[ aquarius records catalogue

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Showing results 1001 through 1050 of 1106.

Anyone captivated by the hypnotic grooves found on the great "Ethiopiques" series should check out this not-dissimilar music by one of Ethiopia's neighbors to the north. The late Egyptian bandleader Ali Hassan Kuban, who passed away this summer at the age of

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A fairly recently recorded collection by the "James Brown of Nubian music." Ali Hassan Kuban has been both celebrated for fusing jazz / popular music with traditional Nubian music by many and reproved for debasing it by others. Nevertheless, Kuban made an indelible mark on Nubian and Egyptian popular music, selling millions of copies of his records in his 72 years. "Real Nubian" was recorded between 1997 & 2000 and demonstrates that Kuban was not shy, even in his golden years, to incorporate new and modern elements into his arrangements. So it should come as no surprise that this album has a greater presence of synthesizer and electric bass, but also harmonica, saxophone, bagpipes and even a little bit of vocal processing a la Cher's "Believe" on one track. It all gets a little too Peter Gabriel at times and maybe a little rich for some palates, but if you can get past the chilled white wine and restaurant dining al fresco production values of this album the same Ali Hassan Kuban spirit and inventiveness remains there underneath it all.

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Omni may be primarily a country reissue label, but every once in a while they'll come up with something distinctly NOT country and more often from way out of left field. Most recently it was the amazing Russkie Wig-Out compilation of demented surf, electro and exotica from Russia, and now comes this, a career retrospective of German outsider sci-fi electro pop visionary Felix Kubin, whose career has been an ongoing series of twisted sonic experiments, from lo-fi mad scientist sonic tinkering, to freaked out chaotic noise, to hypnotic krautrock grooves to super catchy sci-fi pop to twangy almost soundtracky Morricone-esque soundscapes and beyond. Even after nearly three decades of recording, Kubin remains unknown to all but a select few of far-out music obsessives, which is perhaps the way it will remain, cuz this stuff is indeed pretty dang far out. But for all its weirdness and willful obscurity, it's also catchy, and crazy, and fun, and in places funny, the sort of thing, that if it were some 20 year old kid and it was a limited lp on Not Not Fun, or some self released cd-r folks would be losing their shit. So go ahead, freak out, this stuff is well deserving of that sort of worship, and it's long long overdue! From the opening jam "Phonebashing", all skittery, electro new wave, warped and lo-fi, like some mash up of Kraftwerk and the Radiophonic Workshop and Herbie Hancock's "Rockit", to a killer WAY twisted version of "Lightning Strikes", originally written and performed by Lou Christie, but later covered by Klaus Nomi, which makes sense, since Kubin is a lot like Nomi in many ways, and musically sounds like Sparks crossed with The Residents, but more glitched out and electronic. Then there's "Schnitzler", which does in fact feature krautrock legend Conrad Schnitzler, a loopy, woozy bit of electro skitter, the refrain being simply "Schnitzler" and then "Conrad Schnitzler". The title track is a creepy bit of haunted house electronica, all creepy ambience, and super lo-fi programmed drum skitter, processed vox, and some cheesy, eighties drama soundtrack music woven in, again, twisted, but weirdly genius, and again, if this were some new hip underground band, blogs would be singing its praises. The collection covers pretty much all of Kubin's far out sounds, from manic, stuttery, carnivalesque Devo style video game synth buzz freakouts, to swoonsome soundtracky slow jams, to lush cabaret pop, all deep dramatic vox and pizzicato strings, to manic Love Boat style soundtracks all chopped up and electrified and freaked out, to super lo-fi 8 bit electro crunch, to faux big band almost Lawrence Welk sounding easy listening, to shuffling warped jazzy weirdness, to full on Legend Of Zelda style Nintendo core, to moody groovy electro slow jams, and pretty much every warped and gloriously twisted sonic stop in between. So good! Anyone into the current crop of lo-fi, electronic fractured pop experimentalists, this is will blow you away, and puts lots of that stuff to shame! Features an extensive full color booklet, with liner notes, but the liner notes are quite cryptic, but very interesting, and fantastically written, appropriately mysterious for the music they accompany.

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Lots of folks got their introduction to German outsider sci-fi electro pop visionary Felix Kubin via the Bruder Luzifer compilation we reviewed last year, a career spanning retrospective that offered up a handful of tracks that touched on nearly every aspect of Kubin's schizophrenic and ever-morphing soundworld, leaning heavily toward his twisted electro-pop / new wave popsmithery, but also giving us glimpses of warped lo-fi minimal electro-buzz, lush twang flecked soundscapes, freaked out chaotic noise and pretty much every stop in between. TXRF is something else entirely, a seriously high concept record, apparently based on a method of X-raying microchips to detect microscopic defects, these tracks, ostensibly some sort of sonic test for the X-ray system, and this record in effect, the sonic printout as it were, a document of the processes and their musical byproducts. Which is definitely believable, since on the one hand much of TXRF sounds weirdly clinical and academic, machinelike and robotic, the sort of thing you might hear on Raster Noton or some other label that traffics in such things, but Kubin, as we've discovered is a kind of a nut, and that definitely shows here, the sounds surprisingly playful, occasionally groovy, dizzyingly tripped out and most definitely psychedelic, shifting from a sort of stuttering 8-bit IDM to a woozy glitched out rhythmic abstract house music, to full on sci-fi mad scientist weirdness, all of those various sounds and elements somehow woven into a surprisingly cohesive whole, the record constantly transforming and morphing, the tracks impossibly varied, whether it's pulsing, pounding squelch and stutter, or skittery laser-beam, alien staticscape, playful Perrey And Kingsley style analog experimentation or haunting soundtracky psychedelic synthscapery (the closing track is a KILLER), it's all great, and yet another bafflingly brilliant piece of Kubin's unsolvable sonic puzzle, which of course, if you couldn't tell by now, means absolutely WAY recommended.

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When we reviewed the recent career retrospective compilation on Omni from weirdo German outsider sci-fi electro pop alchemist Felix Kubin, we got a little taste of his very early material, and in a weird way, found some of that stuff the most twistedly and disturbingly appealing, so in the spirit of digging deeper into the warped youthful sonic dabblings of a burgeoning musical madman comes this lp collection of, as the title suggests, Teenage Tapes, which in fact is precisely that, a collection of early EARLY recordings, from a teenage Kubin, aged 11-15 (he began playing at age 8!). And like the tracks we heard on the Omni comp, maybe even more so, these tapes do not disappoint. Consisting of nearly half entirely previously unreleased material, Teenage Tapes is a wild melange of tripped out electro pop, primitive cold wave, and some weird strain of home brewed krautrock, just check out opener "Paris Paris", with it's driving drum machine beat, twisted electronics, goofily playful melodies, sinister super distorted vocals, it may have been a teenage experiment, but it's way more fierce and bad ass than half of the grown up bands trying to pull this stuff off now. And more of Teenage Tapes is made up of the same sort of churning, rhythmic minimal kraut-pop weirdness. Stripped of the vocals, these jams could easily be early electronic krautrock experiments, but add in the vocals, and it becomes some sort of warped avant electro pop, with some tracks drifting into almost kosmische synth territory, others sounding a bit like Perrey & Kingsley doing Tangerine Dream, others like wild 8-bit freakouts, and still others sounding like some rad new band on Wierd or Captured Tracks. And while usually, a collection of early teenage works would end up being more of a novelty, and sure, some of this stuff is a little goofy, many of the tracks here are incredible, lush and textured and atmospheric and near cinematic. Hard to believe Kubin was making music like this in grade school, just grateful that someone is finally digging through Kubin's teenage archives. Here's hoping there's more to come. Nicely packaged in a heavy jacket adorned with a teenage Kubin's gothy made up face, with an inner sleeve featuring lyrics, and some hand drawn diagrams and schematics.

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Brand new music from German outsider sci-fi pop weirdo / visionary, whose "particle accelerator pop" positions somewhere between a sort of naive, alien Gary Numan, and a time traveling Brian Wilson cyborg, his pop music meticulously crafted from the detritus of classic pop music past, fused into some impossible space aged future pop, Kubin a Joe Meek like studio mad scientist, transforming pop music into something strange and wondrous, even when working with someone else's music, just check out the opening track, a killer and fantastically confusional cover of Lou Christie's "Lightning Strikes", which turns the original into a near operatic robotic future funk, channeling the spirit of Klaus Nomi (who also does a killer version of the song), but Kubin has no shortage of his own mini masterpieces, beginning with "Atomium Vertigo", which sounds like Serge Gainsbourg played by an all robot band, a krauty drum machine kraut-groove beneath fields of FX and static, while Kubin delivers his sultry spoken word, oh yeah, and of course there's the bleepy bloopy vocodered chorus. And so it goes, every track here a twisted future pop gem, from the avant electro-kraut exotica of "Nachts Im Park", to the 8-bit skitter of "Flies Without Memory", to the garbled electronic jazz collage that is "Restez En Linge", to the banging synth hop of "Piscine Ressonenzi", which has us envisioning Kubin as a producer and beat maker for the current crop of pop stars like Ke$ha, or Beyonce, or Britney... if only! And Kubin never lets up, the second half of Zemsta Plutona as chock full of electro future pop weirdness as the first, flitting from plunderphonic style forties jazz to maniacal alien electro, and from murky minimal avant-kraut weirdness to Perry & Kingsley style electronic experimentation, and beyond! Like all Omni releases, Zemsta Plutona is beautifully appointed, there's a big full color booklet, with liner notes and plenty of photos!

MPEG stream: Lightning Strikes
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Aaaiiieeeee! Sounding just as you'd expect a collaboration between Aavikko and Felix Kubin would sound! "Superlake Beat" will make ya wanna do a juiced-up-funky-twist-shimmy-shake on your orange shag-carpeted ceiling. "Antarktis Slow Rock" is a four minute

Continuing to dig into the vaults of 'new music' composers, Ampersand offers another reissue from the collaborative team of Christina Kubisch and Fabrizio Plessi. Just as their previous outing "Two and Two" centered conceptually around the primal

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In the late 18th Century, Benjamin Franklin invented the Glass Harmonica as a musical instrument with the idea of improving upon the parlour trick of rubbing the rim of a wine glass with a wet finger to produce a constant drone. Franklin heard a pristine beauty resulting from from this action but immediately recognized the limitations if one wanted to play more than one or two wine glasses at once. For his Glass Harmonica, Franklin cut off the stems of several dozen wine glasses and drilled holes directly in the center of the glasses. He then mounted these augmented glasses along a horizontal rotating spindle, so that the player of the Glass Harmonica could effectively be rubbing the rims of several glasses at once and create harmonies and chords out of those pure tones. The Glass Harmonica was quite a novelty instrument for plenty of composers of the day; but it fell out of favor with the discerning public (possibly because some of the players had actually fainted from the frequencies they were creating with the Glass Harmonica). In recent years, there's been a resurgance of interest in the glass harmonica amongst avant-garde composers, including Simon Wickham-Smith, Manu Holterbach, and Christina. As one of Germany's most reknowned sound artists, Kubisch typically operates in the realm of installation with almost all of her previous recordings being documents of those installations; thus, Armonica is a rare documentation of Kubisch's compositional sensibility. In using the glass harmonica as the source material for this album, she constructs a beautiful polyphony of never-ending timbres, resulting in an exquisite piece of haunted minimalism on par with the likes of Phill Niblock, Andrew Chalk, and Eliane Radigue. Highly recommended!

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For nearly 4 decades, the German sound artist Christina Kubisch has explored the dynamics of a restricted pallette from unconventional sound sources, including water jets, metronomes, marbles, and bells (her most widely used sound source). She situates these sounds within a number of poetic installations, which depend upon architechtural, environmental, and object-relational contexts to literally activate the sound. Some of her work including the recordings from the "Klangraumlichtzeit" monograph never translated very well outside of their original installations, but there have been examples of her sound work which transcend the borders of the installations. "Dreaming Of A Major Third" (1998) was one such piece, as a wonderful drone recording of churchbell tones whose sharp attacks had been curtailed into muffled swells. The album is so strong that the technological gimmickery of her solar panel interface to control those churchbells is almost a footnote. Similarly, "Diapason" is another successful composition outside of its original installation context, having been exclusively composed with medical tuning forks. Utilizing the intrinsically long acoustic decay of those forks to her advantage, Kubisch spartanly strikes these instruments in variety of delicate patterns that emerge, dissolve, and re-appear with the vast expanses of time and space. In the end, this album has many of the ephemeral and transient characteristics of late period Morton Feldman.

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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 CD is the same disc that accompanied the recent monograph that Edition RZ published about the lifework of German electro-acoustic composer Christina Kubisch. With the exception of the first piece which dates back to 1988, "Vier Stucke"

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SORRY. "Two & Two" is the collaborative effort between German sound artist Christina Kubisch and Italian experimentalist Fabrizio Plessi. Basing their four pieces on the four prime elements - earth, fire, air, and water - Kubisch and Plessi each played a single instrument / object with a perpetual repetitive motion. The two had amplified the objects in a specific manner, to extract more unusual characteristics than sounds usually associated with voice, metronome, steel drum, ventilators and water jet. The resulting continuous sound streams have a beautiful organic quality not far from David Jackman's stunning arsenal of bowed metal in Organum. This is the original late 70s pressing from the Cramps Records offshoot.

A few months back we were able to pick up a few copies of the original Cramps '70s vinyl of this album, but now the hardworking Ampersand label has reissued it on CD. Two & Two is the collaborative effort between German sound artist Christina Kubisch and

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SORRY. One of two import solo albums from the chanteuse of Japan's Maher Shalal Hash Baz.

One of two import solo albums from the chanteuse of Japan's Maher Shalal Hash Baz.

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Another album from the female singer of Japan's Maher Shalal Hash Baz.

How rad is this? One of our favorite Record Store Day items this year was not a record, but a book! A hefty, 508-page tome that thoroughly chronicles the history and obsessions of one of the largely misunderstood and under-appreciated niches of recorded music, the "vanity record" - also known as "private press recordings". Enjoy The Experience, edited by noted collector Johan Kugelberg, delves deep into the uniquely 20th century phenomena of the custom-made record and the little-known artists who made them, as well as the collectors and reissue labels that have obsessed over them and ultimately prevented them from fading into obscurity. A lot of our faves are here, including many we have reviewed over the years like The Shaggs, Michael Farneti, Gary Wilson, Jr. and His Soulettes, Bob Chance, Luie Luie, and Hans Edler, many with extensive back stories about their creation. But there is sooooo much more. Including Christian family recordings, ventriloquists, creepy loner folkies, restaurant /resort entertainers, over-the-top lounge singers and just outright bizarre musical artists who just wouldn't have been able to release a record any other way. There are pages and pages of beautiful color reproductions of the cover art to these home made records, some even hand drawn, in all of their earnest naive glory. There's even a chapter on Century Records, one of the most well-established custom record manufacturers, who provided stock album covers for individual artists - and it's funny to see how many different albums utilized the exact SAME cover (including the one seen on the front of this book!). Enjoy The Experience is a joy to behold and will renew your faith in the self-released record. Comes with a download card for a 20 song playlist including a song from a hopefully up and coming aQ Record of the Week, when it gets reissued - try and guess which one! While supplies last, this special RSD edition also comes with a clear vinyl 45 reissue of a recording by the Century Records marketing department, on how to customize and create your own record. So Awesome!!

You might recall Ms Kadet Kuhne's two exceptional IDM albums 2001's Seismic and 2004's Thin Air. In the years since she moved to LA and has now returned to the Bay Area with this dvd. We always knew that she was one heck of a multimedia force -- filmmaker, electronic music composer, installation artist -- just as adept at sculpting atmospheres through visuals as via artfully textured glitch and drone audio... and this document reconfirms it! Holding Pattern III: Infinite Delay is an audio/video work of hers from 2006. Otherworldly languid live-processed soundscapes with dreamy underwater imagery. She's joined by like-minded artists mem1. Immersive and beautifully crafted.

We're always on about '70s prog. Well what about prog in the '80s? Here's a nice example, though it's from the very early in the decade (recorded 1980, released 1981) so it's practically '70s anyway. A rather obscure Swedish outfit called Kultivator, whose sole album Barndomens Stigar (which boasts a b&w engraving on the cover by none other than conceptual artist & experimental musician Leif Elggren) blends the quirky herky jerky of prog complexity with blissful melody, tilting at times towards the twee whilst menacingly muscle-flexing at others. There's sizzling instrumental solo sections, and also much in the way of delightful female vocals (mostly wordless ba-ba-ba's). Kultivator were a quartet, with lots of Fender Rhodes electric piano, as well as other organ and synth keyboards. Also recorder and/or flute. And on occasional backing vocals, a boy's choir. Yup, very proggy indeed. Armchair prog percussionists are provided with their fair share of air-drumming opportunities, percolating energetically as the drumming here does! All those keyboards create a moody, slightly jazzistic sound which reminds us a bit of the brilliant Bo Hansson, '70s Swedish prog royalty. There's also a definite Magma influence at work (the thick bass riffing and martial drumming in the middle of "Kara Jord" for instance, leading some to go so far as to label Kultivator a genuine "zeuhl" band), and you'll hear hints of traditional Scandinavian folk music as well. Further reference points: fellow Swedes Samla Mammas Manna and Kebnekajse, also '70s UK prog like Genesis and Gentle Giant, RIO a la Henry Cow, and specifically Canterbury groups like Soft Machine, among others. Guess that's what happens when you make prog in 1980, with a whole previous decade of genius from which to draw inspiration! Although Kultivator, um, certainly cultivated their own unique spin on what came before. We'd also say this is a good one for folks who enjoyed the modern day Swedish prog of Gosta Berlings Saga, reviewed here last year. This brand-new reissue on the Mellotronen label features three bonus tracks added to the original LP's eight cuts, plus a whole extra bonus disc, called Waiting Paths, featuring four songs recorded by the now-reunited band in 2006. Since they already seemed a bit "out of time" (& we don't mean rhythmically!) even back in '81, it's no surprise that this more recent material sounds like a more modern Kultivator... but not that much more modern. Also included in this nice digipacked reissue, a big booklet with vintage photos and lengthy liner notes. Prog-lovin' AQ customers, check this out!

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We listed the documentary about the notorious late '80s Valencia Street rock bar, The Chatterbox, a few lists back. Now we have copies of the official book written by vintage Aquarius Records employee, Alfie Kulzick! SF music scene vets will no doubt fondly recall the days of the Chameleon Lounge bar which was located on Valencia Street a few blocks away from aQ. It was a beer-soaked and black velvet painting festooned underground rock haven through most of the '90s. These days that spot is now occupied by a considerably less gritty and tattered bar called Amnesia. However, you'll score super duper old school cred points if you can remember the venue that predated the Chameleon... The Chatterbox!... even more so if you have some first hand memories of your own! And if you do happen to have some of your own then you're probably in this book, aren't you? Most of us here at aQ were either still underage back then and/or hadn't made our way to the Bay Area yet. So unfortunately we weren't privy to the club's glory years circa 1986-1990, but we all can now catch a time machine-esque sneak peek via this book. It's packed with plenty of live rawk photos, punk fliers and vivid anecdotes with the likes of Hewhocannotbenamed, Boom (of Boom & The Legion Of Doom), Buck Naked, Ginger Coyote, Blag Dahlia, Gary X Indiana, SF Dogs, Sister Double Happiness, among many many others. Plus amazing photos and stories of touring bands such as the Dwarves, The Mentors, and Nirvana. We spotted friends like Chewy and John from Hammers Of Misfortune in there too (back then, in the band Osgood Slaughter). It makes for a wildly colorful patchwork of recollections (er, though the pics themselves are all black and white)! And it gives equal love to the music acts, the staff and the patrons, conveying the beloved neighborhood bar's strong sense of community, and offering a vivid raw glimpse of the late '80s SF music scene. The book's layout and content really captures the feel of a well-worn zine from back in the day. Y'know, cut'n'pasted together with love and very rough around the edges, almost like it was assembled in the wee hours at the Kinko's on Market Street (back when it was open 24 hours). Fuck Yeah!

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SORRY. Totally brutal, Chicago powerviolence ala Spazz, Drop Dead, etc...These kids know how to thrash with the best of em though. Short blazing, grinding, pounding furious grindcore. Excellent.

One guy and his acoustic guitar, conjuring up the spirits of Kottke, Basho, and Fahey. Gentle, mellow, folk-classical guitar explorations, pretty and somewhat melancholy. Kunin's playing, while adept and intricate, is not as out there as what fellow

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This super limited (and hand numbered) cassette from legendary Finnish composer, inventor, instrument designer and musician Erkki Kurenniemi, celebrates the 50 year anniversary of his first, and perhaps most famous record work, 1963's "On-Off". This track has been included in various Kurreniemi compilations, and was inspired by the roar of turbines Kurreniemi heard as a child once while visiting a power plant. It's a sprawling abstract expanse of howling buzzing electro acoustic musique concrete, lots of thrums and rumbles, disembodied voices buried in the background, slow shifting textures, and gristled drones, all spread out into shimmering, undulating sheets of sound. Super dynamic too, flitting from hushed murmur to explosive and caustic howl, and often settling somewhere right in between. It sounds occasionally like jet engine noise, and at others, rushing water, or whirling wind, multiple variations of dense hypnotic sound. Noisy enough to predict much of the industrial/noise music that would follow, but also prescient of so much electronic and experimental music as well. Grey and austere, but somehow also lush and lovely. This tape includes the original version of "On-Off", along with a second, shorter German edit. The flipside features a 2013 reimagining of / homage to "On-Off", which attempts to capture the same spirit with a whole different set of sounds, lots of electronics, and strange FX, the sound less grey and more multihued, not as raw or primitive, and a bit more psychedelic, but quite a cool piece, regardless of its provenance. LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!! Each one hand numbered and housed in a thick black and white J-card, the whole tape sealed in a plastic bag.

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This is an awesome document of early computer music from Finnish inventor/composer Erkki Kurenniemi, who is featured on the Arktinen Hysteria: Suomi-Avantgarden Esipuutarhureita compilation, one of this week's Records of the Week, which is a brief sonic overview of Finnish experimental/electronic/avant garde in the sixties. Kurenniemi's track on the comp is a sort of precursor to Pan Sonic, stiff robotic dance music made from blips and bleeps. This collection of his work from 1963-1973 shows multiple sides of Kurenniemi, the silly, playful side, like the comp track (which also appears here) and then a much darker, noiser side. Having spent time as an artist, a photographer, and a musician, Kurennemi was always an enthusiastic amateur, with most of his works remaining in a raw and unfinished state. Which in no way detracts from the power of these amazing pieces. In fact like lots of home-recorded/primitively recorded music, the quality of the recording is a huge part of the overall sound. A combination of computers, synthesizers and home made automated sound making devices, resulted in a broad range of sound, from grainy rough walls of sound to boinky primitive rhythm tracks to thick rumbling tones and ear piercing sine waves to dorky spastic freak outs to twinkly spacescapes. Really cool stuff. MPEG Download: "Sahkosoittimen Aania #1" [/audio/kurenniemisahko1.mp3] MPEG Stream: "Sahkosoittimen Aania #1" [/audio/kurenniemisahko1.m3u]

MPEG stream: Sahkosoittimen Aania #1
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A while back we reviewed a killer compilation from this legendary Finnish composer / inventor / early electronic music pioneer. This new release on Jussi from Circle's Ektro Records offshoot Full Contact, features many of those same tracks on vinyl for the first time, along with a bunch of others that weren't on the cd version. Here's what we had to say about that collection: This is an awesome document of early computer music from Finnish inventor/composer Erkki Kurenniemi, who is featured on the Arktinen Hysteria: Suomi-Avantgarden Esipuutarhureita compilation, a past aQ Record of the Week, that collection a brief sonic overview of Finnish experimental/electronic/avant garde in the sixties. Kurenniemi's track on the comp is a sort of precursor to Pan Sonic, stiff robotic dance music made from blips and bleeps. This collection of his work from 1963-1973 shows multiple sides of Kurenniemi, the silly, playful side, like the comp track (which also appears here) and then a much darker, noisier side. Having spent time as an artist, a photographer, and a musician, Kurennemi was always an enthusiastic amateur, with most of his works remaining in a raw and unfinished state. Which in no way detracts from the power of these amazing pieces. In fact like lots of home-recorded/primitively recorded music, the quality of the recording is a huge part of the overall sound. A combination of computers, synthesizers and home made automated sound making devices, resulted in a broad range of sound, from grainy rough walls of sound to boinky primitive rhythm tracks to thick rumbling tones and ear piercing sine waves to dorky spastic freak outs to twinkly spacescapes. Really cool stuff. Really cool indeed. This comp definitely expands on the earlier cd version, in part by introducing the music in the context of Kurenniemi's 'rules', the first of which was "A work has to be completed in a single day." The second was: "Consecutive sounds must be chosen so that they are totally inconsistent or surprising and have no rational relationship with each other." And most interesting, the third rule stated simply: "...?" Not sure exactly what that means, but perhaps we're not meant to know, or perhaps it means nothing. What we do know is the music of Kurenniemi is fascinating and beautiful, difficult and perplexing, sometimes it's like mad video game music gone haywire, at other times it's darkly delicate and downright haunting, much of this created on machines he built and invented, electro-acoustic experiments give way to tape collages which in turn give way to primitive early synthesizer compositions which in turn give way to pure electronic sounds. Gorgeous mysterious stuff, and absolutely recommended for fans of early electronic and computer music pioneers like Suzanne Ciani, Laurie Spiegel, F.C. Judd, Daphne Oram, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, as well as imaginary pioneers like Ursula Bogner!! Incredible deluxe packaging, super thick full color heavy duty gatefold jacket with extensive liner notes, pictures and detailed notes on each song.

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This is maybe not entirely what you might expect from a solo album from the guitarist for modern-day Japanese psychedelic rock legends Ghost and, formerly, White Heaven (he's also currently the six stringer in Stars, and a frequent Damon & Naomi sideman)... He's perhaps best known for his gorgeous displays of John Cippolina influence in his guitar playing, but on portions of Sunset Notes he sounds less like the legendary Quicksilver Messenger Service guitarist than he does like Robert Fripp in Frippertronics mode. This lovely, lovely, sprightly, poppy album will also remind listeners of Ennio Morricone soundtracks (we're always suckers for that!) and surf music and dreamy pop. With track titles like "Twilight Mystery Of A Russian Cowboy" and "The Old Man And The Evening Star" it seems clear that he's not gonna deny the Fripp and Morricone influences... To be sure, some fans who want a more Ghostly album won't go for this but we think it's great! Bright and energetic, or gentle and pretty, but not hippified at all. Released last year, now finally in stock at a reasonable price despite its Japanese import status.

MPEG stream: Do Deep-Sea Fish Dream Of Electric Moles?
MPEG stream: Twilight Mystery Of A Russian Cowboy

The soundtrack to the film of the same name features the film's score as well as excerpts from interviews between Kurt Cobain and music writer Michael Azerrad, but perhaps just as revealing are the musical selections. Nope there's nothing by Nirvana here, instead the cd presents 14 of Cobain's personal favorites and deepest influences -- The Vaselines, Scratch Acid, Iggy Pop, Melvins, R.E.M., Arlo Guthrie, Half Japanese, Butthole Surfers, Creedence Clearwater Revival, David Bowie, Mudhoney, Lead Belly, Mark Lanegan, Bad Brains -- plus a previously unreleased recording by Steve Fisk and Ben Gibbard. Makes for a pretty awesome, ultra eclectic compilation!

MPEG stream: Hardcore Was Dead (Interview Excerpt)
MPEG stream: Touch Me I'm Sick
MPEG stream: Indian Summer

Oh my god! We're overwhelmed with this sudden spasm of Fela Kuti reissue activity -- a dozen cds (many of them containing two LPs worth of music) in the last couple weeks alone, with more on the way! Needless to say, we're not YET able to offer reviews of each

KUTI, FELA Everything Scatter / Noise For Vendor Mouth (MCA / Universal) cd 17.98 KUTI, FELA Ikoy Blindness / Kalakuta Show (MCA / Universal) cd 17.98 KUTI, FELA J.J.D. / Unnecessary Begging (MCA / Universal) cd 17.98 KUTI, FELA Live In Amsterdam (MCA / Universal) cd 17.98 KUTI, FELA Monkey Banana / Excuse O (MCA / Universal) cd 17.98 KUTI, FELA Open & Close / Afrodesiac (MCA / Universal) cd 17.98 KUTI, FELA Roforofo Fight (MCA / Universal) cd 17.98 KUTI, FELA The '69 Los Angeles Sessions (MCA / Universal) cd 17.98 KUTI, FELA Upside Down / Music of Many Colours (MCA / Universal) cd 17.98 KUTI, FELA Zombie (MCA / Universal) cd 17.98

MPEG stream: Lady
MPEG stream: Water No Get Enemy
MPEG stream: Coffin For Head Of State
MPEG stream: ODOO

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

SORRY.

[ aquarius records catalogue — K ]