[ aquarius records — Electronic ]

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Showing results 2451 through 2500 of 5033.

There's nothing new about hip hop headz stealing wholesale from the Blue Note catalog. Never has there been a collection more ripe for the sampling, And years of funky jazzy hip hop can attest to that. So what's all the fuss about? Why is this new Madlib Blue Note record getting so much attention? Not sure exactly. On the surface, it sounds like it could be any group, with a knack for simple funky beats and a deft hand at sampling. I think maybe the key is choice of source material. In the case of Shades Of Blue, it's totally impeccable: Donald Byrd, Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, Andrew Hill, Bobby Hutcherson, Wayne Shorter and more. But Madlib is more than just a competent sampler. He's managed to transform classic jazz and funk into a strangely appealing modern hybrid, by enlisting a bunch of musicians to flesh out the original recordings, many from nicely worn records (replete with snaps and cracks and that warm old record fuzz), adding some scratching, and funky beats, as well as some rapping on a few tracks, and then weaving all of those elements into a catchy, jazzy, funky whole. Nothing ground breaking here, but it is definitely a great party record or laid back late night listen.

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Despite her country-western look on the cover, this is Madonna with William Orbit again, continuing the rather successful electronica efforts of her last album, "Ray of Light". You'll be/have been hearing it.

Disco heads take notice! When we first got this white-sleeve 12" in the store and gave it a whirl on the turntable everyone here was sure they were hearing the sounds of some lost obscure disco platter circa '77. In actuality this 12" is a brand new release put out on the Solardisco label, which just so happens to be run by the artist Maelstrom, whose deft touch in cutting, pasting and recording vintage disco sounds is displayed on this edits EP. No doubt he hit his target right on. The sweeping horns, the cosmic vibrations, the Paradise Garage, Patrick Cowley and Giorgio Moroder influences are wielded with pride. With folks like Prins Thomas, Lindstrom and James Murphy already geeking out over him and playing his edits out when they DJ, it's just a matter of time before the Glasgow based Maelstrom becomes a household name, in houses where disco is in high rotation at any rate!

Second single from Chicago electro pimp Marlon Magas (he and wife / Metalux member Bridgette Wilson also run the squeaky clean underground electronic superstore Weekend Records And Soap!), formerly of no wave supergroup Lake Of Dracula and Detroit rawk legends Couch. Sad to say, the vocals are the weak spot here... and such a very weak, distracting spot it is! Remove them, and

Berlin-based, Detroit-raised Magda makes minimal techno for people who love Umberto and Demdike Stare! She did a Fabric mix that started off with a Goblin track, and the first cut on this debut full-length of her own productions is called "Get Down Goblin", so you know she's got a thing for vintage Italian horror soundtrack prog-funk. Another track is titled "Doom Disco", and that's sorta the concept for this whole dark and groovy album, replete with eerie echoes and subtle whip-cracks, music for a darkened, desperate dancefloor. Sometimes the propulsive beats thump like the tell-tale heart, at other times they take a backseat to the hauntological electronic atmospheres. "Get Down Goblin" begins with the creepy caresses of a keyboard in horror movie mode, shimmery, ominous, before percolating rhythms bubble up, jittery grooves commence, and you can get down indeed to her off kilter, zombified funk. And so it goes. Later, the likes of "Little Bad Habits" ride on steady beats interspersed with atonal piano stabs and tinklings and other eerily abstract, almost modern classical flourishes, clearly suspense film inspired, in fact that one reminds us a bit of David Shire's classic score to the Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3. We're smitten, From The Fallen Page is totally techno that's up our alley as fans of anything Goblin-y... Recommended!

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RSI is another UK label trafficking in difficult and totally original electronic music (like countrymates Fflint Central). It's a shame that they only make cd-rs. I find it hard to believe they wouldn't be able to sell 1000 cds, but it hardly makes a difference, because this stuff is so good. This is easily the most difficult of the bunch. An honest to goodness noise record. Well, sort of. It begins with chopped up opera singers (not literally), stuttering blue note drum loops and skittering high hats that, by track two, has turned into a noisy sort-of-rhythm, with squealing high end electonic reeds, and skull scraping, ultra distorted bursts of Merzbow-ish NOISE that coalese into some sort of sadistic barely discernable breakbeat! Even the 'quiet' track is built from eye watering sine waves and subsonic, speaker shredding low end. Totally brutal, and totally fucking great.

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Another one we never got around to reviewing for some reason. A home brewed psychedelia, fusing Eastern melodies, psych folk shimmer, strange electronics, cinematic soundscapes and dense layered noisiness, using a crazy assortment of instruments, and not-exactly-instruments, including pump organ, voice, contact mics on faulty electrical lines, melodica, toys, iron balls rolling on wooden floors, accordion, cellophane, air cans, tape decks for the blind, guitar, shruti box and lots more. Twisted droney avant folk noise weirdness that is definitely right up our alley...

Given the look and sound of this short EP, Magnetic Stripper could be some terminally obscure DIY-industrial-synth project circa 1982, with the tinny drum machines, noisy blurts from various synths, and plenty of references to Absolute Body Control, Minimal Man, The Units, and Chris Carter's synth moments within Throbbing Gristle. But in fact, this is the work of San Francisco's James Ellis, currently working and performing today. There are four short pieces that would make for a great teaser for a forthcoming record, with the weird-science array of disjointed synth melodies and electro-static squiggling, all hanging upon skeletal drum machine pulses. The title track has more of a bedroom project New Wave feel with its motorik rhythms and percolated step sequencing. The other three tracks take more of an early SPK direction with all of the drum rhythms taking on a lumbering pace, minus the snarled noise and grizzy imagery. Both sides of the 7" end on locked grooves, and the single comes with a retro-looking button. Very cool.

Lovely! After a series of singles on the trustworthy UK indie labels Static Caravan and Earworm, Magnetophone releases a full length on the newly-exciting 4AD label. This promising duo makes super lush electronica along the mellow lines of Boards of Canada, Two Lone Swordsmen, and Autechre, only more warm and less digital sounding. Shuffling percussion, masterful and careful use of distortion and echo result in this instrumental beauty of an album. Very nice minimal packaging too. Recommended.

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Wow. This is a strange one. When we last heard from Magnetophone, they were a warm fuzzy electronica outfit along the lines of Boards Of Canada or Two Lone Swordsmen. Muted and dreamy and sort of spacy. While The Man Who Ate The Man still has plenty of that warmth and fuzziness, and is still basically a blissed out dreamy electronic record, it's much more 'pop' this time around, and not just more pop, but more eighties pop. Shades of EMF, the Cure, Gene Loves Jezebel, INXS, Howard Jones, Jesus Jones, Depeche Mode, all those groups you loved way back when, but some how filtered through some strange gauzy 4AD elctrobliss filter. Warm warped organ fuzzscapes over strange bloopy bleepy eighties funkiness, super reverbed vocals, and lots of strangely familiar melodies. That may sound like a bizarre and maybe not entirely appealing mix, but the results are actually really quite gorgeous. The end result sometimes sounds a bit like Stereolab or some similarly inclined Too Pure band, sometimes not unlike your favorite modern rock station from the nineties, broadcasting all the hits into the ether, which are then intercepted by a satellite and sent back to earth, getting fuzzier and fuzzier as they struggle to make it back through the atmosphere, where they are then broadcast through the amps of a shoegaze-y Neu! worshipping rock band, the whole thing given a fuzzed out indistinct blissy patina by Tim Hecker or Philip Jeck. Good stuff!

MPEG stream: A Sad Ha Ha (Circled By Demise)
MPEG stream: ...And May Your Last Words Be A Chance To Make Things Better

Perhaps the following situation may be a bit foreign to those of you who don't work in the music industry but we'd bet that some version of this happens to everybody now and again. Every once in a while, I (Jim) will meet somebody whose best friend is in a band or I'll re-acquaint with an old high-school or college pal who has recently discovered GarageBand; and inevitably the conversation sways to "Oh, you work at a record store? You should really check this record out! You'll love it." It's then that the misanthropist in me wishes I was wearing Andee's tUMULt t-shirt which elegantly proclaims, "I hate your band," as the music proffered inevitably falls between the twin pillars of musical mediocrity: Dave Matthews and Hootie & The Blowfish. Instead, there's usually a smile, a nod, and the non-critique, "oh, that sounds nice!" hoping the conversation will turn to other matters. So when Ashis Mahapatra contacted me a while ago about his newfound love with digital synthesis, I was a bit nervous. Here's a genuinely great person who I hadn't been in touch with since college; fortunately, his record is FUCKING AWESOME, so I really didn't have to worry about dancing around the subject of a crappy record. Enough of that for a protracted introduction. Onto the meat of the record... Orange Of is an album that fans of Fennesz, Tim Hecker, and Keith Fullerton Whitman will drool over, densely packed with guitars blurred, fizzled, and refracted through the polygon abstractions of Max/MSP techniques. A beautiful shimmer of tapped guitar tones hovers above a thick pool of drone harmonics at the album's beginning, slipping and sliding through micro-glissandos before erupting in a dense Kevin Shield's explosion of narcotic distortion and tone-bending half-melodies. Mahapatra doesn't allow the computer to do too much of the talking for him, as he's certainly keen on grounding this album on the fundamentals of songwriting as swaying instrumental waltzes and elegant melodic phrases nestled in Mahapatra's vast oceans of post-shoegazing digitality. A highly recommended release from one code-slinging guitarist whose bound for great things.

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It's been a very long time since Robert Hampson has released a Main album and an even longer time since he's produced a *great* Main album. Ablation changes that, although those who would be expecting the deconstructed hypno-rock of Motion Pool or Hydra-Calm will be disappointed; but those who had followed Hampson's trajectory starting with the last few Main records about a decade ago into spatialized electro-acoustics only to rediscover his infatuation with the drone which finally brought him back to the guitar as a principle instrument will certainly understand where this record is coming from. Hampson is still working at the storied GRM studios in Paris, and there is an infusion of the classic aesthetic of what came out of GRM within Ablation (notably Parmegiani and Ferrari), but at the same time he does link it back, if in a subtle way, to the mesmerism which girded the Main productions in the '90s. That said, any connections to his former group, Loop would be quite a stretch indeed. On Ablation, Hampson has recruited Stefan Mathieu - a brilliant drone technician in his own right whom we've not heard from in ages - and the pairing works seamlessly, even as it clearly slants towards Hampson's vision of a cold disconnection dispensed in overlapping hissing layers and hypnotic patterns of abstracted sound. The percussive klank of a prepared piano on "I" is a bit of a red herring for what's found throughout Ablation especially on "II" and "III", is a series of slow ellipses of churning guitar drones and golden tonal coronas drifting with all of the uneasy beauty of an android's dream. The closing track "IV" bends along a radiophonic arc with ether crackle and metallic rasping and slow motion pixelations from a sharply rendered synth that forms the coda to the album. Organic. Liquid. Electric. Motorized. Bleak. Holy. All of those adjectives apply to this fantastic album. Welcome back, Main!

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The evolution of Robert Hampson's career has employed a steady skeletonization of the guitar -- possibly to the point that he doesn't even play guitar anymore on any of his records, but at least to the point where he's producing nothing that resembles a guitar. After dissolving his first band (the incendiary hypno-rock group Loop) and fronting Main, Hampson first dropped all drum tracks, then removed the bass, and gradually shifted towards sampling technologies over the guitar itself. "Transiency" is a short 20 minute EP, released by longtime Main / Loop / Hampson fan Kid 606 on the Tigerbeat 6 label. True to the last couple of releases, Hampson offers studied compositions of electronic minimalism and concrete flourishes that have been clipped against gaping voids of quiet spaces.

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

SORRY. It's been a while since Fat Cat offered anything from their outstanding series of split 12" singles, and the much ballyhooed release from laptop-guitarists Main and Fennesz has been well worth the wait. Main -- now solely under the propriety of Robert Hampson -- offers an exceptionally well done set of granular synthesis applied to the source material purported to be guitar drones, bowed cymbals, and homebuilt stringed instruments. Little of the textural sounds of the original remains within Hampson's compositions, which become sterile investigations of microscopic sounds fluctuating with digital crackle. Similarly, Fennesz relies upon digital manipulation to reveal trace elements of guitar driven avant-pop amidst the dominant masses of warm buzzings and electric fractures.

NOW ON VINYL!! We love dancehall, the beat, the rhythms, the toasting especially, the lurching hypnotic groove of it, but what we, and lots of other folks have always had trouble with, was the lyrical content, the whole scene in fact, rife with violence, and homophobia and misogyny, much like American hip hop, but even more fucked up and seriously unpalatable. So much so that plenty of folks around aQ land who might otherwise dig dancehall big time, have sworn off it completely. UNTIL NOW. Diplo and Switch, bring their twisted and tweaked approach to beats and grooves, and whip up one the wildest, craziest dancehall records EVER. And what better way to thumb their noses at traditional dancehall than by getting a whole gaggle of female rappers and toasters to team up with the more well know male Jamaican dancehall vocalists, often verbally sparring back and forth in the same song. The sound is supercharged, electrifying, the beats banging, the samples bizarre but perfect, a tangled technicolor musical backdrop over which the vocalists do their THANG. Morricone-esque guitars, the clip clop of horse hooves, ringing cell phones, horse whinnies, dizzying looped rhythms, a killer stuttery beat, tons of woozy low end, everything chopped and hiccuppy, an awesome deep growly bit of toasting, and some cool looped Santigold vox, before she gets to spit her own bad ass verse, and that's just the first song. The whole disc destroys though, relentless non stop hip shaking head bobbing sweaty sexy speaker destroying musical magic, some tracks bliss out into some sunshiney reggae grooviness, all laid back, infused with some awesome smoky sultry vox, other tracks get raw and rough, with buzzing guitars and fuzzed out bass lines, plenty of clatter and crunch, others are fizzly and festive, with vocodered vocals and skittery beats, and still others are dense tightly wound jams, drenched in effects and tangled up with rollicking block rocking beats and squiggly melodies. Even as an instrumental record, this would kill, but the vocalists push it over the top, tongue twisting flows all over the place, lightning fast sputters, growly drawls, head spinning back and forth and of course plenty of whoops and whooooooos... Summer dancehall party record of the year for sure, with awesome Major Lazer cartoon cover art, very reminiscent of the classic old Scientist albums!! So recommended. Every time we play this in the store, someone comes up to see what the heck it is!

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Most of us were big fans of the Major Lazer full length from last year, but even those of us who didn't totally fall in love with with it are going crazy about this new ep of remixes especially the banging new track with M.I.A. that leads it all off. Major Lazer is the blasting, dance inducing, dancehall influenced project of master producers Diplo and Switch and with folks like Buraka Som Sistema and Thom Yorke giving them the remix treatment this is start to finish adrenaline pumping, body moving blasts of ecstasy. If we were hired as party planners for someone looking to put on a rager that we would want to lose our minds at we would urge them to blast this so loud loud followed by other smoking new releases from M.I.A., Omar Souleyman, and maybe that Shangaan Electro compilation of killer new South African dance jams. Maybe part of the magic is that it's an ep which makes this so perfect, there is no overkill or filler or duds. Every single second hits so damn right. And as cheap as it's priced this one is a no brainer!

MPEG stream: Sound Of Siren (Feat. M.I.A. & Busy Signal)
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THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY.

This has all the wunnerful markings of another Uwe Schmidt project (aka Senor Coconut, Los Samplers, Atom and Tea Time, Midisport, Geez 'n Gosh, Lisa Carbon, Datacide, Dandy Jack, LB, Bund Deutscher Programmierer, and more!), although we're supposed to think it's a couple of his compadres. Complete with an almost-believable bio that's just a little off [as in "he already set standards very high for the complete genre of Latinotronics" and "In search of t(r)opical sounds beyond power (Kraft) and plant (Werk) they have intuitively recognized and consolidated the affinity of both styles not only to each other"], the music is similarly just a little off. It's mambo and other Perez-Prado-inspired tunes, yes, but smoothly dance-ified with tinny sampled drums, Kraftwerky synth burbles, all of which are cut up, spiced with ping pong percussive thwacks 'n woozy horns, and reassembled into a most pleasant listen that's nicely accessible despite its blurpy loopiness. A strong listen all the way through, no filler. Recommended, especially for fans of Senor Coconut and Perez Prado!

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Been waiting for this one now for a while now, a killer collaboration between Northwestern drone/drifters Mamiffer (aka Aaron and Faith), and Finnish hypno-rockers Circle (aka Jussi and Mika), and this foursome whip up some blissed out avant garde minimal dreaminess, utilizing an old organ, in a nineteenth century stone church in Circle's hometown of Pori. The organ's lush chordal whir may form the basis of these tracks, but they are fleshed out by all sorts of elements, some you might recognizes from the members' other bands, some seem to have been conjured from the ether. Long stretched out tones, hazy layers of sonic gauze, wild keening violin melodies (courtesy of Mr. Eyvind Kang), scrapes and creaks, murky percussion, heavily processed vokills buried way down in the mix, the tracks super dynamic and nuanced, slipping easily from hushed shimmer, to howling squall, the mellower parts, truly mesmerizing, with hints of Morricone surfacing in the twang flecked dusky drifts, while the heavier/louder/more chaotic moments seem to be channeling all manner of noisiness throughout the ages, hints of free form floorcore, Japanoise, heavy drone, black ambience, but all masterfully sculpted into brooding, dramatic swaths of majestic minimalism, that seems to be constantly slipping into maximal sonic overload. Hushed and tranquil one second, tense and intense the next, whispery and woozy transformed into caustic crunch and heart-of-the-sun psychedelia. Some tracks unfold like some lost Circle B-side, Mika's strange vocals draped over flurries of acoustic guitar, simple tribal percussion, and that ever present organ drone, while others begin life sounding like some court music from the past, before morphing into something more ominous and gothic, a blackened neo-folk that would sound right at home on Cold Spring. Elsewhere guitar rumbles blossom blackly into something almost SUNN-like, which is countered by some Circle-like dramatic hypno-prog weirdness, operatic and over the top, before finally, resolving with what might be the prettiest of the bunch, the near ten minute closer, a gorgeously hypnotic slab of rumbling, whirring, shimmering dronemusick, that's equal parts barely there modern minimalism, and rib cage rattling low end assault, the end result, both harrowingly heavy, and blissfully dreamy. This vinyl version is LIMITED TO 800 COPIES, in deluxe two part jackets, the fancy inner sleeves housed in a deluxe slipcover.

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Wow! We were blown away when we first heard Nigerian organist Mammane Sani Abdullaye's La Musique Electronique Du Niger record reissued last year on Sahel Sounds (and now sadly out of print, it seems). Reissued from a rare cassette that originally came out in 1978, we thought that was Sani's only recording, but now Sahel Sounds has unearthed this doozy of a release, which takes Sani's minimal organ pop to a whole new Afro-futuristic level. Taken from unreleased studio sessions made in the mid-to-late eighties, when Sani began programming his own rhythms, the music here, derived from Saharan folk-ballads re-imagined for a cosmic future, is more spacious and exploratory, laid back and atmospheric, yet still loping, circular and groovy, perfect for astral-cruising across planetary deserts. For fans of the Ethiopiques series or that Personal Space electronic outsider RnB compilation we always raved about, and library music heads and minimal synth-lovers will find lots to love here too.

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A big turn for Mr. Jacob Mandell, whose previous releases have been sort of stomping. "Underling" is filled with enigmatic slashes of electronic sound and digitally simulated tectonic rumbles make for album one would expect from Stilluppsteypa or John Duncan. This is the second in a 12 part series from Kodama. Very little information is given either about the record or for the series, but if this is an indication of what the future holds, things look quite interesting.

There was a time when Mike Paradinas wasn't all tongue-in-cheek and could give the Aphex Twin a run for his money...now that mu-ziq is stock on that one James Brown sample, we can give our attention to Jake Mandell's oblique melodies and electronic breakbeats.

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

SORRY. After a number of IDM records for Worm Interface and Carpark, Jake Mandell turns to the formidable German label Force Inc for his most club-friendly album full of Moroder-esque production techniques of modulating synth patterns, topped with big techno beats, terse house organ chords, and spastic �-ziq like spastic rhythmic flailing.

Questions, questions, questions. Boy does this new release from Germany's Manes raise some questions. Like, how did this exemplar of raw, primitive, droney black metal end up making melodic trip hop? And how did they get Ozzy Osbourne (or, in truth, his close sonic approximation) to handle the vocals?? And, with all these changes, didn't this genre-fucking, once-but-no-longer black metal act release this disc on Garm of Ulver's Jester label, alongside recent works by Ulver themselves, another band, along with Arcturus and to a lesser exent Mayhem, who delight in upsetting their (former) fans who obsess about "true" black metal? Certainly if it's old-school black metal purity you're looking for, forget about the new Manes, stick with their 1999 "Under Ein Blodraud Maane". The open-minded, however, might actually dig this. It's only about 10 percent metal, with lots of samples and beats and layers of noise, and tons of Survivor-esque melodic pathos. It all kinda sounds like one epic song, the Ozzy meets The Cure style vocals soaring over junglist / tech step Amen breaks, with what heavy metal riffing there is being gloom-pop catchy a la Katatonia. There's even a track that drops in what sounds like Spandau Ballet's saxophonist. Other parts have a Pink Floyd-gone-industrial vibe. In The Woods meets Aphex Twin, perhaps? Solefald meets Cyclefly at a rave? Quite a shocking transformation from the howling-at-the-moon, spikes n' corpsepaint black metalness of their earlier material!! Now, it might have been a more interesting progression if Manes had gone the other way, done this in 1999 and then come out with the black metal of "Blodraud"...especially since most metallers who get into the realm of electronica tend to produce albums that are at least 3 years behind the times. And Manes haven't avoided that problem. Yet, somehow, we can't help but enjoy this, it's got a certain sincerity and quality and spark, and sheer chutzpah to it that works for us. MPEG Download: "Death Of The Genuine" [/audio/manesdeath.mp3]

MPEG stream: Death Of The Genuine

Calling all skweee-jays! Or would-be skweee-jays. We've got four new 7" singles of fresh skweee straight from the source, imported from Flogsta Danshall in Finland. They're in plain white sleeves, the only art to be found here on the labels. If you've followed our other skweee recommendations (both Museum Of Future Sound comps, the more recent Skweee Tooth collection) then you know all about this Scandinavian DIY electro b-boy instrumental 8-bit phenomenon, and you'll also already be familiar with the strange names of the artists on these four singles. Flogsta boss Limonious' slinky "Swedish Pommak" already wormed its way into our ears via the Museum Of Future Sound Vol. 2, though the jittery yet spacey b-side "Hurri Up!" we hadn't heard before. And all the tracks by Mangrove, Mrs. Qeada, and Joxaren (all three artists hailing from Sweden) are new to us as well. Suffice to say, if you like skweee, you'll like these cuts, presented here in skweee's ideal format. Joxaren's "Ritam Bluz" is a chiming, exotic, slightly sinister groove. Mrs Qeada's laidback "Post-Pubertal" bleeps and bloops nicely along aided by robotic handclaps and digital hisses (oddly, her MySpace page lists Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum as her only influence). Maybe our fave of the batch, Mangrove's "Angry Animals", is a bit of a fractured funky banger, bringing down some rigid buzzin' beats. The flip is pretty solidly crunchy / catchy too. The various other A- and B- sides on these 7"s are all pretty darn skweelicious as well! Seriously, if you're a DJ, just throw one of these on in your set for instant skweee cred. Listening at home is fun too. Go here: http://skweee.com/ for a lot more interesting skweee info, including interviews with some of the folks we just mentioned.

One half of avant experimental dronescapers the Starving Weirdos strikes out on his own, teaming up with some other mysterious noisemaker to form Manilapede and craft this disc of 'dune rock', which is essentially a Starving Weirdos record writ buzzing and black, super distorted and blown out. A series of thick undulating drones, cobbled together from dense churning slo-mo metal riffage, buried hiss-like skree, which to these ears sounds like some sort of barely recognizable vokills, peppered with bits of weird percussion (which on the opening track sounds like someone hitting a chainlink fence with a two-by-four), Manilapede are basically some sort of avant-SUNNO))), and "Peninsula Overdrive" lays out their modus operandi pretty perfectly, a sprawling buzzscape, roils and grinds, the sounds so distorted they seem to ooze, the low end rumble and thrum, impossibly thick, shot through with streaks of high end melody, wrapped around the aforementioned chainlink fence percussion, it's a creepy, haunting bit of mysterious dronedirgedoom, that barring its experimental leanings, holds up pretty damn well alongside the various more metal practitioners of similar sounding heaviness. And that opening track is good enough that we would have been perfectly happy if the whole record was just an hour of that and nothing else. Thankfully, the rest of the record is essentially variations of that same sound, multiple movements in a singular sprawling epic songsuite, trancelike riffs are blurred and smeared and stretched into loooooong streaks, then layered and set to undulating, various bits of crunch and glitch and hiss are harnessed to form skeletal rhythms, giving the proceedings an obliquely industrial vibe, glacial and corrosive, buzzy and fuzzy and near static, dune rock is essentially a more experimental drone metal, a sort of modern minimalism applied to the new wave of dirge/drone/doom, and the results we are happy to report, are as awesome as you might imagine. Hypnotic and heavy, droney and dark, murky and mesmerising and in its own way, pretty fucking metal.

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Released as a part of a 7" series of modern ambient artists inspired by Brian Eno's groundbreaking Ambient series, local San Francisco painter and sound artist Marc Manning (formerly of Tied To The Branches) delivers this epic slice of cosmic gloom. Four hazy planetary lullabies of soft-edged electronics and guitarwork, cut by distant floating vocals and a wayward descending trajectory. In addition to the 7" there is a cd of one long 70 minute track called "October", which sounds like the doomed travels of a silent running spaceship far from home. Beautifully packaged with a 33rpm hand stamped 4 track 7", a 70 minute cd, artist portrait, double sided insert, 'ambience letter' insert, and a download code. Limited to 150 copies!

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MPEG stream: Saturn
MPEG stream: October (bonus cd)

Easily the coolest release from this year's Black Friday Record Store Day, and thankfully one that didn't disappear after the day, Joe Mansfield's Beat Box is a loving homage to the drum machines that have driven so much of the music we love - and holy cow, is this total record nerd / gear geek nirvana, a huge hardcover book, featuring page after page of glossy shots of pretty much every drum machine we've ever seen, as well as TONS we had never even heard of. In addition to pix of the drum machines themselves, there are also drawings, paintings, shots of the original packaging, old ads, even schematics and instruction manuals, totally obsessive and totally amazing! The drum machines covered go all the way from the fifties to the present day, big old hulking behemoths, to tiny toy like gizmos, the machines themselves displaying some incredible industrial design, the sort of thing that won't just appeal to drum machine dorks, but also design buffs, and heck, even folks who just dig big beautiful art books. Of course most aQ-ers probably find themselves in all three camps! We got a taste of this book on this past April's Record Store Day, with the release of a sort of mini-Beat Box, that featured a couple pages from the book, as well as two exclusive flexi-discs (we still somehow have a couple of those left, just ask!), but even that didn't prepare us for how crazy cool the actual book is. And it's not just the book itself either, the book comes housed in an oversized hard box/slipcover/leatherette case, that sort of has the feel of an actual drum machine, and in fact, one side of the box is printed with the schematic for the Rhythm Composer TR-808 drum machine, while the other side features little cutouts, one that houses a 7" single, with the legendary "Paul Revere" beat, as well as a cassette tape with bonus beats. The book also features a download card with beats from the various drum machines featured in the book! Easily just about the coolest Christmas gift we can imagine this year, even if (and maybe especially if) it's just a present for yourself!

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

SORRY.

We love getting to hear new sounds when they seem to appear from out of nowhere. Such is the case with this, the debut release from Mantle Sound Core, the project of continental drifter Mark Shvartsman, a onetime SF resident now making his home in Santa Cruz when he's not trekking across the states with, quite literally, an ARSENAL or machines. Having recently witnessed Mantle Sound Core in action in one of the most unlikely of venues - a mansion in San Francisco's uber elegant Twin Peaks neighborhood with an unbelievable window view of the the city at night - we can safely say we have NEVER seen anything like it before. Watching Shvartsman and his setup - numerous synths, drum machines galore, multiple mixers, maybe about 30 cassette players, and a killer lightshow - brought to mind many of electronic music's great visionaries, including everyone from Klaus Schulze to Aphex Twin to Boards of Canada. At the same time, MSC will no doubt appeal to fans of recent electro maestros like Umberto, Zombi, Etienne Jaumet, and stuff making the rounds on Honest Jon's. Unlike many of these artists, however, MSC doesn't exist within any sort of network that will lead to instant recognition from a certain fanbase. Instead, Shvartsman appears to be on an entirely different path altogether. He even went as far as to make a film in Death Valley with a handful of collaborators, which he then created a live soundtrack for. With this in mind, one can easily detect the cinematic nature of the music. The recordings here are a compilation of live performance from MSC's West Coast Spring tour and previous ambient studio recordings. The colossal journey that is this tape begins with a vaguely Italian horror styled intro with creeping industrial ambience lurking above majestic synth swells. Throughout there are strong melodies that help to set this apart from being an exercise in mere droniness. At times the feeling is somewhat ominous, but always wondrous and beautiful. Buried rhythms churn below the synthed out glory, with distant vocals occasionally coming in to add yet another dimension. There are also some extended workouts of Jeck-ian ambience that are dreamy and a perfect comedown for the more harrowing moments. Elsewhere krauty percolations keep things moving forward before hushed atmospheres take things into the sunset. Wow. As is often the case, these tapes are limited - as in, like, 25 copies, so act now before it's too late. We feel this is just the beginning for Shvartsman and his wholly unique vision, and we can't wait to see what the future holds.

Compiled by legendary musician / producer / remixer Kurtis Mantronik, this is a collection of tracks from the late '70s and early '80s, all of which he considers not only super influential on his own work, but also typical of the groundbreaking dance / hip hop / electro / disco / house music being made in New York at this time. If you're a fan of ESG or any of the music on the two "Disco not Disco" comps, you're gonna love this too. It's a fantastic collection of tracks covering everyone from Art of Noise to Yellow Magic Orchestra, Visage, Yello and T-La Rock. More than easily standing up to today's scrutiny, none of the tracks sound dated in a bad way at all. Another great comp from Soul Jazz, the London store/label that brought us the In the Beginning There Was Rhythm comp, the 100-400% Dynamite collections, etc. Highly recommended!

RealAudio clip: That's the Joint
RealAudio clip: Computer Games
RealAudio clip: Pleasure Boys

Mapstation is the work of Stefan Schneider - better known for his work in To Rococo Rot. Using a lot of gurgling electronics and sampled live instrumentation, Mapstation sounds like a rock band trying to pull off what Oval does live, but realizing their mistake half way through the process and turning back to the laptop. Mellow almost noirish electronica melodies that aren't too far from the early Tarwater albums. But, if you've never heard To Rococo Rot's stunning albums, we suggest you start with them first instead of Mapstation.

Although they didn't start out that way, for this album, the musical entity that goes by the name Mar has become a mini super group of glistening glacial proportions. Its central figure is one Mr. Kyle Reidy originally from Arkansas, but its guest membership here includes Jimmy Lavalle of The Album Leaf and Mum's Samuli Kosminen. Recorded at Syrland Studios in Iceland (that would be Sigur Ros' studio!), The Silence is a drowsy drifting affair with whispery male vocals that not unsurprisingly nestles in perfectly with the Lavalle and Kosminen's main projects. Reidy mines the aching emotional depths with such a delicate touch countered with a grand regality that has become the trademark of Icelandic bands -- articulating both the monumental and the minute, the mighty and the frail in single sweeping elegant gestures. Guess it goes without saying that we'd highly recommend this to fans of Mum and The Album Leaf (and probably Sigur Ros too)... and/or folks who like their music to seek out the heartstrings in a most shimmery fashion. Lovely!

MPEG stream: Silence
MPEG stream: Bows

Our friend Adam who runs the super cool Crucial Blast label, has, for over 6 years now, been quietly (and not so quietly) putting out some of the coolest shit around. From crusty Finnish metal to droning electronica to sparse folk to brutal power electronics. This new series of cd-r's, limited to 100 copies and nicely packaged in oversized DVD cases will only be available via Aquarius records (unless you get them directly from Crucial Blast). So don't blow it... Marax, named for an asthma medication, is the long running experimental electronic project of one Eric Crowe. For Crucial Blast, Crowe decided to do an expansive project focused on death and dying. 12 cd-rs released monthly for a year. LIMITED TO ONLY 25 COPIES each and hand numbered. This is volume one in the series and is very dark and grim. A gritty, noisy and completely intense drone record. One of the best we've heard in a while actually. Very reminscent of Organum, Lustmord and that sort of thing. Funereal washes of chest-rattling low end and ear-scraping grit and dreamy (as in bad dreams) walls of monstrous thrum. Really great. And I'm sure if you want, we can get Adam at Crucial Blast to hook you up with all 12. But let us know quick.

RealAudio clip: The Pleasure In Grieving 1
RealAudio clip: The Pleasure In Grieving 2

Our friend Adam who runs the super cool Crucial Blast label, has, for over 6 years now, been quietly (and not so quietly) putting out some of the coolest shit around. From crusty Finnish metal to droning electronica to sparse folk to brutal power electronics. This new series of cd-r's, limited to 100 copies and nicely packaged in oversized DVD cases will only be available via Aquarius records (unless you get them directly from Crucial Blast). So don't blow it... This is volume two in Marax's 'For The Love Of Death' series of super limited cd-r's (LIMITED TO 25) thematically focused on death and dying. Where the first volume was slow brning drones ala Lustmord or Organum, volume two takes that drone and adds even more grit and static, with the resulting sound, much more akin to turnatablist Philip Jeck. But where Jeck's gritty soundscapes are dreamy and pastoral, Marax uses the antiquated sound to invoke memories of the long dead and times best forgotten. A dark and doomy trip down memory lane. Kind of like an Organum wax cylinder played on a decrepit old gramaphone with occasional anguished howls in the distance. Melodies surface but soon deteriorate into a wash of grit and grime. When the vocals come in it sort of sounds like Burzum played at 15 r.p.m. transmitted through tin can and twines. So fucked up and creepy and great. And as I said before, I'm sure if you want, we can get Adam at Crucial Blast to hook you up with all 12. But let us know quick.

RealAudio clip: Pass Away Into Heaven 2
RealAudio clip: Pass Away Into Heaven 3

As we mentioned on the last list, our friend Adam runs the super cool Crucial Blast label, and has, for over 6 years now, been quietly (and not so quietly) putting out some of the coolest shit around. From crusty Finnish metal to droning electronica to sparse folk to brutal power electronics. This new series of cd-r's, limited to 100 copies and nicely packaged in oversized DVD cases will only be available via Aquarius records (unless you get them directly from Crucial Blast). So don't blow it... This is volume THREE in Marax's 'For The Love Of Death' series of super limited cd-r's (LIMITED TO 25) thematically focused on death and dying. Where the first volume was slow burning drones ala Lustmord or Organum, and the second volume was griity and granular like a Philip Jeck record, Voulme three pulls it back a little toward a much more ambient excursion. Distant rumbles like passing traffic heard from underwater, with barely audible digital skitter and analog hiss, and occasional far-away feedback. Super minimal, but quite nice. This one would definitely appeal to fans of Bernhard Gunter and John Hudak. As we mentioned before, I'm sure we can get Adam at Crucial Blast to hook you up with all 12. But let us know quick.

RealAudio clip: Strange How The Dead Bleed Part 2
RealAudio clip: Suttee Part 2

As we mentioned on the last list, our friend Adam runs the super cool Crucial Blast label, and has, for over 6 years now, been quietly (and not so quietly) putting out some of the coolest shit around. From crusty Finnish metal to droning electronica to sparse folk to brutal power electronics. This new series of cd-r's, limited to 100 copies and nicely packaged in oversized DVD cases will only be available via Aquarius records (unless you get them directly from Crucial Blast). So don't blow it... This is volume FOUR in Marax's 'For The Love Of Death' series of super limited cd-r's (LIMITED TO 25) thematically focused on death and dying. Volume four is quite similar to volume three, with distant rumbles and faraway shimmers, gently panning from speaker to speaker, a hypnotic slow motion pulse, that is joined for the last ten minutes by what sounds like a train crossing signal way off in the distance. Another hyper minimal and very appealing installment in this awesome series (all this one clocks in at a quite short 16 minutes, good thing it's only 5.98). As we mentioned before, I'm sure we can get Adam at Crucial Blast to hook you up with all 12. But let us know quick.

RealAudio clip: Distant But Deafening Screams
RealAudio clip: The Fires Burn Cold

If you've enjoyed the recent ultra-dreamy releases from Tujiko Noriko or Lali Puna, Margo might tickle your fancy too! Each track washes over you gently with its lilting, angelic female vocals and delicate musicbox melodies darkened by the presence of IDM gelatinous squidge and crystalline splinters. Quite a mesmerizing combination. Two songs are simply called "Warm" and "Luminous", and those two words fit The Catnap perfectly.

MPEG stream: Warm
MPEG stream: Cloud's Juice

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

SORRY. With more than a dozen LPs (17 as of this date) released in less than a year or so, Markant's prolific output has been compared to an electronica diary by Drew from Matmos... Working remarkably similar to Boards of Canada and the Skam output, Markant excels at constructing beautiful and melancholic melodies over sputtering post-AFX electronica breakbeats. With so many of his records out, there's sure to be a dud. So our recommendations are for... Cat M-5, Cat M-14, Cat M-17 and Cat M-18, but we will do our best to keep as many of them in stock!

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