[ aquarius records catalogue

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Showing results 1351 through 1400 of 1521.

Not sure what to say. Newest album from THE independent indie rock/punk rock band. Their first in 3 years. The sound is similar to 1998's 'End Hits' but they continue on their path towards melody and away from explosive emo. Lots of actual 'singing' and the

RealAudio clip: Life And Lime

Includes a live performance of "Killing Me Softly With His Song."

New Jersey trio do amazing groovy hip hop thing. The samples're somewhat too recognizable at times, nonetheless the version of "Killing Me Softly" is delicious & there's not a boring or less-than-wonderful track in the bunch. "Why you acting like Al Capone? I'll be Nina Simone, defecating on yr microphone."

Decent indie pop with a Beach Boys meets Stereolab vibe to it. You may recognize Fugu's name from the ultra collectible split 7" they did with Stereolab some time back. Also, S'lab's Laetitia appears on one track.

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SORRY. John Zorn-approved tsugaru-shamisen virtuoso Michihiro Sato, in a trio with the computer of Mamoru Fujieda and the drums of Sean Meehan. Live in Tokyo, October 1994. Lovely packaging, including a stamped metal name-plate.

Talk about a dynamic duo. Drummer Tatsuya Yoshida, the madman responsible for Japanese prog-core band Ruins' insane music, teams up here with pianist Satoko Fuji, a lady who seems equally excitable. In addition to their prowess on their respective instruments, both provide bizarre and even beautiful vocals. Recorded live at the 2002 Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, Quebec, this performance veers from precisely composed, hyper high-speed workouts to sheer improv weirdness (quite melodic much of it though). Piano music genres like boogie woogie and tango are bent into the Ruins realm. With its insistent repetitive rhythmic attacks and Morse code piano parts a la Yoshida's classic solo album "Magaibutsu", this is gonna satisfy fans of Yoshida's brand of musical mayhem for sure. Amazing. And nuts! I think Yoshida is playing a contact mic'd zipper in one song...

RealAudio clip: Omjhonz
RealAudio clip: Kiretsu

Berlin-based electronica experimentalist Jan Jelinek, whom we've grown ever more enamored of thanks to his star turn in the role of Ursula Bogner (documented on a previous release via Jelinek's Faitiche label, purporting to be a collection of pioneering Radiophonic Workshop style electronic pieces by an obscure female composer from the sixties who it seems never actually existed except in Jelinek's imagination) here teams up with one Masayoshi Fujita, who plays a prepared vibraphone (and how many prepared vibraphone records do you have??), for a lovely, lovely disc of ambient droneworks. It begins with "Undercurrent", a track of wavering shimmering meditative hum, softly crackling around the edges, some gentle melody glowing within. The idea of nature-sounds suggested by the disc's title are not dispelled by this music, however electronic (and vibraphonic) it may be. Track 2, "Workshop For Modernity", is composed of whirring and tinkling, again gentle, as if the sounds were conjured from the breeze. The next, "I'll Change Your Life", is even quieter, more "lowercase" in presence. We don't know much about Fujita (assuming he's real) but would guess if he's Japanese, he has some familiarity with Japan's "onkyo" school of soundmaking. The following tracks continue this disc's patient and pleasant trajectory, with much shuffling glitch and soft focus digital stutter, alongside/overtop/underneath the melodious but abstracted vibraphone. It's only on album closer "IA_AI" that the duo eventually build up a thick wall of drone-distortion, louder and louder, a dramatic crescendo that ends with a sudden silence. Quite nice, as we like to say, quite nice!! Sometimes experimental electronic stuff can be too clinical and abstract, academic exercises y'know, but this manages to maintain a human feel, an exquisite emotional resonance, by existing in real space with the sounds of real instruments. Yes, quite nice.

MPEG stream: Undercurrent
MPEG stream: Waltz (A Lonely Crowd)
MPEG stream: IA_AI

Hey now, isn't this Japanese-surname-laden band moniker quite a red herring? 1. Although they do seem to be very obsessed with all things Japanese, they themselves are not Japanese. They are from Brighton. 2. The group is not a duo, they are actually a trio. 3. They have nothing to do with The Karate Kid. All that stuff aside, apparently they've got the hip kids overseas drooling and dancing for their tunes that blend the kraut-synth pop of The Notwist, the icily detached electro-wave of Ladytron, the chillout groove of Air and the propulsive dance punk of LCD Soundsystem. This cd is their first U.S. release and it compiles new versions of the six songs that appeared on their first three limited vinyl only 10" singles (originally released in '05/'06 on U.K. label Tirk), three brand new tracks and one U.S. exclusive track "Reeboks In Heaven".

MPEG stream: Ankle Injuries
MPEG stream: Reeboks In Heaven

Full length number five follows hot on the heels of number four, but unlike the dreamy poppiness of 'Couples In Trouble' with its melancholy twang and wistful sentiments, '13 Hillbilly Giants' shows Fulks returning to his position as No Depression's bad boy

RealAudio clip: I Want To Be Mama'd
RealAudio clip: Family Man

Chicagoan Robbie Fulks, here with his fourth full length album, makes the leap from the country troubadour's lonely road to much broader horizons, as many of the songs on this album remind me of non-country folks as diverse as Nick Lowe (Fulks' voice is

RealAudio clip: Anything for Love
RealAudio clip: Banks Of The Marianne
RealAudio clip: Mad at a Girl

These days the appearance of skits on music albums has been pretty much constrained to the hip hop realm. True? But Robbie Fulks ain't one to follow trends, is he? Hence on his new live album we're hit with a studio recorded skit right at the get go! It all begins with what resembles an old tyme radio advertisement jingle. Y'know the ones that had a group of male singers in turn assuming different characters. The prim barbershop quartet stylings are quite a change from Fulks' slow burnin' smokehouse blues and rowdy barnburners, but the tune's lyrics uproot the well-mannered facade ("Spreading our hillbilly sound... just like a cancer! Ha!"). Fulks' music has always been a study in contrasts, bringing together the rowdy and the sober, loose ramblin' and razor sharp musicianship, the true blue rustic old country feel and his biting, black wit. This 2cd release continues on in that fashion, offering two sides of the Fulks coin -- Disc One is all electric, Disc Two is all acoustic. The actual live recordings took place one wild night in Champaign and one more subdued eve in Chicago. One yowch! moment pops up on the second disc when he unleashes a cover of Cher's "Believe". Yikes.

MPEG stream: We're On The Road
MPEG stream: Fixin' To Fall

More '70s collector cock-rock rediscovered and reissued by the maniacs at Monster. If you like Truth & Janey, JPT Scare Band, Ultra, Winterhawk, here's another gem from the past. 1980 actually. Full Moon rocked Pennsylvania clubs and bars with Thin

Merzbow, Merzbow, Merzbow. We love the ultra-prolific king of Japanese noise as much as the next person - maybe even more, since several of us here own the 50-cd Merzbox! But, it's almost impossible to keep up - and also, when you've already got at least 50 cds of Merzbow's noise, do you really need any more? However, we do still get intrigued whenever Merzbow goes and collaborates with (or remixes) some other artist, like a rock or metal band. Maybe 'cause we like our Merzbow rhythmic, as in, with drumming. Also a little bit of, uh, music, in the mix tends to make the noise parts even MORE effective and interesting in our opinion. So this new release on Profound Lore caught our ears - East Coast metalcore band Full Of Hell teaming up with Masami "Merzbow" Akita for not one but two cd's worth of intense destructo mayhem. The blasting drum battery, filthy riffage and throat-shredded vokills are all par for the course with Full Of Hell, but the presence of Merzbow's mad noise skillz tips the scales further into the extreme and avantgarde! More "power electronics" feedback, more hellish drone and distortion, more abstract abjection. It sounds as if the pit is feasting upon itself, as FoH's fierce metal core breaks loose from its moorings and plunges into the abyss, accompanied by what sounds like 1,000 vacuum cleaners in a windtunnel, that sort of thing. Of the two discs, there's one that's presented as the "main course" with printed lyrics in the digipack, that one seems more like Full Of Hell doin' their usual thing, with a (powerful) side of Merzbow - and also, some free jazz style horns on a few of the tracks!! The other disc, entitled Sister Fawn, seems intended as a bonus, and finds FoH and Merzbow more fully enmeshed, blurring the lines a bit more, the noise to the fore with beats and demented vocals in the background. Noisefreaks can go straight to that one, the metalheads should start with the first disc...

MPEG stream: Gordian Knot
MPEG stream: High Fells
MPEG stream: Aphid

Remember the double cd we listed last year? East Coast metalcore band Full Of Hell teaming up with Masami "Merzbow" Akita for not one but two cd's worth of intense destructo mayhem. The 1st half came out on vinyl not long after, and now at long last also on vinyl is this, the even noisier 2nd part, which finds Full Of Hell and Merzbow fully enmeshed, lines blurred, the noise to the fore with beats and demented vocals in the background, one more for the noisefreaks than the metalheads. Merzbow, Merzbow, Merzbow. We love the ultra-prolific king of Japanese noise as much as the next person - maybe even more, since several of us here own the 50-cd Merzbox! But, it's almost impossible to keep up - and also, when you've already got at least 50 cds of Merzbow's noise, do you really need any more? However, we do still get intrigued whenever Merzbow goes and collaborates with (or remixes) some other artist, like a rock or metal band. Maybe 'cause we like our Merzbow rhythmic, as in, with drumming. Also a little bit of, uh, music, in the mix tends to make the noise parts even MORE effective and interesting in our opinion. The blasting drum battery, filthy riffage and throat-shredded vokills are all par for the course with Full Of Hell, but the presence of Merzbow's mad noise skillz tips the scales further into the extreme and avantgarde! More "power electronics" feedback, more hellish drone and distortion, more abstract abjection. It sounds as if the pit is feasting upon itself, as FoH's fierce metal core breaks loose from its moorings and plunges into the abyss, accompanied by what sounds like 1,000 vacuum cleaners in a windtunnel, that sort of thing.

MPEG stream: Aphid

Following the digital obfuscation of public domain recordings found on his "Frequency Lib" album, Stephan Mathieu presents his "Edits" series, dramatic remixes of his contemporaries' work under the Full Swing moniker. Originally, these edits of Laub, Kit Clayton, Antenne, Autopoesies, Raumgestaltung Eins, Ekkehard Ehlers, Monolake, Yo La Tengo (!), and Akira Rabelais were released as a series of 10" on Kit Clayton's Orthlorng Musork label, and now have been collected conveniently on one CD. What is immediately striking about this album is how strong and how unique Mathieu's signature sound is becoming. While the archetypal application of laptop DSP synthesis ends up tainted by antiseptic, clinical, or cold tones, Mathieu manages to wrap all of his digital pixelations in a dreamy, warmly crackling, and wholly inviting atmosphere, not unlike the beloved Aphex Twin album "Selected Ambient Works Vol II." For the Laub remix, Mathieu centers his recontextualization around one of Laub's lilting synth melodies, which slowly loops through flickering wisps of static, hushed drones, and occasional vocal interjections from Antye Greie-Fuchs, whose Bjorkish voice collapses pixel by pixel. For both Monolake and Kit Clayton, Mathieu re-arranges the original Chain Reaction pulse into deep low end fluctuations, amidst fractilized clatter. The work of Raungestaltung Eins has been stripped down to the root frequencies, sounding like a downpitched morse code transmission, with hyper-pointillistic surface noise crackle and time-stretched drones. Of all of the remixes, the Akira Rabelais reworking of a Carte piano study is the least deconstructed, by overdubbing subtle modulations of Rabelais shimmer and vibrato into a beautifully spun web of spindly tonalities. While Mathieu's work may hint at the discourses of ownership in a digital landscape since he has chosen to develop his sound almost exclusively through pre-existing work, his music ranks way up at the top the increasingly prolific laptop community alongside Fennesz, Carsten Nicolai, and Stilluppsteypa. "Edits" will undoubtedly rank as one of the best electronic record of 2002.

RealAudio clip: Raumgestaltung Eins 070300 Edit
RealAudio clip: Laub Weit Weg Edit
RealAudio clip: Yo La Tengo Hoboken Beach Bums Edit
RealAudio clip: Akira Rabelais ... Edit

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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.

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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.

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SORRY. If you were to put one of the lovely organ drones from Yo La Tengo's warm blanketing sound library into the hands of Full Swing, what would you get? Beautiful slow soft swells of fizzing static drones. And you know what? The same goes for Raumgestaltung Eins.

The last entry from the brilliant series of 10"s by Full Swing (aka Stephan Mathieu) who presents drastic reconstructions of various artists. Previously Mathieu has transformed Monolake, Yo La Tengo, Laub, Antenne, Ekkehard Ehlers, Autopoesies, and Raumgestaltung Eins into dreamy digital fractalization, and the same goes for these remixes of Kit Clayton's atonal electronica single "Latke" and Akira Rabelais's digital reworking of Carte. This entire series stands as some of most exceptional work to come out of the microsound / digital glitch schools of electronica.

How could we resist a band called Full Toilet? Especially when the cover features a crudely drawn 'full toilet', seemingly drawn on a piss stained piece of paper. And then when the label (Sub Pop!) describes the band with descriptors like "angry young man", and "short attention span", and "volatile and erratic", and "bad personal relations", and "turbulence and anger", and "channeling ultimate unhappiness" and finally "bursts of rage". All that and 13 songs crammed onto one 7". There's also some backstory about the Full Toilet guy being some impossible to deal with mentally deranged home recording loner, but we have it on good authority that Full Toilet is in fact one of The Fastbacks, in outsider lo-fi punk mode, and it suits him. And we can only assume one of the reasons we can't stop listening to this weirdo filth, is that there is something more musical lurking underneath, but it hardly matters, cuz this stuff KILLS, heavy and noisy and chaotic, the production totally twisted and lo-fi, the drums stumbling and confusional, the vocals barked and yelped, the guitars crusty and filthy and blown out, the whole sound off kilter and weirdly dubbed out, but in its own creepy damaged way totally catchy.

MPEG stream: Side 1 (excerpt)

What happens when you open a hotel that rests on one of the seven gateways of hell? Let me tell you - eyes will be gouged out, skin burned off, heads melted away, humans will be crucified and spiders will eat out tongues (and lets not fail to mention all the flesh-eating zombies). Thank Satan himself that Lucio Fulci's masterpiece THE BEYOND is back on the racks, rereleased just in time for a Merry Xmas (whoops, we should have listed it last month!). This gored-out unrated, uncensored, nauseatingly unyielding version of said splatter masterpiece now features a 5.1 surround sound experience, providing live bleeding from the eerie score by Fabio Frizzi (The Gates Of Hell, Manhattan Baby, Zombi 2). With an intro and commentary by actress/screamer Catriona MacColl. A must see film for those who like to test how dark their visuals can get.

The Bay Area gent known as Levi Fuller crafts somber elegant folk in league with Low, Black Heart Procession, Sixteen Horsepower, Red House Painters and Mountain Goats. Fans of any/all of those artists very well could find themselves taking quite a shine to the slow smoldering beauty of This Murder Is A Peaceful Gathering. An earth-toned tapestry of strummy acoustic guitar, sinewy electric guitar textured with unexpected percussive and atmospheric elements.

MPEG stream: As The Crow Flies
MPEG stream: Bread

Another amazing archival find from the Sanity Muffin label of unreleased interviews from one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. R. Buckminister "Bucky" Fuller (1895-1983) was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. Fuller published more than 30 books, coining or popularizing terms such as "spaceship earth" and "synergetic". He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, including the widely known geodesic dome and Dymaxion car. What's fascinating about hearing him speak is how direct and plainspoken he is, speaking about high-minded concepts in ways that make them easily accessible and question our very understanding of how the world is perceived. For example, he opens the first interview with an anecdote about speaking at a conference of scientists. He asks them how many of them had ever seen the sun come up and was flabbergasted at how many hands were raised. Here we have outstanding members of the scientific community and most still only understand the world largely in constructs that we have placed upon it, not operating in the real world where concepts like "up" and "down" do not actually exist. From there on we were hanging on every word! This limited cassette version has 4 panels of embossed artwork and insert. Highly Recommended!

Minimalist composer Ellen Fullman speaks of her instrument quite lovingly. Considering the immense amount of time and energy that it takes to set up her long-stringed instrument, her attachment is understandable. When she recently moved to the Bay Area after many years in the Pacific Northwest, she had to radically change the architecture of her apartment by building an addition beyond the porch just to fit the multi-stringed device in the building. It's not enough for Fullman just to stretch long wires in any architectural space, for her pieces involve a complex mathematical foundation which enable Fullman an incredible amount of control when composing her extended drones and minimalist mantras. Indebted to '60s minimalists like LaMonte Young, Arnold Dreyblatt, and Phil Niblock, Fullman's best work -- as found on Staggered Stasis -- suspends microtonal shifts amidst thick rasping drones rich with resonant overtones and complex harmonics. Fullman herself describes the work quite accurately, that "there is a flatness in this drama, what I imagine it must be like in the middle of an ocean, continually moving yet appearing the same." The end result is a much more contemplative and restrained aesthetic than the dynamic dronescapes of Organum and Andrew Chalk. This is a lovely and thororughly engaging work.

MPEG stream: Staggered Stasis Section 1
MPEG stream: Duration

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By now, everyone must be aware of how into turntables we are. The glitch, the crackle, the hiss. Similar to how everything sounds better slow, or backwards, everything definitely sounds better all wrapped in crackle and pop (how about something backwards, slow and crackly!!!). Anyway, we discovered The Fun Years a while back and were immediately smitten with their unique line up, a duo of baritone guitar and turntable. The mix proved perfection. The guitar providing most of the melody, the turntable offering up most of the texture, but sometimes deftly changing places.� We played the heck out of that first record and were super excited to discover there was a new full length in the pipe and it does not disappoint. In fact, the new one is way heavier on the guitar, in fact the opening track might just be the best thing we've heard from these guys. As it was playing, Allan suggested it sounded like Philip Jeck playing Nadja-lite. Which is in fact not that far off the mark. The guitar is deep and resonant, unfurling a lazy minor key riff, the turntables creak and crackle in the background, offering up a stuttery staticky rhythm, the main riff has a bit of twang to it, and reminds us a bit of recent Earth, but underpinned by a subtle black swirl, a smoldering drone, eventually everything begins to bliss out and get all woozy and gauzy, and get really dense and heavy, the guitar and the turntable locked into a gloriously hypnotic loop, eventually building to a truly explosive finale. Man, once they lock in and the distortion begins to swell, we sort of wished this was the only song on the record and was gonna go on for another 30 or 40 minutes. But only until the next song started up... The next track, not nearly as heavy, is just as darkly evocative, a crackly skipped piano loop wreathed in soft effects, the guitar offering up spidery melodic counterpoint, laced with super effected streaks of distorted guitar, a gorgeously mesmerizing repetitive loop that as far as we're concerned could go on forever.� And so it goes, three more extended tracks, lumbering crackly loops, simple moody guitar melodies, haunting effects, deep thick drones, layers of hiss and fuzz, the final track a gorgeous post rock drift, jangly clean guitar, a murky scraping turntable loop finishing off with a sudden burst of what sounds like full on metal, blown out, blissed out, psychedelic, super distorted, but also all glitchy and damaged, hiccuping rhythms, the main riff throbbing beneath all the buzz, so fucking awesome. Fading out just as quickly, leaving just a a bit of needle in groove scratch and crackle as the disc runs out... These guys just keep getting better and better. Dying to hear what they come up with next, and hell if they ever decide to expand to a trio and get a real drummer, well, they know where to find me!

MPEG stream: My Lowville
MPEG stream: Auto Show Day Of The Dead

Full length number three from this turntable / baritone guitar duo, whose last two records have been huge favorites around here, and this one looks to follow suit. With a sound that's equal parts doomy abstract drift, and gauzy atmospheric ambience, washed out textures of hum and hiss and crackle and whir wrapped around lush melodic figures and effects heavy psychedelic shimmer, these two craft gorgeous mini epics, slow building soundscapes that brood and drift and soar, haunting and hushed, layered and lush. This latest installment opens with a lustrous bit of guitar loopage, locked into a web of soft spun delay, repetitive and mesmerizing, the turntable nothing but crackle at first, but gradually growing into something much more substantial, adding texture, little shards of melody, the sound getting more and more hazy, and blurred, and softly noisy, the guitar receding behind undulating sheets of swirling static, eventually the various sounds smearing into a single shimmering sound. That track flows directly into the next, another slow drift, this one driven by a simple percussive crash, surrounded by soft swirls of recorded sound, and washed out streaks of dreamlike guitar blur, this track growing more and more hushed and minimal, before segueing directly into another gorgeous field of electronically charged crackle, warm whirling melodies surfacing in lush gauzy billows, eventually parting to reveal a simple, moody riff, the melody gently driving the sound, the turntable wrapping ethereal swaths of buzz around the riff, and introducing some disembodied percussion. The rest of the record unfurls in some sonic dreamstate, the guitars and turntables hard to distinguish from one another, each offering up snippets of melody, percussive thumps, gauzy shimmer, and easily slipping into a supporting role when one or the other takes charge. The middle portion of the record plays out like a single epic multipart piece, all the tracks bleeding into one another, ambient and atmospheric, rhythms surfacing and then dissipating, melodies doing the same, all about texture and mood, the various layers shifting and drifting creating all manner of subtle tonal color. The final two tracks are the culmination of the record's overall slow build sonic arc, with "Get Out Of The Obese Crowd" unveiling a lazy buzzy guitar figure, wreathed in hushed hazy wheezes, that build to dense static charges, the sound growing more brittle and electronic, the buzzes swirling and whirling, a dizzying glitchscape, that leads into the ominously fuzzy final 6+ minutes that make up "Precious Persecution Complex", a sort of WAY more minimal SUNNO))), a glacial low end creep, that slowly gives way to a staticky sun dappled drift, and then slips right back into the smoldering caustic crunch that transforms the song into a minimal moody chunk of Nadja style doomdriftdrone, but one writ in shades of grey and streaks of static, a thick charged stretch of dense crackling sonic energy, threatening to explode, but that unrealized threat simply becomes a lush hazy tension, that infuses the track with a strange otherworldly pathos, and thus creating a powerful and hauntingly lovely coda, to an already hauntingly lovely record.

MPEG stream: Breech On The Bowstring
MPEG stream: Division Of Labor (TV Track)
MPEG stream: Precious Persecution Complex

Band names come in strange zeitgeists, don't they? We've had waves of "The Something", "Wolf Something" and "Black Something" bands, now it seems it is "Year" time. So far we've noted Capitol Years, The Early Years, Year Future, and The New Year. Now The Fun Years come drifting into view. It does seem to be a bit of a misnomer though. Indeed, this group's name as well as their album and song titles all strike us as being very incongruous with the sounds they make. We sort of expecting some doleful pop music or something, but nothing would have prepared us for the murky muted beauty of Life-Sized Psychoses. Every track a washed out minimal landscape of record crackle, bits of hiss and pop, a dense washed out backdrop for the guitar to sort of drift and shimmer. The record commences with "Powerball Annie", unobtrusive feathery shimmers of static that wash across lapping cycles of three-note sequences plucked out on baritone guitar. Strange reverby bits of percussion drift in and out. The whole thing very languorous and dreamlike. The second track weaves a similar spell, a crackle crusted loop, disembodied and haunting, repeats over and over, eventually joined by a laid back guitar line that gives the track's very Philip Jeck like turntablescape sound a distinctly post rock vibe. At times the Fun Years almost sound like some avant turntablist spinning super scratched up old math rock and slowcore records, all loping rhythms and muted minor key melodies, but draped in thick swaths of buzz and fuzz and hum and hiss. Some tracks are mere whispers, others glow and sound sun dappled, smeary blurry burnished soundscapes, all wreathed in those analog recording inconsistencies we can never seem to get enough of. Every track here is a subtle sprawl, and shifts and shimmers ever so gradually. No quick moves or hard edges. Just blurry, bleary eyed drift. So very nice! Definitely for fans of Jeck, Basinski, Tim Hecker, Machinefabriek, Jasper TX and the like...

MPEG stream: Powerball Annie
MPEG stream: Softy As Stilts

The return of our favorite (and perhaps the only?) baritone guitar / turntable duo The Fun Years, and another record of warm warbly mystery. Wonderfully warped turntablescapes, looped and crackly and fuzzy, the baritone guitar unfurling spidery melodies while the turntables weave lush gauzy backdrops of sepia sound. Like past Fun Years records, this one is dreamy and otherworldly, ghostly and sweetly melancholic, the guitar manages to sometimes sound just as crackly and fuzzy as the vinyl on the turntables, the two elements so perfectly intertwined. The Fun Years side builds to a lush crescendo, a warm layered, soaring ur-drone, before slipping back into a slow shimmery outro. .Cut Featuring Giblet are new to us, a guitar and laptop duo, who are a perfect match for the Fun Years, their sound a haunting elegy, the laptop is super subtle, adding texture and color more than glitch or bleep, gorgeous, creepy, warm and lovely, a slow building gauzy swirl over ghostly drifting guitar figures, eventually reaching a sort of soft cacophony, but even then still floating dreamily from the speakers. Super limited, only 489 copies, each one hand numbered, and unfortunately super price-y as well, not sure why, but both bands offer up sounds pretty enough that for some folks, it'll definitely be worth it.

Straight out of the Asian Underground; strong, driving Big Beats in line with Talvin Singh and Asian Dub Foundation--Post-Colonial politics on the dancefloor.

Okay all you techno-phobes (and we mean techno music), it's time to add another killer weirdo dark techno record to your collection, you know that little stash of brooding, pulsing minimal electronica that you maybe keep tucked away, hidden from the reproving glances of your punk rock or metalhead friends. But hell, if the recent spate of killer techno records hasn't convinced you that there's sonic darkness to be found creeping like a black fog across underground dancefloors worldwide, then you might need to revisit some recent faves: Shed, Raime, Terrence Dixon, Stefan Goldmann, even the witchy avant electronica of Demdike Stare or the recently reissued murky heroin house of Porter Ricks, all deliver the sort of dark, dubbed out, seething, narcotic, trancey minimal sounds we can't get enough of, and that have won over even the most techno/house music averse. You can now add Function to that list, the solo project of David Sumner, who happens to be one half of legendary techno duo Sandwell District, and whose debut, Incubation, is a seriously ominous slab of blackened techno, the sound slipping easily from cinematic horror movie creep, to prismatic dark kosmische, to spaced out digidub, to druggy kraut-house, and plenty of other sonic stops in-between. The opener "Voiceprint" sounds like a John Carpenter score, all tinkling melodies, heaving ominous drones, and the sort of ch-ch-ch, h-h-h sound effects that definitely reminded us of Friday The 13th. The follow up doesn't get any lighter, instead, it introduces a pulsing 4 on the floor beat, but it's a throbbing, skittery groove, surrounded on all sides by dubbed out blackness and murky sci-fi swirls, the result is less dancey and more trancey, a tense dubbed out minimal house music that gradually grows more and more druggy and abstract as the track progresses. "Counterpoint" ditches the rhythm completely, and instead unfurls a swirling psychedelic synthscape, all cosmic arpeggiations, and lush layered prismatic shimmer, it could be Oneohtrix or Cloudland Canyon, but then in swoops "Modifier", a skittier, jittery groover, that peppers it's muted melody with a disembodied intake of breath, giving the track a seriously creepy vibe. And so it goes, the sound in constant flux, pulsing house music is woven into Goblin like synth creep, sounds blossom into drowsy, drifty dubs, before slipping right back into some slithery techno skitter, or reprising the opening track, this time wound around a serious groove, the song transformed into a tense, intense sprawl of atmospheric, cinematic electronica. The record closes with the epic "Gradient I", which lays down a house-y rhythm, but then wraps it in keening tones and hissing high end hum, the tones stretched way out into tense drones, the sound murky and washed out, darkly psychedelic, minimal and motorik, but super hypnotic and mesmerizing, laced with swaths of soaring synths, but always slipping right back into a gauzy, druggy, techno murk. So great. Anyone who's been digging the recent breed of 'dark' minimal techno will flip for this, and the previously mentioned techno-phobes, this might be the one that finally convinces you to come out of the techno closet!

MPEG stream: Voiceprint
MPEG stream: Against The Wall
MPEG stream: Counterpoint
MPEG stream: Gradient I

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We were really excited about this match up, Hospital Productions head honcho Dominic Fernow's gothic industrial techno project Vatican Shadow, teamed up with David Sumner of Sandwell District's ominous minimal techno alter ego Function. We could only imagine what sorts of fantastically grim and murky sounds would emerge from this unholy union, would it be monolithic slabs of heartless black techno, or swirling rhythmic sprawls of pulsing murk? Our imaginations sort of ran wild, and yet somehow, we never imagined THIS. The sound is definitely still plenty moody and dark, but instead of being harrowingly abject, or bleak and brutalist, it's actually sort of blissed out, and pretty dreamy much of the time, the vibe more hazy and soft focus, lots of atmospheric drift and Pop Ambient style swirl. There are beats too, but they're not so much beats as pulsations, often buried and barely there, almost always skeletal and ultra minimal, drifting amidst gauzy stretches of woozy, washed out nocturnal murk, soft focus atmospheres, and blurred dream-state ambience, the vibe ethereal and airy, almost like a blackened new age, but one that often drifts into fields of dark, swirling, chordal thrum, and softly tangled sheets of smeared melody, glistening and glimmering and prismatic. There are hints of Wolfgang Voigt's Gas, the Caretaker, the whole Pop Ambient series, Emeralds, lots of drift and shimmer for sure, but a few spots that get downright sinister and soundtracky, like on the "nemesis Flower", an ultra minimal John Carpenter style sprawl of murky throb, rumbling synth blurts, and distant melodic shimmer. It's not until the second to last track, "Red Opium" that we get any actual techno, and even then, it's a sort of laid back, blissed out mid-tempo house music groover, the tempo loping and hypnotic, the beat surrounded by soft billows of resonant overtones and blurred melody, which leads directly into the closer, "Bejewelled Body", which is about as close to a 'banger' as any track here, a churning, four-on-the-floor throb, wreathed in electronic squelches, keening fragmented melodies, and underpinned by some seriously droned out kosmische raga-like shimmer.

MPEG stream: Things Known
MPEG stream: The Nemesis Flower
MPEG stream: A Year Has Passed

Sometimes, punk rock just hits the spot. Especially when it's druggy and garagey and a little bit freaked out. So we have been seriously digging the Functional Blackouts. A fierce, thrashy slab of lo-fi garage rock Stooges style stomp from Chicago. Punk rock destruction unleashed, a handful of messed up, sloppy and slippery, drug fueled scuzzrock jams. Guitars are trashy and trebly, the drums sound like neighborhood kids throwing rocks at trash cans, garbled, affected sort of shouted vocals, all wound up into a white hot ball of Raw Power! This is old school hardcore filtered through new school garage rock. Plus there's plenty of spacey psychrock swoosh a la Hawkwind or Comets On Fire, adding a whole other layer of druggy delirium. Packaged in a cool brain melting collage of a sleeve! Includes insert and a poster!

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One of several new tapes on this week's list from local label Acephale Winter Productions, and another group new to us despite, as the title explains, having been around for a more than a decade, this tape being a sort of best of from this Canadian horde. And seeing as it's a best of, drawn from multiple releases, spread out over years, the sound, and sound quality varies greatly, but we have to say, we're digging pretty much all of it. The opener is furious drum machine driven slab of epic black metal, with a distinctly post-BM vibe, soaring and epic, with chiming guitars, the production lush and HEAVY, some cool weird breakdowns too with woozy, fretless sounding bass, and strange percussion, some foresty folk here and there, but for the most part, it's just epic and majestic, frosty, wintry black buzz. But the second track is totally different, way more lo-fi, and super symphonic, gnarled black buzz, and crumbling distortion wedded, to majestic orchestral pomp, with some classic metal chug, more weird bass, and some serious shreddery, we almost like this even more than the first track. And FF continues to confound, the third track sounding like a slightly more lo-fi Dimmu Borgir, retaining that symphonic sound, but adding dramatic spoken word, swirling synths, the results are pretty fantastic. From there on out, it seems like we're digging deep, with some tracks sounding like demos, super lo-fi, but with the same aspirations of metallic grandeur, which translates pretty well, even with the obvious recording limitations, the band also delving into blackened doom, as well as some sonic surprises like "Riding In The North", that seems to channel Borknagar, plenty of midtempo black buzz, but with dramatic piano, and some gothy crooned clean vocals, before the tape finishes off with two blasts of frosty black grimnity, one with some almost Queen sounding harmonized leads!! Killer stuff, that will definitely have us tracking down some of FF's full lengths! LIMITED TO 50 COPIES!!! Guessing these won't be around for long...

MPEG stream: The Weeping Tree
MPEG stream: Cold Colossus
MPEG stream: No One Has The Right To Exist
MPEG stream: Riding In The North
MPEG stream: Sorrowspell

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From the festering unsilent graveyard that is Minotauro Records comes another fresh cadaver of Italian okkvlt horror! Funeral Marmoori (your guess is as good as ours what a "Marmoori" is) are entirely new to our Aquarian ears, but what we hear is a delectably groovy slab of organ laden heavy rock/doom that would fit snugly in any collection betwixt those musty Paul Chain, Death SS (who get covered here) and Black Hole lps. Although Funeral Marmoori are perhaps a little groovier than some of their Italian forebears, at times recalling more contemporary acts like Blood Ceremony and Reverend Bizarre, but with an added dose of bloody Technicolor giallo spookiness. Don thy ritual robe, sharpen thy ceremonial dagger, and dive in!

MPEG stream: Deer Woman
MPEG stream: Last Sip
MPEG stream: Drunk In Hell

Only recently did we finally get enough of these to list, and we've been trying since we listed Funeral Mist's more recent album, Salvation, WAY back on list #203. Even so, we only managed to get a handful so if when we run out be prepared to wait for us to get more. For those of you whose black metal addled brains can barely remember all the way back to list #203 of last year, Funeral Mist's Salvation was quite possibly THE best black metal release of 2004, and one of our favorite BM records ever! Let's have a quick look at a bit of that review: "It's been forever since we saw a record this beautiful and frightening looking, and so weird but utterly heavy sounding. This is definitely black metal. Appropriately buzzing and grim, with fuzzed out riffs and blasting rhythms and death rattle shrieks, but unlike most other black metal records, this is HEAVY. No, we mean H E A V Y." And thus we went on and on about how unlike most black metal bands, where heaviness is sacrificed for speed and buzz, Funeral Mist manage to be fast and at the same time ultra heavy. Dense and completely pummeling. And beyond that, the songs are linked by and laced with bizarre suffocatingly intense ambient interludes, rife with unrecognizable samples, screams of terror, strange snippets of fifties orchestra music, thunder, lightning, droning rumble and smears of blacknoise, like the sound of hell, and Devilry is quite similar. In fact it might be even more intense, if that's possible. Devilry is from way back in 1998, and the sound is a little bit more raw, the production is a little bit more blown out, but the sound is very much the same, a frighteningly intense blast of Norwegian style black metal, with plenty of doomy melodic breakdowns, but the majority of Devilry is spent in full on blast mode, buzzed out guitars, impossibly heavy AND fast drumming, and super complex catchy songs. Hard to really put into words why this band kicks our asses so hard, their sound is just so visceral, and again SO HEAVY, the buzz is definitely still in full effect at all times, but the drums are hit so hard (there's even a sort of black metal drum solo!!) and the whole thing is just so LOUD and not at all lo-fi like so much of the black metal we love. A blackened upside down cross to the face, and we love it! Also included is the Havoc Demo from 1996, which is a lot more lo-fi than Devilry, like a foetal version of what they would soon become, but even in their demo form, these songs leave practically all other BM in the dust, fuzzy and buzzy, tons of super bizarre affected vocals, strange production fuckery, killer riffs all tucked beneath Funeral Mist's warm black wings. SO FUCKING GREAT!!

MPEG stream: The Devil's Emissary
MPEG stream: Bringer Of Terror

[ aquarius records catalogue — F ]