[ aquarius records — Electronic ]

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Showing results 1901 through 1950 of 5033.

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SORRY. Black 50/50 t-shirt with metallic silver print of the band's head-bending-fork logo. Various sizes available. Please inquire.

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SORRY. Black 50/50 t-shirt with red telephone and white lines design. Large only.

Black 50/50 t-shirt with metallic silver print of the three forkmen from the Teletwin album. Various sizes available. Please inquire.

This might be the coolest, weirdest release yet from Medical Records, which is saying a lot considering how much cool, weird stuff they put out. From the French synth pop of Mathemetiques Modernes, to the twisted WTF? guitar & synth one man band Lou Champagne System (a previous Record Of The Week!), and from the space-y psychedelic synthscapery of Axxess (another past ROTW!), to Swiss teenage electro poppers Guyer's Connection, it's all so good, and we could go on, but you get the picture. We love this label, and their ability to consistently dig up the most amazing, baffling, brilliant gems, maybe none so brilliant and baffling than this rarity, a 1979 record from an Italian outfit called I Signori Della Galassia, who play cosmic prog space disco, but with plenty of sonic twists and turns. Might as well start with the cover, a stunning super surreal painting of a stylized naked woman, whose bottom half is a tree, her roots and branches disappearing into the sand of what looks like an alien beach. Flip the record over, and peep the band members' photos, they all look like regular seventies rockers, that is except for the giant collars on their different colored capes/jumpsuits!!! Holy cow, everything is screaming PROG so far, and opener Proxima Centauri (prog title too, no?) does not disappoint, 8+ minutes of pulsing sci-fi, futuristic chase music, swirling synths, wild percussion, loads of FX, crazy catchy melodies, the beat is definitely disco, but it's pretty progged out too. Fans of groups like Majeure, Zombi and Umberto, will FLIP. The Carpenter and Goblin vibe is obviously huge, but when combined with some pulsing Euro-disco propulsion, the track explodes into some serious space-disco-prog radness! It sounds like the follow up track is more of the same, if anything, even MORE prog, heavier, with some fuzzy acid riffing, the vibe darker, laced with swirling soundtracky strings, and this time vocals, super dramatic, alternately pushing the sound toward something more disco, but then something poppier and proggier. Super dynamic, super psychedelic, and pretty goddamn heavy! Things slow down around track three, the sound growing even more cinematic, pulsing and puslating, droned out and ominous, tinkling synth melodies over a bed of cosmic shimmer, and sinister low end thrum, some acoustic guitars, as well as strange voices, and mysterious effects, and then suddenly, about halfway through, the song explodes into a weird, almost jaunty groove, proggy and funky, and SO GOOD! And so it goes, the band laying down carnivalesque keyboards, fuzzy guitars, and then BLAM, track 4 turns into what sounds like the music for Christmas On Ice, goofy and playful, the main motif totally holiday, but all the while, Eastern guitar melodies swirl in the background, a push pull between festive and exotic, at one point sounding a bit like a disco-prog version of Perrey And Kingsley! And it only gets weirder from there on out. Slipping into some seventies yacht rock balladry, lush and heartfelt, before flitting right back into more disco-prog, this time heavier on the disco, it's not hard to imagine some alien discotheque, I Signori the house band, the dancefloor looking like the Cantina scene in Star Wars. Later, the sound is transformed into creepy cosmic balladry, Tangerine Dream synths wrapped around grooving hard rock drums, Queen like guitars, and some super twisted processed vocals, before finally moving into a songsuite that is total cosmic disco-prog bliss out, swirling synths, wild drumming, complex arrangements, the sound lush and epic, spacey and psychedelic, until the very strange closer, which begins like it might be another pulsing prog out, even when the vocals come in, it's total classic Italo-prog, a synth driven chorale, that is suddenly transformed into some treacly seventies yacht pop, which is somehow still peppered with bursts of tangled prog, not to mention some weirdly abrupt stops and starts. So weird, and SO GREAT! Like all Medical Records releases, elaborately packaged, pressed on 180 gram silver vinyl, and LIMITED TO 600 COPIES!!!

MPEG stream: Proxima Cantauri
MPEG stream: Puoi Sentirmi
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We've been huge fans of the Greek born new-ager Iasos since discovering his 1975 masterpiece, Inter-Dimensional Music through EM Records' 2006 reissue. That record had us totally rethinking our understanding of new age music and helped give us a whole new love for the genre. While that record has been reissued a few times since, the rest of Iasos' material been harder to find, so it's nice to get this overview of hisseventies output, nicely released by the fine folks at the Numero Group. For those concerned, there are 5 tracks here from Inter-Dimensional Music, but 8 others that are totally new to us, and for anyone familiar or new to the gossamer vibes of Iasos, this is a great collection, and a perfect introduction. Most all of this music was created on a houseboat in Marin, where Iasos conducted musical experiments with tape reversal, electronic processing of acoustic instruments (phase-shifted flutes and harp strings) and the first commercially available synthesizers. He believes he was transcribing music from Vista, a benevolent music-maker from a distant dimension, and in doing so essentially created a new genre of music. There is even evidence of a psychology paper from 1989 that states that Iasos' music bears a striking resemblance to the sounds people hear in near-death experiences. It is indeed heavenly music! This release features never before seen photos and extensive liner notes, detailing Iasos musical process and history. So great!

MPEG stream: Rainbow Canyon
MPEG stream: Blue Fire Realms
MPEG stream: Siren Shallows
MPEG stream: The Winds of Olympus

It's rather funny that with cassette tapes becoming popular again that we now see classic New Age albums getting reissued in the same format that they were originally released. We got a handful of this new cassette reissue of New Age Icon Iasos' 1986 release Elixir. Subtitled, A Visionary Gateway to Celestial Realms, it certainly is a dramatic mix of the symphonic and electronic with deep vortex swooshes, angelic cascades and mind-expanding synth drones. Heavenly!

MPEG stream: Elixer (excerpts)

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SORRY. So Mika Vainio and Ilpo Vaisanen have picked another mega-corporation to name a sound project after. The precedent was Panasonic who demanded that the Finns change their name, with Pan Sonic being the permutation of the offending moniker. Of course, Vainio & Vaisanen's argument here will be that IBM is nothing more than an acronym for Ilpo, Bruce, Mika (the Bruce being Bruce Gilbert from Wire), but they've appropriated the IBM corporate logo, thus abolishing any artistic propriety they may have in the matter... Sure this Mego release will certainly be such small pressing (it's vinyl only, too) as to not even show up on IBM's legal radar. But if this project continues and gets signed to Mute / Blast First, their name too will likely get altered. Personally, I'm hoping for MIB, but then Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones will be on their case. The self-naming crisis aside, the collaboration between Ilpo Vaisanen, Mika Vainio, and Bruce Gilbert is a triumphant one, but one that is far from the crystalline sounds that have dominated the Pan Sonic aesthetic. The turntable appears to be the original source for these recordings, for which the trio has forced locked grooves onto already mangled pieces of vinyl and then manipulated the resulting sounds through a variety of computer generated effects (lots of pitch shifting, flange, and digital-crunch distortion). "The Oval Recording" (another play with names as it was recorded in The Oval Mansion across from the Oval cricket arena in London) has nothing to do with the clean digital fragmentation of Oval - this is a dissonant rumbling album which rides a thick wall of industrial strength fuzz before diving into an Earth / Sunn like low end rumble. There's just as much Non and Otomo Yoshihide as there is Pita and Fennesz on the first.

Finally, a Chicago-style postrock band that doesn't traffic in the over-baked, quiet storming, Chuck Mangione meandering so prevalent these days. Instead, spartan and lovely instrumentals pay indirect homage to Steve Reich's phase patterns. So pleasant and yet so interesting, one of those few records that always sells when we play it and prompts customers to ask 'What is this?!' Highly recommended!!

Don't be confused by the name. We couldn't figure out why the band we remembered as sounding sort of post rocky and Tortoise-y could make a record like this. Well, they didn't. This Icebreaker is not from Chicago, but from Great Britain. And this Icebreaker

RealAudio clip: Mad Legs In A Sack 1
RealAudio clip: The Baby Bear's Bed 2
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SORRY. With their first album "Distant Early Warning", Icebreaker were defintely one of our great post-rock hopes, eschewing the oh so commonly used Chuck Mangione horns (see Tortoise) for a more Steve Reich-like sound, as if they were influenced by his "Phase Patterns". Lovely, austere. So after a year's passing (and with "International" now added to their name) we understandably had high expectations for this new album. Can you see where I'm headed with this? Sigh... Yes, this is a disappointment. Along with their new name they've also got a new sound: fortified with bubbly dance beats, "Trein Maersk" is a case study in poor band direction choices. The Icebreaker sound doesn't need the beats, and it certainly doesn't need the Mogwai- or Godspeed-like addition of found sampled spoken word vocals, in this case some politican's boring speech or lecture on economic policy that unnecessarily intrudes on one song. Cut us a break! We wanted to like this, we tried to like this, we do like the artwork, we like the underlying sound, but can't recommend the final result. Better luck next time.

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SORRY.

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SORRY. ICU are an instrumental drum'n'bass trio out of Olympia. This is nice lo-fi experimentation, not mindblowing or anything but really good AND they're able to reproduce it live without resorting to merely playing their own recordings, and there's a lot to be said fer that. Amateurish bitmappy cover art to heighten the overall effect. Fun.

A review from "electronicmusicreviews.com" offered an interesting piece of personal history regarding Deno Vichas (aka If Then Else). He had apparently received a 6 month jail sentence for marijuana possession before recording this album. What is so strange

RealAudio clip: Missing My Bong
RealAudio clip: Waiting

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SORRY. Blip. Bleep. Boom. Pole. Dub. Autechre. Skitter. Electro. If. Then. What else? ...recommended Bay Area electronica, originally featured on the acclaimed Emanated compilation.

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SORRY. The debut album from the French duo Ihan is built on the coexistance of conceptual leanings of the French electroacoustic schools and the pulse oriented architechtures of minimal techno. Ihan forms slow building collages out of rather dry sounding digital glitch abstraction unveiling tenuous patterns of high-end rhythmic fluidity. A perfect fit into the current Mille Plateaux line-up.

We're always excited when a new disc from Ryoji Ikeda appears. As far as we're concerned, this Japanese electronic composer is the master of the "clicks and cuts", minimal-micro-sonic scene. And Dataplex is his latest masterpiece, a twenty-tracker with titles like "data.complex", "data.googolplex", "data.superhelix", "data.vertex". With each data dot shift, clinical little sounds that clearly come from a computer -- datastreams it would seem, that's the idea here -- are presented and then worked into rhythmically complex techno music. It's not exactly "dance" music though, but these carefully placed, computer-generated clicks and whirrs and glitches and high frequency pulses you could maybe THINK about dancing to... certainly they're something for your brain to marvel at, edging closer to seizure as the album progresses, though Ikeda gives some relief with a more ambient ten-minute track near the end of the album. It all starts off with sounds that are almost raw data, morphed into music as Ikeda, track by track, engineers more and more 'plexity into the disc, working with a purity of sound and at so microscopic of a scale that Ikeda and his music seemingly belong in the science laboratory. Yet, at the same time, he breathes a lot of life into these little bits of information, making them dance even if you don't. Recommended -- and don't let what's stickered to the cd tray scare you off: "Caution! This cd contains specific waveform data that performs a data-read test for optical drives. The last track will cause some cd players to experience playback errors, with no damage to equipment." We love warnings on cds like that! Yes indeed, after his successful foray into orchestral instrumentation on 2002's Touch release Op., long time fans of Ikeda (like us) should be happy that he's still also forging ahead in the digital realm, Dataplex being a fine successor to such past Ikeda classics as +/- and Matrix.

MPEG stream: data.multiplex
MPEG stream: data.microhelix
MPEG stream: data.vortex

"Cyclo" is the inevitable collaboration between glitch maniplulators Ryoji Ikeda and Carsten Nicolai, who quite obviously state that "the error itself becomes the topic for this release." This album sounds exactly as anyone familiar with both Ikeda and As with the packaging of the "20' to 2000" series on Raster with the then little seen clam shell cases, Raster has found a nifty new prefabricated case that houses the CD tightly inside until the adjoining plastic lever is pulled down, pushing the disc out of its case (like a manual toaster. There's probably a name for it... but we'll call it the Prest-O-Matic for now

RealAudio clip: C1
RealAudio clip: C8

We were pretty into the Ikonika tracks we'd heard, especially on that kick ass Hyperdub comp. And we were pretty thrilled to discover that Ikonika was in fact a woman, a rarity in the dubstep boy's club for sure, and while many of us lean toward the harder and heavier, darker and deeper, in dance music, there are definitely some exceptions, the party music of Zomby being one, and Ikonika being another, her music is definitely dubstep, but it's weirdly retro, definitely reminding us of 8-bit video game music, and at the same time sort of futuristic, but that cheesy sci-fi future imagined by any thousands of late night straight to video movies. Apparently she used to be a drummer in a post hardcore band too, not sure that's relevant, but it's definitely cool! A dizzying hybrid of spaced out dubbed out minimal electronica and old school synth pop, a little hip hop too, synths all over the place, sometimes glimmery and shimmery, other times ominous and foreboding and a bit Carpenter-ish, creating a weirdly lush backdrop for Ikonika's retro futurist beats, from skeletal skitter, to groovy stutter, to total eighties new wave MTV, to fuzzy funky groove, to pulsing house-y thump, the beats and synths constantly tangling, often locking into cool synchronous rhythm, but just as often colliding wildly in total chaotic video game dance floor mayhem. All the tracks here rule, our favorites are the ones that sound either like Commodore 64 jams, music from some bootleg Japanese Dance Dance Revolution knockoff, or the credits from some ridiculous eighties teen horror film, which thankfully is most of 'em.

MPEG stream: Ikonklast (Insert Coin)
MPEG stream: Idiot
MPEG stream: R.E.S.O.L.
MPEG stream: They Are Losing The War

Yay, more delightful music from Ilaiyaraaja, illustrious composer for South India's Kollywood (not Bollywood, but close) film industry. Finders Keepers / B-Music has previously brought us a couple other comps full of Ilaiyaraaja's tremendously enjoyable and unusually arranged tunes, so hopefully you know all about him already and are eager for more, 'cause look out, here's another seventeen tracks of the man's colorful and creative East-West mashup music, circa the synth-pop Eighties (his prime), full of electro funk drum machine grooves, '80s future shock synthesizer (Yamaha DX7 keyboard in the house!), orchestral flourishes, and the often amorously impassioned vocalisations of a variety of famous playback singers including K.S. Chitra, aka the "Tamil Nightingale". Ilaiyaraaja himself can lay claim to the honorific "The Maestro". He's also been called "The Crown Prince Of Tamil Pop", and it's easy to hear why from this disc of so very lively and infectious and not overly-serious music, joyful songs designed to get characters in Tamil films - and maybe you too - singing and dancing. Apparently Ilaiyaraaja, currently 69 years of age, has written/recorded over 4,500 songs in his career (and counting), so we can probably look forward to more collections from Finders Keepers and other equally hip labels, but don't let this one slip by, it's got a lot of gems on it. Imagine if Axel F went to India... Extensive, interesting, informative (as usual) liner notes from DJ Andy Votel are included, the disc having been compiled by Votel and Doug Shipton. Import double vinyl version also forthcoming, by the way, we should have that in time for our next list.

MPEG stream: Adi Rani
MPEG stream: Ponmani
MPEG stream: Sangeetham

Another limited edition split single from Die Stadt, this time featuring Chicago's stalwart post-Industrial ensemble Illusion Of Safety and Germany's dronecore specialist Thomas Koner. Illusion Of Safety takes a confrontationist approach by opening their condensed program with a jarring clatter of fragmented film-noir orchestrations that are roughly broken into a nervous drone. Koner's approach is far more subtle, gently pushing forward a sublime drone and allowing it to fade into silence. Limited to 400 copies.

This Paris synth / cold / new wave duo are the first contemporary release on the Medical reissue label, and they're a perfect fit, sounding like, if we didn't know better, and actual reissue of some Euro-wave obscurity from the nineties. Sure the sound is a bit more modern, more synth-gaze / darkwave than old school new wave, less low fidelity too, but for the most part, I.S. have THAT sound nailed. Buzzing synths, squelchy basslines, sequenced rhythms, swirling atmospheres, the vibe cold and clinical, with vocalist Christina delivering her best sexy ice queen croon, besides sounding like an actual band from back in the day, they also sound like they'd be right at home on Italians Do It Better. Fans of that labels Euro-disco synthwave and outfits like Desire, Chromatics and Glass Candy will be in retro-synth gloom-wave heaven. Many of the tracks are dark and dour, shadowy and melancholic, but a bunch fall closer to classic EDM, channeling Cabaret Voltaire and Chris And Cosey, and obviously anyone into the current crop of modern retro synthwave outfits will definitely dig! Usually when reissue labels dabble in contemporary music, the results are disappointing, but Medical obviously know what they're doing, and we can't imagine anyone who's dug ANY of the Medical reissues, wouldn't also dig Illustration Sonore! Like all of Medical's reissues, Illustration Sonore's Undisciplined Strips Of Emotion is fantastically packaged, pressed on heavy clear vinyl, housed in a faux distressed full color jacket, with a full color insert / lyric sheet. And yeah, also VERY limited...

MPEG stream: Ulysses
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As if all of the projects that Emeralds' synth wrangler John Elliott weren't enough, he's adopted a pseudonym to record under the Imaginary Softwoods banner. The name's Blue O'Randa here, although there's little doubt as the authorship of the sounds. With the exception of the bittersweet attitude of "Rainbow Obsidain Key" and its faux-harpsichord melodies, The Path Of Spectrolite fully embraces the New Age path that Elliott, ummm, O'Randa has been teasing us with through all of his recordings. With all of the aquatic bubbling, bright-eyed synth pads, cosmic shot dream-drone, and harmonic tonal shimmer, Imaginary Softwoods bare more than passing resemblance to the likes of Iasos. Limited to just about 500 copies.

The strangely named duo Imbogodom, made up of UK based Alexander Tucker (Grumbling Fur, Ginnungagap) and New Zealander Daniel Beban, once again return to the BBC studios, sneaking in after everyone has gone home, where they again proceeded to work some audio alchemy on the old equipment, using not much more than a mixing desk and tape machines, as well as some field recordings and found sounds to create their own sort of BBC Radiophonic Workshop style analog tape musique concrete. And like their last record, The Metallic Year, it's pretty fantastic. A dizzying assemblage of sounds and textures, atmospheric, ambient, rhythmic, moody and haunting, mysterious and otherworldly, clouds of static whirl around the whir of machinery, glistening tinkling chimes are blurred into smears of hazy shimmer, melodies and voices are chopped and looped and layered into weirdly majestic alien prog folk, deep tones and slowed down voices are transformed into foghorn like gurgles and deep monstrous rumbles, wild drums are wedded to woozy psychedelic guitars, fuzzy folk is wreathed in black clouds of whir and thrum, and doused in strange effects, shortwave buzz gives way to creepy music box melodies, keening high end tones melt down into murky muddy creep, pocked with sci-fi glitchery, and disembodied voices, stately pianos are smeared into something a bit hazy and warbly, before blossoming into a strange fuzzy psychedelic ballad. It's a pretty fantastically trippy songsuite, one that masterfully avoids the pitfalls of much experimental music, where the idea and the execution, the story behind the sounds and the joy of creating far surpass the joy of actually listening. But here, it's just the opposite, it's so easy to be immediately transported, the sounds so evocative, so warm and layered and full of small discoveries that surface with each repeated listen, they become essentially a series of miniature soundtracks, music to accompany whatever wild visions the listener can conjure up. So good!

MPEG stream: Borogmog's Clock
MPEG stream: Slate Grey Light
MPEG stream: Heir Looms
MPEG stream: Welcome Away

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. Oh Lordy, it's here. Weren't you just asking us about when the next issue of Improvised Music From Japan was going to arrive? All 200 pages (half in English, half in Japanese) of it, plus two compliation cds. Do any of these names interest or excite you: Kazue Sawai, Aki Onda, Kazuo Imai, Tetuzi Akiyama, Uchihashi Kazuhisa, Sachiko M, Taku Sugimoto, Haco? Then this is for you, and you probably *were* asking us about it... All those folks and more appear in these pages, along with a bunch of tantalizing reviews. And there's a special section from Otomo Yoshihide all about making connections with the Korean free jazz scene, in which he interviews saxophonist Kang Tae Hwan. So, if Japanese free jazz / 'onkyo' / improv electronics etc. is your thing, here you go, plenty of good readin'. Not to mention listenin', as the two discs are crammed with all sorts of interesting and diverse performances from many of the artists mentioned above. We were particularily chuffed to check out the "improvised extreme optical core unit" Optrum who provide five noisy tracks on disc two.

MPEG stream: New Motorhead Banging & DC/DC
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SORRY. "Some of the most imaginative and accessible experimental sounds around at the momement" says The Wire magazine of this solo project from American visual artist Steve Roden, which involves a plethora of acoustic and electronic instruments and sound sources, mixed together in an interesting ambient brew.

While we have yet to review any Indian Jewelry records on the aQ list, most of us here are pretty big fans. Their Invasive Exotics record was an awesome chunk of tripped out droniness, that probably would have been a really good fit on the aQ list. We'll have to remedy that soon. But before they were Indian Jewelry, they were called NTX + Electric, and had a pretty dramatically different sound. On We Are The Wild Beast, the soon to be Indian Jewelry sounded less like some wacked Texas free psych dronewave outfit, and more like some NYC no-wave skronk combo, complete with squawking saxophones, thick gristly synth, haunting new wave grooves, lots of electronic bleepery, but also some more modern sounds, some of the melodies sound like they could have been plucked from Interpol songs, there's definitely some garage-y stomp, some shoegazey droneouts, the core sound though is the simple clattery percussion, the huge thick slabs of buzzing synth, and the saxophone, which spends much of its time in the background, unfurling hypnotic snakecharmer grooves. Buried amidst all this skronk and skree and buzz re some fantastic pop songs, and some killer hooks, but they're usually obscured by clouds of FX, or wrapped around spiky angular riffing. The opener is a killer, a modern sounding dancefloor killer, with it's sax refrain and the blown out synth buzz, a total new wave groove that would have the girljean set frugging madly. But then there's songs like "Looking At You", a dreamy krautpop jam, with that same sax refrain from the first song resurfacing, all under thick sheets of crumbling psych guitar. The nearly 14 minute "S-O-S-O-S" begins like some sort of Spacemen 3 bliss out, but soon transforms into some off kilter Unrest style jam, insistent guitar jangle, Beatles-y croon, and simple lo-fi pop hooks, all wrapped up in loads of distortion, and more amp frying FX. It's really not that hard to hear a lot of later Indian Jewelry in the sound of NTX+Electric, but they have more of an old school electro / no-wave thing going on, which means fans of folks like Glass Candy and the like might also dig. Cool, weird, awesome stuff.

MPEG stream: Walk Through Fire
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Over the course of three solid albums, the Bay Area's Unagi has blended traditional hip hop with the smooothest love-you-down r&b and soul. On his latest release, he's joined by Memphis based MC Infinito 2017. Combined, their sound is super loose and laidback (especially on the mildly chaotic track "On Air Takeover"), but exceedingly 'up' vibe-y. Seven tracks addin' up to 17 minutes of good times!

MPEG stream: Game Winning Moment
MPEG stream: Home For The Weekend

Armed with two analog synths and an alliance of effects pedals, this NY duo conjure forth a deep cleansing slab of grim new agey bliss. In the same droney vein as newcomers Emeralds, Infinity Window delve deep into the divine world of heavy synth wizardry to unveil two sides of all-encompassing aural blitzkrieg. To say their sound is thick would be a total understatement. These guys know how to lay it down heavy, but there is a lighter side to their heaviness, not really a dooomy type of heaviness, more a melodic and shimmering type of heavy that reminds us of the earlier Growing albums. Both sides build from wondrously minimal, video game-y bleeps and bloops to huge walls of trance inducing, glacial radiance. Like staring directly into the blaring sun, these tracks are celestial and huge but damaged and textured. Fuzz and noise subtly encapsulate the reverberating tones to swiftly steer away from any new-agey cheesiness.

Information is the subdued electronica Norwegian duo of Per Henrik Svalastog and Jorgen Knudsen, sharing more than a passing resemblance to their fellow countryman Geir Jensen (aka Biosphere). "Biomekano" is Information's third album, and has found a perfect home on the exceptional Rune Grammofon label. The Biosphere references are quite obvious in the duo's construction of arctic atmospheres through an active exploration into the rich tonal colors of ambient washes; yet Information's music is far from pure ambience as they provide a greater intensity to their music through the throbbing micro-techno pulsations often associated with Vladislav Delay and Thomas Jirku. This may not be as good as the recent Biosphere album (a tough venture for any artist), but is way better than the current Mille Plateaux output of glitch happy neo-dub.

RealAudio clip: Plot Ratio (Replug)
RealAudio clip: Higher Densities / Maximum Choice

Ultra limited, sprawling triple cassette collection of murky, mechanical hypnogogic loopscapes, from Belgian soundscaper and synth minimalist Innercity aka Hans Dens. While on his previous cd-r for Ruralfaune, he crafted a sound more in keeping with the current movement of blissed out synthkraut dronemusic makers, on Arupa Travels, Dens' sound falls more in line with the other Innercity releases we've heard. Gloriously tripped out lo-fi blisscapes, rife with decaying loops, streaks of blurred noise, buried rhythms, strange sped up voices, crumbling low end drones, field recordings, Jeck like skipping-record landscapes of dusty crackle and muted melody, ethereal expanses of gorgeous hazy ambience and heaving slabs of rhythmic crunch, lush swells of soft noise, peppered with mechanical creaks and layered whirs, a bleary eyed soft focus drift, rendered in chunks of low fidelity hum, mysterious bits of soundtracky post rock meander, gauzy clouds of sci-fi synth, haunting stretches of ominous cinematic shimmer, and deep dense slabs of otherworldly psychedelic minimalist drift. So fantastic. ULTRA LIMITED!!! Only 30 copies, we have about a dozen left. Comes in a cool oversized plastic clamshell case (like they use for language tapes), with a printed fold out insert.

Another fantastic collection of murky, sci-fi, new ageish, synth-wave, soft-noise dronescapes from this Belgian audio alchemist. Low fidelity mad scientist concoctions of muted mechanical crunch, woozy myopic shimmer, hazy soft focus whir, buried hypnogogic melodies, sonically similar to countrymen Dolphins Into The Future, as well as folks like High Wolf, Skaters, etc. Innercity, aka Hans Dens, takes all those elements and blends them into retro-futuristic miniature soundtracks, each track evoking some strange alternate universe, some long lost and buried civilization, decaying tape loops unwind crookedly, bunching up into warped soft squalls of blurred melody, cacophonous collisions of metallic crunch and layered thrum, bleed into each other, and are seemingly viewed through broken panes of frosted glass, everything gorgeously shadowy and indistinct, fractured rhythms stutter and stumble beneath clouds of Eastern melodies and effects drenched squiggles, occasionally locking into total Goblin/Carpenter sinister synthscaped ambience, or lurching machinelike robo-funk, the motorik pulses skittering over buried slowed down vocals all wreathed in a fuzzy haze, sometimes overtaken by heaving walls of crumbling shoegazey crunch, other times gradually blissing out into barely there swirls. The lp comes with a cassette, featuring nearly an extra hour of music, parts 3 and 4 of Innercity's Future Life songsuite, one part washed out gauzy minimal drift, a darkly meditative sprawl of hushed shimmer, the other a futuristic bit of ultra lo-fi loopage, murky and blurred, which eventually gives a way to a fantastically lysergic bit of hypnotic electronic minimalism. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!

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Of all the currently operating cd-r microlabels, we're tempted to pick RuralFaune as our favorite, no offense to any of the other labels we love, but Bruno P. and his weirdo label have unleashed some serious and awesome sonic strangeness over the last few years, all sorts of free folk and drone music, outsider soundscapes and minimal abstract weirdness, but then he went ahead and launched Faunasabbatha a RuralFaune offshoot specializing in extreme heaviness, the fringes of ultra doom and damaged black metal, blackdrones and grimnoise, and if that wasn't enough, there's now a new series, the Synth Series, or as the label puts it "the new new synth age", which makes sense, all of these blossoming and burgeoning krautdrone synthscapers need a home, and why not Ruralfaune, with a whole stable of synth unknowns, but among these unknowns, lurk some serious aQ faves, like Innercity, aka Belgian synthscaper Hans Dens, whose sound is like a twisted, more fractured take on groups like Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never, case in point, the twisted dizzying synth driven freakout that is the Cop Killer tape reviewed elsewhere on this list, but for his contribution to Ruralfaune's Synth Series, Dens has dialed back his penchant for freakiness, and delivered some seriously hypnotic and mesmerizing synth minimalism, not at all like the above mentioned groups, instead, a strangely gnarled synthesized dronemusic, lush layered loops, stretched out into gorgeous hazy warped landscapes of sound, some like weird processed burbling brooks wreathed in softly static whir, others like tangles of complex melody looped into stuttering rhythms, almost like Avarus samples collaged into alien dronefolk, while still others sound like the buzz of swarming bees, others like some sort of woozy ambient chamber music, and others like twisted IDM filtered through super lo-fi heroin house. Somehow Dens has managed to craft a sound that bucks all the conventions of the current kraut-drone-synth craze, while creating a unique sound that somehow still manages to fit into the very same movement, albeit awkwardly, which continues to situate Innercity as outsiders in an already outside sonic subculture. So great. LIMITED TO JUST 70 COPIES!!! We got 20 of those and that's it!!!

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A lot of people are going to say that this is great... A lot of people are going to say that the label's proclamations of this as Detroit Techno Meets Free-Jazz represents the perfect culmination of two seemingly disparate genres... A lot of people are going to say that the African-American science fictions of Sun Ra's cosmic exploration and Carl Craig's futurist wastelands will find common ground... Well, a lot of people say a lot of things...

Innode is the project of Stefan Nemeth, an Austrian electronica engineer aQers might be more familiar with as a member of glitchily elliptical, post-rock trio Radian. Here, he's working with Steven Hess (that jetsetting percussionist who seems to be everywhere these days) and Bernhard Breuer (responsible for the drums in the shockingly good 'live' techno ensemble Elektro Guzzi). The idea behind Gridshifter was to incorporate live drums as counterpoints to a rigid latticework of electronic patterns - hence, the title. But the results from Nemeth and his drummers totally transcend any formalist concept, as Gridshifter is full of some serious noise crunching swagger. The live and / or electronic breakbeats stalk through all of the tracks on this fantastic album with glistening waves of controlled, tonal feedback, jarring bursts of whipcracked noise, and ominous rumbled pulsations. In otherwords, it sounds just like Pan Sonic or Alva Noto played with a 'live' drummer. Even some of the analog synths have a bit of a warmer hue as well as if there could be something akin to a chord organ or wurlitzer tossed in for good measure. This would actually be an incredible performance to see live! Let's hope Nemeth can pull off a tour and not just of the European festivals, but into the US as well. Kudos to Editions Mego once again for a killer record.

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Institut Fuer Feinmotorik are a German collective of techno / turntable engineers with the misleading motto: "to produce from almost nothing almost nothing." It is true that their turntablist source material may qualify as 'almost nothing' culled from

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RealAudio clip: Rufen Sie Die Polizei

Upon entering into this downtempo 'Ward (which if you don't count the vocal samples is indeed entirely instrumental), you'll encounter a loose and laidback sample-heavy assembly of drumbeats, swirling harp, snippits of French dialogue, and later on some trumpet and choral flourishes too. This is the duo's second full length release and it comes from the label who served up the moody atmospheric downtempo cd-r by Angle Of Repose earlier this year. Although I.W.'s rhythm sampling could be a bit tighter in spots, Physiology, Hygiene, Narcotics does have its groovy moments, particularly the third track "The Other Heartache" and a bunch in the second half of the album such as the seventh "Here I Go" with its stutter almost percussive vocal samples and the skittery ninth "I Dreamed".

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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. Interpol aren't groundbreaking or anything, but boy does this NYC quartet sound good. (They probably look good too, got the 'scrod' style DOWN.) The singer's voice has the arch desperation of Joy Division's Ian Curtis. The music is dominated by intertwining guitars that're sometimes angular and choppy, sometimes pensively creating a lush blanket of minor key intensity. Very Factory Records, very Echo & the Bunnymen... but not annoyingly so, for a modern group. I like it! This is a three song, inexpensive teaser single in preparation for the full length to be released August 2002.

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Intrusion is the solo project of Steve Hitchell, who alongside Rod Modell forms the impressive heroin-house meets dub-factory duo Echospace. Just as Modell's solo recordings don't veer too far from the Echospace mantra, the Intrusion sound doesn't see any reason to break the mold either. If it ain't broke, why fix it? This is the beloved muted blur of the Detroit / Berlin axis of techno that spurned the whole Basic Channel / Chain Reaction sound and which then slowed itself down into the murky dub of Burial Mix. Hitchell and Modell have both been so captivated by this particular sound, that they've collected many of the modular synths, signal processors, and classic drum machines that Moritz Von Oswald and Juan Atkins used back in the day to perfect the mimesis of that abstracted techno that steadily cruises through the dronefields. The bulk of the album finds a hypnotizing rhythm sublimated behind atmospheric synth chords rippling in sync with the cascading wash of echo and heaping snow drifts of tape hiss; but Hitchell does make a few noteworthy detours. "Intrusion Dub" is a decidedly uptempo digidub number, with Augustus Pablo-esque trills across the melodica and an insistent hi-hat uncannily similar to the metronomic rhythms provided by Public Image Limited on Metal Box, but of course pixel-pointed into a Chain Reactive / Burial Mix cloud of digital hiss. Elsewhere, he recruits the Burial Mix toaster par excellence Paul St. Hillaire to offer his ghostly croon to the mix. Mighty fine, mighty fine.

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