GARET, RICHARD Four Malleable (And/OAR) 2cd 14.98
Richard Garet is a multimedia artist who has been quite active in and around New York for many years now. Our only exposure to his work was by way of an excellent if under-appreciated collaboration with perennial AQ-favorite Brendan Murray entitled Of Distance, which came out earlier in 2009. Unfortunately, we missed out on a couple of Garet's earlier recordings on NonVisualRecordings and Winds Measure, but when And/OAR announced an album from Mr. Garet, we were quite intrigued. Given the strength of this recording, he's definitely making us reconsider going back and digging up those earlier records. This double disc set is a fantastic collection of hushed drone music, cracked silences, stacked tape hiss, controlled feedback, and stoic masses of gray noise.
The four extended pieces date from 2004-2009, and all exhibit a restrained aesthetic balancing an environmental stillness from various field recordings with the grandeur of minimalist strategies in composition. In many ways, it makes a lot of sense that Garet would be drawn to work with Brendan Murray, as both generate work that oozes with a hypnotic, wholly monochromatic sound design that could act as the soundtrack to a sandstorm as viewed from the otherside of the Sahara Desert or to missile tests that are supposed to be hidden from public view. Something ominous is at hand in Garet's work, and the mystery as to what exactly 'it' is works to his advantage. Amidst these accumulations of layered textures and slow gravitational orbits of sonic detritus, Garet alludes to the swells of oceanic currents, the nocturnal buzzing of amassed insects, and reverberant echoes bellow from the depths of some underground bunker. All of which falls somewhere near Joe Colley, Tarab, John Duncan, and Coelacanth. So yeah, we dig it. Limited to 300 copies.
MPEG Stream: "Nocturne"
MPEG Stream: "From Modified Tapes"

GARET, RICHARD L'avenir (Winds Measure Recordings) cd-r 11.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The title of Richard Garet's exemplary piece of lowercase tonefloat and crackle refers specifically to what Jacques Derrida saw as a profound difference between the future that has been mapped out and a future that is unpredictable and can shatter the continuity of the present. L'avenir is defined in French as the latter of the two, with Garet describing this through oblique shifts of electronic drones suspended quietly upon a backdrop of hushed activity and near silence. The album opens with a slight crackling that sounds like a ill-tempered radio transmitting from somewhere outside, whose particulate pocks of activity quietly burst in the distance. From these, radioluminescent tones grow and collapse within a flickering glow of a haunted melody, just barely announcing itself through the overlapping of rarefied frequencies. After a noticeable crack from a short and sharp tactile event -- somewhere between a hammer, a creak, a sigh, and a jolt - Garet fleshes out the sinusoidal drones with what could be field recordings or maybe some low-voltage electronics, which elicit the nocturnal stillness of hidden motors creating their own chorus of phase-shifting hum. Some 30 minutes into the 49 minute piece, the relative placid mood which Garet has carefully crafted shifts towards a something comparatively menacing before everything dissolves into a quiet mass of radioactive snow.
Garet's methods are reductive in nature, stripping away everything that isn't essential; but there's also a subtle, but certainly noticeable flair for the dramatic that comes across L'avenir. Through his signals and gestures, Garet is easily on par with the finest work of Richard Chartier, Steve Roden, Keith Berry, and Bernard Gunter. L'avenir comes to us by way of Winds Measure Recordings, who has housed these professionally duplicated cd-r's in a very elegant oversized, and letterpressed folio. Limited to just 150 copies, and very recommended!
MPEG Stream: "L'avenir 1"
MPEG Stream: "L'avenir 2"
MPEG Stream: "L'avenir 3"

GARET, RICHARD & ASHER THAL-NIR Melting Ground (Contour Editions) dvd-r 17.98
Here's a beautiful dvd-r from Richard Garet and Asher Thal-Nir. While Garet's greysmear minimalism has hypnotized us via his previous releases, it's his visual sensibility that provides the sublime, slow-motion drama here. Asher, too, is an exceptional understated composer whose signature lines of soft-focus static gird his musical accompaniment to Garet's film. There are only a few interlocking elements to the sounds and visuals for Melting Ground, with Garet providing a single tracking shot of a series of Alaskan glaciers viewed from above by way of helicopter; and Asher's piano interludes look back to the delicate compositions of Satie, hovering above that audio snow that he so often uses within his work. The treatment that Garet gives to his film is quite remarkable, as he really does an excellent job in simulating the antique patina of a hand-cranked camera whose imperfect motion creates a pulsing flicker with overexposed flashes of bleaching white and Rorschach blots of underexposed inky blacks. Coupled with a fine coat of fabricated film-dust, scratches, and debris, the film itself has the bruised visual corollary to so many of the sounds generated out of Phillip Jeck's vintage turntables. The pacing of the film is deliberately slow, panning across enormous mountains of crumpled earth jutting out of looming banks of suspended fog and vast patterned surfaces of ice. The effect is one of a found-piece of film, uncovered from somewhere deep within one of those glaciers as an artifact from a lost team of explorers. The elegiac timbre of Asher's composition supports a similar antiquity, given the early 20th century references he seems to be making. Even the softened static that grounds all of his clustered piano notes, seem to have been extracted from the surface noise of a wax cylinder from that same time period. There is a sense of wonder, awe, fear, and beauty to this piece, one that parallels Leif Elggren's minimalist abstraction Arranging for an Opening of a Teleport to Shangri-La, which appropriated Frank Capra's early film Lost Horizon into a smear of drone and slow-burning visuals. Melting Ground's magic lantern approach to the material gives it more of a haunted, excavated aesthetic, with all of it addressing an allusion to the perils of climate change, especially in its impact upon the glaciers which hold so much of the world's fresh water. Limited to a mere 150 copies, and nicely packaged in an oversized folio.
MPEG Stream: "Melting Ground (audio extract)"

GARET, RICHARD & BRENDAN MURRAY Of Distance (Unframed) cd 14.98
Dronesculptor extraordinaire Brendan Murray should need no introduction, after his slew of stunning releases through Students Of Decay, 23five, and Intransitive; but this collaboration gives us some insight into the work of NYC based composer / painter / photographer Richard Garet. The two began collaborating back in 2004 and worked throughout the intervening years on the two sprawling compositions that make up Of Distance, heavily processed out of field recordings, textured improvisation, occluded dronescaping, and shortwave radio.
Given the presence of shortwave radio static and detuned transmissions rippling through this fine exercise in tense minimalism, there is an obvious parallel between this album and the work of John Duncan. But it's not just those grey smears of disembodied voice and cracked ether that provide such a reference. Garet and Murray have built an album with its crucible of noise that vulcanizes sound into harmonically vibrant if psychologically dark accretions of fluctuating drone.
Broken into two long-form pieces, the album opens with slashes of metallic timbres that gradually give into a series of tactile cracklings, whereby the shortwave radio static and broadcast detritus filter through the mix. A low growling rumble intercedes as a structural girder, only to cast an ominous hue across the piece, which intensifies in its pierced tones, industrial grade electrical fields, and radioluminous hum. This is probably not a track for headphones given some of the upper registered frequencies, and they certainly cut through the ambient din of Valencia Street here at aQuarius quite easily! The second piece follows suit with an initial thrust of aerated white noise pocked with utility signal bleeps (these again are shortwave transmissions, nothing as overtly creepy as numbers stations, but far more common). As this chunk of sound collapses into a slow build of rarefied drones, Murray and Garet offer another evolving composition of tonal intensity, smeared with aggregate textures and extended harmonic exercises. Murray has never let us down before, and his work with Richard Garet does not disappoint!
MPEG Stream: "In Parallel"
MPEG Stream: "The Tyranny Of Objects"

GARGANTULA Infinitasm (Gargantula Music) cd 14.98
Debut from the band that used to be Spaceboy! Very Spaceboy-like, a weird space-punk-metal mix.

GARGAUD, GUILLAUME Here (Kvist Records) cd 12.98
At this point, the idea of "improvised guitar and electronics" (what it says here) elicits a bit of a ho-hum reaction from us. Heard it before, we think. Do we need more of that noise? But, in the case of French guitarist Guillaume Gargaud, it's still pretty worthwhile of an idea. We hadn't heard him previously (despite his having a recent recording on AQ fave label Utech, somehow we missed that one!). But we're glad we checked out his new disc, released on the same label that previously brought us the cosmic New Age electronics of J.D. Emmanuel (via archival release Solid Dawn: Electronic Works 1979-1982).
Portions of this are certainly dreamily deep space sounding enough to fit in with that. The nine tracks here in fact range from truly intense, dramatic drone, like the ominous opening cut "Seve Brute" (which reminds us of Darsombra or an "isolationist" Expo 70) to purely acoustic, post-Takoma wanderings more akin to James Blackshaw or Steffen Basho-Junghans ("Aedeiinae"). Though there's heavy moments, many of the tracks are ultimately gentle, vaguely glitchy, sometimes soothingly rhythmic, mostly drifting... all quite nice. Turns out there's still lots of good & not TOO abstract results possible with ye olde improvised guitar and electronics, why did we doubt it?
MPEG Stream: "Seve Brute"
MPEG Stream: "Traces Du Temps"
MPEG Stream: "Tache De Suie"

GARGAUD, GUILLAUME She (Utech) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Elsewhere on this week's list there's a brand new Utech title from Japanese improv drone duo Hasegawa-Shizuo. Plus there's 3 other new Utechs (Ural Umbo, Architeuthis Rex, and The Skull Defects/The Sons Of God) waitin' to be reviewed, that you'll find on our "in stock, not yet reviewed" section. But right now we're gonna deal with this one, which isn't quite so new, it came out last year, somehow overlooked by us, which is odd 'cause we thought we'd learned to keep a close eye (ear?) on what Utech puts out. We highlighted a more recent Gargaud disc on the Kvist label, entitled Here, on our last list, and that's when we realized that this French guitar and electronics improviser already had a cd out on Utech, this one, which is equally lovely and interesting, basically part 1 to the Kvist disc's part 2, more shimmering yet sometimes quite sinister stuff that again makes us think that folks who dig the moody Type and Miasmah label "sound" would enjoy what Gargaud is able to conjure spontaneously with his guitar and other gear.
The disc starts off quietly, with a buzzing, hissing drone gradually emerging and increasing, as if slithering out from a malevolent mist. It's hard not to think of fog and wind and rain and other weather phenomena when listening to this. Some sunshine breaks through the clouds on the second, more pop ambient-ish piece. Gauzy, gentle, drifting, vaguely melodious fuzzzzzz. Nice. The other tracks here tend to either get physical with the grinding, dramatic drone, or stay on the soothing side of things, sometimes blissfully both. There's various degrees of abstraction as well, as Gargaud adjusts his admixture of guitar and electronics. One extreme would be the crackling crinkling night-noises of "Clairere" (how can that be a guitar?), but elsewhere on the disc the guitar is more recognizable, in fact, on "Mer Du Nord", you can actually hear strings being strummed, how 'bout that!
Recommended - and in future, we'll definitely pay attention to anything Gargaud releases!
MPEG Stream: "La Legende Du Scarabe"
MPEG Stream: "Emissaire"

GARGOTHERON Black Metal Supreme (200mg) cd-r 9.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Another killer release from the 200mg label, this one a seriously grim slab of raw primitive black metal from of all places, Arizona. Just to make sure you know where this blackness hails from, the opening track begins with a seriously desert-y intro, all rattlesnake rattles and howling coyotes, chirping crickets and croaking frogs, while all around swirl haunting black rumbles and a growling monstrous like demonic rasp, a distant pulse beats like a black heart, until the band finally kicks in. Suddenly we're in a swirling squall of ultra raw buzz and thrash. Think Bone Awl, Ildjarn, Zarach'Baal'Tharagh, the guitars furiously buzzing, the drums spastic and hyperkinetic and way up in the mix, giving the music at times, a Lightning Bolt / Ruins vibe. Imagine a black metal Ruins, or Brian Chippendale drumming for Bone Awl.
The tracks are separated by brief ambient interludes filled with random clatter and amp buzz, room noise and tape hiss, it's weird, most bands unfurl some weird creepy drones as interludes, but here it sounds like the band just kept the tape running between tracks, while they adjusted, tuned, futzed around, but weirdly enough it has a similarly ominous effect.
The songs though, exhaustingly relentless, furiously buzzy, insanely fast and thrashing, a snarling gnarled mass of noise drenched complex mathy blackness, that spends as much time locked into looped sounding repetitive riffing as it does spazzing out. What else can we say, if we didn't have you at "Lightning Bolt meets Bone Awl" then we give up. Needless to say, fucking awesome.
LIMITED TO 106 COPIES! Packaged in a cool oversized screenprinted cardstock booklet, inside a 12 page printed black and white booklet with lyrics and stark images of forests and mountains, the whole thing held between two pieces of cardboard, the front printed with the band name and record title, all tied up with rough twine.
MPEG Stream: "Enter Into The Necrowash Of Darkness"
MPEG Stream: "Forest Of Grimness In The Necro-Desert"

GARLAND, JUDY Speaks! (Celebrities at Their Worst, Volume 2.5) (Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God) 2cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Volume "2.5" of the series that shows what stars past and present say when the cameras and tape recorders *aren't* supposed to be rolling. This double disc set features just Judy Garland in all her drunken pillpopping glory, much of it purportedly from never-released home recordings she made for her autobiography.
"I'm an angry lady: I'm a lady who is angry. I've been insulted, slandered, humiliated -- but still 'America's Sweetheart.' Now I'm rather intelligent, I think, and I'm emotional -- YEAH -- I'm a woman; I'm emotional... I wanted to believe, and I tried my damndest to believe in the rainbow that I tried to get over and I COULDN'T... I've sung, I've entertained, I've pleased your children, I've pleased your wives, I've pleased YOU -- you SONS OF BITCHES! Now you better write it, YOU BETTER PAY FOR IT, OR DON'T LISTEN AND GET THE HELL OUT OF MY LIFE!"

GARMARNA Vittrad (Omnium) cd 16.98
Amazing swedish drone, some traditional, some original. Recommended by listmember Alan Korn, this is REALLY GOOD.

GARNEAU, CHRIS Music For Tourists (Absolutely Kosher) cd 13.98
Another unassuming, slightly off-kilter singer/songwriter joins the strong stable of artists at the Absolutely Kosher camp. Chris Garneau is his name and Music For Tourists is his debut album -- a baker's dozen folk pop tunes played out mostly on piano and guitar augmented by strings. Sweet and hushed, Garneau's boyish vocals seem to pursue the sensitive intimacy of the late Elliott Smith. The album as a whole has an underlying bedroom recorded feel, but with a fully fleshed out lush production afforded these days via the now easily accessible, user friendly recording technology. Pleasant lo-fi pop recorded with hi-fi capabilities.
MPEG Stream: "Relief"
MPEG Stream: "So Far"

GARNER, SUE Shadyside (Thrill Jockey) cd 14.98
Sue Garner possesses one of those lovely voices that flows along so warm and smooth, but with a tendency to suddenly swoop up all high'n'lilting or slink down low to a dry, almost spoken delivery. With the varied tempos and styles of her third solo album Shadyside, her music brings to mind a melding of Joni Mitchell, Sally Timms and Ani Difranco - full of heart and presence. The lyrics of four of these songs are actually previously existing poems written by Fay Hart (who also penned a song for one of Garner's former bands The Shams). She invited a number of her talented musician friends to help flesh out the songs - namely husband Rick Brown (with whom she recorded as Run On), Marc Ribot, Jim O'Rourke, and Yo La Tengo's James McNew. The result is a dramatic, diverse musical backdrop with bass clarinet, bass harmonica, kalimba, organ, accordion, electric piano and an array of percussion joining the assembled guitars, bass and drums.
RealAudio clip: "Don't Still The Flicker"
RealAudio clip: "Handful Of Grapes"

GARRICK, MICHAEL TRIO Moonscape (Trunk) cd 16.98
British pianist and bandleader Michael Garrick is probably not too well known in these parts, but his 1964 debut, Moonscape is still something of a legend in England. Released as a 10" record in a run of 100 copies, it's probably one of the most collectable British Jazz records ever made and for good reason. Sprightly and pastoral, yet tightly wound and at times completely unhinged, the piano melodies, reminiscent of the best Vince Guaraldi albums, wrap swimmingly around your head while the drums and bass propel your body with mad-dog intensity. Perplexing titles like, "Music for Shattering Supermarkets" and "Man, Have You Ever Heard" coupled with the enigmatic titular cover art lend an intriguing figure to the sounds inside. Not quite cosmic, yet anything but pedestrian. Since this was originally a 10" record, this is rather a short set, clocking in about 22 minutes. We suggest you put your player on repeat, because it's worth hearing all day.
MPEG Stream: "Music For Shattering Supermarkets"
MPEG Stream: "Sketches of Israel"

GARRICK, MICHAEL TRIO Moonscape (Trunk) lp 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Also available on vinyl!
British pianist and bandleader Michael Garrick is probably not too well known in these parts, but his 1964 debut, Moonscape is still something of a legend in England. Released as a 10" record in a run of 100 copies, it's probably one of the most collectable British Jazz records ever made and for good reason. Sprightly and pastoral, yet tightly wound and at times completely unhinged, the piano melodies, reminiscent of the best Vince Guaraldi albums, wrap swimmingly around your head while the drums and bass propel your body with mad-dog intensity. Perplexing titles like, "Music for Shattering Supermarkets" and "Man, Have You Ever Heard" coupled with the enigmatic titular cover art lend an intriguing figure to the sounds inside. Not quite cosmic, yet anything but pedestrian. Since this was originally a 10" record (and we're perplexed why the LP wasn't reissued as a 10" as well), this is rather a short set, clocking in about 22 minutes. We suggest you put your player on repeat, because it's worth hearing all day.
MPEG Stream: "Music For Shattering Supermarkets"
MPEG Stream: "Sketches of Israel"

GARRIE, NICK The Nightmare of J.B. Stanislaus (Rev-ola) cd 16.98
Another day, another rare sixties pop-psych reissue with quite a bit of collector cachet... that is also pretty darn great! First time on cd for this Eddie Vartan-produced 1969 LP, wonderfully dreamy and baroque and folky and orchestrated. Lots of languid, lazy-day la, la, la's here!
Talented, curly-haired singer-songwriter Nick Garrie was youthful, peripatetic, and quite cosmopolitan (you can tell from his lyrics, referencing all corners of Europe). He had a Scottish mother, a Russian father, and was raised in both France and England, calling Paris his home at the time this record came out. Though nowadays it gets compared to the work of Nick Drake, Billy Nichols, Peter Sarstedt, Bill Fay, and others of note, due to music biz circumstances beyond Nick's control, it immediately sank into obscurity upon initial release. But now thanks to Rev-ola it's been reissued, complete with extensive liner notes, track-by-track commentary by Nick himself, and seven bonus tracks including his fantastic and even harder to find than the LP 1968 single "Queen Of Spades" b/w "Close Your Eyes" (the B-side of which you may have already heard on the Nightmares at Toby's Shop compilation we listed last year). Great stuff for fans of UK popsike like Kaleidoscope.
MPEG Stream: "The Nightmare of J.B. Stanislaus"
MPEG Stream: "Bungles Tours"
MPEG Stream: "Queen Of Spades"

GARSON, MORT The Wozard Of Iz: An Electronic Odyssey (El / Cherry Red) cd 17.98
Mort Garson is probably best known for playing on records by folks like the Sandpipers, Glen Campbell, Mel Torme, Doris Day and others, which is to say, probably not very well known at all. He even composed and played the music accompanying a short film of past space missions to fill in the spaces when not much was going on during the 1969 moon landing.
He was however, one of the earliest proponents of the Moog synthesizer, and for the crate diggers out there is probably most famous for two records, a disc of Moog music based on the signs of the zodiac, and a record credited to Lucifer, called Black Mass, another freaked out Moog holy grail. But until those get reissued we'll have to make do with this tripped out drug addled re-envisioning of The Wizard Of Oz. And tripped out and drug addled it is!
Narrated with some freaky beat poetry (a voice uncannily like Jello Biafra at times), the story peppered with all manner of sound effects, blown out fuzz, warbly melodies, fuzzy static percussion, blurpy basslines, swirling space-y FX, and then there are the songs. Almost Gary Numan-ish sounding synths, laced with operatic female vocals, growling menacing monster like male vocals, some more abstract beat poetry, all woven into a head spinning retro exotica mishmash.
Some of the tracks are definitely reminiscent of Perry and Kingsley, some of the tracks slip into almost groovy porno style seventies psych jams, some are manic, with the Moog spitting out super percussive sputter and hiss, others are dreamy and trippy and almost Beatles-esque (if the Beatles only played Moogs), and some tracks, like our favorite on the disc, "Killing Of The Witch" are downright freaky and sound like primitive lo-fi Goblin jams.
The narration is really weird and funny and goofy but can be incredibly distracting, and it's probably the one thing that might limit the re-playability of this disc, strip away the random dialogue, and this would have been a pretty awesome fucked up synth freakout, but since the narration is here to stay, it ends up being exactly what it was meant to be, a truly over the top exotica oddity, that might not get played all the time, but it's exactly the sort of record that will probably end up on plenty of mixtapes, and will get pulled out at parties, and will most definitely feature heavily in wild whatthefuck DJ sets.
MPEG Stream: "Prologue"
MPEG Stream: "Leave The Driving To Us"
MPEG Stream: "Upset Strip"

GARY WAR Galactic Citizens (Captured Tracks) lp 14.98
The attack of the killer outsider jams continues! One thing the recent crop of left of center damaged pop deconstructionists have in common is their rapid fire release schedule. Seems like everytime we come up for air there's a new slab of wax from Blank Dogs, Ariel Pink, Kurt Vile and now Gary War. But we ain't complaining one bit cause we've loving it. And so far, everything we've heard from Gary War has KILLED, and these six brand new tracks are no exception. While Ariel Pink has made clear his love of and inspiration from R. Stevie Moore, it seems that for Gary War his true influence is Joe Meek, as evidenced by GW's tripped out production and bubbling/collapsing electronics.
Those elements are fused with some seriously strange skewed pop and has us imagining what it might have sounded like if Meek lived long enough to have produced fucked up new wave albums. Of all the current warped pop peddlers Gary War really does feel in sound and spirit closest to John Maus, as they both use really primitive electronics to help achieve their otherworldly approach to pop gone wrong, so damn right!
FYI the copies we got (and all the ones at our distributor too) are all just a tiny little bit dinged on the corners, sorry, them's the breaks.

GARY WAR Horribles Parade (Sacred Bones) lp 16.98
Gary War definitely found a perfect home for his tweaked and twisted pop, right next to the best of recent outsider pop deconstructionists like Ariel Pink, Kurt Vile, John Maus, Blank Dogs, etc. With his latest lp he carefully stretches his already compelling sound into even more tripped out directions, some gorgeously bizarre, warped catchy, electronics melded with ultra fucked up pop that sound like they really belong on some sort of amazing Ariel Pink/John Maus collaboration. While his last records oozed with residues of '70s psychedelia, Horribles Parade almost sounds like an amazing deconstruction of new-wave gone way weird. Like if someone got a hold of old master tapes from Devo, the Units and Gary Numan and doused them mysterious liquids, messed with the speed a bit, and played it all back on an old analog reel to reel through shitty speakers in the room next door. Deliciously delirious.

GARY WAR Horribles Parade / Galactic Citizens (Sacred Bones) cd 13.98
Finally, now on cd!!! With hella bonus tracks...
Gary War definitely found a perfect home for his tweaked and twisted pop, right next to the best of recent outsider pop deconstructionists like Ariel Pink, Kurt Vile, John Maus, Blank Dogs, etc. With his latest lp he carefully stretches his already compelling sound into even more tripped out directions, some gorgeously bizarre, warped catchy, electronics melded with ultra fucked up pop that sound like they really belong on some sort of amazing Ariel Pink/John Maus collaboration. While his last records oozed with residues of '70s psychedelia, Horribles Parade almost sounds like an amazing deconstruction of new-wave gone way weird. Like if someone got a hold of old master tapes from Devo, the Units and Gary Numan and doused them mysterious liquids, messed with the speed a bit, and played it all back on an old analog reel to reel through shitty speakers in the room next door. Deliciously delirious.
There's been seven bonus tracks added to this cd version, including "Anhedonic Man," previously released as a one-sided single, as well as the entire Galactic Citizens 12" ep, about which we wrote the following:
The attack of the killer outsider jams continues! One thing the recent crop of left of center damaged pop deconstructionists have in common is their rapid fire release schedule. Seems like everytime we come up for air there's a new slab of wax from Blank Dogs, Ariel Pink, Kurt Vile and now Gary War. But we ain't complaining one bit cause we've loving it. And so far, everything we've heard from Gary War has KILLED, and these six brand new tracks are no exception. While Ariel Pink has made clear his love of and inspiration from R. Stevie Moore, it seems that for Gary War his true influence is Joe Meek, as evidenced by GW's tripped out production and bubbling/collapsing electronics.
Those elements are fused with some seriously strange skewed pop and has us imagining what it might have sounded like if Meek lived long enough to have produced fucked up new wave albums. Of all the current warped pop peddlers Gary War really does feel in sound and spirit closest to John Maus, as they both use really primitive electronics to help achieve their otherworldly approach to pop gone wrong, so damn right!
MPEG Stream: "Highspeed Drift"
MPEG Stream: "Sold Out"
MPEG Stream: "Everynight"

GARY WAR New Raytheonport (Shdwply / Disaro) lp 11.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The last couple years have been pretty great when it comes to outsider, DIY pop delights. John Maus, Ariel Pink and Night Control have made brilliant records as fucked up as they are catchy and hooky. You can add Gary War to the list of those twisted popsmiths and eccentric songwriters. This lp is filled with haunting and mysterious pop songs that are as melty and tripped out and fucked up as they are catchy and hummable. There's some serious Syd Barrett worship going on too all over New Raytheonport, but wow is it channeled so totally right on. Pop songs drenched in cough syrup that take you on a blurry and hallucinogenic voyage, the fractured sound become the perfect soundtrack for warped daydreams and drifting off into a million different dimensions. But while others groups that are influenced by folks like Syd Barret and Roky Erickson end up sounding like nostalgia acts wishing they were born decades earlier, Gary War's sound is quite timeless, and weirdly futuristic sometimes. Ariel Pink actually gets a mastering credit on the record and for sure much of the sonic scope of the album would sound right at home on any of the Haunted Graffiti albums, but there is also something so rainbow hued and prismatic and kaleidoscopically damaged about these songs that gives Gary War a unique and far out sound of his own. And it was just a matter of time before someone gave the Alan Parsons Project track "Eye In The Sky" a good outsider facelift!
We heard that Gary War is going to collaborate with Blank Dogs on a new project called Roman Soldiers and we're pretty much already signed up to join the Roman Soldiers fanclub, without even hearing a note! And we might as well proclaim ourselves charter members of the Gary War fanclub too now, can't wait to see the band rock our SXSW showcase next week! Highly recommended!

GARY WAR Police Water (Sacred Bones) cd ep 10.98
Latest from these damaged art pop deconstructionists, a brief blast of retro new wave garage pop weirdness, beginning with the very Ariel Pink-ish "Born Of Light" , which begins with a smear of ambient whirs and random clatter before the pulsing synths and swirling sci-fi effects swoop in, supporting some weirdly processed vox and an old school eighties electro drum machine beat. Which definitely sets the scene for Police Water, the whole thing sounding like an experimental eighties science fiction straight to video soundtrack, composed by Joe Meek, but performed by some forgotten new wave band, recorded on an old boombox, and played back through a busted Leslie speaker, long stretches of swirling effects give way to trippy synthscapes and woozy electro pop, the sound muted and hazy and washed out, as if it was dubbed straight off the VHS tape, groovy and a little dance-y, like a fractured lo-fi pop version of that recent Majeure record, where that record was sleek and polished, evoking futuristic landscapes, Police Water evokes an alternate future, one much more bizarre and broken down, via this crumbling ramshackle off kilter future-retro pop score. As always, so awesome, and so confusionally genius. Definitely on the weirder side of the current crop of Carpenter style synthscapery, and just a twisted weirdo popwave record in its own right.
The cd includes two bonus mixes!!
MPEG Stream: "Born Of Light"
MPEG Stream: "On Its Head"
MPEG Stream: "Grounds For Termination"

GARY WAR Reality Protest (Sacred Bones) 7" 5.50
Another awesome slab of lo-fi intergalactic warped pop from Gary War. Seems like each of his releases keeps getting more damaged, drugged out, and space-y. This new single is brimming with hissing tape, changing speeds, acid drenched keyboards, and GW's distorted and enchanting vocals. Both songs sound like being trapped in some long gone 80's arcade game with all the wires and sockets disconnected creating all these weird glitches, pitch shifts, crumbling loops, electronic buzz, but somehow all wrapped around some insanely warped and catchy garage pop. While it might be frustrating for GW to always be lumped in with his pals Ariel Pink and John Maus, those comparisons are inevitable. But with Ariel Pink about to make his big 4AD debut with much higher production value, it might be up to Gary Way to carry the flame for totally fractured and fried outsider pop.

GARY WAR Zontag / Don't Go Out Tonight (Sacred Bones ) 7" 5.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We've been hearing all sorts of great things about the mysterious Gary War. We always hear him mentioned in the same breath as Ariel Pink and John Maus, who just so happened to produce the Gary War full length. And for sure those brilliant outsiders are a good reference point for the kind of warped bedroom pop that Gary War conjures up. Lo-fi and warbly, these songs almost sound like several great bizarre pop songs playing at once. If you've been digging folks like the aforementioned Ariel Pink, John Maus and Night Control then we're pretty sure Gary War will be your next favorite. This 7" is the perfect taster for the also kick ass full length reviewed elsewhere on this list. You definitely need BOTH!

GAS Compressed Gas (Siltbreeze) 7" 8.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Awesome archival release from this rad New Zealand garage psych combo, recorded in the late nineties, this is THE SHIT. Super lo-fi recording, trash can drums, tangled guitar buzz, cool squiggly melodies, scowly drawled vox, dirgey, jangly, filthy, doomy, a bit gothic, super dramatic, weird synth squiggles on one of the tracks, sonically, some of this reminds us of the Celibate Rifles, and you can definitely hear some Pere Ubu, and plenty of classic Nuggets style jangle and fuzz, but with a sound that manages to be murky, moody and weirdly (and subtly) noisy. Killer stuff. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES.

GAS Konigforst (Mille Plateaux) cd 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
In spite of the numerous alter-egos such as Mike Ink, Studio 1, and others we can't recall right now, Wolfgang Voigt's best work to date is from his moniker Gas. Voigt has polished the sedate technotic pulse, the wind swept drone, and the orchestral references to an exquisite golden lustre. Voigt's subtle dub techniques coax the polytonal swells of deep sustained horns into lush rhythmic repetitions. These are heroic if gloomy electronica epics, making plausible the fusion of Wagner's vigor with a dance floor mentality. "Kšnigforst" should stand as one of electronica's few masterpieces.

GAS Konigforst (Mille Plateaux) 2lp 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
In spite of the numerous alter-egos such as Mike Ink, Studio 1, and others we can't recall right now, Wolfgang Voigt's best work to date is from his moniker Gas. His third album continues where Zauberberg and Oktember left off in using sedate techno pulses as a monochromatic structure for echoing cavernous drones and drawn out melodies. A subtle dub technique (delayed fragments of what once were hi-hats, snares, and other percussive stabs) completes a bleak poetic monument to spectral decay.

GAS Nah Und Fern (Kompakt) 2lp 26.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Not sure where to even start with this one. Everyone here at aQ, heck almost everyone we know loves Gas, the blissed out minimal ambient techno project of Mr. Wolfgang Voigt. But don't let the word 'techno' scare you off, as the music of Gas can easily win over the most ardent techno-phobes. The techno element in the sound of Gas is only a tiny part of Voigt's magical soundworld, often just a shadow, a distant heartbeat like pulse, sometimes more pronounced, but usually just a murky throb or a rhythmic murmur, the music of Gas is Gauzy and shimmery, blurred and softly buzzy, it's like an even more dreamlike Oval, or perhaps Porter Ricks crossed with Labradford, or Tim Hecker recording a record for Chain Reaction. When we talk about Kompakt's Pop Ambient sound, Gas is the template, that which we measure all other 'pop ambience' by. The sound is at once ethereal and intimate, haunting and mysterious, lush and expansive, the beatless tracks drift endlessly, each a divine blur of soft chordal whir and looped effervescence, the more beat heavy tracks, retain that same washed out otherworldliness, but manage to infuse them with a subtle, barely-there groove, sometimes adding gritty crackle, or subtle dubbed out delay, but always sounding light and airy, weightless and darkly blissful. We once described Gas as sounding like being adrift in a sea of electronics, in a fog so deep, the pulsating beats that would guide you back to shore are murky at best, muffled by distance and the unending push of the droning wind. And we're not sure if we could describe it better. But we'll try.
Nah Und Fern collects all four Gas albums, all of which have been out of print for ages: Gas, Zauberberg, Konigforst and Pop. And when we were first preparing to review this set, we were all ready to describe Gas' sonic arc, from the more overtly techno debut, to the much more ambient and ethereal final album. But on returning to the s/t debut, we discovered that the sound of Gas changed very little over the course of 4 albums, instead, each is like a movement in a massive symphony of gloriously murky minimalism.
The self titled debut deftly balances pure ambience with some of the most propulsive Gas tracks, including a 14 minute epic that seems to b assembled from a Chariots Of Fire loop, but in the hands of Voigt, it's transformed into something otherworldly. It is techno, but not for dancing, for many of us Gas serves the same purpose as dronemusic, sounds to lull you to sleep, to allow you to drift off, to disengage and let your mind float freely, led by your ears, entranced as they are by the beautiful shimmer and motorik soft focus propulsion of Gas.
As much as we love all of these records, the two middle records Zauberberg and Konigforst make up the heart of this Gas box. Both luminous and exuberant, yet subdued and melancholic. Sedate technotic pulses beneath wind swept drones, expansive orchestral sprawls burnished to an exquisite golden luster. Voigt's subtle dub techniques on these two discs coax the polytonal swells of deep sustained horns into lush rhythmic repetitions. These are heroic if gloomy electronica epics, realizing a fantasy fusion of Wagner's teutonic vigor and a disembodied dancefloor drone.
The final disc, Pop, is in fact the poppiest, or so we always believed, but in context with the other three discs, we are once again surprised by how consistent the Gas sound remained, while still managing to subtly expand on the sound Voigt virtually created and perfected over the course of the first three full lengths. Much like the original cover art, Pop is the metaphorical sound of the intrusion of the forest onto the dance floor, with all of its mysteries, mythologies, and wonders being ordered by the insistency of Voigt's monophunk beats. Where the earlier works were dark haunts wherein deep fluid ambience topped the nonstop pulsating rhythms, Pop is a shimmering sunfilled excursion that is mostly beatless, forming its structures out of repetitive sequences of trilling ambience swelling in and out of each other within Voigt's surreal soundworld of hypnodub washes. The lost beat resurfaces finally on the last track which is a beautiful looped repetition of the previous ambient modulations, but subtly and gracefully merged with a muted, insistent underwater dancefloor throb. Breathtaking.
A modern minimalist electronic masterpiece, four stunning parts of one majestic whole, finally united into one magnum opus, spanning years, yet sounding to our ears, utterly timeless.
The vinyl version of the Gas box, is not in fact at all the same as the cd set, instead, it features only one track from each album, but extended to fill one of the four sides. So it's basically four extended mixes, one from each of the discs in the box. And, unfortunately, we have less than 10 copies, and that's all we'll ever have, so once these are gone, we will NOT be able to get more.
MPEG Stream: "Gas 2"
MPEG Stream: "Zauberberg 2"
MPEG Stream: "Konigforst - Eins"
MPEG Stream: "Pop 1"

GAS Nah Und Fern (Kompakt) 4cd 34.00
Not sure where to even start with this one. Everyone here at aQ, heck almost everyone we know loves Gas, the blissed out minimal ambient techno project of Mr. Wolfgang Voigt. But don't let the word 'techno' scare you off, as the music of Gas can easily win over the most ardent techno-phobes. The techno element in the sound of Gas is only a tiny part of Voigt's magical soundworld, often just a shadow, a distant heartbeat like pulse, sometimes more pronounced, but usually just a murky throb or a rhythmic murmur, the music of Gas is Gauzy and shimmery, blurred and softly buzzy, it's like an even more dreamlike Oval, or perhaps Porter Ricks crossed with Labradford, or Tim Hecker recording a record for Chain Reaction. When we talk about Kompakt's Pop Ambient sound, Gas is the template, that which we measure all other 'pop ambience' by. The sound is at once ethereal and intimate, haunting and mysterious, lush and expansive, the beatless tracks drift endlessly, each a divine blur of soft chordal whir and looped effervescence, the more beat heavy tracks, retain that same washed out otherworldliness, but manage to infuse them with a subtle, barely-there groove, sometimes adding gritty crackle, or subtle dubbed out delay, but always sounding light and airy, weightless and darkly blissful. We once described Gas as sounding like being adrift in a sea of electronics, in a fog so deep, the pulsating beats that would guide you back to shore are murky at best, muffled by distance and the unending push of the droning wind. And we're not sure if we could describe it better. But we'll try.
Nah Und Fern collects all four Gas albums, all of which have been out of print for ages: Gas, Zauberberg, Konigforst and Pop. And when we were first preparing to review this set, we were all ready to describe Gas' sonic arc, from the more overtly techno debut, to the much more ambient and ethereal final album. But on returning to the s/t debut, we discovered that the sound of Gas changed very little over the course of 4 albums, instead, each is like a movement in a massive symphony of gloriously murky minimalism.
The self titled debut deftly balances pure ambience with some of the most propulsive Gas tracks, including a 14 minute epic that seems to be assembled from a Chariots Of Fire loop, but in the hands of Voigt, it's transformed into something otherworldly. It is techno, but not for dancing, for many of us Gas serves the same purpose as dronemusic, sounds to lull you to sleep, to allow you to drift off, to disengage and let your mind float freely, led by your ears, entranced as they are by the beautiful shimmer and motorik soft focus propulsion of Gas.
As much as we love all of these records, the two middle records Zauberberg and Konigforst make up the heart of this Gas box. Both luminous and exuberant, yet subdued and melancholic. Sedate technotic pulses beneath wind swept drones, expansive orchestral sprawls burnished to an exquisite golden luster. Voigt's subtle dub techniques on these two discs coax the polytonal swells of deep sustained horns into lush rhythmic repetitions. These are heroic if gloomy electronica epics, realizing a fantasy fusion of Wagner's teutonic vigor and a disembodied dancefloor drone.
The final disc, Pop, is in fact the poppiest, or so we always believed, but in context with the other three discs, we are once again surprised by how consistent the Gas sound remained, while still managing to subtly expand on the sound Voigt virtually created and perfected over the course of the first three full lengths. Much like the original cover art, Pop is the metaphorical sound of the intrusion of the forest onto the dance floor, with all of its mysteries, mythologies, and wonders being ordered by the insistency of Voigt's monophunk beats. Where the earlier works were dark haunts wherein deep fluid ambience topped the nonstop pulsating rhythms, Pop is a shimmering sunfilled excursion that is mostly beatless, forming its structures out of repetitive sequences of trilling ambience swelling in and out of each other within Voigt's surreal soundworld of hypnodub washes. The lost beat resurfaces finally on the last track which is a beautiful looped repetition of the previous ambient modulations, but subtly and gracefully merged with a muted, insistent underwater dancefloor throb. Breathtaking.
A modern minimalist electronic masterpiece, four stunning parts of one majestic whole, finally united into one magnum opus, spanning years, yet sounding to our ears, utterly timeless.
Each disc is packaged in a full color sleeve, along with four inserts, all adorned with blue and green tinted forestscapes, and all housed in a gorgeous matte finished cardboard box, also adorned with a similar image, and the letters G A S embossed across the top of the box.
MPEG Stream: "Gas 2"
MPEG Stream: "Zauberberg 2"
MPEG Stream: "Konigforst - Eins"
MPEG Stream: "Pop 1"

GAS Pop (Mille Plateaux) cd 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Recording under the Gas moniker, 'Pop' is yet another exceptional album in the continuous stream of Wolfgang Voigt's techno structuralism. While he has recorded under a number of pseudonyms (Mike Ink, All, Studio 1, M:I:5, etc) to varying degrees of success, the Gas recordings have clearly been his strongest work. This is especially true when Voigt applies one of the odd (and few) metaphors to his work, as the intrusion of the forest onto the dance floor, with all of its mysteries, mythologies, and wonders being ordered by the insistancy of his monophunk beats. Where the trilogy of "Zauberberg," "Oktember", and "Konigforst" were dark haunts where deep fluid ambience tops the nonstop
pulsating rhythm, "Pop" is a shimmering sunfilled excursion that is mostly beatless, forming its structures out of repetitive sequences of trilling ambience swelling in and out of each other within Voigt's penchant for hypnodub washes. For those longing for the beat of Voigt, simply wait for the last track which is beautiful repetition of the previous ambient modulation, with his insistent techno. It's a trick he used on the 20' to 2000 series, and it's trick I hope he uses again. Breathtaking.
RealAudio clip: "1"

GAS Zauberberg (Mille Plateaux) cd 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Adrift in a sea of electronic music, in a fog so deep, the pulsating beats that would guide you back to shore are murky at best, muffled by distance and the unending push of the droning wind. Cross Porter Ricks with Labradford. Subdued and melancholic.

GAS (WOLFGANG VOIGT) Gas (Raster-Noton) book+cd 49.00
Maybe even more anticipated that the recent Nah Und Fern box set from Gas, compiling all of the previously released Gas records, is this, a book of art from the man behind gas Wolfgang Voigt, which beside being beautiful and packed with variations on the foresty images that graced all the Gas records, also comes with a 5 track disc featuring rare, old, unreleased Gas tracks, which have the Gas faithful in a frenzy. More on the music in a second.
The book itself is quite striking. A slightly blurred shot of a forest, tinted deep red, it could be the cover of a lost Gas album (which in some ways it is), the band name embossed in a deep red metallic ink, Voigt's name on the back. Inside is a selection of photos, which seem to be from the same shots that produced the record covers, all shot of trees and branches and leaves, close up, from afar, they would look amazing all blown up on a gallery wall, but manage to be pretty dang striking here too.
Even sans cd, this would make a pretty excellent coffee table art book. But there is a cd, and as we mentioned before, it does in fact include nearly an hour of unreleased Gas, soÉ
Five tracks, all ten minutes or longer, each a deep dark gritty drift, almost completely eschewing the beats that would find their way into later Gas albums, these tracks explore deep billowy black ambience. A few have some glitch and crackle, but never does it evolve into that murky thump Gas does so well, instead, it sounds like water dripping, or ice melting, while the leaves and branches sway in the background, one track is super lo-fi and raw, with an industrial machinelike loop beneath the glistening musical mumble, underpinned by deep string swells, and haunting melodies, but that track is quickly followed by something much darker and elegiac, a brooding longform shimmer, like a string quartet slowed waaaaaay down, and blurred into soft shifting shapes. The closer is the most pastoral of the bunch, almost like it could be the music for some sort of nature show, slow panning shots of glaciers glistening in the sun, leaves falling in slow motion, time lapse films of wildflowers blooming then withering, clouds drifting across a deep blue sky, the only thing keeping it from going to far in that direction, is the soft patina of fuzz, the buried buzz, the looped mesmer, the barely audible glitch, all the things that make it distinctly GAS.

GASENETA Sooner Or Later (PSF) cd 17.98
Not remotely new (the catalog number for this is PSF-17, it was released some years ago) but something that we thought we'd get a few of and list 'cause we were doing an order with the PSF label in Tokyo and hadn't ever reviewed this cult classic before. Anyone into the speedfreak psychedelic acid punk of flagship PSF band High Rise (or Mainliner, or Musica Transonic, etc.) ought to check out Gaseneta, a Japanese combo from the late '70s who helped pioneer that sound (and were later covered by High Rise). This disc contains archival recordings mostly from 1978, all of 'em ultra distorted, in-the-red recordings of a band simply destroying, sonically wrecking the place. We mean, if you thought Boris kicked out the noisy jams on Pink... well this is a whole 'nother kettle of raw fish of course, way punker than Pink, but of potential interest to Boris fans wanting to check out their antecedents. There's eleven energetic tracks on Sooner Or Later, bursting with skronky guitar solos (Black Flag style) and the spittle of guttural vox, backed by urgent bashing rhythms. Four of 'em are live recordings, which are especially lo-fi but since you should be playing this LOUD anyway that just adds to the effect. Way cool.
MPEG Stream: "track 1"
MPEG Stream: "track 3"

GASMAN Love Collection (Planet Mu) cd 14.98

MPEG Stream: "White"
MPEG Stream: "Plush"
MPEG Stream: "Vigor"

GASMAN The Grand Electic Palace Of (Planet Mu) 2cd 15.98

MPEG Stream: "Hump"
MPEG Stream: "Imodium"
MPEG Stream: "Twit"

GASMAN This One's For You (Planet Mu) cd 14.98

MPEG Stream: "Freezer"
MPEG Stream: "Flatus"

GASPARYAN, DJIVAN I Will Not Be Sad In This World (All Saints / Hannibal) cd 16.98
Originally released in Russia only, in 1982, the master duduk sounds of Djivan Gasparyan began to finally hit the ears of listeners in the west thanks in part to folks like Brian Eno who had been fans for years. In '89 this, his first solo record after years of ensemble and orchestra playing, was released on Opa, and it's finally been repressed once again. Without a doubt Gasparyan is a master of his instrument, the duduk, a woodwind instrument traditional to his homeland of Armenia. I Will Not Be Sad In This World is a beautiful record filled with reworkings of several traditional Armenian songs re-imagined by Gasparyan along with the drone backing duduk playing of Vachagan Avakian. The result is a meditative and ethereal wind of calm sound after the storm. Such the perfect record to play when you need to wash everything away, collect your composure, regain your thoughts, reach for a moment of peacefulness. We were recently playing this in the store when a customer was in with her dog who apparently was acting crazy and wild all day. She said it wasn't until the moment this came on that her dog settled down and began to relax. We have to admit it always has that same effect on us. Hypnotizing and cleansing sounds that you can trust. So very nice.
MPEG Stream: "Cool Wind Is Blowing"
MPEG Stream: "Your Strong Mind"

GASTR DEL SOL Camofleur (Drag City) cd 12.98
Why do I keep thinking Terry Gross is going to do a special on these guys soon? Very very appealing fragmented post rock post everything that wears influences on sleeve (Fahey, bluegrass etc). It doesn't hold together all that well but then again that's always kind of been the point with Gastr del Sol. Recommended!

GASTR DEL SOL Camofleur (Drag City) lp 13.98
Why do I keep thinking Terry Gross is going to do a special on these guys soon? Very very appealing fragmented post rock post everything that wears influences on sleeve (Fahey, bluegrass etc). It doesn't hold together all that well but then again that's always kind of been the point with Gastr del Sol. Recommended!

GASTR DEL SOL Crookt, Crakt, Or Fly (Drag City) cd 14.98

GASTR DEL SOL Mirror Repair (Drag City) cd 11.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

GASTR DEL SOL The Harp Factory on Lake Street (Table of the Elements) cd 15.98
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GASTR DEL SOL The Serpentine Similar (Dexter's Cigar) cd 14.98
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The first, long-out-of-print Gastr album, pre-Jim O'Rourke, reissued! the most Bastro-ish and brilliant.

GASTR DEL SOL The Serpentine Similar (Dexter's Cigar) lp 8.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The first, long-out-of-print Gastr album, pre-Jim O'Rourke, reissued! the most Bastro-ish and brilliant.

GASTR DEL SOL Twenty Songs Less (Minority) 7" 8.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Here's a band we haven't heard from in ages, and to be honest, one we honestly thought we might not ever hear from again. O'Rourke is in Sonic Youth, Grubbs has his own stuff going on, but back in the day, Gastr Del Sol were a post rock beast. Born of the mighty Bastro, they took that muscled math rock and twisted it all up into something much artier and more avant garde, and we LOVED it. Heck, we still do. So it's awesome to hear this blast from the past. Not actually a new record, this is a fancy new reissue of a long out of print 7", and boy it sounds as good as ever.
Beginning with a blast of old skool post rock, strummed angular acoustic guitar and complex drumming, before giving way to a mellow mathy folk, which quickly crumbles into strange melodic fragments, almost sounding like a Gastr Del Sol track proper, chopped up and put together in some random order. Nice.
The flipside starts off again, with a blast of post rock fury, aggressive acoustic guitar riffing and some seriously chaotic math rock drum freak out, before blissing out into a droney drift, complete with strange field recordings of children laughing and playing before fading out into a slow shimmer, all muted electronics and reverbed piano. So nice.
Packaged in a thick vinyl sleeve with a full color sleeve, pressed on clear vinyl with a full color center label. Simple, stark and striking.

GASTR DEL SOL Upgrade & Afterlife (Drag City) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

GATE A Republic Of Sadness (Ba Da Bing) lp 14.98
The first new Gate music in over a decade! Michael Morely aka Gate, may be more well known for his work in legendary New Zealand noiserockers the Dead C, but he's been making Gate records just as long, and they've all been pretty much stone cold classics, The Dew Line is one of THE most unsung, underappreciated weirdo outsider pop records EVER, Golden is ostensibly a noise record, but manages to harness noise into something much more beautiful and listenable and lovely. And now we have A Republic Of Sadness, that like all Gate records, is tough to describe, but impossible to resist. A strange swirling assemblage of lush guitar textures, of Jeckian turntable loops, of crooned lo-fi bedroom pop, of skittery IDM style beats, all woven into dark, woozy, abstract electronic drone pop, or minimal dreamfolk electronica.
The opener "Forever" is totally gorgeous, built atop a scratchy turntable loop, that Basinski like backdrop repeats endlessly, drifting in its cloud of crackle and pop, while all around it other loops sway and swell, a simple stripped down beat, shuffles and skitters, and Morely unfurls a distorted dreamy croon, it's like Gas meets Jeck meets Basinski meets The Caretaker meets Sentridoh. When the vocals drop out, and the loop just repeats endlessly, it's utterly trancelike and mesmerizing. "All" starts out with soft swaths of synth, before a weird clattery lo-fi distorted beat lurches into action, thick rumbling bass underpins the sound, and in come Morely's creepy distorted mumbled vocals, a bit like a Strotter Inst / Gas remix fronted by Jandek, mysterious, mournful, intimate, part way through, a strange lumbering low end wheeze adds a strange counterpoint, and like the track before, the non essentials are jettisoned, and the layered loopscape plays out hypnotically.
The rest of the record constructs similarly twisted bits of lo-fi electronica, woven into skittery dreamscapes, and muted minimal grooves, slipping from the almost funky wah wah guitars and low slung depressive basslines of "Desert", sounding like some home brewed DIY Interpol, to the almost M83 bliss out of "Wilderness" with its fuzzy shoegaze guitardrone, and creaking almost industrial sounding rhythms, all beneath some sun dappled buzzy synths and twisted mush mouthed crooning, to the deconstructed trip hop of "Freak", a stuttery effects drenched rhythm shuffles beneath some super distorted looped guitar crunch, and finally to the nearly 10 minute closer "Trees", with its blown out metalgaze guitar smolder, its booming skeletal big beat rhythm, more moaning vox, a throbbing synth bassline, a sort of lo-fi bedroom brewed cold wave, until about halfway through, when the drums drop out, and all that's left is a gorgeous pulsing synthscape, that will have fans of Oneohtrix and Emeralds and other outer spacesynth krautdrone explorers frothing for sure.
Includes a download card.

GATE My Dear Sweet Reluctant Sweetheart / The Lavender Head (Hell's Half Halo) 2cd 19.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Before we delve into a detailed discussion of Gate's latest release, let me just say that this album is gorgeous, droney and dreamy and about as un-noisy as noise gets, with chirping electronic whale-call blips and bleeps and luscious gossamer washes of thick and crumbling guitar. There are a few 'difficult' moments, but for those of you who haven't heard too much Gate or Dead C, this might be the perfect record to get your feet wet. And those of you who are already fans, well, do we even have to tell you that this is essential? No. But it is. Essential. Completely.
Michael Morley's output in the New Zealand free-noise / avant-rock ensembles Gate and AQ-faves The Dead C has always been purposefully unsettling. He's primarily armed with gritty, somnambulent guitar noise and a half mumbled voice, yet "My Dear Sweet Reluctant Sweetheart" offers a drastic shift in his aesthetic focus, as he has recently put down the guitar in favor of electronics. This double CD features reworkings of two previously recorded pieces, with a condensed and vastly different remix of Gate's 1999 vinyl only double album "The Lavender Head" and a recapitulation of his 1996 soundtrack to the cacophonous sound installation "My Dear Sweet Reluctant Sweetheart."
For Morley, the use of electronics is not just about the technological filters and modulations offered by drum machines and synthesizers, but also the ability to recontextualize and deconstruct the sampled fragment. Morley's use of the quotation may not seem anything new in comparison to, say, Amon Tobin, until he brings the woozy melancholia and troubled combativeness of his earlier guitar-based work to these electronic compositions.
"My Dear Sweet..." is a series of electronic dirges made by collaging together various samples of contemporary electronica onto a really noisy 4-track with lots of tape hiss. Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works 2," Panacea's "Twisted Designs" and something resembling Biosphere or Orbital are some of Morely's sources. These are pretty simple overlappings of rhythmically synchronized loops with elements of his guitar noise phasing in and out of the mix. And on "The Lavender Head" Morley loops his patented guitar grit into abstract slow-motion warbles, forming downtempo rhythms that appear lost in a sea of lo-fi tape hiss -- something *NEVER* heard in any other electronica. Really nice!
RealAudio clip: "Light.1.1"
RealAudio clip: "Pe.ch.1.aiff"
RealAudio clip: "Jsex.1.sldge"

GATE s/t (Poon Village) cd 12.98
Michael Morley, Zeena Parkins, Lee Ranaldo. Live in Boston. Features Poon Village's always-breathtaking packaging.

GATE The Dew Line (Table Of The Elements) cd 16.98
Originally released way back in 1994, and reissued again a few years back, Gate's The Dew Line always seemed to disappear before we could get enough copies to list. Which was a shame as it still ranks as one of our favorite discs. A mesmerizing noise-pop-drone jem from the Dead C's Michael Morley, an improbable mix of NZ noise whir and skree, minimal drifting drone and lilting indie pop. Think the Dead C at their very poppiest, crossed with Sentridoh at its most minimal and rawÉ
Gate's Golden record was one of our favorite 'noise' records ever, and we do hear a lot of that Golden noise in this chunk of damaged deconstructed pop. Long drawn out expanses of crumbling guitars, buried-in-the-mix sad boy vocals, all very raw and lo-fi, but strangely lush and heavy in that way only blownout bedroom recordings seem to sound. It's a little like Lou Barlow if he was raised on Throbbing Gristle and Suicide instead of indie rock. Guitar jangles transformed into thick sprawling atonal riffage, verse chorus verse transformed into verse verse verse, and the vocals adding a strange sweet sadness.
Dense clouds of electronic glitch and amp buzz, the riffs more textural than melodic, long stretches of shirring lo-fi organ, mournful and almost funereal, strange haunting minimal percussion, drifting alien FX, disembodied guitars unfurling crunchy textures and barely there melodies. Much of the tracks are vocal-less haunting guitarscapes, riffs and layers, looped and repetitive, extended into grinding washed out mantras. Cyclical and gorgeously hypnotic. Which makes the tracks with vocals sound all the more poppy. Especially "Have Not", which is essentially a single, super catchy, languid distorted guitar riff, looped and cyclical, minor key, sounding a bit like a slowed down drum-less Rein Sanction, with drawled Neil Young / Dinosaur Jr. style double tracked vocals, laid back, emotive, and hauntingly monotone. Nearly 13 minutes long, a single riff, a subtly changing vocal line, but it's just so mysterious, sad and perfect, the whole record could easily have been a 70 minute version of this track only and we would have been just as happyÉ
But then we would have missed out on the melancholy minimalism of "Needed All Words", a lonely vocal line, drifting above a glacial sea of organ drone and fractured effects, or the looped stuttering industrial buzzscape of the title track, or the divine washed out crumbling grind of "Triphammer", the final song, which manages to turn 3 minutes of abstract distorted riffage, into a chunk of dark moodiness.
Way recommended. This disc is old enough that for many of you, we're probably already preaching to the converted, but if you missed out on this, here's one more chance to sink deep into Morley's mysterious musical miserablsim.
And be warned, while we finally managed to get a bunch of these, it took forever, so if or when we do run out, please be prepared to be patient, since it could take a while to get more.
MPEG Stream: "Millions"
MPEG Stream: "Needed All Words"
MPEG Stream: "Have Not"

GATE The Lavender Head (Hell's Half Halo) 2lp 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Mistakenly labelled Gate's 'techno record' by an unnamed party, this is Dead C guitarist Michael Morley's first computer generated album. While most computer programmers are trapped within the crystal purity of digital sounds, Morley's penchant for a fidelity below the standards of lo-fi has saved his 'techno record' from sounding like one. Lazy looping soundtracks for dirgy guitars and sloppy synths. Only about 1/2 of it has got 'beats', and they are pleasant.