ENDLESS ENDLESS ENDLESS Black Talisman (self-released) cd-r + talisman 10.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Debut release from this East Coast duo, who weave a dense swirl of softly rhythmic ambience, druggy dronemusic and abstract psychedelic space drift, utilizing a strange assemblage of instruments. Along with guitars, vocals and pedals, they also utilize a Gameboy, the result is not that far removed from the sounds of folks like Expo 70, Gnod, Sounding The Deep, Pulse Emitter and the like, but these guys describe their sound as "triumphant post-noise and stretched out bummer-wave", which translates to washed out expanses of skittery programmed rhythms, warm shimmery guitars, muted loops and subtle glitchery, everything raw and lo-fi but still lush and expansive, there are vocals, but they tend to be blurred into soft swirls of layered hum and whir, the sound is dreamlike and mediative, but not mellow, instead it's minimally propulsive and blissed out, sometimes slipping into full on Autechre-like skitter, but even then, the rhythms are set amidst dense layers of drone, disembodied melodies, hushed ethereal ambience, or tripped out soft noise. Cool, mysterious and definitely psychedelic, this is the perfect headphone drift soundtrack, or sounds for a rainy day lost wander, or music to help you achieve the next level, to leave your body and attain enlightenment, or to just put on and chill out.
SUPER LIMITED RUN, 53 tapes and 47 cd-r's, we only got the cd-r's, and each one comes bundled with a bad ass lazer etched black triangular talisman, that according to the band, will "bring you infinite power", and that Andee has been wearing since we first got these in!! (proof is here: http://twitpic.com/ya15g, http://twitpic.com/ya1cu)
MPEG Stream: "I Remember"
MPEG Stream: "Distortions"
MPEG Stream: "A Way"

ENDLESS TIME Coasting (Monorail Trespassing) cassette 6.98
No idea who Endless Time is or where they hail from, but his/her/their Coasting cassette on Monorail Trespassing is a great introduction, and stands well with some of the disturbed drone passages that have come from the recent output of Emaciator and Infinite Body. The first side ripples with an ominous drone from a single synth line transmitting beneath a series of haunted piano notes, which split the difference between the Caretaker and Cranioclast (if anybody remembers that once prolific German post-industrial outfit of peculiar darkness). Stretches of iron-clad static burst through these sci-fi atmospheres, giving way to a melodic interlude between two harmonized notes. The second side seems to be a soft dub of the first with alienating bleeps set in motion across an undulating and unsettling electrical field of an analog synth sawtooth drone, placated by pastoral flutes which emerge toward the end of the piece. Here, Endless Time has more of the '80s ambient feel of Vangelis, particularly from some of the Blade Runner soundtrack. Limited to 125 copies, of which we only have a few.

ENDO, NIC Cold Metal Perfection (Geist) cd 15.98
Very impressive. Much less randomly aurally assaultive than her previous works. Atari Teenage Riot's Ms Endo has steadied her aim, and carefully selected her angles of attack. Not a constant barrage of pummelling abrasiveness, but instead more of a nightmarishly twisted soundscape. Feelings of suffocation by sound. As if some very malevolent, hostile forces are at work, whispering their plans to only you. At times, approaching a somewhat industrialized, sinister (Morton) Subotnick-ness. Recommended for adventurous ATR fans.
RealAudio clip: "One Night Domination"
RealAudio clip: "The Program And The Brides"
RealAudio clip: "Mask Identity"
RealAudio clip: "Neon Sunrise"

ENEMA SYRINGE Bogens Massage Institut (Ultra Eczema) lp 25.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
As always, these Ultra Eczema lps are amazingly packaged, in gorgeously designed sleeves, pressed on nice thick vinyl, and limited to 400 copies, most of which are sold before we even realize they're out. So we only got a tiny handful of these (5-10 copies) so don't get your hopes up.
A selection of rare and unreleased tracks from these infamous Swedes. Recorded in the mid to late eighties, these tracks mix electronic experimentation with industrial pummel, abstract noise, sound collage, processed vocals, all tangled up into drummachined blasts of grinding squealing, squeaking, pounding fuzz drenched, super distorted freak out. Think a more newwaved Throbbing Gristle. Dance music for the one legged. A musical metal helmet strapped on and set to stun, ears bleeding and toes tapping. Bogens Massage Institut is a gloriously dense assemblage of thick and corrosive, but sort of surprisingly playful, alien sounds and noises.
Includes an insert with extensive liner notes and discography.

ENGLISH, LAWRENCE A Colour For Autumn (12K) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

ENGLISH, LAWRENCE Incongruous Harmonies (Touch) 7" 7.98
One of two new Touch singles this week, this mysterious batch of 'incongruous harmonies' comes from Australian composer / sound artist / musician Lawrence English, and these two tracks were both composed and recorded for an installation called Regarding The Joy Of Others, and are both mysterious and amorphous, textural and abstract. The first is a series of gritty washes, deep swells pocked with streaks of crumble and crackle, buried melodies glowing from within a softly heaving surface of burnished thrum and muted static, bleary and blurred and subtly smeared, a gorgeous soundscape of indistinct harmony, quite Jeck-ian in fact, something very lovely, disguised by a gauze of soft noise, the two elements not competing so much as bleeding into one another and becoming a hauntingly beautiful melody infused, slowly unfurling buzz.
The flipside peels back some of the grit and grime, leaving something more serene and a bit more ambient, a darkened landscape of distant churning rumbles, shot through with shards of looped high end, almost like a mellowed out Wolf Eyes, but it's not really all that mellow, it's still ominous, and tense, and a bit haunting, a sprawling dronemusic that subtly throbs and pulses with some implied rhythm, while layer upon layer shift and overlap and intertwine, the track actually growing less and less dark, the low end fading away, leaving just the mysterious keening high end warble to drift like some alien distress call. So cool.
And like with all Touch releases, super striking design and layout by Touch Records boss Jon Wozencroft.

ENGLISH, LAWRENCE Kiri No Oto (Touch) cd 16.98
Kiri No Oto is the first album that Lawrence English has released for the venerable Touch Music. This after a number of releases through his own Room 40 imprint, which bridged environmental recordings and somber electronics with sublime results; but there's been little to indicate that he would generate something as stellar as Kiri No Oto. The Japanese title loosely translates as 'the sound of fog' or 'the sound of mist.' Both are applicable to the extended blur that this Australian sound-artist generates, with its miasma of soft-focus distortion arching into long-form compositions of minimalism. The album doesn't exactly erupt, as the sounds are more soothing in their softened textures; but English cuts into one of his grey-mass drones with little fanfare. English slowly glides his 'sound of fog' down to a muffled static, then brings up tectonic rumblings and kicks the overdrive in on his distortion box (or more likely, some patch on ye olde laptop) for one of those digital distorto-drones that Tim Hecker and Christian Fennesz have been sculpting over the past few years. And yes, we'll throw in an obligatory My Bloody Valentine reference, well because there are plenty of parts here which have the blissed out wash of the ambient interludes on Loveless. Given that similar dynamics appeared on one of the last great Touch albums - BJ Nilsen's The Short Night - it made us wonder if these gestures toward static-laden, shoegazing noise bursts dappling the almighty drone were a coincidence for Touch, or if Touch were handing out particular Max/MSP patches to accommodate this sound. It's probably the former; but the similarities to many of the other Touch artists is too great not to comment. As with all of the Touch releases, Jon Wozencroft delivers his perfect design with an overcast sea-side photograph to match the depth, mystery, serenity, and subtle darkness of this very impressive album.
MPEG Stream: "Organs Lost At Sea"
MPEG Stream: "White Spray"
MPEG Stream: "Allay"

ENGLISH, LAWRENCE Kiro No Oto (Digitalis) lp 19.98
Originally released on Touch as a cd, now available on vinyl via the always kick ass Digitalis...
Kiri No Oto was the first album that Lawrence English released for the venerable Touch Music label (now, as mentioned above on Digitalis). This after a number of releases via his own Room 40 imprint, which bridged environmental recordings and somber electronics with sublime results; but there's been little to indicate that he would generate something as stellar as Kiri No Oto. The Japanese title loosely translates as 'the sound of fog' or 'the sound of mist.' Both are applicable to the extended blur that this Australian sound-artist generates, with its miasma of soft-focus distortion arching into long-form compositions of minimalism. The album doesn't exactly erupt, as the sounds are more soothing in their softened textures; but English cuts into one of his grey-mass drones with little fanfare. English slowly glides his 'sound of fog' down to a muffled static, then brings up tectonic rumblings and kicks the overdrive in on his distortion box (or more likely, some patch on ye olde laptop) for one of those digital distorto-drones that Tim Hecker and Christian Fennesz have been sculpting over the past few years. And yes, we'll throw in an obligatory My Bloody Valentine reference, well because there are plenty of parts here which have the blissed out wash of the ambient interludes on Loveless.
The art, as on the Touch cd version, matches the depth, mystery, serenity, and subtle darkness of this very impressive album.
MPEG Stream: "Organs Lost At Sea"
MPEG Stream: "White Spray"
MPEG Stream: "Allay"

ENGLISH, LAWRENCE The Peregrine (Experimedia) lp 19.98
Peregrine falcons are impressive birds of prey that can be found in almost every ecosystem, known for their extreme speeds in flight sometimes reaching over 200 miles per hour. Being quite adaptable, they are often found in urban areas where the pigeons are plentiful; and it can be quite spectacular to see these birds streaking through the skyscrapers of San Francisco reducing the pigeon population one at time with a precision that's the envy of any military campaign. The Australian ambient-laced sound artist Lawrence English came to his appreciation of the Peregrine by way of a book of the same title by J.A. Baker who obsessively mapped the daily activities of a pair of peregrines in England with a purported magical lyricism in his writings. English's ornithological portrait is all about flight and soaring - it's unclear whether English took after Baker by seeking out these birds on his own or if English's work is solely articulated through the lens of Baker's prose. But, English has long been able to express a poetic simplicity through the fog of sound; and he's proved once again how deft he can be. Smeared synth drones and grey-tone ambience streams through each of English's tracks, with subtle melodic interludes of low-end bass tones girding the compositions, coming across as something between Popul Vuh and Tim Hecker. A beautiful record for sure, and one that captures a sublime element of the majesty of the nimble falcon. Limited to 500 copies and comes with a download card.

ENGLISH, LAWRENCE Transit (Cajid) cd 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The more one scratches the surface of Australian sound art, the more gems emerge from the search. We've uncovered a handful of artists whose work has slipped under the radar. Tim Catlin's drone guitar work is one example, Eamon Sprod's treated field recordings under the moniker Tarab would be another; we can now count Lawrence English amongst this bunch. Where those two aforementioned artists have connections to the RMIT program in Melbourne, English hails several hundred miles up the coast in Brisbane. There, he has produced a handful of processed soundfields on his Room40 imprint; and for his Transit album released on Cajid, English offers a concoction of electric minimalism pieced together from sources provided by a number of exceptional guest stars including DJ Olive, Robin Rimbaud, Philip Samartzis, and a handful of lesser known artists. Despite the diversity of voices on Transit, English is firmly in command of the album, digitally smearing each of his guests' source material into a spectral ambience dappled with field recordings and textural events. It's not too far off from Loren Chasse's Of recordings if it weren't for the noticable digital sheen; and at times, English hits on a similar bleak isolationism found in Thomas Koner's work. A mighty fine record.
MPEG Stream: "Oceanic Drift"
MPEG Stream: "That Was A Lucky One"
MPEG Stream: "Closing Frame"

ENGLISH, LAWRENCE / AI YAMAMOTO Plateau (Phono-Statique) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Lawrence English is another unsung hero of Australian underground experimental music. We've reviewed one of his discs in the past, a dreamy digital exploration of ghostlike ambience. Sort of a less organic Jewelled Antler. On this latest disc, English teams up with Japanese composer/sound artist Yamamoto to further explore the realms of processed field recordings and minimal electronics. And lord this is some truly sublime stuff. Fans of all things Fennesz, Coleclough, Chalk, Tim Hecker, Ambarchi and the like will find much to love. Dark droning dreaminess, not as digital or electronic as you might imagine. Incredibly deep and resonant, huge smears of glistening shimmer, subtle reverberations, an expansive world of totally mesmerizing drones. Soft colors shift and swirl, organs wheeze and stretch out into thick layers of textured sound, hard to know what more to say about this other than WOW. So totally and absolutely breathtakingly gorgeous.
MPEG Stream: "Longing"
MPEG Stream: "A Silent Kouta"

ENKIDU Hasselt (Turtle's Dream) cd 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Following their very well received Live At Showboat recording for Last Visible Dog, Mukai Chie and Yamamoto Sei-ichi have hooked up with French improviser and electro-acoustic wizard Eric Cordier for a project they've entitled Enkidu. Ms. Mukai has been wandering through the Toyko improv scene since the '70 performing with the PSF band Che-Shizu, whereas Yamamoto's illustrious career finds his guitar freakouts splattered throughout the Boredoms, Omoide Hatoba, and Rovo. Harkening back to the psychedelic, ur-drone mantras of the Taj Mahal Travellers, this trio offers a delirious set of improvisations out of Mukai's trademarked two-stringed violin and percussion, Yamamoto's guitar and flute, and Cordier's hurdy-gurdy and mess of electronics. Nick Cain accurately describes the resulting sounds as "swirling and head-spinningly noisy slow burn deep-sound drone-ragas." It takes a good 10 minutes or so for their improvisation to really take off from the incredibly quite introduction of Mukai's deliberate bowing upon her violin. Deep cavernous electronic tones rumble behind, Yamamoto's neck-wrangling of jagged flourishes and Mukai's vocal wailings. The trio constantly builds dense crescendos which in turn they abruptly halt in rough, herky-jerky gestures, only to reform into a new trajectory towards another crescendo, all the while unfolding into a magnificently complex drama.
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 1"
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 2"
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 3"

ENNEY, ROE Damnatio Memoriae (Phaserprone) cassette 8.98
There's really no useful information to be found about Roe Enney. She authors a thoroughly cracked strain of bedroom electronica, one that could have been produced around 1983 in some depressed region of the world. We could say Vladivostok for someplace fitting of the sounds but in truth she hails from Phoenix, Arizona. That's pretty much all that we know about her and this tape she produced for the newly invigorated Phaserprone label, who has never shied away from grimy electronics, queasy rhythmic oppression, and fucked-up histrionics. Enney's stoned, witchy vocals would certainly draw parallels to Liz Harris and Amanda Brown, although Enney is far more of a deconstructionist, stripping away her already emaciated structures through a Spartan use of vintage Linn drum machine, synth, guitar, voice, and a fair amount of tape decay with all of these typically keeping their own orbits independent of everything else. The resultant warbling constructions are stunted, ghetto-dub mutations where voice and synth murkily blur into cough-syrup overdosed crawlings whose sewer seduction atmospheres are splattered with her puncturing drum machine programming that rarely acts as time keeper to these personal, dystopian visions. She's channelling the more idiosyncratic elements of Dome, Throbbing Gristle, Tara Cross, and The Storm Bugs, and it wouldn't be much of a stretch to situate this near the early Zola Jesus singles or LA Vampires. Limited tape-only production in a run of 100 copies. Don't expect these to last long.

ENO / MOEBIUS / ROEDELIUS After the Heat (4 Men With Beards) lp 17.98
Now on Vinyl!!
The combination of Brian Eno and Cluster proved to be a golden match. The sounds they delicately created together have been echoed again and again in the three decades since their collaborations. A feeling of both effortlessness and a total awareness of the space and sounds they were building radiates throughout the recording. You can hear the tinkering hands of Moebius and Roedelius giving elements of warped spaced out bliss. Eno approaching the songs in a magic space somewhere between Before & After Science and Another Green World. When his vocals appear they just begin to melt and dissolve into your ears. For sure the best backwards vocal delivery we've ever heard can be found on the track "Tzima N'arki". There is such a sublime feeling of melting on this record. These three knew how to meld warmth with an motherly feeling that takes you into golden horizons, mesmerizing twilight and an afterglow that you just want to surrender yourself to. Originally released in '78, once again 4 Men With Beards has done the fine service of bringing it back to a world that's more ready for these sounds then ever.
MPEG Stream: "Tzima N'arki"
MPEG Stream: "Foreign Affairs"

ENO, BRIAN Ambient 1: Music For Airports (Virgin / Astralwerks) cd 16.98
Perhaps the most renowned of Eno's ambient albums, Music For Airports, originally released in 1978, is a (or we should say *the*) seminal -ambient- work. The proof is over a quarter decade's worth of other artists (and some downright imitators) who've amassed an enormous collective body of work directly inspired by this one album. This is the O.G. of gorgeous shimmering atmospheric soundscapes. Truly sublime. While Eno's conceptual "hands off" compositional style is certainly one of the larger factors in his influencing other future ambient artists, the striking thing about this work that makes it so compelling is the way in which the pieces manage to impart a feeling of warmth despite the clinically mechanical way in which the pieces are played. And while the performance here is not executed by machines the impact of it carries on down, all the way to the Aphex Twin's zenith of robotic beauty, The Richard D. James album. The four pieces here (programmatically named "1/1", "2/1", "1/2" & "2/2" for their sequencing on the original LP) build one upon the next. The first is arranged entirely with electric and acoustic pianos (with some help from Robert Wyatt for this), the second a chorus of voices and the third and fourth pieces combination of those elements with additional synth help. The drifting and staggered arpeggios cascade in slow motion giving the pieces a shapeless consistency, somehow always moving forward while remaining frozen. A suitable antidote to muzak if there ever was one. If anything dates, or holds back the three latter pieces on this disc it's the now archaic synth patches. They can be charming, but I've never been able to listen to "2/2" without thinking immediately of Steve Winwood's "While You See A Chance". Needless to say, this small downside can't spoil as great an album as this.
MPEG Stream: "1/1"
MPEG Stream: "2/2"

ENO, BRIAN Ambient 4: On Land (Virgin / Astralwerks) cd 16.98
While Plateaux of Mirror could be seen as the inspiration for a generation of new age musicians, On Land (released in 1982) is arguably a place card for a wellspring of darker ambient musicians forging soundtracks for non-existant films. Some, like the now obscure J. Grienke made careers out of this single album. Others, like Richard James on the Aphex Twin's excellent double cd Selected Ambient Works Volume 2, pay homage and move on. But hints of this dark collection of audio soundscapes can be heard from the likes of Biosphere, Deathprod, Andrew Chalk, Troum and even Village of Savoonga. The key elements involved are an elimination of melody and rhythm. As Eno puts it, quite well in fact, in the liner notes: "the landscape has ceased to be a backdrop for something else to happen in front of: instead everything that happens is part of the landscape. There is no longer a sharp distinction between foreground and background". A seminal work and a must have.
MPEG Stream: "The Lost Day"
MPEG Stream: "Unfamiliar Wind (Leeks Hills)"

ENO, BRIAN Another Green World (EG) cd 13.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY. Now reissued on EMI!

ENO, BRIAN Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks (EG) cd 13.98

ENO, BRIAN Discreet Music (Virgin) cd 16.98
The second wave of Brian Eno reissues is of his genre creating and defining ambient music albums from 1975 through 1982. The first in the series is Discreet Music and it's in the liner notes here that Eno describes the genesis for his ambient music. The story goes that while he was recouperating in a hospital after having been struck by a car he found himself inspired through another sort of accident. Eno had been brought a record of 18th century harp music to listen to but, after having struggled to put the record on in his weakened state, found the amplifier levels way too low and one channel of the recording completely missing. Thus he was forced to strain to hear nothing but the loudest of notes above the ambient din in the room. Add to this Eno's admission that he considers himself a much better conceiver of plans than executor of them and you have the foundations for Discreet Music. Eno's goal was to set up a system which would generate music with as little input from him as possible. To this end Eno created a feedback loop into which he could insert pairs of notes and let the ensuing echo box and delay line do the rest. The flipside of this coin, included on this album, is a suite in three parts entitled "Three Variations On the Canon In D Major By Johann Pachelbel". For this piece Eno took sections of the Canon and, on each of the sections, gives the players different instructions for the treatment of those parts. In each case the directives result in different but beautiful deconstructions of the all too familiar Canon.
MPEG Stream: "Discreet Music"
MPEG Stream: "Fullness of Wind"

ENO, BRIAN Thursday Afternoon (EG) cd 13.98

ENO, BRIAN / HAROLD BUDD Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror (Virgin / Astralwerks) cd 16.98
Recorded in 1980, The Plateaux of Mirror is the least successful of Eno's ambient works, with the exception of its success in being the blueprint for the myriad new age records that would soon follow in its footsteps. Budd's meandering legato piano lines sound so maudlin in comparison to the austere rigidity of Wyatt's playing on Music For Airports. There are less syrupy moments here that make for fine soundtracks. In fact, I think I've seen no less than a dozen student and/or low budget documentaries in my day that have used these tracks in their scores.
MPEG Stream: "First Light"
MPEG Stream: "An Arc of Doves"

ENOCKSSON, ERIK Farval Falkenberg (Kning Disk) cd 15.98
Another disc we knew nothing about and just luckily stumbled across (with our interest whetted due to its label affiliation, Kning usually being quite interest-ing). We were initially struck by the gorgeous cover, an embroidered landscape, all oranges and blacks, the texture of the background fabric adding grit to the already dark and mysterious shapes and hues in the foreground. The words Farval Falkenberg printed in huge gold metallic letters, strangely poetic song titles.
We later discovered that this is in fact the soundtrack to a Swedish film, a coming of age story, sad and bittersweet, and the music couldn't be more perfect. The opening track had us completely smitten within seconds. A gorgeously melancholy acoustic guitar, spinning a soft sad melody, mournful and moody, the main melody is whistled, giving the track a certain childlike vibe, a bit of a Morricone / Bjorn Olsson feel too, it seriously gives us shivers just writing about it. Then the 'chorus' kicks in, and adds soft focus piano plinking in the background, another guitar higher up in the mix, simple tambourine percussion. It's so evocative, you can't help but let your mind start making up different scenes from this movie you've never seen. Lonely walks, sitting by the window, rain pouring down, wandering along railroad tracks, laying in bed staring at the cracks in the ceiling. Wow.
And the rest of the record is just as compelling. Every song a mini super emotional epic. Organs wheeze ominously, acoustic guitars flutter and flit, chimes drift and shimmer, the piano returns in dense swells, bits of static and glitchy hiss intrude like someone changing stations on the radio, there are creaks and groans, distant rumbles, bits of electronic skitter, subtle drones, chimes, bells, even the occasional vocals, but it's always about the guitar, it's delicate dreamlike melodies, and how it's so perfectly intertwined with the piano and the organ. So moving and intense. Think Rachel's, Dirty Three, Pinetop Seven, Japancakes, Godspeed, but somehow much less arty, and more genuine, subtly experimental, but practically perfect, dark, emotional, so incredibly moving. Makes us want to see the film so bad, but in the meantime, it's the ideal music for whatever film you have running through your head. And of course the absolutely perfect soundtrack for lonely walks, staring at the ceiling, staring out the windows in the rain, wandering along railroad tracks, etc...
MPEG Stream: "The Joy Of D.H. Lawrence"
MPEG Stream: "Dusk Settles In"
MPEG Stream: "The Breaking Of Waves"

ENOS SLAUGHTER Saloth Sar (S@1) cd 14.98
You know you want it. Members of Sunburned Hand Of The Man and No Neck Blues Band sneak out in the middle of the night to perform their strange alchemical musical experiments. Sonically not all that different from the above musikal kults, the hostile growl of stumbling angular guitar, atonal skronk, mysterious world music warble, dangerous hippies spewing abstract psychfolk grit and grime, occasionally blissing out into tranquil otherworldly ragas of sitar like shimmer and tribal paganism. Packaged in a beautiful hand screened Godspeed like cardstock digipak!
MPEG Stream: "Lon Nil"

ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE At The Foot Of Nameless Roads (Digitalis) cd 12.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Not so much an ensemble as it is the work of one of the Starving Weirdos, the one who also records in the equally cool RV Paintings. Although it's unclear why the new monicker was necessary, besides the fact that it's a solo record, since the sound is not all that far removed from the Weirdos', which is no bad thing, if anything, the sound on At The Foot Of Nameless Roads is like a more intimate, more hushed take on the Weirdos' abstract avant ambience. Where the SW sounds like a handful of guys bathed in shadows, around a roaring fire, banging on mysterious objects, coaxing sounds out of big old hunks of electronics and busted musical instruments, the sound of EE, is more tranquil, movements measured and precise, lit not by fire, but by moonlight, or soft sunlight filtered through grey clouds. A series of longform dronescapes, shimmering smoother out high pitched skree spread out over layers of burnished hum. Deep metallic shimmers create fields of swirling overtones and buried melodies, delicate tendrils of washed out buzz spread out like a crack in the ice, creating intricate patterns that when viewed from afar are barely visible, but up close reveal all manner of shapes and designs, dense fields of looped percussion get tangled up with reverberating tones and overlapping chunks of fragmented melody, drums are dubbed out and delayed to the point that they almost become a static blur, and finally the sound of a crackling fire underpins hushes whispered dronelike ambience.
This is after all, for all of it's various sounds and timbres, arrangements and processes, a very minimal drone record, and a quite varied and lovely one at that.
Cover art by Tarentel's Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!
MPEG Stream: "At The Foot Of Nameless Roads"
MPEG Stream: "Mud Banks Shine In Broken Shards"
MPEG Stream: "Light Reflects As Seagulls Dive"

ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE Crossing The Path, By Torchlight (Dekorder) lp 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
BACK IN STOCK!
The latest release from Mr. Bryan Pyle, one half of the Starving Weirdos, as well as one half of RV paintings, both groups who we've raved about in the past, as is the case with Pyle's solo project, Ensemble Economique, whose sound is even more difficult to pin down than either of his other two groups. Both the Starving Weirdos and RV paintings seem to be cut from the same sonic cloth, the difference seemingly being that the SW stuff is roughly torn, while the RV Paintings is delicately cut, the former trafficking in a sort of ramshackle experimental droned out abstract ambience, while the latter, dials back the ramshackle, and deftly weaves in field recordings and produces something much warmer and pastoral. Needless to say, we're huge fans of both. Pyle on his own, is all over the place, incorporating obviously elements of both SW and RV, but definitely doing his own idiosyncratic thing, whether it be progged out krautpsych electronics, dark synth-croon songsmithery, filmic melancholia or dense layered dronemusic, so we were definitely prepared for Pyle to throw us a curve ball with this new one, his first for Dekorder. And we were not disappointed. Not one bit. Opener "Heat Waves" sounds remarkably like Salem, straight up witch house, all fuzzy sun dappled synths, those skeletal crunked out handclap rhythms, some very John Carpenter like melodies, but Pyle definitely makes it his own, adding strange flurries of percussion, stretches those synths out into something a bit dronier, but regardless, Salem fans might find themselves flipping out. "Vanishing Point" dials back the witchiness a bit, but it's still all synthy and drum machiney, very retro eighties, a little bit of that synthdrag we dig so much, but with lush string laden swells, and darkly delicate melodies. And so goes the rest of the record, a songsuite of witchy cinematic eighties retro-futurism, but Pyle definitely is a master, transforming what in lesser hands could be bandwagon jumping, into something all his own, mixing in some downtempo Portishead style grooviness, loads of texture, subtle percussion, the vibe haunting and ominous, even hearing a little Barry Adamson here and there, that same sort of faux soundtrack Adamson did so well. But here it's a bit more twisted, the sound seeming to revisit that Salem-y witch housiness throughout, but on tracks like "Everything I Have, I Give To You", making something new and exciting and sonically compelling, out of a sound that's been done to death, and in doing so, creating his own genre, which is basically what he seems to do with every record. Borrowing a little, but then basically tangling and twisting it all up until it's totally unrecognizable.
This might just be our favorite EE record yet, but pretty sure we say that about every one.
Absolutely RIYL Salem, Umberto, Dylan Ettinger, Xander Harris, Roll The Dice and various other purveyors of witchy / synthy / retro sounds...
MPEG Stream: "Heat Waves"
MPEG Stream: "Vanishing Point"
MPEG Stream: "To Feel The Night As It Really Is"

ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE Live In London (Not Not Fun) cassette 6.50
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE Live In Manilla, CA. August 26th 2012 (self-released) cd-r 8.98
Not really a live recording per se, but a focused session at the Manilla Beach compound where Brian Pyle lives and works in Northern California. Pyle is well known around these parts for his work in the DIY cosmic explorers The Starving Weirdos and psychedelic "nature jammers" RV Paintings, with his solo work being under the guise Ensemble Economique. 2012 has been a busy year for Pyle, even by his manic work ethic, thanks to a lengthy tour from the western end of the European continent all the way into the depths of Russia; and he also took a handful of excursions up and down the California coast bracketing that tour. When Pyle performed his set, which he mapped out for the European tour, it was already an impressive array of discordant Tim Heckerish blasts of semi-melodic fuzz, post-Goblin arrangements of ominously minor-key church organs, and a vibe pointing to late-nite habits of getting stoned and aimless trawling through the vacant spaces on cable television. By the time he got back from the tour, he had the set nailed down; and this recording is THEE document encapsulating all of the detours, epiphanies, and experiments Pyle made along the way. Pyle offers up seven or eight distinct movements within the seamlessly mixed session; and in those movements, electro-tribal rhythms and delirious synth tones gird the swelling arrangements for left-field ambience, punk raga-drones, crusty guitar blasts in prolapsed Morricone-styled melody, and brain-cracked vocalizations, with interludes from field recordings of fire, crickets, and whispering cyborg women. More great work from Brian Pyle. And yup, it's super limited.
MPEG Stream: "extract 01"
MPEG Stream: "extract 02"
MPEG Stream: "extract 03"

ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE Live In Studio - July 19th 2011 (self-released) 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.
First off, this is a super fucking limited cd-r, produced in the fog-laden confines of Manila, California by the one and only Brian Pyle. This dude is one of characters in the Starving Weirdos and RV Paintings, with Ensemble Economique being the moniker he's chosen for his solo work. The last couple of Ensemble Economique albums - especially the Psychical lp recorded for Not Not Fun - had been veering from a home-grown psychedelic improvisational splatter and into wonderfully off-kilter takes on cinematic melodrama. Psychical was clearly hedging towards the VHS-horror / John Carpenter vernacular, but here Pyle's jumping into dark-synth croon territory as he's molding sparse songs out of his morass of loops, witch house rhythmic skitter, and occasional arcs of luminous downer guitar tones. What's more is that Pyle SINGS throughout the album - not the reverb-soaked sustained caterwaul he would utter in the Weirdos, but more of a late-nite stoned balladeering that could have infected Pyle's brain from too many Miami Vice re-runs. One could imagine this to be Brian Pyle's ode to that show's incidental music - not the Don Johnson chase scene frenzy, but the crying tone-bent guitar excursions that would peg a scene's cinematic tragedy. Bits of dialogue splattered with delay tricks and synth nodes flash with neon intensity against Pyle's naked electronica, all of which was recorded in a marathon session on one day in the summer of 2011. It's pretty dang amazing actually, it even had folks coming up from the back room to find out what the heck was playing, which is always a good sign.
We're probably the only source for these discs... and who knows if more can be procured!
MPEG Stream: "Track 01"
MPEG Stream: "Track 03"
MPEG Stream: "Track 07"

ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE Psychical (Not Not Fun) lp 14.98
The Italian horror artwork that graces Psychical is something of a red herring, as Brian Pyle guides his Ensemble Economique into the orbit of Conny Plank and Moebius in his use of electronics rather than one of Goblin or Zombi. Pyle is an artist who should need no introduction as one of principals in the Starving Weirdos as well as RV Paintings, with records on pretty much every cool label under the sun (Root Strata, Blackest Rainbow, Weird Forest, Olde English Spelling Bee, Digitalis, and now Not Not Fun). While the debut Ensemble Economique record was very much dialed into what Pyle was conjuring in RV Paintings through a superb stoner-zoner-drone vibe of gorgeous guitar shimmer and suspended harmonic intonations, his solo EE recordings have been carving out a separate identity other than the Starving Weirdos or RV Paintings. Beginning with the Standing Still, Facing Forward LP released earlier in 2010, Pyle's Ensemble Economique has been mining references from '70s and '80s progressive electronics, mostly looking back to those seminal Germans. Certainly, Holger Czukay, Plank, and Moebius come to mind; hell, even Cranioclast and Stockhausen wouldn't be that much of a stretch.
Psychical is wholly dark-trip cast upon waves of two note synth melodies that bounce back and forth against a backdrop of hand percussion and heavily looped drone-shadow. Snippets of dubbed voice and radio transmission crackle ooze a fourth-world, rhythmicist eeriness somewhere between Muslimgauze and that Zero Set record from Moebius and Plank, furthered along by bloodshot guitar snarls. Tom Carter makes a guest appearance on one of the track, bringing a rather incendiary prolonged solo to Pyle's raga-drone rhythms. All in all, another great record from Brian Pyle!

ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE Standing Still, Facing Forward (Amish) lp 22.00
Brian Pyle is a musician with far too many ideas bouncing in his head to let them lie still. He's best known as one of the Starving Weirdos, specializing in druggy and junked avant-drone work, which we have championed for years. But he's also produced equally impressive sonic opiates through the nature-jam project RV Paintings and his solo outing Ensemble Economique. There are obvious similarities in all of the Pyle projects, found in the foggy psychedelia oozing from the sodden landscape of his native Humboldt County and into the billowing passages of guitar drones that perch between overcast industrialism and stoned wanderlust. Standing Still, Facing Forward leans a bit more toward the early experiments of krautrock electronics, especially in comparison to Holger Czukay's oft forgotten masterpiece Canaxis.
The album opens with a set of somber strings overlapping and colliding into a filmic melancholy, transitioning into an Andromeda Strain type of sonic paranoia with electronic twinklings dispersed upon a ghostly drone smear. The noir horns that repeat throughout "Angkor Wat, In The Mist" harken to a slow-motion John Barry at his peak and certainly the facet of Morricone's work for Italian slasher films. Pyle furthers the tension of those allusions with a sustained rasp from a Tambura and a weird chirping from what sound like electric birds. The finale of minor-key synth tones grafted to a harmonica transmitting extended tones through waves of echo and reverb. Mysterious, haunting, and recommended as with pretty much everything that Mr. Pyle touches.

ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE The Vastness Is Bearable Only Through Love (Shelter Press) lp 19.98
If there was any artist who deserved to be covered on aQ List #420, it would have to be Brian Pyle. Even though we've heard rumors that the man from Humboldt county gave up smoking pot - even if it just for a short amount of time - the residual THC levels in his bloodstream and around the synapses of his brain are so strong that when 4:20 rolls around, the rhythms and the rituals of the long-term stoner seem to have permanently ingrained a daily jolt of chemically induced mind-expansion. Mr. Pyle is of course one of the drivers behind such aQ favorite projects as the Starving Weirdos and RV Paintings, with his solo work designated as Ensemble Economique, although all three projects do share a ramshackle, atonal aspect that tosses absolutely everything into the mix of horror score sound design, avant-drone hypnosis, no-fi pop madness, and woozily looped psychedelic constructions all stained with a stoner touch.
The title is an allusion to Carl Sagan, with Pyle showing much more restraint in his schizoid ambience than we've ever heard from him. A tense two note piano loop cycles through the side long title track, with icy shivers of time-stretched electronics casting wave after wave of late-night Videodrome vibes. Hissing repetitions gird "All That Remains Is The Night Sky" with analog synths dialed into zoned-out cosmic buzzings with shimmering melodies flickered in the distant and atonal harmonics that could almost be Tibetan horns if they weren't so electronic. Wind-swept field recordings scrape across a golden radiant drone broadcast through Pyle's synths on the minimalist long-form closer "Something New Is Happening" whose uncanny tones suspend time amidst its whisps, swirls, and flurries. More brilliant stuff from Brian Pyle, to whom we say "you're welcome" for getting him on to list 420. We just had to do it.
400 copies, on blue vinyl.
MPEG Stream: "The Vastness Is Bearable Only Through Love"

ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE The Vastness Is Bearable Only Through Love (Agents Of Chaos) cassette 9.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Ultra limited cassette from Ensemble Economique, aka Brian Pyle, 1/2 of Humboldt avant abstractionists Starving Weirdos and RV Paintings. We've long loved the SW's sprawling rhythmic dronescapery, and on his own, Pyle explores similar sonic territory, but Pyle's approach sans partners seems to be more dense and dark, caustic and abrasive, the rhythmic element balancing the atmospheric elements, like here on the title track, which spreads out over all of the first side. A thick, swirling low end thrum oozes and undulates, it's a hazy blurred rumble, over which Pyle layers heaving shards of crunch, thick throbs, deep bell-like tones, rhythmic machine gun stutters, all of which pile up and overlap, creating a soft cacophony of clatter and crunch, chug and churn, a strangely haunting, and sorta noisy, almost industrial creepscape, that sounds like some weird hybrid of Wolf Eyes, Philip Jeck and Umberto performed by some strange robotic minimalist chamber ensemble. A swirling, heady, and darkly psychedelic barrage of loops and rhythms, layers and textures, mesmerizing and intense.
The flipside is another permutation of Pyle's abstract beat laden drones, another thick swirling morass of sitar-like buzz and sci-fi synth squelch, this time the beats buried, little flurries of stutter and shuffle, squalls of glitchy tangle, more coloring the proceedings than driving them. The last track is a tense soundtracky stretch of layered buzz, haunting melody, a sprawl of pulsing high end over deep ominous rumbles, like the music from the scariest moment in some lost Italian giallo, stretched out into minutes instead of seconds, all tension, no release, brooding and intense, haunting and mesmerizing, fantastic stuff.
LIMITED TO 120 COPIES! We only have a handful direct from Mr. Pyle himself when he was in town, and it's very likely that these are the last copies we'll be able to get...

ENSEMBLE MODERN / FRED FRITH Traffic Continues (Winter & Winter) cd 15.98
Avant guitar great Fred Frith, along with Ikue Mori (drum machines) and Zeena Parkins (harp), join one of Germany's premier new music ensembles (the aptly named Ensemble Modern) for what sounds amazingly like, if you can imagine, Aaron Copland at the Knitting Factory. A downtown NYC jazz take on 20th century classical, verging into Carl Stalling cartoon-music territory at moments. Not silly-sounding though, rather it's beautiful, pastoral and grand. Really great. On Winter & Winter, with their distinctive packaging. Dedicated in part to the memory of cellist Tom Cora.

ENSEMBLE PEARL s/t (Drag City) cd 14.98
Ensemble Pearl is a new psychedelic supergroup of sorts, featuring SUNNO))) guitarist Stephen O'Malley, Boris basher Atsuo, legendary Japanese psychedelic axeman Michio Kurihara, and William Herzog (guitarist for Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter) along with a handful of guests including violinist extraordinare Eyvind Kang. This unlikely collective have whipped up a heady brew of smoldering slow motion doom psych lumber and blackened kosmische drift, all murky and muddy, wasted and washed out, the core sound a smoldering, twang flecked tarpit trudge, a little bit Earth, a little bit Barn Owl, a little bit former Record Of The Weekers Torlesse Super Group - the same sort of windswept, apocalyptic, desert drone dirge, only this time, imbued with a pulsing psychedelic cosmic energy, a ferocity and intensity that seems to lurk just below the surface, as if barely restrained, a glowing black heart beating within Ensemble Pearl's bleak, bleary, blackly blissful exterior.
The sounds here are dense and dark, and yet simultaneously free and abstract, a trudging rhythmic plod, offering the only real structure, the sounds only tenuously moored to the surface, as if all it would take is a subtle shift in the solar winds, for the whole thing to drift heavenward, which it does at several points, the sound then seeming to blur into a more spaced out version of modern minimal dronemusic, almost like a more blackened, demonic Tangerine Dream, or a seriously sinister Phill Niblock, a hazy, softly churning kosmische thrum, lush and layered, pulsing and rich with chordal coloration and slow shifting overtones, laced with all manner of mysterious tonal shifts, like the soundtrack to some super abstract sci-fi art film, those stretches of droned out buzz could be the music of the cosmos, the streaks and contrails in the night sky translated into sound, a haunting, serene sonic stasis, that still somehow seems to be in perpetual motion, tranquil, slow swirling clouds of sonic debris, imbued with a warm glow of divine dreaminess.
But those sounds invariably coalesce into the dark dirgery that defines Ensemble Pearl's soundworld, the record bookended by to slowburn epics, the closer maybe our favorite, an epic sprawl of smolder and shimmer, a dreamy sonic death march, the guitars doused in reverb, the drums subtly dubbed out, the whole thing a woozy weary wander, a skeletal slo-mo lope through softly undulating swirls of smokey chordal shimmer, and heaving hushed drones, wreathed, like the opener, in fragmented shards of blurry ambience, spidery melodic tangles, the soaring sheets of keening high end here muted and smeared into distant glimmers, the occasional howl of feedback, or soft squalls of achingly keening high end guitarnoise, disappearing into fields of dubdrone blur, before returning to the motorik dirge creep that churns ever onward, gradually disappearing into a hushed field of atmospheric black buzz, warm and darkly billowing.
Fans of minimal drone smolder and abstract cosmic psychedelic space-doom drift will be in heaven.
MPEG Stream: "Ghost Parade"
MPEG Stream: "Painting On A Corpse"
MPEG Stream: "Giant"
MPEG Stream: "Sexy Angle"

ENSEMBLE PEARL s/t (Drag City) 2lp 25.00
Ensemble Pearl is a new psychedelic supergroup of sorts, featuring SUNNO))) guitarist Stephen O'Malley, Boris basher Atsuo, legendary Japanese psychedelic axeman Michio Kurihara, and William Herzog (guitarist for Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter) along with a handful of guests including violinist extraordinare Eyvind Kang. This unlikely collective have whipped up a heady brew of smoldering slow motion doom psych lumber and blackened kosmische drift, all murky and muddy, wasted and washed out, the core sound a smoldering, twang flecked tarpit trudge, a little bit Earth, a little bit Barn Owl, a little bit former Record Of The Weekers Torlesse Super Group - the same sort of windswept, apocalyptic, desert drone dirge, only this time, imbued with a pulsing psychedelic cosmic energy, a ferocity and intensity that seems to lurk just below the surface, as if barely restrained, a glowing black heart beating within Ensemble Pearl's bleak, bleary, blackly blissful exterior.
The sounds here are dense and dark, and yet simultaneously free and abstract, a trudging rhythmic plod, offering the only real structure, the sounds only tenuously moored to the surface, as if all it would take is a subtle shift in the solar winds, for the whole thing to drift heavenward, which it does at several points, the sound then seeming to blur into a more spaced out version of modern minimal dronemusic, almost like a more blackened, demonic Tangerine Dream, or a seriously sinister Phill Niblock, a hazy, softly churning kosmische thrum, lush and layered, pulsing and rich with chordal coloration and slow shifting overtones, laced with all manner of mysterious tonal shifts, like the soundtrack to some super abstract sci-fi art film, those stretches of droned out buzz could be the music of the cosmos, the streaks and contrails in the night sky translated into sound, a haunting, serene sonic stasis, that still somehow seems to be in perpetual motion, tranquil, slow swirling clouds of sonic debris, imbued with a warm glow of divine dreaminess.
But those sounds invariably coalesce into the dark dirgery that defines Ensemble Pearl's soundworld, the record bookended by to slowburn epics, the closer maybe our favorite, an epic sprawl of smolder and shimmer, a dreamy sonic death march, the guitars doused in reverb, the drums subtly dubbed out, the whole thing a woozy weary wander, a skeletal slo-mo lope through softly undulating swirls of smokey chordal shimmer, and heaving hushed drones, wreathed, like the opener, in fragmented shards of blurry ambience, spidery melodic tangles, the soaring sheets of keening high end here muted and smeared into distant glimmers, the occasional howl of feedback, or soft squalls of achingly keening high end guitarnoise, disappearing into fields of dubdrone blur, before returning to the motorik dirge creep that churns ever onward, gradually disappearing into a hushed field of atmospheric black buzz, warm and darkly billowing.
Fans of minimal drone smolder and abstract cosmic psychedelic space-doom drift will be in heaven.
MPEG Stream: "Ghost Parade"
MPEG Stream: "Painting On A Corpse"
MPEG Stream: "Giant"
MPEG Stream: "Sexy Angle"

ENTOURAGE MUSIC AND THEATRE ENSEMBLE Entourage (Folkways) lp 16.98
From the minute we saw the cover, we knew this had to be something special! I mean we can easily see this psychedelic graphic of a hooded horn-playing figure with a gnarled tree emanating from below being a new record by any number of druggy experimental outfits from psych-folk to pagan eco-metal, but this Smithsonian Folkways reissue is from the Entourage Music and Theatre Ensemble, a modern ambient classical outfit who hailed from Baltimore. Recorded in 1973, the ensemble of musicians performed with a dance troupe making these strange tripped out pieces of abstracted sound and movement heavy on viola, keyboards, percussion and guitar, with an emphasis on interesting harmonics, organic percussion and textured melody. The music is impressionistically gorgeous conjuring all kinds of mental sound pictures, reminding us of a combination of The Penguin Cafe Orchestra and Harry Partch, but also Barton Smith, or perhaps a hippie folk version of Philip Glass. The ensemble was active until 1983 when the founder and director Joe Clark died. They put out two records, this and The Neptune Collection from 1975, both produced by Moses Asch, founder of Folkways Records, and both incredibly amazing!!

ENTRELACS Cynorrodhon (Drone Records) 7" 7.50
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Here's one of those few instances in which I would have to scold Drone Records for their adamant adherence to releasing this sort of music on 7"s. The debut recording of Entrelacs -- a collaborative effort between dronologist Michael Northam and field recordist Yannick Dauby -- is too good for just a 7". The parallel between Entrelacs and Organum are so profound as to bring back to me all of my frustration with Organum's insistence upon releasing just 3 minutes of the most sublime chorales of screeching metals when those sounds want to extend toward infinity like LaMonte Young or Phil Niblock. Entrelacs presents a similarly dynamic sound, that is so perfectly self-contained with its timbral massings from long-stringed instruments and clamorous details of various rocks and leaves. Perhaps no media can really contain these sounds, and I would be making a similar critique even if this were released on CD. This highly recommended single is limited to 300 copies, with this first edition pressed on clear vinyl. VERY FEW OF THESE IN STOCK!!

ENTRELACS Underleaf (Semperflorens) cd 14.98
Entrelacs is the sporadically operational collaboration between longtime aQ fave eco-dronologist Michael Northam and phonographer Yannick Dauby, as Northam is perpetually wandering back and forth between North America and Europe, and with Dauby residing in Taiwan. These recordings actually date back to 2003, made "along a fallen tree in Courbet, Oregon and [at] a conversation with found objects in Paris." The Entrelacs project begins with the collection of found objects, continues through the manifestation of tactile sounds from those objects aided by some use of digital manipulation, and concludes when the objects are returned from where they were found. This lends itself well to the discovery of previously unknown sounds in new regions, especially when these two would perform live. On their website, they site an impressive array of atypical sound making devices that would give Matmos more than a few good ideas for their electro-acoustic madness. Amplified chimney sweeps, bowed escargot, obsidian shards, dried chardons, and needles piercing leaves are just a few of the more interesting ones. We're very curious to know where those bowed snails are in the mix! Underleaf unfurls slowly through a slow crunching of organic materials occasionally jolted with the sharp tinkling of what must be those obsidian fragments. Aggregated masses of those textures blossom throughout the 49 minute track in blurry drones that settle in the background of those tactile sounds, eventually giving way to a bowed metal chorale near the 30 minute mark that has all the right Organum / Andrew Chalk references. Very lovely and very limited stock on this one!
MPEG Stream: "Underleaf (extract 1)"
MPEG Stream: "Underleaf (extract 2)"

ENVENOMIST Black Bile (Twonicorn) cassette 7.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
This here's the first we've heard from the strangely monickered Envenomist, but already it sounds like something we could do with a whole lot more of. And certainly the sounds here fit perfectly amidst the rest of the Twonicorn roster: Changeling, Brendan Murray, Glass Organ, Bonecloud, Tombi, Taiga Remains, etc...
Three tracks of shimmering steel string buzz, distant moaning train horn drone, thick clouds of buzzing swirl and fragmented melodies, looped krautrock like grit and grim doomy low end swells, thick and viscous, all layered into a harrowing and haunting sonic journey. Veering from FX drenched alien psychscape, to creepy modulated drones, to dense slow moving landscapes of buzz drenched melodies and slithering low end whir, to crackling fields of metallic buzz and warm whorls of thick soft focus ambience....
As with all Twonicorn, gorgeously packaged, pro printed tapes, textured paper sleeves, and of course super limited, ONLY 100 COPIES!! Each tape hand numbered.

ENVENOMIST Helix (Killer Pimp) cd 11.98
Holy shit is this Killer Pimp label kicking our ass. First the recent Dead Letters cd that we made Record Of The Week, then the gorgeous Aidan Baker / Thisquietarmy collaboration, before that there was the A Place To Bury Strangers record, and now this new Envenomist disc! (There are a few others on deck too, to be reviewed soon we hope).
Pretty bad ass for a first batch of releases we think. We'd been dying to hear more from Envenomist, who we haven't heard from since we reviewed the Black Bile tape way back in 2007. Sonically very little has changed, extended soundscapes of shimmery metallic buzz over deep low end thrum, layered into softly undulating sonic swells, ominous and haunting and so cinematic. As we most certainly have mentioned before, movie makers should be looking to the underground music scene for truly original, and in the case of Envenomist, truly frightening music for their films.
The sounds of Envenomist are noisy, but the noise is blurred and smeared, muted and dulled, a soft noise that is so evocative, of ashen skies, burning wastelands, cold barren landscapes, mysterious otherworlds, lost planets, underground caverns, these sounds are so subtly harrowing and haunting, conjuring a sense of doom, of loneliness, of death and destruction, of sadness and sorrow, the long tones build tension, creating a sense of an impending end, to life, to everything, but while creating this palpable sense of dread, Envenomist manages to create a sound that is also beautiful, perhaps blackly beautiful, but beautiful nonetheless, hypnotic and mesmerizing, mysterious and truly creepy, but again, soothing and meditative, a sort of doom-ic new age perhaps, whatever you call it, it's pretty fantastic, and has been a constant late night listen since we first got it in. And another winner from Killer Pimp...
MPEG Stream: "The 11th Hour"
MPEG Stream: "Bestowal"

EOH Wormy (Diagnosis...Don't!) 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.
Another blast of glorious noisy weirdness from the Grey Daturas' Diagnosis...Don't! label, this time from the strangely name EOH (named for Rob from the Daturas' son Max's imaginary friend! cool), a trio of drinking buddies (featuring Rob from the Daturas) who channel their drunken unruliness into recording session after recording session. This 20 minute chunk of dark drones and abstract free noise was culled from hours and hours of wild drunken recording, and the results are surprisingly cohesive and listenable. Still dense and noisy and intense, but with a soft touch. More whisper than roar, more drone than screech. A Wolf Eyesian industrial murk march. Dense swirling layers of thick pulsing guitar distortion, wavering and warbling in thick sheets laid over everything, peppered with occasional cymbal crashes and what sounds like some sort of throat singing. This is some seriously massive ur-drone shit. Huge industrial wastescapes, abstract spare stretches of low end rumble swirling like black fog over ruined landscapes of damaged amplifiers and detuned guitars. Haunting, and desolate but strangely lovely. Essential listening for the drone obsessed among you.
Packaged in thick textured paper grey mini 3" sleeves, with a printed (band name, label info, liner notes) Japanese style obi. Nice.
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 1"
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 2"

EPA Black Ice (Dorobo) cd 16.98

EPHEL DUATH The Painter's Palette (Elitist / Earache) cd 15.98
Woah. The "what the fuck?!" meter is going off the scale here. Ephel Duath -- no, we don't know what that name means exactly -- are from Italy and this is their second album. They're a black metal band. So far, so good, so what. Then take a listen. THIS is black metal?? More like metalcore (the screaming vocals), prog (the schitzo song structures), and/or jazz (the horns, the drumming). Let's talk about the drummer -- the dude's a jazz drummer pushing 50, who never played a metal "date" before. Well, he shows up quite a few metal drummers with this performance. And, to backtrack, yes we said horns. Total Miles Davis In A Silent Way trumpet, y'know... Then there's also everything from prettily melodic sensitive male vocals to skittering electronic beats to funk bass to ambient synth drone to, oh yeah, epic symphonic black metal thrown in. Could be a mess, yet somehow, somehow, it works, for us anyway. They just have a knack for mixing all these ingredients just right so that the results stick in your ear. Call 'em songs, even though they don't sound much like most songs out there. So, if your listening diet contains some or better yet all of the following, you're pretty much meant to buy this Ephel Duath disc: Arcturus, Naked City, Maudlin Of The Well, Mr. Bungle, Melt Banana, Yakuza, Neurosis, Sigh, Dillinger Escape Plan, Radiohead, Opeth, Emperor... Yeah, Opeth with jazzy trumpet and more of an ADD, John Zorn styled songwriting approach, that might be a good shorthand description of this Ephel Duath thingie.
MPEG Stream: "Labyrinthine"
MPEG Stream: "Praha"

EPILEPTINOMICON Changeling House Summer (self-released) cd-r 6.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We first discovered Epileptinomicon years ago, when some mysterious cd-r's showed up in the mail, all handmade, with very little info, but how could we not be intrigued by a band called Epileptinomicon? So we threw it on and were totally blown away, dark, and droney, heavy and dense, spaced out and psychedelic, a little krautrocky, lo-fi, but definitely well crafted, some seriously blackened ambient dronemusic for sure.
So we tried to get in touch with this Epileptinomicon, but had no luck, emailed went unreturned, no trace on the web, Google searches turned up two mentions on the aQuarius site. So we assumed the worst, and gave up. The at last year's aQuarius / WFMU South By Southwest showcase, who should show up, but none other than Epileptinomicon, so we hung out, agreed to keep in touch, and arranged for us to order a bunch of records for the shop. Well, then what do you know? The mysterious Epileptinomicon disappears again, no word, no sign, no nothing.
But finally, the connection has been made, via of all people, recent aQ thrash faves Speedwolf, who live in the same town as E-con, and are weirdly enough touring together with 'em, so we now have a limited selection of two different Epileptinomicon cd-r's the first one, titled II, that we initially heard years ago, and a more recent tour disc, both of them awesome. And unfortunately, both extremely limited...
Changeling House Summer is the more recent of the two E-con discs, and shows a whole new side to what we remember as more of a drone / doom / ambient sound, that stuff is still present, loads of low end, thick rumbles, and dense shimmers, but there seems to be more of a focus on rhythm, from simple minimal pulses, to strange skeletal skitters. Reminding us of current synth drone outfits like Oneohtrix Point Never, Emeralds, Pulse Emitter, Emaciator and the like, but more slow and low and blackened.
"Changeling House" is sprawling field of murky drones, and muted melodies, that seems to be peppered with bits of glitch and crackle, until those glitches and crackles coalesce into a strange rhythm, brittle and almost techno like, the sound reminding us of a much more raw, blackened Chain Reaction, the 'beat' looped and hypnotic, over a churning sea of crumbling distortion, and swirling fragmented melodies. Some sort of murky alien dancemusic perhaps, or more accurately, some minimal rhythmic space doom. The pulses spread further and further out, the background noise grows considerable smoother, and suddenly, the track has returned to its initial dronestate, where it hovers before blinking out.
"Summer House" is more obviously recorded live, and begins with a scraped rhythm, and what sounds like a fucked up human beatbox, before both are joined by thick throbbing bass, so dense and blown out it nearly swallows the rest of the sounds whole. And so it remains for the remainder of the track, that rhythm locked solid, looped endlessly, while all around it the low end rumbles grow more and more aggressive, as well as bursts of crackle and hiss, muted feedback squeals, all in a never ending tangle, constantly shifting and mutating, before dissipating in a burst of super distorted buzz.
Finally, there's the 22 minute closer "Perfect Hell", another sprawling expanse of whirling layered low end, grinding guitar buzz, shards of feedback, but with much more melody this time, a glacial tarpit dirge, but infused with all manner of subtle melody. The second half of the track finds an extra element introduced, a groaning, creaking drone, wreathed in effects, that slips from hushed rumble to strangely gnarled slow motion squiggle, underpinned by a glitch driven rhythm, subtle, simple, and weirdly haunting.
CRAZY LIMITED, we got a bunch of these, but not sure how long they'll last, in cool hand stamped xerox sleeves, the discs themselves also stamped.
MPEG Stream: "Changeling House"
MPEG Stream: "Summer House"

EPILEPTINOMICON II (self-released) cd-r 6.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We first discovered Epileptinomicon years ago, when some mysterious cd-r's showed up in the mail, all handmade, with very little info, but how could we not be intrigued by a band called Epileptinomicon? So we threw it on and were totally blown away, dark, and droney, heavy and dense, spaced out and psychedelic, a little krautrocky, lo-fi, but definitely well crafted, some seriously blackened ambient dronemusic for sure.
So we tried to get in touch with this Epileptinomicon, but had no luck, emailed went unreturned, no trace on the web, Google searches turned up two mentions on the aQuarius site. So we assumed the worst, and gave up. The at last year's aQuarius / WFMU South By Southwest showcase, who should show up, but none other than Epileptinomicon, so we hung out, agreed to keep in touch, and arranged for us to order a bunch of records for the shop. Well, then what do you know? The mysterious Epileptinomicon disappears again, no word, no sign, no nothing.
But finally, the connection has been made, via of all people, recent aQ thrash faves Speedwolf, who live in the same town as E-con, and are weirdly enough touring together with 'em, so we now have a limited selection of two different Epileptinomicon cd-r's the first one, titled II, that we initially heard years ago, and a more recent tour disc, both of them awesome. And unfortunately, both extremely limited...
II was the very same disc that just showed up in the mail, the one that originally got us so psyched on these guys (this guy), it ended up getting played all the time in the shop, and even on Andee's radio show, after a loooong while, it was weird to return to this, in some ways if felt like we had already listed it, when in fact, we never got enough to review until now.
The sound here is a sort of abstract minimal drone drift, with a bit of lo-fi dub going on. Slow smeared tones, layered over one another, a strange muted pulse way off in the distance, all beneath slow wheezing barely there melodies, and a strange reverbed dubby little percussive thump, that seems in its own way to drive the whole track. Headphones help, an immersive sound world, of drift and shimmer and throb, ambient for sure, space-y as well, but weirdly (and very subtly) propulsive. The sound is murky and muddy and muted, until about halfway through when a shimmering crystalline guitar surfaces, a simple strummed chord that is dosed in delay, sent echoing into the ether, adding a distinctly pop element to what was otherwise something black and bare, and only minimally melodic.
The second track, the 17 minute "Lunar Menagerie", begins again as a hushed, stuttery underwater sounding bass pulse, and for the first 7 or 8 minutes remains underwater, or perhaps it's meant to emulate the sounds on the surface of the moon, either way, it's a gloriously rumbly, soft swirling sea of tangled synaptic misfires and heartbeat pulses, launched into the cosmos and allowed to reflect and refract starlight into gorgeous prismatic pulses. The second half of the track gets way more psychedelic, with a guitar unleashing strange squalls of swirling notes, wailing streaks of high end sound, like some classic psych rock guitar solo, removed from its track, untangled and unfurled into the weightlessness of space, where it floats and tumbles, spinning out bits of melody and warmly textured fragments, and inadvertently channeling other psych drone explorers like Expo 70. Gorgeous stuff.
As me mentioned, EXTREMELY LIMITED, two versions, one in a hand made paper sleeve, the other in a dvd style case, they're both essentially the same, it's random which one you'll get, and odds are we'll be out of both before you know it.
MPEG Stream: "IIIrd Bridge"
MPEG Stream: "Lunar Menagerie"

EQUIMANTHORN Exalted Are The 7 Throne Bearers of Ninnkigal (From Beyond) cd 14.98

EQUIMANTHORN Second Sephira Cella (From Beyond) cd 14.98
Magic with a K, audial indulgence describes Equimanthorn's Second Sephira Cella. It's sonick Sumerian mystery from several necromantically exalted members of the Texas occult metal act Absu, including Emperor Proscriptor Magikus, whose absurd genius has been trumpeted here before. Is Equimanthorn also an "act"? Or it in fact something more serious? Whatever it is, it's certainly NOT a black metal album. No metal on here at all, actually. It's all quite atmospheric (but musical), creepy, ritualistic material... The resemblance to, say, Absu is all in the lyrickal text, the ancient sorceries evoked and invoked. Ridiculous it (probably) is, but at least these adepts have done their homework. You can argue with them about the significance of the Sixth Throne Of Asaru or the Rule Of Utukagaba but I'll stay out of it. Professing a belief in supernatural arts or not, the sheer sonics should seduce many a listener. Divided among the three members of Equimanthorn (Proscriptor, Equitant, and Ekimmu Abstractum), the tracks here are all deep and dark ritual soundtracks, resplendent with droning synths, 'unseen voices', mellotron, 'six-fold bows', and varieties of exotic Eastern instrumentation. We're reminded of such diverse artists as Goblin, Laszlo Hortobagyi, and a host of World Serpents... The music and its meaning are well matched. Equimanthorn is at ease with obscure, occult Esoterica in a way that, say, The Secret Chiefs 3 would like us to think they are but never will be. Advanced, impressive, and -- regardless of any reality-altering aspects -- excellent, candlelit entertainment.
MPEG Stream: "Entrance To The Ancient Flame (Precursory Procedure In The Name Of OUMQ)"
MPEG Stream: "Rule Of Utukagaha (Ruling Of The Scarlet Light Established At The Gates Of The Waters)"

EREMITA, VICTOR A Study For Transcendental Communication (Black Horizons) cassette 8.98
One of two new tapes on this week's list from local label Black Horizons, the other being a new one from local psychedelic drone folk drifters Common Eider, King Eider, and this one, the first we've heard from Victor Eremita, the moniker for a mysterious Swedish soundscaper, who delivers a cold, haunting, minimal ritualistic industrial music, all murky pulses, abstract scrapes and creaks, whirring shimmers, at times sounding like super abstract house music slowed to a crawl and then fused to Ghost Orchid style EVP recordings, at others, like some haunting machinemusic, a softly churning barely there rhythm, wreathed in clouds of keening high end thrum, and blurred layers of rumble and whir, haunting but not so much harrowing, as ominously entrancing.
A dreamworld of rusted automatons, animated by some dark spirit, and compelled to create this soft focus din, an otherworldly sonic ritual, an ethereal, skeletal krautrock style churn, blurred and smeared into soft focus streaks of haunting mesmer, which are ghostlike and spectral, and seem to have been conjured from a realm free of human interference, their presence less musical, and more spiritual, the remains of a mad sonic scientists lab, imbued with the dying spark of his soul, which has somehow kept everything barely working, a strange workshop, a perpetual musical motion machine, gradually running down, captured here in the throes of slow expiration, and a gradual drift to the other side. Haunting and darkly lovely.
And as with all Black Horizons releases, super swank packaging, this time the tape is all clear, with no sticker or printing, housed in a silver and black printed vellum J-card, which holds several printed cardstock inserts. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!

ES A Love Cycle (Fonal) cd 17.98
BACK IN PRINT! One of our old Finnish faves. In new, non-jewelcase packaging like most recent Fonal releases. Here's the review from AQ list 109: Coming out of the same Finnish scene that spawned AQ-faves Circle and Ektroverde, Es is the work of Sami Sanpakkila, who in addition to this solo project, also plays in various bands like Kiila and Velvolino. He also runs Fonal records. (I guess all that is how he keeps himself busy during those long cold dark winters). His previous disc, Flick, was guitar-based, a beautiful, psychedelic (in a modern way) guitar-electronics meditation. For "A Love Cycle" he focuses not on guitar but on the use of loops from scratchy old records, reminding us very strongly of the work of AQ-fave Philip Jeck! It's a very pretty and hypnotic album, also very melancholic and at points darkly ominous. The record crackle is a real presence, its sound seemingly as significant as the music in the looped records' grooves. On one track this vinyl hum is joined by a female's humming vocals, and on others Sami layers synth and beats over the loops. A Love Cycle conjures up an inviting and mysterious soundworld. Very nice.
MPEG Stream: "Les Fleurs Sont Des Bonnes Auditrices"
MPEG Stream: "Twenty-Five Twenty-Five"

ES Flick (Fonal) cd 16.98
Es is the work of Finland's Sami Sanpakkila. This is the first work that we've encountered from Es, though Sanpakkila is closely connected to the out-rock ensembles of Circle and Ektroverde. The nine tracks are hermetic sculptures built out of beautifully gossamer guitar playing with Zoviet France like backing loops and atmospheres. Fans of early Durutti Column or Steven R. Smith's evocative work should definitely take note.