[ aquarius records — Electronic ]

IMPORTANT (Please read to avoid confusion): Some items below may be tagged with a bold, red, all-caps OUT OF PRINT/UNAVAILABLE notice. This does NOT mean that all other items not so tagged are, in fact, in stock — or for that matter, in print and available, though there's a good chance they are. Some folks get confused on this point, and we can see why, so please read this for further clarification and other important before-you-order information. Unlike some mailorder websites, we don't have an electronic inventory system linked to our site, so you can't be sure of what we actually have or don't have in stock at any given moment without asking us — please email our mailorder department for availability status — or better yet, just go ahead and place your order using our shopping cart function and we'll get back to you with the status of each item. If you have general non-mailorder questions, email the store.

Showing results 1401 through 1450 of 5033.

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MPEG stream: Sandia

When beloved noise duo The Skaters broke up, the two partners went in drastically different directions sonically, with Spencer Clark taking his Monopoly Child Searchers in a more hazy, tribal, washed out direction, which wasn't really all that removed from the Skaters' sound, at its loveliest, at least. And James Ferraro going off the musical deep end, transforming into some sort of bizarro avant pop songsmith, his last record Night Dolls With Hairspray, exactly what the title might have you expecting, a tripped out, lysergic collection of tweaked lo-fi glam rock weirdness, which managed to be totally baffling, but pretty much totally irresistible at the same time. And while we were expecting more of the same on Farsidevirtual, Ferraro once again has mixed things up and managed to come up with something even MORE ridiculous, and again, a glorious car crash of a record, channeling the cheesiest parts of eighties music, sure he was sort of doing that before, but now it's like new age mixed with the sort of upbeat music that would accompany one of those workplace educational films, all swirly synths, programmed rhythms, weirdly funky grooves, all rendered in shades of super shiny, super well produced, gleaming ultra produced electro rock. Or something. The opener "Linden Dollars" sounds like Shadowfax covering the theme from Peanuts, but given a little 21st century new age makeover. Then there's "Global Lunch" which just baffles all the way through, super cheesy synths, a woman asking if you want something or other beamed directly to your "I-Tablet", with faux strings, tinkling chimes, a melody played using those weird voice presets on synthesizers, then a solo played on a fake sitar, or the sitar setting on a synth, while male vox are clipped and sent stuttering off into the distance, and then finally the song builds to a crazy climax with a wild sax solo, and some fuzzy electronic bass, it's literally some of the craziest shit we've ever heard. The whole record sounds like library music from 1985, composed and recorded for infomercials, straight to video rom-coms, and third tier sporting events, and if that seems like we're bagging on it, we're totally not, we're just baffled by how someone could even conceive of making music like this in the 21st century, how they would make these sounds, and why the hell we can't stop listening to it. Packaged in the usual garishly futuristic sleeve, with thick printed cardstock insert and a download coupon too!

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MPEG stream: Global Lunch
MPEG stream: Dubai Dream Tone
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We first discovered Fescal, via his Alchemical Wanderings release on Time Released Sound, and not soon after we reviewed it, Fescal got in touch and offered us the remaining copies of his super limited Moods & Views cd-r on Twice Removed, so of course we got all the copies we could, and besides some INSANELY deluxe packaging (more on that in a bit), the music is just as lovely and haunting as Alchemical Wanderings. Separated into two nearly half hour 'movements', Fescal weaves a gorgeous sprawl of minimal electronic dronemusic, that right off the bat had us in the mind of Oval, but where Oval was all liquid swirl and skipped cds blurred into lush lustrous dreaminess, Fescal is a bit more home brewed, the sounds a little more raw and less polished, the first piece here, a deep sonorous thrum, pulsing gently, as if it was caught in a slow moving current, or drifting in a gentle breeze, the sound itself though is dark and ominous, a distorted drone, that seems to shift subtly with each pulsation, and is wreathed in a gauze-y haze, everything wrapped in a cloud of crackle, that sounds a bit like either a sputtering campfire, or an old scratchy record spinning lazily on an antique turntable. There's little variation, or what variation there is, is subtle enough that it's almost imperceptible, instead, the piece sucks you in, and holds you in thrall for its full 28 minutes. Super gorgeous dreamy dark minimalism for sure. The second piece is a whole 'nother beast entirely. Gone is the woozy washed out shimmer, and in its place a heaving sprawl of distorted low end, but muted and blurred into hazy ghostlike shapes, buried in the mix, moaning tones, and mysterious low end melodies, the sound thick, and softly caustic, a bit more industrial, and a bit more sinister. Soft noise sprawls into blackened ethereal thrum, shot through with keening streaks of high end, and what sounds like strange industrial field recordings, everything still wreathed in that warm comfortable crackle. The packaging is just as stunning as the music, a textured paper outersleeve, wrapped in twine, with a fabric flower affixed to the front, the whole thing wrapped in rough twine. Inside, a printed insert, with liner notes and credits, as well as a beautiful fold out poster, printed on gold metallic paper, bundled with another insert, also on textured paper. Each cd-r also includes a tiny personalized note from Fescal, and these are LIMITED TO 50 COPIES!!! Already sold out and long out of print. These are the last copies we'll be able to get.

MPEG stream: Moods & Views

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

SORRY. This is the third release we've reviewed from Fescal, the first was on local label Time Released Sound, which should give you an idea of Fescal's sound, and sadly this one too, like both before it, is INSANELY limited, we have ten copies of a total run of 100 and won't be able to get more once we sell out. Fescal delivers two long tracks of softly psychedelic, pastoral drone music, long layered tones, softly undulating beneath a sky full of fractured melody and ethereal shimmer, all smeared into heaving swells of deep chordal thrum. Buried within seem to be voices, a distant angelic singing, which imbues the sound with a melodic warmth that keeps this from being simply dronemusic. The sounds too are imperfect, bits of sound crumble here, distort there, sounds drop out, others waver, still others surface, it's dreamy and druggy and divine, the first track here is a heady stretch of lush, lustrous drones, and deep listening mesmer, a sound which wouldn't have been out of place on Root Strata or yeah, Time Released Sound. But unlike much of this music that sounds passive, this music is powerful, the sounds alive, and active, beneath the surface is a roiling world of complex structures and continually shifting melodies, this first track glows with a mysterious inner warmth, and exudes and a cosmic energy that seems to bathe the listener in an otherworldly golden light. The second track is much more contemplative, cut from the same song cloth, but where the first seemed to smolder with some mysterious energy, the second sound more entropic, casting off all that energy, the sound of melting snow, of fading light, of waning life, still pastoral and dreamlike, but a bit more melancholy, the end not the beginning, a haunting, and lovely rumination on what has been, and what can never be again, faded memories and future dreams of the past. So lovely. Fantastic packaging too. A small textured box, with printed art affixed to the front. inside a small plastic bag containing some sort of dried plant, on a nest like bed of blue confetti, a printed, numbered full color insert, and a gorgeously printed, textured paper, vellum songbook, containing the titular poems, as well as the liner notes.

MPEG stream: Winter Morning
MPEG stream: Winter Evening

Fetish 69. The name says everything, right? Well, perhaps not on this double CD of remixes and collaborations. With a name as bad as Fetish 69 (implying some horrid diva-house disaster or worse a My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult sex-horror-shock industrial

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

SORRY. Andee's favourite hip hop record of 1998, which originally came out on Alec Empire's Digital Hardcore label in Germany, has been released here in the States at domestic prices! After a year of disappointment from big name hip hoppers (RZA, Method Man), DHR surprises us all with what may be the weirdest and best hip hop record of the year. Deep, dark, and disturbingly distorted. Murky, monotone, and menacing. Sort of like Sensational and Alec Empire having a fist fight in a dark alley!

This is the first we've heard from local songstress/soundscaper Feverwitch, and with that band name, the strange song titles, the unorthodox characters/spelling, you might be thinking Witch House, a genre we all loved but which seemed to have been a bit of a flash in the pan - and to a degree you'd be right, from the very first few second of the first track FW unfurls some seriously haunting slomo mesmer, ritualistic and cinematic, whirling organs, slowed down male vocals drone beneath FW's dramatic croon, what sound like strings swoop and soar, darkly mysterious and almost liturgical, like a lo-fi 4 track Arvo Part, spectral and shimmery, murky and moody, the perfect late night chill out bliss out, with a slightly witchy/demonic edge to it. And really, that's how the whole tape plays out, vibes of Twin Peaks, hints of Grouper, definitely plenty of Witch House residue, gothy and gloomy, some of the tracks are like otherworldly ballads, FW's distinctive vocals nestled in fields of processed vocals, delicate tinkling piano, crystalline expanses of hushed thrum, others build to strident singer/songwriter drama, albeit steeped in thick clouds of reverb and delay, and when the drums come in (which is seldom), they had some heft, some rhythmic gravitas that gives the song a ghostly propulsion. Swirls of cosmic synths drift in, adding a sort of new age / sci-fi vibe, everything blurred into a washed out lysergic sonic haze, that's darkly and dreamily divine. Then there's the final track, where FW really gives her voice a workout, letting loose with the sort of voice that gives you chills, dramatic operatic, somewhere between Kate Bush and Diamanda Galas, wild trills, soaring impossible melodies, all over sweeping faux strings and brooding atmospheric swirl. Wow. Really nice, fans of Grouper, Zola Jesus, Chelsea Wolfe should check this out for sure!

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Simply superb. The Field could release the same damn album over and over again, and we'd be completely content, so perfect is his signature style of minimal techno. Cupid's Head is his fourth album in six years, a relatively slow pace of output for such top shelf work; so with each album comes the opportunity to savor what Alex Willmer is up to. From Here We Go Sublime was the debut album that introduced the template for all of Willmer's other albums; and like Wolfgang Voigt's pinnacle of minimal techno - the four Gas records - Willmer's success is through the presentation of inventive variations on a theme. His begins with a sparkling arrangement of delicately arpeggiating pixel points and micro-samples, which might have been lifted from soft-rock ballads of the early '80s; and with the skill of a crafty plastic surgeon, he deftly eviscerates an ugly source material and renders it exquisite and wholly refined. All of his taut melodic phrase and clipped gasps of romantic exhortation latch perfectly onto the archetypal Kompakt monophunk techno pulse. The minimalism of Cupid's Head is not one of stasis, as there are rather broad gestures of emotional dynamism even within the framework of a constant beat. "Black Sea" begins with a classic set of The Field's pink-n-pastel electronic colorations, but slips oh so gradually into a more nocturnal set of jet-blacks and engorged reds that really would be the perfect transitory track between Ulrich Schnauss and Surgeon. These long-view structures look backward to how Arthur Russell produced with some of his slowly developed strings that slowly resolved a melody over a 10 minute New York house track. Radiant, glassine, and downright rapturous.

MPEG stream: They Won't See Me
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MPEG stream: A Guided Tour

What's release without tension? What if there's no real release, just an ongoing tension? Like you are hovering over a brink of a precipice but somehow knowing you are not going to fall and die you really get into the powerful momentum of floating fixed in space between the universal expanse above and the bottomless nothing below. That is how The Field (aka Axel Wilner) fashions his tightly edited minimal trance compositions on his Kompakt debut, From Here We Go Sublime. Like the best Kompact releases, from The Pop Ambient series to Wolfgang Voigt's Gas albums, The Field make the most out of nothing much at all. But what incredible nothings! The evolving repetitions of finely honed razor-sharp edits off of bits of samples, such as the vowel sounds of words, belied by rudimentary drum programming only occasionally reveal their source, including a bit of Lionel Ritchie's, "Hello" and The Flamingo's "I Only Have Eyes For You", more famously sampled by The Fugees. Dare we say it, This is sublime!

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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.

Album number three from one of our favorite forces to emerge in the world of electronica over the last several years. Their (his?) Kompakt debut, Here We Go Sublime, still stands as one of our favorite records of the last five years and this new one is making us think we probably have lots of great records from The Field to look forward to for a long time to come. The Field's hypnotic take on minimal techno has the ability to win over folks who might not usually find themselves listening to techno records, while at the same time putting those who do occupy that word into a perpetual state of bliss. Looping State Of Mind finds The Field taking their trademark approach to repetition and harnessing it deftly to reach ecstatic levels of energy, yet also demonstrating a knack for evoking much needed breeziness into their sound. We can't wait for some serious late night drive-time with this blasting as we cruise over bridges and under freeway ramps, only paying attention to the road ahead and the blinking lights of the city that surrounds us. So damn good!

MPEG stream: Is This Power
MPEG stream: Looping State Of Mind
MPEG stream: Arpeggiated Love

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

SORRY.

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

SORRY.

The Field's 2007 album From Here We Go Sublime caught many people by surprise, and we were happy to find ourselves included in that crowd of Field supporters. This was a minimal techno record playing the part of a pop album, through sleights of hand that extracted the sappiest moments of the '80s without appearing the part of the ironist. In pixel-painted blurs of entrancing melodies and soothing ambient warmth, The Field offered nostalgia without having a damn Lionel Richie song stuck in your head. Yup, one of the more memorable samples from From Here We Go Sublime was a wistful guitar lead from Richie's "Hello." In a lot of ways, The Field reached a pinnacle for Kompakt's Pop Ambient strategies, easily surpassing perhaps the album that started it all: Gas' Pop. Jump two years down the line and several trips around the world, The Field returns with a second album that shouldn't disappoint those who were held rapt by the debut. Yesterday and Today has much of the restrained crescendos of velvety hypnosis grafted onto the steel girds of German engineered techno. Yes, we do know that The Field's Axel Willner is from Sweden, but the heart and soul of the motorik pulse is firmly rooted in Germany. Neu!, Kraftwerk, Cluster, Basic Channel, and of course, Kompakt are the obvious references in the formal structures of The Field, with his source material being those misty-eyed remembrances of music's past. If there are specific samples to be recognized in Yesterday and Today, they are not overt and obvious; but the sentiment is still the same. Nice. The vinyl version includes a cd of the album as well!

MPEG stream: Leave It
MPEG stream: I Have The Moon, You Have The Internet
MPEG stream: Yesterday & Today

This is the second full length release by this amazing trio which features a member of Dntel. Some of the sweetest electronic dance melodies are found right here on 'The Heartfelt'. Imagine the Pastels, Aphex Twin, New Order and Future Bible Heroes (the

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While many techno-pop / electro-clash folks have recently shed many of the trappings of that deliriously champagne-bubbly dancefloor sound in favor of other directions (more rock in the case of Fischerspooner for instance), not so with James Figurine. Yes, he's of the band Figurine and yes, he's also known as Jimmy Tamborello of DNTEL and one half of Postal Service. Why mess with what he does best in all of his projects? He soldiers on with his new album titled Mistake Mistake Mistake Mistake. Funny thing tho' is that we can't hear any. So maybe the title was intended as a conjuring away of such maladies? Dunno, but what ya get is ten sparkling sweet electronic pop confections that fall dead center between Postal Service and Fischerspooner (think: more heft than PS and more twee than FS). Guest stars include Jenny Lewis and Kings Of Convenience's Erlend Oye.

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Expensive import disc that we brought in because we're unsure whether or not it's going to be released domestically. Kind of like Studio k7's DJ Kicks series of DJ mixes, it's not Fila Brazillia at all here, but them spinning a collection of their favorite

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

SORRY. Forbidding ambient-drone project from Godflesh's Justin Broadrick. British import.

We try to carry everything we can from Time Released Sound, and we generally do, but some releases sell to quick, or are too limited, some are just too expensive, but well worth it, as those of you who've purchased one of TRS's over the top, extravagantly packaged deluxe editions can attest to. So this new one from Benjamin Finger, we almost weren't gonna carry for all those reasons, it's crazy expensive, and the label nearly sold out already, but there are a handful of aQ list readers who are pretty dang obsessive about TRS, so we managed to finagle a tiny handful of these, so at least a few aQ customers will be able to get their hands on one of these. Cuz holy cow are these incredible, easily the most fantastic packaging we've seen from TRS, which is saying a lot, since they pretty much pull out all the stops every time, but they've outdone themselves with this one for sure. The whole thing is housed in an extensively modified chocolate box, collaged inside and out, with century old educational musical strips, it's stamped and hand painted, the boxes feet made from brass piano capstans, inside the box is a bird marionette, a sculptural/skeletal creature made from the parts of an antique piano, that bird marionette is laid atop a nest of random piano parts, nestled in little sections, separated by antique and hand printed inserts. The mythical bird, the marionette in the box, is then described in extreme detail on the inserts, its history, and the story of its eventual extinction. Yowza, you sort of have to see it to believe it, and it's totally worth the price, just imagining how much time and work went into making every one of these sort of boggles the mind. And it's limited to just 70 COPIES, of which we have 3 or 4, and can NOT get more. But enough about the packaging, it is a musical release after all, and a lovely one at that, Finger weaving hypnotic landscapes of looped piano, Reich and Riley like figures, wreathed in echo and delay, and laid over a soft swirling background of barely there thrum, the shimmery piano augmented by strange ethereal, processed voices, melancholy and wistful, some tracks shot through with a shadowy, slightly sinister vibe, but others purely pastoral, sun dappled and dreamy, the production is strangely lo-fi, giving the sound an immediacy, often sounding like you're right there in the room, but other times, the sound smearing and blurring into something more ephemeral, shadowy and softly psychedelic, those voices surfacing throughout, and giving the whole record a strange haunted faded photograph feel. Definitely cinematic, a little bit old timey, and definitely darkly dreamy.

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Don't be fooled by the promotional DJ sticker, this is in fact a proper full length from weirdo witch house / ghost drag outfit First Flesh, the dead eyed seventies zombie hottie on the cover your first clue as to what lurks inside Zombie Rave, and actually, the jams here sound less Zombie Rave, and more warped new wave chopped and screwed eighties house pop, which is not a bad thing at all. Imagine some Rick Astley style cheesy eighties pop vox slowed way down, to a ghostly, almost Antony sounding dramatic baritone, then lay those vocals over some woozy slo-mo house music, some HI-NRG grooves, sapped of most of their energy, and recast as a sort of symphonic gloom house, woozy and warped and pretty fuckin' cool. The second track takes those same vocals and wraps them around pulsing synths and ominous tolling bells, the whole thing rife with a 'wrong speed' vibe, a dark drowsy drag, a ghostly house music pop ballad that sounds like it could be the music from some cheesy montage in a seventies zombie arthouse flick. The flipside starts out with another slab of ghostly draggy gloom pop, the vocals sounding auto-tuned, but instead of tuned up, tuned WAY down. The final track is more pounding and industrial, but mixes in a crazy poppy chorus, a sped up Kesha style radio pop chorus, which sounds so weird with the otherwise gloomy pound, but somehow sounds so cool at the same time! Fans of weirdo witch house will dig for sure, and folks who like the warped pop of Ariel Pink, John Maus and the like, might also find themselves getting into FF quite a bit...

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Second 12" of weirdo minimal electronica from this New Zealand producer, and it might be even stranger/cooler than the first (Preparations, which we reviewed back on list #441). In our review of Preparations we describe FiS as sounding like a Tri Angle band, but totally deconstructed, and pulled apart, into something super abstract and slo-mo, but on Iterations, the sound is strangely lush and expansive - check out the title track, which pairs a fractured, super noisy beat, with soaring swoon some strings, the whole thing wrapped in gristle and static, but the end result is somehow epic and majestic, darkly groovy, but almost cinematic and symphonic. That beat does just gets more and more twisted and jumbled as it goes, the perfect foil for that melancholic backdrop. The rest of the record is not too shabby either, "Womb Dreams" is all skeletal dubstep, more hiss and static sculpted into slowly undulating waves and anchored by a dubbed out pulse, and some buried melodies, murky but darkly lovely. "Fever Sweats" cranks up the distortion, sounding a bit like a Burial B-side gone haywire, all blown out and in the red, grindingly rhythmic, with distant angelic voices, and swirling synths, beneath the crumbling latticework of decaying beats. And finally "Her Third Eye (Drum Rain)" lays down a flurry of wild percussion beneath softly stuttering melodies, all smeared into a prismatic haze, shot through with pulses of bass-synth, and strange percussion, a total come-down, minimal electro-dub trip out, that has us hankering for more more more!

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MPEG stream: Womb Dreams

First we've heard from Kiwi producer FIS, even though he apparently released a couple super hyped 12"s over the last year, but we can definitely see why folk are digging this, or at least folks like us! Preparations is a twisted bit of murky minimalism, that while definitely fitting pretty well amongst other Tri Angle outfits (Balam Acab, Vessel, Holy Other, Forest Swords, oOoOO, Haxan Cloak), is really way more grim and claustrophobic, we can't even imagine the sort of dancefloor DJ who would subject the heaving throngs to this hiss drenched creep - actually we can, OUR kind of DJ. Imagine any of those other Tri Angle artists, doing that sort of blurred, smeary slo-mo-soul, dubbed out and dark, and pull it apart, douse it in FX and slow it down even further, the results are fantastically gristled and grim, dubby pulsations buried WAY beneath fields of abstract thrum, a barely rhythmic sprawl of near static (well, actual static!), a field of hiss and hum, sculpted into dark shadowy clouds of sound, shot through with high end streaks, shards of muted crackle, pulsing loops that occasionally coalesce into abstract stutter-step beats, but more often seem to just hover on the verge of total collapse, a blackened electronic drift, skeletal, stripped down and minimal, a gorgeously gloomy, avant electro-creep that oozes ominously over the whole of the first side. The flipside, though, is a bit more musical, a sort of gloom-house, swirls of synths, buried beats, the vibe soundtracky and sinister, sweeping and ambient, with just enough rhythmic heft to give the sound a dark motorik energy, anchored by some rib cage rattling bass throb, and blurred into still more mesmeric swaths of lumbering slow-dub creep.

If Adult. scored "Hedwig And The Angry Inch" or... if I Am Spoonbender went Broadway. If the cast from Fame played electro. Glammy and slick with many cool parts and sounds but unfortunately weak arrangements undermine Fischerspooner's drive for #1. And well, I really could do without the diva singer too. The second track on the album is a cover of Wire's "The 15th", and quite a great

RealAudio clip: The 15th
RealAudio clip: Fucker
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Odyssey... the new eau de parfum... er, eau d'album from the fashion house of Fischerspooner. They've revamped their formula since their audacious debut -- holding onto those tried and true arpeggiated basslines and rocking things up with electric guitar, live drumming and... flute! They've apparently even given the diva singer the boot, drawing the spotlight more to Casey Spooner's vocals which come across as much more sing-song-y and sensitive guy (think: a more 'pumped' Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys), but please excuse us for being more than a little wary of their sincerity and substance when the group's career thus far has been unabashedly fabricated from truckloads of gloss, glitter and gall. This time when soliciting contributions the unapologetically shrewd and calculating duo shunned the fading electro-clash fashionistas and approached the likes of Susan Sontag, Linda Perry and David Byrne for assistance. Plus here's a head-scratcher for ya: they close the album with a cover of a Boredoms song -- a strange, truncated but oddly effective synthesized transformation of "Circle" from Vision Creation Newsun! There's two bonus tracks: one is a remix of "Just Let Go" and the second is an incongruous swirly pop song sung by Lizzy Yoder. Hmm, dare we guess that they're testing that genre's waters for a potential next new direction? Something to consider 'cuz it just might be the best song on the album. Sure had us scratching our heads a second time, goin' wtf!? though.

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Here's a novel concept... Why not let Fischerspooner be your tourguide to gettin' around New York City? Those obsessive who-what-where-when mavens at Time Out (makers of those hip city guides that are usually found in magazine and book form) thought it a dandy idea, and have issued a series of three travel guide dualdisc (cd one side, dvd on the other) sets compiled by select taste-makin' startlets from London (Damian Lazarus), Paris (Black Strobe) and New York (Fischerspooner). The eclectic musical selections are a funfilled romp although they're oddly not limited to New York based artists -- Bloc Party, Fiery Furnaces, Au Pairs, Princess Superstar, Broadcast, David Carretta, Plastique De Reve, Big Boys, Lassigue Bendthaus, Electronicat, Thomas Schumacher, Model 500, Richard Bartz, Martin Rev, Pixeltan and Laurie Anderson. Of course, shrewd businessmen that they are, they also include one of their own in the mix -- a remix of "Emerge". The dvd side of The Other Side is hosted by Casey Spooner and offers a glimpse of his choice picks around the Big Apple.

MPEG stream: Jealous Guy
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Here's the debut full-length release from this Irish electronica artist, who you may already know from his appearance on Quatermass' recent "Personal Settings" cd alongside Pan American and Komet. Fisherofgold follows the currently cool

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RealAudio clip: Ballad Of Nothing Important

My first year of college, stuck in the Northwest, I discovered an old Steve Fisk cassette in a small record store and bought it to listen to on the way home for X-mas on the Green Tortoise. Cruising down I-5, headphones on, I dug it instantly. Fisk not only had

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RealAudio clip: The Backwards Song

Five Five 2000 is a duo from San Francisco, produding this very nice debut of dronologist electronica. Shortwave radio broadcasts of mechanized voices pinpointing time down to the second break up the freefloating, very dark washes of sound, and buried drum & bass skitter. Beautifully intense.

Freshly reissued as part of the Dynamophone Folio series! Fjordne's The Last 3 Days Of Time album was previously released as part of the label's special Parcel series - each volume came packaged in a round metal tin. The Folio series comes in a full color single-fold cardboard sleeve. Just as lovely the second time around! Here's what we said about the release back in 2008... Wonderful! As is reflected in the icy blue cover art, this is a wintry album - contemplative and shimmering soundscapes populated by acoustic guitars, piano, fleeting vocal gasps and seemingly microscopic electronics. Imagine a not so distant Japanese cousin of the Diskont album by Germany's Oval. Yes, it's that good! Winding and unwinding like the delicate clockwork mechanics revealed amid the feathers of the diminutive birds on the cover, these ten tracks are simply gorgeous from start to finish... as has been pretty much everything released to date by this fine, young SF independent label. Needless to say, very recommended! A perfect fit for those who've also been enjoying the soothing immersion into the releases on labels such as A Room Forever and Mystery Sea.

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For those of you who really dug B. Fleischmann's Welcome Tourist (as we did!), here's a reissue of an earlier album of his (originally released in 1999 on Morr Music). What can we say? Mr. Fleischmann has a knack for crafting the sonic equivalent of the loveliest aquatic dreams. Such echoe-y, shimmery prettiness that's sweet without being sugar-coated. Plus unlike the more recent album on which they served as something of a distraction, this one does not have vocals! In the past we've compared Fleischmann's music to that of The Notwist, but Pop Loops For Breakfast is actually more akin to Notwist cousins Lali Puna albeit minus the female singing.

MPEG stream: Slope
MPEG stream: The Red Saloon

Unfortunately (?) B. Fleischmann's new album is not titled 'The Thumbsucking Coil' as one of us initially thought... and unfortunately (on a completely different but not unrelated topic) Mr. Fleischmann has chosen to sing more on it. Now if you're at all familiar with us here at AQ, you probably know that we've totally dug his past recordings (both Welcome Tourist and Pop Loops For Breakfast have always received a warm bear hug reception around these parts), and we haven't had an aversion to his drowsy speak-singing in the past. However each time we've put The Humbucking Coil on for a spin, it has definitely been his vocals and lyrics that have been bringing us dooown. Maybe your ears won't have a problem with 'em, but we'll just say that we're happy he doesn't sing on all of the tracks. We've been without a Fleischmann fix for too long already... we'll take what we can get! Fortunately the vocal-less tracks are of his gently lulling, blissful fare. Soft'n'soooothing.

MPEG stream: Broken Monitors
MPEG stream: From To

Inevitably when we play this in the store, someone comes up and asks if we're listening to Boards Of Canada. The first track definitely demonstrates why: melancholy ambience with haunting distorted piano over lazily glitchy beats. This Boards Of Canada vibe permeates most of the record, but this is a lot weirder and much more varied. One track will have subtle electronics spare steel string guitar and lonesome lapsteels, sounding a little like an electronic Calexico. Then one track will have German spoken word over a super pretty blend of piano, slinky guitars and electronics. This is definitely something for fans of Boards of Canada as well as folks who dug that last Notwist record. The Notwist similarity surfaces about halfway through the first disc, with the introduction of singing! Bearing a striking resemblance to Malcolm 'Arab Strap' Middleton's new album as well as the Notwist obviously, and even Faust with those sing-songy, innocent vocals. A gorgeous rainy day record of organic electronica. The second disc is an epic 45 minute track that revisits many of the musical themes of disc one. A gorgeous chunk of bliss, fuzzy and hypnotic, distorted melodies over loping post rock grooves, burbling upright bass, gauzy atnospheric haze, and sweet sweet melodies.

MPEG stream: Guided By Beats
MPEG stream: Grunt
MPEG stream: Until The Real Thing Comes Along

We've heard a lot of strange black metal related discs, but this is among the strangest...On this album, metal is only one (important but small) component of the whole, which also involves free jazz and trip hop...Released on the same label that brought us the infamous Benighted Leams, and you can see how this truly fucked-up "so bad it's weird and so weird it's bad and so weird and bad that it's kind of amazing" band would appeal to the same minds that thought the Leams were genius. Formerly a medieval 'forest-is-my-throne' epic black metal band a la Ulver (and we think still sharing some members with that Norwegian Ulver/Ved Buens Ende/Dodheimsgard axis), now these guys are wearing suits, carrying automatic weapons, and programming beats. But they've gone beyond the Mr. Bungle tendencies of say, an Arcturus (who seem "ordinary" in comparison!), and created something that even we at AQ can't quite understand, or judge. Every time we put this on, our reactions vary from being blown away at how bizarre and great it is to being appalled at the (same!) dismally bad and wrong moments. Great packaging, with the lyrics in the form of a miniature intelligence "dossier". Essential for those compelled to always increase the utter weirdness quotient of their cd collections, and very definitely for fans of Arcturus, Solefald, and recent Dodheimsgard.

RealAudio clip: Fingerprint

Flower Man is the work of Chris Bush from the Kentucky based electron revivalist ensemble Caboladies. While we've failed to hear any of his work from that outfit, the constant comparisons to Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never was more than enough to pique our interest. As Flower Man, Bush doesn't stray too far from what we would assume Caboladies to sound like, squiggling and squirming around his analogue synths and some pretty murky tape production that triangulates his sound somewhere between Grouper, a really druggy Bruce Haack, and a happy-go-lucky Omit. With its clunky Ikue Mori-styled drum-kit leaden dance around the rhythm, the opening track laces itself around two harmonized '80s / sci-fi melodies that fragment into squelchy percolations and lazer beam vibrations. The next batch of tracks could easily originate in any number of BBC Radiophonic projects with playful yet somewhat detached bleepity-blooping interwoven with some of those spooky synth sounds that Richard D. James mustered on his really early Aphex Twin tracks from Selected Ambient Works Vol. 1. Bush slows everything down to a turgid crawl of introspection through a lonesome, moping piece of bedroom electronics on the suitably titled track "Swirling" coming across as Delia Derbyshire on Quaaludes; and then makes a quick turnabout with some spasmodic electroid flashes which dissipate into nothingness as if sucked in various directions into outer space. It makes perfect sense that Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) would release this on his newly launched CD-R imprint Upstairs. Limited to 75 copies, and already sold out at the label!

MPEG stream: Behind The Habit Wheel
MPEG stream: Swirling
MPEG stream: Perhaps We're Floating On

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SORRY. The new Old! Avant/ambient/ex-grindcore guitarist James Plotkin returns with the perfect, hypnotic, techno-pop experiment! (That's techno in the sense of "done with machines".) Vocalist Ruth Collins adds her quite good spoken word poetry (a la Lori Carson in the Golden Palominos), and production is handled by Mick Harris of Scorn fame. Highly recommended.

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SORRY. CR-24 in case you're keeping track of your Chain Reaction library. The origins of the Chain Reaction sound are found embedded within the walls of Hardwax Records in Berlin, yet none of the current roster from Chain Reaction hails from Germany. Still, the legacy of Porter Ricks and Monolake can still be heard in the 'heroin house' with bleak granular synth washes, dubbed out EQ action, and post-Detroit techno pulses. Very nice.

Here we have a brand new record from Konstantinos Soublis, better known as Fluxion. The former Basic Channel / Chain Reaction mainstay is known for his crisp sound design and stunning attention to detail, and here he does not disappoint! Traces presents a dark and lush soundworld, where a myriad of texture and color, rhythm and drone meld into something wholly enveloping and hypnotic. When we hear this slab of dub-wise techno we cannot help but picture some brilliantly lit alien all-nighter, where enlightened beings helplessly gyrate in a state of trance-like ecstasy to the careening percussion and keenly developed melodic textures which unfold as the album progresses. The fourth track, "Eruption" has this hazed out, extraterrestrial disco-tech vibe for sure! Classic Chain Reaction delayed out chord sounds are melded with a groovy bass line and some handclaps and 909 rim-clacks, making for a dance floor cut that engages the mind and the ass in equal measure! Every sound within Fluxion's palette seems to be perfectly placed and of utmost necessity, restrained yet totally psychedelic (albeit in the glacial, slow-burn type of way), with enough haunting synth pads and far-out riddims to keep the ear fully engaged throughout. This is absolutely perfect late night vision quest blissout muzik! Dreamy and dark, and hauntingly hallucinogenic! Track two, "No Man Is And Island" features a wonderful unreleased vocal version from the late, great Dennis Brown. Beautiful! Recommended!!!

MPEG stream: Motion 1
MPEG stream: No Man Is An Island
MPEG stream: Desert Nights
MPEG stream: Eruption

We've been accused of being house music haters. And there's some truth to that. But is one certain obtuse branch of the house music family tree that had us the second we laid ears on it. A while back, the Chain Reaction label introduced a super stripped down, minimal house music, that was quickly dubbed "heroin house", for it's murky druggy laid back feel. It was like hearing house music through a drug induced haze. Or hearing the sound of throbbing four on the floor dance music seeping through the floor of your apartment from the late night dance club below. A super minimal throb. just a pulse really, a completely hypnotic, barely there rhythm, that just shifts and shimmers and works its way into your head, into your chest, into your soul. Hard to imagine people dancing to this music. It's a little like chillout music, but way more rigid and rhythmic. It sounds a little like the music that was created for those 3 o4 people still on their feet, after a night of serious imbibing, who are unwilling to stop dancing, but can't muster anything more than a druggy shuffle, or a barely visible shimmy. Playing on and on and on until the final one drops. For those of us who don't dabble in either drugs OR dancing, this music fulfills a function much like drone music, in fact, it is a sort of drone music, the beats and throbs and pulses are like a segmented drone, a completely hypnotic static sound that carries us into oblivion. Fluxion's Vibrant Forms just might be our favorite of the Chain Reaction bunch, the most skeletal, the most monochrome, the most everything minimal, it's like techno music composed by Steve Reich. Slowly shifting subtleties and barely drifting overtones, over a framework of repetition. Loops that shift ever so slightly, creating the sensation of change, while keeping us suspended, drifting, in a state of dreamlike suspension. Maybe one of our favorite "techno" records ever. Fans of Gas and the more rhythmic end of the Pop Ambient spectrum NEED this. As might the more daring dronesters amongst you...

MPEG stream: Lark
MPEG stream: Hiatus

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SORRY. At its best, techno is an effortless sound with the technician merely setting up parameters for drum machines, basslines, and melodic patterns that get subtle tweaks, filters, and modulations applied to them to keep everything from being static, locked grooves. Chain Reaction has been at the vanguarde of techno productions with a post-dub sound that modernizes the delayed tape hiss which eerily floated through Lee "Scratch" Perry's '70s production work. The process of creating the Chain Reaction sound was of course a digital one, giving a cold metallic patina to the ghostly patterns which hovered above a classic Detroit techno groove. The sound of Chain Reaction had been pioneered by artists like Monolake, Porter Ricks, and Vainquer -- all German artists who have since left the label for other pursuits. While not populated by Germans, Chain Reaction has still attracted artists whose agenda is to continue in the Chain Reaction sound. They may not be German, but they certainly sound it. Fluxion's "Vibrant Forms II" stands out from the recent croppings of Chain Reaction with a set of grooves that could easily hail from Wolfgang Voigt's Kompakt series that has been coupled with the cold shimmer of the Chain Reaction sound. Like Gas' "Konigforst," I could listen to this all day and never get sick of it.

RealAudio clip: Equilibrium

A far cry from Fluxion's previous heroin house sounding discs for Chain Reaction, "[spaces]" may have been created with the same software, but is an incredibly slow moving affair with crawling digital rhythms being stretched out over expansive fields of

RealAudio clip: Field 1

While the Flying Lizards are best remembered for their new wave / post punk antics in the '70s -- avantgarde electronic novelty covers of pop tunes, most famously the dub influenced tinkering of their jaunty version of "Money (That's What I Want)" from '79, they had a more serious interest in dub and experimentation as well. "The Secret Dub Life..." is an example of such that should not go unnoticed, and here we have a reissue to check out. The somewhat murky story is that back in 1978, Flying Lizards main man David Cunningham was given the chance to remix some tracks laid down by Jah Lloyd and some unidentified Jamaican musicians. Confronted with a mono master only (and with no fancy studio or samplers at his disposal) he had to be rather inventive with the mixes, doing them in his free time so that this album was only fully completed and released in 1995! (Although, his original experience with these mixes informed much of his subsequent work through the eighties, we're told in his liner notes.) Real nice, authentic sounding low-tech ambient dub stuff, loaded with weird sound effects, and really not at all like the Flying Lizards "hits" you may have heard. MPEG Download: "Preface" [/audio/flyinglizardspreface.mp3]

MPEG stream: Preface