Oh, Senor Coconut we can never get enough of you and all your sneaky alter egos. He just unleashed his homage to Yellow Magic Orchestra a couple lists back and when summertime rolls around his effervescent fun party sounds always hit the spot. Los Negritos is supposedly the work of Los Sampler's, a Chilean percussion group that Atom Heart aka Senor Coconut claims to have discovered. But we are still betting that at the end of the day this is all the work of the imaginative, playful mind of Senor Coconut himself. His frantic choppity-chop arrangements of electronics and abundant samples are pretty unmistakable... and pretty darn irresistible. Tweaked horns and synth sounds jump about the itchy-glitchy and yes verrry speedy merengue beats as highly processed vocals make often indecipherable exclamations. Never fails to delight in the most heart-racing and spastic way!
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I don't really believe Atom Heart when he says that he 'discovered' this South American Electronic Percussion Band. I mean it really sounds just like his Senor Coconut records. Liar, er, clever marketer or not, this is pretty nice. More crunchy reinterpretations of Latin mambos on lowgrade samplers... Everyone who bought a Senor Coconut will love this! Economics-wise, go for the full-length first.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Another Atom Heart caper of electronic tom-foolery, that we brought in after being captivated by his Senor Coconut stuff. Though keeping with the Latin/Mambo theme of his Senor Coconut moniker the result is not the same smooth, literal interpretations as his Kraftwerk covers. On this disk Perez Prado and other Latin classics (as well as unknowns) receive plastic surgery from Atom Heart using only the digital equivalents of a rusty machete and a propane torch. The result (purporting to be an actual Chilean band called Los Sampler's, produced by Atom) is like a Rancho Relaxo All-Stars spin off for Mego Recordings.
With all the Deerhunter/Atlas Sound/Jonas Reinhardt business we've been hearing from Kranky lately, we were starting to think they forgot about the rad, beautiful ambient music that defined the label's sound. Needless to say we were relieved and quite pleased to hear another gorgeous release of serene ambient wash from the Chicago label, this time from Vancouver electronic dream-ambient outfit Loscil. Whose last few records have been big time faves around here. Picture the crisp, laptop crush of Fennesz woven into the melodic soundworlds of maybe Emeralds or anything on the Miasmah label. Lush string tones rise and give way to radiating synth lines, minimal passages recall the solitude of winter or the calmness of a rainy SF afternoon (actually the album opens with a sample of pouring rain!), the kind of thing that leaves us completely entranced but never bored. The kind of dream harbor we'd love to set sail into, swelling tones of melodic shimmer cast a blissful daze over the oceanic horizon as deep pulsing, minimal rhythms plod and turn under blankets of radiating bliss. So gorgeous and completely recommended!
Slowly but surely Scott Morgan (aka Loscil) is building a really nice collection of subtly crafted daydream electronic recordings. Recalling the more ambient outings of Brian Eno, Loscil are so good at letting the listener linger, wander, and float in space, as they the music mixes pop ambience with minimalist electronic drones. Kind of like playing Keith Fullerton Whitman's Playthroughs record beneath the latest outing from Klimek. This will appeal to both the brain and the the body for sure. Nice stuff!
The latest from daydream ambient electronic soundscaper Scott Morgan aka Loscil, comes in the form of this super limited 7", perhaps misleadingly titled "Sine Studies 1", which had us expecting a very clinical collection of super Spartan tones and Raster-Noton like academic minimalism, but instead, the A side here is warm and lovely, softly swirling fields of hum and thrum, draped over dubby percolations, softly hazy and dreamily washed out, laced with swaths of rhythmic skitter, all very hushed and spare, darkly motorik and mesmeric, plenty of space and softly shimmering tones, almost like a dreamier more soft focus Pole, an abstract digidub made even more abstract and almost ethereal. The B side ditches most of the rhythmic elements, leaving just the tones, lush and layered, softly pulsing, shimmering fields of distant pulsations, and lazily unfurling melodies, all blurred into billowing expanses of ephemeral thrum. So nice.
The second full length from Loscil (aka Scott Morgan) doesn't sonically stray from the dreamy, hypnotic path he began with his debut, Triplepoint, but it does come with a theme - submarines. Apart from the song titles which are the names of submarines (eg. Kursk, Triton, and Argonaut), there is definitely a languid deepsea feel to his music. Slowly swellling and enveloping sometimes to the edge of claustrophobic, the layers of echoing pulses, translucent drone washes and subtle hints at melody combine for an overall serene listening experience. Close your eyes and visions of such antiquated colossal vessels drifting through the shadowy depths easily emerge. Lovely!
Scott Morgan has spent his fair share of time in a number of notable Vancouver pop outfits. For instance, most recently he's played in Destroyer (with former New Pornographer Dan Bejar) and with retro-popsters The Battles, but neither revealed even a hint
We had never heard of Lossmaker, aka video artist / musician Luke Wyatt, but this new 12" on recent Record of The Weekers Nihiti's Lo Bit Landscapes label is pretty fantastic, a strange assemblage of mini-soundscapes, cinematic and lush, textured and layered, the vibe sort of mellow and melancholic, a little Boards Of Canada for sure, but way more twisted and experimental. The opener is a brief bit of crackle wreathed chamber folk, sort of old timey, but definitely strangely soundtracky, piano and fiddle, swoonsome strings, a little haunting and dreamlike, which leads directly into the sort of Boards Of Canada style minimal electronic groovescapery, minor key melodies, over softly pulsing rhythms, the sound sweeping and darkly epic, while at the same time pensive and personal, lots of strange production happening, but it's all woven into some dreamy dark electronica.
There's more of that hazy, softly psychedelic chamber music, again haunting and cinematic, this time laced with strange electronic glitches and mysterious pulsations, a dreamy, melancholy coda to the first side.
The flipside begins with a brief bit of backwards melodic swirl, dreamy and super psychedelic, super hypnotic, sorta wish it was more than an intro. That leads directly into another stretch of minimal moody electronic skitter, this time, laced with acoustic instruments, some guitar strum here and there, but also some ominous synth swells, some robotic squelches, some cool super distorted melodies, all warped and warbly, the song epic and intense, getting more and more psychedelic and intense, but remaining warm and woozy and dreamlike.
Discover what sort of trouble four theremins and one violin can get into. Quite a pleasing sort actually. At times the theremins wind and whine around each other emitting sounds not unlike the voices of dolphins at half speed... or the creaky squeals you'd make by letting the air out of a balloon very very slowly. Other moments sweep you into a blanket of drones and chimes. Recorded live at the Charnwood Conservatory in Somerville, MA. Very nice.
We were pretty much sold before we'd even heard a single note from the bizarrely name Lou Champagne System, which is indeed the work of Mr. Lou Champagne, and that 'System' is actually a thing, not just a cool band name appellation, it's some sort of "guitar and hookup" invented by Lou himself which "allows him to play guitar and sound like a whole band with no tapes!" There's a picture of him on the cover too, skinny mustache, and skinny Cylon style new wave shades. Plus it's on Medical Records, who were responsible for another recent Record Of The Week, Novels For The Moons by Axxess. And if you thought that one was weird, this one is gonna blow your mind.
"The Lou Champagne System is a real time guitar synth solo act" the original liner notes go on to explain, who with the help of that aforementioned system, whipped up some of the coolest, weirdest post punk / new wave we've heard in ages. A rare private press lp from Canada, originally released in 1983 on Champagne's own label, this unearthed gem, on first listen, elicited a whole range of reactions, ranging from "this is freaking amazing?!" to "what the fuck is this?!", and in most cases it was a little bit of both, cuz while this stuff is pretty weird and a little bit goofy, it's also totally kick ass. And the fact that he played this stuff live using a whole array of pedals and switches and that system. Just check out the opener "Don't Say I'm Here", which takes crunchy almost metallic guitars, swirling analog synths, and primitive skeletal drum machines, and crams it all into some dense, claustrophobic punk wave weirdness. Ranting vocals, hysterical laughter, a bizarre back and forth dialogue between someone called "Fred" and a "Narrator", there's also some rad shredding psychedelic leads. It's the sort of retro weirdness that the current crop of outsider synth wave revivalists are channeling, but nothing compares to the sheer madness/brilliance of the original. "Broken Hearts" is a bit more poppy, the same sonic layout as "Don't Say I'm Here", but for a brief minute it sounds way more commercial like it could have been some obscure eighties hit, but then BAM, the synths get all squiggly, the vocals get even more unhinged, a woozy weirdly psychedelic synth punk freakout that is so fucked and bizarrely brilliant, there's another wild squall of guitar leads, this time sounding like some tangle of malfunctioning electronics.
The other jam here we're obsessing on is the awesomely titled "Propaganda Frustration", with its smoldering slow build synth intro, that explodes into a droned out sprawl of skeletal drum skitter and pulsing synths, and when the song proper kicks in, it's all dark and heavy and propulsive, a sort of Goblin / Carpenter sound transformed into something much more electro-pop, the vocal heavily effected and buried in the mix, a driving late night future groove that sound like those sunglasses on the cover. Then there's "Another Dimension", with a sort of faux synth horn intro, that gives way to some chugging metallic guitars, that almost sounds like Motorhead or something, until those primitive programmed drums come in, then it becomes this weirdly metallic driving synth punk, the vocals over the top and dramatic, you can almost imagine the sort of low budget cable access video that would have accompanied this jam. Oh and did we mention the insane chorus, where the drums go all wobbly and chaotic and sound like they're totally malfunctioning beneath the howled vox? So fucking nuts!
From there on out it doesn't get any less weird, in fact, if anything it continues on its warped trajectory, squiggly synths, skittery stuttery drums, strange synth melodies, the vocals unhinged and maniacal, the songs heavy and punky and fuzzy and synth and totally catchy and baffling bizarre, but we definitely have to mention the awesomely brooding closer, which is quickly becoming our favorite, sounding like some outsider synth dirge version of Blue Oyster Cult's "Veteran Of The Psychic Wars" from the Heavy Metal soundtrack, with it's haunting creep and weird field recorded honking horns and crickets, all beneath super psychedelic swirls of synth and some seriously tripped out gorgeously multi-tracked harmonized vocals, including the way too appropriate lyric "I'm like a man in a fantasy, maybe I should just get stoned..."
Totally and utterly amazing, and baffling, and so obviously absolutely recommended. Total fractured genius outsider post-punk synth wave weirdness that is threatening to become the only thing we want to listen to!
Pressed on white vinyl, LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES, each one hand numbered. Includes a 12" x 12" insert with liner notes / lyrics.
Love duets -- strange, twisted, and surreal -- sung by Mike Patton (Faith No More, Mr Bungle, Fantomas) and Jennifer Charles (Elysian Fields), and presided over by Nathaniel Merriweather a.k.a. DAN THE AUTOMATOR (Dr. Octagon, Deltron 3030, Gorillaz), the
Dan the Automator strikes again. This here record is the INSTRUMENTAL version of the Lovage album, and in our opinion it is much better! We felt the same way about the Deltron 3030 record, whose instrumental version kicks ass so much we named it Record of the
One of the Zombi guys gets kinda cheesy and soulful here, the "disco" side of Zombi to the fore, with saxophone!! Caveat Emptor... though we did enjoy it.
Certainly an unlikely candidate for the seemingly ubiquitous remix, Low has received a few brilliant reworkings by likeminded slo-mo electronica superstars Porter Ricks, DJ Vadim, and Neotropic. Worth owning simply for the Porter Ricks cut which demonstrates that Andy and Thomas truly understand the slow motion minimalism of Low with this beautiful piece of delicately shifting electronics.
Lowfish's "Eliminator" shuffles between early Autechrisms with sad melody lines topping elegant post-electro / IDM breakbeats and simple arrpeggiated synth sequences more on line with mid 80s New Order and the recent output from Console.
Look out! Toronto electro surgeon Lowfish (Gregory De Rocher of Suction Records, not to be confused with Berlin's DJ Highfish) rips out four new numbers for Detroit's premier electro dealers Ersatz Audio. Playful, bubbly hip-hop-electrofunk from the label you know and trust.
You are more likely to find Lucky Dragons performing in a small gallery or someone's living room or on an enchanted island then you are a conventional rock club or bar. Convention doesn't seem to be something Luke Fischbeck or Sarah Rara care much for and their music and vivid imagination is all the better for it. While this is a record that brings together so many ideas and influences it's strength is in how seamless and succinctly they do so. Opening with a dreamy snippet that recalls a daydream Boards Of Canada moment, the record then finds it's way into captivating and repetitive percussion that sounds like a Konono No.1 record interpreted by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. They have a very special ability to travel through both intense and wandering states with equal power and grace. It's amazing that they've made a record that can sound like the most relentless snake charmer recording one moment, a hip-hop inspired pulsating beat next, an ambient interlude that could be part of a Grouper record somewhere else but also a germinal techno jam you never want to end. While bringing in a wide range of styles and influences is not something so new, making a totally cohesive, pleasurable and transcendent album with all those influences is much more rare and with Dream Island Laughing Language, Lucky Dragons have done just that! Highly recommended.
And here we go, further into the shadows, down the black hole of minimal mutant techno. We've become downright obsessed with this twisted, grim, bleak strain of electronic sound, as is evidenced by recent Record Of The Weekers Akkord and Basic House and this week's Echologist, also killer releases by Vatican Shadow, Silent Servant, Prurient, Haxan Cloak, Terrence Dixon, Shed, we could go on, but needless to say, even the former technophobes here at aQ, have been fully converted and indoctrinated into the cult, now we find ourselves on a mission to dig up the darkest of blackened house, the wooziest, warped techno, the sound of spare skeletal skitter and haunting electro-creep mood music, all that we crave. Our latest discovery is provocatively titled Churches Schools And comes to us from Lucy, who is not in fact a woman named Lucy, but some mysterious guy, who is a master and crafting suffocatingly sinister techno, pulsing sprawls of blurred murk, looped and layered rhythms, opener "The Horror" is indeed horrifying, a grim field of glitch and gristle, laid over a field of rumbling swells and wreathed in grinding black static, super tense and intense, an intro maybe, but the sound oozes ominously into the rest of the record, which plays out like some alien mutant dub, long stretches of muted thrum, peppered with fractured beats, and swirling synths, bizarre samples, geiger counter like sputter, all blurred into something hazy, and dreamily druggy. "Leave Us Alone", sounds like a more blissed out Silent Servant, or a Kompakt track gone very very bad. "The Self As Another", buries its beats under ethereal swaths of chordal shimmer, the whole thing gauzey and ephemeral, as if being listened to from a great distance.
"Human Triage" is like electro-dub melted down to its very essence, laced with weird bits of crumbling FX, and gradually growing more and more frenetic, but simultaneously, the sounds getting more and more indistinct, as of the whole thing would eventually blur into a single smear of sound. "Follow The Leader" is all gristly slo-mo house, throat singing, record crackle, and muted pulsations, fashioned into something hauntingly hypnotic, while "Catch Twenty Two" might be the grooviest of the bunch, but its still all crackle wreathed minimal murk. The rest of the tracks, deliver fantastic variations of Lucy's crumbling, crackly, techno-dub creep, culminating in the surprisingly blissful closer "Falling", which stretches ethereal female vocals, into a spectral chorale, all over soft focus flurries of glistening finger picked guitars, and swirling clouds of prismatic glimmer, wreathed in fuzzy barely there shimmer, and crafted into gentle swells, the end result sounding almost like a Grouper track, produced by The Field!
We only got a handful of these, and it was limited to only 100 or so copies anyway, so we won't get into too much detail. Most folks just need to see the name Lull and they'll be sold. Lull, aka Mick Harris, collaborates here with Beta Cloud, who a while back teamed up with Aidan Baker for a killer disc of dark buzzing dronemusic. But on Circadian Rhythm Disturbance, Harris and Beta Cloud team up for one 20 minute track of extreme dark ambience, loose barely there rhythms drift in and out occasionally, but this is all about the atmospheric low end, and it is LOW, a deep subterranean rumble that seems to swallow up all light, like the sound of some massive behemoth drifting slowly through the blackened deep, or some mysterious black shape drifting across the midnight sky, huge groaning drones and massive swells of rib cage rattling bass, smeared and blurred into a tidal sort of barely-rhythm, that subtly pulses and throbs, sucking the listener under, filling you ears with gorgeous soft black sound.�
SUPER LIMITED. Most likely already out of print at the label.
Absolutely beautiful and highly unlikely collaboration between Alexander Balanescu, Isabella Bordoni, Rupert Huber, Sergio Ganhor and to rococo rot.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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We first heard Euro synthwave combo Lust For Youth on a witch house mixtape of all places, which sort of makes sense, as the sound of most modern minimal wave synth groups is really not that far removed from some witch house. What we heard was buzzy and murky and washed out and yeah, kind of witchy, but it definitely gave us a taste for these guys (now apparently just one guy), and this new full length definitely hits the spot, fusing classic synth driven eighties pop, modern retro minimal synth music, experimental noise, kosmische synthscapery, and pounding EDM beats into something we find ourselves listening to constantly, and something that every time it gets played in the store, someone comes up to see what's playing.
The bulk of the record is made up of buzzy, dark wave synth pop gems, the synths gloriously distorted, wrapped around lilting melodies, and driving rhythms, the vocals drenched in echo and draped over the top. Just check out "Behind Curtains" which adds some post punk swagger to the otherwise moody swirly synth poppiness. "It's You" sounds like deconstructed Depeche Mode, another sprawl of pulsating distorted synths, woozy warble melodies drifting in the background, a definite kraut-wave vibe, motorik and hypnotic, again those vocals, weary and heavily reverbed, soporific incantations over shadowy synth pop.
Then there are tracks like "We Planted A Seed", which mix in some crumbling distorted noise, and unfurl very retro-futuristic sounding Carpenter style eighties chase scene synthscapery, all tense and dark, and slightly sinister. But then right on the heels of a track like that, a track like "Champagne" swoops in, all old school electro pop, but still, just buzzy and dark enough to retain some sonic malevolence. Imagine Breakfast Club recast as some sort of seventies horror art flick, this stuff could definitely be the soundtrack (there's a bit of Goblin going on too needless to say).
But sonically this is most definitely dark synthwave, slipping into something a bit poppier on some tracks, but then something much darker on others, ultimately culminating in the shadowy kraut-wave groove of "We Got Lost" which even manages to channel a little Suicide into the equation, not to mention some eerie sampled screams of terror, before finishing off with the almost M83 sounding "Neon Lights Appear", those wasted vox, the only thing keeping the track from slipping into full blown synth-gaze territory.
Bay Area's The Lymbic System bring us instrumental indie post-rock pop with a jazzy lean, a la Tortoise. That said, their ep Carved By Glaciers maintains a looser and slightly edgier sound, thus keeping a safe distance from truly formal post-rock constructions. Low frequency distortion, hints of a Moog-y synth, a Wurlitzer, layers of electronic melody and many incredibly delicate moments form these songs within a generous spatial structure. Very nice guys! May we have another?
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We had never heard of the oddly monikered M Ax Noi Mach, aka Philly noisemaker Rob Francisco, but it was brought to our attention that if we were digging Finnish power electronic hypnodirge weirdos Will Over Matter, we really oughta check out this guy, and holy cow, while it's definitely not the same thing, it definitely pushes a lot of the same buttons, total lo-fi beat heavy post industrial noiserock club music for sure, the sort of shit noiseheads would be blasting if they had any sort of booming system. Just check out opener "Creeper", with its brittle crunked out beats, super distorted tweeter punishing clipped hiss, the howled feral vox, a total gristly groove that kills. Think Will Over Matter collaborating with Wolf Eyes on some sort of alternative universe club banger, and you wouldn't even be close.
The second track sounds like some sort of cold wave DHR mash up, stuttering trashcan beats, the warbly bass groove, peppered with a killer skipping skittering high end break that DESTROYS.
There's definitely some serious Throbbing Gristle worship going on, but via Philly club music, and there's some glitchy post Whitehouse chaotic crunch, like "Devil City" which definitely sounds a lot like Will Over Matter, a thick grinding murk pulsing away, and peppered with caustic blasts of white noise drenched feedback/vocal freakouts, a thick ugly groover that would be a guaranteed dancefloor clearer. Then there are tracks like "Fetico", which finds much of the high end peeled back, the skree blunted, the rhythms muted and murky, multiple vocals laid atop one another, whispers, spoken, slooooowed doooooown gurgle, a dizzying tangle over that loping stuttersludge loop, the follow up, "Hallowed Eyes" is equally stripped down, a fuzzy pulsating low end throbs beneath some clipped house-y skitter, about as groovy and anything on the record gets, the melodic element supplied by what sounds like amp buzz, and a switch being flipped on and off again, it's like some sort of Dead C electro, which is fine by us, we could listen to shit like this endlessly, and at 6 minutes it ends WAY too soon.
The rest of the record cranks it back up again, a barrage of lo-fi DHR pound, gouts of growled angry bellowed vox, sheets of Metal Machine Music chopped and screwed into hiccuping expanses of grind and gristle, clouds of angry crunch and dense swirling hiss wrapped around robotic drum pound and muddy mechanical grooves, everything filthy and crusty and blown the fuck out, a glorious chunk of rhythmic electronic punishment that we can't seem to stop listening to.
LIMITED TO 406 COPIES. Housed in swank printed cardstock jackets.
Austere sine-wave tones, clicks and silence from Japanese experimentalist Sachiko M, known for her work solo and in the avant-pop trio Hoahio as well as with collaborators like Otomo Yoshihide (in Ground Zero, ISO, Filament, etc.). This cdep (in the irresistable 3" format) fits firmly into her ouvre of barely-there, barren electronic soundscapes of blips and non-blips. Is it zen art? is it conceptual bullshit? Depends on your tastes, but it seems quite lovely for those whose ears are attuned to such efforts. On the new, potentially interesting Greek label Antifrost.
Holy crap. This album rules. Ragga, hip-hop, dancehall, infused trashy electro party pop jams! Quelle mix.
A few months ago, some folks came in the store while on holiday from Germany asking if we had anything like "M.I.A.? You know this? It is all over tha place in Germany." I had to say no, not in this neck of the folktastic dronedom of San Francisco. But now it is here, XL at last bringing us the domestic release of M.I.A.'s debut album, Arular, which follows up a mix-tape on which she collaborated with Diplo and raised a lot of eyebrows -- apparently German eyebrows in particular!
Seriously though, you know you want to party!! No says you? You're too bummed out on Karl Rove taking over the whole damn place to party? Well, her lyrics are very politically leaning so you don't have to feel all guilty about having a good time. We've been spinning this non-stop ourselves, and selling it non-stop too. Lives up to the hype.
Holy shit this record is amazing!!! What a charged and dynamic follow up to one of the hottest debuts of the decade. It doesn't surprise us though, as we knew from the first time we heard M.I.A. that she had some special power inside of her. She is that rare world voice in music that we desperately need so much right now. It's incredible how she crosses lines and borders like very few other artists seem able to.
Kala is one of the few records that we sell to every kind of person and taste. Metalheads, indie rockers, pop kids, dance-heads, hip-hop aficionados, experimental music lovers.... they're all going crazy for the new M.I.A. and for great reason. It's one of the most kick ass, colorful and fully realized albums to come out in a long time.
She was denied entry to the States repeated times when making this record, so her initial plans to record the record with Timbaland were thrown out the window. But this countries' insane border policies ended up being a blessing in disguise, as it forced M.I.A. to look elsewhere for producers, so she traveled throughout Africa and India where she did lots of raw field recordings which all come to life in such exciting ways on Kala. In fact Kala is kind of like what we imagine might happen if Konono No.1 were transported to Bollywood. While we've recently been swept up by the mystical power and strength of some fierce women of the past like Selda and Betty Davis, we can't think of anyone in the modern day who better conjures up that kind of unique energy and spirit than M.I.A.
This is a record meant to be blasted LOUD. So next time you have folks over, no matter what sort of music they dig, don't worry it won't be awkward just throw on M.I.A. and every single one of them will dig it like crazy. Guaranteed.
Without a doubt a contender for record of the year!
For all that's made of M.I.A.'s politics and persona, it's important not to forget that what makes her music so fucking special is how it taps into such a purely physical sensation. Her last album Kala was an absolute game changer. The kind of record that reshaped everything around it. You could almost use her name as a genre, as so many folks were inspired by it and after her debut, we began hearing so many people try their hand at the M.I.A. sound. From Santogold, Gang Gang Dance, Rainbow Arabia, Rye Rye, Bonde Do Role, Thunderheist, Buraka Som Sistema, and on and on. Her influence crossed so many cultural lines and on so many fronts, not just her sound but also her fashion, imagery and overall aesthetic. And it's easy to see why, there is something so dynamic, urgent, spirited and alive about what M.I.A. is doing.
It's so hard to follow up a record that was as close to perfect as we think an album can be, but god damn she has found a way to maybe do it. Maya blasts right out of the gate and makes it clear its going to be an uncompromising, visceral and frenetic ride. With great collaborating producers like Diplo, Switch and Blaqstarr back on board as well as bringing in dubstep sensation Rusko as well as Sleigh Bells guitar shredder Derek E. Miller. But much like Bjork, M.I.A. is a master of curating and surrounding herself with super talented producers and players, yet taking all the pieces of those elements and crafting them into something much bigger and more fully realized. The record is paced so perfectly, after an onslaught of charged, dirty and sweaty tracks she offers fresh breaths through some catchier pop minded jams and then its right back into the line of fire. Maya, is both the most angry and tender of the albums she is made so far. Because while its filled with so many unrelenting politically fueled anthems it also finds M.I.A. singing about the courage of falling in love and getting weighed down by gravity, which shows us the range she is capable of and will continue to explore.
It seems certain folks love to build people up only to knock them down. In recent months M.I.A was torn to pieces in a tacky/petty feature in the New York Times and many of the same blogs and online music critic establishments who championed her in the first place, and who are now taking cheap shots at her, personally and musically. But all that is meaningless. Truth is, M.I.A. continues to be an absolute force of nature. Creating music that really can and does unite so many different kinds of people and makes you sweat in ways that feels empowering and full of purpose. She has taken the spirit of punk, hip-hop and dance music to make a sound that is so singular and spectacular. Maya is another striking achievement from one of the most important, outspoken and brave artists of our generation.
We've long been complaining about the dearth of "grime" in the States, so we were psyched to discover that the folks at Planet Mu decided to do something about it. They've been reissuing UK grime releases for the states, but this latest batch of 12"s offers up some grime / jungle hybrids as well as their own twisted take on dubstep and grime. And it kills!
This is grime done commercial hiphop style, which is not a bad thing at all. We always talk about how grime should be all over the radio and MTV, well if that's gonna happen, it's probably gonna be M.R.K.1 aka Mark One. The first track on here is an absolute killer, like Kanye or the RZA with sped up soul samples over dizzying stuttery dubstep rhythms. The next track is slippery and slithery and grimy but weirdly convoluted and tangled up, super murky and dark, like Tricky or Portishead gone grime, and bass lines so low and heavy that even at low volume they threaten to blow your speakers.
The flipside features two groovy grimy instrumental shuffles, with alien synths, that speaker shredding low end, and wide open spaces just begging for some mad freestyle flows.
Whatever this is called M2 or Squaremeter; this is the work of Panacea remixing a handful of electronic minimalism / post-techno from the Ant-Zen label. It follows aesthetically the path Panacea had been taking on the "Brasilia" album with ping-pong oscillations of sine-waves, digital glitchery, and an erratic machine-gun drum & bass kick popping up for a split second then deferring back to piercing tones. While 89% of this album came from Ant-Zen, this really could be another release from the damaged mind of Panacea. Do you think he has tinnitus?
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Our first encounter with Panacea's M2 was on his remix album of the Ant-Zen catalogue, where he transformed the Ant-Zen sound into an aggressive minimalism much closer to a steroid-pumped version of Raster clan's digital clickery. Now "Sinecore", much like the remix project, is an album of clinical tension. M2's cerebral metronomic structures clang with rhythmic sinewave modulations and rigid digital tones, yet a sputtering collage of mutant flanges and dadaist arrythmia disrupts the insistency of the pure tones and clicks.
You'll be glad to know that M83 still basically sound like some strange and wonderful mix of My Bloody Valentine, the Orb, Boards Of Canada, Stereolab and New Order. And they most definitely are still the only band around making this sort of lush, fuzzed out, electronic bliss pop. But the new record takes a strange turn. Some around here think a not so advisable one. But we'll elaborate a bit and you make the call.
First, strap yourself in, and set the controls for the heart of... the eighties.
It starts with the ultra-cheesy cover art, a late night big city scape with the band name written in a thick white graffiti scrawl. If you didn't know M83 was a band you'd be forgiven for thinking that this was a Bacardi ad for some new drink.
And sonically it follows a similar time travelling path. Imagine the eighties is a big packet of Lick-Em-Aid, you know that weird colored sugar you'd eat as a kid. So after a year of listening to the first M83 record non stop, it's nice and wet, so go ahead and dip it into your packet of eighties Lick-Em-Aid and you've basically got Before The Dawn Heals Us. Where Dead Cities was almost timeless sounding in its seamless melding of eighties pop, anime soundtrack, modern electronica, nineties shoegaze and classic Krautrock, the new record is eighties through and through. Every song could be music for a montage from Gleaming The Cube or Pump Up The Volume or Back To The Future. When you close your eyes, you can almost visualize the credits rolling over garish splashes of pastel, listing all of the other songs on the 'soundtrack' by folks like Rick Springfield, Ray Parker Jr., Cyndi Lauper, etc. That said, this is still an amazing record. For every moment of cringeworthy fluff, there's three or four of utter pop brilliance. Totally alien snatches of shimmering synth, stuttering studio fuckery, the entire thing peppered with little sounds, electronic and organic, some barely noticeable, some completely defining the songs. Before The Dawn Heals Us sounds best when the band is going full bore, firing a warm beam of thick guitars and fuzzed out synths straight up into the starry sky, stretched out over a rigid framework of drum machine and pulsing bass, that gets so bombastic it almost sounds like Dimmu Borgir or Cradle Of Filth. On first listen the cheese factor was definitely too distracting, but on each listen, those bits of dated pop just sound like pieces of a glorious bigger picture. They may stick out at first but soon, you can't imagine the rest of the record without them. Which makes sense as soon as you spend some time with the record. The whole thing just sort of flows like some unearthed eighties arthouse soundtrack. A deliriously abstract, emotionally charged musical arc, with strange snippets of dialogue and spoken word moving the musical plot forward.
On its own this might not be the perfect record, but as the second part of M83's fuzzy, blissed out musical journey into the shimmery ether, it's an absolute masterpiece.
We hadn't even heard of this band until a handful of customers started mentioning them, so we figured we'd best check it out, and guess what? Turned out to be pretty fucking amazing. A huge slab of fuzzy shoegazey electronica-flecked dream pop. We've been listening to this nonstop since it came in. It's not really that new, but it's so good, we figured better late than never. Imagine the post rave swirl of the Orb, mix in the muted warmth of Boards Of Canada, the lalala Neu-worship of Stereolab, the catchy new wave of New Order, then wrap the whole thing in a thick shimmery distorted haze a la My Bloody Valentine and you'll be close. Now imagine that concoction as the soundtrack to the love scene in some super bizarre Anime. You know, the part where the girl is going into space because she can't live on earth because her tentacles keep killing cute little pandas, and her boyfriend is a giant panda, but they love each other so much her tears turn into jewels that the pandas can eat to make them invincible. It's that heartbreakingly good. This will totally hit the spot for electro geeks, shoegazers, pop kids, and everyone in between.
We probably reference M83 in reviews more often than No Neck Blues Band or SUNNO))) (okay, maybe not SUNN), which makes sense since they, almost more than any other group we can think of, totally typify that gorgeously washed out synth heavy warm shimmery bliss that infuses so much of the music we love. Their sound is seeped in gauzy smears of new age-y blur and hushed layered soft focus ambience, and even on their last record, the super eighties shimmer pop of Saturdays=Youth, that shimmer was always right below the surface, adding a distinctly otherworldly vibe to the songs.
Digital Shades (Vol. 1) in not a proper album per se, more of a project, undertaken by Anthony Gonzalez, aka M83, between recording sessions, exploring a more stripped down, ambient and new age sound. Originally released as a digital download (hence the title), Digital Shades is finally available as an actual release, the first in a series.
Playing more like fragments, or rough sketches, the songs on Digital Shades are simple and space-y, often only one or two notes, a simple melody, a breathy buried vocal, stretched out into long mesmerizing streaks of sun dappled drift. You can almost imagine these as backing tracks for soon to be M83 tracks. Remember when Pet Sounds mania was happening, and that record was released in all sorts of different permutations? Well, one version contained a whole bunch of gorgeous harmony vocal backing tracks, that once removed from their songs, sounded so strange and angelic and haunting, and such is the case here. Loosed from any sort of structure, these pieces are allowed to float and hover and swirl and slowly unfurl into sprawling expanses of billowy dreamy dronemusic. Sweeping and cinematic, yet somehow still minimal and intimate. Bird song surfaces here and there, as well as some brief snippets of more traditional M83 vocalizing, but those moments are brief, leaving just long streaks of soft sound, to unfold slowly, to blossom into delicate shapes, and to glisten in the light of a thousand suns. Admittedly, Gonzalez is paying homage to Brian Eno, and that's not difficult to hear at all, even in more traditional sounding M83 recordings, and lots of these pieces also sound quite a bit like some lost Twin Peaks Angelo Badalamenti mood music. Absolutely gorgeous. Maybe too minimal and blissed out for some, but for those of you (us!) with a soft spot for delicate drone-y new ageish ambience, and soft shimmery drones, a la Eno, Harold Budd, Popol Vuh, IASOS, Ariel Kalma, and the like, this is absolute heaven.
You probably already know if you like M83 by now. If you haven't heard them, go check out their brilliant debut Dead Cities RIGHT NOW. If you're already a fan of their fuzzed out My Bloody Valentine / Boards Of Canada dream pop bliss out then like us you can never get enough. This ep features "Don't Save Us From The Frames", probably the best track from their most recent album, Before The Dawn Heals Us -- a massively thick, multi layered psych pop confection with soaring harmony vocals and fuzzy synths all over the place. The reason to pick this up though (we'lll assume you already have the album) is the three unreleased tracks. "Until The Night Is Over" is a gorgeous eighties style ballad, with just enough fuzz and production fuckery to keep it interesting. Think Alan Parsons Project meets Air Supply meets the Flaming Lips. Then there are two remixes of "Don't Save Us...". The first is by Superpitcher, and he works some Kompakt magic, turning the original track into a stripped down, four on the floor, moody heroin house workout. The vocals soar unfettered over a simple pulsing rhythm and a relentlessly throbbing bassline. So good. Exactly how you dreamed a Gooom / Kompakt mashup should sound. The other remix is by Boom Bip, and is a shuffling, skittery IDM workout. A little like Autechre covering the Beach Boys. As always, so good!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
This is the single for possibly the best track on M83's breathtaking Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts album (about to get reissued with a bonus disc!), a hazy shimmery Stereolab meets My Bloody Valentine sun dappled, shoe gazing pop gem. Could it get any better? We definitely thought not, as exhausted as we are by the endless stream of remixes and remix albums. But what do ya know? The remixes on this single actually do twist the song into new and totally appealing shapes. Abstrakt Keal Agram turns the track into a hiccupping hip-hop-shoegaze mash up. Stuttering samples and bumping rhythms totally restructure the wispy original. The main reason to pick this up though is Jackson's Midnight Fuck remix, which takes the original and adds some simple electronica skitter, and morphs the whole thing into a Mike Inc. / Gas / Force Inc. blurry throbbing soundscape of fuzzy synths, etherial vocals, rumbling ambient murk and a propulsive 4/4 rhythm. The final track gets the remix treatment from fellow Gooomsters KG and it's the biggest blast of the bunch, a way rougher and noisier burst of distorted haze and supernovas of white noise static, with the vocals and melodies buried under a thick wash of grit and skree.
Over the course of several records, M83 have virtually invented their own genre, we're not even sure what to call it, but it's some sort of gossamer, fuzzed out blissy dream pop, so much so that, the name M83 itself became an oft referenced descriptor when referring to bands of all stripes that borrowed bits of fuzz or buzz or bliss from M83's sonic palette.
The last record, Before The Dawn Heals Us, found the band shedding some of their more arty influences, much of the krautrock, some of the electronica, lots of the buzzy shoegaze, opting instead for some straight up eighties pop, replete with cheesy electronic drums, big choruses, super effected guitars, a gloriously retro chunk of sweetly dated pop, BUT, they balanced that with some seriously over the top fuzzed out bombast.
However, that record definitely hinted at what was to come, and now years later, the bombast is long gone, and if anything, the band has delved even further into our teenage years, and reinvented themselves as a band plucked right from MTV circa 1985, and we love it! This is total emo. Before there was emo. The soundtrack to hanging out in parking lots, crushes, love notes, first kisses, John Hughes movies, falling in love, break ups, mix tapes and all that stuff.
The sound of Saturday = Youth is that, the sound of Saturdays, no school, hanging out with friends, the sound of being young, your whole life ahead of you, but with every second feeling like it could be your last. So much angst, so much passion, so much hope, and so much fear. All perfectly represented by this collection of gloriously glistening sunshine-y pop and fuzzy synthy electro pop.
The record begins with melancholy piano and swoonsome synths, fluttery female vocals somewhere between Kate Bush and Elizabeth Fraser, an intro that quickly gives way to some straight up eighties style MTV pop, a la Tears For Fears, all wooshing and emotional and dramatic, but so awesome. Not sure if this would be quite as appealing to someone who hadn't grown up on this kind of stuff, but for those of us who did, it's pretty irresistible. The next song is all electronic drums, and super processed soaring female vocals, squiggly synths, electric piano, and more super dramatic soaring choruses.
Our favorite so far is probably "Graveyard Girl", with its Cranberries-esque intro, all big jangling guitars, and crooned vocals, the melody super sweet and melancholy, drifting over swooning synths and a relentless rhythm, this is perfect pop, harmonies and hooks, all filtered through that particular time. It helps that there's a video that pretty much perfectly captures the spirit of the song. With a cute gothy girl who visits the pet cemetery and leaves dog toys and kibble on gravestones, pining after the cute boy. Filmed all fuzzy and old, so it looks just like out memories feel. There's even a spoken word part in the middle, delivered by a young girl, talking about loneliness and love, it's pretty perfectly heart wrenching. And then the artwork, all fuzzed out photos of various teens, the jock, the goth girl, the cute guy, the hot girl, the nerd, the punk, all hanging out in some sun dappled park on a Saturday, killing time, being young.
The whole record is like that, so totally moving and jubilant and emotional and slightly cheesy but in a really good way. Whether they're channeling the electronic skitter of New Order, or the fluttery dramatic pop of Kate Bush, or the jangle rock bombast of the Hooters, it's the very best kind of retro. It all makes us feel either really really old, or secretly sort of young again. Or like we're in some awesome eighties teen movie. Regardless, we love it, and can't seem to stop listening to it...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
LIMITED LIMITED LIMITED!!!
OK, now that we've got that out of the way, we managed to get a dozen or so of these very limited, promotional only 10"s from AQ faves M83. And unlike the overlap between their singles and re-releases and imports, as far as we can tell these tracks are exclusive to this record. Two longish tracks of that perfect electronic bliss psych we've been freaking out over, although this time a bit heavier on the beat than the bliss (a decidedly steady techno-ish thump throughout), sounding quite a bit like New Order dipped in My Bloody Valentine. Nice.
Single number two (or is it number three?) from the recent M83 record and damn if that record doesn't sound better and better as we re-examine it single by single. A perfect warm flush of gossamer dreaminess, lush buzzing synths and breathy otherworldly vocals. You should really already have the title track by now, if you don't, for chrissakes order yourself a copy of Before The Dawn Heals Us and then come on back. So it's the two bonus tracks that are the reason to pick this up. There's the exclusive-to-this-single track "Addicted To Self Mutilation", a slow burning soundscape of falsetto harmonies, like the Beach Boys on peyote, slipping and slithering over a simple electronic shuffle and a jagged buzz-guitar drone. Hard to figure how a band can come up with sonic leftovers WAY better than most bands' main courses! The other track is a reworking of "Teen Angst", by Montag, a fellow Gooom Records sonic alchemist, who was responsible for the soaring string arrangements on both of the M83 records (and whose lastest record we'll be reviewing soon!). Montag takes the lush and fuzzy original and strips it way down, leaving just a skeletal electronic rhythm, with ghostly traces of the original synths swirling amidst the hushed vocals and mournful minor key melodies, eventually allowing the whole thing to build to an intense and chaotic rhythmic frenzy that simply blinks out, leaving residual traces of synth and skitter floating through your head.
Wolfgang Voigt's palette of techno structuralism shifts ever so slightly, but apparently enough to warrant lots of different names (including Gas, Mike Ink, Wassermann, All, Studio One, Love Inc, etc). M:I:5 bubbles with off kilter synthetic syncopations phasing against the 'monophunktrax' (that's what Voigt calls it), a sort of monochromatic shuffle of unchanging techno drum kick throbs. Despite the omnipresent beat, Voigt's minimalist aesthetic doesn't seem to be going for the dance friendly experience, unless you can imagine dancing the night away to bleak and hypnotic blackness. Recommended.
Here's the latest from Juan MacLean... that's right, The Juan MacLean (formerly of Six Finger Satellite, latterly a DFA associate). Less Than Human can barely be contained on your stereo, bursting forth with ultra broad spectrum energy. Super vibrant and fun with its solid dance thump to keep you goin' 'til the wee hours. It even sounds like they dug out an ol' rave whistle for the beginning of the fourth song "Tito's Way". Sure there's lots of folks targeting the funky dancefloor these days, but Mr. MacLean takes a more elegant and captivating approach, as well as an ample dose of Kraftwerk reverence, that most definitely bears repeat listens... and not just while you're shakin' yer thang.
The first pressing of this classic slab of modern minimalism sold out in a heartbeat, so we're guessing pressing number two will follow suit, and not surprising really, these archival recordings are fantastic. Rescued from obscurity by Gerard Malanga, this lp documents a handful of purely electronic recordings, a sound few knew MacLise had ever explored before, but listening to these now, has us wishing he had continued. The A side especially is a stunning sprawl of glimmering ambience, lo-fi, and full of ambient sounds, voices, room sound, chair scrapes and the like, but all of that is subsumed into the glorious field of shimmer MacLise conjures up. "Electronic Mix For 'Expanded Cinema'" does in fact live up to its title, the sound expansive and psychedelic, and yeah, very cinematic at points, sometimes devolving into wild little tangles are furious electronic squiggles, but just as often blossoming into something much more majestic and moving, long stretches of near silence too, at which point the ambient sounds seem to drift to the fore, as well as the sonic artifacts of the original medium, tape hiss and hum, but that hiss and hum only adds to the lush textures and constantly shifting sonic landscape. We'll admit that a lot of academic music and modern electronic minimalism can sometimes leave us cold, bleeps and scrapes and clicks, but the sounds here manage to feel lush and organic, the arrangements alive, the recordings raw and intimate, and definitely worth it for the A side alone.
But the B side is chock full of equally compelling stuff, murky expanses of drum driven (?) psychedelia, blurred, hazy ambience, looped and layered sounds, "Trance 1" especially is some sort of spaced out psychedelic jam, with Maclise joined by Tony Conrad and John Cale, with some of the other tracks moving back into purely electronic tonalism, the sounds gristly and in-the-red, flitting from pure tone phase to weird psych jam and back again.
Killer stuff. Here's hoping there's more lost gems like these still to be discovered...
We dig Macromantics! She's one supa cool hiphop gal from Australia. Trouble is, there's seemingly never enough of her music to go around! She's got a scant two self-released cds out thus far (the more recent of the two being Hyperbolic Logic from late 2004), and they're not the easiest things to get a hold of. Fortunately though, we get at least a quick fix by way of those fine Quaketrap Collective folks from down the block who've offered up this short'n'sweet 7". One side has the lady bustin' out with her beat conspirator Shaggy Manatee (formerly of Pancake Circus) on her new track "Four Facets" while the flipside has a sharply chiselled remix of the Hyperbolic Logic album track "Conspiracy" by their pal Yoko Solo. Ah, leave 'em wantin' more! Pressed on white vinyl.
Just as it first appeared in the Boston Area around 1977, there are no song titles, contact info or any other identifying information accompanying this mysterious release, a reissue of a private press recording of serene but outsider-inflected new age classical composition. Like another similarly minded aQ fave, Moolah, the music presented on Mad Music Inc. is an oceanic mixture of echoed piano, harp and gong, in short sketches with one track adding percussion, some subtle bass groove and female spiritual cosmic jazz vocals (not quite the "cosmic disco" stated on Drag City's cover sticker, but still pretty cool!).
The primitive cover painting of two diametrically opposed naked women looks like it was inspired by Da Vinci's famous Vitruvian Man, with the women jumping out of their constrained environs. This seems like it would be an easy candidate for the Nurse With Wound list, especially with the back cover graphic of a chuckling Ming The Merciless type character with a tape machine implanted on the side of his head. Whatever it means, it must have been too elusive for even Stephen Stapleton, an obsessive authority on such obscurities. Regardless, for fans of weirdo new age, library records, and private press mysteries, this should be a nice sounding addition to your collection!
