[ aquarius records — Electronic ]

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Showing results 2901 through 2950 of 5033.

U.K. import.

Ex-Talk Talk people making ethno-ambient bleepy music very much like Mouse on Mars. Subtle, measured, nice.

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SORRY. San Francisco's electronica maverick O.S.T. has unfortunately not been doing as well career-wise as he deserves, as several records which were originally intended for release Plug Research and Reflective got shelved by the labels. Not too smart on their part, as all are great. And thankfully, at least this one got a proper release at last. On the Pthalo label, Chris Douglas (aka O.S.T. as well as Rook Vallard) presents his third album as O.S.T. "Death Notice," which despite its morose title is his most delicate record. It's a collection of poetic vignettes of delicate electronica melodies. While the palette used is similar to O.S.T.'s previous abrasive work, there is an interest not so much in the caustic but the beautiful, resulting in an album not unlike Coil's rejected "Hellraiser" soundtracks or Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2". Recommended!

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SORRY. San Francisco's dandy of damaged electronica - Chris Douglas aka OST aka Rook Vallard aka Church Steps (when working with Mike Dial) - presents another installment from his increasingly prolific output. 'Deflect' is an epileptic album of erratic drum programming, skittering and sputtering alongside counterpoint flanges of digital bell-like resonations and oblique washed out melodies. It's actually quite close to the painterly electronica of Mouse On Mars though a bit more darkly hallucinatory and twisted.

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SORRY. Along with the roster of L.A.'s Plug Research, O.S.T. dispels any notion that West Coast electronica need be sunny and pleasant. San Francisco's maverick has also recorded for the Worm Interface label as Rook Vallard and here, sculpts malevolent soundtracks of distant washes of noise which have been pushed intensely into the foreground. Highly recommended.

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SORRY. This album was intended for release on Jonah Sharp's Reflective label but never saw light of day, until Phthalo manufactured 250 cd-r's of the album. O.S.T.'s metallic tones and piercing squiggles sit above crunchy distorted beats for a very dark and alienating piece of electronica.

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SORRY. Yup, this is one of the limited Phthalo cd-r releases. O.S.T. took his array of computers and electronic gizmos to the academic realms of Mills Collage. Retaining his caustic sensibility, Chris Douglas (aka O.S.T./Rook Vallard) mimics the late '60s sound of academic computer music within the more structural sounds of post-Aphex electronica.

Ominous shadows lurk in the dank maze of sewer tunnels beneath the city, and O.S.T. has lured them to the surface. Well, not literally, but this does sound pretty close to what you might imagine... that is, if the tunnels were inhabited with tiny electronic spiders weaving webs of prickly circuitry. Subdued bleep'n'click rhythms keep things on an even keel through the layers of synthetic strings, severely processed samples and vaporous drones. This was probably pretty great to experience live in a darkened club setting, but you surely can scoop up a copy of this limited cd-r and recreate an equally suitable atmosphere at home. Just shy of an hour long.

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SORRY. This cd-r from the maverick Phthalo label showcases San Francisco's O.S.T. at his most punishing. Recorded live at the rotating if sporadic Static club, O.S.T.'s arsenal of distorto-Aphex-crunch beats smash against agressive melodic chords, all wrangled through his banks of effects. A very nasty piece of electronica.

Chris Douglas (aka O.S.T. / Rook Vallard / Rook Vallade) returns with more of his 'chemically imbalanced', willfully difficult electronica. For "Seimlste," Douglas appears to have done away with much of the post-Aphex drum machine damage which dominated many of his earlier recordings in favor of incredibly caustic Max / MSP filters that are heavy on the DSP downpitching and fractalization to achieve a ton of digital snow, covering O.S.T.'s electronic wasteland, at times occasionally venturing into territory similar to MB's early recordings of misanthropic ambience.

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Perhaps his most polished work to date, O.S.T. covers a lot of sonic terrain on his newest album. As opposed to many of his previous releases on which you might encounter just one of his sonic personas - extremely abrasive confrontations, spacey atmospherics, arachnidian electronic glitchiness - on D.N.P.W.W.O. he incorporates all of them. This provides for a vast contrast from one track to the next, but not jarringly so. You'll get the droning heaviness, clusters of electronic shards, distorted carnivalesque melodies (check out "Jeux"), gluey minimal pulses and more throughout these eighteen tracks.

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Around here at aQ we live for the moments of musical discovery that seem to appear out of nowhere. On a rare occasion those moments are created by an artifact dropped off in the store by the creator himself. In our age of internet buzz and blogosphere strip mining, it's exciting and refreshing to be floored by a piece of proper wax passed on in person, without us knowing a damn thing about it beforehand. This record represents one of these moments, and Laws, the brand new lp from LA's William Marshall, aka Octavius, is really blowing our minds right now, so much so that we absolutely had to jump on the chance to make it record of the week! A dizzying assemblage of fucked up outsider post witch house, damaged and deranged avant industrial and whispered, hiss-wreathed melancholic brooding downer experi-techno-pop! Laws is a multidimensional excursion through the depths of urban isolationism. The dead dreams of metropolis living and lifelong plans falling apart seem to be woven into the sonic fabric. You're all alone in this burned out city, and it's a dark, dark time. The sound is grinding, buzzing, thumping and industrial. The beats are constructed with rusted rebar shards, rattling about the charnel house floor, like some subwoofer-shook bones long forgotten. Octavius' caustic and restrained sound world creates an intensely claustrophobic mood. On tracks like "Apartments" and "Of Mask and Money", the sounds of sharpening knives and blistering white noise blasts commingle with a tense, gasping for breath vocal delivery. As the songs flow onward, layer upon layer of noisy mechanical skree stack up against beautifully stark and forlorn melodies. Haunting, discordant synth stabs add subtle harmonic depth to the tunes, as the vocals, seemingly hacked to bits, syllables left out or cut short, writhe to the beat. The sounds are abrasive and damaged and robotic, but there is never too much going on at one time and everything sits in the mix in such a way that the songs really breathe. It's got that hypnotic sonic subtlety of Berlin era Bowie mixed with the pulsating noisy gnash of Throbbing Gristle. Speaking of Bowie, one of the raddest moments on Laws comes in the form of a "cover" of "Breaking Glass". The low slung, heroin sheen funk of the original is replaced by a fiercely mechanical drum machine stomp, some heavy as fuck JK Flesh-like digitally distorted guitar chugs bashing with the beat, while cascading doppler blips and scraping synths swirl around the stereo field. The only recognizable element are the lyrics, although delivered in the by now signature manner in which Octavius uses his voice, and that is to say fractured and corrosive, hissing hypnosis. Totally bent and completely AMAZING! There are moments of dark meditation, such as "CCC CCC" and "331 155". Moody, drifting soundscapes of splintered metallic klang, ping-ponging singing bowls, bolstered with aphotic, creepy crawly Carpenter-like synth drones. Beautifully oscillating cinematic ambience laid over what sounds like a far off string section unfurling some somber, elegiac melody. Psychic TV's "Silver and Gold" comes to mind, except with a mechanical bass drum throb twisting beneath the surface. These hazy, murky moments of sonic darkness serve as tension builders. Haunting and anxious and mesmerizing respites from the churning corrosive elements that make up the bulk of Laws. "Liars & Thieves" is definitely the centerpiece of Laws. Abusive electro-psychosis, uncomfortable and polluted with an industrialized cacophony, and scrap metal pounding rhythms, Octavius allows his reflections on failure and anonymity to unravel in a harrowing, stream of conscious cypher. Imagine Tricky rapping over Coil's "Fire Of The Green Dragon". Paranoid and demented, the noise and words melding to create a bleak miasma of isolation. Moody and tense and wholly original. Laws pushes all the right buttons for us. It references the WAVES (minimal/NO/cold/synth), without getting mired in any particular sub-genre. It's noisy and abrasive and grim, reminding us of the gnarlier moments of Coil and TG, but produced in such a subtle manner that new layers of sound present themselves with each listen. It's got enough Suicide like swagger as not to get totally bogged down in its mechanized, vitriol pummel. Hypnotic and tensely mesmerizing, the album as a whole is so consistent in its vibe, we find ourselves listening to it over and over and over again, just to get lost, deeper and deeper, in its seedy sonic underbelly. Packaged lovingly in a minimalist, silver embossed white card stock sleeve, with a beautiful 16 page book of lyrics as well as some killer collage work by Brooklyn based artist Justin Sloane. Do yourself a favor and snatch this twisted gem up quick, really some of the most mind fuckingly special and original music we've heard around here in a long time!

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Some seriously twisted WTF hip hop for fans of Sensational, the Pharcyde and the like, blending warped home brewed studio fuckery, with some classic hip hop. He's a member of Deadverse Massive, along with Dalek and Destructo Swarmbots.

Although the opening track "HiLO" seems to start things out in a similar fashion, as a whole SunnyPsyOp is definitely not as Numanesque and pop-oriented as Ohgr's previous album Welt. So if you were craving more of the same, unfortunately you'll just have to keep spinning the former 'cause this takes a somewhat different path. However, it's not completely off the map of Ohgr. If you're seeking more of a bridge between Skinny Puppy (the project that Ohgr is best know for, where he recorded as Nivek Ogre) and the abovementioned album - something somewhat more somber and abstract, more skin-crawling and mind-bending - this might be for you. Whereas Welt might've made you want to get up and move about, SunnyPsyOp might make you want to settle down into brood mode with a sturdy set of headphones. Shades of Nivek Ogre's Skinny Puppy roots surface here - perhaps as a result of the recent reunion of said group (that's right, we can expect a new album from Cevin Key, Ogre and co. very shortly! - listen... are those celebratory cheers coming up from the catacombs?). Of course it sounds great. Much like his SP bandmate, sonic craftsman / mad genius Key, Ogre's gained another well-suited, producer / multi-instrumentalist in Mark Walk (Pigface, Ruby). He skillfully fills your ears with rich synthesizer textures, sharply puncturing beats and intricate details and captures Ogre's deeply emotive and affected voice in fine form. With cover art by Camille Rose Garcia. Includes a video for the track "Majik".

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Throughout the '80's/90's, Vancouver surrealists Skinny Puppy were a group ahead of their time. Laced with film dialogue samples (one of the first and best, if you ask me) and seething emotion, their highly visceral and visual music seemed to reverberate from the future much like that of Throbbing Gristle, Suicide, and Cabaret Voltaire before them. Much more experimental and sonically

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While Noise Museum has predominantly been a bleak isolationist/noise label, Oil 10 may seem to be an anomalie to their catalogue with the black lung rhythms chugging along like Pan Sonic's 'complex rhythm generator'... for fans of Autechre or Matmos.

Norwegian fiddler on Rune G, nice stuff as always.

Fflint Central is a U.K. label run by two extraordinarily nice guys and darn fine hosts (good enough to befriend a sick and bedraggled on-tour Andee and buy him Cokes). Fflint specializes in experimental electronics and harsh abstract noise. One would think that there's enough, or too much of both, but the men from Fflint have that something special (fuck-you attitude? undefinable sound? sense of humor?) that makes these records way better and way more interesting than the majority of the 'electronica' we hear these days. Fans of VV/M, Lesser and other 'troublesome' electonica will dig this stuff. Affordable CD-Rs. Go ahead and take a chance. You may regret it... This is probably the most laid back record on FFlint, but that's not to say it isn't still intense and incessant. Tranquil soundscapes (processed field recordings made in Norht East Wales) are mixed with pulsing synths, bells and chimes, and warm drones, making for a soothing and dark and an amazingly beautiful record.

Two beautiful and intense minimal electronic compostions from 1967 and 1966 respectively.

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SORRY. Wow! Three early live experiments with electronics, which at the simplest level use an array of oscilators and tape loops processed through long delays, for some of the most beautiful and haunting electronic drones to pass through our speakers!

Not sure how we stumbled across this. And it seems foolish to state once again, in a review of a house music record we have been digging BIG TIME, that we don't in fact really like house music, so fuck it, we found a couple tracks by Omar S on some aQ pal's website, and were immediately blown away, apparently he's a bit of a big deal in the world of house music, from Detroit (obviously), and while most Fabric comps feature proper DJ sets, for this one, it's all him spinning his OWN tracks, which is just fine with us, we've been listening to this nonstop since we first got it in. Needless to say, this is a variant of that kind of house music we DO like, super stripped down, minimal, skeletal, very Kompakt for sure, mostly just beats, wrapped around barely there loops, abstract melodies, tons of space, all about the pulse, just listen to "Strider's World", that's the track that sucked us in. It begins all crunchy and big beated, before mellowing out a bit, and then... what? The main rhythm is some looped video game sound (from the game Strider? We checked, being the nerds that we are, and it didn't seem like it), how rad is that? Draped over a skittery rhythm and a repeating minor key melody, it's only 4+ minutes, but we would have been psyched for it to be twice that long. Heck, we would have been happy if the whole 72 minutes was just that song, but it hardly matters, the rest of the disc is pretty much just as rad, bloopy and skittery and hypnotic. Hard to imagine people dancing to this stuff, but for chilling out, it's perfect, all blissed out and late night sounding, dreamy and totally mesmerizing. There are a couple tracks that get a bit to 'diva', but just skip those and the rest of the disc is pretty much flawless, and definitely one of our new favorites, and once again, has us reassessing our seemingly barely applicable anymore generally negative stance on house music... Like all Fabric comps, comes in a cool metal box, wrapped in a printed slipcover. NICE.

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Watch out Senor Coconut! You might have someone on your tail. This is a record that was put out on a German label by an Amsterdam based Ukrainian born electronic artist known as German Popov who calls his project OMFO(Our Man From Odessa). With its Kraftwerk inspired title, Trans Balkan Express is made up many traditional Eastern European folk songs gone totally electro, dubbed out and quirky. OMFO do the same kind of genre and global combinations and bastardizations that Senor Coconut has made famous and somehow manage to come out sounding so endearing and infectious instead of schlocky and annoying. Old world sounds given a proper modern weirdo twist. Trans Balkan Express actually came out a couple years ago without much press or attention. Though it was a big hit at KUSF and much college radio it didn't seem to get its rightful attention. But thanks to its inclusion in the Borat movie and soundtrack it's been given a new lease on life. And with a new record in the works and an upcoming tour with none other then Senor Coconut we're sure to be geeking out to lots more OMFO in the future.

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Anytime you can get metalheads to start dancing and smiling you know you got some special skills! The latest offering from Amsterdam based and Ukrainian born electronic prankster/mastermind German Popov (aka OMFO), has been making all sorts of folks tap their foot and start grinning goofy wide smiles as we've been blasting this from our stereo. We Are The Shepherds picks up where Trans Balkan Express left off, with old world eastern European sounds given a proper weirdo kick in the ass. It makes so much sense that this outing was co-produced by kindred spirit Atom Heart (aka Senor Coconut) as these two have such a grasp on making electronica that's as goofy as it is good, so spazzy and well crafted. Sort of like Aavikko doing world music! The last three times we've been playing this folks who are usually camped out in our metal section couldn't help themselves and had to take one of these home with them. So fun and undeniably charming!

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Omit is the longstanding project of New Zealand's finest electron technician Clinton Williams, who dropped out of high school close to two decades ago and holed himself up in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere New Zealand to wrangle with analogue synthesizers, 8-track tape decks, unruly drum machines, and a small army of effects pedals. There was a time in the '90s when Williams' output was ridiculously prolific, through countless cassettes in tiny editions and a handful of lathe-cut singles. His work caught the attention of the Dead C's Bruce Russell, who was so taken by Williams' work that he collaborated with the man as Dust/Omit and released a handful of discs through Russell's seminal Corpus Hermeticum imprint. Upon the release of the 1997 3cd boxset Quad, Williams' Omit project began to slow down tremendously. The quality of work had certainly continued, but the wealth of releases was considerably diminished. In 1999, there was Interior Desolation, brilliant with its squealing pigs adding to electronic claustrophobia. Then Anomalous released Rejector in 2002; and Helen Scarsdale had the honor of releasing the epochal darkness of Tracer (2005), and now the skeletal rhythmicist drones on Interceptor. Working in isolation has lead Williams to develop a language which is entirely his own, yet exhibits a curious convergent evolution with many of the other greats in DIY electronics - most notably Chris Carter from his days in Throbbing Gristle, Mika Vainio and his early hyper-minimal phaseshifting experiments in post-techno, and the gaping proto-industrial paranoia of Klaus Schulze. His work is simultaneously ponderously huge and effortlessly simple, as his sounds hover along intertwining sweeps of synthetic ambience grafted to simple rhythmic structures. The saddest melodies in the world poke through Omit's cold and barren surfaces, accenting the isolationist tendencies already inherent in these sounds. Interceptor is a slight detour in the Omit aesthetic, and the detour was by design as Williams had ventured outside of his hometown of Blenheim in search of a job. But he also brought two suitcases of gear with him to continue his recording. The frustrations he felt in his failure to secure employment are matched in the bleak gestures found on Interceptor. Williams had stripped away much of the grandiose sweeps of ambience and shadow, leaving behind a life-support system grid of overlapping, phase-shifted blip and click. An undertow of hypnotic tonalities pulls those rhythms towards a crepuscular gloom, which as with all of Omit's work are effortless in their compositional appearance. Anybody, and we mean ANYBODY, who has a passing interest in electronic music - contemporary, historic, surreal, arcane, Warp-ish, Kompakt-ish, or otherwise - has got to do themselves a favor and investing the time into Omit. The rewards are infinite from this under recognized, autodidactic genius.

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Over the past few years, we have made quite a fuss over the free-noise / dronescraping scene out of New Zealand, as perenially great artists such as the Dead C, Birchville Cat Motel, Flies Inside The Sun, Surface Of The Earth, RST, Eso Steel, Seht, Peter Wright, and many others form a population that is proportionally way larger than countries many many times the size of New Zealand. Amongst all of those NZ artists we mentioned, there is another artist who gets name-checked from time to time: Omit. At one time back in the mid-90s, Clinton Williams -- the sole knob twiddler and tape-splicer behind Omit -- put all of today's hyper-prolific cd-r artists to shame with his own stream of releases through his own cassette and lathe-cut imprint Deep Skin. An artist whose paranoiac aesthetic was completely wrapped up in the bunker mentality of '70s analogue electronics, Omit never really made the logical transition by updating from cassette to cd-r, having only re-released a fraction of his old tapes on disc, the Rejector reissued on Anomalous, the Quad boxset released on Corpus Hermeticum and now the monumental double disc set Tracer, rescued from obsolescence by The Helen Scarsdale Agency. While Williams calls the tiny farming comunity of Blenheim, New Zealand his home, there is very little in his work that latches upon the gristled noise and feral folk tunes heard in many of his fellow New Zealanders. Instead, his work sprawls from the sci-fi bleakness that ran through the post-psychedelic explorations of German electronics, most notably Klaus Schulze, Conrad Schnitzler, and Cluster. At the same time, Omit's kosmische homage stands as an eerie parallel to the Raster-Noton sound that ripples with Omit's millenial horror, albeit through the sterility of digital production. Comparisons have also been made to early '80s Cabaret Voltaire, but Omit is infinitely better in executing his ideas than CV ever were. It could be said that Mr. Williams is a man in the wrong time, in the wrong part of the world; and all things considered, Mr. Williams would probably like it that way. Perhaps the best way to make the world's most isolating music is to be thoroughly isolated oneself. Following his previous work on Anomalous and Corpus Hermeticum, Tracer demonstrates a finely crafted execution in these bleak, isolationist recordings. The slow moving synth sweeps, creeping electric atmospheres, unnerving loops of mechanized clamour, and low-slung rhythmic austerity have all of the trappings of industrial culture strategies in using technology to critique technology's alienation over mankind; yet, Omit has never really stated what this is about, instead leaving hints that Omit is merely a reflection of Clinton Williams' soul expressed through blighted electronic hypnosis. Emotive expressionism isn't something you think of when it comes to Cabaret Voltaire or Throbbing Gristle, but that's the ground where Williams has consistently tred. You would be hard pressed to find an electronic album as majestic, melancholy, and profoundly human as Tracer.

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So, Gneiss Things made a small batch of discs for this Oneohtrix Point Never album back at the end of 2008, probably not anticipating that OPN would become something of a big deal via his cyborg meditation music. A Pact Between Strangers was the second recording for OPN, predated only by the Betrayed In The Octagon album, which first came out as a cassette on Deception Island and later got released on LP through No Fun. By now, most everything that Dan Lopatin has released as Oneohtrix Point Never has gone out of print; so Gneiss Things wisely decided to make another run down to Kinkos, run off some more color copies of the artwork, and press up another batch of discs. But it will inevitably be a small window of time in which we'll be offering these discs. That said, A Pact Between Strangers is not all that dissimilar to the long sprawling sci-fi tracks of Betrayed In The Octagon with shimmering synth patterns gliding along those day-glo lazer tones without much use of the sequenced arpeggiations that Lopatin had featured so prominently on Zones Without People or the KGB Man material. Limited as fuck, and just as recommended.

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On this 7", the title track from the most recent Oneohtrix Point Never full length gets two radically different reworkings, one from Antony (of & The Johnsons), the other by Christian Fennesz. The original "Returnal" was a dizzying slab of robotic future funk, all pulsing synths, processed machinelike vox, a tripped out hybrid of Gary Numan, Kraftwerk and M83, all fuzzy, and swirly and psychedelic and spaced out, but these two reimaginings couldn't be further from the original. First up, Antony strips away all the synths, and reinterprets it as a torch song, played entirely on an acoustic piano (by Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix, himself), the sound lush and elegiac, Antony's vocals moving and emotional, intense and so dramatic, the new version a haunting dark ballad, that even to fans of the Oneohtrix original, will most likely sound like a completely different beast. Fennesz takes the Antony version from the A-side, and pulls it apart, blurs and softens the sounds into softly spinning clouds, taking various tones and stretching them way out, letting the piano drift in and out, the vocals slipping from gently reverbed to layered heavily effected, looped and repeated mantra like, occasionally disappearing into a squall of dubbed out effects, other times suspended in a field of pixilated piano and thick streaks of chordal clusters, eventually building to a warm lush psychedelic climax, before settling back to earth, fading out completely, leaving just shadowy traces and slowly decaying sonic contrails... Probably quite limited, as these things most often are, features some sleek minimal Mego style cover art/design by none other than Stephen O'Malley.

Oneohtrix Point Never is the work of Brooklyn's Daniel Lopatin who also records as Infinity Window with Taylor Richardson, operating in that curious resuscitation of progressive electronics which so far hasn't strayed into the dodgy waters of vapid ambient-lite found in so so many New Age records from the late '70s and '80s. Yet that's exactly the time period which Lopatin seems intent on mining. Fortunately for all of us, Lopatin enjoys the benefit of being born well past the New Age nadir, and he can selective mine the past through a darkening lens of noise culture and with a skepticism that selects against dopey (even if earnestly penned) philosophies and woefully lackluster music. Nope, Oneohtrix Point Never is none of these, despite a conscious nostaglic trip into the cosmic drones of Klaus Schulze and the lazer-ping melodies of John Carpenter. The label tag of No Fun Productions should also be an indication of where this may lie on the musical spectrum. Both sides of Betrayed In The Octagon open with two sprawling pieces of densely layered electronic swoosh and sweep, with more of a sci-fi sound design feel than anything else. It's not entirely ominous in these emanations of analog synths, but a gloominess persists just beneath these tumbling oscillations of electric drone. The other pieces bubble and percolate with clunky, geometric arppegiations and major chord melodies which have all of the charm of an '80s John Carpenter filmscore, or for that matter a Zombi album of today (although admittedly not as well produced). This is great stuff that won't last for long. No Fun only printed up 300 of these!

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SORRY.

An album that has been lauded as the next great hope for electronica, R Plus Seven marks another curious sonic direction for Daniel Lopatin's Oneohtrix Point Never. At one time, he was deftly composing geometric patterns of drones as the forgotten soundtracks to unwritten Philip K. Dick novels, all of which took 1982 as a technological jumping off point. But things have changed. There has always been an awkwardness to Lopatin's pastiche oriented aesthetic; and it is not without its charm. On R Plus Seven, the clunky Russian sci-fi allusions dissolve into the intellectual domains of Phillip Glass and Steve Reich in the late '80s who were dabbling with digital technologies, sprinking their chunks of non-melodic synth blort with skittered vocal samples in compositions that wore their technological limitations on their sleeves. Like the recent revival of late '80s EBM, this was a style that we never expected to come back into fashion again. But here's Lopatin taking up this ivory tower aesthetic. Leave it to Lopatin to make another uncool sound seem relevant.

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Copies from copies of copies upon copies to copies through copies on copies of more copies. Daniel Lopatin was but a babe in the early '80s - the global time frame which stands central to his Oneohtrix Point Never project, where Russian TV advertisements, faded slow-jam hits, and forgotten futures all get misinterpreted, rewired, and misremembered through an android dream. Much of his past work revolved around the step sequencing and ambient swoosh that filtered through the kosmische aesthetic of Conrad Schnitzler with plenty of sci-fi sound design moments thrown in for good measure amidst the angular trajectories of his obtuse electronica. Where Lopatin had been instrumental in bringing this retrogarde aesthetic to a broader audience, he's dropped much of the compositional framework that went into albums like Zones Without People and Betrayed In The Octagon. Some of the swelling Vangelis synth pads reappear on Replica, but this album has much more in common with a plunderphonia aesthetic, with his 'ghost vocal' samples getting caught in an inexplicable feedback loop as a self-perpetuating syntax error within a Cray supercomputer which got hung up trying to come to terms with the audio-visual data from bad VHS transfers from old episodes of Max Headroom. Some of Lopatin's sounds originated from a series of compilations of late night TV commercials from the '80s, with the saccharine strings, flutes, and pianos cycling in elliptical patterns that scrub backwards and forwards. On "Sleep Dealer" in particular, these loops snap with a hard-disc rigidity more in common with the Oval disc-skipping mantras on Diskont 94 or the winking electronica of The Books. "Submersible" locks onto a middle-eastern rhythm, conjuring the ghost of Muslimgauze in an appropriation of an appropriation. For as much hype as this record has received, Replica is a very abstract and deliberately confusing proposition for OPN, one which we have been digging quite a bit. Killer cover art to boot!

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MPEG stream: Nassau
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FINALLY ALSO AVAILABLE ON CD!! Here's what we said about the vinyl version a couple weeks back: With the opening squall of electrical noise on his latest Oneohtrix Point Never album, Daniel Lopatin must have been paying homage to Mego's history of digital cacophony, with the likes of Kevin Drumm, Florian Hecker, and Zbigniew Karkowski all abusing binary code through their releases on the label. Of course, Lopatin's signature sound is a throwback to the bygone era of education films about the wonders of chemistry and the drama of the space program with their cheesy, blooping soundtracks, so an homage to Mego is not entirely out of character from a conceptual point of view. Beyond this assaulting track, the elastic surfaces and geometric patterns which have become the hallmark of Oneohtrix Point Never work their magic on Returnal. On the title track with its staccato synthesis, Lopatin tricks his voice out through a couple of pitchshifters, rendering it very much in line with what Karin Dreijer Andersson has done in The Knife and Fever Ray. This isn't the first time he's sung on a track, as he did entertain some robotic vocals on one of those KGB Man cassettes from 2009. He follows this with a series of tracks overlapping cathode-ray drones, algorithmic shapeshifting, and pools of synthetic android tears all of which revolve into curving compositions that split the difference between pastoral new age drool puddling and progressive electronics with a nod to atonal cybernetics. Like Emeralds, who have also signed to Editions Mego, Oneohtrix Point Never has been on quite a roll, and Returnal lives up to all the hype.

MPEG stream: Describing Bodies
MPEG stream: Returnal
MPEG stream: Where Does Time Go

The long overdue reissue of the Rifts anthology, which was originally released on cd by No Fun in 2009 as a collection of the first three vinyl releases from Oneohtrix Point Never (Betrayed In The Octagon, Zones Without People, and Russian Mind), and now also sports a half dozen or so tracks from OPN's constant stream of cassette and cd-r releases, many of which never made their way to aQuarius. That was a double CD, which now gets expanded to FIVE pieces of vinyl, with even MORE unreleased material! Here's a bit of a rehash of what we've said about those earlier records (and which would apply to the bonus material as well): Oneohtrix Point Never is a curious resuscitation of progressive electronics by Daniel Lopatin who so far has not strayed into the dodgy waters of vapid ambient-lite found in so so many New Age records from the late '70s and '80s. His vision is a conscious nostalgic trip into the cosmic drones of Klaus Schulze and the lazer-ping melodies of John Carpenter. The seven tracks from Betrayed In The Octagon ripple with densely layered electronic swoosh and sweep, with more of a sci-fi sound design feel than anything else. It's not entirely ominous in these emanations of analog synths, but a gloominess persists just beneath these tumbling oscillations of electric drone. A few tracks bubble and percolate with clunky, geometric arpeggiations and major chord melodies which have all of the charm of an '80s John Carpenter filmscore, or for that matter a Zombi album of today (although admittedly not as well produced). Above a solar-powered electric hum, the tracks from Zones Without People interweave poly-synth pulses which insistently push up against each other, collapsing into the electronic sunrise which is the next track of slowly building arpeggiations and sequences situated on top of cybernetically pastoral ambience. When Lopatin gets to the title track of Zones Without People, his laser beam pings have calmed into a sublimely sad offering, easily the best thing that he's produced to date. This isn't to say that the rest of these tracks are duds. Far from it, as a wigged-out squiggling collage splatters into cosmic arpeggiations and stargazing drones to amazing effect. A set of gaseous ambient chords opens Russian Mind and could have been lifted from an early Boards Of Canada release, although the lack of IDM-rhythms to the Oneohtrix Point Never's electronics steer this work in an entirely different direction. His bright chimes of arpeggio poly-synth tones build asymmetrical waves that are as compelling as they are cheesy. But that's always been the point, to terminally obliterate the lines between a high-brow piece of Terry Riley minimalism and a lowest common denominator of sub-Eno ambient drivel. Here, Lopatin tends to be a bit more stratospheric in nature, with these sublime arcs of vapor trails passing through moonlit nightscapes, all redrawn in neon hyperdelic colors. Beautifully packaged in a stunning heavy box, with eye popping new artwork, each one hand numbered, and LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!!

MPEG stream: Betrayed In The Octagon
MPEG stream: Woe Is The Transgression
MPEG stream: Zones Without People
MPEG stream: Russian Mind

Russian Mind is the third piece of vinyl to be released in 2009 by Daniel Lopatin's ever-amazing Oneohtrix Point Never, following Zones Without People and Betrayed In The Octagon. All three of these LPs have recently been collected on the Rifts anthology, also released through No Fun, and this week's Record Of The Week! The ideas of a forgotten future had been recently employed by Leyland Kirby on the driftscape trilogy Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was; but where Kirby pegged his lost future as somewhere in the early portion of the 20th century, reclaimed through downpitched and blurred 78s, Lopatin firmly pegs his lost future as the one perceived from the time period between 1975 and 1985. Given the title of this album, Lopatin's retro-garde zone-tripping looks back to the former Soviet Union. Such is also the case for some of Lopatin's appropriated video work, which features '80s Russian commercials with all sorts of a wonderfully corn-ball, lazer-clad video effects. Furthermore, he claims this album was "transcribed by the Material Eye Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Universitetskaya nab. 1, St. Petersburg, 199034, Russia." Nope, there is no such institute at the Russian Academy, but it makes for a good piece of fictional context. A set of gaseous ambient chords opens Russian Mind, and could have been lifted from an early Boards Of Canada release, although the lack of IDM-rhythms in the Oneohtrix Point Never's electronics steer this work in an entirely different direction. His bright chimes of arpeggio poly-synth tones build asymmetrical waves that are as compelling as they are cheesy. But that's always been the point, to terminally obliterate the lines between a high-brow piece of Terry Riley minimalism and a lowest common denominator of sub-Eno ambient drivel. Russian Mind tends to be a bit more stratospheric in nature, with these sublime arcs of vapor trails passing through moonlit nightscapes, all redrawn in neon hyperdelic colors. A marvelous record for sure.

MPEG stream: Russian Mind

Not only do we finally have the awesome Oneohtrix Point Never Returnal record now available on cd, we also just got in OPN's Young Beidnahga, released as part of Ruralfaune's Synth series (along with the Innercity reviewed elsewhere on this week's list too!), but it sold out so quick we never got a single copy. Thankfully, the label decided to do one more small batch, so the band would have copies to sell on their recent European tour, and we'd have copies to sell in the shop! Three tracks, 26 minutes, long form blissed out spacedrones, but somehow a bit more twisted and gnarled than other OPN releases, beginning with some sprawling wavery tones that sound almost Native American, the synths soon go wild, emitting wild tangles of melody, laced with what sounds like fluttering flutes, a wild trancelike swirling soft psychedelic squall that goes on and on and on, until eventually morphing into what sounds like several minutes of lazer battle! The second track continues in much the same vein with spidery melodies branching out and intertwining, trills and arpeggiated runs, all laid over hazy whirs and a fuzzed out, blurred background soundscape, those flute like flutters return, everything sun dappled and reflective, this track two morphs part way through and becomes a woozy sprawl of spare lo-fi analog synth squiggle. The last track is definitely a surprise, a strange stripped down coda, all acoustic guitars, strange effected vocals, some sort of druggy psychedelic dronefolk, lo-fi and a bit twisted, but also weirdly lovely. Strange for sure, even by already strange OPN standards, far out and space-y and psychedelic, this should appeal to all you kraut-drone space-synth fanatics... Be warned, we got a little less than 40 copies, and we won't be able to get more, so this is it, and it's a doozy, so if you're already a fan, you're FOR SURE gonna want one, and if you've always wanted to check out OPN, this is as good a place to start as any....

MPEG stream: Continuous Smooth Jazz Trepanation
MPEG stream: Young Beidnahga

It makes perfect sense that Daniel Lopatin is a fan of J.G. Ballard, the late author of dystopian environments plagued and / or graced with the dilemmas of the relationship between man and machine. Lopatin's previous entry as Oneohtrix Point Never was the Memory Vague dvd on Root Strata, recycling '80s computer animation from YouTube to serve as the visual data for his sci-fi soundtracks of analog synthesis; and there was no doubt about the peculiar Ballardian aura to that dvd which enjoyed a bittersweet optimism for the future of technology with its sensual grasp upon the 'new.' For this album - Zones Without People - Lopatin continues to delight us with his perfectly anachronistic use of synthesizers to capture the early '80s memories of early afterschool science specials, cheap sci-fi soundtracks, and the never-ending fascination with space. Lopatin is keenly aware that we don't have teleportation devices, jetpacks, or holidays on the moon; and an undercurrent of sadness does seem to bubble from below all of his compositions. In fact, Lopatin describes the strategies he employs for his poly-synths as "grid tears," imbuing a sense of melancholy through his rigid network of percolating tones and bleeps. Above an solar-powered electric hum, the album opens with a series of interwoven synth pulses which insistently push up against each other, collapsing into the electronic sunrise which is the next track of slowly building arppegiations and sequences situated on top of cybernetically pastoral ambience. When Lapotin gets to the title track, his laser beam pings have calmed into a sublimely sad offering, easily the best thing that he's produced to date. This isn't to say that the flip side is a dud. Far from it, as a wigged-out squiggling collage splatters as the second side's opening cut. Cosmic arpeggiations and star-gazing drones settle in the rest of this amazing record. Don't expect this to be around for long. We're not the only one's freaking out about Oneohtrix Point Never, and Zones Without People is limited to 400 copies.

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

SORRY. These two tapes, housed in a soft-plastic case a la RRRecords, offer documentation of four live, and very nice electronic sets from one evening at the Glasslands Gallery in Brooklyn, featuring the 2009 darling of outro-electronics Oneohtrix Point Never, the ever impressive Keith Fullerton Whitman, No Fun Acid (aka Carlos Giffoni in his 'acid' guise), and Prehistoric Blackout (aka Taylor Richardson of Infinity Window). Oneohtrix Point Never begins his set with a lugubrious plodding synth melody before nestling into those stratospheric arcs of Juno-synth tones found on his recent Russian Mind LP. Keith Fullerton Whitman kicks out squiggles and step-patterned melodic phrases via a C64 emulator on his iPhone (no shit!) which gradually explode into a kaleidoscopic supernova after lifting out of a thick set of modulated tones 'n' drones. Giffoni has been talking up his love of acid techno with No Fun Acid being the project to act upon that infatuation. He sets down a simple breakbeat and begins a set that would make Phuture proud, in a pretty straight forward, but wholly effective techno workout. Prehistoric Blackout offers a four-note synth melody that drifts with counterpointed arpeggiations, tremolo lazer beams of sound, and tripped out, looping electronics. It should be noted that this is a room recording, and not a board mix. But as a result, there is some very amusing banter that Whitman provides at the end of his set with two enthusiastic women describing his set as a being akin to achieving multiple orgasms. Ahem. Throughout most of the sets, the audience politely stays quiet with the exception for the beginning of the Prehistoric Blackout set. Super limited, we've got less than a dozen of these.

The latest release on Echochord comes from the oddly monickered Onmutu Mechanicks, aka the Scottish techno producer Arne Weinberg. Where Weinberg's regular gig is more melodic, traditional techno, Onmutu Mechanicks exists for his more dubbed out ambient explorations, which of course sounds right up our alley, and it is. Fans of other stuff on Echochord (Quantec, Rod Modell) as well as stuff like Pole, Echospace, Deepchord, Kompakt's more minimal less housey sounds and well as the more Pop Ambient stuff, will definitely dig this, skeletal skitters careen back and forth over deep billows of dubbed out synth, low slung bass throbs pulse beneath strange bits of industrial crunch, while barely there melodies wrap themselves around the slow drifting murk, many of the tracks take that house music throb as their core, but bury it under layers of whir and shimmer, sending extra peripheral beats bouncing around from speaker to speaker before letting them sink back into the swirling sonic miasma, other tracks ditch the beats entirely, their looped synths and processed effects creating their own rhythms, while still others take chilled out late night techno and strip it way down, the soundtrack to some futuristic after hours nightclub, or a wander through some post apocalyptic future world. Another fantastic chunk of sonic bliss to add to the recent spate of killer minimal techno and abstract rhythmic electronica releases from Actress, Glitterbug, Pantha Du Prince, Clubroot, Vex'd, Klimek...

MPEG stream: Catatonic
MPEG stream: Aspiring To Aspire
MPEG stream: Across The Styx

What's this? Another collection of remixes from Yoko Ono already?! You're darn tootin' right! But whereas Yes I Am A Witch (released February 2007) enlisted the very varied and very 'now' cool cats (i.e, Peaches, Antony and the Johnsons, Flaming Lips, Le Tigre, Polyphonic Spree, and Cat Power) to do new remixes and reworkings of Ono's music, Open Your Box (released April 2007) compiles her previously released dancefloor smash remix 12"s. In case you're unacquainted, these remixes are far more NYC house, techno and disco scene oriented (a scene that has celebrated and embraced Ono and her music over the years), and feature the likes of Orange Factory, Basement Jaxx, Danny Tenaglia, Felix Da Housecat, DJ Dan and Pet Shop Boys. Sure some of them are pretty dated, but it's terrific to have and hear all of these tracks together. Throughout the two releases, much love and reverence and fun flow freely, and in the case of Open Your Box also much giddy clubland nostalgia. Yes.

MPEG stream: Walking On Thin Ice (Pet Shop Boys Electro Mix)
MPEG stream: Open Your Box (Orange Factory Club Mix)

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

SORRY.

While to most folks, 'witch house' was a sort of flash-in-the-pan, one of those musical genres that blogs and the media leap all over, it blows up big and pops up everywhere, before all of a sudden, poof, it's gone. As we've mentioned in past reviews of witch house and witch house related outfits though, we LOVE that sound, STILL, no guilty pleasure here, it's the sort of woozy, warped electronica we can't ever seem to get enough of. Witch House, also referred to as drag, due to the fact that everything drags, is all hazy and lazy, the beats molasses slow, the vocals too, slowed to a creepy crawl, jagged edits, fractured loops, dizzying collaged layers and textures, everything melty and oozy and gloriously murky and tripped out, and while lots of former witch housers have jumped ship, some have definitely stayed the course, and while pushing the boundaries of the WH sound, haven't deviated too much from THAT sound, if anything, digging even deeper, getting slower and murkier and even more fantastically druggy and darkly dreamy, while somehow fusing that haunted creep to something more polished and modern, which is precisely the case with this, the latest from local witch house warlock oOoOO (supposedly pronounced 'oh' btw), who does just that, starting out with some vintage old school witch house (albeit with a spiffier production than most of the witch house we first heard), "Sirens" unfurling as a weirdly cinematic dirge, wreathed in hiss and crackle, haunting female vocals drifting through clouds of shimmery hum, the looped background constantly shifting pitch, everything warbly and woozy, the beat a barely there skeletal pulse, the whole thing laced with faux strings and delicate piano, all choppy and glitchy throughout. But then the second track swoops in, with a super soulful vocal, draped over a lurching half speed hip hop beat, some serious slo-mo soul, a la Burial or Vessel, some of the old lysergic pop yacht rock-isms (as described in our review of the last oOoOO record) surface here too, but in the form of mutated sampled backdrops that warble woozily, a la Ariel Pink or James Ferraro, but they're really just warped backdrops for oOoOO's swoonsome soul slither. And the rest of the record essentially splits the difference, some tracks, minimal and moody, total witch house murk, while others drift further into the more soulful modern minimal slow motion electronica, the best moments though, are on tracks like "3:51 AM", where both those sonic sides are melded into a subtly stuttery chunk of loping tarpit witch-hop, laced with weird sampled snippets, and boasting a gorgeous, lilting melody (the sort of track that should have big name rappers hitting this guy up for beats), or the brooding cinematic closer, a darkly moody, totally epic, slo-mo electro-soul ballad, that might be the most haunting and stunning track here. So good!

MPEG stream: Sirens
MPEG stream: Stay Here
MPEG stream: 3:51 AM
MPEG stream: Across A Sea

Dig the creepy cover, the extended claw like arms extended above a shadowy shawled woman, the whole image hazy and ghostly, and inside, strange electronic ghostly minimal dream pop that is the perfect soundtrack for that image, and for a lost world of similar sights, of blood red moons, of creatures in the dark, of low lit mysterious after hours underground gatherings, welcome to Witch House. No doubt most folks have already heard something about this new movement/genre, a twisted sample heavy dark minimal electronic music, which may have begun life as a witchy sort of house music, but has blossomed into a whole cadre of bands, make spooky, and evocative, and darkly lovely music. Most of these sounds released on limited tapes or cd-rs or as free downloads, the bands all named with strange option-control heavy keyboard characters, little black triangles, underscores, tiny crosses, jumbles of &'s and *'s, even OOOOO is written oOoOO, and who knows how it's pronounced. We could list some of the other bands, but it's probably just as easy to set your font for Zapf Dingbats and peck away at random! But for all the secrecy and purposeful obfuscation, when you finally get your ears on this stuff, it is indeed, pretty fantastic. Woozy, warped, haunting, hypnotic, mysterious, dark, retro, futuristic, minimal, electronic, sampled, looped, depending on the group, it could be some sort of bewitching IDM shuffle, or some horror movie sampling bit of plunderphonia, or in the case of oOoOO, a gorgeous chunk of electronica flecked otherworldly dream pop. Skeletal and shoegazey, a soft pop cold wave wreathed in a ghostly haze, like Cocteau Twins or Slowdive but chopped & screwed. There's a little of that eighties sci-fi synth soundtrack stuff that's so popular right now, but somehow here it sounds more genuine, more a part of the admittedly twisted whole. Swirling effects, spectral ambience, atmospheric synth shimmer, occasionally slipping into some dark and sinister propulsive kraut disco, vocals clipped and looped into clouds of psychedelic soft noise, other times, the sound drifts more toward eighties MTV style yacht rock, but again, dubbed out, slowed down and wrapped in a blurred gauze, and throughout it all, the wispy angelic wraithlike female vocals, ethereal and ephemeral, a dreamy sonic thread that holds it all together. Gorgeous stuff for sure. Anyone into all that hypnogogic pop stuff, or tripped out lo-fi cold wave, as well as folks like Zola Jesus, Nite Jewel, or even Beach House and other shoegazey dreampoppers, here's something just a bit darker, and a bit more out there, for when you're wandering the streets at night, or holed up in your house, lights out, candles lit and emotions dark, needing something pretty and poppy still, but infinitely more murky and mysterious.