[ aquarius records — Compilation Split ]

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Showing results 851 through 900 of 3832.

Push Button Objects, the Miami-based hip hop producer, here releases an interesting new track, 360 Degrees, with mic duties handled by Del tha Funky Homosapien and Def Jux's Mr Lif, and nice turntablist scratching courtesy three-time DMC champ DJ Craze.

Another record that was slated for release on Black Friday "Record Store Day" and was delayed, only finally reaching us well after the day, and one that we have VERY few copies of, and it's unclear whether we'll actually be able to get more, so this might be your only (non eBay) shot at it, if you're quick. A sprawling collaboration between black metal / guitardrone soundscapers Horseback, and abstract sort of black metal ambient alchemists Pyramids (whose mainman also runs the Handmade Birds Label), a sprawling epic spread out over SIX sides (a 7" AND an lp), which finds each band offering up their own little thing, and then putting their heads together for the bulk of the release. The 7" comes first and features Pyramids on the A side, who after a chaotic stuttery programmed drum into, slips into a dreamy blissed out stretch of cinematic ambience, all softly swirling effects and hazy melodic drift. Horseback handle the B side and counter with a blast of black metal, a frantic blast beat beneath buzzing guitars that almost sound more like blackened gypsy folk than black metal proper, until the vokills come in, and the demonic shriek clears that all up, before changing gears half way through and transitioning into a gorgeously decayed crumbling distorted dronescape. So when it came time to throw on the lp, we were imagining some sort of black metal / drone hybrid, or something similar, instead, the epic 4 part album length A Throne Without A King, plays out more like some lost Nurse With Wound album, heavy on the abstract soundscapery and mysterious collaged atmospheres, the processed garbled vocals, and truncated melodies, lots of drones and textures, and strange industrial filigree, it's haunting and hypnotic and very abstractly cinematic for sure, and finds a mysterious middle ground where neither band's influence is obvious. Woozy industrial thrum drift beneath sine wave tones and fluttering high end melodies, all over fields of crackle and whir, mysterious voices doused in effects intone some ominous warning, as the listener is slowly pulled under, swallowed whole by deep drones and ethereal melodic drifts, wild squalls of white noise and grinding machinelike textures, the track most often settling into long stretches of UNsettling ambience, sounding not unlike Philip Jeck or The Caretaker, ominous and sinister, cinematic and haunting, the various textures constantly subtly shifting and transforming, as much a part of the sound as the melodies, everything floating in some epic expanse of nothingness, tethered to one another by thread like slivers of fuzz and buzz and thrum. Vinyl and cassette only for now (although we have yet to receive the cassette), cd in January...

Got us a kick ass split here, bringing together a band we had yet to hear (and can barely pronounce), Pyrifleyethon, and aQ faves Ophidian Forest (counting the man behind tUMULt's Botanist as a member!). First up is Pyrifleyethon, hailing from Greece. We're told pretty much everything we need to know within the intro "Ignipotence", where guitar fuzz takes on the sound of a portal opening up into hell before launching into full on blasts of black metal fury with "Powers of The Second Sphere". Our favorite track from this horde is "Underneath", where the band expertly utilizes melancholy melodies with croaking troll vokills and machine gun riffery with all kinds of queasy runs up the fretboard. The final song, the perfectly named "Hades Landscape" begins with a spooky guitar melody and rides it for a good 5 minutes as a midtempo dirge before shifting gears and launching into full on black metal insanity. Pretty bad ass stuff from Pyrifleyethon, but Ophidian Forest have no difficulty in staking out their own crazy identity on this split. OF's previous albums, which we gobbled up like crazy, gave us a roadmap for where things *might* go, but goddamn if this band hasn't upped the ante for totally confusional, totally fucked black metal mayhem. Given the band's international makeup and method of creating albums via file swapping, we wonder how these three manage to produce stuff this bizarre while still sounding completely together and musical. No doubt the most immediate reaction is to the keyboards, which almost sound like a jazzy organ at times. In terms of how they are worked into the mix, think maybe of Beherit's Drawing Down The Moon. The songs have a strange sepia-tone quality to them, and it sounds like they could be the soundtrack to some lost Jan Svankmeyer film. On "Never Wish To Sleep", the keyboards buzz about nefariously like a poison fog while the vocals sound like something creeping out of an underground bunker. The song is weird and hallucinatory with a cool end of the world vibe that we can definitely get behind. "The Tower" makes great use of the aforementioned "jazzy" keyboards, thrown in with guttural riffs and uber metal drumming. The song is almost proggy at times, like something Van Der Graf Generator might have made if they were a three strangers from disparate parts of the globe instead of a bunch of old English nutters. Ending with "Paladin Of The Blackest Heart", OF conjures elements of industrial sci-fi craziness and even hints of folk (we think anyway) while still sounding like... well, only themselves. Quite a feat, and highly recommended!

MPEG stream: Powers Of The Second Sphere
MPEG stream: Underneath
MPEG stream: Never Wish To Sleep
MPEG stream: The Tower

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SORRY. Intercontinental stoner rock summit between Queen of the Stone Age (the reincarnation of Kyuss, although they freshen up the Kyuss sound with seeming nods to Foo Fighters and Black Flag) and Beaver, sludge rock from Holland, where you'd think there'd be lots of competition in the stoner rock field, and yep, they're good.

Here's a really great split cassette between Quiet Evenings and Former Selves released by the hitherto unknown Constellation Tatsu label. Quiet Evenings is, of course, the husband / wife duo of Rachel and Grant Evans - the former better known as Motion Sickness Of Time Travel, the latter as Nova Scotian Arms, Crippling, etc. and both run the exemplary cottage industry micro-label Hooker Vision. Here, the Evans produce a gorgeous, blissout, lo-fi ambience with freefloating wordless vocals, natural sounds of twittering birds (Bush Tits, if you must know), fuzzed guitar drones that brainmelt in and out of languid synth melodies, all sprialing together into more of an end-of-an-era vibe - that the dawning of the new age of the '70s was not all that it was cracked up to be. It's nice to hear Quiet Evenings engaged in a more bittersweet / darker sensibility as those are the moments that work best for both Motion Sickness Of Time Travel and all of Grant Evans various projects. As good as the Quiet Evenings side is, Former Selves may have upped the ante with this magically, twinkling piece of lo-fi electronica. The spacious synth pads gradually lock into subtle techno rhythmic underbelly with accumulated melodic patterns that arrives at a really fantastic amalgam of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol II, Suzanne Ciani's crystal powered tonecolors, and even the early tape loop experiments from Terry Riley.

These two bands are a match made in hell. Assuming hell is some backwoods primitive pagan free folk jazz flecked noiserock jam session taking place during a full moon in the heart of some dark forest. In this corner, we have the impossible to pronounce Raccoo-oo-oon, from Iowa of all places, who fill up their side of this lp with a length, shimmery almost-jazzscape rife with scrabbly electric guitars, haunting washes of some distant horn section, angular riffing, muted trumpets doused in wah wah, this is some sort of alien psychedelic free jazz. Sort of. Abstract and space, this is an epic space rock jazz freakout fantasy, spacey FX, big waves of skronk and skree collide with tranquil drifts of jangly guitar and simple caveman percussion, a few minutes in, the record skids to a halt as some beast made out of speaker shredding digital glitches and grinding spastic in-the-red guitar rips everything to shreds, but the record quickly picks back up and drones on in a hypnotic blissed out jazz flecked krautrock freefolk groove. And you thought that was way out, the flipside is the work of Brooklyn's Woods, who are a pretty good match for Raccoo-oo-oon, donning a similar cloak, equal parts deconstructed free jazz and avant noise rock. Swooping atonal guitars slip wildly through a dense tangle of staggering stumblin freejazz Neanderthal percussion, surrounded by clouds of dizzy guitar squiggles and swirling psychedelic distortion. Woods are like the damaged offspring of the No Neck Blues Band and Sunburned Hand Of The Man, the child they keep locked in the basement, the one who pounds on the door until they through raw meat down the stairs to calm him down. Mix in some weirdly rock riffs (at points it almost sounds like the band will lock in and rock out, although they never do) and some splattery jazz weirdness, and you've got the wonderfully weird world of Woods. Elaborately packaged in a hand painted, silk screened, sleeve, garish green and black and brown, purple photocopied insert. Pressed on super thick swirled yellow opaque vinyl, and each disc comes with a different colored rabbit's foot attached to the sleeve!

When the fuck is Raionbashi going to release a proper album again? Daniel Lowenbruck (aka Raionbashi) has been releasing his work on various splits over the past couple of years following a 2006 lp on Hanson that nobody seems to have anymore. Even then, much of his output has been released in tiny editions, and this split on Senufo Edition is in an edition of 280 copies. Raionbashi operates within the transgressive art collective Schimpfluch-Gruppe alongside Sudden Infant, Dave Phillips, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, and G*Park, all of which mine the nether regions of the id for intensely claustrophobic collages of grim noise and post-Viennese Aktionism. For this split, Lowenbruck slumps into an occult almost doom-laden piece of ritualist gong strikes that certainly look back to Coil's How To Destroy Angels, but Lowenbruck slowly ramps up a smoldering, hypnotic squallor of discordant strings and uneasy field recordings with snippets of muffled vocals which seem in the midst of an unknown criminal act. Brilliantly creepy. Daniela Fromberg & Stefan Roigk are multimedia artists hailing from Berlin, although little can be found regarding their intentions beyond their mutually crappy websites that only sport pretty pictures of their un-contextualized installations. Whatever these people are up to, it's a damn effective piece of acousmatic collage work, reflective in classic sound collage techniques found on Nurse With Wound's Homotopy To Marie, through the various bumps in the night and funhouse sound effects turned horrific and nightmarish. Arcane, oblique, haunting, and captivating. Fromberg & Roigk are an excellent foil to Raionbashi's dark ritual, and certainly should muster something else in the near future. Regardless, this is an excellent album of foreboding musique concrete.

We don't know if there's anything like an official membership form or some sort of fucked-up ritual one has to endure before joining the inner circle of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe, but this Swiss / German collective of malcontent noise makers and tape splicers might just increase their ranks through the diabolical collage work from Krube. Schimpfluch (whose members include Sudden Infant, Dave Phillips, G*Park, Raionbashi, and Rudolf Eb.er) began in the early '90s as an aggressive / primitive hybrid between the Viennese Aktionism of Hermann Nitsch & Rudolf Schwartzkogler and the sharp collage techniques of the French musique concrete pioneers. Performance is often a critical component to the Schimpfluch aesthetic involving all sorts of transgressive theatrics, audience baiting tactics, and maybe a dead fish or two; but the recording output of Schimpfluch and associates has been exceptional throughout their history. Perhaps with all of those performative gestures hidden in the recording process, the resultant squeaks, bangs, grunts, and scrapes begin to disassociate from their origins and become all the more bizarre, more obscure, and more damaged. This is definitely true for the work of Krube, the project of a German sound-artist by the name of Alexander Schneider. His techniques begin in snipping various sounds from who knows what. The label Hronir tells us its everyday objects, body openings, and non-definable machines; but by the time Schneider is done with his digital razor blade, what's a fart and what's a piston is not terribly discernible. These sound are quickly jettisoned in squadrons of battering sounds that collide with each other in clusters of events that splutter and bristle like a punk version of Pierre Henry's classic Variations Pour Une Porte Et Un Soupir. Raionbashi's side long composition is comparatively sublime affair, more in keeping with the underappreciated G*Park sound of atonal ambience, creepy as hell field recordings, and generalized disturbances. Daniel Lowenbruck is Raionbashi, and a relatively recent addition to the Schimpfluch-Gruppe, having run the exceptional Tochnit-Aleph label and the rumpsti pumsti shop in Berlin. His track begins with a bellowing piano chord which elongates into a desolate drone, marked with scurrying vermin like noises, backward scrapings, and indeterminate swells of grey noise. That same piano returns throughout the piece with an incremental build of anxious black energy seeping through every quiet gesture and gurgling rupture. Like the work of G*Park, the more you let yourself into the details of this piece, the more terrifying it becomes. Truly exceptional!

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SORRY. Another candidate for best band name ever: S.T.R.E.E.T.S. which in case you didn't know, stands for Skating Totally Rules Everything Else Totally Sucks! Man. And then team those guys up with the also suitably named Rammer, and you've got a pretty decent all-Canadian skate rock vs. cock rock tag team battle! In a cool, nicely designed lime green sleeve.

The Rapture has been one of the most hyped bands to emerge in the past couple of years, embodying everything that Vice magazine wants in a band: cocaine, disco grooves, more cocaine, punk snarl, and a little more cocaine for good measure. Yet with all of this hype, there's only been the "House Of Jealous Lovers" single (admittedly a triumphant blast of A Certain Ratio post-punk fused with the distilled perfection of 20 years of disco) and this split with the Juan Maclean. The Rapture's "Killing" is nowhere nearly as epic as "House Of Jealous Lovers," but is a nervously ethereal punked-out groove driven by a pretty catchy one-note bass line and the Luke Jenner's claustrophobic whine which uncannily mimics Robert Smith of The Cure. As is the case for "Killing," The Juan Maclean's track benefits greatly from the production skills of The DFA in crafting an angular funk track that updates the Liquid Liquid / ESG model of stripped down grooves with a much punchier sound.

We discovered this strange split lp via the always amazing WFMU in New Jersey, a freeform radio station we've collaborated with on numerous occasions in the past, most notably we shared a couple showcases at the South By Southwest music conference in Texas, which by the way was no coincidence, and it wasn't just because we're pals, it's also because WFMU constantly and consistently play the most amazing shit. We think we know about the craziest, most underground music, and then we tune into WFMU and routinely have our minds blown. And yeah, we blow their minds once in a while too, with stuff we recommend on our list, but pretty much every time we listen to WFMU, we have to have a pen and paper handy to jot down all the amazing things we need to track down, which happened recently with this here record. One track was all it took to know this was some serious aQ-worthy weirdness, dark and psychedelic, tripped out and bizarre and beautiful, on a label we love too, with a background story as cool and weird as the music itself. So we got as many as we could (it's limited to 300 copies!) but odds are they won't last, so grab one of these quick cuz once we describe it to you, we're pretty sure you're not gonna be able to live without one... The oddly named Razen are a duo, who grew tired of the traditional rock band instrumentation, and decided to each pick a new instrument, one they had no idea how to play, which is how they ended up with a detuned santoor (like an Indian hammered dulcimer) and a drumset assembled from metal plates. And thus was born Razen. They've expanded their instrumentation to include still more instruments they don't know how to play (bouzouki, keyboards, horns), and have invited a handful of guests to contribute an even more impressive and bizarre arsenal of noisemakers, including bagpipe, chalumeau (a classical style recorder), sopranino (one of the smallest horns in the saxophone family), bass recorder, duduk (a Middle Eastern woodwind) and shenai (a North Indian oboe), and this is the result: a glorious, mysterious take on world music, dark and haunting, heavily percussive, cinematic, abstract and dramatic, the label mentions Moondog and Bohren & Der Club Of Gore and David Lynch, but we also hear some Sun City Girls, some martial industrial music, while at the same time the sounds dip into African folk music and Indian style ragas, all rife with drone and buzz and strange melodies, lush textures, frantic rhythms, all filtered through Razen's distinctively non-world music perspective. "Rammelaargong" begins with hypnotic tribal hand drumming, deep low end thrum, fluttering woodwinds, and haunting steel string shimmer, eventually building to a frenzy of howling horns, and frantic drumming, infused with plenty of drone and buzz, and a strangely motorik rhythmic pulse, with everything eventually dropping out, finishing off with a brief flurry of lo-fi percussion. "Razen Zand" begins with a thick undulating raga like drone, rendered in glitchy electronics, before the drums kick in, and then the horns, and the sound is almost like a marching band playing some abstract African folk music, the drums and horns locked into staccato bursts, while in between those bursts, wild melodies are unfurled from buzzing steel strings, the sound manages to be epic, and majestic and HEAVY. "Richel" is all low end blur, and woozy snake charmer melodies, shimmery spidery buzzing strings, a sun baked sprawling raga-like drift, the vibe dark and emotional and intense, very cinematic, wild fluttering woodwinds flit above that mournful snake charmer cry, the track laced with sharp percussive strikes, and thick low end thrums, hummed chantlike vox, and swirls of metallic shimmer. "Rode Hond" too, begins with a deep metallic buzz, layered and lush, and those exotic intense snake charmer melodies, the percussion, spare and skeletal, but propulsive and rhythmic, the song growing more and more intense the drums more frenetic, the horns and woodwinds more tense, soaring and singing out, all the instruments slipping into a hypnotic groove, that we could listen to forever, and fades out way too soon. So incredible, it's only 4 tracks, but they're so intense and detailed and blossom a little more with every listen, you might as well set your turntable to send the needle right back to the beginning, and let it play all night. And that's just the Razen side. The flipside is taken up entirely by a single track from Sheldon Siegel, which is not in fact a person, but rather a group, a Belgian abstract free jazz outfit, made up of cello, drums, percussion, sax, vocals, tapes and music box, and don't be expecting regular old free jazz, they are after all teamed up with Razen for a reason, and not because they're both from Belgium, it's more likely, that like Razen, the guys in Sheldon Siegel approach their music similarly, looking to subvert the old, and invent something new, to create a music that while made up of free jazz elements, is more than free jazz, and what they've come up with does definitely strike out from the confines of free jazz, sure, a quick listen will sound like free jazz on the surface, but as you dig deeper, and the song develops, thick grinding cello drones ground the sound, a thick undulating textural buzz, underpinning, stuttery skronk and little flurries of percussive skitter, beneath clouds of cymbal shimmer. Over the course of the side's 25 minutes, the group shift gears dramatically, slipping into a seriously twisted dirge, with the horns super processed and sounding almost electronic, blissing out, and letting blurts of feedback and spurts of rhythmic sputter spar over mournful cello melodies, sounding super dramatic and intense, after some bursts of almost traditional sounding avant jazz, the sound winds way down, the tapes warble and whir, the other instruments are muffled and muted, a strange landscape of scrapes and thumps, of fragmented melodies, and abstract ambience, before finishing off with a strange stretch of stumbling loping jazz flecked skitter, and swirling droned out weirdness. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!

MPEG stream: Rammelaargong
MPEG stream: Razend Zand
MPEG stream: Drie Mannen Stappen Aan Boord... (excerpt 1)
MPEG stream: Drie Mannen Stappen Aan Boord... (excerpt 2)

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SORRY.

Not only does this mix come from our favorite 'techno' label, Kompakt, but it was compiled by a Mexican DJ/producer, Rebolledo, who's got a thing for Filipino '70s psych rock guitarist Wally Gonzalez (of Juan De La Cruz fame, down & dirty Filipino proto-metallers par excellance). aQuarius customers might remember, we even reviewed cd reissues of Wally's two late '70s solo albums some years ago, one of which, 1978's Wally On The Road, provides the intro and outro tracks on this disc, via Rebo's edits of "Wally's Blues" from that album. Perhaps surprisingly, Wally's space-ily effected soloing totally works in the context of all the propulsive and powerful electronic music elsewhere on here. Not only that, but the cover photo has been done as an homage to Wally On The Road, as well - Rebolledo has carefully recreated that album's cover scene, posing identically to Wally, seated on a dirtbike in front of a Porsche, with a pair of fancy cowboy boots on the ground nearby. So that's pretty cool, and odd, as is this disc, really one of the most captivating, hypnotic, groovy techno mixes we've heard in a while, with lots of interesting standout tracks. 'Bangers' if you will. Among 'em, several exclusive cuts, including Rebo's own studio contribution, the amazing "Windsurf, Sunburn and Dollar", an intensely, relentlessly mesmeric track with bizarrely accented/inflected vocals repeating the title phrase over and over with fierce emotion. The duo Rebo's in with Superpitcher, Pachanga Boys, is here too, and they and he both do some remixes as well. Other artists appearing: Wolfgang Voigt, Red Axes, The Love Supreme, Justus Kohncke, The Twins, C.A.R., Christian S., Sebastian Bouchet, Gebr. Teichmann, Barnt, Slove, and Vox Low. An excellent, idiosyncratic mix we just kinda can't stop playing! Cd-only, but in June Kompakt will be releasing a 12" vinyl ep featuring an extended 'raw' mix of "Windsurf, Sunburn and Dollar" as well as two more cuts taken from this album also previously not on vinyl, so any discerning DJ's out there ought to look for that when we have it.

MPEG stream: Wally's Blues (Rebo Intro Edit)
MPEG stream: Windsurf, Sunburn And Dollar
MPEG stream: Dance And More

Last list we highlighted the Kompakt mix cd from Mexican DJ/producer Rebolledo, Momento Drive. This 12" ep with the same name features three of the rarest trax from that mix, released on vinyl for the first time, including probably our favorite from that mix, Rebolledo's own "Windsurf, Sunburn and Dollar", here presented in an 'extended raw version'. Again, totally mesmeric and relentless, and a bit bizarre as well due to the vocal part (the title, repeated over an over in a weird, intense accent and manner). The other two selections have Rebolledo's hand in 'em too, one's the Pachango Boys (Rebo's duo with Superpitcher) doing a remix of "Flash" by Stove, the other a Rebo remix of a track by Red Axes. DJs, in particular, ought to think about grabbing this.

MPEG stream: Windsurf, Sunburn And Dollar

A super limited and insanely packaged triple cd-r, highlighting, well, just like the title says, the Birth Of A New Rural Europe, a sonic world of free noise, free folk and abstract ambience. Three full length discs, one from each band, the Reggaee, Sawaadyja and Valerio Cosi. French free rock outfit The Reggaee offer up 52 minutes of clattery, rambling, drift, harmonicas wheeze, nestled in a soundscape of field recordings and distant percussion like the chirping of crickets, doomy folk with detuned guitars and ghostly vocals, reverb drenched tribal freakouts, dreamy dreary mumbly ambience, buzzing steel string serenades and every stop in between. Sawaadyja, aka Danish sound maker Mikkel Andersen, contributes a similarly varied disc, starting off with huge thick washes of distorted guitars and buried psychedelic melodies, like a more lo-fi Sunroof!, and quickly drifting into gentle forest folk, with simple childlike melodies over spare tribal drumming, dreamy Appalachian style steel string fingerpicking, a bit of raga like buzz with snake charmer melodies and some spacious abstract shimmer. The final installment comes from Italian sound artist Valerio Cosi, whose disc is maybe the droniest and dreamiest of the bunch. The opening and closing tracks are lengthy slow moving near static shimmers, bookending track two, a nearly half hour long festive percussive free form sonic ritual. Fluttering flutes, clattering pots and pans percussion, buzzing kazoo melodies, thick reverb, like being lost in some bazaar in the center of some foreign city. Cool. LIMITED TO 35 COPIES!!! WE GOT 12 OF THOSE!!! Each copy is super elaborately packaged, each disc, hand painted, in its own sleeve with a printed insert, all three discs held shut with wire and affixed to the inside of an oversized, wire and bamboo sleeve, like someone dismantled a tiki hut and cut the walls into squares to make cd sleeves. Also inside is an insert that is hand numbered! Weird but cool.

MPEG stream: Language Legend
MPEG stream: Baalerinaa
MPEG stream: Dancing Zealot
MPEG stream: Eclipse

Lovely split single by local Bay Area (via Brittany) songbird, Helene Renaut and Scottish folk chanteuse Emily Pond, featuring members of Incredible String Band. This is a first of a series of four split seven inches devoted to the seasons from this twee Scottish folk label. Limited to 300, on summer yellow vinyl!!

Fantastic split from aQ faves Rene Hell, and until now unknown to us Three Legged Race, both 'groups' paying homage to early electronic music, experimental tape music and science fiction outsider bedroom private press weirdness. Rene Hell offers up a 4 part series of zoner synthscapes, lush layers of buzzing rumbling electronics, buried, barely there vox, haunting and cinematic, with distinctly pop music melodies, but here suspended in charged fields of squelch and whir and buzz. As the songsuite progresses, the sound shifts to something more new agey and washed out, total Tangerine Dream style kosmische bliss out, swirly and hypnotic, space-y and sun dappled, total trance-y synth age drift, which again changes tone and drifts into something a bit more ominous like the opening track, more cinematic creep, slow, low tones, mysterious and atmospheric, subtly rhythmic, soft swells over buried pulses, finally moving into the closing track, which manages to fuse those two sides of RH's sound, the fluttery super nova synthkraut bliss and the brooding minimal electronic flutter, darkly dramatic, rife with dense chordal swells, swirling black ambient atmophere and more of those muted murky voices. The flipside is similarly dark and mysterious and electronic, courtesy of Three Legged Race, aka Robert Beatty, who starts his side off with an unexpected chunk of woozy, lo-fi Scott Tuma like loner folk guitar haze, all murky and spidery, underpinned by a soft field of hauzy crackly thrum, glistening melodies drifting in the ether, hushed and lovely, until... in swoop some super twisted processed robotic vox, heavily effected and distorted and crunchy, totally at odds with the rest of the song, but it somehow sort of works. After a brief swath of Radiophonic Workshop style electronic percolations, raw outer space shimmer, sixties sci-fi sound effects and hauntological bleep and bloop, the record blossoms into a sprawling stretch of glitched out primitive analog electronics, sounding a bit like Bruce Haack, but way more fractured and distorted and processed, a malfunctioning starfield of sound that manages to be weirdly melodic and subtly rhythmic, the background growing louder and murkier and more ominous as the track progresses. So good. Both sides are incredible. Way recommended for fans of the burgeoning new wave of spaced out sci-fi synth drone, especially folks who might be on the hunt for something darker and weirder and slightly more cracked. LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!!!

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

SORRY. Rev B do a song called "Rotestilaulu", Kuolema reply with "Kaljaa Nuorille".

Ratto Ja Lehtisalo are a weird band. Made up of half of aQ faves Circle, their sound is less krautrock, and more like some weird hybrid of eighties new wave faves, Oingo Boingo, The Fixx, Sparks, Talking Heads, but then Circle are pretty weird themselves, flitting from murky propulsive hypnorock, to bombastic metal to atmospheric drone to eighties style New Wave Of British Heavy Metal and back again. And the side projects, too many to name here, but needless to say, they are all pretty far out. This here is the latest from Ratto Ja Lehtisalo, and find the band, doing what they do best, confounding and confusing, and even more confounding and confusing is that they are teamed up with the mighty late great doomlords Reverend Bizarre!! Sure they're both from Finland, and yeah, RB's Albert Witchfinder got recent aQ Record Of The Week recipients Quest For Blood signed to Jussi from Circle's Ektro label, but sonically, the couldn't be more different, and yet, weirdly enough, they sound kind of cool back to back. Anyway, Ratto Ja Lehtisalo start things off with some demented court jester music, sounding very twisted and Renn Faire, before slipping into some moody almost Circle-ish drama, a weird almost-krautrock, but way lighter and jazzier, with chanted vocals that sometimes sound like Queen, sometimes like Circle, the first thing that came to mind was Cluster mixed with Shadowfax, which sounds bad, we know, but is more, just sort of, strange, it's like the music to some insane production of seventies mime troupe Mummenschanz, the band lock into a very Circle-like jam, but soft and fuzzy and jazzy, but just like the Circle mothership, easy enough to get lost in and carried away by. The flipside comes from Finnish doomsters Reverend Bizarre, who like Tupac, just seem to keep releasing records post mortem, but heck we're not complaining ONE BIT. A new track composed over an improvised drum track, and it's obvious cuz the drums steal the show. Huge roiling guitars, throbbing doomy bass, and those vocals, deep and resonant and soaring. This is, my friends TRUE DOOM! The track lurches and sways, grooves and swings, sometimes slipping into seriously dense tangles of angular riffing and freaked out drumming, near the end the band launch into a blissed out psychedelic space rock drift that devolves into a bizarre coda all bellowed vocals and wild drums, and yep, a DRUM SOLO!! Before slipping back into the riff and dooming their way to the very end. As always. awesome. A weird and wonderful, and did we say WEIRD, split of far out Finnish freakiness. Super limited. Pressed on thick swirled opaque white vinyl, with killer cover art by Albert Witchfinder.

In keeping true to the uncanny laws of nature in the Reynolsian universe, No-Reynols came into creation because the world had slipped out of balance due to the invincible musical force that is Reynols. This is not to say that No-Reynols is the evil

RealAudio clip: N9 Colesio Americama
RealAudio clip: Amete Pulpo Un Groda
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ATTENTION FINNISH MUSIC FREAKS!!! It isn't all forest folk and hypnotic space rock over there you know. Finland has some serious metal bands as amazing, as heavy and as fucked up as anyplace else, maybe even more so. Just off the top of our heads, Dead Reptile Shrine! Maybe the weirdest black metal band ever, Reverend Bizarre, amazing classic doom, and let's see... Horna, Thergothon, Circle Of Ouroborus, Spiritus Mortis, Stumm, Wyrd, Vultyr, Trollheim's Grott, Uncreation's Dawn, we could go on and on and on... So here we have a split from two Finnish black metal one man bands, one name you might recognize, the other you might not, but both are equally amazing. It takes a very special band to share a split with the mighty and mighty demented Dead Reptile Shrine, but Torturium were up to the job, as evidenced on their recent split with DRC reviewed right here a few months back. Here they continue on their damaged and convoluted journey through some off kilter black thrash buzzscape. Midtempo and completely blown out, guitars are thick snarling beasts, flaying the flesh fron your skin, while some of the most anguished vocals EVER soar and shriek, the drums a murky thud, everything chaotic and crazed. Blasting and buzzing relentlessly, the whole thing threatening to come hunhinged and fly into sharp jagged pieces. Fucked up and furious and so great. Torturium shares the split with fellow counryman Ride For Revenge, who with a name like that you might expect some classic thrash, but this is anything but. Muddy downtuned guitars, harsh vocals and simple pounding drums, all woven into some sort of murky dirgey black doom. Midtempo rhythms, drums WAY up in the mix, everything sort of droney and hypnotic, tons of reverb, weird swaths of creepy clean guitar, everything cloudy and indistinct, a super old school production liek Winter or diSEMBOWELMENT, fuzzy and relentlessly, trudging through thick FX drenched drifts of black buzz and weird whorls of creepy haunted house synth. So cool and so weird. Definitely a new favorite, and another notch in Finland's holster, or bedpost, or whatver. SO RECOMMENDED!!!

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Two sidelong pieces recorded in 1969 and performed by Groupe d'Etude et Rèalisation Musicale of France, or simply the GERM Ensemble. Riley's "Keyboard Study 2" is a twenty-four minute minimalist exercise for two pianists (executed here by Gèrard Frèmy

As a founding member of the extremely successful group The Techniques, way back in 1962, Winston Riley probably could have retired at an early age. But, like many who'd started their careers under the production monopolies of Dodd and Reid, Riley eventually set out on his own to form his Techniques label. And while he never had a stable a fraction the size of Coxsone, he did have significant success. Most notable was his production of Ansel Collins' "Stalag 17" in 1973. Today the Stalag rhythm is one of the most heavily versioned rhythms on the island. But this collection doesn't cover either Riley's earlier work as a performer or producer. Instead, "Dancehall Techniques" compiles some of the producer's best work from the period between 1986 and 1991 -- the dawn of the digital era for Jamaica. 1985 saw the release of Wayne Smith's "Under Mi Sleng Teng" with revolutionarily minimal production by Prince Jammy -- the rhythm being no more than the stock Casio keyboard "reggae" rhythm. Like other producers, Winston Riley wasn't about to be left wallowing in the past. And while you won't hear the Sleng Teng rhythm used here, those who are ill disposed to listen to drum machine rhythms -- and a lot of rhythm recycling to boot -- might be advised to look elsewhere. The track that most all Aquarius customers are certain to be familiar with is Tenor Saw & Buju Banton's "Ring The Alarm Quick" -- itself a reworking of the Stalag rhythm. Also included on this comp are tracks from such household names as Super Cat, Michael Prophet, Cutty Ranks, Gregory Isaacs and Admiral Tibet.

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

SORRY. We've been going a little bit Robedoor crazy. We were sort of late to the party, but we're trying to make up for it, by dumping as much of their noisy divinity into our ears as humanly possible. This latest slab of glorious sound is a split with fellow noise maker Leslie Keffer. Hard to tell whose side is whose, but fuck it, it hardly matters, as both sides are amazing. One side (we're guessing the Keffer side) is a roiling mass of thick hissy clouds, whirring and rumbling, a seemingly unwavering blast of fuzzy white noise, that somehow manages to be super listenable, pretty even, for a brief moment in the middle, the noise fades out, leaving a damaged loop of what sounds like a little girl speaking in tongues, but the loops intensify and overlap and soon the voices are a jumbled mass and we're back to more of that beautiful noise. The flip side is all glistening guitars and chant like vocals, super distorted and washed out, layer upon layer upon layer, dense and thick and warm, like a roomful of DJ's all spinning the same Sunroof! record at slightly different speeds. Dizzying and so gorgeous. And speaking of gorgeous, HOLY SHIT, the cover of this lp is SO thick with paint, we almost got high in the time it took us to get the record out and on the turntable. A thick glossy coat of black, and over that, a super detailed illustration done all in metallic gold. So totally amazing looking... LIMITED TO 300 COPIES and already out of print, so act fast...

In our ongoing obsession with all things Robedoor, here's yet another awesome chunk of blissed out drone-noise, teamed up with their perfect sonic foils, AQ faves the Yellow Swans. Both bands dial down the brutality and intensity, offering up two gorgeous tracks of shimmering, buzzing ambience, each with their own vibe, and one still a bit brutal and intense.� Robedoor are up first, and this is just about the loveliest thing we've heard from these guys. All gliding glimmer, warm effulgent swells of sound, distant moaning cellos that just sort of melt all over the top of the guitar, gorgeous and tranquil, a blissy drift through billowing clouds of soft focus blur, distorted and buzzy, but smeared into one slow burning easy on the ears whir.� Yellow Swans counter with their own version of 'tranquil' and as you might imagine it's a bit different than RD's. Noisier and heavier, more fuzzed out and harsh, but no less lovely. A whirling wash of thick gritty grime, muted grinding rhythms, industrial whir, buzzing and rumbling. The whole thing thick and crumbling and corrosive, but still so pretty! LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, each one hand numbered.�

Island records reissues the soundtrack to this classic Jamaican comedy / musical. Features tracks by Inner Circle, Junior Murvin (Police & Thieves of course), The Heptones, Peter Tosh, Junior Byles, Bunny Wailer, Gregory Isaacs, The Upsetters, Burning Spear, Justin Hinds & The Dominoes, and more. Originally released in 1979.

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With the first track on this anthology being a recording of wind from a 1935 sound effects record, AQ beloved sound artist Steve Roden makes a very literal introduction to I Listen To The Wind That Obliterates My Traces. Released by Dust-To-Digital, this beautifully constructed hardback book filled with images both from and ephemeral to Roden's collection of 78s, as well as two discs worth of sounds from that antique vinyl. Yeah, the idea is pretty much the same as what the Climax Golden Twins presented via Dust-To-Digital on their also-awesome Victrola Favorites anthology a few years back; but Roden's collection trends more to the mid-part of the 20th Century and is focused on Americana (including a couple of Hawaiian tracks made before the islands were granted statehood). Following that crackled recording of the wailing wind from that sound effects record, is the unmistakable voice of John Jacob Niles, the 'mountain tenor' whose spooky falsetto and maudlin melodic wanderings predated Devendra Banhart by a good 60 years... Afterwards, there's plenty of bluesmen, blueswomen, gospel belters, Appalachian balladeers, and barbershop crooners, many of which seem quite world-weary in singing their tales of lust, money, and liquor (or the lack thereof). Some of the names are familiar to us (e.g. Clara Smith, Roy Smeck, Sol Hoopii), but there are plenty of anonymous recordings from home-cut discs as well. The arrangements for many of the songs tend to be very sparse, just voice and guitar is pretty much all you get on every track; and the album is dotted with tracks from antique sound effects records of birds, ice, and even "night noises!" For those of you aware of Roden's own compositions of understated field recordings, quiet ruminations on found objects, and soft looping techniques, this shouldn't be a big surprise. The vintage photos inside this 184 page book are completely lovely, with all of their rumpled edges, ruddy patinas, and cracked surfaces, with some far more poignant - such as the shot of a bunch of violas suspended outside in the sun perhaps to allow a coat of shellac to dry. There's the silhouette of G.J. Jessup decked out in his one-man drum and bugle corps regalia, and the glum looking fellow with the unkempt mustache leaning against his Funnygraph contraption (sadly, there's no corresponding recording for either photograph). Pages and pages of interesting images to provoke curiosity and evoke reverie. Altogether, Roden has compiled over 150 photos and 51 tracks for this stunning document of sonic obsession from Dust-To-Digital! Hard to imagine NOT wanting this.

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The return of Roladex one of the few contemporary artists on the kick ass new wave / synth wave reissue label Medical Records, and like their first full length, Anthems For The Microage, which we raved about back on list #445, their track here, "Glass Statuette" is another dark synthy gem, sort of Giorgio Moroder meets the Human League, pulsating synth arpeggios, romantic (but still a little icy) boy/girl vocals, robotic cold wave Kraftwerkisms surrounded by minimal programmed pulsations, and blooping, bleeping melodies, and like that full length, sounding as much like an actual reissue as anything on Medical. The flipside is the first we've heard from [[Pressures]], and it's a good match for Roladex, a bit more melancholy and minor key, the vibe dreamily wistful, the sound propulsive and motorik, all pulsing synths, and lockstep rhythms, the hazy vocodered vocals, angelic and ethereal, give the track it's human/romantic/melancholy vibe, balancing the retro/futuristic machine music beneath... Like all Medical releases, housed in a nice full color sleeve, and for this one, pressed onto heavy, transparent yellow vinyl. And yeah, also VERY LIMITED!

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This here is a noise record. No way to sugar coat it. There are bits and parts that are less than noisy, some subtle sonics and strange ambience, but ultimately, to dig this, you need a taste for NOISE. Roman Torment is a blast of face melting ear shredding rooooaaarr. A dense smear of sonic chaos, grinding shrieking howling, thick crumbling masses of sound, blinding streaks of feedback, bursts of speaker shredding grit. Intense and thick and L O U D. Feed The Dragon, are all about the noise too, but they creep up on it slowly, starting out with some minimal glitch and stutter, a swirling, scraping ambience, lots of low end and distant sonic gristle, before gradually building into a thick undulating swell of electronic buzz and rumbling sonic grind, sheets of skree draped over throbbing pulses of crunch and grind, that gets so thick and heavy near the end, it almost begins to resemble something distinctly metallic, like Earth or SUNNO))), but of course way noisier... LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Pressed on super thick vinyl. with cool and creepy paste on art.

The tireless SF DJ Romanowski brings good tidings with his brand new festive mix, Holidays With Romanowski! His turntable boughs are weighed heavily with old soul and hip hop classics. Nice.

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

SORRY. This disc pairs up two jazzy-but-weird underground Japanese bands: Rovo (featuring Yamamoto Seiichi of Boredoms/Omoide Hatoba) who you probably know from their popular "Imago" disc released last year on San Francisco's Incidental Music label, and the delightfully-named Date Course Pentagon Royal Garden, a crazy big-band project that's got Ground Zero's Otomo Yoshihide playing guitar. Rovo's half-hour track "Sino" starts off all droney and spacious, with pretty keyboard frills and sparse, funky drumming. Thirteen minutes into the piece, a propulsive, trance-inducing percussion-driven jam ensues. A soothing, muted violin passage is shortly interrupted by a funk bass line, which some of us here found kinda annoying, before settling back into some sort of zoned-out space-jazz. This is followed by DCPRG's 32 minute piece (entitled "Pan-American Beef Steak Art Federations") which is a schizoid, cut-up composition that incorporates bad jazz, rap, psych guitar, funk, sampling, etc., etc., and makes about as much sense as its title. It has an undeniable sense of fun, however. So, Rovo is calmer, DCPRG more chaotic, and neither do we fully understand, except that somehow it seems appropriate that they're together on this cd.

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Killer split from these two bands, RST most AQ folks should know by now, New Zealand guitarist Andrew Moon, who delivers another fantastic chunk of dark, dense, humid guitardrone, darkly meditative, but surprisingly active, the swirling blackened churn alive with buried melodies, and ever shifting textures, spaced out and psychedelic for sure, but more a softly swirling bit of layered mesmer, rife with muted feedback, and jagged shards of fragmented melody buried in the mix, kinda wish this was a 12" and this track was waaaay longer. The flipside comes from US outfit Insect Factory, who we had never heard before, but who apparently played the Terrastock festival back in 2008, this being their first recording since. Good stuff, and a nice contrast to RST's darker drift. Insect Factory are a much noisier proposition, a warped psychedelic collage, muted percussive loops, all woozy and warbly, wheezing melodies, layered textures, softly distorted and dreamily chaotic, it sounds a lot like a more dreamy drifty Our Love Will Destroy The World, with a similarly skewed kitchen sink style, all the sounds blurred into something more washed out and melodic, druggy and hypnotic.

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A while back we had a little gift certificate giveaway to help raise money for aQ pal Stephen Kasner, an artist you no doubt know, his art has adorned records by Aluk Todolo, Skullflower, Lotus Eaters, Subarachnoid Space, Blood Fountains, Khlyst, Aun, Habsyll, and loads more, we used to carry his amazing art book too, anyway, he was recently diagnosed with a serious illness, and of course like many artists/musicians, he does not have health insurance, and was faced with impossible medical bills, so the underground community has been doing everything they can to help raise money so Kasner can get the treatment he needs and get better. This here split cd-r is another benefit, all proceeds from the sale of these discs will go directly to Kasner, and in addition to helping out a super nice, and ultra talented guy, you get two gorgeous, massive slabs of dark, thick. layered droned out ambience. Most of you probably already know RST, aka Andrew Moon, a killer NZ guitarist, here he shares a disc with Rahmane, who are/is new to us, but who offers up a pretty stellar bit of droned out psychedelic ambient drift, beginning with a bit of abstract shimmer, some minimal percussion, and finally some wheezing organ, haunting and cinematic, minor key and moody, the whirring organ soon gives way to a tangle of horns, wild squalls drifting over the now distant low end thrum, a sort of abstract dronejazz, which quickly erupts into a blast of noisy chaos, of gnarled electronics, twisted effects and processed vocals, a sound that gradually crumbles leaving just the sounds of a burbling brook, and a hazy layer of metallic drones, and soaring string like melodies drifting over the top. Quite nice. RST follows up with a sprawling expanse of humid guitar drone, a thick all of muted and distorted heaviness, no forward momentum, instead, the sounds themselves churn and roil, buried melodies shifting and tangling, streaks of sizzling cymbals, chordal fragments, all drift within a corrosive, glacial swells, throbbing and pulsing but somehow remaining nearly static, a gorgeous washed out almost Tim Heckerish expanse of gauzy soft noise, underpinned by bits of guitar strum, and deep rumbling low end. Gorgeous as always. And well worth the price of admission, even mores knowing that it's for a good cause. LIMITED TO 70 COPIES. Features original Stephen Kasner artwork, ALL proceeds go to the Kasner Fund.

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A live 2cd set of the suitably partnered Rumah Sakit & Sweep The Leg Johnny recorded right here in SF at the Bottom Of The Hill. Putting these two angular, mathrock bands together was a great idea. Guaranteed to make fans of either or both group absolutely pee in their pants. Disc 1 contains seven songs performed by Sweep The Leg Johnny and the other has six by Rumah Sakit. STLJ offers the more unrelenting angular ass-kickin' with squelches of saxophone and tense, strained vocals, On the other hand, RS delivers the prettier, but no less heavy action with moments of sparse drumming and chiming melodic cycles. Overall, a pretty great live recording that captures the emotion and vitality of these two bands' live shows.

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Here's one that may appeal to those interested in the recent post punk reissues such as The Pop Group, A Certain Ratio, the In The Beginning compilation, etc. From the same label that put out the 'Select Cuts From Blood & Fire' compilations comes a reissue of London's Ruts DC. Originally known as Ruts, the group added the additional initials after losing their front man Malcolm Owen to a heroin overdose. The remaining members of the group restructured their sound, modelling it much closer to the reggae and dub that had informed their rock foundation. After the unsuccessful 1981 release 'Animal Now', the group hooked up with Mad Professor at his newly constructed Ariwa Studio the following year and hammered out the 8 tracks for 'Rhythm Collision'. Although they couldn't claim to be the first of the "second wave" of punk groups to cite dub as an influence, they certainly took reggae music to heart and the overall sound of 'Rhythm Collision' is perhaps the most identifiably "reggae" of any to come out of the London scene. Combined with Mad Professor's technical wizardry the album was impressive in its ability to absorb the aesthetics of dub while avoiding being merely Jamaican imitators. Depending on one's prior familiarity with the album the indelible eighties production stamp on these tracks can be an obstacle, as can the occasional harmonica solos and cheesy vocals. But thank the heavens their bassist avoids the funky / slap bass urge on all but one track. It's really not as bad as all that, sounding at times a lot like what Tones On Tail did years later. As a bonus to the original tracks from 'Rhythm Collision' are five bonus remixes courtesy of Mad Professor. AND, on top of the original album and the Mad Professor remixes, there's an additional disc of remixes by Zion Train which were executed at Ariwa in 1998 on Mad Professor's now antique, or classic, gear.

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Aussie noise rockers the Grey Daturas had been telling us forever about some killer band called Fire Witch, who they played with all the time. It took forever, but we finally managed to get a bunch of copies of their Critter / Kritta 3" cd-r, which of course sold like crazy and was gone before we knew it. We stayed in touch with the band, but had been unable to get anything else until now. The strange thing is we had to go all the way to Japan to get this, a split with Japanese duo Ryokuchi... It was well worth the wait though. Fire Witch are another band who traffic in the slooooooooow and heavy, but they definitely give it their own twist. Not sludgy like SUNNO))) or their legions of followers, and not really noisy like many of their countrymen. Instead they're some sort of strange downtuned slowcore mathrock. Massive guitars churn and throb, the drums a crushing pound, over the top, drawn out wailing leads, all the makings of a proper rock band, but instead they fuck it all up, gloriously, lurching forward only to pause briefly, allowing the silence and bits of room sound to seep in, before launching back into downtuned action. And they go on like that for ages, never attaining any momentum, instead engaging is some crowd baiting bit of stop start torture, and we love it. A slow motion wall of psych guitars and slow shuffling drums. Here and there, the band reels it in, allowing the drummer to just wander, while the guitars squiggle and oscillate, a dizzying warbly soundscape of tangled melodies and sea sick shimmer. They finish off with the brilliantly titled "I Spilled A Lot Of Blood To Get This Meal", a lengthy chunk of abstract soundscaping, reverberating metal, soft swells of feedback, lazy basslines, drifting harmonics, shuffling rhythms, eventually bursting into a dense doomy plod, but laced with all sorts of killer melodies, making it sound like a doomed version of June Of 44 or Engine Kid. Fire Witch are teamed up here with Ryokuchi, a Japanese duo (what is it with Japan and duos?), just bass and percussion, who offer up an ultra dense, and relentless onslaught of mathy grinding doom-drenched metallized noise rock. Beginning with strange percussion and fuzzy minimal drones, the band suddenly launches into a massive wall of sludgy pummel, like a more hyper kinetic Eyehategod, or a doom metal Ruins. Relentless and hypnotic, the drums pounding away, the bass a swirling wash of blackened buzz, amidst the chaos duel vocalists howl and shriek. Fuck! And that's just the first track, their second number is way more spread out and sprawling, offering up some stretches of relative tranquility with affected bass and tribal percussion, sounding a bit like a more metal Three Mile Pilot, but the majority of the nearly seventeen minutes is spent furious and chaotic, grinding and crushing, a Tasmanian Devil of sound, going from wild thrashing to slow motion plod and back again in a matter of second. Dense and complex and convoluted and so fucking great!

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Here's a three-way split, presented as 'a string based compilation.' Yup, the guitar is the centerpiece to these experimental smears and dronescapes, starring Aidan Baker, Licht-Ung label boss Milan Sandbleistift, and Relapxych.0 (an upcoming Swedish laptop trickster, or so we assume). Sandbleistift's gauzy drones hover above a thick amplifier hum, coupled with metal-on-metal scrapes, electrical interference directed into the pick-ups, and spidery textures that wiggle into the mix as he plucks away at the bridge of his guitar. Imagine Keith Rowe recording for Celebrate Psi Phenomenon. This is a pretty good track; but to be honest, it's Aidan Baker who steals the show on this album. Even with his esteemed catalogue of ethereal ambience and doomdronedirge excursions, "One Step Ahead, One Step Behind" is pretty exceptional. A desolate guitar melody repeats throughout the entire track, alluding to the doom of Nadja had he kicked on the distortion pedals. But without, there's a sadness which permeates the track, accompanied by ghostly flickers of complimentary drones, flanging bursts of static, and a slow-burning roar of distant distortion that eventually consumes the entire piece. So good! Relapxych.0 holds his own in creating a series of guitar-meets-the-laptop abstractions that looks to Fennesz and Tim Hecker for inspiration, and does a pretty good job in the way of an homage. Limited to a mere 300 copies; and it remains to be seen, if any more will be made available to us!

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We've been trying to get the full length from these Virginia biker doom garage punks for ages now with no luck. So we were super psyched when this new single popped up, featuring Satans Satyrs teamed up with aQ pals Ohmwar. For those new to SS, the opening track is about all you need to know, starting out with a Black Flag cover, transformed into a massive blast of churning, metallic psychedelic biker doom, which quickly explodes into some snarly, swaggery metalpunk, all gristly guitars, and yowled vox, feedback galore, loose, wild and freaked out big time. The second track on the SS side is weirdly poppy, lots of jangle, almost sounding like a Kids In The Hall style theme song to some obscure cult TV show, minus the crazed tangle of blown out psych guitar squiggle, which is AMAZING. Man, we need to get that full length. Ohmwar make a good match for SS, kicking out the classic post punk noise rock, with some fierce glass gargling vocals over some surprisingly melodic guitar lines, and sampled thunder and rain, minus the vocals, the sound would be more like Husker Du or the Nils, albeit, with a slightly more metalpunk bent, but the vox transform in into something way more aggro. The second track finds Ohmwar tackling their own Black Flag cover, "Nervous Breakdown" this time, given a sort of hyperkinetic punk pop makeover, with the cool addition of wild squiggly guitar shred and some awesomely mush mouthed vocals...

Oooooh, yes! Remastered and reissued on cd! Blinded by the pearly white teeth, blown away by the skin-tight polyester disco boogie... that's what many of us were after seeing Saturday Night Fever way back in 1977. Seems like a whole 'nother lifetime. These days John Travolta's moving in a different kind of polyester crowd, and the seventies fashions we thought were gone for good have more than made a comeback. Oh, the more things change.... Such is also the case with the central musical force on this soundtrack. When you think of the Bee Gees, isn't this what springs to mind? Such a different musical beast from the band who just a few years earlier made the immensely Beatles influence drenched albums 1st, Idea and Horizontal (fyi: all three were recently reissued as deluxe 2cd editions, one of which was our Record Of The Week back in January!). Overflowing with delectable falsetto harmonies as only the Brothers Gibb could dish out, we love this album! Yes, there are ample top 40 moments and many dripping with cheese ("A Fifth Of Beethoven" anyone?), but don't be mistaken! This isn't just a "so bad it's good" trip. Nostalgia, yes. Irony, no. And lest we forget film score dynamo David Shire's presence. His disco-fication of the classical composition "Night On Bald Mountain" (retitled "Night On Disco Mountain") is mighty wonder unto itself! Yeah, you know how to do it!

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We can't remember a movie we've wanted to see this bad in ages. Sure we're a little sick of Michael Cera, and his one dimensional / one character bag of tricks, but somehow he seemed MADE to be in this movie. More importantly, it's directed by Edgar Wright, the man responsible for not only the amazing RomZomCom Shaun Of The Dead, but the equally awesome buddy cop parody Hot Fuzz, not to mention the fake grind house trailer for Don't (and hey, if they can make a real movie out of one of the OTHER fake Grindhouse trailers, Machete, then come on, why not an actual movie of Don't?). Plus if you've seen the trailer, it's total eye candy, like a tween rock band version of Fight Club, with all sorts of random CGI filligree, not to mention some awesome over the top battles, and the whole concept of this indie rock nebbish having to battle a league of super evil exboyfriends (AND girlfriends) to win the punk rock love of his life, c'mon! We haven't seen it, but we KNOW it's gonna rule. And the soundtrack is pretty bad ass too. People are psyched about it for new music from Beck, but what some might not realize is that while he wrote the music for the 'fake' band in the movie Sex Bob-Omb, he doesn't actually perform those tracks, instead, the band, including Cera, actually tackle Beck's songs, which are fuzzy and garage-y and snotty and GREAT. Broken Social Scene show up too, as the fictional band Crash And The Boys, whose sound is fast and furious and hardcore, one of the tracks, "I'm So Sad, So Very Very Sad" clocking in at about all of 5 seconds! But fear not, there's a new Beck song proper, a new Broken Social Scene song, new music from Metric, as well as some classic jams from Frank Black, T-Rex, The Rolling Stones, and some others. The soundtrack finishes off with a rad 8-bit jam, that's all Nintendo-y and groovy and pretty much sounds like it should be the theme for the movie. Killer soundtrack, and we're betting killer movie too (we'll know for sure this weekend!!!)...

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The soundtrack to Jon Moritsugu's latest award-winning independent film - this one about the tangled struggles of indie filmmakers and indie bands - is just as packed with friends of AQ as the film itself. Dustin from I Am Spoonbender plays the bad-ass Church, our very own Cup and J-Church's Lance Hahn make cameo appearances as eager film students, and Windy's bitchin' Trans Am even has a guest spot! The soundtrack features ample doses of Casiotone For The Painfully Alone and J-Church, as well as Moritsugu and Amy Davis' own band Toni Ann. Good, raw, lo-fi fun!

Either you want this or you don't! Not much we're gonna be able to do to persuade you either way, once we explain the premise: yes, it's a Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme split! This record collects together the audio from a whole bunch of movie trailers by those two iconic '80s action stars. On the Seagal side, you get the exciting advertisements for Above The Law, Fire Down Below, Glimmer Man, Hard To Kill, Marked For Death, On Deadly Ground, Out For Justice, Under Siege, and Under Siege 2. On Side Van Damme, enjoy the trailers for Bloodsport, Cyborg, Death Warrant, Double Impact, Double Team, Hard Target, Kickboxer, Lionheart, Nowhere To Run, The Quest, Sudden Death, and Universal Soldier. It's a limited edition of 150 copies, and we only were able to get, like, 4 of 'em, so act fast if you want one (why wouldn't you??). Great DJing fodder we're sure, or just to spin at home prior to a trip to the video rental store.

Wish we had more of these, apparently it's out of print already (until they repress, c'mon) and we only have a couple... It's been raining Ty Segall the last few weeks with a slew of rad vinyl offerings that have flown out the door. This new split LP with Black Time finds Ty at his most raw and rocking! Seven brand new songs including a smoking cover of The Dwarves "Be A Caveman" from back in their total garage punk days. Black Time were new to our ears and they definitely prove that London can get raw and fuzzy with the best of them, as their way lo-fi and in-the-red sound make them a perfect match for Segall. Maybe a bit more punk in sound and aesthetic then TS while still totally tapping into the more damaged and distorted side of primitive garage punk. Such a good time to be a fan of raw and impassioned garage rock cause folks like Ty and Black Time are totally coming correct.

The LAMC series of 7"s features tons of our favorite bands (Fuzz, Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees), delivering an exclusive track on the A side, while the B side features one of THAT band's favorite new artists. A pretty cool concept for sure and we're reviewing 3 of our favorites in the series. Number 7 features a killer A side from Ty Segall, who lays down a super funky drum track, swaddles it in organ, then some super distorted percussion, bongos maybe, a wild rhythmic freak out, that gets more and more wild and distorted as it goes, bursts of psych-squall noisiness, ultra distorted leads, all somehow wound up into a dense slab of cinematic psychedelic groovery!! Segall's choice for unknown up and comer on the B side was totally unknown to us, still don't know much about them/him, other than they have a super goofy band name, and that they kick out some serious jams, a psychedelic garage rock din that is very reminiscent of Thee Oh Sees, scrappy and rambunctious, soaring harmony vocals, plenty of ooooh's and aaaah's, wound around gristly, rumblingly distorted crunch, even some almost metallic riffing and harmonized guitars, some chugging heaviness, and some crazy catchy poppiness, not to mention some weird high vox. Oh Sees fans will flip for these guys for sure. The bandname is definitely not doing them any favors, but odds are, if you can get past that, these guys could be a garage rock next big thing. You heard it here first! And as you probably figured out already, EXTREMELY limited!!!!

MPEG stream: Music For A Film I
MPEG stream: Mountain

For those of you who were hopin' for a new Senor Coconut album proper, well, you're just gonna have to keep on waiting 'cause while this cd certainly has many of the Coconut earmarks -- cheeky cover art, playful Latin booty beats, chirpy electronic melodies, kooky samples -- it's actually a compilation of tracks put together by Senor Coconut (aka Uwe Schmidt, aka Atom Heart). Nonetheless, it's pretty darn great and sure to please his fans (and fans of that recent Rio Baile Funk comp Essay also put out too) 'cause he's got really good taste and knows his stuff! This effervescent 17-track comp is a super duper delight. In particular, be sure to check out the tracks by Os Carrascos and Los Pibes Chorros, as well as the one by Senor Coconut himself. Recommended!

MPEG stream: Labirinto Dos Carrascos
MPEG stream: Llegamos Los Pibes Chorros