ALVA NOTO Transform (Mille Plateaux) 2lp 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Although I don't predict that Carsten Nicolai (aka Noto and Alva Noto) will be taking a sabbatical any time soon, the global electronica community might be better for it if he did. Not because his work's not great -- quite the opposite. It's just that the proliferation of Noto imitators might subside, and maybe artists would be more inclined to try something new. Maybe. Unfortunately, such statements of discontent about Nicolai's ubiquitous sound go completely out the window when confronted by the all around success of an album like "Transform." As with anybody whose aesthetic has been blindly copied throughout an art scene, Nicolai has talent. He's the original. And while "Transform" does exactly what you expect -- Nicolai mutates 60 cycle hums, static pops, and terse electron pinpricks into perfect, post-techno grooves -- it is certainly his strongest production to date.

ALVA NOTO Unitxt (Raster-Noton) cd 17.98
We love Alva Noto. His minimal rhythmic soundscapes are just so fantastic, dense and complex but at the same time impossibly simple and spare. And everything he does is so high concept. But in a way, that's not obvious just listening to the music. This may be art, high concept art, but the resulting sounds transcend art, and become music, and grooves, pleasing to the ear, not only the mind.Ê
Unitxt is Alva Noto's (aka Carsten Nicolai) return to 'the rhythm' after a handful of releases (in several different series) that were much more esoteric and ambient. Unitxt is still pretty ridiculously high concept, with the songs developed through various methods: one song is a portrait of Nicolai converted into sound, another is based on the golden ratio, a recitation of an endless row of numbers, another is based on a reading of the various items in Nicolai's wallet, credit cards, business cards, notes, just reading the words and numbers and converting the resulting information into sound. Endlessly amusing for sure, but it wouldn't mean shit if the music was bad. Thankfully, this is exactly the stuff we love from Nicolai, super clinical machine like soundscapes of skitter and glitch. everything sharp and clipped, the grooves far from funky, at least in the normal sense, but VERY funky in some sort of fucked up futuristic minimal robot dancefloor way. A few of the tracks feature vocals, but they're in German, and spoken quickly and rhythmically, making them less like lyrics and more like another overlaid rhythm (especially when the voice is just reciting numbers).
Imagine a huge white glass cube filled with robots, all hunkered over computers and drum machines, and synthesizers and equalizers, everything totally automated, huge gears turning, machines pulsing, the robots locked into the same motion over and over, a strange assembly line. At the end, a tiny speaker, facing a huge empty grassy field, a blue sky, nothing in the sky but a single white cloud. Perfectly ovoid. Out of the speaker comes this. That's what we imagine when we listen to Unitxt. Stripped down, cool and clinical outer space future robot anti-funk, laced with plenty of sculpted buzz and crackle, and shaped from bits of hiss and crunch.
Tacked on to the end of the record, are a whole series of fragments and sound sources, each created from transforming an image or information into sound. These are 'Source Code Solos' to be played over the other tracks, or might assume, that with these sounds, and your own giant robot manned glass cube sound factory, you could make your very own Unitxt!
MPEG Stream: "U_07"
MPEG Stream: "U_06"
MPEG Stream: "U_04"

ALVA NOTO Unitxt (Raster-Noton) 2lp 23.00
We love Alva Noto. His minimal rhythmic soundscapes are just so fantastic, dense and complex but at the same time impossibly simple and spare. And everything he does is so high concept. But in a way, that's not obvious just listening to the music. This may be art, high concept art, but the resulting sounds transcend art, and become music, and grooves, pleasing to the ear, not only the mind.Ê
Unitxt is Alva Noto's (aka Carsten Nicolai) return to 'the rhythm' after a handful of releases (in several different series) that were much more esoteric and ambient. Unitxt is still pretty ridiculously high concept, with the songs developed through various methods: one song is a portrait of Nicolai converted into sound, another is based on the golden ratio, a recitation of an endless row of numbers, another is based on a reading of the various items in Nicolai's wallet, credit cards, business cards, notes, just reading the words and numbers and converting the resulting information into sound. Endlessly amusing for sure, but it wouldn't mean shit if the music was bad. Thankfully, this is exactly the stuff we love from Nicolai, super clinical machine like soundscapes of skitter and glitch. everything sharp and clipped, the grooves far from funky, at least in the normal sense, but VERY funky in some sort of fucked up futuristic minimal robot dancefloor way. A few of the tracks feature vocals, but they're in German, and spoken quickly and rhythmically, making them less like lyrics and more like another overlaid rhythm (especially when the voice is just reciting numbers).
Imagine a huge white glass cube filled with robots, all hunkered over computers and drum machines, and synthesizers and equalizers, everything totally automated, huge gears turning, machines pulsing, the robots locked into the same motion over and over, a strange assembly line. At the end, a tiny speaker, facing a huge empty grassy field, a blue sky, nothing in the sky but a single white cloud. Perfectly ovoid. Out of the speaker comes this. That's what we imagine when we listen to Unitxt. Stripped down, cool and clinical outer space future robot anti-funk, laced with plenty of sculpted buzz and crackle, and shaped from bits of hiss and crunch.
Tacked on to the end of the record, are a whole series of fragments and sound sources, each created from transforming an image or information into sound. These are 'Source Code Solos' to be played over the other tracks, or might assume, that with these sounds, and your own giant robot manned glass cube sound factory, you could make your very own Unitxt!
MPEG Stream: "U_07"
MPEG Stream: "U_06"
MPEG Stream: "U_04"

ALVA NOTO Univrs (Raster-Noton) cd 17.98
After a multitude of records filled with austere expanses of ultra minimal, cold and clinical beep and click, or warm lush dreamlike ambience, Alva Noto, aka Carsten Nicolai, finally seemed to embrace the funk a few years back - which for some of us, would not have been a good thing necessarily, if it weren't Nicolai, cuz Alva Noto funk is something utterly unto itself, a wild super dynamic robotic funk that takes all manner of glitch and whir, hum and click, beep and hiss, and weaves those minimal building blocks into something incredibly and impossibly groovy. This might be the best Alva Noto funk record yet. Weird and minimal enough for the dancefloor hating avant experimental headphone set, but holy shit, we can barely imagine what would happen if some big time DJ just unleashed one of these jams at full volume, besides everyone going apeshit, it seems like everybody's brains and eardrums would just melt, these sounds so pure, the lows so intense and rib cage rattlingly low, the highs piercing sine waves, and in-between, all manner of hum and hiss that we imagine would blow your hair back if you were standing in front of a big pile of speakers. But in headphones, this is total bliss out alien robofunk, that sounds better than anything we can imagine! But this is Alva Noto, so there's lots of other stuff going on, long stretches of glitched out super ominous buzz, over some looped skitter, or some weird swirling lush drones, or some dizzying rapidfire percussive stutter, some full on speaker shredding noise, some gorgeously serene electronic ambience, but it always eventually returns to the funk, or the groove, or whatever you call the thing that makes these weird beeps and clicks take over your body and force it to move along to the music. So goddamn great!
MPEG Stream: "Uni C"
MPEG Stream: "Uni Fac"
MPEG Stream: "Uni Rec"

ALVA NOTO Univrs (Raster-Noton) 2x12" 23.00
After a multitude of records filled with austere expanses of ultra minimal, cold and clinical beep and click, or warm lush dreamlike ambience, Alva Noto, aka Carsten Nicolai, finally seemed to embrace the funk a few years back - which for some of us, would not have been a good thing necessarily, if it weren't Nicolai, cuz Alva Noto funk is something utterly unto itself, a wild super dynamic robotic funk that takes all manner of glitch and whir, hum and click, beep and hiss, and weaves those minimal building blocks into something incredibly and impossibly groovy. This might be the best Alva Noto funk record yet. Weird and minimal enough for the dancefloor hating avant experimental headphone set, but holy shit, we can barely imagine what would happen if some big time DJ just unleashed one of these jams at full volume, besides everyone going apeshit, it seems like everybody's brains and eardrums would just melt, these sounds so pure, the lows so intense and rib cage rattlingly low, the highs piercing sine waves, and in-between, all manner of hum and hiss that we imagine would blow your hair back if you were standing in front of a big pile of speakers. But in headphones, this is total bliss out alien robofunk, that sounds better than anything we can imagine! But this is Alva Noto, so there's lots of other stuff going on, long stretches of glitched out super ominous buzz, over some looped skitter, or some weird swirling lush drones, or some dizzying rapidfire percussive stutter, some full on speaker shredding noise, some gorgeously serene electronic ambience, but it always eventually returns to the funk, or the groove, or whatever you call the thing that makes these weird beeps and clicks take over your body and force it to move along to the music. So goddamn great!
MPEG Stream: "Uni C"
MPEG Stream: "Uni Fac"
MPEG Stream: "Uni Rec"

ALVA NOTO Xerrox (Raster-Noton) cd 17.98
Like most Raster-Noton releases, the latest from Alva Noto begins with plenty of stutter and squelch,Êsinewaves and dog whistle tones, subterranean rumble and digital clips, but it's actually kind of misleading, as the rest of the disc exists in a sonic landscape much closer to the Kompakt sounds of Pop Ambient, or the hissy soft focus ambience of Tim Hecker, than the lowercase world of glitch and squeak.Ê
The first three tracks are strange minimal sonic experiments, plenty of hiss and scrape, static and hum, but it's track four, "Haliod Xerrox Copy 3 (Paris)", where suddenly things get downright pretty. Soft distant swells, mysterious slow motion loops, hard to say whether the sounds are synthesizers or tape loops or field recordings, although according to the liner notes all the sounds here are drawn from airports, in flight announcements and telephone hold music, but by 'xeroxing" these sounds over and over, and letting each copy degrade just a little,ÊAlva Noto takes those degraded sounds and shapes them into lovely blurred dronescapes, eventually wrapping them in soft prickly layers of digital hiss, which only adds to the soft focus romance and dreamlike otherworldliness.Ê
The tracks are named and grouped thematically. The ultra short "Astoria" tracks seem to act as brief respites, tiny sonic events separating the longer more song based tracks. The focus seems to be on those particular songs, each named "Haliod Xerrox Copy" and numbered or given an extra title in parentheses, these are gorgeous fuzzy, blown out dreamy drifts, all reminiscent ofÊ"Haliod Xerrox Copy 3 (Paris)" but each, with its own distinctive flow, seemingly drawn from the same sonic template and utilizing a similar melodic theme, but softly molded into subtly different shapes. In "Haliod Xerrox Copy 2 (Airfrance)" it's all warm fuzz and muted white noise, a dense buzz, that is more soothing than abrasive. Moments later, in "Haliod_Xerrox_Copy_6" the buzz becomes washed out, pulsing louder and then quieter, while off in the distant, we are able to observe gentle lilting sonic events, as if alva notojourney, a much heavier drone element. This is intense, brooding, beautiful too, but haunting and ominous, a gorgeous minimal sonic smear of M83 fuzz, Tim Hecker-ish sepia toned blur, and Basinski-esque looped dreaminess, all wrapped in Noto's thick fuzzy ambient buzz.Ê
The cd comes packaged in another striking and strange oversized Raster-Noton package, a multiple panel fold out sleeve, with die cuts holding the disc in place.
MPEG Stream: "Haliod Xerrox Copy 4"
MPEG Stream: "Haliod Xerrox Copy 3 (Paris)"
MPEG Stream: "Haliod Xerrox Copy 2 (Air France)"

ALVA NOTO Xerrox (Raster-Noton) lp 26.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Like most Raster-Noton releases, the latest from Alva Noto begins with plenty of stutter and squelch,Êsinewaves and dog whistle tones, subterranean rumble and digital clips, but it's actually kind of misleading, as the rest of the disc exists in a sonic landscape much closer to the Kompakt sounds of Pop Ambient, or the hissy soft focus ambience of Tim Hecker, than the lowercase world of glitch and squeak.Ê
The first three tracks are strange minimal sonic experiments, plenty of hiss and scrape, static and hum, but it's track four, "Haliod Xerrox Copy 3 (Paris)", where suddenly things get downright pretty. Soft distant swells, mysterious slow motion loops, hard to say whether the sounds are synthesizers or tape loops or field recordings, although according to the liner notes all the sounds here are drawn from airports, in flight announcements and telephone hold music, but by 'xeroxing" these sounds over and over, and letting each copy degrade just a little,ÊAlva Noto takes those degraded sounds and shapes them into lovely blurred dronescapes, eventually wrapping them in soft prickly layers of digital hiss, which only adds to the soft focus romance and dreamlike otherworldliness.Ê
The tracks are named and grouped thematically. The ultra short "Astoria" tracks seem to act as brief respites, tiny sonic events separating the longer more song based tracks. The focus seems to be on those particular songs, each named "Haliod Xerrox Copy" and numbered or given an extra title in parentheses, these are gorgeous fuzzy, blown out dreamy drifts, all reminiscent ofÊ"Haliod Xerrox Copy 3 (Paris)" but each, with its own distinctive flow, seemingly drawn from the same sonic template and utilizing a similar melodic theme, but softly molded into subtly different shapes. In "Haliod Xerrox Copy 2 (Airfrance)" it's all warm fuzz and muted white noise, a dense buzz, that is more soothing than abrasive. Moments later, in "Haliod_Xerrox_Copy_6" the buzz becomes washed out, pulsing louder and then quieter, while off in the distant, we are able to observe gentle lilting sonic events, as if viewed through a dense fog. Later on, "Haliod Xerrox Copy 1" returns to the billowy bliss of track 4, offering long soft contrails of sound, floating weightless amidst swirls of smeared radio static and and the sound of TV channel snow.
The disc finishes with the lengthy "Haliod_Xerrox_Copy 9", the most dramatic of the bunch. The melody is again similar, there is still plenty of hiss and fuzz and white noise, but the low end is more intense, giving the track more weight and emotion, the peaks and valleys too are more pronounced, a much more dynamic musical journey, a much heavier drone element. This is intense, brooding, beautiful too, but haunting and ominous, a gorgeous minimal sonic smear of M83 fuzz, Tim Hecker-ish sepia toned blur, and Basinski-esque looped dreaminess, all wrapped in Noto's thick fuzzy ambient buzz.
MPEG Stream: "Haliod Xerrox Copy 4"
MPEG Stream: "Haliod Xerrox Copy 3 (Paris)"
MPEG Stream: "Haliod Xerrox Copy 2 (Air France)"

ALVA NOTO Xerrox Vol.2 (Raster-Noton) cd 17.98
Part two of Alva Noto's Xerrox series takes up right where the last one left off, continuing on in a much more buzzy, blissy, droney vein, way more textural and melodic than many of the AN records that have come before. In the review of volume one we mentioned Pop Ambient, and if anything volume 2 is even more washed out and shimmery, right out of the gate, AN offers up a warm wash of muted buzz, and thick gristly whir, softly pulsating, layered and warm, seemingly gone are the harsh tones and glitchy clicks and pops found on most Raster-Noton releases. Could be that Xerrox is just a concept record, but we have to say, as much as we loved the clipped minimalism of other Alva Noto records, the sounds here are quite divine. But this is an Alva Noto record, so even these warm whirls of drifting ambience, are laced with bits of static and hiss, super high end sine waves, but they're woven deftly into the sound, and serve to simply add more texture. There's a brief bit of super minimal beep and rumble, but then it's right back into that gorgeous drifty haze, that could just as soon be a Tim Hecker record.
"Xerrox Meta Phaser" follows suit, at least in the beginning, a soft whirring soundscape, that quickly escalates into an almost Sunn like dirge before exploding into a squall of blown out white noise. And then we're back to the dreamy dronemusic, this time, stretched out strings, smeared into soft summery swells, laced with a patina of gritty hiss, and so it goes, the whole record is a dark swirling expanse of muted minimal melodies, warm textures, mysterious drones, and delicate hazy drifts, the usual glitch and buzz, relegated to accents and filigree, rarely interfering in the rest of the record's blissy sprawl. Any one of these tracks would be right at home on the newest, more Kranky-fied Pop Ambient comp, and thus, this might be the first Raster-Noton record that might just appeal to all the drone and dirge folks as much as the glitch and pop people.
Like all R-N stuff, gorgeously designed and packaged, an oversized diecut, 8 panel sleeve, the cd nestled within the diecuts, the art spare and minimal and striking.
MPEG Stream: "Xerrox Phaser Acat 1"
MPEG Stream: "Xerrox Soma"
MPEG Stream: "Xerrox Meta Phaser"

ALVA NOTO Xerrox Vol.2 (Raster-Norton) 2lp 23.00
Now available on vinyl!
Part two of Alva Noto's Xerrox series takes up right where the last one left off, continuing on in a much more buzzy, blissy, droney vein, way more textural and melodic than many of the AN records that have come before. In the review of volume one we mentioned Pop Ambient, and if anything volume 2 is even more washed out and shimmery, right out of the gate, AN offers up a warm wash of muted buzz, and thick gristly whir, softly pulsating, layered and warm, seemingly gone are the harsh tones and glitchy clicks and pops found on most Raster-Noton releases. Could be that Xerrox is just a concept record, but we have to say, as much as we loved the clipped minimalism of other Alva Noto records, the sounds here are quite divine. But this is an Alva Noto record, so even these warm whirls of drifting ambience, are laced with bits of static and hiss, super high end sine waves, but they're woven deftly into the sound, and serve to simply add more texture. There's a brief bit of super minimal beep and rumble, but then it's right back into that gorgeous drifty haze, that could just as soon be a Tim Hecker record.
"Xerrox Meta Phaser" follows suit, at least in the beginning, a soft whirring soundscape, that quickly escalates into an almost Sunn like dirge before exploding into a squall of blown out white noise. And then we're back to the dreamy dronemusic, this time, stretched out strings, smeared into soft summery swells, laced with a patina of gritty hiss, and so it goes, the whole record is a dark swirling expanse of muted minimal melodies, warm textures, mysterious drones, and delicate hazy drifts, the usual glitch and buzz, relegated to accents and filigree, rarely interfering in the rest of the record's blissy sprawl. Any one of these tracks would be right at home on the newest, more Kranky-fied Pop Ambient comp, and thus, this might be the first Raster-Noton record that might just appeal to all the drone and dirge folks as much as the glitch and pop people.
Like all R-N stuff, gorgeously designed and packaged, an oversized diecut, 8 panel sleeve, the cd nestled within the diecuts, the art spare and minimal and striking.
MPEG Stream: "Xerrox Phaser Acat 1"
MPEG Stream: "Xerrox Soma"
MPEG Stream: "Xerrox Meta Phaser"

ALVA NOTO & RYUICHI SAKAMOTO Insen (Asphodel) cd 13.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Insen is the exquisite follow-up to Vrioon, which was the first collaborative outing for seminal electronic musicians Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nicolai) and Ryuichi Sakamoto that came out in 2003. As on their first album, Insen centers upon the balance between the impressionist piano passages of Sakamoto and the cold yet graceful production of Nicolai. While the differences between the two records are subtle, they are certainly noteworthy as Nicolai slices up Sakamoto's piano into fine slivers of time-stretched fragments, terse rhythms, and blurred ambience. In turn, Nicolai realigns these sounds with Sakamoto's untreated notes, providing a complex interplay between the piano and its fractured electronic mimesis. In structuring all of the pieces on Insen, Nicolai occasionally situates his electronics along a parallel path to Sakamoto's piano, and slowly moves the two paths toward different directions, with Nicolai's rhythms achieving velocity and tension whereas Sakamoto's pointillist notes remain weighless and transient. Yet, Nicolai always teases with losing control over the composition, as he often snaps back into a somber atmosphere of minimalist smears, resorting to a similiar strategy as heard on Eno's epic Thursday Afternoon. Stunning.
MPEG Stream: "Aurora"
MPEG Stream: "Logic Moon"

ALVA NOTO & RYUICHI SAKAMOTO Insen (Raster-Noton) cd 17.98
Formerly released on Asphodel, now on Raster-Noton!
Insen is the exquisite follow-up to Vrioon, which was the first collaborative outing for seminal electronic musicians Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nicolai) and Ryuichi Sakamoto that came out in 2003. As on their first album, Insen centers upon the balance between the impressionist piano passages of Sakamoto and the cold yet graceful production of Nicolai. While the differences between the two records are subtle, they are certainly noteworthy as Nicolai slices up Sakamoto's piano into fine slivers of time-stretched fragments, terse rhythms, and blurred ambience. In turn, Nicolai realigns these sounds with Sakamoto's untreated notes, providing a complex interplay between the piano and its fractured electronic mimesis. In structuring all of the pieces on Insen, Nicolai occasionally situates his electronics along a parallel path to Sakamoto's piano, and slowly moves the two paths toward different directions, with Nicolai's rhythms achieving velocity and tension whereas Sakamoto's pointillist notes remain weighless and transient. Yet, Nicolai always teases with losing control over the composition, as he often snaps back into a somber atmosphere of minimalist smears, resorting to a similiar strategy as heard on Eno's epic Thursday Afternoon. Stunning.
MPEG Stream: "Aurora"
MPEG Stream: "Logic Moon"

ALVA NOTO & RYUICHI SAKAMOTO Insen (Raster-Noton) lp 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Now available on vinyl! Be warned though, that the vinyl version only contains -some- of the music on the cd! Here's what we had to say about that cd:
Insen is the exquisite follow-up to Vrioon, which was the first collaborative outing for seminal electronic musicians Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nicolai) and Ryuichi Sakamoto that came out in 2003. As on their first album, Insen centers upon the balance between the impressionist piano passages of Sakamoto and the cold yet graceful production of Nicolai. While the differences between the two records are subtle, they are certainly noteworthy as Nicolai slices up Sakamoto's piano into fine slivers of time-stretched fragments, terse rhythms, and blurred ambience. In turn, Nicolai realigns these sounds with Sakamoto's untreated notes, providing a complex interplay between the piano and its fractured electronic mimesis. In structuring all of the pieces on Insen, Nicolai occasionally situates his electronics along a parallel path to Sakamoto's piano, and slowly moves the two paths toward different directions, with Nicolai's rhythms achieving velocity and tension whereas Sakamoto's pointillist notes remain weighless and transient. Yet, Nicolai always teases with losing control over the composition, as he often snaps back into a somber atmosphere of minimalist smears, resorting to a similiar strategy as heard on Eno's epic Thursday Afternoon. Stunning.
MPEG Stream: "Aurora"
MPEG Stream: "Logic Moon"

ALVA NOTO & RYUICHI SAKAMOTO Revep (Raster-Noton) cd 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
When the dollars-to-minutes ratio eeks close to 1:1, we tend to get a little uncomfortable. Really, what's the big deal about David "Organum" Jackman doubling or even tripling up the sounds on his $15.00 singles that clock in at a couple of minutes? There's also been talk of this marketing psychology from this mathematical ratio due to a pending Boris LP, which is not going to be cheap (not surprising), but also isn't one of their monstrously long drone-doom pieces either... well it's just sorta long. So the question always comes down to the quality of the merchandise, is Boris worth the price of admission? The same question should be asked of the third collaboration between Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto) and Ryuichi Sakamoto, which clocks in a little under 20 minutes. Again, the division of labor puts Sakamoto at the piano and Nicolai at the laptop, with Sakamoto providing a series of impressionist clusters of piano notes and elegant repetitions, and Nicolai smudging those sounds through his pixel crunching software. Harmonically crisp and deftly performed, the three pieces on Revep offer a nice variation on the theme set by the first two collaborations Vrioon and Insen. Sakamoto fans will delight that he's offered a new arrangement for his classic piece "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence," which Nicolai aerosolizes into a fine mist of digital ephemera and pin-pricked ambience. Certainly as lovely as the first two!
MPEG Stream: "Siisx"
MPEG Stream: "ax Mr. L"

ALVA NOTO & RYUICHI SAKAMOTO Vrioon (Raster-Noton) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
"Vrioon" is a collaboration between Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto (of Yellow Magic Orchestra) in which Sakamoto provided source material of impressionistic piano pieces to Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), who blurred many of the edges into a beautiful ambience and added clusters of slow-moving rhythms. It's very simple and very effective and very beautiful...
RealAudio clip: "Uoon 1"
RealAudio clip: "Noon"

ALVA NOTO & RYUICHI SAKAMOTO WITH ENSEMBLE MODERN UTP_ (Raster Norton) cd+dvd 32.00

ALVA NOTO + OPIATE Opto Files (Raster-Noton) cd 10.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
"Opto Files" is the surprising combination of the Pole-esque neo-dub work of Denmark's Opiate and the clinically clicked rhythms of Noto (here calling himself Alva Noto, although there hasn't been any discernable difference between the Noto and Alva Noto projects). While Noto has supplied his trademarked glitchs, it is Opiate who offers a wide spectrum of color to Noto's typically neutral tonalities. It may not be a huge jump between the two styles, but it's nice to see a covergence of aesthetics.
RealAudio clip: "Opto File 2"

ALVA NOTO + RYUICHI SAKAMOTO Insen Live (Raster-Noton) dvd 30.00

ALVA NOTO + RYUICHI SAKAMOTO Summvs (Raster-Norton) cd 17.98
Latest offering from long time collaborators Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Their work together really exemplifies the pinnacle and potential of true collaboration, each party bringing in a different aspect and aesthetic while simultaneously balancing each other and creating something neither would be able to achieve on their own.
While Sakamoto's work can be drenched in warmth and heavy emotion, Alva Noto is known for his ice cold precision and together they really are able to strike an awesome balance of sound that takes from each of their very different approaches to create a unique chilling warmth. With Sakamoto's impeccable piano playing, and Alva Noto's skilled hands processing and chopping us that playing, Summvs might just be their finest work together yet. The most sublime moment coming in their cover of Brian Eno's "By This River", which we really wouldn't want anyone else to touch, but these two are able to bring out its melancholy in such a breathtaking manner.
This is the rare album you want to play from start to finish, ideally in a clean and silent room where you can just drift and dream in its presence. So beautiful!
MPEG Stream: "Microon I"
MPEG Stream: "By This River"
MPEG Stream: "Pionier IOO"

ALVA NOTO + SCANNER Uniform (SFMOMA) cd ep 9.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
This limited edition cd ep was released by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the exhibition "010101: Art in Technological Times". Carsten Nicolai (Noto) and Robin Rimbaud (Scanner) did a three-hour set as part of the opening of the show, and this cd ep is the result of the two of them editing down and manipulating their live recording into a 26-minute work.
Both the digipak design and the sounds on the cd lean towards the Raster-Noton aesthetic -- minimal clicks and cuts style, starting with a pleasant insectoid buzz and gradually adding layers of crackle and drone (and what sounds like crickets chirping or frogs croaking!). As the piece progresses, these "synthetic late summer night" sounds are augmented by high, wavering electronic tones. Really a gorgeous listen!
RealAudio clip: "Uniform (excerpt1)"
RealAudio clip: "Uniform (excerpt2)"

ALVA NOTO / SIGNAL / BYETONE / KOMET Mort Aux Vaches (Staalplaat) 2cd 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
This is basically the Raster-Noton allstars: Alva Noto, Byetone, Komet, and Signal (which is a collaboration of the aforementioned three artists) recording for Staalplaat's acclaimed "Mort Aux Vaches" series. Alva Noto's piece is a live documentation of the material found on his debut, with its terse electron pinpricks evolving amidst very slowly developing pure-tone, post-techno structures. Nicolai's performance of "Prototypes" clearly incorporates the same sounds found on his studio album, but the arrangement is one very long track and is completely different than the original. Byetone (aka Olaf Bender) is the least prolific of the Raster-Noton founders, with only a couple of releases. His 30 minutes for the Raster "Mort Aux Vaches" is a solid replication of Mika Vainio's crystalline "Metri" album for Sahko, as a surgical presentation of acid house bleeping grooves. Komet, who has recently simply been recording under his given name Frank Bretschneider, is the most effects-happy amongst the Raster-Noton family, warbling his pure tones through ring modulation and ample delay patterns to give the whispered clickery and alarm call bleeps a Frippertronic feel. The Signal recordings may be the weakest amongst the group, Pan Sonic / Goem throwaway tracks with electronic loops are set up and left unchanged, as if nobody amongst the group wanted to change anybody else's sounds. It is the slippages between melody and rhythm that make the Raster-Noton sound so appealing. While the rest of this double set is well worth checking out, Raster-Noton's collaborative efforts prove they are perhaps better as solo artists.
RealAudio clip: ALVA NOTO "Prototypes"
RealAudio clip: BYETONE "1:2"
RealAudio clip: KOMET "Glas"
RealAudio clip: SIGNAL "Light Pipe"

ALVARIUS B Blood Operatives Of The Barium Sunset (Abduction) cd 16.98
NOW ON CD! And a swank multiple-skull-bedecked 6 panel digipak to boot. Originally released on vinyl in 2005 on the Sun City Girls' Abduction label (and more recently as a cassette on PlusTapes), Blood Operatives Of The Barium Sunset was at the time the first Alvarius B release in 7 years, a project of Sun City Girl Alan Bishop, accompanied by long time SCG accomplice violinist Eyvind Kang, as well as Randall Dunn, Tim Young and Andrew McGinnis.
Alvarius B is some sort of weirdo psychedelic cabaret folk music, somewhere between Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and show tunes (?). The opener is a swampy bit of country folk, all slithery acoustic guitars, junk yard percussion, weird voices, Bishop's snarly vox, lots of buzz and tense atmospheric shimmer, and the lyrics, an over the top tale of miserable miscreants, while the second track is even more Tom Waits-ish, a piano ballad, haunting and melancholy, distorted and creepy, over a chorus of nighttime crickets, as if Bishop was set up on the porch of some old house on the edge of a black swamp. From there on, the sound slips into a strange lilting doom folk, Kang's viola, moaning over some atonal strum, and Bishop ranting like a madman. Deep chanted vocals draped over jagged acoustic guitar, a distant choir competes with some strange grunting, jaw harp, moody hushed vocals drift over a latticework of spidery steel string buzz, super dramatic and over the top, helps that that one is actually a cover, a piece by Italian horror soundtrack composer Fabio Frizzi, lyrics of course courtesy of Bishop. Which is what turns it into something much sicker and more hauntingly demented than even Frizzi could have ever imagined.
They also tackle a Morricone track, and a traditional, but it hardly matters, Bishop and company make the songs their own, transforming them into oozing, misanthropic swamp folk dirges, creepy, and funny, and fucked up, exactly what you'd expect from one of the Sun City Girls, an aural roadtrip through the hellish mind of a madman, a lost world of run down houses, bleak swampland, of destitution and despondency, but viewed through a serious cracked lens, that makes even the most dismal and brutal and miserable situations and characters seem endlessly fascinating and mysterious. Awesome stuff, essential for Sun City Girls obsessives of course, but maybe a bit TOO out there for the general population, which is precisely what makes this so awesome.
MPEG Stream: "Dirty Angels"
MPEG Stream: "Ballad Of Colonel Fawcett"
MPEG Stream: "Missy Undertaker"
MPEG Stream: "Shenandoah"

ALVARIUS B Blood Operatives Of The Barium Sunset (PlusTapes) cassette 6.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Originally released on vinyl in 2005 on the Sun City Girls' Abduction label, Blood Operatives Of The Barium Sunset was at the time the first Alvarius B release in 7 years, a project of Sun City Girl Alan Bishop, accompanied by long time SCG accomplice Eyvind Kang as well as Randall Dunn, Tim Young and Andrew McGinnis.
Alvarius B is some sort of weirdo psychedelic cabaret folk music, somewhere between Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and show tunes (?). The opener is a swampy bit of country folk, all slithery acoustic guitars, junk yard percussion, weird voices, Bishop's snarly vox, lots of buzz and tense atmospheric shimmer, and the lyrics, an over the top tale of miserable miscreants, while the second track is even more Tom Waits-ish, a piano ballad, haunting and melancholy, distorted and creepy, over a chorus of nighttime crickets, as if Bishop was set up on the porch of some old house on the edge of a black swamp. From there on, the sound slips into a strange lilting doom folk, Kang's viola, moaning over some atonal strum, and Bishop ranting like a madman. Deep chanted vocals draped over jagged acoustic guitar, a distant choir competes with some strange grunting, jaw harp, moody hushed vocals drift over a latticework of spidery steel string buzz, super dramatic and over the top, helps that that one is actually a cover, a piece by Italian horror soundtrack composer Fabio Frizzi, lyrics of course courtesy of Bishop. Which is what turns it into something much sicker and more hauntingly demented than even Frizzi could have ever imagined.
They also tackle a Morricone track, and a traditional, but it hardly matters, Bishop and company make the songs their own, transforming them into oozing, misanthropic swamp folk dirges, creepy, and funny, and fucked up, exactly what you'd expect from one of the Sun City Girls, an aural roadtrip through the hellish mind of a madman, a lost world of run down houses, bleak swampland, of destitution and despondency, but viewed through a serious cracked lens, that makes even the most dismal and brutal and miserable situations and characters seem endlessly fascinating and mysterious. Awesome stuff, essential for Sun City Girls obsessives of course, but maybe a bit TOO out there for the general population, which is precisely what makes this so awesome.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!!

ALVARIUS B & DYLAN NYOUKIS Sugar: The Other White Meat (Catsup Plate Recordings) lp 12.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
People had been really excited for this collaboration, and on first listen it was a little difficult to see why. The first handful of tracks come courtesy of Alvarius B, otherwise known as Alan Bishop of the Sun City Girls, and sad to say, sound really tossed off and pointless. Sounding alternately like a guitar lesson with two people arguing in the background, someone blowing through a crazy straw, and a guitar with squirrels climbing on it, those tracks had us pretty much ready to give up. Thankfully, we stuck it out until Dylan Nyoukis' 12 minute closing track on side one, a relentless barrage of muted thumb pianos and rubber band/kleenex box guitars that overlap and intersect and eventually become a loping, skipping, Philip Jeck-ian soundscape, warm and sepia toned. Side two fares just as well with Nyoukis and Bishop teaming up for a super abstract half hour of song snippets, transient noise bursts, bizarre sonic disturbances, eastern ragas, rumbling drones, spastic freakouts and subtle melodies. Sounds like the Sun City Girls' recent Sublime Frequencies series of world music recordings, only from some other world entirely.

ALVARS ORKESTER Interference (Ash International) cd 14.98
A semi-legendary fixture of the late eighties cassette underground, Alvars Orkester was a noise/drone duo obsessed with "the mysteries of psychic sickness, mental institutions, the industrial music culture and the power of sound". They took their influence from the likely industrial candidates, Test Dept. SPK, Throbbing Gristle and the like, but their sound soon developed into a more minimalist approach to sound, focusing more on the drone. The band split in the nineties only to reunite last year to record this 4 track exploration of paranoia and discord, fear and mortality, sickness and death.
The first track is a ten minute near static drone, dense and layered a high end sine wave hovering above a low end buzz, the two slowly shifting and subtly interacting. Sublime and in its own way quite gorgeous. Track two is much more harsh, an assemblage of digital feed back, harsh slabs of noise, chopped and sequenced into ear piercing rhythmic blocks of sound. Track three "Reality Distortion Field" is a shimmering soundfield of chimes and sinewaves, pulsing instrument hum and far away feedback, a murky backdrop for disembodied voices and strange tape manipulation. Truly creepy stuff. the final near 20 minute "Field Grey" is a super minimal expanse of barely there dark ambience. Low warm tones, ebb and flow, their shifts barely noticeable until near the end of the record when processed percussion swells up beneath the drones, and ultra subtle melodies drift ghost like from the murk. So haunting and lovely. Definitely for the dark drone obsessed, Organum, Lustmord, Chalk, Coleclough and the like.
And as with most releases on Ash International, gorgeously understated and quite striking packaging.
MPEG Stream: "Johannishus"
MPEG Stream: "Cobra Mist"

ALVARS ORKESTER Organic Woodtrip 1991-1992 (Kning Disk) cd 17.98


MPEG Stream: "Woodtrip"
MPEG Stream: "Dance In Halfway Under Earth"
MPEG Stream: "Irenic Urchin"

ALVARS ORKESTER Organic Woodtrip 1991-1992 (Kning Disk) cd 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Not sure how we managed to not review/list this amazing record, we just stumbled onto a little cache of these beauties, each disc housed in a gorgeous wood box, with a slide out top panel revealing the disc inside, and the name of the band burnt/embossed into the wood of the box. So nice! In fact, so nice, you might want to buy one regardless of the music inside, lucky for us (and you), the sounds of Alvars Orkester are most definitely worthy of the over the top packaging.
The AO duo were a staple of the late eighties cassette underground, and it wasn't until much later, that one half of the Orkester would re-emerge as half of another duo we dig, The Skull Defekts. And similar to how the Defekts sculpt rhythms, Alvars Orkester sculpted textures and atmospheres, creating gorgeously lush abstract soft noise dronescapes and slow shifting heavily textured ambience.
The bulk of the record is drawn from long out of print cassettes, and is made up of long sprawling, smoldering, slow developing drones, layered and looped, the sounds are tangled into long streaks of pulsing sound, that often blur into gorgeously indistinct crystalline shimmers, but just as often blossom into corrosive squalls of distorted crunch. The tracks drift from abrasive electronic squelch, to hazy sun dappled drift, keening FX-warped skree to stumbling blown out krauty chaos, finally culminating in the 3 part final suite of short form electronic workouts, all squiggly and glitchy and spacey, sounding like some Radiophonic Workshop psych jam, lots of buzz and distortion wrapped around the swooping bloops and bleeps.
LIMITED TO JUST 200 COPIES, long out of print we'd imagine, we have just 3 copies, so act fast if you want one.
MPEG Stream: "Woodtrip"
MPEG Stream: "Dance In Halfway Under Earth"
MPEG Stream: "Irenic Urchin"

ALWAYS F.I.S.T. (Nervous Jerk) cd 13.98
Depending on your tastes this is either the most insane and enjoyable record you're gonna hear all year or the record that will drive you utterly and completely crazy. Sounds like a perfect record for AQ no doubt. Always is an a cappella outfit from Australia who loop their vocals to create some super strange and mesmerizingly repetitive sounds. Somehow the human voices become blurred and it begins to sound like you're being swarmed by wild buzzing flies. If each of those flies was whispering the same thing in your ear. Hmmm... In some ways we hear the influence of Steve Reich's early tape pieces but here they end up broken down into shorter tracks that still test the limits of endurance and your tolerance for maddening repetition. Whenever we play this in the store at least a few people end up driven away, yet just as many freak out and need to know what's playing so they can buy it. Listen to the sound samples and figure out which camp you belong in. Just a matter of time before folks like Irwin Chusid and the Incredibly Strange Music brigade freak out to the totally insane sounds of Always.
MPEG Stream: "Gutter Tripp"
MPEG Stream: "Slimed Aztec"
MPEG Stream: "Di-Ye-Yah"

AM Mccleod-ganj (Pseudo Arcana) 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 is Antony Milton's first completely computer based recording, using the sounds of Tibetan instruments that just happened to be laying about. Things start off with what sounds like someone taking a powersaw to a bell, UGLY, but with gorgeous shimmering overtones. As the record progresses we hear lots of wild tribal percussion over a thudding pulse and some low end rumble, banjos chopped up into a digital soup that sounds a bit like a more uneven, more jagged Oval, and syrupy bass melodies and fluttery static over a dreamy, hypnotic dirge with rich swells and seasick melodies. This is a really nice mix of organic and non-organic sounds, computer manipulated into a collection of rich soundscapes, gorgeous ambience and some downright melodic, almost-pop-songs.
RealAudio clip: "Skullbow Handycam"
RealAudio clip: "Dharamsala"

AM More Domestic (Pseudo Arcana) 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.
We'll just have to assume that AM stands for Antony Milton, head of Pseudo Arcana. This disc starts off with a three part piece, the sounds of passing traffic, buzzing insects, whirring fans, and sort of lowercase drones with the occasional percussive intrusion of a bumped microphone, or distant clatter. Eventually, strange otherworldly notes are introduced, sounding a bit like horns without reeds, more sound than actual notes, but they manage to add miniscule amounts of soothing melody. Part two sounds like a version of part one, only far away, and with the sound of crickets, that slowly evolves into a buzzing swarm. Part three sounds like a version of part two, but with the addition of doleful lonely melodies played on a bamboo flute. Sounds like some overheard, ancient ceremony being performed fireside. Track 2 is all casio bleeps and blips, that demarcate a warbly uneven synth drone, all dreamy and effevescent. Sounds a bit like a more lo-fi Boards Of Canada. The final track is a noisy assemblage of dissonant clatter and barely discernable melody, tape hiss, and a wild spray of notes and tones, like a Total or Gate record falling apart, slowly deconstructing before your ears. Nice.
RealAudio clip: "Kitchen Sink #2"
RealAudio clip: "Pop. Tape"

AM (ANTONY MILTON) Poerua Acid (Diagnosis...Don't!) 3"cd-r 6.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
One of three new discs in the latest series of lovingly hand made 3" cd-r's from the Grey Daturas' Diagnosis... Don't! label (the other two being Bonecloud and Nigel Wright, reviewed elsewhere on this list). Poerua Acid features two looooong tracks from beloved NZ noisemaker and PseudoArcana label head honcho Antony Milton, and is the perfect mix of his two sides of his sonic personality, one side lilting dreamy and melodic, the other, dense, muted and noisy.
The opening track begins with just guitar, all warbly and slightly out of tune, the tape speed shifting and changing speed, making it sound like the sound on one of those grade school film strips, warm and wreathed in reverb, underneath, strange little swells and swirls drift and shimmer. Over the course of the track, the delicate finger picked melodies sink deeper and deeper into the background, until all that's left is a blown out muddy dronescape of overlapping rumbles and haunting flute like melodies.
The second track is much less restrained, opening up with a thick wall of guitars, dense and tangled, thick with distortion, roiling and overblown, garbled vocals and all manner of mysterious melodies lurk ghostlike beneath an epic expanse of layered guitar grind, like a more blissed out and melodic Sunroof! or Hototogisu.
Packaged in thick textured maroon paper mini 3" sleeves, with a printed (band name, label info, liner notes) Japanese style obi. Nice.
And as always, these are SUPER LIMITED, and odds are we won't be able to get more. So don't dawdle...
MPEG Stream: "Part 1"
MPEG Stream: "Part 2"

AMACHER, MARYANNE Sound Characters (Tzadik) cd 15.98
A spectacular release from Tzadik's Composer series! Maryanne Amacher is a reclusive sound sculptor who constructs the aural equivalent of rust to be heard in the reverberant spaces of cathedrals. The sonorities constructed out of mutilated recordings of bells, tape noise, and lots of highly amplified alien noises that would normally be on the quiet side of inaudible.
A beautifully cromulant release.

AMBARCHI / AVENAIM Clockwork (Room 40 / Jerker) cd 15.98

AMBARCHI / FENNESZ / PIMMON / REHBERG / ROWE Afternoon Tea (Ritornell / Mille Plateaux) 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 powerbook improv ensemble is a relatively new music performance hybridization that has found little success in attempting to bring the fluidity of free-jazz improvisation to the digital clickery of live hard disc editing. Recorded results we've heard have mostly been boring, self-important collages of inconsequential noodling from alpha male egos who want to upstage their companions rather than to collaborate. While the cavalier Christian Fennesz and the studious Peter Rehberg have been involved in some of more egregious failures of this genre, this, their collaboration with Keith Rowe, Oren Ambarchi, and Paul "Pimmon" Gough is perhaps the first work of true greatness for any powerbook ensemble. The keys to the success for "Afternoon Tea" are the high degree of restraint from each individual collaborator and the indecipherability betwixt the guitars of Ambarchi & Rowe and the computer trickery of the rest. Slow rhythmic creaks, subtle drones, and hacked musique concrete elements form and dissolve various structures, with a lot of room for each of the sounds to breathe. While this tracks in at almost 50 minutes, you really want it to go on for much longer. Nice.

AMBARCHI / FENNESZ / PIMMON / REHBERG / ROWE Afternoon Tea (Weird Forest) 2lp 30.00
More than ten years old now, this cool collaboration finally gets released on vinyl!!
When this was originally recorded, the Powerbook improv ensemble was a relatively new music performance hybridization that was having trouble finding any sort of tangible success in attempting to bring the fluidity of free-jazz improvisation to the digital clickery of live hard disc editing. Recorded results we'd heard had been mostly boring, self-important collages of inconsequential noodling from musicians who seemed more interested in being loud or noisy or simply upstaging their companions rather than in pure creative collaboration. While the cavalier Christian Fennesz and the studious Peter Rehberg have been involved in a few of the more egregious failures of this genre, this, their collaboration with Keith Rowe, Oren Ambarchi, and Paul "Pimmon" Gough perhaps still ranks as one of the best powerbook ensemble recordings. The keys to the success for "Afternoon Tea" are the high degree of restraint from each individual collaborator and the indecipherability betwixt the guitars of Ambarchi & Rowe and the computer trickery of the rest. Slow rhythmic creaks, subtle drones, and hacked musique concrete elements form and dissolve various structures, with a lot of room for each of the sounds to breathe. While this clocks in at almost 50 minutes, you really want it to go on for much longer. Nice.

AMBARCHI AND NG Fateless (Asphodel) dvd 17.98

AMBARCHI, OREN A Final Kiss On Poisoned Cheeks (Table Of The Elements) 12" 17.98
Latest in Table Of The Elements new one sided etched 12" series of modern guitar music, and certainly a collection of modern guitar music would not be complete with long time aQ fave Oren Ambarchi. Whose mastery of the guitar seems to know no bounds, teaming up with the Southern Lord stable for various exercises in extreme heaviness, but just as often crafting delicate dreamscapes of hushed strum and blurred riffing. His solo records tend toward the latter, but this piece is something else all together.
Still essentially a dronescape, A Final Kiss is rife with sonic activity, so much so that in lesser hands it would be more of a mess, a sort of pretty-ish noise record, but Ambarchi, takes all manner of buzz and glitch, of scrape and hum, and weaves it into a strangely lyrical arrangement. The core of the piece is a thick, undulating low end drone, a muted Niblockian shimmer, that seems not to change so much as shift, reflecting different colors and sounds depending on the angle. Over this nearly constant thrum, exist a veritable universe of strange sounds, streaks of feedback, cricket like electronic chitter, moaning throbbing swells of guitar rumble, brief blurs of warm soft focus fuzz, layers of crumbling distortion, all of the various elements constantly shifting and blossoming, collapsing and then blooming again, creating a super organic flow, another instance of leaving the instruments on the stage, guitars against amps. amps cranked, although here it seems the instruments have come to life, and we are glimpsing their secret lives, as the communicate musically, telling some sort of story, exchanging mysterious messages, which while indecipherable to human ears, still manage to sound magical.
Guitardrone freaks will, well, freak! Subtly heavy, darkly drone-y, slightly noisy, rich and dense and textural. Really gorgeous. And totally recommended.
Pressed on swirled turquoise vinyl. One sided, the other side with a super bad ass etching, housed in a thick vinyl sleeve, and of course, as always LIMITED!

AMBARCHI, OREN Der Kleine Konig (Tonschacht) 7" 8.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Australian avant-guitarist Oren Ambarchi wrangles with some Max / MSP patches to craft this single of looped mantras of chopped guitar buzz and dissonant noise drones.

AMBARCHI, OREN Destinationless Desire (Touch) 7" 8.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Brand new 7" of delicate beauty and haunting songsmithery from Mr. Oren Ambarchi, who hasn't had much time lately for his own music making, as he seems to be a constant part of the Southern Lord / SUNNO))) axis, being a part of at least three groups we know of. But we've pretty much loved every one of Ambarchi's releases and this new single is no different.
Using electric guitars, organ, bells, samples, percussion and motorized cymbal (!), Ambarchi has created to dramatically different pieces. The A side is a woozy, washed out underwater sounding loopscape, peppered with record crackle (unless that's coming from the record player, either way, it sounds great!), like a slightly jauntier, less melancholy Oval, major key melody, all softly sunshine-y, a dreamily hypnotic stretch of soft swirl that could go on forever.
The B side is much darker, long streaks of shimmery low end beneath haunting slowed down vocals, mournful and mysterious, the vocals and the guitar drift and shift, all wound up in and around each other, throughout, bits of electronic glitchery, smears of muted buzz, snippets of conversation and dialogue, but all that stuff seems to be woven into an undulating backdrop for Ambarchi's ghostlike disembodied blues.
As always, packaged in super striking thick matte sleeve with gorgeous photos and layout from Touch head honcho Jon Wozencroft.

AMBARCHI, OREN Grapes From The Estate (Touch) cd 15.98
The notion of musicians hunkered over their laptops, sitting still in the glow of the screen, not moving at all except for their fingers, paints a rather dull performance picture of what is often sonically quite exciting. So when organic/real/live instruments are brought into the mix, it makes the whole thing that much more alive and approachable and personal. Especially when the computer is left out of the equation COMPLETELY. Thus our appreciation of guitar-wielding electronicists (and fellow Touch label recording artists) Christian Fennesz and especially Oren Ambarchi. Fennesz with his sun dappled, "Venice" California sunshine-y shimmer, and Oren Ambarchi with his less-is-more, minimalist pointalism. Both use the guitar, Fennesz to interact with the computer, Ambarchi just to SOUND like it's being run through a computer, whihc is what makes this disc so amazing. Where Fennesz paints lush dense soundscapes, of thick harmonies and dreamy buzz, Ambarchi takes a way more minimal approach on Grapes From The Estate, spreading notes out into lazy barely there melodies, and loose frameworks of subtle glitchery and gentle strum. Occasionally, drums enter the mix, but only as a shuffling afterthought, lending the sound a definite jazzy post rock vibe. Imagine Oval's glitchy and muffled underwater murmer, but played on a guitar instead of being assembled from skipping cds. There is that sort of hiccupping rhythmic element present, but it's much more an innate part of the song, and these are most definitely -songs-. Instead of long 'pieces', these tracks are structured like actual songs, melodies appear and disappear, recur and subtly shift throughout, there are almost-choruses, and some of the motifs are quite catchy (although subtly so). Most of the record is dark and glacial, stepping carefully through a vast expanse of space, except for the album's centerpiece "Remidios The Beauty", where the pace picks up just a bit, and Ambarchi's guitar / effects interface produces an almost bouncy melody, that while being slightly more upbeat, still retains all of its dreamy sleepiness. This is the perfect mix of Kompakt style pop ambient, minimalist post rock, and those dark and rumbling drones we all love so much.
MPEG Stream: "Girl With The Silver Eyes"
MPEG Stream: "Corkscrew"

AMBARCHI, OREN Grapes From the Estate (Southern Lord) 2lp 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
This long time AQ fave now available on vinyl. A deluxe gatefold double lp, limited to 1000 copies, a handful of which are on purple vinyl, cross your fingers if you care and you might get lucky...
Here's what we had to say about this amazing work:
The notion of musicians hunkered over their laptops, sitting still in the glow of the screen, not moving at all except for their fingers, paints a rather dull performance picture of what is often sonically quite exciting. So when organic/real/live instruments are brought into the mix, it makes the whole thing that much more alive and approachable and personal. Especially when the computer is left out of the equation COMPLETELY. Thus our appreciation of guitar-wielding electronicists (and fellow Touch label recording artists) Christian Fennesz and especially Oren Ambarchi. Fennesz with his sun dappled, "Venice" California sunshine-y shimmer, and Oren Ambarchi with his less-is-more, minimalist pointalism. Both use the guitar, Fennesz to interact with the computer, Ambarchi just to SOUND like it's being run through a computer, whihc is what makes this disc so amazing. Where Fennesz paints lush dense soundscapes, of thick harmonies and dreamy buzz, Ambarchi takes a way more minimal approach on Grapes From The Estate, spreading notes out into lazy barely there melodies, and loose frameworks of subtle glitchery and gentle strum. Occasionally, drums enter the mix, but only as a shuffling afterthought, lending the sound a definite jazzy post rock vibe. Imagine Oval's glitchy and muffled underwater murmer, but played on a guitar instead of being assembled from skipping cds. There is that sort of hiccupping rhythmic element present, but it's much more an innate part of the song, and these are most definitely -songs-. Instead of long 'pieces', these tracks are structured like actual songs, melodies appear and disappear, recur and subtly shift throughout, there are almost-choruses, and some of the motifs are quite catchy (although subtly so). Most of the record is dark and glacial, stepping carefully through a vast expanse of space, except for the album's centerpiece "Remidios The Beauty", where the pace picks up just a bit, and Ambarchi's guitar / effects interface produces an almost bouncy melody, that while being slightly more upbeat, still retains all of its dreamy sleepiness. This is the perfect mix of Kompakt style pop ambient, minimalist post rock, and those dark and rumbling drones we all love so much.
MPEG Stream: "Girl With The Silver Eyes"
MPEG Stream: "Corkscrew"

AMBARCHI, OREN In The Pendulum's Embrace (Southern Lord) cd 14.98
Space... tones... space. A bass note now and again, and whispering hissssss. A guitar string plucked, muffled by effects, droning into silence. And repeat. Doom paced (as per much on the Southern Lord label, home to SUNNO))) after all), but not "heavy" like doom metal. Talk about slooooooooooooooow though. Soporific this is, in a nice nice dreamy way. Warm and pretty and so, so sad sounding. There's three long tracks here that do indeed wrap you in their embrace, and proceed with the reassuring steadiness of a pendulum's swing. Aussie experimentalist Oren Ambarchi (known for many collaborations, projects, and solo albums, including 2004's wonderful Grapes From The Estate to which this is perhaps offered as sequel) utilizes sounds both fragile and foreboding, from instrumentation including glass harmonica, bells, piano, percussion, and of course guitars. The opening track "Fever, A Warm Poison" sleepwalks glacially, as per the first few sentences of this review. Ambarchi orchestrates the swell of strings, or what could be an accordion's wheeze, into this album's soundworld on the second track, "Inamorata". Utterly gentle & melancholic. As is the 17 minute finale, "Trailing Moss In Mystic Glow", which while blissfully relaxed, might be the "busiest" track of the disc on account of the presence of some quiet, spectral vocals, indistinct but still a suggestion of songiness towards the end of the piece. The guitar melodies are denser here, and there's a hint of glitch. It's gorgeous at any rate. This cd should appeal to fans of Earth's Hex, and Bohren & Der Club Of Gore, and even Boris's gentler moments, as if held under a microscope, volume hushed. Also this very list, we've reviewed the new release from another Ambarchi act, Sun. This could be that Sun album, left out to melt in the (actual) sun, to droop and drip, pooling into a limpid, low-key loveliness...
MPEG Stream: "Fever, A Warm Poison"
MPEG Stream: "Trailing Moss In Mystic Glow"

AMBARCHI, OREN In The Pendulum's Embrace (Southern Lord) 2lp 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Now available on vinyl!
Space... tones... space. A bass note now and again, and whispering hissssss. A guitar string plucked, muffled by effects, droning into silence. And repeat. Doom paced (as per much on the Southern Lord label, home to SUNNO))) after all), but not "heavy" like doom metal. Talk about slooooooooooooooow though. Soporific this is, in a nice nice dreamy way. Warm and pretty and so, so sad sounding. There's three long tracks here that do indeed wrap you in their embrace, and proceed with the reassuring steadiness of a pendulum's swing. Aussie experimentalist Oren Ambarchi (known for many collaborations, projects, and solo albums, including 2004's wonderful Grapes From The Estate to which this is perhaps offered as sequel) utilizes sounds both fragile and foreboding, from instrumentation including glass harmonica, bells, piano, percussion, and of course guitars. The opening track "Fever, A Warm Poison" sleepwalks glacially, as per the first few sentences of this review. Ambarchi orchestrates the swell of strings, or what could be an accordion's wheeze, into this album's soundworld on the second track, "Inamorata". Utterly gentle & melancholic. As is the 17 minute finale, "Trailing Moss In Mystic Glow", which while blissfully relaxed, might be the "busiest" track of the disc on account of the presence of some quiet, spectral vocals, indistinct but still a suggestion of songiness towards the end of the piece. The guitar melodies are denser here, and there's a hint of glitch. It's gorgeous at any rate. This cd should appeal to fans of Earth's Hex, and Bohren & Der Club Of Gore, and even Boris's gentler moments, as if held under a microscope, volume hushed. Also this very list [not this one, but the one upon which the cd version of this originally appeared], we've reviewed the new release from another Ambarchi act, Sun. This could be that Sun album, left out to melt in the (actual) sun, to droop and drip, pooling into a limpid, low-key loveliness...
MPEG Stream: "Fever, A Warm Poison"
MPEG Stream: "Trailing Moss In Mystic Glow"

AMBARCHI, OREN Intermission 2000-2008 (Touch) cd 15.98
Killer collection of unreleased, super limited, out of print tracks from the last 8 years, from guitarist and soundscaper Oren Ambarchi, who besides making incredible records on his own, has been spending lots of time contributing to SUNNO))) and various SUNNO)) related offshoots. But these 5 tracks, all of them looooong, find Ambarchi doing what he does best, transforming his guitar into utterly new shapes and sounds.
"Intimidator" is the bonus track from the lp version of his In The Pendulum's Embrace album, and is a super minimal arrangement of tones and overtones, a gorgeous ethereal super abstract drone, subtly pulsing and throbbing, occasionally interrupted by an errant strum or bit of glitch, but for the most part, some serious Ikeda style clinical drone minimalism. "Iron Waves" is a remix of a Paul Duncan track, and finds Ambarchi adding guitar, bells and cymbals to the original, the result is a dark and meditative drift, that grows more and more lush, perfectly complimenting the soulful croon of the original, a dark, layered sound art ballad. "Moving Violation" is from a Touch Records comp, and is another gorgeous expanse of dark meditative guitar drift, laced with crackle and glitch, a strange textural patina over an otherwise serene and smooth expanse of muted tones. "The Strouhal Number" is from a live cd released in Australia, and is warm and washed out and beautiful, minus the crackle and distorted grit, this would almost be some super serene meditation music, chiming tones, lilting melodies, dreamlike and so so pretty.
And finally, the 20 minute "A Final Kiss On Poisoned Cheeks" originally released on a clear silkscreened one sided 12" as part of Table Of The Elements Guitar series, still essentially a dronescape, A Final Kiss is rife with sonic activity, so much so that in lesser hands it would be more of a mess, a sort of pretty-ish noise record, but Ambarchi, takes all manner of buzz and glitch, of scrape and hum, and weaves it into a strangely lyrical arrangement. The core of the piece is a thick, undulating low end drone, a muted Niblockian shimmer, that seems not to change so much as shift, reflecting different colors and sounds depending on the angle. Over this nearly constant thrum, exist a veritable universe of strange sounds, streaks of feedback, cricket like electronic chitter, moaning throbbing swells of guitar rumble, brief blurs of warm soft focus fuzz, layers of crumbling distortion, all of the various elements constantly shifting and blossoming, collapsing and then blooming again, creating a super organic flow, another instance of leaving the instruments on the stage, guitars against amps, amps cranked, although here it seems the instruments have come to life, and we are glimpsing their secret lives, as the communicate musically, telling some sort of story, exchanging mysterious messages, which while indecipherable to human ears, still manage to sound magical.
Guitardrone freaks will, well, freak! Subtly heavy, darkly drone-y, slightly noisy, rich and dense and textural. Really gorgeous. And totally recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Intimidator"
MPEG Stream: "A Final Kiss On Poisoned Cheeks"

AMBARCHI, OREN Lost Like A Star (Bo'Weavil) lp 32.00
A brand new two track 'album' from Australian guitarist / soundscaper Oren Ambarchi and it's a doozy. Two side long tracks, one composed for a Japanese dance troupe, the other recorded live, both gorgeous.
The 'dance' track takes up all of side A and utilizes electric guitar, bowed instruments, samples, bells, cymbals and percussion. Deep drifts of buzzing sounds drift dreamlike from the speakers, cymbals sizzle like falling rain, bells twinkle like stars in a black sky, very drifty and otherworldly. It eventually builds to a throbbing fever pitch, but instead of getting heavier, it just gets thicker, and more dense and way more intense. Notes throb and pulse, reverberating and beating against one another, creating dense fields of rich overtones, the whole thing very liquid and organic sounding, constantly shifting and changing shape. Would have loved to see the dance that accompanied these sounds.
The B side was recorded live, the instrumentation including electric guitars, cymbals and a motor (!). A much more delicate and haunting piece than the flipside, moody melodies drifting over pulsing buzzing drones, the melodies spaced out and spidery, over a fuzzy shimmery backdrop. About halfway through the track, the sound explodes and becomes a massive, grinding, buzz drenched wall of thick static guitar, layer upon layer, very trancelike and hypnotic, but incredibly fierce and intense, finally culminating in a dreamy fade out of muted tones and a barely there melody.
Nice super textured cardstock, full color sleeves, incredibly thick vinyl, LIMITED TO 650 COPIES, each record hand numbered...

AMBARCHI, OREN Mort Aux Vaches: Song of Separation (Staalplaat) cd 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Recorded for the Dutch radio station VPRO and released as part of Staalplaat's acclaimed "Mort Aux Vaches" series, Oren Ambarchi's "Song of Separation" is a continuation of the ideas previously investigated on his "Suspension" album for Touch. Employing a number of electronic / digital effects to manipulate the shape of his guitar, Ambarchi produces a slowly moving series of pointillistic tonal plucks. Each tone hangs in space before dissolving into the emptiness of silence which in good time is replaced by another sympathetic tone. While Ambarchi has openly stated the influences of Alvin Lucier and Morton Feldman, he approaches this work quite clearly as an improvisation, meandering through time and space rather than controlling it with conceptual restrictions or repetitive melodic stanzas. Limited to 1000 copies.
RealAudio clip: "Song Of Separation Part 1"

AMBARCHI, OREN Persona (Black Truffle) cd 16.98
One of two new archival reissues from Australian avant guitarist and sometime member of SUNNO))), Oren Ambarchi. Persona was originally released as an ultra limited lp (only 300 copies) in 2000, which sold out quite quickly, but is finally available again, on cd.
Ambarchi's sound is quite varied and fluid, capable of coaxing the sweetest sounds from his axe, as well as using it like some blood flecked weapon, hurling jagged shards of distorted crunch and spitting out thick swaths of viscous buzz. On Persona, the sound is minimal and delicate, droney in places, but also glitchy and spare. The opening track here, and the shortest of the three, is a warm looped low end drone, the guitar transformed into a pulse generator, the sound soothing and softly buzzy. The second track sounds like it could be on Raster-Noton, plenty of low end, but with processed clicks and whirs, clipped percussive thumps and machinelike murmurs, eventually becoming almost silent, leaving just bits of crackle and surface noise, so austere and abstract.
The final track, and the longest at almost 19 minutes, is the prettiest of the bunch, a softly skittering soundscape of Oval like underwater shimmer, lightly laced with glitches and little electronic squelches, but all warm and washed out, and allowed to swirl and drift dreamily, super gorgeous stuff.
MPEG Stream: "Alme"
MPEG Stream: "Vogler"

AMBARCHI, OREN Persona (ERS) lp 13.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

AMBARCHI, OREN Stacte Motors (Western Vinyl) lp 9.98

AMBARCHI, OREN Stacte.3 (Black Truffle) cd 16.98
One of two new archival reissues from Australian avant guitarist and sometime member of SUNNO))), Oren Ambarchi. Stacte.3 was originally released as an ultra limited lp (only 500 copies) in 2000, which of course went out of print relatively quickly, and remained unavailable until now, with this cd reissue.
Ambarchi's sound is quite varied and fluid, capable of coaxing the sweetest sounds from his axe, as well as using it like some blood flecked weapon, hurling jagged shards of distorted crunch and spitting out thick swaths of viscous buzz. Stacte.3 is one 37 minute track, split into two parts, A and B. A, clocking in at 14 minutes, begins with a looped bit of chiming guitar harmonics, mesmerizing and music box like, that loop soon joined by all manner of swooping bloops and bleeps, a soft barrage of strange melodic fragments and electronic shards, a bit like some malfunctioning synthesizer let loose over that steady music box pulse, eventually, the higher tones drift off, leaving just a couple low tones to shimmer and warble, their overtones creating subtle patterns and pulsating fluctuations, which are eventually joined by some of the stray sounds from earlier on.
The second longer track, begins all buzzing metallic shimmer, what sounds like a room full of bowed cymbals, all sorts of gorgeous overtones, a washed out muted bit of metallic crunch, which eventually dissipates, leaving the bloops and bleeps of part A to return for a playful bit of swooping and swirling, before again, the track slowly shifts into a more minimal phase, playing out in a drift of layered rumbles, dreamy whirs and soft melodic electronic pulses. Quite nice.
MPEG Stream: "Stacte.3A"

AMBARCHI, OREN Suspension (Touch) cd 15.98
Finally back in print!
While Christian Fennesz had been quite active in working with a diverse group of musicians, few of his collaborators exhibited as much of a sonic likemindedness as did Sydney's tinkering guitarist Oren Ambarchi. For both Ambarchi and Fennesz, the guitar is merely the jumping-off point for making ultimately electronic music. Within the oblique electric shards of Fennesz' "Endless Summer," the jangling strum of his guitar is most definitely heard; likewise, a gentle plucking from Ambarchi's guitar still resonates through his work, despite all of the processing. But those distinct guitar sounds are merely a tiny piece of a bigger, more gloriously expansive musical picture. "Suspension" was Ambarchi's second recording for Touch, and stands miles above the his previous album "Insulation." Citing Lucier as an influence (though much more in terms of tonality than methodology, as Lucier is far more interested in the execution of a system than Ambarchi), he has transformed the guitar into a strangely archaic tone generator that chimes with the color of a well weathered bell. A beautiful record in keeping with other essential Touch albums from Hazard and Rafael Toral.
MPEG Stream: "Vogler"
MPEG Stream: "This Evening So Soon"
MPEG Stream: "Gene"