[ aquarius records catalogue

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Showing results 651 through 700 of 2272.

Akercocke has been touted as England's great black metal hope. A lot to live up to when you consider the UK has produced Venom, the fathers of black metal, and probably the most successful black metal band of all time, Cradle of Filth. Setting a course for

RealAudio clip: Of Menstrual Blood And Semen
RealAudio clip: A Skin For Dancing In

Celebratum is the debut release from this mysterious ritualistic dark ambient outfit, the sounds here comprised of remixed, reworked and remastered songs and sounds from three super rare tapes originally the group released in the mid nineties. Presented here, these bleak, blackened rituals offer up a surprisingly lush sonic palette, the usual industrial/ambient tropes are most certainly present, militaristic percussion, lots of drones, and ominous low end rumbles, but the band incorporate horns (or what sound like horns), in fact the opening/intro is a haunting bit of regal sonic pageantry, echo drenched voices intoning ominously over muted percussion, and mournful horns, shimmering strings, the result very dramatic and cinematic, which is sort of what we were expecting the whole record to sound like, but the sound here are even more intense, the first track proper, the near 19 minute "Nos Dominari Noctus: The Dominions Of The Night", takes that dramatic, cinematic sound, pushes the vocals to the fore, two voices speaking the same words but quite differently, over blurts of brass, churning rhythms, swirling black drones, the vocals becoming vokills as the track progresses, the vibe blackening, building to a near frenzy, before settling into a long stretch of murky rumbles, and sinister whispers, mysterious mumbling undertones, and darkly processed shapes and sounds, blurred into a sprawling, ominous, black ambient creep. While much of the record plays out similarly, the sound is constantly shifting, a cloud of rainfall like hiss, drifts over a murky pulse, wreathed in a choir-like chorale, once again a backdrop for strange spoken vocals, mysterious incantations, that seem to slip from English into some unknown tongue and back again, the sounds drifting in and out, lush swells, bursts of crumbling noise, streaks of textured ambience, shards of melody, moaning and keening and rumbling and shimmering. Various bits of rhythm and percussion, offering a dark propulsion, from dirge-like throb, to strangely looped skitter, to warped, fractured anti-grooves, all woven into the bleak black fabric of Akhkaru's terrifying sonic rituals.

MPEG stream: Das Swartzen Orden Und Das Gesetzen
MPEG stream: Nos Dominari Noctus / The Dominions Of The Night
MPEG stream: Ave Calix Sanguinis (Praise Be The Blood)

When I asked someone recently if they liked Akimbo, they responded with "Well, I like Karp." Not sure that's entirely fair, although Akimbo do definitely share some sonic similarities with the sadly defunct Karp. Howled vocals over simple but pulverizing riffing. However, Akimbo up the ante significantly, by having BIGGER riffs, LOUDER guitars, and WAY WEIRDER songs. Very proggy at points with lots of that dual guitar harmonizing, you know...that keening NEENEENEENEENEENEENEENEENEENEENEENEENEE before exploding back into a crushing downtuned pummel. And also unlike Karp there's some definite stoner rawk going on not to mention some sludgy doom. Makes sense that they're on the same label as doomsters Buried At Sea. We raved about the last Akimbo record, but this one is definitely even better. Imagine the crusty metallic crush of Neurosis or Isis, the post-rock-meets-metal of Dazzling Killmen, the churning repetitive chaotic crunch of Helmet, and the insane howling of the Jesus Lizard's David Yow and you'll get a rough idea of why this band kicks our asses so hard.

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Those of you in need of some serious sonic sludge, some pummelling crushing metallic dirge, and who have maybe also been missing the Neurosis of old, should stop right here. Imagine Neurosis' Enemy Of The Sun or Souls At Zero filtered through hardcore kids in the Northwest, and augmented with furiously complex black metallisms, insane start/stop time signatures and shrieking metalcore crunch. Sound good? That's 'cause it is good. Really good.

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Akimbo are another one of those new breed of heavy bands, sort of straddling that line between heavy metal love and heavy metal parody. Whenever you have a bunch of young guys, kicking up a serious metallic skree you have to wonder if those guys truly have souls of metal or if they're just johnny come lately's who realize that maybe it's okay to play metal now. Especially when they mix distinct metallic elements and imagery with goofy over the top artwork and dorky song titles ("Rockness Monster", "Spooning With Disaster", "Ground Control To Major Bummer"). But the sound, while indeed metallic, owes much more to post rock and heavier indie bands -- Karp, Unwound, that sort of thing -- the overall vibe is still pretty metal, with some seriously metallic riffs, plenty of 'evil' artwork, an inscription that reads "Sharpen swords, polish the armor, it's feeding time", but metal or not, this is just a fucking kick ass blast of sludgy pummeling RAWK, big fuzzed out riffs, pounding drumming, throat shredding vocals, their sound incorporating Neurosis-y crustsludge, Unwound post rock and grooved out Kyuss-y stoner rock into one massive crushing black (w)hole! Definitely for all you folks who dig stuff like Buried At Sea, Conifer, Tides, Dazzling Killmen, Warhammer 48K, etc.

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THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY.

There's a certain breed of rock band that just rocks. Or RAWKS. They're not punk or metal, emo or indie, they just kick boatloads of ass, destroy live, are fun and funny, wild, over the top, and their rock tends to transcend scene politics or genres. Cuz who doesn't love a rock band that RAWKS, right? Karp were probably the ultimate example. A band that were legendary, and rightfully so. A Karp show would be packed to the rafters with punks and metalheads and indie nerds, and white belted emo kids, and goths. It didn't matter, you could hole up in your bedroom and listen to whatever you wanted to the rest of the time, but Saturday night, when it was time to go out and get wild, Karp was the soundtrack.� There have been a few bands since, who managed the same sort of RAWK magic, but none so deftly as perfectly as Akimbo. In the past, we played down the Karp comparisons with Akimbo, cuz they tended to be WAY heavier, and much more of an actual metal band, channeling Neurosis as much as if not significantly more than Karp, but on this latest slab of rock and roll fury, Akimbo have stripped down and rocked up, sounding less metal and more like some supercharged AC/DC, and it sounds fucking awesome.� From top to bottom this is pure rock, a tour van with horns on the hood and a mast and sail mounted to the top, plowing through stormy seas on the cover, song titles like "Wizard Van Wizard", "Dungeon Bastard" and "Huge Muscles", but it's what inside that really counts (just like your mother always told you) and inside are some mega huge ultra shredding riffs, wild howled vocals, crazy catchy hooks, and some of the most bad ass drumming ever, just check out the proggy drum solo intro to�"Wizard Van Wizard"! Holy Shit. We have been rocking this disc like crazy since it came in. And for those of us who have seen them live, they most definitely deliver the goods there too. Maybe even more so.� So for those of you who need your ROCK FIX, this is exactly what the 'doctor' ordered!

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THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY. Legendary Japanese musician / inventor / instrument builder / visionary Akio Suzuki is most likely unknown to most of you. But the more we discover, and the more of his music we hear, the more it seems like everyone needs to hear / experience his genius. Those of you who bought the recently re-listed Kogezan Koukiji double cd, a gorgeous ambient happening in a temple, surrounded by rain, have heard Suzuki performing on an ancient stone flute. And while the sound and spirit of the performance captured the tone and purpose of Suzuki's life and work, he is much more than just a stone flautist. Suzuki has been performing and building and teaching for 30+ years, exploring nature and how natural sounds can be captured and then set free, how one can get lost in the sounds all around us, and how music and creation and beauty exist always and everywhere. These tracks, as the titles suggests, are bits and pieces culled from the last 3 decades and reveal a spiritual pre-cursor to the Jewelled Antler collective, modern sound art and sound art exploration. Home made echo machines create throbbing, hypnotic voicescapes, warm and soft and naturally unique. Dancers' movements are translated into hand positions on a piano creating wild and unpredictable jumbles of notes. Hand made brick walls interact with wind and weather and expose their hidden emotions as haunting tones and subtle drones. Sounds are shuffled between multiple cassette decks creating insext symphonies of high end whir and distant chirps. Long glass tubes are struck and rubbed and bowed mimicking the sound of bird calls. Multiple turntables are used as the 'plates' in a musical game of plate juggling. Microphones are placed in rolled up tubes of paper, recording the phase shifts of people moving around the room and the sounds of the papers shifting. Roughly cut bamboo flutes accompanying the sound of a distant waterfall and the songs of birds. Suzuki's music is pure and zen, dreamy and uncluttered by the rules and worries of most modern music making. The liner notes are littered with effusive adulation from folks like Jim O'rourke ("All you have to do is listen"), David Toop ("I think of Akio Suzuki as a kind of magician") Yamatsuka Eye ("Hearing this music, I remember many things, including playing in a puddle as a tiny kid") and more. Suzuki reflects fondly on the recordings and offers us a glimpse into the soul of a shaman, truly in touch with himself and the sounds the earth has to offer. If we only know how, and where, to look.

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This is the second collaboration between Masami Akita (you know, Merzbow) and Zbigniew Karkowski, yet should not to be confused with their first record, which held the same acronymic title. While the Merzbow sound has become a beast in and of itself -- lots of furious noise, tempestuous distortion, and a predilection to inspire hyperbolic rhetoric -- Zbigniew Karkowski's aesthetic

For all the black metal bands, trafficking in raw, primitive, crusty, blackened d-beat driven minimal metal, few can touch mighty Canadian BM horde Akitsa. Active for over a decade, every record from Akitsa is a grim black testament, an unholy writ, rendered in greys and blacks and blood reds, a sonic assault equal parts frosty blast and thrashing crush, but infused with stray elements of pop and drone and classic metal, those elements subverted and transformed and absorbed into the bands twisted take on classic black metal. Feral like punk, buzzy like black metal, doused in noise, Au Crepuscule De L'Esperance might be the weirdest Akitsa yet, which makes perfect sense as it's their first for Hospital, run by the man behind Prurient and Ash Pool among others. Past Akitsa records were experimental, but subtly so, here the band digs deep, explores their sound in ways only hinted at before, so between bouts of blast and bash, there are long stretches of manipulated sound, of dark drones, and sculpted noise. The record begins with a brief nearly 3 minute stretch of crumbling distortion, of hiss and glitch, a swirling cloud of corrosive noise, but wrapped around a strange haunting melody, the sort of thing you might hear on a Prurient disc, but not normally on black metal records. But here it sounds perfect, a caustic blown out blacknoise intro, leading right into still more weirdness, a hazy melodic dirge, weirdly loping drums, soaring majestic riffing, what sounds like organ, a mysterious minor key slow burn, the harsh vokills hardly distracting from this blurred melodies and almost regal sounding crush. "Morsure" is really the first old school Akitsa jam, pounding, the guitars grinding and super distorted, the vocals a hellish bellow, the drums, a punkish pound, trancelike and repetitive, killer of course, but even more so set amidst all this fucked up far out experimentation. Then there's tracks like "Loyaute", dirgey and almost groovy, sorta like some Stooges-y garage rock coated in filth and slowed down, again way melodic, but still fierce and with weirdly whined almost glammy sounding vox, and a killer main riff, which explodes into the blown out drone drenched chugscape of "Cercueil National", with it's howled vocals, and looped tranced out riffage. The title track is another chunk of outsider black noise, or metal noise, totally in the red, meters pegged, layered drone, crumbling distortion, the various layers throbbing and pulsing, super hypnotic and noisy, but weirdly dreamy too, a sort of shoegazy melodic thrum, but super charged and blackened. The rest of the record plays out like a more traditional Akitsa record, blasting, pounding, thrashing, simple and stripped down, but WAY distorted, until the final song, which sounds like a Japanese Brainbombs, or something, an insanely distorted riff, seemingly assembled from white noise, a lumbering drum plod, and some awesome croaked, almost throat singing style vocals, super creepy and fucked up and GENIUS.

MPEG stream: Crematorium
MPEG stream: Les Sentinelles
MPEG stream: Morsure
MPEG stream: Loyaute

We've been dying to list some Akitsa for ages, one of our favorite purveyors of ultra filthy, simple stripped down buzz drenched black metal. But their records have been impossible to come by for ages, other than for way too much on eBay. Recently however, NYC's Hospital Records came to the rescue, and reissued two of our favorites, Sang Nordique and this one, Goetie. On the opening track, the sound is much like their Canadian brethren Malveillance, frosty and cold, fierce and fast, old school black metal. The riffs are blown out and buzz like swarms of tiny spiked insects, the drums, a seemingly relentless pound, the vocals a wild hysterical shriek. The D-beat influence is not so prevalent as in Malveillance, but the structure is quite similar, a single riff, pounded into submission, over and over and over, a blackbuzzmantra of the highest order. But Akitsa only spend a small amount of their time buzzing at breakneck speed. Much of the rest of the time they slow things way down, the high end buzz becoming murkier and more malevolent, complete with strange guitar harmonies, and croaked demonic vocals, resulting in what almost sounds like a black metal Brainbombs. And as with most of our favorite BM outfits, Akitsa are not at all afraid of melody, offering up some strangely lovely interludes where minor key melodies drift over loping drums and guitars jangle more than crunch, lots of melodic prettiness and droning shimmer.� On the track "Les Ruines De La Modernite", things slow down to an absolute crawl, a sludgy lurching plod, but somehow, the chord progression and the melodies end up sounding super pretty. It's almost like some slowcore track given a black metal makeover. Like Codeine covering Immortal. And most of the slow tracks sound like that, like pretty and poppy painted pitch black.� The intro and outro are also quite lovely, the intro a swaying repeated minor key guitar figure over a sea of static buzz, while above it all a voice croons hypnotically, while the outro is delicate and dreamy, like some soft focus eighties British pop music, simple chimes and a looped melody, all hovering over what sounds like something burning, a low level crackle and rumble. And everything in between is perfect, whether it's wild thrashing, slow plodding, mid tempo waltzes, whatever, every moment is infused with some super unlikely pop sensibilities and an arsenal of blackbuzz riffs to die for.

Another long overdue reissue from these French Canadian masters of stripped down black buzz. We reviewed their amazing 2001 debut, Goetie, a few lists back, and now we've got Sang Nordique originally released in 2002, it's just as black and buzzy, offkilter and strange. And as hard as it is to believe, maybe even better than the debut, certainly weirder! Beginning with a damaged super reverbed guitar intro, that sounds like some impossible cross between blackened surf music and a Morricone western score, featuring a gorgeously melancholy, super distorted guitar buzzing within a cloud of thick reverb, the band immediately launch into some gloriously relentless Darkthrone-ish pounding old school blackness, with looped riffage, killer blastbeats, and some super harsh hellish howls. But by the next track, they've switched gears, and are spitting out some weird sort of crusty punk rock, flecked with a little old school classic metal, sounding for the most part, minus the blackened vocals, like this could be Doom or Discharge or some missing D-beat band from the eighties. Track three, the title track, has them switching it up once again, with a strangely melodic midtempo groove, pounding out a garage-y sort of stomp, sounding not a little bit like the Brainbombs, filthy and blown out, in the red and dripping with crumbling distortion, lots of swagger and groove, but painted all sorts of black.� The next two tracks are straight ahead D-beat black thrash, furiously frenzied blasts of buzz and howl, veering from full on black metal, to more of that sort of blackened crusty punk. But then things get super strange... The second to last track, "La Nature De Mon Pans", begins as a loping swinging dirge, all demonic howl, caveman pound, and some super stripped down riffing, until the -other- vocals come in, a monotone Jandekian drawl, a slightly atonal croon, that suddenly gives this a Circle Of Ouroborus vibe, and the track is transformed into a lurching demented, seasick downer slab of doomy crust pop, complete with soaring minor key lead guitar. Whatthefuck?!? So goddamn good! It had us almost wishing the whole record sounded like this.� At least until the final track, a 10+ minute drone and buzzscape of rumbling low end glitches, distant reverbed drum pound and haunting vocals, like a black metal Whitehouse maybe, the whole track a grinding rumbling glacial dirge, with those creepy vocals drifting ghostlike over the machinelike murk. Another seriously amazing WTF moment on a record packed with 'em. Definitely one of our favorite weirdo black metal bands, and Sang Nordique is one of their best records for sure. We can hardly wait to get their most recent full length�La Grande Infamie (from 2006) reviewed and on the list! But until then, this should most certainly hold you over...

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This long in the works split finally sees the light of day. Two sides of raw primitive blackness, one from Canadian outfit Akitsa, the other from Dominick Fernow's Ash Pool, just one of his many bands/guises/projects (Prurient, Cold Cave, Silent Servant, etc.) Akitsa have long been favorites around here, purveyors of a particular strain of primitive, blackened, D-beat driven black metal crush we can't ever seem to get enough of here. And little has changed on these four tracks, filthy fuzzy riffage, harsh howling guttural rasping vokills, and of course pounding drums. One thing that has changed, at that at least seams a little lot more pronounced, is a serious poppiness, which is established pretty much immediately on the opening track here, which sans vox, almost sounds like some Ramones outtake, hooky and heavy and super melodic, weirdly catchy too, but with a churning punk metal 'chorus', and of course generally more blackened all around. The second disc finds Akista in full on trance out mode, what is essentially buzzing black metal, but here slowed down to a crawl, the guitars are still buzzing and frantic, but the drums (or drum?) is just a static pulsing throb, while the guitar soar and swirl hauntingly above it. Akitsa enter the final stretch of their side with another weirdly catchy punk pop jam in grim black metal clothing, right down to clean reverby vox, the sound, minus the extreme buzz, some weird cold wave post punk jam, that KILLS. Fans of Soror Dolorosa and Grave Babies and the like maybe have found their black metal jam. That leads directly into a bit of mournful blackbuzzscaping, swirling soaring insectoid guitars over reverby Morricone like twang, space and darkly psychedelic, and finally, a sprawling closer that's equal parts post punk, classic metal, and gloom pop dirgery, a super repetitive tranced out churn, that almost sounds like krautrock at times, or at least like a black metal Circle, but still all wreathed in gloriously crusty production, that makes it appropriately murky AND blown out. Ash Pool start off with their own sort of weird pop / black metal hybrid, sounding like some mutant strain of very evil pop punk, a downright jaunty main melody and a galloping rhythm, but soon that splinters into full on furious chaotic black squall buzz, the drums relentless and dizzying, the vocals a raspy croak, the guitars swirling dervishes of sound, but then BAM, they slip right back into that opening poppiness, and so it goes back and forth, a seemingly impossibly hybrid, but it works, and sounds kind of amazing. All before a final black-psych blowout, replete with shredding head spinning guitar freakout. Most of the Ash Pool side remains firmly entrenched in pure grim black buzz territory, but throughout, they pepper the proceedings with super catchy melodies, lush textures, progged out arrangements, managing to keep things dense and brutal and furious, but also strangely catchy. And then they respond to that Akitsa track, by going full on black-pop gloom-buzz, clean vocals soaring over the mix, and again, minus the distortion, this would be some strange bit of dreamy downer pop, but when wedded to those frenetic guitars, it becomes a weirdly soaring sort of blackened postrock/post punk, before finally finishing off with a short blast of shrieking black crush. Amazing stuff from both bands, fans absolutely NEED, newbies, this could be the record that finally turns you on to both Akitsa and Ash Pool, you won't be sorry!

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Wow! A new release on Bruce Russell's Corpus Hermeticum label! But just who the hell are these folks? Taku Sugimoto (electric guitar) is the most well known artist in this collaboration; we've heard his beautiful mimimal guitar playing previously on records with Kevin Drumm, Gunter Muller, and Otomo Yoshihide, as well as his performances both solo and collaboratively on the Recorded in Tokyo in 1999, "Hokou" ("Spazieren" in Swiss or "Periodic Drift" in English) is an exercise in minimalist improvisation, full of abstract tones, deep droning cello swells and restrained guitar plucks. Really nice.

Like Jonah Sharp (aka Spacetime Continuum) and Tom Jenkinson (aka Squarepusher), Mitchell Akiyama arrived at electronica after extensive training as a jazz musician. That said, Mitchell's jazz roots don't really show here. "Hope That Lines Don't Cross" is

We loved the dreamy yet glitchy album Small Explosions That Are Yours To Keep from earlier this year by Montreal electro-acoustic composer Mitchell Akiyama, as did quite a few of you...so here's something new from him that may be of interest. Akiyama's entry into Staalplaat's Mort Aux Vaches series of cds documenting live-on-the-air performances for the Dutch radio station VPRO. For this 44 minute recording, Akiyama digitally processed his own live guitar playing (no pre-recorded samples were utilized). What you'll hear are placid, ambient guitar melodies given a scratchy, static-y scrubbing, making this sound a bit like one of the loops from Philip Jeck's turntable, or the result of shortwave radio interference. In fact, it's kinda funny that this was meant for a radio broadcast, since any listeners not up to speed with the standards of "experimental" music-making might just think that they had really bad reception! This is mostly quite gentle, but with a bleeding edge of sonic overload that now and then builds to near-painful levels of distortion before subsiding and again letting the melancholic guitar wash and clicking rhythms soothe your ears. Really beautiful. Packaged in a thin, folded sheet of embossed copper! Watch you don't cut yrself on it...

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The Small Explosions That Are Yours To Keep (if you purchase this, that is, which we recommend you do) are the eleven instrumental songs/soundscapes found on this latest, lovely electro-acoustic outing from Montreal's Mitchell Akiyama. His is a dreamy world of stuttering electronica, abstract yet pretty, with fragments of melody coaxed from what sound like swooning strings, accordion wheezes, delicate piano, and tinkling bells amongst other playthings. The gauzy glitch and crackle put us in mind of Tarwater, Oval, Alog and Philip Jeck. It's just really really nice... Allan's mom (visiting SF) heard this playing in the store and immediately bought a copy she liked it so much! In fact, he was gonna get her to review it, but that didn't happen unfortunately. He does remember her saying that she thought that each track sounded like a different insect, some happy, some sad, young and old, producing some sort of sap or syrup...honey I guess. Something like that. We can kind of hear where she's coming from with that. You (or your mom) might come up with a different mental image, but we imagine that if you like gentle, moody rainy-day electronica with a certain 'clicks n' cuts' element you'd like this too. Likewise even if you didn't know you liked any sort of electronica (like Allan's mom previous to hearing this). Recommended!

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Every couple of years in electronica, there is a specific sound or a defined aesthetic that grabs the attention of the community as a whole. Even within the seemingly conceptually aloof parameters of glitch manipulation, mimesis and mimicry have been endemic, as numerous artists have mirrored the genre's figureheads -- Oval, Pole, Fennesz, and now Stephan Mathieu. As with his previous record "Hope That Lines Don't Cross," Canadian electron peddler Mitchell Akiyama has liberally appropriated the sounds of another. That former album used Vladislav Delay / Pole as his template, and "Temporary Music" seeks the sounds of Mathieu and Oval's "Diskont 94." As on Mathieu's Full Swing recordings, Akiyama centers on the digital fragment to craft an enveloping cloud of electro-drone bristling and densely packed shards of granular synthesis. Don't get me wrong, it's certainly a beautiful record to behold; but one that never strives for its own voice. Released as a part of the new "Raster-Post" series housed in quite nice silkscreened, fold-out cardstock sleeve and bound with an elastic band.

RealAudio clip: Thaw
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Don't forget to boogie is right. Although you'd be hard pressed to actually boogie to this collection of minimal, hyper repetitive blues riffs. Maybe bouncing in place or nodding hypnotically would be more appropriate. Akiyama is a stalwart of the Japanese improv scene along with Taku Sugimoto and Otomo Yoshihide, but here has chosen to let his bluesman freak flag fly. Well, sort of. While these pieces are all 'blues', the riffs are endlessly repeated and slowly become a fuzzy, Reich-ian guitar rock dronescape, at times sounding like Henry Flynt playing the Muddy Waters songbook, at others like a novice guitar player practicing the only riff they know, and still at others like a busker in the subway. Allan posited that this is either the dumbest record he's ever heard, or the most amazing. I think I lean a little toward the latter. either way the overall affect is intoxicating and seriously hypnotic. And let's not forget the impeccable Idea Records packaging. A gold embossed obi hugs the edge of a dark photo of Akiyama, looking all badass cowboy, at a table piled high with tommy gun, booze, electric guitar, full ashtray, knife, gold coins and of course a glass of milk. The back cover is a brownish/blackish haze, with a glossy old fashioned skull barely visible, printed on top. So nice.

In 2003, Locust released the mighty fine Wooden Guitar compilation, featuring a tracks by some of the most interesting of the current crop of Fahey-inspired practicioners of folk-improv acoustic guitar: Jack Rose, Steffen Basho-Junghans, Tetuzi Akiyama, and Richard Bishop. They've since followed up that release with solo discs by Bishop and, now, Akiyama. Akiyama, who hails from Tokyo, was responsible for the longest and perhaps most avant-garde track on the original compilation, as his guitar playing incorporates the silence and abstraction of the "onkyo" electronic improv scene happening in his hometown. Yet the dusty, folky old timeyness key to the "Wooden Guitar" concept is much in evidence as well. So, listen to Pre-Existence and let Akiyama slowly wrap his sprongy steel guitar strings 'round your head, as he plucks and strums what almost sounds like a blues for the guitar itself. There's a lot of knock knock percussive playing and lonesome sustained tones. It's maybe what John Fahey would sound like if totally slow-mo stoned on cough syrup. Of course that sounds good to us. Can't wait for more in this series!

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Tetuzi Akiyama has always been one of the weirdest of the whole "Wooden Guitar" bunch, doing the lovely steel-string, neo-Appalachian folk thing a la Jack Rose and James Blackshaw in the John Fahey tradition sometimes, yeah, but often bringing to it the fractured logic and significant silences of the experimental "onkyo" improv scene he's a part of in Japan. Then there's his whole, under-documented uber-repetitive, electrified avant-garde "boogie" side. And, when he was here earlier this year and did an instore at Aquarius, he held us spellbound with slow-motion string pluckings that we could barely hear. So it's something of a surprise to find that this new seven-song, 15 and a half minute ep from Akiyama is entirely song-based, and not only that, he SINGS. There's lyrics printed on the cd sleeve, cryptic poetry suggestive of Biblical commands. Vocally, he sounds something like Devendra Banhart, believe it or not! But his nasal vocals are stereo-effected (double tracked), and maybe a bit off-key... so imagine The Shaggs doing a Devendra impression. The music fits with that to, as of course being Akiyama his compositions aren't gonna be easily grokked by your typical folk-fan. There's a definite Jandek-ishness to this, but by way of Takoma, an alienated, atonal quality that (for us) feeds perfectly into the strange dismal blues mood he's trying to conjure. With wheezing harmonica drones, rattling maracas, Akiyama's delta-delic acoustic guitar, and some dabbling in electronics, he has us spellbound again with these atypical Akiyama-ized death chants.

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Another nice one from this avant garde guitar/lute improv duo!

Japanese 'onkyo' (and sometimes minimalist electric boogie!) guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama is always up to something interesting. Here he engages in live improvisation with Dutch avant-garde lute player Jozef van Wissem, who plays some sort of Renaissance lute while Akiyama chimes in on a nylon string resonator guitar that has been tuned to Renaissance lute tuning. The two long tracks here are both gentle, yet sorta jarring... a bit like some traditional Chinese music in that way (to our ears). There's lots of near-silent, pregnant space betwixt the quavering string plucks and resonating notes, as you might expect from any recording featuring Akiyama. Quite nice if you're up for this sort of thing -- a fan of the more abstract "wooden guitar", "deltadelica" stuff on Locust, for instance.

MPEG stream: The Golden Mass

Ladies and gentlemen, The Blues Deceivers! Huh? Yes that's what this trio is calling themselves, says so right on the back of this spooky lil' 3". These three guitarists (representing Japan, Australia, and the USA respectively, all well known in underground music circles) agree that the tradition of 'the blues' should or could be (or already was) an aspect of their approach to experimental improvised guitar, and so teamed up for this live recording at the 2004 Bomb the Space Festival in Wellington, New Zealand to let their guitars gently weep and moan (like the willow of the title) in desolate and dismal blues style... avant "blues" that is, droning and eerie and abstract and evocative. The Blues Deceivers are definitely not the sort of blues band you'd find booked at the Boom Boom Room fer instance. No vocals, no drums... the only voices those of their guitars and the ghosts they conjure. For fans of Loren Connors, for sure, and also all three of these players, who have explored such old timey territory in their work to some degree or other before. It's 18 minutes, 47 seconds long in case you're wondering about how much music they fit on the 3" format, in this case.

MPEG stream: Willow Weep and Moan for Me (excerpt)

This might be the first we've heard of Taku Unami, but the other three Japanese guitarists here, Tetuzi Akiyama, Toshimaru Nakamura, and Otomo Yoshihide are all usual suspects from the "onkyo" scene of minimalist, fragmentary sound-making. So, perhaps we already know the unknown Unami by the company he keeps. As expected, this disc is a compendium of extreme guitar strategies, running the gamut from pedal steel string-slides amidst silence (Unami's "The Whisperer In Darkness") to similarly barely-there acoustic string-pluck that in its stark simplicity is quite beautiful (Akiyama's "Moebius Rings") to haunting feedback tones that some will find slightly preferable to a dog-whistle (Nakamura's "gt flo #2"), to an exuberant feedback/distortion fest (Otomo's "Plastics Pick & Mini-Motor"). All should provide ample satisfaction to fans of idiosyncratic avant-guitar play! (In case you're wondering, Compositions For Guitar Vol. 1, unlisted by us, featured the work of Brett Larner, Burkhard Stangl and Taku Sugimoto, whereas this is an all-Japanese affair).

MPEG stream: Mobeius Rings (for two guitars)
MPEG stream: Plastics Pick & Mini-Motor

Very Special Nothing Music. Well, that's what Ed Pinsent at The Sound Projector calls the stuff found here. Recorded live at the Offsite space in Tokyo when London's uber-minimalist Mark Wastell was touring Japan in early 2002, this quartet revolves around the principles of very spare gestures for improvising. So quiet are these sounds that if someone were to wander into the performance off the street unawares, they might think that they found an audience staring at four men sitting quietly on a stage. But in fact, Wastell was working with three heavyweights of the Japanese improv community: Tetuzi Akiyama, who splits his time between the 'onkyo' aesthetics for generated silences and his avant-boogie rock explosions; Taku Sugimoto with his own take on minimalist compositions for numerous instruments and electronics; and Toshimaru Nakamura, whose no-input mixing board can emanate blistering feedback loops and systems of rarefied drone. Put these four artists on stage and their respectful hush only intensifies with subtle smears, acoustic scrabblings, a tiny arc of sinewaves, and pointillist plucks becoming a punctuation marks across vast silences. This is one of those records that is not served very well by the street noise bleeding through from outside. Headphones are recommended, if not required, and in doing so, you will most definitely be rewarded.

MPEG stream: Part 1
MPEG stream: Part 2

Another gorgeously grim slab of blackened minimal techno from this recent Record Of The Week honoree, and like that self titled full length, this new 12" is another harrowing expanse of rumbles, and groans, deep vibrations, and cinematic sound design, all wound around skeletal rhythms and buried pulsations. Pretty sure it's meant to spin at 45, but at 33 it's transformed into something even more like SUNNO))) gone techno. The opening track is peppered with weird orc-ish grunts, and a subtly Muslimgauze vibe, while the follow up is a bit more straight up jungle, albeit still wound up in a black haze, and and slow that down for some seriously old school sounding breakbeat slugstep. The flipside is another spare sprawl that quickly ramps up into a skittery groover, which actually does sound like it's meant to be at 33, sped up to 45, it's frantic and frenetic, but at 33, it's a head nodding pulsating come down bliss out, before finishing off with another atmospheric ambient jam, this one laced with field recordings and heavily dubbed out, murky and mysterious, the techno element sublimated into rib cage rattling low end throb, and some second half stutter step drum programming. Housed in super striking, embossed covers, and pressed on silver metallic swirled vinyl.

So imagine some sort of ultra doom band, like Bunkur or Moss or Corrupted, the downtuned low end heaviness, the brooding, harrowing blackened sound world; now imagine, if you can, a band like that that doesn't make doom metal, or sludge, or even dronemusic, but instead makes electronic music. Imagine some hellish danceclub, hidden away in some cavern, far below the surface of the earth, where only demons, and those that dwell in the shadows, could be found. And certainly not on the dancefloor - this music is not for dancing, it's too ominous, too grim, too blackened. That club is wreathed in shadows, with some mysterious DJ spinning records with ribcage rattling lowend, skull caving beats, the sounds droney and bleak, blown out and minimally murky, some sort of black avant dub maybe? That may all sound too good to be true, or classic aQ hyperbole, but this debut full length from Akkord, definitely evokes exactly that sort of scenario. Just check out the opener, "Torr Vale", preferably on a really loud speaker, or in a car, system BOOMING, or in headphones, volume cranked, it's stunningly immersive, the low end a physical presence, less dance music or electronica than abstract sound design, we're tempted to make comparisons to Ben Frost, Roly Porter, Pole, Demdike Stare, there's definitely a huge hauntological vibe going on for sure, but somehow, this is even more grim and sinister than anything Demdike Stare has conjured up. Swaths of blackened shimmer, clipped beats, submerged in a murky sprawl of tarpit ambience, squelchy synths add subtle colorations, but it's all about the low end, the rumbling, whirring, churning bass, peppered with sonar pings, and rhythmic pulsations for sure, but those elements play out more like light desperately trying to escape from a black hole, and that's what Akkord have conjured up, a sonic black hole, crushing, and blackened, dark and yeah, doomy. It took us ages before we could make it past that first track, and while nothing on the rest of the record is nearly as black and bleak, that dark energy definitely surges throughout, or more accurately, oozes. "Smoke Circle" cranks up the rhythm a bit, the feel sort of double dutch, a little tribal, with little blurts of free jazz skitter mixed in, but all draped over another ominous backdrop of low end rumbles, this time accompanied by a cool looped vocal, buried way down in the mix, the vibe undeniable groovy, but with a seriously sinister undercurrent. Some tracks, like "3dOS" get downright house-y, sounding like they wouldn't be out of place on some Kompakt release, but even here, the sound is wreathed in shadow, about as feel-bad as a feel-good music can get, especially when it breaks down into, some swirling, pulsing death dub drifts. "Folded Edge" is another groover, almost jungle-y, but wreathed in creepy slowed down vox, and in the background, all manner of low end warble, and rib cage rattling thrum, the echo drenched vocal snippets dubbed out and psychedelic, the whole thing tripped out and trance-y. The rest of the record offers up variations on Akkord's grim sonic theme, pulsing, motorik rhythms, some house-y, some jungle-y, some techno, all clipped and fragmented, and all sort of shadowy and sinister. The best moments though remain tracks like "Channel Drift", where the beat is a monotonous pulse, buried beneath a sprawl of cinematic shimmer, weird field recorded clatter, all hazy and murky and washed out, it's not until more than halfway through that the beat emerges from the murk, a bit of skittery jungle, that devolves into a woozy lope, or the killer closer "Undertow", another bit of creaking low end grimnity, hauntological for sure, swirling and heavily panned, sounds swooping from speaker to speaker, sounding more like Nurse With Wound via Demdike Stare, some mutant strain of abstract industrial electro-dub minimal murk. So killer. Fans of the Basic House record we made Record Of The Week recently, or Ben Frost, Roly Porter, Demdike Stare, Andy Stott, Vatican Shadow, Silent Servant, all all those various strains of dark mutant electronica, this could very well be your new favorite record. It is ours!

MPEG stream: Torr Vale
MPEG stream: Smoke Circle
MPEG stream: 3dOS
MPEG stream: Folded Edge
MPEG stream: Channel Drift

We've been a bit obsessed with the haunting minimal techno sound design of Akkord, so much so that we made their (his?) full length our Record Of The Week a while back, and ended up comparing it to doom groups like Bunkur and Moss; Akkord's heaving blackened malevolence, and sinister soundtrackiness transforming their dark electronica into something much more epic and harrowing. So it makes perfect sense that two of our other favorite masters of the electronic dark arts would chime in, with their own remix takes on Akkord's already brilliantly bleak soundworld. Haxan Cloak radically reinvent whatever song it is they've chosen, it's impossible to tell, we're tempted to think it might be some confusional collage of all of them, but Haxan Cloak delivers a tripped out sprawl of his own cinematic sound design, stereo-panned heavily, weird ambient sounds swooping from speaker to speaker, draped over a skeletal digidub pulse, and a field of spare Raster-Noton like clicks and flutters, slowly building to a dense barrage of glitched out industrial crunch, the sound veering wildly from hushed pulsation, to wild rhythmic freakout, all the while, wreathed in mournful melodies and moaning drones, with at least one burst of crazily caustic electro-noise that somehow manages to sound intense and beautiful and weirdly moving and sorta heartbreaking. The flipside finds Dominick Fernow, is his guise as Vatican Shadow, offering up a remix that's not nearly as overtly terrifying, much more subdued, and way less abstract, the sound like, well, like Vatican Shadow, a pulsating low slung gothic groove, a gauzy stretch of minimal batcave techno, with syncopated rhythms, and ominous low shimmer, a hazy house music that sounds like it could be some obscure Kompakt 12", but more shadowy and sinister.

MPEG stream: HTH020 (The Haxan Cloak's Cloud of Witness)
MPEG stream: Typeface/Greyscale (Vatican Shadow's The World Is Complete)

This long form EP (7 songs, 30 minutes) is the follow up to last years eponymous debut and it displays even more of this cultish collective's enigmatic relationship to any sort of defined sound. Songs weave from cosmic mantra chants to space rock epics, improvised skronk jams to pastoral psych-folk reverie and country inflected Flaming Lips-style indie rock, creating a rich sonic tapestry that is engaging as it is perplexing. Delightfully head-spinning!

MPEG stream: Blessing Force
MPEG stream: No Space In This Realm

It's the case with lots of our favorite bands that the magic and awesomeness of any group comes from the collaborative energy every member puts forth into the overall sound. It's not so much one member leading, or one guitar part, or one vocal hook that makes a band awesome. Put it this way, the whole is always greater than its parts. After leaving the infamous Young God Records and losing key member Ryan Vanderhoof, Akron family find themselves in a state of creative purgatory. We were surprised to hear Set 'Em Wild sounding so unconfident and unsure, one song lead by a post-rock guitar splurge, then the next a funky bassline from some sweaty disco romp. Not to say we don't fully appreciate the weird and unconventional approach these dudes have always taken, but there's something missing here. In all fairness, the production and performance is up to par with past Akron records, rich group harmonies, catchy pop hooks, atmospheric wash and delay, but the overall magic that linked all these key elements into something tangible seems to have unfortunately faded away...

MPEG stream: Everyone Is Guilty
MPEG stream: Set 'Em Free

This review comes courtesy of our pal Forrest, longtime AQ customer and fellow massive music geek: Akron/Family comfortably fit within the same free-flowing post-rock continuum as many of Michael Gira's other signings for Young God. Like Larsen and Ulan Bator, instruments drop in and out of the mix as needed, making it hard, on first listen, to tell how many musicians produced the music on the album (there are four). Like Devendra Banhart, their lyrical preoccupations tend toward the sweetly metaphysical, with occasional bits of unconscious derangement popping out. Like Gira's Angels of Light (for whom Akron/Family are now the backing band), occasional moments of darkness and creepiness intrude in the mix, although Akron/Family are never as dark, heavy, or gravel-voiced as Angels of Light, following instead a wandering course between Jeremy Enigk's metaphysically obsessed solo album and the warbling sweetness of mid-period Flaming Lips. Gira produced the album, and brings to it what has become his trademark: the album is recorded as a densely-woven suite, with songs fading from one to the next. Like Larsen's Rever, this gives it a seamlessness that may not be to everyone's taste, as the album feels longer than it is. Unlike Rever, there are lots of actual songs, and while the music is occasionally muscular post rock (with synths, chimes, toys, found sounds, and whatever else seems to work), the songs themselves belong more to the school of psychedelic folk popular with folks like Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, and Six Organs of Admittance. It's hard to describe Akron/Family without making reference to other bands, as much in their sound is very familiar. Just the same, like every other Young God release, this record sounds like a transmission from some strange other dimension, being both very definitely a Young God record and its own unique thing.

MPEG stream: Before And Again
MPEG stream: Interlude: Ak Ak Was The Boat They Sailed In On

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY.

A fat new release from cult faves Akron/Family, a cd AND (while they last) bonus dvd chock full of their uniquely freaked mix of tribal chant, symphonically folky indie pop, catchy rock, improv abandon, and several extra kitchen sinks worth of sounds. It runs the gamut from quiet and pretty to joyously chaotic, via artfully arranged, dynamic songs. Perhaps their noisier, more out-there (yet composed) stuff is what we like the best, as when their collective voices rise together in sweet harmony in the midst of stomping jangle ramshackle drone jams. Whereas the more intimate singy songy stuff can get a bit sappy for our tastes. For us, it's things like the seasick distortion effect that takes over towards the end of the album that we want to hear more of, for them to take that path of fucked-upedness a lot further. The weird thing about this band is that, despite all the craziness on the surface, somehow they just don't seem all that weird to us. Sure, they use a psychedelic array of bright colors all over the place ("There's So Many Colors" is the title of track 6) but still they're carefully coloring inside the lines. Nothin' dangerously experimental here, when all's said and done. We could compare 'em to another anarchic sonic collective, Volcano The Bear -- that is, if they sold Volcano The Bear cds at Starbucks. Quite nice, really, and no surprise they're popular. A safe choice though. And while they last, this first pressing comes with a bonus dvd with performance footage from their notoriously full-on live shows!

MPEG stream: Ed Is A Portal
MPEG stream: Lake Song / New Ceremonial Music For Moms
MPEG stream: Love, Love, Love (Reprise)

This is the debut cd by AQ pal Jeff Sampson and his partner Jeph Jerman (Hands To), who live 2000 miles apart and have been playing on and off together for 20 years! This is noise-y intense music concrete but filtered through a more modern noise/found sound/freejazz aesthetic. Two 30 minute pieces. The first starts out with struck bells, shimmering into nothingness, chiming and ringing, lots of overtones and lots and lots of space. Soon the whole thing implodes into an orgy of clatter and thumps and creaks and splattery percussion, wild freeform rhythms and non-rhythms, and all sorts of strange sounds. Whining strings that sound like the cries of a wild animal, moaning lower register drones, all manner of bowed, and strummed an plucked instruments, making sounds they weren't designed to make. Track one is half hippy psych clatter, half 20th century freak out. A weird combination but it works somehow. Track two uses the same elements but spreads the clatter out a bit, making for a more sort of haunted soundscape, done musique concrete style. Really cool.

RealAudio clip: Suite Revision

It's no surprise that we like this a lot, as it's a collaboration bringing together some big aQ faves (and friends of ours), Aktor consisting of Jussi and Tomi from Finnish prog weirdos Circle, joined by American metal musician Chris "Professor" Black of Dawnbringer and High Spirits fame! Wow, what a great idea! Jussi, Tomi and the other Circle guys already can do no wrong, their unique brand of "NWOFHM" quasi-metal weirdness being hugely popular around here. Put Professor Black into the mix and you've got gold! This debut 7" features two songs, about three and a half minutes each, of hook-laden, sadly majestic, melodic rockin' heaviness, definitely inspired by the '70s likes of Blue Oyster Cult (a reference made by the title of the A-side song), there's A LOT of synthesizer keyboards all over this, getting a little R2D2-ish with the sci-fi bleep and bloop. Darkly poppy, rhythmically driving and suspenseful, with the keyboards and catchiness it's sorta like the recent Falcon (Ex-Circle) album, but much more metal and more prog too. And of course with a different, very distinctive vocalist - Professor Black's emotive, softly weathered voice always a pleasure to hear. Great existential lyrics too. If you're already a fan of High Spirits or Dawnbringer, you'll be right on board with this, 'cause it basically sounds like the most melodic gallop of either of those bands given an extra dose of WTF? electronic action. As the label (i.e. Jussi) says: "Aktor plays Top 40 Heavy Metal with a delicious psychedelic flair". Meanwhile, if you're coming at this as a Circle/NWOFHM fan, well, the extra-proggy B-side has a "lalalala" part that's very Circle-ish... And while it's unlikely we're gonna sell you on this import 7" if you're NOT already into one side or the other of the Aktor equation, any random BoC fans reading this, oughtta give the sound sample a listen! We REALLY hope there's gonna be a full-length.

MPEG stream: I Am The Psychic Wars

Latest jam from local improvised noiseniks Al Qaeda (featuring one of the guitarists from aQ SF black metal faves Sutekh Hexen), here expanded to a sprawling septet, recorded live on the radio in LA. Guitars, tape loops, oscillators, drums, percussion, metal, and trumpet, all woven into a strange sort of abstract avant free noise minimalism. Spidery free jazz tendrils underpin thick swaths of brooding low end, industrial percussion and room sound are blurred into backdrops for swirls of white noise hiss, streaks of feedback, and lurching loops. It's noisy, but more a soft cacophony, a slow build, the drums not about propulsion, at least not at first, eventually the cymbal sizzle and drum splatter coalesces into a sort of krautrock groove (although that other stuff does continue right on, there are multiple drummers after all), but once the drums lock in, the clouds of ever shifting noise and texture get the anchor they need, and you can almost hear it in all the players as they seem to lock in alongside the rhythm, playing more fierce, the sounds more jagged and caustic, but the whole thing sort of more structured. The sound shifts eventually, the drums becoming more motorik, while the sounds around the drums grow more abstract, like a field of electronic buzz, sheet of billowing low end, before eventually fading out. The second piece starts out drum heavy right off the bat, and the track is a murky monster, the guitars not so much riffing and unfurling swaths of soft focus guitarnoise and little curlicues of melody, this one does get heavy, a churning slab of krautnoise that sounds like an updated version of Parson Sound or Faust. The next track set dials back the heavy, letting the trumpet drift in a field of skittery snare and abstract electronics, the drums eventually coming together, into something like abstract krautjazz, left to meander into the final number which is a hazy washed out expanse of layered tones, of distant melodies, of overlapping loops, a blurred droney drift, that thickens as the set progresses, darkening too, before the drums kick in hard, and the sound solidifies into a droned out blur, the trumpet playing a strangely mournful lament over the top, while the rest of the band churns and chugs their way through a final blackened free noise blow out. LIMITED TO 50 COPIES, each one machine numbered.

[ aquarius records catalogue — A ]