AUTECHRE s/t (LP5) (Warp) lp 18.98
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Autechre's sad little melodies over angular electro breakbeats have taken on the very distinctive trait of deceleration, as the pulsing electronica speed through dystopic conduits only to hit vacuums within the digital spaces causing vertiginous slow motion freefalls. With every release Sean and Andy successfully redefine electronica while maintaining their exquisite signature. Highly recommended.

BANNLUST Digital Tensions (Sabotage) cd 16.98
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Grabbed this off of Jim's favorites shelf, this is what he had to say about it: "As Sabotage gets a criminally small amount of press, there will be virtually no hype for Bannlust...which is a fucking shame, as thousands of trainspotters will pass this up looking for that long gone Autechre album when they should be listening to this...as good if not better than recent Autechre and/or Skam recordings!!!"

BASTRO Diablo Guapo (Homestead) cd 13.98
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Wow, Homestead reissues two of Andee's favorite records ever (see The Frogs, below). There was a time, pre-Tortoise and pre-Gastr del sol, when John McEntire and David Grubbs rocked. I mean really ROCKED. Hard to believe, but in 1989, those guys were making some of the meanest, noisiest (barely indie) rock around as Bastro. Nasty Albini-ish high end guitar assaults, hammering rhythms, and howlingly furious vocals, made them Slint's bigger and meaner noise rock brother. Awesome.

BLONDE REDHEAD In An Expression Of The Inexpressible (Touch & Go) cd 14.98
The Japanese/Italian trio's last album Fake Can Be Just As Good should have been the album Sonic Youth made right after Daydream Nation. Fortunately, their latest album proves that they are no longer a Sonic Youth rip-off band. And for that matter, what they've grown into is quite something to behold. On In An Expression Of The Inexpressible, the band's fourth full length, lead female vocalist Kazu Makino has honed her pipes into a distinctly expressive wonder... taming its former shrillness into something very childlike and otherworldly. Noisy melodies of angular guitars, modest keyboards, and a tight rhythm section come across as desperate yet beautiful epics. Very highly recommended.
RealAudio clip: ""

BLONDE REDHEAD In An Expression Of The Inexpressible (Touch & Go) lp 17.98
The Japanese/Italian trio's last album Fake Can Be Just As Good should have been the album Sonic Youth made right after Daydream Nation. Fortunately, their latest album proves that they are no longer a Sonic Youth rip-off band. And for that matter, what they've grown into is quite something to behold. On In An Expression Of The Inexpressible, the band's fourth full length, lead female vocalist Kazu Makino has honed her pipes into a distinctly expressive wonder... taming its former shrillness into something very childlike and otherworldly. Noisy melodies of angular guitars, modest keyboards, and a tight rhythm section come across as desperate yet beautiful epics. Very highly recommended.

CRESCENT Collected Songs (Roomtone) cd 13.98
Due to Bristol's rather incestuous pool of avant rock bands, Crescent's name often appears in conjunction with Flying Saucer Attack, Movietone, Third Eye Foundation, and Amp. As it should, since members of Crescent have performed with all three of those groups. It is a tad disheartening to see customers buy Crescent records with the hope of hearing a cosmic drone of blissful feedback, only to find an antithetical abject muck, and then selling them back.
And you know what, there's absolutely nothing wrong with an abject muck, actually we really like abject muck. If you listen closely to the tracks that Matt Jones (Crescent's mastermind) has appeared on in Amp and Movietone, you'll realise that everything he touches ends up with a gritty lo-fi quality. And for Crescent's third album, he has taken up residence in a Bristol church to capture a rather humid, almost rusting sound on top of his very loose songs. A gothic (NOT in the Trench Coat Mafia definition) sensibility of decaying atmospheres, permeates the slow moving waves of sonorous basslines, loose hammond organ semi-improvisations, and skittering rhythms, somewhere between jazz and krautrock.

DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE Something About Airplanes (Elsinor/Barsuk) 2cd 15.98
Here's there review we wrote about Death Cab's debut way back when (we made it Record Of The Week in 1998), we don't want to change a word, it's funny though since they're so huge now....
At the risk of slipping into hyperbole, which we try avoid at all costs (snicker...), this is hands down, one of the best (and possibly most overlooked - we almost missed it ourselves, gasp!) indie rock records ever. Landing somewhere between There's Nothing Wrong With Love and Perfect From Now On, Death Cab craft a Built-to-Spill-ian universe, full of lazy sad pop, intricate compositions, jangly melodies, shifting structures, odd time signatures, and haunting cellos (and none of that solar malevolence that Doug Martsch and our very own Jim are so fond of.)
This record has been an unbelievable hit in the store. We don't think it's ever been played without at least one person buying it, sometimes 2 or 3!
The version we have now, is the limited, numbered, slipcased 10th anniversary edition, with expanded booklet and bonus disc of DCFC's first show in Seattle, on February 25th, 1998, titled Live At The Crocodile Cafe. Nice!!
MPEG Stream: "Bend To Squares"
MPEG Stream: "President Of What?"
MPEG Stream: "Your Bruise"

FUCKHEAD The Male Comedy (Mego) cd 16.98
Calling this an industrial record certainly does this record no justice... Although Fuckhead's overblown testosterone laden angst is clearly presented through digital technology, thankfully none of the dated Front 242 or Rammstein references appear. Instead dense hyperactive sampling and digital noise processing dominate the album. Certainly an odd choice for digital electronica saboteurs Mego to release, but nonetheless an brutal and beguiling album. Recommended.

I AM SPOONBENDER Sender / Receiver (Gold Standard Laboratories / Mint) cd 11.98
The debut album from the San Francisco avantgardists I Am Spoonbender is quite a brilliant fare, in which the telephone operates as metaphor to semiological, aural, and sidereal transmissions (Andee's interpretation: "They sing into phones"). But this object finds itself in need of repair, disrupting and re-interpreting the original signals of This Heat and Gary Numan into mutant grooves propelled by Dustin Donaldson's post-Jaki Leibezeit percussion and Brian Jackson's prog bass angularity. On top of all of this rhythmic disruption, Cup's delicate vocal / synth melodies fall somewhere in between the tropes of late '70s new wave and Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy For Lilith. Yeah, I already run the risk of making this review far more advanced than it really need be, so I say that this -- the aural equivalent of Avital Ronell's Telephone Book -- is one of my favorite records of the year. No shit.


MPEG Stream: "Replaced By Toys"
MPEG Stream: "Waking Dream Seance"
MPEG Stream: "Mr. Knife Miss Fork "

LABRADFORD E Luxo So (Kranky) cd 13.98
The fifth studio album from Labradford finds the band incorporating instrumentations of dulcimer, string section, and tape loops alongside their atmospherics for guitar, bass, and piano. Labradford may have beaten Andee (in his first solo project after A Minor Forest, Pee, and Tic War) to the punch with a blatant appropriation of George Winston / Shadowfax / Windham Hill onto a record for Kranky.
Beautiful, none the less.

LABRADFORD E Luxo So (Kranky) lp 10.98
The fifth studio album from Labradford finds the band incorporating instrumentations of dulcimer, string section, and tape loops alongside their atmospherics for guitar, bass, and piano. Labradford may have beaten Andee (in his first solo project after A Minor Forest, Pee, and Tic War) to the punch with a blatant appropriation of George Winston / Shadowfax / Windham Hill onto a record for Kranky.
Beautiful, none the less.

MAEROR TRI Hypnotikum I (Soleilmoon) lp 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Almost entirely overlooked by 'post-rock' journalists for their fascination with industrial culture, Maeror Tri (now disbanded though Stefan and Martin have continued as Troum) have nevertheless constructed some of the most beautiful and simultaneously terrifying drone rock, complete with delicate melancholic melodies sublimated beneath glacial guitar washes. These tracks were culled from the backing tapes Maeror Tri performed with on their last European tour. Opens up a can of whup-ass on Windy & Carl and Labradford. A pretty limited piece of vinyl from Soleilmoon.

MAEROR TRI Language of Flames and Sound (Old Europa Cafe) cd 16.98
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MB (BIANCHI, MAURIZIO) Symphony for a Genocide (EEs'T / Alga Marghan) cd 16.98
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In the liner notes, a smug Maurizio Bianchi (aka MB) included a quote from Genesis P-Orridge who described MB's early 80's industrial noise records as 'boring, meaningless, pathetic'. I'd agree with MB in claiming that Gen was jealous, as MB was able to construct brutal hallucinatory recordings of electronic noise that offer metaphors of microscopic anyeurisms which collapse the body from within. Bleak chilling drones that are reminiscent of Conrad Schnitzler's most neurotic, Nurse With Wound's most droning, and Whitehouse's least annoying. MB's very prolific career in the early 80's with a more than a dozen records was cut short in 1984 at which time he joined a monastary.
Some of my favourite 'noise' records that have been gratefully reissued, thus sparing me from shelling out the $120.00 that I've seen the vinyl editions of these records going for!

MCGREEVY, STEPHEN P. Electric Enigma (Irdial) 2cd 22.00
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From the same label that brought us the truly disturbing Conet Project comes Stephen P. McGreevy's VLF recordings. With a knowledge of basic radio telescopics, a few choice geographical / atmospheric anomalies, and a good ear, McGreevy records the earth's electromagnetic signature generated through such phenomenon as the Alaskan Northern Lights. Delicate whistles streak over loud crackles, that bring to mind Id Battery's fascination with recorded fire, or John Duncan's shortwave radio experiments. Word of caution, one of our faithful customers complained that this created rather deleterious psychosomatic effects.

NURSE WITH WOUND Second Pirate Sessions (United Dairies) 2cd 26.00
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There was an old Nurse With Wound LP which Steve Stapleton (the madman behind NWW) sold to the old Rough Trade distribution in the UK for $99.99 simply because he knew of glitch in the accounting system that would cause the whole system to crash when anyone bought his record. Not quite as maddening a prospect here, but still he has released all of the unused tracks from the Rock 'n' Roll Station sessions across a double cd and a single piece of vinyl... Yes, there are different tracks on the vinyl and the cd (the 2nd disc is the complete Rock 'n' Roll Station album), making the consumer decisions of which to buy (if not both) somewhat problematic. Musically, it is 'rock' as NWW probably will ever get, with a solid recognizable pulse that punctuates the dadaist noises that is oddly similar to a Joe Meek with a drum machine. Easily one of the best releases from NWW in a very long time... and if it matters... of the AQ staff, Byram and Marc took home the CDs and Jim got the vinyl.

NURSE WITH WOUND Second Pirate Sessions (United Dairies) lp 23.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
There was an old Nurse With Wound LP which Steve Stapleton (the madman behind NWW) sold to the old Rough Trade distribution in the UK for $99.99 simply because he knew of glitch in the accounting system that would cause the whole system to crash when anyone bought his record. Not quite as maddening a prospect here, but still he has released all of the unused tracks from the Rock 'n' Roll Station sessions across a double cd and a single piece of vinyl... Yes, there are different tracks on the vinyl and the cd (the 2nd disc is the complete Rock 'n' Roll Station album), making the consumer decisions of which to buy (if not both) somewhat problematic. Musically, it is 'rock' as NWW probably will ever get, with a solid recognizable pulse that punctuates the dadaist noises that is oddly similar to a Joe Meek with a drum machine. Easily one of the best releases from NWW in a very long time... and if it matters... of the AQ staff, Byram and Marc took home the CDs and Jim got the vinyl.

OMIT Interior Desolation (Corpus Hermeticum) cd 16.98
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With dozens of self released tapes, a 3cd boxset, and a handful of collaborations with Dead C/A Handful of Dust guitarist Bruce Russell, this New Zealand reclusive misanthrope returns with more dark & claustrophobic dronescapes. Found sounds, homemade instruments, & barely perceptible rhythms are forced into Omit's mostly broken 8-track in the form of tape loops which shift and pulse ominously. Plus the recurrent motif of squealing pigs. An absolutely stunning record!!!

PLASTIKMAN Consumed (Novamute) cd 15.98
After the early 90's incarnation as F.U.S.E. making some of the heaviest cybernetic techno stomps to come from Detroit, Richie Hawtin has continued to devolve techno along a trajectory of minimalism. The monochromatic pulsing beats appear more as the afterimage of techno than as some club floorfiller. Brilliant in its paradoxical expansive claustrophobia.

PLASTIKMAN Consumed (Novamute) 3lp 14.98
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After the early 90's incarnation as F.U.S.E. making some of the heaviest cybernetic techno stomps to come from Detroit, Richie Hawtin has continued to devolve techno along a trajectory of minimalism. The monochromatic pulsing beats appear more as the afterimage of techno than as some club floorfiller. Brilliant in its paradoxical expansive claustrophobia.

THIRD EYE FOUNDATION Fear Of A Wack Planet (Domino) cd 7.98
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Once in a blue moon an absolutely perfect single drops from heaven onto us mere mortals. It's almost unheard of that this phenomenon would be realized by the same band twice. Yet Matt Elliot, Mr. Third Eye Foundation first gave us the brilliant "Semtex" single... and now "Fear Of A Wack Planet".
Majestic choral voices delicately float as haunting historical texts to a Baroque past with elegantly simple breakbeats forming the basic structure. Yes, this is the same alchemic formula that Enigma has been boring the world with for some time now, yet Third Eye Foundation's ability to manifest the sublime provides that elusive transcendental quality that makes this one of the most beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard.

THIRD EYE FOUNDATION Fear Of A Wack Planet (Domino) 12" 8.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Once in a blue moon an absolutely perfect single drops from heaven onto us mere mortals. It's almost unheard of that this phenomenon would be realized by the same band twice. Yet Matt Elliot, Mr. Third Eye Foundation first gave us the brilliant "Semtex" single... and now "Fear Of A Wack Planet".
Majestic choral voices delicately float as haunting historical texts to a Baroque past with elegantly simple breakbeats forming the basic structure. Yes, this is the same alchemic formula that Enigma has been boring the world with for some time now, yet Third Eye Foundation's ability to manifest the sublime provides that elusive transcendental quality that makes this one of the most beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard.

V/A Mission Two: Connecting Electronix Network (Nature) cd 18.98
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NOW AVAILABLE ON CD!!! This is a brilliant compilation of a lot of electronica outfits which are pretty obscure... Only V/VM and D'Archangelo are the really familiar artists here. Nonetheless, the tracks (which are mostly Italian in origin) share a similarity to Skam's or Rephlex's output of nu-skool electro and warped electronica. As a result we've been tracking down singles from A Credible Eye Witness, Phoenecia, and Vendor Refill.

V/A Mission Two: Connecting Electronix Network (Natural) 2lp 16.98
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A brilliant compilation of fucked electronica, with tons of outfits none of us had ever heard of. Only V/VM and D'Arcangelo are the familiar names here. Mostly Italian, the tracks sound quite similar to SKAM's output in Manchester, and Rephlex in London. Nu-skool electro and warped electronics. If you like Autechre or Aphex, pick this up, you won't regret it!

PORTER RICKS Biokinetics (Type) 2lp 27.00
Techno is a genre of self-quotation and unrepentant appropriation, always looking in the rearview mirror at what just happened to predict what will be the hot-shit trend on the dancefloor tomorrow. So to be able to trace an entire strain within techno's taxonomy to a specific record is quite rare. The 1996 album Biokinetics by Porter Ricks is one such record, setting the stage for pretty much every electronic artist who would flock to the banner of Chain Reaction through a stylized hypnotic, narcotizing techno haunted with deep atmospherics, dub murkiness, and subaquatic allusions. Porter Ricks was the duo of Andy Mellwig and Thomas Koner, who pursued "techno as a nautical sound experience." By the time the first Porter Ricks single emerged in '96, Koner had already developed his signature isolationist approach to slow-motion sound-design blustering with arctic metaphors through the dronemuzik classics of Nunatak Gongamur (1990) and Permafrost (1993). So when Koner began exploring techno with Mellwig, the approach to techno was less about 64-bar measures and more about constructing an evolving atmosphere girded to quintessentially German techno engineering that could be taken for a sonic portrait of tidal flows, map coordinates, sonar blips, and the vastness of the deep blue sea.
Biokinetics opens with the magnificent "Port Gentil" whose steady techno pulse coalesces through overlapping patterns from muffled pulsations of white noise and distant locomotive rhythms, later topped by a radiant metallic drone. The somatic oscillations of "Biokinetics 1" hardly makes for a techno track at all despite the insistent rhythms, but the eerie heartpulse dub of "Biokinetics 2" takes an isolationist reproach to everything adding its own desolate pulse and some subterranean reverb. Granulated hiss and slippery drone shimmer blossom through the final tracks "Nautical Nuba" and "Nautical Zone" that look forward to what Wolfgang Voigt would produce on his seminal Gas albums Zauberberg and Konigsforst. It sounded awesome in 1996, and it sounds awesome today.
The vinyl is limited to 700 copies!
MPEG Stream: "Port Gentil"
MPEG Stream: "Biokinetics 2"
MPEG Stream: "Nautical Zone"

SOFT CELL The Bedsit Tapes (Some Bizarre) cd 23.00
We managed to miss this one when it was released a while back in 2005, but we figured we weren't the only ones to let this import cd slip through the cracks. The Bedsit Tapes is the officially released collection of the early demos, escapades, and excursions from the megawatt new wave pop stars Soft Cell. These DIY recordings date back to 1978 when David Ball was attending Leeds Polytechnic, where he made full use of a makeshift recording studio consisting of a couple of reel-to-reel tape decks and a mixing board. Upon wiring up a Korg synth and primitive drum machine, Ball started to make "weird little tunes," one of which caught the ear of fellow student Marc Almond who asked if he could use one of those songs for his performance art shows. The two began refining those electronic blorps and bleeps into arty synth-pop numbers, snarling with contemporary punk energy and technological primitivism. Almond already had developed a charismatic persona, which he jubilantly expressed upon the wide vistas of grandiose theatricality, from the crooning balladeering of "L.O.V.E. Feeling" to the switchblade slashes on the uber-ironic "Bleak Is My Favorite Cliche" to the ominous bark of "Occupational Hazard" and onto the fucked-up delirium of their frenzied cover of Black Sabbath's "Paranoid." Yeah, you heard us right: Soft Cell covered Sabbath!
Given the stripped down arrangements and trial-by-fire approach to the technology at hand, Soft Cell certainly benefited from Almond's larger than life persona. Such is what gave the 'pop' elements of Throbbing Gristle and Reproduction era Human League their iconic status, and it certainly set the stage for the anthemic '80s hits that Soft Cell would produce later on. While many ordinary Soft Cell fans might be put off by the roughness of these tracks, it's precisely that fucked atonality, that avant-punk electricity, that giddy nervousness, those warbled, sci-fi effects and those ominous drones which make us totally dig this collection. Anyone into the whole "Messthetics" scene, and/or the current revival of retro new wave electronica old and new, should also dig.
MPEG Stream: "L.O.V.E. Feelings"
MPEG Stream: "Science Fiction Stories"
MPEG Stream: "Paranoid"

KAHN, JASON On Metal Shores (Editions) lp 24.00
As we've mentioned before, American ex-pat and former hardcore drummer Jason Kahn made a radical shift away from the SST punk style jams he was kicking out during the '80s toward an avant-drone-noise-improv type of career that has taken him to Zurich, Switzerland. Yeah, it is a career for him, but the price one has to pay for having a sound-art career is a constant tour / exhibition schedule. Rock'n'roll may have its fortune seekers, but a steady paycheck through sound-art? Not very likely. Yet, Kahn has done it; and done it by producing work that is incredibly refined through his own take on electro-acoustic strategies, modular synth exploration, holy minimalist composition, and an occasional percussion flourish in ghostly deference to his former life as the drummer for Leaving Trains. With all of the touring and exhibitions (seriously, his schedule is fucking insane!), solo releases from Jason Kahn can be fleeting (although he's very prolific with his collaborative contributions). So, this new production from Kahn is something that could be celebrated simply because the man somehow found the time to get this out in the world; but that would be selling it short... as On Metal Shores is a brilliant piece of shimmering, gasping minimalism that glides out of acoustically-sourced drone reminiscent of Andrew Chalk and Organum, the metallurgically organic swells of Alan Lamb's wire recordings, and the graceful minimalism of Eliane Radigue and Roland Kayn. Kahn writes at great length in the liner notes about some of the situations for the source recordings, including the nice image of Jason Kahn tapping on a resonant hand-railing near Lake Zurich as local birds would congregate and take off depending on the volume of Kahn's rhythm-n-drone. These elements along with long-thin-wire instruments attached to transducers, the thrum of giant water tanks, drainage pipe raspings, and much more get worked into Kahn's shifting drones that accrete into swollen crescendos of complex shimmered noise and harmonic interplay. This stunner of an album is limited to 250 copies, hand numbered, and hand-painted.

VAN HOEN, MARK The Revenant Diary (Editions Mego) cd 16.98
Recording as Locust back in the late '90s, Mark Van Hoen produced a signature post-IDM electronica that was sublime in mood but was fraught with overly complicated rhythms and portentous song cycles that weighed far too heavily on what might have developed into something on par with Biosphere or Bowery Electric. As a result, much of his output is immediately attractive but has failed to rise above the overwrought production he endlessly piled on to his sounds.
Fortunately, recently Van Hoen came upon an experimental tape piece he made at the precocious age of 13, when he was remastering some of his earlier tracks from the '90s. That archival track centered on a mashed-up banal pop song with garbled vocals and backwards recordings of church organs, creating something quite spooky and arresting. Van Hoen took the simplicity of that process to heart (but not the track itself, drat!), recording much of The Revenant Diary on a 4-track, which is pretty much unheard of in this day and age of Ableton. The results find Van Hoen at his absolute best, shorn of those implausible complexities which troubled his earlier recordings, rendering an album that should warrant plenty of comparisons to Demdike Stare as a very well executed piece of hauntological electronica.
The warbly, decaying drones from those 4-track levitate in an uneasy fashion at the beginning of the album, suffocating what was once a vigorous drill-n-bass workout into fizzling skitter amidst the shadow, grain, and hiss of "Garabndl X", leading into the hypnotic "Don't Look Back", whose looping female vocals intoning the track's title, orbit a strutting, dubbed-out, mid-tempo rhythm that wouldn't seem out of place on Tricky's Maxinquaye. "No Distance" glides two streams of reverberant ambience along a computer-mad sequencing as a meeting between Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II and Oneohtrix Point Never's Returnal. While all of this may be simple from Van Hoen's perspective, The Revenant Diary is a richly textured album that dynamically jumps from vertiginous ambient passages into throbbing, post-dubstep explorations of rhythm. Let's hope that Van Hoen keeps it this 'simple' for the next record!
MPEG Stream: "I Remember"
MPEG Stream: "Where Were You"
MPEG Stream: "Don't Look Back"

VAN HOEN, MARK The Revenant Diary (Editions Mego) 2lp 30.00
Recording as Locust back in the late '90s, Mark Van Hoen produced a signature post-IDM electronica that was sublime in mood but was fraught with overly complicated rhythms and portentous song cycles that weighed far too heavily on what might have developed into something on par with Biosphere or Bowery Electric. As a result, much of his output is immediately attractive but has failed to rise above the overwrought production he endlessly piled on to his sounds.
Fortunately, recently Van Hoen came upon an experimental tape piece he made at the precocious age of 13, when he was remastering some of his earlier tracks from the '90s. That archival track centered on a mashed-up banal pop song with garbled vocals and backwards recordings of church organs, creating something quite spooky and arresting. Van Hoen took the simplicity of that process to heart (but not the track itself, drat!), recording much of The Revenant Diary on a 4-track, which is pretty much unheard of in this day and age of Ableton. The results find Van Hoen at his absolute best, shorn of those implausible complexities which troubled his earlier recordings, rendering an album that should warrant plenty of comparisons to Demdike Stare as a very well executed piece of hauntological electronica.
The warbly, decaying drones from those 4-track levitate in an uneasy fashion at the beginning of the album, suffocating what was once a vigorous drill-n-bass workout into fizzling skitter amidst the shadow, grain, and hiss of "Garabndl X", leading into the hypnotic "Don't Look Back", whose looping female vocals intoning the track's title, orbit a strutting, dubbed-out, mid-tempo rhythm that wouldn't seem out of place on Tricky's Maxinquaye. "No Distance" glides two streams of reverberant ambience along a computer-mad sequencing as a meeting between Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II and Oneohtrix Point Never's Returnal. While all of this may be simple from Van Hoen's perspective, The Revenant Diary is a richly textured album that dynamically jumps from vertiginous ambient passages into throbbing, post-dubstep explorations of rhythm. Let's hope that Van Hoen keeps it this 'simple' for the next record!
MPEG Stream: "I Remember"
MPEG Stream: "Where Were You"
MPEG Stream: "Don't Look Back"

DOME 1-4+5 (Editions Mego) 5lp 170.00
After producing three seminal art-punk records from 1977 to 1980 that moved in rapid trajectory away from the short-sharp economy of Pink Flag to the tongue-twisting surfaces of 154, Wire dissolved for the first time. Call it a hiatus, call it an acrimonious break-up, call it a fuck-you to the major label that signed them; but regardless of what may or may have transpired in 1980, there were just too many ideas in those four blokes to be contained in the trappings of a four-piece punk band. Given what came immediately after 154, it's pretty clear where all of those radical shifts came from - Graham Lewis and Bruce Gilbert. Sure, Colin Newman produced a pretty decent solo record in A-Z, but in all of the projects that Lewis & Gilbert produced, there was a torrent of amazing material that included Duet Emmo, Cupol, P'O, and what proved to the best of the lot - Dome.
In quick succession, Dome produced four albums between 1980 and 1982, all of which now are just referred to by their numerical order, although Dome 4 was originally released under the title Will You Speak This World. As much as these records were explorations of deconstructing the punk song into drone, atonality, minimal synth abrasion, and polyglot perversity, Lewis & Gilbert would also tease with hints at what Wire had previously manifested. This audience baiting was also demonstrated on Wire's live lp Document & Eyewitness which condensed the classic Wire songs "12xU" down to 15 second fragment that never launched into that pogo-punk beat. As such, Dome would build songs out of repetitive guitar & bass patterns that would parallel one of the exuberant numbers like "Outdoor Miner" or "Mannequin" but the song would then detour into ellipsis with alien drones and discordant counterpoints. "Here We Go" from Dome 1 was a prime example of this punk-tease, furthered by tracks like the wild-eyed delirium of Lewis' ranting on "Cancel Your Order" also from Dome 1. The much ballyhooed highlight from that first record is the sublime track "Cruel When Complete" sung by Angela Conway, who coos breathily over an elegant if very cold electronic pattern with quintessential minimal wave detachment. Dome 2 continues along the convoluted art-punk abstraction through the two part "Red Tent" framed by plenty of abstracted electronic fragments and rhythmic work-outs that parallel what This Heat was doing at the same time.
Dome 3 found the duo hitting their stride, where the synthetic rhythms and loops play a central role in the arrangements accompanied by weird percussion, distorted vocals, feverish minimalism, abstractionist drones, and industrial overtures. All of the tracks are given names more fitting to Kurt Schwitters "Ursonate" such as "Ar-Gu," "Roos-An," and "An-An-An-D-D-D," providing more of a connection to Dada than to punk. Through these synthetic noises, Dome find them the perfect bridge between Throbbing Gristle and Zoviet France. Dome 4 stretches out the fragmentary brilliance of Dome 3 into longer, more thoughtfully composed pieces such as the archaic sounding folk-hymnal "To Speak" where Lewis' baritone intertwines with a languid violin and lots of cathedral reverberations.
Jump some 8 years to when Wire had reformed to produce a couple of fantastic art-pop records, when Dome also reconvened with the aid of late-80s technology: samplers and MIDI sequencing (as opposed to the tape loop and primitive synth work of the early recordings); and they recorded an album entitled Yclept which didn't get released for another decade. Here, the machined rhythms, repetitive noise collages, and loping basslines rejoin the realm of the song, albeit fractured somewhere between Aphex Twin, Greater Than One, and SPK, with Lewis crooning as he would occasionally do in Wire and on his under-appreciated He Said solo projects.
These 5 lps come packaged in large box filled with photographs, posters, and liner notes plus the requisite download coupon and inexplicably a box of matches. Don't set yourself on fire, please.
MPEG Stream: "Cruel When Complete"
MPEG Stream: "Danz"
MPEG Stream: "Ar-Gu"
MPEG Stream: "To Speak"
MPEG Stream: "Because We Must (Version 1)"
MPEG Stream: "Virtual Sweden (V.S.#1)"

STOTT, ANDY Passed Me By / We Stay Together (Modern Love) 2cd 24.00
Before we had actually heard Andy Stott, we had a procession of folks come into the store and tell us how incredible his stuff was, and how we should definitely get whatever we could, and yet, with every 12" release, they disappeared before we could get any copies at all, and before we knew it they were gone. We did manage to hear bits and pieces, enough that when we discovered that two of the records were being reissued together as a double cd, we could barely wait, and once it arrived, well, pretty much everyone here has been playing it nonstop. UK producer Stott seems to have taken the minimal downtempo soul of Burial as a jumping off point, taking that same sound and slowing it down even further, adding more grit and grime, creating a sound now twice removed from the dancefloor, a soporific, somnolent techno that fuses murky dirgey slo-mo soul with abstract house music creep, conjuring up a music that is both haunting and sinister, mesmeric and minimal, an array of looped melodies, melded to skeletal thumps and heartbeat like pulses, fragmented samples woven into the mix mostly to provide texture and melody, but for the most part all of the various elements are recruited to either become rhythms themselves, or to be blurred and smeared into a grim washed out backdrop, over which the rhythms slither and skitter. The dub element is huge, but it's a muted sublimated dub, only really showing itself, when a voice escapes the gravitational pull of Stott's black hole dub, the swirl of effects dragging it right back down into the murk, quickly disappearing into the inky blackness, leaving just the churn and lurch, and it's that balance, a delicate one to be sure, that makes Stott's sound so special. Too much rhythmic murk, and it's monochromatic and dull, too much melody, and sonic filigree and suddenly it's not nearly so dark and mysterious. Stott deftly negotiates the middle ground, dragging the more melodic elements into the dark and repurposing them, using them to infuse his sonic black energy with life. The bonus tracks on Passed Me By, are much more active, the pulsing house-y "Stitch House" sounds like Stott covering The Field, still all fuzzy and washed out and Pop Ambient, but much more rhythmic, and less murky, while "Love Nothing" lets the rhythms come front and center, skittering and shuffling over a rubbery low end melody, and swirling synthy chordal swells, not to mention a deep dramatic croon. It almost sounds like a sketch for a future song that would find the various elements dipped in pitch, slowed down and blackened.
The second disc does dial back the murk a bit, instead focusing on the rhythmic component, wrapping everything in a Pop Ambient haze, but letting the beats break free of the whir and thrum, opener "Submission" is all hazy swirls, the only rhythm a sort of echo drenched dubbed out ripple, very dreamlike and abstract, before slipping into "Posers" which at first sounds very much like something off Passed Me By sampled water gurgles beneath a muted techno thump, but soon, fog horn like melodies drift in, and the beat blossoms into something much more active, a shuffling crunch anchored to a house-like pulse, processed vocals drifting over the top, the vibe groovy, but still washed out and druggily abstract. Which is how the first half of We Stay Together plays out, but then about half way through, the sounds begins to veer back toward the murk, "Cherry Eye" being a fantastic bit of muddied minimalism, even at its most propulsive, it's still a muted creep, as is "Cracked", although it does crank the beat a bit, conjuring up a sort of slow motion shimmy, that remains looped and mesmerizingly motorik.
The bonus tracks on We Stay Together, in some ways mirror those on Passed Me By, in that they actually sound more like their opposite, "Work Gate" is super minimal and sketch-like, a little dubby and darkly Portishead-y, while "We Stay Together (Part Two)" begins life as a hushed blur, but gradually blossoms into another Field like chunk of looped techno mesmer.
Released on the same label that gave us all the Demdike Stare records, which should give you an idea that while this might technically be techno, it's some murky dubbed out hauntology that transcends any sort of genre classification. A brand new unanimous store fave, and definite contender for Record Of the Year!
Packed in a super striking oversized gatefold sleeve, with a different cover for each album depending on which way you're holding it, both stunning black and white photos culled from the pages of National Geographic.
MPEG Stream: "North To South"
MPEG Stream: "Intermittent"
MPEG Stream: "Dark Details"
MPEG Stream: "Submission"
MPEG Stream: "Posers"

RADIGUE, ELIANE Geelriandre / Arthesis (Senufo Editions) cd 17.98
A much needed reissue of two magnificent pieces of Holy Minimalism from Eliane Radigue! Much of Radigue's classic work from the late '60s and into the '80s had never been presented outside the context of live playback, due to the simple fact that vinyl couldn't handle more than 25 minutes to a side without serious loss of fidelity. So with the advent of cds, the vast archives of her reel-to-reel tapes of very-long form compositions and stasis-oriented dronemuzik began to see the light of day well after the work had been completed and shelved. Radigue had studied composition in the INA-GRM studios in the mid-'60s and was one of many artists who became enamored with the potential of feedback as a tool within composition. The long sinewy drones of a controlled feedback loop became a signature of her earliest works, with synthesizers gradually enveloping those sounds with their greater control and tonal palette.
Composed in 1972 and 1973 respectively (though these recordings were made several years later), "Geelriandre" and "Arthesis" represent some of the earliest work demonstrating Radigue's maturation as a minimalist. "Geerlriandre" - for prepared piano and Arp synthesizer, ripples with a melancholia through a beautiful chorus of tightly oscillating electric drones occasionally punctuated by the sustained yet muffled resonance of the piano, anticipating what Brian Eno would present many years later on Thursday Afternoon albeit with none of the romanticized impressionism. "Arthesis," using the Moog, is a more ominous affair, whirling back and forth between low end frequencies amidst a glacial progression of bleak ambience. This album isn't only good for historical documentation, but also is an exceptional precursor to the drone-tastic pursuits of current artists like Thomas Koner and Andrew Chalk.
Originally released about ten years ago on Giuseppe Ielasi's Fringes, and Ielasi wisely reclaimed these recordings for his new imprint Senufo. If you didn't get it the first time, you should certainly pick this one up now!
MPEG Stream: "Geelriandre"
MPEG Stream: "Arthesis"

CAN Tago Mago (40th Anniversary Edition) (Spoon ) 2cd 19.98
Nice!! One of our favorite Can, nay krautrock, nay any-kind-of albums ever (that is if you don't ask Andee, who for some insane reason doesn't like Can at all), given a fancy 40th Anniversary reissue! What's so fancy about it you ask? Well, first the packaging, it's in a nice gatefold miniature lp style sleeve, with the original art of the German lp edition that came out back in 1971 (yay, 1971!). That's nestled inside a cardboard wallet-like folder which bears the cover from Tago Mago's UK release in 1972, a movie still of singer Damo and drummer Jaki on stage, in action, dramatically lit. For some reason they made big deal about this alternate cover being used on this reissue, it's cool to have it but we're happy the original art is also present and accounted for on that gatefold sleeve. Also inside the folder, a thick booklet with vintage photos and plenty o' detailed liner notes, including some by the guy from Primal Scream.
More importantly though, what makes this so special is that it includes a whole extra disc, a previously unreleased, 48 minute live performance from 1972! They do "Mushroom" and "Halleluwah" from Tago Mago, as well as "Spoon" from that year's equally amazing Ege Bamyasi, that song here stretched out to almost a half hour in length! Any true Can fan will want this just for the live disc, even though you probably already have one or more remastered versions of Tago Mago proper. But yeah, with the live set and the nice packaging, this is definitely worth getting, it's an upgrade all right.
For those of you who aren't big Can fans already, this would be a fine place to begin your love affair with this amazing band (c'mon, Andee!). Here's what we wrote about Tago Mago when it was last reissued:
1971's Tago Mago double album was Can's third full-length release, and their first with expatriate Japanese singer Damo Suzuki (whom they discovered busking on the street outside a club). It's truly a sprawling masterpiece of krautrock. Witness the weird noise/drone stuff on the 17 minute "Aumgn", or the totally hypnotic rhythmic psych groove of the equally side-long "Halleluwah". Again, we probably don't have to say much more, you already have this, right? But if Can's new to you, we'd recommend this (as well as Monster Movie and Ege Bamyasi and Soundtracks) as among their best efforts. PS: If you like Circle and you don't have this record, get it!!
MPEG Stream: "Mushroom"
MPEG Stream: "Oh Yeah"
MPEG Stream: "Spoon (Live 1972)"

TARAB Wind Keeps Even Dust Away (23five) cd 14.98
BACK IN STOCK!!!
Wind Keeps Even Dust Away is the second album from the brilliant Australian sound artist Tarab (aka Eamon Sprod) originally released in 2007; yet in his small discography of manipulated field recordings and agitated objects, he's proven himself a masterful sound artist, on par with all time aQuarius favorites Chris Watson, Toshiya Tsunoda, Matt Shoemaker, and Loren Chasse. In comparison to those esteemed artists, Tarab's work is considerably darker; and he has mentioned in a rare interview a somber sympathy for the views of extreme ecologists who posit that the world would be better off if humanity were to succumb to nuclear annihilation. As such, his albums loom as sonic harbingers of the end of the world. He builds all of his work through the overlay of multiple field recordings, augmented by the complementary sounds of Sprod rustling leaves, flaking rust, crumbling dirt, and shattering glass, all of which get mulched into seamless compositions swollen with expansive low end drones and electrocuted vibrations. Wind Keeps Even Dust Away navigates barren landscapes between the industrial wasteland and the wilderness of the outback, whose epic suites wander through the exploded view of locust swarms transmogrified into an electro-static hiss coupled with wind-borne drones and thrumming metallic vibration. Toward the end of the record, Tarab hits an ecological density through his arid sources that would imply the monumental forces of the Amazonian rainforest, but where Lopez seeks to pummel, Tarab is far more subtle in his approach, being inclined to show that weird beetle scurrying through the loose soil. He'll also make you aware of that bug's toxic qualities well after it has already crawled up and down your arm. Brilliant!
MPEG Stream: "Wind"
MPEG Stream: "Keeps"
MPEG Stream: "Away"

IRR. APP. (EXT.) Flux / Crayfish (Errata In Excelsis) cassette 9.98
It has been a while since we've heard from the hermetic M.S. Waldron and his ignoble project irr. app. (ext.), and now he's released two cassettes through his Errata In Excelsis imprint, continuing his slippery alchemy of surreal collage, spiraling drone, and cracked intention.
If that title looks a little familiar (as well as the cover), it is in fact an homage to the 1987 split album between AMM's Eddie Prevost and Organum, entitled Flayed / Crux which sported a bizarre mandala of Victorian-era clip art as cover art. But it's not just the title and the cover that Waldron is riffing upon, he's created two stellar 'covers' of those two lengthy tracks. The originals found Organum's David Jackman accompanying Prevost for "Flayed" with a signature acoustic drone from Jackman's bowed cymbal underlying a reverb-saturated, free-falling excursion around Prevost's drum kit. The irr. app. (ext.) reinvention in "Flux" is nearly flawless in keeping up with Prevost's polydactyl splutter and tempestuously rolling drum fills, while building an equally impressive simulacrum of Jackman's bowed cymbal thrumm of surging electrified friction.
As good as both Prevost and Waldron's tracks are, the best work is reserved for the flipside. The original of "Crux" featured an all-star Organum line-up with Jackman surrounded by Andrew Chalk, Dinah Jane Rowe, and Steven Stapleton who's credited performing on "chair." Waldron does list the objects that went into the formation of his reinterpretation entitled "Crayfish" including the enigmatic use of a "chair" in the assembling of this rebirthing drone-construction. Was the chair particularly squeaky? Did Stapleton drag it around to create a muffled texture somewhere in the mix? Did he just sit down and get high? Those same questions can be asked of Waldron, in his use of the piece of furniture in this beautiful swarm of acoustic drones from sustained cymbal drones dappled with shortwave radio detunings and a ritualistic flute that hangs sadly above all the droning surfaces. Waldron's version rings true with the eerie, yet beautiful atmospheric construction that Organum mustered during the height of their career, with the notable differences found in Waldron's use of squishy textures and squeaks that dot the heavy-droning swarm. That said, both the original and this cover should be lauded alongside those magnificient pieces of holy minimalism by Tony Conrad, LaMonte Young, and Charlemange Palestine. Yeah, it is that good! As you know, tapes like this are usually limited, so don't wait around on this one!
MPEG Stream: "Flux"
MPEG Stream: "Crayfish"

THROBBING GRISTLE 20 Jazz Funk Greats (Industrial Records) 2cd 23.00
The cover for Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats is a marvelous piece of subversive design. The four members of Throbbing Gristle look quite dapper, Genesis dolled up in a tailored white suit jacket, Cosey smiling happily in her pert miniskirt, and Chris & Sleazy both wearing rather conservative sweaters, but they had situated themselves on the cliffs of Beachy Head (a notorious suicide spot on the south coast of England) with a rented Range Rover in the distance and in a variation of this scene, a nude male body lies at their feet in the grass, presumably dead. This design (executed by Sleazy through his day job at Hipgnosis Design) was a sneering act of contempt for British society that failed to see the horrors and injustice which boiled just under the surfaces of congeniality and civility.
Both Second Annual Report and D.o.A. were ostensibly compilations of recontextualized material both from the studio and extracts from live recordings, but 20 Jazz Funk Greats - the third proper album from Throbbing Gristle - feels like a conceived album from beginning to end, even with all of its dead-ends and contradictions. The album opens with the title track, where a slow-motion drum machine and synthesized bass tones strut with a mechanical swagger with Cosey's discordant cornet blurts in the distance and predatorily whispered vocal extracts of what could be some smooth jazz DJ trying to set the mood - with that mood being a sickening, menacing threat. Such is also the case, with the lugubrious "Tanith" whose atonal rolling basslines churn against strange electronic blorp and tinkling chimes, which leads into "Convincing People" - whose metronomic synth sequencing became the signature for nearly every 'industrial' band that claimed TG as an influence. The detuned and distorted guitar from Cosey smears the mechanical edges while Genesis wailed through the lyrical repetitiveness which articulated to the effect that if you say it enough, people will start believing you. A hammer might help too. The minimalist club hit "Hot On The Heels Of Love" is one of the most memorable TG songs, and for very good reason as TG offered a much-imitated disco frugality through their insistent drum machine, squiggling sequencing, and Cosey's whispered vocals. Immediately following this is a nightmarish narration of the aftermath of a night of partying too much in "Persuasion", as disembodied female yelps of sexualized horror sporadically punctuate a slithering Genesis donning the role of a low-rent pornographer. "What A Day" is another 'industrial' template with a corrosive loop of cybernetic thumps forming the only backdrop to Genesis barking as loud as he can in a diabolical take on a footballer's chant. The finale "Six Six Sixties" finds Cosey's monochord guitar awfully prescient of Sonic Youth and Bailter Space in the drone intensity through distortion and rhythm, with Genesis reciting a suitably bleak monologue above, rounding out what is arguably the best of the Throbbing Gristle albums.
The cd version contains a bonus disc with live material extracted from the numerous live cassettes (and some of these versions apparently appear on the 24cd boxset of live TG material, although we've not cross referenced these facts yet). The two versions of "Discipline" (which were released as a 12" on Fetish Records in 1981) suitably conclude this disc, as that was the track that TG also performed at the end of their sets, with the heavy drum machines whipping the crowd into a frenzy and Genesis barking hysterically for some order. Such were the wonderful contradictions of Throbbing Gristle. About as a high a recommendation as we can give.
MPEG Stream: "20 Jazz Funk Greats"
MPEG Stream: "Persuasion"
MPEG Stream: "What A Day!"
MPEG Stream: "Discipline (Berlin)"

DISCO INFERNO The 5 EPs (One Little Indian) cd 15.98
Wow! Given the acrimonious break-up of Disco Inferno after their aesthetically fraught album Technicolour in 1996, we're a little shocked, yet totally stoked to see anything from Disco Inferno back in print, let along the rare EPs reissued here. This London trio formed in 1989, releasing three albums and seven eps that amounted to a brilliant mish-mash of sample-based technology, post-punk intensity, and a profoundly British mope that hangs throughout their catalogue. The first recorded forays by Disco Inferno found the group wearing their influences proudly on sonic sleeves - Joy Division, Wire, Durutti Column, and The Smiths - with the band twisting those influences into a narcotized torpour through an elliptical rhythm section that grounded the suitably delay-riddled, arppegiations and repititions from guitarist / vocalist Ian Crause. The band quickly took to MIDI technology, often sampling Crause's own guitar and alchemically rendering those into percolating satellites of effervsecent sound that orbit the song with peculiar trajectories and angles. Over time, the sampling became more and more of the focus in the band, appropriating sounds outside of their studio and fracturing all of those sounds into a more and more bizarrely splintered electronica that mutated into something grotesquely baroque, all the while hanging onto the core principles of the pop-art melody. This emphasis on sampling was an obsession for Crause after reading what David Stubbs and Simon Reynolds were championing in NME, as those two fixated on a technological thread that ran through My Bloody Valentine, Public Enemy, and The Young Gods. Crause was single-minded in his pursuit of figuring out how technology could be seemlessly integrated into the context of a British art-rock band, in frantic anticipation of what anybody might be doing elsewhere in the world. As such, Disco Inferno and Robert Hampson's post-Loop project Main were at the vangarde of ostensible pop bands disintegrating themselves before their audiences' eyes and ears. Where Hampson did achive escape velocity from rock's heavy gravitational pull with little to show for it after Motion Pool, Disco Inferno's internal disputes over where that technology needed to go caused so much strife as to destroy the band, with none of the members doing anything memorable since.
The 5 EPs featured here showcase that transition from an artful post-punk project conjuring the ghost of Martin Hannett into a complicated electronica ensemble that predicted how Christian Fennesz would deconstruct the spirit of The Beach Boys, but without the benefit of granulating laptop tricknology. We mentioned above that the band released seven EPs, the first two of which were compiled with their first album on the anthology entitled In Debt. The first EP in this anthology is "Summer's Last Sound" from 1992 and features two tracks that sparkle with harsichord-like patterns from the sampedelica, pulled back down to the ground by the thickly strummed bass from Paul Willmot, not to mention Crause's wistful, unpretentious vocal delivery of his deeply sad lyrics. "A Rock To Cling To" from 1993 finds the band in more of a traditional rock mode with guitars, bass, and drums, whose repetitive groove is offset by soaring bursts of sampled vocals that stretch like vapor trails glowing in moonlight. The B-side to that EP, "The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea", introduces a sample that would become common place in the ever-abstracting repetoire of Disco Inferno, that of shattering glass whose tinkling fragments of sound lock into an elegant Terry Riley patterning of minimalist rhythms. "The Last Dance" (also from 1993) features two versions of the title track, where Ian Crause has penned a damn good song that could have fit neatly in with the Johnny Marr songbook of The Smiths, but with jittery electronics and melancholy appropriations of schoolyard song puncturing Crause's crisp guitar lines. The B-side of "D.I. Go Pop" (the name of their second record, which didn't feature this track, oddly enough) is a manic affair of tape-revving guitar noise, threatening to unravel and unhinge as a spastic dervish. "Scattered Showers" is the other B-side, a beautifully poetic abstraction of British melancholy through sampled motorcycle engines forming the patterned tension beneath Crause's rain-drenched guitar strum. This EP and the next, "Second Language" from 1994, stand as the best material in Disco Inferno's short-circuited career. The title track of the latter single finds the band recycling Crause's sparkling Vini Reilly guitar into enchanting, hypnotic echoes out of which Crause concludes the track with a triumphant Brit-rock riff obviously alluding to the comtemporary bombast of Oasis. "At The End Of The Line" follows the aforementioned "Scattered Showers" as Disco Inferno's penchant for beautiful miserablism cast through refracted guitar lines into shoegaze bliss. The final single "It's A Kids World" finds the band at odds with itself, creating a jubilant kaleidoscope out of the drum crash from Iggy Pop's "Lust For Life" with Umbrellas of Cherbourg-esque flute trills of baroque pop guiding this atypically uptempo number. The B-side "A Night On The Tiles" is a Felini-esque collage of vaudevillian records, screaming girls, and smashed glass coming across more like a diabolical Nurse With Wound track than anything else found in their catalogue. Whew!
If you've just so much as glanced in the direction of Stereolab, Notwist, Fennesz, My Bloody Valentine, Spiritualized, and/or Animal Collective, you really owe it to yourself to check out Disco Inferno. They really are that good! We can only hope that D.I. Go Pop and In Debt (both of which are long out of print) will see the light of day once again, given the inevitible interest that will come from this anthology from one of the pioneers of avant-rock.
MPEG Stream: "A Rock To Cling To"
MPEG Stream: "Scattered Showers"
MPEG Stream: "Second Language"
MPEG Stream: "It's A Kids World"

TAJ MAHAL TRAVELLERS August 1974 (Phoenix) 2lp 34.00
Made the latest cd reissue of this a Record Of The Week last time, now the same label has also done a fancy double vinyl version!!!
Not sure how we never made this our Record Of The Week before, considering most aQuarians would probably rank this as one of their all time favorite drone records. Or all time favorite Japanese psychedelic records, heck, it's pretty much just one of our all time favorite records ever PERIOD. We've listed it in the past as a pricey import double cd, and an even pricier double lp, and maybe we thought it a bit too expensive before, but now with this new, more reasonably priced reissue, it seems like a no brainer to finally bestow the Record Of The Week honors on an album that has deserved it ever since we first heard it years and years ago. For those who have yet to discover the mysterious psychedelic beauty of Taj Mahal Travellers, you are in for a treat, and most likely a new musical obsession...
We love this record so much. The Taj Majal Travellers are so utterly mind blowing. This is a double cd reissue of this legendary Japanese psych ensemble's second album which has been sporadically available over the years, and when we did have it in stock, if anyone asked about drones, this is the record we would always suggest. One of the most hallowed artifacts of the psych-rock collector scum scene (originals on vinyl could set you back more than $1000!), this album is an epic higher key improvised drone extravaganza, all performed live on beaches and deserted hills in Sweden, India, Iran and England. Slow, complex, irregular throbbing waves of sound, broadcast through distant loudspeakers and recaptured and reincorporated. Feedback, time-space lag, horns, echo machines, and primitive handmade electronic devices all contribute to the ever shifting clouds of sound. So unbearably awesome. And this is not electronic music, or studio based carefully constructed drone music, this is massive and organic, dreamy and natural, waves of sound drifting through sun and sky, rain and fog, trees and electrical wires, the shape of the earth, the temperature, the wind, all affecting the sound, changing the timbre ever so slightly, band members spaced out over hundreds of yards, improvising on an impossibly grand scale, the earth as their stage, nature as their recording studio, a deliriously abstract sound world of subtle drones and drifting ambience. Imagine some long haired seventies Japanese psych rock combo, but filtered through the Jewelled Antler Collective, jamming with Chris Watson, set up on sandy dunes, grassy knolls, forest glades, each not necessarily -playing- their instruments, but instead coaxing sounds from within the instruments, setting those sounds free and sending them skyward, watching them drift downwind, where a bandmate snatches the sounds and coaxes complimentary sounds from his own instrument, sending a sonic response, these messages, these billows of abstract shimmer and steaks of lush reverberation weaving into and around each other, the sky full of warm warbly mysterious sound. Psychedelic for sure, but more a sort of eyes closed, mind open dream drift drone psychedelia. One of the most hauntingly mysterious and utterly beautiful drone records we've heard, and one of our all time favorite records!, Gatefold packaging, 180 gram vinyl.
MPEG Stream: "1"
MPEG Stream: "2"

WATSON, CHRIS El Tren Fantasma (Touch) cd 15.98
Preeminent field recordist Chris Watson returns with a bit of a twist on El Tren Fantasma. Pretty much all of his work up to this point (outside of his contributions to Cabaret Voltaire and The Hafler Trio way back when) has been audio verite. Even such albums as Weather Report, which edit field recordings from the African savanna (for example) into a condensed journey, are pristine, realist documents codified through the exquisite, lush details in Watson's enviromental sounds such as that of a lion panting after a successful hunt. El Tren Fantasma is much more engineered, imagined, and processed than anything else in his solo career; and this fictionalized Watson is no less compelling, no less dramatic, and no less awesome.
El Tren Fantasma - The Ghost Train - traces a now-defunct passanger rail line which ran from the Pacific Coast of Mexico to Veracruz on the Atlantic Coast. Watson had the opportunity to make this journey while working as a sound recordist for the BBC for their Great Railway Journeys. His compositions work with extracts from that excursion travelling across Mexico along with archival recordings whose origins are not specified. As he's stopping throughout the Chihuahuan Desert, Watson does capture the stunning chorales of chirping frogs, buzzing insects, and the blaring call of a California Quail (whose syllabic chortle is often mnemonically transcribed as "chi-CA-go" as if it were seeking a more temperate climate); but it the train's power and mass that provides so much of the impact for Watson's album. By the fourth track "El Divisidaro," Watson captures a series of loops of the train - with the bellowing horn pitched back and forth into a sustained symphonic tone and the clatter of the train's engine becoming an ersatz rhythm track, which in turn gets tricked out with some Martin Hannett styled, phasing delay work. It's easy to get lost in the majesty of this track, much like the expressive electronica that Wolfgang Voigt produced on Konigsforst as Gas. What a brilliantly simple transformation executed to perfection! "Mexico D.F." reprises this strategy with rhythmic churns building out of the grinding brakes and the roiling tumult of steam blasting through the train's pipes, becoming an almost militant thump on a lone drum. The train's horn drifts suitably in a cloud of reverberation at the end of the album, dissolving into the ghostlike apparition Watson intended it to be. As brillliant as this work is, we should also point out that Watson is not alone in composing such fictionalized scores purely through environmental sound. We would be remiss if we failed to point out the work of Australian composer Tarab, whose deft psychogeographical albums share the scope and execution with Watson's El Tren Fantasma. So great!
MPEG Stream: "Sierra Tarahumara"
MPEG Stream: "El Divisidaro"
MPEG Stream: "Mexico D.F."

WOLFE, CHELSEA Apokalypsis (Pendu) lp 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The apocalypse has come to mean 'the end of the world' but its original Greek definition is that of 'revelation,' albeit a really fucking heavy revelation of how the world is going to end. The differences between the pop-cultural definition and the biblical definition are somewhat semantic, but it's apt to mention in regards to Chelsea Wolfe's second record which situates the title in the context of the Greek alphabet. It's pretty clear that the revelations that Chelsea Wolfe spills across her brilliant doom-folk album don't aspire to the allegories and mystical visions pronounced by David Tibet, rather she seems to be clamoring about the conditions leading up to the end of the world. With demonic possession, toxic wastelands, and haunted sexuality being so prevalent in her ghastly world view, it's no wonder she's bellowing that the end is near.
Wolfe's first record - The Grime And The Glow - was a home-recorded affair, whose tape murk added to the choking-on-smog atmosphere of the dour songs. The sparse arrangements aggressively strummed on acoustic guitar shot all of the attention back on Wolfe's beguiling voice which takes cues from PJ Harvey, but way darker and witchier. The songs did liken themselves to the early apocalyptic folk aesthetics of Sol Invictus and Current 93; and that's still the case for Apokalypsis, although she has fleshed out her sound with a full band, capable of delivering minimalist Goth ballads, swamp-rock menace, and harrowing bursts of distortion to match the mood of her songs. Wolfe twists the fairytail beginning of "Tracks (Tall Bodies)" into gritty depressive dirges, reflective of the goth sound of her native LA some two decades ago (e.g. Abecedarians, Kommunity FK, etc.). She also reprises two songs from The Grime And The Glow, including the infernal barnburner "Demons" and the antebellum blues number "Moses" which retains its minor-key mope and slavehouse misery. The stalking-in-the snow pace of "Pale On Pale" lurches at a pace even slower than that of True Widow, with Wolfe's mournful voice lifting above the churning, blackened guitars. There's a grit and a severity to Chelsea Wolfe that makes her a very compelling figure in contemporary music, almost like a musical reincarnation of The Process Church in neo-goth form. Very highly recommended.

DUNCAN, JOHN / Z'EV / MICHAEL ESPOSITO There Must Be A Way Across This River / The Abject (Fragment Factory) lp 24.00
Really fucking spooky! Of course, we wouldn't expect much less from John Duncan, whose sound research specifically seeks out the most intense of psychological states. As the most infamous case, Duncan's Blind Date performance piece tells of his presumed experience with necrophilia as a masochistic ritual for depositing his last seed in a dead body before undergoing a vasectomy. While the audio documentation of Blind Date is cold and precise in what it says, Duncan neither confirms nor denies any of the details beyond what is told in that recording. It could have been a fabrication; but he plants the idea that he *might* have broken the most significant taboo of human civilization. Since then, Duncan's psychological research through sound, visual art, and performance has become far more sophisticated in approach and content. For example, there's his convoluted Pynchonesque album Our Telluric Conversation with CM von Hausswolff, and there's the masterful recapitulation of the sounds from the Stanford Linear Accelerator into The Crackling - a cavernous, sublime electric chorale which magnify the smallest of particles into massive discordant drones.
There Must Be A Way Across This River was a performance / installation that Duncan presented inside a refrigerated basement at a performance hall in Bologna, where he presented a slow-developing soundtrack of arctic drones layered with darkly vibrating shortwave patterns, whispered declarations from Duncan himself, and these strange violent bursts of electronic noise. While he never stated this to be the case, we wonder if he demanded that the audience be naked, as he has done for a handful of his other claustrophobic, black-box performances. That might have been even too cruel for Duncan! The sounds of There Must Be A Way Across This River are relatively subtle for Duncan's catalogue of work, but they are darkly evocative, eerie, bleak, and ominously threatening. Another very strong piece in his ever impressive body of work.
The flip side of the record is a strange collaboration between Duncan, Z'ev, and the EVP hunter Michael Esposito. Originally, Esposito, Duncan, and the medium Heidi Harman set out to make recordings in Duncan's childhood home outside of Chicago. Despite making arrangements with one of the occupants at the house, they were refused access, all the while Esposito was recording their conversations. During those recordings, 18 EVP invocations occurred, one of which addresses Duncan by name - an allegation that Harman confirmed through her own psychic contact. These 18 invocations were then given over to Z'ev who manipulated them into a suitably frightening set of interwoven drones and spectral undulations. If that particular EVP citation of Duncan's name is on these recordings, Z'ev has thoroughly eradicated the syntax into a slippery, ectoplasmic sound. It's one of the best things we've heard from Z'ev outside his kinetic percussive assaults, and rounds out a terrifyingly great piece of wax!

CALDERA LAKES Arranged (Ecstatic Peace) cassette 9.98
Kevin Shields! There's a name that garners a lot of attention; and it's pretty obvious why Eva Aguila uses that moniker for her scalding noise ventures which she has broadcast up and down the West Coast. We're sure that a few must have stumbled into grimy warehouse noise shows expecting The Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine to be slumming it, instead to find a woman behind a table of pedals and some weird typewriter looking thing, all of which sizzle and shriek with a blaring electricity. So, if the ruse has ever drawn anybody in, were they pissed? Bemused? Hard to guess, but in addition to her activities as Kevin Shields, Aguila also records and performs in the duo Caldera Lakes with Brittany Gould. Here, they swing between deconstructed dream-time, avant-folk meanderings and full-on noise mode. Everything on this tape is swimming in a suitably lo-fi soup that could be the shittiness of this cassette (ostensibly a 'professional' duplication job) or the antique haze purposefully grafted onto the production. Detached folksongs strummed in monotone on guitar, with spluttered events, eerie tones, and haunted voices that drone-on creating a vibe that's not too far from those of Christina Carter or Grouper; but as these tracks proceed, convulsive noises ramp their activity from minor overloads on a four-track into concussion bomb explosions muffled through the constant gauze of tape hiss. Elsewhere, percussive scrabblings trickle through a multitude of delay pedals, forming stoned / hypnogogic patterns in keeping with some of the early experiments by Zoviet France (e.g. Eostre, Signal Gesture Threat, etc.). Static electricity cracks the ether around these phasing delays gradually building into another swelling cloud of ominous charged particles. Limited to 100 copies!

SLEEP OVER Forever (Hippos In Tanks) lp 16.98
Finally, we got enough of these to list, the darkly dreamy lp debut of Stefanie Franciotti's hazy and gauzy solo outfit, Sleep Over. A new light in the field of female-led synthesization, a la Laurel Halo and Maria Minerva, Sleep Over is a stunning mix of Grouper's washed out and oceanic distortion, Cocteau Twins-ish pop romanticism and uncanny gothic dream soundtrack. We've been fans of Franciotti since her days as singer in aQ faves, Silver Pines, but in Sleep Over she has found her true calling as an experimental sound composer, synthesizing voice and sound in chillingly bright sonic environments and ambient textures. Gorgeous!
MPEG Stream: "Romantic Streams"
MPEG Stream: "Casual Diamond"
MPEG Stream: "Cryingame"

REED, RICK The Way Things Go (Elevator Bath) 2lp 25.00
BACK IN STOCK!!!
The Way Things Go is a very impressive electro-static drone anthology documenting a bunch of barely released material from the Texas gear junkie Rick Reed. This is a man who's been tinkering with vintage synths, shortwave radio, and sinewave generators for well over 25 years, work from the classic progressive electronic sound of the likes of Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler, through the nihilism of the post-industrialists (e.g. MB, Arcane Device, John Duncan, etc.), and into post-noise constructs of liquid psychedelia from Emeralds and all of their satellite projects. In so many ways, this could have found a nice home on John Elliott's Spectrum Spools imprint, but Reed stays with the ever impressive Elevator Bath.
There is some overlap between this collection and the self-published Celestial Mudpie album that Reed issued a couple years back. In particular, there's Reed's very evocative and chilling soundtrack to the Ken Jacobs film Capitalism: Child Labor that is an intense piece of tonal vibration, slipping from Andromeda Strain styled pulses upon rotating layers of a atonal hums, arching drones, and nervous lines of analogue static. Another high profile soundtrack is "Hidden Voices Pt 1." which was composed for the Hermann Nitsch gallery exhibit "The Orgies Mysteries Theater" in Houston back in 2005. This track contains the bloodcurdling atonality that Nitsch composes for his own aktions, but Reed twists the stratified dissonance with deep space blorp, shards of Birchville-esque distortion, and shortwave SSB detunings. The whole album follows suit with muffed static cracklings amidst radioactive clouds of analogue fired tone float, sulking at times into a melancholy atmosphere but always immensely complex. Very highly recommended stuff, and yes this does come with a download card. Nice.
MPEG Stream: "Capitalism : Child Labor"
MPEG Stream: "Hidden Voices Part 1"
MPEG Stream: "In A Hazy Field Of Green & Grey"

CRONIN, MIKAL s/t (Trouble In Mind) cd 11.98
Yay, after a brief delay, last week's Record Of The Week is now available on cd!!! (And it's now a proper cd, not a cd-r like they pressed originally, though the packaging is fairly no-frills.)
Here's what we said: Up until now, SF garage popper Mikal Cronin seemed to exist mostly as sideman, his name usually following an ampersand, which in turn seemed to typically be preceeded by the name Ty Segall. Thus most of our experiences with Cronin had been the duo of Segall & Cronin, and everything we had heard we dug, a LOT, but it was hard to tell what exactly Cronin was bringing to the table, but listening to this now, seems the answer is EVERYTHING! And as much as we love Ty Segall, we're thinking that maybe much of that garage pop magic was coming from the other side of the ampersand, cuz WOW is this record totally great. Anyone at all into the SF garage pop scene, Thee Oh Sees, the Fresh & Onlys, Ty Segall, Bare Wires, etc, will go absolutely nuts for this. And if this record doesn't immediately catapult Cronin into the spotlight, then there's something very very wrong with the world. A perfect blend of sunshiney jangle, garagey fuzz, paisley pop and noisy psychedelia. And for all the warped fuzz and reverbed drunched lo fi crunch of his peers, it seems Cronin has much more of a pure pop heart. That pure pop is however gloriously corrupted by little bits of wild flute flecked freakouts, strange horns, noise rock jams, and whatever else struck Cronin's fancy it seems, yet whatever sonic weirdness Cronin adds to the mix, it never sound gratuitous, it always sounds like an organic part of the song and the sound, and without fail, the song is crazy catchy, and the sound is fantastically lush and psychedelic and utterly ruling.
The first track manages to sum it up pretty perfectly. Starting with some dreamy Beach Boys a cappella harmonies, then some big distorted guitar crunch, pounding drums, before slipping right into some dreamy almost folky jangle, acoustic guitar strum, fuzzy bass, sweet vocal harmonies and HOOKS FOR DAYS, like the best song the Fresh & Onlys never wrote, but a little bit more twisted and a little bit more Byrds / paisley pop, but with plenty of crunch and fuzz, a little bit proggy in its arrangement, and then out of nowhere, with about a minute left, the song explodes into a double time pounding psych rock blow out, complete with jagged guitar crunch and a wild flute freakout (coutresy of John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees). We've probably listened to that song 50 times since we got this in.
But once we dug deeper, we realized that pretty much every song here is an absolute gem, "Apathy" with it's start/stop acoustic strum, wild feedback, and total classic pop hooks (reminding us melodically of The Olivia Tremor Control actually), "Green And Blue", with it's thick crunch droned out guitar buzz, dirgey drumming, thick blown out wall of sound and wild tangle of psychguitar freakout, "Get Along", which is another acoustic guitar driven chunk of practically perfect dreampop, rife with sweet harmony vox and some cool tripped out backwards psych guitar melodies, "Slow Down", a lo-fi, organ driven ballad, all stretched out drones and fuzzy reverbed vox, "Gone", another crunchy, riff heavy rocker, that should have Thee Oh Sees fans frothing at the mouth. And so it goes, the perfect mix of modern garage pop and classic indie jangle, and some of THEE best songs EVER. This week's list is chock full of contenders for pop record of the year, but if any of the other ones are gonna come out on top, this is gonna be the one to beat.
MPEG Stream: "Is It Alright?"
MPEG Stream: "Green & Blue"
MPEG Stream: "Apathy"
MPEG Stream: "Get Along"

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

V/A The Hidden Tapes (Minimal Wave) lp 26.00
Now here on vinyl too, we know you want it!!
Lost Tapes, then Found Tapes, and now Hidden Tapes. As good as many of the reissues that Minimal Wave has released, it's their compilations that really shine. Here, those obscurant new wave / post punk obsessives offer a great collection of urgent synth blorp from all over the world and all dating from the early '80s. Very few of these tracks had much in the way of distribution or fanfare whatsoever, and that makes the discovery all the better. There's only a couple of the acts that we had any familiarity with, and we're probably not alone in that assessment. The opening number by SS-Say is one of the tracks we had heard, being featured on the CD reissue of the Pesteg Dreg album, as both bands were led by the Danish synth-mastermind Martin Hall. "Care" is a mega-watt anthem of oversaturated synth lines and euro-pop danceability that lusts after the New Order production of Blue Monday with more cocaine and dark theatricality tossed in for good measure. Every thing else on the compilation is considerably more understated in terms of production quality (and following the branding of 'minimal wave' all the more), with high caliber tracks offered on the Normal / Human League anxious bleep from the Yugoslavian project Oskarova Fobija and the insistent synth-chanting of Danton's Voice. The British duo Robert Lawrence and Mark Phillips take up a friendlier version of early SPK / Nocturnal Emissions monophunk sequencing with transitor radio vocals and speed-simulating circuitry. Things turn toward the ultra-minimal side with the bittersweet melodicism of The Fast Set and Reserve's proto-italo disco number, sporting an icy vocal detachment that would make Johnny Jewel jealous. The CD features two bonus tracks not on the vinyl including Gary Allen's weird science sequencing and goofy lyricism that looks to Devo and Oingo Boingo. Another tip of the hat goes to Minimal Wave for this one!
MPEG Stream: SS-SAY "Care"
MPEG Stream: DANTON'S VOICE "I Hear The Bells"
MPEG Stream: ROBERT LAWRENCE + MARK PHILLIPS "Computer Bank"
MPEG Stream: RESERVE "Destination Pour L'Inconnu"

BEE MASK Elegy For Beach Friday (Spectrum Spools / Editions Mego) cd 16.98
NOW ON CD!!!
Here stands the monumental sonic anthology, culled from the numerous cassettes and cd-rs that Chris Madak has released over the past decade or so, under the moniker Bee Mask. Like Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never, Madak is single-minded in his retrogarde aesthetic for synthesized compositions based on a vintage 1970s' cosmology. But where many of the '70s synth revivalists have coyingly adopted a full-fledged new age aesthetic through effervescent prettiness and soft-focus ambient swirl, Bee Mask offers up his own dysptopic take on psychedelic electronics through a crucible of cracked circuits, tape splutter, infernal field recordings, and a hell of a lot of sustained synth drones oscillating into crescendos of dissonant thumming. The zoner tracks on Elegy For Beach Friday (and there are a number of them) never sit in the background seeking a sublimated hypnosis, rather Madak zooms in on the placid pools of sound to unveil intense percolations and swarming vibrations. There's a scientific rigor to his pieces that finds Bee Mask orbiting around the dense, alienating electronics from Matt Shoemaker, Rick Reed, and Bernard Parmigiani. But, Madak is also one to tease with the subtle swelling melodies that harken to the more emotive works from Omit and Emeralds. If his work shares anything with the retro electronic tapestries that are the forgotten soundtracks for a summer sunset, Madak would rather blind the audience with the intensity of the sun, complete with blisters on the skin and technological mishaps from sunspots. Brilliant!
MPEG Stream: "Deducted From Your Share In Paradise"
MPEG Stream: "Askion Kataskion Lix Tetrax Damnameneus Aision"
MPEG Stream: "Stop The Night"
MPEG Stream: "Scarlet Thread, Golden Cord"

HTRK Work (Work, Work) (Ghostly International) cd 12.98
It's a bleak world for HTRK, as tragedy and death has surrounded this outfit which has only been around for a couple of years. In 2010, the band's bassist Sean Stewart committed suicide and the producer of their haunted album Marry Me Tonight, Rowland S. Howard died of cancer a year earlier. All of these elements make a connection to The Birthday Party almost inevitable, especially given their historical mirroring in relocation from Melbourne to Berlin and the manifestation of the id through a very raw sound. But where The Birthday Party was an expression of violence, HTRK are in constant search of desire, occasionally finding it only to have it frustratingly fizzle out before anything ecstatic can be achieved. As a result, HTRK's sensual bleariness is in an emotional feedback loop that never can spiral beyond the longing for sex, love, a relationship, etc, without anything ever attained. HTRK's existential portraits of being trapped by one's own desires are in direct opposition to the hedonism found in most electronica. Here on Work (Work, Work), the band parallels some of the horror-affected reverberation of the flash-in-the-pan Witch House crowd; but instead of drawing on unremembered memories of the forgotten '80s, HTRK has profound pain to draw upon... and they want their audience to feel that too.
The band had been shifting their sound even before Stewart's death, with a greater reliance on electronics and subharmonic tones girding the spindly guitar work from Nigel Yang and the self-composed breathiness of Jonnine Standish. They were moving away from the rock trio and towards a miasma of voice, guitar, bass, and electronics with boundaries between these sounds far more permeable. The closest references to HTRK's sound would be Ike Yard and Dome, although HTRK are much more interested in building tension with their teasing melodicism through their droning electronics. The first track on the album features a weird collage that Stewart had made of late nite TV sex ads in Berlin amidst slow-motion sighs caught in a half-melodic drone and crawling drum machine pulse. "Eat Yr Heart" ramps a quarter-speed Giorgio Moroder sequence above heroin paced rhythm with Jonnine crooning a sultry melody counterpointed by breathy exhalations. Sexually charged yes, but more of a downward spiral into dejection rather than release. "Poison" is more in keeping with the bass and guitar structures found on Marry Me Tonight, with Sean Stewart's bass clearly present next to the twilight flickering drone-riffs from Yang. "Body Double" overhauls Suicide's classic sound of metallic synth / drum interplay with undulating melodies that stretch into a magnificent coda of cascading melancholy for what amounts to a masterful album. Highly recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Ice Eyes Eis"
MPEG Stream: "Eat Yr Heart"
MPEG Stream: "Poison"
MPEG Stream: "Body Double"

HTRK Work (Work, Work) (Ghostly International) lp 17.98
It's a bleak world for HTRK, as tragedy and death has surrounded this outfit which has only been around for a couple of years. In 2010, the band's bassist Sean Stewart committed suicide and the producer of their haunted album Marry Me Tonight, Rowland S. Howard died of cancer a year earlier. All of these elements make a connection to The Birthday Party almost inevitable, especially given their historical mirroring in relocation from Melbourne to Berlin and the manifestation of the id through a very raw sound. But where The Birthday Party was an expression of violence, HTRK are in constant search of desire, occasionally finding it only to have it frustratingly fizzle out before anything ecstatic can be achieved. As a result, HTRK's sensual bleariness is in an emotional feedback loop that never can spiral beyond the longing for sex, love, a relationship, etc, without anything ever attained. HTRK's existential portraits of being trapped by one's own desires are in direct opposition to the hedonism found in most electronica. Here on Work (Work, Work), the band parallels some of the horror-affected reverberation of the flash-in-the-pan Witch House crowd; but instead of drawing on unremembered memories of the forgotten '80s, HTRK has profound pain to draw upon... and they want their audience to feel that too.
The band had been shifting their sound even before Stewart's death, with a greater reliance on electronics and subharmonic tones girding the spindly guitar work from Nigel Yang and the self-composed breathiness of Jonnine Standish. They were moving away from the rock trio and towards a miasma of voice, guitar, bass, and electronics with boundaries between these sounds far more permeable. The closest references to HTRK's sound would be Ike Yard and Dome, although HTRK are much more interested in building tension with their teasing melodicism through their droning electronics. The first track on the album features a weird collage that Stewart had made of late nite TV sex ads in Berlin amidst slow-motion sighs caught in a half-melodic drone and crawling drum machine pulse. "Eat Yr Heart" ramps a quarter-speed Giorgio Moroder sequence above heroin paced rhythm with Jonnine crooning a sultry melody counterpointed by breathy exhalations. Sexually charged yes, but more of a downward spiral into dejection rather than release. "Poison" is more in keeping with the bass and guitar structures found on Marry Me Tonight, with Sean Stewart's bass clearly present next to the twilight flickering drone-riffs from Yang. "Body Double" overhauls Suicide's classic sound of metallic synth / drum interplay with undulating melodies that stretch into a magnificent coda of cascading melancholy for what amounts to a masterful album. Highly recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Ice Eyes Eis"
MPEG Stream: "Eat Yr Heart"
MPEG Stream: "Poison"
MPEG Stream: "Body Double"

PESTEG DRED / SS-SAY 1981-1985 I Have Seen You Through The Years, Worn By Different Faces (Optik) cd 15.98
Martin Hall appears to be the figure who defined the Danish New Wave scene, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that any of the projects he worked in found much traction outside of Denmark. Ballet Mecanique was one such project, And Then Again was another; of course, there were a couple of solo outings too. Both Pesteg Dred and SS-Say were very short-lived projects in the early '80s. Pesteg Dred was a trio that revolved around Hall in 1981 with electronics wrangler Per Hendrichsen and vocalist Inge Shannon. During one weekend, the three landed in a studio and banged out an album but didn't have the ability to pay the bill. So the tapes sat until Hall could negotiate something with the owners of the studio. A cassette of the material surfaced as a bonus with an art magazine in 1985, but otherwise, the recordings languished while all three members went onto other projects.
The dark storm of post-punk had certainly come to Denmark, with Hall admitting an early infatuation with Cabaret Voltaire and A Certain Ratio (well, he did name one of his later projects And Then Again after an A Certain Ratio tune), but The Pop Group and The Ex must have made a big impact as well. The band is essentially a mutant rhythm section of rumbling, discordant funk basslines and unschooled percussive fills that showcase way more fury than skill, with a series of weirdly skittered electronics flushed between the rhythms with murky modular sweeps, distorted drones, and delay-rippled bloop. Inge's vocals are a cold monotone bellow that aren't too far from Bettina Koster of Malaria, making a perfect fit for the darkly, cacophonous agit-punk of Pesteg Dred. The lengthy "Light, More Light" is very much in the vein of the best A Certain Ratio, with breakneck post-disco rhythm, neck-strangling basslines, jittery guitars, and even some atonal blurts from a trumpet.
SS-Say released only one single in 1985, and that material rounds out the cd. Here, Hall is working again with Inge Shannon, for a more baroque, anthemic number wrought with Siouxsie-esque operatics and wah-wah guitar scratching above the catwalk disco rhythms. With its cocaine strung synths, "Care" is definitely the gem amongst the SS-Say tracks, which showcase much more polish as a Studio 54 / Batcave hybrid than Pesteg Dred, but with just as much post-punk bombast.
The Pesteg Dred material was reissued by Dark Entries on vinyl in 2010, and now it's available on cd for the first time with the SS-Say tracks that didn't appear on the lp reish.
MPEG Stream: PESTEG DRED "Salt"
MPEG Stream: PESTEG DRED "Cold Impressions Of Perhaps"
MPEG Stream: PESTEG DRED "Almost"
MPEG Stream: SS-SAY "Care"

CINDYTALK Hold Everything Dear (Editions Mego) 2lp 29.00
Prior to Hold Everything Dear, the resurrected Cindytalk had been the work of Gordon Sharp sitting down at his computer by himself to experiment with digital glitches and abstracted electronic drones. The Crackle Of My Soul from 2009 felt more like the first fruits of Sharp wrangling with his ideas in a digital environment with a few too many compositional rough edges that were in need of refinement. Up Here In The Clouds was a marked improvement through the glassine drones and fizzing noise; but Hold Everything Dear is the first Cindytalk album that truly feels like it has a connection to those brilliant post-punk records from the early '80s. While Sharp hasn't returned to the noise-rock abjection of Camoflage Heart and he has yet to sing on any of these recent albums, the fragmented smears from bowed metals, haunted clanging bells, watery field recordings, and impressionist piano of Hold Everything Dear harken to those post-noise ambient constructions found on the Eno-esque album Wind Is Strong and which concluded In This World. Many of the cavernous sounds on the album are probably sourced from the late Matt Kinnison, who had been Cindytalk's bassist since 1982 and who died in 2008. Sharp has cast a bleary atmosphere throughout the album through subterranean passages of sodden drones, cobwebbed dark elegance, and decayed textures. Sharp pocks this album with plenty of piano interludes whose somber half melodies and shadowy ambience are pulled from the same mold as those earlier piano works. They were beautiful then, and they are still beautiful now.
MPEG Stream: "In Dust To Delight"
MPEG Stream: "Fly Away Over Here"
MPEG Stream: "From Rokko-San"
MPEG Stream: "I See You Uncovered"

BESTIAL MOUTHS Hissing Veil (Dais) lp 21.00
The bloodletting goth-punk of LA's Bestial Mouths is likely to find black-clad company with contemporaries like Zola Jesus and Chelsea Wolfe, but this outfit harnesses a creative dualism between voice and drums that's a unique take on what Siouxsie and Budgie had done so brilliantly for so many years in the Banshees and Creatures. Vocalist Lynette Cerezo shrieks, barks, and howls between the operatic vibrato that reaches for the atavistic bellowing that's something of a cross between Diamanda Galas and Rozz Williams of Christian Death. Ebrahim Saleh's percussion is hardly the death-disco that's so often heard from goth drummers, but more of a splattercore punk likened to a No Wave version of Crass regressing at times to caveman pummelling. Christopher Myrick's synths fill in the blanks, and often do get upstaged by the spiralling dynamism between Cerezo and Saleh with all of their car-crash stops and thunderous stomps. Where many of the songs on Hissing Veil are short sharp blasts of feral energy, Bestial Mouths settles into an effectively infernal dirge that's equivalent to Lydia Lunch ripping apart The Cure's Pornography and leaving the parts ugly and abused in some forgotten alleyway. A great addition to the Dais catalogue of recordings!

BERNIER, NICOLAS Usure.Paysage (Hronir) cd 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
This hot shit musique concrete album is now available on cd! There are so many stuffy compositions and constructions that look back to the salad days of tape experimentation in the '50s and '60s. Works can get so conceptual with each sound being meant to allude to some particular phrases of Beckett or recapitulate the Merz of Schwitters that the interplay between this found sound and that electronic blorp is totally lost amidst a dull and boring concoction that serves little more than an execution of a grant application. This is certainly not the case for Canadian composer Nicolas Bernier, whose dexterous yet ominous concrete album has landed in the good hands of Hronir, a label which has a small catalog of brutal collage artists (e.g. Sudden Infant, Raionbashi, GX-Jupitter Larssen) to accompany more oblique voices from the academic world. While Bernier's work isn't nearly as toxic as those jackbooted noiseniks, his compositions are wholly discomforting, and we mean that in the best possible way. Within the avant-garde pantheon, Bernier's work follows that of Michel Chion and Luc Ferrari doing their finest work, through dynamic juxtapositions blurting concrete sounds (bellowing car horns, steam engine growls, leaden explosions, etc.) against unsettled atmospheres and spackled dronings that start and stop with a series of repeating punctuations not unlike the strategy that Nurse With Wound mastered on Homotopy To Marie. He's aware of the cinematic urge for acousmatic works, and pushes "Les chambres de l'atelier" towards a Lynchian noir with a soft-focus melody warbling in the background to a series of crunched abrasions and eerie footsteps, ruptured by ghostly noises. Excellent, through and through!
Oh! The cd is super limited to 150 copies (and no, it's not a cd-r!), comes with a 9-minute bonus track (not listed on the artwork, though), and is housed in the same 12" sleeve as the LP.
MPEG Stream: "Paysages Articules No. 4"
MPEG Stream: "10 Passages"
MPEG Stream: "Les Chambres De L'atelier"

RODEN, STEVE ...I Listen To The Wind That Obliterates My Traces: Music In Vernacular Photographs 1880-1955 (Dust-To-Digital) 2cd + book 49.00
With the first track on this anthology being a recording of wind from a 1935 sound effects record, AQ beloved sound artist Steve Roden makes a very literal introduction to I Listen To The Wind That Obliterates My Traces. Released by Dust-To-Digital, this beautifully constructed hardback book filled with images both from and ephemeral to Roden's collection of 78s, as well as two discs worth of sounds from that antique vinyl. Yeah, the idea is pretty much the same as what the Climax Golden Twins presented via Dust-To-Digital on their also-awesome Victrola Favorites anthology a few years back; but Roden's collection trends more to the mid-part of the 20th Century and is focused on Americana (including a couple of Hawaiian tracks made before the islands were granted statehood). Following that crackled recording of the wailing wind from that sound effects record, is the unmistakable voice of John Jacob Niles, the 'mountain tenor' whose spooky falsetto and maudlin melodic wanderings predated Devendra Banhart by a good 60 years... Afterwards, there's plenty of bluesmen, blueswomen, gospel belters, Appalachian balladeers, and barbershop crooners, many of which seem quite world-weary in singing their tales of lust, money, and liquor (or the lack thereof). Some of the names are familiar to us (e.g. Clara Smith, Roy Smeck, Sol Hoopii), but there are plenty of anonymous recordings from home-cut discs as well. The arrangements for many of the songs tend to be very sparse, just voice and guitar is pretty much all you get on every track; and the album is dotted with tracks from antique sound effects records of birds, ice, and even "night noises!" For those of you aware of Roden's own compositions of understated field recordings, quiet ruminations on found objects, and soft looping techniques, this shouldn't be a big surprise.
The vintage photos inside this 184 page book are completely lovely, with all of their rumpled edges, ruddy patinas, and cracked surfaces, with some far more poignant - such as the shot of a bunch of violas suspended outside in the sun perhaps to allow a coat of shellac to dry. There's the silhouette of G.J. Jessup decked out in his one-man drum and bugle corps regalia, and the glum looking fellow with the unkempt mustache leaning against his Funnygraph contraption (sadly, there's no corresponding recording for either photograph). Pages and pages of interesting images to provoke curiosity and evoke reverie. Altogether, Roden has compiled over 150 photos and 51 tracks for this stunning document of sonic obsession from Dust-To-Digital! Hard to imagine NOT wanting this.
MPEG Stream: HMV WEATHER EFFECTS "Wind"
MPEG Stream: JOHN JACOB NILES "John Henry"
MPEG Stream: ANONYMOUS HOME RECORDING "Mandolin"
MPEG Stream: GENNETT SOUND EFFECTS "Rainfall And Thunder"
MPEG Stream: CLARA SMITH "My Good Fur Nuthin' Man"

OMIT Interceptor (The Helen Scarsdale Agency) 2cd 17.98
BACK IN STOCK!!! Omit is the longstanding project of New Zealand's finest electron technician Clinton Williams, who dropped out of high school close to two decades ago and holed himself up in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere New Zealand to wrangle with analogue synthesizers, 8-track tape decks, unruly drum machines, and a small army of effects pedals. There was a time in the '90s when Williams' output was ridiculously prolific, through countless cassettes in tiny editions and a handful of lathe-cut singles. His work caught the attention of the Dead C's Bruce Russell, who was so taken by Williams' work that he collaborated with the man as Dust/Omit and released a handful of discs through Russell's seminal Corpus Hermeticum imprint. Upon the release of the 1997 3cd boxset Quad, Williams' Omit project began to slow down tremendously. The quality of work had certainly continued, but the wealth of releases was considerably diminished. In 1999, there was Interior Desolation, brilliant with its squealing pigs adding to electronic claustrophobia. Then Anomalous released Rejector in 2002; and Helen Scarsdale had the honor of releasing the epochal darkness of Tracer (2005), and now the skeletal rhythmicist drones on Interceptor.
Working in isolation has lead Williams to develop a language which is entirely his own, yet exhibits a curious convergent evolution with many of the other greats in DIY electronics - most notably Chris Carter from his days in Throbbing Gristle, Mika Vainio and his early hyper-minimal phaseshifting experiments in post-techno, and the gaping proto-industrial paranoia of Klaus Schulze. His work is simultaneously ponderously huge and effortlessly simple, as his sounds hover along intertwining sweeps of synthetic ambience grafted to simple rhythmic structures. The saddest melodies in the world poke through Omit's cold and barren surfaces, accenting the isolationist tendencies already inherent in these sounds. Interceptor is a slight detour in the Omit aesthetic, and the detour was by design as Williams had ventured outside of his hometown of Blenheim in search of a job. But he also brought two suitcases of gear with him to continue his recording. The frustrations he felt in his failure to secure employment are matched in the bleak gestures found on Interceptor. Williams had stripped away much of the grandiose sweeps of ambience and shadow, leaving behind a life-support system grid of overlapping, phase-shifted blip and click. An undertow of hypnotic tonalities pulls those rhythms towards a crepuscular gloom, which as with all of Omit's work are effortless in their compositional appearance. Anybody, and we mean ANYBODY, who has a passing interest in electronic music - contemporary, historic, surreal, arcane, Warp-ish, Kompakt-ish, or otherwise - has got to do themselves a favor and investing the time into Omit. The rewards are infinite from this under recognized, autodidactic genius.
MPEG Stream: "LockNut Shadow"
MPEG Stream: "POD 4 Lander"
MPEG Stream: "Loop ReBounder"
MPEG Stream: "SkiMMEr"

SHOEMAKER, MATT Tropical Amnesia One (Ferns) cd 15.98
In the handful of exceptional records from concrete/drone composer Matt Shoemaker, the field recording has been central to his work. Take the aggregate tumblings of minerals from Groundless or the woozy humidity from Spots In The Sun, Shoemaker's use of the field recording in his pieces is miles apart from the pastoral use of bird songs or a gentle rainstorm to offer something 'natural' for an electronic ambient record. No, Shoemaker amplifies the more threatening aspects of nature with insects emitting nightmarish chorales, beetles aggressively scurrying towards hapless prey, and the air of a landscape so heavy and pungent with decay as to be impossible to breathe. For Shoemaker, the world may be nasty, brutish, and short; but he's discovering a weird beauty way out there amidst the grotesqueries of the world.
On the last two records from Shoemaker, a greater emphasis on synthesized psychedelia shot through his tense drone constructs; so with Tropical Amnesia One, Shoemaker has built an album that's just field recordings, without much of the atypical filtering, gizmos, and effects that turn Shoemaker's studio into a scientific laboratory. All of these recordings came from a two week residency Shoemaker spent deep in the Amazon forest, where silence was never afforded amidst the constant buzz of insects, torrential cloudbursts, and burbling streams all teeming with life. Watery sounds introduce the first 20 minutes to this album with all sorts of sodden creaks, slurping movements, and mud-sucking events amassed together. It's as if the vantage point to Shoemaker's sounds were just below the surface of a stagnant body of water next to a muddy embankment, crawling with leeches, skin-breaching worms, and any other parasitic creature that might come to mind. Shoemaker then shifts his attention for the remaining 44 minutes upward to the tops of the trees, where the insects have conspired to broadcast an ominous nocturnal hiss worthy of horror film sound design. A few insects and birds puncture the swarming noise, making the environment seem a lot less threatening than Shoemaker has contextualized it to be. A powerful, sublime recording, and what looks like to the be first in a series of recordings from the Amazon.
MPEG Stream: "Tropical Amnesia One [excerpt 1]"
MPEG Stream: "Tropical Amnesia One [excerpt 2]"
MPEG Stream: "Tropical Amnesia One [excerpt 3]"

MOTION SICKNESS OF TIME TRAVEL Luminaries & Synastry (Digitalis) lp + cd 24.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Motion Sickness Of Time Travel is the spellbinding synth and voice project of Georgia's Rachel Evans. Up until late 2010, she had released a bunch of tiny edition cassettes and cd-rs through her Hooker Vision imprint, after which her work caught the attention of Digitalis, who released the highly acclaimed album Seeping Through The Veil Of The Unconscious. So acclaimed in fact, that all of three pressings of that album went out of print before we had a chance to wax poetic about the record on our list. It's easy to hear why Motion Sickness Of Time Travel would cause such a stir, as there's something to the easy quip that Rachel Evans is a synth version of Grouper. Evans deconstructs an ethereal pop down to hypnotic looping synth structures and her own whispering voice, all the edges are blurred and softened to a heavenly, glowing gaseousness. Her synth applications typically build from glistening arpeggios and sustained church organ tones, giving many of her arrangements a levitating, Kosmische touch considerably more vaporous in her psychedelic visions than the likes of Emeralds and Oneohtrix in her Cluster fixation. Yet, tracks like the aptly named "Day Glow" eagerly appropriate tone-bent melodies and acid-squelchiness from post-rave ambient engineers (think back to Future Sound Of London), suspended amongst the reverb glide of her breathy vocals. Then there's the oceanic and mysterious drone-waltz found on the lysergically titled "The Walls Were Dripping With Stars" which flickers with backmasked vocalizations and intermittently dubbed out whisperings. Luminaries & Synastry is a real gem; and if past performance is indicative of anything, this album will not be around terribly long. The lp comes with a cd of all the material found on the vinyl, plus a couple of a extra tracks.
MPEG Stream: "Late Day Sun Silhouettes"
MPEG Stream: "Day Glow"
MPEG Stream: "Like Dunes"

BEE MASK Elegy For Beach Friday (Spectrum Spools) 2lp 27.00
BACK IN STOCK!!
Here stands the monumental gatefold double vinyl anthology, culled from the numerous cassettes and cd-rs that Chris Madak has released over the past decade or so, under the moniker Bee Mask. Like Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never, Madak is single-minded in his retrogarde aesthetic for synthesized compositions based on a vintage 1970s' cosmology. But where many of the '70s synth revivalists have coyingly adopted a full-fledged new age aesthetic through effervescent prettiness and soft-focus ambient swirl, Bee Mask offers up his own dysptopic take on psychedelic electronics through a crucible of cracked circuits, tape splutter, infernal field recordings, and a hell of a lot of sustained synth drones oscillating into crescendos of dissonant thumming. The zoner tracks on Elegy For Beach Friday (and there are a number of them) never sit in the background seeking a sublimated hypnosis, rather Madak zooms in on the placid pools of sound to unveil intense percolations and swarming vibrations. There's a scientific rigor to his pieces that finds Bee Mask orbiting around the dense, alienating electronics from Matt Shoemaker, Rick Reed, and Bernard Parmigiani. But, Madak is also one to tease with the subtle swelling melodies that harken to the more emotive works from Omit and Emeralds. If his work shares anything with the retro electronic tapestries that are the forgotten soundtracks for a summer sunset, Madak would rather blind the audience with the intensity of the sun, complete with blisters on the skin and technological mishaps from sunspots. Brilliant!

RAIONBASHI / DANIELA FROMBERG & STEFAN ROIGK Der Strick / Blowing Up The Master's Workshop (Senufo Edition) lp 23.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
When the fuck is Raionbashi going to release a proper album again? Daniel Lowenbruck (aka Raionbashi) has been releasing his work on various splits over the past couple of years following a 2006 lp on Hanson that nobody seems to have anymore. Even then, much of his output has been released in tiny editions, and this split on Senufo Edition is in an edition of 280 copies. Raionbashi operates within the transgressive art collective Schimpfluch-Gruppe alongside Sudden Infant, Dave Phillips, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, and G*Park, all of which mine the nether regions of the id for intensely claustrophobic collages of grim noise and post-Viennese Aktionism. For this split, Lowenbruck slumps into an occult almost doom-laden piece of ritualist gong strikes that certainly look back to Coil's How To Destroy Angels, but Lowenbruck slowly ramps up a smoldering, hypnotic squallor of discordant strings and uneasy field recordings with snippets of muffled vocals which seem in the midst of an unknown criminal act. Brilliantly creepy.
Daniela Fromberg & Stefan Roigk are multimedia artists hailing from Berlin, although little can be found regarding their intentions beyond their mutually crappy websites that only sport pretty pictures of their un-contextualized installations. Whatever these people are up to, it's a damn effective piece of acousmatic collage work, reflective in classic sound collage techniques found on Nurse With Wound's Homotopy To Marie, through the various bumps in the night and funhouse sound effects turned horrific and nightmarish. Arcane, oblique, haunting, and captivating. Fromberg & Roigk are an excellent foil to Raionbashi's dark ritual, and certainly should muster something else in the near future. Regardless, this is an excellent album of foreboding musique concrete.

V/A The Hidden Tapes (Minimal Wave) cd 19.98
Lost Tapes, then Found Tapes, and now Hidden Tapes. As good as many of the reissues that Minimal Wave has released, it's their compilations that really shine. Here, those obscurant new wave / post punk obsessives offer a great collection of urgent synth blorp from all over the world and all dating from the early '80s. Very few of these tracks had much in the way of distribution or fanfare whatsoever, and that makes the discovery all the better. There's only a couple of the acts that we had any familiarity with, and we're probably not alone in that assessment. The opening number by SS-Say is one of the tracks we had heard, being featured on the cd reissue of the Pesteg Dreg album, as both bands were led by the Danish synth-mastermind Martin Hall. "Care" is a megawatt anthem of oversaturated synth lines and Euro-pop danceability that lusts after the New Order production of Blue Monday with more cocaine and dark theatricality tossed in for good measure. Every thing else on the compilation is considerably more understated in terms of production quality (and following the branding of 'minimal wave' all the more), with high caliber tracks offered on the Normal / Human League anxious bleep from the Yugoslavian project Oskarova Fobija and the insistent synth-chanting of Danton's Voice. The British duo Robert Lawrence and Mark Phillips take up a friendlier version of early SPK / Nocturnal Emissions monophunk sequencing with transistor radio vocals and speed-simulating circuitry. Things turn toward the ultra-minimal side with the bittersweet melodicism of The Fast Set and Reserve's proto-Italo disco number, sporting an icy vocal detachment that would make Johnny Jewel jealous. The cd features two bonus tracks not on the vinyl including Gary Allen's weird science sequencing and goofy lyricism that looks to Devo and Oingo Boingo. Another tip of the hat goes to Minimal Wave for this one!
MPEG Stream: SS-SAY "Care"
MPEG Stream: DANTON'S VOICE "I Hear The Bells"
MPEG Stream: ROBERT LAWRENCE + MARK PHILLIPS "Computer Bank"
MPEG Stream: RESERVE "Destination Pour L'Inconnu"

WOLFE, CHELSEA The Grime And The Glow (Pendu Sound) lp 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Back in stock, just a few last copies!!
Yeah, she covered a Burzum song before releasing this album, but there's a hell of lot more to Chelsea Wolfe than copping a few moves from Mr. Vikernes. This Los Angeles minstrel has quipped she writes "spiritual realm funeral songs," and that's a pretty apt description given the acoustic guitar dourness, doom-laden atmospheres, grimy production values, and witchy goth-folk vocals that come together as the perfect hybridization of Zola Jesus and PJ Harvey. Her arrangements are pretty stripped down with little more than acoustic and / or electric guitar occasionally fleshed out with a rhythm section. She puts an outsider folk spin on her songwriting, as if she were penning acoustic black metal songs channeled through the freak-folk mysticism of Topanga Canyon. This also has a lot of similarities to the apocalyptic folk stylings of Death In June / Sol Invictus / Current 93 circa 1992 although Chelsea Wolfe is far less precious with the song and is not afraid to let some blood spill as she violently scrapes her knuckles on the guitar strings. In so many ways, what she does is so much better than what Douglas P and Tony Wakeford could conjure through their cryptic folk songs. The haunting "Cousins Of The Antichrist" is one track that effortlessly exceeds the songwriting achievements of those aforementioned British esoteric musicians, with the urgency of the violent strum on her acoustic guitar stuck in minor chords buttressing the soaring vocals.
Similarly, "Deep Talks" works its blown out 4-track recording of her grab-every-string-on-the-guitar-and-pull method of playing along with her wordless vocal delivery that's as impressionistic as Grouper, but with Grouper's narcolepsy replaced by night terrors. "Moses" (a track which interestingly follows "Cousins Of The Antichrist") plays on stomping Southern spirituals but turned ashen and turgid in pace and demeanor. And the album's closing number "Widow" is a bleak, half-whispered song mired in morose atmospheres and just the right amount of narcotic smoke and exhumed-from-a-swamp 4 track production values, sounding a lot like the criminally underappreciated Corpses As Bedmates (whose sole album was reissued under an entirely different band name - Venus Handcuffs, probably worsening things for the band, but we digress). The short of it is that Chelsea Wolfe's The Grime And The Glow is fucking great and marks another killer release in the growing catalogue of witchy releases by Pendu Sound, following an lp from Sasha Grey's Atelecine and a single from witch house maven Mater Suspiria Vision. Highly Recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Advice & Vices"
MPEG Stream: "Cousins of the Antichrist"
MPEG Stream: "Moses"

DRUMM, KEVIN Imperial Distortion (Hospital) 3lp 47.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
There had been rumors this album would get reissued on vinyl; thankfully, those rumors have proven true, as Kevin Drumm's epic Imperial Distortion is now on wax, pressed as a thick triple LP! Here's what we had to say about the album a while back...
In recent years, Chicago's Kevin Drumm has unleashed an impressive cacophony through a handful of recordings of gnarled distortion and tempestuous noise. Having collaborated with the black-clad noisemonger Prurient and the power electronic technician Lasse Marhaug, having released an album for Hanson Records, and having composed a kick-ass disc called Sheer Hellish Miasma should be enough to let you know what the man is capable of. But listen closely to each of those albums, you'll find hints of glinted melody and a subtle beauty just below the surface of the chainsaw buzz. Here on Imperial Distortion, Drumm focuses entirely upon the contemplative and introspective gestures in the form of the huge longform drones similarly embraced by Eliane Radigue, Andrew Chalk, BJ Nilsen, etc. Gone are the attack, the aggression, and the noise; but the dark, the doom, and the hellishness are what remains in these icy drones. His strategy is pure hypnosis through slippery layers of elongated electronic drones and bell-tone like resonance. On "Guillain-Barre," the subterranean gong clatter soaked in reverberation could easily tear themselves apart into digital chaos, but Drumm molds the gritty klank into an ominous dronedirge. This softening of potentially destructive sounds becomes Drumm's modus operandi, with each modulation toward excess pregnant with malcontent energy reigned in for a severely dark moodscaping. With the two parts of "Snow," Drumm sets up soft transmissions from controlled feedback undulating with a slow moving rhythmic pulse, which gradually doubles upon itself into a topographical drone with all of the same-but-different patterns of wind swept sand. Here, Drumm most recalls the unnerving minimalism through refined feedback manipulation that Nurse With Wound concocted on Soliloquy For Lilith. By the end of the record, the shadow and disease which could be read into some of the tracks at the front end of the album dissolve into a shimmering ambience that's just damn pretty.
Imperial Distortion was easily one of the best drone records of 2008.
MPEG Stream: "Guillain-Barre"
MPEG Stream: "More Blood And Guts"
MPEG Stream: "Snow (Part Two)"

CICCIOLINA HOLOCAUST / SERMONIZER Albeit Albeit / Sibelius Spiders (Forced Nostalgia) lp 21.00
Enter Forced Nostalgia - a label mining the post-punk underground of dark electronics. Judging from this release and their upcoming programming for "a wayward selection of often unreleased, mostly unheard and overlooked material from tape music to industrial, from bossa-pop to proto-techno, and from drone to out and out analogue experimentation," Forced Nostalgia looks to be something wholly different from Vinyl-On-Demand, Minimal Wave, and Dark Entries. The bands here are two terminally obscure Italian industrial outfits who made these recordings in the early '80s with a clear aesthetic framework set forward by the Industrial Records model of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Clock DVA, and Cabaret Voltaire. Cicciolina Holocaust's woozy cornet buried in the mix of murky rhythms and electronic arpeggiations certainly draw their inspiration from the early productions of Chris & Cosey (think Heartbeat and the collaborative single with John Duncan) and of course there's plenty of TG to be heard in the mix. There are a couple of exceptional minimal wave numbers with clockwork nocturnal techno modulations and super creepy windswept dronings, all of which have been expertly remastered and sound really amazing on this piece of vinyl. Sermonizer harkens from the same realm of spooky electronics, with weirdly plucked guitars working through tape-delay splutter which is more Illitch than TG. Cold radio detunings, dark meanderings of synth warble, and highly sexualized moans and groans flush out Sermonizer's contribution to the split. All of these tracks seem to have come from private cassettes handed out back in the day. This is an amazing find and whets our appetite for what else Forced Nostalgia will be offering in the years to come.

BERRY, KEITH The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish / Turn Right A Thousand Feet From Here (Infraction) 2cd 17.98
The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish was released back in 2005 by Jon Mueller's now defunct label Crouton, and it came packaged in slightly oversized cardboard box filled with dried flowers drenched in a silken perfume. While devoid of this smell-o-rama trickery, the much-needed reissue of Keith Berry's masterpiece of hallowed drone does come with an unreleased body of work as a bonus disc, which is just as good of The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish.
Here's what we had to say about the album way back when, and these words still ring true today: Berry defines his work through the teachings of Zen Buddhism and Sufi poetry, striving for an artform that could "unlock the mechanisms inside one's mind that leads to enlightenment." In doing so, Berry begins The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish with a series of unremarkable sounds which fall somewhere in the hushed white noise territories, possibly including the sound of a gentle spring shower or the empty spaces on shortwave bands. He molds these hisses, crackles, and shadows into subtle repeating forms which do, in fact, lend themselves to any number of images, metaphors, and ideas. Given that he landed his debut album on Trente Oiseaux, Berry's work falls in the lowercase school of ephemeral electronics alongside Steve Roden and Bernhard Gunter, but there is an antiquated tactility to his albums which hint at the same temporal netherworld as heard in Philip Jeck's avant-turntable melodramas. These seductively restrained compositions for quiet flickerings, muffled rumbles, and whispered reverberations truly captured our imagination.
Not to be confused with a track on his Twenty Hertz album whereby he instructs the listener to veer left, Turn Right A Thousand Feet From Here is a far more nocturnal album than The Ear with its enveloping shadows, snowblinded mirages, and slow-motion tumbling of obfuscated noises into half-melodic passages. One would be forgiven for thinking these recordings to be a lost Thomas Koner record around the time of Kaamos or Daikan. Both discs are completely mesmerizing and come with our highest recommendation.
MPEG Stream: "The Sun Rays Of Another Pale Afternoon"
MPEG Stream: "Cars Keep Passing By"
MPEG Stream: "My Backward Voyage"
MPEG Stream: "Untitled II"

KAHN, JASON Vanishing Point (23five) cd 14.98
Strange that we, of all people, didn't realize this before - the Jason Kahn who has been producing extraordinary minimalist compositions and beautifully subtle sound installations in recent years is the same Jason Kahn who had stints as the drummer for mid-'80s, SST bands Trotsky Icepick, The Leaving Trains (one of Andee's all time faves!), and Universal Congress Of. Believe it! Around 1990, Kahn moved to Europe, dropping out of the US art-punk / post-hardcore scene and effortlessly transitioning into the avant-garde improv community in Zurich. He soon began experimenting with feedback systems resonating within the architecture of his drum kit, discovering a vocabulary of noises that have become the building blocks for his current body of work. A man of numerous collaborations (Gunter Muller, Ralph Steinbruchel, Asher, Steve Roden, Kevin Drumm, Jon Mueller, Toshimaru Nakamura, etc.), solo Jason Kahn records don't happen ever so often; and this one on 23five is exquisite!
On Vanishing Point, Kahn's techniques shift a little bit from the feedback bouncing around the innards of his drum kit to a series of colored noises generated from his custom built, patch-bay synth. The album reveals itself as a subtle and hypnotic elegy for rattling metals, timbral vibration, gossamer static, hissing field recordings, and those aforementioned softened noises. Soon into the piece, Kahn introduces a flickered ghost of melody whose luminous tones manifest ever so slightly against his contrails of noise. The upper register hiss and statics of these layered noises slowly drop in pitch and frequency over the duration of the piece, revealing subharmonic rumblings and an oceanic current that tugs at the agitated textures of Kahn's surface noises. This glacial, minimalist shift renders Vanishing Point elegant and meditative.
For those familiar with the 23five catalogue, this fits snugly next to those awesome records on 23five from Jean-Francois Laporte and Tim Catlin, and for those who are not, the calm surfaces of Kevin Drumm, the crackled surface noise of Loren Chasse's Hedge Of Nerves, the spectral reflections from Alan Lamb's wire recordings, and even the placid side of Taiga Remains could be good sonic reference points for this excellent album.
MPEG Stream: "Extract 1"
MPEG Stream: "Extract 2"

VERTONEN We Had A Few Sprinkles Today, But Not Enough To Help Out In The Garden (Crippled Intellect Productions) cd 10.98
Chicago's power acoustician Blake Edwards has been recording as Vertonen for years now, with plenty of caustic noise and atonal hums that draw parallels to the likes of John Duncan, CM Von Hausswolff, and Joe Colley (who has released a number of works through Edwards' own C.I.P. imprint). Yet, this album is easily the most subtle production for Edwards, and it's almost as it he's gone out of his way to burnish away almost every plausible signifier to this album, leaving behind a stately drone construction of phased vibrations and bellowing rumbles. All he provides from the outset is a statement that his source material was culled from a tape made in 1979. While he doesn't come outright and say who made the tape, if you were to ask him (we did), he would honestly say that the tape was from Jonestown; and the title itself comes from the People's Temple book of shortwave radio codes, which is code for "this is not a code." His obfuscation of the source material was intended not to shroud the material further in occluded transgression, but an attempt to remove the potent sensationalism around the Jonestown massacre all the while trying to articulate his own metaphors of horror, control, and fear through an act of negation. The slowly developing passages of flickering, long-stare drones is thick with a creeping sense of dread, even as Edwards makes plenty of compositional gestures to the likes of Eliane Radigue and Roland Kayn. It's as if Edwards has erased everything from that Jonestown tape, except for feelings of tranced-out exhaustion and sun-bleached humidity from the People's Temple members who had left everything behind in the US to embark upon a utopian project that had already turned ugly but soon was to become tragic. This is probably Vertonen's best work to date and certainly comes recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Invocation"
MPEG Stream: "Jackal"
MPEG Stream: "High Silence Into The Winds"

V/A BART: Bay Area Retrograde (Vol. 1) (Dark Entries) lp 17.98
A few years back, Minimal Wave offered some choice crate digging collections of nearly forgotten darkwave and post-punk electronics through their Lost Tapes and Found Tapes collections, highlighting the differences between the European and American models of underground new wave. Dark Entries produced this anthology in that same tradition, focusing even more tightly on the geography of the Bay Area. As Johnny Ray Huston so rightly points out in the liner notes, San Francisco in the '80s had its own unique crucible of local events that shaped the Bay Area's particular sound (e.g. the assassination of Harvey Milk, the growing AIDS epidemic and the fear surrounding the disease, etc.). While there's none of the art-damaged abstraction filtered from The Residents, Snakefinger, or Tuxedomoon in an obvious lineage to the artists featured here, BART (named after the subway that connects Oakland, Berkeley, and other parts of the East Bay to San Francisco) is a great collection of quirky minimal wave electronics, with a fair amount of unreleased material from obscurant Bay Area new wave bands.
Nomimal State opens the compilation and was from the suburban hamlet of Danville, recording this demo 1983 with a militantly uptempo drum machine and urgent synth lines. It's a track that easily fits next to the likes of The Units and Nervous Gender in terms of manic, punkish use of electronics. Speaking of The Units, they round out the compilation in contributing their sci-fi pop anthem "Mission," which is still bitchin' after all these years! Voice Farm is the other 'big name' to appear on this compilation, contributing a sinewy darkwave number from their 1982 album "The World We Live In." Batang State, Quiet Room, and Necropolis Of Love offer more Joy Division / Wire / Kraftwerk atmospheric post-punk number with considerable panache. The Wasp Women were a crossdressing trash-punk outfit, whose demo featured a wastoid lo-fi number and had appeared in the 1982 film "What Ever Happened To Susan Jane." Danny Boy & The Serious Party Gods offer a fabulously campy disco number with suitably over-the-top raunchy lyrics that ramble on and on against anthemic synths. If there's one track that you need to hear from this compilation it's this one! But the whole collection is very well done, and comes highly recommended as with everything that Dark Entries releases.
MPEG Stream: NOMINAL STATE "Middle Class"
MPEG Stream: UNITS "Mission"
MPEG Stream: DANNY BOY & THE SERIOUS PARTY GODS "Castro Boy"
MPEG Stream: VOICE FARM "Voyeur"

CRYSTAL STILTS In Love With Oblivion (Slumberland) lp 14.98
Most folks around here have been pretty obsessed with Crystal Stilts, since their self titled 2008 debut on Woodsist. But there's definitely a been holdout or two among us. Who, while appreciating that Crystal Stilts were a decent band, didn't necessarily understand what the fuss was all about. That all changes with In Love With Oblivion, and those folks are definitely gonna have to reassess their opinion on those older records too, cuz EVERYone here has gone totally nuts for this new record. Including the previous nonbelievers. Not sure what exactly it is, their sound hasn't changed so dramatically, but there's just something about this record that's totally magical. Dark and brooding, low slung slithery gloom pop, that while lumped in with the current crop of Sacred Bones / Captured Tracks outfits, to these ears are way more beholden to Aussie groups like the Celibate Rifles, the Lime Spiders, the Scientists, the Saints, Radio Birdman, even the Hoodoo Gurus, maybe especially the Hoodoo Gurus. Which is weird, cuz these guys are from Brooklyn. But they have that twangy surf guitar, the Fuzztones style wheezing garage rock organ, everything hazy and reverby, and of course the vox, that's what really does it, deep and dramatic, commanding and intense but still melodic. Opener "Sycamore Tree" is a perfect example, a dead ringer for some lost Celibate Rifles jam, a minimal woozy groove, the percussion a propulsive shuffle, the guitars thick with twang and reverb, the bass dense and driving, and the vocals, the sort of singing that would go on to define noise rock outfits from down under like Lubricated Goat and Kingsnakeroost, eyes closed it feels like being in some dingy club in Australia in the early eighties, packed in like sardines, the sound deafening, the crowd rapt and sweaty, moving to the music, total zoner gloom pop post punk bliss.
Then there's the other side of the band, like on "Through The Floor" where they channel classic girl group sounds, but add their own twist, those deep crooned vox, the whirring organ, lots of sweet back up harmonies, and of course plenty of buzz and reverb. And so it goes, the band switching from shimmery sixties jangle, to dark brooding eighties post punk gloom pop, often melding the two. And while we love both sides of the band, it's the darker side that we find the most mesmerizing. Like on "Alien Rivers", a creepy crawl, all thick undulating organs, shuffling snares, spidery guitars, the vocals especially heavy with reverb and echo, the sound droned out and druggy, divinely hypnotic. And there's the woozy groovy stomp of "Prometheus At Large", classic rock and roll wrapped in murk and grit and grime, a sort of classic fifties style pop transformed into something much more sinister. Elsewhere there's plenty of jangle and shimmer, shuffle and buzz, "Flying Into The Sun" sounds like a lo-fi indie pop Interpol, "Precarious Stair" sounds like some fantastic union of Thee Oh Sees and the Vivian Girls, but with those crooned post punk vox, all the songs buzzy and hooky and heavy in their own way, slipping easily from indie pop to new wave to indie jangle but always infused with the Stilts' dark brood, and fuzzy wall of sound reverby shimmer, and all held together by some impossibly great and catchy songs, and of course those fantastic vocals.
Definite contender for record of the year, and a new unanimous aQ fave for sure!
MPEG Stream: "Sycamore Tree"
MPEG Stream: "Through The Floor"
MPEG Stream: "Silver Sun"

IMPLODES Black Earth (Kranky) lp 14.98
The debut album from Chicago's Implodes is a quintessential Kranky release. It's a darkly beautiful production of pop narcotic smeared in layers of shoegaze distortion, monochromatic psychedelia, and slumping atmospherics, harkening back to Kranky's early releases from Bowery Electric, Amp, and maybe even the first Labradford record. That said, Implodes does fit nicely in with the current Kranky roster of Belong and Tim Hecker as well, and moreso Disappears, as Implodes is a conventional rock quartet crafting their tuneful sludge balanced with radioluminosity through pedals and amps. Throughout the album's humid, smoldering fuzz and droned distortion, Black Earth perpetuates the creeping violence and midwestern depression, spoken through the album's cover art, a creepy photograph of a woman's silhouette brandishing a knife in a rather hostile pose. The suitably downer melodies and androgynously murmured vocals flicker amidst the muffled guitar haze like the best of all shoegaze acts, but unlike most who reference My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, or Ride, Implodes is more attuned to Flying Saucer Attack, Bailter Space, or even the desolate drone-rock of Higuma. Tracks like "Screech Owl" and "Experiential Report" slowly burn from downer acoustic strumming into the plodding rhythms and intertwining male / female vocal mumblings buried beneath the narcoleptic atmospheres of muffed guitar haze. But if there was to be a 'hit' on the album it would be "Meadowlands" with its disco-ping synth notes that must be a reference to Joy Division's "She's Lost Control" instead of anything remotely hedonistic. Out of all this fuzz and distortion, sad melodies and muffled androgynous vocals sing of woe and heartache with a psychic conviction that doesn't need anything explicit like lyrics. The music is perfect in delivering this bleak mood all on its own.
MPEG Stream: "Marker"
MPEG Stream: "Screech Owl"
MPEG Stream: "Meadowlands"

NILSEN, BJ & STILLUPPSTEYPA Big Shadow Montana (The Helen Scarsdale Agency) lp 16.98
Collaborations in the experimental scene come and go, so it's so great to see one that has some longevity. This is album number seven from BJ Nilsen and Stilluppsteypa, and the fourth released by the discerning Helen Scarsdale Agency label. Since this trio (Benny plus Sigtryggur and Helgi of Stilluppsteypa) unleashed their drunken drone trilogy through the aforementioned Agency, they've been venturing into all sorts of delirious bouts of murky psychedelic collages and imagined soundtracks. There were the weird ruminations upon a found cassette, turned into a mondo filmscore on Man From Deep River; and then the sci-fi opus of synth meanderings found on Space Finale. Now what may be the best to emerge since that earlier alcohol-inspired trilogy is this, the mercurial and hauntological album Big Shadow Montana. Two long-form pieces make up the album, with the A side standing as a hallucinatory foreshadowing of what is to come on the flip. Here, ghostly drones broadcast directly out of the haunted ballroom from The Shining, flickering with half-received transmissions, bumps in the night, and any number of other worldly sounds. Bits of structure emerge in this slow-motion churning of drone, shadow, and filigree coming across somewhere between the fucked up collages that seem to bring all of the Teenage Filmstars records to a close and the subterranean drone-rock sensibility of German Oak. When the record flips, a cosmic stream of vintage synths slump toward oblivion paralleling what has been done by Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never (both of whom have released work alongside this trio on Editions Mego), but before this can venture any further down the rabbit hole of Schnitzler and Schulze references, Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa slip into a faux-exotica guise with cheap Casiotone melodies swaying to and fro through old Les Baxter and Martin Denny records. It's a signature move for Stilluppsteypa, if anyone remembers how they mustered a similar strategy on The Best Possible Yet back in 1997. But the maudlin organ harmonies and percolating tone-bloop oscillations are much more confident here, emerging perfectly out of the drone fog like those organ-led numbers on that Deathprod boxset, only to slip into a twin engine thrum of inner-space expansion. In listening back to the second side of the album, it's clear that the first is a lengthy dub of the second, recast and recontextualized as a percussive ghost. Totally captivating through and through, and with a damn trippy cover sporting a vibrantly hypnotic, candy-colored mandala. Yup, it does have a download card. Yup, it is limited. Yup, it is highly recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Big Shadow Montana 1"
MPEG Stream: "Big Shadow Montana 2"

IMPLODES Black Earth (Kranky) cd 14.98
The debut album from Chicago's Implodes is a quintessential Kranky release. It's a darkly beautiful production of pop narcotic smeared in layers of shoegaze distortion, monochromatic psychedelia, and slumping atmospherics, harkening back to Kranky's early releases from Bowery Electric, Amp, and maybe even the first Labradford record. That said, Implodes does fit nicely in with the current Kranky roster of Belong and Tim Hecker as well, and moreso Disappears, as Implodes is a conventional rock quartet crafting their tuneful sludge balanced with radioluminosity through pedals and amps. Throughout the album's humid, smoldering fuzz and droned distortion, Black Earth perpetuates the creeping violence and midwestern depression, spoken through the album's cover art, a creepy photograph of a woman's silhouette brandishing a knife in a rather hostile pose. The suitably downer melodies and androgynously murmured vocals flicker amidst the muffled guitar haze like the best of all shoegaze acts, but unlike most who reference My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, or Ride, Implodes is more attuned to Flying Saucer Attack, Bailter Space, or even the desolate drone-rock of Higuma. Tracks like "Screech Owl" and "Experiential Report" slowly burn from downer acoustic strumming into the plodding rhythms and intertwining male / female vocal mumblings buried beneath the narcoleptic atmospheres of muffed guitar haze. But if there was to be a 'hit' on the album it would be "Meadowlands" with its disco-ping synth notes that must be a reference to Joy Division's "She's Lost Control" instead of anything remotely hedonistic. Out of all this fuzz and distortion, sad melodies and muffled androgynous vocals sing of woe and heartache with a psychic conviction that doesn't need anything explicit like lyrics. The music is perfect in delivering this bleak mood all on its own.
MPEG Stream: "Marker"
MPEG Stream: "Screech Owl"
MPEG Stream: "Meadowlands"

PETERLICKER Nicht (Editions Mego) lp 21.00
Why the hell would you call your band Peterlicker? And even if you did give yourself such a terrible name, why would you keep it after you broke up over 20 years ago, especially when the band in question hardly even managed a couple of practices and maybe one gig? These are the important questions we ask here at aQuarius, and perhaps we can feel justified in asking these questions, since they themselves admit theirs is a stupid band name following the tradition of the Butthole Surfers and Throbbing Gristle.
So, with that discussion out of the way, here at last is the debut LP from Peterlicker, a monstrously good electro-doom-dirge-noise-rock quartet featuring Peter (Pita) Rehberg. While Pita's brain-drilling power electronics are a component of the crawling noise structures in Peterlicker, it's clearly not just his project. F. Hergovich is the vocalist in the band, whose ominous deepthroating vocalizations loom over the entire production, timestretched into undefinable gaping bellows and monstrous Lustmordian howls. C. Schachinger takes his cues from Swans' stalwart guitarist Norman Westberg, in his bent atonal screeches, gritty crackling of white-hot distortion, and dive-bomb arcs of noise that settle upon the ever crawling post-doom basslines of G. Weissegger. Pita and Weissegger fill in the gaps with plenty of crunched noises that buttress the grim arsenal of crusty noise. Imagine Godflesh, if Broadrick forgot to bring his drum machine to the studio, or Swans (circa Cop and Filth) with Gira even more amped up on amphetamines and taking his vocals on a really fucked godhead trip. Needless to say, Nicht is pretty fucking brilliant, regardless of what they chose to call the band.
MPEG Stream: "Always Right"
MPEG Stream: "C-Slide"
MPEG Stream: "Schleim"

SCHNITZLER, CONRAD Ballet Statique (M=Minimal) lp 16.98
An album that launched thousands of better known records, Ballet Statique is Conrad Schniztler's masterpiece. Schnitzler, of course, was a maverick in the Krautrock community, having been an original member of both Tangerine Dream and Kluster, and later developing an expressive language of tape collage and electronic synthesis which expanded upon his early studies with Joseph Beuys. His most influential works, however, came out in the late '70s following an almost serialist body of work based on the poetics of various colors through electronic sound, eventually leading to Ballet Statique. It was originally released with the title 'Con' back in 1978 through the Barclay funded Egg Records, Ballet Statique is a skeletal distillation of progressive electronics into a bleak hypnosis of rotating melodies, atonal slashes of synthetic noise, and proto-techno rhythmic propulsion. While this album has been reissued a few times since it's original release, the current infatuation with late '70s electronics - especially through the psychedelic and minimal-wave sensibilities - make this reissue especially timely. "Electric Garden" is one of those elegantly simple pieces of electronica with an abstracted, almost random melody guiding Schnitzler's rigid step sequence cast in a cosmic shower of delay ripples with bent electro-shock noises sliding up and down against his motorik drum machine. From a track like this, one can see where Aphex Twin would have been able to make such a profound break from rave culture with these head-spinning sequences. "Metall 1" is all space-dust and comet debris hung weightlessly through Schnitzler's ominous undulations of bright synthetic shimmers and lurching rumbles of metallic low-end, clearly the inspiration for pretty much everything that John Elliott of Emeralds has ever touched. The deep-space sonor pulses of "Black Nails" reprise the tone-bent noises Schnitzler produced on "Electric Garden," looking forward to the robotic bleakness of Monoton, Dome, and Omit. It's pretty shocking how good this record is, and how timeless it sounds, even with the current strain of '70s revivalism. So highly recommended, it's actually embarrassing that we've not written about this record sooner.

CRYSTAL STILTS In Love With Oblivion (Slumberland) cd 10.98
Most folks around here have been pretty obsessed with Crystal Stilts, since their self titled 2008 debut on Woodsist. But there's definitely a been holdout or two among us. Who, while appreciating that Crystal Stilts were a decent band, didn't necessarily understand what the fuss was all about. That all changes with In Love With Oblivion, and those folks are definitely gonna have to reassess their opinion on those older records too, cuz EVERYone here has gone totally nuts for this new record. Including the previous nonbelievers. Not sure what exactly it is, their sound hasn't changed so dramatically, but there's just something about this record that's totally magical. Dark and brooding, low slung slithery gloom pop, that while lumped in with the current crop of Sacred Bones / Captured Tracks outfits, to these ears are way more beholden to Aussie groups like the Celibate Rifles, the Lime Spiders, the Scientists, the Saints, Radio Birdman, even the Hoodoo Gurus, maybe especially the Hoodoo Gurus. Which is weird, cuz these guys are from Brooklyn. But they have that twangy surf guitar, the Fuzztones style wheezing garage rock organ, everything hazy and reverby, and of course the vox, that's what really does it, deep and dramatic, commanding and intense but still melodic. Opener "Sycamore Tree" is a perfect example, a dead ringer for some lost Celibate Rifles jam, a minimal woozy groove, the percussion a propulsive shuffle, the guitars thick with twang and reverb, the bass dense and driving, and the vocals, the sort of singing that would go on to define noise rock outfits from down under like Lubricated Goat and Kingsnakeroost, eyes closed it feels like being in some dingy club in Australia in the early eighties, packed in like sardines, the sound deafening, the crowd rapt and sweaty, moving to the music, total zoner gloom pop post punk bliss.
Then there's the other side of the band, like on "Through The Floor" where they channel classic girl group sounds, but add their own twist, those deep crooned vox, the whirring organ, lots of sweet back up harmonies, and of course plenty of buzz and reverb. And so it goes, the band switching from shimmery sixties jangle, to dark brooding eighties post punk gloom pop, often melding the two. And while we love both sides of the band, it's the darker side that we find the most mesmerizing. Like on "Alien Rivers", a creepy crawl, all thick undulating organs, shuffling snares, spidery guitars, the vocals especially heavy with reverb and echo, the sound droned out and druggy, divinely hypnotic. And there's the woozy groovy stomp of "Prometheus At Large", classic rock and roll wrapped in murk and grit and grime, a sort of classic fifties style pop transformed into something much more sinister. Elsewhere there's plenty of jangle and shimmer, shuffle and buzz, "Flying Into The Sun" sounds like a lo-fi indie pop Interpol, "Precarious Stair" sounds like some fantastic union of Thee Oh Sees and the Vivian Girls, but with those crooned post punk vox, all the songs buzzy and hooky and heavy in their own way, slipping easily from indie pop to new wave to indie jangle but always infused with the Stilts' dark brood, and fuzzy wall of sound reverby shimmer, and all held together by some impossibly great and catchy songs, and of course those fantastic vocals.
Definite contender for record of the year, and a new unanimous aQ fave for sure!
MPEG Stream: "Sycamore Tree"
MPEG Stream: "Through The Floor"
MPEG Stream: "Silver Sun"

O'ROURKE, JIM & CHRISTOPH HEEMANN Plastic Palace People Vol. 1 (Streamline) cd 14.98
Plastic Palace Alice? Let's hear it for Scott Walker, first of all; but the mad genius of baroque pop has nothing in common with the long-form stupor and granular synthesis that these stalwarts of the avant-garde produced way back in 1991. At that time, O'Rourke was a recent graduate of music school with a head full of knowledge about vangarde composition, the whole Luc Ferrari back catalogue, and an standing invitation to perform / record within Chicago's preeminent postindustrial ensemble Illusion Of Safety; and Heemann was in the process of dissolving his seminal dada-montage project H.N.A.S. The two began a correspondence that led to him travelling to Germany where they jumped into a heady collaboration in Heemann's studio. Why none of these recordings have yet to see the light of day is anybody's guess, but here's what may be the first in a series of archival recordings produced by O'Rourke and Heemann.
A buzzsaw drone gradually introduces the first of three long-form pieces of stratified minimalism. As the piece grows and blossoms, an uneasy set of harmonic overtones dominates the stage, holding a firm grasp on the psychoacoustic properties that an epic Eliane Radigue or Phill Niblock piece can achieve. The track collapses through a weird gurgling of electronics only to swell back again with a chorus of LaMonte Young inspired drone-vocalization rasped through electronics and / or coupled with sympathetic drones from a guitar, only to mutate into a spasmodic explosion of electronic granularity and sine-tone modulation. Really amazing stuff, for sure! The second track, picks up with what we'll assume to be O'Rourke's buzzing guitar drones giving way to a devilish montage of vocalized growling, suffocating gaspings for air, and other grim sound poetics that look forward simultaneously to the lupine babbling of Sudden Infant and the tortured incidental black-metal ambience of Spektr. The profound spookiness of the second track dissolves into the pools of shimmered tone and radiant beauty of the third, as something of a harbinger of where Heemann would direct the Mirror project with Andrew Chalk almost a decade later. So nice!
Again, we have to wonder why the hell did it take so long for these recordings to come out? They are simply too good to have been sitting dormant on some shelf!
MPEG Stream: "Track 1"
MPEG Stream: "Track 2"
MPEG Stream: "Track 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)"

RODEN, STEVE Three Roots Carved To Look Like Stones (Sonoris) cd 13.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Here's a 2003 release that we've never stocked before, from one of our favorite sound artists. Steve Roden built this album originally as the sound design for an installation back in 2000, with all of the sounds sourced from three musical instruments found in a Chinatown giftshop, including a toy wooden flute, an aluminum wind chime, and a paper accordion. Where so many musicians would take these instruments and render their sounds cute, cheeky, or ironic, Roden has always been an artist with a profound sensitivity for his source material; and he deftly extracts harmonically rich and emotionally resonant hues and tones from all of those instruments. The first piece, sourced from the wooden flute, elegantly weaves sustained wisping tones out of a deep, almost sinewave-sounding thrum of down-pitched low-end rumbling. The looping hypnosis of this track harkens to the pre-digital smears of flutes that Zoviet France created on such albums as Shouting At The Ground or Shadow Thief Of The Sun - in other words, haunting, sublime, and gorgeous. The second track is adopted from the aluminum wind chimes, collects an aggregate of variably pitched sounds of those chimes, with deep resonance, metallic textural scrapes, and chittery clicks coming into the mix. The pacing of this track is quintessentially Roden, deliberate and hypnotic, becoming all the more engrossing the further one engages with the track. The final composition is for the paper accordion, whose spare notes evolve into a beautiful elegy of lilting tones that overlap and loop with each other, upon sets of miniature abrasions and a thick set of low-drones, which must have been designed to simulate those on the first track. Like much of Roden's work, this is a lovely piece of introspective minimalism, slowly germinating into a beautiful ambience.
MPEG Stream: "8 Breaths Of Different Lengths"
MPEG Stream: "Hands Moving, Slowly"
MPEG Stream: "Air Chamber With 4 Holes"

BERNIER, NICOLAS Usure.Paysage (Hronir) lp 24.00
Hot shit musique concrete found here! There are so many stuffy compositions and constructions that look back to the salad days of tape experimentation in the '50s and '60s. Works can get so conceptual with each sound being meant to allude to some particular phrases of Beckett or recapitulate the Merz of Schwitters that the interplay between this found sound and that electronic blorp is totally lost amidst a dull and boring concoction that serves little more than an execution of a grant application. This is certainly not the case for Canadian composer Nicolas Bernier, whose dexterous yet ominous concrete album has landed in the good hands of Hronir, a label which has a small catalogue of brutal collage artists (e.g. Sudden Infant, Raionbashi, GX-Jupitter Larssen) to accompany more oblique voices from the academic world. While Bernier's work isn't nearly as toxic as those jackbooted noiseniks, his compositions are wholly discomforting, and we mean that in the best possible light. Within the avant-garde pantheon, Bernier's work follows that of Michel Chion and Luc Ferrari doing their finest work, through dynamic juxtapositions blurting concrete sounds (bellowing car horns, steam engine growls, leaden explosions, etc) against unsettled atmospheres and spackled dronings that start and stop with a series of repeating punctuations not unlike the strategy that Nurse With Wound mastered on Homotopy To Marie. He's aware of the cinematic urge for acousmatic works, and pushes "Les chambres de l'atelier" towards a Lynchian noir with a soft-focus melody warbling in the background to a series of crunched abrasions and eerie footsteps, ruptured by ghostly noises. Excellent, through and through! Limited to 300 copies as well.
MPEG Stream: "Paysages Articules No. 4"
MPEG Stream: "10 Passages"
MPEG Stream: "Les Chambres De L'atelier"

BEE MASK Canzoni Dal Laboratorio Del Silenzio Cosmico (Spectrum Spools / Editions Mego) lp 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Chris Madak is the man behind the Bee Mask, a project with several dozen cassette releases issued over the past couple of years. Madak should also be noted as the principle behind the exceptionally curated Deception Island tape label, which had the foresight to release Oneohtrix Point Never's Betrayed In The Octagon as well as a handful of killer Emeralds related side projects. That said, not much from Bee Mask's own discography has made it through here, with blister popping electrical noise and synth sequencing seeming to be par for the course. Yet through those circuit bent experiments, Bee Mask emerges fully evolved as a master synthesist of all things elekronische and kosmische circa 1975. Canzoni Dal Laboratorio Del Silenzio Cosmico is a wonderfully varied album whose hallucinatory narratives speak to a purposeful and thoroughly intelligent design in its creation. Throughout you'll hear distinct references to the likes of Roland Kayn, Tangerine Dream (e.g. Electronic Meditations), Jean-Claude Eloy, Francoise Bayle, anything from Sky Records you could think of in the mid to late '70s, and even the more bombastic electronic interludes offered by Pink Floyd for that matter. The album opens in a more studied fashion through a sequence of carillion bell tones backmasked with a series of soft vocal grunts and gradually building set of electronic percolations, but all of this is engulfed in a tidal wave of polydactyl synth sequencing and brainfried electronic percolations only to morph again into a cavernous expanse of elongated tone and drone. The album's numerous detours and labyrinthine structures twist and devolve constantly across both sides of the record, delving into melodic phrasing in the electronic sequences only to shift deftly into plunging electrical vibrations of pulsing synth noise and delirious crescendos popping throughout.
The fact that John Elliott of Emeralds has brought this to vinyl after a release on Gift Tapes a while back should not go unnoticed. Spectrum Spools is his new imprint, released through Editions Mego, and this should be a label not to be missed. Certainly not this release, that's for sure.

SLAVES, THE Ocean On Ocean (Debacle) 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.
We love bands whose music-making formula appears, on the surface, simple and intuitive, yet the sounds they create are huge, engulfing and seemingly complex. Using two synthesizers and echoing vocals, The Slaves inhabit a sound that is as lush and dense as it is mysterious and minimal. Their debut album, Ocean on Ocean, is the perfect showcase of a group that can conjure up bountiful sounds within a restrained approach. Honestly, we can't get enough of Ocean on Ocean, something about those enormous, dreamy, engulfing songscapes just leaves us wanting more. Their oozing brew of minimal pop melts and blurs with the melodic thickness of MBV's Loveless or early Slowdive, but surrenders to a contemplative mode that falls somewhere between Gregorian hymn and pagan ritual. The duo spin a radiant web of sustained vocals and heavy synth, each chord drawn out and smeared into a neon haze while indecipherable lyrics suggest longing, loss and submission to oblivion.Ê
"Seventeen" unfolds with a slow arching chord progression that grows and dissipates like a coastal tide. Female vocals creep into the oceanic haze while fluttering noise and cosmic wash hover in obscurity. And though the rhythm-less wash may appear to be aimless improv, a close listen reveals a defined structure beneath the veil of long tones and heavy atmospherics. And yes, The Slaves are heavy. And it's not a 'down-tuned guitars through a wall of amps' kind of heavy. It's more evident in the slow movement of the songs, and the visceral effects felt by each musical gesture. The duo have perfectly crafted a searing offering of 'soft doom', so gorgeous and mesmerizing we've had Ocean on Ocean on repeat for the past week. "Shadows" is another noteworthy track. We love the push and pull of heavy synth and whispery vocals, whirls of female voice echo into the night then dissipate into huge swells of HEAVY distorted synth. Crumbling low end amid ethereal dream chants, what else could we ask for?? One of our favorite records in recent memory and highly recommended!Ê
MPEG Stream: "Seventeen"
MPEG Stream: "Sweet High"

GANG OF FOUR Entertainment (Rhino / Warner Bros.) lp 24.00
NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL, ONCE AGAIN!!!
The roots of Gang of Four can be traced back to 1976, but from opposite ends of the globe. In their native England during that year, The Sex Pistols, The Damned, and The Clash dropped the bomb that was punk whose shockwaves can still be felt to this day through music, literature, art, politics, fashion, etc. In China also in 1976, a renegade faction of communists staged a leadership coup after the death of Mao Zedong, holding out for 10 days and calling themselves the Gang of Four. Back in England a year later, a punk band began as four art students from Leeds appropriated not only the name but also the insistance upon bold ideological stances from those Maoist revolutionaries. After achieving considerable success with their debut Damaged Goods EP on the remarkably prescient Fast Productions (who also signed The Mekons early on as well), Gang of Four landed a deal with EMI which resulted in Entertainment. This album - like Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures and the first three Wire albums - transformed punk with its ingenious marriage of intelligence, angst, politics, and aesthetics, and has not been improved upon since, despite the best efforts from a crowd of post-punk revivalists (i.e. The Rapture, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, etc.).
Gang of Four were Andy Gill, Jon King, Dave Allen, and Hugo Burnham; well at least for Entertainment and the two follow up records. Entertainment's politics have been at the center of most of the reviews you'll find praising this record, but those politics wouldn't have been heard had Gang of Four not been a fucking tight band, with Gill's rapid fire guitar arpeggios, Allen's agitated funk-punk basslines, and Burnham's explosive post-disco rhythms. Every thing that has been written about Gang of Four in the past is true, especially from those kind people at Pitchfork who sneered at the end of their review of Entertainment that "anyone who says it's played out is a douchebag." Truer words have not been spoken.
MPEG Stream: "Damaged Goods"
MPEG Stream: "At Home He's A Tourist"
MPEG Stream: "Anthrax"

INFINITY WINDOW Artificial Midnight (Arbor) lp 14.98
Out of print for quite a long time, Infinity Window's Artificial Midnight is now back in print. This was the first project we heard from Daniel Lopatin, who's better known as Oneohtrix Point Never. Here, he was working with Taylor Richardson, one time member of Sunburnt Hand Of The Man, although this is much closer to the classic OPN sound of liquid synth ambience and polyhedron step sequencing. The two parted ways shortly after this record came out, and well before OPN's breakthrough album Returnal. Here's what we had to say about this way back when:
Armed with a bunch of analog synths and an alliance of effects pedals, Infinity Window conjures a deep cleansing slab of new agey bliss. In the same droney vein as Emeralds, Infinity Window delve deep into the divine world of heavy synth wizardry to unveil two sides of all-encompassing aural blitzkrieg. To say their sound is thick would be a total understatement. These guys know how to lay it down heavy, but there is a lighter side to their heaviness, not really a dooomy type of heaviness, more a melodic and shimmering type of heavy that reminds us of the earlier Growing albums. Both sides build from wondrously minimal, video game-y bleeps and bloops to huge walls of trance inducing, glacial radiance. Like staring directly into the blaring sun, these tracks are celestial and huge but damaged and textured. Fuzz and noise subtly encapsulate the reverberating tones to swiftly steer away from any new-agey cheesiness.

XEX Group Xex (Dark Entries) lp 17.98
Xex was the experimental synthpop creation of three high-school misfits living in central New Jersey during the mid-'70s, having survived their teen years of suburban boredom with plenty of drugs and eye-opening excursions to New York. Liberated by the spirit of punk, this outfit - pseudonymously known as Waw Pierogi, Thumbalina Gugielmo, and Alex Zander (later joined by Jon-Boy Diode and David Anderson) - took up the task of infusing a smarty-pants cynicism to hyper-primitive arrangements on a small assortment of synths and drum machines. No guitars whatsoever, the sound of Xex is one of skewed melodicism and incessant repetition. This combined with a typically monotone vocal sensibility put Xex in the same synthpunk orbit as The Units and Crash Course In Science. It's a very American sound, to look back upon all of these records. In Europe, the new wave and synthpop was far more self-possessed, even amongst the DIY circles, but for a certain subset in the States, the nerds had become emboldened in punk to use science and math as a spasmodic, future-shock means for nihilist poetics and cathartic release - hence, Devo, Dark Day, Nervous Gender, the aforementioned Crash Course In Science, and Xex. With the exception of Primitive Calculators and Severed Heads in Australia, there's hardly a parallel anywhere else in the world to this synthpunk sound; and Xex were certainly exceptional at it.
Group Xex was the only record they released, although the band recorded a second album but never released it (unfortunately the tapes of that second album had deteriorated beyond repair). Self-released in 1980, the album was sold pretty much exclusively in Manhattan and North Jersey, with an edition of a 1000 copies disappearing quickly. The album did get a cd reish in 1995 after Tom Smith championed the record after discovering it in the vaults at WFMU. It's a very quizzical album of purposefully simple electronic tunes played upon whipcrack drum machines and minimally percolating synths matched by the alternating female and male vocals, which are always thin, reedy, and metallic. Thumbalina's girly vocals bounce through the motorik synthpop ditty "Fashion Hurts" whose singsonginess is immediately countered by the unwavering robotic monotone that Pierogi presents on the cybernetic "You Think", and the grim, paranoiac poetry on "SNGA" (which stands for Soviet Nerve Gas Attack).
Another great find from the always impressive Dark Entries label! Definitely for fans of Devo and the Units. Limited to 500 copies with a great looking new wave booklet with lyrics, a band history, and some amusing tidbits thrown in for good measure.
MPEG Stream: "Fashion Hurts"
MPEG Stream: "You Think"
MPEG Stream: "Sgna"
MPEG Stream: "Party"
MPEG Stream: "Holland Tunnel"

ALVARIUS B Baroque Primitiva (Poon Village) cd 17.98
Here's the much anticipated cd reissue of this way-too limited Alvarius B album which came and went on vinyl in a matter of days early in 2011. Alvarius B is the solo project of Alan Bishop, better known as one of the Sun City Girls - a project which dissolved after over twenty years following the death of drummer and fellow provocateur Charles Goucher. The Girls (a trio rounded out by Bishop's brother Richard) were specialists in frustratingly brilliant psychedelic-punk, damaged with free jazz, Southeast Asian pop, and fucked-up beat poetry. They were notorious for their designed lack of editorial constraints in situating brilliantly over-charged weirdo-pop melodic crescendos often hybridizing the likes of Ennio Morricone and Vietnamese songwriter Trinh Cong Son next to an uncomfortably misogynistic rant from Alan Bishop's slimy Bukowski parody as Uncle Jim. Even the most die-hard Sun City Girls fans who could stomach and perhaps grow to love their confrontational affronts will undeniably say that it's Torch Of The Mystics or 303,003 Crossdressers From The Rig Veda that are the masterpieces of borderless songwriting.
So with the Girls no more, where would Alan Bishop take his own work? The Sir Richard Bishop records have been uniformly brilliant in their fiery elliptical fingerpicking, exploding the Takoma handbook; and Alan has often given off the appearance of being a trickster figure, presenting himself as a minstrel with an immense emotional range only to pull back the mask to reveal a devilish, blackened heart intent on causing misery upon all who hear. With all of this as a preamble, we can say that Alan has followed where the Sun City Girls ended their career on Funeral Mariachi, with this gorgeous record in the form of Baroque Primitiva.
The album is rich with covers, although an Alan Bishop cover would certainly amount to a delirious transfiguration. The man has long been obsessed by Ennio Morricone, and this expertise has been applied to some of the best compendiums of Morricone's best work during the '60s and '70s. And 6 of the albums 12 songs are attributed to Morricone, or "Maestro Padre Supremo" as Bishop describes him in the liner notes. These songs enjoy the lilting yet complex melodies that Morricone had been so known for, with Bishop crooning all of the wordless oohs and ahhs that Morricone had originally penned for a female vocalist. Bishop has long been known for his ability to hit sharp falsettos in the Girls. Even though he does bend many of the notes towards atonality, he is quite reverential towards the Morricone text. In fact, the contrast between Morricone's ecstatic songs and the many cracks in Bishop's deliberately lo-fi production (think Sebadoh's four-track recordings with just multi-tracked voice, guitar and chord organ) serves to heighten the drama of these recordings. There are a couple of Bishop originals, "Humor Police" is very much a manic carnavalesque number and "Well Known Stranger" is a classic downer jam of strum and vocal mope that sounds like it could be a lost Neil Young tune, but done way better. The two other covers on the album are also quite noteworthy: the only song to emerge from his aborted album of John Barry covers in the form of "You Only Live Twice" and one hell of jubilant romp through the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows."
This is very nicely packaged in the form of a 30 page hardback book, featuring various close-ups of the nude mandala artwork photographed by Kristen Anderson, to sweeten the deal. Already proving to be one of the best albums of 2011. So don't let the cd pass you by, if you didn't have the good fortune of getting hold of the vinyl already.
MPEG Stream: "Well Known Stranger"
MPEG Stream: "Funny Thing Is..."
MPEG Stream: "God Only Be Without You"
MPEG Stream: "Humor Police"

EVIL MADNESS Super Great Love (Editions Mego) lp 21.00
To look at the personnel line-up of Evil Madness, you probably wouldn't know what to expect. There's the melancholy composer Johann Johannsson with a number of acclaimed cinematic records on 4AD. There's the bleak-minded drone specialist BJ Nilsen and his long-time collaborators Stillupsteypa. And there's another Icelander dude named Petur Eyvindsson, who has some oddball releases under the name DJ Musician. Given that, the punchy discotheque grooves of Evil Madness are way out of left-field and totally great. Italo disco, minimal wave / EMB, anthemic Detroit techno circa 1988, John Carpenter's paranoiac synth arpeggiations, lots of analogue synth worship, and pre-fab electronic beats all come together underneath the stoic yet tongue-in-cheek banner of Evil Madness. We suspect that Sigtryggur from Stilluppsteypa has quite a lot to do with this one, given the electro-breaks that would occasionally slap in the face of his seriously minded crackled dronemuzik; no matter who's responsible, both sides of Super Great Love are brilliantly hedonistic mash-ups of vintage synth stabs, stupidly good anthemic electronic melodies, and plenty cybernetic Moroder sequences, spiralling upon techno, disco, and electro rhythms. Super Great Love is actually the fourth record by Evil Madness, with their other releases coming out through the poorly distributed 12 Tonar label and the dada-fetish imprint Ultra Eczema, so this album on Editions Mego should garner a broader audience for Evil Madness (they'll be releasing a cd version eventually too). Fans of Majeure, Umberto, K-X-P, and the Oneohtrix Point Never sideproject Games would be well served to check this out!

SLUG GUTS Howlin' Gang (Sacred Bones) cd 13.98
With a name like Slug Guts, you might expect some ugly ultradoooooom from this band, but they express their misanthropy and disgust in another genre, as these punks Slug Guts are in fact Aussie underground garage rock wranglers, swampy and sinister in the grand tradition of Nick Cave & The Birthday Party, also sharing deviant DNA with the likes of Bird Blobs, King Snake Roost, Lubricated Goat, The Scientists, and other degenerate Down Under gutter crawlers of that ilk, from over the years...
We'd first heard 'em on their import-only debut Down On The Meat a couple years back, and are stoked that Sacred Bones have added them to their fine roster for this sophomore outing. Even if we hadn't heard of 'em before, the SB seal of approval (and the band name!) would have gotten us onboard.
Plus we love this sort of thing, being big fans of the bands mentioned above, so we're primed for Slug Guts' insidiously catchy caterwauling and late night, whiskey soaked dirgery. Perhaps not quite so noisy/nasty as Down On The Meat was, here Slug Guts show off their pop side, such as is, the record being a rollin' and tumblin', slow drunkard's stagger consisting of eerie guitar jangle, low-slung bass, and deep, drawled vocals, all bathed in loads of reverb, and menace. Opener "Howlin'" has a bit of a sinuous "Painted Black" vibe and indeed the entire album is cloaked in damnation and darkness.
MPEG Stream: "Howlin'"
MPEG Stream: "Cold Bones"
MPEG Stream: "Chrome Crucifix"

SLUG GUTS Howlin' Gang (Sacred Bones) lp 14.98
With a name like Slug Guts, you might expect some ugly ultradoooooom from this band, but they express their misanthropy and disgust in another genre, as these punks Slug Guts are in fact Aussie underground garage rock wranglers, swampy and sinister in the grand tradition of Nick Cave & The Birthday Party, also sharing deviant DNA with the likes of Bird Blobs, King Snake Roost, Lubricated Goat, The Scientists, and other degenerate Down Under gutter crawlers of that ilk, from over the years...
We'd first heard 'em on their import-only debut Down On The Meat a couple years back, and are stoked that Sacred Bones have added them to their fine roster for this sophomore outing. Even if we hadn't heard of 'em before, the SB seal of approval (and the band name!) would have gotten us onboard.
Plus we love this sort of thing, being big fans of the bands mentioned above, so we're primed for Slug Guts' insidiously catchy caterwauling and late night, whiskey soaked dirgery. Perhaps not quite so noisy/nasty as Down On The Meat was, here Slug Guts show off their pop side, such as is, the record being a rollin' and tumblin', slow drunkard's stagger consisting of eerie guitar jangle, low-slung bass, and deep, drawled vocals, all bathed in loads of reverb, and menace. Opener "Howlin'" has a bit of a sinuous "Painted Black" vibe and indeed the entire album is cloaked in damnation and darkness.
MPEG Stream: "Howlin'"
MPEG Stream: "Cold Bones"
MPEG Stream: "Chrome Crucifix"

INDEX Black Album / Red Album / Yesterday & Today (Lion Productions) 2cd 25.00
Index was a band like thousands throughout the '60s, encouraged by the birth of rock 'n' roll a decade earlier and fueled by the waves of British bands that would hit the American shores. This quartet was born in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe in 1967, at a time when the country was beginning to experience the pangs of turmoil and Detroit itself could be seen almost as a microcosm of the social unrest that was beginning to unfold. The heritage of Index is certainly notable, as the lead guitarist of the band was one John Ford. While the liner notes penned by drummer Jim Valice never overtly state that John's family was THE Ford family which spawned the automotive empire; the implication is quite clear that it is. While the affluence of John and fellow guitarist Gary Francis certainly helped in getting some great gear and recording equipment, the sound of Index is one of adolescence entering adulthood with an awakening disbelief that so much could be wrong in the world. At least on their first album, Index played with an urgency that sounded like the end of the world was near, as an underlying horror of bleakness lies beneath Index's punchy garage-pop beats and spring-reverb overloaded distortion. Their amateurish production that stumbled upon a cavernous sound certainly helps with this assessment. Think Jandek trying to mimic the sound of Martin Hannett's classic production sound for Joy Division.
The band drew from the '60s songbook, covering the Byrds' "Eight Miles High", The Supremes' hit single "You Keep Me Hanging On", and The Bee Gees "I Can't See Nobody", and the band claims Hendrix as a huge influence on their sound, with an incendiary feedback encroaching into their beat pop tunes, at times coming across like Davie Allan and at others looking forward to Ron Asheton's work on The Stooges' first album. All of this came to fruition on what would become known as The Black Album, which was recorded with a single microphone in a large empty ballroom, whose acoustics gave the album its unusual sound. The spring reverb drips upon the overdriven guitar leads and forceful rhythmic guitar jangle, which for 1967 would have been pretty damn heavy. The vocal duties of Index rotated from song to song, occasionally finding all of the members singing these emphatic, if monochordal harmonies that oozed with bittersweet energy and late-teen angst. This is typified on one of Index's best songs "Fire Eyes" and furthered along through their cover of "Eight Miles High". Another great highlight of note is the proto MC5 oil'n'motorcycle grind found on the instrumental track "Feedback".
When Index recorded their second album in 1968 later pegged as The Red Album, they had picked up a sound-on-sound cassette recorder, which seemed to be something of precursor to a 4-track. Unfortunately, in this technological jump, Index lost the cavernous murk of that single microphone recording in that ballroom, but they still managed some great songs dominated by Ford's spring-reverb soaked guitars, including a reprise of "Eight Miles High". "Paradise Beach" is a wonderfully downer, '60s pop number, and "Break Out" is a spry instrumental with a fine backbeat lifted from Booker T & The MGs. The band stumbles with the one boogie-rock blues number, but otherwise, The Red Album makes for a great listen.
The second disc of this set is a collection of tracks from an unreleased third album in 1970, recorded mostly by Ford and Vallice. A paisley-pop jangle settles into the mix with less of the expressive feedback that drove so much of The Black Album, and the songs show a maturation in the vocal harmonies as well. But the band broke up with the various members torn by their commitments with college, girls, and work. So the world turns.
A highly recommended find!
MPEG Stream: "Eight Miles High"
MPEG Stream: "Fire Eyes"
MPEG Stream: "Feedback"
MPEG Stream: "Paradise Beach"
MPEG Stream: "It's All In Your Mind"

BASINSKI, WILLIAM A Red Score In Tile (Streamline) cd 14.98
The tape loop that William Basinski sources on A Red Score In Tile, dates back to 1979 during that manic period in Basinski's life when he was cataloguing shortwave radio noises, bittersweet sounding moments in muzak's mood engineering, and various piano extracts - all of which ending up on tape loops in the way that a lot of people build photo collections of the events, people, and places around them. But beginning around 1998, Basinski began to transcribe those tape loops digitally, finding an immense source for his future compositions that all heavily incorporate the slow-motion, sleepwalking murkiness of those original tape loops to their fullest advantage within his elliptical hypnosis of emotive tone and drone.
He actualized A Red Score In Tile first in 2003 for a piece of vinyl issued by the Chalk / Heemann label Three Poplars; of course, it quickly went out of print. This new cd version is a slightly different mix (only in that the piece isn't split over two sides, tracking instead about 45 minutes or so).
But for that tape loop, we're told the sole source is a piano, but it could have easily come from some of the bleak incidental music that Lalo Schifrin composed on the Rhodes for Dirty Harry. It's also incredibly prescient of the blackened 'horror jazz' from Bohren & Der Club Of Gore. This loop might only be cycling through an endless repetition, but it really doesn't sound that way. An atmosphere of urban decay hangs upon these broken notes, amplified by the vaporous reverb that oozes in, through, above, and below Basinski's sound. Of course, Basinski's music has long spoken of the elegant corrosion of sound, spoken most concisely through his epic Disintegration Loops series. But where the physical act of disintegration mirrors that of the sound itself, the sonic decay of A Red Score In Tile is spellbindingly subtle, and might actually be a grand illusion sparked by Basinksi's part works and deft ability to make a simple tape loop sublime. As a result, A Red Score In Tile is a stunning disc, one that ranks very highly within Basinski's always impressive catalog of recordings. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
MPEG Stream: "A Red Score In Tile"

RIDE Nowhere (Sire) cd 8.98
My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, Slowdive's Soulvaki, Mazzy Star's So Tonight That I Might See - there are just some records that stand especially tall amongst the pantheon of shoegaze's finest moments. Ride's album Nowhere belongs right there too, as one of our all time favorites, a truly perfect album from start to finish, that has most definitely stood the test of time. While Ride made some other cool records, they never were able to duplicate the genius of Nowhere. A record that soars and floats with such emotional honesty as well as that dazed 'n glazed vibe that has made it one of those records we've turned at so many different times in our lives. It came out in 1990 and really served as a perfect extension of what folks in the '80s like The Jesus & Mary Chain, Spacemen 3, The Durutti Column, Loop, and The Cure were doing, infusing that sound with an even deeper emotional quality as well as lots of psychedelic undertones, creating music that soared and floated with dreamy ease and driving force.
No matter how hyperbolic we get, we simply can't even get close to describing how much this record means to so many of us. We've turned to it in moments of despair, we've cranked it with windows down on endless drives with crushes and close friends, we've shacked up alone in our bedrooms with this playing during intense moments of loneliness, we've lain in beds with the ones we love lingering in ecstasy as it plays. It's a record that has and will continue to be such a constant source of pleasure for our ears and minds, hearts and souls.
Rhino recently reissued the vinyl and there have been rumors about a special deluxe double cd edition but those haven't yet surfaced here. But we were able to get our hands on the original Sire cd release of Nowhere at a special low price and if you don't have it YOU NEED THIS!
MPEG Stream: "Vapour Trail"
MPEG Stream: "In A Different Place"
MPEG Stream: "Seagull"

RIDE Nowhere (Rhino) lp 19.98
My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, Slowdive's Soulvaki, Mazzy Star's So Tonight That I Might See - there are just some records that stand especially tall in the pantheon of shoegaze's finest moments. Ride's album Nowhere belongs right there too, as one of our all time favorites, a truly perfect album from start to finish, that has most definitely stood the test of time. While Ride made some other cool records, they never were able to duplicate the genius of Nowhere. A record that soars and floats with such emotional honesty as well as that dazed 'n glazed vibe that has made it one of those records we've turned at so many different times in our lives. It came out in 1990 and really served as a perfect extension of what folks in the '80s like The Jesus & Mary Chain, Spacemen 3, The Durutti Column, Loop, and The Cure were doing, infusing that sound with an even deeper emotional quality as well as lots of psychedelic undertones, creating music that soared and floated with dreamy ease and driving force.
No matter how hyperbolic we get, we simply can't even get close to describing how much this record means to so many of us. We've turned to it in moments of despair, we've cranked it with windows down on endless drives with crushes and close friends, we've shacked up alone in our bedrooms with this playing during intense moments of loneliness, we've lain in beds with the ones we love lingering in ecstasy as it plays. It's a record that has and will continue to be such a constant source of pleasure for our ears and minds, hearts and souls.
Long out of print, we are SO stoked that Rhino has stepped up to reissue this classic on vinyl now! YOU NEED THIS! (There's also supposedly a special deluxe double cd edition on Rhino that includes a whole mess of bonus tracks, we haven't been able to get our hands on that yet, however.)

MB (BIANCHI, MAURIZIO) Technology X (Mirror Tapes) cassette 11.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The entire MB back catalogue is a daunting encyclopedia of industrial noise, bleak abstraction, and internalized struggles with abjection and salvation. Bianchi has been known to recycle titles for considerably different compositions, with Symphony For A Genocide being truncated for a different work called SFAG. The same goes for Technology, as this was the name of a double cassette originally released in 1981 with several bootlegs to follow until an official 2cd set was made available through At War With False Noise in 2009. Technology X is an entirely different composition, although much of the same electronic gear was obviously used in both sets of recordings (and throughout all of the MB recordings in the early '80s for that matter). Similarly, the track titles are slightly different ("Techno-X" vs. "Techno" and "Logy-X" vs. "Logy"); at the same time, the tracks on Technology X are considerably more caustic than those tracks on the original Technology.
Bianchi has long been an obsessive composer and documentarian of his work, which emerged in birth pangs of Industrial Culture in 1980 through the first of many self-released cassettes. His neurotic drones, turgid noises, and bleak electronics recognized influences from the Kraut-electron-magicians of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream; but Bianchi was far more interested in revealing his own theories on the disintegration of the human mind, body, and soul through the encroachment of technological and informational warfare. Technology X, like the aforementioned SFAG album, is a very bleak undertaking of abstracted blorping electronics distorted and mangled through a number of effects giving the impression of a scorched battlefield rumbling with numerous panzer divisions, raked machine-gun fire, and various experimental weapons decimating whoever might be unfortunate enough not to have died in the first wave of dive-bombs and ballistic missiles. His compositions are known for their many turns and twists, moving from mind-wiping lazer shots to engine-revving accelerations of noise and into weirdly militant musical moments of atonal stabs on his synthesizer. It's altogether an exhilarating and claustrophobic recording; and one that's limited to a little over 200 copies. The cassette also comes with an MB / Technology X button!

CHRIS & COSEY Songs Of Love & Lust (CTI) lp 21.00
Album number three from the electronic pioneers Chris & Cosey is Songs Of Love & Lust, which originally came out on Rough Trade back in 1984. It was on this album that the signature sounds of Chris & Cosey really developed as something other than what they managed to produce in Throbbing Gristle. It may not be a surprise that this was also around the same time that the other former TG members began to really flourish in their own projects with Psychic TV's masterful Dreams Less Sweet and the epic Scatology record by Coil. Here, on Songs Of Love & Lust, Chris & Cosey were polishing their electro / minimal wave surfaces with hypnotic cascades of arpeggiating synths, plucky drum machinations, and outright majestic swells of electronic wash. A handful of these tracks clearly became anthemic floorfillers that inspired acid house in Chicago, EBM in Belgium, and the Detroit / Berlin axis of techno. "Walking Through Heaven" is one such track with its soaring sustained electronics counterpointing all of the scintillatingly brilliant sequencing. Chris Carter had long been a non-ironic fan of Abba, and yes, he was responsible for the cold-sex disco TG classic "Hot On The Heels Of Love" which essentially eviscerated the Abba structures of baroque disco down to a skeletal rhythm with an uncomfortably breathy sensuality thanks to Cosey's vocals. And the ghosts of "Hot On The Heels Of Love" and "United" (another stellar Carter engineered TG song) emerge within this album (e.g. "Love Cuts," "Chiron" and "Driving Blind"), although they are wholly detacted from the grand guignol commentaries of TG. Rather, Chris & Cosey spoke more of a cybernetic sensuality, embracing the technologies around them as a means of expressing, well songs of love and lust. This album has held up remarkably well, and is required listening for anybody who's been gobbling up anything on Dark Entries, Minimal Wave, Anna Logue, or Vinyl-on-Demand.

PEAKING LIGHTS 936 (Not Not Fun) lp 14.98
We've dug pretty much everything we've heard from this Wisconsin husband and wife duo, the lp on Night People, the split with Wet Hair, those records found the group unfurling thick slabs of murky dronepop, twisted psychedelic dub, blurred hypnotic riff heavy space drone, psychedelic space boogie, all wound into a roiling sonic stew, seriously warped and druggy and occasionally blown out and noisy, but on this new record, they've ditched much of the heaviness, a lot of the noisiness, and toned down much of the murky psychedelia and instead crafted something much poppier and dreamier. The first track is a bit misleading with this in mind, as it's a lysergic bit of distorted dubbed out riffage, with some programmed beats, buried under chiming melodies and a heaving bass buzz, kaleidoscopic and hazy and with the potential to explode into something much heavier and noisier, but instead it gives way to "All The Sun That Shines" which sort of lives up to its title, a dubby reggae flecked bit of woozy skitter, programmed beats, swirling effects, loads of reverb and delay, and hazy ethereal female vox, some spidery Morricone-esque guitar twang, and an almost calypso groove are woven into the proceedings too, the result though is indeed hazy and sunshiney and gloriously washed out.
"Amazing And Wonderful" is up next, and while featuring a similarly murky Skaters-esque rhythm, it ditches the dubbiness, and sets a sort of abstract post punk into a much more dreampoppy realm, all tinkling chimes, descending melodies, multi tracked vox, all wrapped in a gauzy patina of swirling reverby whir. "Bird Of Paradise Dub Version" is another abstract swirl of druggy space pop, the 'dub version' aspect embodied by the delayed drums and the softly swirling clouds of blurred effects and heavy heavy echo. And so it goes, the rest of the record unwinds similarly, an ever shifting collection of murky, lo-fi programmed-beat driven dub pop, muddy, and murky and warbly, plenty of buzzing low end, shimmery effects, hushed dreamlike vox, a little bit of synthy new wave here and there, some stripped down low slung trip hop every once in a while, and even some fragmented off kilter synth pop strangeness, but overall, way less damaged then their past outings, and more akin to a group like Pigeons, that same sort of downtempo electronic pop, albeit with a much more murky, warped and experimental bent. Which as far as we're concerned translates into really really cool!
MPEG Stream: "Synthy"
MPEG Stream: "All The Sun That Shines"
MPEG Stream: "Birds Of Paradise Dub Version"

PEAKING LIGHTS 936 (Not Not Fun) cd 13.98
We've dug pretty much everything we've heard from this Wisconsin husband and wife duo, the lp on Night People, the split with Wet Hair, those records found the group unfurling thick slabs of murky dronepop, twisted psychedelic dub, blurred hypnotic riff heavy space drone, psychedelic space boogie, all wound into a roiling sonic stew, seriously warped and druggy and occasionally blown out and noisy, but on this new record, they've ditched much of the heaviness, a lot of the noisiness, and toned down much of the murky psychedelia and instead crafted something much poppier and dreamier. The first track is a bit misleading with this in mind, as it's a lysergic bit of distorted dubbed out riffage, with some programmed beats, buried under chiming melodies and a heaving bass buzz, kaleidoscopic and hazy and with the potential to explode into something much heavier and noisier, but instead it gives way to "All The Sun That Shines" which sort of lives up to its title, a dubby reggae flecked bit of woozy skitter, programmed beats, swirling effects, loads of reverb and delay, and hazy ethereal female vox, some spidery Morricone-esque guitar twang, and an almost calypso groove are woven into the proceedings too, the result though is indeed hazy and sunshiney and gloriously washed out.
"Amazing And Wonderful" is up next, and while featuring a similarly murky Skaters-esque rhythm, it ditches the dubbiness, and sets a sort of abstract post punk into a much more dreampoppy realm, all tinkling chimes, descending melodies, multi tracked vox, all wrapped in a gauzy patina of swirling reverby whir. "Bird Of Paradise Dub Version" is another abstract swirl of druggy space pop, the 'dub version' aspect embodied by the delayed drums and the softly swirling clouds of blurred effects and heavy heavy echo. And so it goes, the rest of the record unwinds similarly, an ever shifting collection of murky, lo-fi programmed-beat driven dub pop, muddy, and murky and warbly, plenty of buzzing low end, shimmery effects, hushed dreamlike vox, a little bit of synthy new wave here and there, some stripped down low slung trip hop every once in a while, and even some fragmented off kilter synth pop strangeness, but overall, way less damaged then their past outings, and more akin to a group like Pigeons, that same sort of downtempo electronic pop, albeit with a much more murky, warped and experimental bent. Which as far as we're concerned translates into really really cool!
MPEG Stream: "Synthy"
MPEG Stream: "All The Sun That Shines"
MPEG Stream: "Birds Of Paradise Dub Version"

RAIONBASHI / KRUBE. Anatze Zum Taumel (Hronir) lp 24.00
We don't know if there's anything like an official membership form or some sort of fucked-up ritual one has to endure before joining the inner circle of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe, but this Swiss / German collective of malcontent noise makers and tape splicers might just increase their ranks through the diabolical collage work from Krube. Schimpfluch (whose members include Sudden Infant, Dave Phillips, G*Park, Raionbashi, and Rudolf Eb.er) began in the early '90s as an aggressive / primitive hybrid between the Viennese Aktionism of Hermann Nitsch & Rudolf Schwartzkogler and the sharp collage techniques of the French musique concrete pioneers. Performance is often a critical component to the Schimpfluch aesthetic involving all sorts of transgressive theatrics, audience baiting tactics, and maybe a dead fish or two; but the recording output of Schimpfluch and associates has been exceptional throughout their history. Perhaps with all of those performative gestures hidden in the recording process, the resultant squeaks, bangs, grunts, and scrapes begin to disassociate from their origins and become all the more bizarre, more obscure, and more damaged.
This is definitely true for the work of Krube, the project of a German sound-artist by the name of Alexander Schneider. His techniques begin in snipping various sounds from who knows what. The label Hronir tells us its everyday objects, body openings, and non-definable machines; but by the time Schneider is done with his digital razor blade, what's a fart and what's a piston is not terribly discernible. These sound are quickly jettisoned in squadrons of battering sounds that collide with each other in clusters of events that splutter and bristle like a punk version of Pierre Henry's classic Variations Pour Une Porte Et Un Soupir.
Raionbashi's side long composition is comparatively sublime affair, more in keeping with the underappreciated G*Park sound of atonal ambience, creepy as hell field recordings, and generalized disturbances. Daniel Lowenbruck is Raionbashi, and a relatively recent addition to the Schimpfluch-Gruppe, having run the exceptional Tochnit-Aleph label and the rumpsti pumsti shop in Berlin. His track begins with a bellowing piano chord which elongates into a desolate drone, marked with scurrying vermin like noises, backward scrapings, and indeterminate swells of grey noise. That same piano returns throughout the piece with an incremental build of anxious black energy seeping through every quiet gesture and gurgling rupture. Like the work of G*Park, the more you let yourself into the details of this piece, the more terrifying it becomes. Truly exceptional!

ROSENQVIST, DAG & SIMON SCOTT Conformists (Low Point) lp 21.00
Now, here's one hell of a good collaboration! These are two incredible abstractionists of the song in their own right, both known for their protracted dronesmear pocked with eerie melodies and ghost-echo structures. Rosenqvist is the man behind the Jasper TX project with tons of incredible records of blackened murk, nocturnal ambience, and the tactile grit of antiquity, while Scott may be best known as the former drummer of Slowdive, although he's released a couple of stunning shoegaze instrumental records over the past couple of years. This album is ostensibly a soundtrack to a short film directed by Juriaan Booij. The film itself is just about 20 minutes long, but the soundtrack is nearly twice that in length. There seemed to have been a number of complications with production that caused innumerable delays for Booij, but this worked to the advantage of Rosenqvist (the original choice of Booij) as he was able to take his time with the concept that the filmmaker had presented to him and in turn consult his confidante Simon Scott about a possible collaboration. Without much of a deadline or even the indication that the film would be completed (in fact, it was and has screened at various film festivals around the globe), Rosenqvist and Scott composed an incredible album of luminous sound that glows through an endless bank of sonic fog.
A rasped buzz emerges from an oceanic current of tonal guitar swell as the intro to Conformists. A collage of cracked ether, electrical static, and crunched surface noises from what could be from old 78s amass into a small crescendo of noise that collapses just as gracefully as it emerges. Out of this, Scott and Rosenqvist follow up with gasping set of radiator drones which swirl around cavernous swells, all dark, metallic, and ominous. A more enveloping, less threatening drone develops next, with somber flickers of a melody buried somewhere in the mix only to succumb to another passage of prolonged shadow and desolation. It's all very haunting and very evocative.
The flipside takes up a beautiful set of twin guitar drones with subtle half-melodies barely flickering within their mutual undulations, gradually overtaken by a soft buzz of distant distortion and bass-heavy thrum, transitioning toward the glacial centerpiece of this side of the record, a track called "Monuments." Here, a slow electrical pulse repeats ad infinitum, almost like an old ringback tone on a telephone with nobody on the other end picking up, laden with glacial bursts oversaturated chiming guitar noise that flood the soundfield like high-beam headlights cutting through a wintery darkness. The album descends and fades away into another beautiful crushed velvet drone. Epic!

SHOEMAKER, MATT Spots In The Sun (The Helen Scarsdale Agency) cd 14.98
Have a glance back at our most verbose descriptions about anything from the avant-garde fringes of music making, and you'll most likely find a common metaphor of specific locations, or rather the memories that the author attributes to that space -- good, bad, holy, abject, transcendent, etc. Upon listening to Spots In The Sun, we find ourselves returning to the well-trod linguistic device of comparing sound to the detached memories of place; however, Shoemaker's exploration of psychogeographic sound never grounds itself upon a specific location -- like a crumbling hospital, reclaimed World War II bunkers, or even his own favored locations of the jungles of Indonesia. Rather, Shoemaker drops the listener into a sunbleached environment, where heat, humidity, jetlag, fatigue, and general environmental claustrophobia prevent any of the specifics to make themselves known. While Shoemaker's landscapes are openly hostile toward the listener, these swarming masses of sound are incredibly alluring, drawing us in even though we may know better than to enter these openly toxic spaces. Shoemaker is always teasing us with small hints as to where we might be, with screeching birds, temple bells, and the patter of rain; but before we can begin to triangulate a position, Shoemaker rips us from our locale with a ruptured crescendo and drops us somewhere else. It is through the drone that Shoemaker achieves all of this and more, his swarming monochrome morphs from complex vibrations into radioluminescent clouds. Spots In The Sun is an exquisite manifestation of abstracted field recordings pushed to the point of grotesque minimalism, and is indeed some of the finest that we've heard (comparable to the likes of BJ Nilsen, Machinefabriek, Loren Chasse, Philip Jeck's Surf, and mnortham).
MPEG Stream: "1. ..."
MPEG Stream: "3. ..."
MPEG Stream: "4. ..."

OUTSIDERS, THE CQ (Jackpot ) lp 23.00
Cool, our friends at Jackpot made a good choice here to do a vinyl reissue of this 1968 gem by sixties Dutch rockers The Outsiders, an album beloved by many collectors, critics, and us...
It's kind of a concept album describing multiple perspectives of an unrequited romance, with the father of the girl disapproving of the boy in the scenario. However, The Outsiders, being boys themselves, show considerable favor to the plight of the jilted boy in the story, which ends with that protagonist snapping in psychotic violence. Fortunately, The Outsiders spent just as much time composing an economical psych / garage / beat-punk score as they did on the story itself; thus, each track is a solid pop entry of jangly melodies and punchy basslines, occasionally repeating leitmotifs somewhat like the Leaves / Standells version of "Hey Joe" or Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd. The concept album element also puts us in mind of SF Sorrow by the Pretty Things. And anyone into other Nederbeat bands like Q65 and The Motions ought to like this too. Certainly worth checking out!
Limited edition, deluxe gatefold vinyl-only reissue, with silver foil cover artwork as per the original, and liner notes from Mike Stax of Ugly Things, including a recent interview with The Outsiders' lead guitarist Ronnie Splinter.
MPEG Stream: "Misfit"
MPEG Stream: "C.Q."
MPEG Stream: "Doctor"

CHROMATICS IV: Night Drive Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Deluxe) (Italians Do It Better) cd 13.98
REPRESSED!!! Now including the "lost side" of unreleased tracks featured on the recent deluxe vinyl version.
Ooooh Ahhhhh! This one has been sizzling in our ears pretty much on endless repeat since it showed up at the store. Chromatics have undergone a pretty radical change from their early herky-jerky no-wave inspired beginnings, as showcased on the amazing and scene defining After Dark comp that we recently listed, and are still so in love with. Chromatics now have a sound that is much more sensual, subdued and spaced out. And we have to say we are loving this new direction. I definitely suits them so much more naturally than their noisier punky past.
With a sound much more rooted in early drugged out disco and '80s Euro-pop, Night Drive is sparse and melancholic enough to reel in folks whose taste usually falls on the darker end of the spectrum yet with songs so damn sexy and enticing that those of us with dance and pop leanings are seduced by their sound as well. With Ruth Radalet's vocals sounding like they are being delivered in a dark room filled with fog and smoke, there is such an intoxicating late night vibe that Chromatics tap into which feels so vacant and so sexy in the best possible way. They take on the daunting task of covering Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" and manage to make it their own, no small feat as that is a song with such deep meaning for so many of us. So damn good!
MPEG Stream: "Night Drive"
MPEG Stream: "The Killing Spree"
MPEG Stream: "Running Up That Hill"

MURRAY, BRENDAN Inveterate (Arbor) cassette 9.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Brendan Murray, we salute you! You get the reason why there should be a cassette resurrgence - the 90 minute tape! So many noise / drone / floorcore tapes have been released in recent years as 8, 12, 15, 20 minute running times, and it's totally baffling. If you're gonna put out a cassette, let's have the full 90-minute experience as was the norm for any self-respecting mixtape in the '80s and '90s.
So, yes the Boston-based minimalist has cranked out a stunning, slow-crawl tape of suspended tone, that was originally commisioned as some sort of installation thing at Weird Records. The A-side is a brain-drain smear of brass instruments turned into a brash atonal undulation that sounds more like a symphony of junkyard car-horns rather than french horns or trumpets (the more likely culprits). As a result, Murray's piece becomes this glacial recapitulation of a Hermann Nitsch style sonic violence, whose speed is crushingly slow but impossible to avoid. There are also similarities to Murray's highly acclaimed Commonwealth album and its long-stare contest of inevitable decline. If you sit and listen for anything to change there's nothing noticable in the perpetual shimmer and consummate drone; but get up leave the room for a couple of minutes and something will be different - a slight variation in timbre, a repeating form either added or subtracted, a lumbering rhythm oozing from the depths, etc. The B side is not an exact replica of the first, promoting more compositional leaps and starts. In reality these shifts are quite subtle, but given the anesthetizing affect of the A side, any transition is gonna appear like a huge mountain range on a flat surface. Put this up there with LaMonte Young and Charlemange Palestine. Limited to 150 copies of professionally dupped cassettes.

SOFT MOON, THE s/t (Captured Tracks) cd 13.98
Ok, bear with us here... Might anybody remember Steve Trecasse? We're guessing the answer is no. He has been a small-time music producer, who worked at a time for MTV way back in the mid-to-late '80s. He was responsible for all of the music on the shortlived MTV gameshow Remote Control, but he also composed the theme song for the first incarnation of 120 Minutes. The show grew into a rather banal rehash of major label sponsored "alternative" music, but the early years had some genuine underground acts showcasing their videos. Live Skull, Swans, Sonic Youth, and Loop were some of the more atypical groups to get their videos on the air, alongside more conventional college rock favorites like The Sugarcubes, Love & Rockets, and They Might Be Giants. But that theme song hedged toward the darker, grittier sound through a throbbing electronic underbelly girding an air-raid siren guitar swarm which was not too far from a Skullflower (circa Birthdeath & Form Destroyer) / Sigue Sigue Sputnik / Joy Division hybrid as bafflingly awesome as that may seem. Another weird piece of trivia about that theme song was that it was performed by Trecasse with Doug Di Franco (who might just be Double Dee, turntablist Steinski's partner in crime) and Josh Braun (who seems to be the same dude who played keyboards in Circus Mort, which was Michael Gira's band before Swans). Anyway, that theme song proved to be more haunting and menacing than anything else that 120 Minutes dared to broadcast. It is a bit strange that a song that good, that dark, and that bleak would make it as a theme song for anything, much less for MTV. While that track is clearly something for somebody to dig up beyond an odd YouTube clip here or there, the fact remains that The Soft Moon has unintentionally arrived at this exact same psychic, sonic environment, nearly 25 years later, in an act of convoluted convergent evolution.
The Soft Moon is the post-punk / minimal wave project fronted by Oakland's wunderkid Luis Vasquez, whose eagerly awaited debut album is the perfect extension of his two teasing singles which emerged on Captured Tracks earlier in 2010. Guitars, bass, keyboards, drum machines, and a whispered vocal delivery all come together in a series of monochromatic, mechanical, and gloomy propulsions that fit within the current resurgence of Factory inspired alienation through sound. Amongst his death disco vibes and downer post-punk dirges, Vasquez has a knack for an icy noise quotient that glides through the springy basslines and taut rhythms. Layers drift throughout each song, building never as anything so garish as a solo, but more as a scabrous doppleganger of the songs arching mood. These are tonebent squalls of atonal screeches exhumed from a lo-fi murk and rinsed in pools of reverb, very much like those really early Skullflower recordings when Gary Mundy and Stefan Jaworzyn provided the twin guitar attack. Where Skullflower had a drug-fuelled nihilism at their core, The Soft Moon is more of an alchemist of gloom, doubling rhythms with staccato electronics and downtuned Killing Joke-ish basslines to what would have been a standard Goth plod. In many ways, it makes perfect sense that The Soft Moon has landed on Captured Tracks, as he's mining the same aesthetic surfaces of Blank Dogs, but where Blank Dogs holds back with a subtle irony, The Soft Moon fully embraces the gloom of this music; thus making this one of the best records of 2010 that everybody will be hearing in 2011. Awesome.
MPEG Stream: "Breathe The Fire"
MPEG Stream: "Circles"
MPEG Stream: "Out Of Time"
MPEG Stream: "Tiny Spiders"

SOFT MOON, THE s/t (Captured Tracks) lp 16.98
Ok, bear with us here... Might anybody remember Steve Trecasse? We're guessing the answer is no. He has been a small-time music producer, who worked at a time for MTV way back in the mid-to-late '80s. He was responsible for all of the music on the shortlived MTV gameshow Remote Control, but he also composed the theme song for the first incarnation of 120 Minutes. The show grew into a rather banal rehash of major label sponsored "alternative" music, but the early years had some genuine underground acts showcasing their videos. Live Skull, Swans, Sonic Youth, and Loop were some of the more atypical groups to get their videos on the air, alongside more conventional college rock favorites like The Sugarcubes, Love & Rockets, and They Might Be Giants. But that theme song hedged toward the darker, grittier sound through a throbbing electronic underbelly girding an air-raid siren guitar swarm which was not too far from a Skullflower (circa Birthdeath & Form Destroyer) / Sigue Sigue Sputnik / Joy Division hybrid as bafflingly awesome as that may seem. Another weird piece of trivia about that theme song was that it was performed by Trecasse with Doug Di Franco (who might just be Double Dee, turntablist Steinski's partner in crime) and Josh Braun (who seems to be the same dude who played keyboards in Circus Mort, which was Michael Gira's band before Swans). Anyway, that theme song proved to be more haunting and menacing than anything else that 120 Minutes dared to broadcast. It is a bit strange that a song that good, that dark, and that bleak would make it as a theme song for anything, much less for MTV. While that track is clearly something for somebody to dig up beyond an odd YouTube clip here or there, the fact remains that The Soft Moon has unintentionally arrived at this exact same psychic, sonic environment, nearly 25 years later, in an act of convoluted convergent evolution.
The Soft Moon is the post-punk / minimal wave project fronted by Oakland's wunderkid Luis Vasquez, whose eagerly awaited debut album is the perfect extension of his two teasing singles which emerged on Captured Tracks earlier in 2010. Guitars, bass, keyboards, drum machines, and a whispered vocal delivery all come together in a series of monochromatic, mechanical, and gloomy propulsions that fit within the current resurgence of Factory inspired alienation through sound. Amongst his death disco vibes and downer post-punk dirges, Vasquez has a knack for an icy noise quotient that glides through the springy basslines and taut rhythms. Layers drift throughout each song, building never as anything so garish as a solo, but more as a scabrous doppleganger of the songs arching mood. These are tonebent squalls of atonal screeches exhumed from a lo-fi murk and rinsed in pools of reverb, very much like those really early Skullflower recordings when Gary Mundy and Stefan Jaworzyn provided the twin guitar attack. Where Skullflower had a drug-fuelled nihilism at their core, The Soft Moon is more of an alchemist of gloom, doubling rhythms with staccato electronics and downtuned Killing Joke-ish basslines to what would have been a standard Goth plod. In many ways, it makes perfect sense that The Soft Moon has landed on Captured Tracks, as he's mining the same aesthetic surfaces of Blank Dogs, but where Blank Dogs holds back with a subtle irony, The Soft Moon fully embraces the gloom of this music; thus making this one of the best records of 2010 that everybody will be hearing in 2011. Awesome.
MPEG Stream: "Breathe The Fire"
MPEG Stream: "Circles"
MPEG Stream: "Out Of Time"
MPEG Stream: "Tiny Spiders"

GROUPER Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill (Grouper Records) lp 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
The THIRD repress of this exquisite album on vinyl. If you missed it the last two times, don't expect this one to last any longer! The only difference is the black & white artwork, but the musical content is the same. Here's what we said way back when...
Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill opens with an entirely characteristic yet coy swell of effected elemental smear, crumbling delicately yet forcefully, until giving way to what is, to date, and here is the coy part, Liz Harris' most songwriterly and structured album. As opposed to the rich swaths of drone that up until now defined her sound, Harris has shifted from the abstract towards a more distinct and figurative sound. True to the title, the record unfolds like a sort of mysterious and morbid fairytale, innocent in its clear and elegant melodies, yet creepy and highly abstract in its more droney and sublime interludes. For the most part, her guitar playing is laid bare, removed from the dense fog of effects that typically occlude them. And what we discover is actually a pretty strummy record, with plenty of clean guitar articulation though certainly the aroma of her previous tech heavy approach remains in what is relatively speaking still pretty effected. At times she even reverts back to the gorgeous icey crunchy string attack of some previous efforts. With so much space liberated in the absence of drones, we also get to hear her stunning voice. Furthermore, the occasional audible lyric creeps to the surface, one standout fragment being "Love Is Enormous," a somewhat shockingly affirmative sentiment from an otherwise darkly mysterious and abstract persona. From start to finish Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill lulls you into its graceful murmurings and hypnotic thrumming. An exquisite addition to an already compelling discography. Recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Disengaged"
MPEG Stream: "Heavy Water/ I'd Rather Be Sleeping"

NO JOY Ghost Blonde (Mexican Summer) cd 13.98
These days noise pop bands are a dime a dozen. And we could count the number of shoegaze bands popping up on one hand, if that hand had about thousands fingers, and to be fair, it's a sound we love, and so in many cases, we can be less than discerning, we just love hearing those thick coruscating guitars, the soaring melodies, the lush walls of sound, spaced out and dreamy and fuzzy and buzzy and blissy. So what is it exactly that makes a band stand out from the pack? Songs, sure, you can't be a pop band of any stripe without songs. But it's more than that. Something ineffable. Songs sure, and the sound, of course, but just as importantly there are a handful of intangibles that all have to fall into place perfectly. Or at least perfectly IMperfectly. And more often than not, it's not something that can be created consciously. All a band can really do, is to follow their hearts, create the sound they hear in their heads, and try their best to realize that sound, to render that sound in all the glorious shades and colors and textures it needs to become more than just music, to transcend and become something magical, something special.
And that happens more than one might think, or expect, enough monkeys with typewriters as the saying goes, or in this case enough punk rock kids with guitars and a 4 track. Most recently it was the amazing record by Bay Area outfit Weekend, whose record captured everything we love about this sound, and now there's this, the debut full length from female fronted shoegaze noisepoppers No Joy, which moniker be damned, is about the most gloriously joyful record we've heard in ages.
In some ways, No Joy's Ghost Blonde is the perfect compliment to that Weekend record, a distinctly feminine variation of the same formula, the overall sound is more dreampoppy and hazy, the vocals ethereal and ephemeral and is the perfect counterpoint to the bands thick wall of sound, infusing clean guitar jangle, a distinctly nineties indie rock vibe, all wound into a pretty perfect chunk of pure pop JOY.
If you're anything like us, it should only take about the first 60 seconds of album opener "Mediumship" thick crunchy jangle guitar wrapped in a field of wild tangled feedback, the vocals drifty and pretty, and then when the song kicks in, we're totally transported, crunchy, fuzzy, hooky, heavy, shoegazey-y, plenty of ooooh's and aaaaah's, the sort of song you never want to end, and that you'll find yourself playing over and over and over. Which pretty much applies to every track here.
There are definitely some broodier moments, and some abstract psychedelic ambient drift, even some slightly atonal Sonic Youth inspired guitar tangle, but those elements are smoothly woven into the group's hazy, softly noisy, girl groupish, crunchy, jangly shoegazey dream pop bliss.
Definite contender for pop record of the year, and a record which will no doubt send lots of folks scrambling to redo their prematurely finished year end lists! Rightfully so!
MPEG Stream: "Mediumship"
MPEG Stream: "Heedless"
MPEG Stream: "Maggie Says I Love You"

NO JOY Ghost Blonde (Mexican Summer) lp 24.00
These days noise pop bands are a dime a dozen. And we could count the number of shoegaze bands popping up on one hand, if that hand had about thousands fingers, and to be fair, it's a sound we love, and so in many cases, we can be less than discerning, we just love hearing those thick coruscating guitars, the soaring melodies, the lush walls of sound, spaced out and dreamy and fuzzy and buzzy and blissy. So what is it exactly that makes a band stand out from the pack? Songs, sure, you can't be a pop band of any stripe without songs. But it's more than that. Something ineffable. Songs sure, and the sound, of course, but just as importantly there are a handful of intangibles that all have to fall into place perfectly. Or at least perfectly IMperfectly. And more often than not, it's not something that can be created consciously. All a band can really do, is to follow their hearts, create the sound they hear in their heads, and try their best to realize that sound, to render that sound in all the glorious shades and colors and textures it needs to become more than just music, to transcend and become something magical, something special.
And that happens more than one might think, or expect, enough monkeys with typewriters as the saying goes, or in this case enough punk rock kids with guitars and a 4 track. Most recently it was the amazing record by Bay Area outfit Weekend, whose record captured everything we love about this sound, and now there's this, the debut full length from female fronted shoegaze noisepoppers No Joy, which moniker be damned, is about the most gloriously joyful record we've heard in ages.
In some ways, No Joy's Ghost Blonde is the perfect compliment to that Weekend record, a distinctly feminine variation of the same formula, the overall sound is more dreampoppy and hazy, the vocals ethereal and ephemeral and is the perfect counterpoint to the bands thick wall of sound, infusing clean guitar jangle, a distinctly nineties indie rock vibe, all wound into a pretty perfect chunk of pure pop JOY.
If you're anything like us, it should only take about the first 60 seconds of album opener "Mediumship" thick crunchy jangle guitar wrapped in a field of wild tangled feedback, the vocals drifty and pretty, and then when the song kicks in, we're totally transported, crunchy, fuzzy, hooky, heavy, shoegazey-y, plenty of ooooh's and aaaaah's, the sort of song you never want to end, and that you'll find yourself playing over and over and over. Which pretty much applies to every track here.
There are definitely some broodier moments, and some abstract psychedelic ambient drift, even some slightly atonal Sonic Youth inspired guitar tangle, but those elements are smoothly woven into the group's hazy, softly noisy, girl groupish, crunchy, jangly shoegazey dream pop bliss.
Definite contender for pop record of the year, and a record which will no doubt send lots of folks scrambling to redo their prematurely finished year end lists! Rightfully so!
MPEG Stream: "Mediumship"
MPEG Stream: "Heedless"
MPEG Stream: "Maggie Says I Love You"

K-GROUP / OMIT Storage (Fusetron) lp 14.98
Here's a piece of wax that came out back in 2002, and it's a title that we thought was long discontinued by Fusetron. But, luckily, somehow, a handful of copies still exist, and if you're keen on the stun-drone / brain-zonk electronics currently blasted by the Emeralds axis, you NEED to investigate everything that Omit has ever released. Our words from way back when...
Both K-Group and Omit have been longtime aQuarius favorites from the New Zealand experimental noise scene; but unfortunately, they've been pretty quiet in their respective outputs during the past couple of years. K-Group is the solo project for Paul Toohey, who has also worked in the (defunct?) Surface Of The Earth, both of which centered around low-frequency tectonic drones coaxed from abused amplifiers. Clinton Williams has taken up the Omit moniker for his creepy, tape loop compositions loaded with bleak sci-fi / psychotic imagery. This collaboration between Williams and Toohey is actually their second, if you count a 7" which came out ages ago. In running Williams' battery of analog synths through Toohey's cabinets, they've constructed an eerie album of deep rumblings that are on par with anything that Coleclough, Koner, or Troum have managed to release. As the K-Group / Omit drones ripple with a gritty amplifier buzz often lacking in the driftwork of those aforementioned artists, "Storage" pulses with a subterranean heaviness, pushing this closer towards the Earth / SUNNO))) terrain. A really wonderful album!!!

DEMDIKE STARE Tryptych (Modern Love) 3cd 28.00
Finally, Demdike Stare's dark and dizzying, murky and mysterious hauntological black dub triptych, previously available via three separate slabs of vinyl, is now available on cd, gathered up into a single, nicely packaged triple disc set. And loaded with bonus tracks (nearly 40 minutes extra all told), which makes this pretty much a shoe-in for Record Of The Week...
Demdike Stare are one of the few bands who seem to be a unanimous aQ favorite, everyone here LOVES these guys, and judging on how many of the various lps we've sold, everyone out there does too. Which makes sense, when you consider, DS basically create a kind of black metal dubstep, or as we (and others) like to describe it, a blackened dub record on Chain Reaction. Either one should give you an idea of the sort of dark sonic energy these guys conjure up. Thick claustrophobic atmospheres, skeletal rhythms, thick throbbing bass, skittering dubbed out beats, disembodied voices, stuttering minimal sort-of-dubstep, looped and processed African folk music (??), swirling glitched out electronics, deeeep pulsing dronemusic, reverb drenched post-rock-via-techno skitter, all woven into a swirling organic mass of dub flecked blacktronica, dark and sinister and dubby, and weirdly house-y, sprawling and epic and creepy and so totally sweeping and cinematic.
The first disc, Forest Of Evil, was originally two sidelong tracks, the first starts out all deep shimmer, with a softly melodic buzz, spidery acoustic guitars, long stretches of billowy black ambience, bits of shuffly jazzy drift, peppered with thick shards of buzzy fractured dub bass and Kompakt style skitter, giving way to glistening late night techno, whirling pop ambient, and blissed out ethereal dronemusic, while the second is darkly dramatic, epic and majestic, like some lost Italian soundtrack, big drums, orchestral and ominous, looped samples, blurred melodic smears over deep pulsing bass, whirling clouds of cymbal shimmer, insectoid FX buzz, jumbled atonal melodies (hints of Bernard Herrmann), the vibe tense and haunting, with some dubstep bass buzz, that slowly dissolves into a Caretaker like outro, all layered strings wreathed in hiss and crackle, hazy and druggy and divine. The bonus track "Quiet Sky" conjures up just what the title implies, a quiet sky, but a dark, bruised midnight sky, flecked with stars, soft swirls of metallic shimmer like gauzy clouds, the song gradually developing a strange minimal hiccuppy rhythm, underpinning the deep melancholic swells, a strange almost industrial tinged bit of pop ambience.
The second disc, Liberation Through Hearing, is thematically related to the Book Of The Dead, and focuses on the space between death and rebirth. Rendered in greys and blacks, in buzz and rumble, beginning with some woozy late night Portishead style downtempo trip hop, low slung looped skitter and swell, lush swirls of cinematic strings, ghostly choirs, a softly lurching rhythmic stutter, a deep cavernous throb, sounding like a ghostly stripped down dubstep. Which gives way to heaving expanses of black tidal thrum, muted scrapings, all wound into hypnotic pulses of dark energy, laced with distant chiming melodies, a haunting, gauzey faded memory in sound, drawn from radios with dying batteries and gradually slowing turntables, a soft focus symphony of creaks and rumbles and blurred low end shimmer. The first half finishes with a swoonsome smear of looped ambience, like a field recording of an after hours nightclub captured in a temporal loop, warm and druggy and fuzzy, strangely hypnotic and rhythmic, totally trancelike, a creeped out wasteland soundscape, mysterious and chilling, which is eventually augmented by thick slabs of corrosive low end, and heavily reverbed industrial clatter, which eventually emerges into a strange sea of crackle and hum, of warbly rhythms, chiming bells and distorted crunch, sounding a bit like Jeck spinning Pole record, abstract and spaced out and hauntingly lovely.
The second half opens with thick streaks of ghostly mesmer, all washed out and slowly decaying, underpinned by thick swaths of dubstep style bass wobble, but muted and smoothed into soft smears of undulating blackness. Subtle skitter surfaces, as do distant voices, the sound getting more and more dubby, a bit like a Caretaker record on Chain Reaction, that sort of hazy abstract drift, but anchored to barely there beats, the buzz building to an intense coda, all the while wrapped in throbbing woofer punishing low end.
Some super stripped down rhythms are laid over a swirling ghostly backdrop of fragmented melodies and a buried house music thump, tangled and blurred strings wrap the proceedings in a veil of softened reverb and subtle echo, the almost Eastern sounding pulse and swell reminding us a bit of the late great Muslimgauze.
Finally, the record collapses into some sort of melancholic sonic reverie, a hushed ambient outro, a tranquil sea of soft swirling swells, clouds of echo and reverb, a dreamy darkness, a blackened bit of blurpop minimalism, laced with muted streaks of fuzz and hiss, but all gradually sinking into Demdike Stare's endless trancelike billowing blackness.
The bonus tracks on this one (3 of them, clocking in at nearly 20 minutes) continue the record's surreal sonic journey, spidery rhythms, and chiming melodies are looped and layered over a simple pulsing propulsive groove, the whole thing slightly warped and warbled, as if recorded onto an old piece of tape, and played back on some dusty old ramshackle tape player, ghostly, but surprisingly playful at first, before slipping into some seriously creepy, deeeeeep droning rumbles, wreathed in shimmering solar winds, softly billowing sheets of hiss and static, eventually shedding all of that, leaving just a thick morass of softly undulating low end, shot through with a slo-mo house music pulse, only to have the hiss and whir return, this time relegated to the background, until the track finishes surprisingly with what sounds like a bit of African style funkiness, before disappearing in a brief cloud of swirling hushed buzz.
Finally, the third disc, Voices Of Dust, unveils the Tryptych's final movement, opening with "Black Sun", a short stretch of some super minimal electronic dronemusic, all layered overtones and strange sonic shadings, which gives way to the chopped and looped and stuttery vocal driven "Hashshashin Chant" which takes tribal drums and traditional folk music vocals, and twists them all up, and tangles those elements with strange percussion, industrial buzz, the whole thing a dizzying chunk of hypno-electronic collaged psychedelic mashup weirdness, before slipping into the much murkier and minimal "Repository Of Light", which unfurls like some sort of Hawkwind-meets-Pole spaced out digi-dub drift. And so it goes, the sound flitting between impossibly realized miniature sound worlds, cinematic electronic ambience, ominously pulsing low end rumble, hazy glitchy dubbed out Jeckian smears, super blown out electronic big beat bombast, almost industrial sounding avant big band abstraction, roiling corrosive soft noise, bellowing foghorn-like melodies, warped and woozy scratchy old lp warblescapes and beyond.
The bonus tracks are the perfect, hazy, ghostly coda, the first, a warm, whispery bit of keening abstract melody and thick pulsing thrum, all very washed out and space-y and dreamlike, a constantly vibrating living thing, a throbbing organic expanse of minimal space drone psychedelic ambience, until finally, the whole disc is laid to rest with 9 minutes of heaving, glacial, metallic creep and creak, wreathed in record crackle, the final sounds unfurl like some old dusty Tim Hecker 45 spinning at 16rpm, mournful moaning melodies, buried rhythmic thumps, shimmery sitar like buzz, all hazy and smeared and lysergic and mysteriously murky, the perfect slipping-into-darkness, leaving-this-world-behind finale...
Gorgeously evocative, creepy and cinematic, abstract and otherworldly, druggy and dreamy, fantastically haunting and utterly spine tinglingly stunning. And thus, absolutely recommended.
Packaged in a super swank, oversized, hardcover book style digipak.
Matt's addendum: "Really feeling this collection of tunes these days. Love blasting this spooky dub-collage REAL loud in the shop! Thee neighbors get upset, but they need to chill cuz it has to be MASSIVE!"
MPEG Stream: "Forest Of Evil (Dusk)"
MPEG Stream: "Caged In Stammheim"
MPEG Stream: "Eurydice"
MPEG Stream: "Regolith"
MPEG Stream: "Hashashin Chant"
MPEG Stream: "Repository Of Light"
MPEG Stream: "Rain And Shame"

ATELECINE ...And Six Dark Hours Pass (Dais) lp 19.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
At the beginning of December we made the latest aTelecine lp our Record Of The Week. A fantastic slab of twisted collaged industrial weirdness, blackened and warped and freaky and far out and weirdly beautiful. We sold tons, and were super psyched to discover that there was in fact a previous record, so we tried to order a bunch, but were only able to get a handful, so here it is, the debut lp from aTelecine, the avant industrial drone collage project of porn star Sasha Grey, and her band aTelecine, and like A Cassette Tape Culture, which we made our Record Of The Week, ...And Six Dark Hours Pass is just as dark and creepy and gorgeous and essential. Unfortunately, only a handful of folks will manage to get their hands on one of these. Anyone who loved the first one, is definitely gonna want this one too, layered samples, warped effects, disembodied voices, detuned guitars, dense rumbling drones, crumbling riffage, alien vocals, minimal murky percussion, hazy almost shoegazey drifts, hushed low end thrum, crackle and hiss and whir and hum and shimmer, stuttering looped rhythms, creepy gauzy driftscapes, all blurred and smeared and stretched and tangled into a psychedelic songsuite that melts before your very ears, the songs all oozing into one another, the melodies wrapping themselves around layered textures, the textures decaying and revealing hidden sonic treasures, those treasures blossoming into sounds way more sinister than expected and so it goes. Totally recommended. Even if you missed out on the first one, this stuff is so good. Regardless of the Sasha Grey hype/stigma, both of the aTelecine records are fantastic, grab one of these while you can. Sorry we couldn't get more...
MPEG Stream: "Very Small Friends"
MPEG Stream: "Sky Then Trees Then Birds Then Nothing"
MPEG Stream: "Sixth Pass"

CHOP SHOP Oxide (23five) cd 14.98
LAST COPIES AVAILABLE!!! When we heard that one of our favorite noise albums was nearly out of print, we grabbed a bunch. If you've not gotten a hold of this album, this is probably your last chance! Here's what we said about it a while back...
Akita. Menche. Blankenship. Dilloway. These are the men of noise with discographies the size of small town phone books, proving their might in the international noise community by the sheer audaciousness of their output. But then again, you might really only need a single testament to stake your claim as one of the greatest noise musicians. Chop Shop has chosen the latter tactic, with Oxide being that sole document, after a relatively tiny back catalogue of cassette only releases, a couple of cd-rs, and two infamous 10"s. Both released through RRR, the first was the Steel Plate 2x10" that was literally bound to a steel plate; and the second was a split 10" with Small Cruel Party that was literally cut in half, making playback a dangerous proposition for the needle on your record player. Both of those releases have long been out of print; and despite the hushed respect that those 10"s demand, Chop Shop has kept a low profile. A very low profile. Hence, after a career that has spanned nearly two decades, Oxide is his first proper cd. And it's stunning.
The sole proprietor of Chop Shop is New York based noise technician Scott Konzelmann, whose audio demolition revolves around speaker constructions forged out of hammered plate metal and disfigured commercial grade pipes, which focus particular frequencies and resonant overtones into swarming orchestras of rust, noise, drone, and static. Tape has long been Konzelmann's medium of choice for recording; and like William Basinski before him, Konzelmann endures the self-disintegration of the medium whilst transcribing the sounds of Oxide digitally. Where Basinski's vocabulary of decay is all romance and melancholy, Konzelmann's is muscular and urgently present. Oxide offers a metallurgist's din where compressed air strikes hard steel and machine vibrations generate noxious resonant frequencies in neighboring vents. Konzelmann composes the old school way, with a razor blade and pieces of tape, generating jump cut edits alongside the self-generated debris from the magnetic literally falling apart. These grey, dead-tech drones thus rupture and explode along the faultlines of those edits, and Oxide emerges as a forceful, dynamic album without resorting to puerile shock tactics. This is a seriously great noise album for anybody with a passing interest in Broken Flag, Hansen Records, or early Hafler Trio.
MPEG Stream: "Oxide (extract 1) "
MPEG Stream: "Oxide (extract 2)"
MPEG Stream: "Oxide (extract 3)"

ATELECINE A Cassette Tape Culture (Pendu Sound) lp 10.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
LAST COPIES! Now OUT OF PRINT, except for this small handful. All the remaining copies have slightly damaged covers (mostly bent corners), hence the reduced price, vinyl is pristine, last chance to pick up one of these twisted beauties...
Most people probably know Sasha Grey for what she is most (in)famous for, and that would be for being a porn star. Even folks who don't know porn stars might still know Grey as an actress, who recently starred in Steven Soderbergh's film Girlfriend, and has been on HBO's Entourage, but few probably know her as a musician (although aQ customers might remember she sang on a Current 93 record!). And we're not talking cheesy club diva, a la Tracy Lords, crooning terribly over bad house music, no we're talking as a proper musician, one who apparently has been making music since she was a teenager (influenced by KMFDM and Throbbing Gristle), and whose current group aTelecine is some sort of blackened industrial avant drone sound collage thing, that would put most of the current crop of experimental musicians to shame. The label hypes Grey's music as being heavily indebted to groups like Nurse With Wound and Coil, and while we're tempted to think this is just the label trying to make the band seem 'cooler' and more authentic, it only takes a few minutes listening to aTelecine's new full length to realize, it's not all that unlikely. This stuff is dark, and corrosive, haunting and fierce, otherworldly and intense, a little bit industrial, a little ambient, a little witch house-y, a little black metal, doomy and new wavey and seriously dark, a dizzying churning cauldron of field recordings, samples, loops, electronics, distorted guitars, programmed beats, FX drenched vocals, throbbing basslines, plenty of glitch and clang and rumble and buzz.
If you're anything like us it'll just take a single song, the first one we heard (even though this is aTelecine's 3rd or 4th record), the super creepy, super intense "I Came, I Sat, I Departed", a lumbering blackened industrial creep, all downtuned chug, low slung slither, laced with some seriously fucked up and freaky hissed whispery vokills, the sound crunchy and glitchy, but super hypnotic. The song gets more and more chaotic, with anguished howls, more distortion, the song seeming to crumble before our ears into a hellish reverb drenched miasma. Terrifying and incredible.
The rest of the record stacks up pretty well too. "A Cassette Played" is all woozy low end and rumbling bass over snippets of crowd sound, a sort of collaged dark wavey drift, with some super minimal skittery Autechre style fractured beats, a sprawling expansive dronescape, laced with skitter, and ominous synth swells, strangely cinematic keyboards, the sound becoming almost John Carpenter-esque near the end, before slipping directly into "Chroeg Xen", which sounds like Steve Reich or Terry Riley as interpreted by the current crop of retro futurist sci fi new wavers. "Elijah's New Sun" is a fluttering field of hiss and static, of shortwave interference, buried synth pulses, strange processed vocals, and minimal synth melodies way off in the distance.
"It's All Write" is an avalanche of song fragments, woven into a woozy, series of melodic swells, streaks of buzz, bits of sampled voices, a minimal barely there beat, slowly unwinding like some out of focus sonic charnel house. "Kitchen Light" is a surprisingly lovely bloopy bleepy bit of spacey synthiness, while "Never Was A Dreamer (vox)" is a swirling synthy crawl, all whispered tangled voices, and layered shimmery drones. "She Is Beautiful" is another bit of sci fi synthery, which leads into the short closer "Some What Daft", a gorgeous creepy glitchscape, of muted melodies, fractured drones and alien squelches, all over a sort of krauty pulse, the sort of track that we would have loved to see go on way longer. Which is pretty much how we feel about almost every track here.
Sure, the fact that aTelecine is Sasha Grey's band is the hook, but it hardly matters really, besides bucking the convention of actresses turned terrible musician, or certainly porn star gone pointlessly mainstream, this stuff is incredible, dark and dense and extremely well crafted, occasionally playful and mysterious, but more often fucking chilling and intense, and definitely makes it plain for all to see, that if Grey ever did decide to give up her day job, as sad as that would be, at least we'd have more of this amazing music to look forward to.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
MPEG Stream: "I Came I Sat I Departed"
MPEG Stream: "A Cassette Played"
MPEG Stream: "It's All Write"
MPEG Stream: "Some What Daft"

GAMES That We Can Play (Hippos In Tanks) 12" 11.98
The duo known as Games presented themselves as chillwave mutants on the Everything Is Working 7" which came and went a couple months back, but this long EP / short LP (depending on how you wanna look at these six tracks) proves that Games is an entity existing between a number of dichotomies: Now vs. Then, East vs. West, ironically uncool (thus making it cool) vs. unfashionably gauche, etc. It shouldn't be a surprise then that half of Games is the sci-fi trickster Daniel Lopatin, who's better known as Oneohtrix Point Never. There's plenty of the Lopatin infatuation with polygon melodies, allusions to Russian technocracy, and dreamtime slippages into the forgotten futures of the past; but Lopatin's partner, Joel Ford, brings a mash-up aesthetic of Italo-Disco sensuality, mid-'80s Fairlight sampling mimesis, and plenty of trashy Euro-pop tropes. Unlike Lopatin's Oneohtrix project which seeks to capture a sound which never existed in the '80s but is an extract of a bleary selective memory from all of the data that's been left behind, Games is far more concise in what it's referencing - the mid-'80s synthpop / tropes of bands like Animotion and Ministry. No, we don't mean the "Jesus Built My Hot-Rod" era of Ministry, but the period that Mr. Jourgensen seems to want to forget: the swooning romanticism of With Sympathy and the cross-pollinated electronica album Twitch. The track "Strawberry Sky" is a Top 10 single that should have been released in 1986, with a magnificently catchy vocal chorus delivered by Laurel Chartow atop faux-flute synth pads, darkly washed electronic arpeggiations, thumped drum machines, and a coked-up production sensibility. The auto-tuned vocal utterances that drive "Shadows In Bloom" compliment an acid flashback of an arrangement seemingly lifted from one of Bel Biv Devoe's skittered grooves. Couple that with all of the new wave synths, and it's a downright awesome track! The Gatekeeper Remix of "Strawberry Sky" steps up the Ministry / Twitch references with more of a cybernetic flare to the punchy EBM rhythms and American Anglophilia. Recommended.

ASHER & UBEBOET Cell Memory (Winds Measure Recordings) cd-r 11.98
Intentional or otherwise, Asher Thal-Nir and Ubeboet (also known as Miguel Tolosa) have created a near perfect soundscape for winter. While Cell Memory is not nearly as isolated and grim as the classic Thomas Koner records that looked to Greenland for inspiration, the hushed noises and barren drones of Cell Memory capture a similarly cold environment. The album is split almost evenly between two near 20 minute tracks. "Alter" echoes a muted howl across a billowing mass of radio snow, nocturnal hallucinatory gestures, and soft focus noise, all of which has been muffled into a long-stare miasma of ghostly repetitions flickering against a fog-laden horizon line. While the mood of "Alter" has something akin to being awakened at 3am by a snowstorm, the second track "Nullus" is more of a subterranean, bunker recording, with flecks of static dropping on the cavernous subharmonic drones like seeped water from the ceiling into a massive concrete cistern. Electrical murmurings and accreted layers of smeared textures ebb and flow against the near constant background hum. Beautifully chilling impressionism that would fit very well next to Jonathan Colecough, Mirror, Murmer, Bernhard Gunter, Steve Roden, and the aforementioned Thomas Koner.
As with all of the Wind Measures Recordings, Cell Memory comes in an elegant folio, letterpressed by WMR's Ben Owen. It's a professionally duplicated cd-r and is limited to 150 copies.
MPEG Stream: "Alter"
MPEG Stream: "Nullus"

CHRIS & COSEY Heartbeat (CTI) lp 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Throbbing Gristle ceased to exist (for the first time) in 1981, shortly after the transgressive industrialists performed in San Francisco in May of that year. TG were deft in their manipulation of media, ominously stating that "The Mission is terminated," with the 'mission' referring to their numerous stark proclamations against society at large conjoined with their adventurous manglings of noise, rhythm, and atonality. But there's another rather self-evident historical fact: that TG's Genesis P-Orridge broke up with fellow bandmate & long-term partner Cosey Fanny Tutti. Shortly thereafter, Cosey and fellow TG member Chris Carter struck out on their own (with a romantic partnership not far behind), and later on in 1981, Chris & Cosey released their first solo project, the minimal wave / synthpunk masterpiece Heartbeat. In TG, Carter's propensity for beguiling electronic melodies and disco rhythms could be heard on such classic tracks as "United" and "Hot On The Heels Of Love." Both of these were signature tracks for Carter's aesthetic, which espoused an economic proto-techno approach to drum machine rhythms and heavily sequenced electro pulse melodies. Such has been the template for Chris & Cosey's sound since.
"Put Yourself In Los Angeles" opens the album with a dizzying percolation of flanged electronics which snaps into a militant march of Cosey's gnashed guitars locked against barked samples of a lunatic radio host and insistent rhythms. At least on this track, it's easy to hear the influence that Chris & Cosey would have on the likes of Front 242, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails. Other tracks such as the metronomic spiralling of "Voodoo" and the downright pastoral birdsounds of "Moorby" looked back to the Krautrock electronic meanderings of Cluster. "Just Like You" is one of Chris & Cosey's finest tracks, oozing with paranoia and dread throughout the slashed noises and found dialogue haunting the minimalist techno-horror sequencing and sustained minor-key melodies. The title track completes the album brilliantly by looking forward to any number of Detroit-inspired techno trax with double timed rhythms emerging out of maudlin, if cybernetic melodies and electronic-pop propulsive sequencing that really does act as a bridge between the realm of Kraftwerk and the British new wave that was bubbling up around Chris & Cosey back in the day. An absolute classic!
MPEG Stream: "Put Yourself In Los Angeles"
MPEG Stream: "Just Like You"
MPEG Stream: "Heartbeat"

CHROMATICS Night Drive (Deluxe) (Italians Do It Better) 2lp 14.98
So stoked that this awesome album by the Chromatics is available on vinyl now and with a whole side filled with unreleased tracks.
Ooooh Ahhhhh! This one has been sizzling in our ears pretty much on endless repeat since it showed up at the store. Chromatics have undergone a pretty radical change from their early herky-jerky no-wave inspired beginnings, as showcased on the amazing and scene defining After Dark comp that we recently listed, and are still so in love with. Chromatics now have a sound that is much more sensual, subdued and spaced out. And we have to say we are loving this new direction. I definitely suits them so much more naturally than their noisier punky past.
With a sound much more rooted in early drugged out disco and '80s Euro-pop, Night Drive is sparse and melancholic enough to reel in folks whose taste usually falls on the darker end of the spectrum yet with songs so damn sexy and enticing that those of us with dance and pop leanings are seduced by their sound as well. With Ruth Radalet's vocals sounding like they are being delivered in a dark room filled with fog and smoke, there is such an intoxicating late night vibe that Chromatics tap into which feels so vacant and so sexy in the best possible way. They take on the daunting task of covering Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" and manage to make it their own, no small feat as that is a song with such deep meaning for so many of us. So damn good!
MPEG Stream: "Night Drive"
MPEG Stream: "The Killing Spree"
MPEG Stream: "Running Up That Hill"

NEON JUDGEMENT Early Tapes (Dark Entries) lp 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
BACK IN PRINT!!!
One of the more eccentric acts to emerge from the Belgian EMB scene in the late '80s, The Neon Judgement developed a stylized sound of electronics melded to an Americana swagger with patinas of country-fried twang working into leather-clad industrialisms. At times, Neon Judgement were brilliant in this approach, other times it was a contrived dud. Yet, this sound was one that was developed over time, as their earliest recordings took on the more of synth punk idioms that were held by contemporaries in Cabaret Voltaire, Absolute Body Control, Siglo XX, Suicide, and even bits of Gary Numan. This LP contains all the tracks from the two cassettes that Neon Judgement released in 1981-1982 (TV Treated and Suffering), and it makes perfect sense that the exceptional ears at Dark Entries would seek out the finest moments from Neon Judgement's beginnings. At this time, the band was considerably more raw, with jagged guitar riffs coupled to the overdriven synth chords and jabbing arppegiations. It sounds like Neon Judgement had been listening to that first Suicide record, and wanted to try to figure out how to reinterpret the zombified rockabilly through electronics as well, without resorting to a pure homage. The minimalist spiralling of Neon Judgement's electronics holds some of Suicide's simplicity, although Neon Judgement's rock sensibility is purely showcased through the guitar and not the songwriting, which is much more tuned (at least here) to the European approaches of coldwave detachment. A couple of the tracks (e.g. "Factory Walk" and "TV Treated") had made appearances on later albums with more polish on the production, but there's something better suited to the stilted gait and agitated guitar pluckings on "Factory Walk" that make these recordings more expressive. As with all Dark Entries titles, limited to 500 copies.

DARK DAY Window (Dark Entries) lp 19.98
This former Record Of The Week is BACK IN PRINT!!!
So cool! And cold wavey. A wonderfully produced piece of vinyl to replace those crappy downloads which have been bouncing around the internet for the past five or six years. Dark Day was the project spearheaded by R.L. Crutcmicre Mori in the earliest incarnation of the seminal No Wave band DNA in the mid '70s. By 1979, Crutchfield was striking out on his own as Dark Day; and at first, this band was an intentional reversal of roles within the trad-rock band with two women playing guitars and drums and a man behind the keyboards. The ladies for that incarnation were Nancy Arlen of Mars and Nina Canal of Ut; and they managed a few gigs and one hell of a great single - "Hands In The Dark" - which appeared many years later on a Soul Jazz No Wave compilation and has been covered spectacularly by the Chromatics. Canal and Arlen weren't terribly interested in continuing in the project, leaving Crutchfield to find likeminded folks with whom to work. The second (and last) Dark Day record was recorded in 1982, with Crutchfield going into the studio with a bunch of cheap electronics and toy synthesizers with Bill Sack to flesh out the accompaniments on similar instruments. Their interlocking arpeggiations are punctuated with blooping electronics that are equal parts Trio and Kraftwerk with an underlying dread to the spiralling songs that detoured from Kraftwerk's utopian vision of man-machine hybrids and down a paranoid vision of man being at the mercy of his machines, no matter how innocent their intent. Dark Day's songs are insistent and catchy despite their utterly simple structures. "Metal Benders" and "Danger / Dance" are probably the closest thing to being 'hits' on the album as weird / anti-romantic variations of Young Marble Giants with whip crack rhythms and spectral pre-X-Files electronic whistling melodies. Coming out of the NYC No Wave scene helped craft Dark Day into a something other than neo-Romantic post-punk outfit with electronics. This was a wholly unique band, who never got the attention that many of their contemporaries. Kudos to Dark Entries once again on a splendid reissue!
MPEG Stream: "Window"
MPEG Stream: "The Metal Benders"
MPEG Stream: "Danger/Dancer "
MPEG Stream: "Don't Bother"

FALL, THE This Nation's Saving Grace (Beggars Banquet) lp 14.98

FALL, THE This Nation's Saving Grace (Beggars Banquet) lp 14.98

PESTEG DRED Years Of Struggle Against The Lies, The Stupidity And The Cowardice (Dark Entries) lp 15.98
Martin Hall appears to be the figure who defined the Danish New Wave scene, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that any of the projects he worked in found much traction outside of Denmark. Ballet Mecanique was one such project, And Then Again was another; of course, there were a couple of solo outings too. Pesteg Dred was a very short-lived project, as the trio that revolved around Hall got together in 1981 with electronics wrangler Per Hendrichsen and vocalist Inge Shannon. During one weekend, the three landed in a studio and banged out an album but didn't have the ability to pay the bill. So the tapes sat until Hall could negotiate something with the owners of the studio. A cassette of the material surfaced as a bonus with an art magazine in 1985, but otherwise, the recordings languished while all three members went onto other projects. We've never heard of any of Hall's other projects; but if any were half as good as Pesteg Dred, they'd be worth the price of admission.
The dark storm of post-punk had certainly come to Denmark, with Hall admitting an early infatuation with Cabaret Voltaire and A Certain Ratio (well, he did name one his later projects And Then Again after an A Certain Ratio tune); but The Pop Group and The Ex must have made a big impact as well. The band is essentially a mutant rhythm section of rumbling, discordant funk basslines and unschooled percussive fills that showcase way more fury than skill, with a series of weirdly skittered electronics flushed between the rhythms with murky modular sweeps, distorted drones, and delay-rippled bloop. Inge's vocals are a cold monotone bellow that aren't too far from Bettina Koster of Malaria, making a perfect fit for the darkly, cacophonous agit-punk of Pesteg Dred. The lengthy "Light, More Light" is very much in the vein of the best A Certain Ratio, with breakneck post-disco rhythm, neck-strangling basslines, jittery guitars, and even some atonal blurts from a trumpet. Death disco? You bet!
Dark Entries scores yet again with a really great re-discovery on Pested Dred.
MPEG Stream: "Salt"
MPEG Stream: "Cold Impressions Of Perhaps"
MPEG Stream: "Almost"

TAIGA REMAINS / RV PAINTINGS split (Blackest Rainbow) lp 17.98
BACK IN STOCK!!!
Blackest Rainbow has been pretty damn consistent in their survey of the pharmacologically tainted realm of dronemusik, releasing great albums from Aidan Baker, Barn Owl, Elm, Tom Carter, Jazzfinger, more recently that Bong / Quttinirpaaq split, and certainly this incredible split between Taiga Remains and RV Paintings. The former is the work of Alex Cobb, who also runs the equally great label Students Of Decay; and the latter is a side project of the Starving Weirdos. Both sides of the LP dwell heavily upon reverb saturation grafted onto acoustic dronings from various sources - probably guitar, certainly some bells, maybe a long-stringed instrument. Such is a typical strategy for RV Paintings, but is somewhat novel for Taiga Remains, whose driftscape sensibility tends more towards the smooth surface arcing for tone and harmony. If Blackest Rainbow hadn't etched the names of each artist into the surface of the wax, you'd have a 50 percent chance of guessing who was doing each side. Perhaps Cobb was deliberately trying to coax more of a RV Paintings sound from his gear and vice versa. The major difference in these two sides only becomes apparent when RV Paintings begins to gently tap across sheet metal, gongs, and a drum kit a la Eddie Prevost from AMM. The drone is still the central feature, and the percussive serves to levitate and propel the drone forward. Really great stuff to be found here, and limited to a mere 400 copies.

IMAGINARY SOFTWOODS s/t (Digitalis) lp 33.00
All right. Yet another great homage to the transcendent, cosmological sounds of mid-'70s progressive electronics by way of John Elliott, better known as one of the synth dudes in Emeralds. The number of Elliott's solo / side projects is pretty staggering, with Imaginary Softwoods being the eighth that we're aware of, outside of Emeralds. Given the vast back catalogue from the Elliott / Emeralds axis, it shouldn't come as surprise that this 2lp set has gone through several permutations as well. First on cassette (three of 'em!). Then on vinyl. A cd-r came and went. Now, this remastered set appears once again on vinyl. There is a reason for all of the various editions of this album: it's a damn good record!
The first side opens with a cold void atmosphere of filter sweep tones and metallic sawtooth vibrato, reminiscent of Elliott's recordings as Outer Space with more of slant toward the languorous, flanging drones that come by way of Maeror Tri or Cranioclast, minus the post-industrial framework. Elliott settles into a series of tone cluster of rounded synth notes whose cycling phrases have an elegant restraint and somber mood, as if Morton Feldman were to score a isolationist sci-fi soundtrack. Side two offers more of the liquid abstraction that became an Emeralds' signature on What Happened, sprawling through gentle oscillation and bittersweet half-melodies. A church-organ like set of rainy-day impressionism settles onto the third side, before Elliott reprises the cold flanging isolationism and Feldman-like tone clusters noted on the first side. The album drifts into a minor-key oblivion that descends over the course of the three final tracks on the fourth side of the album, tumbling into maudlin suspended tones and drones. So so nice!

JATOMA s/t (Kompakt) cd 16.98
Ah, Kompakt! The current kingdom of electronic music has produced another exceptional album from one of its citizens. There's not much to be said about Jatoma, as this Danish trio seems to be flaunting an air of mystery through a half-hearted attempt at anonymity. Regardless of their backstory, Jatoma are impressive magicians when it comes to their eccentric techno productions that recall the best of Four Tet, Matthew Herbert, and even Matmos from time to time.
With an opening sequence of sparkling digitalia on "Little Houseboat" that teases at a precious melodic phrase in the same way that Oval captured our imaginations with his impeccable Diskont 94 album, Jatoma is clearly onto something quite special. This becomes obvious when they push through a jumble of electronic squiggles and clockwork clicks into the soft whump of a techno pulse and accompanying bass groove that fleshes out just the first number on the very impressive debut. References to Animal Collective have been offered in comparison to Jatoma, but their sound relies less on lithium-addled bubblegum electronica and more on a chimerical synthesis of Pop Ambient dreaminess and the tech-house dramatics of build-and-release. It's no wonder that Kompakt signed them! "Durian" and "Bou" are both curious anthems with their auto-tuned, chill-wave melodies and warbled acid motifs fused onto thumped deep-house rhythms and hi-hat swing. While there are distinct tracks which stand on their own as the singles amongst the album, Jatoma take the time to subvert the iPod listening experience with very short interludes, codas, and intros of transitional squelches and tuned melodies that bridge the moods and atmospheres of Jatoma's varied tracks. Yup, it's an album that works best when listening from beginning to end!
Like many of the recent Kompakt releases, the vinyl comes the cd of the same material found within.
MPEG Stream: "Little Houseboat"
MPEG Stream: "Bou"
MPEG Stream: "Paper Lights"
MPEG Stream: "Permafrost"

SHOEMAKER, MATT Soundtrack For Dislocation (Elevator Bath) cd 12.98
Undeniably, this is a Matt Shoemaker recording. This Pacific Northwesterner has long been a favorite dronologist here at Aquarius with his ominous recordings spawned from electro-acoustic feedback systems, humid field recordings, tonebent mood engineering slanted toward audio hallucinations, dense guitar swarms, and elongated, zoner synth passages that give John Elliott a run for his money. Soundtrack For Dislocation is a self-evident title for Shoemaker, given how his work fractures temporal / psychogeographical planes, teleporting the listener from one opiated mirage to another. His process is just as interesting as the sounds that he produces, as he drives and controls feedback through a system of slinkies that act like something of a hybrid between a stereo spring reverb unit and an omnidirectional microphone, with Russian synths, VCO filters, and noise-aggregators positioned at various points on the feedback loop track. We had once thought that the pre-digital Merzbow recordings had developed into something of an organism that thrived on electricity, had an intelligence that dictated the course of the noise, and begrudgingly entertained a relationship with Masami Akita. Shoemaker's electro-acoustic contraptions seem to be approaching this Frankensteinian, electric organism on par with Merzbow's, although the architects of both projects have very different designs.
Hence, this is not a torrent of distortion, but a vertiginous path of drone, hiss, blur, shadow, grit, and decay. Placid atmospheres shimmer at times with all of the cinematic grandeur of Stars Of The Lid, only to dissolve, mutate, and crumble into hallucinatory slippages where flecks of environmental sounds breaking through, twisting once again into a metallic resonance on par with the most haunting of Nurse With Wound constructions. Thrumming tones pulse into skittering vibrations that build to rupturing crescendos that snap into near-silent voids of disquieting rumble. All of this comes together in another magnificent album from Mr. Shoemaker. Highly recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Arrival"
MPEG Stream: "Fuse Error Phantom"
MPEG Stream: "Circulation Within The Elemental Drift"

CANTU-LEDESMA, JEFRE Love Is A Stream (Type) lp+cd 22.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Before we blather on like we so often do, it seemed like it might be good to just toss out a first impression of Love Is A Stream, the fantastic new record from Root Strata label Head Honcho Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, his first for the Type label. And heck, that first impression might be all you need:
Lovesliescrushing meets Flying Saucer Attack.
There. Hard to argue with that. Warped warbly, blurred shoegazey drift, long stretches of incendiary psychedelic guitar drone, streaks of soft noise, buried melodies, ethereal vocals, lush layered textures, dense and explosive, expansive and dreamily hazy, and in its own way, gorgeously heavy.
A new side of Cantu-Ledesma for sure, whose past records seemed to hover in a much more tranquil serene otherworld, unfurling hushed landscapes of whispery minimalism, of delicate crystalline shimmer, and of barely there soft focus ambient drift. Love Is A Stream is anything but, a fiery, fierce, yet ultimately lush and washed out series of bold shoegaze dreamnoise experiments, not so much pop songs swathed in distortion and effects, as carefully crafted sonic impressions, a series of gorgeous miniature epics, each a brief expanse of prismatic hypnogogic psychedelia, every one a unique a roiling concoction of fuzzpopbliss and murky melodic churn. On the surface, the record plays out like a series of textures, from warm whirling hum, to crumbling blown out white noise blur, to grinding muted pulse and throb, to gauzy bleary haze, to thick billowy low end rumble, to superdistorted effects-drenched synthnoise, and yeah, you're reading right, this is in fact a noisy record, but it's an artfully crafted, carefully sculpted noise. A thick, billowing, warm and gloriously enveloping melodic noise, like sinking into a swirling sea of burnished muted crush, a nearly overwhelming avalanche of whirling swirling crumbling throb and thrum, beneath it all lurk delicate melodies, tendrils of minor key guitar, ghostly voices, whirring synths, they rise to the surface here and there, but for the most part exist as shadowy impressions, infusing the noisy textures with a melodic core, a warm glowing sonic heart, which is what transforms these heaving slabs of shoegazey heaviness into something divine, and divinely dreamy.
There are brief moments, where the surface noise, and the distortion, and the walls of effects peel back, and we get to peek behind the curtain, which reveals the lush minimal underpinnings of the songs, a brief melodic smear here, a hushed little fragment of guitar there, but a glimpse is all we get, and really all we want, because it's how those bits of minimal songcraft interact with the intense sonic effulgence that is truly the magic that Cantu-Ledesma wields in conjuring up the sounds here. And like all magic, the joy is not in how it was done, but it how it makes us feel.
The lp version comes with a bonus cd, a collaboration with Type label mainman Xela, who took source material provided by Cantu-Ledesma, and fashioned his own bit of ambient dronemusic. Nearly 50 minutes of haunting drift, after a short burst of caustic super distorted crunch, Xela settles into a slow burning sprawl of washed out chordal shimmer, deep rumbling thrum and lush streaks of shoegazey buzz, a few moments as dense and psychedelic as the record proper, but for the most part, more of a chill out wind down coda, the perfect addendum to an already practically perfect record. Really quite lovely.
MPEG Stream: "Stained Glass Body"
MPEG Stream: "Body Within Body"
MPEG Stream: "River Like Spine"

HORRID RED Empty Lungs (Holidays) lp 11.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
An offshoot of Teenage Panzerkorps / Der TPK, Horrid Red is described by the band's Glenn "Edmund Xavier" Donaldson as a militant new wave project somewhere near the likes of Death In June circa Nada. A beloved album of Death In June fans for sure, but Nada was a very clumsy attempt at bringing an occult obliqueness and right-wing imagery to the more romantic strains of new wave - Donanldson's recapitulation of '80s stark post-punk is WAY better.
The name Horrid Red might also be a play on the peculiar, forgotten new wave iconoclast Snowy Red, who sort of fell between Suicide and Fad Gadget; this was a band that Donaldson once professed considerable admiration for. That said, Horrid Red doesn't fall that far from the TPK sound, especially since Bunker Wolf is very present in delivering his booming Teutonic vocals with megaphone volume and clarity. Donaldson's arrangements are more stripped down than in TPK, but no-less spiky with their propulsive basslines, and also feature these sad, melodic leads that certainly look back to his earlier work in the Knit Separates and early Blithe Sons. But then there are the minor-key, haunted synths that take a page out of the Blessure Grave / Zola Jesus playbook and the minimal wave rhythms that gird almost every song. Released on Holiday Records, who seem to be the Sacred Bones of Italy. A necessary album for all fans of the recent wave of new goth. Limited to 300 copies!

NAGAMATZU Sacred Islands Of The Mad (Dark Entries) lp 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Something of a musical chameleon, Andrew Lagowski has popped up in a bunch unlikely places since the mid-'80s. He worked with Brian Lustmord on a couple of his seminal records (including the dark ambient classic Heresy and the brutalist industrial project Terror Against Terror), and shortly thereafter produced some thumping techno singles for the Warp-lookalike label GPR, only to produce an incredible series of paranoiac electro-acoustic work on Touch under his moniker SETI in the late '90s. Nagamatzu represents Lagowski's earliest recordings, dating back to 1986, and these sound nothing like anything that he's done since. This was his minimal wave / post-punk project, working with bassist Stephen Jarvis. Drum machines, claustrophobic electronics, horror-movie / newsreel samples, and a few droning licks on the guitar all work through these instrumental pieces, with most every track driven by Jarvis' low-slung melodies that come directly out of the Peter Hook and Simon Gallup schools of goth-inflected basslines. Not surprising, "Sacred Islands Of The Mad" comes across as an incredible collection of what could have been lost Joy Division or Cure demos minus the vocals. Every track is met with dour moods and melodies grafted onto comparatively uptempo rhythm tracks. There was an mp3 rip of the cassette posted by Mutantsounds a couple years back, and the remastering job that George Horn did on the recordings is a huge improvement on those pretty crappy sounding files. Yup, Dark Entries has delivered another kick-ass album from the farthest regions of '80s dark/minimal/cold wave.
MPEG Stream: "Lonesco"
MPEG Stream: "Watch & Waste"
MPEG Stream: "Magic"

RV PAINTINGS Samoa Highway (The Helen Scarsdale Agency) lp 15.98
Two brothers from Humboldt County are RV Paintings - one is Brian Pyle, whose name should probably strike a chord as one of the principals in Starving Weirdos and recently has been generating some impressive work under his solo Ensemble Economique moniker; the other is Jon Pyle, who occasionally makes a guest appearance in the Weirdos but also operates in Nudge with Honey Owens, Paul Dickow, and Brian Foote. For all of the method acting from the brothers Pyle in getting stoned and jamming, they have been remarkably consistent and consistently good in all of their ruminations, with RV Paintings probably the best that they've mustered. The RV Paintings debut on Root Strata is three years out but is still a timeless, gorgeous dronesmear of bowed metals and elongated guitar; this was followed by a well-suited split with Taiga Remains on Blackest Rainbow, and now, they've got this stunner on Helen Scarsdale.
RV Paintings speak about, to, and from their own immediate surroundings: the moss, mushrooms, and mycelium of the awe-inspiring redwood forests, the heavy fog that hangs at the coast and from their bongs, and the weightiness of the Pacific Ocean just off to the west. The title Samoa Highway gives the impression that the two brothers were on their own trip during a cold, wintery day, gazing off to the southwest and pondering the warmer climate of American Samoa. But no, the Samoa Highway is located in Humboldt County, connecting Eureka with the small community of Samoa on the other side of the bay which was thought to resemble that of Pago Pago in the mid-19th Century. It's also the bridge that would get you to the Arcata/Eureka Airport.
So, the album begins with field recordings of airplanes lifting off on the jawdropping track "Millions," as sitar-like harmonics and ghostly, levitating drones emanate from the distance. It's a perfectly narcotized smear of echo and drift, hanging in space as the remnants of a particularly lucid dream or the foggy headspace from an afternoon of smoking pot and staring at the sun. This is a track that could spiral onward forever. So nice! Samoa Highway continues with "Mirrors" driven by melancholy looped melody from a cello that dissolves into a flurry of shimmered guitar fuzz, whose shoegazed mantra has been submerged under centuries of felled trees and lichens. Cyclical patterns of samples from dark yet pastoral orchestral passages rounds out the album. If it weren't for the delicate freeform clamor of the drumkit, tracks such as this wouldn't be that far removed from the 'pop ambient' cuts by Gas. Citations of Taj Mahal Travellers, Organum, Grouper, Barn Owl, and The Caretaker certainly hit the mark. Music for airports? More like Music for California airports! Fuck yeah!
And a download coupon is tucked within the sleeve as well!
MPEG Stream: "Millions"
MPEG Stream: "Mirrors"
MPEG Stream: "As Far As We Could See"

SUN CITY GIRLS Funeral Mariachi (Abduction) cd 17.98
Yay! Repressed and back in stock!!
This recent Record Of The Week, NOW AVAILABLE ON CD!!! Packaged in a mini-lp style sleeve.
We had long heard rumors that the Sun City Girls had been working on a cinematic album as something of a follow-up to Torch Of The Mystics and 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda, two of our all-time favorite, classic albums from the Girls' idiosyncratic catalogue of punky psychedelia dissolved through Southeast Asian pop, free jazz, and Ennio Morricone soundtracks. But with the tragic death of drummer, poet, and polyglot savant Charles Goucher in 2007, it seemed that the Girls would end their career with the grand tease of an album of this sort never to be released. Fortunately, those recordings were not the stuff of urban legend or of unfounded fantasy, and the Sun City Girls' Alan Bishop has finally completed the album with the help of long time SCG cohort Scott Colburn! So here it is, the final SCGs album, and it's a worthy (and really quite accessible) capstone to their idiosyncratic discography.
Morricone has long been an influence and inspiration for the Sun City Girls, and especially Alan Bishop. In fact, he's been responsible for some of the best Morricone compilations issued over the years (i.e. Morricone 2000 and the Crime & Dissonance 2cd on Ipecac). As much as Bishop had been infatuated with Morricone, the homages to Morricone had been heavily disfigured and mutilated within the playfully murderous aesthetic of the Sun City Girls, where nothing is sacred and everything is fair game with the Girls' crosscultural appropriation. But for Funeral Mariachi, the Morricone riffs are situated in beguiling songs wholly devoid of the Sun City Girls' curmudgeonly fuck-you stances. In other words, Funeral Marachi is a damn good record. So good that it will probably invite a lot more people to investigate the wonderfully frustrating and woefully inaccessible back catalogue of the Sun City Girls.
Introspective, haunting, and at times beautiful, Funeral Mariachi opens with "Ben's Radio" where the Bishop brothers breakthrough a mid-tempo spy thriller number with a staccato duet of call and response avant-weirdness coupled with blurting atonal horns. Unmistakably Sun City Girls. In "Black Orchid", the group turns in the first of many Morricone references, where the Girls' are equally enamored by the incidental vocal melodies that worked throughout all of his scores. Here the Girls' offer a sad ballad for Richard Bishop's always stunning acoustic guitar and Alan's falsetto vocals bellowing his polyglot language. "Blue West," with its high-lonesome chorales, bad-ass guitar licks, and a mournful arrangements, could have been straight out of a John Ford movie. "Holy Ground" might as well be the Girls' answer to Pink Floyd's "Set The Controls to the Heart of the Sun" with Alan's caterwauling voice droning behind the diabolically chanted vocals, beautiful guitar leads, shadowy atmospherics, and weirdly playful calliope melodies. "Mineral Wells" and "El Solo" turn towards the more saccharine moments of the Morricone oeuvre with loungy piano, reverb whistled melodies, and actual female vocals (and not Alan mimicking a woman's voice). "Come Maddalena" is in fact a Morricone cover, from the 1971 Italian film Maddalena, perhaps known only for its soundtrack. Again, a rather moody atmosphere is set for plaintive, yet fuzzed out guitar melody. So fucking good!
MPEG Stream: "Ben's Radio"
MPEG Stream: "Black Orchid"
MPEG Stream: "Blue West"
MPEG Stream: "Come Maddalena"
MPEG Stream: "Funeral Mariachi"

PEDESTRIAN DEPOSIT East Fork North Fork (Monorail Trespassing) cd 11.98
Pedestrian Deposit have relentlessly toured the United States for as long as we can remember; if your hometown has some shithole warehouse space or a couple of dudes who host noise shows in their house, chances are that PD have been there. Given their constant touring in a car with a tape player, it makes perfect sense that the cassette would be the preferred media for PD; in fact, PD's Jon Borges has released a shitload of noise and drone tapes over the years through his Monorail Trespassing imprint. East Fork North Fork did in fact come out as a cassette earlier in 2010, only to disappear before anybody really got to get a hold of it; but the tape has been usurped by the cd for the reissue of this pretty fucking awesome record, with two new unreleased tracks as a nice bonus.
The days of Pedestrian Deposit abusing soundsystems with deleterious feedback and earscraping noise are pretty much gone. Nowadays, Borges is working with his partner Shannon Kennedy in constructed a frightening, haunting set of recordings for cello and electronics, thick with echoing drones and ghostly shadows that creep out of the woodwork. The amount of empty space on East Fork North Fork is notable, with Borges and Kennedy layering backish abrasions of rusted objects on contact microphones, distant pluckings of cello looped into seasick passages, heartbeat thumps coupled with subterranean scrapings, and hauntological half-melodies pushing to the foreground. Everything appears tuned as to announce the possibility of a huge surge of punishing noise, much like the atmosphere that Michael Gira built on Children Of God; and Pedestrian Deposit does allow for one such explosion on the album. But for the most part, it's the post-noise threat of audio holocaust that gives East Fork North Fork its sense of drama.
This is easily the best thing that Borges has released either through Pedestrian Deposit or through his solo Emaciator project.
MPEG Stream: "A Blessing"
MPEG Stream: "Strife/Meridian"
MPEG Stream: "Cycle Of Combustion"

COLLEY, JOE Desperate Attempts At Beauty (Auscultare) cd 12.98
Here's one of the finest albums from one of California's best sound+noise artists. Since the album came out in 2003, Colley's only released a handful of releases, including one that was awarded a Grand Prix at Ars Electronica. He's also the proprietor of the Issues magazine shop in Oakland, which you should check out if you're in the neighborhood or even if you're not. Anyway, Colley's recorded works and performances continue to amaze even after many years. Here's what we had to say about this one, way back when.
If you hold the cover at just the right angle, a misanthropic and self-loathing text emerges from what might appear at first to be simply just another austere, all white package housing another austere album of micro-glitch minimalism. This well-executed design strategy (courtesy of Randy Yau) works to complement Joe Colley's transgressive agenda, which might even end up undermining his own intentions. For all of the macho posturing of the text (e.g. "REMEMBER HOW WE DESTROYED THE THINGS THAT MADE US HAPPY AND HOW WE STILL DO? LETS DAMAGE EACH OTHER BEYOND REPAIR..." and so on) and the opening 8 second jolt of unnecessary noise, Colley's sound constructions speak of an inquisitive spirit. Throughout this record, Colley pokes and prods various sonic-making situations that often hold fascinating textural detailings. The most obvious example of this is found in his recordings of water being absorbed by modeling clay, which results in a dense chorus of tiny squeaks and squiggles. Colley almost allows himself to be seduced by these sounds; but just before he does, that misanthropic urge deep within his being instructs him to obliterate those curious textures though harsh digital noises, piercing arpeggiations, and noxious jump-cuts. This strategic hammering of sound certainly keeps the listener alert to what may be coming next; thus making the intricate detail work far more enjoyable... if "enjoyable" can in fact be a description attributed to Colley's solo output or his earlier, bruitist work as Crawl Unit.
MPEG Stream: "January Broken Statis"
MPEG Stream: "Claysound 07.02"
MPEG Stream: "Headache (Diagnostic Testpulse For Blown PA)"

MARSFIELD (ANDREW CHALK) Three Sunsets Over Marsfield (Faraway Press) lp 33.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Here's the second release from Andrew Chalk's Marsfield project, even though these recordings date back to 2002 well before the 2010 release of The Towering Sky. At that time, Chalk was still engaged with the sublime Mirror collaboration with Christoph Heemann, producing a vast collection of impressionist drones that certainly set a gold standard for anyone looking to dive into the dronemuzik category. Enter Brendan Walls, an Australian ambient practitioner who also moonlights in the slugfuck-noise outfit the Menstruation Sisters (although there's nothing of the Sisters' scattered noise that enters any of the Marsfield recordings). Walls had released a few albums through Heemann's labels of vaporized hum and oceanic tonefloat, including a 2004 collaboration with Mr. Chalk on Three Poplars. Whatever the relationship of the collaboration between Chalk and Walls might have been, Three Sunsets Over Marsfield has the fingerprints of Andrew Chalk all over it: smeared texture into elongated drone and shimmering resonant tones coalescing into thrumming hypnosis. What is unique to Three Sunsets in relation to the Chalk catalogue, is that there is a peculiar backstory about a retired British soldier who had been able to receive and amplify radio transmissions through a metal plate in his skull. It's easy to imagine that Chalk and Walls set out to create a sublime piece of music, best suited for playback within the skull of an old soldier, sick of listening into whatever the BBC might be broadcasting. Chalk and Walls compact and compress numerous layers of psychedelically-bent guitar drones into a gorgeous, mid-frequency stream of flutter, shimmer, and mirage, not unlike what Chalk would later reprise on Shadows From The Album Skies. To say that this album is mesmerizing is undoubtedly an understatement!
Andrew Chalk vinyl is a rare commodity indeed, and Three Sunsets Over Marsfield is no exception, being printed in an edition of 300 copies in an extraordinary package of embossed metallic paper with an obi sporting the title in Japanese.

HECKER, TIM Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again (Substractif) cd 14.98
This long time aQ fave is finally available on vinyl! And still available on cd! And heck, it's been years since we reviewed this the first time around, so odds are some folks missed out on this completely, which is a serious shame, cuz this record is BRILLIANT!!
Long before every one and their mother began releasing washed out gauzy soundscapes of pixelated abstractions and dreamy hazy otherwordly drift, we got an earful of Tim Hcker's Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again, which at the time was a huge stylistic shift from his previous work as Jetone on Force Inc, we dug that Chain Reactive, techno-minimalism, but this was something else. A gorgeous sprawl of epic swirling blurred beautiful
sonic abstraction. "Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again" was the first in a series of releases that would establish Hecker as a master of abstract sonic conjuration, along with fellow sonic abstractionists like Philip Jeck, Fennesz, Jasper TX, Machinefabriek, Belong, Hecker was, and is, capable of creating super evocative soundscapes, manipulating and treating sound, and molding these effected sounds into something living and breathing and organic.
Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again was clearly inspired by Christian Fennesz' earlier recordings ("Hotel Parallel" and "+47 Degrees 56' 37" - 16 Degrees 51' 08"), a guitar driven digital synthesis, Hecker blurred a monochromatic palette of fractured samples into expansive washes and textural drones, but never forgot the basic tenets of composition in melody and rhythm. As sublime and very subtle forms, delicate melodies of just a few slowly repeated notes swell out of the digital drones only to quietly retreat amongst the album's many diaphanous folds of sound. The rhythmic elements of the album are mostly in the form of the staccato time stretching of samples into brittle repetitive chunks that also flicker in and out of the dense rumbles. This is a cinematically grand album in its exaggeration of minute details, and is required listening for those enthralled by the work of Stephen Mathieu, Oval, Ekkehard Ehlers, and the other above mentioned artists, and sounds as good today as when it was first released nearly a decade ago, and listening to it now, it's easy to see how much of the modern music we love was foreshadowed by this record, and how many of the new soundscapers and drone creators are beholden to Hecker and his gorgeous hazy soundworlds...
MPEG Stream: "Music For Tundra"
MPEG Stream: "Arctic Lover's Rock"
MPEG Stream: "The Work Of Art In The Age Of Cultural"

SWANS My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky (Regular) (Young God) cd 14.98
Michael Gira has made his point that Swans has been reactivated, and that this is not a reunion. The distinction may be important to Gira, but it's pretty clear that he doesn't want the world to think he's jumping on the bandwagon of every cool band from the '80s and '90s getting back together again. But the fact remains that Swans dissolved back in 1997, and Gira took some of the musicians from those Swans gigs and sessions to form his grizzled folk ensemble Angels Of Light. Given the acoustic songs that Gira would sometimes wrangle as a counterpoint to Swans' signature brutality, the transition for Gira from Swans into Angels was a logical one. Over time, Angels developed into a lush ensemble with twinkling psychedelic aspects of a bright baroque aesthetic never revealed in the harrowing, abject tracks from Swans.
In early 2009, Gira embarked on a solo tour, showcasing a bunch of new material that seemed to be harkening back to the sound and fury of Swans, in spite of their minimalist presentation through just acoustic guitar and voice. On more than one occasion Gira quipped that he was thinking of making another Swans record. And that brings us to My Father Will Guide Me, ushered forth by a squadron of atonal guitars and lumbering percussive crashes. The album really does sound like it could have been produced in 1999, right after Soundtracks For The Blind, which was thought to be the final studio record for Swans. Sure, there's no Jarboe (for obvious reasons), but Gira did recruit guitarist Norman Westberg to return to the fold, as he was responsible for the guitar sound for the band from Filth up through White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity - in other words, the most brutalist period for the band. That buzzsaw rasp which Westberg produced is very present in Swans resurrection, cutting through the thug-fist basslines and lockstep drum rolls. The sound of Swans is very much intact, but Gira's songwriting has constantly grown, with his booming voice still wailing doom and gloom through the lens of an American apocalypticist. Devendra Banhart also makes a guest appearance on a track equally noted for its discordantly brash trombones and trumpets with their resembles to divebombing arcs. If only every band that got back together could make a record with this much intensity, drama, and power. Utterly brilliant.
MPEG Stream: "No Words / No Thoughts"
MPEG Stream: "My Birth"
MPEG Stream: "You Fucking People Make Me Sick "
MPEG Stream: "Eden Prison"

SWANS My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky (Vinyl) (Young God) lp 15.98
Michael Gira has made his point that Swans has been reactivated, and that this is not a reunion. The distinction may be important to Gira, but it's pretty clear that he doesn't want the world to think he's jumping on the bandwagon of every cool band from the '80s and '90s getting back together again. But the fact remains that Swans dissolved back in 1997, and Gira took some of the musicians from those Swans gigs and sessions to form his grizzled folk ensemble Angels Of Light. Given the acoustic songs that Gira would sometimes wrangle as a counterpoint to Swans' signature brutality, the transition for Gira from Swans into Angels was a logical one. Over time, Angels developed into a lush ensemble with twinkling psychedelic aspects of a bright baroque aesthetic never revealed in the harrowing, abject tracks from Swans.
In early 2009, Gira embarked on a solo tour, showcasing a bunch of new material that seemed to be harkening back to the sound and fury of Swans, in spite of their minimalist presentation through just acoustic guitar and voice. On more than one occasion Gira quipped that he was thinking of making another Swans record. And that brings us to My Father Will Guide Me, ushered forth by a squadron of atonal guitars and lumbering percussive crashes. The album really does sound like it could have been produced in 1999, right after Soundtracks For The Blind, which was thought to be the final studio record for Swans. Sure, there's no Jarboe (for obvious reasons), but Gira did recruit guitarist Norman Westberg to return to the fold, as he was responsible for the guitar sound for the band from Filth up through White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity - in other words, the most brutalist period for the band. That buzzsaw rasp which Westberg produced is very present in Swans resurrection, cutting through the thug-fist basslines and lockstep drum rolls. The sound of Swans is very much intact, but Gira's songwriting has constantly grown, with his booming voice still wailing doom and gloom through the lens of an American apocalypticist. Devendra Banhart also makes a guest appearance on a track equally noted for its discordantly brash trombones and trumpets with their resembles to divebombing arcs. If only every band that got back together could make a record with this much intensity, drama, and power. Utterly brilliant.
MPEG Stream: "No Words / No Thoughts"
MPEG Stream: "My Birth"
MPEG Stream: "You Fucking People Make Me Sick "
MPEG Stream: "Eden Prison"

RODEN, STEVE Transmissions (Voices Of Objects And Skies) (In Between Noise) cd 12.98
Scores for sound installations often have a way of not really translating when heard outside of the installation. Steve Roden is one of the few sound artists who has perfected the balancing act of creating a sublime sonic experience through his installation work which also translates equally as well on disc. Transmissions (Voices Of Objects And Skies) was originally commissioned by the Fresno Art Museum, and found Roden creating a metonymic environment that bridged childhood wonder with the rough technologies of tin-can telephones and daydreams of space travel and NASA. The installation itself was an 8 channel sound piece spread over 64 speakers which were all mounted within tin cans and suspended from the ceiling alongside countless other tin cans that housed low wattage colored light bulbs, creating a fantastic chandelier of muted light that was perfect for the delicate compositions. Roden states in the liner notes that the source material for the album was recordings of satellites by amateur astronomers from the 1960s through the 1980s; and through Roden's impeccable reductivist filtering and manipulation, he arrives at a slow-motion collage of electronic bleeps which might have more in common with a distantly flickering flute than anything electric in origin. Nevertheless, Roden turns these sounds into looping lullabies and subtle declinations of sound. It's one of the best pieces we've heard from Roden and is certainly recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Transmissions (excerpt 1)"
MPEG Stream: "Transmissions (excerpt 2)"

NURSE WITH WOUND Insect And Individual Silenced (Expanded Edition) (United Dairies) cd 14.98
BACK IN PRINT!!!!
Steve Stapleton has always viewed Insect And Individual Silenced as a monumental failure. So much so, that he had resisted every attempt by friends, colleagues, and other labels to convince him to reissue this album. Yet, with this reissue, he's finally been convinced to the contrary. Insect And Individual Silenced emerged as the fourth Nurse With Wound album back in 1980, and found Steve Stapleton out on his own as the principal soundmaker for the ensemble. Yet he had convinced Jim Thirlwell (Foetus) and Trevor Reidy to join him in the studio, just to see what would happen. According to the liner-notes, the studio sessions found Thirlwell fucking around with his amplifier, cable buzz, and the jack-plugs; Reidy brought in a drum kit, which he skitters across on one of the three original cuts on the album; and Stapleton had his arsenal of junk, toys, and tapes. Through the aid of drugs and alcohol, Stapleton mixed and mastered the album; and quickly sent it off to get it pressed. When the albums arrived, he admits being horrified by the results, qualifying it as "a dismal failure, a dreadful pressing, and an appallingly carefree mix -- in fact a seriously misguided project altogether." So he vowed to never reissue the album by burning the masters.
Yet some 25 years later, a confluence of events forced Steve to reconsider his position, and as Steve finally returned to the work, he now admits being "pleasantly surprised." That said, Insect was reissued through Raash Records in 2007, with that label dissolving amidst unseemly rumors; and now the album gets a proper reissue through Stapleton's United Dairies, complete with a lengthy bonus track that was commissioned for a unpublished 'suitcase edition' through Raash.
Insect is an album guided by the slice of a razor, as tape edits had to be done by hand. Stapleton's collage techniques have always been deft in their erratic disruptions and maniacal detours, and Insect is no exception. The first track "Alvin's Funeral" is a wonderful and wild ride through demented sounds all going in multiple directions at once, which make it easy to get lost in this maze of distortion, sound effects, and splattered guitar noise. There's an urban gamelan of springs and bowls with the varispeed being fucked with as the tape drags across the recording heads; there's the screeched sound of metal dragged against the floor, overblowing what the magnetic tape could handle (ah, what a lovely sound compared to the ugliness of digital peaking!); there's a sampled scream from Disney's Haunted Mansion LP; and then some surprisingly sublime moments where a collaged section of distant female vocals duet with a string of shells being shaken. But the jump cuts and quick edits of dynamic volumes between the quiet and loud that keep this moving at a frantic pace. The second piece seems to have much more of that aforementioned studio session present with skittering drums and searing white hot guitar noise grating against the ears. The third track is a precursor to the screeching metal collages of Organum, albeit far more feral and atonal. This brings us to the the bonus track "Tooth, Teeth, Milk, Teeth, Skin" which is very much a contemporary collage of eerie female vocals looped into a mesmerizing ambience blown apart by harsh, musique concrete jump-cuts.
It's obvious that what Steve Stapleton may view as his own personal failure is greater than most everything that's come afterward from any of the post-Industrial soundscapers.
MPEG Stream: "Alvin's Funeral"
MPEG Stream: "Absent Old Queen Underfoot"
MPEG Stream: "Mutiles De Guerre"

V/A Mission Two: Connecting Electronix Network (Natural) 2lp 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
A brilliant compilation of fucked electronica, with tons of outfits none of us had ever heard of. Only V/VM and D'Arcangelo are the familiar names here. Mostly Italian, the tracks sound quite similar to SKAM's output in Manchester, and Rephlex in London. Nu-skool electro and warped electronics. If you like Autechre or Aphex, pick this up, you won't regret it!

HECKER, TIM Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again (Alien 8) 2lp 26.00
This long time aQ fave is finally available on vinyl! And still available on cd! And heck, it's been years since we reviewed this the first time around, so odds are some folks missed out on this completely, which is a serious shame, cuz this record is BRILLIANT!!
Long before every one and their mother began releasing washed out gauzy soundscapes of pixelated abstractions and dreamy hazy otherwordly drift, we got an earful of Tim Hcker's Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again, which at the time was a huge stylistic shift from his previous work as Jetone on Force Inc, we dug that Chain Reactive, techno-minimalism, but this was something else. A gorgeous sprawl of epic swirling blurred beautiful
sonic abstraction. "Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again" was the first in a series of releases that would establish Hecker as a master of abstract sonic conjuration, along with fellow sonic abstractionists like Philip Jeck, Fennesz, Jasper TX, Machinefabriek, Belong, Hecker was, and is, capable of creating super evocative soundscapes, manipulating and treating sound, and molding these effected sounds into something living and breathing and organic.
Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again was clearly inspired by Christian Fennesz' earlier recordings ("Hotel Parallel" and "+47 Degrees 56' 37" - 16 Degrees 51' 08"), a guitar driven digital synthesis, Hecker blurred a monochromatic palette of fractured samples into expansive washes and textural drones, but never forgot the basic tenets of composition in melody and rhythm. As sublime and very subtle forms, delicate melodies of just a few slowly repeated notes swell out of the digital drones only to quietly retreat amongst the album's many diaphanous folds of sound. The rhythmic elements of the album are mostly in the form of the staccato time stretching of samples into brittle repetitive chunks that also flicker in and out of the dense rumbles. This is a cinematically grand album in its exaggeration of minute details, and is required listening for those enthralled by the work of Stephen Mathieu, Oval, Ekkehard Ehlers, and the other above mentioned artists, and sounds as good today as when it was first released nearly a decade ago, and listening to it now, it's easy to see how much of the modern music we love was foreshadowed by this record, and how many of the new soundscapers and drone creators are beholden to Hecker and his gorgeous hazy soundworlds...
MPEG Stream: "Music For Tundra"
MPEG Stream: "Arctic Lover's Rock"
MPEG Stream: "The Work Of Art In The Age Of Cultural"

SWANS My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky (Deluxe) (Young God) 2cd 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Michael Gira has made his point that Swans has been reactivated, and that this is not a reunion. The distinction may be important to Gira, but it's pretty clear that he doesn't want the world to think he's jumping on the bandwagon of every cool band from the '80s and '90s getting back together again. But the fact remains that Swans dissolved back in 1997, and Gira took some of the musicians from those Swans gigs and sessions to form his grizzled folk ensemble Angels Of Light. Given the acoustic songs that Gira would sometimes wrangle as a counterpoint to Swans' signature brutality, the transition for Gira from Swans into Angels was a logical one. Over time, Angels developed into a lush ensemble with twinkling psychedelic aspects of a bright baroque aesthetic never revealed in the harrowing, abject tracks from Swans.
In early 2009, Gira embarked on a solo tour, showcasing a bunch of new material that seemed to be harkening back to the sound and fury of Swans, in spite of their minimalist presentation through just acoustic guitar and voice. On more than one occasion Gira quipped that he was thinking of making another Swans record. And that brings us to My Father Will Guide Me, ushered forth by a squadron of atonal guitars and lumbering percussive crashes. The album really does sound like it could have been produced in 1999, right after Soundtracks For The Blind, which was thought to be the final studio record for Swans. Sure, there's no Jarboe (for obvious reasons), but Gira did recruit guitarist Norman Westberg to return to the fold, as he was responsible for the guitar sound for the band from Filth up through White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity - in other words, the most brutalist period for the band. That buzzsaw rasp which Westberg produced is very present in Swans resurrection, cutting through the thug-fist basslines and lockstep drum rolls. The sound of Swans is very much intact, but Gira's songwriting has constantly grown, with his booming voice still wailing doom and gloom through the lens of an American apocalypticist. Devendra Banhart also makes a guest appearance on a track equally noted for its discordantly brash trombones and trumpets with their resembles to divebombing arcs. If only every band that got back together could make a record with this much intensity, drama, and power. Utterly brilliant.
The second disc of the limited edition deluxe set is totally... fucking... awesome. This revisits Gira's capacity for relentlessly punishing dronerock, which had been clearly missing during his Angels Of Light period over the past decade. But this disc seamlessly emerges out of the slowburning crescendos from the aforementioned Soundtracks For The Blind and the amphetamine riddled noise mantra Number One Of Three that Gira produced as The Body Lovers. In many ways, this *could* be Number Two Of Three, as the Body Lovers project was supposed to be a trilogy of deconstructed Swans guitar swarm, chorales of car horns, and brute atonal fury. A single track spanning 46 minutes, Swans present a series of powerdrone movements with bass and rhythm guitar locked into militant marches that guide an scathing crosshatching of atonal guitars and electronics. The infernal nature of these sounds brings the scores of Hermann Nitsch's aktions to mind, and even some of Glenn Branca's guitar symphonies at their most punishing.
This double disc set is quite limited, we've sold a whole bunch already and are down to only about 10 copies, and then that'll be it (though the regular single disc version is in stock, and that one's on sale for the next 2 weeks). If you're ordering this deluxe one, and we run out, let us know if it's okay to send you the normal standard version...
MPEG Stream: "No Words / No Thoughts"
MPEG Stream: "My Birth"
MPEG Stream: "You Fucking People Make Me Sick "
MPEG Stream: "Eden Prison"
MPEG Stream: "Look At Me Go (Bonus Disc)"

ROCKET SCIENCE AND THE NIGGER LOVING FAGGOTS s/t (Vulgar Tango) lp 8.98
Pretty provocative name huh? These problematically monikered nineties Bay Area improvised noise makers, in fact, boasted a pretty surprising and stellar pedigree, the duo included Kelvin Pittman now of Portland Bike Ensemble, and Kyp Malone, of fellow SF noiseniks Iran and now of... TV On The Radio!!? Huh? Yep, long before Malone was playing huge festivals and helping send Pitchfork into conniptions, and releasing solo records, and impressing the indie rock throngs with his impossible and impressive facial hair, he was in fact one half of Rocket Science, a raucous, blasting, psychedelic combo, who spit out a wild fusion of free jazz and free noise, and this was their only record, released on Vulgar Tango way back when, along with the debut Iran lp reviewed elsewhere on this week's list. The Vulgar Tango dude discovered a stash of records (both Iran and Rocket Science) that had been hidden away for close to a decade, and decided to let us have them!
So yeah, we always sort of wondered why in all the articles about TV On The Radio, they never ONCE mentioned Kyp's time in RSATNLF, although we can sort of guess. Which is too bad, cuz these guys ruled. Nothing at all like TV On The Radio of course, or Iran really (except for some of the noisiness), Rocket Science took guitars and bells and drums and some 'singing' and wound 'em all up into a super charged take on that SST jazz sound, filtered through a warped SF noiserock filter. Sometimes surprisingly melodic and tranquil, but more often than not, fierce and free and heavy and loud, skittery percussion, tangled grinding guitar gnarl, some serious psychedelic crunch, lots of feedback, all woozy and warped, chaotic and off kilter, brief squalls of splattery atonal skronk, give way to warbly drone psych squiggles, which gives way to drum-kit-down-the-stairs cacophony, which then gives way to some almost metal chug and thud, which always seems to blossom into a crumbling mass of swirling sound and amp damaging free-rock delirium. Gloriously ramshackle and seriously challenging, an extremely noisy and loud look back at one of our favorite unsung outfits that helped define the SF underground in the early 2000s...

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"

LETHE Catastrophe Point 7 & 8 (Invisible Birds) 2cd 19.98
Here's the regular (and much more reasonably priced!) edition of the ultra deluxe Lethe 2cd set we reviewed a few weeks ago.
For many years now, Kuwayama Kiyoharu (aka Lethe) had been recording the resonance of various abandoned spaces, first around his native Japan and more recently from sites far far away. He seeks out an old warehouse, airplane hanger, the hull of a ship, or any massive slab of architecture shaped by concrete and/or steel which happens to have an open door (or broken window) and a choice amount of natural reverb and resonance. There he collects whatever he can find within the space to use as source material to resonate those industrial spaces: slabs of metal, empty water tanks, sodden wood, broken glass, small bones, and the flotsam that had collected on the floors after years of neglect. Out of these found objects, Kuwayama has an uncanny knack for producing natural, acoustic drones which hold a haunted aesthetic amplified through the cavernous reverb of those crumbled cathedrals to industry. Given the seemingly surreptitious nature of Kuwayama's wanderings, these recordings are swaddled in the darkness of night with only candles or a bonfire somewhere in the far corner of the building as his illumination. It has to be said that Kuwayama does overlay and edit all of his recordings into composition, following liked minded artists such as Tarab, Eric La Casa, or John Grzinich.
Catastrophe Point 7 begins with this process at a site deliciously referred to as Arsenic in Lausanne, Switzerland. Well, it turns out that Arsenic is a contemporary theater space in current use, and despite his non-feral residence, Kuwayama offers an incredible assortment of acoustic drones, noises, and textures. Bellowing tones emanate from a variety of long plumbing pipes, replicating the circular breathing strategies of Yoshi Wada; and around these leaden flutterings, he scrapes uneasy textures and builds clattering crescendos. The point about Arsenic not being a totally disused space comes to the forefront about halfway through Catastrophe Point 7 as he rolls a piano into the empty theater space and sets forth a melancholy series of clustered piano tones, much like his one time collaborator Jonathan Coleclough produced on his signature album Period.
Catastrophe Point 8 was recorded in an abandoned space. This time, it's a former power station in Scotland. A mournful acoustic drone, perhaps from a similar set of plumbing pipes heard in the Swiss recordings opens this disc, with small crumblings of wood, glass, and concrete positioned close to the microphone. Set in spatialized contrast to these closely miced sounds, Kuwayama captures various clanks, thumps, and other bumps in the night all decaying in the prolonged reverb of that power station. It's a much more Spartan affair than the first disc, but just as effective in its haunted sensibility. Highly recommended listening!
MPEG Stream: "Catastrophe Point 7.2"
MPEG Stream: "Catastrophe Point 8.1"
MPEG Stream: "Catastrophe Point 8.3"

MCGUIRE, MARK Off In The Distance (Cylindrical Habitat Modules) lp 23.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Yes, it's another solo album from Emeralds' guitarist Mark McGuire, and yes, it's totally awesome. Off In The Distance was originally a cassette that came out briefly back in 2008, but had been so beloved by the dudes who put out the tape that vinyl became a necessity. And it's a perfect format for McGuire's kosmische zoner jams, with all his continued allusions to Ash Ra Tempel, Gunter Schickert, Michael Rother, Popul Vuh, and Achim Reichel that stretch into grand movements of psychedelic melancholy. Slow-motion, aquatic bubblings of analog synths percolate upon an undulating bed of guitar drones muffling the growls from a distortion box. All the while, McGuire layers his signature elliptical guitar arpeggiated melodies that snap into locked grooves only to mutate effortlessly into doubles and triples of themselves, resulting in the passages of spaceship lift-off on a exploratory mission towards the heart of glowing nebulae. Towards the end of the first side, McGuire transitions into a particularly maudlin riff of intertwined and overlaid guitars, making some of us here think back to that incredible Dreamies album of symphonic psychedelic mope. Off In The Distance strikes that balance found in so much of the Emeralds / McGuire axis of music making, that of the inner-cosmonaut in pursuit of transcendence and/or tranquilization on one hand, and on the other, he channels something profoundly sad as McGuire's aware that such pursuits can only be fleeting at best. Undoubtedly beautiful stuff from McGuire. Limited to 500 copies.

WITCHFINDER GENERAL Death Penalty + Friends Of Hell (Buried By Time And Dust) 2lp box set 38.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Oh yeah! We've been eagerly awaiting this ever since we heard Buried By Time And Dust was putting it out. A deluxe box set containing 180g vinyl reissues of this cult NWOBHM band's original two full-length albums, 1982's Death Penalty (featuring classics like "Free Country" and "No Stayer") and 1983's Friends Of Hell (equally cool, with such songs as "Love On Smack" and the under-rated "Music"). Part Sabbathy doom, part psychedelic punk, and part party metal. Initially best known for their risque album covers, featuring topless witches/wenches in tableaus that combined "historical reenactment" with Page Three Girl cheesecake, WfG's lasting legacy has more to do with their Sabbathy sound, they being one of the first (and few) bands in the '80s to so overtly worship Ozzy, Tony and Co., and establish the "doom metal" genre, along with Saint Vitus, Trouble, Pentagram, and Candlemass.
With this collector's set, you get not just the two lps, and nice box to keep 'em in, but also a huge 20 page booklet featuring unpublished outtakes from those infamous album cover photo sessions, plus full lyrics, liner notes from guitarist Phil Cope, newspaper clippings, and more previously unseen photos (live and promo shots), making this quite a treat for all true WfG fans.
Here's what AQ's Jim Haynes (not our usual metal reviewer!) had to say about these two albums when we first listed compact disc reissues some years ago...
Death Penalty is one of the lost metal albums from the early '80s, falling victim to its own indecisiveness, not that such is a bad thing. Never really staying "true" either to the glam metal of Hanoi Rocks, Fastway, and Motley Crue or to the shocking horror shows of Ozzy and Iron Maiden, Witchfinder General alternated between both worlds, with the first half of Death Penalty being rowdy party numbers about drinking beer and dropping acid. These songs followed standard blues based rock, but as Witchfinder General was pretty amped up on the aforementioned substances, they were quite a bit more distorted and quick tempoed. By the time Witchfinder General gets to their anthemic "Witchfinder General," this album takes an impressive turn down the dark path of mythologically laden proto-doom metal, loaded with super-heavy (for 1982) Sabbathy grooves and aggro lyrics mostly about killing witches. They also throw in some grave robbing, just to prove how evil they are. A confused classic... Witchfinder General's second album Friends Of Hell picks up right where Death Penalty left off, with an album split evenly between the party rock elements from the New Wave of British Metal back in 1983 and their undeniable influence from Sabbath. Just as bipolar (between comical and evil) as the first album, and just as great. One of Jim's (!) favorite metal bands, and that goes for most of the rest of us here at AQ too.
Not that probably if you're in the market for this, you need US to tell you that Witchfinder General is great. Though, we were shocked, shocked, to find out not long ago that one of our good friends and customers, who shall remain unnamed, had not only never heard any Witchfinder General but had never heard OF them, despite being a huge fan of Sabbath specifically and stoner, doom, black and other metal music in general! We were like WTF? How can you not know WfG??! What are you, -not- high?
MPEG Stream: "Free Country"
MPEG Stream: "Witchfinder General"
MPEG Stream: "Love On Smack"
MPEG Stream: "Shadowed Images"

ALICE COOPER Pretties For You (Warner Bros. ) lp 14.98
A couple years ago, we made the (now out of print, again) cd reissue of this a Record Of The Week, along with Alice Cooper's second album Easy Action as well. Now at last Pretties For You has been reissued as it once was, on vinyl!
Anyway, here's more or less what we said about Pretties when we ROTW'd it:
Ok, we know what you're thinking (maybe). Alice Cooper? Aquarius Record(s) Of The Week? Two of 'em?? If you're not familiar with these albums, you might be wondering... and while we know that many loyal AQ customers are of course extremely knowledgeable about all sorts of cool music, just as much or more so than any of us who work here, we also wouldn't be surprised if more than a few of you had never been exposed to these first two Alice Cooper albums before. Which is why we HAVE to list them and make them Records Of The Week!!
So, when most people think of Alice Cooper, what comes to mind? The big '70s shock rock act, up there with KISS, the guy who was the Marilyn Manson of the '70s, or maybe the regular on Hollywood Squares, or even the early '90s hairmetal Alice of Wayne's World "we're not worthy" fame. Campy and kitschy and schlocky and alcoholic, with snakes and blood. All good things of course. But even if you are a fan of the Alice Cooper classics from the '70s, albums like Love It To Death, Killer and Billion Dollar Babies, the Alice Cooper Band's 1969 debut Pretties For You and its 1970 follow up Easy Action are often overlooked, and underrated. Originally released on Frank Zappa's Straight label (and whatever you might think of Frank Zappa, he had a good track record for releasing freaky music by other folks, Captain Beefheart ferinstance!) this early Alice Cooper stuff is NOT the heavy metal hard rock you might be expecting. That was a direction AC went in really only after moving from LA to Detroit and hooking up with producer Bob Ezrin. There's hints of heaviness, of course, but this is waaay more psychedelic and poppy and proggy. And weird. If you think you know what to expect, think again. You're in for a bizarre treat indeed. (Some Alice Cooper fans might not agree, but we hope most open minded AQ customers will!)
The front cover of Pretties For You has a painting that make it look like a Robert Wyatt record. And on the back cover, the band, posing in a gallery of strange modern sculptures, show off a visual style that makes 'em look something like a cross between Blue Cheer and Roxy Music. Intrigued? Throw the album on, and you're confronted with the first of this album's many non-sequiturs, the orchestral fanfare of "Titanic Overture", which segues into the why-be-normal, twisty-turny psych piece "10 Minutes Before The Worm" (actually only 1 minute, 40 seconds long). They weren't trying to ease anybody into their "thing" it seems. Better yet is track three, "Swing Low Sweet Cheerio", the album's first true pop gem, and still plenty weird. And that's what this is, a pop album, full of great pop songs, super Beatlesy, hummable stuff. But it's Beatlesy in a tripped out Sgt. Pepper's way. And wait a second, Pretties For You? The Pretty Things' "SF Sorrow" might also have been an influence. There's a lot of quirky dynamics, theatrical art rock gestures, cryptic humor, wild psychedelic effects, screaming fuzz guitar, strange stops and starts... it can be off-putting at first, probably difficult listening for some, with as much in common with Amon Duul II or even Olivia Tremor Control as they do with Alice Cooper's later million-sellers. But, you like '60s garage psych right? Well early AC were really a Nuggetsy garage band (originally called The Earwigs, then The Spiders, and then The Nazz, finally settling on Alice Cooper following a legendary Ouija board session). Doing their thing on the Sunset Strip in LA, they gradually got nuttier and nuttier, more psychedelic and experimental. If AC hadn't gone on to such later success, we're certain this would be regarded by psych lovers as an obscure cult classic of late '60s freakdom, like 50 Foot Hose or West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band or something. Instead, it's the record that probably confuses average Alice Cooper fans, and isn't heard by anybody else, which we think is a shame...
While Alice Cooper (both the man and the band) made a lot of classic music in their career(s), no other Alice Cooper records were ever quite as arty and bizarre, with the unique one foot in the psychedelic sixties mix of throbbing manic energy and melancholic moodiness that's found on both Easy Action and this one, Pretties For You.
MPEG Stream: "Swing Low, Sweet Cheerio"
MPEG Stream: "Fields Of Regret"
MPEG Stream: "No Longer Umpire"

KONER, THOMAS Nunatak / Teimo / Permafrost (Type) 3cd 26.00
With the three key albums of Thomas Koner's work having recently been reissued individually on vinyl, Type has now collected those records - Nunatak, Teimo, and Permafrost - in a handsome oversized folio for presenting those albums on compact disc. Here's a recap of our reviews of these stunning pieces of glacial minimalism:
Thomas Koner's debut album Nunatak Gongamur (now truncated as Nunatak) was a record that quietly emerged on the Dutch label Barooni in 1990. Almost all of Koner's recordings (at least his solo recordings), speak to the tundra of the Northern environs, with a lot of allusions to the expanses of Greenland in particular. Nuuk was the name of one Koner record, which happens to the capital and largest city of that frigid island; and Nunatak is an Inuit word describing any rocky outcropping not covered in snow. And of course, Koner excels in the producing of cold cold music. There is a considerable difference between this album and the rest of his catalogue, as Nunatak is an electro-acoustic album entirely sourced from huge gongs. His other records definitely obliterated the source material (some of which was cited as being the sound channel on blank 16mm film stock) into deep space shadow and blackened noise. Here on Nunatak, Koner leaves the resonance of his metal gongs alone, occasionally catching them in languid loops but always focusing on vast deep rumbling overtones and the vast subharmonic frequencies. Given the rasping textures from the gongs, this one is less the all-consuming isolationism and more of an adventurous dronescrape as if extracted from the hull of a cargo ship.
Teimo is an album that was originally released as a cd on Barooni in 1992. Like its predecessor Nunatak Gongamur, Koner had sourced much of Teimo from recordings of gongs, using contact microphones and hydrophones to capture an unusual assortment of resonance, timbre, and decaying frequencies from his gongs. In these recordings, Koner was investigating what he qualified as an 'aesthetic of decline' shaped by the processes of decay, thermal cooling, and any gradual event that will achieve stasis. Water seeking its own level. Glaciers amassing in frozen landscapes. The metal fatigue of submarines, cracking under the pressure of an entire ocean. The long sustained metallic resonances of the gong is an apt tool for his conceptual framework, with Koner further manipulating his sources into elegant passages of subharmonic rumblings that utter subtle melodic phrases whilst shaking the bottom of the seafloor. Amidst the low-end drones and allusions to barren landscapes, Koner takes great care to keep the sounds immersive without imbuing them with terror. Yes, this is 'dark' ambient music, but his aesthetic of decline is far more clinical than say the theatrical drama that Lustmord can muster through his deadly recordings. Koner's quest is for the sublime, filled with awe and beauty simultaneously; and he has effortlessly achieved that quest throughout his career, certainly including this masterful record.
In Permafrost, we have the third and final chapter of this series of reissues from Type, documenting the long out-of-print isolationist composition from Thomas Koner. As with the previous recordings - Nunatak and Teimo - the German sound artist has masterfully captured the frigid atmospheres of the most northern ecosystems, and the title Permafrost leaves little to the imagination as to where this one will be travelling. Cold. Barren. Black. Sublime. The sounds are thoroughly abstracted into shifting blocks of grey noises slipping above seismic rumblings of infinitely bellowing low-end frequencies. By doing so, Koner eschews the use of the gong scrapes and metallic glistenings which graced those early records, adopting the bleak ethos which he continued to master on such albums as Kaamos and Daikan (the latter of which is probably the pinnacle of his career).
All of Koner's work is required listening for anyone who has been interested in drone-based recordings from any time period (e.g. Eno, Lustmord, Chalk, Hafler Trio, Roland Kayn, Alan Splet, Bernhard Gunter, BJ Nilsen, Kevin Drumm, etc.). His subtle use of movement and half-melodic phrasing in his arctic-driven ambience has warranted him quite a reputation, and fortunately none of his reissues fail to sound timeless, breathtaking, and bone-chillingly beautiful. Highly recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Untitled (Nunatak)"
MPEG Stream: "Untitled (Nunatak)"
MPEG Stream: "Untitled (Nunatak)"
MPEG Stream: "Andenes"
MPEG Stream: "Teimo"
MPEG Stream: "Nieve Penitentes 1"
MPEG Stream: "Permafrost 1"
MPEG Stream: "Permafrost 3"
MPEG Stream: "Permafrost 4"

NILSEN, BJ & STILLUPPESTEYPA Space Finale (Editions Mego) lp 27.00
This out of print cassette, now available on vinyl!
At the end of the 'alcohol trilogy' that BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa released via Helen Scarsdale, the dark isolationist rumble which dominated the previous two and half records was shattered by a robotic sequence of bleeping analog synth tones which spiralled deep into the void of the arctic night sky. Such a dramatic juxtaposition is not uncommon within the realm of Stilluppsteypa, but less so for Mr. Nilsen. And those Derbyshire / Dockstader / Oneohtrix like tones found on Passing Out (the finale mentioned above) is clearly the jumping off point for Space Finale - an epic 90 minute double lp of analog synthesis, captured, spliced, and cut, all on a Revox 2-channel tape machine. Amidst the vintage synth blips and sustained tones, Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa offer another narrative composition that moves from the vacant space station overrun by some unknown alien virus into the lair of the mad scientist who meanders dabbles on his Wurlizter (or some kind of organ, if it's not an actual Wurlizter) in minor key melancholy when not toiling away on an abomination that will somehow destroy the world. Shadowy ambience, fuzzed out tape hiss aggregation, weird dropouts and glitches on the tape that would make Leif Elggren proud, and much much more.
As mentioned above, Space Finale originally came out as a limited edition cassette earlier in 2010, but it was pretty clear that Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa intended this to be a 2lp, as both sides of the cassette were neatly broken into two suites a piece, perfectly suited for vinyl! This too is limited - just 500 - and highly recommend, as with all from this ongoing collaborative project.

PALE BLUE SKY Shades Of Grey (Arbor) lp 14.98

FABULOUS DIAMONDS Fabulous Diamonds II (Siltbreeze) lp 15.98
Much has been made about the Dual 7"+ cd set that Fabulous Diamonds released a few years back through Nervous Jerk, a small Australian imprint which had the good fortune of also releasing an Animal Collective single. Dual did make an appearance here at Aquarius, although it arrived rather mysteriously (perhaps from the band, perhaps not) and vanished after just a single play of the disc on a busy Saturday afternoon. Yes, that's always a good sign when we don't have to ballyhoo the merits of a record, and the strength of the tunes speak for themselves. Woozy hypnosis from organ, sax, drums, monotone female vocals, and lots of delay patterning is what we can remember from back in 2007. The arrival of Fabulous Diamonds' II (whoops, somehow we missed their self-titled Siltbreeze LP in '08) jogged that memory to the forefront of our collective mind, and we're happy that at least we got hear those early tracks at least once. BUT, damn if Fabulous Diamonds haven't made a stellar album here with II.
This Melbourne duo - Nisa Venerosa (drums, voice) and Jarrod Zlatic (organ, effects) - channels a quasi-mystical hybrid of post-Terry Riley time-lag accumulation and the proto-electronica riffs of the Silver Apples through deliriously simple means. Venerosa lays down a slinky percussive groove without much in the way of variation what so ever, much like finest of motorik krautrock drummers (e.g. Jaki Liebezeit, Zappi Diermaier, etc.), and pairs it with Zlatic's spellbinding layers of interwoven phases, loops and moire patterns snatched from his arpeggiating mantras on organ and synthesizer. Venerosa's stoned lullabies are well suited in their simplicity and echoplex ooze to the Diamonds' hypnotic arrangements. On this album, three short tracks about three and half minutes each are bracketed by two lengthy hypno-zoner jams. Those untitled shorts are great on their own, with curiously catchy phrases of repetitive pop minimalism, but Fabulous Diamonds are clearly at their best when sprawling their rhythms and sounds over longer durations, when Zlatic's organs, electronics, and loops have plenty of time for a lunar trajectory around the dark side and back. Anyone with a passing fancy for the likes of Stereolab, Can, Pocahaunted, Aavikko, Shogun Kunitoki, and of course The Silver Apples would be well served with these Fabulous Diamonds. Excellent!
MPEG Stream: "1"
MPEG Stream: "3"
MPEG Stream: "4"

BEST COAST Crazy For You (Mexican Summer) cd 13.98
It's finally here, the debut from Cali sunshine retro poppers Best Coast, and as much as all the internet hype might make you want to think otherwise, it's just as good as they all say. The seven inches we've heard definitely already had us hankering for a full length, and as much as we dug those singles, the band has benefited big time from some serious production upgrade, the sound on Crazy For you finally realizes their potential. All the comparisons to Spector's wall of sound and sixties girl groups, now totally make even more sense, the sound here is totally timeless, fuzzy and reverby, like a treasure trove of rare sixties 7"s, but at the same time lush and lustrous and subtly modern, the guitars warm and liquid, and the vocals, wow, Bethany Cosentino manages to channel every torch singer and chanteuse that she was ever inspired by, her voice rich and smokey and passionate, every line sung with such conviction, the songs melancholic and wistful, a heartbroken longing infusing the sad songs, a pure unfettered joy, and enthusiasm for all the little things, sunshine, love, friendship, oozing from the happy ones, the drums simple and propulsive, the background vocals soft focus clouds of oooohs and aaaahs, Bobb Bruno's understated guitar parts sealing the deal, mirroring the vocal melodies but occasionally spiralling off into soft psychedelic swirls, and the songs, the songs are so good, catchy and fun, and dreamy and heartfelt, and like the sound, totally timeless, opener "Boyfriend" is an instant classic, the melody utterly beguiling, the perfect encapsulation of what Best Coast do so well, right down to Bruno's minimal leads, which perfectly compliment Cosentino's harmonies, the soaring chorus, and the simple propulsive rhythm that drives the song. "The title track is another practically perfect summer pop gem, more jangly and driving, like a sixties girl group jam as interpreted by vintage Unrest, more oooh and ahhhs, and plenty more hooks. The whole record is overflowing with perfect pop, with summery vibes, everything you could possibly want from a feel good pop record. And while they last, we have the version that tacks on the bonus track "When I'm With You", the closest thing the band has to a 'hit', a woozy, soporific intro, quickly exploding into a gloriously infectious pound, the main melody so awesome, and the chorus, a stone cold killer, the harmonies, the arrangement, the fuzzy guitars, the drums, everything. Perfect. Yeah okay, we totally love this record. Like crazy, and we're pretty sure you will too.
MPEG Stream: "Boyfriend"
MPEG Stream: "Crazy For You"
MPEG Stream: "The End"
MPEG Stream: "When I'm With You"

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

KONER, THOMAS Permafrost (Type) lp 19.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
In Permafrost, we have the third and final chapter of this series of reissues from Type, documenting the long out-of-print isolationist composition from Thomas Koner. As with the previous recordings - Nunatak and Teimo - the German sound artist has masterfully captured the frigid atmospheres of the most northern ecosystems, and the title Permafrost leaves little to the imagination as to where this one will be travelling. Cold. Barren. Black. Sublime. The sounds are thoroughly abstracted into shifting blocks of grey noises slipping above seismic rumblings of infinitely bellowing low-end frequencies. By doing so, Koner eschews the use of the gong scrapes and metallic glistenings which graced those early records, adopting the bleak ethos which he continued to master on such albums as Kaamos and Daikan (the latter of which is probably the pinnacle of his career).
All of Koner's work is required listening for anyone who has been interested in drone-based recordings from any time period (e.g. Eno, Lustmord, Chalk, Hafler Trio, Roland Kayn, Alan Splet, Bernhard Gunter, BJ Nilsen, Kevin Drumm, etc.). His subtle use of movement and half-melodic phrasing in his arctic-driven ambience has warranted him quite a reputation, and fortunately none of his reissues fail to sound timeless, breathtaking, and bone-chillingly beautiful. Highly recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Permafrost 1"
MPEG Stream: "Permafrost 3"
MPEG Stream: "Permafrost 4"

LETHE Catastrophe Point 7 & 8 (Invisible Birds) 2cd 63.00
It's hard not to jump right into discussing the packaging that Invisible Birds has crafted for this opus by the peripatetic Japanese experimentalist Lethe (aka Kuwayama Kiyoharu), but that will have to wait for later on in the review as it's the incredible, occluded sounds that Lethe generates that are of true import here.
For many years now, Kuwayama had been recording the resonance of various abandoned spaces, first around his native Japan and more recently from sites far far away. He seeks out an old warehouse, airplane hanger, the hull of a ship, or any massive slab of architecture shaped by concrete and/or steel which happens to have an open door (or broken window) and a choice amount of natural reverb and resonance. There he collects whatever he can find within the space to use as source material to resonate those industrial spaces: slabs of metal, empty water tanks, sodden wood, broken glass, small bones, and the flotsam that had collected on the floors after years of neglect. Out of these found objects, Kuwayama has an uncanny knack for producing natural, acoustic drones which hold a haunted aesthetic amplified through the cavernous reverb of those crumbled cathedrals to industry. Given the seemingly surreptitious nature of Kuwayama's wanderings, these recordings are swaddled in the darkness of night with only candles or a bonfire somewhere in the far corner of the building as his illumination. It has to be said that Kuwayama does overlay and edit all of his recordings into composition, following liked minded artists such as Tarab, Eric La Casa, or John Grzinich.
Catastrophe Point 7 begins with this process at a site deliciously referred to as Arsenic in Lausanne, Switzerland. Well, it turns out that Arsenic is a contemporary theater space in current use, and despite his non-feral residence, Kuwayama offers an incredible assortment of acoustic drones, noises, and textures. Bellowing tones emanate from a variety of long plumbing pipes, replicating the circular breathing strategies of Yoshi Wada; and around these leaden flutterings, he scrapes uneasy textures and builds clattering crescendos. The point about Arsenic not being a totally disused space comes to the forefront about halfway through Catastrophe Point 7 as he rolls a piano into the empty theater space and sets forth a melancholy series of clustered piano tones, much like his one time collaborator Jonathan Coleclough produced on his signature album Period.
Catastrophe Point 8 was recorded in an abandoned space. This time, it's a former power station in Scotland. A mournful acoustic drone, perhaps from a similar set of plumbing pipes heard in the Swiss recordings opens this disc, with small crumblings of wood, glass, and concrete positioned close to the microphone. Set in spatialized contrast to these closely miced sounds, Kuwayama captures various clanks, thumps, and other bumps in the night all decaying in the prolonged reverb of that power station. It's a much more Spartan affair than the first disc, but just as effective in its haunted sensibility. Highly recommended listening!
And yes, the packaging. The discs themselves are housed in a beautifully printed letterpress folio, with a lengthy booklet written by fellow industrial shadow-master Giancarlo Toniutti. For this small art-edition, Invisible Birds has housed the two discs in an archival, embossed box with another booklet of photographs from Kuwayama and a snippet of 8mm film. The art edition is beautifully done and well worth the expense. Needless to say, they made just 100 of the art edition!
MPEG Stream: "Catastrophe Point 7.2"
MPEG Stream: "Catastrophe Point 8.1"
MPEG Stream: "Catastrophe Point 8.3"

BRAINTICKET Cottonwoodhill (Lilith) lp + cd 29.00
Good grief, we've never listed this??? Every once in a while we realize when such an oversight has occurred. Thankfully, we've got this new vinyl reissue to review. This album, originally released in 1971 (that's right!), the debut from Swiss krautrockers (I think you can call 'em that) Brainticket, is simpy one of the freakiest, LSD-trip inspired slabs of groovy mu-sick ever. Up there with Funkadelic's Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow, even.
The first two tracks on side one, "Black Sand" and "Places Of Light", ease you into it, being laidback groovers laced with stabs of distortion... then the true "trip" begins, the utterly over the top, three-part "Brainticket", that starts on side one and spreads over all of side two, dense and propulsive and repetitive, with orgasmic female vocals and all kinds of intense psychedelic throb. It's the perfect soundtrack to goin' completely mad. In addition to wah-wah guitar, organ, flute, tabla, and sci-fi electronics, there's layers of musique concrete "samples", tapes of rainfall, clanging bells, clattering trains, cheering crowds, all sorts of chaotic noise panic...
Quite a overdose of LSD-enthusiasm, that even today still seems more likely to scare folks off from trying drugs than encourage 'em to do so. But then, who needs to actually drop acid when you can just listen to this? Fans of the likes of A.R. & Machines, Amon Duul II, Siloah, Tangerine Dream's Electronic Meditation, and other cosmic trips (as well as hippie kitsch) this is another one you need to get turned on to if you haven't already. Oh, and as a footnote, the drummer went on to play in proto-metallers Toad.
An old fave, maybe a bit more expensive than it needs to be, though to be fair this package does come with a cd version of the album as well, which is a nice touch. 180 gram vinyl, gatefold sleeve, which is nice too.
MPEG Stream: "Black Sand"
MPEG Stream: "Brainticket Part I"

BERRY, KEITH The Cartesian Plane (Elevator Bath) picture disc 17.98
It's been way too long since Keith Berry has put anything out. The last time we had one of his records in stock, it was the impeccable 2005 album The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish, which was housed in an oversized box filled with fragrant flower petals. On that album, Berry's somber ambient constructions looked forward to the hauntological wash of Leyland Kirby, but also ran parallel to Thomas Koner's isolationism and the miniscule musicality of the later works of Bernhard Gunter. There had been rumors of an album to appear on The Helen Scarsdale Agency; for reasons unknown, the album never surfaced. Outside of a compilation track here and there, this British artist has kept a very low profile until this breathtaking album, released as a part of Elevator Bath's ongoing series of picture discs. Berry presents five extended pieces of soft-focus ambience, whose elegant suspension of sound gently bends along a majestic orbit with huge expanses of sounds undulating with ghostly melodies transmitting from way back behind Berry's dense fog. Where Kirby imbues his work with a maudlin strain, Berry's casts an eye into heart of the sublime. Something beautiful is afoot here, and at same time, the feeling is darkened and just unsettled enough. Let's hope that it's not another 5 years between albums, as Berry is too good a composer to be forgotten about! Limited to 233 copies.

SHOEMAKER, MATT Isolated Agent / Stranding Behavior (Elevator Bath) picture disc 17.98
Seattle's Matt Shoemaker has long stood as one of the few consistently great drone tacticians around, principally because his take on the drone supreme is punctured by humid field recordings laced with occasional bellowings of atmospheric dread. His previous works such as Erosion Of The Analogous Eye and The Wayward Set are demonstrations in equal parts of rich transcendence and hallucinatory isolationism. Given the titles of the two pieces on this gorgeous picture disc released by Elevator Bath, you can make a pretty solid bet that this tends more toward the latter aesthetic of Shoemaker's black-hole expressionism.
Shoemaker begins with a tense diamond-shot drone from overlapping sinewaves generated from controlled feedback. These pierced frequencies slide downwards amidst a curious set of clattering noises, almost like the amplification of a paramecium undulating its way into the crevices of its host body. Extended wheezes of grey gasps of air and motorized growlings swallow everything that came before with a ghostly echo of those feedback tones broadcast from way back at the event horizon. The second side (which may be the first, as Elevator Bath's picture discs are very trickly to discern track listings!) immediately expands into one of Shoemaker's signature pieces of lysergic darkness, with all of his ill-tempered vibrations colliding into huge phase patterns that mutate, deviate, and detour the linearity of his cold drone fundamental. Always bending and set off-kilter this composition is dangerously slippery as if set upon quicksand with the various layers upon layers splitting off in asynchronous, oozing, droning directions.
Very highly recommended as with all of Shoemaker's work! Limited to 233 copies.

COMMON EIDER, KING EIDER Worn (Root Strata) lp 16.98
Another gorgeous outing of hushed acoustic sprawl and hauntingly grey ambience from San Francisco's Common Eider, King Eider. It's record number three from this mysteriously monikered band of outsiders, now expanded into a four-piece, still led by Rob Fisk, former member of both Badgerlore and Deerhoof.
We've always been impressed with the ghostly decay that seems to be so effortlessly flowing through CEKE's sound, a perfect balance of organic drone and instrumental songwriting, all bundled together into a seamless journey into the coldest, deepest woods. We must say that Worn immediately appears more melancholic and somber than past CEKE releases, whether it's the doom laden vocal drawls of Grouper on "Ennui" or George Chen's heaaaaavy buzzing guitar riff on "All They Will Find Is Blood", we're totally blown away!
Swells of gorgeously shimmering vocal melodies weave in and out of the rumbling distorted guitars like some shoegazing doom opera, an ocean of distortion buzzing under a glowing sky, so serene and moving. What we really love about Worn is while there are defiantly heavy moments of sheer epicness, there are also moments of precise composition and gently guided ambience. "The Rabbits Will Come Again" unfolds with gracefully bowed notes ringing out into the moonlit sky, while distant bells and shimmering feedback melt into the mournful piano. Vocal sighs and whispers set the mood for a deep forest seance, super chilling and super amazing. In addition to the special appearance made by Miss Grouper, don't miss out on Tom Carter's whirlwind cameo on "Earth Liver"! And don't forget, this one is limited to 300 copies, complete with lp covers that fold out into full size posters, lovely packaging for this ice cold, psychedelic epic!

COMMON EIDER, KING EIDER Worn (self-released) cd-r 14.98
NOW ON CD-R!!! We'd thought it was gonna be a cd, but still cool for the turntable-impaired, as this was previously a vinyl-only release. And the packaging is special too.
Another gorgeous outing of hushed acoustic sprawl and hauntingly grey ambience from San Francisco's Common Eider, King Eider. It's record number three from this mysteriously monikered band of outsiders, now expanded into a four-piece, still led by Rob Fisk, former member of both Badgerlore and Deerhoof.
We've always been impressed with the ghostly decay that seems to be so effortlessly flowing through CEKE's sound, a perfect balance of organic drone and instrumental songwriting, all bundled together into a seamless journey into the coldest, deepest woods. We must say that Worn immediately appears more melancholic and somber than past CEKE releases, whether it's the doom laden vocal drawls of Grouper on "Ennui" or George Chen's heaaaaavy buzzing guitar riff on "They Want To Dig For Gold But All They Will Find Is Blood", we're totally blown away!
Swells of gorgeously shimmering vocal melodies weave in and out of the rumbling distorted guitars like some shoegazing doom opera, an ocean of distortion buzzing under a glowing sky, so serene and moving. What we really love about Worn is while there are defiantly heavy moments of sheer epicness, there are also moments of precise composition and gently guided ambience. "The Rabbits Will Come Again" unfolds with gracefully bowed notes ringing out into the moonlit sky, while distant bells and shimmering feedback melt into the mournful piano. Vocal sighs and whispers set the mood for a deep forest seance, super chilling and super amazing. In addition to the special appearance made by Miss Grouper, don't miss out on Tom Carter's whirlwind cameo on "Earth Liver"! And don't forget, this one is limited to 300 copies, complete with oversized cover that folds out into a full size poster, lovely packaging for this ice cold, psychedelic epic!
MPEG Stream: "The Rabbits Will Come Again"
MPEG Stream: "Ennui"
MPEG Stream: "They Want To Dig For Gold..."

ZOLA JESUS Tsar Bomba (Troubleman Unlimited) lp 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Here's the second pressing of the 2009 EP by Zola Jesus, whose neo-goth theatrics have made quite a big splash around these parts, especially with her 2010 Stridulum EP. Zola Jesus (born Nika Roza Danilova) had been trained in her formative years as an opera vocalist, but she's far more interested in taking a similar path as Siouxsie Sioux and Diamanda Galas by grafting her powerful vocals onto a grim post-punk latticework of cold, almost no-wave electronics. The arrangements are skeletal with little more than mechanical drum programming and simple atonal melodies, performed with a naive panache more in keeping with the anti-aesthetic of early Ariel Pink or John Maus. There's tons of lo-fi, energy negating reverb and swaths of blackened noise (after all she did have a split LP with Burial Hex on Aurora Borealis!) that splatter throughout the seven tracks on Tsar Bomba (the title alludes to the world's largest nuclear bomb held in the Russian arsenal... ah, nihilism!). The dichotomy between her vocals and the arrangements shouldn't work; but against the odds, it works magically, coming across like an early Cabaret Voltaire fronted by Lydia Lunch. As with the first pressing, there's 500 of these in print.

HTRK Nostalgia (Fire) cd 15.98
Once known as the Hate Rock Trio, this Australian-born / London-based ensemble shortened their name down to HTRK (which the band still insists on pronouncing Hate Rock). Unfortunately, in the spring of 2010, the bassist Sean Stewart committed suicide. The remaining members - Jonnine Standish and Nigel Lee-Yang - look to continue making music, although that may seem a difficult proposition given that Stewart's low-slung basslines really drove HTRK's doom and dirge songwriting approach. The Birthday Party, Sisters Of Mercy, and PJ Harvey came together within HTRK's very impressive 2009 album Marry Me Tonight, produced by Roland S. Howard who really emphasized the skeletal, haunted aspect of HTRK's sound. That's quite different from what you'll hear on their 2007 debut Nostalgia, which still had a very strong Birthday Party sound especially with Stewart's recapitulation of Tracy Pew basslines, but the band has buried Standish's exhausted / exasperated vocals, Lee-Yang's swampy guitars, and the minimalist electronic programming in a huge bath of reverb. The spectral morass of all of the reverb really casts as a abjectly narcotic to the feel of these songs. Where on Marry Me Tonight which pushed Standish's vocals to the foreground to dramatic effect, she's lurking around the corners of these songs, howling and yelping deep into the night. It should be noted that a couple of songs from Nostalgia do reappear on Marry Me Tonight, although the difference in production really does change the the outcome. "Look What's Been Done" has become "Ha". "Look At That Girl" reappeared as "Rent Boy" and "I'm All Broke Up" turned into "Disco." Really fantastic.
MPEG Stream: "Look What's Been Done"
MPEG Stream: "Look At Her"
MPEG Stream: "I'm All Broke Up"

MILLIS, ROBERT 120 (Etude ) cd 13.98
BACK IN STOCK!!! One of our favorite bits of audio collage / field recording / amazing experimentation was Mr. Millis' 120 cd-r which came out late in 2008. It's now available once again, but this time as a proper compact disc!
Robert Millis is a man of many talents: a Climax Golden Twin, a collector of 78s resulting in the impeccable Victrola Favorites book & compilation, purveyor of searing avant-scum-noise-rock in AFCGT, a world traveller in search of esoterica for Sublime Frequencies, a field recordist of frogs, birds, blue jeans salesmen, etc, etc, etc. Despite his many activities, Millis' recorded output has almost entirely been by way of collaboration, making this self-released gem of a solo album all the more special. This is closer related to the collage work that Millis has contributed to the Climax Golden Twins, bridging all of those aforementioned interests in a polyglot of psychedelic drone smear pocked with snippets of conversation, poetic extracts from his collection of '78s, and a judicious amount of vinyl crackling. An album such as this would easily be confused for the hermetic revelations that Philip Jeck extracts from his rough shod vinyl and turntables; but Millis seems to counterpoint the crackle and the clean with more drama than Jeck, almost positing the crackle like a punchline in a joke that breaks through one of Millis' blissed out shimmers constructed from loops and drones from guitar, bells, and glass harmonica, where haunted melodies from times long gone whisper through the mix. But at another instance, Millis leaps geographically from a field recording of loosely played Thai temple music into a shortwave burst of noise seamlessly mixed through a cloud of insects and back into one of his sleepy drones. The logic of the album may seem absurd from afar; but the internal logic is peculiarly sensible, as if Millis were tapping into some stream of consciousness that subcutaneously connects all of these intermingling sounds. Very highly recommended no matter how you slice it.
MPEG Stream: "Track 1"
MPEG Stream: "Track 2"
MPEG Stream: "Track 3"

KONER, THOMAS Teimo (Type) lp 19.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Here's the second of three vinyl reissues of the early, seminal work from Thomas Koner, who alongside Andrew Chalk may stand as the greatest drone artist from the past few decades. Teimo is an album that was originally released as a cd on Barooni in 1992. Like its predecessor Nunatak Gongamur, Koner had sourced much of Teimo from recordings of gongs, using contact microphones and hydrophones to capture an unusual assortment of resonance, timbre, and decaying frequencies from his gongs. In these recordings, Koner was investigating what he qualified as an 'aesthetic of decline' shaped by the processes of decay, thermal cooling, and any gradual event that will achieve stasis. Water seeking its own level. Glaciers amassing in frozen landscapes. The metal fatigue of submarines, cracking under the pressure of an entire ocean. The long sustained metallic resonances of the gong is an apt tool for his conceptual framework, with Koner further manipulating his sources into elegant passages of subharmonic rumblings that utter subtle melodic phrases whilst shaking the bottom of the seafloor. Amidst the low-end drones and allusions to barren landscapes, Koner takes great care to keep the sounds immersive without imbuing them with terror. Yes, this is 'dark' ambient music, but his aesthetic of decline is far more clinical than say the theatrical drama that Lustmord can muster through his deadly recordings. Koner's quest is for the sublime, filled with awe and beauty simultaneously; and he has effortlessly achieved that quest throughout his career, certainly including this masterful record. Limited to 500 copies.
MPEG Stream: "Andenes"
MPEG Stream: "Teimo"
MPEG Stream: "Nieve Penitentes 1"

DURUTTI COLUMN LC (4 Men With Beards) lp 16.98
There are those certain records for all of us that just change things when they enter your world. For a few of us here, this 1981 album by Durutti Column is one of those records. An album that showed that music could be sparse and majestic at the same time. D.I.Y., yet and grandiose in how it evokes emotion, memory, longing and desire. The work of Vini Reilly, Durutti Column emerged out of Factory Records yet their sound was something completely of its own world. Merging impeccable guitar playing with subtle drum machines, soft vocals and a golden warmth that makes this one of those albums that makes you melt everytime you put it on.
Pastoral and blissful, LC is filled with both perfect restraint and full on flowing beauty. You can hear how traces of the more blissed out side of Krautrock influenced him, merging that with the stripped down emotional quality of British folk and placing it into a very modern moment. While not an obscure band by any measure, we are still blown away though by how many people who would love Durutti Column have never heard them. And with the reissue of their first two lp's we hope that so many of those folks finally do. We could go on and on listing folks whose music we love and who have undoubtedly been influenced by Durutti Column, and this record in particular: Felt, Fuqugi, Danny Paul Grody, Colleen, James Blackshaw, Ducktails, Fennesz, Manuel, A.R. Kane, My Bloody Valentine, and on and on. One of our favorite records of all time, so if you didn't have this before, now's the time!

FNS s/t (Miasmah) cd 15.98
Another fantastic Miasmah release, this one from FNS, aka Fredrik Ness Sandoval, who besides playing in a whole bunch of Norwegian bands we've never heard of, has collaborated with members of Acid Mothers Temple, 1/3 Octave Band, the Cranes, Zeni Geva, and Marble Sheep, but here on his solo debut, Sandoval crafts a gorgeous expanse of minimal psychedelic folk, that reminds us both of local dronefolk duo Barn Owl, but also space kraut astral travelers Expo 70.
Imagine folk music transformed into druggy drifty dreamy space ragas, and you'll be getting close, acoustic guitars unfurl gorgeous trancelike stretches of almost Appalachia like strum, while all around, effects swirl, other guitars are layered and woven into the original guitar, creating fantastical stretches of psychedelic drift, of abstract dronekraut minimalism, all infused with a subtle pathos, even the sunshiniest of the tracks here, brood with a somber undercurrent. The record opener sets the stage perfectly, an acoustic guitars strums a melancholy chord progression, while another guitar churns and chugs, a rhythmic counterpoint to the woozy drift of the acoustic, this undulating space raga is laced with tinkling chimes, swooping backwards effects, all wreathed in a sort of otherworldly shimmer, and allowed to loop and repeat and mesmerize, growing subtly more intense and loud, but never fully letting loose, instead, eventually shedding all the extra guitars and strange production, leaving just the warm strummed acoustic, and little streaks of backwards swoop. We say it a lot, but Sandoval could have stretched that out to 40 or 50 minutes and we'd STILL be raving about it. And that applies to all the tracks here.
"Sappelur" is a smoldering blackened dirge, roiling clouds of processed buzz, muted feedback, lots of layered tones and lush chordal blur, a lovely blown out psychedelic haze that just throbs and pulses and drifts, right into "Wooden Leg", which returns to the folk of the album opener, but unlike that track, the progression here is much more subtle, it's nearly 2 or 3 minutes before a strange drone begins to surface, along with gorgeous angelic female vocals, soon male vocals join in as well, not singing so much as sort of crooning along, the result is a darker, more menacing take on classic seventies British acid folk.
"I Think She's Asleep" is more abstract, a gorgeous shimmery dreamscape, all layered tones, and pulled apart melodies, haunting and otherwordly, hushed and lovely, very reminiscent of folks like Machinefabriek and Jasper TX. "Dream" is surprisingly less dreamy, sounding instead like some strange sonic ritual, spidery guitars wrapped around twisted damaged electronics, while the vocals transform the sound into something almost liturgical, lots of reverb and echo, as if it were being performed in some massive black cathedral, the effects swirling and swooping, and pushing the sound into the realms of spacekrautdrone for sure.
Finally, the record closes with the epic 12 minute "Flaggermusvingers Vift I Dimmet", which again begins as a slowly unfurling lush sprawl of melancholy Appalachia, all minor key and mournful, while just below the surface, some thick blackened buzzing is birthed, and as the track progresses, it grows more and more caustic, roiling and churning, eventually nearly swallowing the Appalachia whole, transforming the sound into some washed out doomgaze, all woozy and swirly, the low end swells laced with tangled psychedelic melodies, before dropping out completely, leaving just a soft focus cloud of distant reverbed shimmer, a distant cosmic vibration, that seems to gradually fade, like the stars disappearing behind the clouds.
Dark and dreamy and druggy and so so gorgeous... For fans of Expo 70, Svarte Greiner, Barn Owl, Jacaszek, Nadja, Jasper TX, Machinefabriek, Fear Falls Burning and other purveyors of doomfolk, krautdrone, spacefolk and all sorts of abstract minimal guitarscapery...
MPEG Stream: "Silence To Say Hello"
MPEG Stream: "Flaggermusvingers Vift I Dimmet"
MPEG Stream: "Dream"
MPEG Stream: "I Think She's Asleep"

ALUK TODOLO Finsternis (Public Guilt) lp 26.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
It's been two long years we've been waiting for this, another mysterious rhythmic communique from French blackened post krautrock alchemists Aluk Todolo. But it's not like they've been idle. Since 2007's Descension, two thirds of Aluk Todolo have recorded a record and toured the world as Gunslingers, and all of Aluk Todolo do double duty in French black metallers Diamatregon, who recently released a new full length on tUMULt called Crossroad.
But as much as we love those other two bands, and we do, there will always be something magical about the strange sonic world Aluk Todolo are able to conjure up. Especially considering they're a three piece, a power trio, drums, guitar, bass. Nothing else, no synths, no strings, just the basic rock band instruments. It's testament to the power these three wield, that they can do so much with so little. Or more accurately, so little with so little. As the music of Aluk Todolo, is disarmingly simple, subtle and minimal, but in its minimalism, lies its power. The power of rhythm, of texture, of mood, these five long pieces are so evocative, so expressive and strangely emotional. Even at its most spare and skeletal, the sound is palpable, almost a physical presence, which is surprising again considering just how stripped down Finsternis actually is.
Descension, Aluk Todolo's debut, was heavy and space-y and rhythmic, we described it as a buzz-less black metal, some of the songs were thick and caustic, others were loping and motorik, but on Finsternis, it's as if the band decided to strip away all the extraneous sounds, leaving just the core, the root, the heart of the music, and that heart beats out a simple, hypnotic rhythm.
The record is split into 4 parts, with a brief interlude, but those four parts are split into two distinct movements. The first, which comprises the first two parts, is much of what we described above, simple skeletal rhythms, surrounded by minimal guitar whir, bursts of grinding distortion, fragmented jangle, keening feedback, but it's all about the rhythm. After a brief burst of mathy chaos, the track reverts to its initial rhythm, this time the bass more prominent, fuzzy, distorted, woozy and mesmerizing, the band locked in tight, the bass and drums solid and unwavering, while the guitar sings in the background, moaning and keening and howling, giving the track an ominous otherworldly vibe, a trudge across some hostile alien landscape, a weary, washed out deathmarch.
Then the interlude, a haunting abstract percussive sprawl, simple percussive thuds set amidst a sea of warped distorted low end, bits of glitch and hiss, and grinding shards of industrial clatter, which gives way to the second, noisier movement, the drums transformed into a simple machinelike pound, snare and cymbal crashing over and over and over, the guitars whipped into a frenzy of blurred buzz and warped swirling blackened chaos, what at first sounds noisy and harsh, soon reveals itself as strangely textural, and as hypnotic as the more stripped down first movement, the guitars slip from monochromatic whir, to insectoid black metal riffing, constantly swirling around the motorik pound and pummel, the final track finds the guitars slipping into ever higher registers, blissing out, laced with feedback, smoothing out into warm smears and blurs, before a brief deconstruction, and a surprisingly tranquil last few minutes, the drums back to a woozy lope, the guitar offering up warm swells and shimmering thrum, the bass throbbing beneath, eventually stumbling to a halt in a cloud of creaking metals and static-like tape hiss. Woah.
Just like Descension, Finsternis is an intense and emotional journey through sound, a haunting and hard to describe exploration of rhythm, mood and texture, a slow shifting otherworld defined by This Heat, Geronimo, Laddio Bolocko, Can, Faust, accessible only via the three shadowy figures that make up Aluk Todolo, whose magic and mystery has been rendered in these glorious black rhythms.
Housed in a multi panel jacket with super striking original artwork by Stephen Kasner, on the always impressive Utech label (whose other two new releases, from Gog and Olivier Dumont, we'll review on the next list, although we do have both in stock if you want 'em, and we're fairly sure you do!).
MPEG Stream: "Premier Contact"
MPEG Stream: "Deuxieme Contact"
MPEG Stream: "Totalite"

ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER Returnal (Editions Mego) lp 21.00
With the opening squall of electrical noise on his latest Oneohtrix Point Never album, Daniel Lopatin must have been paying homage to Mego's history of digital cacophony, with the likes of Kevin Drumm, Florian Hecker, and Zbigniew Karkowski all abusing binary code through their releases on the label. Of course, Lopatin's signature sound is a throwback to the bygone era of education films about the wonders of chemistry and the drama of the space program with their cheesy, blooping soundtracks, so an homage to Mego is not entirely out of character from a conceptual point of view. Beyond this assaulting track, the elastic surfaces and geometric patterns which have become the hallmark of Oneohtrix Point Never work their magic on Returnal. On the title track with its staccato synthesis, Lopatin tricks his voice out through a couple of pitchshifters, rendering it very much in line with what Karin Dreijer Andersson has done in The Knife and Fever Ray. This isn't the first time he's sung on a track, as he did entertain some robotic vocals on one of those KGB Man cassettes from 2009. He follows this with a series of tracks overlapping cathode-ray drones, algorithmic shapeshifting, and pools of synthetic android tears all of which revolve into curving compositions that split the difference between pastoral new age drool puddling and progressive electronics with a nod to atonal cybernetics. Like Emeralds, who have also signed to Editions Mego, Oneohtrix Point Never has been on quite a roll, and Returnal lives up to all the hype.
MPEG Stream: "Describing Bodies"
MPEG Stream: "Returnal"
MPEG Stream: "Where Does Time Go"

AUBRY, GILLES s6t8r (Winds Measure Recordings) cd 11.98
We've never carried anything from Winds Measure Recordings before now; but that will certainly be changing, as this is a label with an excellent ear for the finer points of dronesmear sound-art and an equally excellent eye for letterpressed packaging. And we'll start with the stellar manipulated field recording work from the Swiss-born / Berlin-based sound artist Gilles Aubry, who seems to have run a space in Berlin dedicated to experimental music called Stralau 68. The space had unfortunately closed in 2007, but it seemed to have been a nexus of activity for noise, aktionism, avant-rock, live-wire electronics, and whatnot. Perhaps as a final act within the emptied space, Aubry recorded the resonance of the room, capturing all sorts of resonant drones, tones, hums, and buzzes intrinsic to the space outside of its former use as a performance venue. The first of three pieces on this album centers on the rasping frequencies from the industrial air vents matching wind-blown recordings from within what sounds like a huge concrete structure. Here Aubry's work attains the acousmatic aesthetic that the finest Francisco Lopez pieces of minimalism seek. The second piece is far more dynamic, with thrumming rumble grounding an interwoven drone of pierced frequencies and jarring movements from creaking metal doors, bellowing hisses of infernal air, and scrabbling textures. It's unsettled and ominous, something of a hybrid between the end-times collages of Tarab and the late period bleakness of Lustmord. The final piece continues with the scraped abrasions and elongated drones of toxic environmental frequencies. Absolutely brilliant stuff!
As we mentioned, Winds Measure's packaging is a thing of beauty, here with an elegant folio of letterpressed text on thick white paper with a set of abstracted smears printed precisely in a pale pale grey. Some of the finer letterpressed work we've seen! Put it all together in a small edition of just about 300 copies. Highly recommended!

PHILLIPS, DAVE ? (Heart & Crossbone) cd 12.98
BACK IN STOCK.
Dave Phillips doesn't give us a lot to go on here, but all of the clues point to this being the most fucked-up break-up record ever. Sure, there's plenty of emo bands and sensitive singer-songwriters who pine over their broken hearts with oh-so earnest lyrics and anthemic crescendos; but if you were to break the heart of a twisted Swiss aktionist with a penchant for violent noise outbursts, industrial-doomscaping, and slaughterhouse ambience, you'd get an album far more wracked with the depths of abject loneliness. Like we said, we can't be sure that this is a break-up record, but Phillips does state the album was recorded as a "therapeutic process during a period dominated by severe disturbances of loss, mental abysses and despair." And he does dedicate this album to Thala, who may have been his girlfriend at one time, but certainly had appeared in several rather disturbing performances with Phillips. Those performances involved a mattress wired up with numerous contact microphones and the two engaging in rather violent sex, with the noises of the groaning mattress tossed back at the audience through explosive amplification.
Of course, Phillips is a member of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe of Swiss aktionists, alongside Sudden Infant, Rudolf Eb.Er, Raionbashi, and G*Park. He was also the man responsible for that Dead Peni record released in 2008 on Blossoming Noise, and was the drummer for Fear Of God, which was like the Swiss equivalent to Napalm Death way back when. In all of those references, this album with all of its fragmented noises, nocturnal events, funereal dirges from an accordion, and fatalistic dronescaping falls more on the G*Park end of the spectrum, preferring mystery through abstraction rather than scatological expulsions of bloodcurdling skree. A few brief interludes of softened white noise dappled with various forest-dwelling field recordings opens the album, snapping to a halt with a 12 minute uncomfortable track that seems to recycle one of those sexually explicit performances. Phillips clips and cuts the moans of a woman rapt in sexual ecstasy, matching that with a male voice which has been pitch shifted way down to a demonic growl. Yes, this gets into the same problematic territory that you get with Brainbombs or Whitehouse, but given how Phillips treats the male protagonist in this exchange (and especially, if he is the man behind that voice), it's very clear that there is to be no sympathy for him. The despair to which this album speaks is of his own making. At the conclusion of this track, Phillips turns to his accordion which sways between two dour notes and a series of nocturnal recordings. Clusters of notes hammered at the very low end of the pianos keyboard are struck and extended into Lustmordian passages of bleak ambience, and there are further examples of Phillips' Aktionist pedigree with a scream session rhythmically locked to a series of meat-cleaving blows. There is nothing pretty about this album, and it is really quite a depressing opus when you get right down to it. Break-up record or not, it's utterly powerful and absolutely not for the squeamish.
MPEG Stream: "Untitled 3"
MPEG Stream: "Untitled 9"
MPEG Stream: "Untitled 10"

MB (BIANCHI, MAURIZIO) The Plain Truth (Hot Records) lp 15.98

KONER, THOMAS Nunatak (Type) lp 19.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Thomas Koner's debut album Nunatak Gongamur was a record that quietly emerged on the Dutch label Barooni in 1990. With works from Nurse With Wound, Charlemagne Palestine, Roland Kayn, and Christoph Heemann also released by that same imprint, Koner's debut had some very good neighbors trafficking in a somewhat similar post-industrial murk and bleak minimalism. Unfortunately, the label went out of business after a ten year run, rendering many of those amazing records impossible to find. Two of Koner's other albums on Barooni - Teimo and Permafrost - were reissued