[ aquarius records catalogue

IMPORTANT (Please read to avoid confusion): Some items below may be tagged with a bold, red, all-caps OUT OF PRINT/UNAVAILABLE notice. This does NOT mean that all other items not so tagged are, in fact, in stock — or for that matter, in print and available, though there's a good chance they are. Some folks get confused on this point, and we can see why, so please read this for further clarification and other important before-you-order information. Unlike some mailorder websites, we don't have an electronic inventory system linked to our site, so you can't be sure of what we actually have or don't have in stock at any given moment without asking us — please email our mailorder department for availability status — or better yet, just go ahead and place your order using our shopping cart function and we'll get back to you with the status of each item. If you have general non-mailorder questions, email the store.

Showing results 501 through 550 of 1631.

Two discs of sonic mayhem beamed from space through a hazy cloud of pot smoke. Hawkwind are seriously kicking my [Andee's] ass. This is a double live disc of Hawkwind at their best (that would be Lemmy-era). Taking the studio cuts and stretching them out, twisting them all out of shape and turning them into endless jams, looping and repetetive and hypnotic. Once the rhythm section locks into their motorik groove, the rest of the band just follows, through a swirling morass of drug addled psychedlia and into another plane altogether. Never has a band made me want to get high so much. [This from a guy who's completely straight-edge.] I already almost feel high just listening, when I'm all stretched out, eyes closed, stereo turned up as loud as it'll go, my whole body vibrating from the sound, my mind drifting off. Like a faster, meaner, hippier Spacemen 3 but with better drugs, or Loop or Godflesh or Circle or any band that tries to transport you through repetition and subtle shift. Simple riffs spread out into a warm landscape of fuzz and thrum, while flutes and saxophones and tweaked wah wah guitars ride wildly atop the mayhem. So so so so good. Hawkwind make music to take drugs to make music by better than almost anyone else.

Mayer Hawthorne is the pseudonym for Ann Arbor native and multi-instrumentalist/DJ /producer, Andrew Cohen, who began recording as the retro-soul heavy Mayer Hawthorne as a sort of joke. When Stones Throw label head Peanut Butter Wolf first heard it, he thought he was listening to reedits of some obscure late sixties soul singles, not realizing Cohen had laid down all the tracks himself. Cohen is definitely channeling the same retro soul vibe that the Daptone label is putting out, and listening to this, he's got all the right soul references down from The Dells, The Delfonics, The Stylistics and The Moments, with the benefit of great song writing hooks. His first single, "Just Ain't Gonna Work Out", released on a red heart shaped 45 is probably the most groovy breakup song we've ever heard (It ironically get played a lot at weddings!). But our favorite track is the second single, "Maybe So, Maybe No", that shows that his hip blue-eyed soul persona is no mere shtick, but a viable modern soul force to be reckoned with.

MPEG stream: Maybe So, Maybe No
MPEG stream: Just Ain't Gonna Work Out
MPEG stream: Green Eyed Love

One of the most intoxicating male voices we've heard in so long belongs to Mayer Hawthorne. On How Do You Do, he makes the leap from the indie Stones Throw to the big time, now finding a home on Universal, but luckily his soulful music is not compromised one bit. In fact when we first heard Mayer Hawthorne a couple years ago we had a feeling he could get HUGE. Looks like maybe we were right. His blue eyed soul shines nice and bright on this new outing and shows off both his ability to create such a seductive mood, while also his super strong song writing chops. Equally influenced by amazing singers like Al Green, Dusty Springfield, Otis Redding, Smokey Robinson as well as sweet sounding west coast pop like The Beach Boys, The Monkees, Herman's Hermits and The Louvin Spoonful, there's just no denying he creates make-out jams that sound so damn good, and thus he's amassed a pretty awesome list of bigtime fans which include Dam-Funk, Peanut Butter Wolf, and even Snoop Dogg who appears on "Can't Stop", a totally killer track on How Do You Do. Speaking of amazing guests, legendary psych-funk guitar god Dennis Coffey plays on two tracks as well. The only thing we don't love about this record is the album cover and the marketing campaign that Universal has launched in support of it. We understand that they want to make him a huge star, but truthfully Hawthorne is so much more talented then what major labels like to push as the next big thing. He is not just a pretty face and voice, he wrote and produced every track on the album, and his sense of arrangements and pop structure are so spot on. But like we we were always told, you can't judge books or records by their covers, cause what's inside is what really counts, and the songs on How Do You Do are pure proof.

MPEG stream: A Long Time
MPEG stream: Can't Stop ( Feat. Snoop Dogg)
MPEG stream: Stick Around

Now available on vinyl, in a condensed, editted form. Richie Hawtin (aka Plastikman) really wants you to know the concept behind this album. So, in his own words, here it is: "After recording, sampling, cutting and splicing over 100 tracks down to their most basic components, I ended up with a collection of over 300 loops, ranging from 1 note to 4 bars. I then started to recreate and reinterpret each track, putting the pieces back together as if an audio jigsaw puzzle -- using effects and edits as the glue in between each piece. This represents what those loops became and how their interactions created something that had not existed before." Well, not exactly. In reconstructing his decontructed history of Detroit / Berlin techno, Hawtin hasn't really "created something which had not existed before" as much as he's stated the obvious: the techno rhythm is wholly interchangeable. There, of course, are differences amongst the work of Wolfgang Voigt, Carl Craig, Maurizio, Stewart Walker, and Richie Hawtin... but their use of techno's rhythm is all virtually identical. Thus, in cutting all of those tracks down to a near molecular level (where the sampled sounds don't much opportunity to manifest their uniqueness), Hawtin is purposefully not emphasizing techno's aesthetic individuality, but its ultimate uniformity. So, Hawtin's "DE9: Closer To The Edit" may technically be something new, but it really sounds exactly like what techno should sound like -- big 909 or 808 four-on-the-floor drum kicks with tight cybernetic arpeggiations. This is NOT a slight against this record, it's just that Hawtin has failed in achieving his lofty goals, BUT Hawtin has created a really great techno record, sounding just like Jeff Mills' "X-103" or his previous "Decks, EFX, and 909."

Richie Hawtin (aka Plastikman) really wants you to know the concept behind this album. So, in his own words, here it is: "After recording, sampling, cutting and splicing over 100 tracks down to their most basic components, I ended up with a collection of Well, not exactly. In reconstructing his decontructed history of Detroit / Berlin techno, Hawtin hasn't really "created something which had not existed before" as much as he's stated the obvious: the techno rhythm is wholly interchangeable. There, of course, are differences amongst the work of Wolfgang Voigt, Carl Craig, Maurizio Bianchi, Stewart Walker, and Richie Hawtin... but their use of techno's rhythm is all virtually identical. Thus, in cutting all of those tracks down to a near molecular level (where the sampled sounds don't much opportunity to manifest their uniqueness), Hawtin is purposefully not emphasizing techno's aesthetic individuality, but its ultimate uniformity. So, Hawtin's "DE9: Closer To The Edit" may technically be something new, but it really sounds exactly like what techno should sound like -- big 909 or 808 four-on-the-floor drum kicks with tight cybernetic arpeggiations. This is NOT a slight against this record, it's just that Hawtin has failed in achieving his lofty goals, BUT Hawtin has created a really great techno record, sounding just like Jeff Mills' "X-103" or his previous "Decks, EFX, and 909."

RealAudio clip: track 1

Orange is Richie Hawtin's tribute to Yello and built claustrophobic Detroit tech-house remix of Yello's 'Oh Yeah', sounding more like the early Plus 8 singles than the recent Plastikman output. Anyway, it's packaged in those cute cd cases that look like they should hold contraceptives.

It seems Haxan Cloak has gone through a bit of a reinvention. Up until now, we would have classified Haxan Cloak as psychedelic folk, their previous records darkly ritualistic, with urgently strummed acoustic guitars, swirling black ambience, chanted monk like vox, moaning cello rumbles, a fluttery folkiness that seemed more in keeping with industrial neo folk outfits like Death In June. Which raises the question, how did they end up on Triangle, and how did they end up sounding like Burial and Vessel and Raime? Not that we're complaining. We can't get enough of this new strain of slo-mo soul, dubbed out minimal electronic murk, and that's pretty much what Haxan Cloak deliver on their Triangle debut. Sure much of the moodiness and black ambience of their previous sound carries over, but then that's the perfect delivery system for spare, skeletal, glitched out rhythms, and Excavation definitely straddles the line between new and old Haxan Cloak, peppering black drifts of deep rumble, and keening sine wave tones, with weird sampled voices, and shimmering Tibetan bowls, but soon that tell tale Burial style wood-block snare sound comes in, all echoey and reverbed, and the song transforms into a blackened electro creep, the background sounds swooping ominously, soft swells of hiss and grit wreath the rhythm, the mix a bit warped as well, the sound pulsing, laced with thick bursts of ominous thrum cranked WAY louder than everything around it, creating a secondary rhythm, one that's even more woozy. Which is pretty much how the rest of the record plays out, and perhaps exactly what you might expect from a formerly psych folk / black ambient technician gone electronic. In fact, strip away the beats, and this would be some harrowing black ambience, but it really is all about the beats, as much as the textures and moody ambience. In some places, the sound slips into an almost dubstep, but a hellish ultra minimal, avant dubstep, a swirling swath of fractured blurred samples, glitched out beats, and rib cage rattling low end. The shorter tracks here seems to drift back toward the Haxan Cloak of old, with scraped cello string rumbles, keening distant melodies, echo drenched industrial plod, ominous minor key piano stabs, but the two 2-part epics here definitely have the new sound on full display, channeling a Burial like minimal dub, and the more spare haunting minimal abstract beatscaping of recent aQ faves Raime, filtering it through Haxan Cloak's sinister black ambient industrial filter, the results might be one of the darkest, meanest sounding electronic records ever. The second half of the record finds some melody filtering through, the second half of "The Mirror Reflecting", is almost pretty, although still fractured and fucked up, but it builds to a seriously psychedelic coda, before the relatively brief "Dieu" delivers the most straight ahead electro jam here, but it's really relative, freaky vocal snippets, swirling strings, buzzing bass thrum, fragmented rhythmic skitter, ominous pulsating melodies, it's almost like an intro for the massive 13 minute closer "The Drop", which ditches beats completely for the first half of the track, instead, weaving a lush undulating landscape of shimmering chiming melodies, moaning strings, deep bass pulsations, lysergic chordal swirls, everything hazy and washed out, the beats do eventually surface, but they're more like processed low end throbs, looped beneath the song's haunting almost orchestral sounding swirl, the beats becoming almost Kompakt worthy for the last half, but the blackened surrounding sounds, and the weirdly static churn of the main single beat rhythm, keeps the track from getting at all 'dance-y', the beats merely adding texture to the song's blurred and blackened abject sonic sprawl. The sort of seriously sinister, cinematic soundscaping that transform any dancefloors into a crushing, harrowing, black pit of sonic despair. Awesome!

MPEG stream: Excavation (Part 1)
MPEG stream: Excavation (Part 2)
MPEG stream: The Mirror Reflecting (Part 2)

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

SORRY.

Heavy music obsessives and grind freaks the world over were crushed by the end of Discordance Axis. And rightfully so. Never had a band so artfully combined, furious relentless grindcore, crushing metal, intelligent lyrics, and a visual conceptual aesthetic that was as obtuse and confusional as it was striking and absolutely beautiful. We had all secretly hoped that the band would reform, record another record, anything, but alas it never seemed to happen. We heard very little from the various members, except for drum dynamo Dave Witte who seemed to be drumming for more bands than humanly possible, as well as focusing on his retro party thrash outfit Municipal Waste. But finally, one of the other Discordance dudes as resurfaced, vocalist Jon Chang, and holy shit. His new band, Hayaino Daisuki is everything we could have hoped for, but absolutely nothing we would have expected. Chang's amazing impossible shriek is of course still present, but the music is anything but techgrind. Instead it's some sort of supercharged power metal. Like Blind Guardian with a grind makeover. The guitars are furious, the drumming relentless, but the songs are epic with guitar harmonies, incredibly catchy riffs, tons of parts, even some almost-falsetto vocals tangled up in and around Chang's banshee wail. A lot of Headbanger's Karaoke Club Dangerous Fire sounds amazingly like an Iron Maiden 45 played back at 78. Fucking majestic and masterful and soaring and heavy as fuck, with killer little bursts of frenzied riffing, some squiggly leads, stop start dynamics. Minus the vocals, this sounds like the heaviest fucking band from the eighties you never heard. Add the vocals, and it's just genius. Two great tastes that SHOULD not taste great together but do. This is hyper, blown out, freaked out, head spinning, super melodic, grinding hook filled heaviness. The first in what we can only hope is a new musical movement, the New Wave Of Grind Heavy Metal. NWOGHM!!!! The packaging is pretty nuts too. Nowhere does it mention the members of the band, instead, the elaborate booklet and digipak is filled with pictures of some super cute all girl heavy metal band, with names like Speed Satan, Divebomb Valentine and Psychic Warlock Assassin, with spikes, bullet belts, torn t-shirts, ripped tank tops, and of course flames everywhere. The booklet is made up to be like some obscure Japanese metal zine, filled with band photos, record reviews, comics and more. And while it seems totally random and bizarre, it totally suits the classic (grind) metal inside.

MPEG stream: Horobi Monogatari
MPEG stream: Haairo Ikotsu Gakidou

The easiest way to describe Hayaino Daisuki is like this: they're the band we always wished existed. Imagine classic eighties metal but about 100 times as fast and furious, or maybe a blasting grind version of power metal, or Iron Maiden crossed with Discordance Axis. That last one being particularly appropriate, seeing as Hayaino Daisuki is the new band of former DA screamer Jon Chang, even though the band do everything in their power to disguise who is in fact in the band, the first record purported to be a bunch of teenage metal girls, this one has a huge booklet with comics and interviews and lyrics, but very little actually band info. But it hardly matters, once you lay ears on this stuff, you'll be totally and utterly obsessed, it may be only 12 minutes, but if you play it ten times in a row it's 120 minutes, and we DARE you to try to just listen to this once. Music this heavy and fast and furious and brutal should not be this catchy. The riffs are incredible, the drumming insane, the vocals of course are untouchable, and the wild leads and constant shredding harmonies is what pushes this over the top. What more do you need to know than 'Iron Maiden meets Discordance Axis'? Absolutely nothing. But if you're looking for something that totally shred and slays, is crazy catchy, you'd be hard pressed to find something more perfect than this. It's either the most melodic and hook filled shredding grind record ever, or the most blasting brutal grinding power metal record ever. Either way, this totally destroys, and is quickly becoming our favorite 12 minutes of music this year. Now 24 minutes. Now 36 minutes. Now 48 minutes...

MPEG stream: Ghosts Of Purgatory
MPEG stream: Blood

The original soundtrack to the classic Akira Kurosawa-directed, Toshiro Mifune-starring samurai film from 1954, now on vinyl AND cd, in one package. The cd includes nine bonus tracks. Hayasaka's varied score incorporates majestic martial fanfares, sweet melodies, traditional Japanese folk music, and even a bongo-driven mambo. Gotta say, although we're glad the "free bonus cd" is included along with the 180 gram vinyl, Doxy has come up with a pretty dumb way of doing it on their releases - the compact disc is affixed by a nub to an obi-like strip that doesn't even wrap around the lp jacket, so once the shrinkwrap is off, it's liable to move around and get scuffed, even if you put the whole thing in a plastic sleeve. Regardless, soundtrack aficionados will agree it's nice to have this in circulation.

Most folks who would be interested in something like this probably don't even need to read the review. C'mon, it's a 4lp collection of Akira Kurosawa soundtracks, that's Akira Kurosawa soundtracks ON VINYL, in a cool multiple gatefold sleeve, it includes the soundtracks to such classics as Roshomon, Seven Samurai, The Throne Of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Ikiru and Record Of A Living Being. To be fair, it's been a while since we've seen these films, but if we remember correctly, and we're pretty sure we do, the music was, and IS, incredible. AMAZING. Allan even had a friend of ours pick up a pricey Kurosawa soundtrack cd box for him years ago when she was visiting Japan, at the time the only way to get that music, but this is the first time we've ever seen these ON VINYL! We've only been ordering one of these at a time, cuz of the steep price, but every time we get one in, some one nabs it right away. So if you want one, by all means, order it, if we run out we should hopefully be able to get more pretty quickly. There's not a single person who works here who isn't insanely tempted to take this home. So probably better if someone out there buys it before someone here does!!!

Hey all you Alabama Chickens! Or admirers of Bay Area country boy Sean Hayes' album of that very name! If you're in the Bay Area, you just might've seen him performing with his pal Ms Jolie Holland recently. Such a great combination! From the clamour of folks coming in askin' about him, it seems like he made quite an impression. Well, we're happy to report that we've got a couple of his earlier releases for y'all straight from the man himself. Each proves him to be a prolific and consistently high caliber singer / songwriter. This one is his debut full length originally released in 1999, and what really struck us right off the bat was how soulful Hayes' vocal delivery is on it. In fact, when combined with the meditative barebones folk guitar plucking, it bears more than a striking resemblance to that of Tracy Chapman. That in itself is by no means a bad thing, just a little startling, and apart from that initial oddness, this reveals itself to be another fine, achingly expressive album from Mr. Hayes. Fourteen songs in all.

MPEG stream: Candles, Birds, Water
MPEG stream: Mary Magdalene

Now, we might wanna recommend right here and now that you not be mislead by the cover and title of this cd which sort of suggested (to us at least) something akin to a Southern Culture On The Skids style hootenanny. Not so! Although we wouldn't doubt that this gent can kick up some dust on his own. Instead, how 'bout some southern Americana twang from right here in SF? Sean Hayes is the man slinging this fine Alabama Chicken, and he's joined by a luminous group of guest players. To name just a couple of them... AQ fave Jolie Holland plays her fiddle and sings on a couple of songs, and AQ dear friend Will Waghorn plays drums on a bunch of 'em too. Actually the title track is one that Holland and Waghorn both grace, and it's definitely a highlight. It's ever so solemn, haunting and perhaps the most fleshed out of the album's down home dozen with the aforementioned fiddle, as well as some ghostly musical saw, banjo, and marimba. The rest are more barebones and intimate, allowing individual instruments to linger and lope all by their lonesome. A bittersweet swoop of harmonica, some understated acoustic guitar, a handful of soft piano keys, a hushed brush-tap on a snare drum and high hat. Lovely! Hayes' softly ragged, mournful voice (Andee compared it to James Taylor) pairs so well with Holland's -- like kindred spirits -- it makes you yearn for more of their stirring duets. We'd venture to say that if you've been swooning to Ms. Holland and The Be Good Tanyas, you just might want to check this out too. Even if you haven't, please do! A moving, earnest and earthy album.

MPEG stream: Alabama Chicken
MPEG stream: Two Big Eyes

The name Sean Hayes has swiftly become one that you can trust for some really good down-home listenin'. His ever-growing following around these parts know very well that this man has a special way with both word and song. His last album, the laidback bluesy beauty Alabama Chicken from 2003, really made its mark on the Bay Area country folk community, equally appealing to fans of his fellow indie folksters Will Oldham, Jason Molina and his pal Jolie Holland as well as fans of the less grassroots-y types such as Dave Matthews and Jack Johnson or country rock vets John Hiatt and Graham Parker. This, the eagerly anticipated Big Black Hole And The Little Baby Star, is his fourth full length. Honing, fleshing out and expanding on that which came before, it sure doesn't disappoint. Not one to let the grass grow beneath his feet nor one to rest on his laurels, Hayes continues to grow as a deeply soulful songcraftsman, discovering and exploring new broader possibilities in his music. Refreshing and strong from start to finish, Big Black Hole And The Little Baby Star's fourteen songs find him at his most confident and effortless. He's joined by a number of fellow SF musical luminaries Ara Anderson (Iron & The Albatross), Etienne DeRocher, Ches Smith (Trevor Dunn's Trio-Convulsant), Todd Roper and Kathryn Jensen. Be sure to check out the album's closing number, the slowly grooving "Turnaroundturnmeon" that perhaps offers a glimpse of his future directions. Sure to convert many many more ears to this gent's warm, earthy aural finery. Recommended!

MPEG stream: Boom Boom Goes The Day
MPEG stream: Turnaroundturnmeon

Please welcome the new Sean Hayes full length! You know we sure do! Such a terrific storytelling songsmith with a liltingly sensitive and soulful voice, Mr. Hayes and his music are always an absolute pleasure to encounter. He's followed up 2006's Big Black Hole And The Little Baby Star with a whole 'nother wonderful album that expands on what has come before, stretching its limbs stylistically, expressively and production wise too. In fact, this is his first studio-recorded album, but don't expect anything drastically different, distractingly slick or heavy-handed. No, it was for the most part recorded live, and it retains his trademark intimate, down to earthy charm. Who's joining him this time around? Well, quite an awesome seven member backing band which includes Ara Anderson (Iron & The Albatross) and Ches Smith (Secret Chiefs 3, Trevor Dunn's Trio-Convulsant). This baker's dozen does feature a broader instrument palette than his past releases which offers tasteful horn and accordion flourishes here and there to the rootsy proceedings. Yes, indeedie, Flowering Spade is another feather in his cap. Recommended!

MPEG stream: All For Love
MPEG stream: Elizabeth Sways

Hey all you Alabama Chickens! Or admirers of Bay Area country boy Sean Hayes' album of that very name! If you're in the Bay Area, you just might've seen him performing with his pal Ms Jolie Holland recently. Such a great combination! From the clamour of folks coming in askin' about him, it seems like he made quite an impression. Well, we're happy to report that we've got a couple of his earlier releases for y'all straight from the man himself. Each proves him to be a prolific and consistently high caliber singer / songwriter. This one, Lunar Lust is his second full length which came out in 2002. Much like on his debut A Thousand Tiny Pieces, what really struck us right off the bat was the earnest, yearning emotiveness of Hayes' voice. In fact, when combined with the meditative barebones folk guitar plucking, it bears a startling resemblance to that of Tracy Chapman. That in itself is by no means a bad thing, and apart from that initial oddness, this reveals itself to be another fine, achingly expressive album from Mr. Hayes. Fourteen songs in all.

MPEG stream: Simple + Ideal
MPEG stream: Whale Butterfly

Wow, is this really album #6 for Mr. Sean Hayes? Yes, indeedie it is! Shucks, we kinda knew there was something special 'bout this fine gent waaay back in 2003 when we heard the first few tunes off of his engaging debut album Alabama Chicken which he hand-delivered to us. Now, seven years later he's still tending kindly to the grass roots, self-releasing his music, and personally presenting it to us. We're happy to report that Run Wolves Run is splendid, and sure to please his ever growing legions of fans. While the heart of this Bay Area troubadour's music is unmistakably rooted in folk Americana, he's open to venturing beyond the genre's boundaries and welcoming fresh possibilities while steering clear of current trends. This time we sense that he's injected a bit more rock and funkiness into the proceedings. The results are perhaps a bit more upbeat that his past recordings, but they still maintain a sound that's wonderfully soulful and warmly familiar. Recommended!

MPEG stream: When We Fall In
MPEG stream: So Down

Ace Of Spades is a cd-r series of live recordings showcasing the intimate acoustic music of a variety of local indie artists. The series so far boasts consistently strong performances from all participants (well played and well recorded at Mama Buzz Cafe in Oakland). Of the Volume 5 - January 2005 edition's seven featured artists, AQ customers will probably be most familiar with Sean Hayes. His three songs include "Diamond In The Sun", "Rattlesnake Charm" and a fine rendition of the title track of his beloved Alabama Chicken album. Other stand-outs are the haunting spartan female sung three songs from Black Bird Stitches, the easy-going pop folk double-shot from Songs From The Living Room and the rousing intoxicated gypsy strings of Sour Mash Hug Band. L.Carey, Jason Webley, and P. Panamarenko (who also appears on the Vol. 6 and Vol. 8 editions).

MPEG stream: Snapshot Memories
MPEG stream: Song 1

HERE ARE THE VERY FINAL COPIES OF THIS VERY LOVELY PICTURE DISC!!! Yup, we do love picture discs. They may not sound the best, but they look so amazing. Especially with the right images embedded in that there vinyl. We all definitely have a little treasure trove of picture discs that we hang on to just because they're so goddamn beautiful. It's just a bonus when the music is good too. Especially when the music actually benefits from the limitations of the picture disc format. The latest release from our very own Jim Haynes is the inaugural release in Elevator Bath's picture disc series and they couldn't have chosen better. For those of you who have never seen Haynes' artwork, he rusts things (as he always so reductively describes his process), but the truth is he coaxes impossible textures and patterns from chemicals and metals, often letting nature determine much of a pieces final look. And they are simple amazing, deep oranges and browns, streaks and smears, strange shapes where metal has rested on other metal, drips and layers where the chemicals have pooled or allowed to shift, inconsistencies in the metal revealed after having some of it's surface eaten away. The process is almost as amazing as the outcome, but needless to say, Jim's pieces are total industrial-wasteland-decay eye candy. The two images chosen for this picture disc are no exception. And knowing that some of Haynes' music was also created utilizing the process of rusting, it's nice to think that the sounds within are in fact produced from chemical and metal interacting, the picture disc the literal visual analogue to the resultant sounds on the recording. But the sounds here are way too lush and varied to be produced so simply, so the images are left to spin, only somewhat removed from the sounds to which they are linked. Eraldus / Eravaldus is probably Haynes' most varied and lush recording to date, whether on his own or with sound artist Loren Chasse in Coelacanth. The chirping of birds and the rustling of leaves, underpin what sounds like an airplane passing overhead, but the sound remains, too static to be an airplane, soon revealing itself to be manufactured, gradually melodies take shape, bits of glitch and little shards of electronic interference surface, tiny little sonic events pepper the slow shifting rumble. But those little sonic events eventually blossom into thick streaks of high end, which not soon after transform into strange scraping and whirrings. The rest of the record drifts from mysterious soundworld to mysterious soundworld, dark dronescapes rife with clicks and hiss and grit, like a recording of some swamp late at night, gritty landscapes of reverbed percussion, blurred into droney smudges, smeared static becomes long expanses of slow shifting sound, that slips effortlessly from corrosive to shimmery and back again. Quite nice! LIMITED TO ONLY 260 COPIES!

MPEG stream: Eraldus
MPEG stream: Eravaldus

Here's the latest from our very own Jim Haynes, dronologist, soundscaper, recorder of rusting metal. These two pieces both represent impressions of Kamchatka, a Russian province often referred to as the "Siberia of Siberia", which speaks to its utter isolation, which Haynes manages to evoke magnificently in the opening track "Lilith", which is a 21 minute sprawl of intercepted shortwave broadcasts, captured and reworked into brittle buzzing textures, swirling masses of crumbling sonic shimmer, and deep morasses of subterranean rumble, the sky full of tinkling chimes and blurred static, beneath it fragmented melodies drift below the surface of a tranquil sonic sea. The track seemingly drifts between two extremes, thick layered dronescapes, and spare stretches of Geiger counter like chitter, those sparse passages draped over what sounds like field recordings of boats rubbing against docks, the clatter of oars, or perhaps the slow decay of nature. Somehow these mysterious purloined sounds are captured and recontextualized as a strange field of scrape and rumble, of creak and groan, all beneath soft focus billows of distant shimmer, and those skittery Raster-Noton cricket-like chirps. Haunting and ominous, the track finally seeming to blossom into the blurred bleary final movement, an ethereal wash of blissful thrum and strangely, an almost aquatic shimmer, that evokes images of some placid body of water, surrounded by miles and miles of emptiness. The second track, "Rocks Hills Plains", a slightly reworked version of a soundtrack Haynes performed for a film by Paul Clipson at the ATA in 2008, seems culled from the same source material, opening with a gauzy cloud of static, over a softly undulating sea of low end rumble, and continues in a similar manner, all of the rough edges and more clattery elements of the first piece here, smoothed into a swoonsome sprawl of hushed murky mesmer, haunting and cinematic, the sounds creeping and oozing ominously, until the begin to recede, leaving in the foreground a field of softly percussive scrabbling, sounding like strange ghostly rubbings against the microphone, those sounds slowly growing more ethereal and soon transforming into still more cloudy shimmer. Eventually, the sound of the whole track begins to coalesce into something much more pure tone, seeming to shed any vestiges of the low fidelity with about 7 minutes to go, the sound building to something softly caustic, with some serious sonic heft, on the recording it's still comparatively quite, but live through the proper sound system, it's easy to imagine the sort of sonic energy this passage might emit, lush and layered and darkly dense, a powerful (but still minimal) coda, which quickly subsides, winding down as a barely there bit of ambient thrum, laced with disembodied field recordings, a hushed outro that quickly becomes silence. LIMITED TO 150 COPIES. Each one hand numbered, housed in super swank, silkscreened, oversized 6 panel sleeves.

MPEG stream: Lilith (Excerpt)
MPEG stream: Rocks Hills Plains (Excerpt)

Feedback, shortwave, wasps! Perhaps that's all we need to say to get you to click the "add to cart" button, but let's go on... Our own Jim Haynes may be primarily a visual artist, working within a self-actualized aesthetic of rust and decay (a small sample of which you'll get with the each-one-unique cover to this release). But his love of music, especially of the 'dronological' variety, of sound art and field recording and experimental glitchscapes, has led him to accompany his recent art shows and installations with soundtracks of his own making. He's also been collaborating with AQ-fave Loren Chasse in the duo Coelacanth, who just released the very nice Glass Sponge disc (reviewed last list), so you know he knows what he's doing. This Magnetic North cd is the audio portion of an installation of the same name and is a despairingly lovely drone-scape, constructed from feedback, shortwave radio static, and recordings of wasps, as we said. Like his visual art, it's just a little spooky and discomforting, evoking ghostly transmissions from the void. It's quiet, wind-tunnel drone that could be a wordless EVP recording of a paranormal haunting, and then begins to sound like the haunting is being itself haunted! Jim's solo work seems less microscopic in focus than what he and L. Chasse do in Coelacanth. It can be claustrophobic, but conversely also spacious and even somehow incorporeal, phantasmal. One track features sparsely chopped clips of feedback, but we like best the tracks that drift endlessly without making the listener consider the physical sound-making process. Definitely for fans of Mirror, John Duncan, Francisco Lopez, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson...or for anyone willing to plumb the abyss suggested by this sound-work.

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MPEG stream: track 2

AQ's own Jim put this disc of rather spooky and evocative drone/glitch music together as a soundtrack to his recent art installation, but even without his excellent visuals, Jim's music on this cd-r conjures the atmosphere of rust and decay that his art is all about. Down-pitched bass-rumble, eerie Conet Project samples, and looping clicks make for an impressive first release that would be at home on Trente Oiseaux or Raster. Very nice!

RealAudio clip: (excerpt)

Right before Christmas 2014, our own Jim Haynes walked into the shop with a hunk of gauze and metal attached to one his fingers, as he had an unfortunate encounter with a table saw which lopped off the tip of his finger in the process. Jump forward a couple of months and he offers forth Scarlet - a nasty, violent piece of scabbed pulses and blasted electric corrosion. While he had finished the album earlier than this incident, the rupture of that event -- torn flesh, greasy machinery, pending sepsis, healing through cauterization - are all the inner workings of the aptly named Scarlet. The source material, it has to be said, is not that of the machine shop but the exploded-view amplification of micro-rhythms from the cheapest of strobe-lights and cooling fans; and back at the end of the summer 2014, Haynes made a lone performance of this body of work, opening for Tim Hecker here in San Francisco. The blister-popped strobes and accumulated tumult made for a much more theatrical, and dare we say, more expressive performance than that of the much beloved Tim Hecker. Scarlet it turns out is the reworkings and reconfigurations of all of the recorded variations that Haynes crafted upto that Hecker show. It's just as deliciously caustic and nervously turbulent as that performance, girded on the rhythmic, noise-pulse interlacing of those electromagnetic devices. The opening "Cerise Cerise" quicksteps from weird angular blurts into a brutal, shrill torrent of noise, like some fucked-up meeting of Factrix and Mika Vainio. The dead-tone "Alizarin" buzzes with blackened drone and brooding mesmer as an viscous, ocean sized acid-bath of bad intentions. Even as the rhythmic clatter subsides on this track, the claustrophobic intensity persists. The psychoid grit of "Venal" erupts with those rhythms in a latticework of out-of-phased patterns and gasped/gnarled loops. And so it goes for Scarlet, barrage after barrage of blown-out abstractions, supercharged locomotive grindings, irradiated hauntings as melody, and the sound of the computerized parts of a cyborg extracting itself from its human host, leaving behind all that sinew, muscle, and bone. Super fucking limited, of course.

MPEG stream: Alizarin
MPEG stream: Acrid
MPEG stream: Kazankak
MPEG stream: Pfennig M.

We listed this recently as a double disc limited edition, unfortunately that is now out of print, but the single disc is well worth the price of admission. Here's our review attesting to that... Much like his art, the music of Jim Haynes is based on, and is a continual exploration of the act of decay, an imagining of natural (and un-natural) processes rendered into sound, a world of crumbling landscapes and of microscopic worlds collapsing. While he has yet to figure out a way to actually record the process of metal rusting, Haynes has managed to create a soundworld that sounds precisely how he, and perhaps we, might imagine it. The process of decay, and erosion, found on and in Sever, is some sort of sprawling sonic time lapse, each track as much about the sounds as the sources, as much about the arrangements as the process of listening, as much about texture as timbre, as much about the tiny details, and the expansive whole, the opening track for instance, is all clatter and crunch, chiming and tinkling, to these ears it sounds like wandering through a ruined world, a dead planet, the sun drying every living thing to husks, these sounds are the dried carapaces, hung from rotted fence posts, rubbing against one another in what little breeze is left under a harsh midday sun. The sound of footsteps, the crunch and scrape of a despondent trudge, a death march, but all of this is carefully blurred and smeared, the obvious references are blunted, so the sound evokes all of the above, yet as if it were a dream, the edges a bit fuzzy, the sounds slightly gauzy, the colors hazy, the sound almost underwater sounding at times, a feverdream in sound. The rest of the tracks explore a different world altogether. A world of darkness and blight, of grim emptiness and eternal blackness, three variations on the darkness beyond, varying shades of grey and black, ominous, haunting, threatening, abject, deep and so very dark. Almost as if the listener from the first track, stumbled into the cool darkness of a cave, sheltered through the sun, only to find his or herself wandering through an endless labyrinth of tunnels and caverns, the sound massive and bottomless, but simultaneously hushed and intimate, the blackness rife with buried melodies, with warm whirring textures, the haunting clang and clatter of bells? Some sort of metal on metal. Crunch and crackle adds grit to Haynes' subterranean drift, the sound growing ever more ominous, the low end shimmer transformed into a grinding hiss, a black hum, wreathed in clouds of effervescent static, beneath it all, an unlikely pulse, a barely audible throb, a machinelike anti-groove buried beneath, a slow swirling noxious obsidian haze. The final track explodes with what sounds like the grind of stone against stone, whirring processed textures, that slowly shift and are pulled apart into strands of greyed melody, a whirring, gritty expanse of softly intertwined layers, that seem to extend forever, the various bits of grit and grime worn away as the track progresses, the sounds getting smoother as they grow darker, as if the sounds are dragging the listener further down into the dark, the light from above fading, becoming a warm orange glow, then a smudge of red, before any and all color is swallowed up, leaving just the echoes to ring out before they too disappear.

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What the hell? We thought these had long disappeared, but a handful of the super limited edition 2cd version of Sever / Severed were just discovered. These will most likely be the final copies we'll see of this... As for the record, here's what we had to say about it when we first reviewed it: Much like his art, the music of Jim Haynes is based on, and is a continual exploration of the act of decay, an imagining of natural (and un-natural) processes rendered into sound, a world of crumbling landscapes and of microscopic worlds collapsing. While he has yet to figure out a way to actually record the process of metal rusting, Haynes has managed to create a soundworld that sounds precisely how he, and perhaps we, might imagine it. The process of decay, and erosion, found on and in Sever, is some sort of sprawling sonic time lapse, each track as much about the sounds as the sources, as much about the arrangements as the process of listening, as much about texture as timbre, as much about the tiny details, and the expansive whole, the opening track for instance, is all clatter and crunch, chiming and tinkling, to these ears it sounds like wandering through a ruined world, a dead planet, the sun drying every living thing to husks, these sounds are the dried carapaces, hung from rotted fence posts, rubbing against one another in what little breeze is left under a harsh midday sun. The sound of footsteps, the crunch and scrape of a despondent trudge, a death march, but all of this is carefully blurred and smeared, the obvious references are blunted, so the sound evokes all of the above, yet as if it were a dream, the edges a bit fuzzy, the sounds slightly gauzy, the colors hazy, the sound almost underwater sounding at times, a feverdream in sound. The rest of the tracks explore a different world altogether. A world of darkness and blight, of grim emptiness and eternal blackness, three variations on the darkness beyond, varying shades of grey and black, ominous, haunting, threatening, abject, deep and so very dark. Almost as if the listener from the first track, stumbled into the cool darkness of a cave, sheltered through the sun, only to find his or herself wandering through an endless labyrinth of tunnels and caverns, the sound massive and bottomless, but simultaneously hushed and intimate, the blackness rife with buried melodies, with warm whirring textures, the haunting clang and clatter of bells? Some sort of metal on metal. Crunch and crackle adds grit to Haynes' subterranean drift, the sound growing ever more ominous, the low end shimmer transformed into a grinding hiss, a black hum, wreathed in clouds of effervescent static, beneath it all, an unlikely pulse, a barely audible throb, a machinelike anti-groove buried beneath, a slow swirling noxious obsidian haze. The final track explodes with what sounds like the grind of stone against stone, whirring processed textures, that slowly shift and are pulled apart into strands of greyed melody, a whirring, gritty expanse of softly intertwined layers, that seem to extend forever, the various bits of grit and grime worn away as the track progresses, the sounds getting smoother as they grow darker, as if the sounds are dragging the listener further down into the dark, the light from above fading, becoming a warm orange glow, then a smudge of red, before any and all color is swallowed up, leaving just the echoes to ring out before they too disappear. The bonus disc features recordings previously thought to originate from a sound installation, but which is in fact the reworked source material of his performance opening for Nurse With Wound back in 2009. Totally recommended!

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Just because Jim is an AQ employee doesn't mean we can't gush like crazy about his new record. C'mon, pretty much everyone who works here plays in a band or runs a label. We like to think that the music we all make and release would be just the kind of stuff we love to listen to and sell, and just the kind of stuff you all like to listen to and buy. And such is the case with Jim's new record Telegraphy By The Sea, an album he's been working on for several years now, cobbled together from material culled from various elements used in installations and performances in New York, Australia and various locations in between. The disc is lovely, all wrapped in an ominously blackened but totally beautiful package of silkscreen and letterpress that could at first glance be mistaken for another Jesu or Godflesh album with its telephone poles smeared into moire patterns. The music inside is just as lovely. Rust, drones, shortwave, drones, acid rain, drones, a big pile of rocks, drones, a small pile of rocks, and more drones. Drones and drones. But like all of those great drone artists we freak out about (Chalk, Coleclough, Basinski, Organum, blah blah blah...), Jim's not one to let the drone settle as a terminal pool of inactivity. This is a dynamic album, bristling with texture amidst the shifting passages, dramatic shifts, and evocative soundscapes. The visual side of his installations has this weird eeriness as he builds dense layers of rust and debris on top of corroded photographs of abandoned buildings and desolate landscapes. Those same metaphors of abandoned, desolate spaces are musically represented in Telegraphy By The Sea. In these spaces, time is accelerated with things rusting, falling apart, getting covered in moss, and being washed away by the ocean. Scrapes and gurgles from all of those bits of metal, bricks, and rocks dissolve through radioactive sinewaves into a gorgeous magnetic wall of grey-slab tones, gradually building through half-melodic phrases, a clatter of monochrome, and squalls of crackling static. All of this snaps in an instant at the end of the album, giving way to a wondrous nocturnal ambience cobbled from luminous bell-tones and detuned shortwave radio communications. One of Jim's good friends and collaborators Loren Chasse, said it better than we could, "A telephone cord in the sand? A message taken down using an alphabet of sea-glass, shell and carapace? It all makes sense in the last 11 minutes!"

MPEG stream: Telegraphy By The Sea (excerpt 1)
MPEG stream: Telegraphy By The Sea (excerpt 2)

Another mysterious sonic missive from our very own resident dronologist Jim Haynes, another excursion into the sound of decay, this time in the form of four sprawling sidelong epics, each its own self contained soundworld, culled from various field recordings, vibrating strings and other sonic errata. Recorded over the last three years, these recordings require headphones to truly explore their depth, and once strapped on, it's easy to get lost in these strange lands of decay and declines. The A side was originally a commissioned soundtrack for a pair of films that screened at the Hauntology exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2010, and while we've yet to see either of these films, the smoldering slow moving "Ashes" does evoke a certain ontological sonic dread, the core of the sound is of course the drone, but that drone is pulled taut, and the sound seems to fray as the track progresses, shedding sonic detritus in the form of fractured melodies, strange clicks and muted buzz. At times, this begins to sound like perhaps Haynes' most overtly musical record, but that musicality is eventually picked apart, the remaining elements litter the landscape like bits of some sonic wreckage, but then the edges are smoothed, and the stray shards are reigned in, the sound is truly beautiful, whether a deep sonorous drone, or a lush layered stretch of celestial shimmer. Named for the performance space at which the piece was debuted, "Terminal" is another sidelong soundscape, the majority of the sounds sourced from field recordings of geysers and thermal vents, the opening few minutes unfurling like a raw field recordings, playing out like some obscure scientific document, unearthed from some dusty box filed away in a warehouse, chronicling some lost expedition. The sound doesn't necessarily grow more musical, but instead, seems to blossom and display more texture, and more depth, as if more sounds were introduced and then layered or woven into one another, streaks of blurred hiss, peppered with the sound of wind on microphone or the trickle of water, the white noise of eruption balanced by the hushed murmur of calm before and after. Side three finds Haynes exploring radioactive decay, unclear what the sound sources are, we'd like to think, that it's indeed recordings of Strontium or Uranium, the radioactivity causing the tape to warp and curdle, but in fact, it sounds more like an assemblage of intercepted short wave broadcasts, and deep bellows of bowed metal, lush chordal swells washing over strange effects, muted glitches, lush tones and surprisingly dreamy overtones, bell like chimes, chittering cricket like clicks, Geiger counter like bleeps, all blurred and smeared into a gorgeous hazy of soft focus shimmer, those clicks coalescing into an almost-rhythm, while the surrounding sounds seem to lose cohesion, the edges softening, all bleeding into one another and drifting like blackened clouds of whir and thrum. And finally, the last movement in this crumbling sonic tetraptych is the wire recording sourced "Cold", in which Haynes captures the sympathetic buzz of wires and plays them like some sort of abstract harp, at least that's how we picture it, a huge stone room, with metal wires running across in wild tangles, Haynes at the center, wildly bowing and striking wires, creating this delicate crystalline symphony, another blurred buzzscape, that peppers the lush layered shimmer, with creaks and clatter, skitter and crunch, but those errant sounds are quickly subsumed by the warm whirls of hushed bleary drift and an unexpected eruption of caustic blown out noise, a psychedelic squall that acts as the record's coda, before the inevitable decline, the sound slipping into nothingness. Gorgeous stuff. LIMITED TO 350 COPIES!! Housed in a luxurious full color gatefold sleeve, and pressed on nice thick black vinyl. Includes a download coupon as well.

MPEG stream: Ashes
MPEG stream: Cold

After killer releases from Motion Sickness Of Time Travel, Grant Evans, Quiet Evenings, Afterlife and a bunch more, the Hooker Vision label gives us a brand new recording from our very own Jim Haynes, who seems to move well beyond his "I rust things" method of sonic alchemy, creating what in Haynes' world is about as close to a minimal avant garde shoegaze as we can imagine. And in fact, we had wondered if Haynes might try something more overtly melodic for his first Hooker Vision outing, and while perhaps The Incident With A Ghost isn't strictly melodic, it's much more lush and warm than past release, seemingly trading in some of the grey austerity he often traffics in for something more organic. The first side opens with a strange rhythmic tangle made up of what sounds like the warm rhythmic patter of rainfall on clay pots, geiger counter crackle and the snap of crackling fires, those sounds form the core of what becomes a slowly expanding sonic sphere, all softly swirling reverberations, lush tonal thrum, and strange pulses and pulsations. The vibe is definitely some underwater world, or the surface of some alien planet. The sound is stormy, that rhythmic crackle blurring into shapeless whorls, beneath which tones shimmer and churn, before a sudden glitch, sends the track into much more tranquil territory, a deep slow building rumble, that begins to smolder, and transform into a sort of soft focus dream-noise, eventually giving way to some Caretaker like creep, all gauzey longform tones, and timestretched ballroom dreaminess, which billows into thick droney clouds that border on serious shoegaze blissout. Maybe the prettiest thing we've heard from Haynes yet! The flipside is much less active, a sprawl of blackened ambience, pocked with all manner of micro sonic events, scrapes and thumps, rumbles and whirs, the sound a series of slow swells, hazy and haunting, downright tranquil until the last 5 minutes or so, when those tranquil sounds begin to grow corrosive, exploding into a raw, grinding howl of sound, wrapped in junk metal clatter, and jagged shards of static, only to suddenly dissipate, unfurling a haunting outro, all mysterious sounds, voices and machines, buried beneath slow shifting layers of bleak glowing shimmer, a woozy, wraithlike drift. Nice metallic silver packaging. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!

MPEG stream: From Wasps

We quipped in the review of our very own Jim Haynes' last album that when he wasn't spending time behind the counter here at aQuarius recOrds that he must be holed up in some subterranean bunker. Apparently, that wasn't far from the mark, as his studio is actually a shipping container perched in the industrial wastelands of East Oakland. Yeah, that makes sense, though he does mention that he would happily switch to a subterranean bunker if one were available. It's a landscape of diesel fuel spills, empty expanses of asphalt, soil tainted with mercury, and the ever present the echo of gunshots. The Shudder Of Velocity is the latest album from Haynes, released by the tiny Portuguese imprint Noisendo who generated the very un-Haynes like collages of '60s pin-up model June Palmer gracing the cover instead of his signature mark-making through rust. The album opens with a tectonic rumble that snaps against tone-split frequencies and electro-shock drones all of which are scraped with these harsh pricks of noise that jettison from the speakers like bolts shaken loose from a perilous decent through the atmosphere in some shoddily build spacecraft right as the fuselage of said spacecraft is about to come apart at the seams. There may be some sort of landing in the future for that spacecraft; but Haynes does puncture a massive hole, whose implosion sends shockwaves throughout the remainder of the track. The woozy, sonar-bleep tone of the second track is ominously prescient of the lost signal from the black-box transponder never to be found from the Malaysian airplane that presumably crashed into the Indian Ocean in the early spring of this year. The smoldering frequencies of overlaid drones and radioactive crackle bury those tones, replacing them with the disembodied shortwave transmissions of detuned voices. Bright electrical hums from a chorale of fluorescent lights, discarded medical equipment, poorly grounded neon build with the smoldering intensity of Phill Niblock's psychoacoustic minimalism on the final track, coupled with slashing waves from bowed metals that lend an updated version to the classic acoustic clatter of Organum, all dappled with prickly textures, corroded atmospheres, and earthmover rumblings. Awesome. Limited to just 100 copies.

Latest from our very own Jim Haynes, and his first for the esteemed Editions Mego label, and like releases past, Haynes immediately delves into a world of decay. As a visual artist, he often jokes that his art consists simply of 'rusting things', and rust is definitely a large part of his visual aesthetic, but it's evident that in some ways his goal is similar in the music making process, to take sounds and corrode them, to treat them in such a way that they crumble, and decompose, revealing whatever mysteries lurk within, those subsequent sonic mysteries also decaying, as if the process was akin to nesting dolls, layer upon layer of sound, peel one away and fall deeper into the abyss, one that seemingly has no termination point. The source sounds here are quite varied as always (most notably this time around a particle accelerator), but Haynes tends toward the greys and browns, static and hiss molded into streaks and shimmers, melodies subverted and melted down into textures, the opening track on The Wires Cracked (another nod to decay), begins with a hushed rumble, an accretion of thrum and hum, pocked with bursts of static, and shards of granular buzz. As the track progresses, the melodic component, becomes more pronounced, but subtly so, still merely a show beneath Haynes' churning windstorm of sound, a blurred, muted squall that manages to whip up billows of caustic noise, but then tamps them down into something much more malleable. The sprawling "X-Ray" lays down a field of field recorded crackle and spatter, foot steps on snow, broken glass, hard to say precisely, but that gristled crackle hovers beneath an opening blast of noise, before giving way, to a hushed creep, a distant keening shimmer beneath a series of near microscopic sonic events, headphones most definitely required, a hazy, gauzy expanse of windblown emptiness, the sonic approximation of a wintery tundra, transformed into sound, and again, wreathed in Haynes's slow shifting textures, and peppered with insectoid like chitter. The track seems to seesaw between thick, billowing soft noise swirl, and breathless minimal near nothingness, tense and intense, a sonic travelogue through some lost land, or perhaps as the title infers some strange network of inner pathways, not hard to imagine being shrunk down, injected into a human body, and traversing a series of blood vessels and capillaries, the previously silent sound of the body's inner workings, now rendered terrifying and overwhelming, an organic machine pulsing and throbbing, the listener lost in a world of darkness, with only these mysterious sounds as proof that the listener still exists. The whole of the second side is taken up by the near 18 minute "November", which unfurls like ghosts in the machine, deciding to dismantle the machine before our very ears, again, the sound is seemingly being pulled apart, Haynes there to chronicle its gradual decay, the most active of the three tracks, reminding us in places of the Conet Project, not the recited numbers, or the snippets of music, but the sounds in between, the various bits of static and hum, the tense interludes between sounds, here allowed to become sounds themselves, erupting into huge droning tangles of crunch and crumble, wrapped in keening high end shimmers, occasionally dipping into serene stretches of bleary ambience, the eye of the sonic storm as it were, the sedges of the sonic field still corrosive and crumbling, lending an air of impending doom to these otherwise tranquil passages, but the hammer never falls, instead, the sounds gradually dissipate, the clouds of noise clearing, revealing a hushed landscape of whistle like tones, smoothed out into a blurred susurrus of streaked shimmer, pocked with what sounds like the rasp of stone on stone, a final moment of decay, before the record itself crumbles into silence.

MPEG stream: Oscar
MPEG stream: X-Ray

It seems that when Jim Haynes is not behind the counter at aQ, he must be holed up in some subterranean bunker, or perhaps a network of caves that reach all the way into the center of the earth, or even still, some abandoned space station, drifting weightless miles above the earth. What else could explain the harrowingly abject sounds that make up his various recordings, none moreso than Ununtrium's Daughter, another fantastically and abstractly mysterious selection of deftly manipulated field recordings, and carefully crafted sounds, that Haynes weaves into mesmerizing expanses of lowercase dronemusic. But not the sort of static drift of most drone music, the drone here is often implied, the sounds active and alive, alien field recordings constructed from short wave radio dispatches, and lush, cavernous thrum built from all manner of sonic detritus. The opening track here sounds like a muted Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, all of the metal elements stripped away, leaving just a murky sonic husk, a thick rumbling, a deep, layered whir, laced with what sounds like human breath, or perhaps that's the rumbling of distant subway cars, it never really matters where the sounds come from, since in Haynes' hands, they become something wholly other anyway. In this case, it's a geiger counter symphony, underpinned by a lush, almost melodic hum, peppered with what sounds like the clunk of someone changing the channels on an old TV, that is if every station was broadcasting some sort of glitchy electronic thrum, and then before you know it, the sound transforms into some Conet Project like transmission, voices drifting in the ether, the ether in this case of Haynes' construction, thick, blackened swirls, that over the course of the track, build to a power electronics like intensity, before settling back down into a slow smolder, all crackle and crunch, hum and hiss. The rest of Ununtrium's Daughter exists in a similarly bleak sonic wasteland, again evoking the aforementioned caverns and bunkers, abstract crumble, staticky drones, ominous black ambience, all laced with strange industrial happenings, creaks and clatter, the sounds of buttons pushed, of levers pulled, of dials twisted, all re-contextualized into abstract anti-rhythms, long expanses of barely there, whispery drifts, offset but roiling clouds of grim, grinding, crunch. A few moments evoke an underwater world, adding abandoned undersea research laboratory to the list of potential Haynes' hangouts, all warbly and woozy, blackly bloopy, respirator like rhythms woven into softly bubbling grey noise arpeggiations, often building to symphonies of chitter and skitter, the occasional insectoid chorus drifting atop black swells, settling into a final stretch, the most hushed and dreamily sinister of the bunch, a muted swirl of blackened thrum, wreathed in gristled layers, the prickly texture constructed from a tangle of processed static, smoothed out into a pulsing sonic cowl, beneath which a strange sound world winds down, gradually, toward eventual oblivion... Packed in an oversized slim DVD style case, and as you might have figured, quite limited...

2006 was most definitely the year of Harvey Milk. A year most of us had been waiting for forever! A live DVD, a double disc reissue of Courtesy And Good Will Toward Men, a brand new fucking album!! Some tours, a bunch of live shows. We've basically been in downtuned sludge rock Nirvana. And as if that weren't enough, now we've got a brand new 7" from the boys, a split with Hayride, a band they shared another split with way back in 1992. The Harvey Milk track is an oldie, recorded at home way back sometime in the early nineties, a riffy mathy dirgey masterpiece. Very lo-fi, with the vocals buried WAY down in the mix, but it's a killer, roiling and churning, a slow motion groove, like the Melvins covering ZZ Top at 16 rpm. Essential if you're a HM nerd, and if you're not, what the hell is wrong with you?!? Hayride, we assume are also from Athens, and unlike Harvey Milk, they sound like it. Sort of jangly and mathy, what you might imagine R.E.M. would sound like if they had recorded for Touch And Go. Some June Of '44, even some Interpol with the deep dramatic vocals. But with plenty of jangle and math rock riffage. But no matter how cool Hayride are, the 'Milk is the reason to pick this up. Super limited, already out of print it seems. We were one of the only stores to get copies, and while we did get a bunch, they won't last...

It's really a testament to the songwriting of AC/DC that their songs sound great no matter who sings them, or how. Whether it's the moody mumbly Mark Kozelek versions or the twangy good ol' boy versions presented here. And boy do they sound just right here, The only problem is the vocalist's country twang. It's SO pronounced and so purposeful sounding, we were convinced he was faking it. But once we got used to it we were digging this like crazy (well, not Allan). Nice version of 'Big Balls' too.

RealAudio clip: Hell's Bells
RealAudio clip: Have A Drink On Me

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

SORRY. Just buy this record. If you've never heard it, then by all means you must. And if you liked them before, I know you've been dying for the definitive cd reissue of what is quite possibly one of the coolest records of the eighties. Originally released in 1983, Haysi Fantayzee were a boy/girl duo (with a behind the scenes 3rd member), sort of a mix between Toto Coelo ('I Eat Cannibal') and Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Super catchy and super stupid. Plus I'm sure you all remember that song 'Shiny Shiny' which was their big hit. And Kate Garner, the irrestable chanteuse from Haysi Fantayzee, was my first punk rock crush: I mean, a half shirt, leg warmers, fishnet body stocking, leather codpiece, dreadlocks, and an upside down cross on her forehead(!), what was a 13 year old boy to do?! Except maybe masturbate furiously. This reissue has two bonus tracks and five remixes and is of course, highly recommended by Andee.

'Bout time we had a cd reissue of this obscure slab of heavy, hard rockin' high weirdness, the only album released by this late '60s/early '70s band, who if nothing else, should get an award for having one of the best names ever. Haystacks Balboa, just what were they on? Also, one guy in the band is a dead ringer for the MC5's Rob Tyner (big dude with honky Afro). Originally released back in 1970, produced by Shadow Morton (The Shangri-Las, Vanilla Fudge, Iron Butterfly, New York Dolls), this is a crazy little record, part acid rock, part blues, part prog. There's lots of heavy groovin', proto-metal riffing mixing it up with proggy keyboard action a la ELP's self-titled debut from the same year. More cogently, we'd recommend this to fans of Sir Lord Baltimore, The Good Rats, The James Gang, Mountain (whom they were buddies with) and Billy Joel's Attila (don't laugh - we love that record and really wish it would get reissued too!). Or, for a more recent reference, sometimes SF's own Hot Lunch sound a bit like Haystacks Balboa, actually! The album starts off in full-on fuzz guitar & jammin' organ mode, with "The Spoiler", the rough-edged vocals hollerin' hard. The next track, "The Children Of Heaven" is even heavier at first, with ultra-gruff deep voiced vocals and lumbering riffage, but then veers into twee thespianism and ornate keyboard melodies, the track teetering back and forth between light and heavy extremes, with some maniacal laughter thrown in as well. Next up, "Bruce's Twist" (aka "Gasbag") is rollicking number with sleazy lyrics, blues guitar licks and carnivalesque organ, hardcore honky-tonkin'. Following that, the mostly melodic epic "Auburn Queen" takes center stage for nearly nine minutes, and many moods - one of which sounds a bit like ELP doing the theme music to The Simpsons, and another of which is kind of in the mode of spooky, atmospheric Alice Cooper, like "The Ballad Of Dwight Frye", but with a dash of Tom Waits due to the especially gruff singing. Haystacks Balboa give us the "Sticky Finger" next, a great garage-prog headbang, and then offer up another ambitious psychedelic epic, the two-part "Ode To The Silken Men", before winding things up with the mellow "Riverland", a sweet song about a place "where life is grand and wars are fought with loud rock bands". Yeah!

MPEG stream: Spoiler
MPEG stream: Children Of Heaven
MPEG stream: Sticky Finger

Ethiopiques meets Torch Of The Mystics? Cambodian pop meets Turkish psych rock? Freaked out surf rock meets Saharan guitar music? Howabout all of the above...? The very first release on the Sun City Girls' Sublime Frequency label from Istanbul-based instrumental psychedelic surf / space rock band Hayvanlar Alemi, their first vinyl lp, and their first record readily available outside of Turkey. The thing that makes this Hayvanlar Alemi record work in the context of Sublime Frequencies, is that it borrows from a super varied set of sounds, from all sorts of musics, each track here sounding like it could possibly be from some other SF release, twanged out desert psych, moody Eastern garage pop, fuzzy druggy almost krautrock style drift, a few of the tracks even sound like they could be some Sun City Girls Torch Of The Mystics B side! But somehow these guys make all those different sounds work, this whole record holds together perfectly and flows like a proper album, a super expansive and sonically rich collection of modern psychedelia, beholden to all the various musics that came before. The sound on Guarana Superpower is definitely exotic, lush, with Eastern melodies, simple hypnotic percussion, long droning tones, looped motorik grooves, plenty of buzz, and jangle, and crunch, rhythms that veer from spare and skeletal to wild and splattery, songs drift from tranquil shimmer to meditative buzz to occasional blasts of full on chaotic freaked out in-the-red psychedelia, but even in the midst of those noisy squalls, the instrumentation is distinctly Eastern, the result some fantastical Eastern psychedelic noise rock. It's during those moments that the Torch Of The Mystics comparisons become even more apt. The record is of course rife with references to traditional Turkish folk music, Turkish classical music, sixties and seventies Turkish psych rock, as well as all the above mentioned NON Turkish sounds and influences, all filtered through a modern avant rock sensibility. There are a few tracks of surfy, bluesy garage rock stomp as well, but again, even those jams are infused with a vibe and energy that is way more Eastern than Western. So good. And such a perfect fit for Sublime Frequencies... As always, this is a super limited one time vinyl pressing, nice thick vinyl, housed in a heavy old school style tip-on jacket.

Yay, Turkey's answer to the Sun City Girls is back with their 3rd full-length album! We're talking real GOOD Sun City Girls, like Torch Of The Mystics, 330,003 Crossdressers, or the group's swansong Funeral Mariachi. Not a surprise that their previous record and 7" single both came out on ex-Sun City Girl Alan Bishop's Sublime Frequencies label, and that this one is on Unrock, a German imprint that up to now had specialized solely in releases featuring Sir Richard Bishop, also formerly of the Sun City Girls. The Ankara-based Hayvanlar Alemi trio (their name in English means 'The World Of Animals', btw) clearly have the Bishop brothers' seal of approval, and could be considered SCG proteges, carrying the torch (of the mystics) passed by the now defunct SCG's. Their all-instrumental music is a similar, wide-ranging, partially improvised mixture of Western and 'world music' influences - an exciting, exotic synthesis of psychedelic surf rock and various Near Eastern / Middle Eastern / Far Eastern ethnic sounds� So if you're into classic Ethiopian groove (they are, covering Mulatu Astatke's wonderful "Yekermo Sew" here, which also appeared on that aforementioned single), and contemporary North African guitar groups like those found on many Sublime Frequencies releases, and all those cool obscure international '60s garage combos from everywhere from Turkey to Thailand we're always heralding reissues and compilations of, then Hayvanlar Alemi's jams are gonna be your jams too. Likewise probably if you dig some other excellent bands also currently doing the 'ethnic-psych' thing, like Swedish Afro-fuzz purveyors Goat or Mexican cumbia-psicodelico instrumentalists Sonido Gallo Negro. This new lp-only album, limited to 750 copies, provides eight more 'twisted souvenirs' from Hayvanlar's sonic world explorations, which can be both heavy and atmospheric, shimmering and sinuous, fuzzed-out and groovy, often all of the above at once! Great stuff, recommended!

MPEG stream: Hadron Collider Twist
MPEG stream: Yekermo Sew

We already know that any Sublime Frequencies release is gonna be desirable - and not just 'cause it's undoubtedly limited in edition, especially the vinyl variety. But this one's really rad. A 45rpm 7" single from modern day Turkish psych band Hayvanlar Alemi, whose SF full length Guarana Superpower had us likening 'em to a surfy Sun City Girls steeped in the Anadolu pop playbook of the late '60s/early '70s, in other words they're the descendants of the likes of Mogollar, 3 Hur-el, Baris Manco, and Sublime Frequencies labelmate Erkin Koray, mixed with many other psychedelic influences. The B side here is a cool unreleased improv jam, live in the studio in their hometown of Ankara. But it's the A side that makes this a double whammy for international groovy music lovers - it's a heavily rocked up, killer cover of the classic song by Ethio-jazz legend Mulatu Astatke! Even if you don't know it by name, chances are you'll recognize it when you hear it. Now we'd like to hear Hayvanlar Alemi do an entire Ethiopiques album...

Live duets from ex-This Heat member Hayward with Keiji Haino, Tatsuya Yoshida (Ruins), Otomo Yoshihide and Peter Brotzman.

Charles Hayward of This Heat performing live in Japan. Accompanied on several tracks here by Jin Harada, Makoto Nomura, Otomo Yoshihide, Akira Toyonaga, Kazuhisa Uchihashi & Tatsuya Yoshida.

Highly recommended solo album from the This Heat drummer.

[ aquarius records catalogue — H ]