We've said it before and we'll go ahead and say it again: Fans of Young Marble Giants, Marine Girls, Raincoats, Velvet Underground, check out these Detroit rock minimalists! Their music often sounds like it's from 'back in the day' (circa late '70s/early-mid '80s), but they're not. Aliccia Berg and co.'s fourth album Musik just came out and is mostly comprised of their usual sweet summery folksy tunes. Think: cozying up under a patchwork quilt rather than walloping your pals in a pillow fight.
That said, we'd add that this time it sounds like they've developed a little chip on their collective shoulder as there are also a few edgier post-punk-y numbers amongst the lilting pop tunes.
This is the third full length from these four sweetie pies from Michigan. Gretchen, Aliccia, Marcie and Leagh make dreamy, retro and folky songs with sweet girl vocal harmonies. The guitar sound is soft and pretty. Low key and unassuming, this is quite
Another twisted gem from UK horror movie vinyl soundtrack reissue label Death Waltz, this one the infamous Roger Corman slasher exploitation flick, The Slumber Party Massacre, originally released in 1982, and initially reviled and ridiculed, but later, it would become a cult classic, due in no small part to the fact that it was written by a feminist writer Rita Me Brown, and directed by a woman (Amy Holden Jones, who would go on to write and direct much more mainstream fare, like Indecent proposal, Mystic Pizza, etc.) and was considered by some to be a feminist parody of the classic slasher flick. But classic slasher flick it is, lots of scantily clad co-eds, power tool torture, gratuitous nudity, and over the top gore. The soundtrack also is a strange surprise, the whole thing composed and performed on a primitive Casio keyboard, purchased at a Macy's by composer Ralph Jones, augmented by a single cymbal and some wine glasses, the resulting score is fantastic, haunting and ominous, dark and noisy, creepy and cosmic, hits of John Carpenter (of course), but also Perrey & Kingsley, the sound by turns playful and bloopy, droned out and sinister. A trippy sonic fantasia, that blends kosmische drift with classic soundtrack tropes, noisy experimentation, with a sound that impossibly emulates a huge church organ, removed from the movie, the score could be some trippy Umberto style modern retro homage, some limited home brewed cd-r, fantastic stuff for sure, and like all good scores/soundtracks, has us hankering to see the movie again.
And like all the Death Waltz reissues, the packaging is fantastic, the vinyl is pressed on heavy, milky clear vinyl, the jacket is a super thick tip-on jacket, inside is a full color booklet with liner notes from Jones, and artist Luke Insect, who provided the new cover art, as well as a big poster of said cover art. So cool!
As much as we try to not judge records by their covers, sometimes you just have to, especially when the record is called Slumberwood, and features some strange blurred painting of a cartoon-ish dragon, in what looks like some sort of psychedelic forest, the name scrawled in fuzzy golden letters that look like they're made of light. And the record is called Yawling Night Songs, and it sort of looks like that cartoon dragon just may be 'Yawling'. Plus there's a sticker that compares Slumberland to Werner Herzog, Coil, Nurse With Wound, Big Star and This Heat. That's some serious praise, but the more we listen to this, the more we're convinced that maybe it's not all hype. From the first track we were smitten, a noisy, swirling chunk of slow building psychedelia, mysterious voices, wild distorted guitars, simple krautlike percussion, swells of cymbal shimmer, thick rib cage rattling bass thrum, feedback everywhere, we would have been just fine if the rest of the record had sounded exactly the same. Instead, the sound shifts constantly, the second track is all weird echoey voices, strangled melodies, all floating in clouds of reverb, until the song kicks in proper, and the drums pound and the guitars grind and snarl, creating a sort of unhinged, speaking in tongues, dark forest kraut folk, while the track after sets hushed crystalline steel string guitars over distant wheezing shimmer, and flecks of electronic glitch and squelch, barely audible, more like some sort of sonic fireflies drifting in this sun dappled glade of a song. And so it goes, weirdly bluesy one second (complete with harmonica), meandering post rock the next, rustic almost roots rock psychedelia one second, murky hazy pulsing druggy dronemusic the next, before finishing off with what kind of sounds like some sort of looped, cyclical indie rock jangle.
Too bad we have so few of these, cuz folks around here have gone a little crazy for this. Sadly, WE ONLY HAVE SIX COPIES, the label no longer exists, which means we can NOT get any more of these, so grab one before they are gone...
Windy's new favorite record. After a slew of singles and remixes for a variety of respected labels including Cheap and Mego, the Swedish duo Sluta Leta release their American debut on Miami's trustworthy Chocolate Industries label. Man, there's only four songs on this EP but they're SO GOOD it makes me wanna get everything Sluta Leta has released. Their sound has been described as Throbbing Gristle meets Cibo Matto. I don't really hear the Cibo Matto part of it except in Sluta Leta's irreverent inclusion of sounds suggesting such disparate influences as noir gangster thrillers to entire-car-throbbing heaving bass and lounge music. In fact, it's in the way that Sluta Leta fucks with genres that makes the music sound so good. Abstract low end rumbles. Weird horns and sleazy ice queen vocals. Shuffling staticky digital breaks make for a lot of on-the-beat stops and starts, done so seamlessly and rhythmically that you find yourself unconsciously moving to beats that *aren't there*, that they've dropped out of the mix. Yeah, it's that good.
It's been simply ages since we last heard from Sluta Leta. 'Twas way back in 2000 when If You Like Champagne On Ice? came out and pleased our ears (it was a particular fave of Windy's). Now four years later what are these folks up to? Very much the same dynamic, eclectic multipersonality music!
A sampling of just how wide Sluta Leta's stylistic pendulum swings? Track 9 "Super Swede" swoons along with super sultry female vocals atop accordion and electronic allsorts. Then, on the following track called "Wirbla" Sluta Leta delights with bouncy playful yet severely squidgy digital goo.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We'd been hearing a lot about this here fella (and how could you forget a name like Micah Blue Smaldone?) but until now we'd never actually heard him, and we're please to say, this stuff is pretty dang great. Yet another steel string wrangler tossing his hat into the already crowded neo-Appalachia ring, but if it's good there's always room for more.
Smaldone's M.O. is not an unfamiliar one, dreamy laid back steel string guitar, jaunty melodies, deft fingerpicking, dreamy melancholy arrangements, but Smaldone's tracks have a distinctly old timey twang to them. Not quite Vaudevillian, but that sort of dusty old crackly 78 sort of feel. Plus, unlike most of his sonic contemporaries, he sings. And quite nicely too. A crooning, sometimes cracking sort of classic country voice. Warm and familiar, but definitely distinctive. Add some record crackle and some tape hiss and it wouldn't be tough to convince us that this was a reissue of some long lost sixties Takoma lp! Fans of Jack Rose, John Fahey, Robbie Basho and the like will totally love Mr. Smaldone.
Super deluxe thick cover, some seriously heavy vinyl, and a cool, hand screened lyric book insert.
We tried so hard to get our hands on the 12" Small Black released last year to review on the list, with no success, which was a bummer as it was really one of the best slabs of wax to come out of the then just blossoming chill-wave scene. Luckily those songs made it to the ears of a good range of folks via blogs and college radio, and Jagjaguwar were smart enough to sign the band and release this, their debut full length.
New Chain is brimming with awesome waves of Hacienda inspired pop, equal parts dream and dance. One of the things that has been making Small Black stand out over lots of their chill-wave friends is the fact that they are actually a full band, able to pull of live what they capture so well on their recordings. In fact lots of folks we know who saw them open on tour for Washed Out agreed that Small Black gave a way better live performance. They sit right near the top of the crop with folks like Washed Out, Neon Indian and Nite Jewel, in delivering lo-fi soaked sounds with such great hooks and inviting melodies. Hazy and blissful pop that hits the spot!
It's a fucking shame we have so few copies of this cassette. Small Cruel Party is a project from the mysterious Key Ransome, who once lived in Seattle and may now live in France; and unfortunately, we've grown to appreciate his work well after the bulk of his material has disappeared from distribution. Field recordings, found object manipulation, and minimalist blasts of noise-drone are the common tools of Small Cruel Party, paralleling those used by Joe Colley, Coelacanth, Giancarlo Toniutti, and many others championed here at Aquarius; but the Small Cruel Party application of his restricted elements (often no more than three or four layers of distinct sounds) comes across as the audio equivalent to a Bruce Naumann video piece. At first, it seems that not a lot happens in a Small Cruel Party piece, but as the elements slowly emerge into view, the sounds become wholly engaging yet mysteriously distant. This tape collects a bunch of material originally issued on cassette back in the late '80s, including some collaborative work with Abo from Yeast Culture. With any luck we'll be able to stock more of these and make a much bigger stink about these amazing sounds. Small Cruel Party deserves it.
An obscure project with an obscure agenda. Small Cruel Party was the brilliant / difficult sound project of Key Ransome, who operated in and around the Incubator warehouse in Seattle from the early '90s up until he left for Paris around 2003 when he became a vegetarian chef and shed much of the contacts with his former life. But back during his most prolific periods, Small Cruel Party managed over 30 releases (including a disproportionate amount of seven inches) and contributed to nearly as many compilations. But since he left, nothing. The precipitous cessation of Small Cruel Party can appear to have all of the trappings of Maurizio Bianchi's demonstrative retirement back in the early '80s, but where Bianchi might have cracked under the existential weight of his depressive electronics, Small Cruel Party may have transcended itself out of existence. In a rare piece of text accompanying the almost Dada-ist titles of his pieces, Ransome speculated that Small Cruel Party "... focused on the inherent mysterious and beautiful quality of sound itself, with the emphasis on noninstrumental sound sources, the source itself not being readily apparent. Work generally involves manipulation of physical objects in acoustic space and a great deal of concentrated activity. Even in pieces involving dense sound at high volume the resultant effect is one of intense calm." Even as one hears the haptic sounds from rocks, sand, bells, scribblings, strange whisperings, electrical hums, sodden field recordings, and barren drones, the raw sounds are given over to a ceremonial austerity whose liturgy is completely unknowable. The work is certainly informed by minimalism, but more from a context of sculptural physicality through the barest of materials instead of the musical forms of Phill Niblock or LaMonte Young. A Small Cruel Party composition is often just two or three sonic elements, with Ransome creating subtle shifts in the orbits of those elliptical sounds or mustering an ectoplasmic glow around a formless tone that ominously lifts out of nowhere to the foreground.
Accident In Substance is a wholly impressive document, collecting a bunch of those compilation and seven-inch tracks and presenting them in chronological order based on when they were created (and not necessarily when they were released). The earliest piece "Even The Lives Of Our Grandfathers" may be the most musical with a hypnotic, Terry Riley-esque repetition on a couple of piano notes, Ransome layers such with scabrous textures and breathy whispered utterances devoid of any specific words. It's eerie, beautiful, and sublime. While Ransome eschews the melody on every other track since, that haunted, hidden sensibility strengthens throughout his body of work. Thickets of acoustic noise and thudding rumbles find strange bedfellows with a chorus of handbells on the dramatically intense track "Home Borders" all of which cascade like a grim kaleidoscope of urban refuse. Those same bells blossom into a Ligetti-like swarm of linear dissonace on the blindingly glistening track "Iron Moment." Stuttering electrical pulses murmur as distant beacons amidst the field recordings of unknown actions in dank warehouse spaces on the "Second Honor" and "Ceremonies of Memory." The sense of mystery that hangs on Small Cruel Party's recordings is really something to behold. Our own Jim Haynes claims Small Cruel Party as a huge influence on his rusted sound-art, to the point where one of the tracks on his 2009 album Sever is an homage to SCP. Accident In Substance is required listening for anybody whose been smitten by AMM, John Cage, Daniel Menche, Zoviet France, Organum, Loren Chasse, and Steve Roden. Yeah. It's that fucking good.
Small Cruel Party turns up again, just a few weeks after the release of the impeccable 3cd anthology An Accident In Substance released by Harbinger Sound. As we mentioned in the review of that set, Small Cruel Party was the obscurant sound-art project for then Seattle-based Key Ransome, who applied the grandeur of minimalism to the sodden detritus of his surroundings, creating a brilliant amalgamation of texture, noise, drone, atmosphere, tension, bombast, industrial euphoria, and mystical threat. Three Simple Eyes Of The Insect Ancestor was an early cassette by Small Cruel Party, released by Apraxia in 1992 in a package smeared with wax and oversized sticks that would have surely fallen off merely by looking at it sideways. In a rare piece of text accompanying these recordings (found on the Kaon website, and not the cd), Ransome describes a considerable difference in the sound quality between the original cassette and remastered cd, the latter of which negated the former's overblown mulched sound from faulty replication providing 'clarity' for the murky sounds found within. Ransome admits a lack of memory when it comes to the recording of the first track "Crowd Of Small Things" - but the dank atmosphere that hangs on a mysteriously motorized droning erratically hums amidst a slow arcing crescendo of ever-increasing tactile crunches. If anything, it's an existentially bleak soundtrack to an environmental disaster, with the damp forests of the Pacific NW suffocating under the slow ooze of a bunker oil spill. The second track "Tank Ecstasy Between Floors" features recordings make with the members of Yeast Culture in the reverberant stairwell of the Seattle Public Library. Those huge thumps and klangs from the SCP/YC industrial pipe fights are set against a shimmering stream of aquatic field recordings processed with a dreamy delay & reverb combination. In the final mix, Ransome balances the menace of those heavy-handed, thunderous booms in the stairwell with the rapturously hypnotic calm of the watery recordings. A classic Small Cruel Party strategy that's as brilliant as ever.
A functionally difficult proposition, Small Cruel Party is the defunct sound-art moniker of US ex-pat Key Ransome, who generated a considerable amount of material back in the late '80s and early '90s when he was residing in the Pacific Northwest. His post-industrial / phenomenologically centered work is always tactile with the scraping of found objects, the grinding of wires, the cascade of bells, the whir of some unseen turbine, the rustling of abject garbage strewn in a sodden warehouse. Very little electronic processing seem to go into the whatever Small Cruel Party happens to be recording, just some overdubbing here and there maybe. Unroof The House Of The Fishes was originally a cassette from 1993 on the seminal if obscure Japanese label G.R.O.S.S. curated by Akifumi Nakajima aka Aube. Both sides of this record operate as two distinctly different pieces, with one side quietly rumbling with somatic gurgles, nocturnal thrumming, haunted chanting, and the din of cargo ship engines echoing through abandoned warehouses. It's not far from Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing, though far more ominous and creepy. The otherside is quite a bit more tortured with layering metal-on-metal grinding and deep resonant frequencies with the near constant churn of cobalt black textures scraping against each other. Here, Small Cruel Party's nearest neighbor would be the more scabrous moments of Organum or perhaps the anti-mnemonic compositions of intertwined frequency and texture from Giancarlo Toniutti. Remastered for vinyl by Scott Konzelmann (aka Chop Shop) and features new artwork by Ransome.
Yet another pseudonym for the insanely prolific Matt Wand, one half of Stock, Hausen & Walkman and Hot Air head honcho. Small Rocks is a bubbly squeaky beat monster that just might send Mouse On Mars, Atom (tm) and even Blectum From Blechdom running home
Another fantastic lost score rescued from obscurity by Trunk Records, this one a fantastic batch of flute driven jazziness, the score to The Small World Of Sammy Lee, a British classic we're told, but also one that's fairly racy, receiving an 'X Certificate', which is maybe similar to an X rating in the US, we haven't seen the movie, but the liner notes tell us it involves lots of pimps and strippers and thugs. Although the music is actually anything but racy, instead, it's dreamy and melodic, soft focus and serene. We had reviewed another Kenny Graham release on Trunk, which we described as sounding like Moondog recorded by Joe Meek, but this is much more traditional. Playful at times, lilting and lovely at others, occasionally tense and brooding, once in a while with a bit of an exotica vibe, those moments rife with wild percussion, tangled guitars, wild drumming (check out "Four O'Clock Hop"), definitely the most overtly soundtracky number here, one track has some melancholic violin, which gives that song a sort of gypsy folk vibe, but the bulk of the record is slow and smokey, lots of flute, and vibes, skittery percussion, understated bass lines, plenty of horns, subtle strings, all woven into some dreamy, sixties jazziness, that besides getting played on repeat quite a bit, has us really wanting to check out the film!
Another fantastic lost score rescued from obscurity by Trunk Records, this one a fantastic batch of flute driven jazziness, the score to The Small World Of Sammy Lee, a British classic we're told, but also one that's fairly racy, receiving an 'X Certificate', which is maybe similar to an X rating in the US, we haven't seen the movie, but the liner notes tell us it involves lots of pimps and strippers and thugs. Although the music is actually anything but racy, instead, it's dreamy and melodic, soft focus and serene. We had reviewed another Kenny Graham release on Trunk, which we described as sounding like Moondog recorded by Joe Meek, but this is much more traditional. Playful at times, lilting and lovely at others, occasionally tense and brooding, once in a while with a bit of an exotica vibe, those moments rife with wild percussion, tangled guitars, wild drumming (check out "Four O'Clock Hop"), definitely the most overtly soundtracky number here, one track has some melancholic violin, which gives that song a sort of gypsy folk vibe, but the bulk of the record is slow and smokey, lots of flute, and vibes, skittery percussion, understated bass lines, plenty of horns, subtle strings, all woven into some dreamy, sixties jazziness, that besides getting played on repeat quite a bit, has us really wanting to check out the film!
Amongst soundtrack composers, Michael Small was the king of the seventies thriller with amazing scores for the films Parallax View, Marathon Man, Night Moves, and Stepford Wives and AQ-fave Klute among so many others. His signature sound was infusing an uncanny subtlety and tension into his arrangements, that tension creeping up on you, but never overwhelming. This new double cd set combines 3 lesser known thriller scores from his later period and they don't disappoint: The Driver (directed by Walter Hill), Star Chamber (directed by Peter Hyams), and Black Widow (directed by Bob Rafelson).
The Driver (1978) starring Ryan O'Neil, Bruce Dern and Isabelle Adjani, is sort of an early incarnation of the recent movie Drive. Ryan O'Neil plays a cool, soft-spoken driver who steals cars to use in robberies as getaway vehicles, and Dern is the detective who uses a robbery witness (Adjani) to focus a sting on O'Neil. Like the movie Bullitt, there are amazing car chases and the music follows suit with atmospheric tension, slow and eerie with delayed trumpet squeals and hallucinogenic phased synth drones in a dark jazz score.
The Star Chamber (1983), starring Michael Douglas and Hal Holbrook, is about a secret underground committee of judges who reap violent justice on perpetrators who are set free through technicalities in the legal system. The score has a slow heavy orchestration fraught with horns and strings punctuating the weight of judicial power with an ominous presence.
And finally, Black Widow (1987) starring Debra Winger and Theresa Russell, is a cat and mouse thriller about a investigative journalist who believes that a string of murders of wealthy men are connected by their mysterious young widows who may or not may not be the same deadly woman. The score is creepily hair-raising with eerie flutes and subtle orchestral manipulations reminding us of spiders crawling on skin as we're sleeping.
Being creeped out never sounded so good!
Don't know much about this artist, but "Yinyue" is supposedly an hour long journey through Beijing via static laden radio transmissions collected and manipulated by DJ Smallcock. Essentially, these recordings (all clocking in at 3:33, by the way) are
Another beautifully austere letterpress design housing another beautifully austere set of recordings of found sounds by way of Winds Measures Recordings. This album was the result of a performance at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn a few years back in which these five artists consecutively mixed unprocessed environmental recordings. The whole set is pocked with silences and quiet moments of sonic inactivity, working compositionally in sync with the latter day / lowercase acolytes of Morton Feldman (e.g. Bernhard Gunter, Steve Roden, etc.), but also speaks to the growing lack of quietude in the 21st century society. Scott Smallwood is a sound artist who worked with Pauline Oliveros in the past and had a fantastic, if under appreciated disc of desert wind recordings released on Deep Listening about a decade ago. His field recordings here focus on aquatic details and rippling textures, that deftly cut to the resonance from wind chimes and back to those watery sounds. In a terse piece of text that accompanies the disc, Smallwood speaks of the unwanted / unexpected / hidden sounds that blur the lines between the natural and man-made sound ecologies. One has to wonder if those bells would qualify as an "unwanted" intrusion for Smallwood as he tried to situate his microphones near an alpine stream, and as such, would those seemingly innocuous sounds bemoan an urban interlocution with the natural soundscape. Sawako's bizarrely reflective echoings of disembodied human speech seem completely unnatural, but we'll assume that her contribution held true to the modus operandi of unprocessed sources. Church bells introduce the field recordings of Seth Cluett, who transitions towards a series of small tactile cracks and thunderous scrunches from contact microphone recordings, feeling like a hyper-amplified listen into the crevices of a teeming colony of ants. Ben Owen's wooden clunking events transition perfectly out of Cluett's sounds, again focusing on the amplification of the minuscule through the contact microphone. Civyiu Kkliu completes the album with a humming drone from an unknown electrostatic source, crafting a sustained minimalist howl akin to his sporadic collaborator Toshiya Tsunoda, rounding out a wonderfully introspective record of pure sound. Limited to a mere 300 copies!
Fuzz guitars, sitar-psych, blues licks, flamenco influences, anarchic comedy, melancholic pop brilliance: that's Smash! Nope, not something new at all, this is actually a 2001 release reissuing music much older than that. Y'know, not only do we try to review as many crucial new releases and newly reissued things as we can (which isn't nearly as many as there are, unfortunately!), there's also all kinds of not so new, but new to us (and quite possibly new to you, too) stuff that we come across and really really dig and want to let y'all know about too.
This would be one of those things, just discovered by Allan last year. Now we have finally got enough of 'em to write up on our list. Smash were a psychedelic rock band from Spain that flourished from 1969 to about 1972 or so, and this double cd compiles their complete recorded output as far as we can tell -- all their singles, both their albums Glorieta De Los Lotos and Esta Vez Venimos A Golpear (aka We Come To Smash This Time), and their half of a split LP. 32 tracks on two cds! And it's all pretty great. Since it's everything they ever did, the music here explores wide territory...from the blues to rustic folk to raga rock to psych pop to hard rock heaviness. Variously, Smash would seem to have been Spain's answer to the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Led Zeppelin, all. We're also reminded a bit of Os Mutantes at times. And we can make a couple of more modern comparisons: the slow n' sad beauty of Smash's "I Left You" totally could be a song off that Elope album we loved from last year, and their dark, drifting "Look At The Rainbow (Flying In The Sky)" is a dead ringer for something by Japanese psych shamans Ghost! They do it all, and really really well. Just imagine that Musica Dispersa reissue we recommended recently, if they also cranked things up occassionally to rock n' roll ya on a Mississippi mountain side... The last time a double cd of vintage psych stuff impressed us this much would have been when that amazing Public Nuisance collection came out.
If any of us ever bother listening to this, we'll let you know how it is.
Billy's got one of those egos that thrives off of the love/hate relationship he has with the media. And while selling Smashing Pumpkins records is not AQ's bread & butter, it's a morbid curiousity to listen in... and no, not much is there: the romantic drama of Duran Duran, a few heavy licks, and Billy's squealing whine. Regardless of what we say, you'll either want it or not.
The Smashing Pumpkins are back. Well at least Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin. You probably know where you stand on the Pumpkins by this point, and while some of us here have never been fans and a few who never made it past Gish (which still ruleez says Andee!) there are a few of us here who aren't ashamed one bit to let it be known that we have always had a big ol' soft spot in our hearts for the Smashing Pumpkins. If you came of age in the '90s it's pretty much impossible not to have some nostalgia for how perfect their angst sounded in our poster decked teenage bedrooms. And love him or hate him Billy Corgan is one great guitar player who's managed to write some of the most memorable songs of the last couple decades. That being said they do leave lots of room for criticism and this new outing probably won't be the one to convert you if you've never been a big fan. But for those of you with that aforementioned soft spot, we think you should check this out and play it for a few times before you make your mind up as we've found this one to be a serious grower with repeated listens.
Portland's clattery, free improvised noise unit meets Ann Arbor's caustic power electronic doom-synth trio, for an unprecedented meeting of the..uh..minds. Smega seem to come out on top, with the overall sound falling squarely in their clinking, crashing, hippie music concrete by way of No Neck Blues band free folk clatter and Negativland-ish plunderphonic found sound collage. The strong sonic personalities in Wolf Eyes seem to have no problem playing the supporting role here, underscoring the ramshackle freeness of Smegma, with their buzzing homemades synths, and grinding electric guitar grit.
Remember the first time you heard a crank call tape, or a compilation of found sounds, or an answering machine tape you bought at a thrift store? You probably don't remember exactly what it was you heard, but you definitely remember the feeling. The thrill of hearing someone else's private thoughts, glimpsing into the lives of complete strangers. It almost didn't matter what was on the tape, just the fact that you weren't meant to hear it was enough to make it funny and crazy.
But since then, we've been barraged with mediocre crank call records and boring collections of random phone calls. Like anything else, people don't seem to realize that it's not as easy as just slapping some recordings onto a tape and presto. If you're a crank caller, you need to have style, charisma, the whole idea is to push the limits while keeping someone on the phone long after a sensible person would have hung up. Give a listen to Longmont Potion Castle for the ultimate in "Why the hell don't these people just hang up"? If you're compiling a collection of found sounds, you have to have a good ear, a sense of what is actually interesting to listen to. Voices, subject matter, cuz it's not all that fascinating to listen to someone calling the dry cleaners or making a reservation to get their hair cut. But it IS totally fascinating to hear two women talk about the fact that they won't eat at Hamburger Hamlet because it's owned by a Lesbian, or hearing an instructional tape teaching women how to sell dildos door to door Tupperware style. Thus we have Jacob Smigel, a deft archivist with a keen ear for human foibles. This collection isn't necessarily laugh out loud hilarious (although it is sometimes) but what it is, is bizarre, curious, demented, poignant, and yeah funny. And it's not just what's on the tapes, it's the recording quality, some of the dialogue is difficult to hear, but the timbre and the weird tape hiss is interesting in its own. But ultimately, it's the wonderfully wide world of weird people that make collections like this worthwhile, and this is one of the best ones we've heard in ages. From the opening Hamburger Hamlet track, to the ultra brief second to last track where a woman calls to leet someone know she's happy they are pro choice and then asks him how his lawn is. In between is a totally baffling, completely mesmerizing procession of strange, confusional, cute and crazy conversations and messages. One man discusses the infection in his cock and how it swelled up to 2 and a half times its size, a girl painfully tries to reach a way too high note, a couple does some cocaine, argues a bit and listens to some country music, a woman balls out a deadbeat ex-boyfriend, a woman describes a truly disturbing relaxation technique, a man performs various jingles he's written, a woman sends her friend to the store, and needs her fuckin' Pepsi, a girl performs possibly the most painful karaoke EVER, a not very bright woman tries to rent 3 Men And A Baby on BETA, the Hamburger Hamlet women discuss the downside of charcoal broiling, a young man takes a French Horn lesson, various couples make tapes for far away relatives, boyfriends and girlfriends make tapes for their significant others, some really amazing square dancing announcing to "Elvira", a stammering young man reads his book report, and on and on and on. Each vignette, whether 30 seconds or 5 minutes, is completely riveting. Funny and fucked, weird and wonderful, a totally addictive listen.
Gorgeously packaged in a full color multi panel digipak with extensive liner notes.
Ah, Melters, easily one of our favorite local labels going. Masters of the cavity-inducing bubblegum pop, hazy bedroom psychedelia, and cultivators of endless earworms. So, it should go without saying, we are VERY stoked to get in their newest release, the debut 7" from local power poppers Smiles. The only complaint here is you only get FOUR of the best Teenage Fanclub worship this side of the Atlantic Ocean. Simultaneously melancholic and sickly sweet. Pitch-perfect pop for fans of the aforementioned Scots, along with Elliott Smith's more boisterous numbers, and obviously a must for anyone who has enjoyed the flawless Melters back catalog (Ovens, Swiftumz, and Violent Change). Recommend!
These kids from Chicago are musically way wise well beyond their age. Barely out of high school they proved on their debut that they were most definitely a musical force to be reckoned with, playing infectious guitar driven pop that fits somewhere between the sounds of their slightly older peers and touring pals, Girls and Hunx & His Punx. With their second full length, they have upped the ante even more, once again demonstrating their knack for creating songs with huge hooks and melting warmth. Their love of T. Rex can be heard boldly throughout these songs, but you also get the feeling they spent a lot of last year being swept away by Beach House's Teen Dream, as there is a new level of sophistication and a whole other layer of woozy warmth woven into their sound. We love how SW's are both so full of energy yet also ridiculously talented musicians who have found a way to merge spirit and talent in such satisfying ways.
Full length number three from these Midwestern jangle poppers, whose fuzzy bubblegum garage pop has changed a lot since their 2009 debut. No band wants to hear how they've 'matured', but since these guys were barely out of high school when they released that first record, it's not surprising that 4 years, and 2 records later, that their sound would have blossomed into something more fully realized, Soft Will is sonically much more lush, and the songwriting this time around finds SW's taking classic popsongsmithery and making it their own. Just check out opener "3AM Spiritual" and see if you're not smitten. Cuz really if you're not, that pop music heart of yours must be shriveled and gnarled, cuz this might be some of the most perfect pop we've heard in ages. Lilting, super melodic, swathed in swirling synths, summery guitar strum, sweetly crooned vocals, busy but understated drumming, and then halfway through, the song blossoms into chiming, shimmering, softly psychedelic dream pop bliss out, suddenly cranked up, even louder, more full and lush, the gang vocals drifting over layered guitars, more synths, dreamily dramatic, with a cool lead guitar breakdown before swooping right back into it.
Which pretty much sets the template for the rest of the record, a killer collection of delightfully hook filled sun dappled jangle pop that's catchy crazy, liberally doused with streaks of fuzz guitars, subtle psychedelic swirls, lush almost orchestral swells, equal parts old school eighties new wave, classic power pop and more modern garage pop jangle.
We'll be the first to admit that sometimes our customers are quicker than us to be turned on to the newest coolest sounds. We hadn't heard the Smith Westerns but a few of our regular customers kept gushing about them and told has we had to check it out. And we're so glad they did. While there has been no shortage of lo-fi garage pop in the last couple years, Smith Westerns have their own endearing and charming take on that kind of fuzzy bubblegum garage pop we can never seem to get enough of. While they hail from Chicago, these guys would be so at home right here in the Bay Area as they share a similar spirit and aesthetic with folks like Hunx & His Punx, Girls, Thee Oh Sees, Nobunny, Personal & The Pizza's, etc. In fact we just found out they will be playing a Valentines Day show here in San Francisco with the above mentioned Girls and Hunx & His Punx. So perfect!! We love how Smith Westerns bring in a wide range of influences, from T. Rex to girl groups, to create songs that are fleshed out and lushly lo-fi while bursting with bright eyed excitement. So fucking cool!
There is a very fine line between schizophrenia and a totally eclectic diverse creativity and we seem to enjoy music most when that line remains really blurry. This 2-cd set, recorded between 1980-82 by electronic alchemist Barton Smith definitely straddles that weird blurry line. One moment basking in tender beauty while the next moment flourishing into a noisy wall-of-sound. Very little was known about Smith. The fact that Smithsonian Folkways originally released these tracks on vinyl back in the early '80s, and still Smith remained a relative unknown, just adds to the mystique. The first disc opens up with what sounds like gamelan influenced percussion on homemade instruments, followed by pastoral pretty meandering guitar and then underwater sounding rumblings drenched in primitive sounding electronics. We have been totally intrigued and in awe of these recordings since we first got this set in a few weeks back. Listening to it nonstop, and trying to think about how this was received in the early '80s when even now it still sounds so ahead of its time. Former AQ-er Windy came in recently and jumped for joy to see this on the new arrivals rack, telling us how she scored an original vinyl copy years back at a flea market and it's always been a record she found so weird and wonderful and special. Outside of Windy, we haven't really come across anyone else who knew anything about Barton Smith. We've come to discover that these were recordings he made for modern dance troupes and we can only struggle to imagine bodies moving to his ever changing sounds. While for most musicians it can be tricky and problematic to change gears and sounds so often within an album, there is something so natural and lucid and smooth about the extremes explored on Reelizations. We can't think of many musicians who have the ability to explore such a wide range with this much success and intrigue. Moondog's versatility and eclectic output is someone who came to mind when trying to figure out how to classify Mr. Smith. From acoustic tranquility to electric outbursts this had us picking up on a totally diverse range of reference points: Sandy Bull, Jim O'Rourke, This Heat, Koji Asano. And for sure you could start seeing how years later groups would start exploring similar sonic atmospheres. Black Dice, Excepter, Loren Connors are some who come to mind. Scott even suspects that Kieren Hebden might have heard this at some point, as there is a really good chance that the Barton Smith track "Lotus" was sampled on the Four Tet album Rounds.
This is a record that we can't stop listening to or thinking about. We hear so much music everyday, when something kicks our ass this hard we know we've discovered something really special.
As with all releases on the fabulous Japanese reissue label EM, this is gorgeously packaged, coming in an oversized double jewel case, with a huge booklet, tons of photos and lots of liner notes -- those unfortunately all in Japanese.
Bessie Smith has earned immortality as The Empress Of The Blues, having been one of the first major musical superstars of the 1920s. Though the fact has been somewhat obscured over time, female singers like Smith and Ma Rainey were the first blues artists to gain widespread exposure, something that would change when Blind Lemon Jefferson hit the scene, but no one would deny this woman's supreme mastery of her craft which she honed throughout her life, from street busking to vaudeville and later stylistic shifts during the swing era. All of this was cut tragically short when Smith was killed in a car accident in 1937, but her status is secure.
The material here was all recorded in 1927, featuring Smith and pianist James P. Johnson on a few tracks and a number of ensemble pieces elsewhere. Whatever the instrumental situation was, Smith's voice cuts through everything as the focal point. Her booming voice is impossible to ignore and reaches almost unbelievable heights. And man was she LOUD! Once again, Italy's Monk label steers us in the right direction. Bravo!
The debut solo album from percussionist / vibraphonist about town (and beyond) Ches Smith! He's built quite a name for himself as both a studio and touring percussionist. Perhaps you've seen/heard him perform with the likes of Secret Chiefs 3, Marc Ribot, Xiu Xiu, Carla Bozulich or Trevor Dunn's Trio-Convulsant? Congs For Brums is comprised of ten explorations in rhythmic and dynamic progressions incorporating a broad spectrum of percussion instruments, both the conventional and the less so. The works range from the absolutely stark single strike per instrument tour at the beginning of the second track "My Motherfuckin' Roda!" to the more fleshed out full kit rush of "Metal Vacation" to the resonant vibraphone tones of "The Clarinet In B Flat" (uh, there is no clarinet!) and "Mental Vacation". A particular fave is a repeating segment of track #5 "Homemade Posi" that brings to mind a drunken camel. While this disc may not find itself on regular rotation in your living room, it's so well recorded that we'd bet that pieces of it are going to resurface as prime sample material for many other musicmakers.
Finally! After years of being a huge fan of Australian guitarist Chris Smith, and only being able to track down split eps and comps, or collaborations, we've finally got our hands on the latest, and seems only in-print cd releases from this amazing musician. Some of you might remember Smith from the split Fatcat 12" he shared with Jewelled Antler outfit The Ivytree a while back, or more recently, the killer collaboration with fellow Australian�Justin Fuller, reviewed�at the beginning of this year (and still in stock!).
All of Smith's proper releases, even a stateside collection of 'greatest hits' are all out of print and unavailable, which is s massive shame as this man is a guitar genius. But where other records feature Smith mostly solo, using his guitar to weave magical landscapes of abstract sound, on Bad Orchestra, he seems to have put together an actual band (a Bad Orchestra?) and written some songs, for a record that is as rock as we've heard him for sure. Thankfully, Smith's rock is as good as his non-rock, dark and emotional, epic and intense, at times sounding like Dinosaur Jr. channeling Crazy Horse, right down to the vocals, a whiney plaintive croon, at others sounding a bit like a more moody meandering Dirty Three, and still at others unwinding into sparse deserty twang. The guitars thick and reverb drenched, the drums slightly distorted and heavy, acoustic guitars below sheets of psyche rock fuzz, that alone would have made Bad Orchestra a winner, but the rock tracks here are scattered amidst more abstract (and more familiar to us) pieces, guitarscapes and expansive ambience, the opener, a brief spell of Scott Tuma style Appalachian murk, to the forlorn sounding piano-in-a-warehouse of "Glue Factory" or the glistening high end raga of "Slight Problems (Intermission)", the Dead C like fractured noise pop of "Jimmy's Theme" to the blurred Tim Hecker like washed out soundscape of "Your Tunnel".�
A pretty perfect mix of gorgeous ambient experimentalism, blown out RAWK, and haunting dark desert pop. Obviously WAY recommended.��
We're huge fans of Australian guitarist Chris Smith, but until now had only ever been able to get a hold of the split 12" he shared with the Ivytree. There have been plenty of other releases, but the only proper stateside release has been out of print for ages. So finally, we managed to get a bunch of these, Smith and fellow countryman Justin Fuller's first full length collaboration, a full 7 years in the making, and it's quite nice.�
Hard to discern exactly what the instrumentation is, there are most certainly guitars, and according to the liner notes there is also piano and accordion, but with records like this, it's not what you're playing, it's how you play them and what you do with the sounds once you've made them. These two wrangle the various sounds into long stretches of slow shifting ambience. Some tracks are delicate and dark, barely there shimmers of crumbling low end and distant glimmering high end, while others are massive walls of guitar, churning chaotically, but smoothed into warm thick whorls. The heavier tracks definitely remind us of�Sunroof! or Vibracathedral Orchestra or even a less mangled Wolf Eyes or a way prettier SUNNO))). The prettier tracks have a bit of Tim Hecker going on, all blissy and fuzzy and beautifully blurred. The whole record is quite dreamy in fact, whether buzzing malevolently, or drifting languorously, a gorgeous chunk of blissed out guitardrone. The usual suspects will definitely need this...
23 years after the release in 1982 of Mutabaruka's "Check It!" the dubs can now be heard. The one and only collaboration between Mutabaruka and multi-instrumentalist Earl "Chinna" Smith, "Check It!" became a top seller and a huge hit in Jamaica despite being essentially blacklisted from Jamaican radio for Mutabaruka's "incendiary" lyrics. It was a match made in heaven: rasta poet with no music experience teams up with a young idealist and his musical collective -- The High Times Players -- to create an album completely outside what the roots or dancehall musicians were doing. While a few dubs from this seminal record were issued as b-sides on singles, there's never been -- until now -- a complete collection of those dubs on CD. Recorded at Bob Marley's Tuff Gong Studio and with an impressive cast of musicians, including: Carlton Barrett, Augustus Pablo, Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace, Dean Frazier and Bobby Ellis.
All right all of you Mississippi Records fans who have dug those amazing old school gospel compilations, do we have a book for you! One of the best tracks from The Life Is A Problem... compilation was from Elder Utah Smith, The Church Of God In Christ Pastor who played his electric guitar and wore two giant angel wings to preach the gospel and whip his revival audiences into an evangelical frenzy. For forty years from 1925 to 1965, Reverend Smith travelled across the country conducting his Holy Ghost revivals for his church, and this book collects amazing oral anecdotes, witness testimony and vintage photographs of this legendary gospel figure. Plus it comes with a cd of 18 tracks culled from extremely rare 78's, five tracks of which have never been issued before. So Awesome!!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
As the years pass after Elliott Smith's sad suicide, it's becoming more clear that his musical legacy will have the same impact and influence on future generations that Nick Drake's did a few decades before. He created such intimate and fragile songs that anyone with a heart (that's been broken) could relate to and find warmth, comfort and solace from. His songs have proven to be so practically perfect and seemingly timeless. He wasn't a part of any musical fad or trend. Instead he was one of those rare songwriting geniuses, the ones that only come along every few generations and craft songs that become the soundtrack to so many of our lives.
An Introduction To... is just that. A selection of his best songs spanning all his albums as well as a couple tracks from New Moon, the collection of B sides and demos during the era he was on Kill Rock Stars. We're sure the only problem the folks at KRS had with this collection was having to narrow it all down to fourteen tracks, as he did leave behind so many amazing songs. But we have to say they did an impeccable job choosing which songs and in what order to craft this ultimate ES mixtape.
There are also great liner notes written by Tape Op editor Larry Crane which gives a nice history and plenty of insight into the music of Elliott Smith. For any of our friends who somehow slept on his music in the past, we must INSIST this you at least pick this up, you'll soon be under his spell for sure, we can't imagine many lovers of music not finding so much beauty and richness in these stunning songs.
We miss you Elliott!
Finally, the new album from the fine introspective singer/songwriter formerly from the band Heatmiser. His songs will break your heart... seriously. One of his best.
