Saaad is a French duo with a small catalogue of mostly digital-only releases, and Deep/Float is quite a feather in their cap, as not only their first piece of vinyl but also an album released by the tastemaking imprint Hands In The Dark, who have previously put out records by the likes of Death & Vanilla, Robedoor, Cankun, and Ensemble Economique. Saaad are probably selling themselves short with their lackluster name which might come across as a mere mnemonic shorthand for any given ambient project over the past 30 years. Within the album, cinematic vapor trails course through these blurred ambient orchestrations, that could easily draw comparisons to the dreamy dreamtime sounds of A Winged Victory For The Sullen or the psychonaut introspection of Tangerine Dream or even the more industrially minded rumblings of Troum. These thick, immersive arrangements for synths and reverb hinge on simple melodies that flicker through head-swimmingly dense accretions of echo upon delay upon reverb upon more echo, delay, and reverb. The elliptical melodies require a considerable amount of space to articulate themselves with all of the ghostly haziness, making one melodic phrase appear like carlights in a nighttime fog, becoming blindingly obvious only to dissolve into an inky blackness. Not surprisingly, Saaad's pacing is suitably slow and creeping, but the darkness of their tones is hardly ominous. Theirs is a sound that envelops and soothes. This feeling is emblematic of the majestic stasis of "New Helicon" which has all of the forest-borne transmission of the pure ambient tracks on those stately Gas albums. "Valley Of Quartz" sparkles with twinkling trills that lace the gaseous arcs of what could be the ion-engine hums from alien rocket ships accelerating through a deep space nebula. The album's finale "After Love" is a bleak funereal ambient dirge with Caretakerish melody slowly descending into the event horizon of a black hole. Sounds to tug at your heart strings; and limited to 300 copies!
If you never heard of this obscure eighties female fronted world-pop outfit, get in line. An unlikely mix of Teutonic new wave and dubby balearic dance pop created in Bremen, Germany, Saada Bonaire only released one single in their lifetime. Now Captured Tracks, through its new imprint Fantasy Memory, has brought to us the complete recordings of this short-lived outfit, and it's pretty amazing, especially if you are into lost post-punk disco rarities as much as we are. Created by Bremen DJ Ralf Behrendt in 1982, and recorded in Kraftwerk's studio by legendary dub-punk producer Dennis Bovell (The Pop Group, The Slits) featuring an array of jazz and world musicians hired from the local immigrant center, Saada Bonaire was fronted by Stefanie Lange and Claudia Hossfield, whose sultry but blase delivery make their sound a sort of hybrid between the domineering dance music of Gina X and Grace Jones and the breezy dub of Brenda Ray. The aforementioned single "You Can Be More As You Are" is an infectious post-disco club classic, that probably had a lot more traction in southern Europe than in the west. Their music, with its exotic flourishes and dreamy tropical rhythms, seems tailor-made for warmer climates, and we can easily see these tracks being played in sunrise dance sets after a long night of clubbing. Definitely a band that should have been a lot bigger than they were, their lack of success the fault of EMI's A&R man who notoriously went over budget with the acts he developed. After going over 5x the budget for Tina Turner's Private Dancer, EMI pulled the plug on Saada Bonnaire and they were rarely heard from since. This anthology covers everything the band recorded between 1982 and 1985, but still remains surprisingly modern sounding for being 30 years old.
Legendary SF DJ Cheb I Sabbah returns with a DJ mix drawing from Asia, Arabia and Africa -- or tracks at least influenced by music from those parts of the world. Included are cuts by Asian Dub Foundation, Najma, Trilok Gurtu along with remixes by Sabbah of Don Cherry, Paul Horn and Solace.
Local DJ Cheb i Sabbah returns with the third installment in his trilogy of Indian classical music infused electronica. Divided in two parts: North & South, Krishna Lila takes as its inspiration the devotional musics of Northern and Southern India. Recorded in Madras, Bombay and New Delhi, India with a score of Indian musicians and then augmented with electronics and Bill Laswell via Pro Tools in New York & San Francisco. Those looking for pumping four on the floor dance music with token sitar, tabla and sundry other Indian samples thrown in for flavoring should look elsewhere as DJ Cheb i Sabbah's approach is nearly the antithesis of this. I guess this is what one could call, in the parlance of dance culture, "chill out" music. Using an already solid foundation of recordings DJ Cheb very tastefully adds a beat here and there, but never overwhelms what's been laid down by the musicians. Much of the time in fact, it is hard to tell that he's done anything at all to the original tracks. Fans of Talvin Singh should definitely take note of this one.
Local DJ makes good! Yes, the East-meets-West DJ masterwork that was Sabbah's very popular "Shri Durgah" album now gets the remix treatment, from Transglobal Underground, Fun Da Mental, Bally Sagoo, Bedouin Descent, State of Bengal, TJ Rehmi, and DJ Cheb I Sabbah himself. Fans of the "Asian Underground" need no further recommendation.
This legendary local DJ assembles brilliant musicians (Ustad Salamat Ali Khan, K. Sridhar, Ustad Sultan Khan, Mala Ganguly and the unavoidable Bill Laswell) to create beautiful ambience and soundscapes, bringing together classical Hindustani music and the chill room. "Traditional ragas meet 'DJ science'" it says here. Fans of Talvin Singh, for one, should find this to their liking.
While currently spending his days surrounded by Berlin's techno digerati, Matthew Curry (aka Safety Scissors) pines for his hometown of San Francisco... or at least that's where his musical heart still is. "Parts Water" is Safety Scissors' debut album
Heads up! Here comes another wave of limited edition 7"s from 333 Records! Each release in this series is pressed in an ultra small quantity of 333! The latest additions are this one by Sagan and one by Girl Talk. Plus: The first 100 of this Sagan single comes with a little extra something -- a bonus 3"cdr! Don't fret too much if you do miss the first 100 though 'cause we've been assured that the track will be available online for download too. The ever mischievous and crafty trio of Jay Lesser, Blevin Blectum, Wobbly pour out the prickly tickles, thick bass thuddery, and druggy effected vocals for these two short heavily processed and distorted tracks. Always entertaining! We've only got a handful of these. Snoooze'n'loooze, kiddie!
We've been getting more and more tired of electronic music recently. How could you not? It seems that every week there's a hundred more glitchy wannabe Autechres or Aphex Twins. But thankfully, there are always groups of folks, quietly doing their own thing, thinking weird thoughts and making weird sounds, turning unlikely concepts into reality, and offering us amazing alternatives to the usual crap we are forced to sift through day after day. Thus we have Sagan. With a pedigree that would have us expecting no less. Jay Lesser, Bevin Blectum, Wobbly, fim maker Ryan Junell, and the label run by Drew And Martin of Matmos. You'd almost find yourself shouting 'supergroup' if yo didn't know that such behavior would get you a punch in the nose.
A massive concept album based on Carl Sagan and just good 'ol science in general, Unseen Forces is a heaping sensory overload of sonic irregularites and visual fuckery. The audio disc is a lot more listenable that you might expect from audio terrorists like Lesser and Blectum. It's a far spacier affair, channelling classic Tangerine Dream, Pink Floyd swoosh, Hawkwind spaciness, as well as modern glitch into a slowly swirling galaxy of shimmery synths, and stuttering starbursts, throbbing techno broadcast from a distant galaxy, and garbled through the light years into a smeary ambient blur, demarcated by chirps and clicks, thumps and throbs. A space opera for the IDM set.
We were a bit wary of the accompanying film, fearing at best, some sort of cool music videos, and at worst, home movies of band members mugging and acting silly. Well, somehow it's actually both, but the sum of those parts is infinitely more watchable than you might think and so completely compliments Sagan's techno space glitch swirl. So much so that after watching the film, every time we listen to the record now, all we can picture is the scenes from the film! Various historical scientific discoveries and encounters are fictionalized and re-enacted by the band members as well as the guys from Matmos and AQ pal Dave Cerf. Gorgeously filmed and masterfully edited, the grainy Viewmaster menus and segues perfectly balance the silent movie feel of the vignettes, with the action skipping and hiccupping to the music. Funny and fascinating, silly but emminently watchable. Also the opening sequence and the closing credits are AMAZING looking. This record and film have been in the works for a LONG time, but we are happy to report that the wait was worth it!
Also, the hybrid DVD contains 9 shows with over 6 hours of music!
The latest mysterious musical missive from now local label Moon Glyph comes in the form of this gorgeous bit of collaged ambience from M. Sage, who sound hovers in the shadows between the Caretaker, Philip Jeck and Tim Hecker, a woozy loopscape of random radio snippets, of treated instruments and muted moody melodies, processed guitars drift wraith like over haunting field recordings, wreathed in hazy swirls of static, the various sounds all blurred into soft focus impressionistic drifts, that just seem to fade in and out, like the flickering of an old filmstrip, or the world viewed through the dusty old window of a beat up car, driving through empty towns and long abandoned neighborhoods. Sound become distorted, gristly and crunchy, shards of caustic buzz surface here and there, but are quickly smeared into another layer of sweetly swirling sound. And when proper instruments do surface, they give the sound a haunted otherworldly twang, or a glistening prismatic cosmic shimmer. The sound constantly shifting from sun dappled dreamlike glimmer, to murky, faded drifts, softly churning dronescapes, all slowed down sounds and softly keening melodies, warm whirs and hushed crackle, to darkly cinematic mesmer, the crackle almost becoming a physical presence, the dreamy lilting thrum beneath almost wholly obscure by this glorious patina of crunch and crackle, turning sound into something impossible tactile, a blissed out sprawl of heavenly soft noise. So utterly, and hauntingly gorgeous.
Before we get into our usual wordy meandering, hyperbolic gushing and tangential ruminating, we oughta come right out and say it first thing, this record is fucking incredible. One of the coolest weirdest records we've heard in ages. Twisted and blown out, weirdly melodic and groovy, dense and washed out and otherworldly and fucking bizarre, equal parts blissed out hypnogogic shoegazey drift, lurching, chopped and screwed style Southern crunk, majestic choral dreaminess, blurred beat heavy collaged electronica, and sample heavy blown out synthbuzz epicness. In some alternate universe alien world, THIS is the music that comes blasting out of booming systems in tricked out lowriders, some sort of glorious, blindingly blissy club music that fuses stuttery stumbly beats, to crumbling distorted low end, and thick swaths of synths so blown out the whole record sounds like it might collapse, mix in soaring operatic vocal samples, low slung bass buzz, jittery drum skitter, and mush mouthed slowed down 'rapping', smear and blur it all into one glorious, warped and warbly cough syrup fever dream epic, and that's basically Salem's King Night.
By now, most folks have at lest heard of 'witch house' a new 'genre' that Salem seem to represent, willingly or not, it's hard to say, but alongside other groups like oOoOO, witch house has received the sort of blog hype (and mainstream press) that immediately turns us off, and made us want to hate it, but so far, everything we've heard, we've dug, big time, but nothing has kicked out ass as much as this Salem record. It's so weird, and twisted and bizarre, it's sort of hard to believe that THIS is the record people are talking about, it makes sense that we'd love it, and that it would be an aQuarius Record Of The Week, but the New York Times? John Q. Public? Fuck it, like we always say, we'd way rather here stuff like this on the radio anyway. But regardless of the hype, or the backlash, or any of the nonmusical stuff, it all boils down to how ingenious and utterly OUT THERE this is. Just check out the title track, some weird garbled voices, some skittery drum machine, some ravey synths, choral voices, and then BAM, the song explodes, the bass a throbbing slab of rumbling crunch, the drum machine weirdly awkward, but the perfect compliment to the tangled melodies, and those soaring distorted operatic voices, the track a total epic, building and building, like the score for some insane alien sci-fi slow motion dancefloor martial arts battle, you can almost visualize fishtanks exploding into galaxies of exploding glass shards, while bodies fly threw the clouds of glistening sparkle, everything seemingly floating weightless. So good. We could listen to this track FOREVER (and pretty much have since we got it). But then comes "Asia" with its fat stuttery beat, and girlish vocals buried beneath a miasma of crumbling distorted crunch, and woozy synth melodies and confusional drum programming, sounding a bit like some over the top M83 jam gone haywire, or maybe some lost Cocteau Twins B-side remixed by Alec Empire and Black Moth Super Rainbow, everything fuzzy and washed out and gauzy, murky and dark, but still suffused with a weird sort of sunshininess. "Frost" is more of the same, even prettier and blissier, taking Sigur Ros and dipping it in a vat of gristly distortion and Carpenter sci-fi synths, and then stretching it out into a billowing sheet of diaphanous dream pop.
It's not until "Sick" that we get a glimpse of Salem's other side, their chopped and screwed, sippin' sizurp, alien slow motion shoegaze hip hop side, the music remains essentially the same, maybe not quite as dense, still swirls of female vocals, a strange otherworldly chorale, but over the top of this sonic cotton candy , a 'rapper' delivers his mutated pitch shifted flow, mouthful of marbles, finger on the record slowing it do a crawl, creating a weirdly dreamy draggy druggy hip hop / dream pop hybrid. And the rest of the record seems to drift lazily between those two sounds, "Release Da Boar" finds Salem offering up another cloud of dopesmoke dreaminess, fuzz drenched dirge pop bliss, which gives way to "Trapdoor", another slow motion, DJ Screw style cough syrup remix, laid over a warm warped and warbly bit of lysergic ambience and buzzing rave synth swirl. "Hound" is like the title track redux, so thick and crumblingly distorted, but so blown out and beautiful, "Tair" is a gloriously weird spaced out, handclapped chunk of shoegaze rap, and "Killer" sounds like Joy Division or Interpol run through a million distortion pedals, and set to a Casio keyboard drum machine beat, only to shrug off some of the crunch and warble, leaving a gorgeous stretch of plaintive low slung doom pop, that hints at the poppiness that lurks beneath the surface on King Night, only to finish the record in a squall of synth buzz, mumbled vox and drum machine chaos.
Wow. What else can we say. This sounded so good in the store, and even better in headphones, but it wasn't until we got in the car, and cranked this as loud as it would go, that it finally sunk in, and suddenly, we were bouncing up and down in a tricked out lowrider on some alien planet in some alternate universe, our booming system BOOMING, getting totally lost in these twisted and gorgeously damaged sounds. WAY WAY recommended.
Since the late '80s, having spent time in the avant-noise project Gum, Australian sound artist Philip Samartzis has been exploring the technological residue that most sound engineers spend lifetimes trying to eliminate. Not surprisingly, indeterminant buzzings, electrical disturbances, crossed wire interference, tape hiss, and the surface noise of vinyl are the current source materials for Samartzis' electro-acoustic compositions. While there have been plenty of examples involving the tactility of technological residue with as many conceptual agendas (e.g. Loren Chasse's "Hedge Of Nerves," C.M. von Hausswolff's "An Operation of Spirit Communication," Christian Marclay's "Record Without A Cover," etc.), Samartzis has developed a unique signature that favors a clincally precise compositional technique that is typically affiliated with the Raster-Noton and 12K camps of electronic music. However, within those tightly controlled sets of sound, Samartzis allows for all of the haptic blemishes and residual sounds to continue unchecked by any controlling mechanisms.
Recorded as part of Staalplaat's stellar "Mort Aux Vaches" series of radio broadcasts for VPRO radio, these three lengthy pieces may be Samartzis' best work to date. While many of the sounds (i.e. miniature clatterings, run-out groove vinyl crackle, and irritable strains of gossamer feedback) have been recycled from previous recordings, Samartzis has greatly improved upon the contextualization of those sounds, providing an open-ended arena for a number of phenomenological events and metaphoric disconnects.
While maintaining the same packaging principles as all of the earlier "Mort Aux Vache" releases with a single tri-folded piece of paper holding the cd in place with a brass fastener, the paper in question is a beautiful iridescent, 'shark-skin' paper.
MPEG Download: "Variable Resistance" [/audio/samartzisvariableres.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "Variable Resistance" [/audio/samartzisvariableres.m3u]
You think Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti is weird, wait until you hear APHG offshoot Samps, who basically take all the fucked up retro FM radio-ims and tweaked yacht rock tropes of Ariel Pink, and tosses it all into a blender, chops it all up, twists it into crazy head spinning shapes and spits them back out in the form of the most fucked up, drug addled seventies coke party disco dance freak out you've ever heard.
From fat fuzzy funked out basslines, to stuttery sampled vocals, to blown out AM radio melodies, to record crackle crusted synthfunk grooves, to cheesy MTV style new wave pop, to creepy jittery collages of slap bass, wah wah guitar, fuzzy synth and electronic drums, but Samps fuck it all up, piling on layers, looping samples, sometimes into full on blown out blissed out almost shoegazey sounding sheets of ethereal buzz and shimmer, but just as often into some sort of stumbling, lurching, unfunky, eighties pop-funk free for all. It's cheesy as all get out, but it's so tweaked and twisted and fucked up, that it basically becomes a sort of low brow high art, a dizzying psychedelic sampledelic mash up that in some weird way transcends all the references, and creates something pretty bad ass out of the musical detritus we've all tried to leave behind.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES, each one hand numbered, comes with a download coupon, we're not sure we can get more of these once they're gone...
While he hasn't really had any projects quite as popular as his original group Cabaret Voltaire, Richard H. Kirk has been quite busy and surprisingly prolific, most often indulging his electronic side. Sandoz is his dub project inspired by the heavy dub grooves of King Tubby but with a very '90s/modern electronic feel to it. And while modern dub as the potential to be cheesy, this is actually quite good. Deep and dark and dubby, almost sounds like it could be some lost Wordsound joint. Cool.
From the dark minds of Sandwell District comes this impressive mix of motorik techno, bleak disco, and heroin house. Sandwell District is both the name of a label which collects some of the finer specimens of electronica (i.e. Silent Servant, Rrose, Surgeon, Regis, Function, etc.) and the name of the project for Karl O'Connor (Regis, British Murder Boys, etc.) and David Sumner (Function). It's pretty much just a semantic difference when it comes to this mix, as many of the artists that have contributed to the label are featured on this mix. Sandwell District envision themselves (both label and project) as a logical outgrowth of the British industrial culture (e.g. Throbbing Gristle, Clock DVA, Cabaret Voltaire), with ominous chords and controlling rhythms bounding through their body of work. We've long heard that O'Connor likes to toss in some of the more extreme proponents of early industrial noise in his DJ sets; and we do get a brief taste of Boyd Rice & Frank Tovey - whose metallic flanges are driven by a thumping 909 kick. Not exactly the infernal chaos of Whitehouse, but still a nice touch. Most all of the mix comes from various cuts and mixes from the past 12-18 months with recognizable selections from Raime, Vatican Shadow, Ike Yard, Function, and Surgeon - all of which enjoy skeletal structures of muscular rhythms, black atmospherics, and nary a melodic chord in sight. The closest thing to a melody could be found in the Chain Reactive stabs of metallic synths that glide in sync with the ride cymbal swagger of Mary Velo's "Detune" and the mid '90s acid trax from Plastikman's "Plasticine." Nice work, Sandwell District, nice work.
After a way too long break, Hidden Shoal return to aQuarius, with two new gems, both from long time aQ faves, the first is the latest from SF dreamdronedrifter Wes Willenbring, reviewed elsewhere on this list, and this right here, the latest from German outfit Sankt Otten, who we originally described as a mix between Bohren And Der Club Of Gore and Portishead (they're often described in the press as the German Portishead), and really Bohren and Portishead, can't do much better than that. But we were excited to hear how these guys might have changed over the last couple years, and in fact, their sound has shifted quite a bit.
At least in the beginning, the murk and the muted minimalism has been replaced by something much more washed out and ethereal, glimmering and dreamlike, the opening track is a weightless swath of gauzy chordal shimmer that leads directly into a deep throbbing bass synth, we were prepared for a descent into darkness, but weirdly, the sound shifts toward something more epic, a chiming gamelan like melody, over warm soaring synths, skittery drums, a sort of laid back droney downtempo shuffle, but laced with a weirdly major key melody.
It's around track three, where the group slip into some serious downtempo trip hop territory, a gorgeous hazy trawl through greyed electronics and blackened ambience, more laid back skitter, thick throbbing bass, and all sorts of sweeping swirling melody, dark and epic and mysterious. But SA continue to defy the German Portishead pigeonhole, by cranking up the tempo, veering into a sort of krautrock by way of Four Tet one minute, whirling Pop Ambience the next, synthy sprawling blissed out prismatic new age the next, over the course of the record slipping back and forth between these various sounds, sometimes melding several at once, a gorgeous, moody sonic journey, from haunting atmospheric darkness, to sun dappled rhythmic mesmer, to spaced out psychedelic synth, to eighties sounding new wave to hushed dreamlike ambience, to creepy slowcore crawl. Awesome stuff.
Wow, "Creator" is quickly becoming our favorite single of the year. Santogold has been getting lots of attention and winning high profile fans like Bjork, Spank Rock and Lily Allen. "Creator" for sure makes us think of her friend M.I.A. in both the vocal delivery and the splatter-of-color production by Switch (who worked on most of M.I.A.'s latest). The 'b' side finds Santogold in more of a new wave territory sounding kind of like Karen O singing lead on the first Cars album. While both the aQ faithful as well as her famous fans wait for her debut full length, we'll be laying the needle on "Creator" again and again and again.
Local laidback rockers Sappington sure take their own sweet time. Their first cdep came out in late 2000 and we've not heard a recorded peep from them since. They do play out occasionally though which reassured us that they were still making music. To refresh your memory, this trio makes lovely, drowsy, starry sky tunes. In the time since that first release, it appears they've grown quite a bit. Their sound is much more confident, developed and detailed. The male and female vocals are much more robust and front and center than I recall. The latter are very reminiscent of Carly Simon or Rebecca Gates, and they're warmly effective in contrast to the fuzzy washes of electronics in their "Airtight" remix which closes the second side of the 10". So dreamy and mellow, this entry fits well in the Dreams By Degrees seasonal series which also includes fellow mellows Colophon (Jef from Tarentel), Loquat, and Coastal.
Scott Herren's (better known as Prefuse 73) latest incarnation as Savath & Savalas has manifested one of his finest works to date which for some reason we weren't expecting at all. His last couple of records on Warp featured Eva Puyuelo Muns on vocals which made them highly compelling to listen to on the one hand but also made them safe enough to feature in car commercials and as background music in trendy restaurants. On Golden Pollen, well after a highly publicized falling out between Herren and Muns, Herren takes up all the vocal duties himself, making for a subdued but never unpredictable recording. After listening to O Terco and Caetano Veloso all week, Golden Pollen almost sounds like a lost Brazilian pastoral psych record from the early seventies, if it wasn't for the experimental electronic passages in tracks like "Te Amo...Por Que Me Odias". Although it's his best record, that doesn't mean it's without certain flaws. Its concentration on subtlety creates a lack of dynamics making the record seem overly long and a bit same-y at times. But that is sometimes what happens when a record is based more on atmosphere than composition and is probably best enjoyed in a peripheral setting rather than a deeply concentrated listening environment. Produced by John McEntire, with Jose Gonzales and Mia Doi Todd making guest appearances.
Mr. Scott Herren sure likes to keep busy. We just listed his newest project Diamond Watch Wrists, an indie rock minded collaboration with Zach Hill from Hella, he also has a brand new Prefuse 73 album in the works, but somehow even with all that going on, he's also managed to crank out another Savath & Savalas album. S+S is the project that allows Herren to explore a more delicate, breezy and tropical sound. Teamed up with a great ensemble of musicians, which includes dreamy vocalist Eva Puyuelo Muna, La Llama might be the most fully realized and satisfying Savath & Savalas recording yet, channeling the sounds and sentiments of '70s Brazilian/South American soft-psych greats like Joyce, Milton Nascimento, and Congregacion, yet infusing that sound with a modern element that keeps the music from sounding purely nostalgic. Understated and richly flowing with an ease and breeze that is totally hitting the spot!
Sometimes it takes incredibly stressful interpersonal band relationships to make really wonderful music. Perhaps this is an example. Acclaimed hip-hop producer Scott Herren, aka Prefuse 73, claims that he and singer Eva Puyuelo Muns will no longer work together beyond this release. That's really too bad, cause it's truly a cool and beautiful ep. Manana exposes their shared passion for early '70s Brazilian psych, simple production techniques, sad melodies as found in Spanish folk music and edginess and attitude in Afro/Cuban/Puerto Rican/NYC fusions. Bright and juicy Catalan sounds fill-out the abstract electronic recontextualization, creating a successful sonic collaboration, at least musicly so. Let's hope they can make amends and create some more hazy explorations of Catalan singing in this electronic manifestation. Meanwhile, Manana is a glistening beauty for us to treasure!
Two new, 7"s of delicious skweee here folks! From the same Portland label, Poisonous Gases, that previously brought us Lazercrotch. Now they've gone and signed up a genuine Scandinavian skweeer, Daniel Savio from Sweden, as well as Portland's Michael Bruce (not the guy from the Alice Cooper Band we're pretty sure).
Savio's 7", following up his other recent one for LoDubs, features two new tracks, both representative of Savio's brand of "Apocalyptic Skweee", suspenseful blip-blip-bloop rhythms and ominous bass pulses that harken back to creepy cool John Carpenter scores.
SKWEEE!!!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Skweee!
By now, faithful readers of the aQ list know how into skweee we are, that twisted playful freaked out glitchy electronica that's equal parts 8-bit video game music, classic hip hop boom bap and eighties electro, all woozy synths, stuttery beats, lots of buzz and fuzz and bloop and bleep. We've listed tons of 7"s, a few full lengths, some killer comps, but this is the first long player we've listed from Swedish skweee scene king Daniel Savio, and it's a good one.
And unlike most skweee, which tends toward the fun and funky, Savio's Nekropolis gets downright dark. Well dark for skweee anyway. Savio calls it "Apocalyptic Skweee". The sounds are buzzy and fuzzy, the melodies minor key, the mood ominous and haunting, sure it's still playful, that's the nature of the skweee beast, but Nekropolis plays out like a compliation of the music from all the scariest levels from all your favorite eighties arcade games, remixed into creepy dancefloor destroyers. Bleeps and glitches are underpinned by thick swaths of low end buzz, jagged shards of upper register crunch, at times almost like Bernard Herrmann like string stabs rendered in 8-bit, the low end constantly creeping like some digital black fog. "Warhead" is an awesome Atari creepscape that manages to be both haunting and spooky, groovy and goofy; "Black Water" is John Carpenter's soundtrack to Escape From New York played on a Commodore 64; "Reanimator" is an old school electro jam constructed from chiptuned tones and laced with horror movie ambience, it's all so good. If there was ever gonna be a record that finally convinced the masses to bow before the skweee, it would most definitely be Nekropolis!
The vinyl, with tip-on art, comes packaged with a cd version of the album as well, which we way prefer to just a download code, thanks Losonofono!
Skweee! Skweee! Skweee! (That's our onomatopoeic skweee alert siren, of course.) Daniel Savio is one of those peculiar Scandinavian skweee producers, making tracks in that funky, fun (and pun) filled '80s arcade-y, chiptune-y, instrumental electro genre we dig so much, you've heard his stuff on the Museum Of Future Sound comps, on the Skweee Tooth comp too, and he's got several 7"s and a full-length lp out as well... Here's his latest, released by an American label, actually a sub-label of Portland dubstep imprint Lo Dubs (who also brought us the killer new Clubroot set also highlighted this week), it's a 2-song 45 featuring skweee that maybe leans towards the darkness of dubstep a bit!
"Nightmare Food" is slinky-slunky skweee, jammin' the blip-blurp, with vaguely Middle Eastern motifs. "Sleeping Wit' Fish" is maybe even moodier, building up into whipcracks of suspenseful grooviness. If John Carpenter made skweee, it might sound like this. Apparently this single is the forerunner for a new full-length from Savio, of what he terms "apocalyptic skweee", eventually to be released on Losonofono, can't wait!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Skweee!!! See our Museum of Future Sound review for more explanation...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Ex-Seefeel members. For fans of Too Pure, and yes, this is the full-length. Fuzz, distortion, and a cool techno version of "Heart of Glass" that makes those who recognize it run to the counter to ask 'who IS this?'
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Their previous album Beauty Nowhere was a furious incarnation of belligerent electronica / noise almost sounding like Leichenschrie era SPK with a female vocalist. Here Scala (whose members feature the talented remnants of the once great Seefeel - Sarah Peacock and Daren Fletcher - as well as Locust's Mark Van Hoen) have greated a darker, more sublime album of leftfield electronica with a surprisingly silky atmosphere lingering around the processed guitars and subdued breakbeats... not too far from the last Tricky album.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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We've reached the eighth installment in Raster's monthly countdown to 2000, and this time it's Robin Rimbaud's turn. His contribution is a minimal array of pulses, blips and beats (nothing too surprising in that discription, now is there?). Very much a headphone listen--keep away from noisy machines.
From the liner notes: "The Scanner series of recordings features the intercepted conversations of unsuspecting talkers, edited into minimalist musical settings as if they were instruments." Robin Rimbaud is Scanner, recorded live in London, March 1995.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
David Shea, Robin Rimbaud, and Robert Hampson follow up their live in London disc with another from the French capitol.
The second cosmic synth-drone-rock missive from Scantily Clad, a duo of instrumental improvisers split between Northern and Southern California. We loved their first cd-r, an amalgam of lo-fi synth styles from soft lullabies to abrasive noise that showed a lot of promise. Well, that promise is made good on their follow-up, a richer, more focused, and self-assured outing than before. The sonic intensity is beefed up, the songs more composed, the instrumentation more varied, the dreaminess heightened ( especially on tracks like Vanilla, Baby"), and the nosier parts (like what sounds like chipmunks speaking in tongues on "Deep Witch") are even weirder. But it all fits together very well as a fully-realized piece of heavy instrumental spaciness. Even the packaging is cooler, with their clipart collages of mandalas and symbolic animals housed in a sturdy transparent plastic case. Fans of groups like Emeralds and Carlton Melton will find lots to dig here!
The bedroom synth-rockers of Scantily Clad return with their third home-brewed communique. And as always, they deliver the lo-fi/sci-fi goods with tracks that teeter from distorted cosmic rock instrumentals to moody cinematic soundscapes.
They often pack a lot of ideas into short songs that only add to their listenability. White Noise and other fucked-up and broken electronic textures are painted on over prettily composed pieces that add a noirish sublime element to the proceedings, like lullabies for powered-down robots before they retire to obsolescence. Packaged in a homemade gatefold digipack with their usual xerox copy art inserts.
Limited to 99 copies, these most likely won't last for long. Their other two releases went out of print in a flash, so don't wait too long!
Album number 4 from these home recorded synth rock improvisers, each one has been a beautifully hand assembled package rife with bizarre xerox collages that riff on retro-futurist themes, as does the music though in a more roundabout way. This is modular synth music that doesn't winkingly nod to the vast past of synth heavy music, but takes a more DIY off the cuff attitude towards shaping its sounds and song. Though we can hear strains of groups like Chrome, Add N To X and Stereolab, Scantily Clad don't seem to try and emulate either of those bands instead focusing on a hodgepodge of moods and tropes: Noisy interludes, distorted shoegaze psych, vibrant pop, kosmiche bliss, and avant experimentation. All with strange titles like "Vacant Stare World Exciter" and "Exotic Fabrics And Materials". This is library music for the new modern age!
5 is the magic number for this central California duo of stoner over-driven electronica, looped samples and big noisy drum breaks. The oddly monikered Scantily Clad not only celebrate their fifth cd-r release, but it contains 23 tracks (2+3=5), limited to 55 copies and priced to move at $5.55! That's a lot of high fives! But seriously, we have loved this duo since their first cd-r, their sound a home-brewed collaged confection of dirty over-driven electronics and big beats with a humorous Lynchian sensibility for melody, song titles and packaging, each one a hand-assembled venture of surrealist clip art collage and scrappy recycled cd cases from what must have been from those free AOL trial cds they used to mail out in the nineties.
On their fifth release, the sound is more sample-based and dreamier then ever before. Each track is a miniature world of vintage electronic soundscapery with often a mysterious jazz soundtrack vibe deconstructed, cut and repasted that reminds of something like Madlib or J Dilla remixing Dymaxion or Quintron, or a less self-aware Tipsy. Way eccentric and off-kilter, but also shimmery and narcotic, with occasional clipped vocal snippets peering through the stony layers of hazy sound, twangy strings, cascading harps and drum breaks. Super unique and very likely our favorite release from them so far. Again, LIMITED to 55 copies. Grab one while you can!
Schizoid was responsible for our favorite tracks on the massive (and massively good) 'Don't Fuck With Us' 3 cd compilation of North American digital hardcore compiled by the 'expert' on such things, Mr. Alec Empire. We described Schizoid as "Burzum goes DHR" and that's still pretty right on. But now we have a whole disc, so there's much more variation and much more mayhem! Super distorted, heavily effected, totally evil vocals over dense electronic soundscapes, with chopped up metal guitars, pounding hardcore/gabber/drill'n'bass rhythms. Way more intense and aggressive than almost anything on DHR, and certainly more fucked up and pummelling than almost any electronic music we've heard lately, without falling into the boring, repetitive sameness of most gabber/digital hardcore. Super varied, with full on speed metal gabber, lots of spaced out ambient breaks, electronic drones, and some seriously damaged mid tempo primitive-black-metal-electronica. This is definitely some of the best (and most brutal) electronica to come our way since we first heard 'The Destroyer'. For fans of DHR, The Berserker, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Pig Destroyer, Venetian Snares, Atomsmasher, Burzum, Darkthrone and all that evil stuff.
With a name and title that are quite a mouthful (nay, alphabetful!), what might you expect musically from this gent? (more clues: he's a German fella also in Holosud etc., and this is on A-Musik). Well on this, his fourth full-length, you'll be treated to a hefty dose of the arpeggiator button on his Casio for one thing. A playful multi-tiered electronic pop arcade of PacMan-esque melodies.
As you may have heard, Allan here just had a baby! And thus, our last in-between list's special theme was "baby music" - a bunch of suggestions by friends who are parents, of music that they liked to play for their newborns and infants. But, what has Allan really been playing for his little girl? Well, um, actually she's been hearing a lot of the things Allan has been working on reviewing for aQuarius. Fortunately for her, one of 'em was this disc, by German electronic experimentalist Gunter Schlienz, his first full-length cd after quite a few obscure cassette and cd-r releases over the past four or five years.
And it's totally baby-approved and appropriate, these delicate, otherworldly ambient instrumentals full of light and shade and (occasionally eerie) blissfulness, with titles like "Immaculate", "Numb", "Lament", "Shimmer", and, oddly enough, "Janitor".
Schlienz's modular synth and field recordings create Cluster-y swells of sound, moving in gentle waves adorned with simple sweet melodies and darker drones. A few of his friends, including Norm Chambers (aka Panabrite, also the guy who actually made the Science Of The Sea album by "Jurgen Muller" we liked so much) appear as guests on here as well, adding strings, piano, etc.
We're not really sure if Allan's baby likes this a lot or not (hard to tell, as yet), but HE sure does. Consider Contemplation to be a lovely, peaceful set of abstract electronic lullabies for adults, and possibly their children too! Limited to 300 copies, btw.
Marcus Schmickler (aka Pluramon and Wabi Sabi) expands his electronica experimentations creating a surreal open-ended album of painterly textural sounds. Certainly for fans of Jan St. Werner's more experimental outings (Microstoria and Lithops).
