[ aquarius records catalogue

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Showing results 201 through 250 of 1910.

Three new sonic missives from the ether, from whatever mysterious alternate sonic universe the NOTHingness label exists in. A world of bleak emptiness, massive expanses of barren rumbling tundras, of glassy black surface sonic pools... Every disc dark and lovely, creepy and ominous, haunting and super intense. And of course outrageously limited... This shadowy shimmer is the work of Taphephobia, a side project of the more well known dark ambient outfit Nothaunt, and actually treads somewhat similar sonic ground, but maybe even more abstract. The true audial essence of nothingness for sure, not so much dark ambience, as a mysterious series of soundscapes, of imagined field recordings, the sounds of strange goings on beneath the surface of the earth, massive slow moving machinery, a series of nearly abandoned mines populated by strange shuffling creatures and the occasional ghostly spirit. The clang and shudder of huge pieces of metal being moved across rock strewn plains, the hiss of steam and the grinding of gears, steeped in the shimmering reverb of bottomless pits and mile high caverns overhead, clank and clatter, spread out over strangely rhythmic backdrops, reverberating shimmers, huge pulsing thumps, a gorgeous hellish underworld industrial symphony of minimal lowercase crawl.� LIMITED TO ONLY 111 COPIES!! Packaged in a slimline dvd style case with full color cover.

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First things first: yes, this album IS every bit as cool as the cover looks, the cover being a photo of a pink skull! There's no relation to Glenn Donaldson's Pink Skulls cd-r label, of course, these guys thought of it first, way back in 1971! So yeah, here's another vintage '71 gem for all of you into hard progressive bluesy psych rockin' action. Last list we had Japan's Strawberry Path, this time around, from the fertile underground of Franco's Spain, we've got the power trio Tapiman, which features the burning electric guitar heroics of one Max Sunyer, later of Spanish jazz rock outfit Iceberg. He'll definitely make hard rock guitar fans happy, though -- Tapiman is riffy, heavy rock, full of psychedelic poppiness. The main riff of storming opener "Wrong World" is sorta "Sunshine Of Your Love" mixed with "Lord Of This World", and the track is full of energetic, impressive guitar soloing and wild vocals. Some subsequent songs are more gentle and moody, though you're never far from some wailin', cranked-up amplifier worship on this disc. It's a groover, and a grower, too, from a classy band who knew what the heck they were doing. For all of you who dig the obscure '70s sounds of stuff like Blues Creation, Buffalo, Eduardo Bort, and other things along those lines we've recommended before... Newly remastered for this reissue, with four bonus tracks and detailed liner notes in both English and Spanish.

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While the name Jorma Tapio may not be familiar to you, the name Terje Isungset sure as heck should. He's the man responsible for the Igloo record, a past record of the week, recorded entirely on instruments made from ice. We've been selling that like CRAZY, when all of a sudden we got an email from Jussi (Circle, Pharaoh Overlord, etc.) letting us know that his label Ektro was releasing a brand new record by Isungset, teamed up with some guy names Tapio. We were of course intrigued, but had no idea what to expect. And had we actually expected something, we probably never would have guessed how weird and wonderful this record would be. No ice instruments sad to say, but armed with flutes, bells, voices, kantele, percussion, Jew's harp and lots and lots of drums, these two whip up a super wild and wooly, ultra dense blast of what we can only describe as tribal forest folk free jazz. Or something like that. Free jazz is probably the closest comparison, the first few tracks are dense psychedelic percussive freak outs, lots of splattery spastic free jazz drumming all over the place, deep bowed bass, steel string zings, and super creepy strangled and howled vocalizations. Everything sounds very primal and tribal, thick swaths of rhythmic throb underpinned by shimmering washes of cymbal sizzle and warbly mumbled melodies. Isungset proves to be a pretty bad ass drummer, whipping up some seriously wild squalls of spastic skitter, and octopoidal crash and bang. The vocals grunt and chant, sort of yodel, and hoot and holler, very festive and just a little nuts sounding. When the drums recede a bit, the band sort of wonders through some ancient forest, fluttering flutes, simple subtle percussion, distant drones. A bit reminiscent of Avarus or Anaksimandros for sure. The 20+ minute centerpiece, the track "Selainin Tuli / Sacred Fire" lets the duo spread way out, and lay out an expansive tribal soundscape, like the earlier 'free jazz' tracks but stripped way down. Hints of No Neck Blues Band and Sunburned Hand definitely surface now and then, the track eventually building to a howling shrieking psych drone freakout before settling back to almost complete silence. then a gentle lilting smudge of soft flutes and abstract clatter. That smeared clatter sort of drifts into the next two songs, disembodied scrapes and creaks, random bits of percussion, thick washes of low end thrum, quite dark an lovely. The final track is a flittering flutescape, a spare landscape of woodwinds and distant shimmer, which is soon joined by a buzzing Jew's harp, and the harp and flutes get all tangled up into a strangely propulsive groove, some sort of skeletal prog laced with primal psych rock primitivism and festive Renn Faire revelry, like stumbling into some clearing in the woods and finding some strange open air market, with a very strange duo performing before a crowd of rapt onlookers. Weird, but pretty darn cool as well. Finnish music obsessives need this no matter what. Lovers of that modern free folk new weird America thing might just find that this pushes all their buttons, and REALLY REALLY open minded jazz heads might also want to give this a try. Highly recommended!

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For those of us who came of musical age in the nineties, especially lots of you avid aQ list readers, odds are you were way into noise rock, labels like Amphetamine Reptile, Touch And Go, Homestead, and bands like Jesus Lizard, Chokebore, Unsane, Vertigo, Lubricated Goat, the God Bullies, godheadSilo, Hammerhead, Jawbox, Killdozer, Arcwelder, Janitor Joe, King Snake Roost, we could go on and on, but if that either looks like your record collection back in the day, or reads like a current iTunes playlist, odds are you're also probably familiar with Tar. Tar were a band from Chicago, who existed from about 1988 until 1995, and not only made some amazing records, but also released some of the most kick ass singles of that era. And for some reason, never hit it big like some of those other groups. Like another favorite of ours, Arcwelder, Tar toured like madmen, made record after record, and while attaining a pretty decent cult following, remained pretty solidly underground. So in swoops Henry at Chunklet, to wake folks the fuck up to what they may have, and most likely DID, miss back in the day. And like it says in the liner notes, and as mentioned above, as great as Tar albums were, their best songs seemed to end up on singles, which makes this singles collection arguably the best Tar record there is, which is saying something for sure. The sound will no doubt be familiar to fans of all the above mentioned bands and labels, the feeding back, wildly distorted guitars, the tight muscly drumming, the yowled vox, indie rock infused with some serious punkiness and noisiness, thick jagged riffs wrapped in sinewy basslines, some tracks crazy catchy, like a pop song in noise rock's clothing, others obtuse and aggressive and fierce and fucked up. Lots of mathy tension, post rock sprawl, these guys were so goddamn good, and listening to this chronologically, it's crazy how they transformed from a feral noise rock beast, into seriously killer songwriters. Just listen to the clips below. We made sample of our favorites, but even those were tough to pick, cuz pretty much every song here KILLS. And that AC/DC cover is a doozy! The packaging is of course over the top, colored vinyl, with a huge 12"x12" booklet with tons of liner notes, lots of famous folks you know reminiscing on how great Tar were, notes on each track, and each single, lots of rare photos, a ticket stub and more. Also includes a download code for the record proper AND for a bonus collection of rare live tracks. Absolutely and totally essential!!!

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Tar Pet is the solo project of Miss Taralie Dawn, who you might know as a member of the Spires That In The Sunset Rise, and Tar Pet does indeed sound quite a bit like her group proper. Old timey piano, recorded all scratchy in a wash of reverb like some dusty old 78, mournful flutes and damaged atonal guitar, creaking scraping steel strings, buzzing frets, and all sorts of hiss and static. A fuzzy blissful ambient dream world of fractured folk and bedroom recorded psychfolk nursery rhymes, with Dawn's creepy, almost spoken vocals, occasionally building to a Diamanda Galas like wail, but more often groaned and whispered, barely a croak. Truly haunting and intense. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!

From local label Moon Glyph (local now, recently relocated to the East Bay from afar!), comes another gem, this one a dreamy collection of shimmering French psychedelic pop, from the oddly named Tara King Th. A group who traffics in fuzzy, prismatic, Technicolor retro dream pop, lush and lovely, baroque and blissful, lilting pop songs laced with Morricone-ish twang, and futuristic Stereolab style dreaminess, shuffling busy drumming, chiming melodies, droning keyboards that occasionally build to near psychedelic squalls, and of course some seriously swoonsome vox, often woven into lovely harmonies, but just as often crooning dreamily over a spare backdrop of groovy shuffling shimmer. Fans of another recent Moon Glyph outfit, the New Lines, as well as Still Corners, with whom they shared a split, will dig big time, the same sort of sixties style space age retro pop that evokes shag carpeting in sleek silver penthouses, cocktail parties and secret agents, the dreamier numbers making us imagine rainy afternoons in Paris, sitting by the window, drinking tea, looking out at the steel grey sky and the glistening city below. Really great! LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!

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We loved the last tape from this French psych pop act, and so did all of you considering how quickly we sold out. A stunning collection of baroque pop equal parts Stereolab and Ennio Morricone, and we're happy to report that this new one offers up more of the same, expansive, cinematic, brooding and moody cosmopolitan pop music, that sounds like it was plucked from some Euro arthouse flick. Skittery drumming beneath ominous pianos, swirling synths, buzzing steel string guitar, a little bit of twang, a little bit psychedelic, so good! In fact the whole tape this time around is way more cinematic, even divided into songs, and what seem to be interludes, short little sonic vignettes, some creepy and ominous, others jazzy and jaunty, but all sounding again, like they're straight from some sixties French soundtrack. The songs themselves are essentially extensions of those interludes, less 'songs' proper, and more fantastic bits of mood music, organ everywhere, and the bass too, holding it all together, while the guitar adds color, as do some swoonsome strings, even what sounds like theremin, all wound up into a sort of retro-futuristic pop exotica, imagine John Carpenter via Stereolab, or Morricone covers by the New Lines or Still Corners, the big difference this time around really is just how dark much of this is. Sure, there are tracks like "L'Enquete", with dreamy female vocals (in French of course), over swirling synth melodies, very Stereolab sounding for sure, or "Vague A L'Ame", which drapes hummed melodies over vibes and intricate fingerpicked guitars, there's even one song that gets super fuzzed out, a sweet slab of dreamy electro shoegaze fuzz-pop for sure, but most of the record is more brooding and soundtracky, perfectly balancing the more ebullient sunshinier numbers, the whole thing, even the poppier tracks, an imaginary soundtrack to a film we're now suddenly dying to see! LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!!

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"Careful arrangements of sonic rubbish." That's one hell of a great artist's statement, courtesy of Eamon Sprod (aka Tarab). Over the past decade or so, this Australian sound-artist has quietly produced some of the finer examples of composition through field recording. His work is hardly the stuff of pleasantries from a soft ambient whoosh set as the backdrop to various birdsongs plopped willy-nilly for the intrepid listener to identify. Nope, there's always the threat of psychological, psychic, and existential violence lurking throughout Sprod's work. When the insect chorales push through to the foreground, it's symbolic of pestilence, disease, blight, and the simple fact that much in the outback can fucking kill you. It's easy to tap into the ultra-violent, post-apocalyptic, doomsayer, and/or isolationist scenarios mapped out elsewhere through the Australian psyche (e.g. Mad Max, Chopper, On The Beach, Bad Boy Bubby, etc.); and Sprod carves out his own niche in digging through the hinterlands of urban neglect, locating meaning of psychogeographical import (or the lack there of) within a recontextualized sound object. Since his debut Surfacedrift back in 2004, Sprod's work has steadily exhibited a maturation in conceptualization and aesthetic complexity, culminating in the schizophonic collage-tactics of I'm Lost. The opening salvo of leaden thud, turbine roar, and pressurized blasts of air slithering through release valves is a torrent of concrete-actions, jump-cuts, and dead-ends, as if Sprod has decided to dematerialize the listener and purposefully mistranslate the coordinates between alternate realities of equally miserable / fascinating locations of industrialized bleakness. When he settles upon a singular space-time continuum, it's a vat of uranium churning at the bottom of an oil drum, while the container itself quickens its half-life through atomic fission. Another turn and Sprod channels an ethereally unholy skree of a thousand particle accelerators amassing their beams on a single contact microphone, ending up with something akin to a far more uncomfortable Phill Niblock or Rhys Chatham, manifested through what could be fluorescent bulbs. The quiet passages of textural rummaging that Sprod intersperses throughout I'm Lost have the queasy feel of somebody pulling off scabs from old wounds. Equal parts Cronenberg and Schimpfluch (Lanz, Phillips, Eb.Er., Zeier, etc.) - so of course, it's fucking awesome.

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Too long has passed since we've heard anything new from Tarab - the solo project of Australian sound artist Eamon Sprod. His process involves the recontextualization of field recordings into dense collages of acoustic noise, natural disruptions, violent crackling, and grandiose crescendos of activity bracketed by periods of a unsettled calm. In listening to each of his records, we can easily see how much time and attention he puts into these increasingly complex compositions; so it's no wonder it can take two to three years for a new album to emerge. Sprod collected all of the sounds for Shards Of Splinters while on a month-long residency at MoKS in Estonia. He purposefully chose to go to Estonia in the middle of a very cold, very bleak Baltic winter, in stark contrast to the fire-season and sweltering temperatures he would have found at the same time in his native Australia. As with his small back catalogue, Shards Of Splinters navigates along the boundary between the natural and the industrial - where factories had been left to collapse and to be consumed by vegetation, where tin sheds were torn asunder by hurricane force winds, where rusted pipes eerily resonate chorale drones from unseen cisterns deep under the surface of the earth. Many a field recordist and sound ecologist uses this boundary space to collect a beguiling array of recordings, but Sprod focuses almost entirely on mapping an apocalyptic poetry through his profoundly broken sounds. The unforgiving cold of the Estonian winter threads his recordings of slushing ice, crumbled concrete, and scraped metal that he deftly arranges into ruptures and disturbances that churn through tactile squeaks and metallic vibrations. There is a violence front and center in Sprod's work as if he's forecast the globe itself waking from hibernation to exterminate humanity once and for all. Aesthetically, Shards Of Splinters finds common ground with Eric La Casa or the more narrative work of Chris Watson; but conceptually, Sprod takes a much darker approach akin to Small Cruel Party or G*Park, that gives his recordings a magnificent depth. Brilliant.

Vacant store fronts, abandoned buildings, and empty lots are increasingly harder to find in San Francisco these days. Even the former wastelands well to the east of our Mission location are filling in with all manner of development, from modern office spaces to sleek steel & glass apartments. Complaints of gentrification can hardly be made when such buildings are constructed on purportedly mitigated toxic sludge or the settled landfill of crumbled highways from the '89 earthquake. These dead zones in the urban landscape nevertheless are thriving ecosystems of feral plants and animals that can exist sprouting through broken asphalt and plumping themselves on the scraps of whatever can be pulled from nearby garbage cans. Few would pine over the loss of such spaces, and the Australian sound artist Eamon Sprod (aka Tarab) is one who would actively explore vacant lots instead of ignoring them. Over the years, Sprod has released a small catalog of brilliant, if understated albums that reflect these dead spaces in the urban landscape, often with apocalyptic foreshadowings through his compositions. He patiently builds this work through layers of sparsely processed field recordings and found object manipulation often recorded directly in such environments - empty warehouses, military bunkers, dry sewer ducts and the like. For Strata, Sprod has documented something of a concrete island on the outskirts of Melbourne, bordered by train tracks, highways, and drainage ditches. In collecting his recordings, he would dig and claw through the broken concrete, construction refuse, bum trash, and aggregated debris, amassing a whole array of crumbled textures and noises that would also echo with the distant din of cars and trains roaring by, many miles away. What is always impressive about Sprod's albums is the incredible clarity of detail which pops into focus, as the bright frequencies of found metal debris take the shape of obsidian shards with possible diabolically mystical qualities. The compositions coalesce into churning swarms of texture that snap into expansive rumbles paralleling the desolation of Thomas Koner's polar treks, giving way to doppler-effected field recordings of trains with the grinding of brakes and the pulsing thunder of the engines. It's that rich attention to detail that warrants comparisons to Chris Watson's impeccable phonography, but the compositional approach strikes a balance between the psychological implications of Luc Ferrari and those damn-near perfect collages by Small Cruel Party. As with all of Tarab's work, this is very highly recommended! Limited to just 200 copies!

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Eamon Sprod (aka Tarab) is a name you don't come across everyday; and I (Jim) swear that I've heard something by this Australian sound artist somewhere along the way. While I could be remembering a track on some obscure Australian compilation, I am probably mistaken as Surfacedrift is his debut recording. Given the high quality of this record, I should have been listening to Sprod's work for many years along with all of those Hazard, Francisco Lopez, and Loren Chasse records that I constantly return to. This unfortunate lapse of memory could also be the result of wandering through Sprod's psychogeographic soundfields. Surfacedrift is a disorienting album, which implodes the perspectives of sound by amplifying the miniscule and softening the impact from environmental recordings. Sprod massages richly textured passages from crumpled leaves, spilled water, and tumbling rocks; he couples these haptic events with field recordings. As everything is so seemless, it's hard to tell if Sprod had actually recorded these rock garden symphonies out of doors (a la Blithe Sons), or if there's a fair amount of production work synthesizing the field recordings with the performative elements. An very impressive debut to say the least!

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With a huge clamorous slash of metal grinding against metal, Eamon Sprod (aka Tarab) introduces the aptly titled album Take All The Ships From The Harbour, And Sail Them Straight Into Hell. This Australian sound artist has in the past already deeply impressed us with his incredible albums of field recordings interspliced with found object manipulation. In previous recordings, Tarab has exhibited sleights of hand in turning the sounds of the dry scrub lands outside of Melbourne into watery, sinewy compositions with haunted ambience lurking throughout. Here, Tarab activates the resonance of abandoned spaces (including a handful of recordings made at Angel Island with all of its crumbling beauty housed here in the San Francisco Bay); and the watery details, which emerged as illusion before, are pronounced in an ominous rumble of surf, rain, and wind rattling the undercarriage of this album. An album of extreme dynamics, Take All The Ships evolves quite effortlessly from that opening metallic klang through a series of softened white noises culled from oceanic sources and cutting into a quiet passage of vacant spaces with sand and pebbles pushed slowly across the stereo's surface. Through these events, Tarab presents his album with a cinematic grandeur and an orchestral pacing, despite the fact that all of the sounds are derived from those field recordings and found objects. Aside from a few choice backwards masked tracks and the timbral emphasis of EQ, there's no apparent electronic manipulation in his sympathetic layering of sound. The details have all of the presence of the best sound ecologists (e.g. Chris Watson, Douglas Quin, Eric La Casa, etc.), and have been enhanced through the unveiling drama of Tarab's compositions. This is best noted in the album's concluding 15 minutes which gradually build out of a concoction of insect chorales, piles of tumbling sand, and corroded metal handrail being coaxed to emit a gong-like resonant drone. A series of ramped accumulations of sound are cut away to reveal a thicker set of reverberant drones and humid ambience which swell and grow more in keeping with those minimalists we love so much (Chalk, Coleclough, Svarte Greiner, Xela, Peter Wright, etc.). As infernal as the opening of the album is and as prophetic as the title is, this coda to Take All The Ships is uncannily beautiful, almost hallowed, and certainly imbued with melancholy. A damn great record!

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It would be a stretch, even for us habitual hyperbolists, to proclaim Tasmania as the next eccentric origin for unusual music to join the ranks of Finland, New Zealand, and Iceland. But there have been two cultural exports from Tasmania which have blown our collective minds: those being the black metal misanthrope Striborg and the elemental sound ecologist Tarab (aka Eamon Sprod). No, there is nothing really connecting the two other than the fact that they originated from the tiny Australian island; and even now, Sprod has migrated across the channel to Melbourne, but the case could be made that the compacted Tasmanian environments of bleached deserts, scraped coastlines, and tempestuous rain forests still tug at Sprod's heart. These landscapes which Sprod documents, agitates, and amplifies, sound as if they herald the end of the world, which may speak to a communal Tasmanian bleakness shared with Mr. Striborg. This allusion might be validated through the few interviews conducted with Sprod that highlight his nihilist traits; and maybe in that, there is some black metal oozing in Sprod's veins. Anyway, Wind Keeps Even Dust Away is only the second full album as Tarab, yet in his small discography of manipulated field recordings and agitated objects, he's proven himself a masterful sound artist, on par with all time Aquarius favorites Chris Watson, Toshiya Tsunoda, Matt Shoemaker, and Loren Chasse. But even in comparison to those esteemed artists, Tarab's work is considerably darker, as you might imagine with that end of the world reference posited earlier. Field recordings are central to the Tarab sound, augmented by the complementary sounds of Sprod tossing leaves, rust, dirt, and shattered glass, all of which get mulched into seamless compositions swollen with expansive low end drones and electrocuted vibrations. As on his first album Surfacedrift, Wind Keeps Even Dust Away navigates barren landscapes between the industrial wasteland and the wilderness of the outback, with jolts of shattered glass and heavy rains breaking up the tactile sounds and sympathetic frequencies that make this album so incredible. Very highly recommended!

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Taraf De Haidouks are a 13 piece ensemble (not including vocalists) of Gypsy musicians who hail from the land encompassed by the country of Romania. Oft dismissed within their home country as "ragged Gypsies", they've nonetheless managed to acquire international acclaim, with four albums under their collective belt up to now and a featured appearance in the film Latcho Drom. Well, of course you have no doubt that they succeeded because we wouldn't be listening to the cd here in the store and I wouldn't be writing all this now if they hadn't. Some of the best, most kick-ass eastern European blues and breakdowns that we've heard in a month of Sundays. A veritable Gypsy supergroup with more violin, cymbalum, accordion, flute, double bass, clarinet, darbuka, saxophone, baritone tuba, bass tuba, trumpet, tapan and vocal virtuosity than you can shake an encyclopedia of organology at. Shit yeah!

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No, not the soundtrack to the Romanian version of the Jim Carrey comedy...rather, the long-awaited third album from these wonderful Gypsy musicians. Many guests feature on this disc, including a troupe who "are part of the poorest and most despised group of Gypsies, the ursari, who descend from the ancient brotherhood of the bear-tamers. Their old trade has now disappeared and, as they are too poor to hire musicians in order to celebrate life's great events, they sing their own songs and accompany themselves on makeshift percussion instruments (barrels, chairs, spoons) or by producing rhythms with various parts of their bodies (hands, feet, mouth)." These and the other guests make "Dumbala Dumba" an exciting addition to the Taraf's discography.

This is the first we'd heard from Taragana Pyjarama, aka Danish producer Nick Eriksen, but all it took was a quick listen and we were smitten. This is the sort of blissed out loop heavy electronic dreaminess we can never seem to get enough of. Right off the bat it reminded us of The Field, but even more washed out and woozy, the opening track is pretty much the perfect chunk of sun dappled pop ambient dreaminess, all swirling synths and swoonsome melodies, dense layers and lush melodic tangles, pulsing and pulsating and shimmering, a cascading kaleidoscopic stretch of electronic dreampop loveliness that almost kept us from making it to the rest of the record. The second track is more of the same, this time harnessing those same sounds into something subtly more propulsive, a dreamy pulsating new age synthscape, that just gets more and more lush and gloriously blissed out, we were almost convinced that maybe the whole record was this pure soft focus shimmery sweetness, but it is on Kompakt after all, so there are beats, but even the beat driven tracks are dreamy and playful. "Lo Ng" is s tripped down minimal house track, of woozy bloops and bleeps, that blossoms into a hazy tropical cinematic groove, before slipping into a stripped down electro pulse. "All Those Weird Things" almost sounds like Animal Collective if they were on Kompakt, the same sort of lush, psychedelic pop vibe, but here wedded to a garbled stuttery underwater beat. "Pinned (Part 1)" has a beat at its core, but it's nearly swallowed whole by the woozy warped synths, and the title track, is a gorgeous abstract skitter, that sounds like it was collaged from chiming bells and and samples scrapes and rattles, like some sort of abstract field recorded Muslimgauze, the track eventually becoming a gorgeous stretch of meditative bell like tones, and so it goes. From blooping bleeping synth heavy house-pop, to playful electro skitter, to bleary blissed out synth-drone ambience, easily our new favorite electronic record, and way recommended for fans of The Field, Gui Boratto, Actress, and other outside-the-box electronic alchemists...

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From the same deep dark part of Colorado (umm... Denver!) that brought us the dark swampy dirge folk of the mighty Sixteen Horsepower, comes the mysterious and lovely Tarantella. Featuring an unlikely pedigree (Slim Cessna's Auto Club, Blood Axis) Tarantella, are equal parts Calexico's desert mariachi twang, 16HP's creepy Biblical swampfolk with a bit of bolero, a touch of tango and just a pinch of that Decemberists-y Victrorian shuffle. A dark and swoonsome swirl of mournful strings, shuffling rhythms, warm washed out guitars, plenty of twang and the torch song vocals of Kal Cahoone, who you might recognize from her contributions to the gorgeous Short Stories record, from 16HP side project Lilium, her vocals a raw mix of PJ Harvey swagger and Cat Power moody mumble. Here, her vocals are the focal point, rich and warm and dripping with emotion, occasionally singing in Spanish, a deep sultry croon, wrapping you in its deliriously dangerous embrace. Definitely for fans of Calexico, Howe Gelb, Friends Of Dean Martinez, 16 Horsepower, M. Ward, Cat Power, PJ Harvey and all that smolders and twangs.

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Not sure what it was exactly, but something kept us from checking these guys out before now. Ultimately it might have been the band's penchant for dressing up in period costumes for their record covers. Who knows. Whatever it was, we're sure kicking ourselves now, this record is a killer. And it sounds nothing like we would have imagined from the name and the album cover and the label. Yeah, we know, book, cover, book cover. We're sorry. We were wrong. We love this record. Penance? All we can do now is try to convince you all how great it is. And it is. Some impossible hybrid of classical chamber music, post rock and sludge metal. Sort of. Or if you can imagine the Rachels, or maybe Godspeed You Black Emperor in their practice space, and every few minutes when someone opens the door, the sound of Corrupted, who practice right across the hall and leave their door open all the time, comes rushing in. Big riffs battle keening strings, huge pummeling waves of downtuned guitar, segue into near pastoral stretches of moody meandering post rock, or occasional bits of moody psychedelic folks, with lilting vocals and gentle guitars, or long passages of classical guitar, or gorgeously abstract ambient interludes constructed from subtle vocals and Eastern tinged drones but they eventually always return to the RIFF, exploding in a frenzy of guitar versus string section, like a heavy metal Dirty 3 or Apocalyptica jamming with Boris, or... heck we don't know, it's just so perfectly schizophrenic, veering wildly from heaviness to melancholy moodiness and back again over and over and over. Epic and dreamy and heavy and darn near perfect. We love discovering new music, sort of why we do this, but there's definitely a special satisfaction and secret joy in realizing a band you thought sucked actually completely kills! Being wrong never felt so right!

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AQ's favorite instrumental psychedelic space-rock prog-keyboard crust-metal outfit, San Diego's terrific Tarantula Hawk, has produced two great full-length albums (both of 'em self-titled), one on Life Is Abuse and this year's Neurot labels release. But, of course, fans like us want more. So, thankfully, there's also these two live, not-quite-tour-only cd-r releases, of which we've managed to acquire a few. TH's grind-drone music is a great live experience, dense and dark, and while you'd have to have a IMMENSE stereo system to replicate the loudness and power of their shows, it's still good home listening even at more moderate volume. "Desert Solitaire" documents a show in August of 2000 at something, a festival I guess, called the One Gathering in San Diego's Madre Grande Sanctuary. 80 minutes, one track! Fuckin' epic and eerie. Godspeed You Black Emperor needs to get schooled by these three guys. The title of the other cd-r, "Live At KFJC 07.15.01" is rather self-explanatory. Basically, last July the Hawk (space-)rocked the hell out of the studio of one of our favorite Bay Area college radio stations for 32 minutes. Both discs sound great, dynamic and heavy.

RealAudio clip: Desert Solitaire (excerpt)

AQ's favorite instrumental psychedelic space-rock prog-keyboard crust-metal outfit, San Diego's terrific Tarantula Hawk, has produced two great full-length albums (both of 'em self-titled), one on Life Is Abuse and this year's Neurot labels release. But, of course, fans like us want more. So, thankfully, there's also these two live, not-quite-tour-only cd-r releases, of which we've managed to acquire a few. TH's grind-drone music is a great live experience, dense and dark, and while you'd have to have an IMMENSE stereo system to replicate the loudness and power of their shows, it's still good home listening even at more moderate volume. "Desert Solitaire" documents a show in August of 2000 at something, a festival I guess, called the One Gathering in San Diego's Madre Grande Sanctuary. 80 minutes, one track! Fuckin' epic and eerie. Godspeed You Black Emperor needs to get schooled by these three guys. The title of the other cd-r, "Live At KFJC 07.15.01" is rather self-explanatory. Basically, last July the Hawk (space-)rocked the hell out of the studio of one of our favorite Bay Area college radio stations for 32 minutes. Both discs sound great, dynamic and heavy.

RealAudio clip: Live At KFJC

San Diego's Tarantula Hawk create a heavy, epic rock soundscape, a bit like a metal version of Godspeed You Black Emperor, with a healthy dose of Hawkwind. The band is a four piece: with not one, but two bassists, a drummer, and a guitarist/keyboardist, and a couple of samplers amongst them. This, their debut recording, consists of one 40-or-so minute long track, all instrumental, that combines metallic math-rock (including the occasional blast-beat) with bombastic prog-rock keyboard sounds of the sort unheard since the early '70s! The keyboards make TH remind me (and perhaps only me) of a malevolent version of the organ-led seventies Italian prog cult-band Le Orme, but mixed with the majestic bass-heavy attack of Japanese prog-punk technicians the Ruins. All these sounds are then eventually subsumed into an experiment in drone science. Ominous stuff indeed! It's like the soundtrack to the military-occupation of a haunted house: martial drum beats, grandiose synth themes, eerie abstract electronics. For fans of Thrones, Neurosis, Magma, The Champs, Old Man Gloom, etc. No wonder they've toured with both California grindcore heroes Dystopia and Texas neo-psych spacerock act Yeti, drawing as they do from both genres. The cd version also includes a gritty cd-rom video of a live show, about the same length as the audio track on the cd, that's if anything heavier and scarier. Highly recommended!

RealAudio clip: Tarantula Hawk

NOW ON VINYL! and still self-titled... this is their second album, the cd that came out on Neurot. But the label that did their first self-titled album just released this vinyl, clear wax in a nice gatefold. Here's what we said about the cd version: Witness the return of the mighty Tarantula Hawk, the San Diego based psychedelic volume dealers whose immense self-titled debut cd we raved about two years ago. Here's their second album, somewhat confusingly also self-titled (obviously these guys don't work in record store!), which again proves them to be the masters of drone prog metal supreme. Instrumental super heavy ritual music, bass-heavy majestic murk with grinding prog rock keyboards and intense, energizing drumming, spacey stretches of ominous gloom... Imagine the Omen soundtrack meets Neurosis, or an evil ELP into Eyehategod. Or a crust-metal take on 20th century classical? Or AQ-fave '60s Swedish drone-psych band Parson Sound on a diet of cough syrup and Celtic Frost? Further references: Boris, Corrupted, Old Man Gloom, Thrones, Magma, Ruins, Harvey Milk...you get the picture. After getting into the first T-hawk album, and seeing them live for the first time (an amazing show at Richmond's Burnt Ramen), I remember thinking, wow, this band really should be playing that Neurosis Beyond The Pale festival, they'd blow everybody away. A year or so later -- lo and behold, the Hawk not only played the 2002 edition of Beyond the Pale, but this is on Neurot Recordings as well. As good as their self-titled debut, or better, and obviously highly recommended!

Krust! Nekkro! Grimm! Kvlt!!! If it's evil-sounding and spelled weirdly then it most certainly applies to this filthy oily mass of lice infested, punk infused black metal that has slithered its way through the front gates of aQ HQ. Hailing from right here in San Francisco, Tare seems to be a totally new proposition, formed just last year, and they name the Finnish orthodox hordes as their primary inspiration (i.e. Horna, Sargeist, Vordr), but their blown out brand of venomous, simplified BM will surely appeal to fans of Bone Awl and Raspberry Bulbs as well (and maybe even worshippers of black metal ultra minimalists Ildjarn!). The guitars are a staticky stab, the drums a relentless minimal caveman plod, the vocals a garbled howl. If you like your black metal dirty, nasty and truly ugly then you don't want to pass this up. Plus it's housed in a swanky oversized case that includes both a cassette and a 3" cd-r (that both feature the same music we presume??).

Tarentel's 2004 album We Move Through Weather found the San Francisco's sonic journeymen balancing their penchant for moody atmospheres and a new found spirit of improvisation, which hurtled them somewhere near Jackie-O Motherfucker meets This Heat territory. In constructing that record, Tarentel had to sift through hours and hours of recordings in order to pare down to a mere 72 minutes. Well, they could have done a Supersilent or Necks and released a massive 3 or 4 cd set of material; but instead they chose to wait and release two EPs (which both clock in well above 30 minutes each) of material that was not included on the We Move Through Weather album. The companion to Paper White, Big Black Square is a 43 minute sprawling epic recorded at the very end of the We Move Through Weather sessions. Opening with a lengthy passage of humid drones from amplifier buzz, aqueous flutterings, organ tones, and somnambulant field recordings, Big Black Square lumbers into action after some 20 minutes as drummer Jim Redd slowly transforms an indifferent textural clatter across his drum kit into a complex elliptical groove. Multi-instrumentalists Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Danny Grodinski flesh out the skeletal rhythms with a spindly duel between their two guitars crumpled through tons of effects both high and low tech, making for a beautiful, dark, and evocative EP.

MPEG stream: Excerpt 1
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Handy cd format for some heretofore vinyl-only outta sight outta print Tarentel cuts. While we still favor Tarentel's first proper full length From Bone To Satellite as their peak moment, this is still pretty, epic instrumental work, lots of arpeggiated chords, softly shimmering cymbals and sad sack melodies. Very very slow; sometimes a heady climax finishes off a piece, and sometimes we're left hanging midair, holding our breath, waiting for redemption... ahem. Five tracks, one from the Temporary Residence lathe cut 10", two from Resonant's "Looking for Things Searching for Things" 12", and two tracks from Static Caravan's "Two Sides of Myself" 7".

RealAudio clip: Searching for Things

While strictly limited to the subscribers of the "Purposeful Availment" series, we have managed to get hold of a handful of this 6 song EP from the San Francisco ensemble Tarentel, which finds the group pushing even further away from the epic post / space rock that defined their "From Bone To Satellite" album. These days, Tarentel is far more content to build their barren, desert-like atmospheres out of those interwtining Slint-ish / Morricone guitar quotations, without ever having to crank up the volume. While their earlier incarnations of the quiet / LOUD dynamism mounted some furiously beautiful live shows, Tarentel's recent balancing act has been located between the traditional rock instrumentation of bass, guitars, and drums (although the drums haven't been of much use as of recent) and the Max/MSP digital tricks promoted by Fennesz, Stephan Mathieu, and Ekkehard Ehlers. "Fear Of Bridges" switches off with the spartan guitar interplay on one track and the laptop re-interpretations of Tarentel sounds into gossamer droning pieces spinning with digitally pointilistic details. If it's any indication where Tarentel is heading, guitarist Jefre Cantu has a couple of solo projects of his laptop work coming out soon and there's a Tarentel release on the electronica boutique label Bottrop-Boy also in the pipeline.

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CD finally back in stock! The debut album from San Francisco's Tarentel is a majestic affair as multiple guitars churn through slow epic songs that build slow yet catchy melodies out of a deep space sonic miasma. Follow this with super-nova explosions of radioluminescent guitar / bass / drum crash that does very well to replicate the q...u...i...e...t L!!!O!!!U!!!D!!! dynamism of the likes of Mogwai via Morricone, or Godspeed You Black Emperor without the warm strings. Sure, Tarentel may in fact be wearing their influences proudly on their sleeves. But, unlike so many 'post-rock' bands who think you have to badly rip-off Tortoise to be artful, Tarentel's admission of their their influences is anything but detrimental. A solid, quite excellent album.

We listed the individual vinyl installments of Tarentel's Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun a while back (all now out of print so don't order!), each one a mind blowing blast of druggy, psychedelic free form rhythmic bliss out, and each one could well have been an AQ record of the week. But good thing we held off, cuz here we are a year or so later, and all four slabs of wax have been digitized and compiled as a massive double cd set, and needless to say, four -possible- records of the week, all piled on top of one another, can only mean one thing! Well, yeah, obviously, this absolutely had to be a record of the week. Quite possibly (and very probably) the best music we've heard from these guys, which is saying a lot considering how much we dig most everything Tarentel does... When we first heard the title of Tarentel's 2cd (formerly FOUR lp) set, Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun, we were pretty sure they were being ironic, or facetious, or something, and there would be no beats, ghetto or otherwise, to be found anywhere, just their usual gorgeously slow shifting epic postrock soundscapes. But actually, Ghetto Beats IS all about the beats, not sure if they're 'ghetto' or not, but they sure are dense and funky and weirdly rhythmic, from blissed out shuffling skitter to super propulsive krautrocky pound, these discs are definitely a whole new side of Tarentel. A much more raw and ragged, caustic and groove based beast. It almost sounds like Tarentel covering This Heat, or a krautrock No Neck Blues Band, or maybe even Tussle via This Heat with a bit of 23 Skidoo thrown in for good measure. While the framework of most of these songs is some dense web of percussive clatter or some sort-of-funky drum jam, these gorgeously hypnotic skeletal rhythms are surrounded on all sides by thick swaths of crumbling ambience, disembodied guitar loops and rumbling bass, thick swells of warm whir and all sorts of other random dreamlike shimmer. Often building into seriously caustic squalls, big churning white hot sonic swirls, each wrapped around beats that seem on the edge of falling apart, or splintering into rhythmic fragments. Maybe that's the ghetto angle, the beats are super lo-fi, blown out, strangely recorded, so they sound sort of alien, with lots of strange FX and stuttering stumbling variations. So fucking awesome. We originally reviewed Ghetto Beats one lp at a time, and while they do work perfectly as one epic cohesive chunk of sound, they still sort of play out like the separate movements they started out as... The first movement (lp #1) is six tracks, a little over a half an hour, a dense assemblage of abstract rhythms and brooding, swirling psychedelia, heavy on the This Heat worship, beats stretched out over huge expanses of industrial whir and jagged angular guitars, very loping and hypnotic, brooding and drone-y, mysterious tribal rituals stretched out into epic spaced out, abstract rhythmic jams. Part two (lp #2) is 4 tracks, 40 minutes, two epic jams, both 16+ minutes, separated by two shorter tracks. The opener starts with an endlessly hypnotic, near metal drum jam, over which guitars and sound makers creak and keen, a crystalline web of high end sonics over a swirling tribal rhythm. It could seemingly go on forever, and it sort of does, but near the end it dissipates into a dark spacious soundscape of distant clatter and thick rumbling buzz. After a one minute rhythmic experiment, all freaked out psych rock effects and super distorted drum sputter, the second lengthy jam kicks in, and it's definitely the most mellow and blissed out track so far, some muted free jazz skitter, over a slow burning expanse of chiming guitars and smears of abstract melody all stretched into a near static glacial groove. So nice. As if that weren't enough, the last 5 minutes is some of that fuzzy crumbling blurry ambience we can never seem to get enough of. Soft focus and indistinct, shimmering guitars wrapped in thick crumbling guitars and a glistening sonic glow, like Tim Hecker, Fennesz, and that sort of thing, a gorgeous late night coda of dreamy drone-y bliss. For part three (originally the third lp), the group start out by moving even further out into space (rock) on the ten minute "Stellar Envelope", blown out crumbling sheets of distorted psych guitar and dizzying FX wrapped around propulsive tribal beats, feedback everywhere, it almost sounds like Hawkwind with all the structure sucked out, leaving a huge swirling mass of psychedelic tribal ambience, while managing to still rock somehow. The rest of volume three area gorgeously obfuscated drift through a sonic landscape at once rough and lo-fi and blissfully lush, strange industrial clatter and clang is muted and smeared into mumbly ambience, guitars are looped into hypnotic stretches of throbbing drone, bits of dreamlike melody, simple spacious piano, are wreathed in fuzz and warped into gorgeous slabs of pop ambient fuzz, the whole thing is surprisingly tranquil and shimmery, especially after that opening salvo, and the dense rhythmic intensity of the first two movements, but within the context of Tarentel's seriously epic Ghetto Beat symphony, it couldn't sound more perfect. The final movement (the 4th and last lp in the series) offers up Ghetto Beats' heaviest moment in the form of "Somebody Fucks With Everybody", a sidelong doom dirge blow out, referencing everyone from SUNNO))) to Growing to Nadja, a thick glacial swirl of downtuned guitars, wreathed in effulgent streaks of damaged outerspace FX and psychrock solar flares, all underpinned by Neurosis style tribal rhythms, constantly sounding as if any second the song will kick into the heaviest riff of all time, but instead, it stretches on and on, building and building, some sort of cosmic lo-fi krautrock ambience, massive and heavy, but strangely dreamy and blissful. The rest of Ghetto Beats pretty much eschews the titular beats entirely, instead offering up several brief ambient drifts, the far away foresty folk hovering above slow moving slabs of glacial low end of "Where Time Forgot", the ultra brief scrape and shuffle of "Isalais Delay", the murky disembodied post rock of "You Do This. I'll Do That", a strange landscape of fuzzy melodies and indistinct song fragments, all woven into some sort of soft focus fever dream, and finally, "Lake Light", a two minute outro, the glorious final flurry of sound in this epic sonic travelogue spread out over 2cds, a gorgeously hopeful, sparkling glistening drift of shimmery harmonics, and misty minor key flutter... Like we mentioned before, we've loved everything Tarentel has done in the past, but this is by far our favorite, and how could it not be after drifting dreamily through two plus glorious hours of Ghetto Beats, immersing ourselves in a dreamy, druggy, murky world of drifting space drones and propulsive beats, of fuzzed out shimmer and barely there ambience... So amazing! Packaged in a super striking, full color, eight panel fold out sleeve, limited to 3000 copies, each with a numbered metallic sticker affixed to the front.

MPEG stream: Everybody Fucks With Somebody
MPEG stream: All Things Vibrations
MPEG stream: Sun Place
MPEG stream: Cosmic Dust

When we first heard the title of this new Tarentel FOUR LP series, Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun, we were pretty sure they were being ironic, or facetious, or something, and there would be no beats, ghetto or otherwise, to be found anywhere, just their usual gorgeously slow shifting epic postrock soundscapes. But actually, these lps ARE all about the beats, not sure if they're 'ghetto' or not, but they sure are dense and funky and weirdly rhythmic, from blissed out shuffling skitter to super propulsive krautrocky pound, these discs are definitely a whole new side of Tarentel. A much more raw and ragged, caustic and groove based beast. It almost sounds like Tarentel covering This Heat, or a krautrock No Neck Blues Band, or maybe even Tussle via This Heat with a bit of 23 Skidoo thrown in for good measure. While the framework of each song is some dense web of percussive clatter or some sort-of-funky drum jam, these gorgeously hypnotic skeletal rhythms are surrounded on all sides by thick swaths of crumbling ambience, disembodied guitar loops and rumbling bass, thick swells of warm whir and all sorts of other random dreamlike shimmer. Often building into seriously caustic squalls, big churning white hot sonic swirls, each wrapped around beats that seem on the edge of falling apart, or splintering into rhythmic fragments. Maybe that's the ghetto angle, the beats are super lo-fi, blown out, strangely recorded, so they sound sort of alien, with lots of strange FX and stuttering stumbling variations. So fucking awesome. Volume 1 is six tracks, a little over a half an hour, a dense assemblage of abstract rhythms and brooding, swirling psychedelia, heavy on the This Heat worship, beats stretched out over huge expanses of industrial whir and jagged angular guitars, very loping and hypnotic, brooding and drone-y, mysterious tribal rituals stretched out into epic spaced out, abstract rhythmic jams. As much as we dig pretty much everything Tarentel does, Ghetto Beats is by far the best stuff we've ever heard from these guys. So fantastic!

MPEG stream: Everybody Fucks With Somebody
MPEG stream: All Things Vibrations

When we first heard the title of this new Tarentel FOUR LP series, Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun, we were pretty sure they were being ironic, or facetious, or something, and there would be no beats, ghetto or otherwise, to be found anywhere, just their usual gorgeously slow shifting epic postrock soundscapes. But actually, these lps ARE all about the beats, not sure if they're 'ghetto' or not, but they sure are dense and funky and weirdly rhythmic, from blissed out shuffling skitter to super propulsive krautrock pound, these discs are definitely a whole new side of Tarentel. A much more raw and ragged, caustic and groove based beast. It almost sounds like Tarentel covering This Heat, or a krautrock No Neck Blues Band, or maybe even Tussle via This Heat with a bit of 23 Skidoo thrown in for good measure. While the framework of each song is some dense web of percussive clatter or some sort-of-funky drum jam, these gorgeously hypnotic skeletal rhythms are surrounded on all sides by thick swaths of crumbling ambience, disembodied guitar loops and rumbling bass, thick swells of warm whir and all sorts of other random dreamlike shimmer. Often building into seriously caustic squalls, big churning white hot sonic swirls, each wrapped around beats that seem on the edge of falling apart, or splintering into rhythmic fragments. Maybe that's the ghetto angle, the beats are super lo-fi, blown out, strangely recorded, so they sound sort of alien, with lots of strange FX and stuttering stumbling variations. So fucking awesome. Volume 2 is 4 tracks, 40 minutes, two epic jams, both 16+ minutes, separated by two shorter tracks. The opener starts with an endlessly hypnotic, near metal drum jam, over which guitars and sound makers creak and keen, a crystalline web of high end sonics over a swirling tribal rhythm. It could seemingly go on forever, and it sort of does, but near the end it dissipates into a dark spacious soundscape of distant clatter and thick rumbling buzz. After a one minute rhythmic experiment, all freaked out psych rock effects and super distorted drum sputter, the second lengthy jam kicks in, and it's definitely the most mellow and blissed out track on the first two volumes, some muted free jazz skitter, over a slow burning expanse of chiming guitars and smears of abstract melody all stretched into a near static glacial groove. So nice. As if that weren't enough, the last 5 minutes is some of that fuzzy crumbling blurry ambience we can never seem to get enough of. Soft focus and indistinct, shimmering guitars wrapped in thick crumbling guitars and a glistening sonic glow, like Tim Hecker, Fennesz, and that sort of thing, a gorgeous late night coda of dreamy drone-y bliss. As much as we dig pretty much everything Tarentel does, Ghetto Beats is by far the best stuff we've ever heard from these guys. So fantastic!

MPEG stream: Sun Place
MPEG stream: Cosmic Dust

When we first heard the title of this new Tarentel FOUR LP series, Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun, the first two of which we raved about a little while back (both of which we still have in stock, although there are only a handful of copies left!) we were pretty sure they were being ironic, or facetious, or something, and there would be no beats, ghetto or otherwise, to be found anywhere, just their usual gorgeously slow shifting epic postrock soundscapes. But actually, these lps ARE all about the beats, not sure if they're 'ghetto' or not, but they sure are dense and funky and weirdly rhythmic, from blissed out shuffling skitter to super propulsive krautrock pound, these discs are definitely a whole new side of Tarentel. A much more raw and ragged, caustic and groove based beast. It almost sounds like Tarentel covering This Heat, or a krautrock No Neck Blues Band, or maybe even Tussle via This Heat with a bit of 23 Skidoo thrown in for good measure. While the framework of most of these songs is some dense web of percussive clatter or some sort-of-funky drum jam, these gorgeously hypnotic skeletal rhythms are surrounded on all sides by thick swaths of crumbling ambience, disembodied guitar loops and rumbling bass, thick swells of warm whir and all sorts of other random dreamlike shimmer. Often building into seriously caustic squalls, big churning white hot sonic swirls, each wrapped around beats that seem on the edge of falling apart, or splintering into rhythmic fragments. Maybe that's the ghetto angle, the beats are super lo-fi, blown out, strangely recorded, so they sound sort of alien, with lots of strange FX and stuttering stumbling variations. So fucking awesome. On volume three, the group start out by moving even further out into space (rock) on the ten minute "Stellar Envelope", blown out crumbling sheets of distorted psych guitar and dizzying FX wrapped around propulsive tribal beats, feedback everywhere, it almost sounds like Hawkwind with all the structure sucked out, leaving a huge swirling mass of psychedelic tribal ambience, while managing to still rock somehow. The rest of volume three area gorgeously obfuscated drift through a sonic landscape at once rough and lo-fi and blissfully lush, strange industrial clatter and clang is muted and smeared into mumbly ambience, guitars are looped into hypnotic stretches of throbbing drone, bits of dreamlike melody, simple spacious piano, are wreathed in fuzz and warped into gorgeous slabs of pop ambient fuzz, the whole thing is surprisingly tranquil and shimmery, especially after that opening salvo, and the dense rhythmic intensity of the first two volumes, but within the context of Tarentel's epic 4 part Ghetto Beat symphony, it couldn't sound more perfect. As much as we love pretty much everything Tarentel does, volume three of Ghetto Beats only further convinces us that this is by far the best stuff we've ever heard from these guys. So fantastic!

When we first heard the title of this new Tarentel FOUR LP series, Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun, the first two of which we raved about a little while back (both of which we still have in stock, although there are only a handful of copies left!) we were pretty sure they were being ironic, or facetious, or something, and there would be no beats, ghetto or otherwise, to be found anywhere, just their usual gorgeously slow shifting epic postrock soundscapes. But actually, these lps ARE all about the beats, not sure if they're 'ghetto' or not, but they sure are dense and funky and weirdly rhythmic, from blissed out shuffling skitter to super propulsive krautrock pound, these discs are definitely a whole new side of Tarentel. A much more raw and ragged, caustic and groove based beast. It almost sounds like Tarentel covering This Heat, or a krautrock No Neck Blues Band, or maybe even Tussle via This Heat with a bit of 23 Skidoo thrown in for good measure. While the framework of most of the tracks is some dense web of percussive clatter or some sort-of-funky drum jam, these gorgeously hypnotic skeletal rhythms are surrounded on all sides by thick swaths of crumbling ambience, disembodied guitar loops and rumbling bass, thick swells of warm whir and all sorts of other random dreamlike shimmer. Often building into seriously caustic squalls, big churning white hot sonic swirls, each wrapped around beats that seem on the edge of falling apart, or splintering into rhythmic fragments. Maybe that's the ghetto angle, the beats are super lo-fi, blown out, strangely recorded, so they sound sort of alien, with lots of strange FX and stuttering stumbling variations. So fucking awesome. The final volume in the series, offers up Ghetto Beats' heaviest moment in the form of "Somebody Fucks With Everybody", a sidelong doom dirge blow out, referencing everyone from SUNNO))) to Growing to Nadja, a thick glacial swirl of downtuned guitars, wreathed in effulgent streaks of damaged outerspace FX and psychrock solar flares, all underpinned by Neurosis style tribal rhythms, constantly sounding as if any second the song will kick into the heaviest riff of all time, but instead, it stretches on and on, building and building, some sort of cosmic lo-fi krautrock ambience, massive and heavy, but strangely dreamy and blissful. The second side pretty much eschews the titular beats entirely, instead offering up several brief ambient drifts, the far away foresty folk hovering above slow moving slabs of glacial low end of "Where Time Forgot", the ultra brief scrape and shuffle of "Isalais Delay", the murky disembodied post rock of "You Do This. I'll Do That", a strange landscape of fuzzy melodies and indistinct song fragments, all woven into some sort of soft focus fever dream, and finally, "Lake Light", a two minute outro, the glorious final flurry of sound in this epic sonic travelogue spread out over 4 lps, a gorgeously hopeful, sparkling glistening drift of shimmery harmonics, and misty minor key flutter. So lovely. We've loved everything Tarentel has done in the past, but this is by far our favorite, and how could it not be after drifting dreamily through all 8 sides of Ghetto Beats, immersing ourselves in a gloriously murky world of drifting space drones and propulsive beats, of fuzzed out shimmer and barely there ambience... So amazing!

Tarentel have been on a madly prolific run, both as a group and individually -- particularly AQ pal Jef Cantu whom you can also hear in The Alps and as J.C. Ledesma. Following up the companion EPs Paper White and Big Black Square from earlier this year is another beautiful release from those dear fellows, and it's on the Acuarela label from Madrid, Spain. Barely there shifting layers of haze and shimmer punctuated by spartan plucked strings and strums. Ultra delicate and airy.

MPEG stream: Ghost Weight
MPEG stream: Holy Throbs Of Silence

ULTRA LIMITED, HAND SILKSCREENED lp from local post-drone-rock outift Tarentel. We've had the sonic good fortune of listening to Tarentel develop over the years from a Tortoise like post-rock ensemble to a truly risk taking experimental group, who wield a deft hand with catchy melodies and clever, complex song writing, but never shy away from taking big chances, experimenting with sound and sounds, leaning lately much more toward the abstract soundscape end of the spectrum, which of course we can't get enough of. From the opening track, a downright dreamy expanse of gentle piano, warm whooshing woodwinds and delicate acoustic guitars to the much darker and abrasive second track, a super distorted rumbling dronescape, swirling and churning around a shuffling jazzy rhythm and some creaking machine like melodies. The remaining seven tracks are a mix of the two, stretched out, blissed out smears of twinkling synths, and fluttery minimal percussion, all occasionally disrupted by big fuzzy spurts of distorted rumble and sunspot like flashes of digital glitchery. So gorgeous. And again, VERY LIMITED. Beautiful hand screened sleeves, strictly limited to 500 copies, not sure how many we'll be able to get!

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It's been over a year since we've heard from Tarentel. Not since their Ghetto Beats release in 2007. Since then the various members have been doing their own things, recording solo records, playing in other bands, running labels, and while this is not an actual new record it will go a long way to tiding us over until the next proper Tarentel release. Live Edits, as the title suggests, are various recordings from their 2005 European tour, short excerpts and edits from looooong live performances. The first thing you notice, in one of the Switzerland shows, which was hinted at on Ghetto Beats, is how much more rhythmic they can get live, the drums seem to be THE driving force. Offering up dense flurries of tribal rhythms, pounding out mysterious rituals, while the rest of the band contribute sounds and textures in the background, high pitched sine waves, sheets of feedback, processed guitar scrabble, whirring drones, very abstract and tripped out. But at another show in a different Swiss city, the drums are ditched completely, or if they are present, they are processed into another layer of buzzing drone, to pile atop the already intense wall of sound being conjured up, lots of rumble and hiss, a deep mysterious pulse buried beneath, which eventually builds to something much more blissy and melodic, guitars ringing out, chiming, woven into an ethereal shimmer. Back at the first Swiss show, the group create a mysterious soundscape of creaking machinery, haunting loops, and heavily effected guitars, left to drift through a super abstract dubby drift. In Italy, Tarentel offer up yet more minimalism, guitars scrape and groan, creating a rough smear of textured hum, over a distant soft focus shimmer, before letting the guitars growl and buzz, building to a thick throbbing swirl. The above were just the longer tracks, those are actually separated by brief snippets of various performances, from awesomely chaotic glitched out synthscapery, to deep FX drenched dark ambience, to creepy expanses of low end sprawl and whirring blackened rumbles, all of the tracks, are deftly placed to create the flow of a proper record, the various performances, and the varied sounds, smeared and blurred into one stretched out abstract freeform whole. Packaged in a cool 2 color silkscreened cardstock sleeve, and LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!

MPEG stream: Geneva, Switzerland
MPEG stream: Bern, Switzerland
MPEG stream: Perugia, Italy

Local ambient drone rockers Tarentel have kept a pretty low profile as of late. Jefre Cantu has focused on his solo recordings as well as running the amazing Root Strata label, while the other members have had their fingers in all sorts of Bay Area exploits. But it seems like maybe Tarentel is starting to gain momentum again, a recent tour with Pelican, a flurry of upcoming releases as well as this here live cd (a cd, NOT a cd-r, although still limited to 500 copies). Recorded last year, this 40 minute set displays some new facets of Tarentel's sound. The opening track is a dense collage of aggressively strummed acoustic guitar amidst swirls of feedback, guitar grit and what sounds like chantlike vocals. A thick cloud of tribal skree that sounds like it could be some lost NNCK track or a Sunburned Hand jam. The next track, the disc's 15 minute long centerpiece, is a murky drift of abstract percussion, haunting horns, muted melodies all in a cloud of room sound and natural reverb. Pretty and space-y and dreamily delicate. The last two tracks, each about nine minutes, find Tarentel dabbling again in New Weird America, albeit offering their own slant. Random percussion, shakers and bells, moaning horns and bits of clatter and clank, cloudy ambience, a muted scrape and scrabble, adding a drone like background texture, peals of feedback drift through a whirring sheet of amp hum and staticky FX, whistles send squiggly little melodies fluttering into the ether, the whole thing a deliriously laidback jam, free and unmoored, a deliriously druggy drift. So nice. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!! Packaged in beautiful brown and metallic silver hand screened cardstock sleeves, with a photocopied insert.

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SORRY. Two extra long songs of majestic instrumental post rock from local favorites Tarentel, who have been getting well-deserved attention from all over the world. This single is limited to 500 copies and comes from Resonant, house label of the Chunky Records shop in the West Midlands of the UK. Tarentel specialize in long emotional tracks composed of delicately strung together sections, each one a miniaturized soundscape of its own. Deep. Buy now or cry later! Orange vinyl if you're quick, black vinyl otherwise.

Newest in the Mort Aux Vaches series of live performances, here are four pieces from local boys Tarentel, in their best lineup -- when Trevor Montgomery and Jeff Rosenberg were still in the band -- during Holland's 1998 VPRO festival. If you've never heard Note: we got these straight from the band so they're relatively inexpenisive. All future copies we may carry will be more expensive.

RealAudio clip: When No One's Listening

Tarentel's 2004 album We Move Through Weather found the San Francisco's sonic journeymen balancing their penchant for moody atmospheres and a new found spirit of improvisation, which hurtled them somewhere near Jackie-O Motherfucker meets This Heat territory. In constructing that record, Tarentel had to sift through hours and hours of recordings in order to pare down to a mere 72 minutes. Well, they could have done the Supersilent or Necks thing of releasing a massive 3 or 4 cd set of material; but instead they chose to wait and publish two EPs (which both clock in well above 30 minutes each) of material that was not included on the We Move Through Weather album. Paper White is the four-song companion EP to the drone-rock epic EP Big Black Square. Strangulated post-Joy Division guitar chords jaggedly alternate with atonal Gastr Del Sol stabs of repeating clunky guitar melodies on top of the atypical marching percussion supplied by drummer Jim Redd. Tarentel fleshes out their skeletal sound with a subtle use of live Max-MSP patches and more conventional guitar pedals that actively transform their sounds into a aural kaleidoscope with muted colors and blue-gray hues. In comparison to Big Black Square, this could be constued as the "pop" side of Tarentel; but even so, this is a pretty avant-garde mutation of what pop music could be.

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AQ has previously praised the post-rock instrumental drama of popular local kids Tarentel. Certainly fans of Mogwai, Godspeed You Black Emperor, and the like have found Tarentel quite enjoyable as well. Nearly two years after their stunning debut album, From Bone To Satellite, the band is back with The Order of Things, released on Neurosis' label Neurot. In addition to the traditional

RealAudio clip: Adonai
RealAudio clip: Ghosty Head

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SORRY. Rare UK import limited to 500 copies, and we have only a few left. Local spacerock group that's been compared to everyone from Ennio Morricone to Mogwai. Emotional, stretched out music that makes you wait for the climaxes.

Very little has remained constant with San Francisco's Tarentel over their seven year existence. Revolving around two core members Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Danny Grodinski, the band has shifted from their original beginnings as a slowcore, post-rock trio to an explosive radioluminescent on their debut album From Bone To Satellite to the art rock experiments with absence on The Order Of Things. We Move Through Weather marks yet another transition for Tarentel, but perhaps what is remarkably diffferent about this album is that its inspirations are far more difficult to discern. All of the previous Tarentel albums wore their influences on their sleeves: Winsdor For The Derby, Mogwai, Godspeed! You Black Emperor, Radiohead, Fennesz, Stephan Mathieu, etc. Here on We Move Through Weather, the spirit of This Heat is the only thing that's recognizable. Even so, Tarentel doesn't really sound like This Heat but they share a similar lust for adventurous and risky music. Sonna's Jim Redd has been moonlighting with Tarentel for sometime on the drums, bringing vertiginous, stumbling percussive patterns that are somewhat like Charles Hayward or Jaki Leibezeit. Around Redd's centering rhythms, Grodinski and Cantu-Ledesma fill the space with a sort of humid Bark Psychosis abstraction with sad sack piano melodies, haunting tape flutterings, and twin guitar drones. After so many years of reinvention, Tarentel have finally come out the shadow of mimesis and produced an emphatic album that is uniquely their own. Well done, boys!

MPEG stream: Hello! We Move Through Weather
MPEG stream: Get Away From Me You Clouds Of Doom
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The third in a new series of 7" singles from some very familiar names. Elsewhere on this list you'll find the first two volumes, one from local boys Tussle and the other from A sunny Day In Glasgow, and now this one, number three, comes from another bunch of local boys, Tarentel, who have been a bit quiet as of late, the various members pursuing their various solo projects, leaving us to enjoy little bits of Tarentel here and there, archival recordings mostly, as we wait patiently for a new full length. We recently reviewed Tarentel's Live Edits disc on Digitalis, a collection of, well, live edits from various performances, and one of the things we noticed was how rhythmic and almost heavy some of the performances were. The A side, here, or the North side, in keeping with the series theme, sounds like it could have come from the same performance, very drum heavy, a loping groove that sounds almost looped, as the drums are subtly effected and all around them swirl bits of feedback and blurred noise, very krautrocky, with that noisy backdrop surprisingly caustic at points, but just as often smoothed out into buzzing snarling dronescapes, still littered with jagged shards of feedback, and still hovering over that relentless rhythm. Turning South (to the B side) we find the band ditching the drums completely, for a brooding soundtracky drift, spidery abstract guitars, warm whirring buzz, lush smears of hazy ambience, subtle effects and mysterious rumblings, all woven into the theme music for some late night rainy day wander through some crumbling city, culminating in a haunting bit of cacophony, a corrosive blackened drone, that plays out to the very end of the side before suddenly blinking out. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! Super simple, striking covers, mint green vinyl!

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SORRY. An impressive debut from this delicate spacy local group that is very reminiscent of Low and the good stuff from Kranky. A hidden bonus track features a great electronica reworking by Arrow.

Yet another collaboration between local filmmaker Paul Clipson, and musician and Root Strata co-head honcho J.C. Ledesma (although the first three of the previous collaborations were with Ledesma solo, so technically this is the first one with the whole band) and it's another fantastic feast for the eyes and the ears. Clipson is a master of Super 8, his films more about light and shadow than the particular images, street lights, lit buildings, reflections of the moon or the sun on bodies of water, all become streaks and blurs, trains racing by, escalators, street signs, are examined close up and become textures, moving designs, Clipson often layers image upon image creating lush tapestries of dense visuals, sometimes high contrast, sometimes colorful and saturated, here, the first film is a nighttime cityscape, but rendered city-less in Clipson's able camera, instead a series of shapes and lights and textures, visuals that play like a score to some late night symphony, Tarentel offer up an equally busy sonic backdrop, mostly percussion, a tribal wash of toms and the occasional flurry of snare, shrouded by soft distant shimmers, looped guitars, also blurred and smeared, all very abstract and ethereal, a perfect match for the visuals. The second film, Over Water, begins with shots of rivers reflecting the sunlight, photographed from a plane, clouds, edged by sunlight, a constantly shimmering slideshow of water in its various forms, already gorgeously abstract, with no help from Clipson, although he edits them and occasionally superimposes to create even more abstract impressions of water, the music this time around is equally hushed, no drums, just shimmery guitars, distant loops, lots of textural buzz, and warm barely there whirs, super delicate and dark. Finally, Tuolumne finishes off the program, the visuals impressionistic, close ups of what seems to be leaves and water, slow moving streams filmed with bubbles and a strange white scum that makes gorgeous patterns as it floats atop the nearly black water, branches offer a high contrast foreground, Tarentel counter with the most active of their scores, a muted insectoid buzz, drifting atop a deep thick smoldering thrum, which builds to a gorgeous almost metallic crescendo. Gorgeous packaging too, sort of mimicking Clipson's films, light dappled vellum, yellow on a warm brownish backdrop, that folds over and into itself, a small Xeroxed insert inside, and like the first three installments, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!

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SORRY. Tarentel "Sets And Rises". Lilienthal "Rises And Sets". Two new songs exclusive to this release, limited to 500 copies. Tarentel, you may already know, play majestic instrumental post rock. Lilienthal, the electronic solo project from New Yorker Arrow Kleeman, are similar in prettiness and mood to Boards of Canada.

[ aquarius records catalogue — T ]