FROST, BEN By The Throat (Bedroom Community) lp 17.98
We first discovered Ben Frost on, of all places, a dubstep comp. It definitely worked, this long brooding chunk of creeped out electronic dronemusic plopped down right between to stuttery stripped down dubbed out jams. It quickly became our favorite track on that disc, and got us to hunt down his full length, Theory Of Machines, which was just as good as that track. A strange assemblage of mysterious psych jams and minimal techno, drones and glitchy electronica, but all shot through with a mysterious darkness, that seemed to infuse every track with a bit of malevolence.
But if that record was dark and mysterious, then his new one, By The Throat, is downright terrifying. Who knew electronic music could be this harrowing, this epic and intense?! Mixing organic instruments, field recordings (lots of wolf howls and growls) and fucked up glitched out electronics, Frost has conjured up an incredible cinematic electronic dronemusic masterpiece. Sounds like hyperbole, but it's not. This record is amazing, playing out like a soundtrack to some lost-in-the-woods Italian horror film, pianos and strings, dense swells of static, the aforementioned wolves, all wound into tense soundscaped vignettes, each one rife with tension, and emotion, and a sprawling darkness.
The opening track is worth the price of admission alone, a series of slow building sonic swells, each a wall of crumbling distorted hiss, throbbing over a minimal stretch of subtle glitch and muted melody, the tones are jagged and sharp, the melodies are fragmented and minor key, bits of acoustic guitar drift over the squalls, ghostlike, while beneath, thick ominous low end rumbles and whirs. It's like a more electronic, more minimal, and much darker Godspeed.
That track segues right into "The Carpathians", where the wolves make their first appearance, howling over Bernard Hermann like strings, their growls providing seriously scary low end, the baying matched by the mournful melodies, it's easy to imagine being lost in the snow, miles away from civilization, wandering through the dark, the night filled with the howling of wolves.
The whole record really does play out like a soundtrack, each track evoking a certain mood, "O God Protect Me" is all clipped abstract rhythms and muted crystalline melody, soft glitches and distant beeps, pretty and melancholy and subtly ominous, while "Hibakusja", which starts out with a simple guitar melody and what sounds like the moan of horns, becomes the scariest track on the record, the wolves growling processed into fucked up glitched low end stutters, that original opening guitar remains, but beneath those fucked up grinding glitchy growls, totally intense, before becoming more and more staticky and abstract.
If there's not a movie, someone needs to make it NOW. The rest of the record evokes still more strange territory, skipped Jeck-like loopscapes, all glitchy and tense, the skipping records offering up snippets that on their own would be fairly haunting and mysterious, but recontextualized become something even more, thick swells of buzzing cellos and harmonized voices transformed into massive crumbling walls of sound, various melodies and elements resurfacing throughout, especially a main theme that seems to define the record, and sounds like a simple melody, but here is infused with the terror and fear of the surrounding sounds, long stretches of layered high end shimmer, more glitched out electronic minimalism, again, all rife with tension, with a cinematic weight, that makes this record sound like so much more than just a collection of songs and sounds.
Gorgeous cover art too, all reflective inks on a matte background, all images of snow and wolves and empty landscapes, the spare frostbitten white wasteland, where the seemingly imaginary events described by the sounds on By The Throat could have taken place. Intense and amazing.
MPEG Stream: "Killshot"
MPEG Stream: "The Carpathians"
MPEG Stream: "Hibakusja"

FROST, BEN Theory Of Machines (Bedroom Community) cd 14.98
YES! BACK IN PRINT! We originally raved about this back in the summer of '08, it's been out of print for a while now but finally has been repressed, and is a little bit cheaper now too! If you picked up Ben Frost's By The Throat (an AQ Record Of The Week last fall) but missed this earlier, now's your chance to grab it!
Ben Frost was a total unknown to us until just a few months ago, when we heard his track on the recent Mary Anne Hobbs Evangeline mix cd, which was soooooo good, a huge surprise, a totally left field electronic drone jam stuck in the middle of a dubstep mix. Some of us were definitely thinking jam of the year, even though the record it was taken from had come out the year before, but holy crap, it totally stole the show, and we knew we had to hear more. So we tracked down the full length, but then, to be honest, became a little nervous before digging in, worried that we might discover that THAT track, the one we were already obsessed with and already had, might be the only good one on the record. Thankfully nothing could be further from the truth. And in fact, a few of the other tracks are now vying to knock that one out of the top spot.
Theory Of Machines is a tough one to describe. It's electronic, but rife with strange glitches, with deep buzzing drones, blown out psych jams, mysterious murky minimal techno, all somehow woven into something totally cohesive, ultra dark and ominous, and so fucking kick ass. The record begins with the title track, the one from the Hobbs mix, but for those of you who might have missed that one, here's how we described it:
An extended slab of slow burning blurred dronemusic, that over the course of its 9 minutes builds from soft shimmer to dense crumbling Tim Hecker style smeared gauzy beauty, to thick caustic blown out soft noise, to an super distorted almost-trip-hop. The sound is immense and epic, and so gorgeous, wreathed in crackle and underpinned by buzzing downtuned lowend, streaked with soaring synths, the track's climax, all skittery beats beneath clouds of hiss and whir and crackle and fuzz is totally intense and gorgeous.
Indeed! If lots of folks didn't already own the Hobbs mix, we would be declaring this worth owning for that track alone. But the follow up, "Stomp" is just as good. A shimmery minimal glitchscape, tons of space, swells of hissy buzz, and off kilter fractured beats, drifting in and then out, leaving long expanses of whispery hush, a blown out electric guitar, super processed, is smothered and muted into a stuttered decayed riff, struggling to let loose, the drums begin to pound, the guitar grinds out a noisy crunch, before retreating again, leaving just that soft almost techno skitter finally culminating in a super fuzz drenched industrial pound, a looped rhythm beneath that same damaged riff filtered through all sorts of static and short wave interference. It's so intense and weirdly ominous and sort of exhausting to listen to. So cinematic and fraught with tension. When the song ends you almost feel like you just crawled up from the sewers after being chased over rooftops, having the shit kicked out of you, leaping from a helicopter, saving the damsel in distress, and discovering that the city before you lay in ruins. So evocative and dramatic.
The next track, while still dark and haunting, is a bit of a respite, a moody trawl through a glitched out low end drift, peppered with a mysterious sonar like single note high end pulse, a subtle shuffling beat hovering just below the surface, the hiss and static swirling and crunching while a distant melody floats in an expanse of soft shimmer. A quick two minute arrangement of big beats, grinding electric guitar, whirling ambient buzz offers up the record's most 'rock' moment before slipping into the final jam, which is not so much a jam as it is an extended drift, deep resonant tones, ring out, decaying ever so slowly, the various sonic ripples blending into one another, creating soft, shimmery minor key melodies, underpinned by deep pulsing bass, that you almost feel more than you hear, very tranquil and serene, eventually jazzy drums come in, melodies coalesce into something much more tight and arranged, becoming a sort of dreamy jazzy slowcore, softly dramatic, with what sounds like swoonsome strings and warm organ warble, a surprisingly dreamy and sun dappled finish to a record that is otherwise pretty caustic and dark. Which is precisely why it's so good. Totally unpredictable, a jarring mash up of rock elements all fucked up and processed, glitched out electronics, of dark brooding drone and cinematic ambience, all woven into a creepy, menacing, beautiful batch of sound.
MPEG Stream: "Theory Of Machines"
MPEG Stream: "Stomp"

FROSTMOON ECLIPSE I Am Providence (God Is Myth) 3"cd-r 8.98
Yet another entry in God Is Myth's ongoing series of 3"cd-r homages to horror author H.P. Lovecraft, who is obviously one of the main sources for metal band names, song titles and lyrical themes. Get rid of Lovecraft and Tolkien and suddenly metal bands would have names like Sunshine and Tigerlilly and would sing songs about picnics and rowboats. But fear not, until some mischievous soul with a time machine gets some crazy ideas, all is well in metal.
Past installments have come from a pretty disparate selection of black metal and black ambient outfits: Caina, Harvist, LVTHN, Sapthuran, Smohalla, and now Frostmoon Eclipse.
Although we've only ever listed one Frostmoon record, we've long been big fans, their blend of classic Norwegian style black metal, a la Mayhem, Emperor with dark moody rock, a brooding gothic groove, the result is a strangely catchy, but still fiercely heavy blackened metallic rock. With long stretches of acoustic guitar, simple drumming and almost flamenco style melodies, they definitely remind us of Opeth as well. But FE manage to take their influences and distill something distinctly their own. The strange thing is, we almost prefer the band when they are all acoustic, which much of this ep ends up being, evoking all sorts of melancholic emotions, with just steel strings and a hushed whispered vocal. That said, these guys can crush, and the blasts of heaviness are indeed intense and blackened, blending perfectly with the folky flutter and dark ambient drift surrounding it.
LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES. Already sold out and out of print. We got nearly a quarter of those, but like past installments these will no doubt disappear quick. Packaged in a normal slimline cd case, with black and white covers and a sepia printed cardstock insert with a photo and a brief biography of Lovecraft.
MPEG Stream: "In The Vault"
MPEG Stream: "The Thing On The Doorstep"

FUCK BUTTONS Tarot Sport (ATP) cd 14.98
The first Fuck Buttons record, Street Horrrsing, was a bright colorful explosion of sound, we described it as "massive super distorted heavy electronic drone fuzz pop" and "energetically exotic and hypnotically repetitive and just chock full of sheer noise fuzz bliss, bulldozering over buried melodies, tribal weirdness, and equally distorted screaming vocals". Basically it was a noisy fucked up head spinning chunk of noise rock bliss pop infused with all manner of electronics.
On Tarot Sport, the equation has been flipped, if anything this is an electronic record, heck, a techno record, that just so happens to be filtered through some twisted noise rock, lo-fi punk rock lens. Like Daft Punk for the noise rock set, these extended jams sound like some unholy collision between the Boredoms, Gang Gang Dance, Black Dice and the Basement Jaxx, the synths are throbbing and thick and buzzy, the beats bounce and pound and skitter and slip from lurching stutter to house-y pound to groovy lope, while all around these various sounds is wrapped a warm gauzy layer of M83 like fuzz, giving the whole record a super dreamlike almost eighties feel. "Space Mountain" sounds like M83 gone techno and then nabbed for a crucial scene in a remake of Sixteen Candles, "Flight Of The Feathered Serpent" is another one that has futuristic eighties jam written all over it, hazy and druggy, washed out and shimmery, the beats big and block rockin', with a gorgeously almost Jesu sounding second half, albeit way poppier.
The first half of the record though, starting with the single "Surf Solar" is more on the Daft Punk side of things, still fuzzy and noisy and blissed out but way more techno. "Rough Steez" might be the weirdest of the bunch, with its super buzzy jagged fuzz bass, stuttery clipped rhythms, and squealing glitchy electronics, although there's plenty of fuzzy dreaminess creeping in already.
This is one of those rare records that pretty much everybody here loves, it's groovy, noisy, fuzzy, druggy, the beats are bad ass, the atmosphere is hazy and eighties, and it's all wrapped up into one practically perfect set of future summer retro noise rock techno electronic jams. This is quickly turning into one of our new favorites...
MPEG Stream: "Surf Solar"
MPEG Stream: "Rough Steez"
MPEG Stream: "Olympians"

FUCK BUTTONS Tarot Sport (All Tomorrows Parties) lp 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The first Fuck Buttons record, Street Horrrsing, was a bright colorful explosion of sound, we described it as "massive super distorted heavy electronic drone fuzz pop" and "energetically exotic and hypnotically repetitive and just chock full of sheer noise fuzz bliss, bulldozering over buried melodies, tribal weirdness, and equally distorted screaming vocals". Basically it was a noisy fucked up head spinning chunk of noise rock bliss pop infused with all manner of electronics.
On Tarot Sport, the equation has been flipped, if anything this is an electronic record, heck, a techno record, that just so happens to be filtered through some twisted noise rock, lo-fi punk rock lens. Like Daft Punk for the noise rock set, these extended jams sound like some unholy collision between the Boredoms, Gang Gang Dance, Black Dice and the Basement Jaxx, the synths are throbbing and thick and buzzy, the beats bounce and pound and skitter and slip from lurching stutter to house-y pound to groovy lope, while all around these various sounds is wrapped a warm gauzy layer of M83 like fuzz, giving the whole record a super dreamlike almost eighties feel. "Space Mountain" sounds like M83 gone techno and then nabbed for a crucial scene in a remake of Sixteen Candles, "Flight Of The Feathered Serpent" is another one that has futuristic eighties jam written all over it, hazy and druggy, washed out and shimmery, the beats big and block rockin', with a gorgeously almost Jesu sounding second half, albeit way poppier.
The first half of the record though, starting with the single "Surf Solar" is more on the Daft Punk side of things, still fuzzy and noisy and blissed out but way more techno. "Rough Steez" might be the weirdest of the bunch, with its super buzzy jagged fuzz bass, stuttery clipped rhythms, and squealing glitchy electronics, although there's plenty of fuzzy dreaminess creeping in already.
This is one of those rare records that pretty much everybody here loves, it's groovy, noisy, fuzzy, druggy, the beats are bad ass, the atmosphere is hazy and eighties, and it's all wrapped up into one practically perfect set of future summer retro noise rock techno electronic jams. This is quickly turning into one of our new favorites...
MPEG Stream: "Surf Solar"
MPEG Stream: "Rough Steez"
MPEG Stream: "Olympians"

FUCKWOLF s/t (Kimosciotic) cd 11.98
The SF indie label Kimosciotic run by Le Flange Du Mal's Chris Rolls is a hard one to pin down. In the last five years he's offered up the soul'n'hip hop of DJ Unagi, the electro-disco-bizarro of Crack We Are Rock, the atmospheric electronics of Not Breathing and the scuzz murk art rawk of Ezeetiger. One of the few common links we've been able to sleuth out is that many of the artists seem to have a penchant for costumes, disguises and devil-may-care attitude. Now get a load of Fuckwolf, Kimosciotic's latest release. They fit right in! From the looks of the photos in the insert, medical masks, wigs, coveralls, a lemon tree, sunglasses, a reel-to-reel, drums, electric guitar and bass all came into play during the recording of this cd. Some degree of propulsiveness lurks within and seeps out occasionally, but the overall results are a molten sludge filth stew that draws equal influence from the industrial and no-wave music of the '70s and '80s.
MPEG Stream: "What A Fuck"
MPEG Stream: "So What"

FUJITA, MASAYOSHI & JAN JELINEK Bird, Lake, Objects (Faitiche) cd 19.98
Berlin-based electronica experimentalist Jan Jelinek, whom we've grown ever more enamored of thanks to his star turn in the role of Ursula Bogner (documented on a previous release via Jelinek's Faitiche label, purporting to be a collection of pioneering Radiophonic Workshop style electronic pieces by an obscure female composer from the sixties who it seems never actually existed except in Jelinek's imagination) here teams up with one Masayoshi Fujita, who plays a prepared vibraphone (and how many prepared vibraphone records do you have??), for a lovely, lovely disc of ambient droneworks.
It begins with "Undercurrent", a track of wavering shimmering meditative hum, softly crackling around the edges, some gentle melody glowing within. The idea of nature-sounds suggested by the disc's title are not dispelled by this music, however electronic (and vibraphonic) it may be. Track 2, "Workshop For Modernity", is composed of whirring and tinkling, again gentle, as if the sounds were conjured from the breeze. The next, "I'll Change Your Life", is even quieter, more "lowercase" in presence. We don't know much about Fujita (assuming he's real) but would guess if he's Japanese, he has some familiarity with Japan's "onkyo" school of soundmaking. The following tracks continue this disc's patient and pleasant trajectory, with much shuffling glitch and soft focus digital stutter, alongside/overtop/underneath the melodious but abstracted vibraphone. It's only on album closer "IA_AI" that the duo eventually build up a thick wall of drone-distortion, louder and louder, a dramatic crescendo that ends with a sudden silence. Quite nice, as we like to say, quite nice!! Sometimes experimental electronic stuff can be too clinical and abstract, academic exercises y'know, but this manages to maintain a human feel, an exquisite emotional resonance, by existing in real space with the sounds of real instruments. Yes, quite nice.
MPEG Stream: "Undercurrent"
MPEG Stream: "Waltz (A Lonely Crowd)"
MPEG Stream: "IA_AI"

FUJITA, MASAYOSHI & JAN JELINEK Bird, Lake, Objects (Faitiche) lp 19.98
Berlin-based electronica experimentalist Jan Jelinek, whom we've grown ever more enamored of thanks to his star turn in the role of Ursula Bogner (documented on a previous release via Jelinek's Faitiche label, purporting to be a collection of pioneering Radiophonic Workshop style electronic pieces by an obscure female composer from the sixties who it seems never actually existed except in Jelinek's imagination) here teams up with one Masayoshi Fujita, who plays a prepared vibraphone (and how many prepared vibraphone records do you have??), for a lovely, lovely disc of ambient droneworks.
It begins with "Undercurrent", a track of wavering shimmering meditative hum, softly crackling around the edges, some gentle melody glowing within. The idea of nature-sounds suggested by the disc's title are not dispelled by this music, however electronic (and vibraphonic) it may be. Track 2, "Workshop For Modernity", is composed of whirring and tinkling, again gentle, as if the sounds were conjured from the breeze. The next, "I'll Change Your Life", is even quieter, more "lowercase" in presence. We don't know much about Fujita (assuming he's real) but would guess if he's Japanese, he has some familiarity with Japan's "onkyo" school of soundmaking. The following tracks continue this disc's patient and pleasant trajectory, with much shuffling glitch and soft focus digital stutter, alongside/overtop/underneath the melodious but abstracted vibraphone. It's only on album closer "IA_AI" that the duo eventually build up a thick wall of drone-distortion, louder and louder, a dramatic crescendo that ends with a sudden silence. Quite nice, as we like to say, quite nice!! Sometimes experimental electronic stuff can be too clinical and abstract, academic exercises y'know, but this manages to maintain a human feel, an exquisite emotional resonance, by existing in real space with the sounds of real instruments. Yes, quite nice.
MPEG Stream: "Undercurrent"
MPEG Stream: "Waltz (A Lonely Crowd)"
MPEG Stream: "IA_AI"

FULL BLAST + FRIENDS Crumbling Brain (Okka) lp 24.00

FULL SWING Edits 1 (Monolake / Antenne) (Orthlorng Musork) 10" 5.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

FULL SWING Edits 2 (Autopoisies) (Orthlorng Musork) 10" 5.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

FULL SWING Edits 3 (Laub / Ekkehard Ehlers) (Orthlorng Musork ) 10" 5.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

FULLMAN, ELLEN Staggered Stasis (Anomalous) cd 14.98
Minimalist composer Ellen Fullman speaks of her instrument quite lovingly. Considering the immense amount of time and energy that it takes to set up her long-stringed instrument, her attachment is understandable. When she recently moved to the Bay Area after many years in the Pacific Northwest, she had to radically change the architecture of her apartment by building an addition beyond the porch just to fit the multi-stringed device in the building. It's not enough for Fullman just to stretch long wires in any architectural space, for her pieces involve a complex mathematical foundation which enable Fullman an incredible amount of control when composing her extended drones and minimalist mantras.
Indebted to '60s minimalists like LaMonte Young, Arnold Dreyblatt, and Phil Niblock, Fullman's best work -- as found on Staggered Stasis -- suspends microtonal shifts amidst thick rasping drones rich with resonant overtones and complex harmonics. Fullman herself describes the work quite accurately, that "there is a flatness in this drama, what I imagine it must be like in the middle of an ocean, continually moving yet appearing the same." The end result is a much more contemplative and restrained aesthetic than the dynamic dronescapes of Organum and Andrew Chalk. This is a lovely and thororughly engaging work.
MPEG Stream: "Staggered Stasis Section 1"
MPEG Stream: "Duration"

FUN YEARS, THE God Was Like, No (Barge Recordings) cd 13.98
Full length number three from this turntable / baritone guitar duo, whose last two records have been huge favorites around here, and this one looks to follow suit.
With a sound that's equal parts doomy abstract drift, and gauzy atmospheric ambience, washed out textures of hum and hiss and crackle and whir wrapped around lush melodic figures and effects heavy psychedelic shimmer, these two craft gorgeous mini epics, slow building soundscapes that brood and drift and soar, haunting and hushed, layered and lush.
This latest installment opens with a lustrous bit of guitar loopage, locked into a web of soft spun delay, repetitive and mesmerizing, the turntable nothing but crackle at first, but gradually growing into something much more substantial, adding texture, little shards of melody, the sound getting more and more hazy, and blurred, and softly noisy, the guitar receding behind undulating sheets of swirling static, eventually the various sounds smearing into a single shimmering sound. That track flows directly into the next, another slow drift, this one driven by a simple percussive crash, surrounded by soft swirls of recorded sound, and washed out streaks of dreamlike guitar blur, this track growing more and more hushed and minimal, before segueing directly into another gorgeous field of electronically charged crackle, warm whirling melodies surfacing in lush gauzy billows, eventually parting to reveal a simple, moody riff, the melody gently driving the sound, the turntable wrapping ethereal swaths of buzz around the riff, and introducing some disembodied percussion.
The rest of the record unfurls in some sonic dreamstate, the guitars and turntables hard to distinguish from one another, each offering up snippets of melody, percussive thumps, gauzy shimmer, and easily slipping into a supporting role when one or the other takes charge. The middle portion of the record plays out like a single epic multipart piece, all the tracks bleeding into one another, ambient and atmospheric, rhythms surfacing and then dissipating, melodies doing the same, all about texture and mood, the various layers shifting and drifting creating all manner of subtle tonal color.
The final two tracks are the culmination of the record's overall slow build sonic arc, with "Get Out Of The Obese Crowd" unveiling a lazy buzzy guitar figure, wreathed in hushed hazy wheezes, that build to dense static charges, the sound growing more brittle and electronic, the buzzes swirling and whirling, a dizzying glitchscape, that leads into the ominously fuzzy final 6+ minutes that make up "Precious Persecution Complex", a sort of WAY more minimal SUNNO))), a glacial low end creep, that slowly gives way to a staticky sun dappled drift, and then slips right back into the smoldering caustic crunch that transforms the song into a minimal moody chunk of Nadja style doomdriftdrone, but one writ in shades of grey and streaks of static, a thick charged stretch of dense crackling sonic energy, threatening to explode, but that unrealized threat simply becomes a lush hazy tension, that infuses the track with a strange otherworldly pathos, and thus creating a powerful and hauntingly lovely coda, to an already hauntingly lovely record.
MPEG Stream: "Breech On The Bowstring"
MPEG Stream: "Division Of Labor (TV Track)"
MPEG Stream: "Precious Persecution Complex"

FUN YEARS, THE God Was Like, No (Barge Recordings) lp 19.98
Full length number three from this turntable / baritone guitar duo, whose last two records have been huge favorites around here, and this one looks to follow suit.
With a sound that's equal parts doomy abstract drift, and gauzy atmospheric ambience, washed out textures of hum and hiss and crackle and whir wrapped around lush melodic figures and effects heavy psychedelic shimmer, these two craft gorgeous mini epics, slow building soundscapes that brood and drift and soar, haunting and hushed, layered and lush.
This latest installment opens with a lustrous bit of guitar loopage, locked into a web of soft spun delay, repetitive and mesmerizing, the turntable nothing but crackle at first, but gradually growing into something much more substantial, adding texture, little shards of melody, the sound getting more and more hazy, and blurred, and softly noisy, the guitar receding behind undulating sheets of swirling static, eventually the various sounds smearing into a single shimmering sound. That track flows directly into the next, another slow drift, this one driven by a simple percussive crash, surrounded by soft swirls of recorded sound, and washed out streaks of dreamlike guitar blur, this track growing more and more hushed and minimal, before segueing directly into another gorgeous field of electronically charged crackle, warm whirling melodies surfacing in lush gauzy billows, eventually parting to reveal a simple, moody riff, the melody gently driving the sound, the turntable wrapping ethereal swaths of buzz around the riff, and introducing some disembodied percussion.
The rest of the record unfurls in some sonic dreamstate, the guitars and turntables hard to distinguish from one another, each offering up snippets of melody, percussive thumps, gauzy shimmer, and easily slipping into a supporting role when one or the other takes charge. The middle portion of the record plays out like a single epic multipart piece, all the tracks bleeding into one another, ambient and atmospheric, rhythms surfacing and then dissipating, melodies doing the same, all about texture and mood, the various layers shifting and drifting creating all manner of subtle tonal color.
The final two tracks are the culmination of the record's overall slow build sonic arc, with "Get Out Of The Obese Crowd" unveiling a lazy buzzy guitar figure, wreathed in hushed hazy wheezes, that build to dense static charges, the sound growing more brittle and electronic, the buzzes swirling and whirling, a dizzying glitchscape, that leads into the ominously fuzzy final 6+ minutes that make up "Precious Persecution Complex", a sort of WAY more minimal SUNNO))), a glacial low end creep, that slowly gives way to a staticky sun dappled drift, and then slips right back into the smoldering caustic crunch that transforms the song into a minimal moody chunk of Nadja style doomdriftdrone, but one writ in shades of grey and streaks of static, a thick charged stretch of dense crackling sonic energy, threatening to explode, but that unrealized threat simply becomes a lush hazy tension, that infuses the track with a strange otherworldly pathos, and thus creating a powerful and hauntingly lovely coda, to an already hauntingly lovely record.
MPEG Stream: "Breech On The Bowstring"
MPEG Stream: "Division Of Labor (TV Track)"
MPEG Stream: "Precious Persecution Complex"

FUN YEARS, THE Life-Sized Psychoses (Barge) cd 13.98
BACK IN STOCK!
Band names come in strange zeitgeists, don't they? We've had waves of "The Something", "Wolf Something" and "Black Something" bands, now it seems it is "Year" time. So far we've noted Capitol Years, The Early Years, Year Future, and The New Year. Now The Fun Years come drifting into view. It does seem to be a bit of a misnomer though. Indeed, this group's name as well as their album and song titles all strike us as being very incongruous with the sounds they make. We sort of expecting some doleful pop music or something, but nothing would have prepared us for the murky muted beauty of Life-Sized Psychoses. Every track a washed out minimal landscape of record crackle, bits of hiss and pop, a dense washed out backdrop for the guitar to sort of drift and shimmer.
The record commences with "Powerball Annie", unobtrusive feathery shimmers of static that wash across lapping cycles of three-note sequences plucked out on baritone guitar. Strange reverby bits of percussion drift in and out. The whole thing very languorous and dreamlike. The second track weaves a similar spell, a crackle crusted loop, disembodied and haunting, repeats over and over, eventually joined by a laid back guitar line that gives the track's very Philip Jeck like turntablescape sound a distinctly post rock vibe.
At times the Fun Years almost sound like some avant turntablist spinning super scratched up old math rock and slowcore records, all loping rhythms and muted minor key melodies, but draped in thick swaths of buzz and fuzz and hum and hiss. Some tracks are mere whispers, others glow and sound sun dappled, smeary blurry burnished soundscapes, all wreathed in those analog recording inconsistencies we can never seem to get enough of. Every track here is a subtle sprawl, and shifts and shimmers ever so gradually. No quick moves or hard edges. Just blurry, bleary eyed drift. So very nice!
Definitely for fans of Jeck, Basinski, Tim Hecker, Machinefabriek, Jasper TX and the like...
MPEG Stream: "Powerball Annie"
MPEG Stream: "Softy As Stilts"

FUN YEARS, THE / .CUT FEATURING GIBET split (Three:Four) 10" 27.00
The return of our favorite (and perhaps the only?) baritone guitar / turntable duo The Fun Years, and another record of warm warbly mystery. Wonderfully warped turntablescapes, looped and crackly and fuzzy, the baritone guitar unfurling spidery melodies while the turntables weave lush gauzy backdrops of sepia sound.
Like past Fun Years records, this one is dreamy and otherworldly, ghostly and sweetly melancholic, the guitar manages to sometimes sound just as crackly and fuzzy as the vinyl on the turntables, the two elements so perfectly intertwined. The Fun Years side builds to a lush crescendo, a warm layered, soaring ur-drone, before slipping back into a slow shimmery outro.
.Cut Featuring Giblet are new to us, a guitar and laptop duo, who are a perfect match for the Fun Years, their sound a haunting elegy, the laptop is super subtle, adding texture and color more than glitch or bleep, gorgeous, creepy, warm and lovely, a slow building gauzy swirl over ghostly drifting guitar figures, eventually reaching a sort of soft cacophony, but even then still floating dreamily from the speakers.
Super limited, only 489 copies, each one hand numbered, and unfortunately super price-y as well, not sure why, but both bands offer up sounds pretty enough that for some folks, it'll definitely be worth it.

FUNERARY CALL Fragments From The Aethyr (Crucial Blast) cd 13.98
Fragments From The Aethyr is the latest blast of caustic cinematic black ambience from this Vancouver based audio alchemist, although it's the first FC record to get reviewed on the aQ list, which is strange, since this is the sort of dense black mesmer that many of you can't get enough of. With a sound that lurks somewhere betwixt Gnaw Their Tongues, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Tenhornedbeast, MZ412 and Wolf Eyes, this band weave gristly sprawls of feedback drenched buzz, and keening high end squalls of swirling black psychedelia, the sound driven by what sounds like a violin, but a violin possessed, wreathed in effects and sent spiraling into the ether, a weird sort of droned out black folk drift, that manages to be lilting and lovely, even while being face meltingly brutal. The sound slips into a long stretch of haunting hushed shimmer, laced with chiming minor key harmonics, and lush rumbling drones, and oozes through clouds of blackened sonic murk, growing quite minimal, and almost modern classical sounding, the violin to the fore, soaring above the abyss, a harrowing bit of minimal modernism that broods ominously, and blossoms blackly into a gorgeous blackdrone cinematic epic, that ends up being far too short, even at nearly twenty minutes, before finishing off with a dense sprawl of echo drenched ritualism, processed vox and heavily layered tones, dubbed out and smeared into hazy blurs and almost liturgical sounding chants, seriously sinister and gorgeously grim.
Fans of abject minimal blackness and any of the above mentioned purveyors of sick sonic miserablism, heed the call.
MPEG Stream: "Libation"
MPEG Stream: "Fragments"

FUNGAL HEX s/t (Galerie Jeleni) cd 11.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Fungal Hex is doom-lord Stephen O'Malley (of Khanate, Burning Witch, Lotus Eaters) doing music for an art installation by Brooklyn artists which showed in the Czech Republic last year. His graphic design and guitar playing talents are both evident on and in this cd release, an "installation document with audio supplement". Musically, it's a 40-minute session of eerie drone and scrape, rather quiet and unsettling stuff, similar in spirit if not sound to the much heavier and more metallic output of O'Malley's band projects. The gallery in Prague printed only 500 of these discs to accompany the exhibit, and they're all gone now -- we've got just *four* copies, so act fast if you think you're gonna want one. (In other words, use the phone.)
RealAudio clip: "track 2"

FUNGAL HEX s/t (Aurora Borealis) 2 x picture disc lp 24.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
WOW! This has to be one of the best looking picture discs, we mean DOUBLE PICTURE DISCS, we've ever seen. Two nice thick full color lps housed in a lovely vellum sleeve.
We had a cd of this a while back which is long gone, but it hardly compares to how totally overwhelming and amazing this double lp set is. For those who don't know, Fungal Hex is doom-lord Stephen O'Malley (of Sunn 0))), Khanate, Burning Witch, Lotus Eaters, etc) doing music for an art installation by Brooklyn artists which showed in the Czech Republic last year. His graphic design and guitar playing talents are both evident on and in this release, an "installation document with audio supplement". Musically, it's a 40-minute session of eerie drone and scrape, rather quiet and unsettling stuff, similar in spirit if not sound to the much heavier and more metallic output of O'Malley's band projects. The artwork is beautiful, a striking and super creepy closeup image of a mouth with tongue extended, each disc differentiated by the color of the mouth and which rune like symbol is placed on the tongue. Ewww. So cool. And the vellum sleeve is a gorgeous abstract swirl of blues and metallic silvers. So completely amazing.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, WE GOT 75 AND WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO GET MORE, SO IF YOU WANT ONE ACT FAST. ONE PER CUSTOMER!!!

FUNKE, MAXINE Lace (Next Best Way) cd 14.98

FURISUBI Limb Of Copernicus (Last Visible Dog) 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 raved about the first Furisubi cd-r a while back, a huge, punishing, stumbling Black Sabbath homage/tribute/cover, with thunderous guitars and retarded drumming. So I was mildly surprised by how mellow 'Limb Of Copernicus' was. Just guitar and organ, playing gently against each other in a world of drone and reverb. Steadily, gently strummed guitars over glacial and unwavering organ drones, that only occasionally shift subtly. Like Fahey jamming with Birchville Cat Motel or Troum. Quite gorgeous actually. Fans of Windy And Carl, Landing and space/drone rock in general will dig this a lot!
RealAudio clip: "Limb Of Copernicus"

FURISUBI Three Armed Mary (Last Visible Dog) 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.
Furisubi is the experimental guitar drone/psych/noise project of Kris Lapke, on this release a one-man band playing guitar and (sometimes) drums. The two tracks found on this hour-long cd-r basically sound like Japanese distorto-psych rockers High Rise or Mainliner covering Black Sabbath. Actually, track two actually *is* a Black Sabbath cover -- maybe we should say 'interpretation' -- a nearly half-hour version of Vol. 4's "Snowblind"! Well, actually, perhaps inspired by Sabbath's own in-concert jams/medleys, he works "Snowblind" over for about 15 minutes, and then deviates into some other symptoms of the Sabs' universe, like "Paranoid" and what sounds like a super-sped up version of "Smoke On The Water" which isn't even a Sabbath song (though Sabbath HAS performed it) before returning to finish-up the world's most stretched-out version of "Snowblind".
That's all after the preceeding 30 minutes of the disc's first track, which borrows no Black Sabbath riffs but certainly could have! So, whether covering Sabbath or not, Lapke's modus operandi here is pretty much utter distorto guitar drone demolition, motorpsycho guitar in the Makoto Kawabata zone, but heavier, darker, dronier... yes!! Our kind of guitar hero. But he's obviously not a drummer, though, as his timekeeping skills are, shall we say, poor...but the fucked-up drumming gives this a bit more of a damaged charm anyway...and he bothers to drum only about half the time as well (so it's better than a live Electric Wizard show, who's drummer is notoriously drunk and incompetent). Lapke also allows the occasional ragged vocal to (barely) surface amid the howl of guitar and feedback, helping to place one in the flow of Sabbath tuneage. This is what "stoner rock" *should* sound like... There are other, more 'experimental' Furisubi releases, but we liked this 'rockier' one the best and so decided to feature it. Plus, who can argue with extended Sabbath-inspired jamming? We're glad of whatever possessed him to record this, in all its wonderfully blown-out and messed-up glory.
RealAudio clip: "Snowblind"

FURSAXA Alone In The Dark Wood (Eclipse) lp 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We've long been entranced by the mystical world of Philadelphia's Fursaxa. With her latest offering she dives even deeper into her mesmerizing world of vibrating tones and otherworldly vocals, which sometimes remind us of Nico performing a seance in her secret garden. While recent outings by the likes of Grouper and Valet have been making waves around these parts with their dreamlike swirls of vocal delay and reverb magic, it's so nice to hear new music from someone who helped spawn this recent movement of hazy psychedelic drone-folk. But what makes Fursaxa always stand out is that it's not just her voice and effects which demand your attention but the entrancing instrumentation as well, that pulls you into her irresistible spell.
MPEG Stream: "Lunaria Enters The Blue Lodge"
MPEG Stream: "In The Hollow Mink Shoal"

FURSAXA Amulet (Last Visible Dog) cd 12.98
Over the past couple of years, Tara Burke (aka Fursaxa) has entrenched herself as a mystical queen for the free-folk crowd, channelling the disaffected sorrow of Nico as well as the transcendent visions of 12th Century abbess Hildegard von Bingen. On her previous recordings, Burke sewed together her albums from short vignettes of narcoleptic folk songs, typically in the form of monotone lullabies in which her resonant voice radiated through stoned-and-droned acoustic guitar strum and / or farfisa arrangements. So it's very rare to finds a Fursaxa song that clocks in at anything longer than 3 minutes, which curiously is ample time for her to hypnotise her audience with her utterly compelling songs. Amulet, thus, is a bit of a detour from the collections of shortened songs as she offers four extended pieces of sprawling drones built out of delay-pedal loops. On the first couple of tracks, it's Burke's voice that takes center stage, spiralling into a hypnotic set of oscillating patterns, mossy psychedelic chants harkening back to the dark ages. She accentuates these tracks with occasional interludes for flutes and hand bells. On one of the final tracks on Amulet, Burke sets forth on a slow-motion acoustic guitar renditition of a Glenn Branca symphony, aiming for nothing more than transcendent hypnotic monotone. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!
MPEG Stream: "Rheine"
MPEG Stream: "Rodeo In The Sky"
MPEG Stream: "Song To The Cicada"

FURSAXA Mandrake (Eclipse) lp 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

FURSAXA s/t (Ecstatic Peace) lp 13.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
While I (Jim) have normally attempted to write reviews for Aquarius that are noticeably different from the reviews I've written for other outlets, I now state my failing in crafting some new syntax for this Fursaxa record, which I think is fantastic. So without further ado, here's what I wrote in The Wire #222.
"Tara Burke has earned major endorsement from Makoto Kawabata and Thurston Moore, who have been so impressed by the Philadelphian psych-out maven as to release a couple of recordings of her Fursaxa project on their respective labels. Following the 'Mandrake' CD-R on Kawabata's tiny imprint, this self-titled album published by Moore's Ecstatic Peace is an exceptional set of narcoleptic post-VU semi-rock haze. Working with a couple of her former comrades form the underappreciated Siltbreeze group Un, Burke has scored 19 sketches for monochord acoustic guitars, pedal treated Lowry organ and Farfisa loaded with a grainy texture of raw tape hiss and a general disregard for production cleanliness. She channels these stories like a Wiccan earth mother, with sounds emanating like disaffected recollections of various memories and previously hidden histories. She's not so much interested in telling us specific stories as evoking a psychic connectivity towards those past visions, which are beautifully nostalgic yet vaguely haunting. This album is as good as anything from the Jewelled Antler collective, No Neck Blues Band, and Jackie-O Motherfucker."
RealAudio clip: "Euclidian Geometry"
RealAudio clip: "Quinine Hill"
RealAudio clip: "Voltaire"

FURSAXA / THE JUNIPER MEADOWS split (Foxglove / Digitalis) cd-r 7.98
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FURUDATE, TETSUO (x).x is not a man or x is mortal (God Factory / Staalplaat) cd 15.98
Through the 3 lengthy recordings of his live performances, Tetsuo Furudate (who had previously released an exceptional collaboration with Zbigniew Karkowski which we also stock) situates lengthy passages of near silence next to eruptions of dissonance; chunks of noise, militant metallic percussion, incendiary guitar feedback (a la KK Null), and slow motion bass drones. It's like listening to a one-man band performing a Hermann Nitsch orchestration through pure strength of will.

FURUDATE, TETSUO Othello As Noise Opera (Les Disques du Soleil et de l'Acier) cd 18.98

FURUDATE, TETSUO / ZBIGNIEW KARKOWSKI World As Will II (23five) cd 14.98
Tetsuo Furudate and Zbigniew Karkowski have released their second collaboration under the banner of "World As Will" as an homage to the 19th century thinker Arthur Schopenhauer, whose philosophical principles had been spelled out most thoroughly within a four volume set of the same title. Schopenhauer purported that the world was understood through the objectification of the will; thus positioning the will itself as the ultimate source for reality and its creation. If each individual shapes their desires and understandings through the force of will, then social relationships are based upon a network of self-centered acts; thus, human suffering is not symptomatic but inherent to society as a whole. For Schopenhauer, morality is the denial of the force of will, and should be eschewed in favor of the will as the primal creative force even at the inevitable price of existential pessimism.
The Furudate / Karkowski collaborations (an album on Staalplaat and this record published by 23Five) have certainly followed Schopenhauer's fundamentals, with the creation of a violent, masculine, and ultimately tragic orchestrations as actions purely guided by edicts of the will. While based upon live arrangements for big horns, discordant strings, and timpani (in part composed by Karkowski and in part sampled from Wagner), the two offer a punishing collage in which the orchestral sounds spiral downward into brutal stabs of molten digital noise. "World As Will II" may lack some of the loud / quiet dynamics of the first volume, but the two more than make up for it in unrelenting intensity that falls between the totalitarian critiques of Laibach and the sonic bloodletting of Hermann Nitsch. A very difficult album.
RealAudio clip: "Part 1"
RealAudio clip: "Part 2"

FUTURIANS Play The Breathtaking Sounds Of Tivol (Soft Abuse) lathe cut 7" 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Managed to get a handful of these SUPER LIMITED lathe cut 7"s from New Zealand noise rockers the Futurians, and it's a doozy. Already they were a sludgey, garagey, noisy, a bit damaged, freaked out and arty, some mix of Chrome, the Stooges and the Brainbombs. If anything this 7"s pushes them even further out. Adding sheets of white noise distortion, some old school Butthole Surfers style vocal processing, and a production that barely surpasses tin can and twine through dictaphone, the band churn out a super repetitive hypnotic groove, the guitars not so much riffy as chunks of static, the drums a muffled barely there throb, the two elements that hold it all together, are the buzzing low end that pulses and throbs beneath the surface, seeming to fade out completely before exploding back into motion, a blackened rumble, and the vocals, a skipping, stuttering, hiccupping high end chirp, that almost sounds more like a malfunctioning synth than an actual human voice. The result is pretty fantastic though, a fucked up garage sludge noise rock wetdream, equal parts Buttholes, Siltbreeze, Brainbombs and shitgaze.
Hand painted sleeves, clear lathe, INSANELY LIMITED. Already out of print. We have 7 or 8. Don't blink...

FUZZBOY Manipulated Field Recordings With Li'l Marshall (Solipsists Unite!) cd-r 12.98
Here's a lovingly homespun assemblage of field recordings which have been altered and pieced together over the last couple years into a hushed collage of mysterious texturous scrapings and ambience. These three hazy soundscapes were created by Bay Area artist Fuzzboy (aka Dan Bornstein). 'Tis the gentler side of experimental noise that he treads.

G*PARK Reuters (Tochnit-Aleph) lp 25.00
BACK IN STOCK! We got a few more copies of this hard-to-find LP, when G*Park was in town for the 2010 Activating The Medium festival, where he floored the audience. It's unfortunate that we've not listed any G*Park recordings until now; but it's certainly better late than never. G*Park is the work of Marc Zeier who has been quietly generating some of the most evocative musique concrete / electro-acoustic whatnot / broken drones / softened noisejunk since the mid '80s. These recordings had mostly been on cassette back in the day, with a couple of discs appearing over the past decade thanks to Blossoming Noise and the defunkt Zabriskie Point label. He's also an auxiliary member of the aktionist Schimpfluch collective, although his work shares little of their scatological hyper-violence of smeared fish guts, vomit, and bloodletting. Yet, the G*Park recordings mirror the sinister vibe of Schimpfluch through his delicately disfigured field recordings and tape-cut manipulation. Zeier presents a masterful collage of disjointed repetitions from handcranked mechanisms that rupture with bellowing drones and aqueous gurglings. Elsewhere, air raid sirens explode through the laser-whipsnap recoil of cellphone tension wires being struck, and the reverberation of prepared piano abuse slams against densely packed drones into thunderous punctures. These pieces are clinical studies of decay amplified from a microscopic order; and considering that Zeier's occupation is a plankton fisherman (seriously!), perhaps these are the birth pangs and death throes of those tiny creatures. A very highly recommended piece of sound art!

G-FRENZY Eel Creek (Pseudo Arcana) cd-r 12.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The Pseudoarcana website describes G-Frenzy as "White trash hip hop and drunken country." Don't let that turn you off though, this is actually quite a cool weird record. Weird lo-fi rhythmic pop, with lots of samples (mostly 'borrowed' from other Pseudoarcana releases!). Think Sebadoh, slowed waaaaay down, buried in a hole for a month, then dug back up and slapped on the tape machine, dirt and worms and all. Mumbly, wavery, distorted vocals step hesitantly through a series of sonic backdrops, from gentle piano riffs smothered in ambient noise, to loping fuzzy rhythms and warm gauzy atmospheres. Cool.
MPEG Stream: "From The Stars"
MPEG Stream: "Black Goat Of The Wood"

GAL Relisten (Intransitive) cd 14.98
Bernhard Gal is an Austrian sound artist involved in the process of extrapolating and dissecting the sound of everyday life to offer new insight into those noises which we take for granted everyday. Unfortunately, Gal stumbles horribly with the pretentious introduction to this album with a clumsy vocal cut-up recalling bad New Media art from the '80s. Things pick up nicely with increasingly tense collages of beehives, rushing cars, and the clatter of train tracks. While Gal has pushed these sounds into something that is quite engaging to listen to, he is a bit too obvious and heavy handed in getting his point about the ubiquity of mass transit across. You get the feeling that he's come up with a well constructed thesis and forced all of his sounds to fit within his arguments, rather than actually listening to the sounds to see what they have to say.
RealAudio clip: "57A"

GAL*IN_DOG s_nd (self-released) cd 11.98
Guillermo Galindo dons a diverse array of musical hats -- experimental, electro-acoustic, electronic, sound art installations and opera! He even wore a modified helmet during his performance at last year's SF Electronic Music Fest! This is the first we've heard from Gal*In_Dog, his atmospheric soundscape chapeau. The six slowly shifting vaporous tracks stretch out over the course of 69 minutes. Occasionally the sound fades to often barely-there drones, sometimes more tactile prickles and swarms of hiss, once in a while giving way to the surprise of nature bird songs. A quite nice record of electronic experimentalism, dark and mysterious, dense but still quite lovely.
MPEG Stream: "Xecatl"
MPEG Stream: "Benux"

GALAS, DIAMANDA Defixiones, Will And Testament (Mute) 2cd 23.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
One of two double disc sets from Diamanda Galas, Defixiones, Will and Testament is the song cycle that Galas has performed around the world, set to texts from various poets, rembetika singers, and blues musicians. As with her infamous trilogy of release, the Plague Mass, Litanies of Satan, and The Masque of The Red Death which focused upon horror of AIDS, Defixiones takes up another deadly serious topic, genocide. Galas offers her own definition of genocide, as "an attempt to brutally crush and erase a civilization by any means necessary in its entirety. Also, this work concerns those who must live in exile as a means to escape and the desire to document one's existence -- to leave behind proof of life." For these recordings, Galas sings to those forgotten in the Armenian, Assyrian, and Anatolian Greek genocides which occurred between 1914 and 1923. With minimal arrangements of piano and windswept electronic tones, Galas belts out her highly stylized demonic shrieks, operatic falsettos, and tortured blues, always pointing towards the pain and suffering of her subjects.
MPEG Stream: "The Desert (part 2)"
MPEG Stream: "Birds of Death"

GALAS, DIAMANDA La Serpenta Canta (Mute) 2cd 19.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Diamanda Galas' La Serpanta Canta is a collection of live recordings from 1999 - 2002 that celebrates her numerous influences, a veritable Diamanda songbook, tunes by Hank Williams, Ornette Coleman, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and John Lee Hooker. Each song is hammered out on the lower regions of the piano's keyboard, with her incredibly stylized vocalizations churning out shrill falsettos and diabolical growls. Compared to the conceptually grim Defixiones album released at the same time, La Serpenta Canta opens up to a slightly wider range of emotional expressionism. Diamanda's own ragtime ditty "Baby's Insane" is a notably comic moment (intentional or otherwise), where her comparably uptempo, spry piano chords drive her faithful vocal rendition of a standard blues progression. Yet, the declarations of damnation and vocal gymnastics caught in the grieving process are more typical of many works found on La Serpenta Canta.
MPEG Stream: "Baby's Insane"
MPEG Stream: "My World Is Nothing Without You"

GALAS, DIAMANDA Schrei X (Mute) cd 16.98
The Village Voice says: "[Galas] possesses the most powerful, versatile and disciplined instrument of any vocalist in the new music, and her new piece ...is more than anything else a showcase for it."

GALAX Never Ending Space Trackin' (aRCHIVE) cd 13.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
It's rare that we're ever able to get stuff on aRCHIVE back in. That stuff flies out of here and then seems to go straight out of print. So we leapt at the chance to get a little handful of these back in. Already out of print, last copies ever...
A glorious spaced out druggy FX drenched sonic trip to the outer reaches of the galaxy from the aRCHIVE label (Nadja, Goslings, Astral Traveling Unity, Alasehir, Jack Rose, Khanate, Keiji Haino, LSD-March, Growing, Bardo Pond). The perpetrator of said sonic space trip is Hiroshi Hasagawa, who spends most of his time doing similarly druggy business in C.C.C.C. and Astral Traveling Unity, on synth and ring modulator, and Keichi Miyashita (from Mandog) on guitar and tape echo. Needless to say, everyone who bought that ATU on aRCHIVE is definitely gonna want this....
Three extended improvised freaked out ultra mega blown out drifting space jams. Swirling clouds of whoosh and bleep and bloop and shimmer and schhhhhhhhwwwwwwwwooooooooooooooooossssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhh. Peppered with glistening sonic sparkles, a sky full of blinking twinkling melodic shards. Very laid back and meditative at times, a pulsing throbbing hypnotic krautrock like Tangerine Dream or Popol Vuh, but occasionally exploding into full on blistering acid fried psychedelic chaos. If you loved that Astral Traveling Unity, or Space Machine, or the above mentioned krautrockers or Acid Mothers Temple at their most unhinged and free (one track even features AMT's Hiroshi Higashi on extra synth) then this will surely hit the spot.
Like all aRCHIVE releases, beautifully packaged, this time a glossy psychedelic 6 panel fold out sleeve with the cd affixed to the inside.
LIMITED TO 600 COPIES.
MPEG Stream: "Acid Forest in the Space Mountain"
MPEG Stream: "Mysterious Smile of a Buddhist Image"

GALBRAITH / NEILSON / YOUNGS Belsayer (Time-Lag) lp 23.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Totally mind blowing collaboration between three masters of drone / raga / free / folk / noise. New Zealander Alastair Galbraith is a long time AQ fave as is the UK's Richard Youngs. Alex Neilson while not an instantly recognizable name in his own right, has played on oodles of amazing records (including some by Matt Valentine, Taurpis Tula) and you may recognize his name due to the fact that he and Mr. Youngs were the back up band for Jandek at his first ever live performance! None of that has very much to do with this, two sides of incredibly dreamy modern folk raga. Lighter than air swirls of falsetto vocals drift and shimmer, harmonies slowly shifting, all over a long slow drawn out ur-drone, constructed from buzzing steel strings, bits of percussion, warbling synthesizers, spaced out effects, electronic buzz and glitch, strummed guitars get stretched into fuzzy blurs, melodies float by in the distance, chimes tinkle and sparkle, almost the whole disc is made up of languorous, lazy stretches of dreamlike sound, EXCEPT for the opening and closing tracks on side 2, when some wild drumming is introduced, and the FX levels get pushed all the way into the red, and what was once tranquil bliss, is transformed into a snarling, chaotic super tripped out space rock.
Packaged in beautiful simple full color offset printed and debossed sleeves, with deluxe debossed inserts, LIMITED TO 900 COPIES, each insert has the record's number debossed along with of the liner notes, pressed on 180 gram virgin vinyl!

GALBRAITH, ALASTAIR Head Soup Dream/From the Empire (Crawlspace) 7" 5.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Limited to 200 numbered copies, this is two new instrumentals from New Zealand's respected experimentalist.

GALBRAITH, ALASTAIR Orb (Nextbestway) cd 16.98
Oh Alastair, how we have missed you. Although there have been a handful of reissues, a collaboration here and there, and those incredible long wires discs, there's something magical about the strange world Galbraith is able to conjure up give a whole record to work with. A dizzying blend of folky freaky lo-fi experimental pop, handmade instruments, ambience and noise, all held together by some ineffable magic that very few possess, but some, like Galbraith have mastered and seem to unfurl effortlessly.
Orb is the first proper solo record in years and also marks the re-activation of Galbraiths Xpressway label, now called Nextbestway. And once again, we're transported to some mysterious glade, where a strange man is hunched over a small arsenal of sound making devices, and like some sort of mad scientist is assembling an endless series of perfect little sonic gems.
The opening track is so immediately warm and recognizable, with it's warped warbly organ, and Galbraith's haunting multi tracked vocals, reminding us once again, that long before Neutral Milk Hotel, Galbraith was shaping similarly powerful little spiritual pop songs, and "Here Not There" is no different. Less than two minutes, but in that brief span, he's able to lull and soothe, trip out and transport. The second track is even shorter, less than a minute, but it's a killer chunk of billowy krautrock drift that finishes in a flurry of digital skipping.
Galbraith has a sort of Guided By Voices thing going, giving us tantalizing glimpses of incredible hooks, cool moody riffs, fluttering bits of sweet folk, but then nips them in the bud, songs that could very well stretch on for hours, slip away after minutes, sometimes seconds, creating these brief magical flourishes that have us returning over and over to sample briefly, always wanting more.
Like all Galbraith discs, the sounds are disparate, but interconnected, clattery feedback drenched Dead C style noise rock, with crumbling distortion and fuzzy sheets of synth, murky detuned folk ramblings, keening scarping strings, high end skree and metallic reverberations, utterly heartbreaking perfect pop, stretches of field recordings overlaid with soft shimmery drones, wheezing organs and delicate plucked strings, thick swaths of dense guitar buzz and super distorted vocals, black metal via NZ noise rock, meandering abstract Appalachia draped over soft swells of mumble and drift, warm warbly guitar and every possible combination in between.
So lovely, so magical and so totally mysterious. Galbraith is truly a bard from beyond, a songsmith who transcends genre, perhaps even time and space. And we're so glad to have him back.
MPEG Stream: "Here Not There"
MPEG Stream: "One Direction"
MPEG Stream: "Lost"
MPEG Stream: "Bird Ghost Viola"
MPEG Stream: "Short Dream FOr Fire Organ"

GALBRAITH, ALASTAIR / MATT DE GENNARO From The Dark (South Island) (Xeric / Table Of The Elements) cd 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 volume two of one of our favorite records EVER, Long Wires In Dark Museums, a sound installation from a few years back where New Zealand underground legend Alastair Galbraith teamed up with American musician Matt De Gennaro and strung long metal wires, some as long as 100 feet, between the walls of the performance space, and thus proceeded to scrape and bow and coax huge reverberant drones and groans from the wires, creating huge metallic dronescapes, informed by the works of Harry Bertoia and the long string experiments of Ellen Fullman. the cool thing about these Long Wires In Dark Museums, is that when the wires are excited they don't actually produce the sound, it's the points at which the wires are affixed to the space, the vibrations run up the wall, or through the windows, turning the whole space into a natural resonator, where the architecture of the space, the shape of the rooms, the makeup of the walls determine the tone and timbre of the sound. These performances occur in utter darkness as well, so the ears become the only sense that matters.
The sounds these two, and their building of choice create is magnificent, massive, the sort of sound that not only resonates within the space, but also in our ears, in your bones. It's like the idea of bowed metal, the glorious warm sound that makes, expanded and stretched out into a sound at once so natural, but so alien, that it's impossible to not be drawn in and completely mesmerized. It almost sounds like huge violins, or a cello the size of a barn, being tuned and tinkered with. Long notes stretched out for minutes, letting the microtones and sonic subtleties gradually reveal themselves. These metallic drones shift and shimmer, each long strecth of sound full of subtle colors and layer after layer of strange texture. This is seriously deep listening. Very very recommended, as is the first volume.
MPEG Stream: "Archenar"
MPEG Stream: "Matariki"

GALBRAITH, ALASTAIR / MATT DE GENNARO Long Wires In Dark Museums (Vol. 1) (Emperor Jones) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Despite the designation as being "Volume 1," "Long Wire In Dark Museum" is the second documentation of the long thin wire music of New Zealand's multi-talented violinist Alastair Galbraith and American composer Matt De Gennaro, following their previous recording on Corpus Hermeticum (the main difference being that it was recorded in a bank, not a gallery). Galbraith and De Gennaro are simply bowing very long piano and violin wires which had been mounted throughout darkened art galleries, creating hypnotic acoustic drones that draw from Lucier's minimalist masterpiece "Music For A Long Thin Wire," though retain far more textural scrapes and dissonant overtones than found within Lucier's monotonal purity. This is a beautifully spartan album quite similar to the bowed cymbal work of Organum and Andrew Chalk.
RealAudio clip: "Autahi"

GALBRAITH, ALASTAIR AND CONSTANTINE KARLIS Radiant (Emperor Jones) cd 13.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
This is the first we've heard from Alastair Galbraith since a couple years ago, when he teamed up with Matt De Gennaro for an album of Ur-drone we absoultely loved, gorgeous bowed piano and violin strings, shimmering and shuddering. Really dreamy and mesmerising. And it seems like Galbraith is continuing even further in his trajectory away from song based forms and toward more free and abstract sound. And we couldn't be happier. While we love everything this man does, our hearts belong to the drone. For these two lengthy tracks, Galbraith teams up with fellow Kiwi legend Constantine Karlis, drummer for High Dependency Unit, to craft delicate and spidery abstract soundscapes of buzzing, scraping and keening violin, treated guitar loops, and scattered free drumming. The result is absolutely divine. Spare and spacious, the violin occsionally hints at eastern sounding ragas, playing almost-melodies, before slipping back into wavery drones, squeaky and swaying, while the huge, cavernous sounding drums are splattered throughout, sometimes a basic primal rhythm, sometimes barely-there flourishes, and sometimes a full on squall of percussive brutality. At it's free-est it's a bit like Angus Maclise or Tony Conrad backing up a free jazz drummer, when proceedings get a little more structured, you can almost imagine Damon Che of Don Caballero or...maybe even...ME (I tried to think of another drummer but Allan made me put me, Andee Connors), drumming for Lamonte Young or John Cale. So highly recommended. A new favorite late night record for the drone-prone among us.
MPEG Stream: "4 Orbits"

GALENA Through Veils (Sanity Muffin) cassette 5.98
One of two new releases on Oakland label Sanity Muffin, the other, a fantastic collection of sonic strangeness from Dutch blackened drone/dirge ambient outfit Torture Corpse, and this, some droned out blackened heaviness from Galena, the one man band of the guy behind the SM label, and it's definitely the sort of sound that pushes all our buttons. Shouldn't take more than a minute or so before you're sucked in, after some swirling ambience, a strange rifflike high end drone loops and loops, and then suddenly everything explodes in a frenzy of what can only be described as electronic black buzz, a churning bit of melody looped beneath sheets of hiss and buzz and thrum, with what sounds like a super distorted blast beat laid over the top, the result is fantastically psychedelic and hypnotic, even as the blast beat fades, and much of the buzz, the ensuing high ends shimmer and thick layered crunch continues to invoke the same sort of grim vibe, except here, Galena lays some lilting warped melodies over the top, so it almost sounds like a Philip Jeck installation gone haywire, a wild tangle of woozy synths over a thick swirl of Our Love Will Destroy The World like skree.
And that's just the first track. The rest of the tape plays out similarly though, taking riffy black metal buzz and transforming it into something much more washed out and psychedelic, the various elements seeming to ooze and bleed and melt before our ears, sometimes building to crushing cacophonies, other times smoothed out into a sort of almost Pop Ambient prismatic mesmer. A murky, drifty bit of ambient buzz and blurred blackened swirl, that definitely has us wanting to hear more.
Nice packaging, too, a thick cardstock J-card , with a xeroxed hand stamped insert.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!

GAMBLE, LEE Diversions 1994-1996 (Pan) lp 19.98
Imagine a whole record crafted from an old box of jungle cassette mix tapes, but imagine it without any of the jungle, or more specifically, none of the beats, just the surrounding sounds, intros, outros, interludes, swirls of synths and snippets of vocals, woozy basslines, strange percussion, mysterious melodies, the whole thing layered and recontextualized into some sort of modern collaged avant dub soundscape. That's pretty much what Lee Gamble's Diversions 1994-1996 is, and it's fantastic. On the surface, in a lot of ways it reminds us of the recent lp from SeekersInternational, which crafted dub out of static and hiss, crackle and sonic detritus. Diversions has a similar vibe, in some ways even more so since the sound sources are old tapes, so tape hum and hiss and warble are everywhere, giving the sounds here even more of that washed out Caretaker-y feel we can never get enough of. In fact, much of this exudes that sort of Caretaker / Tim Hecker vibe, murky and muddy, woozy and looped, the vibe definitely dubby, but a sort of super abstract avant strain of dub, maybe Chain Reaction style, but even MORE abstract and murky. The track "Emu" is practically perfect, a lush, hazy sprawl of blurred buzz, laced with mysterious bits of percussion, the whole thing driven by a heaving swell of industrial thrum, one that builds to a seriously caustic crunch, the whole track mesmerizingly cyclical, dense and dark, but so lush and layered, dreamily textured, everything gauzy and washed out and indistinct. And while the rest of the record is not nearly that dark and murky, it is similarly abstract and minimally dubby. Dense psychedelic loopscapes, that often lock into a sort of minimal house music, if only because they're anchored by a heartbeat like pulse, while all around sound swirl and ooze and overlap and gradually change shape.
Actual Jungle beats only show up on one track, and even then, they're slowed down, doused in effects, and laid over a swirling sea of crackling static and echo drenched shimmer, which had us hankering for some sort of avant slo-mo, minimal jungle mix.
But Diversions is mostly just the opposite, while the sound source may ostensibly be jungle records, the sound is much more like minimal abstract murk and blissed out loop buzz mesmer, and we're digging it big time!
Pressed on 140 gram white vinyl, and packaged in a super striking orange silk screened PVC plastic sleeve.
MPEG Stream: "Pandemonium Institute"
MPEG Stream: "Emu"
MPEG Stream: "M25 Echo"
MPEG Stream: "Razor"
MPEG Stream: "Dollis Hill"

GAMBLE, LEE Dutch Tvashar Plumes (Pan) lp 28.00
The last Lee Gamble record, Diversions 1994-1996 was a strange sort of ANTI-jungle, jungle record, having been constructed from just the NON jungle parts of old jungle mixtapes recorded off the radio. Only a brief bit of beat driven murk toward the end even hinted at the genesis of that record. This latest Gamble missive, was described to us as Gamble finally getting to make a proper beat record, one that's maybe not jungle, but wherein all those sublimated beats apparently finally show up. Which to a degree is true. We were sort of picturing some old school jungle drum and bass style throwback, but instead, those lost beats are only part of the occasion, with Gamble focused more on creating dense collaged landscapes of hazy pulses, sculpted static and murky sublimated rhythms. This still sounds like Gamble sort of deftly stepping AROUND the beats, the rhythms that do show up, end up being woozy fragmented loops, or strange 'heroin house' style throb, all wreathed in lots of hiss and crackle and static, with much of the record foregoing beats entirely, focusing instead on textures and ambience, some of it quite lovely, a little bit woozy and washed out, minimal psychedelic drifts, but the beats are definitely an integral part of the equation this time around, just not for the usual reason.
Squelchy 8 bit crunch is sculpted into murky, hiccuping anti-grooves, which morph into woozy, blurred and looped sprawls of 4-on-the-floor pulses and cascading synth melodies. There are some swoonsome moments of Kompakt like skitter, all hazy, gauzy, murky dreaminess, the beats buried beneath pixelated swirls of grainy tape hiss, but there's also some full on beat driven alien funk, mutated beats, warped melodies, pitch shifted percussion. The sound throughout is gristly and lo-fi, which is only magnified during the record's housiest moments, where all that hiss and static gets whipped up into clouds of hazy druggy shimmer, which is perfectly balanced by long stretches of ghostly murmur, softly dubbed out thrum, and druggy nocturnal drift.
Like all PAN releases, super exquisite packaging, a heavy full color jacket housed in a thick silkscreened plastic PVC sleeve.