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"Lur" is another cd-r release for the exceptional German drone ensemble Tarkatak -- who have a number of tiny editioned releases. With perhaps only using tape speed modulation and a few effects (mostly reverb), Tarkatak beautifully processes a series of heavy bell tones into dark shimmering ambience on par with Andrew Chalk's amazing "East Of The Sun" album. "Lur" comes packaged with a sewn blue hessian bag (a similar idea to :Zoviet France:'s early album entitled "Hessian") which tends to fray easily, so please be careful when handling it.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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The German drone outfit Tarkatak has been a little too low profile for their own good, with a handful of super limited edition releases that have sadly been pressed as cd-rs. Fortunately Jef Cantu of Tarentel plans on releasing a Tarkatak album on his newly christened dronological label Blessed / Cursed, which could very likely get Tarkatak the attention which they deserve. But until that day comes, we'll try and keep as many of the tiny editions of Tarkatak records as we can. "Skok" is a fairly recent release, though the recordings date back to winter of 96 / 97. Tarkatak keeps things very quiet with some beautiful deep drones punctuated by subaquatic washes. The tonal palette is remarkably similar to Zoviet France's "Digilogue." Excellent work!!!
Decemberists alert! This was Colin Meloy's band before the Decemberists that not many people got to hear. Maybe if you were really on top of the Montana indie-rock scene of the late '90s you have one of their releases that were limited to a couple hundred copies. But if you are like us, maybe you missed the boat on them the first time around, but thanks to the popularity of his current band the all out of print recordings of Tarkio have been unearthed on this two-cd set. There is no mistaking Meloy's voice and lyrical stylings with Tarkio but with a more Midwestern/salt-of-the-earth, less Victorian and dramatic delivery. In fact this reminds us so much of early and mid-era R.E.M. which ain't a bad thing at all. And his Robyn Hitchcock-like delivery was in full effect as well. Had they been on a label like Merge, Alias, or Matador they would have been staples of college radio but their location and lack of distro kept them pretty much a Missoula secret. A must have for Decemberists enthusiasts!
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Over the years, I have met many people who have taken the pains to make cassette dubs of the "Stalker" soundtrack straight from the video. No longer necessary. Dark and heavy orchestrations and vibrations resonating from the claustrophobic cloak of the cold, cold iron curtain. And one folk dance. Very highly recommended. And if you have seen (heard) "Solaris" lately, you know how beautiful and mysterious it is too. Japanese imports, hence the price (nice packaging though.) "Ivanovo" is a little cheaper because it's a little shorter.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Over the years, I have met many people who have taken the pains to make cassette dubs of the "Stalker" soundtrack straight from the video. No longer necessary. Dark and heavy orchestrations and vibrations resonating from the claustrophobic cloak of the cold, cold iron curtain. And one folk dance. Very highly recommended. And if you have seen (heard) "Solaris" lately, you know how beautiful and mysterious it is too. Japanese imports, hence the price (nice packaging though.) "Ivanovo" is a little cheaper because it's a little shorter.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Over the years, I have met many people who have taken the pains to make coldhave seen (heard) "Solaris" lately, you know how beautiful and mysterious it is too. Japanese imports, hence the price (nice packaging though.) "Ivanovo" is a little cheaper because it's a little shorter.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Over the years, I have met many people who have taken the pains to make cassette dubs of the "Stalker" soundtrack straight from the video. No longer necessary. Dark and heavy orchestrations and vibrations resonating from the claustrophobic cloak of the cold, cold iron curtain. And one folk dance. Very highly recommended. And if you have seen (heard) "Solaris" lately, you know how beautiful and mysterious it is too. Japanese imports, hence the price (nice packaging though.) "Ivanovo" is a little cheaper because it's a little shorter.
What's this? Maybe the cover, all-black but for the name Tarkus, caught your eye? Holy grail time here, people. We've been wanting to get this album on cd FOREVER. There was a hard-to-find LP reissue some years ago, but we'd never yet found a cd version -- until now, at last, and it's a totally legit one from the master tapes! Released (barely, in an edition of just, like, 50 copies) in Tarkus' native Peru back in 1972, this is an album to go down in the annals of heavy rock, proudly belonging to the pantheon of proggy proto-metal!!! We'd definitely rank this with favorites of ours in that truly cult realm, other early '70s stuff like Necronomicon and Night Sun and Eduardo Bort and Steamhammer's Speech!
It may be that they're named after the ELP's 1971 album Tarkus (you know, the one with that freaky armadillo/tank on the cover), but they don't sound much like ELP in any event. While progressive rock is part of their sound, this Tarkus come across more like a bizarro hybrid of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and some of the more out-there and baroque Italian prog outfits of the era, rather than ELP. It's music that's dark and doomy and powerful and psychedelically dosed, sometimes with really weird operatic vocals -- and always with about a zillion cool, heavy guitar riffs. It's meant to be played LOUD. Shouldn't be hard to comply!
With some very pretty melodies and acoustic moments, Tarkus somehow seem like a '60s garage psych act (which they previously were, Tarkus being formed by members of Peruvian psych-pop group Telegraph Ave.) in possession of a crystal ball that enabled them to gaze into the future to be anachronistically inspired by Black Sabbath's Sabotage album, which was released three years later in 1975 (we'll have to assume that crystal ball had a place to plug in earphones).
This comes packaged in a gatefold, miniature LP styled sleeve. There's a folded color insert, another black and white lyric sheet, and also separate liner notes in both Spanish and English, which make mention of the band dressing like monks when they made one of their rare live appearances.
And by the way, we'd somehow suspect that Portland's Danava have heard this record. If not, they should -- we think they'd like it! And we think you will too, if any of the above raving and referencing strikes a chord!
This underground, Down Under band's first disc, which mostly collected tracks from their cassette EPs, really wowed us last year (landing the number two spot on Allan's 2015 Top Ten, in fact), with their highly enjoyable retro facsimile of early '70s keyboard-driven symphonic proto-metal, a la Deep Purple, Rainbow, and especially the very 'humble, very 'eavy Uriah Heep - what we termed Musty Tasmanian Wizard Rock!
Tarot have now returned with their first proper full-length album, and heaping helpings of Heep are still on the menu, with lots of pomp and majesty, heavy Hammond organ riffing, as well as folky acoustic guitars and mellowed-out choruses. Aside from Heep and the like, we're also reminded of the arcane old school metal of Pagan Altar and Manilla Road - the latter especially due to the nasal delivery of the band's vocalist, who is also the frontman for eccentric sludgy, Sabbathy doom faves The Wizar'd, here taking a much more mystical, rainbow-hued, progtastic path to olde tyme metallic glory!
The wizened seer tentatively flips the last card, her eyes illuminated by the dancing firelight. Her eyes widen as she gasps, before letting out a croaking grotesque cackle. "In your future... I see... MUSTY TASMANIAN WIZARD ROCK!" Well, congratulations! It must be your (Magician's) birthday, because no finer fate can await gods nor men than the prospect of delving into this arcane helping of mystical, mythical, organ-driven heavy folk prog from far off Tasmania. The Warrior's Spell comes hurtling across the astral plane courtesy of Tasmania's Heavy Chains Records (undoubtedly one of our fave new sources for weird & wonderful heavy rock and metal, along with Minotauro, having recently brought us the Outcast ep and latest The Wizar'd album), and conjures all of the torchlit corridor mystery & dusty crumbling aroma of some of our favorite proto-metal, proto-doom & witchy folky proggy rock bands, all swirling Hammond organ, plucked acoustic strums, seriously epic heavy riffing, plaintive flutes & distant nasal vocal prophecies. Uriah Heep is obviously a major touchstone here, the album title and cover clearly paying homage to the technicolor fantasy wonder-realm of Heep's 1972 opus The Magician's Birthday specifically. But just us clearly one can hear the sepia-toned Medieval echoes of Rainbow and the crackly mournful dirge of Pagan Altar. Tarot also shares their vocalist with another one of our favorite obscure quirky heavy acts, The Wizar'd! And while here he sounds significantly less theatrical and maniacal than in his other wilder doomed project, his more restrained approach in Tarot lends the music a much more sombre, majestick, archaic air. Very highly recommended for fans of all of those aforementioned groups as well as anything from early Wishbone Ash to Witchcraft to Comus to The Lamp Of Thoth to the Darkscorch Canticles compilation. Consider us well and truly... under the spell!!!
There is no doubt that we have a big soft spot for so much of the music that comes out of West Africa and Mali in particular, so we were not sure how we missed the first album from this great Mali outfit called Tartit, but we are more then pleased to jump on their fan wagon with their new outing Abacabok. Recorded in the northern Mali desert by Congotronics producer Vincent Kenis, this is a record that keeps you captivated from start to finish. Call and response vocals, handclaps and percussion creating the perfect back-beat, three-string lute and one string fiddle, a few moments of electric guitar. It all comes together to form a record that feels so coherent, hypnotic and grounded to the salt of the earth. Fans of Tinariwen and Ali Farka Toure will be thrilled to hear this record. And just about everyone here at AQ has caught the Tartit fever with a fury! This is really great!
This dynamic Bay Area duo continue onwards and upwards into the stratosphere of terrific music making with their latest release, Nests Of Waves And Wire. After 2006's Us Upon Buildings Upon Us left our ears wonderfully tangled in its wild mathiness and quick twists, we still have to admit we're a bit happy to hear Tartufi bringing back some of their earlier poppiness. This is really really good! Just as ambitious as its predecessor and perhaps even more fully realized. Lynne Angel and Brian Gorman really let their creative juices flow. Each of the seven tracks are impressively multilayered and detailed musical journeys incorporating elements of prog, post-rock, psych (yup, all the good stuff!) - particularly the almost thirteen minute long awesome third track "Engineering" and the final "Hole Or Space". Most are feverishly propulsive and highly rhythmic with vocals chanted and howled in hypnotic cycles. That said, the fifth song "System Folds" does brings a bit of calm to the otherwise breathless proceedings! Recommended.
Tartufi's second cd is simply burstin' with energy and confidence. We still stand by our previous comparison of this Bay Area band (which we made with regards to their six-song EP Westward Onward) to what you might imagine a collaboration between Jody Bleyle (Team Dresch, Hazel) and Rob Crow (Heavy Vegetable, Pinback) sounding like. Sounds pretty darn good to you, don't it? As well, some of their new songs are very much along similar lines as the recent Electrelane album Axes. Hope that doesn't sound like we're oversimplifying things. Really, we're just tryin' to say that Tartufi's music is packed with all the good stuff: a solid emotive pop core, infectious hooks, smartly crafted, challenging twists and strong female vocals. And they just keep gettin' better. Recommended!
Bay Area indie pop trio Tartufi have reached across the ocean to release a four-song EP with the Spainish label Acuarela... and we're glad to hear the word is spreading on this terrific band. If you've dug their intelligent, well-crafted first two cds So We Are Alive and Westward Onward then this will surely be a welcome treat too. Pop tunes played primarily on the straight-forward instrumentation of guitar, bass and drums (okay, there's a little piano, synthesizer and xylophone too), but with lots of plot twists (melodic, rhythmic and tempo-wise) to keep things interestin' and movin' along at a spritely clip. Check 'em (all) out!
Now that they're a duo instead of a trio, SF's Tartufi have shifted their focus away from punchy pop hooks and towards a more epic and expansive punk/prog/pop exploration. The news has created some division around here between those who totally thought their old incarnation was pretty darn great and let down by their new direction; and those who think their old sound was good but a tad derivative and find their new direction amazing, ambitious and refreshingly their own. Perhaps this division would have been better resolved with a new name for their new sound, but what's done is done. Singer and guitarist, Lynne Angel and drummer, Brian Gorman with the help from Tim Green (of The Fucking Champs) have crafted a mathy stew of beauty and noise with vocals that are at times both angelic and damning with turn-on-a-dime changes, majestic sweeps, soft interludes, and only a touch of over-indulgence. The acrobatics that Angel brings doubly to the guitar and her voice have to be seen live to be believed, where they seriously sound like a four piece with a choir. While their new sound to some of us is definitely less immediately engaging than their old sound and may take a little getting used to, we think there will be plenty of fans, love and support for their new shift in focus. Rock on!
The introduction to new SF duo Tartufi comes in the form of this six song EP. From the get go, Westward Onward brings to mind the power pop smarts of bands such as Jody Bleyle's Hazel and Team Dresch or any one of Rob Crow's many incarnations (that is, if he were a she). Very energetic and emotive with lots of lilting vocal counter melodies (which Cup's a total sucker for!). A little amusing side note: if you put this album's cover side by side with that of Adult.'s Anxiety Always, you get a complete picture of a car.
Like so many bands, it's the singing that'll make it or break it. Tarwater's monochromatic Germanic mumble worked with their bleak electronic / post-rock albums, but when attempts to sport songwriting chops and to arrive at the baritone croon of Stephin Merritt are met by uptempo funboy electro pop tunes, the results can make skin crawl. Swear to God, while we were listening to it, Windy kept asking if it was the new Lou Reed album. Still, it's not *all* that guy's vocals, and the music is that nice Tarwater submerged sample crackle, so...
Excellent album! Tarwater come out of a very fertile German electronica meets rock scene, one which has also sprouted To Rococo Rot and Kreidler, both big AQ faves. You want details? OK -- Tarwater is the duo of Ronald Lippok and Bernd Jestram. Ronald and brother Robert are in To Rococo Rot along with Stefan Schneider who is in Kreidler and who also lends his keyboard sound to Tarwater on a track here. Jestram has engineered a couple of To Rococo Rot's recordings.
This close proximity has resulted in a some amazingly beautiful records from all three of these groups, and as a whole they just keep bettering themselves for our delight. Dwellers On The Threshold is one of the very best of the bunch. Just gorgeous! About half instrumental, the album's vocal tracks feature Lippok's vocals which are a morose sort of talk / sing murmur that reminds me of Tindersticks. Several of the tracks feature bittersweet strings and the exact same lush plucked harp-sounding thing that made the last Kreidler record Eve Future so stunning. There's lots and lots of serenely picked guitar amongst the programmed beats that don't call too much attention to themselves; rather it's the melody and songwriting that stand out. And the whole thing runs on a consistently stately pace. Really well done. Highly recommended, especially if you're a fan of the Notwist, Fridge, Tindersticks, To Rococo Rot, Kreidler, etc. A big fave of Windy and Allan.
After the fairly savage review we gave to Tarwater's previous effort (we said we thought "Animals, Suns, and Atoms" sounded like a new Lou Reed album!) we can happily say we like this new one better. Indeed, we'll call it a comeback for the Tarwater duo of
Germans Ronald Lippok (of To Rococo Rot) and Bernd Jestram are Tarwater, and this is the follow-up to their fine 11/6 12/5 album which seemed to bridge Nick Cave and Portishead. Here's some of what Forced Exposure's email list has to say about the new disc: "DJing (loops, breakbeats, cut-ups, speeches), electronic experiments and classical song structures lay next to each other in Tarwater's music, which leads them in the direction of artists as DJ Shadow or Tricky...and one can find a long list of other references: early 90's East Coast Hip Hop, the Coil of the Horse Rotovator Phase, the Crooklyn Dub Consortium, the minimal electronic sets of DJ Kazi Lenka and Taschensound, and the compositions of Carl Wilson. Still: the intuition kicks out the strategy and gives this music a rather mysterious pop-appeal."
As we've said before, we've both loved and not-loved-quite-so-much past releases from the modern day kraut-tronica duo of Robert Lippok (To Rococo Rot) and Bernd Jestram. But overall we like 'em pretty well. So we're sorry we didn't get around to listing this disc when it came out... last year... since it's certainly a nice enough entry in the ever so textural Tarwater discography. We particularly dig the track that sounds like underwatery video game music, sonar pings in a soundscape of moodiness...
Tarwater, the German postrock/electronica duo featuring a member of To Rococo Rot, has had their ups and downs with their fans here at AQ. If you look back at our reviews of their several previous albums you'll find some we rave about and some we pan. Their last full-length, Dwellers On The Threshold, got a rave. So does that mean that this new one, their first for new label Morr Music, is bound for the downswing? Or are they at last on a steady upward trajectory with us? Well if you're a fan by now you've probably made up your own mind 'cause this has been out for a little while now. But for what it's worth, we like this one. The unique Tarwater charm -- the combination of bloodless vocals and mellow beats and instrumental textures -- does it for us again. Relaxed, pretty, downtempo stuff for the most part. With the aid of various guests, Tarwater's Robert Lippok and Bernd Jestram have come up with 14 songs that (as always) blend "live" instruments and singing and electronics into a variety of melodic, moody soundscapes and low-key synthpop tunes. There are some more upbeat numbers with percolating rhythms but the vocals are never upbeat! Indeed, the singing remains the thing that is either going to make or break this for most listeners. Depends if you like their style of gently spoken-sung, kinda soft and dreary, English-language vocals. Their unexcitable, deadpan delivery would be easy to parody. But Tarwater's intimate, rainy-day electro-acoustic symphonics give this album human warmth. The Needle Was Travelling is mysteriously groovy, whilst being laid-back and droney too. It's modern-day krautrock after all. Some might like it better in an instrumental version, but Lippok's vocal limitations are for better or worse a key part of the Tarwater sound that we enjoy.
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While we've raved about the insane and insanely elaborate packaging from local boutique label Time Released Sound, we try to stress that all this fancy pants packaging wouldn't mean shit though if the music wasn't able to stand on its own, and thankfully, since a lot of the TRS releases sell out before we can get our hands on them, or are just a bit too pricey for some folks, they also come available as more affordable discs in less extravagant packaging, which is especially good news, cuz it would be sad for music like this to only make it into the ears of the 80 people who managed to nab the deluxe version.
Taskerlands is a duo consisting of Michael Tanner, aka Plinth, who was responsible for that incredible Collected Machine Music disc all created from the sounds of vintage music boxes, and David Colohan from psych folk outfit United Bible Studies. Tanner and Colohan each strap on a guitar, run it through some pedals, and out comes some gloriously dreamy pastoral psychedelic folk, lush and sun dappled, the notes and chords wreathed in reverb and echo and allowed to drift weightless over darkly delicate piano, and the sweet melodies from a bass clarinet fluttering just below the surface. Two twenty-one minute tracks, each one a softly smoldering sonic rumination, slipping from dense tangles of abstract Appalachia to brooding low end swirl, flickering melodic drift to dark distorted droned out minor key dirges, from haunting hypnotic thrum, to washed out hazy psychedelic shimmer. Lovely, lovely stuff.
Not as limited as the deluxe version, but limited nonetheless, so grab one before they're gone!
This is the second pressing of A Strange Artifact which dates to 2004. The second edition, like the first, comes by the way of Darren Tate's own Fungal imprint, although he's vastly improved the artwork with reproductions of Tate's stain-and-ink drawings adorning the sleeve. Given the limited nature of the original edition, this one is certainly new to us; and for better or for worse, the second one will soon depart from these doors.
Darren Tate has been a regular fixture here at Aquarius with his self-produced constructs of eccentric droneworks, although he's best known for his impressionist compositions with Andrew Chalk and Colin Potter, in Ora and Monos respectively. A Strange Artifact is a suitable title for this album, which Tate composed as a fictional piece of automatic music through accordion, guitar, and field recordings. The accordion tentatively seesaws a quizzical arpeggiation that when brought up to speed sounds like a primitive variation of Phillip Glass's early work, but mostly is a slow meander through notes providing something eerily carnivalesque like a Svankmajer soundtrack. Spindly guitar plucks float amidst the accordion, and subterranean field recordings churn in the distant. Perhaps this is the least droning piece we've encountered from Darren Tate, certainly one of the weirdest, too. Limited to 100 copies.
Another Sunday is another self-released micro-edition from the British drone maestro Darren Tate, best known for his work in Ora and Monos. Here, Mr. Tate presents three lengthy tracks of analogue synth variations on a theme and one pastoral field recordings of the birds flitting around his country garden. The analogue sounds revolve around a kosmische swirl of filter-sweep minimalism dappled with oceanic, tonal glissandos which gently sway up and down for a subtle hypnotic effect. Tate weaves into these ambient modulations a chorus of sympathetic vibrations, which taken on their own could easily be confused for the glacial pacing of Eliane Radigue's compositions. The coda of birds is a nice touch, countering the navel-gazing circuitry of the electronic sound with a fanciful chorus of avian calls. For those of you who have picked up any number of those field recording documents from Sittelle, try your hand at identifying all of these birds. In any case, Another Sunday is super limited, with an edition of 100 copies. We've got only a handful!
Stranger and stranger Darren Tate gets, even as he releases this set of previously unreleased archival material from 1986-87, which finds Tate rummaging around in his garden shed and garage with an unnamed collaborator creating all sorts of clamorous textures, metallic klangs, and screeched bowed drones in a picnic-on-a-summer-afternoon take on the bleak industrial ritualism that was oozing up from the European soils (e.g. Metgumbnerbone, Zero Kama, Ain Soph, and plenty of lesser acolytes from the Temple of Psychick Youth). The spaciousness of Calm In A Teacup does recall the documentary / field recording agenda that Organum offered forth a year later on the magnificently mysterious Vacant Lights album; and a similar metaphysical time/space warp occurs here in Tate's recording through the interplay between the environmental sounds and the hands-on clattering. Very little of the sounds have much in the way of effects or treatments, mostly just the natural echo within the garage and / or shed. Nonetheless, the whole album is pretty zonked-out along a similar axis to Richard Youngs, Taj Mahal Travellers, or Avarus. One would hardly believe Tate would have made records with Andrew Chalk and Colin Potter that would sound so bloody sensible in comparison to this. Signed and number by Darren Tate himself. Just 100 copies.
Close Timid Night is another hand-fabricated, super-limited production from the British eccentric sound artist Darren Tate. His field recording and drone-based work was part of the seminal collective Ora, which found Darren working closely with Andrew Chalk, Colin Potter, Michael Northam, and Jonathan Coleclough. Since then, he's loosened his grip on the drone and has encouraged atypical interactions between long passages of field recordings and an outsider approach to guitar and / or synth. He populates this piece with nocturnal domestic events of creaks from the attic, the ticking of a wind-up clock, the murmur of passing cars, the meowing of cats, and the occasional rattling water pipe all tied together with recordings of distant bursts of fireworks with none of the celebratory cheer and reveling that always echo the flashes of light and thunderous cracks. There's plenty of space for these starkly described environmental sounds, and Tate overlays a monotone hum and his meandering clusters of notes on his synthesized harpsichord. It gives the feel that Tate is allowing his mind to wander whilst peering through the window at the fireworks streaming over a nearby village. Not too sure how limited this one is, but probably somewhere around 50 copies would be our guess.
Once a collaborator many years ago with Andrew Chalk in a project called Ora, Darren Tate has been steadily self-releasing his own diversions of drone, field recording, and eccentric sound-design at quite a brisk pace. Late Afternoon is already the fourth album he's released in 2010, and we might have actually missed one or two. We're pretty sure that the Keijo he's dedicated this album to is the freaked-out Finnish psychedelic minstrel with boatloads of albums on PseudoArcana, Digitalis, Last Visible Dog, etc. Unlike many of the recent Tate records, which had been heavy on the weirdo-synth tip, this one finds Tate adopting the beloved Jewelled Antler strategy of recording out in the wilderness, allowing all of the incidental sounds - manmade, natural, and otherwise - to tread upon whatever musical notes might be generated. Tate doesn't let on to where this recording was made, but it's got something of a natural concrete reverb, it's near an airfield, and it's infested with pigeons. Tate's minor intrusions include a set of chimes which tinkled gently in the thickened reverberations, an acoustic guitar which Tate strums occasionally in brightly ringing chords that again cascade in that reverb, and there's one big cough about 18 minutes into the disc, which Tate purposefully leaves in the mix. Forest folk minimalism meets field recordings! Limited to about 100 copies, of which we have only a handful.
Darren Tate has quietly amassed a substantial catalogue of treated field recordings and electrical eccentricities over the past twenty years, most notably through his collaborations with Andrew Chalk in Ora and more recently through his drone-centric project Monos, which typically features Colin Potter as Tate's trusted foil. While billed as a solo record, Nature In The City was to be the follow-up to the well received (and now out of print) Monos 2cd Generators released on Die Stadt in 2005. That album with its science fiction bleakness through analog electronics was the jumping off point for many of the recent Darren Tate experiments, and was clearly something that Nature In The City comes out of. However, Die Stadt decided to drop Nature In The City from their release schedule, leaving Tate to put this recording out through his own Fungal imprint. Here, Tate concentrates upon atonal flares of sawtooth synth tones and phaser-shot guitar noises that jump out from beds of undulating drones, bellowing loops, and eerie LFO-driven frequencies. Oblique half-melodies nervously flicker out of these constructions, occasionally joined by dreamy flickerings of pixel dust, all awash in nocturnal reverberations. Limited to a mere 100 copies.
The eccentric British sound artist Darren Tate delves back into the drone for this nocturnal album of slippery surfaces. His earliest recordings with Andrew Chalk in Ora and later on with Colin Potter as Monos explored the crepuscular regions of dronemuzik as dappled with sodden field recordings and occluded gestural noise. Yet his solo work of late eschews more and more of the drone quotient, emphasizing the erratic if subdued expressionist elements found in his blorping synths and anti-everything guitar fragments, all of which are bracketed by prolonged periods of quietude. The brilliant producer / engineer Colin Potter (the most sure handed colleague for Stapleton's recordings & performances through Nurse With Wound) amends and adds to recordings provided by Tate on No Longer Here, perhaps transforming the source material into the elegant, mercurial drones found within. A deep thrumming, low end frequency sprawls from end to end of this 45 minute epic, with eerie spectral tones ebbing between synthetic filigrees of cosmic electronics, hallowed reverberations, and watery elongations of sound. Beautiful stuff! The more times we hear this record, the more Tate's outsider strategies become more evident amidst the oceanic currents of drone, making this one of the best "solo" records we've heard from him in a very long time and another exemplary drone album from the whole Chalk / Coleclough / Potter / Tate axis. Not sure how limited this edition is; but probably won't be around for long!
Ah, a drone-centric album from Darren Tate this time around; and perhaps it is not surprising that Nothing By Chance is a reissue of a long out-of-print cd-r that the British eccentric produced way back in 2003. Those were the days when Tate was entering the final stages of his work with Ora - the much revered British drone collective that spilled from the collaboration between Tate and Andrew Chalk (alongside Colin Potter, Jonathan Coleclough, and Lol Coxhill). As a continuation of the rich vernacular of Ora, Tate maps a verdant hypnogogia from home-grown psychoactive tones, drones, and field recordings. There are two long-form tracks on Nothing By Chance, with the first one being girded by a bright, ringing sustained tone from a chord organ furthered along by Leslie-styled flutter / oscillation of the frequencies. Here, Tate's work resonates with a stately grandeur found in the best organ-clad work from Charlemagne Palestine. Sodden recordings of rain tumbling between damp stone houses dominates the second much-longer track, which is a whopping 42 minute expedition of somber patter, sullen street noise, and very English dreariness coming to a rainy-day conclusion with a saturnine round of church organ tones gracefully set against the grey backdrop. Limited to 50 copies, of which we have only a handful.
A wayward psychedelia and an English eccentricity sets Darren Tate apart from many of his psychedelic dronework counterparts. He's unashamed to declare his infatuation with cats and gnomes throughout his many productions. His early recordings with Andrew Chalk (amongst others) as Ora had self-released through their imprint Gnome Records with a few of Tate's kooky watercolors of cats gracing the covers of those albums. Old Pointed Hat was ostensibly to be Tate's "Christmas" album, but he decided to go with the gnome theme once again... at least for the cover art. It's hard to see how gnomes fit into this primitive recording for electronics and guitar, which sounds more like something that should have come out on Snatch Tapes back in 1982, and was only now rediscovered by the bloggers. It's clear by now that Tate has become less interested in the pure drone, pushing more towards an expressive urge through gesture and abstraction. Tate sets up his Roland 101 synthesizer to randomly shuffle through a stoccatic sci-fi bleepity-bloop that slowly evolves into a malcontent post-TG turgid pseudo groove. Throughout this evolution, Tate interjects with a metallic splatter of splintered guitar noise coupled with radio interference and warbles of odd distortion. Growled sawtooth low-end noise and horror / sci-fi half melodies elsewhere on the album give an early Maurizio Bianchi / Hospital Productions vibe. Limited to a 50 copies.
One of the dronescapers behind the seminal Ora project, which also prominently featured Andrew Chalk and Colin Potter, Darren Tate has been quietly churning out tiny edition CD-Rs. Most of his self-released discs have completely evaded us, but we managed to snag the last batch of copies of Organ Of Sight from Mr. Tate himself, who has warned us that these are indeed the last copies to be found. The limited availability of this album is not reason alone to investigate, as Darren Tate has long been an exemplary proponent of otherworldly, long-form abstraction and Organ Of Sight is no exception. A spectral vibrato of an analogue synth set to UFO hover is the foundation for Tate's untitled opening piece, which flashes with eerie electronics on par with much of the '60s esoterica genius mined found in the Creel Pone series. These paranoiac ambient gestures also resemble the general tone of Tate's contributions to the Monos album Generators, from 2005. While the second track rumbles with a deep space frequency and echoes with unsettled sonar pings, Tate counters his isolationist sentiment with a languid series of synthetic harpsichord melodies which make for a dreamy, blissful atmosphere. The final number rattles with a deadened vacuum cleaner hum spotted with smallish events and spooky sound effects cracking the event horizon, which altogether resembles something like Nurse With Wound's A Missing Sense. Limited to a mere 100 copies.
Reflections On A Ceiling is another micro-edition from Darren Tate, the founder of the seminal British avant-drone project Ora with Andrew Chalk. In his recent investigations both under his own name and the Monos project, Tate has been pushing towards a more electronic context with all of the cold, barren, and alien references found in '60s electronic music (e.g. Delia Derbyshire, the Forbidden Plant soundtrack, and most of the electronic esoterica reissued through Creel Pone). Reflections On A Ceiling continues with that trend. Tate opens the album with a series of cold wet field recordings of rain, wind, and other soggy, sodden sounds. Out of this introduction, Tate unravels a series of oscillating tones whose ringing electronics occasionally tumble into declining melodies only to drift into the distance as a Klaus Schulze ambience. For a few minutes in the middle of the album, the synthetic notes subside in a deep dark mass of ghastly electron murk, sort of sounding like a typical Hospital / Hanson production gone by the way of Brian Eno. Tate slowly slips back into the twin-note phase shift with thickly delayed field recordings of wind and rain as the finale to this album. Nicely done. There's something like 150 copies of this kicking around. We've also read that the pressing was only 50 copies. In either case, we don't have many and it's unlikely we'll get more!
Leave it to Darren Tate to throw us for a loop, if only for 53 seconds. Smack in the middle of Secret Mantra is the untitled fifth track, puncturing all of the weirdo DIY electronic spaciousness that came before and comes after it. Just 53 seconds of Tate fingerpicking the guitar, and the melody there is so so sad, so heartwrenching, so damn near perfect a recapitulation the bleakest of British folk, and so fucking brief. Over the years, Tate has been confounding us with his uber-sparse concoctions of zoner radiophonics, field recordings of various English gardens, and slumping drone hypnosis. Secret Mantra would have nestled nicely into his extensive catalogue of eccentric soundscaping, but those 53 seconds make us wonder if Tate might have quite a second career in front of him as England's answer to Jandek, one who carries forth the traditions of indigenous folk songs but through a cracked visionary lens. As it stands, that vignette is just a tease while he turns back to the monosynth, the radio static, the bells, and the clocks that culminate in the smoldering miasma of dub-patterned rhythms and nocturnally mechanical clatter on the untitled ninth piece, which has something of an acoustic :zoviet*france: quality to its eerie repetitiveness.
Secret Mantra celebrates the fifthieth album that Tate has released though his own imprint Fungal Records, and like so many of its predecessors, this is limited to a mere 100 copies. Professionally duplicated, we might add.
Here's a second pressing of this micro-edition release from the hermetic, British sound artist Darren Tate. For many years, we've been championing his strange wunderkammer of drones, field recordings, radiophonic synth meanderings, and slumped stasis; but even so, there seems to be a number of releases that we somehow missed. Small Worlds was one of those recordings that was originally released in such a small edition that it flew completely under the radar; but Tate has remedied that somewhat with a second pressing, but still only in an edition of 70 copies. Working under such monikers as Ora and Monos, Tate has collaborated alongside the likes of Andrew Chalk and Colin Potter off and on over the years, providing some triangulation as to where his aesthetic lies, but his solo recordings tend towards stranger waters so to speak. He populates the astringently barren album Small Worlds with an undercarriage of rumbling, nocturnal drones and deep space meditations. Subtle tonebent phrases quietly cycle through a downer melody at the onset of the album which gives way to spooked-out, sci-fi vibes and eventually some of Tate's beguilingly soft-focus guitar plucks and plonks, all of which barely poke out of the shadowy tones and drones that manifest through the entirety of the album. A very nice one for sure!
Shhh. It's a very quiet recording for Darren Tate. The esoteric sounds of the former Andrew Chalk collaborator have calmed to a nocturnal hush on this, yet another micro-edition release. He's been partial to his analogue synth as of late, with a lot of sci-fi weirdness on display; but here, the sustained tones strike out on a rather lonely orbit, marching through the black of deep space guided by the sparest of oscillations. Tate collapses these tones into a hiss-filled passage of empty spaces, but with the window in that room opened to let in the sounds of soft English rain or maybe the distant hum of a freeway, he quietly situates a series of delicate synth plinks that seem to parallel a few of those reductive sketches Andrew Chalk produced on Ghost Of Nakhodka. Clanks and rattles from small metal objects nestle against sustained drones from Tate's synth only to dissolve into a series of skeletal plunks from his electric guitar echoing its notes in a rich delay pattern, sort of in the manner of the rainy-day psychedelia of Roy Montgomery, but with much more space between all of the notes. Limited to about 100 copies, and certainly not around for long.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The title may be an accurate mapping of Darren Tate's methods, but there is a clear compositional structure to this album which belies the equation of improvisation with mere wanking. Darren Tate's work has long been a staple here at aQuarius through his sodden impressionism in Ora and the deep-end dronework of Monos, with his solo work dialed into one of the odder facets of England's Hidden Reverse (to use David Keenan's terminology). Field recordings, empty spaces, blorping synths, Jandekian guitar plucks, and unkempt sonic rituals all revolve in and out of Tate's albums. And Two Improvisations finds the man situated behind two synths (a monotron and a casio, plus a few bells, and the aid of some avian twitter just outside his window), settling into an early Delia Derbyshire type of soundscaping with tonal long-form undulations pricked by a slow celestial beacon of a synth pulse. Towards the end of the first piece, Tate tweaks the filters to the shimmering electronics which point to the cosmic trippiness of JD Emmanuel. The second piece is considerably shorter and much weirder, with clusters of hand bells tapping against the microphone itself and an oscillating beat pattern hovering just at the event horizon. Another hand-numbered edition from Tate, this one was only pressed up in a batch of 80. We probably won't be able to restock it once it's gone...
Yet another intriguing direction for Darren Tate can be found on this micro-edition. Tate's drone work, which began many years ago with his collaboration with Andrew Chalk piloting the seminal project Ora, has slowly given way to a hermetic, sci-fi sound of electronics augmented by occasional scrapes upon the guitar. Here, Tate has stitched together countless episodes of acoustics, electronic, and ecological soundmaking into a single piece, occasionally pushing toward the realm of the sound poetry aesthetics of Henri Chopin. Tate has never been one to hurry through his compositions and that trait is strongly featured here, as field recordings of birds, gentle drippings of water, intimate rounds of vocal ululations, electrically charged raga drones, percussive rhythms, and even some rather lovely post-Fahey / Mazzacane Connors fingerpicking on an acoustic guitar are positioned rather elegantly with a fine sheen of reverb connecting all of these sounds as a gossamer web of echo and decay. Limited to about 50 copies and already sold out from the source.
For many years now, Darren Tate has been content to issue micro-editions of his work, his earliest recordings with Andrew Chalk and Colin Potter as Ora almost always emerging as an edition of 50 copies or so on cd-r or cassette before warranting a larger pressing on vinyl or cd. Yet recently, the editions on his Fungal imprint have remained the tiny editions with little notion that any will resurface later. True, Tate's eccentric droning, autodidact guitarwork, and psychedelic electronics equate with far more difficult listening than the impressionist blurs of Ora's grand atmospheres; but the paucity of these releases (augmented by their peculiar nature) makes them treasures all the more.
Let's assume this album to be an exaggerated view of what Darren might be meditating upon when he stares out his window. While he's been known to incorporate field recordings from various sources into his work, the flutter of moth wings or the buzz of a wasp won't be found here. The insectoid repetition from the seasickly swooshing glissando that opens the album is the weird science mimesis you get instead; and from there, Tate presents an ever collapsing set of two note melodies (very much on the Giancarlo Toniutti / Maurizio Bianchi end of the hypno-melodic drone spectrum), flanging oscillations, spectral Tetuzi Akiyama style stabs at his guitar, and plenty of asynchronous tone clusters to hang in empty space.
Limited to 75 copies, and that's it!
For the first collaborative effort between venerable British dronescapists Darren Tate (Monos, Ora, etc.) and Andrew Liles (a recent collaborator with Steven Stapleton in the live presentations of Salt Marie Celeste), Liles identifies himself as the Conductor with Tate providing improvisations and field recordings. On the first couple of tracks, the division of labor also equates to a dualism between the menacing minimalism which Liles has been producing with frightening success as of late and the rather charming sounds of Tate's field recordings, consisting of numerous birds twittering around his Northern English garden. But later on, Without Season spirals into a blur of asynchronous loopings, creepy minor key piano progressions, dissonant swells from an accordion (played by Tate's 79-year old neighbor Kathleen Vance), complex chorales for filigree feedback, and post-Jewelled Antler communions with nature. It would make sense if Liles controlled the outcome of Without Season through his claim as the Conductor, as the album's overall feel resembles his unnerving sleights of hand and eerie ambience as opposed to the impressionist dreary dreaminess of either Monos or Ora. Liles' sensibility provide subtle hints at something horrific creeping throughout the charged ether collided with earthen crackle; and it's these occasional reflections of something unsettling that sets this record apart. Exceptional.
Here are the last copies of this album we thought was long out of print. Of course, Darren Tate is the British alchemist who has dozens upon dozens of albums filled with zonked ambient murkiness and psychically unstable drones; and his idiosyncratic soundscapery we've championed here at aQ over the years. Paul Bradley is another British drone-dude, who comes more from the mold of Colin Potter's latter-day working methods. These two have paired up off and on over the years in Tate's on-again / off-again project Monos, which in turn was a continuation of the suspended sound design that Tate produced as Ora with Andrew Chalk and the aforementioned Colin Potter. Acoustically resonant drones from bowed metals and long string instruments seem to be the sources for Sometime Today, with plenty of incidental actions, gestures, and Tate's infatuation with countryside bird song. Out of these materials, the composition organically coalesces into a sublime two note melody that follows the Morton Feldman playbook very nicely through an austere spaciousness, only to dissolve back into the amorphous cauldron of blurry harmonics and ghosts of radiophonic glissando. This album looks forward to much of the transcendent, psychedelic ambience that came through the likes of Quiet Evenings or Mind Over Mirrors, but produced in a manner of eccentric Englishness. Recommended!
Reissue of an LP that Atlantic originally put out back in 1972. Howard Tate ("one of the top ten R&B singers of all time" sez Jerry Ragovoy, who incidentally produced this album and Tate's lone other LP for Verve) quit the music biz in '74 for a career in
This LP features 12 tracks of relaxed funk and soul, always groovin and showcasing Tate's undeniably star-quality vox, with material by Ragovoy and Tate (and covers of Dylan and The Band!). Tate's other album is supposed to be even better, but this is pretty fine for what it is. Despite his talent, Tate never really "made it" but it's nice to know he's not forgotten.
Tau Cross is the magick-infused, forest-dwelling collaboration between Voivod drummer/conceptualist Away and 'The Baron' of UK crust legends Amebix (plus, the guitarists from neo-crust bands War/Plague and Misery). But if you're expecting some sort of crusty, proggy punk record though, think again. Tau Cross are not interested in rehashing the tropes of their past, instead crafting a pumping, riff-filled heavy metal record that oozes with mythology and power. At once catchy, heavy, and forlorn, Tau Cross' debut is as much Motorhead as it is Moonsorrow. Away trades his thrash-prog pound for a more mid-tempo crush, impressing more with what he doesn't play than what he does. Most noticeable and recognizable on this record are the throaty chants of The Baron, in perhaps his most subtle and least purely aggressive performance. This record isn't the future of metal, there's nary a thing on here that is especially forward looking, but these are expertly crafted tracks from some masters of heavy songwriting. Seriously, just TRY and not get absolutely pumped up during "Hangman's Hyll," the stone-stacking, twig-bundling riff of the year.
Could easily make the year end top ten lists of some of the metalheads around here, though actually in some ways it's not always so metal, in fact some of the tracks, with hushed vocals and acoustic guitar, remind us of Leonard Cohen at times - or a post punk blend of Pink Floyd and Current 93, even.
Taurpis Tula are a Scottish duo made up of guitarist / shortwave radio operator David Keenan (who you might recognize as a writer for The Wire) and vocalist / pedal steel guitarist Heather Leigh Murray (of Charalambides and Scorces). The two create a druggy haze from buzzy tentative guitar explorations mired in a wash of shimmery static. Occasional ghostly barely there vocals, and minimal melodies drift and flutter before being swallowed up again. Side two is a single track, an extended ambient blur of bombinating instruments, percussive creaks and fragile theremin like melodies keening in the distance. Like a smoke filled room, operatic vocals buried beneath a dense swirl of murky blackness. Packaged in a gorgeous screen printed black on black sleeve, with a black on black insert. LIMITED TO 700 COPIES!
Most doom metal can be pretty easily classified, categorized or pigeonholed, whether it be stoner doom, funereal doom, sludge, epic doom, doom-folk, death-doom, psych-doom, dooooooooom or whatever other variant folks have cooked up. While plenty of bands do manage to transcend their classification, rare is the doomy beast that defies categorization all together, which is most definitely the case with Northwest duo Taurus, made up of Stevie Floyd (from psychedelic avant doom duo Dark Castle) and Ashley Spungin (of late great mystical metallic garage rockers Purple Rhinestone Eagle). Together they have conjured up a sound we could describe as impressionistic doom, or maybe abstract doom. Right from the outset, the various doomic elements, the usual sonic tropes are recast, filtered through the lives and experiences of these two woman, the result super dynamic, ultra heavy, extremely atmospheric, darkly ritualistic, hauntingly psychedelic, the opening track's main riff sounds like slo-mo Voivod played by Greg Ginn, all woozy and warbly, over churning drum pound, and laced with both deep witchy crooned vox, and more harsh vokills, all wound in a dizzying atonal sonic spiral that's harrowingly hypnotic and utterly mesmeric. But before that even happens, there's a gorgeously terrifying intro assembled from looped riffy churn, pounding percussive bombast, weird sample voices, and more howled shrieked vokills, a tense, and intense push and pull. The sound soon settles into something a bit more traditionally metallic, but only just, the vibe more like slowed down black metal than doom. It's like Deathspell Omega at 16rpm, barring the brief squalls of frenzied blackened freakout, but again, like that first track, the sound is warped and avant, even choice of notes, melody, rhythm, all seem obtuse and OTHER, which gives the whole record a sense of OTHERness, an outsider quality, that infuses even the most orthodox of moments with twisted pathos and deep emotion.
After those two relatively brief tracks, Taurus unfurl an epic psychedelic sprawl with "Set Forth On The Path Of The Infinite", setting the stage with swooping backwards melodies, simple ukulele (!) melody, reverbed samples, dense throbs of crumbling low end, a slow build bit of black ambience that sounds more like some lost arthouse soundtrack, and even when the drums come in, instead of exploding into a metallic onslaught, the track lopes and lumbers. And again, in swoop the guitars, and they're strange and alien, the melodies difficult, obtuse, accompanied by feral vocal howls, the song bursting into action in fits and starts, the sound ebbs and flows, eventually switching gears completely, with soaring angelic vox, over a backdrop of thick drum pound, and a slowly melting tangle of guitar keen and moan, before finishing off with another bit of haunting folkiness.
The tracks here are less riffscapes, and more a sort of ever shifting landscape of doom-ed sound, the riffs that do surface, are often indistinct, not so much riffs, as loose tangles of notes and chords that seem ghostly, and gauzy, occasionally indeed coalescing into proper riffage, but just as often drifting apart into something less distinct, more blurred and smeary, those sounds oozing and bleeding into each other, what in the hands of a more traditional doom outfit, would be more riffy and song-like all howl and pound, here becomes something ethereal and darkly psychedelic, abstract and ephemeral, and yeah, it's still heavy, but that heaviness is only loosely tethered, instead it's allowed to drift and dissipate, like on the other epic track here, "Increase Aloneness", which layers choral vocals over some roiling organ, a sort of blackened disembodied prog, by way of Arvo Part perhaps, here the build is slow, and distinctly non-metallic, samples only adding to the creepiness, to the twisted emotion, until finally, a MASSIVE riff comes cascading in, and the song is transformed into a churning, chugging behemoth, but that riff occasionally flickers and blinks out, leaving just Spungeon's double kick drum bombast, and that swirling psychedelic organ, building tension until the riff returns and so it goes, back and forth, light and shadow, love and hate, a tense/intense blackened majesty, an impossibly epic culmination of it's various constituent parts. The final track features Wrest from Leviathan adding vocals (he plays in a new group with Floyd called Devout), and we were expecting straight up some straight up black buzz brutality, but instead Wrest's croak drifts wraithlike atop a swirling morass of whirring organ, loose almost jazzy drumming, surrounded by dense billows of mysterious murk, and lush, decaying layers of drone and thrum, a sinister sprawl of grim psychedelic ambience, and textured cinematic moodiness, a Cold Meat Industry style sonic brood building to a bleak coda, suffocating and soul shearing, all by way of something infinitely more black and unknowable. No/Thing is harrowing and heavy, dense and demonic, but also spiritual and personal, intimate and introspective, and fucking fantastic.
We have both the lp version and the cd version, and for a very limited time, we also have just a tiny handful of the super limited, ultra deluxe BOXset version of No/Thing, which includes the colored vinyl version of of the lp, the cd version as well, a large silkscreened back patch / tapestry, a double sided lyric sheet / mandala, all housed in a hand screen printed, stained and shellacked wooden box, each one hand numbered and limited to 100 copies, and again, we only have a two or three...
The Tompkins Square label who puts out the Imaginational Anthem compilations (volume 2 of which is reviewed elsewhere on this list), has reissued the 1965 sole private press record of finger-picking guitarist Harry Taussig. A contemporary of John Fahey and Robbie Basho (Taussig's only other recording is on a 1967 Takoma label compilation featuring both Fahey and Basho), Taussig's repertoire explores blues, ragtime and Americana, covering songs from Reverend Gary Davis and Elizabeth Cotten as well as other traditional songs. Comparisons to Fahey will of course abound, but there are definite differences in their playing styles. Most notably Taussig's exploration of stark ragtime idioms and stricter adherence to songforms, leaving less room for the excursionary meditations that Fahey fostered.
While this reissue is remastered with original liner notes and photos, our only complaint about it is the lack of Taussig's back story. What happened to him? Is he still alive? Perhaps the mystery is what the title eludes to. Fate is Only Once.
