[ aquarius records — Electronic ]

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Showing results 1551 through 1600 of 5033.

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SORRY. 4 re-releases of very early Funkstorung records which are much more of the AFX / Caustic Window variant of tracky 4/4 techno with acid squiggles and heavy distortion crunching the dense beats. Each limited to 100 copies.

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At first listen, Funkstorung has often tricked listeners into exclaiming, "Which Autechre album is this?" While the palette of fractured electro and delicate toy-piano-like melodies do share a striking resemblance to the duo from Manchester, the aesthetic distinction is found in the sporadic often spastic declination of the breaks from a midtempo beat to a grinding halt. Additional Productions is a different take on the idea of a remix album and works infinitely better than the average remix full length. Instead of lots of other artists remixing Funkstorung, this is an album of Funkstorung remixing lots of vastly different artists... Bjork, East Flatbush Project, Finitribe, S'Apex, DJ Craze, Visit Venus, Various Artists (Chain Reaction), and Wu-Tang Clan (!?!). As can be imagined, all of these have been released as singles over the past few years... but are either out of print, not available on CD, or very hard to find. Regardless, this is a totally great record!

After all the attention garnered by the Funkstorung 'Additional Production' it's weird that only now, is Funkstorung's actual debut being released. Still cursed with the same sonic palette (or just the same software) as Autechre, Funkstorung surprise everybody and sloooooow thiiiings doooown. Especially surprising after the spastic electro crunch of their remix record. This could be Funkstorung's slow jam record. Dark and deep and skittery and hiccuppy. Sounds sort of like a long lost Tricky record being broadcast on shortwave. Then there's the vocals. Several of the songs feature guest mc's and end up sounding remarkably like AQ fave Fever. One song even features breathy female vocals that sound remarkably like Martika, furthering the Tricky comparisons. So I give this one a big thumbs up, although my compatriots are not so sure.

"Multiple Grammy Winners" is a four tracks of Funkstorung mangling their "Appetite for Disctruction" album. The only remnant from the "Appetite" album is the stuttering slo-mo rhythmic vocal delivery, and even that has been hacked to bits on the timestretched chopping block. Funkstorung pushes IDM's electron stream much further from the arthritic Autechre sound (which was present on almost all of their previous outings) to something much closer to Sensational's abstract hip hop production, being almost devoid of melody. On a really embarassing note: At Sonar 2000, Funkstorung's MC called out to the audience that "Yo this is the real experimental shit! Come on don't you know who Funkstorung is? This crew remixed Bjork, you know who Bjork is?" when Stockhausen performed "Hymnen" just the night before.

Funkstorung's percolating IDM rhythms and terse melodic episodes tend to result in constant comparisons to Autechre, as they sound VERY similar. Nothing wrong with that, it's made for some great tracks, and something that we can always recommend to Autechre fans! However, "Post Art" has progressed to form a sound which may be the sound which Funkstorung can claim as their own, separate from Autechre (although still recommended to fans of those guys). Rich washes of reverb drench the digitized post-electro breakbeats for sad, almost Joy Division-like, atmospheres.

Just like Funkstorung's previous album "Additional Productions," Vice Versa is a collection of their remixes of other people's work. But unlike "Additional Production" this albums isn't terribly good. Since the majority of the remix offers that Funkstorung

This sure ain't no disco for fans of Stephin Merritt's Future Bible Heroes. Nope! Unlike their last release, this is isn't about high BPM boogie fever at all. In fact it's such a departure that maybe it'd be best saved for the latenight party wind-down (as opposed to the party kick-off). A lot more varied, languid, electroni-glitchy and atmospheric, it sounds like Christopher Ewen - the man behind the music of FBH - got some neat, new music equipment and software since the "I'm Lonely (And I Love It)" ep. And as if to showcase this, every second or third track is a brief under-a-minute instrumental interlude. On the downside, it seems like the lyrics got shortchanged this time around especially on songs like "From Some Dying Star" and "I'm A Vampire" (one of the only upbeat dancefloor numbers). A few excerpts: "It's your blood I crave / I am your bitch goddess / from beyond your grave" and "Damn, I am what? I am what I am and I am impossibly glam and I am happy as a clam cause I'm a vampire." Huh??? I mean, sure, it's not by any means a serious song, but when you've come to know and love the razor-sharp Merritt wit, this comes as something of a serious perturbance. The rhymes are alarmingly and almost painfully simple: "Your eyes are blue on blue / You're too good to be true" - as opposed to his trademark romantic lyrical twists. Even with Claudia Gonson delivering them in her alternately droll and sweetly sing-song voice, the words come off somewhat clunky. Filled with lots of pleasingly pretty melodies and textures, but overall, this cd is rather boggling to say the least.

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After recording a 3-cd boxset of 69 love songs, what's a guy to do? If your name's Stephin Merritt, you hop right into one of your other musical incarnations and hit the dancefloor running. The Future Bible Heroes (not to be confused with his goth combo The Gothic Archies) deliver five straight-outta-the-'80s hi-energy hits ripe for some serious ass-shakin' (well, one's a bit of a slower number), but with lyrics like "... you left an empty room / a useless bed and a suicidal moon..." you know these are more tales of gutwrenching heartbreak and loneliness from the pen of Mr. Merritt. Here he is accompanied by Christopher Ewen on all instruments and joined on vocals by fellow Magnetic Field Claudia Gonson. Go on, dance your tears away.

Attention Stephin Merritt fans! Here's a little slice of early Future Bible Heroes delight. Not to be confused with another EP from FBH out now, this one is called "Lonely Days" and was originally released in 1997, the other is a new remix collection called "Lonely Robot". Of these five songs, the standout is the final instrumental "Berlin On $10 A Day" - splendidly delicate and lovely - but the rest are pretty darn fine as well though. They include an alternate version of their tune "Hopeless", a cover of "Love Is Blue", and Mr. Merritt singing in Japanese on "How To Get Laid In Japan". We should also note that the title number first appeared on their "Memories Of Love" release.

Attention Stephin Merritt fans! Not to be confused with another similarly titled EP from FBH, this one is called "Lonely Robot" and is a brand new remix collection (fyi: the other is "Lonely Days" and was originally released in 1997). This 7-song EP features two new songs and five remixes of songs from their Eternal Youth album. Tackling the remix duties are FBH's own Christoper Ewen, Sunroof (not Matthew Bower's Sunrrof!, doing a fine minimal pulse rendition), Client, Soft Cell's Dave Ball (sooo dancefloor!) and Rob Rives (even more so!). Have to say, Ewen's reworking of "I'm A Vampire" into an extended mix actually fares much better than the original version. Maybe it's because the sorta clunky lyrics of the verses are a bit more obscured by the electronic dance melodies, and the ultra catchiness of the chorus is brought more to the front? Not really an essential FBH / Merritt release, but it does provide for a solid 39 minutes worth of mostly boogie fun with Claudia Gonson's lovely, droll vocals drifting in and out to sweeten the party atmosphere.

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Mr Future Pilot is a Scot of Indian ethnicity whose new record is on The Pastels' Geographic label (which hasn't released a bad record yet), and knowing all that, his new album sounds much like you'd expect. Super light, fresh, and unpretentious melodies are

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SORRY.

Wow, haven't heard from Fuxa in awhile (hey, didn't we start another Fuxa review with a similar sentiment?). The Michigan space dreamers have never received as much attention as their peers, Windy and Carl, or Add N to (X), but maybe cuz their records are so few and far between. Well, it's always nice to hear from them, and their latest offering is this single which features a cover and collaboration with of all bands, Suicide!? Well, it sort of makes sense, doesn't it, as Suicide were a key bridge between minimalist punk and space rock. Fuxa with the help of Martin Rev along with Dean Wareham (Galaxie 500, Lun, Dean & Britta)and Sonic Boom (Spaceman 3, Spectrum) take on a gorgeous and driving retelling of Suicide's classic "Cheree" that sounds a bit like all of these bands combined. Hopefully, it won't be forever before a new Fuxa full length.

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A split release between the two bands. Fuxa's entry is what you've come to expect, long drawn out melodic post-rock with vintage synth action. Welsh group Ectogram's contribution is the reason to buy this disc -- their repetitive groove will remind you of

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Moon Glyph is back with a new tape from aQ pal Glenn Donaldson (Skygreen Leopards, Thuja, Art Museums, Blithe Sons and Horrid Red). And this outfit's second release seems to be all about the nostalgia of freeway driving in Southern California and listening to tapes while gliding through a maze of freeways in the cool desert air. Half of aQ's staff probably can relate to that as many of us are transplants from the southern half of the state and while the reality of being stuck in traffic is no fantasy, some of us do miss driving the long freeways and canyons at night listening to our favorite tapes. With songs like "Irvine", "Orange Circle" "Sepulveda" and "Garden Grove", FWY! channel a motorik New Order vibe in extended instrumental synth jams that are both bright and moody with a languid romantic groove that's hard to resist. A real road trip!

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SORRY. Another band featuring Glenn from Blithe Sons, Horrid Red, Skygreen Leopards, Art Museums, etc., etc.... etc., etc..... etc., etc.....

The second release from Jan Jelinek's Faitiche imprint. The first being the too-good-to-be-true, past Record Of The Week, Ursula Bogner collection, a supposed archival compilation of various recordings made by a 40 something housewife who dabbled in electronic music in her spare time. We like to believe it was all real, and not some meticulously assembled hoax, but hell, even if it was in fact Jelinek, it was so well done, it almost makes it better. Almost. For release number two, Jelinek has convened an imaginary body called the Gesellschaft Zur Emanzipation Des Samples, or Society For The Emancipation Of Samples, more an idea than an acting body (although it seems like Jelinek imagines it eventually being real, or maybe he's just messing with us again), the Society would exist to address the idea of environmental recording, when that recording contains copyrighted sounds. For example, a field recording of a state fair, where one of the rides just so happens to be blasting ZZ Top. Is ZZ Top then entitled to royalties from your recording of the fair? So Circulations is a sonic experiment of sorts, setting up similar situations, where various bits of recordings and samples are broadcast, projected or played in public spaces, which are then recorded, capturing not only those sampled sounds, but also the ambience, voices, footsteps, the sample becoming simply another found sound in a world of sounds waiting to be found. All very interesting for sure, thankfully the actual recordings are pretty fantastic as well. Not sure how much light they shed on the problem/issue, but from a purely listening standpoint they are super cool. Much of the sampled sound seems to be from exotica records, but they are broadcast in various locations which affect the sounds differently, sometimes it's a looped cartoon sounding oboe, wrapped in hiss, with a conversation taking place in the background, other times, there are the sound of footsteps, hidden behind what sounds like a blur of birdcalls and strange malfunctioning computers. Crackling lullaby like melodies wrap around machine like rhythms, the room sound adding all sorts of natural reverb, moody minimal dub loops wreathed in buzz and static drifting through what sounds like a big empty hallway, glitchy electronics and dramatic strings being broadcast amidst the clinks and clanks of a kitchen or restaurant or supermarket, minimal classical music underpins wandering couples, swooping backwards calliope music ringing out in what sounds like a mall or department store, regardless of place, or technique, the sounds and songs here are gorgeous, playful sometimes, haunting other times, the various sounds as important to the pieces and the overall sound as the samples, both elements blurred into one truly fantastic listening experience. Beautifully packaged in a mini digibook, with extensive liner notes, in multiple languages, a few illustrations and even some footnotes.

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The return of this mysterious high concept project from electronic produced and soundscaper Jan Jelinek, which we initially took to be some sort of elaborate hoax (a la Ursula Bogner), a foundation called Gesellschaft Zur Emanzipation Des Samples, or Society For The Emancipation Of Samples, a recording project, and ostensibly and organization, based on the idea that samples, such as music played on a ride at a carnival, should be exempt from royalties, and by extension, we assume it would make sample based artists less worried about lawsuits. That idea is further fleshed out here, with extensive notes on the sleeve, about the idea for this body, as an entity dedicated to helping out artists when their sample based work incites a lawsuit and that artist incurs financial damages. So once again, Jelinek assembles a handful of tracks, all sampled in public spaces, some processed and layered and transformed, others nearly straight recordings, all of them quite lovely, whether it's woozy mysterious melodies, rhythmic minimal beeping, kitschy exotica, ice skating rink organs, all laced with backwards swoops and whirling effects and various degrees of processing, and all replete with the ambient sounds around them, footsteps, voices, cars driving by, various machines, and best of all the hiss and crackle of the public playback devices.

MPEG stream: Be Careful What You Wish For 'Cause It Might Come True
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Gabby La La is known in the Bay Area and beyond for her very imaginative and playful musical mind. She has played alongside folks like Les Claypool, who actually released her previous solo outing. I Know You Know I Know finds Gabby making all her beats and electronics with a Nintendo DS Lite as well as playing sitar, Theremin, ukulele and singing in her childlike voice. In fact the record sounds like it could be an awesome soundtrack for some new super cool psychedelic cartoon for kids...

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Sometimes you can just look at a record and you know it's gonna be good. And oh it's so nice when that gut feeling turns out to be so right on. Such is the case with this record by the unknown to us until now Gala Drop. Something about its tribal psychedelic cover that caught our eye so we rushed to play it and ever since we've been totally hooked. Deep and hazy electronics and dubbed out percussion creating a sound like Four Tet and Tussle jamming at a seance for King Tubby. So subtly psychedelic and trippy with sounds that melt, linger and pulsate with such sizzling perfection. At times we're even hearing a sound like Heldon doing dub. Wow. The first half of the record is all instrumental and then the last few tracks have really nice, icy cool vocals that play out more like an extra instrument then an actual voice. We even hear hints of the spaciest sides of Sonic Boom (Spacemen 3, Experimental Audio Research) as well as a possible Magma / Christian Vander influence. This Portuguese trio has found a way to make dubbed out sounds that reveal themselves in such swirling patterns and compelling color. So good!

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We've been enjoying a barrage of weird new tapes from East Bay tape label Sanity Muffin over these last few months, and this week marks the release of yet -another- batch, one of which is this one right here, the latest from Galena, the blackened synth-drone project of the man behind the label, and like the Galena jams we've heard before, Buried Finch is another collection of smoldering kosmische space outs that often splinter into grinding, glitched out psychedelic noise. Give a listen to the opener, beginning with soft shimmery celestial swirls, before a crumbling caustic buzz surfaces from below, pulsing and sinister, wrapping its inky tendrils around the otherwise dreamy drift, but while it's that buzz and crunch that seems to sonically dominate, much of Buried Finch finds Galena exploring much more abstract and spacey sounds, deep rumbling thrum, bleary, blurry swaths of chordal shimmer, gristly Tim Hecker like shoegaze-synth buzz, mysterious disembodied voices, deep dramatic vox, dubbed out barely there rhythms, a few moments of Casio drum machine driven Goblin / Carpenter style grooviness, but with plenty of jams that could be remixed Will Over Matter tracks. Thick gnarled sprawls of synth buzz, minimal and mesmerizing, here wrapped around motorik rhythms, and swirling space-y textures, like the soundtrack to some tripped out low budget art film, or the music accompanying the scariest planetarium show EVER. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!

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We first discovered Lee Gamble via his Diversions lp, an entire record crafted from an old box of jungle mix tapes, but made even more compelling by the fact that it wasn't even the actual jungle bits he used, but instead, the between song ambience, the tape hiss and buzz, all woven into something way more abstract. Dutch Tvashar Plumes was his next record and found Gamble actually crafting his own beats, and very much like Diversions, wrapping them in dense sonic collages, lushly layered, noisy, gritty, still rooted in classic jungle, and Kompakt style beatscapery, but doused in grit and grime. Koch seems to take up right where that one left off, although the opener is a bit misleading, and had us expecting something else all together, airy swaths of synth shimmer, pocked with impossibly deep low end pulses, a gorgeous crystalline drift, but before you know it, the sound transforms into something much more aggressive and beat driven, a pounding dancefloor banger, but again, still rife with Gamble's idiosyncratic to beat making, a churning, heavy house throb, beneath a gurgling, pitch shifted sampled vocal, groovy and funky, but also sort of sinister. The sound soon slips back into that opening ambient dreaminess, before another beat swoops in, this one more loping, and laid back, headphones reveal a whole world of sound beneath the beat, a beat that eventually grows warped and woozily misshapen, as those background sounds creep to the fore. We'd like to say that's pretty much how the rest of the record plays out, but it really doesn't, Gamble is a sonic mad scientist, and while there is definitely some sort of musical thread holding it all together, it's difficult to put your finger on just what that thread is. From the spare skitter of "Oneiric Contur", to the gauzy almost Heroin House sounding digi-dub abstraction of "Head Model", to the washed out blur-bliss sprawl of "Frame Drag", to the nocturnal beat-murk thrum of "Voxel City Spirals", to the churning blackened throb of "Jove Layup", to the skeletal avant-house groove of "Gillsman". to the warped, and woozily melty dreaminess of "Flatland"... And so it goes, constantly shifting in tone and tempo, vibe and texture, all the tracks here part of some impossibly cohesive, fantastically far out, abstract-electronic, alien dancefloor, psychedelic songsuite. Cool!

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We heard about this single back at the On Land festival, where Daniel Lopatin awed the packed house with his polygon planes of synth as Oneohtrix Point Never. Lopatin brought a handful of the Games single, which was being rumored to be his hip-hop excursion. Well, now that we've gotten a hold of this; it's not quite hip-hop, and not even the abstracted witch-house / chillwave variant of screwed hip-hop from the likes of Salem and oOoOO. Lopatin and his Games partner Joel Ford apply loops of muffled robot-speak vocals, dopey-eyed slow-jam rhythms, and Lopatin's trademarked '80s computer as utopian object iconography. The Ariel Pink-ish false starts through the sampled guitar jangle, and the Max Headroom skipped disc jitter make this unmistakably Lopatin (especially from those hard to find KGB Man tapes) and strangely believable as a wintery mixtape staple for beleaguered COBOL programmers and the robots who love them.

The duo known as Games presented themselves as chillwave mutants on the Everything Is Working 7" which came and went a couple months back, but this long EP / short LP (depending on how you wanna look at these six tracks) proves that Games is an entity existing between a number of dichotomies: Now vs. Then, East vs. West, ironically uncool (thus making it cool) vs. unfashionably gauche, etc. It shouldn't be a surprise then that half of Games is the sci-fi trickster Daniel Lopatin, who's better known as Oneohtrix Point Never. There's plenty of the Lopatin infatuation with polygon melodies, allusions to Russian technocracy, and dreamtime slippages into the forgotten futures of the past; but Lopatin's partner, Joel Ford, brings a mash-up aesthetic of Italo-Disco sensuality, mid-'80s Fairlight sampling mimesis, and plenty of trashy Euro-pop tropes. Unlike Lopatin's Oneohtrix project which seeks to capture a sound which never existed in the '80s but is an extract of a bleary selective memory from all of the data that's been left behind, Games is far more concise in what it's referencing - the mid-'80s synthpop / tropes of bands like Animotion and Ministry. No, we don't mean the "Jesus Built My Hot-Rod" era of Ministry, but the period that Mr. Jourgensen seems to want to forget: the swooning romanticism of With Sympathy and the cross-pollinated electronica album Twitch. The track "Strawberry Sky" is a Top 10 single that should have been released in 1986, with a magnificently catchy vocal chorus delivered by Laurel Chartow atop faux-flute synth pads, darkly washed electronic arpeggiations, thumped drum machines, and a coked-up production sensibility. The auto-tuned vocal utterances that drive "Shadows In Bloom" compliment an acid flashback of an arrangement seemingly lifted from one of Bel Biv Devoe's skittered grooves. Couple that with all of the new wave synths, and it's a downright awesome track! The Gatekeeper Remix of "Strawberry Sky" steps up the Ministry / Twitch references with more of a cybernetic flare to the punchy EBM rhythms and American Anglophilia. Recommended.

2nd cd of jungle from this kru lead by DJ's Zinc and Hype.

Mort Garson is probably best know for playing on records by folks like the Sandpipers, Glen Campbell, Mel Torme, Doris Day and others, which is to say, probably not very well known at all. He even composed and played the music accompanying a short film of past space missions to fill in the spaces when not much was going on during the 1969 moon landing. He was however, one of the earliest proponents of the Moog synthesizer, and for the crate diggers out there is probably most famous for two records, a disc of Moog music based on the signs of the zodiac, and a record credited to Lucifer, called Black Mass, another freaked out Moog holy grail. But until those get reissued we'll have to make do with this tripped out drug addled re-envisioning of The Wizard Of Oz. And tripped out and drug addled it is! Narrated with some freaky beat poetry (a voice uncannily like Jello Biafra at times), the story peppered with all manner of sound effects, blown out fuzz, warbly melodies, fuzzy static percussion, blurpy basslines, swirling space-y FX, and then there are the songs. Almost Gary Numan-ish sounding synths, laced with operatic female vocals, growling menacing monster like male vocals, some more abstract beat poetry, all woven into a head spinning retro exotica mishmash. Some of the tracks are definitely reminiscent of Perry and Kingsley, some of the tracks slip into almost groovy porno style seventies psych jams, some are manic, with the Moog spitting out super percussive sputter and hiss, others are dreamy and trippy and almost Beatles-esque (if the Beatles only played Moogs), and some tracks, like our favorite on the disc, "Killing Of The Witch" are downright freaky and sound like primitive lo-fi Goblin jams. The narration is really weird and funny and goofy but can be incredibly distracting, and it's probably the one thing that might limit the re-playability of this disc, strip away the random dialogue, and this would have been a pretty awesome fucked up synth freakout, but since the narration is here to stay, it ends up being exactly what it was meant to be, a truly over the top exotica oddity, that might not get played all the time, but it's exactly the sort of record that will probably end up on plenty of mixtapes, and will get pulled out at parties, and will most definitely feature heavily in wild whatthefuck DJ sets.

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We've long been fans of these outsider noise pop weirdos, they even played our very first AQ/WFMU showcase at South By Southwest, but wow has their sound changed since then. Our pal Anthony described this new record WAY more succinctly and accurately than we ever could: "Expertly performed, extremely difficult clash between pop inclinations and punk ideals sent through a completely synthetic, inhuman aesthetic. If you sent the Wipers early albums through the most intuitive state-of-the-art midi processor you might end up with something like this, simultaneously baroque and sterile, and very catchy at times. When the option is to zig or zag Gary War will always zap!" And while to our ears, at times Gary War sounds like a whole different band, there are definitely plenty of moments that harken to the GW of old, but right from the outset, Jared's Lot seems to establish a new sonic era with record opener "Thousand Yard Star" unfurling a spaced out psychedelic synthscape that seems to owe more to John Carpenter and Goblin, or more recently Umberto and the like, than Ariel Pink or John Maus, who were so obviously GW's sonic brethren in the past. But this new sound definitely suits them, "Thousand Yard Star" playing out like the soundtrack to some ridiculous, low budget seventies sci-fi epic, all pulsing sequenced synth throb and shuffling Autobahn rhythms, with wild swirling effects and seriously tweaked vox. "Advancements In Disguise" takes that psychedelic synth sound and weds it to some fractured outsider pop, everything doused in space age shimmer, and driven by those percolating synth pulses, the vocals effected and pitch shifted, layered and warped into a dizzying alien chorus, the song driving and propulsive one second, tripped out and almost kosmische the next. It's like some sort of synth heavy outsider garagekraut cold wave, slipping easily from twisted lo-fi pop to prismatic electro bliss out, everything wreathed in swoops of bloops and bleeps and clouds of shimmery outer space psychedelic synth swirl, the best moments are tracks like "Pleading For Annihilation", where the band actually rock, all pounding drums and distorted electric guitars, woven into GW's tripped out galactic synth pop, crunchy buzz butted up against dizzying blasts of arpeggiated synth melodies, those two disparate elements gradually merging into some of the most kick ass kosmische whatthefuck tripped out electronic space pop EVER.

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SORRY. In spite of the numerous alter-egos such as Mike Ink, Studio 1, and others we can't recall right now, Wolfgang Voigt's best work to date is from his moniker Gas. His third album continues where Zauberberg and Oktember left off in using sedate techno pulses as a monochromatic structure for echoing cavernous drones and drawn out melodies. A subtle dub technique (delayed fragments of what once were hi-hats, snares, and other percussive stabs) completes a bleak poetic monument to spectral decay.

Not sure where to even start with this one. Everyone here at aQ, heck almost everyone we know loves Gas, the blissed out minimal ambient techno project of Mr. Wolfgang Voigt. But don't let the word 'techno' scare you off, as the music of Gas can easily win over the most ardent techno-phobes. The techno element in the sound of Gas is only a tiny part of Voigt's magical soundworld, often just a shadow, a distant heartbeat like pulse, sometimes more pronounced, but usually just a murky throb or a rhythmic murmur, the music of Gas is Gauzy and shimmery, blurred and softly buzzy, it's like an even more dreamlike Oval, or perhaps Porter Ricks crossed with Labradford, or Tim Hecker recording a record for Chain Reaction. When we talk about Kompakt's Pop Ambient sound, Gas is the template, that which we measure all other 'pop ambience' by. The sound is at once ethereal and intimate, haunting and mysterious, lush and expansive, the beatless tracks drift endlessly, each a divine blur of soft chordal whir and looped effervescence, the more beat heavy tracks, retain that same washed out otherworldliness, but manage to infuse them with a subtle, barely-there groove, sometimes adding gritty crackle, or subtle dubbed out delay, but always sounding light and airy, weightless and darkly blissful. We once described Gas as sounding like being adrift in a sea of electronics, in a fog so deep, the pulsating beats that would guide you back to shore are murky at best, muffled by distance and the unending push of the droning wind. And we're not sure if we could describe it better. But we'll try. Nah Und Fern collects all four Gas albums, all of which have been out of print for ages: Gas, Zauberberg, Konigforst and Pop. And when we were first preparing to review this set, we were all ready to describe Gas' sonic arc, from the more overtly techno debut, to the much more ambient and ethereal final album. But on returning to the s/t debut, we discovered that the sound of Gas changed very little over the course of 4 albums, instead, each is like a movement in a massive symphony of gloriously murky minimalism. The self titled debut deftly balances pure ambience with some of the most propulsive Gas tracks, including a 14 minute epic that seems to be assembled from a Chariots Of Fire loop, but in the hands of Voigt, it's transformed into something otherworldly. It is techno, but not for dancing, for many of us Gas serves the same purpose as dronemusic, sounds to lull you to sleep, to allow you to drift off, to disengage and let your mind float freely, led by your ears, entranced as they are by the beautiful shimmer and motorik soft focus propulsion of Gas. As much as we love all of these records, the two middle records Zauberberg and Konigforst make up the heart of this Gas box. Both luminous and exuberant, yet subdued and melancholic. Sedate technotic pulses beneath wind swept drones, expansive orchestral sprawls burnished to an exquisite golden luster. Voigt's subtle dub techniques on these two discs coax the polytonal swells of deep sustained horns into lush rhythmic repetitions. These are heroic if gloomy electronica epics, realizing a fantasy fusion of Wagner's teutonic vigor and a disembodied dancefloor drone. The final disc, Pop, is in fact the poppiest, or so we always believed, but in context with the other three discs, we are once again surprised by how consistent the Gas sound remained, while still managing to subtly expand on the sound Voigt virtually created and perfected over the course of the first three full lengths. Much like the original cover art, Pop is the metaphorical sound of the intrusion of the forest onto the dance floor, with all of its mysteries, mythologies, and wonders being ordered by the insistency of Voigt's monophunk beats. Where the earlier works were dark haunts wherein deep fluid ambience topped the nonstop pulsating rhythms, Pop is a shimmering sunfilled excursion that is mostly beatless, forming its structures out of repetitive sequences of trilling ambience swelling in and out of each other within Voigt's surreal soundworld of hypnodub washes. The lost beat resurfaces finally on the last track which is a beautiful looped repetition of the previous ambient modulations, but subtly and gracefully merged with a muted, insistent underwater dancefloor throb. Breathtaking. A modern minimalist electronic masterpiece, four stunning parts of one majestic whole, finally united into one magnum opus, spanning years, yet sounding to our ears, utterly timeless. Each disc is packaged in a full color sleeve, along with four inserts, all adorned with blue and green tinted forestscapes, and all housed in a gorgeous matte finished cardboard box, also adorned with a similar image, and the letters G A S embossed across the top of the box.

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SORRY. Recording under the Gas moniker, 'Pop' is yet another exceptional album in the continuous stream of Wolfgang Voigt's techno structuralism. While he has recorded under a number of pseudonyms (Mike Ink, All, Studio 1, M:I:5, etc) to varying degrees of success, the Gas recordings have clearly been his strongest work. This is especially true when Voigt applies one of the odd (and few) metaphors to his work, as the intrusion of the forest onto the dance floor, with all of its mysteries, mythologies, and wonders being ordered by the insistancy of his monophunk beats. Where the trilogy of "Zauberberg," "Oktember", and "Konigforst" were dark haunts where deep fluid ambience tops the nonstop pulsating rhythm, "Pop" is a shimmering sunfilled excursion that is mostly beatless, forming its structures out of repetitive sequences of trilling ambience swelling in and out of each other within Voigt's penchant for hypnodub washes. For those longing for the beat of Voigt, simply wait for the last track which is beautiful repetition of the previous ambient modulation, with his insistent techno. It's a trick he used on the 20' to 2000 series, and it's trick I hope he uses again. Breathtaking.

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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. Adrift in a sea of electronic music, in a fog so deep, the pulsating beats that would guide you back to shore are murky at best, muffled by distance and the unending push of the droning wind. Cross Porter Ricks with Labradford. Subdued and melancholic.

Maybe even more anticipated that the recent Nah Und Fern box set from Gas, compiling all of the previously released Gas records, is this, a book of art from the man behind gas Wolfgang Voigt, which beside being beautiful and packed with variations on the foresty images that graced all the Gas records, also comes with a 5 track disc featuring rare, old, unreleased Gas tracks, which have the Gas faithful in a frenzy. More on the music in a second. The book itself is quite striking. A slightly blurred shot of a forest, tinted deep red, it could be the cover of a lost Gas album (which in some ways it is), the band name embossed in a deep red metallic ink, Voigt's name on the back. Inside is a selection of photos, which seem to be from the same shots that produced the record covers, all shot of trees and branches and leaves, close up, from afar, they would look amazing all blown up on a gallery wall, but manage to be pretty dang striking here too. Even sans cd, this would make a pretty excellent coffee table art book. But there is a cd, and as we mentioned before, it does in fact include nearly an hour of unreleased Gas, so� Five tracks, all ten minutes or longer, each a deep dark gritty drift, almost completely eschewing the beats that would find their way into later Gas albums, these tracks explore deep billowy black ambience. A few have some glitch and crackle, but never does it evolve into that murky thump Gas does so well, instead, it sounds like water dripping, or ice melting, while the leaves and branches sway in the background, one track is super lo-fi and raw, with an industrial machinelike loop beneath the glistening musical mumble, underpinned by deep string swells, and haunting melodies, but that track is quickly followed by something much darker and elegiac, a brooding longform shimmer, like a string quartet slowed waaaaaay down, and blurred into soft shifting shapes. The closer is the most pastoral of the bunch, almost like it could be the music for some sort of nature show, slow panning shots of glaciers glistening in the sun, leaves falling in slow motion, time lapse films of wildflowers blooming then withering, clouds drifting across a deep blue sky, the only thing keeping it from going to far in that direction, is the soft patina of fuzz, the buried buzz, the looped mesmer, the barely audible glitch, all the things that make it distinctly GAS.

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SORRY. Mistakenly labelled Gate's 'techno record' by an unnamed party, this is Dead C guitarist Michael Morley's first computer generated album. While most computer programmers are trapped within the crystal purity of digital sounds, Morley's penchant for a fidelity below the standards of lo-fi has saved his 'techno record' from sounding like one. Lazy looping soundtracks for dirgy guitars and sloppy synths. Only about 1/2 of it has got 'beats', and they are pleasant.

The last Gatekeeper record, Giza, fell firmly in the camp of Carpenter / Goblin retro soundtrack revivalists, but even on that record, the sound tended toward a minimal electro, mixing skittery beats and warped samples into the ominous synthscapes and, as we described the sound then, Gatekeeper's "electro kraut futurist kosmische sci-fi new wave". But on Exo, things have changed quite a bit, with the techno/electro component taking center stage, and all the atmospheric and cinematic elements woven into the backdrop, whether that be groaning stabs of ominous low end, or deep rumbling drones, or clouds of synth swirl, or chopped and looped vocal snippets or weird fragmented melodies, those sounds definitely make an excellent bed for Gatekeeper's techno skitter and shuffling stutterstep rhythms, whether it's the house-pound of "Exolift", or the or the spaced out squelch of "Bog", or the woozy druggy shuffle of "Vengier", this record is all about the beat, and these are some seriously twisted beats, that while being plenty modern, weirdly remind us of stuff like Techno Animal, or all those old Pathological comps, there's definitely an isolationist vibe to the proceedings, even at its most pounding and propulsive, something sinister lurks just below the surface, and it's all those surrounding sounds that give this the weird moodiness, and ominous atmosphere that seems to be the sonic thread that ties Exo, however loosely, to Giza before it. Most of the record is definitely designed for the dancefloor, albeit one that's twisted and tweaked, but check out the final one-two coda, the swirling buzzing dronescape of "Re-Gen", and the closer "Encarta", which is the only track here that sounds like it could have come from Giza, with its dramatic operatic vocals, its pulsating arpeggiated synths, all anchored to a throbbing house music pound, and wreathed in swirls of creeped out atmosphere and strange bits of percussion. Housed in a super striking futuristic full color gatefold jacket.

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You'd probably never guess listening to this, the debut from a mysterious trio called Gauchiste, that one of the guys here plays guitar in Loincloth, whose recent Iron Balls Of Steel record for Southern Lord was a huge hit around here, but even with that sort of metal pedigree, one that does in fact extend to all three members, you won't find any churning math rock metal mayhem here, or even pounding downtuned chug, instead, this trio specializes in a haunting hybrid of minimal electronics, abstract soundscapery, and droned out avant metal, that more resembles some strange soundtrack than a metal record proper, the whole thing meticulously assembled mostly via computer, using the various sounds in different ways to produce all manner of timbres and textures, evoking a gorgeous hauntological dread, that is seldom found in more traditional metal. The opener is a noxious cloud of blurred guitar buzz, skittery cymbal shimmer, and buried double kick drumming, that initially sound more like some strange chittering insect, it's definitely metal, but a sort of smeared abstract offshoot, with those drums fading out gradually, eventually leaving dense slabs of heaving chordal thrum and post industrial shimmer. The follow up track starts out like it's gonna ooze into some sort of dense doomic creep, but instead blissed out into a billowy cloud of ethereal ambience, washed out drones, and buried processed vox, while elsewhere on the record, deep rumbles pour forth like some sort of downtuned sonic avalanche, the occasional metal vokills, are appropriately growly and gruff, but they're suspended in a sort of blackbuzz stasis, with the most metal moments more reminiscent of a group like SUNNO))), or even more appropriately, like some obscure Cold Meat black ambient outfit. Guitars seem to be the main instrument, but they're rarely left in their distinctly guitar-like form, instead, deftly transformed into what sounds like whirring organs, or smeared blackened hum, over which the group lace skittery glitches and machinelike rhythms, rarely propulsive, or even strictly that rhythmic, more another textural element, to add to the already bleak atmosphere that infuses pretty much every moment. The last two tracks probably best sum up the group's sound, slipping from glimmering dreaminess, almost orchestral at moments, to blurred blackened ambience, and finally to super dense drone, a harsh, haunting, abject sprawl of super cinematic malevolence, that should most definitely appeal to metalheads and dronelords alike. The packaging is stunning, the lp in a deluxe, heavy paper, weirdly cut multi-panel jacket, the cd-r (why a cd-r and not a real cd we do not know), in a cool hinged metallic case, with a plastic front panel, the disc visible through the plastic.

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Yet another weird and wonderful archival release from cold/synth/new wave reissue label Medical Records, who over the last few months have given us a killer Record Of the Week in the form of the Lou Champagne System, as well as amazing releases from Axxess (another ROTW), Dalek I and Guyer's Connection. This latest blast from the past comes from a pair of Italian teenagers who recorded these tracks when they were between the ages of 14 and 16, one of which, "I'm A Vocoder" became a huge club hit. And that track, which somehow we had never heard before is well worth the price of admission alone. A pulsing synth-kraut groove, primitive drum machine, then some very Kraftwerk like melodies, and when the vocals come in, even MORE Kraftwerk worship, heavily accented English, delivered in a robotic sing-song, totally catchy, super fun and while not exactly 'funky', but definitely groovy, and motorik, and hypnotic. We had to listen to that track 4 or 5 times before we could move on, but then going back to the opener "GCP", it's almost as cool, a brooding synth-drone intro with vocals courtesy of a Speak & Spell, the perfect lead in to "I'm A Vocoder" for sure. "My Love Is Electronic" cranks up the tempo a bit, with more intricate drum programming, and tangled synth melodies, not to mention more of those robotic vox, which is even more impressive when you realize these guys were using toy-like keyboards modified into makeshift synths, which is what gives this such a cool DIY vibe. "A Bunch Of Flowers" is a way more melodic take on the electronic pop of groups like Depeche Mode, the sound fuzzy and gorgeous gristly, while "Mr. Do Re Me" is total eighties synth pop a la Yaz, as is "Bit Of Charm", poppy and synthy, with dramatic heartfelt vox and shimmering synths. The title track returns to the Kraftwerk like kraut-homage of the opening tracks, droned out and hypnotic, pulsing and mesmerizingly robotic, and finally, "Television" finishes things off with what sounds like a slowed down version of the "Axel F Theme", but with almost operatic female vox, soaring and dreamy and wonderfully retro-poppy. Great stuff, as usual from Medical. LIMITED TO 650 COPIES. Each one hand numbered.

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Recorded live in 2000, this is the new collaborative project of Martin Ng and Mathias Gmachl (Farmers Manual, Fuckhead). As GCTTCATT, Gmachl digitally manipulates, via "realtime data processing", sounds run through Ng's turntables and cd player. I really

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SORRY. Atom Heart's life has taken him to Chile, where he's been doing his Senor Coconut and Atom and Tea Time things (tricked out salsa Kraftwerk covers, Latin glitch-rap). His life with Jesus is quite a different party -- with house grooves that shuffle alongside laptop clickery, plus requisite religious imagery.

Second record of silly tech-house madness from Mr. Atom Heart (aka Senor Coconut, Los Samplers, etc.). Like Matmos on speed, and even more so like Drew Daniels' The Soft Pink Truth. House rhythms and diva vocalisations are sliced, diced and restructured into a hiccuping tizzy.

RealAudio clip: Mother Showed Me (The Way To Go)