[ aquarius records — Electronic ]

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RealAudio clip: Fuck That Beat Up
RealAudio clip: Evil Sickness
RealAudio clip: Kill The Intruders

Wow! This is one of the most ecstatically strange recordings of hip hop dance music we've heard in quite awhile and it is no wonder that its elusive existence was the spark that inspired Brian Shimkovich's Awesome Tapes From Africa blog (and subsequent label) a decade ago. After years of searching for the man behind the music and eventually getting permission for the reissue, we finally get to hear it. Hailing from Ghana, Ata Kak Yaw Atta-Owusu released this cassette in 1994, an awesome tape indeed of homegrown African Hip-house - a hybrid genre of high energy disco, b-boy hip hop and off-kilter rap-singing, that we weren't sure even existed. Only 50 tapes were originally made and out of them, only 3 sold, making its rediscovery that so much more remarkable. Made with a synthesizer, a 12 track recorder and Notator Atari software, Obaa Sima is like no African hip hop we've heard before. Tinny drum machines, fast-paced babble-rapping, helium voiced back-up vocals, infectious bass grooves and an alltogether beamed in from outer space atmospheric soulfulness that somehow makes this all work. Seriously, it's as much fun as the craziest Bollywood disco stuff, ferinstance. Get in on this party train! Super recommended!!

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For an outfit with such a strong ethos for sticking it to the man, Atari Teenage Riot's deal with Elektra is quite shocking. Upon listening to the first fruits of the deal, I have to wonder if the knowledge of the deal has heightened my criticality of Alec Empire or if his electronic blast beats have gotten tame with age none of the post-Rotterdam 240 bpm insanity...things tend to stay at a reasonable 140 or so, of fractured Amen breaks and straight up 808 techno grooves. The fury of the midrange has certainly been exaggerated by Nic Endo's matriculation into ATR, as her full on noise assaults do stand out. Also of note is the collaboration that Atari Teenage Riot has done with Kathleen Hanna ranting alongside ATR's three-prong vocal attack of Alec, Hanin Elias, and Carl Crack.

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SORRY. Collects tracks from their import albums, and makes for a great introduction to the exciting, incendiary world of Digital Hardcore.

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SORRY. One of 4 singles from Digital Hardcore Recordings, Germany's nastiest, most extreme hardcore techno label, issued here in tasty uninitiated-friendly 7" format by the Beastie's Grand Royal label. A cheap way to learn all about what the hell is going on.

DHR qualifies this set as the ultimate noise concert ever performed in the history of music. While I wonder what Merzbow, Incapacitants, Boyd Rice, and My Bloody Valentine (the most devastating live performance I ever heard) have to say about this hyperbole, Atari Teenage Riot did manifest an extreme noise assault against themselves and their audience at the Brixton Academy in 1999, when they opened for Nine Inch Nails. Alec Empire's liner notes are laughably megalomaniacal about Atari Teenage Riot, implying that their "political" stance in part incited the WTO riots in Seattle. Umm, yeah.

New 4-track ep from Alec Empire & co. Features Nic Endo's first recordings with the band, adding a brutalist barrage of white noise to the already pummelling assault of post-Rotterdam hardcore, hellish drum n' bass breaks, and the three-pronged political vocal rants of Empire, Hanin Elias and Carl Crack.

Shinichi Atobe is probably best known (and weirdly, also least known) for releasing a single 12" on Basic Channel's Chain Reaction label, and consequently disappearing completely. That record became a bit of an obsession for some folks, including the Demdike Stare guys who eventually somehow tracked down Atobe, only to discover an entire record of unreleased archival material, which is this one right here. For fans of Demdike Stare AND Chain Reaction this is some seriously holy grail stuff, and it's easy to see what all the hubbub was (and is) about. The opener is a gorgeous stretch of glitchy digidub murk, distorted chordal swells weaving a dreamlike melodic backdrop beneath a skittery, skeletal groove, before the second track opens the sound up into some hazy house, a softly pulsing four on the floor beneath jazzy chords and fluttery faux Japanese flutes, a second rhythm swoops in eventually, adding a strange, psychedelic off kilter vibe, the mix too is quite strange, with some sounds swooping to the foreground, while others blur into the background murk. The rest of the record careens schizophrenically from grinding glitchiness, to strangely distorted samplescapes fusing more Japanese melodies with crumbling, sputtering squelches, to haunting carnivalesque soundscapes, all woozy synths and strange space-y FX, tripped out industrial dronescapes, with warped, throbbing, barely-there rhythms, all wound around fields of grey noise and blurts of wild chaotic noise. There are a handful of straight up Kompakt style Euro-house groovers too, but those tracks are plopped between softly swirling, looping stutterscapes and weirdly trippy, freeform electro-jazz jams, finishing off with a super psychedelic, beautifully noisy, ultra creepy outro, that's a jumble of distorted alien vox, chopped and looped into a lumbering rhythm, wreathed in wisps of dreamlike thrum, somehow impossible gristly and gauzy AND hauntingly hypnotic. Housed in a hand stamped, hand numbered, card stock sleeve.

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SORRY. We've all been keeping a watchful eye on Mr. Atom Heart lately. Watching bemusedly as his relocation to Chile prompted him to reinvent himself as Senor Coconut, and listening, as his techno turned to mambo, and his obsession with the indigenous music of his new home seeped into every facet of his music making. The first Senor Coconut record (out of print, it seems) was a glorious mix of Perez Prado style mambos and Squarepusherish drum programming. The Senor Coconut we listed on the last AQ list took a bizarre turn no one could have predicted, consisting of all Kraftwerk covers done Chilean style, all mambo and rhumba, barely a hint of his former Atom Heart remained. On "XXX", Atom hooks up with Chilean rapper Tea Time, for a wickedly clever record of X rated rapping (in Spanish of course) and convuluted hip hop, complete with plenty of turntablist trickery and hard disc scratching. And it's practically perfect; funny and catchy and smooth and super wicked. Tea Time's got a super smooth flow (sounding a bit like MC Solaar) and the music is just completely bizarre, lots of hiccuping loops, low end rumble, crazy scratching, and bizarre hard disc editing, making for probably one of our favorite (albeit quite odd) hip hop (Latin American glitch-rap?) records of the year, and it's easily the best Atom Heart...er...Senor Coconut record yet.

RealAudio clip: Mis Chiquitas

There is a fine line between clever and peurile. Actually the line's not all that fine. Guess which side this falls on.

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Regardless of which alter ego he's embodying at the time (Senor Coconut, Datacide, Midisport, Lisa Carbon, Disk Orchestra, etc.), virtually all of Uwe Schmidt's releases have some obvious, fully realized concept behind them. Knowing that, it makes his latest Atom TM album a somewhat befuddling listen. Son Of A Glitch squishes together a seemingly random assortment of distinctly Schmidt-y IDM glitch-squidge, sample-delic outbursts and dialogue snippets. Really, we could be missing something, but it seems like his most unfocused work to date -- sounding like a grab bag of recordings of him just messing around in the studio. Still, if this is Uwe Schmidt just fuckin' around, it's still miles more entertaining and well executed than a lot of releases by his contemporaries.

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Peter Andersson's name is not one that pops up here at Aquarius Records all that often; but his impact upon the Swedish electronic underground has been huge since the early '90s. He's been responsible for some of the more influential dark-ambient / esoteric electronic projects that made up the bulk of the early Cold Meat Industry catalogue with his pseudonyms being Raison D'Etre, Stratvm Terror, Necrophorous, and Atomine Elektrine. Strangely enough, there's another Peter Andersson who also graces Cold Meat Industry's catalogue; but wisely he adopted the moniker Lina Baby Doll to prevent any confusion when venturing into the bizarre, militant territories of Deutsch Nepal. Anyway. Atomine Elektrine is the formerly mentioned Peter Andersson, and this project nestles between kosmische electronica (e.g. Pop Ambient, Boards Of Canada, Omit, etc.) and deep-space isolationism (e.g. Lustmord, Thomas Koner, etc.). Nebulous is a remarkably well done album that doesn't seem to embrace any of the commonplace signifiers of electronica; maybe just a Chain Reaction synth pad here or there alongside the downtempo mechanoid breakbeats, constantly tumbling filter sweeps, and algorithimic arpeggiations cast in shadowy, metallic ambience.

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Predictably, there's been beaucoup hype about this new super group / Radiohead offshoot, featuring Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, longtime Radiohead producer/engineer Nigel Godrich, and oddest of the bunch none other than Flea, from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. We were definitely curious what it would sound like, and while we were maybe expecting something pretty far out and experimental, Amok actually hews surprisingly close to recent Radiohead records and Yorke's solo record The Eraser. Which really shouldn't be all that surprising considering the lineup, and really is not a bad thing. In some ways, we wouldn't have been at all surprised if this had simply been released as a Yorke solo record (which essentially it kind of is?). Every time we play this in the store, someone inevitably asks us if this is Radiohead, which should give you a pretty good idea of what to expect. The tracks here are not so much songs, like much of Yorke's (and Radiohead's) material, eschewing for the most part the standard 'pop' song structure, and instead letting atmospheres drift, and rhythms percolate, Yorke's voice often spectral and wordless, syllables stretched way out, transformed into woozy spidery melodies, the beats looped and layered and skittery, the bass thick and sinewy, pulsing and trancey and hypnotic, the whole thing peppered with strange little electronic filigree, the occasional buried horns, the vibe haunting and melancholic, and darkly, mysteriously groovy. There's a definite late night vibe to most of the tracks, moody and chilled out, but then there's tracks like "Default", which is still moody, but super catchy, "Default" being the most Radiohead of the bunch, the first single, which makes sense, featuring a killer main melody that sounds like it was straight up lifted from some other Radiohead record, we just can't put our finger on which one, but you'll know it when you hear it. So yeah, if you already love Radiohead, you'll love this, and if you dug Yorke's Eraser, you'll REALLY dig Atoms For Peace, and while we maybe weren't blown away at first, we find ourselves listening to this more and more all the time.

MPEG stream: Before Your Very Eyes...
MPEG stream: Default
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SORRY. New release on Force Inc. Steady four on the floor house beats and dark, compressed washes of monochromatic sounds - very much reminiscent of Thomas Brinkmann, Plastikman and most any of the releases on Chain Reaction.

Excellent remix collection (based tracks from Auch's Chain Reaction style "Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye" album), by the happenin' electronica likes of Sutekh, Dat Politics, Goem, Auch, and others.

We raved recently about Iron Forest, a one man band trafficking in gloriously bleak and blackened industrial noise, his disc a murky expanse of wasted beatscapes and zoner dub power electronics. Auditor is the same guy. Not sure if this record by Auditor signals the end of Iron Forest (we hope not), or if it's just another gnarled offshoot, either way, Form Destroyer (possibly named after the Skullflower record, which would make sense...), basically takes up where that last Iron Forest left off, unfurling a caustic sprawl of gristled dronemusic, grinding fields of electronic static, moaning heaving swaths of suffocating low end, dense roiling clouds of sinister chordal thrum, not to mention, glitched out sort-of rhythms, processed vokills, sheets of hiss and hum, and eventually, fragmented distorted beats, which comes together on the second track, a twisted bit of dance floor destruction, with a rhythm constructed from drum machines and jackhammers (literally we think), a sort of gnarled, blackened IDM, fractured industrial techno recast as grimly groovy lurch and lumber, which quickly (d)evolves into a harrowing black ambient epic, all grinding, pulses, crumbling rib cage rattling rumbles, staticky drum machines, and primitive programmed rhythms, straddling the line between dark and moody, and truly terrifying, ultimately, and seemingly impossibly fusing the two, into something heady and hypnotic, darkly hypnotic and strangely mesmerizing. The last two tracks change tack considerably, with "Betrayer Of Sleep" slipping into seriously blackened doom territory, a heaving slo-mo-crawl, with crumbling distortion, and oozing downtuned riffage, a lumbering deathmarch that is constantly on the verge of blurring into a blackdronedirge, while the nearly 15 minute long closer "I Can Never Be Far Enough From You", adds some female vocals, a keening, mewling cry off in the distance, over a swirling tangle of wild hiss and static drenched churn, almost like a disembodied Diamanda Galas torchsong, smeared into a bleary, blackened drift, the sound pulsing and dynamic, moments of crushing malevolence aside moments of delicate shimmer, a bit cinematic for sure, the blackness and grinding distortion eventually receding completely, leaving just some muted murk, buried melodies, distant rhythms, and that female voice repeating the title, everything eventually enveloped by soft noise and blurred buzz, for one final, almost shoegaze sounding coda, before it's just that voice, and that mantra, wreathed in effects. A haunting, and surprisingly delicate finale.

MPEG stream: And Vomit As You Devour Them
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MPEG stream: I Can Never Be Far Enough From You

Yer ears ready for a bit of a challenge? This, the fourth album from take-no-prisoners English instrumental noise-rock project Aufgehoben (nee Aufgehoben No Process) ought to be just the thing. Seven tracks, 45 minutes of crumpled, crinkly skree in the form of amp-frying distortion, chaotic falling-down-the-stairs song structures, and clattering pipe-fightin' percussion. It's "music" that's been brutally improvised and manipulated, coming out sounding something like Merzbow meets the Starfuckers. At its most extreme (which is very, and most of the time) this stuff's so in-the-red it's infrared. This time around we're hearing less of the krauty rhythmic pummel and snatches of near-melody that characterized their earlier releases (like their last one, 2004's Anno Fauve), and more just sheer blown-out, blow-it-up loud skronky noise, or threatening-to-be loud glitchscapes of brief silences, scrapery and FX. The "small print" in the cd booklet somehwhat puzzlingly specifies the instrumentation/methodology as "paper, stone, electronics, two drums, one mono GS" and "no bass, no overdubs, no no no process", along with the usual disclaimer that Aufgehoben "accept no responsibility for health or hardware". A smart lawyer they must have... Messidor is a seriously OTT session for fans of the likes of Wolf Eyes, Shit and Shine, and Skullflower.

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We've long been fans of Canadian doom/drone/dirge outfit Aun. They shared a split with French ultra doomlords Habsyll (who also released a record on Andee's tUMULt label) and we made their most recent record, VII, a Record Of The Week a while back. Which makes perfect sense, as they traffic in a perfect blend of electronic dronemusic, abstract blackened buzz and downtuned glacial sludge that we just can't seem to get enough of. VII was peppered with black metalisms as well, and featured drumming from Voivod's Away, transforming Aun's drones into something way more metal, but on Black Pyramid, Aun move away from overtly metallic soundmaking, and instead focus on creating a collection of epically abject dronescapes, that capture the same sort of intensity and soul crushing heaviness, but using a distinctly different palette. And the results are incredible. Dark, and dreary, depressive and hauntingly beautiful. Each track here is a miniature epic, a bleak sprawl of smoldering sounds, deep shimming low end drifts beneath hazy fragmented melodies, everything blurred and smeared into slow shifting clouds of grim ambience, the tracks peppered with mysterious bits of random percussion, scrapes, creaks, chimes and buried rhythms. The sound occasionally blossoms into thick buzzing sheets of crumbling distortion, smoldering swaths of blown out thrum, or gorgeously dreamy streaks of shoegazey melody, but just as quickly settles back down into pulsing electronic swirls, or murky expanses of blackened drift. The record closes with the 9+ minute "Shining", which finds Aun taking that hushed minimal shimmer, and tethering it to a strange skeletal rhythm, a sort of disembodied techno throb, but more brittle and trebly, as the black swells beneath roil and churn, until eventually, thick throbbing droned out guitars, wreathed in swirling fuzz, are driven forward by a new, more propulsive, loping, lurching rhythm, the sound growing more and more intense and distorted, before finishing in a final squall of swirling FX and washed out distortion. So good. And while way less metal than the previous record, it's most definitely just as heavy, and dark, and intense. LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!!

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SORRY. Mark Van Hoen (Locust) appears courtesy R&S, Belgium, & Daren Seymour (Seefeel) appears courtesy Warp Records, Ltd = impeccable resumes. Check out the inner grooves = "This is what they want." & "A bony prime cut."

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Long gone are the days of Autechre albums like Incunabula, Amber, and LP5 where spiralling electronic melodies tumbled upon algorithmic breakbeats with ghostly allusions to hardcore techno and hip-hop. Over the past five records (LP5 being perhaps the last Autechre album to embrace the 'classic' IDM sound), abstraction for the sake of abstraction has been the order of the day. The atonal squiggling set upon a wooden breakbeat on "Treale" is about a close as (Oversteps) comes to a classic Autechre track, but much of this album seems to be wandering without much clear intention as to what might happen next. Just a fizzing sound here, and a blobby splutter of jazzy midi-synth there. That said, at least some of us have been digging this quite a bit, not for it's Autechre-ness, but rather for the fact, that much of the weird mopey rhythms and synthy splutter, remind us of all of those fucked up weirdo guitar synth bands we're so obsessed with: Xynfonica, Shevalreq, Thursar, Gluttony, somehow, and in some weird way, the less rhythmic, more ambient tracks on (Oversteps) sound like cleaned up, less obviously fucked up versions of that outsider weirdness, which to most ears might not be a plus, but to some of us, makes this Autechre pretty cool, and weird, and we definitely find ourselves drawn to it, listening to it more often that we might have expected...

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This isn't even remotely new, but it does happen to be perhaps the best Autechre record to date. And as it is only now being released domestically and at a decent price (it was $20 until now) we figured it was time to give this record its due. Besides

RealAudio clip: Chiastic Slide 1
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SORRY. Their new, much-anticipated full length, also available as 2 separate 12"s for 8.98 each.

During the past few years, Autechre's work has come to mean much more than a personal aesthetic expression for Autechre themselves, as members of electronica's ivory tower (the IDM list in particular) have placed Autechre's work within a universally However, "Confield" is a drastically different record for Autechre, as they have become too self-involved in making experimental art for the sake of experimentation. All of their previous records have a trace element of hip hop, as if Autechre has taken the futurism of Afrika Bambaata and Grandmaster Flash to a logical extreme of dense cybernetic spaces and whirring binary clatter. Autechre may have been predicting that hip hop wouldn't catch on to this (if at all) for quite a long time; however, the angular hip hop productions of Destiny's Child or Ludacris have indeed developed similarities to Autechre's sound. I would postulate that these similarities rather than the imitators from their own camp are what pushed Autechre towards the more experimental / less accessible forms on "Confield." This album has almost completely done away with the bass heavy hip hop breakbeats. Instead, Autechre sublimates the rhythms to seasick fluctuations of timestretched glitches and phasing sequences. Similarly, the big romantic melodies which Autechre pioneered on their first album ("Incunabula") and revitalized on their last ("AE5") have gone missing. While the individual sounds are interesting, well-groomed pieces of digital errata, Autechre's micromanagement of the sound has made them lose sight of the bigger picture: making a good record, not just a good sound.

RealAudio clip: Lentic Cathachresis
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As nervous as the die-hard Star Wars fans had been about the second prequel "Attack of the Clones," the beleaguered contributors to the IDM list echoed a hushed anxiety about Autechre's seventh full album "Draft 7.30." Would it, like its predecessor, be "unlistenable noise?" Well, the answer may come as a disappointment to those who hold Autechre's "Chiastic Slide" or "Amber" as the pinnacles of contemporary electronica; but at the same time, "Draft 7.30" isn't nearly as problematic as "Confeld." During the past decade or so, Autechre had built the instantly recognizable trademark sound of fragmented breakbeats and melodic fragments that flicker between paranoia and melancholia. This sound sparked a huge number of imitators which certainly out-number the already large catalogue of work from both Autechre and their alter-ego Gescom. While it's difficult to prove their intent, it seems less and less a coincidence that Autechre would choose to abandon their trademark when so many others are replicating their ideas. While "Confeld" had been a radical departure for Autechre as a sea-sick collage of digi-static vibrations with only a modicum of success, Autechre has returned to one of their strengths on "Draft 7.30" in aligning constantly fluctating rhythms along a continuous structure. Thus, fractured electro breaks and obtuse techno ploddings spiral out from a consistent center amidst cascades of digital fuzz which is the obvious result of bending downpitched samples into the ugly parameters of digital distortion. Unfortunately, Autechre offers another mixed bag in the name of re-invention. MPEG Download: "Tapr" [/audio/autechretapr.mp3]

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Somewhere amidst the nervous clattery percussive goodness that is Autechre, melody resides. Intrepid listeners will hear timestretched vocals and pure tones behind the clickety clackety headlong rush to... well where *are* they going anyway? I'm not quite sure. Um, maybe it doesn't matter. This is more quintessential Autechre, impossibly chaotic but nothing new. It sounds good, though, especially the last track where the notes tumble out so manically, competing with each other for milliseconds of space that it just becomes one big melodic wash of texture, like sand turning into glass. Very nice. Twenty minutes, three tracks. The DVD version of this adds three video tracks, including one by the amazing Chris Cunningham for the track "Second Bad Vilbel," whose visuals can be read as one robot's nightmare of loneliness after we got to see it fall in love in the Cunningham-directed Bjork video "All is Full of Love." Staticky, color separated and full of interference, this video, along with the two others, is pretty good and makes the extra $5 worth it. Maybe.

RealAudio clip: Cap.IV

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This is Peel Sessions Volume 2 from the UKs masters of skitter and stutter. While not as brilliant as the last full length 'LP5' or the fantastic 'EP7' it is nonetheless pretty great. If you are new to this whole Autechre thing, start with the older 'Chiastic Slide', but if you're already a fan, this is just more of what you know (and probably love).

Yeah, somebody is probably going to tell you that Quarstice is brilliant, that this isn't like the last couple of records, which sorta sucked, and that they were wrong to try to convince you that the last couple of records were any good, but that *this* one IS really, really great. Don't be fooled. Autechre hasn't made a great album since 1998's AE5; and Quarstice again fails to live up to Autechre's potential. Here is a collection of 20 short tracks, which supposedly have some sort of revisionist take on the acid tracks and electro breaks that spawned Autechre nearly 20 years ago. Yet, there is nothing squelchy in the acid percolation, no punch to the breaks, no unsettled melodies which seemed to come out of nowhere, no passion. When there are grooves, they sound quite leaden, never venturing anyplace interesting or exciting. Unfortunately, a bit of a big yawn...

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Sorry to say, another disappointing album from the duo responsible for so many exceptional electronic records throughout the '90s. Incunabula? Chiastic Slide? AE5? Remember those records? All absolutely brilliant. Well, the brand new eponymous album from Autechre is not much like those albums and is sort of dull dull dull: a few half assed attempts at the melodies that once seemed second nature, and drum programming that sounds more like they're trying out a whole new set of drum kicks, snares, and time-stretched fizzes with little in the way of ecstatic complexity or groove-oriented dynamism. Autechre should have taken Aphex Twin's lead, who instead of treading musical water has fallen back on the sounds that bring him joy, the old school acid breaks of his ten EP Analord series.

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SORRY. This new release from Autechre is available domestically on one cd, or split into two import-only vinyl 12"s. It's also somewhat misleadingly termed an "ep", seeing as the cd is actually pretty long. Since 1992, Autechre has been digitally redesiging the electro mainframe into terse fragmented breakbeats bearing little resemblance to the sounds of Afrika Bambaata. Hard disc skippings, flanging distortion, and other digital 'mistakes', which had been stumbled upon by all sorts of artists (Oval, Ryoji Ikeda, V/VM, etc...), have become the sources for Autechre's sound. Autechre's stuttering staccatic rhythms appear as the attempts to fuse the flesh and bone of Autechre's human bodies with their machines: blood flows as streaming digital pulses, neural synapses fire erratic distorted beats, and melody has been gradually dissolved perhaps as metaphor of the transformation of the 'human spirit' into its mechanical other. I will admit to being excessive in my analysis of all things Autechre...but this outfit is something really special and this ep is no exception.

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SORRY. Ever since Autechre's stellar self titled album was released a few months back on Warp, we have heard rumors of Nothing releasing this stateside. But attempts to uncover information from Nothing was met with ignorance and belligerence. OK, Nothing might be really busy promoting the aforementioned Marilyn Manson record more so than these... after all he and Trent Reznor provide the hefty sums that purchase the UK rights for Autechre, Squarepusher, and Plaid... but does that give clueless Nothing the excuse to deny information to those who are genuinely interested? Regardless, if you haven't picked up this Autechre record by now, please do so. It may be the year's best electronica record!

Very quiet electronic wisps, distant rumblings, and hushed drones mark the beginning of the second collaboration between Autechre and The Hafler Trio. Again, The Hafler Trio's Andrew McKenzie houses his work in a beautiful, if fragile folio, much like his previous releases on Phonometrography, whom McKenzie has inexplicably ceased doing business with. Why you might ask? Has he ever needed a reason for his actions? At least, Autechre has remained on good terms with McKenzie enough to complete this twin set of recordings. After almost 16 minutes of shrouded-in-secrecy wash and whir, a short segment of randomly splattered fizzing electro-static gives evidence to one of the few sounds on either compilation that clearly hints at Autechre's signature sound, harkening to their most recent recordings Confield and Draft 7.30, but without any of Autechre's already dwindling appreciation for rhythm. In other words, you'd certainly be excused for thinking this a Mego release of laptop noise. The clicks and cuts gradually dissolve across a sea of low end acousmatic rumblings and stretches of inactivity, bringing disc one to a close. The second disc features a considerable increase in audibility, as dense reverberating swells of electric sound (e.g. h3o's Exactly As I Say) snaps to an equally beautiful passage of post-Ligetti electronic chorale music. If you're a fan of the Hafler Trio, it almost goes without saying that you'll want to pick this up; but it must be said that if you're looking for more in the way of Autechre, you won't find much of it here. As with all Hafler Trio releases, no sound samples can be made available.

MPEG stream: Turn (feat. Ed Thomas)

Teeter-tottering betwixt morose indie-rock songishness and purely textural, experimental soundscapery, this avant garde and all together moody international trio, consisting of Dean Roberts (Thela, White Winged Moth), Werner Dafeldecker and Martin Brandlmayr (Radian, Trapist) brings us their second album for Kranky, following up 2004's Jealousy & Diamond. Slow and steady and suffused with low-key drama, Uneasy Flowers should satisfy anyone's yen for (again) an uneasy-feeling yet smoothly executed mix of New Zealand indie-murk free noise and European glitch-drone laptoppery. The album is pleasingly bathed in a glow of wavering distortion/feedback (shortwave static style), scattered with This Heatish percussive patterns (from Brandlmayr) and fragile vocals (from Roberts). Nice!!

MPEG stream: Uneasy Flowers
MPEG stream: Liquid And Starch

Apparently Sergej Auto holds down a day job composing cartoon music in the Czech Republic. For his debut release "Auto", he's put together 13 tracks that starts out with some quaint pop-electronica a la Mouse On Mars / Jimi Tenor that eventually becomes Chain Reaction / Mike Ink style dub-house / click-hop / filter-tech / (fill in your own cute adjective for what Force Inc does). Like most stuff from the Germanic techno genre, Sergej Auto is not super innovative... but certainly effective in the deep groove department.

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

SORRY. With a title such as that you know the music is ferociously cool. Local boy and frequent Mo'Wax engineer/remix-savant Dan Nakamura recently broke out with this exciting ep. He says it pushes OUTward the boundaries of (american) hip hop, a very good thing to do, no? If you dig the Dr. Octagon record, then you'll like this one -- Dan along with Kool Keith are the principals on both albums.

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

SORRY. Autopoesies live album was recorded during the Mille Plateaux tour that skittered across Europe in late 1999. The success of this album (in direct contrast to the rather boring debut) unwittingly calls into question the role of the 'artist' in front of his / her laptop. This record (and thus the live performance) could have simply been made by inputing abstract images into Metasynth (a program that translates visual files into sound files - perfect for manufacturing Ovalesque clickiness), while 'the artist' could be playing Tetris or downloading internet porn or walking off the stage to get a beer. Sure, Roland Barthes' 'Death of The Author' becomes an easy conceptual basis to justify such a live show, but so is 'I couldn't think of anything else to do, so I'll act like Markus Popp snapping my gum and looking bored." Maybe this rant is without merit, and maybe Autoposies had a kick ass live show. Maybe. And maybe Andee will get that helper monkey he wants so badly for the store. With all of this said, "Live A Noir" is an exceptional album of subatomic digital glitches and white hot crackle, turbulent sonic swells and terse glacial scrape. Fits just right with your Stilluppsteypa and Noto.