ANENZEPHALIA s/t (Death Factory) cd 17.98

ANGEL 26000 (Editions Mego) cd 16.98
The intermittent project Angel might become something more prolific, now that Pan Sonic has decided to terminate its mission leaving Ilpo Vaisanen to pursue other matters. Since 2000, Vaisanen has collaborated with Dirk Dresselhaus of Schneider TM under the guise of Angel to produce a peculiar set of electro-acoustic abstractions, often finding them working with the avant-cellist Hildur Gudnadottir. On thie new album for Editions Mego, 26000, Angel can come across like an even more plodding and menacing Supersilent attempting to remove all of its jazz references, leaving weird squiggles and gestures within a cavernous dank reverberation offset by crystalline electronics and found object manipulation. Such events were not uncommon in the narcoleptic sound collages that Pan Sonic would wander into at the end of some of their records. Gudnadottir's cello (and something called a "halldorophone" that sends a controlled feedback loop into the strings of a modified cello) appears on the glacial finale of the album "Paradigm Shift" with isolationist passages and radiotone flicker. All of this is set in contrast with the monstrous form destruction of "Before The Rush" composed with the help of BJ Nilsen. Here, Angel takes up the sheer hellish miasma torch with an explosion of digital abuse bracketed by leaden seas of grey drones and all sorts of post-Tudor scabrous noises and nervous scratches.
MPEG Stream: "Before The Rush"
MPEG Stream: "In"
MPEG Stream: "Paradigm Shift"

ANGEL 26000 (Editions Mego) lp 21.00
The intermittent project Angel might become something more prolific, now that Pan Sonic has decided to terminate its mission leaving Ilpo Vaisanen to pursue other matters. Since 2000, Vaisanen has collaborated with Dirk Dresselhaus of Schneider TM under the guise of Angel to produce a peculiar set of electro-acoustic abstractions, often finding them working with the avant-cellist Hildur Gudnadottir. On thie new album for Editions Mego, 26000, Angel can come across like an even more plodding and menacing Supersilent attempting to remove all of its jazz references, leaving weird squiggles and gestures within a cavernous dank reverberation offset by crystalline electronics and found object manipulation. Such events were not uncommon in the narcoleptic sound collages that Pan Sonic would wander into at the end of some of their records. Gudnadottir's cello (and something called a "halldorophone" that sends a controlled feedback loop into the strings of a modified cello) appears on the glacial finale of the album "Paradigm Shift" with isolationist passages and radiotone flicker. All of this is set in contrast with the monstrous form destruction of "Before The Rush" composed with the help of BJ Nilsen. Here, Angel takes up the sheer hellish miasma torch with an explosion of digital abuse bracketed by leaden seas of grey drones and all sorts of post-Tudor scabrous noises and nervous scratches.
MPEG Stream: "Before The Rush"
MPEG Stream: "In"
MPEG Stream: "Paradigm Shift"

ANGEL Hedonism (Editions Mego) cd 17.98
Pan Sonic's Ilpo V. and partner in crime Dirk from Schneider TM return with another Angel-ic recording, their follow up to last year's excellent and epic Kalmukia, which we likened to both KTL and Earth circa Hex. This time around they're not quite so much in that digitaldoomdrone mood... There's still plenty of digital glitch and distortion, and the 20-minute "Mirrorworld" is a loud n' lovely, humming white noise dronewerk, as is the shorter and sparser "Unsymmetric Distance", for instance, but many of the 10 tracks on Hedonism indulge in electronic noise and clatter that's a lot more active and buzzing.
The broken rhythms, grinding textures, and piercing pulses of tracks like "Holding Loose" and "Dropping The Ego" contrast with the more contemplative nature-sounds field recordings heard in the mix towards the end of the album, for a much more varied listen than Kalmukia.
MPEG Stream: "Adrenaline Strike"
MPEG Stream: "Mirrorworld"
MPEG Stream: "Dropping The Ego "

ANGEL Kalmukia (Editions Mego) cd 17.98
Oooh, moody. Ilpo Vaisanen of Pan Sonic and Dirk Dresselhaus (aka Schneider TM) have recorded as Angel before, exploring the realms of noise and drone with discs on the Bip-Hop and Oral labels, bringing in guest cellist Hildur Guonadottir for the latter. Now they're officially a trio, and offer up a fantastic third album, released on Editions Mego, where this four part, hour long, totally epic album fits in nicely alongside the digitaldoomdrone likes of O'Malley and Rehberg's KTL.
Kalmukia opens with the evocative "Bones In The Sand" which definitely has a desert-y feel, the wide open spaces, barren badlands. Desolation. Dunno about you, but it had us immediately thinking Earth (Hex-era and after Earth), with cavernous slide guitar riffs echoing forth across the wastes...
The tremulous electric humming of the title track is next, nearly 20 quietly mysterious minutes long, graced with droning cello on the edge of feedback. The creepy loveliness continues on through "Effect Of Discovery", which builds up into a shimmering drone laced with metallic electronic whip-cracks and waverings. Full on distorted rumble is kept in reserve, hinted at throughout the thick buzzing beauty of album-closer "Aftermath: The Mutation", which is also filled with delicate percussive chimings and some of this album's most melodic moments.
Packaged all fancy-like in an oversized rectangular sleeve, this is definitely one that fans of the most abstract/ambient side of Southern Lord's output (Oren Ambarchi for instance) should appreciate, along with those into Pan Sonic, KTL, etc.
Satan was an angel, once, too.
MPEG Stream: "Bones In The Sand"
MPEG Stream: "Aftermath: The Mutation"

ANGEL & HILDUR GUDNADOTTIR In Transmediale (Oral) cd 16.98
Angel is the work of Pan Sonic's Ilpo Vaisanen and Dirk Dresselhaus (aka Schneider TM); and Hildur Gudnadottir is an Icelandic cellist whose resume is dotted with numerous collaborative projects through the Reykjavik based arts collective Kitchen Motors. Back in 2004, the three musicians collaborated at the Club Transmediale in Berlin, sparking not only this album but also an ongoing collaboration between Pan Sonic and Gudnadottir. It's Gudnadottir's cello that takes the center stage on this guttural drone album of languorous acoustic scrapings and sustained monotone, with the two other gentlemen augmenting the cello drones with Kosmische electronic sweeps, nervous sinewave aggregates, and bellowing gasps of noise.
MPEG Stream: "In Transmediale (excerpt 1) "
MPEG Stream: "In Transmediale (excerpt 2) "

ANGELA VALID This Book's On Fire (World In Winter) cd 14.98
Been wanting to list this Sheffield UK band's debut four-song ep for a while now, finally got a few in stock so here goes... Angela Valid (name of band, not a person) plays improv instrumentals, a skittery post-rock stitching together of all kinds of glitch and drone, whirring and clatter and feedback, dealt out with guitars, drums, electronics (synths, drum machines, effects...) and violin. Angela Valid's music is very textural, displaying both caution and conviction. We're reminded of the likes of This Heat. Tarentel. Sinistri. A (the Italian band A). Radian. Or, Tortoise + Wolf Eyes as someone else has suggested. At times it's like there's someone building something in the next room, or doing construction work upstairs, banging tools about. But at the same time there's constant jazzy rhythmics buried beneath it all as well. If you like this sort of stuff (we sure do) these four tracks are all very satisfying and leave us wanting to hear more...
MPEG Stream: "Terry's Incantation"
MPEG Stream: "Ocean Ceiling"

ANGELIC PROCESS, THE ...And Your Blood Is Full Of Honey (Decaying Sun) cd ep 9.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The return of one of our favorite purveyors of blissed out metallic dream doom, The Angelic Process. There is a brand new album on Profound Lore, which we do have in stock, so feel free to order that one too. We'll review that one on the next list. But we figured we oughta list this one first. ...And Your Blood Is Full Of Honey was originally released on Crucial Blast way back in 2001, in a run so limited we never even saw one. Now the band has decided to reissue all their old recordings and release them on their own Decaying Sun label, starting with this one...
The Angelic Process' M.O. was much the same here as on the incredible Coma Waering, released on Paradigms back in 2006, slow burning metallic drone epics, the guitars effulgent and blown out, woven into huge washes of dreamy bliss, over simple machinelike rhythms, with soaring emotional vocals buried and lost in thick ropy swells of sound. Everything run through some sort of amazing vacuum cleaner effect that wraps all the sounds in thick swirls of foggy whir. It's like M83 and My Bloody Valentine And Jesu blended up and mixed with some Godflesh and Neurosis, a gorgeously monstrous plodding doom, smeared into blackened shadows that somehow glow warmly from within. It's not really metal although it is most definitely heavy, it's not really pop either, even though there are hooks galore buried within the murk, it's not industrial, although it is intense and mechanical sounding at times, and it's not really doom, although it is heavy and sooooo sloooooow. It's somehow all of those things at once, yet none of those things, a constantly mutating sound that manages to also mix in tranquil ambient interludes, drawn out stretches of keening guitar and smoldering drone, and wild bursts of full on amp crushing, speaker melting noise. It's like the sonic equivalent of being doused in molten metal, every track a thick, viscous flow of sound, pouring from the speakers in black torrents, melting everything within reach, turning all to ash. So good.Ê
Includes two bonus tracks not on the original releases.ÊPackaged in slimline cases, with full color artwork, professionally printed cd-r's, each one signed by both members of the band! Probably limited, these things always seem to be, so even though we got a bunch, not sure how long they'll be around...
MPEG Stream: "Welcome To Oblivion"
MPEG Stream: "...And Your Blood Is Full Of Honey"

ANGELIC PROCESS, THE Coma Waering (Paradigms) cd 12.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
A new slab of glacial metallic beauty from Paradigms, one of our new favorite labels. In the past, they've brought us the drone dirge of Hjarnidaudi (an aQ Record Of The Week), the chamber gloom of Amber Asylum, the cult black metal of Throne Of Katarsis, the druggy prog of Blueprint Human Being, and now two new releases, a grim slab of icy pagan Canadian black metal from Utlagr (reviewed elsewhere on this list) and this, the newest release from dirge doomists the Angelic Process.
Described as slow motion doom drone, The Angelic Process are so much more. This is not just some series of cromagnon metal riffs slowed down and turned into 'art', nor is it a monochromatic wash of rumble and whir, not that there's anything wrong with that, we love that stuff, but the Angelic Process are more of a proper band, with songs, vocals, drums, parts, choruses, verses, all that normal band stuff. They craft simple, swoonsome dream rock, like M83 or Spacemen 3 or Cyann & Ben, albeit a lot more dark and ominous, but it's what they do with that rock, with those songs, that makes this record so special. And so mind meltingly heavy. Each of these songs is buried under a sea of warm sonic swirl. Where a normal band would kick on a distortion pedal for the chorus, The Angelic Process kick on a thousand, and it sounds like they maybe also have 30 or 40 extra guitarists standing at attention just waiting to dump a monstrous mass of churning thick blown out guitar fuzz all over everything. Closer reference points might be Jesu or My Bloody Valentine. The songs are moody plods, droney dirges, but within these songs, and beneath all the murk and fuzz and buzz, there are buried epic swells, heart rending melodies, soaring beneath the gauze and haze, it's like Low or Godspeed being backed up by Earth, performing live with Glenn Branca's guitar orchestra and produced by the Teenage Filmstars. Or maybe Swans if they made a record for French blisspop label Gooom. One of those extremely rare records that manages to be as breathtakingly lovely as it is crushingly heavy. The best blown out blissed out space rock drone guitar record since Loveless! SO RECOMMENDED!
Limited to 750 copies, packaged in a mini lp style sleeve wrapped in a hand stamped brown paper outer sleeve.
MPEG Stream: "My Blood Still Whispers"
MPEG Stream: "The Sun In Braids"
MPEG Stream: "Crippled Healing"

ANGELIC PROCESS, THE Sigh (Decaying Sun) cd ep 7.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

MPEG Stream: "Sigh"
MPEG Stream: "Trance To The Sun"

ANGELIC PROCESS, THE We All Die Laughing (Decaying Sun) cd ep 9.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We went from discovering what we believed to be the only recording from this Southern blissed out doomdrone duo, to suddenly being inundated with a bunch of recordings, old AND new. We're not complaining, cuz if you're anything like us, you can NOT get enough of this sort of My Bloody Valentine metal, epic swaths of blown out beautiful heaviness that drifts and shimmers as much as it pounds and pummels.Ê
It's hard to know what to say aboutÊWe All Die Laughing that we haven't already said about all of the other Angelic Process records, if you're a fan of stuff like Jesu, Nadja, Hjarnidaudi, odds are you're already hip to the gorgeous sounds of the Angelic Process. In iTunes, the genre comes up as 'new age' which in a way it sort of is, but it's OUR sort of new age, blissy and dreamy and washed out and soft focus and blurry and abstract, but also heavy as fuck, massive and crushing and completely overwhelmingly intense.ÊWe All Die Laughing is no exception, from the first track, which begins with a simple machinelike rhythm, and swirling ambient swells, a barely there guitar, before an avalanche of guitars drops from above, obliterating everything, somehow at once dense and heavy, yet so completely beautiful and packed with melody. Which is pretty much how the whole record stacks up, there are long stretches of low end shimmer, and simple tribal drumming, bits of ambient whir and fragmented melodies, but these are just breathers between the crushing black holes of sound, the million vacuum cleaners tuned to 'E' roar of their impossibly heavy sonic crush. You can read more of our AP gushing in any of the other reviews, but what more do we need to say, if you want it heavy, and want it beautiful, it really doesn't get more beautifully heavy than the Angelic Process.Ê
Packaged in slimline cases, with full color artwork, professionally printed cd-r's, each one signed by both members of the band!Ê
MPEG Stream: "We All Die Laughing"
MPEG Stream: "Bleedbeliever"

ANGELIC PROCESS, THE Weighing Souls With Sand (Profound Lore) cd 12.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
What can we say that we haven't already said about this dynamic dronedirgedoom duo? Seriously, have a look at any of the other reviews we've written about The Angelic Process, and see us gush like crazy, what's not to love? Gorgeous swirling black ambience, massive crushing metallic pummel, soaring majestic melodies, the sound somehow heavy and brutal, but washed out and gauzy, a thick My Bloody Valentine haze draped over everything, voices drift amidst the buzz like paper angels dropped into a roaring fire. Everything glistening and sparkling, glimmering and shimmering, then roaring and grinding and washing over you like some suffocating black tide.Ê
AllÊof their records are fantastic, each feels and sounds like a continuation of the one before it. As if they were all movements in some metallic black hole symphony, with each record, each movement, offering up its own subtle twist on the AP's black buzzing sound world. This latest might be the most sonically varied of the bunch. It's been out for a while now, but we had been working our way through the older titles first.
The overall sound like the others is warped and warbly, a slow crawl though an alien world, like every note and melody is being twisted and bent, tangled up into shapes that confuse and confound, the distortion so thick and viscous it seems to be able to alter the natural order, to use gravity as just another effect, ton-of-bricks downtuned guitars don't fall forward like an avalanche, they seem to drift like billowy black clouds somehow, slabs of low end fall upward, guitars slither in reverse, vocals twist inside out, a gorgeous multidimensional swirl of sound, that occasionally coalesces into a roiling propulsive thunderstorm of blissed out doom. Songs growÊfrom whispers into roars, a black doom Godspeed, but the heavy parts aren't just heavy, they're unearthly, unreal, melodies are pulled apart into sparkling notes that spin and soar, dancing atop a churning miasma of crush and crunch. The sound is an impossible blend of light and dark, evil and good, beauty and utter and complete horror. Like Katatonia broadcast through a wall of clothes dryers, doom metal performed by a symphony of leaf blowers tuned to drop-D, pop songs composed using cement mixers filled with gold bricks, a DJ spinning My Bloody Valentine over diSEMBOWELMENT, Winter remixed by Tim Hecker, all nestled amidst dreamy drifts of hushed shimmer and soft focus ambience.
We could go on and on and on and on and on and on.... needless to say, an absolutely essential slab of blissed out dreamdronedoooooooooooooooooooooooooom...
MPEG Stream: "The Promise Of Snakes"
MPEG Stream: "Million Year Summer"
MPEG Stream: "The Resonance Of Goodbye"

ANGELIC PROCESS, THE Weighing Souls With Sand (Senor Hernandez / Roadburn) 2lp 26.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The sadly now defunct dronedoombliss duo's swansong, available as a super deluxe double lp for a very limited time...
What can we say that we haven't already said about this dynamic dronedirgedoom duo? Seriously, have a look at any of the other reviews we've written about The Angelic Process, and see us gush like crazy, what's not to love? Gorgeous swirling black ambience, massive crushing metallic pummel, soaring majestic melodies, the sound somehow heavy and brutal, but washed out and gauzy, a thick My Bloody Valentine haze draped over everything, voices drift amidst the buzz like paper angels dropped into a roaring fire. Everything glistening and sparkling, glimmering and shimmering, then roaring and grinding and washing over you like some suffocating black tide.Ê
AllÊof their records are fantastic, each feels and sounds like a continuation of the one before it. As if they were all movements in some metallic black hole symphony, with each record, each movement, offering up its own subtle twist on the AP's black buzzing sound world. This latest might be the most sonically varied of the bunch. It's been out for a while now, but we had been working our way through the older titles first.
The overall sound like the others is warped and warbly, a slow crawl though an alien world, like every note and melody is being twisted and bent, tangled up into shapes that confuse and confound, the distortion so thick and viscous it seems to be able to alter the natural order, to use gravity as just another effect, ton-of-bricks downtuned guitars don't fall forward like an avalanche, they seem to drift like billowy black clouds somehow, slabs of low end fall upward, guitars slither in reverse, vocals twist inside out, a gorgeous multidimensional swirl of sound, that occasionally coalesces into a roiling propulsive thunderstorm of blissed out doom. Songs growÊfrom whispers into roars, a black doom Godspeed, but the heavy parts aren't just heavy, they're unearthly, unreal, melodies are pulled apart into sparkling notes that spin and soar, dancing atop a churning miasma of crush and crunch. The sound is an impossible blend of light and dark, evil and good, beauty and utter and complete horror. Like Katatonia broadcast through a wall of clothes dryers, doom metal performed by a symphony of leaf blowers tuned to drop-D, pop songs composed using cement mixers filled with gold bricks, a DJ spinning My Bloody Valentine over diSEMBOWELMENT, Winter remixed by Tim Hecker, all nestled amidst dreamy drifts of hushed shimmer and soft focus ambience.
We could go on and on and on and on and on and on.... needless to say, an absolutely essential slab of blissed out dreamdronedoooooooooooooooooooooooooom...
MPEG Stream: "The Promise Of Snakes"
MPEG Stream: "Million Year Summer"
MPEG Stream: "The Resonance Of Goodbye"

ANGST SKVADRON Sweet Poison (Agonia) cd 15.98
Trondr Nefas, aka T.B., is probably better known in black metal circles for fronting Norwegian heavyweights Urgehal and Beastcraft, among others, but odds are that might be about to change with Angst Skvadron, a blackened bastard offspring, that while still black metal is so much more.
This is record number two from this post black metal trio, whose sound, if we had to describe it, would be something more like post space black prog. And were this easier to get, don't doubt that this would have been a shoo-in for Record of The Week. For some of us it's already Record Of The Year!
Employing the usual instruments, but with an incredible arsenal of vintage and classic keyboards and synths, even a Mellotron, to add all sorts of texture and weirdness to their grim black sound. Did we mention ghostly female vocals? Yeah, these guys are a strange proposition, but have maybe catapulted themselves right to the front of the line, that line being our favorite new black metal bands.
Just take record opener "Valium Holocaust" (great title), opening with a cloud or reverbed piano rumbles, before launching into a lumbering midtempo dirge, equal parts Ved Buens Ende, Khold and Voivod at 16 rpm, the guitars warped and crumbling, the riffs woozy, the rhythm peppered with toiling bells, and laced with little glimmering tangles of melody, and super melodic basslines, and of course some haunting female vocals, that make the track either sound like some black metal Argento soundtrack, or some blackened version of Hundred Sights Of Koenji, gorgeous and creepy and far out and spacey and totally mesmerizing.
The whole record is so close to NOT being black metal. The riffs are gnarled and not at all typical, sounding almost grungy at times, like a way more grim black Skin Yard, which is definitely a good thing.
There are moments of blackness for sure, but even then, the band seem dead set on subverting any sort of true kvlt cred they might otherwise be developing, by twisting the songs all up, whether it's adding Mellotron strings, and creating weird carnivalesque slowcore, or adding all sort of strange crooning vocals, or taking an otherwise black blast beat, and transforming it into a mathy stutter. The slow atmospheric bits are incredible, not just randomly quiet for a minute or two like most BM bands, these are fully formed bits of minimal moodiness, with lush tangled melodies, ghostly harmonies, thick wheezing organs, often giving way to spaced out blackened krautrock, all clean guitars, hazy clouds of reverb, rubbery Joy Division basslines, some full on whatthefuck post industrial lumber and crunch, with thick buzzy bass riffs, and streaks of static and hiss, all wound around some incredible black metal grooves, some of the best riffs we've heard in ages, that in other hands could be the basis for perfect pop songs, but here just infuse the blackness with a weirdly irresistible pop element, that helps make these songs totally weird, totally catchy, and completely genius.
The record finishes off with an unlikely three song salvo, some warm almost sunshiney softly strummed minimal pop, all brushed snares, soaring strings, major key melodies, a lush gauzy dream pop dronescape, that gives way to possibly the most mathy and convoluted track on the record, all super tangled riffage, octopoidal math rock drums, serpentine basslines, super heavy and harrowing, with tortured super effected tripped out vocals, culminating in heaving doomic crush, before finally finishing off with the weirdly melodic title track, a wistful minor key dirge, all clean chiming guitars, simple spare drumming, strings and flutes (or at least the Mellotron version), gorgeous and dreamy and softly psychedelic, an appropriately unlikely finish to one of the most unlikely 'black metal' records in recent memory. And quickly becoming our favorite...
MPEG Stream: "Valium Holocaust"
MPEG Stream: "Aerophobia"
MPEG Stream: "Fucking Karma"
MPEG Stream: "The UFO Is Leaving"

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished / Danse Manatee (Fatcat) 2cd 16.98
As part of their Splinter Series, Fat Cat Records have reissued these two enigmatic albums together as a double album credited to the group known as Animal Collective (aka the artists Avey Tare and Panda Bear, Geologist, and Deaken). Fragments of obscured sounds, glimpsing melodies and rhythms peek from around corners and poke out of the cracks while strange voices murmur, chant and howl from the shadows.
If the first disc's title and songs strike you as familiar, well, it might be because we were raving about it late last year. It was originally released on its own in 2000 under the moniker Avey Tare And Panda Bear. Heck, we like it very much under any name. And the wonderfully titled Danse Manatee (who doesn't love the manatee?), was their just as dandy follow-up, a subtly more fleshed out and vocal heavy album that was limited to 1000 handmade, silkscreened editions.
Here's what we had to say about the former when it was still credited to A.T.A.P.B.:
This debut album... is, well, it's really good! It's an intriguing combination of elements -- a plaintive, weak voice chirping sadly over rapidly strummed yet fractured guitar, which is normal enough but then there's these weirdly muffled, like, jungle beats in the background, so faint you barely even notice that they're there. The tension between the styles happening simultaneiously is carefully handled and forms a satisfying whole. Vocals are tremulous and tinny but somehow appealing, too, like the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne making incredibly emotional dissonant, fuzzed-out bathroom electronica. There are also gentler numbers with moody piano and delicate vocal effects. And some raucous squealing feedback guitar (like a womans wail) over Reichian arpeggiated synths. The overall effect is slightly creepy but mostly just wintry, melancholy and sad. Recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Chocolate Girl"
MPEG Stream: "Ahhh Good Country"

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE Sung Tongs (Fat Cat) cd 15.98
The mysteriously eccentric Animal Collective have returned bearing / baring their Sung Tongs. They continue along their quirky, meandering rough-hewn path, yet on this album they seem ever so slightly more focused and (dare we say?) accessible than on previous recorded endeavors. However, that's not to say that they're not plenty 'out there'. This 'Collective is definitely not for everybody. It just sounds as though they've set aside their eclectic genre palette (psych, jazz, prog, noise, etc) for the time being, keeping their sound for the most part within the mossy folk realm. Perhaps they've spent a stretch of time deep in the woods far from civilization? This does make for a much less haphazard, much less disarming listen than those of past A.C. releases. That said, odd details still punctuate the songs like cackling laughter, whooping vocalizations, textural ambient noises -- hazily drifting in and out of lucidity. Furthermore, as if to not fully alienate those who dug their Here Comes the Indian and Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished / Danse Manatee releases, they end on a more characteristically strange note with the trippy track "Whaddit I Done".
MPEG Stream: "Kids On Holiday"
MPEG Stream: "Whaddit I Done"

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE Water Curses (Domino) lp 10.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Now on vinyl!
Initially, it's difficult to appreciate Water Curses on its own merits, and not as the follow up to staggering records like Feels, Sung Tongs, and Panda Bear's Person Pitch, whose influence on contemporary indie music will be felt for a long time to come. In this context, it falls flat, but if you can find the patience to discover it on its own terms, it's not really a bad little ep, and quite possibly even a good one. Fans of Panda Bear's distinctive croon will be disappointed however, as Avey Tare is at the vocal helm of every track, though PB's influence is certainly felt through the nobs and dials of his Dr. Sample. Truly, the title track is as perfect a piece of out-there pop as Animal Collective have ever made, barring perhaps the classic "Who Could Win A Rabbit." It's intoxicatingly catchy, and sends you through a captivating gauntlet of shifts in momentum leaving you delightfully exhausted. The remaining three tracks are all spare in comparison, but each with its own specific charm. "Street Flash" is spacious with sudden screaming accents, and some fantastically wacked vocal processing. Also memorable perhaps for its pathos-enriched lyrics including the standout: "Does anyone in here get hit with inside fevers?"
"Cobwebs" has its roots in sampling, with only a little bit of guitar work, but some fantastic vocal hooks, and exalted whoops and hollers. The final track, "Seal Eyeing", the only track that wasn't tracked in the Strawberry Jam sessions, is a gentle tour of aquatic tableaus and marine communiques, perhaps most noteworthy for its mournfully placid tone, a place Animal Collective hasn't really taken us since the latter half of Sung Tongs. Each song on this ep has its own distinct allure, but in comparison to the revelations embedded in the band's previous work, it's a bit limp. What's difficult to determine, is whether unseasoned ears would find this work as mesmerizing as earlier Animal Collective, or whether there really is something missing. We're not sure. But needless to say, Water Curses will get its far share of spins, if only because it is so damn pleasant.
MPEG Stream: "Water Curses"
MPEG Stream: "Street Flash"

ANIMIST ORCHESTRA Wuwei (Anomalous) cd 14.98
Following the incredibly tiny improvisations with carefully chosen sticks, rocks, and shells on his "Second Attention" solo album, the Seattle sound artist Jeph Jerman expanded those actions within the context of a larger ensemble called the Animist Orchestra with Dave Knott, Jeffery Taylor, Marina Granger, Mike Shannon, and Robert Mills. As before, the sounds on the Animist Orchestra's "Wuwei" are entirely caught up in the spontenaeity of the moment paralleling the pure, expressive goals of free-jazz. But as Jerman explained in the press release to the album, "the use of natural objects (stones, shells, pine cones etc.) as opposed to more conventional musical instruments, can help the players to not fall back on learned habits of musical play." The activities of Jerman's Animist Orchestra are sustained yet hushed rustings of those natural elements, unveiling a vast array of interwoven patterns and textures. Concentrated listenings are neccessary.
RealAudio clip: "excerpt 1"
RealAudio clip: "excerpt 2"
RealAudio clip: "excerpt 3"

ANIMOSITY + DRUMCORPS Altered Beast (Man Alive) 10" 11.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We went a little crazy for Aaron Spectre's Drumcorps project, a crazed manic electronic workout featuring live metal guitars and chopped to bits metal and grindcore, all mashed up into some incredibly head spinning, neck snapping, dancefloor destroying moshpit annihilating heaviness.
So the latest bit of Drumcorps brutality, finds Spectre teaming up with Bay Area thrashmetal titans Animosity for a 3 track one sided 10", which takes up right where the Drumcorps record left off and pushes this whole metal / electronic hybrid even further out. This time, Animosity wrote three tracks, and Spectre got to fuck them up. But weirdly enough, unlike on the last Drumcorps disc, where it sounded like a record assembled from bits of metal and grind and breakbeats, this disc sounds more like an Animosity record, where they just happen to be incorporating bits of jungle and techno and drill+bass and whatever grinding buzzing weirdness Spectre could come up with. And the results are pretty stellar. And its core, this is a grindmetal record, but the guitars are super clipped and processed, often stuttering and chopped up into impossible rhythms, the beats are revved up and transformed into frantic breakbeats, some of the super fast blast beats just keep getting faster and faster until they turn into impossible digital stutters. Huge riffs grind and churn, often separated by squalls of jungle, freaky beats, it's a mash up, but neither side is in control, it veers back and forth from metal to jungle to grind to breakbeat often exploding into everything at once. This is the sort of shit that could get us non dancers out on the floor. Or maybe get you dancers into the pit. Either way, fucking awesome.
And we talk about insane packaging all the time, but once again, holy shit, these guys are pushing the limits of how over the top you can get - eye popping full color screened sleeves, incredible, garish illustrations, inside and out, but it's the vinyl, some are clear and white swirled, some are red and blue and clear swirled, but then the non playing side features and abstract thick metallic ink silkscreened image, either gold or silver, it's hard to explain, but the first time we slipped one out of the sleeve, everyone working had to gather around to see.

ANKERSMIT, THOMAS Live In Utrecht (Ash International) cd 15.98
This "live" drone recording is the debut solo cd from Berlin-based installation artist Thomas Ankersmit, who has previously collaborated/played with the likes of Phill Niblock, Tony Conrad, and Kevin Drumm. One single 39 minute track, this is some dense, abstract, trance-inducing drone indeed, and certainly sounds like more than a mere one-man operation. Ankersmit's drones are like multiple trains running on more or less parallel tracks, diverging and then joining together again, racing ever onwards towards a self-generated brilliant white light at the end of the tunnel.
There's some squeal and squiggle to these sounds, that arise from their origin within Ankersmit's saxophone - that's right, he plays the sax, so these are saxophone drones - but there's really only a few places where you can tell for sure the source is a sax, thanks to all the electronics and processing involved. In addition to alto sax, Ankersmit makes use of a computer, analog synth, and pre-recorded reel-to-reel tape. So his sax is set amidst much mysterious glitch and crackle, and takes on an ominously distorted, grinding quality that's quite unlike what you might expect to hear from a saxophone. Although it makes sense that he's also had some sort of association with the notoriously noisy sax and guitar outfit Borbetomagus, the music here isn't assaultive, and far from free jazz, no, it's simply, or perhaps not so simply, a gorgeous and varied dronework, one that passes through some quieter stretches of eerie subsonic hum and hiss, while ultimately massing towards the end into full-bodied solid drone purity, blissful and glorious. Pretty darn satisfying, we think our fellow drone-heads will agree. Looking forward to hearing more from Mr. Ankersmit as well. Recommended!
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 1"
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 2"
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 3"

ANKERSMIT, THOMAS / JIM O'ROURKE split (Tochnit Aleph) lp 17.98
A very interesting split LP for several reasons, not the least of which being the almost 20 years separating the two recordings. Thomas Ankersmit is a young composer, who splits his time between the saxophone and analogue synthesizers, having spent a good portion of his young career touring the globe with Phill Niblock. His performances are as transcendent as they are physical, with him tugging and re-plugging patch cables into his modular synth at a dizzying speed all the while generating a refined blur of arcing drones and potent electricity. Despite the sax, jazz, this is not! In many ways, Ankersmit's loping compositions resemble those early pieces by Jim O'Rourke, especially his impressive Scend and Tamper albums from the early '90s. So perhaps that's why a contemporary Ankersmit composition got teamed up with an archival (and possibly unreleased until now) piece from O'Rourke from that very time period.
Ankersmit's piece incorporates both sax and synth, with cracked electricity fizzing and popping with electroshock capacity only to be consumed by a laser beam of analogue synth tones swarmed by searing hiss of white noise. The saxophone appears as a sustained squawk of circular breathing techniques with the edges thoroughly roughed up by a litany of distortion pedals. O'Rourke's piece seems to be all guitar, with a midrange distortion enveloping the choppy riffs that eventually coalesce into a thick morass of drone-dirge that looks forward to the likes of Ambarchi and O'Malley, although not nearly as heavy. We've been told this is rare. We've been told this is limited. We can tell you this is great!

ANNA PLANETA s/t (Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers) 2cd 11.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The UK's Anna Planeta (a band) presents a double cd of recordings they made in a derelict Catholic school house that has been empty since 1980. The band improvises on a number of acoustic instruments and guitars powered by cheap battery powered amps in the once-grandiose assembly hall of the school that is now filled with shattered glass, empty beercans, and spent glue-sniffing bags. It sounds like any number of, to use our coined terminology, "pipe fight" or "lithium drone" bands (No Neck Blues Band, Organum, or Skullflower) recording one of their albums with the microphone right next to a electric transformer or a buzzing light bulb. Very nice work, combining improv "outsider rock" with atmospheric environmental recording. Oversized silkscreened cardboard packaging, and a nice price for 2 cds!

ANTENNA FARM / MAIN AF_M (split) (Staalplaat) cd 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
About 10 years ago, Robert Hampson dissolved his incendiary psych-rock outfit Loop, and ever since has been gradually shedding the layers of his once volatile sound. Recorded under the moniker Main, the first experiments in Hampson's dismantling process succeeded through their swarming guitar drones and rolling basslines, and were heralded as the vanguard recordings for the early 90's Isolationist school. Since then, Hampson has continued to distance himself from the structuralism of rock, removing rhythm, melody, and anything that could be qualified as part of a song. Unfortunately, Main's recent output has merely sounded indifferent, rather than pensive or restrained. Perhaps he's realized this design flaw and has therefore been looking for inspiration by actively collaborating with a number of artists such as Organum, Janek Schaeffer, and now Antenna Farm. In all three instances, Hampson's previous success in creating dis-quiet and dis-ease through a sparse use of sound have once again returned.
Hampson's collaboration with Antenna Farm (the duo of Alastair Leslie and David Howell, recently responsible for a very good album on Phthalo) marks the first release on Staalplaat's Brombrom series of collaborative works. "AF_M" originates from recordings of VLF crackle, shortwave modulations, and various domestic events, yet the three slowly pixillate these sounds into spiralling collages of smoldering electronics and muddled glitches. Quite nice.
RealAudio clip: "Track One"
RealAudio clip: "Track Three"

ANTIMATTER Reset (Resipiscent) cd 11.98
Antimatter is the work of Bay Area sound artist Xopher Davidson, whose intense, psychoacoustically challenging compositions earn noble comparisons to fellow Northern Californians like Scott Arford, R.H.Y. Yau, Michael Gendreau, and Joe Colley. Furthermore, Davidson has worked extensively with Zbigniew Karkowski, generating gnarled maelstroms of digital grit and volcanic noise on a handful of albums and live performances. Reset is Antimatter's first album in close to 6 years, after he released a couple of albums on the now defunct Asphodel label. It begins with a nasty low-end throb from phased oscillators, obsolete synthesizers, and integral-logic feedback systems, whose generative tension is heightened through metallic slashes and electrical bursts of white noise static. The vigor of Davidson's grim electronics dissolves on the curiously beautiful ambient construction "Sea Of Tranquility," whose vaporous atmospherics recall more of the mesmerism of Tim Hecker and Leyland Kirby emerging out of queasy sick tones and vibrational splutter. The next track "Sverdlovsk-45" was named for a Soviet secret city that enriched uranium throughout the Cold War, and it has all of the claustrophobic industrial metaphors one would expect through the belching hiss and churning centrifuge actions. The crumbling noises glow once again with a spectral beauty found on the aforementioned "Sea Of Tranquility" by the end of the record. Even so, this album is one for those keen on The Hafler Trio and John Duncan, especially since neither of those two have released anything in quite a while.
MPEG Stream: "Cloud Of Possibility"
MPEG Stream: "Sea Of Tranquility"
MPEG Stream: "Sverdlovsk-45"
MPEG Stream: "Time Projection Chamber"

ANTIPAN s/t (Pulled Out) lp 9.00
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
A one sided vinyl monster. Grinding splattery chaos. Super distorted rhythms beneath thick slabs of ultra distorted hiss and waves of crumbling crunch. That is the sound of Australia's Antipan, a fourpiece that traffics in spaced out aggressive free rock ambience. Or Neu! metal minimalism. Either way it's a gloriously unholy racket. Echoey guitars and streaks of feedback, all tangled up into a dense wall of krautrocky chaos, with buried vocals, and dense squalls of acid fried guitar malfunction and jagged melodic fragments. Those harsher moments are balanced by long stretches of distorted drone and glitchy throb, very reminiscent of their equally noisy countrymen Aufgehoben and Shit And Shine.
Pressed on SUPER thick bubblegum pink vinyl, one sided, the other side features an etching by Rizili from the Menstruation Sisters. Includes a dayglo pink insert, packaged in a hand screened, individually numbered pink on black sleeve.
LIMITED TO 275 COPIES. We only got eight, so you do the math...
(A little bit shelfworn at this point, fyi).

ANTIQUITY (GRASSLUNG) s/t (Ekhein) cassette 5.98

ANWORTH KIRK s/t (Pre-Cert Home Entertainment) lp 19.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Demdike Stare fans listen up! There's a new dark mysterious stranger in town by the name of Anworth Kirk, and for fans of Demdike Stare's haunted dub sound paintings or that Broadcast and The Focus Group record we keep raving about, or any of the vintage horror soundtracks from Trunk Records, you will surely want to give this a listen. No, Anworth Kirk is not really a person, or a band, as far as we can tell, but it's the first release on the new archival imprint Pre-Cert Home Entertainment that will be devoted to releasing a series of limited vinyl missives of contemporary musical and non-musical strangeness. Most definitely associated with DJ Andy Votel and the B-Music crew as well as Demdike Stare themselves (in fact, we're pretty sure Anworth Kirk IS Andy Votel and Sean Canty of Demdike, who run the Pre-Cert label), the music presented here is a mind-bending collage of haunting creaking loops, far away noises of babies crying and dogs barking, slow motion creeping synths, library music, and eldritch incantations culled from dusty corners of British horror. So haunting and beautiful! Limited to 500 copies, it is basically already out of print, so grab one of the few we have while you can!

ANZELLOTTI, TEODORO Push Pull (Hat Hut) cd 18.98
From the fellow who brought us the lovely accordion interpretations of Erik Satie on a prior cd! From the back: "Compositions such as these - unquestionably go a long way in re-defining the accordion, in liberating it from its relatively short, but heavily cliche-ridden history. In a way, the accordion's role may be compared with that of the saxophone: both children of the industrialisation of musical instrument manufacture in the 19th century, both aesthetically defined by certain popular idioms, both re-discovered and re-defined by the composers of New Music. But while I must confess that the re-invention of the saxophone has, as yet, rarely convinced me - too often the wealth of timbres and articulations created by the master jazz saxophonists has been traded for a relative sterility and blandness of tone -, I do feel that these (and other) new works for accordion have enriched the sound world of the accordion immensely, and I hope that you will share my sense of discovery."

APHELION I-VI (Iris Light ) cd 15.98
Former Cradle of Filth guitarist Stuart Anstis offers a solo album on the experimental Iris Light label (Szeki Kurva, Aube, Maeror Tri, Band of Pain, etc.). It's not black metal, but more of an electronic soundscape thing with beats...not bad, but not too exciting either. At least, it's much better than the solo techno record done by one of the guitarists from Dissection a while back. But when Iris Light's website goes off saying that Aphelion is "possibly one of the most highly anticipated releases of 2001, especially after the disappointment of CoFs' last album" that's a bunch of bullshit. Unlikely levels of anticipation aside, the Filthies' Stuart-less "Midian" is a good record and certainly this doesn't compare to that or any CoF disc!!

APHOTIC Stillness Grows (Flood The Earth) cd 10.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

APM Sprint Mill (ICR) cd 17.98
Chris Atkins, Colin Potter, and Phil Mouldycliff are the British drone / field recording collective working as APM. Potter is a brilliant technician whose work we are well acquainted with through his long-standing contributions to Nurse With Wound, Ora, and Monos, not to mention his impressive solo work of processed field recordings and sinister electronics. Mouldycliff is a multimedia artist whose has worked with Loren Chasse, Michael Nyman, and Keith Rowe, and we've had a few of his recordings pass through here. But this Chris Atkins is a character we cannot impart much in the way of a shorthand biography. In any case, APM had travelled to the rustic environs of the Sprint Mill in the northwest of England. This Mill is currently inhabited by one Edward Acland, an eccentric artist who had recently opened up the Mill to various installations and performances. Presumably, APM had performed at Sprint Mill; but it's equally likely that they just collected a plethora of field recordings from all of the Industrial Revolution-era machinery, antiquated plumbing, drafty windows, and the overgrown gardens from the grounds of the Mill. This becomes a beautifully rendered collage slipping between the natural detritus surrounding the Mill and the haunted resonance of the tools in the Mill. Thus, massed aggregates of leaves, sticks, and branches coagulate into watery field recordings of rain, wind, and rushing streams. Throughout, the trio gently intrudes with looping structures of rasping metal where the bell-like chiming of the metal is tempered by the years of use. Where you might expect the drone to be dominant given Potter and Mouldycliff's previous work, it's far more rustic and less all-consuming than we might have thought, although there are some mighty fine drone elements to this album! An excellent piece of manipulated field recording for sure along with the likes of Murmer, Tarab, Jgrzinich, and Loren Chasse!
MPEG Stream: "Sprint Mill Mix 1"
MPEG Stream: "Sprint Mill Mix 4"
MPEG Stream: "Sprint Mill Mix 7"

APOCRYPHAL VOICE Still Trapped (Candlelight) cd 16.98

APOPTOSE Blutopfer (Tesco) cd 17.98
This disc by the one man dark ambient drum ensemble Apoptose has long been a favorite around these parts, but as it was a few years old, we were never able to get enough to list. And eventually it just went out of print completely. We were thrilled recently to discover however, that it had just been reissued, and thus, now all can share in our mass musical obsession with this amazing slab of percussive overload.
In a small village in Spain called Calanda, the villages gather each year during the holy week of the Christian Easter festival. The villages, clad in purple robes, are all carrying drums, of various shapes and sizes and sounds. The villages all stand completely still, in near silence, until all at once, the whole lot erupt in a frenzy of wild drumming, which continues practically nonstop for 36 hours, the rhythms of the thousands of drums finding their way into every corner of daily life, mundane activities are suddenly performed to some hypnotic rhythm, many of the players enter some sort of fugue state, a trancelike stupor, many passing out, some oblivious to their hands being rubbed raw and beginning to bleed.
The festival is nearly 100 years old, and predates its current Christian orientation, with heathen roots in a tradition of warning of danger outside the cities walls. Sounds almost like A Hermann Nitcsh action. And it must sound like it as well.
Blutopfer is a tribute, a musical homage, an impression of what that festival might sound like. Filtered through a distinctly dark ambient lens, but still dense and complex and hyper rhythmic.
The opening track begins with a low droning hum, as if to imitate the opening hush of the actual ceremony, a dark smoky swirl, which hardly prepares you for the massive crush of a million snare drums, all tangled and intertwined, various distinct rhythms surfacing amongst the dense drum line cacophony. It's so dense in fact, that the drums almost begin to resemble radio static. But unlike the actual festival, there are all sorts of other sounds, huge throbbing bass melodies, rumbling pulses, the drums locked into a super hypnotic martial rhythm, while the buzzing bass propels it forward. So epic and heavy and majestic and dense with drums!
The sound is almost like LUSTMORD JAMMING WITH A MARCHING BAND DRUM LINE, which we shouldn't have to tell you sounds AMAZING.
While that first track is ultra heavy, and rhythmically fucking fierce, much of the rest of the record is more skeletal, more spare, with long stretched out black ambience, slowly unfurling barely there melodies, all beneath totally intense, completely mesmerizing drumming. A relentless militaristic drum corps, weaving killer complex snare rolls. At it's darkest and most intense, it sounds like some drum heavy Toroidh or Folkstorm track, a teutonic industrial throb, the snares just adding to the intensity, but most of the record, it really does sound like a drum line transported to some wasted bleak doomscape, their insistent rhythms just barely keeping the blackness at bay. SO GODDAMN GOOD.
All new packaging, a dark purple, six panel, thick card stock folded sleeve, with liner notes detailing the Spanish festival that inspired this record.
MPEG Stream: "Apotropaion"
MPEG Stream: "Blutopfer"
MPEG Stream: "Calanda"

APPARAT ORGAN QUARTET s/t (Skelt) cd 17.98
Finally, the seemingly impossible to get full length release from this amazing Icelandic organ-synthesizer-keyboard combo gets a proper widespread release! Think Stereolab, Trans Am, Kraftwerk, M83, mix in a little Add N To (X), a little Postal Service and you'll be in the ballpark. From straight-up Stereolab worship, the first track is the best Stereolab song that never was (albeit with a Speak And Spell on lead vocals), to full on synth-rock with buzzy guitars and huge thick burping fuzz organ basslines with cool Kraftwerky computer vocals, to blissy M83 style romantic fuzzscapes, to goofy burbly loungy bleep and bloop, to some distinctly Kraftwerkian krautrock. AOQ's quadruple organ attack is tough to beat. You know how when a band had two guitarists, maybe three, it just made the guitar sound that much thicker and in your face, well, just imagine FOUR ORGANS rocking full on! Whoa! And one of the organs just so happens to be manned by AQ fave Johan Johannsson (who also produced the record). In the past various AOQ members have worked with the likes of Marc Almond, Hafler Trio, Sigur Ros, Barry Adamson, Stillupsteypa, Mum, Pan Sonic and even Hermann Nitsch! But you won't find any blood soaked cacophony here. Nope, this is all warm and warbly, dreamy and bouncy, fun and fuzzy.
Gorgeous cover art featuring oil paintings of the various members of the band as Playmobile figures!!
MPEG Stream: "Romantika"
MPEG Stream: "The Anguish Of Space And Time"

APPELQVIST, HANS Sifantin Och Morkret (Hapna) cd 16.98
This is definitely on the poppy side of things for the Hapna label, in our experience, Hans Appelqvist being a singer-songwriter-with-a-guitar kind of guy, but this self-described "patchwork symphony" brings in a lot of other, weirder sounds as well. It's apparently his 3rd album for Hapna and 4th overall, and we're sorry we missed the others 'cause this is really nice, delightful even, though with a sinister underbelly... it's music that someone like Bjork might hear in her dreams, magical and moody, with singing (in Swedish) and guitar strum and piano and bells and also all sorts of cartoony sound effects, playful children's voices, dogs barking, birds cawing, crickets chirping... all woven into a gorgeous patchwork indeed.
If you like your Swedish indie pop to conjure an intimate, mysterious and quirky soundworld, Hans Appelqvist is your man. There's 12 tracks, but many of them are interludes only a bit over a minute, so it's about 25 mins total. As a bonus, though, you get a Quicktime video clip for "Tank Att Himlens Alla Stjarnor", which puts Appelqvist into a colorful and enchanting animated visual representation of that soundworld... you'll get to "see" some of the stranger sounds that crop up on that track!
MPEG Stream: "Tank Att Himlens Alla Stjarnor"
MPEG Stream: "Jag En Gok"

APPLEHEAD Applehead De Applehead (Pre-Cert Home Entertainment) lp 19.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The strangely named duo Applehead is in fact one part the duo (?) Anworth Kirk (which we're pretty sure is at least one part former Record Of The Weekers Demdike Stare (also a duo, confused yet?)), and Applehead's debut record is the second release on Pre-Cert, a label run by Finders Keepers' Andy Votel and the guys in Demdike Stare, focusing on, according to the label themselves, contemporary musical and nonmusical material, referencing research libraries/VHS video culture/electronic Folkways records/sound poetry/tape manipulation/European fumetti/outsider art/field recording and more. Essentially, the music on Pre-Cert, and specifically this new one by the mysterious Applehead, is in fact, some seriously twisted, far out, faux seventies Italo disco soundtrack music. At least that's what we're getting from all that. A heady collection of heavy fuzzed out grooves, strange voices, creepy ambience, all woven into what sounds like the score to the greatest, and creepiest, seventies giallo you've never seen.
The record begins with some haunting, soundtracky murk, all buried melodies, muted buzz and crunch, over which a reverbed female voice intones some mysterious message in some foreign language, all the while ominous chords ring out, until BAM, in swoops a fat funky Italo disco groove, super distorted and gloriously fuzzy, the synths heavy and in-the-red, wah guitars, but the sound is strangely washed out, the groove surrounded by streaks of ghostly shimmer, clouds of effects, the end result is a killer krautrock / space rock sci-fi funk.
The record is peppered with strange little interludes, more of that voice, like a snippet from a film, woven into creepy swirling ambience, blurred minimal dronemusic, but it's not long before the next groove comes in, and it's another buzz drenched bit of giallo style faux soundtrack funkiness, dubbed out percussion, tinkling melodies, complete with terrified gasps and shrieks of females in peril. The A side wraps up with a heavy slice of organ driven haunted house moodiness, that definitely had us thinking Goblin, Zombi, Umberto and the rest of those sci-fi retro futurists.
The flipside offers up more of the same, some pulsing thrum that gives way to another blast of seventies horror funk, chuggy wah wah guitars, muscly drums, creepy minor key melodies, spectral howls super distorted synth buzz, all woven into a heavy organ kraut-funk groove. Finally the record winds down with what is the perfect Italo horror score, another woozy groove, funky and slinky, low slung and slithery, a little dubby, a little disco-y, wreathed in a spectral haze, and rife with haunting melodies, a serious slab of classic John Carpenter style seventies style suspenseful soundtrackiness.
Awesome stuff, and WAY recommended for anyone into the current crop of sci-fi soundtrackers and retro Goblin worshippers, as well as the various strains of modern hauntological soundscaping (a la Demdike Stare)...
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!

APPLETON, JON & DON CHERRY Human Music (Water) cd 16.98
We love the out-there improvs of legendary jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, and the idea of him teamed up with an equally out-there electronics maverick (Jon Appleton, natch) was enough to get us excited about this cd reissue of the duo's 1970 recording Human Music. Cherry, then a fixture on the NYC free jazz scene, was invited to be an artist-in-residence by young Dartmouth music professor Appleton -- who just happened to have a Moog-laden electronic music studio at his disposal. The resulting collaboration is an early exercise in "live" electronic-meets-acoustic music -- as the studio techniques of musique concrete, like splicing and editing tapes with razor blades, couldn't be applied to a real-time improv duet, so Appleton had to find ways for Cherry's playing (on both horns and sundry percussion) to immediately "trigger" responses from the studio's arsenal of synths. The results are VERY bleepy-blurpy-whooshy, like something from a freaky sci-fi soundtrack, and Cherry's trumpet is often obscured by the electronic effects. We can't say that Human Music is an absolutely essential Don Cherry album but it's definitely an interesting novelty in his discography and it's cool to get to hear it now!
MPEG Stream: "BOA"
MPEG Stream: "OBA"

AQUARELLE Sung In Broken Symmetry (Students Of Decay) lp 16.98
Alex Cobb's Students Of Decay imprint must issue an edict to those who pass through its doors to deconstruct the song to particular base elements - primarily noise and drone with a ghost of melody - and rearrange them, for some truly compelling albums. Evan Caminiti, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Brendan Murray, Celer, Peter Wright, and Natural Snow Buildings (the latter being perhaps the most 'traditional' of these SoD acts) have all obeyed Cobb's edict, alongside plenty of lesser knowns.
Aquarelle (aka Ryan Potts) is not a project we've heard all that much about, but the work certainly holds up to the high Students Of Decay standards of scattered drone pocked with sculpted noise. Beginning with cyclical patterns of cello and guitars all encrusted with rough-cut shards of glass that reflect and refract sound into a consonant shimmer of white noise. The fundamental tones from the cello in particular surface through "With Verticals" brightening the space with all of the cinematic flourishes one hears in Stars Of The Lid, but produced with the granularity of a particularly discordant Christian Fennesz (e.g. Endless Summer). "The Blue Light Was My Body" sets undulating washes of static-noise upon a finger-picked acoustic guitar riff and a stately drone that forms a enveloping corona to the track. Again, the references to Fennesz, Loveliescrushing, and Tim Hecker ring true, with Aquarelle flashing Americana-hues from weathered wood and rusty nails to his grit-laden ambience. Limited to 300 copies!

AQUARIUS BUTTONS 2 x 1" buttons 1.00
Hey, we just got another batch of AQ buttons made up...
Spread the word! Show the world your true aQ colors! COOL COOL COOL aQ buttons, now in 6 different vibrant color combinations. 5 new color combos (blue on pink, red on dark grey, dark blue on blue, orange on black, and yellowish green on dark green) and a popular one we had previously (brown on yellow).
TWO FOR $1!!! Colors are random, but buy enough and you'll be guaranteed to get 'em all! And of course all feature our spiffy James Gang style logo!! So stylish!

AR (AUTUMN RICHARDSON & RICHARD SKELTON) s/t (Type) lp 19.98

ARASTOO Three (Isounderscore) lp 13.98
Arastoo is another one of those outfits (persons, actually) who has loads of releases out, but all of them are ultra limited and thus seemingly impossible to get. The last (and only) thing we had from Arastoo was a gorgeous cd-r released on Dielectric records, and now of course out of print. So we were super excited when AQ pal Brandon decided to release a brand new Arastoo on his label Isoundcore. it's still limited of course, but we managed to get a bunch, although we imagine these won't last long.
Arastoo is Arastoo Darakhshan, and is another in the brotherhood of the drone, deftly exploring a warm and wonderful drone drenched ambience. Three is a series of deep cavernous drones, warm and rich, not so much rumbling and sort of washing over you like the sun drenched surf. But this is NOT sunny, this is like a sky devoid of sun, a blanket of rich blackness, permanent nighttime. Occasionally punctuated by haunting reverbed tones, presumably the sound of struck metal. Creepy buzzing alien melodies drift by like a broken trumpet or some sort of shortwave guitar. The heart of the record is a massive, slow building ultra dense drone, layers of low-end get thicker and thicker, while additional layers are added slowly and subtly, each of those new layers, slightly higher in pitch, the result is a rich swirl of strange overtones and hunting ghostlike melodies. Gorgeous.
Housed in an amazing gloss black on matte black sleeve.

ARASTOO Warmth In Digital (Dielectric) cd-r 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
So let's get the business stuff out of the way first. THIS IS VERY LIMITED. In fact, we have the only 17 copies left. Of the 50 ever produced. We tend to be kind of opposed to ultra limited releases, obviously if a release is good enough to release at all, and then spend loads of time and money on, then it makes sense that you would want as many people as possible to hear it. But sometimes cicumstances make that unrealistic.
Running a label is hard. Especially when you specialize in really strange music, spend a lot of money on packaging, and then don't sell a whole lot of records. Even though the records you release are amazing. This happens way more than you think. Often the result is cool little labels just giving up. Which is always a drag. In the case of Dielectric, another label with a houseful of unsold records, all of which we've raved about here, the solution was to start doing super limited, lovingly assembled cd-r's, limiting the financial risk, and of course the amount of space needed to store the damn things. So here we have the newest release by Arastoo, aka Arastoo Darakhshan, who produces some of the most haunting, gorgeously ethereal ambient music we've ever heard. Drifting and shimmering, these thirteen tracks, embrace nature, but in a totally abstract way, dark soundscapes of distant vibrations and subtle sonic shifts, late night expanses of moonlight and forest flutter, smoothed into warm, rich drones. There seems to be guitars, but the actual notes are muted and spread into dreamy ethereal wisps of sound. Really amazing. Coleclough, Mirror, Ora, Chalk and Basinski have nothing on Arastoo. Packaged with six oversized cards, printed with full colour images of industrial landscapes, mostly blown up abstract details, wrapped in a vellum outer sleeve that folds shut like the petals of a flower and is held closed with a wax seal!
Be warned, the wax seal is VERY delicate and will most likely crack or crumble in the mail, or even on the shelf, you'll just have to deal with it since you'll have to break the wax seal anyway to listen to it. So don't expect an intact one.
And again we only have 17 copies. After these are gone, it is gone for good!
MPEG Stream: "October"
MPEG Stream: "Wooded Area"
MPEG Stream: "Moss"

ARBOGA TEENAGE RIOT Ugly Crew Demos (Daft Alliance) cd 7.98
This crazy slab of awesome noisy weirdness back in stock again!!!
Once again, we can just tell when a record is going to be a hit here. Something intangible that tells us that everyone is going to absolutely love (or absolutely hate but still need to own) this record. We felt it about the Conet Project. Hatebeak. Daddy's Curses. The Thai Elephant Orchestra. And now Arboga Teenage Riot.
The story goes like this. Our pal Nathan was on tour in Europe and while traveling through Sweden, two young ladies handed him a tape. The tape sat in the bottom of his bag, unlistened to for months. On his return to the states he remembered the tape, put it in the stereo, pushed play and had his mind promptly blown. And we'll have to admit we feel exactly the same way. Imagine ultra lo-fi, high energy techno / gabber, all four on the floor beats and cheesy synths, whistles and those kinds of melodies usually reserved for cheerleading competitions. "You All Ready For This?!?!" DONK DONK DONK DONK DONK DONK DONK! You know of what we speak. So now imagine two teenage girls, sometimes making up Swedish lyrics and chanting them in cute sing-songy harmonies, but more often, just screaming and growling hysterically in their best approximation of black metal vocals, sounding like they were just dubbed over the music on a boombox (which they probably were). This is the real digital hard core! Or more accurately ANALOG HARD CORE!!! If Alec Empire had any balls Arboga Teenage Riot would be the next DHR superstars. ATR take techno and black metal and riot grrl and DIY recording and turn it into a totally bizarre, fascinating, fun and funny masterpiece! The cover is pretty sharp too, a huge swamp beast thing emerging from the water, beneath a hot pink totally illegible Arboga Teenage Riot black metal style logo! Fuck yeah!
MPEG Stream: "Two"
MPEG Stream: "Three"

ARBOREA Wayfaring Summer (Summer Street) cd 11.98
We hadn't heard too much about these fluttering folk faeries, but odds are, we'll all be hearing a whole lot about these guys (and gals) in the near future. The sound they make is a gorgeous sun dappled blend of soft focus Appalachia, folky forest drift, shimmering indie shuffle, all wrapped in a warm gauzy production like a lazy summer afternoon spent on a porch swing, just sitting, and staring out at everything and nothing.Ê
Minor key melodies unfurl via stately steel string guitar, a lilting mix: a little blues, a little Appalachia, a little moody ambience, flecks of twang here and there, allÊvery spare and languorous. The female vocals are gently affected, the result a perfect mix of modern nu-folk, some Chan Marshall, some Joannna Newsom, and a healthy dose of classic old school British folk, Incredible String Band, Pentangle... the vocals very dramatic and swoonsome, perfectly complimenting the dark twangy swirl beneath. At some points the vocals become much more intense and pronounced, and we're definitely reminded of Jolie Holland, the vibe becoming decidedly country at times, but even then, the music continues to sway and shimmer, drifting and floating, the leaves in the trees above rustling, the leaves below crunching underfoot. So lovely.Ê
Obvious comparisons would be Devendra, Newsom, Feathers, Vetiver, Brightblack, Espers, and odds are anyone into that stuff will be quite smitten by Arborea, but even folks who aren't always sold on this new wave of folk revivalists, might find Arborea's old fashioned sounds just familiar enough to wrap up in like an favorite old blanket...
MPEG Stream: "Wayfaring Summer"
MPEG Stream: "River And Rapids"
MPEG Stream: "Wake Up, Little Sparrow"

ARC Arkhangelsk (Epidemie) cd 15.98
We almost managed to do a list with only ONE Aidan Baker record, but found a stash of these hidden away in the closet and have actually been meaning to list them for a while now. Only have a handful, so these might be the last copies we see for a while.
Arc just so happens to be the the drone / free jazz / krautrock improv trio Baker heads up, the three members employing guitar, flute, percussion, electronics and multiple drumkits to produce the peculiar brand of avant amorphous outsider krautdrone that made their first disc, The Circle Is Not Round, such a hit around here.
Four sixteen and seventeen minute tracks, the first a glistening glimmering long form metallic shimmer, laced with rainfall like percussion, skittery snares, long stretches of glitched out electronics, muted barely there rhythms. The second starts off like a less jazzy Necks, lots of space, softly strummed guitars, strange scattered percussion, soft swarms of electronic FX, backwards swoops, processed cymbal sizzle, subtly ominous and haunting, eventually the drums explode and the pound out a reverb drenched rhythm, while the guitars grow thicker and slightly more propulsive, eventually blissing out and fading out completely. The final two tracks are quite similar, beginning as deep soft shimmers and building in intensity until they become these reverb heavy tribal free jams, thick with droned out shimmers, and layers of fuzzy gauzy ambience, sort of like the Swans meets the Necks, or a blissed out Einsterzende.
Not the sort of stuff we're used to from Baker, but definitely cool, and certainly a bit more challenging than much of his more soothing blissed out drone / dirge output. If you dug the other one, you'll for sure dig this, and if you're looking for something a bit abstract, a bit jazzy, a bit krauty and a bit drone-y, then this could well fit the bill.
Packaged in a striking sepia tone 6 panel digipack style sleeve, and again, we have very few copies, so when we sell out, please be patient while we try to get more.
MPEG Stream: "Relicary"
MPEG Stream: "The Valley Of Dry Bones"

ARC Glassine 1 (A Silent Place) cd 10.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We've reviewed a couple records by Canadian drone / free jazz / krautrock improv trio Arc, probably best know for being fronted by Mr. Aidan Baker, he of doomdronedirge duo Nadja, and numerous other solo records. But Arc is definitely a group, with the three members each contributing to Arc's lovely, minimal sound. Haunting and hushed, slow building and mysterious, simple percussion, fluttering woodwinds, the distant swirl of layered drones, Arc almost sound like a more abstract Necks, which is a huge compliment. And in fact this reminds us of several recent Baker releases (Still Life, Lost In A Rat Maze), in its dark abstract sort-of-jazziness. But unlike the inherent minimal dronemusic leanings of those more recent records, Arc build into something almost propulsive, at times reminding us of Talk Talk's Laughing Stock, an almost world music sounding landscape of sound, the flutes especially evoking a world/folk music vibe, with the minimal tribal percussion, really sealing the deal, especially on the second track, with the band doing a sort of tabla driven, synth heavy bit of Muslimgauze worship, flecked with strange bits of electronic glitchery, and some twisted bits of FX drenched guitar squiggle. Folks who dig Baker's more minimal murky drone side or the heavier metalgaze of his Nadja stuff, might be a bit put off, but if you dug the other Arc records, or just like strange minimal electronic experimentalism and dreamy faux world music weirdness, this just might hit the spot.
WE ONLY HAVE SIX COPIES OF THIS, and as we mentioned, the label folded, and these are absolutely the only copies we'll be able to get, which means snap one up before they disappear.
MPEG Stream: "Glisten"
MPEG Stream: "Glace"

ARC The Circle Is Not Round (A Silent Place) cd 15.98
The Canadian avant-drone guitarist Aidan Baker has been popping up quite a bit at Aquarius in recent months. While he has been quite active in producing numerous drone-based releases, we first took serious notice of his work thanks to the atmospheric doom of his project Nadja. He also turned up on an exceptional 4-way split alongside John Duncan, Z'ev, and Fear Falls Burning. Arc is another project from Baker, finding him working alongside a couple of percussionists in this pastorally psychedelic, improv ensemble. The Circle Is Not Round began as a series of live recordings that Baker blurs into a concoction that lays somewhere in between the spiralling melancholy of a non-aggressive Troum and the '70s prog-ambience of Popul Vuh. Baker's impressionist guitar drones are at the center of these recordings; and while the original live sessions probably slanted more towards the hippie and less the psychedelic end of the spectrum, Baker abstracts all of his sounds with enough backwards masking, tapeloops, and shimmering delay patterns to transform the improv noodling into slow burning dissonant crescendos, earthen throbs, and kosmiche soundscapes with more than a few references to Fennesz, Growing, and even Kompakt's Pop Ambient sound, if you can imagine a guitarist doing his best impersonation of that very digitally constructed ambience.
MPEG Stream: "Desire Is Suffering"
MPEG Stream: "Prajna"

ARCANE DEVICE Also Sprach Zarathustra (Staalplaat) cd 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
On all twelve Arcane Device recordings, David Myers (who is AD) utilised an assortment of home-made feedback generator machines, that in lesser hands would have resulted in head-rattling noise. While much noise *was* generated, on "Also Sprach Zarathurstra" these machines create soft extended pulses of analog electricity and rich textural warmth that emerge from a black claustrophobic aural space and are processed in breathtaking fashion. Myers is certainly one of the most under-rated dronologists, deserving the same critical praise as Mika Vainio and John Duncan. A glorious reissue.

ARCHEOLOGICAL PACEMAKER, GEOLOGICAL COLANDER, ANTHROPOLOGICAL BUNDT CAKE, HORTICULTURAL COMPASS Scepter of Agricultural Indifference (Jewelled Antler) 4 x cd-r 19.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, MAINLY BECAUSE IT WAS AN APRIL FOOLS JOKE! HEE HEE! SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
It's practically raining Jewlled Antler releases this time around. Who are we to complain? We can't get enough of this stuff! And now we've got this here quadruple cd-r set. Featuring four new JA bands, all weirdly featuring the exact same members, but with their names spelled slightly differently on each release. Archeological Pacemaker features Glen Donnellsen, Horticultural Compass features Glenn Donaldson. Geological Colander features Donovon Quinne, and Anthropological Bundt Cake features Donnovon Quin and so on. Strange stuff, but that's why we love those Jewlled Antler guys. All four of the bands featured on Scepter of Agricultural Indifference all tread that similar JA path, delicate, barely there ambience, nature sounds subtly intruding on the proceedings, and of course a pretty vast array of instrumentation including: mandolin, bongos, kazoo, penny whistle, player piano, bugle, jew's harp, spoons, washboard, rubberband guitar, musical saw, racoon trap, diaphragm, toilet seat (!) and much more. The sounds they get out of this disparate collection of instruments is amazing. Truly a testament to the creativity of the Jewelled Antler Collective. Packaged in a bundt cake pan filled with soil (complete with live worms), and containing (in keeping with the various bands' monickers) a pacemaker, a colander and a compass. Obviously super limited and a bitch to mail so be prepared to pay extra shipping.
MPEG Stream: "Radiological Frisbee"
MPEG Stream: "Biological Anvil"
MPEG Stream: "Botanical Parasol"

ARCHITEUTHIS REX Dark As The Sea (Utech) cd 14.98