his brother Cayce) and fronts the hauntingly gorgeous Torrez. We've raved about both Golden Hotel and Torrez in the past, both bands exploring the dark and mysterious corners of ambient folk, druggy psychedelia, alt country and dreamy slowcore. So we had an idea of what to expect from Sidney's first solo effort, but there was little to prepare us for just how goshdarn breathtaking this record is.
Pefectly recorded, intimate and crystal clear, with steel string guitars, shuffling brushed drums, shimmery vibes, haunting slide guitar, hushed raspy vocals (sounding quite a bit like Jeff Tweedy of Wilco at times, and Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse at others), and perfectly melancholy melodies. This record is just so completely beautiful and utterly heartbreaking, it's a little hard to know how to describe it in a way that does it justice. Everytime we put this on, it sucks us into another world, sepia toned and twighlit, dark and dusty, lonely and mysterious. This is the kind of record that is SO evocative, that really does make you feel the music in your heart and soul. You can hear some Sparklehorse, some Court And Spark, some Wilco, some Souled American, some of Sidney's other bands, but it all sounds so personal and intimate, filtered through Sidney's psyche, his triumphs and failures, his hopes and dreams, his loves and his heartbreaks. So so so good it just kills us.
MPEG Stream: "The Season For Working"
MPEG Stream: "An Indian Doctor"
MPEG Stream: "It's Obvious Now"

HOTGUITARS Duets, Duels & D.I.Y.'s (Kevyt Nostalgia) cd-r 9.98
From the same little Finnish label that brought us Kemialliset Ystavat's Varisevien Tanssi / Silmujen Marssi LP comes... Hotguitars! Hotguitars? That's Teemu Korpipaa and Jyrki Laiho, both men members of Circle (Jyrki currently, Teemu formerly). Not that this sounds anything like Circle. It's a home-made abstract improv instrumental noise kind of thing, with titles like "Gamelan Sausage" and "Thurston Does Something Jazz". Just Teemu and Jyrki screwing around with guitars and a four-track...though they're both credited with other instruments, like mandolin and 'banjolin', what I hear, mostly, is guitar noise. A la Japanese noisician Solmania. Or Mitsuru Tabata. Or Merzbow, not that he uses guitars that much. It's sometimes quite pleasant noise though. And actually occasionally there's some structure, beats and melodic content...what you could almost call 'song'! But a lot of this is washy, textural, droney, abstract, varied guitar-splurge. Imagine two distorted electric guitars that were actually animals, let loose in your home, running rampant, scurrying about, leaping up on the furniture, tumbling down the stairs, getting trapped in the dryer, sneaking into the kitchen and knocking over the cookie jar... They're really nice animals, really they are, but maybe too wild and not suitable as pets even though they're so cute. Of course this cd-r is quite limited, we've got 15 and that's it. For ever. Nice full-colour covers by the way.
MPEG Stream: "In The Sound Of Magnificence"
MPEG Stream: "Labor Lapse"

HOTOTGISU Pale Fatal Sister (Important) 2lp 29.00
There's really no point in beating around the bush anymore, Hototogisu are in fact a noise band. Before the cd-r boom, and the micro-label explosion, Hototogisu would have been releasing records on RRR. Not that there's anything wrong with being a noise band, but the duo that make up Hototogisu get described as drone, and free-rock, and black ambient, and all manner of descriptors, but basically this is in fact noise music. Soft noise for sure, and pretty noise almost certainly, but the drone and ambient elements are just that, elements of the big thick layered noise these two can make.
Marcia Bassett of Double Leopards and GHQ, Matthew Bower of Skullflower and Sunroof!, together fuse all of their various sonic proclivities into one huge heaving organic whole. That while drone-y and dreamy and ambient and shimmery, will be a tough sound to get lost in if you don't have at least a tiny soft spot for noise.
But the key here is the way the noise is shaped and crafted, this is now power electronics or face melting Japanoise, instead, this is a dense brew mixing the blurred crush of Total, the upper register ur-drone of Sunroof! and a big ol' chunk of swirling free guitar psych, a bit like a room full of Keiji Hainos jamming wildly, but slowed way down and layered and layered into a whirring buzzing howling free psych drone noise blur.
Like much music of this ilk, a glancing listen will reveal nothing but sound, a wall of deconstructed guitar noise, sheets of feedback, all garbled and chaotic and intense, but listen close, climb right in there, and you'll find yourself in a soundworld alive with melodies and rhythms, textures and harmonies, swirling skies of overlapping overtones, of crunchy buzzy anti-riffing, of warm whirring psychedelic ambience, a sounds as hypnotic and as mesmerizing as records much more mellow and subdued. Sort of like how the buzz of black metal can lull the listener, this caustic 4 sided slab of abstract guitarscapery, this heady and heavy blown out psychedelic din, can be strangely soothing and dreamy, while somehow miraculously managing to be noisy and abrasive and brutally blown out at the same time!
Gorgeous, super deluxe matte finish gatefold sleeves, and of course ULTRA LIMITED. ONLY 700 COPIES!

HOTOTOGISU Chimerendammerung (De Stijl) cd 13.98
Another brand new release, this one another actual cd release (not a cd-r), and again featuring Matthew Bower (Sunroof!, Skullflower, etc.) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards, Zaimph, GHQ, etc.) as they coax an endless flow of molten sounds from their array of instruments and noisemakers.
On Chimerendammerung, like most of the Hototogisu releases, the pair seem to be taking the dreamy drift of Bower's Sunroof! project, and supercharging it, giving it some serious teeth, what was once meditative and hypnotic, is now a serious slab of sound. A swirling vortex of distorted guitars, and bowed strings, all furiously whipped into a frothy psychedelic wash of buzzing overtones and blurring timbres. Within this dense chaotic miasma, are all sorts of raga like drones, muted rhythms, fragmented melodies, a veritable sea of strange sonic occurrences, blended together, piled atop one another, layer after layer. It's like exploring some alien ocean and drifting through the inky blackness, the only illumination coming from a panoply of mysteriously iridescent undersea oddities, the light and the subtle colors all blending into a dizzyingly overwhelming whole.
This may be noise music, and to the casual listener it may sound harsh and unmelodic, but the magic of this band, and these players, is the ability to create this music, this sort of noise, from distinctly un-noisy elements, which is why the final blast of sound, the disc you hold in your hands, is anything BUT noise, a beautiful and hypnotically captivating sound, so rich and textured and completely mesmerizing.
MPEG Stream: "One"
MPEG Stream: "Two"

HOTOTOGISU Prayer Rug Exorcism (Heavy Blosssom) cd 16.98
Holy crap, it seems like the Hototogisu is taking cues from the almighty Acid Mothers Temple as far as release schedules go. What is this their 5th, 6th, 10th release this year? Not that we're complaining. In fact we wouldn't mind a new one very week, just a little amazed and overwhelmed. Part of it is that they're all good. All great in fact, and Prayer Rug Exorcism is no exception. Hototogisu seems to be getting harsher and noisier with every release. The brooding droning shimmer of earlier excursions has given way to thick spiky walls of coruscating feedback, incandescent streaks of supernova guitar, keening high end skree, all layered on top of one another into a huge glacial wall of brain melting guitar pummel. A lot more Total than Sunroof! for sure. All four tracks on Prayer Rug Exorcism quickly build into chaotic squalls, and then hover there, not really building or shifting, just sort of spinning wildly in place, shooting sparks in all directions, a massive ball of super hot guitar fury, fierce and furious, like a transcendent six stringed sun, slowly growing hotter and hotter, not really changing in size or in color, just building pressure until finally the whole thing bursts into a million sparkling pieces, and we're left laying in silence, our hearing a thing of the past, the sound of Hototogisu permanently burned into the back of our skulls.
MPEG Stream: "Untitled One"
MPEG Stream: "Untitled Two"

HOTOTOGISU Robed In Verdigris (Nashazphone) lp 27.00
Another vinyl only missive from the dynamic duo that is Matthew Bower (Skullflower, Sunroof!, Total, etc.) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards, Zaimph, GHQ, etc.) and this one's a loud one. Well, they're all loud ones really, but this one is especially intense and aggressive, a serious slab of guitarnoise as only these two seem to do it.
It begins with thick washes of processed strum and grind, looped and layered, guitars and guitars and guitars, thick and viscous, swirling and whirling and eventually building to a Total like fervor, a keening coruscating high end raga, white hot and blown out, a seriously divine chunk of noisy psychedelia for sure. The rest of the record is just as dense and heavy and thick with guitars, but the high end explorations are scaled back, and the duo instead crawl through a swamp of murky muddy thrum and throb, a caustic morass of crumbling distortion and washed out sonics, with the occasional riff surfacing here and there, but never for long, just long enough to establish that it's an actual riff and not just another layer of droning guitar, before it slips away and once again -is- another layer of droning guitar. There are brief solar flares of high end effulgence, but they too flash briefly before being subsumed by the chaotic distorted black sea below.
Skullflower / Total / Bower / Bassett freaks need this bad. Thick vinyl, beautiful full color sleeves. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Supposedly already sold out at the label, so you know what that means...

HOTOTOGISU Sardonic Wooden Moonlight (Heavy Blossom) cd-r 11.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Yet another blast of sweet sonic skree from Mr. Matthew Bower and Ms. Marcia Bassett otherwise known as Hototogisu, which in case you didn't know is a type of Japanese Cuckoo. But by now, as we should all well know, the sound of -this- Hototogisu is a far cry from the sweet lilting birdsongs one might hear in the woods, that is unless of course you normally stroll through forests populated by ninety foot high armored bird monsters spewing fire and laying flat huge swaths of trees with it's crushing unstoppable stomp and melting skulls with its brutally screeching song!
This time around we've got another one of the super limited cd-r type releases, so act fast if you want one of these!! Sardonic Wooden Moonlight is a massive, seriously noisy two part epic, two half hour chunks of thick prickly fuzzy brrrrrrroooaaaaaarrr. You know what we're talking about, the sort of din Bower used to kick up in Total, like an orchestra of tuned vacuum cleaners spitting out thick sheets of soothing sonic sandpaper, a smoothed out industrial whir, like listening over the telephone to a massive metal forest collapsing in on itself, creaking and shrieking and howling, punctuated by jagged shards of guitar squeal, like pieces of sonic shrapnel floating across a thick black sea.
SUPER LIMITED. Cool poster style cover with transparent insert!
MPEG Stream: "Sardonic Wooden Moonlight Pt. 1 (excerpt)"

HOTOTOGISU Sculpture Built Upon The Graves (Heavy Blossom) cd-r 11.98
Another slab of swirling sonic thickness from the duo of Matthew Bower (Sunroof!, Skullflower) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards, GHQ, Zaimph). Huge whirls of guitar woven into dense tangles and staticky squalls. But WAY limited so probably gone before you know it.
MPEG Stream: "Storm"
MPEG Stream: "Tropical Malady"

HOTOTOGISU Some Blood Will Stick (Important) cd 14.98
These guys are killing us. It almost seems like a contest to see who can release the most material in the shortest amount of time. The main problem being that it's all so goddamn good. Especially when we're talking about Matthew Bower (Sunroof!, Skullflower) and his partner in sonic subversion Marcia Bassett (GHQ, Double Leopards, Zaimph).
This is the thirteenth release (that we know about) between these two since February, which is a lot to take in for sure, but if you're a fan of their particular brand of slow shifting wall of guitar dirge, then another massive blast is more than welcome.
The weird thing is, outside of Skullflower and Sunroof!, most of the music these two make is very sonically similar, which begs the question, why Hototogisu and Zaimph and GHQ, if the sound is fairly consistent. Sure each has it's own subtle nuances, and involves different folks, but it almost seems like everyone from all of the Bower/Bassett offshoots should just get together and form the world's most formidable free-noise ensemble. Then again, that might be a bit too much for anybody to handle. especially considering the sort of ruckus just the duo of Bassett and Bower can whip up.
On Some Blood Will Stick, the two are at their most caustic and metallic, huge washes of coruscating guitar, shrieking feedback, droning buzz, a massive roiling black sea of sound, peppered with all manner of industrial grind and corrosive crunch, and for the first time the vocals are actually audible, just barely, still buried way down in the mix like just another layer of furious freaked out sound, but occasionally the howling, shrieking super distorted black-metal-meets-Whitehouse yowl manages to rear it's ugly head before being sucked back under. Intense!
MPEG Stream: "One"
MPEG Stream: "Two"

HOTOTOGISU Under The Rose (Heavy Blossom) lp 22.00
There seems to be a bit of a noise renaissance going on these days. Not only are there more and more outfits whose specialty seems to be kicking up serious squalls of sonic chaos, but groups who dabbled in noise, or originators of noise music who had perhaps moved on, and often pushed the boundaries of what noise music was or could be, seem to be reverting to sounds much more primal and cathartic. Witness the most recent Skullflower. A blast of coruscating blown out skree. And here we have the latest from the duo Hototogisu, which just so happens to feature Mr. Bower. Hmmm. Maybe it's just Bower then. Skullflower briefly returned to THE RIFF recently, most notably with Exquisite Fucking Boredom, a series of looped seventies drug rock riffs, rendered increasingly disjointed and disembodied. And back in the day, Skullflower were a serious riff heavy thudrock combo. But over the last few records, the sound of Skullflower has gotten increasingly noisier. The cool thing though is that the noise is infused with a melodic sensibility Bower just can't seem to kick. Or maybe doesn't want to.
Now, Hototogisu, Bower's group with Marcia Bassett from GHQ and Double Leopards was always a noisy proposition, and that hasn't really changed much. here and there, the group would slip into something more drone-y or raga like, but noise was their reason for being. So it should com as no surprise that this latest lp is very very noisy. Two side long tracks, the first of which is seriously caustic, as always close listening reveals much going on, texture and rhythm and timbre, but it is very much a serious slab of noisemusic.
The B side however, is much more nuanced. And while still noisy, is much more melodic, drones and layers of buzz shifting and transforming, streaks of feedback, bits of rumble and whir, all wound around accidental melodies, and stretches of almost blissful noise. But noise it remains.
Thus, this is another one for the iron eared. Fans of Hototogisu and Bower and Bassett's various projects will most definitely dig, but those with sensitive ears or a low tolerance for sonic skree, tread very carefully...

HOTOTOGISU & BURNING CORE STAR s/t (Yik Yak) lp 14.98
This collaboration could have gone one of two ways, both equally appealing, blissed out and drone-y like the Burning Star Core albums that we've made records of the week in the past, or noisy and chaotic like most of the Hototogisu records we've reviewed. And while here and there this definitely falls somewhere right in between, for the most part, this falls squarely on the noisy side of things. Which is to be expected, guitars, electronics, voices, drums, percussion violin, Moog, objects (!), acoustic appraiser (!!), it would be no small feat to tie all that stuff up into something droney and composed. But then these folks excel at letting loose, unleashing sounds, unfurling huge clouds of blurred buzz, sending streaks of high end sparking into the atmosphere, conjuring up all manner of sonic demons with these slow shifting ur-drone rituals.
The drums are mostly scattered and abstract, but when they do lock into a groove, the sound briefly transforms into a sort of krautnoise jam, before coming loose again and drifting heavenward, sprawling out and raining sonic debris upon the swirling sea of abstract clatter and pulsing buzz drenched hum below.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!!

HOTOTOGISU + BURNING STAR CORE Volume 1 (DroneDisco) cd 11.98
Originally for sale as a tour only release, this little chunk of ear drum punishing goodness is finally available to the noise starved masses. Most AQ customers should be pretty familiar with Hototogisu by now, the duo of Matthew Bower (Skullflower, Total, Sunroof! and more) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards, GHQ, Zaimph) as well as Burning Star Core, aka C. Spencer Yeh (although here, BSC is expanded to a trio including some folks from Hair Police), and thus are probably pretty excited to hear what might happen when these two freenoise behemoths join forces.
And what in fact happens, is a big sprawling chaotic blown out spaced out free rock noise jam. The addition of drums makes a huge difference, grounding the sound in 'rock', but said drumming is free and abstract enough to let the music breath and expand and spread out like a black fog. The opener is a static Dead C style jam, a simple plodding beat, cymbals and kick drum mostly, while all around, dizzying swirls of guitar fuzz and thick swaths of distorted synth, and in there to some damaged electronics and of course some of Yeh's FX drenched violin. The backdrop is a constantly shifting swirl of noise and sound, but the simple plodding rhythm makes it sound like some ultra gritty lost krautrock rehearsal tape. 
The second track is a bit more unhinged, the background of the first song, brought to the fore and allowed to swallow everything up. The drums this time are just an incessant clanging buried in the mix, like a railroad crossing bell heard from within a tornado. Part way through some of the noise seems to coalesce into sort-of-riffs, and suddenly it a strangely propulsive slab of white hot white noise, albeit with a bit of groove to it. The next track is the most melodic, a gothy, doomy sort of glacial dirge, almost like an ultra lo-fi Hawkwind, crushing drums and more of that noisy blown out squall jammed into every crevice. The drums drop out almost entirely for the next number, the guitars and synths and violins and vocals spread out into long effulgent streaks, super noisy, but strangely hypnotic and dreamy. 
The final track is a sort of throwaway, a brief sputter of creaks and clatter, scrape and grind, angular and atonal, a blown out noise coda, but it's the loooooong tracks that make up the rest of the record that really hit the drone-dirge-noise spot. 
Packaged in a cool, black plastic case with a black and white cover, black and white insert, and each copy includes a button, one of 5 different designs chosen at random. 
MPEG Stream: "One"
MPEG Stream: "Two"

HOTOTOGISU / PRURIENT Snail On A Razor (Hospital) cd 11.98
We never really thought of Hototogisu as a 'noise' band. Sure they're noisy, sometimes REALLY noisy, but there is always a certain raga drone element to their thick-sheet-of-sound rooooaaaar, which makes perfect sense since the two members also make sounds in the Double Leopards and as Sunroof! / Skullflower. And in Hototogisu, you could always hear that struggle, between the Double Leopards' minimal murky crawl, the high end ur-drone of Sunroof! and Skullflower's coruscating wall of feedback pummel. And the results were divine, at once harsh and beautiful, glistening but jagged and brutal.
Then there's Prurient, who we ALWAYS considered to be a noise band. Shrieking feedback, industrial grind, primitive percussion, maniacal howling vocals, all wrapped in buzzing clouds of glitch and hiss and buzz and screech. A seriously intense and pulverizing onslaught of sound. BUT, Prurient also has that special something that keeps their records from sounding like third rate Merzbow or a wannabe Whitehouse. Sure it's noise music, but it's layered and textural and weird and in a really difficult harsh way, pretty dang listenable.
So what happens when you take those two completely different approaches to noise music and make them one? Well, to begin with, as you may have surmised, you get something pretty fucking noisy, and just a cursory listen reveals a thick squirming snarl of harsh hateful sound. And in fact, the first few listens had folks in the store wondering if this was actually blacknoise terrorists Stalaggh, and that's not all that far off the mark. But closer listening reveals a deep dark cavernous world of noise(s), deep resonant washes of rumbling buzz, foghorn-like blares of jagged grinding throb, thick waves of staticky hum, blinding flares of shrieking feedback, epic squalls of chest rattling low end moan, grinding industrial clatter blasted into glistening shards. all constantly pulsing, and throbbing, swaying and shifting, like drifting aimlessly across a stormy obsidian sea, where the water is a roiling swirl of black buzz, and the storm clouds above are thick smears of throbbing metallic crunch, the wind like gusts of ear splitting feedback, and you the listener clinging desperately to your stereo, lest you be hurled into blackness and swallowed whole. Pretty fucking cool.
MPEG Stream: "Snail On A Razor"
MPEG Stream: "This Is Now"

HOTOTOGISU, THE Befriending Demons (Mallard Lake) 3" cd-r 5.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
A super limited repressing of this awesome 3" from a few months back. Once these are gone, there will be not be another repress. The three inch cd seems to be the format of choice these days for all things avant / drone related. I guess it's part the novelty, but also the 20 minute limit is just perfect for one big long track. Like the modern day drone rock equivalent of our old friend the seven inch single. This super limited three inch just so happens to be the latest missive from Mr. Matthew Bower of Sunroof!, Skullflower, Total, etc. Bower is the Hototogisu, and on this disc that means gorgous, pulsing free noise, taking the crushing power of Skullflower and smoothing it out with the bliss of Sunroof! Two tracks merged into one twenty minute piece of strangled guitar chords, droning and throbbing, becoming more and more machinelike, until the whole thing is a keening, looped mass of distorted grit and vibrating hum, like an industrial Steve Reich, or a noise rock Terry Riley. Caustic and abrasive, but also hypnotic and beautiful.
MPEG Stream: "Befriending Demons"

HOTOTOGISU, THE Ghosts From The Sun (Important) 2cd 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Another massive sonic document from the dynamic duo of Matthew Bower (Sunroof!, Skullflower, Total, etc) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards). Ghosts From The Sun is a reissue of the super limited double cd-r of almost the same name (replace 'sun' with 'shit') released last year and finds the group drifting much closer to Bower's bliss rock outfit Sunroof!. While Hototogisu has always been a wilder and noisier beast than either member's other projects, most of the 'noise' is taken care of in the first eight minutes, a glorious burst of incendeiry feedback and churning guitar grrrrr. The rest of the first disc and all of disc two takes the Dead C and slips them some thorazine and the result is a woozy and druggy free noise workout, much heavier on the free than the noise. Each track has a thick brambly bed of distorted guitar thrum, atop which is draped streaks of high end feedback, huge slabs of low end throb and strange effected melodies stretched and twisted into yet more 'noise'. A swirling, surging morass of muscular heave and delicate flutter, an expanse of dense drifting sonic fog, a viscous flow of molten drone and rumble.
MPEG Stream: "Two "
MPEG Stream: "Three"

HOTOTOGISU, THE Green (Heavy Blosssom) cd 14.98
A new cd from Skullflower / Sunroof! mainman Matthew Bower's other ambient free noise outfit Hototogisu, and it's about time too, as most of the other Hototogisu and Sunroof! releases have been on cd-r and have been tough to get back in stock. Hototogisu is now, and has been for a while, a duo with Marcia Bassett of the Double Leopards, and their sound is definitely a bit more noisy and aggressive than in the past (as hinted at on the sleeve with the instrumentation listed as Bower on "oooowwwhh" and Bassett on "rrrggghh"), with sheets of corrosive guitars, spread into thick washes of screeching feedback, all over thick gurgling backgrounds of rumbling drones and glitchy malfunctioning electronics, occasionally splattered with bursts of chaotic percussion and maniacal abstract drum programming. But all of that random clatter and aggressive pummel is harnessed into an epic record of thick, throbbing guitar drone, not all that unlike Bower's old Total outift, or Skullflower at their most guitar heavy and free. Heavy and noisy indeed, but also blissfully hypnotic in that way that only a massive slab of droning guitars can be!
MPEG Stream: "Hellbore"
MPEG Stream: "Crimson Streams"

HOTOTOGISU, THE White Wind Of Autumn (Rural Electrification Program) 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.
Another amazing project from Mr. Matthew Bower (Skullflower/Total/Sunroof!) and his Rural Electrification Program. One has to wonder how one man can be so prolific and continually churn out such amazing sounds. But ours is not to question...
The disc starts off with what sounds like people playing ping pong accompanied by a shopping mall organ and sparsely plucked guitar, moody sparse and sort of whimsical. Track two finds Bower back in more familiar waters. A shimmering wash of high end harmonics and the sound of dripping water. Much mellower and dreamier than Sunroof!, all distant melodies, and guitar shimmers and delicate webs of feedback. Hypnotic and ethereally captivating.
RealAudio clip: "Moonpie"
RealAudio clip: "Poppyheadkid"

HOUSE OF LOW CULTURE Edward's Lament! (Neurot) cd 14.98
Aaron Turner should win some sort of award or something. He's not only the leader of post-rock metalcore masters Isis, and also one of the contributors to the genius of both Old Man Gloom and Lotus Eaters, but he also runs the excellent Hydra Head label, AND never fails to buy stacks of stuff here at Aquarius whenever he's in town. Not only that, but his art and graphics have graced some of our other favorite releases of late. So of course we're happy to present this new 2nd album from House of Low Culture, another outfit featuring Aaron and friends, including other members of Isis, Old Man Gloom and Lotus Eaters. HoLC is in fact probably closest to the droned-out ambient sounds of Lotus Eaters. Unsettling, illusory soundscapes, haunted and desolate. Edwards Lament! starts off in a realm of industrial, boiler room drone, before ghostly strummed guitars infiltrate the mix. Their distorted, slowly unfolding melodies are buried in shallow grave of reverb, accompanied by backwards-tape-fuckery, low-end rumble, echoey effects, dragging chains... You'll hear some voices, but this remains a mostly instrumental affair, and an extremely sombre one. We don't know who Edward is, or what it is he's lamenting, but this does sound sad. Weirdly, while not overtly 'Americana' or at all 'country', somehow this still does keep making us think of an abstract, phantom echo of Woven Hand or Souled American. Maybe Edward counts Blind Joe Death among his friends.
MPEG Stream: "On The Upswing"
MPEG Stream: "Edwards Lament"

HROPTR Silent Depravation (NOTHingness) cd-r 11.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

HUDAK, JOHN Don't Worry About Anything, I'll Talk To You Tomorrow (Alluvial) cd 11.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
John Hudak remains one of the underappreciated dronologists/lowercase composers, despite a number of really great albums notably "Brooklyn Bridge" and this album. "Don't Worry About Anything, I'll Talk To You Tomorrow" uses as its source material a phone conversation that took place between Hudak and his mother a year before she died. But the voices have been stripped of syllabic content to a bare sonorous abstraction with only the hints at conversational rhythms. Hudak uses these sounds to create a poetic miasma of timestretched insect-like shimmers and delicate tonalities that vibrate above a solemn quietness. A beautiful record that makes the impersonal and sterile Raster-label clickery seem, somehow, lacking.

HUDAK, JOHN Helene Marie: Reinterpretations (Alluvial) 2cd 15.98
When experimental composer John Hudak began working on his minimalist piece "Don't Worry About Anything; I'll Talk To You Tomorrow," he originally thought it would be released on vinyl, and so constructed two distinct movements (for the record's two sides). The piece was constructed via digital manipulation of an answering machine message left by Hudak's mother a year before her death. However, the subtlety of Hudak's work meant that the surface noise inherent with vinyl would be a problem, so Hudak opted to release an expanded version of one of the two movements on cd. Alluvial, who released that cd, liked the piece enough to commission a double cd of re-interpretations / remixes to accompany the original unreleased movement.
Hudak's work maintains a tenuous relationship with language, in particular the parallel between minimalism and haiku's communication of complex imagery through self-imposed restrictions. "Don't Worry About Anything" is one of Hudak's most evocative pieces, as he has stretched out the syllabic utterances of his mother's reassuring message into a delicate latticework of slow moving crystalline frequencies that exude a restrained sadness. That said, the unreleased movement doesn't really offer much more than the previously available version (which is ok if you don't have that), and neither do the remixes / reinterpretations on disc one by Jason Lescalleet, M. Behrens, Sukora, and Peter Duimelinks. However, disc two is far more interesting, with remixes / reinterpretations by Francisco Lopez, Eric Lanzillotta, Frans De Waard, and Leif Elggren. These four have all pulverized the original source material into granular rumblings and dense textural drones that offer uneasy responses to the delicacy of the original.
RealAudio clip: JOHN HUDAK "Don't Worry About Anything..."
RealAudio clip: FRANCISCO LOPEZ "Untitled #95"
RealAudio clip: ERIC LANZILLOTTA "Balmy Calm"
RealAudio clip: LEIF ELGGREN "Unitited (November 2000)"

HUDAK, JOHN Highway (Edition) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
John Hudak's minimalist sound experiments have often utilized single source materials. But unlike the elemental singularity of Aube where water, flourescent bulbs, and oscilators are transmogrified into almost interchangeable, dense noise fields, Hudak's choices are based upon the metaphoric content of the subject matter as in "Don't Worry About Anything..." which broke apart an answering machine message from his mother before she died. For "Highway," Hudak has extracted a quiet percolation from transient recordings from a freeway overpass. In spite Hudak's concept of turning the banal anger of road rage into a quiet Lopez-esque meditation of sound, the source material -- which could simply be a loose contact microphone bouncing against asphalt as cars rush by -- doesn't inspire any extended listens.

HUDAK, JOHN Pond (Meme) cd 16.98
While the origins for Hudak's sounds are purposefully ambiguous, the high-end shimmering drones appear with a clear organic textural density to them, that could easily be digitally timestretched chirps of crickets, locusts, or other twilight insects. Hudak pushes the envelope of these crystaline sounds close to the pain threshold, but restrains from going into Whitehouse territory for a more trancendental listening experience.

HUDAK, JOHN & STEPHAN MATHIEU Pieces Of Winter (Sirr) cd 14.98
Pieces of Winter was born of two compositions that the sound artists John Hudak and Stephan Mathieu recorded as holiday gifts for their friends during the 2002 Christmas season. Hudak is reknowned for his stone-faced minimalism of deconstructed acoustic phenomenon; and for -his- seasonal recording buried a contact microphone in the snow and captured the sound of the snow turning to ice. Mathieu had composed a piece with Eva-Lucy Mathieu for pump organ and ocarina, which in turn he transformed into calm and exquisitely warm piece of delicate drones. Commissioned by the Portugese label Sirr, the two married their previous recordings into a gentle exercise for minimalist grace, in which the two have removed all recognizable traces of the source material's distinctive qualities and extracted digital fragments that allude to the poetry of winter, snow, and the cold without overtly stating it. Steady cracklings form a steady stream of hushed gray textures, accentuated by crystalline pinpricks of pristine feedback whistlings. Later on, Pieces of Winter glistens with the delicate glitch collages that have become a signature for Mathieu on his celebrated Full Swing album. A word of warning, this album is very quiet, and you really have crank the volume to perceive the amount of detail found within!
MPEG Stream: "01"
MPEG Stream: "08"

HUDAK, JOHN / JASON LESCALLEET Figure 2 (Intransitive) cd 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
"Figure 2" is the second collaboration for sound artists John Hudak and Jason Lescalleet. Hudak's sound work is an extension of his work with delicate amplifications of emotive sounds which normally exist below the threshold of audibility, sounding like a less composed Bernhard Gunter. Lescalleet explores the expressive qualities of the lo-fi technology of reel-to-reel tape machines, damaged speakers, and ambient found sounds.
On an undisclosed winter night when the first blizzard of the season hit the Boston area, Hudak and Lescalleet were perfoming inside the warm confines of the Lindsay Chapel of the First Church Congregational in Cambridge. The first snow is always a mixed blessing as it offers on one hand the dramatic shift in the landscape from the drab grey of autumn to the blinding whites of early winter, yet on the other the snow obviously signifies the inevitability of cold weather. "Figure 2" subconsciously speaks of these dual emotions conjured by the encroaching winter. Using manipulations of recycled sounds from the dark old chapel itself, Hudak and Lescalleet present a series of slow sub-bass drones punctuated by eerie creakings of the wooden architecture and whistling tones from the wind rushing through cracks in the windows.
RealAudio clip: "Figure 2.2"
RealAudio clip: "Figure 2.5"

HUM OF THE DRUID Raising The New Wing/Braided Industry (SNSE) lp 16.98
Record number two from the mysteriously monickered Hum Of The Druid, and as we mentioned in the review of the first lp, that's exactly what you'll hear, some serious druidic hum, which is just something we made up so you'll just have to take our word for it. The follow up takes the already intense and heavy caustic drones of the first lps and takes it even further. Darker, filthier, heavier. At times it almost sounds like field recordings of a construction site chopped up and assembled into something slightly more musical, at others it sounds like Earth, circa 2, overdosed and slumped against a wall of Sunn amps cranked to 10, and at still others, it sounds a bit like someone spinning Masonna records on a busted Victrola. Indeed.
Massive swells of sound, all low end, and we mean VERY low end, super blown out, crumbling, Merzbowian, vast expanses of speaker destroying rumble, giving way to stretches of sound much more tranquil, like Masami Akita mixing Wolf Eyes. Sheets of murky industrial drift wreathed in corrosive buzz and wallowing in downtuned tectonic filth. Some parts sound like wind blowing on a microphone, but cranked to danger levels, other parts sound like a million turntables with the needle stuck in the run off groove of some super scratched up old record, peppered with the clatter and clank of some alien machinery, it's almost like a stereo test record, but instead of tones, it's a series of long, sprawling slabs of super intense drone, and speaker shredding grind and buzz. It's all very deep and abrasive, caustic and corrosive, but actually strangely mesmerizing.
Gorgeous and super creepy cover art too! We only have 15 copies and then it's gone for good...

HUM OF THE DRUID Societal (Snse) lp 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Hum of the druid indeed. Rarely does a band name so perfectly capture the essence of a band's sound. Societal is just one massive LP length druidic hum. The name may be spot on but the cover is a bit misleading, with its creepy evil Rudimentary Peni style cover, it definitely smacks of some obscure doom metal record, or when you also figure in the name, some sort of neo folk new weird America whatever. But no, Hum Of The Druid is indeed about THE HUM, which is essentially THE DRONE, which means this is definitely going to hit the spot for drone obsessives. However, unlike the slowly shifting static quality of a lot of drone records, Societal is a thick and roiling sonic stew, about as unsmooth as you can get. Static, crackle, hum, fuzz, the sound of ocean surf, radio interference, white noise, pink noise, record run off, it's as if HOTD took every naturally and un-naturally occurring source of hum and constructed this gorgeously thick layered chunk of squirming, twisting, shifting hum. It's ambient sure, but an impossibly grinding ambience, like some long lost Japanoise record with all the edges sanded off, or like listening to My Bloody Valentine, through the one remaining blown speaker on your car stereo, with the bass all the way up and the treble all the way down, rendering everything a warm mewling rumbly hum. Imagine listening to your favorite record with EVERY single cord and cable connecting your stereo components and speakers, pulled out far enough where they're just barely in there, the connection so tenuous, that your favorite record becomes an orchestra of bad connections, with only the occasional glimpse of the melody and music beneath the suffocating smear of glitch and crackle and indeed hum!

HUM OF THE DRUID / FIRE IN THE HEAD split (Audio Immolation Industries / Cipher Productions) lp 15.98
We recently reviewed a full length lp from Hum Of The Druid, Raising The New Wing..., a mighty caustic slab of noise drenched drones and fucked up ambience. For a record that harsh and harrowing, we really couldn't stop listening to it (and yeah, we have a few copies left). So we were psyched to discover a new record by them (him?), a split with another noisemaker we dig, but have yet to review anything by.
The Hum Of The Druid side is more of what we've been hankering for. A dense sea of crumbling distortion and blown out grit, a spray of grizzled amp buzz and all manner of hum and crackle and glitch. There are brief interludes of abstract ambience, laced with bits of feedback, but those are merely brief respites from the relentless onslaught. The HotD side ends with some super creeped out blackened drones, lots of distorted in-the-red low end, and tortured anguished howls buried way down in the mix, culminating in a super jagged speaker destroying crunch and glitch outro.
Fire In The Head most definitely hold their own, opening with slithery slowed down guitar drones, underneath creepy fucked up samples, plenty of buzz and glitch, all over a thick sea of processed rumbles and whirs, there's definitely an old school industrial vibe, intense and haunting, lots of vocal samples. It all builds to a seriously fired filed of static, underpinning cool super effected demonic vokills, doused in distortion and reverb. Super super creepy. The side ends with some awesomely distorted blown out rhythms, all stuttery and chopped up, like some damaged metallic noise dub. Cool.
Super nice packaging. Thick black sleeve with paste on covers on each side, and Rudimentary Peni fans take note, the Fire In The Head side features original Nick Blinko artwork! Also includes a printed insert / lyric sheet, and of course, it's ultra limited, and we only got a handful.

HUMAN QUENA ORCHESTRA Means Without Ends (Daft Alliance) cd 12.98
Various permutations of this disc have been floating around for a while, each in various states of completeness, but every one we'd heard sounded even better than the last. But this is the one, the final, finished product. The long in the works Human Quena Orchestra, the work of Ryan Unks, formerly of techgrind combo Creation Is Crucifixion, but don't be expecting grind, or even technicality, this all the way on the other side of the spectrum. Abject, filthy, pummeling, slow motion noise drenched doom. A plodding sonic monster, guitars, not just distorted, but treated and twisted into harsh, skin scraping, caustic slabs of sinister sound, a low end so thick, it's like dunking your head in a cement mixer, insane sounding drums, each snare crack like the recording of a million breaking windows, each kick drum the sound of a slowed down car wreck. And beneath it all, thick swells of black ambience, drifting and slithering, pulsing and swelling. A lurching, stumbling blackened doom dirge behemoth. 
Think Swans, Godflesh, Pitchshifter, that sort of machinelike apocalyptic industrial pound, mixed with some funereal ultra doom a la Moss, Bunkur, etc., but filtered through a druggy psychedelia, with a minimal shimmery drone bent, that ends up sounding like a way more brutal, way more harsh, tripped out, psychedelic, industrial version of Jesu, that sort of blissed out sun baked vibe, but as if played by some misanthropic black metal horde, harsh blackened vocals, shrieking hysterically and growling demonically over the relentless amp melting metallic trudge. Every track is rife with layer after layer of undulating low end. Like being tossed about on a stormy sea, but instead of water, it's an endless expanse of roiling black sound waves, rumbling drones, and thick snarled streaks of throbbing bass. 
The magic Of Unks' Human Quena Orchestra though is that this hellish harshness is balanced with a nearly equal amount of meditative ambience, long stretches of deep shimmer, and even some of the harshest tracks are tempered by the swirling low end drift lurking beneath. So brutally gorgeous. Definitely essential listening for fans of all the above mentioned outfits, as well as Monarch, Nadja, the Angelic Process, Fear Falls Burning, Skullflower, Abruptum, Monument Of Urns, Trollmann, Khanate, The Body and all our favorite purveyors of crumbling downtuned beauty and dreamy damaged doom.
Packaged in a gorgeous hand screened multiple panel fold over sleeve with super striking ADD style microscopic super detailed artwork. 
MPEG Stream: "The Ballad Of Ayn Rand"
MPEG Stream: "Believer"
MPEG Stream: "To Eat One's Way From The Inside Out"

HUMCRUSH Hornswoggle (Rune Grammofon) cd 16.98
The duo of drummer Thomas Stronen (Food) and keyboardist Stale Storlokken (Supersilent) are back with a second album of playful, percolating improvisation on the ever-reliable Rune Grammofon label. Now these Norwegians are calling themselves Humcrush, which was the title of their album from last year, issued under their own names. Whatever they call it, the music they make is pretty neat. It's a restless blend of live instruments and electronics that somehow sounds catchy and composed, even though this is live-in-the-studio improv. Maybe it's too obscure of a reference, but Humcrush could perhaps be likened to a collision between the Shaking Ray Levis and Autechre. Inventive, very much rhythmically alive and full of glitchy abstraction, some of Hornswoogle would make groovy music for a jungle-themed lounge populated by dancing robots. Other parts feature cinematic atmospheres, or bleepy bloopy computer jingles, or sitar-y keyboards, or what sound a bit like fractured calypso beats... all very exotic and inventive and (importantly) quite listenable, considering it's just Stronen and Storlokken shaking out their respective bags of tricks, on the go. And then the final track, "Cyborg I" takes a turn for the uneasy. It's like the part of a horror film where the doll comes to life and kills everybody (sez Pam).
MPEG Stream: "Hornswoogle"
MPEG Stream: "Seersucker"

HUSH ARBORS s/t (Reissue) (Digitalis) cd 12.98
Long overdue reissue of the out of print debut from Hush Arbors, aka Keith Wood. These tracks are warm and rich, hazy and mysterious free folk explorations of the highest order, each track like some long lost artifact, buried beneath a hundred year old tree, in the middle of the forest, and only just discovered, dusted off and allowed to play...
Woozy warbly drones, thick and dense, rumble and whir over a delicate bed of foresty folk, dreamy and blissy and otherworldly. Wood's fragile falsetto soars high above, another soft swirly layer in the dense tapestry of Hush Arbors' sound. This is exactly what you would expect to hear stumbling upon a forest cathedral, a mighty structure of bent limb trees, thick foliage, a soft wet bed of leaves underfoot, dark but for occasional shafts of sunlight, somber with hushed reverence but so alive and infused with energy, warm and safe and beautiful. Some tracks are fragile dreamlike folk, reminding us a bit of the Skygreen Leopards, due in no small part to the sweet swoonsome oh so high vocals, while other tracks forego melody completely instead opting to drift lazily, wrapping the word in a wreath of sonic shimmer.
Packaged in a plastic sleeve with a cool gold metallic paper sleeve. Includes brief liner notes from Six Organs Of Admittance's Ben Chasny.
MPEG Stream: "Magic Wood"
MPEG Stream: "The Same Tree Forever"

HUSH ARBORS Since We Have Fallen (Harvest Recordings) lp 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Back in stock for a split second. Managed to get a few more copies...
Quite possibly one of the nicest lp packages we have seen. Definitely top 10. Hard to even know how to describe it. You sort of have to hold int and unfold it and feel the texture and the heft. Wow. Thick textured cardstock, fastened all over with black rivets, the whole thing embossed and letterpressed with black ink, abstract designs and very classy looking calligraphy, the back is die cut about half way down, so it opens like a barn door, split down the middle, held shut by black string, once opened, it reveals the 180 gram lp nestled inside as well as still more embossed design and text. So gorgeous.
And the music is definitely deserving of such over the top extra attention. A reissue of a long out of print cd-r, Hush Arbors explore a dark murky side of their soul, a drifting cloudy otherworld of soft freefolk bliss, flecked with all manner of detuned guitars, warped melodies, creaking percussive clatter, shimmery effervescence, but with a definite ominous edge, a lo-fi Third eye Foundation recording for Siltbreeze maybe? But with more twang, and more shuffle, and more delicate dreaminess. So nice.
An essential dreamfolk / free folk / folknoise / dronetwang artifact beautifully preserved and offered up again for a very limited time.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Each copy hand numbered, we got a bunch but these definitely won't last.

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

HWYL NOFIO Anatomy Of Distort (Hwyl Nofio) cd-r 16.98
Been waiting a long time for this one. The last two Hwyl Nofio's were and still are all time AQ faves, and judging from how many we sell, you all most likely feel the same! And a cd-r of Anatomy Of Distort has been on CONSTANT repeat play at home. Which makes sense since we described an earlier Hwyl record as being our "absolute favorite bliss out, late night, chill out record ever!". And Anatomy Of Distort takes HN's sound even farther in that direction, if that were even possible. All of the more traditional song like elements present on the first two records have been stripped away, leaving a ghostly trace, a wavering sonic imprint of some mysterious sound that once was, but that is slowly and purposefully revealing itself to us, bit by bit, slivers of sound slipping into our line of sight, distant melodies, slowly materializing at the farthest reaches of our perceptible sound field. Haunting, drifing clouds of lower register thrum,
faraway pizzicato melodies, percussion built from expansive empty room clatter, the thud of ghostly footprints, the creak and bump of rarely opened doors. Occasional slow motion monster piano plod, gorgeously suspenseful and dimly lit, over an ocean of reverberating, bowed metals, creating ominous smears of dark and indistinct sonic haze, all ocasionally engulfed in massive, warm washes of molten guitar feedback, at once fierce and full of fury, but somehow still completely dreamy and mesmerizing. It's always hard to not slip into hyperbole on the AQ list, but even harder when we're dealing with a record this good. Having said that, this is probably one of the most beautiful drone records you will hear this year. Ever maybe. So completely dense with hidden sounds and rich with sonic layers, totally blissful and perfect for drifting off, but complex enough to reward close scrutiny and active listening. Most certainly for fans of Jonathan Coleclough, Andrew Chalk, Deathprod, Total, Sunroof!, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Sunn 0 ))), Earth, Nurse With Wound, and folks who recently picked up recent releases by Unicorn, Lugosi, Birchville Cat Motel, BJ Nilsen, and Monos will NOT want to miss this. Packaged in an oversized, slimline style DVD case, with a nice photographic insert and LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!!
MPEG Stream: "The Life And Death Of Joseph Merrick"
MPEG Stream: "Red Herald"

HWYL NOFIO Hounded By Fury (Hwyl Nofio) cd 15.98
There are always gonna be special bands, the ones that hold a unique place in your heart. That band you heard when you were on a trip. The band you have loved since the first time you heard them. The band whose songs featured heavily on that mix tape. And then any variati