[ aquarius records catalogue

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What a totally beautiful and moving record! Muni Bashir founded the Iraqi Traditional Music Ensemble in 1981 as an aim to help preserve Arab & Iraqi musical heritage. His ensemble included around 40 musicians who would be sectioned off into groups of five, all playing the same instrument with Bashir leading the oud section. To call Bashir a master of the oud is not hyperbole...he is! This is one of those amazing examples of virtuosity, not for virtuosities sake, this amazing talent is mixed with so much soul and passion it takes the album out of the realms of just amazingly skillful performance into a space of transcendent beauty and bliss from start to finish. It should come as no surprise that there is a strong Persian influence on these traditional Iraqi sounds, and it's those sweeping melodies and intense rhythms that keep us mesmerized and listening with undivided attention. Highly recommended!

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"In fact, as usual, when Robbie spoke to me, I didn't understand what in the world he was talking about" -- from John Fahey's liner notes to this new 72-minute compilation of Robbie Basho recordings from three of his albums (The Falconer's Arm I, The Bashovia is composed of "Orientalist" raga-folk-guitar improv with some of the man's unique vocalizations on a few of the tracks -- but most are instrumental, darkly gorgeous and inspired examples of six-string and 12-string manipulation. Moreso than Fahey and other contemporaries, though, there's a super intense, almost scary, impassioned element to Basho's playing. There's also a lot of surface noise to be heard on some of these tracks (almost like he's playing next to a campfire), and we're not sure if that's 'cause the master tapes were lost and this cd was mastered from scratchy old copies of the original records (which seems odd, especially since this is billed as "remastered") or if the noise was intentionally included by Basho to make his songs sound like the came from old 78s...either way, it sounds cool!

RealAudio clip: The Falconer's Arm
RealAudio clip: The Haji

Bonn Ist Supreme is a rare glimpse into the live performative side of guitar soli legend Robbie Basho. Recorded in Bonn, Germany six years before his death, Basho was by then in his less interesting Windham Hill phase of his career, but you wouldn't know it by this recording. Containing many pieces from his Takoma-era heyday, Basho's fusion of Celtic, Middle Eastern and medieval influences on his guitar work made him the least blues-based of the Takoma triad of himself, John Fahey, and Leo Kotte. Melding an esoteric spirituality to his playing style, it's easy to get lost in Basho's raga like compositions. Some of the pieces do contain his unique singing which is often a dealbreaker for some (though we dig his vocal stylings), but it doesn't get in the way too much here, and shouldn't keep folks from enjoying his mesmerizingly sublime guitarwork. Nice!

MPEG stream: Cathedrals et Fleur De Lis
MPEG stream: The Girl and The Lotus
MPEG stream: Pavan India
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New Age guitar hero? Hmm. More freaky than that I think. Definitely into the mystical/exotic/"oriental" thing though. Here's a compilation of tracks from three LPs Basho released on John Fahey's Takoma label back in '65 and '66. Beautiful stuff from Seal of the Blue Lotus/Guitar Soli, The Grail and the Lotus, and even one track from Basho Sings (that's when it gets really weird). Brilliant steel string guitar action!

A long-awaited reissue of Robbie Basho's debut, originally released on John Fahey's Takoma label in 1965. Basho was the third part of the Takoma triad which of course included Fahey and Leo Kottke. A big surprise that back then, Basho was the least popular of the three, as he has become a serious cult favorite of the genre since, and this first look into his unique take on Guitar Soli shows why. Basho was the least interested in American forms of blues, classical and ragtime, and sought out instead Celtic and Oriental idioms which heavily influenced his music, giving his work a searching devotional quality. But he also wasn't afraid of performing with a brusque playing style as long as it captured an unfettered emotional intensity. This set definitely highlights his inventiveness as he uses the guitar body for a resonating percussive instrument and even accompanies himself on the flute on one song. Housed in a Smithsonian Folkways style tip-on sleeve, with a simple hermetic drawing, Seal of The Blue Lotus has the feel of an arcane mystical object, one that imparts ancient wisdom to seekers of the craft. Basho's records didn't have cryptic liner notes or partake in humorous antiquated eccentricities, so their more serious reverential nature may have had something to do with his lower profile on the Takoma roster, but probably everything to do with why his records are so coveted now.

This two-part solo guitar masterwork recorded for the Takoma label in 1967 finally gets a limited vinyl reissue - and these will be gone fast, so act accordingly! Altogether, these nine pieces and suites are some of the most intricate hybrids of guitar form invention: Celtic, blues, ragas, classical, flamenco and medieval. Lyrical and melancholic, cascading 6 and 12 string filigrees weave into long-form meditations of minor key form and modal beauty. Basho was at the peak of his powers when these were recorded nearly 50 years ago, and their plaintive majesty has not diminished in the least. Did we say limited?? Essential for your Takoma collections or anyone enthralled by John Fahey and early James Blackshaw.

MPEG stream: Pavan Hindustan
MPEG stream: Babs

MPEG stream: Song of The Snowy Ranges
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Wow. This is one ridiculous record. Solo 6 & 12 steel string guitar and singing by '60s acoustic guitar hero Robbie Basho (plus a little South Indian Log Drum accompaniment by Ramnad V. Raghavan). This record (a reissue of Basho's 1972 Vanguard debut) might have been almost passable (for solo proto-nu-age guitar in the usual mode of Basho and his contemporaries Fahey and Kottke) had Robbie not opened his mouth to moan pseudo-Native American vocal stylings (with similarly themed lyrics that may have been quite sincere but come across as very silly). It's only a surprise that the Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God label (of "Celebrities At Their Worst" fame) didn't get around to re-issuing this themselves. Indeed, although the absurd, wavering vocals might ruin one's enjoyment of Basho's fine guitar playing, they also really do make this a hilarious listen. Connoisseurs of the weird/kitsch should check this out, it's like a cross between "Ein Wigwam" and a Fahey album. For fans of the Sun City Girls, Yahowah, Telly Savalas, and other absurdities. Allan finds this record to be quite enjoyable on those grounds, and once you're done laughing, you'll see that some of it is quite beautiful and Tim Buckley-esque as well. "I am the voice of thu-u-und-rrrrr" etc. Reissued in a nice mini-LP style sleeve.

RealAudio clip: Voice of the Eagle

You know we must confess it is getting harder and harder to write about instrumental acoustic guitar records and not repeat ourselves. Sure we can talk about the various fingerpicking styles, the different tunings, the long-enduring influence and lasting legacy of John Fahey, but it starts to sound routine and in a wide field of players concentrating solely on one instrument, it's not easy to keep a fresh perspective. So thank the stars that the Tompkins Square label has reissued this amazing 1970 recording from Robbie Basho because it sounds so refreshing. Basho was the least known of the Takoma label trio, John Fahey and Leo Kottke being the brighter stars. But Basho's style heavily influenced by raga modalities and Celtic melodic structures was more akin to the classical and Eastern hybrid styles of Sandy Bull and Pete Walker. Venus in Cancer is a transitional recording originally released on ABC's Blue Thumb imprint just after he left the Takoma label and before his later New Age dabbling on Windham Hill. The songs are long and flowing, spiritually imbibed (but not overtly so) with melancholic melodic structures and raga-ish tempos that occasionally burst out in song. Yes, folks, Robbie Basho sings on this one (a point other reviews we read seem to ignore). But, before you all run away into the hills, let us tell you that his voice is a) pretty great in context with what he's playing and b) it's thankfully sparse throughout the record. On one song, he does some Henry Flynt-style field hollering, on another a bit of spoken verse, and yet on another his voice recalls a slowed down Antony or John Jacob Niles. This has got to be one of the best and unusual examples of primitive guitar we have heard in a while and as you well know we have heard a lot. Plus the cover art is pretty damn rad. Highly Recommended!

MPEG stream: Venus In Cancer
MPEG stream: Song for the Queen

Robbie Basho: amazing, mystic guitarist. Robbie Basho: absurd, overwrought singer. Here you get a lot of his entrancing ethno-folk guitar, and also a bit of his sincere, but unintentionally silly vocals. Still, "Zarthus" is quite lovely, a blend of "Persian,

RealAudio clip: Khoda E Gul E Abe
RealAudio clip: Khalil Gibran

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A great new record by Junghans, a soon-to-be much more well known guitarist from the former East Berlin. Solo acoustic steel string guitar is his thing. "Inside" is a folk-trance album of exquisite beauty that has been compared to his evident hero Robbie Basho as well as to Loren Mazzacane Connors. Obviously, John Fahey would be another reference point, and Junghan's sometimes quite repetitive minimalism also puts us in mind of Rod Poole. The disc is divided into three "movements", starting in a simple, rhythmic manner (sounding very avant-garde & "Eastern" & Rod Poole-like) before morphing into some equally radical intricacies. There's no overdubs, but lots of variation. It's all very beautiful and hypnotic, never too difficult (to listen to, that is -- to play this stuff I'm sure is difficult). With colorful liner notes by Byron Coley.

RealAudio clip: First Movement
RealAudio clip: Second Movement, Part One

49 year-old German steel-string acoustic guitar talent Steffen Basho-Junghans returns with his third cd for Portland's Strange Attractors Audio House label. His other ones, which we liked a lot too, were of a more experimental bent, all minimalist and droney and weirdly tuned, but this one takes a more traditional path hewing closer to the music of his obvious hero, the great and eccentric Robbie Basho (and to many of Basho-Junghans' past import releases). Like his guru and adopted namesake, here Basho-Junghans deftly picks out some totally beautiful, meditative and damn impressive East-meets-West 6 & 12 string guitar. (But unlike his hero, he doesn't indulge in any singing!) If you're at all into the classic Takoma school of instrumental acoustic solo guitar -- Basho, Fahey, Kottke -- you'll dig this. Really nice. MPEG Download: "Hear The Winds Coming" [/audio/bashohear.mp3]

MPEG stream: Hear The Winds Coming

We never got around to reviewing this prolific Germanic avant-steel-string guitarist's previous release (the 7 Books double cd released on Strange Attractors last year) although it was perfectly fine -- perhaps we were just scared off by the suggestion of Native American themed spoken word poetry associated with it. No such dangers seem evident here, though, so let's check out this brand new new disc of his on the Italian label Sillyboy, shall we? As with all the stuff of his we've heard, it's one for fans of improvised 12-string guitar in a sorta out-there repetitive, minimalist mode... more Fahey than Bailey thankfully. Maybe that's the reason we didn't manage to review 7 Books, 'cause once you've reviewed a few of this man's releases, it's hard to conjure up more to say, even though the listening remains enjoyable... I mean you gotta cite Fahey, the Takoma label influence, all that. The fact that the man named himself after Robbie Basho ferchrissakes! He makes it so obvious. There's even a couple of tracks here subtitled "Kottke On Mars". But that's not to dismiss Steffen Basho-Junghan's own talent, and such is quite evident here with this disc, recorded live to DAT in his Berlin living room, all solo, with no overdubs and only "gentle" edits. The concept here (Basho-Junghans is really into concepts) is that of an outer-space alien musician (one of those cantina dudes from Star Wars maybe?) coming to Earth and trying to do his/her/its best on an unfamiliar Earth-instrument, in this case the guitar. Hmm, is this a stretch for Basho-Junghans or not? After all, the guitar IS his instrument. However, his clusters of notes, slides and bends allow one to imagine the alien appendages perhaps used to play such music. And, especially, this does a fine job of conjuring a sense of the night-space-darkness travelled by such an alien visitor. Stark and weird but really quite lovely, with hints of Eastern exoticism...

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Steffen Basho-Junghans has always been prolific, almost to the point that one can start taking him for granted...luckily we've kept our ears wide open and have been blown away by his recent outings, like this one, more abstract string manipulation brought our way by the Aussie label Preservation.

Here's the seventh cd (!) from Berlin's foremost acoustic 12-string manipulator. We liked last year's "Inside" disc from Junghans (his first domestic release), and this one follows suit with more of his explorations in "minimalist solo steelstring guitar". Repetitive, mesmerizing, rhythmic strum builds and builds while individually picked and slid notes spray like metallic drops of liquid, falling from his guitar strings in shimmering, chiming streams...or something like that. "Waters In Azure" has an obvious watery theme that Junghans renders quite well musically. It's all very beautiful, and sometimes almost manaical in its minimalist single-mindedness. Junghans likes to experiment with arbitrary structures on his playing, limitations (like, say, using but one finger or string) that force him into extreme new compositional solutions. But the results don't sound forced, they just sound like nothing you've really ever heard from a "normal" solo guitarist. He also always records totally live and direct with absolutely no overdubs or effects, which is rather incredible when you listen to some of this! Equally for fans of Robbie Basho and Rod Poole.

RealAudio clip: ONE No 1, Part III
RealAudio clip: Waters, Part II

We've been digging this recent wave of super minimal electronic music like crazy, whether it's the stripped down house and dark moody techno of Shed or Terrence Dixon, the post industrial gothic beatscapery of Vatican Shadow, the dour blackened brutalism of Silent Servant, the murky avant electronica of Haxan Cloak and Prurient, the field recording flecked minimalism of Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, or recent outings from new aQ faves like Shifted and Ron Morelli, it's almost like the techno/house haters have had their whole world turned upside down, with all of these gothy, gloomy, murky, grim variants on house music and techno, stripped down to the bare minimum, transformed somehow into something blackly psychedelic and woozily abject, total blunted comedown minimalism, that is easily some of the darkest and most mesmerizing music we've heard in ages. None more so than Oats, from Basic House, aka Stephen Bishop, the man behind the Opal Tapes label, who as Basic House, has created something more than that moniker might imply, sure it could be considered 'basic house', but a basic house constructed from crumbling distortion, and chunks of static, weird field recordings, woozy loops, disembodied melodies, you can hear hints of Andy Stott and Demdike Stare and the Caretaker, but Basic House is something else all together, a sort of decaying hauntological dance music, that seems to be cobbled together from sonic detritus, one could almost imagine this as electronica as envisioned by Tim Hecker and Philip Jeck, it has that same sort of warped warble, and grey, washed out abstraction. It's one of those rare records that is truly difficult to describe, which is precisely what makes it so utterly mesmerizing. Breaking down the first two tracks should give you a rough idea of what you're in store for, beginning with a weird field of stuttering static, shards of tape hiss, and what sounds like gristly analog crunch, all pulsing hypnotically over a backdrop of woozy looped melody, and slow shifting textures, a barely there rhythm seems to be forming, it's not until nearly two minutes in that a proper beat surfaces, a monotonous 4/4 pulse, adding a strangely skeletal framework to the proceedings, before that beat blossoms into something almost electro, adding some distorted dubsteppy bass wobble, but the whole thing remaining super wasted and washed out and ultra minimal. Eventually, multiple melodies swoop in, as do auxiliary beats, the sound a dense swirl, dizzying and weirdly psychedelic, and in a weird way, almost poppy sounding, before devolving in a field of spaced out crackle and hiss, all tangled up with layered loops, and mysterious, almost easy listening sounding samples, before lurching directly into the second track, a churning murk-march of pounding Teutonic throb, and looped ominous whisper, everything wreathed in thick swirls of record crackle / tape hiss, the sound quickly and repeatedly transforming, at one point sounding like alien elevator music, rife with churning, chugging low end thrum, and fields of insectoid click, while elsewhere unravelling like a heaving sprawl of avant industrial noisiness. And while that may give you an idea of what Basic House is all about, the rest of the record does its best to continually confuse and confound. Short stretches of mangled field recordings wrapped around barely there beats, give way to super spare soundscapes of glistening crackle, and mutated textures, jagged shards of caustic digital crunch are sculpted into corrosive rhythmscapes that seem to melt into droned out Wolf Eyes style drones, all high end skree, and scraping digital crunch. Some tracks are whispery latticeworks of groaning and creaking ambience, short wave transmissions drifting through fields of hushed thrum, and barely there chordal swells, sometimes blossoming into garbled grooves, all hazy and bleakly blissed out, other times unfurling mysterious swirls of digital stutter and looped vocal whispers, those alien sounds seeming to collect melody and texture as they creep through landscapes of shimmer and hum. Here and there, the record does return to something more overtly rhythmic, like on the balearic "C-Beat", which is like modern minimalism by way of Pole's granular digidub, but recast as some ghostly trance, all whispery stutter, wreathed in warbly wooziness and glassine high end shimmer, but the record eventually settles into a haunting hushed finale, the meditative, minimal drone of "L-Wave And Combo", which is one long sprawl of buried melody and tranced out thrum, but instead of smooth and shimmery, the sounds are rough and raw, crumbling and crunchy, but in no way does that detract from the track's enthralling mesmer. So fucking great. And just in under the wire, in the nick of time to make it onto plenty of top ten lists, and for some of us here, quite possibly a contender for the top spot!

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First solo release from Mike Bong, and no Bong's not his last name (at least we don't think so), we're talking about Mike from UK spacedronedruglords Bong, who have become fast favorites around these parts, and it's obvious why. A. They're called Bong. B. They traffic in spaced out doom drone sludge. And C. They rule. So we were psyched to discover one of the Bong dudes had a solo record, we grabbed nearly a quarter of the whole pressing, but odds are that's probably still not enough, so Bong fans act fast, cuz this disc is pretty excellent. We weren't sure what to expect, something maybe Bonglike, and Sealed Temple sort of is, but it's also pretty different. Imagine a single riff, played over and over into a Dictaphone, and played back on a busted old VCR, and you'd be getting close, or imagine a Bong / Skaters mash up, super lo-fi, looped and mantric, just guitar, all wreathed in haze and buzz and tape hiss, sorta like old Earth records, but way more brittle and low fidelity. That's just the first track. The follow up is a bit more lush, still lo-fi, but drone out and fuzzy, tinkling guitar parts drift amidst the looped buzz and warbly low end whir. A sort of stripped down abstract shoegaze drone, super minimal and hypnotic. The final track is like a mix of the two, a warped slowcore crawl, slowly unfurling riffs over slithery low end rumbles, all tangled seasick melody and soft focus drift, like a woozy, drug addles Sunroof! playing at 16 rpm. Cool! LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. We have 20 or so, and it's already out of print, so these are the only copies we'll ever have...

MPEG stream: Warm Blight
MPEG stream: Sealed Temple
MPEG stream: Smoke Your Way To The End

Latest solo outing from one member of space-doom outronauts Bong, and like the Bong mothership, Basillica traffic in a murky, druggy, blackness, but where Bong is definitely rocking and have a sort of sitar-ed Hawkwind going, Basillica are way more free form and abstract, a sort of oozing lysergic black ambience, here a single track that sprawls like some thick slowly swirling cloud of rumbles and whirs, of muted melodies and cavernous chordal washes, at moments it sounds almost like a gamelan at 1rpm, a warped underwater warble, the melodies like strange shadow beasts struggling in vain to extricate themselves from the black sonic tarpit that is the core of Rotting Desert Queen And The Black Isolator Radar Strip. And for a murky druggy bit of abstract ambience, there's definitely a lot going on here, wah guitars are effected until they barely resemble guitars at all, vibrating strings create ripples in the slowly pulsing sea of sound, occasionally shards of high end, or fragments of melodies break through, almost like a stray beam of sunlight, creating even more shadows, and causing the surrounding sounds to slowly swarm and swallow the sunlight whole. Muddy and washed out, haunting and subterranean sounding, these sounds are also strangely soothing, as if you were floating in some underwater tributary, just below the surface, the water heated by the molten rock beneath, the black tide carrying you through all manner of caverns, the sound and light reflecting off the constantly undulating surface of the cavern walls, and then filtering through the swirling currents, becoming warped and warbly before finally settling in your fluid filled ears. Cool cool cool. Not to mention dark and heavy and druggily dreamy.

MPEG stream: Rotting Desert Queen And The Black Isolator Radar Strip (excerpt)

These 4 tracks, built upon signature William Basinksi loops date back to September 29, 1982 (hence the title), and like so many of his recent releases of archival material, they ask the question, "why did it take you so long?" The answer may not be as interesting as the question itself, but the nostalgic look back for Basinski to his own past certainly resonates beyond any notions of solipsism and speaks to something downright universal: an optimism of a half-remembered past. Unlike the masterpiece of the Disintegration Loops, the tracks on 92982 don't crackle and crumble apart as the pieces move forward; but the dust, hiss, and fuzz that have been the trademarks of Basinski loops are all present. The first track centers on a loop of a spacious piano waltzing out of the softened drones of accumulated hiss and soft focus white noise pushed deep into the shadows. The second is a graceful swoon of a composition with delayed rhythmic pock that phases against a swelling ambient loop and occasional interjections of police sirens and helicopters, presumably recorded directly out of Basinski's open window. Another piano loop grounds the third track; this one painfully sad and lilting and made more so by the patina of tape hiss, soft static, and degradation of the source material. An elegant two note loop with a hallowed drone of floating dust completes yet another fantastic William Basinski record. Fans will not be disappointed!

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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

The Deluge and Cascade are two variations on the same set of tape loops constructed by William Basinski, with the former being released on vinyl and the latter on compact disc. Piano and orchestral recordings are the source material embedded onto those tapes, which Basinski colors with the muddled patina of a fictionalized antiquity. It's same deliciously haunted atmosphere that has captured our imaginations ever since he released the seminal Disintegration Loops nearly fifteen years ago. We'd love to believe that he stumbled up a pile of quarter-inch tape from some closet in a forgotten school who had a music program sometime in the '50s and '60s, whose students were only instructed on playing the most elegiac of funeral dirges on the piano. Or at least that's what Basinski's antiquated sounds allude to. Cascade is a single 40 minute piece (coupled with a download of a live variation recorded at the Issue Project Room) that slows the pace on the frenzied loops that were introduced on The Deluge. It's a softer, more contemplative, dreamier variation, all the while keeping true to his woozy melancholia traced with delay, echo, reverb, and drone. So fucking what if we've already heard Basinski present this same technique on every preceding recording, it remains always unnervingly beautiful and spellbinding!

MPEG stream: Cascade

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

SORRY. Lots of folks feel lots of different things about 9/11. Some want to forget all about it. Some feel compelled to explore the emotions and feeling in their art. Some find the resulting art precious and annoying. And some are truly moved. So how you feel about this DVD really depends on where you fall in the above parameters. Disintegration Loop 1.1 is one hour long static shot of the New York skyline as it billows with smoke from the fallen twin towers. Accompanied by Basinksi's now famous / infamous disintegration loop, a found recording that had been slowly decaying, creating wonderful sonic effects. It -is- quite beautiful, and mesmerising, and the music perfectly captures the mood of despair and the emotional fragility of watching life as we know it literally crumble. Separate from the emotional and political overtones, Disintegration Loop 1.1 is a beautiful piece of (sound) art. But with the added resonance of the source material, it is a truly intense and disturbing thing to see and hear.

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

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William Basinski's Melancholia is a transcendent disc of gorgeous ambience featuring a delightful series of 14 vignettes for tape loops, flickering minimalism, and repeating piano figures. Like the Water Music series, the aptly named Melancholia is a reissue of an album that briefly appeared as a tiny edition cd-r and is now getting the proper cd release it deserves. Erik Satie, Brian Eno (e.g. Music For Films), and Aphex Twin (e.g. Selected Ambient Works II) haunt Basinski's echo-laden space and lilting romantic gestures, restructured from Basinski's seemingly endless archive of tape loops from the early eighties. Those of you who fell under Basinski's spell upon hearing his sprawling Disintegration Loops and Variations: A Movement In Chrome Primitive will have another reason to embrace his nocturnal driftscapes. Recommended! Unfortunately, packaged in a cheap plastic clam shell with no additional artwork and no information about the recording.

MPEG stream: Melancholia 01
MPEG stream: Melancholia 12

Ah, William Basinski. How your sounds soothe the soul. His beautifully drifting, tape-loop constructions once again waft from our speakers here at aQuarius, with the release of Nocturnes. The titular composition is a 41 minute piece that originates from prepared piano recordings made during his 'San Francisco' period circa 1979-1980. The notes that Basinski tapped out are singular, haunted stabs that form a simple progression into a resolving chord. It's a very subtle melodic flourish that only comes into focus through the slow, cyclical repetitions that has become the Basinski trademark. Similarly, he judiciously employs his signature production tricks of suspending washes of reverb and ghost-imaging echo patterns. In other words, it's a classic William Basinksi piece. The relatively short 28 minute "Trail Of Tears" is the recontextualized sound design that Basinski composed for Robert Wilson's opera The Life And Times Of Marina Abramovic, which also featured the songs of Antony Hegarty and the lead roles acted by Abramovic herself and Willem Dafoe. Basinski builds his soundtrack through a languid and slippery fretless bass motif which he deftly augments through steady equalization modulation and a billowing aggregated drone mass that eventually overtakes the bass melody, burying it in an snowdrift of accumulated blurriness. After he allows this construct to collapse toward silence, a second, equally elegant and equally languid motif from some unknown orchestral appropriation materializes. It's a trick that Leyland Kirby / The Caretaker has done plenty of times before, with Basinski's aesthetic manifesting an oceanic gravity in his looping patterns that is unparalleled. Bloody hell, that man makes good record.

MPEG stream: Nocturnes
MPEG stream: Trail Of Tears

Here's another archival release from William Basinski, whose still mining that hyperprolific period of his life in the early '80s when the ambient composer produced the work that would later appear on Variations, The River, and of course the seminal Disintegration Loops. That said, ShortwaveMusic has the distinction of being the first set of recordings that Basinski had released in the mid-90s on the Raster-Noton label. Back then, Raster had captured the imagination of many fans of electronic music with their sterile manifestations of digital errata into pristine structures; so when Basinski had this comparatively rough composition of manipulated shortwave and analogue synth released on Raster, it piqued a lot of folks' curiosity and everyone began to wonder just who this Basinski character was. Needless to say, ShortwaveMusic holds up in the musical context that is 2007 as a strong body of work, with prolonged passages of electrical glistenings smeared with the uneasy, deadened grey static that makes shortwave such a compelling medium to work with (e.g. John Duncan, Tod Dockstader, etc.). Basinksi swaddles all of his sounds in the echo chambers of multiple delay units set to infinity, making it seem that Basinski might have been heavily influenced by the likes of electronic pioneers Maurizio Bianchi or Conrad Schnitzler, whose sounds are reflected in the kaleidoscopic monochrome music of current experimental darling Grouper.

MPEG stream: Evening Scars
MPEG stream: Cobalt Pools

Yet another new release from the now (after 20 years of relative inactivity, release-wise) quite prolific William Basinski, and once again it's absolutely breathtakingly beautiful. Unlike the majority of his releases, which are assembled from loops, Silent Night was composed and played on a synthesizer and the are sublime. A glacially chiming ambient sounresultsdscape of soft reverberant shimmers and hissing textural ambience. Shards of melodies drift in somnambulant streams of keening high end and fragmentary tranquility. Dreamy and meditational and pretty much perfect.

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The Deluge and Cascade are two variations on the same set of tape loops constructed by William Basinski, with the former being released on vinyl and the latter on compact disc. Piano and orchestral recordings are the source material embedded onto those tapes, which Basinski colors with the muddled patinas of a fictionalized antiquity. It's same deliciously haunted atmosphere that has captured our imaginations ever since he released the seminal Disintegration Loops nearly fifteen years ago. We'd love to believe that he stumbled up a pile of quarter-inch tape from some closet in a forgotten school who had a music program sometime in the '50s and '60s, whose students were only instructed on playing the most elegiac of funeral dirges on the piano. For that's to what these fragmented piano melodies allude. From the onset of the three pieces, Basinski introduces a loop packed with notes and relatively bombastic melodic figures, not quite to the point of Nancarrow / Melnyk polydactyl fervor; but the flurry from this introductory loop is intentionally set up to be a position of excess from which Basinski can chisel away to reveal a fundamental pattern within his woozy melancholia traced with delay, echo, reverb, and drone. So fucking what if we've already heard Basinski present this same technique on every preceding recording, it remains always unnervingly beautiful and spellbinding.

MPEG stream: The Deluge

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

SORRY. Teetering between a touching personal vision about the gravest of existential themes and sentimental pathos, William Basinksi has overloaded the context of "Disintegration Loops" with plenty of cultural references dealing in grandiose melancholia, including 9/11, the World Trade Center, the death of English poet Thomas Chatterton, the prosaic dreaminess of early 20th century American composers, the death of antiquated technologies, etc. This overload of metaphoric sadness and loss which is clearly stated well before a single note of music emanates from the CD doesn't leave much room for personal interpretation. Simply put you must feel sad when listening to this album. To be fair, the effect of witnessing the collapse of the World Trade Center has been traumatic to us all, and observing that horrific spectacle from the roof of his Brooklyn apartment undoubtably scarred Basinksi. For better or for worse, Basinski used "Disintegration Loops" as his personal soundtrack for the WTC collapse, playing this composition throughout the night as the fires burned and ash spewed into the air. The piece itself intrinsically deals with decay, as it came about because Basinski had discovered an old tape loop, a rendering of a subtle arpeggiated countermelody from lush orchestral deep horns and strings, that he made some two decades ago and decided to archive the piece digitally -- during that process, Basinki found that the oxide of the tape loop was gradually flaking off, leaving unreadable gaps on the loop itself. Hence, "Disintegration Loops". Over this 63 minute recycling of sound, the orchestration is eventually all but lost amidst the terse pops and a ubiquitous wash of reverb. Oh yes, this album is gorgeous; but I can't shake the feeling that I've been manipulated Steven Spielberg-style into granting an emotional weight to a piece of art more through a tautological argument rather than through aesthetic merit.

MPEG stream: dp 1.1 (excerpt one)
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Finally, parts two through four of composer William Basinski's personal musical response to the tragedies of 9/11. Most musical 'tributes' to that fateful day wallow in schmaltz and treacle, but having witnessed the collapse of the World Trade Center from his house in Brooklyn, Basinski was maybe more personally affected than most of us. And somehow, that personal grief comes through in these reworked 20 year old recordings. Basinski had discovered a handful of old tape loops that were oxidizing and essentially disintegrating, and transferred them digitally, capturing the strangely decaying melodies, making for an expansive suite (almost three hundred minutes) of haunting otherworldy looping drones. Muzak like melodies crumble into barely melodic throbbing pulses, swathed in reverb, allowing the already obscured snatches of music, to fade into wispy smears of sound. So beautiful. We also have Disintegration Loops I back in! All four volumes are definitely essential listening.

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Where the heck has Basinski been for the last 20 years? And what the heck has he been doing? And why has he suddenly resurfaced NOW with a ridiculous amount of lost music? It has all the makings of a fantastic musical mystery. Could be that Basinski is just a young guy, no older than you or me, and this whole reissue campaign is just a post modern art project, an invented persona, that most definitely mystifies and makes the music that much cooler? Or better yet, imagine someone just discovered this old box of tapes in an abandoned house, all labeled with the name Basinski, all dusty and mildewy, and has secretly been reissuing them as if he himself was this long lost Basinski. Those scenarios are almost more believable than the supposed -actual- story, that Basinski recorded tons and tons of loops, pieces for piano and tape, decades ago, and only recently, after 20 years of near silence decides to start releasing the tapes, many of them decayed and damaged. But ultimately, who really cares, the important thing is the music, and once again, Basinski's latest batch of unearthed sounds, long lost fragments, are dark and delicate and completely mesmerizing. Gentle lush piano chords, simple and spare, hover ominously in dense fields of background noise, a slow, ominous churn of rumbling whirs and shimmering grey noise. The piano wanders alone through vast expanses of near silence, before the background noise begins to build bit by bit, like a brooding storm on the horizon, slowly enveloping the reverbed piano, the whole thing becoming a thick cloud of overtones and background noise, before the piano wanders from beneath the smears of grey and black, into yet another near-quiet expanse, and then the whole cycle begins again. Like a series of loops where each loop is 15 minutes long. So disorientingly hypnotic and utterly beautiful.

MPEG stream: The Garden Of Brokeness (excerpt)

This is another in the recent spate of releases chronicling William Basinski's experiments with short wave radio. This 2 disc set, 90 minutes in length to reflect two sides of a cassette tape, is a 2 part piece recorded in 1983 using shortwave radio and primitive tape loops. Fans of Phillip Jeck should pick this up immediately. It's got that sepia toned, gorgeous, hazy old victrola sound, with lots of rough edges, staticky fuzz and warm hum. The tape loops are mostly Muzak, slowed down and stretched out into creepy and hypnotic melodies, under and over shifiting shortwave. Supposedly this was Basinski's attempt to emulate the warm dreamy sounds of the Mellotron, a vintage synthesiser that utilises short loops of tape. And in some ways he has succeeded, creating a weirdly lush, gauze-y, droney soundscape all culled from random shortwave transmissions. So nice!

RealAudio clip: The River Part 1 (excerpt)

One of our absolute favorite minimalist composers pulls another lovely work from his bag of tricks. That bag of tricks being his seemingly endless collection of moldering tape loops initially recorded a couple of decades ago. This time around it's from a deceptively simple piano loop titled "Variation #9: Pantelleria". Pantelleria is a tiny volcanic island southwest of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea whose long and ancient history is steeped in bloodshed, due to its once strategic proximity to warring Christian and Muslim nations. The patina of time on Basinski's key material, coupled with a happy accident of the tape loop slipping off of the tape head, creates a beautifully decaying and lyrically submerged counterpoint effect. What at first seems like five simple notes repeated ends up sounding like Nature cleansing herself of mankind's bloody history. Gorgeous!

MPEG stream: Variation #9: Pantelleria

William Basinski is a weird one. Almost everything we've heard from him has been absolutely breathtaking, but everything we have heard from him was also recorded twenty years ago. So twenty years ago he was making all sorts of drones and loops and sound experiments, all of which came out in the last two years. Weird. Wonder what was going on for the last couple of decades. Who really cares when we're treated to music this delicate and beautiful and timeless. Basinski seems to specialize in the loop, constructing droning and repetitive soundscapes out of brief snippets of sound, often letting nature affect the source (as on his earlier Disintegration Loops where old tapes had begun to disintegrate lending his record loops a strange haunting decay) but just as often affecting them himself by mixing, splicing, slowing down, speeding up or layering loops atop one another. Variations was recorded in 1981 and consists of various piano tape loops, played randomly then "bred". The vibe here is similar to the Disintegration Loops, delicate crystalline figures repeated until they start to blur into a slowly shifting river of sound. But where the Disintegration Loops were dark and brooding, rumbling almost-drones constructed from snatches of pastoral soundscapes, the loops on Variations are sparkling and effervescent, sounding like some strange hybrid of Kompakt's pop ambience and Oval's classic Diskont album. Absolutely beautiful!

MPEG stream: Variation 1

By now, if you're a regular reader of the aQ list, you no doubt know all about William Basinski, and the Disintegration Loops that introduced us to his music. And if you're anything like us, you were immediately smitten by his gorgeous slowly decaying dronescapes. The power of a simple loop, played over and over, in various states of decay, hearing the sounds literally crumble before your very ears, like getting a glimpse inside music, behind the notes, within the chords, observing the magnetic particles as they drop like flakes of soot after a fire, music transformed into inert object, and the glorious sound of that transition, from light to dark, life to death, sound to silence. Basinski's music is rife with meaning, representational for sure, but can easily be appreciated from a purely sonic standpoint, the sounds, his loops, are blurred and indistinct and so lovely, washed out, hazy, sepia toned, they sound like they were snatched from another time, lifted from an audial scrapbook, the sounds curled up at the edges, lightly blackened, the images contained within smeared and unclear, beneath a patina of age, the chemicals reacting over time, changing the color, the texture, the emotion even, of each of those sounds. Vivian & Ondine is a more recent work, but sounds like it could have come from the same treasure trove that produced the Disintegration Loops, dreamlike and otherworldly, hushed, intimate, and so beautiful.

MPEG stream: Vivian & Ondine (excerpt)

Back in 2003, Basinski released the Water Music series on his own 2062 imprint on cd-r curiously in editions of 500. Unlike his much acclaimed Disintegration Loops series, the Water Music series is an exercise in minimalism exclusively for the Voyestra synthesizer. Basinksi offers an incredibly simple composition with steady humming drones burying an quietly repeating, muted electric lullaby. Basinski returns to the same ideas that Eno mastered on his early ambient releases and executes them with a similar panache for soothing tranquility. PACKAGING NOTE: No. No. No. When will these very talented musicians learn that it's a terrible idea to house their splendid music in blank jewel cases, clam shells, or prest-o-matic cases? David Jackman, Jonathan Coleclough, and now William Basinski should be ashamed of themselves for presenting their work in such poor packaging! Of course, we all have Raster-Noton to blame as they instigated that design principle with their uber-clean aesthetic, but Mr. Basinski would be much better served in providing a visual accompaniment to his work rather than following the barely-there aesthetic of Raster-Noton, et. al.

MPEG stream: Water Music I (excerpt)

Back in 2003, Basinski released the Water Music series on his own 2062 imprint on cd-r curiously in editions of 500 also in a clam shell case. Unlike his much acclaimed Disintegration Loops series, the Water Music series is an exercise in minimalism exclusively for the Voyestra synthesizer. Basinksi offers an incredibly simple composition with a steady humming drones burying an quietly repeating, muted electric lullaby. Basinski returns to the same ideas that Eno mastered on his early ambient releases and executes them with a similar panache for soothing tranquility. The composition of Water Music is as good as the packaging is stupid. PACKAGING NOTE: No. No. No. When will these very talented musicians learn that it's a terrible idea to house their splendid music in blank jewel cases, clam shells, or prest-o-matic cases? David Jackman, Jonathan Coleclough, and now William Basinski should be ashamed of themselves for presenting their work in such poor packaging! Of course, we all have Raster-Noton to blame as they instigated that design principle with their uber-clean aesthetic, but Mr. Basinski would be much better served in providing a visual accompaniment to his work rather than following the barely-there aesthetic of Raster-Noton, et. al.

MPEG stream: Water Music II (excerpt)

Originally, this collaborative album from William Basinski and Richard Chartier came out on the Japanese label Spekk in 2004. It quickly disappeared, but now it's back in print with two extra tracks (more on those down below) thanks to 12K imprint Line. Here's what we had to say about the album back then: Things are not always as they seem. If you were to put on this album, a collaboration between experimental musicians William Basinksi and Richard Chartier, you might have the same reaction that we did. It appears that the album begins, drones quite beautifully for a brief period of time, and then ends, leaving us with the thought, "Hey, that was really short! What the hell?" Ah, but not so fast, for the album's running time is actually a full 73 minutes, and the perceived shortness of duration is a result of these two composers' mesmeric abilities! William Basinski, of course, has explored temporal phenomenology before, most notably through his breathtaking documentation of tape decay on the Disintegration Loops series. While Chartier's ultra-minimalism tend towards stasis, his under appreciated Archival 1991 album imparts a similar slow-motion effect upon the listener. Working together, Basinksi and Chartier add a considerable amount to each other's work; and hopefully, they will be working together again as Basinksi provides an emotional center to Chartier's rationalism, and Chartier offers a reductivist edginess to Basinski's ghostly romanticism. For this album, Basinksi and Chartier present glacially slow shifts between extended passages of synthetic drones, occasionally haunted by shadowy whisps and windswept details. There's very little drama and very little activity, just an incredible piece of minimalism that has the ability to stop time. The repress also features two bonus tracks that enjoy a similar time-stopping quality, centered upon the sounds that Chartier employed for his installation at the 2006 Bleeding Edge festival, and Basinski's work with the antique Voyetra 8 synthesizer. Each produced a different mix of this source material. Still just as recommended as before.

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Things are not always as they seem. If you were to put on this album, a collaboration between experimental musicans William Basinksi and Richard Chartier, you might have the same reaction that we did. It appears that the album begins, drones quite beautifully for a brief period of time, and then ends, leaving us with the thought, "Hey, that was really short! What the hell?" Ah, but not so fast, for the album's running time is actually a full 57 minutes, and the perceived shortness of duration is a result of these two composers' mesmeric abilities! William Basinski, of course, has explored temporal phenomonology before, most notably through his breathtaking documentation of tape decay on the Disintegration Loops series. While Chartier's ultra-minimalism tend towards stasis, his underappreciated Archival 1991 album imparts a similar slow-motion effect upon the listener. Working together, Basinksi and Chartier add a considerable amount to each other's work; and hopefully, they will be working together again as Basinksi provides an emotional center to Chartier's rationalism, and Chartier offers a reductivist edginess to Basinski's ghostly romanticism. For this album, Basinksi and Chartier present glacially slow shifts between extended passages of synthetic drones, occasionally haunted by shadowy whisps and windswept details. There's very little drama and very little activity, just an incredible piece of minimalism that has the ability to stop time. Recommended.

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Brand new record from dronelord / guitar deconstructionist Bass Communion, aka Steven Wilson, whose day job is playing with prog superstars Porcupine Tree, but who spends the rest of his time, crafting gorgeous sprawling guitardrones and minimal psychedelic landscapes. The latest of which is captured here, Chiaroscuro is a document of the very first live Bass Communion performance, which took place at the Frenzy Of The Absolute festival curated by Fear Falls Burning. And we're happy to report that BC live is something to behold, a buzzing shimmering cloud of washed out psyche guitar drift, dense blackened billows, floating heavenward, while deep downtuned tones keep the proceedings grounded, amidst the swirl and drift, little shards of melody, and high end fragments surface now and again, only to sink back into the glorious druggy haze. The track shifts gears a few times, an acid fried slow burn blow out gives way to soft focus chiming ambience which slips slowly into a deep meditative rumble, finally drifting off in a hushed whir. The second track was originally released on a split 7" with Fear Falls Burning, available exclusively to attendees of the concert, and finds Wilson with his guitar plugged into his laptop, and again conjuring up some haunting otherworldly minimalism, delicate and abstract, before exploding into a wall of crumbling blown out droneblissdoom heaviness, a wild squall of frenzied psych guitar practically melts the speakers. Wow. Would have liked to hear him do that live. Once again, gorgeous stuff, dark and droney and blissed out and occasionally heavy as all get out, essential listening for the guitardoomdronedirge obsessed among you... Packaged in a super fancy, full color mini gatefold lp style cd sleeve.

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We listed this a while back, a gorgeous record of dark dronemusick from Steven Wilson, whose day job is as a member of modern prog combo Porcupine Tree. No prog to be found here though,. just deep mysterious haunting ambience of the highest order. Now it's been re-issued / re-released with a whole extra disc, featuring the entire album reconstructed / re-imagined by sometime Wounded Nurse Andrew Liles. Here's what we had to say about the original disc when we first reviewed it: With the last couple of Bass Communion, Steven Wilson continues down the darkly droning path found on his collaborative record with Jonathan Coleclough and Colin Potter. Inspired by the parapsychological investigations of Konstanin Raudive who claimed to have captured the voices of the dead on tape, Wilson manages an exceptional album of spectral dark ambience laced with the haunted crackle of old '78s struggling to gain a foothold amidst the billowing clouds of brooding drones. A perfect tide-us-over 'til the next Thomas Koner record. And as if that weren't enough, Liles' disc is just as good, a lot more minimal and abstract, but retaining much of the original's dark spirit. The opening turns Bass Communion's slow drift into something much closer to the pastoral chorale of Arvo Part. The rest of the disc rumbles ominously, shimmers dreamily, occasionally interrupted by electronic glitches, blurred fields of crackle, burnished streaks of glistening sparkle, mysterious voices, intercepted radio broadcast, deep cavernous whirs and long stretches of near silence. The perfect compliment to the original's almost nearly perfect dark dreamy drift. Packaged in super deluxe, very striking, mini-gatefold style full color sleeve.

MPEG stream: Ghosts On Magnetic Tape I
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