We've gone on at great length in past reviews of records by Gnaw Their Tongues and sister band Aderlating, about the sound of those groups being bombastic and strangely soundtracky, each trafficking in a strain of symphonic industrial cinematic blackened doom, the usual downtuned sludge crawl and murky black miasmas of like minded noisemakers, instead wrapped around soaring majestic arrangements, lush melodies, as well as strange bursts of brass, and sprawling atmospheric sonic vistas.
As Seirom, the same man behind both of those outfits, draws back the blackened curtain, revealing the lush sonic wonderland that lies beyond, a soaring, shimmering expanse of blurred soft focus ambience, lush layered drones, processed vocals, smeared into shoegaze streaks of spectral psychedelia, all it will take is the first 5 minutes of the first track to convince you, the sound falling somewhere between the gauzy ambience of Tim Hecker, the lush soundtracky drifts of Stars Of The Lid, the Pop Ambient haze of Gas, but listen close, buried beneath the washed out swirls, some black metal blast beats remain, but they're so indistinct, as to be less rhythmic, and more textural, adding a strange pulsing thrum, which oozes into the rest of the surrounding sounds, moaning melancholic strings, gristly soft focus textures, vocal fragments, all floating on a woozy wash of ethereal ambience. Another one of those cases, where had that one track spread out over both discs, we would have been perfectly happy.
And while some of the record does get heavy, the various strands of prismatic melody, turning black, and blossoming into thick heaving walls of downtuned blurred churn, a la SUNNO))) or Nadja, but way more blissed out and ephemeral, even those tracks finds that heaviness being pulled apart, the blackness fading to more of a dreamlike grey, that grey shimmer revealing all manner of voices and fragmented melodies just below the surface, at its most abstract, it's like the Caretaker, a symphony of slowed down orchestral drifts, and gloriously blissed out dream pop melted down into something much more freeform and amorphous.
The title track adds martial drumming, and the sound becomes a sort of majestic industrial M83, which is just as good as it sounds, while "As Hills" laces its dirgey drift with deep dramatic vocals, elsewhere almost black metal buzz, finds guitars soaring skyward and transformed into something much more epic and dreamlike, and when the blast beats do return, this time much higher in the mix, impossibly they don't make the music sound any more metal, but instead, adds a spectral propulsion to the shoegazy bliss, the sound churning and driving the ether, like black metal stripped down and run through some sort of 4AD/M83 filter.
There's a lot to take in, two discs, ninety minutes, too much to really adequately describe here, and yet it's still not enough, a gloriously immersive sonic experience, that manages to take fulfill all the non-metallic promise of Gnaw Their Tongues, the tracks here fully embodying some otherworldly alchemical inverse, an alternate dimension Gnaw Their Tongues, where a blackened burnished beauty is reflected back from the abyss.
That's Bay Area avant-garde icon Michael Gendreau working with a semi-anonymous Seitz who's asked to keep things hush-hush about his/her full identity. This collaboration is one that stems from Gendreau's long-standing use of the turntable as musical instrument. Back in the late '80s, Gendreau (in his project Crawling With Tarts) was composing turntable operas of surface noise and snippets of recontextualized sounds from the records themselves, very much akin to those Christian Marclay recordings from the same time period. By the turn of the millennium, Gendreau had honed his craft as an acoustician (scientifically analyzing the impact of environmental / industrial sound on a particular architectural / workplace system), and he applied those tools to composition, amplifying the tiniest of frequencies from a turntable motor, or the squeaks from a loose belt, or the haptic rumble from the needle scraping against inner label on the record itself. The clarity he was able to reproduce was such that these commonplace sounds became foreign and at times malignant. Here on the Seitz Versus Gendreau record, the turntable is is one of the sources, along with a distorted toy piano whose melodies come into the mix with atonal chops on the opener "Chorus After Rains." The two launch into a gnarled New Blockaders grunt of acoustic scapings and scabrous noise on the following track "Things Lost That Will Never Be Found", that dissolves into a crumbling low-frequency drone. The 18 minute "Trains Will Not Stop" enjoys an apt subtitle "Grand Surface Noise Opera Nr. 9" with a gradual unfurling of crackle and hiss joined by deep subharmonic hums that thrum ominously outside the relative calm of the surface noise / campfire mimesis. A great piece of sound art that lands on the more obtuse sonic sides of Philip Jeck, Janek Schaefer, and the aforementioned Christian Marclay. Limited to a stupidly low number of just 90 copies.
Gambuh is the oldest surviving dramatic form in Bali (incorporating music, literature and dance), a remnant of the Hindu Javanese courts of 500 years ago, it followed those courts to Bali when the Mahapajit dynasty fell to Islam in the 15th century. With the
There's been an onslaught of Ruins-related releases on Ruins drummer Tatsuya Yoshida's Magaibutsu label this week, folks!! Here's one from a brand-new band formation we'd never heard of before, Sekkutsu Jean, an improvising duo featuring Yoshida on drums, keyboard and vocals, and Sato Kenji on bass, cello, and voice. The results are most often SUPER distorted and heavy and fierce. Some of this reminds us a bit of some real old Ruins stuff, when they went for the ultra-dirty fuzz bass sound on such albums as Infect and Stonehenge. Total blurting bass bludgeon. Other parts are more "jazz", or even "classical" oriented, with droning sawing strings battling Yoshida's drum battery, or accompanying his keyboard lines. And then there's things that we can't even begin to classify, like track six, "Wihytcujmo", which is based around a drum machine beat and vicious cello bowing. Overall, this is some seriously mean stuff, without the strain of goofiness that oftentimes shows up in other Yoshida-related improv projects. There's 19 slices of killer improv weirdness here, with easy-to-remember titles like "Ghijuhnkkumn" and "Qyxoichdbihm" and "Bysjiahvoskkn"!! Over the course of all these tracks, there's a lot of creativity and intensity. Recommended.
And as with all of this new batch of Magaibutsu discs, this comes packaged in a handsome tri-fold full-color cardboard cd sleeve.
Epic crushing metallic industrial heaviness, the kind of thing we thought they just didn't make anymore, but this is total Swans / Godflesh / Cop Shoot Cop worship, pounding metallic percussion, soundscapes of whirring drills, blown out low slung bass, howled distorted vox, the whole thing so repetitive and mantric, thick slabs of distorted rumble wrapped around tons of damaged electronics, bleating horns buried beneath reverb drenched beats, some songs are full on walls of twisted electronic crunch, others are brooding, droning skeletal sprawls, laid over deep blurred basslines, and tribal rhythms, some are dense whorls of deeeeeep sinister black ambience, all darkly drifting layers, and distant bits of clang and shimmer. For a few moments here and there, the sound gets downright poppy, like some sort of washed out post industrial deathrock, but even then, it's shot through with a seriously menacing sonic undercurrent that seeps into every beat, and every note. Filthy, crusty, heavy, haunting, crushing and brutal, the perfect mix of old school industrial pound, and more modern bleak blackness. Fucking fierce and frightening, grim and punishing, and we're digging it like crazy.
There's a bunch of new tapes on this week's list from Oakland tape label Sanity Muffin, this one the first we've heard from Selaroda, who deliver three tracks of ominous drones, and buried rhythms, a sort of moonlit kosmische, all swirling synths and muted pulsations, the first track is mostly chordal smears and shimmery drift, with a brief rhythmic intrusion, being the only thing keeping it from pure aural blissout. The second track is a brief bit of staticky swirl, which quickly builds from white noise squall, to slow-mo space-kraut slowcore, all dreamy, prismatic thrum, and skeletal programed beats, wreathed in soft streaks of Michael Rother like guitars, before bleeding right into the epic closer, which begins like some bedroom Kraftwerk, all pulsing rhythms, and time lapse electronics, deep melodic ripples, and streaks of arpeggiated synth shimmer, a hazy, futuristic new age drift, that soon ditches the drums, letting the sounds billow outwards, weightless and ephemeral, but underpinned with a slightly sinister vibe, due in no small part, to the roiling sea of electronics, and the darkly blossoming drones, slowly surfacing, that build to a rumbling climax, only to collapse into another field of dubbed out rhythms, and glitchy electronic static, which in turn, blossoms into a gorgeously epic bliss-scape, the sound of sunrises and glimmering stars, of warm blue skies and deep black space, all blurred into one long swath of rich, lush, lustrous dronemusic.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!! And packaged in full color, two sided, embossed J-cards.
Surface crackle, yes! And the record from which this cd was transferred sounds maybe a little warped. But no matter, we like all that!! Makes it all the more psychedelic, eh? This is a reissue of some potent Turkish protest pop from the '70s, featuring folky strumming, irresistible Anatolian grooves, and Selda Bagcan's beautiful, often urgent-sounding voice. Sounds like something that should immediately be of interest to any AQ customers into radical East meets West psych-folk from Turkey (of which we know there are plenty, nowadays!) particularily those who've already heard Selda via the inclusion of her songs "Bundan Sonra" and "Ince Ince Bir Kar Yagar" on the recent and quite recommended Turkish installment of the Love Peace and Poetry series ("Bundan Sonra" shows up here, too).
As alluded to above, this certainly isn't digitally remastered from the pristine master tapes, but at least folks that put out this cd deserve kudos not only for digging it up for us but also providing lyrics and liner notes in the cd booklet -- although the lyrics are given only in the original Turkish, with no English translations, which would have gone a long way to making Selda's message more understandable to us today, outside of Turkey. Ah well. At least the liner notes, which are in English, provide some context. It's a little unclear, but it seems that Selda was considered a subversive figure by the repressive Turkish government at the time. This record may in fact have been banned -- at the very least we're told that original copies were (and are) hard to find due to government disapproval. And Selda was banned from foreign travel at least until 1987.
The first 12 tracks on this cd are from a 1976 album entitled Selda Vol. 2 (aka Vurulduk Ey Halkim Unutma Bizi, it seems), and then there's also eight additional, bonus tracks taken from Selda singles released in 1971 and '73, songs that are slightly less-rock, more-folk than the Vol. 2 material (which are already pretty folky). However, electric guitar, whining and fuzzed, figures into a few of this disc's tracks, while a lot of the rest is much more in a traditional (if electric) folk vein, with lush arrangements and a great emphasis on Selda's powerful, emotional voice.
To be filed with your reissues of 3 Hur-el and Mogollar (members of which are apparently are in Selda's backup band for some of this)...
Oh Selda! We are soooooooo in love with your voice! We first heard you on the amazing Love Peace and Poetry compilation of Turkish psychedelic music and ever since then, we just wanted more more more! Last year we got our Selda fix with a collection of vinyl transfers released by World Psychedelia, and now finally we get another full serving of Selda that we've so desperately been craving! No surprise that the fine folks with impeccable taste at B-Music/Finders Keepers are responsible for this amazing collection of Selda at her best! With a singular voice that demands and grabs your attention with such utter flare, seduction and style, Selda is truly a musical treasure who we're sure will win the ears and hearts of just about anyone who listens. Every song has a rich musical backdrop, perfectly cradling her lovely vocals, with a sound that has no easy genre lines to point to, but that so few have touched on with such perfection. It's psych-rock and glorious pop, it's folk and funk, it's fun and dramatic, its whatever it wants to be, and it's a collection of songs with absolutely no misses! There is a playfulness in the performances that totally imbue the songs with a rich full color fever that just can't be denied. While some reissues exist more for history's sake or for just a couple cool tracks, this is one of those records that requires repeated listening, and lord knows we have listened to this over and over and over. In some ways we even think of Selda like a Turkish version of Asha Bhosle, with that sort of amazing voice that turns everything it touches into musical magic.
Way beyond recommended!
Here is another dancey / tough / all over the place gem from the prolific duo of Akiko and Rop (from The Peechees and The Lefties and Rice, to name a few). On this record, like their previous releases, Semiautomatic fuse electronica, new wave, punk, and
Rop, ex-Peechees member, has moved to New York where he hones his DJ and turntablist skills as DJ Ropstyle. Semiautomatic features the additional talents of Akiko. Fans of Kid Koala's funny style and ICU/IQU's lo-fi d'n'b will enjoy this.
It's like Christmas around here (we know, it is ACTUALLY like Christmas around here right now), whenever we get a new batch of tapes from Auris Apothecary, not only is it bound to sonically all over the map, without fail the packaging is totally stellar, often high (or low) concept, meticulously hand assembled, often involving organic matter, or broken glass, or sponges, or scrolls, or who knows what else. Needless to say, every AA release is special, and is often as much a work of sonic art, as it is a piece of music.
This one might be the most extravagantly packaged of the new batch, but more on that in a second, first the music. A strange detuned psychedelic folk exploration of opium abuse and the descent into addiction from this mysterious Swede, all spidery steel string guitar buzz and muted lumbering percussion, echoey and buzzy and abstract, darkly hypnotic, a sort of late night creep, very dark and ritualistic, haunting and harrowing, the sound seem to be unravelling before your ears, the notes brittle one second, warm and languid the next, the production reverby and lo-fi, occasionally building to a bit of noisy soft chaos, only to return to woozy lumber, it some ways this reminds us of the late great Reeks And The Wrecks, with it's warped blues stumble, but there also seems to be a weirdly blackened buzz, and a depressive futility to the sounds that hints at some doom / black metal influences, maybe more in mood than in sound, but the result is pretty fantastically dark and dreamily depressive.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES! Housed in a super swank black spray-painted intricately folded cardboard box with metallic gold printing. Inside a printed metallic gold sticker, and a ziplock baggy affixed to the inside of the box, with a gold and black sticker, each bag containing poppy seeds, the tapes printed in gold ink. Each box hand-numbered in gold ink.
Weird (and Finnish, so of course) album of drum machine beats and quirky samples, sorta dancey, sorta experimental, can't really decide what to make of it!
"Kenotaphion" is one of the most unusual collections of archival recordings to pass through the Aquarius doors, as British artist Jonty Semper has culled through the archives at BBC, British Movietone, and ITN Reuters for recordings of the 2 minutes of
Semper was not content to simply collect the solemn silences bracketed by the chiming of Big Ben and the crack of the rifles, he interspersed them with snippets of narration uttered by the BBC commentators, often poetic, yet certainly sentimental thoughts spoken in the finest of Queen's English. Disc one features the oldest recordings (1929 - 1965) and ripples with tons of surface noise, yet as the microphone technology improved through the later recordings (1967 - 2000) the quiet din of London trying to be silent makes itself known. A strangely alluring record.
Here's a lilting fuzzy pop debut from the young SF band who go by the moniker Send For Help. Despite their name, none is really needed here. They're doin' just dandy on their own. The foursome's crunch 'n' jangle guitars and soft emotive male vocals suggest that they're drawing ample influences from the likes of Pinback, Modest Mouse Built To Spill and Sonic Youth. Fits right in with the recent No Midnight album from another Bay Area band Birdmonster. Indie rock lives on right here in SF!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Definitely the 'summer album' for the stellar monthly series of minimalist electronica counting down to the year 2000. Bubbling pulses from banks of little black boxes build sounds that move from pretty drones into dense if rather sedate electronic dub. Senking's twenty minutes share a lot of the same tonalities and structures as Aphex Twin's monumental Selected Ambient Works Volume 2.
Continuing his reconstructions of electro found on his previous releases from Raster and Karaoke Kalk, Jens Massel (aka Senking) digitally sanitizes what could easily be vinyl surface noise into elegant post-techno pulsations that are not unlike Pan Sonic's pioneering "Vakio" album. These rhythms with their clusters of pinprick glitchiness relentlessly clatter through out the short 26 minute program, whilst Massel builds feedback tones that shift in density, aggressiveness, and volume. As a whole, the shortened 26 minute program screeches up to a tense crescendo, plunges down to static minimalims, and rebounds through submariner ambience, all the while maintaining a continuous mix of variable rhythms. Quite nice.
Released as a part of the new "Raster-Post" series housed in nice silkscreened, fold-out cardstock folder and bound with an elastic band.
A sort of companion piece to Alva Noto's Xerrox, reviewed a few lists back, both in design and presentation, as well as sound and scope. In a past review of an older Senking record, we commented that Senking mainman�Jens Massel was restoring our faith in electronic music, and if we had lost faith since then, List would surely do the trick to bring us back into the fold.�
Malevolent and dark, from the first few seconds, it's like diving headlong into some black pool, floating through some Argento style horrific tableau, all grinding buzzing synths, and ominous low end swells, the various elements crackling and bathed in hiss, before being joined by a super minimal beat, mostly click and thump, and some haunting disembodied vocals. If we didn't know better we would think this was actually from some film, as it is, it sure as heck should be. Ultra creepy and gorgeously abject. The second track is more of the same, suffocating sonic darkness, this time with a bit more shimmer, and the briefest flares of melody amidst the corrosive rumbling.�
A few of the other tracks border on the danceable, some strange skeletal offshoot of IDM, bits of shuffle and skitter, but all stretched way out until the beats sound like pebbles tossed into a still black lake. Even then, the beats are occasionally swallowed up by huge swells of low end, or buzzing swaths of slithering synths.
Cinematic and dark, throbbing and mysterious, creepy as all get out, dance-y too, but only if you have a dancefloor in your secret lab, painted black, watched over by an army of cyborgs whose various creaks and ticks are what is creating this strange alien haunted house minimal techno. So good.�
The cd comes packaged in another striking and strange oversized Raster-Noton package, a multiple panel fold out sleeve, with die cuts holding the disc in place.
Senking hails from Cologne, yet has developed an unusual electro-dub technique which is quite the detour from the usual Cologne fair of A-Musik's dadaist humor or Kompakt's techno minimalism. Starting off with rolling bass loops and sleek black ambience, Senking's dub goes so deep as to never really have a bottom, just an enveloping stroboscopic pulsation of bass tones. Jens Massel (aka Senking) has claimed his influences to be both the Aphex Twin's early work and 'Laughing Stock' by Talk Talk, and has left his sound with a spartan abstract way of constructing his pieces. This work culls two vinyl only EPs ("Ping" and "Thaw") on one CD, and predates his amazing "Trial" album for Raster-Noton.
If the archetypal Raster-Noton style of pixel-point rhythms and clinical data-streams represent "Ping", then Senking's far more sensual approach here to the click-n-groove would indeed be "Pong". It's the deeper, weightier side of the equation, but undeniably linked to that equation. The Cologne based sound engineer Jens Massel is more interested in a thickened low-end with rumbling basslines more indebted to a slowmotion techstep cruise or more of a Demdike Stare / Ghost Box electro-haunt than the post-techno shuffle ingrained in most every Raster-Noton artist's DNA. The Raster sounds of sonar blip echo, small rhythmic points, and slashing post-acid squelches do surface as the skeletal grid of rhythm guiding the throbbing bassbin rattle, yet Massel is not averse to coupling these sounds with moody, almost noirish melodic phrases for piano, Rhodes organ, and even some vibraphone. Pong is quite an evocative downtempo record that effectively comes across as something like a Pole / Bohren & Der Club Of Gore collaboration!
The second disc is a CD-ROM with a re-engineered version of the old-school Atari game Pong as a 3-D game, that looks and feels a lot like another old-school Atari video game Tempest. We haven't played around that much with it, but at least it looks really cool!
Yet another installment in Raster-Noton's similarly sleeved (simple black and silver diecut digipaks, quite nice) and sonically consistent Raster.Post series. Voulme four is the work of Senking and is another beauty (like the Komet elsewhere on this list), helping restore our faith in modern electronica, a genre that has been getting less and less fascinating with every compilation and same-sounding record. Unlike the warm dreaminess of the Komet, this is a much colder beast altogether, more ghostly and spare, chilly and skeletal, with skittery rhythms, glitching and shuffling across an epic expanse of blackness, and rhythmic pulses and ribcage-rattling swells of bass throb supporting almost-melodies that are barely there. Think a more clinical, more abstract, less dub-obsessed Pole, and you start to get the idea. Hard to say why this is so pleasing, but it really is. Quite possibly my favorite electronica record of the year!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Raster's conceptualism of electronic, almost utopian purity has some interesting theoretical leanings, but the cold minimalism of Raster/Noton succeeds more often than not through the novelty of subtle melodies and interesting rhythmic patterns. While most of the critical acclaim for Raster / Noton is deserved, they are undoubtably purveyors of The New; and Senking's "Trial" is no different.
With techno and dub each getting the digital deconstruction in the respective work of Thomas Brinkmann and Pole, Senking's work has been emerging as the reductivist reclamation of electro, sounding much like a clinical atomization of Andrea Parker or Depth Charge. Senking's deep grooves of thudding sub-bass plod boldly through the Raster / Noton signature sound of skittering digital errata. Certainly recommended to the already converted... and definitely a good start for any one interested in such things.
Senor Coconut is back with a new set of party favorites. His endearing covers over the years have included everyone from Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra, and Sade. This time out he's on a trip around the globe with each song being a cover of an artist from somewhere different in the world. But his eye is clearly on catchy and mostly familiar pop music (Eurythmics, Daft Punk, Telex, etc). Still totally fun and playful but not quite at the level of pure joy and innovative reinterpreting that his prior releases demonstrated. It kind of feels a little phoned in, but still filled with enough winners to keep us smiling.
Few artists' music can guarantee to brighten your days and nights the way Atom Heart (and his numerous aliases) can. Any new release from this fella is received with a huge aQ grin! If you dug the recent Yellow Magic Fever tribute from the always deliriously delightful Senor Coconut and Los Negritos' Speed-Merengue Mega-Mix, you know what we're talking about and you definitely won't wanna miss these freshly reissued earlier Senor Coconut releases including this, his awesome Kraftwerk tribute! Even if you got 'em the first time around, heck, we're sure you know somebody who'd benefit from this festive treat!
Back in 2000, we had this to say about El Baile Aleman: Senor Coconut is actually the guy better known as techno/electronica artist Atom Heart. He's moved to Chile and gone all Latin and groovy on us. However, all the songs on this (high-) concept album are Kraftwerk covers! So this joins a long line of weird and wonderful tributes to Kraftwerk. Soon we'll be able to have a whole bin at Aquarius dedicated to such endeavors: the Balenescu Quartet one, the Terre Thaemlitz one, the one with all the Slovenian acts, the Japanese import one, the Miami Bass one, etc. etc. Anyways, so incredibly executed down to the tiniest detail, this one will sit at the top of the heap! Super duper fun.
It's been awhile since we last heard from Uwe Schmidt's latin playboy alter ego Senor Coconut. Not at all surprising with all of his other personas and projects in the works - Atom Heart, Mambotur, Los Samplers, Geeez'n'Gosh, Roger Tubesound, Disk Orchestra, Midisport and the list goes on! But at long last, here's a small vinyl dose. No Kraftwerk covers here, these are three versions of his effervescent track "Electrolatino" (one of them a DJ Rodriguez remix). Nice.
Few artists' music can guarantee to brighten your days and nights the way Atom Heart (and his numerous aliases) can. Any new release from this fella is received with a huge aQ grin! If you dug the recent Yellow Magic Fever tribute from the always deliriously delightful Senor Coconut and Los Negritos' Speed-Merengue Mega-Mix, you know what we're talking about and you definitely won't wanna miss these freshly reissued earlier Senor Coconut releases including his awesome Kraftwerk tribute El Baile Aleman! Even if you got 'em the first time around, heck, we're sure you know somebody who'd benefit from this festive treat!
Back in 2000, we had this to say about Gran Baile Con Senor Coconut: Mambo-electronica-fuckery from German cum Chilean Atom Heart. Much more skittery and abrasive than his more recent Kraftwerk covers record, really innovative work that has more staying power without that gimmick. Think V/VM meets Stock, Hausen & Walkman, meets Rancho Relaxo All-Stars. Heavily entrenched in the drill & bass laptop / breakbeat damage employed by Aphex Twin and early Squarepusher, but using samples culled from the rich Cuban traditions of Cha Cha and Mambo. Highly recommended.
A German electronic artist living in Chile doing samba versions of Japanese electro-pop pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra. Well it would only sound absurd if it were anyone else but the ever so loveable Senor Coconut. With him, it's a no brainer. After paying homage to Kraftwerk on the now classic and sadly out of print disc El Baile Aleman, and exploring all sorts of covers on his instant party hit "Fiesta Songs". This carries on in the same fun samba-with-a-twist spirit of those recordings while actually featuring all three members of Yellow Magic Orchestra at different points throughout the record. Also making appearances are members of Mouse on Mars, Dee-Lite and Nouvelle Vague. Senor Coconut has proven himself to be some sort of a hipster Les Baxter for his generation. Appropriating other musical cultures, with tongue in cheek and earnest respect living side by side. Most of all he continues to provide some playful fun to a world that is often all too serious for its own good.
For those of you who were hopin' for a new Senor Coconut album proper, well, you're just gonna have to keep on waiting 'cause while this cd certainly has many of the Coconut earmarks -- cheeky cover art, playful Latin booty beats, chirpy electronic melodies, kooky samples -- it's actually a compilation of tracks put together by Senor Coconut (aka Uwe Schmidt, aka Atom Heart). Nonetheless, it's pretty darn great and sure to please his fans (and fans of that recent Rio Baile Funk comp Essay also put out too) 'cause he's got really good taste and knows his stuff! This effervescent 17-track comp is a super duper delight. In particular, be sure to check out the tracks by Os Carrascos and Los Pibes Chorros, as well as the one by Senor Coconut himself. Recommended!
Uwe Schmidt returns with another Senor Coconut record to tickle our ears. If you're not familiar with the chameleonlike Schmidt, these are just a few of the other aliases he's recorded as: Los Samplers (Perez Prado drill n' bass), XXX (Atom with Chilean rapper Tea Time), Midisport (Brazilian samba gets the midi hatchet), Bund Deutscher Programmierer (refried laptops a la Mille Plateaux), The Roger Tubesound Ensemble ("digital jazz" in Atom's own words). Wow!
Senor Coconut is where Schmidt works out his love for samba, the cha cha cha, merengue, etc, and to make it more fun for him, he likes to cover the most unlikely tracks. Here we've got tracks by Sade, the Doors, Elton John, even Jean Michel Jarre. Unfortunately there's also a Michael Jackson cover ("Beat It") which, of course, instantly calls to mind Weird Al and now I can't seem to listen to this record anymore without picturing the videos for 'Eat It', "Fat' or 'Another One Rides The Bus'. Very fun, but you might want to start with the Senor's Kraftwerk tribute, El Baile Aleman. That one we can recommend start to finish.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Senor Coconut is actually the guy better known as techno/electronica artist Atom Heart. He's moved to Chile and gone all Latin and groovy on us. However, all the songs on this (high-) concept album are Kraftwerk covers! So this joins a long line of weird and wonderful tributes to Kraftwerk. Soon we'll be able to have a whole bin at Aquarius dedicated to such endeavors: the Balenescu Quartet one, the Terre Thaemlitz one, the one with all the Slovenian acts, the Japanese import one, the Miami Bass one, etc. etc. Anyway, this is pretty fun.
The return of one of the most fucked up rappers we know, whose last record was a highlight of the always-excellent WordSound label! Between songs like "Chunky Buds" and "Dope Man", Sensational's second album is much more of a proclamation of getting really stoned and staying really stoned for as long as possible. Somewhere in between all of this pot smoking, Sensational manages to somehow record a really great record of brittle, super slow hip hop and utterly mental words of wisdom mumbled-with-a-mouthful-of-marbles as opposed to rapped with any coherence. Needless to say, Sensational may very well be Aquarius' favourite rapper (yes, more so than Kool Keith). Recommended!
Though we at AQ love the mumbling, narcoticized lo-fi rapping of Sensational, three albums of the same production -- sloppy beats with Sensational mixed way too high in the mix -- was a bit much. The ongoing argument here has always been which of his first two
AQ's favorite rapper (next to Ice Cube) returns (following one 12" single on Matador and anticipating another) with his third full-length album for equally AQ-appreciated label WordSound. His lazy, stoned style is still causing maximum confusion, as his words wander amongst the deliberately lo-fi and disjointed beats found here. He's the master of hazy, blunted, repetitive raps, liberally sprinkled with strange non-sequiturs. If you're new to Sensational you should perhaps start with his "Loaded With Power" debut, but this'll give you the flavor too.
Former member of the Jungle Brothers goes solo, sounds like Wu-Tang with a head injury!
AQ's favorite mumble-mouthed rapper, the oft-surreal Sensational, is back, and back on his original label Wordsound after releases on Matador and Mike Patton's Ipecac.
Wordsound is also the home of another AQ-fave, Spectre, and Sensational shares Spectre's style of rumbling, murky, deep, gritty home-brewed production (the Ill Saint twists the knobs on track 11, "Super Styling"). Sensational's lazy drawl is nicely matched by the dubby echo effects of the music and his doubled-up vocal track. It's the aural equivalent of the clouds of pot smoke swirling around the studio. Sensational's stoned stream of unconciousness lyrics are sometimes retardedly brilliant, and he never lets a nonsensically silly non sequitur get in the way of his flow -- it's all about the flow, the repetition, the layering. He doesn't have to be rhyming -- he often isn't really -- a Sensational track still makes you nod your head and go, huh. As Evil Nice says on track two, Sensational is "hotter than a fucking...missile". Huh.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
AQ's favorite rapper (well, up there with Cube and Dr. Octagon) drops a 12" on the super-dope Matador label, after several brilliant full-lengths for WordSound. Two new songs, with obligatory vocal/instrumental/acapella versions each, of Sensational's super stoned and weirded-out hiphop.
Chunka Bliss is back!!! When Sensational's Loaded With Power came out several years back it was a huge hit here at Aquarius. It made our heads hurt it was so bafflingly fucked up. But man, that was a loooong time ago -- long before the AQ list machine began grinding full force. When you look at the website, the description of Loaded With Power -- entered ex post facto -- is cursory at best. Truth is, we hadn't, nor still have, heard another hip hop artist torture the mic so well. He's the outsider artist of hip hop, dumbfounding all comers with his stoned non-sequiturs and stilted, arythmmic rhyming. God bless Kool Keith, we still love the Octagonecologyst record, but he's in a different league. We can see what street he's coming down and when he's going to make a left turn. Kool Keith is the sort of "crazy" in the same way that your friend who gets really drunk and puts a lamp shade on their head is crazy. Sensational however would be the guy that would come to a party, sit in the corner and make a lamp shade out of cigarrette butts and bottle caps. And somehow it would function in place of the one that Kool Keith was still wearing on his head. Sensational throws so much nonsense at you, that you're still trying to digest the first line before he's gone off on three other random tangents. We've figured that the only way you can keep up with Sensational is to get really, really stoned. Weed is the equivalent of the Babel Fish from Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy with which one is able to follow along with Sensational. Problem is, once you've come down from it you lose the ability to explain. We'd get baked at work so that we could write more about it, but we don't want to freak out straight edge Andee!
We first got a teaser for this long promised full length matchup way back in 2002 on the Spectre record Parts Unknown, which featured super stoned rapper Sensational on 4 tracks, and it was solid gold, Spectre's creepy ominous dubscapes, and Sensational's mushmouthed mumble, twisted, druggy, off kilter and so good.
So who should come by Aquarius just now, but Spectre himself, dropping off this latest disc, a full length showdown / match up / tag team, and it's just as good as those 4 tracks from way back when. Seems like Spectre has dialed back the sinister, instead crafting some very Sensational appropriate tracks, loopy and loping, twisted and stuttery, muted and abstract, clipped and cracking, the perfect bed for Sensational to lay down his drugged out stream of consciousness fffffflow, woozy, warped and warbly, strings sing, horns bleat, a skeletal beat skitters, weaving an almost Hitchcock sounding backdrop for some drawled genius. Slowed down vocals, demonic and growly (remember those from Spectre records?) ooze over some crunchy stabs and some hiccupping beats, lazer fire from some sci-fi movie wraps around a hazy Wu-worthy should sample, looped Led Zep gives way to pizzicatto strings and looped birdsong, Spectre has always been a beat master, and this disc proves he's only gotten better, how come he's not doing beats for the big guys, if we were Kanye or Jay-Z or 50 Cent and heard this shit, we'd get Spectre up to the compound and get him crafting beats PRONTO. And along those same lines, why does everyone want T-Pain and Lil' Wayne to guest on their records? Hell, can you imagine some MTV hip hop jam breaking down into a cough syrup trudge and Sensational strolling out rapping some unintelligable weirdness into a pair of headphones? If only...
Amid the constant, welcome flood of reissued Sun Ra treasures, this is certainly an oddity (and that's saying something). Apparently Sun Ra (who plays Hammond B-3 on here), Marshall Allen, John Gilmore and other Arkestra greats decided to cash in on
Dunno why we've taken so long to get around to listing this... not 'cause it's not cool. It is! Our favorite stoned (really stoned) sounding rapper teams up with a Japanese electronic noise dude!!
Spacey, synth-based prog/psych from the early '70s (or whenever!) doesn't get much better than this. The trio Sensations' Fix captured something pretty special on their tripped out, ultra-underground sounding debut, originally released by Italian Polydor in 1974 and now reissued on vinyl for the first time, by local archival label Superior Viaduct. While it sounds like it could have been made in a synth-stuffed bunker in Berlin, or somewhere in the pastoral English countryside (outside, under the stars, towards the break of dawn), this was actually recorded in an suburban basement in the USA, on a 4-track, by an Italian musician, Franco Falsini (the composer, credited with "guitars and synthesizers"), and two Americans he recruited, Richard Ursillo ("bass guitars and electronic pedals") and Keith Edwards ("drums and percussion"). Though for much of this, Mr. Edwards sits out, as the mysterious floating electronics and blissful strum of Fragments Of Light are ofttimes purely ethereal, only occasionally lashed to propulsive beats, and even those are may be machine-made, with what sounds like live drumming on really only one of the tracks (however, he's apparently the guy that turned Falsini on to LSD, so he should get some musical credit for that).
Song titles include "Nuclear War In Your Brain", "Music Without Gravity", "Music Is Painting In The Air" and "Telepathic Children"; all seem quite appropriate, even the cryptic ones we don't understand. The drifty, druggy, echoing synthed-out weirdness of this, however, is balanced (or, rather, enhanced) by Falsini's knack for wonderful melodies, that's the key to this varied and delightful basement-recorded, often melancholic Minimoog fantasia.
As you may recall, last year we were super excited to highlight a Sensations' Fix anthology, Music Is Painting In The Air, put out by the RVNG label. We mentioned then how we've been longtime fans of this band's hard-to-find debut record, which we hoped hoped hoped would someday be reissued in its entirety (the anthology included just a few tracks from Fragments Of Light, in alternate versions). So, big ups to Superior Viaduct for making this happen. Man, we're not engineers so we wouldn't know about the superiority of their viaducts, but we do know the label's choice of records to reissue certainly is superior! Third aQuarius Record Of The Week this year already - Craig Leon, Devo, now Sensations' Fix! And, there's *another* great SV reish reviewed this list too, Heldon's Interface - and we also just got in their lp of the Solaris soundtrack, too!
In our review of the RVNG collection we said some stuff we may as well more-or-less repeat 'cause it applies here completely. SF's electronic-based driftworks have a quite lovely "pop" side to 'em too, sometimes - while mostly instrumental, a few tracks do have gentle, breathy Robert Wyatt-ish singing to go with the hazy, meandering, meditative atmospheres. It's definitely not the usual sort of quasi-operatic, over-the-top, classically influenced Italian prog that we're used to (and love), from bands like Il Balletto Di Bronzo, Le Orme, or Osanna, no. Also fairly far from the sinister soundtrack funk of Goblin. Sensations' Fix are different, having more in common with the kosmiche krautrock electronics of the era - such as Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Cluster, Popul Vuh, Michael Rother, Ashra, A.R. & Machines, and You (among others who came before and after). They also may have indeed been influenced by the Canterbury sound of bands like the Soft Machine, so one Italian prog act we could compare them to would be Picchio Dal Pozzo. We could also compare 'em to a kinder, gentler version of Richard Pinhas & Heldon, from France, with a similar futuristic comingling of synthesizer and effected guitar, for sure (and thus is makes sense Superior Viaduct would release this simultaneously with the aforementioned Heldon lp too). Also the Heldon comparison brings up another big influence - Robert Fripp. Indeed, this record bears the inscription: "Dear Robert, you'll be glad to know that the heavenly music organisation is here too", a reference to the track "The Heavenly Music Corporation" on the A side of Fripp & Eno's No Pussyfooting album from '73. Oh, and on the surprisingly sunshiney vocal track "Do You Love Me?", we get a bit of an early Yes vibe.
So, if you want to something to enjoy that's just sooooooo very cosmic and dreamy and melodic, this is highly recommended!!
Hurrah! We've long been waiting for the opportunity to list something by Italy's Sensations' Fix. A long time ago, we encountered their debut album Fragments Of Light (1974) and were immediately smitten (it also was a great "secret weapon" to use whenever we were called upon to DJ a set of vintage psych/prog music or what have you). But reissues of anything by this spacey synth-based '70s trio have been seemingly impossible to find. We were excited, however, not too long ago when the Emeralds-approved Spectrum Spools label added a vinyl reissue of the 1975 solo album by Sensations' Fix leader Franco Falsini to their catalog of amazing unearthed cosmic electronic artifacts. That record, Cold Nose, or Naso Fredo, we described (well, raved about) as a gorgeously cinematic longform take on psychedelic new age music, a spiralling composition of EMS and Moog washes and floating guitar lines that reminds us of krautrock legends Michael Rother and Manuel Gottsching, with stratospheric guitar leads over organically pulsating synth treatments, constantly shifting and shimmering. Sounds good right?
That brings us to this very welcome archival double cd (or triple lp) set released on the obscure electronics oriented RVNG label, featuring 30 tracks taken from Falsini's tape vaults, including several alternate mixes of material from Cold Nose, alongside alternate versions of songs that appeared on all five albums released by his band Sensations' Fix circa 1974-77. Plus a number of previously unreleased tracks from those recording sessions as well. Sensations' Fix and Falsini recorded everything in a home studio, on a TEAC 3340 4-track machine, so fortunately Falsini still has access to all these productions and was able to personally select and mix the tracks for this RVNG anthology release. Especially fortunate considering that apparent record label business BS has thus far prevented the individual, original Sensations' Fix albums themselves from coming out again under Falsini's guidance, though we can still hope for full reissues someday. Regardless, this is a wonderful and extensive sonic glimpse into the spacey output of Sensations' Fix, if occasionally therefore somewhat lo-fi.
The blissfulness of Cold Nose is too part of the Sensations' Fix sound, but also there's some krauty rock grooves (some sampled by DJ Shadow, we learned from the liner notes) alongside the electronic-based driftworks. And they have a quite lovely "pop" side to 'em too - while mostly instrumental, some tracks do have gentle, Robert Wyatt-ish singing to go with the hazy, meandering, meditative atmospheres. It's definitely not the usual sort of quasi-operatic, over-the-top, classically influenced Italian prog that we're used to (and love), from bands like Il Balletto Di Bronzo, Le Orme, or Osanna, no. Also fairly far from the sinister soundtrack funk of Goblin. Rather, Sensations' Fix have more in common with the kosmiche krautrock electronics of the era, and also may have indeed been influenced by the Canterbury sound of bands like the Soft Machine, so one Italian prog act we could compare them to would be Picchio Dal Pozzo. We could also compare 'em to a kinder, gentler version of Richard Pinhas & Heldon, from France, with a similar futuristic co-mingling of synth (MiniMoog) and effected guitar, for sure.
Music Is Painting In The Air is handsomely packaged, with a booklet full of those aforementioned liner notes presented in both English and Italian, written by RVNG's Joshua da Costa (who like us was also smitten by Fragments Of Light when he first heard it) and Franco Falsini himself. These notes, while not removing all the mystery of Sensations' Fix, reveal much interesting information... like that prior to SF, Falsini was in a "space-blues" band called Flying with Dave Anderson of Hawkwind & Amon Duul. Or that their debut Fragments Of Light actually consisted of basement demos recorded not in Florence Italy, but Alexandria, Virginia, where Falsini had temporarily moved with his wife, who was American. Which is where Falsini found SF's drummer, also an American, and also the guy who turned him on to LSD...
Sensorband - a trio comprised of Zbigniew Karkoski, Edwin van der Heide, and Atau Tanaka - is interested in the incorporation of interactive technologies within a context of experimental electronic music. While the hardware incorpates neural interfaces (Tanaka's BioMuse translates the electric signals of the body into digital data) and physical interfacing (Karkowski and van der Heide have built instruments that alter pitch based on proximity and distance in any given space), the net result is an album of slowly phase shifting pure tonalities "considered the missing point between The Hafler Trio, Ryoji Ikeda, and no-techno Pan Sonic."
Collaboration spearheaded by Zbigniew Karkowski and compiled from performances in Tokyo, London and Berlin. It featuring performances by KK Null, Tetsuo Furudate and 17 other musicians edited into one intense track that builds with caustic fury into a wall of sumptuous noise.
Before they became a crappy (but very successful!) downer Metallica wanna-be band, Finland's Sentenced were an amazing melodic death metal outfit, and Amok was one of their best records, combining NWOBHM-influenced songwriting with their deathly attack, for
