Let me just mention the crucial facts up front. It has been said that "Vrioon" is all out of print and Raster-Noton is not going to be repressing this record any time soon. Thus we will not be able to get any more than what limited stock we have at the moment. Don't say we didn't warn you.
"Vrioon" is a collaboration between Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto (of Yellow Magic Orchestra) in which Sakamoto provided source material of impressionistic piano pieces to Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), who blurred many of the edges into a beautiful ambience and added clusters of slow-moving rhythms. It's very simple and very effective and very beautiful... and soon, very out of print. If we could have got more, this would have likely been a 'record of the week' pick -- it's the kind of thing we instantly sell whenever it's playing on the store stereo.
This limited edition cd ep was released by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the exhibition "010101: Art in Technological Times". Carsten Nicolai (Noto) and Robin Rimbaud (Scanner) did a three-hour set as part of the opening of the
Both the digipak design and the sounds on the cd lean towards the Raster-Noton aesthetic -- minimal clicks and cuts style, starting with a pleasant insectoid buzz and gradually adding layers of crackle and drone (and what sounds like crickets chirping or frogs croaking!). As the piece progresses, these "synthetic late summer night" sounds are augmented by high, wavering electronic tones. Really a gorgeous listen! This disc is apparently only available at the SFMOMA store, as well as locations in Berlin, London and Tokyo -- and here at Aquarius, which was nice of the SFMOMA people. Get it while you can...
This is basically the Raster-Noton allstars: Alva Noto, Byetone, Komet, and Signal (which is a collaboration of the aforementioned three artists) recording for Staalplaat's acclaimed "Mort Aux Vaches" series. Alva Noto's piece is a live documentation of the material found on his debut, with its terse electron pinpricks evolving amidst very slowly developing pure-tone, post-techno structures. Nicolai's performance of "Prototypes" clearly incorporates the same sounds found on his studio album, but the arrangement is one very long track and is completely different than the original. Byetone (aka Olaf Bender) is the least prolific of the Raster-Noton founders, with only a couple of releases. His 30 minutes for the Raster "Mort Aux Vaches" is a solid replication of Mika Vainio's crystalline "Metri" album for Sahko, as a surgical presentation of acid house bleeping grooves. Komet, who has recently simply been recording under his given name Frank Bretschneider, is the most effects-happy amongst the Raster-Noton family, warbling his pure tones through ring modulation and ample delay patterns to give the whispered clickery and alarm call bleeps a Frippertronic feel. The Signal recordings may be the weakest amongst the group, Pan Sonic / Goem throwaway tracks with electronic loops are set up and left unchanged, as if nobody amongst the group wanted to change anybody else's sounds. It is the slippages between melody and rhythm that make the Raster-Noton sound so appealing. While the rest of this double set is well worth checking out, Raster-Noton's collaborative efforts prove they are perhaps better as solo artists.
One of five new tapes from the awesome Austin based experimental tape label, Holodeck. Largely documenting the growing and diverse Texas underground scene of synth conjurers, drone lords psych meditators, and classical folk devotionists, each tape conceived as a unique listening experience with beautifully designed minimalist packaging. We listed tapes by Lumens, Smokey Emery and Thousand Foot Whale Claw awhile back, and this time around we have another tape from Thousand Foot Whale Claw as well as tapes by Survive, M. Geddes Gengra, Silent Land Time Machine, and this one from the mysteriously monikered Amasa Gana.
Like Lumens, Amasa Gana features members from other groups from this fervent scene though we're not really sure which ones. Using a mixture of electronic and acoustic folk instruments, Amasa Gana make cosmic vibrational sky ragas in slow motion dramatic arcs that evoke the feel of aerial flight or freefalling. Spiraling drones like circular breathing with bowed textures, bird calls, and a cinematically intense pastoral quality that comes close to meditative industrial music. Reminding us of Brian Eno's Apollo record yet with harder deeper edges. Limited to 100 copies!
While UK weirdo tape label The Tapeworm mostly specializes in outsider, oddball sonic wonders, mostly created by groups we've never heard of, or by sideprojects of groups we have, every once in a while a bigger name pops up, which in this case is aQ beloved guitarist/soundscaper Oren Ambarchi, whose Amulet is a great fit for The Tapeworm, without deviating too much from the sound of some of our favorite Ambarchi records proper. All recorded on an iPhone, and edited into one sprawling soundscape/sonic suite, Amulet is indeed a dark gem, all tinkling chimes, whirring thrum, keening distant tones, groaning, heaving swells of distorted buzz, everything smeared and blurred into a gauzy soft-noise drift, that slips from hushed shimmer to roiling psychedelic squall and back again, a black ambience that's gorgeously dreamlike and sonically spacious, a lushly layered sonic event that infuses what would otherwise be a dreamy bit of blissfulness, into something much more shadowy and ominous, with low tones rumbling in the background, fields of clatter and clink, gamelan like crystalline percussion, set amidst thick swells of minor key chordal thrum, haunting and it its own way, heavy as well. The various bits of percussion, also have the feel of a field recording (which they technically are), but it evokes the sense that this is some strange ritual, or some mysterious world, captured surreptitiously, viewed from the shadows, a glimpse of something strange and blackly wondrous.
Cover art by Savage Pencil. And as always, super limited!!
Yet another gorgeously packaged, impeccaby recorded piece of modern minimalism from Idea records. We raved about the now out of print COH double lp a few lists back, and this release is just as nice. This time it's Australian Oren Ambarchi, who's delicate, barely-there guitar improvisations are gorgeously wispy and ethereal and float dreamily from the speakers towards your ears taking thier own sweet time. Notes hang suspended in space shimmering and slowly fading, until another note comes to join it or move it on its way. Super thick gatefold sleeve in an extra thick plastic sleeve. Double lp on super heavy 220 gram vinyl. The copies we have also come with a 7" featuring two extended remixes by Tom Rechion of the Los Angeles Free Music Society. So nice.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The latest in this high profile series of split 12"s. Merzbow is at his most melodic, coming up with an almost hummable bit of white noise. The AMM side is all rhythm, primarily beautifully meandering chimes and bells.
Skwidchy, fluttering, minimal breakbeats that keep going and going and going... from Italy. Go on, give those glo-sticks a workout. Eight tracks o'techno, two of which are live sets.
I had begun to wonder if Richard and Karine would do anything worth while again, as their debut Sirenes clearly stands above everything they have done... until Stenorette. Working with producer Robert Hampson (Main, Loop), Amp has traded in their four track fuzziness for the crystal clear digital purity of Hampson's studio. In doing so, they have written a beautiful album of gossamer electronica / pop songs that nonetheless maintains their ghostly sadness.
King Of Techno??? Hmm. Well, the story of Bruce Haack is a tough one to tackle. He was an introvert of sorts, wildly imaginative, innovative and certainly the odd man out. A small town boy from Alberta, Canada that moved to NYC to make it big, only to become disillusioned by the soul sucking corporate music industry. What remained constant was his cosmic vision and communication through his visionary and otherworldly music. Until the late nineties, he was an obscure footnote in the history of early electronic music. But thanks to underground tape trading and rabid fans spreading the word, reissues and compilations have surfaced, resurrecting the legacy and world of Bruce Haack. Thankfully, we can now place a visual element to the imaginative sonics of Bruce's electric language via this newly produced film documenting the composer's life. In addition to archival television appearances and rarely seen photographs, we get wonderful stories from Bruce's colleagues and collaborators (Ted Praxiteles Pandel, Miss Esther Nelson, Chris Kachulis), and anecdotes from some of the original children featured on the Dimension 5 records! The rare television segments are the highlight of this documentary, including the legendary I've Got A Secret episode in which Bruce plays his Dermatron (*see footnote below*) on pianist Ted Pandel, as well as the 1968 episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in which Bruce demonstrates his musical computer! Unfortunately, the television appearance of Bruce performing the Dermatron on twelve girls (each pitched according to the western standardized chromatic scale) is not mentioned or shown.
And there are a few other omissions...for instance, as Don Bolles (Germs, 45 Grave, Kitten Sparkles, Three Day Stubble) was integral to the introduction of Bruce Haack not only to the filmmaker himself, but to the American underground throughout the nineties via his radio shows and travelling sound system, it would have been interesting to hear his take on Haack. Bolles, a longtime Haack fan and record nerd, was largely responsible for spreading the word as well as the distribution of cassette dubs to many friends. In fact, my first introduction to Bruce's music was via his gushing words about the man. Furthermore, experts like Irwin Chusid, Robert Moog, Russell Simmons (who commissioned the unreleased, yet widely pirated Party Machine) and like minded folks who long knew of the genius of Bruce Haack could have brought forth some insightful perspective.
So while Philip Anagnos' debut as a documentary filmmaker is a wildly ambitious one, some fans of Bruce's music will certainly have issues with context and some of the interview subjects. The large work of Bruce Haack transcends the limitations that the word "techno" conjures, as there is a massive genre of electric music that isn't necessarily "electronic". Once again, techno is a topic of controversy here as Anagnos got a lot of flack for this film's subtitle. Admittedly, he states that he called it as such simply because it "sounded really good", so don't let that turn you off this film completely. Definitely a door opener for those new to the music of Bruce Haack, just don't close that door on the way out...
*footnote* FYI The Dermatron was an early invention of Haack's, somewhat similar in design to the theremin. With the theremin, human hands control electronic capacitance via metal rods connected to the oscillators which emit variable frequencies. The Dermatron's capacitance is controlled not through metal rods, but through two separate currents which are connected to two separate human bodies. These two bodies act as the controllers of the oscillators, so when the two bodies touch, variable frequencies are created with the variable placement of flesh to flesh. Or something like that...cool!
The robots are coming, indeed! And their latest invasion (released with much thanks and gratitude to our favorite record label of late, Japan's EM!) takes the form of this sexy electronic pop concept duo, The Android Sisters. Originally created by ZBS studios, a nonprofit audio production company from upstate New York whose purpose was to raise consciousness through media, namely via new-age-tinged sci-fi inspired radio plays, The Android Sisters began life in the early eighties as the house band in the radio series, Ruby the Galactic Gumshoe. Taking cues from Bruce Haack's electronic children's records from the '60s and '70s, The Sisters perform satirical "speak-songs" in a polyphonic monotone that goofily riff off of everything from Philip K. Dick inspired silliness ("Electronic Sheep") to Old McDonald ("Down On The Electronic Farm"). They soon developed their own cult following, so an album was released on Vanguard in 1984 called Songs of Electronic Despair. Using wonky keyboards, funky beats and spacey synthesizer passages, The Sisters frequent use of terrible puns and android-inspired humor didn't quite fit in with the wry detachment of the New Wave music of the time and has since been relegated to the realms of pop oddity, occasionally resurfacing as samples in trance, techno and hip-hop ("Ray-Dee-Oh", Sss-x Minus One"). But as radio-plays they are highly entertaining and engaging, silly and goofy for sure but as The Android Sisters themselves say, "Dumb is Fun! " Includes 48 page booklet with song lyrics and illustrations for each song.
Four song debut 12" from Oakland's DJ Aneurysm. Side one features dark, aggressive digital destruction that would be right at home beside your DHR and Ambush records. Side two is more dance-y and melodic, with distorto beats and (unfortunately outdated and cheesy) spoken voice samples.
The intermittent project Angel might become something more prolific, now that Pan Sonic has decided to terminate its mission leaving Ilpo Vaisanen to pursue other matters. Since 2000, Vaisanen has collaborated with Dirk Dresselhaus of Schneider TM under the guise of Angel to produce a peculiar set of electro-acoustic abstractions, often finding them working with the avant-cellist Hildur Gudnadottir. On thie new album for Editions Mego, 26000, Angel can come across like an even more plodding and menacing Supersilent attempting to remove all of its jazz references, leaving weird squiggles and gestures within a cavernous dank reverberation offset by crystalline electronics and found object manipulation. Such events were not uncommon in the narcoleptic sound collages that Pan Sonic would wander into at the end of some of their records. Gudnadottir's cello (and something called a "halldorophone" that sends a controlled feedback loop into the strings of a modified cello) appears on the glacial finale of the album "Paradigm Shift" with isolationist passages and radiotone flicker. All of this is set in contrast with the monstrous form destruction of "Before The Rush" composed with the help of BJ Nilsen. Here, Angel takes up the sheer hellish miasma torch with an explosion of digital abuse bracketed by leaden seas of grey drones and all sorts of post-Tudor scabrous noises and nervous scratches.
Oooh, moody. Ilpo Vaisanen of Pan Sonic and Dirk Dresselhaus (aka Schneider TM) have recorded as Angel before, exploring the realms of noise and drone with discs on the Bip-Hop and Oral labels, bringing in guest cellist Hildur Guonadottir for the latter. Now they're officially a trio, and offer up a fantastic third album, released on Editions Mego, where this four part, hour long, totally epic album fits in nicely alongside the digitaldoomdrone likes of O'Malley and Rehberg's KTL.
Kalmukia opens with the evocative "Bones In The Sand" which definitely has a desert-y feel, the wide open spaces, barren badlands. Desolation. Dunno about you, but it had us immediately thinking Earth (Hex-era and after Earth), with cavernous slide guitar riffs echoing forth across the wastes...
The tremulous electric humming of the title track is next, nearly 20 quietly mysterious minutes long, graced with droning cello on the edge of feedback. The creepy loveliness continues on through "Effect Of Discovery", which builds up into a shimmering drone laced with metallic electronic whip-cracks and waverings. Full on distorted rumble is kept in reserve, hinted at throughout the thick buzzing beauty of album-closer "Aftermath: The Mutation", which is also filled with delicate percussive chimings and some of this album's most melodic moments.
Packaged all fancy-like in an oversized rectangular sleeve, this is definitely one that fans of the most abstract/ambient side of Southern Lord's output (Oren Ambarchi for instance) should appreciate, along with those into Pan Sonic, KTL, etc.
Satan was an angel, once, too.
Angel is the work of Pan Sonic's Ilpo Vaisanen and Dirk Dresselhaus (aka Schneider TM); and Hildur Gudnadottir is an Icelandic cellist whose resume is dotted with numerous collaborative projects through the Reykjavik based arts collective Kitchen Motors. Back in 2004, the three musicians collaborated at the Club Transmediale in Berlin, sparking not only this album but also an ongoing collaboration between Pan Sonic and Gudnadottir. It's Gudnadottir's cello that takes the center stage on this guttural drone album of languorous acoustic scrapings and sustained monotone, with the two other gentlemen augmenting the cello drones with Kosmische electronic sweeps, nervous sinewave aggregates, and bellowing gasps of noise.
Angle Of Repose's My Escaping Shoes is comprised of a dozen ominous, looming downtempo hip hop tracks laced with samples of dialogue, horns and a little flute too -- very much in the DJ Shadow Endtroducing camp. If there's to be any escaping to be done by this Bay Area artist, it'll be a sneaky creep through the shadows, not a mad frenzied run-for-it. Limited pressing of 100.
Seems like not a list goes by without a new release on local label Time Released Sound. And for this we are truly grateful. And once again, TRS does not disappoint, with this fantastic double disc from the oddly monikered The Angling Loser, who is in fact a fella by the name of Lee Anthony Norris, whose debut double cd The Author Of Twilight, seems to have a sort of fishing focus, hence the name, and the packaging (more on that in a moment), but really, it's not so much about the fishing, as it is, the setting, warm, summer afternoons, sun dappled trees and slow moving shadows, softly rippling water, and the gentle sway of the boat, or the hypnotic sound of the water on the shore, imagine those images created in sounds, and that's The Author Of Twilight. Softly swirling synths, billowing softly beneath mesmerizingly trance-like guitar figures, everything wreathed in field recordings, chirping birds, chittering insects, the lapping of water, the vibe is truly tranquil and dreamy, and most definitely fits perfectly with TRS's sonic aesthetic. A few of the tracks seem softly blown out, the sounds crumbling and blurring into indistinct smears of sounds, with almost a Caretaker vibe, while others are hushed and haunting. There's definitely an Appalachian vibe too, but it's an Appalachia in a much more verdant setting, green grass, and thick foliage, deep blue water, and clear cloudless skies, but always with shadows, lurking just out of site, the threat of impending darkness, and of the shadows always looming, gives the music a dark, slightly sinister tinge that imbues the sound with even more emotional heft.
As with all Time Released Sound releases, there are two different versions, there's the deluxe, which in this case, is LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, and comes in a square, hand stamped green translucent envelope, inside a hand sewn flip book, antique fishing photos and postcards, a page from an antique angler's journal, and a printed, two sided insert. Each envelope is also tagged with a hand stamped vintage fishing cigarette card, and each one comes with an actual vintage fishing lure! Then there's the standard version, which comes in the same green envelope, and includes the insert, but leaves out all the rest. As always, WAY recommended.
Seems like not a list goes by without a new release on local label Time Released Sound. And for this we are truly grateful. And once again, TRS does not disappoint, with this fantastic double disc from the oddly monikered The Angling Loser, who is in fact a fella by the name of Lee Anthony Norris, whose debut double cd The Author Of Twilight, seems to have a sort of fishing focus, hence the name, and the packaging (more on that in a moment), but really, it's not so much about the fishing, as it is, the setting, warm, summer afternoons, sun dappled trees and slow moving shadows, softly rippling water, and the gentle sway of the boat, or the hypnotic sound of the water on the shore, imagine those images created in sounds, and that's The Author Of Twilight. Softly swirling synths, billowing softly beneath mesmerizingly trance-like guitar figures, everything wreathed in field recordings, chirping birds, chittering insects, the lapping of water, the vibe is truly tranquil and dreamy, and most definitely fits perfectly with TRS's sonic aesthetic. A few of the tracks seem softly blown out, the sounds crumbling and blurring into indistinct smears of sounds, with almost a Caretaker vibe, while others are hushed and haunting. There's definitely an Appalachian vibe too, but it's an Appalachia in a much more verdant setting, green grass, and thick foliage, deep blue water, and clear cloudless skies, but always with shadows, lurking just out of site, the threat of impending darkness, and of the shadows always looming, gives the music a dark, slightly sinister tinge that imbues the sound with even more emotional heft.
As with all Time Released Sound releases, there are two different versions, there's the deluxe, which in this case, is LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, and comes in a square, hand stamped green translucent envelope, inside a hand sewn flip book, antique fishing photos and postcards, a page from an antique angler's journal, and a printed, two sided insert. Each envelope is also tagged with a hand stamped vintage fishing cigarette card, and each one comes with an actual vintage fishing lure! Then there's the standard version, which comes in the same green envelope, and includes the insert, but leaves out all the rest. As always, WAY recommended.
Here comes the sizzle! We have been totally seduced by this steamy, dubby delight of a record, which pairs the detached, sexy & haunting vocals of Anika with the production and musical mastermind of Geoff Barrow from Beak and Portishead. Together they make a perfect match in creating a hypnotic, sensual sound that invokes in the listener a dangerously dazed and drugged out state of mind. Anika's vocals are like Nico's, but paired with a stripped down post-punk sound. Or like Kim Gordon singing for The Slits. The music is so spot on in its classic minimalism transporting us right back to the early '80s, bands like ESG, Gang Of Four, and A Certain Ratio, but Anika and Barrow turn the sound into something much more detached, smoky and sensual. We also hear a hints of French cold-wave pioneers, like Ruth, and the way underrated dubbed out project of This Heat's Charles Bullen, Lifetones.
For all the records that have come out in the last couple years desperately trying to capture a cold wave, or now witch house sound, Anika stands well above that crowded scene as there is something so much more impactful and singular about her vision, that's just so entrancing and mesmerizing....
Anima Morte make their home in the frosty Swedish North, but you'd never know it from listening to 'em. There's no cavernous old school death metal here, and there sure ain't no glistening electropop. Instead, Anima Morte deals in the grisly trade of Italian style instrumental horror prog. The Nightmare Becomes Reality is actually their third full length, and it was released way back in 2011 on cd, but we only just found this vinyl version. In fact, Anima Morte have been dabbling in their own brand of epic blood-soaked prog rock since 2007, which by our calculations puts them right at the forefront of the current Giallo slasher revival craze that we here at aQ HQ can't get enough of.
The album opens with a brief wall of droning skittery back alley synths, barely masking the disembodied weeping, whimpering and agonized screams hiding underneath, but this is one of the few moments of relative reprieve on the record, and soon we've entered into a surreal realm of nightmarish groove and technicolor terror. The plucked dissonance of acoustic guitars chime like the monstrous bell of some crumbling ghostly church. Dizzying haunted pipe organs send the listener spiraling helplessly into a sweat-soaked lightless nether realm. Blood curdling stabs of hypnotic cyclical piano slice their way to the forefront like a straight razor gleaming in the moonlight. With its groovy bass, shuffling drums and moments of bright melodic spaciousness, the majority of this record sounds like Goblin at their most progged out, syncopated and heavy. And while the band also list progressive heavyweights like ELP, King Crimson and Rick Wakeman as influences (and justifiably so), the clean modern production almost give the album the feeling of a more contemporary group like Astra or latter-era Opeth funneled through hours of twisted video nasties and low grade slasher flicks. The more overtly gothic flourishes even recall the theatrical Transilvanian madness of a band like Notre Dame. And it almost goes without saying: if stalking the city streets in the dead of night with only the dread sounds of Blizaro, Orne or Tony Tears oozing from your headphones for company is your idea of a pleasant night out, then you should definitely check this out. Music to be murdered by indeed!
We went a little crazy for Aaron Spectre's Drumcorps project, a crazed manic electronic workout featuring live metal guitars and chopped to bits metal and grindcore, all mashed up into some incredibly head spinning, neck snapping, dancefloor destroying moshpit annihilating heaviness.
So the latest bit of Drumcorps brutality, finds Spectre teaming up with Bay Area thrashmetal titans Animosity for a 3 track one sided 10", which takes up right where the Drumcorps record left off and pushes this whole metal / electronic hybrid even further out. This time, Animosity wrote three tracks, and Spectre got to fuck them up. But weirdly enough, unlike on the last Drumcorps disc, where it sounded like a record assembled from bits of metal and grind and breakbeats, this disc sounds more like an Animosity record, where they just happen to be incorporating bits of jungle and techno and drill+bass and whatever grinding buzzing weirdness Spectre could come up with. And the results are pretty stellar. And its core, this is a grindmetal record, but the guitars are super clipped and processed, often stuttering and chopped up into impossible rhythms, the beats are revved up and transformed into frantic breakbeats, some of the super fast blast beats just keep getting faster and faster until they turn into impossible digital stutters. Huge riffs grind and churn, often separated by squalls of jungle, freaky beats, it's a mash up, but neither side is in control, it veers back and forth from metal to jungle to grind to breakbeat often exploding into everything at once. This is the sort of shit that could get us non dancers out on the floor. Or maybe get you dancers into the pit. Either way, fucking awesome.
And we talk about insane packaging all the time, but once again, holy shit, these guys are pushing the limits of how over the top you can get - eye popping full color screened sleeves, incredible, garish illustrations, inside and out, but it's the vinyl, some are clear and white swirled, some are red and blue and clear swirled, but then the non playing side features and abstract thick metallic ink silkscreened image, either gold or silver, it's hard to explain, but the first time we slipped one out of the sleeve, everyone working had to gather around to see.
CRAZY LIMITED. We got a bunch, but odds are these are the last copies we'll be able to get.
Here's Annie! Cruisin' along in her '80s dance pop revival mobile with the top down and the stereo on 10. The songs on Anniemal are not unlike modernized versions of those by formulaic party girl combos the Belle Stars, Bananarama, Men's Room or early Madonna, but Annie's also got the additional cache of being from Norway. Oooh! Unlike other current female dance music singers (such as Kylie Minogue), Annie's tracks are far less slick and hugely produced and considerably more heavy on the saccharine. She floods the dancefloor with lip-smackin' marshmallow fluff. There's a time and place for the deliciously vacant, and it seems like that time is now. We could get all grumpy about this and dismiss it as yet another force-fed hipster flavor of the day, but really, how would you rather expend your energy during these summer months? Dancin' yer ass off or stompin' your foot in disapproval?
Working with a huge arsenal of equipment (the press release lists guitars, the springs from an old reverb unit, shortwave static, VLF signals, closed circuit feedback loops, turntables, surface damaged CDs, etc.), Antenna Farm offers an album of grim collages
This is an odd release for Korm Plastics, a subsidiary of Staalplaat, who have, in the past, released some truely nasty pieces of electro-shock noise. Antenne is a Danish trip hop ensemble which completes rainy electronic grooves with bleary-eyed female vocals that sound an awful lot like Heidi Berry. The album opens with an cover of Nick Drake's "Black Eyed Dog." Strange.
First new full length since the waaay expensive Japanese import 'Shopping Carts Crashing' which we also carry, and it's a good one. With every release, the NY avant hip hop crew of rapper/producers Beans, M Sayyid and High Priest along with engineer
The return of the mysterious Anworth Kirk, an offshoot of hauntological electronica alchemists Demdike Stare, a 'groop' which professes to be a whole different entity, although as far as we're concerned, we imagine we might be hard pressed to find anyone that loves Demdike Stare, who wouldn't also love these guys (this guy?). Sonically similar, but more shrouded in mystery, and plenty of bizarrely esoteric descriptive psychobabble, the label explains that Avonwaith "constructs dense melodic and narrative sound poems upon a skeletal framework of non-musical elements such as basic magnetic communication, secular religion and primitive mechanical industry. Composed and compiled around fake-loric nonlanguage/electric codes and forbidden information, Anworth Kirk uses the phonographic format as an archive of sonic and poetic commentary (evidence) concerning corruption in pre-war local industry, perverted belief systems and scientific invention. Part musique concrete, part folklore, part-pulp-fictitious, part Neorealist, this indulgent patchwork of mechanical folk/pop and non-music combines essential influences of electric Smithsonian releases, sound poetry, Zden?k Liska, Ilhan Mimaroglu, basic Carnatic music, Letterism, Pierre Henry, Oramics in Ardwick, Massiera, Lloyd M. Williams, Stella Crenshaw, Bruno Nicolai, Suzanne Ciani, Eastern European fiction, AgitProp, L.S. Lowry, J.G. Frazer, Gurdjieff, Kommune pop groups and futen theater."
Phew. And yeah, while perhaps that is all in fact maybe sort of true, it might be easier to say, that it sounds a lot like much of Demdike Stare's Tryptych, equally hauntological, each track a miniature soundworld of electronic ephemera, of skeletal beats and bleep bloop electronics, haunting grey atmospheres, looped tribal rhythms, like a collection of mysterious transmissions from the ether.
Tracks are hazy, their borders constantly bleeding into one another, snippets of gauzy old timey easy listening, lightly dusted with distortion and reverb transformed into some sort of ghostly retro slo-mo electro pop, drifting through fields of tinkling chimes and echo drenched melodic swirls, peppered with muted glitchy pulses, field recordings of unknown provenance, soft focus smears of sun dappled shimmer, chanting children's rhymes, all woven into something strange and magical, very cinematic, a definite seventies giallo vibe in places, a little Euro, a lot jazzy, moody and atmospheric, the record unwinding in it's final movement with a distinctly horror movie like feel, brief melodic motifs repeated (a la Halloween), nestled in a black cloud of thick ominous synths, collaged voices, and laid over what sounds like some ritualistic pagan forest folk, skeletal and otherworldly, all flecked with odd buzz and Eastern melodies, darkly dreamy and beautifully bewitching.
LIMITED TO 420 COPIES, and one final recommendation from the label/groop: "Parts of this disc are presented in both Stereo and Mono and it is to be played at 45RPM with a low-gram stylus pressure." Indeed.
Shacklecross is the third installment in an ongoing series of hauntological vinyl explorations from this mysterious musical brotherhood, rumored to in fact be none other than Demdike Stare, along with Finders Keepers head honcho Andy Votel. Rooted in all manner of arcane esoterica, AK engage in an impossibly obtuse and all over the map crazed kitchen sink sonic alchemy, that results in a topographical musical map that leads to some strange other/inner world, where the sky is streaked with Phantasm like synth squelch, wheezing keyboards, strange sound effects swirls, and railroad crossing percussion. Grim horror movie ambience unfurls revealing detuned plucks, creaky old man vox and keening string scrape. The production warped and woozy, bursts of martial snare and blasts of white noise crunch, beneath thumb piano melodies, and Muslimgauze style grooves.
At one point the drums explode into bombastic chaos, cascading over mesmerizing Middle Eastern vocal loops, sounding like some wild Sublime Frequencies remix, before fading into a field recording flecked ambience, all kosmische synth swirl and fluttery birdsong, pocked with bits of skitter and glitch, which seem to melt into a sort of sci-fi sprawl of warped wooze.
The flipside begins with the introduction of tabla like beats over wavery drones and lush layered tones, all wreathed in crackle and buzz. The sound shifting into a creaking Pierre Bastien like robotic clatter, skeletal and oddly propulsive, draped over distant swaths of feedback drenched electronics, all culminating in a droned out doomy drift, driven by industrial clatter and clang, all over a roiling sea of moaning rumbles and bird song like electronic squiggles. Finally the sound returns to the first 'movement', dark squelchy synths beneath bombastic drumming, funky breakbeats and guitar twang mired in murky gurgles, all of which blossoms into an almost Morricone-esque coda, but more blurry and bleary and much more warped and sinister.
LIMITED TO 700 COPIES, spin at 45rpm, or 33 if you dare!
Demdike Stare fans listen up! There's a new dark mysterious stranger in town by the name of Anworth Kirk, and for fans of Demdike Stare's haunted dub sound paintings or that Broadcast and The Focus Group record we keep raving about, or any of the vintage horror soundtracks from Trunk Records, you will surely want to give this a listen. No, Anworth Kirk is not really a person, or a band, as far as we can tell, but it's the first release on the new archival imprint Pre-Cert Home Entertainment that will be devoted to releasing a series of limited vinyl missives of contemporary musical and non-musical strangeness. Most definitely associated with DJ Andy Votel and the B-Music crew as well as Demdike Stare themselves (in fact, we're pretty sure Anworth Kirk IS Andy Votel and Sean Canty of Demdike, who run the Pre-Cert label), the music presented here is a mind-bending collage of haunting creaking loops, far away noises of babies crying and dogs barking, slow motion creeping synths, library music, and eldritch incantations culled from dusty corners of British horror. So haunting and beautiful! Limited to 500 copies, it is basically already out of print, so grab one of the few we have while you can!
AOA is a Boredoms related group featuring newest member E-da and bassist Hilah (formerly Hira). "Emotion Vacation", their second full length, was recorded in Melbourne, Australia by "deep house / industrial techno / trance" producer Ollie Olsen. Eye
28 pairs up the always lovely Ms Tujiko Noriko with Aoki Takamasa. Both are Japanese artists living in Paris, both are 28 years old (hence the title of the record). The pair initially met over 3 years ago at an event for the Cartier Foundation in Paris. Their collaboration, originally intended for just one song, worked out so well that they decided to work on a full length together, exchanging and sewing more sound bits with the loving attention of a precocious collage prodigy. A patchwork quilt of blissful, Morr-esque electronics, broken toy IDM, lilting, tender vocals, and gently textured raindrops-on-a-corrugated-roof beats. The album is silky and caressing, less jagged than Noriko's recent collaboration with Lawrence English. Reminiscent as well as Japanese chanteuse, Salyu's vocal pieces for the film, "All About Lily Chou-Chou."
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Crushing noise breaks and musique concréte from Jason Skeet, co-owner of Ambush along with DJ Scud, whom
Skeet has collaborated with regularly. Harsh.
Former Cradle of Filth guitarist Stuart Anstis offers a solo album on the experimental Iris Light label (Szeki Kurva, Aube, Maeror Tri, Band of Pain, etc.). It's not black metal, but more of an electronic soundscape thing with beats...not bad, but not too
During the early '90s, the remix became a new marketing tool to help salvage or lend credibility to A&R debacles -- signings that otherwise would have been relegated to bargain bins and been tax write-offs. With the unexpected explosion of Nirvana on one side of the world and grassroots fervor of rave culture spreading out of the UK, the confusion of A&R reps was somewhat understandable. This is exactly the context in which Richard D. James (aka Aphex Twin) was approached to remix The Lemonheads! Perhaps the mythology behind this remix is true -- that James had forgotten all about his commission and when the courier came around to pick up the remix, he randomly grabbed a DAT which obviously had nothing to do with the Lemonheads. When the label protested, James argued that he had sped the entire song up to build one of the snare fills! Or so the myth goes. Regardless, Aphex came away with the cash, and fans of Lemonheads' heart-throb punk image were confused if not irritated by a jackhammered blast of 909 discomfort!
Accused of rank cynicism, or of the post-ironic facade of cynicism, or of an inability to render any consistent conceptual agenda, James remains cryptic as to his intent: "I like doing it sometimes. Basically, I'll take a song and make it into something that I like. The original comes to me in a form that I hate, then I have to do a serious bit of alteration to it, and sometimes I don't even bother. I just give them a track that has nothing to do with the song."
Thus, "26 Mixes For Cash" is what it is, a collection of unrelated projects branded with the Aphex Twin trademarks: slippery ambience, klanging breakbeats, and mercurial electronic melodies. True to his own admission, the songs vary in degrees to his attachment; and those that he feels most passionately about (either love or hate -- e.g. Baby Ford, Curve, St. Etienne, and Seefeel) are rendered with the greatest panache, and others are delivered with an offhanded nonchalance (e.g. Buck Tick, Nav Katze, and Nobukazu Takemura). Certainly, this is not for Aphex neophytes. For those readers out there new to Aphex, please check out his albums "Richard D. James" or "I Care Because You Do." However, completists will be more than happy with this batch of tracks.
MPEG Download: CURVE "Falling Free, Aphex Twin Remix" [/audio/aphexcurvefalling.mp3]
MPEG Stream: CURVE "Falling Free, Aphex Twin Remix" [/audio/aphexcurvefalling.m3u]
Since Richard D. James has recently been hiding from the public with no indications as to when or if another Aphex Twin album will be happening, this rare Australian import collection of Aphex Twin's mid '90s singles is certainly a welcome arrival! "51/13"
During this period of Aphex Twin's sound, he was continuing his mutations of hardcore techno breakbeats, which had been popularized by the likes of The Prodigy, Meat Beat Manifesto, and XL Records. For those who care about such things, this breakbeat sound was instrumental in the birth of drum 'n' bass, yet is drastically different in that the hardcore breakbeats are internally constructed by a drum machine (usually a Roland 909), whereas drum 'n' bass actively sampled its breakbeats from the history of soul, funk, and jazz. As a result of the technological process of the creation of the breakbeat, these three Aphex Twin singles have a particularly cybernetic feel to them. However, Aphex Twin uses this sound as a counterpoint to the oddly whimsical melodies from his re-wired and re-programmed MIDI patches for piano, harp, calliope, and bells. These are the same sounds that the Aphex Twin droned out on his beautiful "Selected Ambient Works Volume 2." "51/13" also features the seemingly incongruous collaboration between Aphex Twin and Philip Glass! For this piece called "Icct Hedral," Glass scored a dramatic orchestral piece around the repetition of a distinctly Aphex Twin melodic phrase. It's surprising how well this particular piece works.
For a lot of electronica, history tends to date and make obsolete certain sounds and artists... But this has never been the case with Aphex Twin.
The title track of this ep scared the pickles out of me. And the video will do the same. Must hear. Must see. Richard D. James, you rule.
The internet spoke and Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments Part 1 has been christened as a collection of tracks for prepared piano and electrically driven acoustic pieces on Drukqs - the 2001 album which preceded a 14 year silence from Richard James. Whether James agrees with that historical connection or if he just wanted to apply that suffix to this long EP / short album is any one's guess. That said, it would be delightful to entertain the notion that James had spent all that time away from the recorded world, perfecting the art or robotics with this album being an IDM symphony composed on Pierre Bastien like automatons. Whirring machines clacking at a piano, tapping on a drum kit, and stringed instruments getting struck, strummed, and abraded. But in all likelihood, this is a sample based construction, even if James did play and collect everything, and then feed them into his sequencers and rhythm programs with little in the way of DSP manipulation. These tracks are intricate constructions of archetypal Aphex rhythms and grooves, with the instrumentation swapped out on the arrangements. Some of the tracks like "Disk Prep Calrec2 Barn Dance [slo]" have an urban gamelan feel of 23 Skidoo, and others like "Diskhat1" march jauntily along like Alarm Will Call's re-constitutions of Aphex tracks, albeit with a much funkier drummer. That was always the failing of Alarm Will Call - the inability to ground the groove; and perhaps that's where James figured he could do it better. Or maybe he's just been listening to the aforementioned Bastien alternated with Herbie Hancock. Not a bad combination at all, we think.
It's been five years since the Aphex Twin unleashed his Surrealist-tainted slab of brilliance "The Richard D. James Album," which jauntily skipped around the accepted boundaries of contemporary electronica with surprising ease and an almost voiceless black
From the get-go, Aphex Twin wisely sidesteps the currently hip clickery of the Ritornell / Raster labels, jumping straight into his tried and true forms of bastardized drum 'n' bass punctuated by delicate piano-ambient interludes. Unfortunately, Aphex has been following the rather tepid stylings of 2 step and speed garage, instead of the vibrant spasticity of Lesser or the mentally damaged dancehall of DJ Scud. Thus, the ambient artifacts -- which come across as Satie's "Furniture Music" for the H.R. Giger set, being both deliciously macabre yet tonally beautiful -- are the more interesting moments found on the first half of the album. Disc two offers a few classic Aphex sounding tracks of smoldering acid squelchiness, time-stretched vocal snippets, and complex grooves built out of constantly counterpointing rhythms. Again, these are spaced between delicate halcyon piano ambience, something which at times appears as dinner jazz for the IDM set.
While certain individual tracks flash a programming brilliance cast with his ever-present sideways smirk, easily putting his contemporaries to shame, "Drukqs" as a whole never really finds a direction; nor, does it makes much progression though all of the various electronica agendas. Nevertheless, those of you already cardcarrying members of the Aphex fanclub won't be disappointed.
The mad-scientist of electronica - Richard D James aka Aphex Twin - released I Care Because You Do in 1995; and now in 2012, that classic electronica album gets a 2lp reissue by way of the 1972 label, who also recently reissued Aphex's Selected Ambient Works Vol. Two on triple lp.
This album's single "Ventolin" stood as one of the more cantankerous tracks that RDJ had recorded to date. A harsh, tinnitus-inducing squeal permeates the sequencing of clunky rhythms and dum-dum melodies of that single thumbing its noise at everybody who took the whole Intelligent Dance Music thing way too seriously. At the time, the track was a blatant provocation, and after all these years, it still sticks out as a grotesque distortion, with the album moving somewhat like a palindrome around that track - progressing up to that nasty piece of electronics from more stately and subdued tracks before reversing course. One of the tracks that brackets "Ventolin" is the majestic "Icct Hedral" which spirals around an orchestration worked out by Phillip Glass for Aphex Twin, with James girding the cauldron of repetitive woodwinds and strings with his trademarked crunching breakbeats and phase-shifting parametric filter sweeps. The sweaty acid-breakcore track "Come On, You Slags!" is the other bookend to "Ventolin" with more introspective abstractions pooling on either side with plenty of counterpointing rhythmic complexities tossed in for good measure. It was on this record that the Aphex sense of humor - with its broad spectrum from the strange to the village idiot - first came into its own as a unique facet to Aphex Twin's vocabulary. So much of this work still sounds amazing after all these years, and it's also great to see this on vinyl again finally, too! (Even moreso since it seems the cd version has gone out of print.)
If Richard D. James had not made the Richard D. James LP there would probably not be Matmos, there would be no Hrvatski (although the electro-acoustic complexities that KF Whitman later produced might have still spilled out), and there would have definitely been no Kid 606. This record was released on Warp back in 1996 and was the crossover album between IDM and jungle, with the purists from the latter crying foul that Aphex Twin had ruined their party, while giving the former a whole new template of rhythms to mine, deform, and mutate with lightning quick precision. Still, what set this album apart from so many of its contemporaries was the adventurousness with form and the ability to maintain an emotively complex sense of melody. Where much of the more playful forms of electronica tends to get precious and saccharine really quickly, James' rounded basslines and idyllic synth arrangements on such tracks as "Fingerbig" or "To Cure A Weakling Child" spiralled deconstructed Amen breaks around the rhythmic architecture of the tracks, giving the replicants something celebratory to dance to.
But the standout tracks on the album still are the lead single "Boy/Girl Song", with its amazingly inventive tricknology sampling plucked strings molded into an utterly captivating synthesized harmony that propel still one of the most skittery and most dynamic drum 'n' bass numbers ever produced, and then there's "Milk Man" in which a deliberately snivelling James sings for the first time, with lyrics obsessing over the mammary glands of the neighborhood milk man. Ah, David Lynch would have been so proud! This album has been a staple here at Aquarius Records since its original release back in '96, and if you've not picked it up over the years, now's your chance to get this fantastic album on vinyl! Yay!!
The album from which Richard D. James' electronica genius became obvious. Selected Abient Works 2 is as if James sonically replicated the post-slumber / pre-waking state when sunlight first strikes the dream riddled eye within the memory banks of his rewired samplers. A beautiful, synaesthetic and haunting post-techno ambient that really must be heard!
