[ aquarius records — Electronic ]

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Showing results 3501 through 3550 of 5033.

A 2-cd re-issue of Ulrich Schnauss's debut album, Far Away Trains Passing By, plus some lovely unreleased material. Shimmery, earnest electronic shoegaze cloaked in wonder with a touch of sadness. Sweetly pretty without tumbling into saccharine excess. Actually, as much as we love Mr. Schnauss, this also really made us yearn for our old Slowdive albums! No surprise that he was a contributer to Morr Music's compilation of Slowdive covers, "Blue Skied an' Clear." Schnauss' work here can also be considered the opposite side of the coin from a band like M83. If M83 were a horror movie soundtrack, this could be for a fantasy film by the same director illustrating a tale of a boy riding dragons in outer space, a whimsical video game, or a rainy day dream. Recommended for fans of the above as well as of Boards of Canada and B. Fleischmann.

MPEG stream: ...passing by
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Swooooon!! He made us wait years, but finally Mr. Schnauss's follow-up to 2003's A Strangely Isolated Place has arrived! Are you ready for some epic shoegazer splendor? Well, sink your ears into this swirling blown-out shimmering dreaminess. The heavily processed and effected vocals, guitars and synthesizers are all melded together into one envelopingly dense yet somehow airy procession. Absolutely gorgeous and absolutely recommended!

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New record from shoegaze electronic maestro Schnauss, here joined by Mark Peters from the band Engineers. While we wait near impatiently for Schnauss's next proper full length in a couple of months, we're happy to spend time in the moody atmospheres of this latest collaborative effort. Underrated Silence takes the familiar synth washes we've come to expect with Schnauss, and tempers them with Peters' Robyn Guthrie-style guitar treatments. The mood is frosty, but beautifully dreamy, taking in the crisp vibrancy of a clear winter's day (which sadly we didn't have much of this year). While not necessarily typical of Schnauss's more pop-oriented recordings, Underrated Silence plays out as more cinematic and mysterious with more experimental edges in sound, and is a welcome addition to his too short discography. Recommended!

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Once a member of Tangerine Dream and Kluster, Conrad Schnitzler evolved into one of the most distinctive artists within the Krautrock scene. Through such seminal albums as Ballet Statique and Con, Schnitzler developed an uncompromising aesthetic that blossomed beyond the cosmic expansiveness of his fellow psychedelic journeymen and into oblique experiments whose bleak results were the templates that inspired post-industrial expressionists such as MB, Giancarlo Toniutti, Arcane Device, and Cranioclast, not to forget about his impact on the works of Emeralds, Omit, and Oneohtrix Point Never. 10.10.84 is a document of one of Schnitzler's 'kassetten konzert', during which he played back a number of pre-recorded cassettes through upwards of six decks that he would sometimes suspend from a belt around his waste and broadcast through a megaphone wired to a metal helmet that he wore on his head. Given his studies with Joseph Beuys in the '60s, one could postulate that these performances might also warrant some theatrical gestures given the mobility of this set-up. For this konzert recorded in Berlin, Schnitzler overlays sweeping oscillations, clouds of static, and nervous electronic percolations, all of which hold a metallic sheen as if each of these sounds could sharpen knives intent on scraping out the collective inner ear canal of the audience. While the step sequencing of his more accessible works isn't all that present, scattershot firings of horror-laden synth notes burst throughout Schnitzler's signature use of heavily filtered electrical tones. Limited to 250 copies, of which we probably have the last ones.

An album that launched thousands of better known records, Ballet Statique is Conrad Schniztler's masterpiece. Schnitzler, of course, was a maverick in the Krautrock community, having been an original member of both Tangerine Dream and Kluster, and later developing an expressive language of tape collage and electronic synthesis which expanded upon his early studies with Joseph Beuys. His most influential works, however, came out in the late '70s following an almost serialist body of work based on the poetics of various colors through electronic sound, eventually leading to Ballet Statique. It was originally released with the title 'Con' back in 1978 through the Barclay funded Egg Records, Ballet Statique is a skeletal distillation of progressive electronics into a bleak hypnosis of rotating melodies, atonal slashes of synthetic noise, and proto-techno rhythmic propulsion. While this album has been reissued a few times since it's original release, the current infatuation with late '70s electronics - especially through the psychedelic and minimal-wave sensibilities - make this reissue especially timely. "Electric Garden" is one of those elegantly simple pieces of electronica with an abstracted, almost random melody guiding Schnitzler's rigid step sequence cast in a cosmic shower of delay ripples with bent electro-shock noises sliding up and down against his motorik drum machine. From a track like this, one can see where Aphex Twin would have been able to make such a profound break from rave culture with these head-spinning sequences. "Metall 1" is all space-dust and comet debris hung weightlessly through Schnitzler's ominous undulations of bright synthetic shimmers and lurching rumbles of metallic low-end, clearly the inspiration for pretty much everything that John Elliott of Emeralds has ever touched. The deep-space sonor pulses of "Black Nails" reprise the tone-bent noises Schnitzler produced on "Electric Garden," looking forward to the robotic bleakness of Monoton, Dome, and Omit. It's pretty shocking how good this record is, and how timeless it sounds, even with the current strain of '70s revivalism. So highly recommended, it's actually embarrassing that we've not written about this record sooner.

This rare album (only 500 copies of the LP were originally issued in 1974) is now finally reissued on cd! "Blau" (Blue) is the second solo effort from legendary krautrock electronics pioneer Conrad Schnitzler, following his amazing debut "Rot" (Red) and his

RealAudio clip: Jupiter
RealAudio clip: Blau bonus track 1

"Gelb" is an unreleased 1974 album produced by the iconoclastic electronic musician Conrad Schnitzler, who sought to demystify the academic strangle hold on electronic music in reducing all of the avant garde techniques and ideas into a simple interplay of tonal color. Often realized as overlapping electronic patterns, cyclical rhythms, and synthetic swooshes, Schnitzler's early '70s compositions appear now as the prototypes of a lot of modern day electronica, especially IDM, ambient, and techno. "Gelb" does sound a little dated, due to the less than perfect recording conditions and the limited palette of electronic sounds, but the sweeping, space-age surfaces of Schnitzler's electronic tones and jittery drum machine arpeggiations are as good as anything he released during that time. Vinyl only.

The last of the five 'color' releases is the Green one. The original LP consisted of two very long, elegantly minimal environmental pieces. "Der Reise Und Seine Frau" from 1976 features an endlessly wandering synth solo, meandering over a very distorted & churning drum machine loop without much development for 32 minutes. The synth patch is a very modest one, but pretty enough: Schnitzler for Mother. There's a lot more going on in 1980's "Bis Die Blaue Blume Bluht": interlocking, circular melodies looping endlessly over a percolating Wurlitzer rhythm for 20 minutes. A very tropical mood: imagine Kraftwerk's "Ananas Symphonie" without the Hawaiian slide guitar left looping for the night and you're halfway there. The original vinyl encouraged playback at both 33 and 45 rpm, so unsurprisingly the 14 minute bonus track is "Bis Die Blaue Blume Bluht / 45" -- although, surprisingly, the piece isn't simply pitched up, it's digitally time compressed to a faster tempo without actually changing its pitch, so you basically get a 35 minute version of the piece that picks up the pace about halfway through. Grun might seem a bit modest compared to the untamed worlds of Schwartz and Rot, but I have to admit that this pleasantly relentless album won me over by the end. (guest review by AQ pal Jon "Wobbly" Leidecker)

MPEG stream: Der Reise Und Seine Frau
MPEG stream: Bis Die Blaue Blume Bluht

First, before we get into the review, we should mention that this double lp is housed in an oversized French paper hand silk-screened jacket. While it's a beautiful package, the combination of its oversized shape and the delicacy of the material means it's prone to damage in shipping, and of course all the copies we have received arrived a bit bent up. The label has no replacement covers so this is all we're going to get. We've taken a couple dollars off the price to compensate a bit, but those who are more fastidious about the shape of their vinyl sleeves, might want to steer clear of this, as we won't be able to replace them. Sorry about that! But WOW!, this is a beautiful double lp live set from 1972 by the late experimental kosmiche composer, Conrad Schnitzler. Salvaged from decaying tapes of a performance for an art exhibition, the sounds on this are like a multifaceted sci-fi ballet. The coordination of individual electronic sounds operating in harmonic tandem of each other showcases a brilliant array of synthesis and restraint, while at the same time emanating a warm centrally vibrant core. For some reason in some of our minds we always have this impression that Conrad Schnitzler was the most abstract and cold of the German musicians of this period, but lately with each new reissue that becomes available, that impression is proven wrong time and time again. This is a gorgeous set, as essential as any of his key recordings from this era. And as usual, crazy limited, ONLY 1000 COPIES and at this point almost gone so act fast!

Here's an unexpected set of reissues: vinyl versions of two classic krautrock albums by electronica pioneer Conrad Schnitzler. They're legit, done from master tapes we're told. "Rot" (Red) was Con's amazing 1973 solo debut. Intense science-fictional bleep-drone, with ironic titles like (side one) "Meditation" and even "Krautrock" (side two). It's totally dark (but a little silly too). The Plate Lunch cd reissue of this we used to stock is now out of print, so that makes this new LP version even more essential. Of course, this vinyl reissue is pressed on red wax, in a red sleeve.

RealAudio clip: Meditation

Ten thousand cheers to Captain Trip Records for reissuing all five of Conrad Schnitzler's Color Albums. Originally available only in private pressings, and only sporadically available since then, this cycle included his first solo albums and his first forays into purely electronic music. Before these, Schnitzler had already been a founding member of Tangerine Dream and Kluster (who renamed themselves Cluster after Schnitzler's departure). His first 'solo' album, Schwartz, is technically the third Kluster album, a trio improvisation by Schnitzler, Moebius and Roedelius -- and was actually reissued as such on cd in the '90s as Eruption. Similar in sound to the first two albums, we hear a variety of traditional instruments (cellos, drums, guitars, organs) played in the most rudimentary manner possible, treating them as raw sources that are then filtered, delayed, and otherwise processed into a bizarre and barely recognizable cavern of pure sound. There actually aren't any synthesizers on this record -- the sounds are all vaguely acoustic in nature, though transformed into something very alien. Whereas their first two albums were commissioned by a Church on the condition that the records also contain strangely religious spoken word texts, this album is purely instrumental -- but more than that, they just get much further out this time -- this is the best of their three records. Though not as compositionally refined as the astonishing Cluster '71 that Moebius and Roedelius would go on to create with Conny Plank, this gains points for audibly being a live performance. A very ahead of its time one at that -- bands are beginning to sound like these records again now, 35 years later -- if you've been spending quality time with Yellow Swans and Skaters cdr-rs recently, you will definitely dig this record from out of their mind Germans playing in a basement 35 years ago, and hitting the source. This new edition adds a four minute soundcheck from a different trio -- Schnitzler, Freudigmann & Seidel. Otherwise it's identical to the 1997 CD reissue. (guest review by AQ pal Jon "Wobbly" Leidecker)

MPEG stream: Eruption 1
MPEG stream: Eruption 2

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SORRY. Not really new, but I don't think we listed it before. Krautrock/electronica pioneer Schnitzler (original member of Kluster, with a long solo career) sets aside the synths and investigates actual piano sounds on this release. Of course, these compositions are not humanly playable--a computer has assisted with the process. Kind of an update on Conlon Nancarrow's player piano pieces, or doing for piano playing what drum and bass programming does for human drumming... Insane stuff, but not utterly chaotic--this is really melodic and quite musical. Schnitzler, indeed, remains a genius.

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The history behind this particular Conrad Schnitzler track is a little vague. Supposedly, Zug is also known as the "Red Cassette" which the German electronic pioneer self-released in 1973 (some say 1974). M=Minimal reissued one of the two 20 minute cuts from that tape as Zug, and fleshing out the rest of the vinyl with two remixes - one from glitched-dub expert Pole and another from Borngraber & Struver. Both of those remixes are reprised on this cd, but Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer are the artists who get the marquee treatment by having their names affixed to the title. A little strange, yes, but don't let the lack of parity dissuade you from this fine remix collection of one of the most influential electronic artists of the post-Krautrok era. Schnitzler's history has been well mapped here at aQuarius, so we'll merely mention his inspired involvement in Tangerine Dream and Kluster. Villalobos & Loderbauer recently wowed us with their abstract recontextualization of ECM chamber jazz. On the first remix here they adopt more of a motorik / minimalist techno vibe that fits with the taut rhythms that Schniztler embedded into that old tape; and the second spins Schnitzler's dystopian synth drones into a clattering decentered piece more reminiscent of the New Zealand outsider Omit (who really would make for a stellar artist for M=Minimal to reissue!). Pole's remix shifts the rhythm to the offbeat, plenty of percolating metallic tones and ghostly filigrees of digital debris; but the clear winner of all of these remixes is from the previously unknown duo of Borngraber & Struver, who snap the darkest, nastiest swells of Schnitzler's synth patches onto a techno-noir grid that reconnects the Detroit / Berlin axis of techno all over again through the mid-tempo 909 thump and locomotive samples. As good as the other three remixes are, Borngraber & Struver tap a vein most in keeping with Schnitzler's grim futurism. Totally worth the price of admission just for that one track!

MPEG stream: Zug (Aktion Mix By Villalobos & Loderbauer)
MPEG stream: Zug (remixed by Borngraber & Struver)

NOW ALSO ON VINYL! The history behind this particular Conrad Schnitzler track is a little vague. Supposedly, Zug is also known as the "Red Cassette" which the German electronic pioneer self-released in 1973 (some say 1974). M=Minimal recently reissued a collection of Zug remixes, a couple of which had already appeared on vinyl before; but now the excellent remixes from Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer get now appear on vinyl. Schnitzler's history has been well mapped here at aQuarius, so we'll merely mention his inspired involvement in Tangerine Dream and Kluster. Villalobos & Loderbauer recently wowed us with their abstract recontextualization of ECM chamber jazz. On the first remix here they adopt more of a motorik / minimalist techno vibe that fits with the taut rhythms that Schniztler embedded into that old tape; and the second spins Schnitzler's dystopian synth drones into a clattering decentered piece more reminiscent of the New Zealand outsider Omit (who really would make for a stellar artist for M=Minimal to reissue!). Download card included!

So often you might read about an album we carry here at Aquarius that sounds as if it were recorded in a bunker, a tomb, a sewer, a cave, a warehouse, or some other nasty, gritty space whose nastiness and grittiness seeps into the recording itself. As much as we would like for each of those times we make such allusions to be true, it's actually quite rare that musicians would record an album in such a location. Conrad Schnitzler and Wolfgang Seidel have done just that, as they brought a bunch of synthesizers down to an abandoned cellar at the Tempelhof Airport in Berlin to record this excellent set of Kosmische electronic blorp. Schnitzler, of course, is a Krautrock legend having worked with the earliest incarnations of Tangerine Dream and the first sessions in Kluster (before the K became a C), and moving on to producing some of the finest examples of claustrophobic proto-electronica from the Krautrock era (e.g. Con and Ballet Statique). Seidel had worked with Schnitzler in the aforementioned Kluster as well as Eruption way back in the day, with sporadic collaborations throughout the past couple of decades. It's impossible to tell who's doing what on this recording of oblique electronic mashings that are equally psychedelic and claustrophobic. Warbling structures of algorithmically complex patterns get torn apart with thrumming electronic noises, weird semi-melodic clunkery, and mad-scientist erratic behaviors. Consequenz 010B is a full 65 minutes in length, but it's limited to 250 copies of which we have limited stock.

We were so saddened by the recent passing of krautrock legend Conrad Schnitzler, a one-time member of both Tangerine Dream and Kluster, who then went on to create one of THEE most incredible bodies of solo work of perhaps any of the krautrockers. This record is not so much a proper Schnitzler record, as it is a strange sort of collaboration. It seems that Schnitzler was forever recording sounds from his many electronic synthesizers, creating an expansive music library, from which all of these sounds were taken. Borngraber and Struver, who run the M=Minimal label, were afforded the opportunity to go through Schnitzler's library, and create a series of new compositions, and Con-Struct is the result. It's difficult to suss out how much of this is pure Schnitzler, and how much of it is Borngraber & Struver, but really it hardly matters, much of this definitely sounds like a Schnitzler record, the krautrock vibe is big, but there's also definitely a sort of minimal techno vibe, the record opens with a gorgeous stretch of deep buzzing pulses and percolating rhythms, the mood haunting and slightly sinister, all laced with swirls of electronics and thick swells of rumbling whir, before giving way to the following track, which has more of a Kompakt vibe to it. But even here, that minimal techno rhythm is wreathed in swirls of dark layered thrum, and mournful minor key melodies, the sound trancelike and cyclical, which is how most of the record plays out, each track essentially a simple looped arrangement, the core sound and rhythm repeated for the length of the track, while the various elements shift gradually, and all around it various sounds swirl and shimmer. Our only complaint really is that all of the tracks could have been stretched WAY out, and turned into epics even more trancey and hypnotic. But overall, the mood is surprisingly dark and haunting, the occasional almost house-y rhythm or skittery groove, does little to take away from the record's darkly cast sonic shadows, the swirling low end, the rumbling drones, the thick bassy buzz, the melancholy melodies, it's pretty much the perfect slab of dark minimal rhythmic krautdrone mesmer.

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Wow! We are so excited that this has been put back into print. Klaus Schulze has an extremely extensive back catalog, and sometimes it can feel a bit overwhelming as to how to navigate it and where you should begin. With Irrlicht once again available we say that answer becomes a little easier. This was his very first solo album which he recorded in 1972 shortly after he left his stint drumming for legendary Krautrockers Ash Ra Tempel (he was also was the drummer in the earliest and maybe greatest incarnation of Tangerine Dream.) After stepping away from the drum-kit Schulze found where he really was most comfortable, and that was behind his elaborate setup of keyboards. With the advent of the Moog, and his mastery of the organ, Schulze was interested in making a new kind of music. Electronic music that was oozing with atmosphere, tension and sensuality. When Schulze was making this record he was heavily under the influence of Musique Concrete along with some other things we are sure! He had a damaged amplifier at the time which would break out into internal feedback when he turned up its volume control. He also went to a large classical orchestra in Berlin where we was allowed to attend a rehearsal that he recorded and then played backwards throughout Irrlicht. For an artists who would go one to make so many more records this still stands as one of, if not his greatest (even though it actually pre-dates his adoption of the Moog synth as instrument of choice!). Along with Cluster, Eno and Kraftwerk, Schulze stands as one of the fathers of electronic music as we know it. What's also so amazing about this record is how you could imagine so many of our favorite black metal bands hearing this and it seeping its way into the more moody/damaged elements of their records. The eerie ambiance of many Burzum and Striborg records can be heard in the totally intense undertones of Irrlicht. Thanks in part to many of the limitations that he was facing back then, there is an eerie and majestic presence to this album. Sometimes beat up organs, messed up amplifiers, and youthful enthusiasm stand the test of time. Especially when the person behind the controls had this amazing knack for creating eerie, haunting otherworldly sounds. This reissue comes in a nice digipack with liner notes in both German and English, some in the form of an interview with KS himself. And, there's a 24 minute long bonus track called "Dungeon"! It's not necessarily from the Irrlicht sessions, in fact no-one seems to know exactly when or where it's from (other than somwhere in Europe, early '70s), but it's agreed that it's more early Klaus Schulze dronework that needs to be heard...

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MPEG stream: Dungeon

Oh man, is this a match made in heaven or what? Actually, more like a match made in outer space, or in whatever warped sonic reality dub legend Scientist calls home, a dozen killer dubstep jams, worked over by the master, already blissed out and skeletal, dubbed out and droney, bass heavy and skittery, Scientist takes those original jams and sends them careening into the cosmos. Much of the bass is stripped away, but the drums, oh the drums, they get the science like nobody's business, bouncing from speaker to speaker, stuttering, and hiccupping, everything wrapped in clouds of echo and delay, the original melodies pulled apart until they're just barely-there streaks of sound, the dubbiness already in full effect, gets cranked to 11, most of the vocals are buried, but little bits of vocals are doused in effects and spit into the ether, only to have them boomerang right back, dizzying and dazzling, spaced out and psychedelic, even the most minimal stripped down tracks take on new life via Scientist's golden touch, it's hard to explain just what it is he does, but you can hear it, and feel it, the sounds are more out there, or in there, the original tracks just the blueprint for the abstract work of dubbed out sonic art they were meant to become. Totally blissed out and hypnotic, and so so so good. Makes us want to hear EVERYTHING get the Scientist dub treatment, garage rock, black metal, whatever, anything and EVERYthing. As a bonus, included is a second bonus disc, with all the original tracks, a pretty bad ass dubstep comp all on its own. The whole thing comes packaged in an eye popping old school reggae/dub cartoon covered 8 panel digipak, depicting Scientist manning multiple spacecrafts, each with a cadre of dubsteppers as his crew. Awesome!

MPEG stream: 2012 Dub
MPEG stream: Hackney Marshes Dub
MPEG stream: Ill Kontent Dub
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SORRY. Vinyl version of the bonus disc that came with the Launches Dubstep Into Outer Space cd, featuring the UNmixed originals, the Scientist name and album title are definitely misleading, but this is a seriously kick ass dubstep comp regardless. If you're after the vinyl version of the Scientist mixes (and you should be), you can find that elsewhere on the aQ website...

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SORRY. NOW ON VINYL!! Oh man, is this a match made in heaven or what? Actually, more like a match made in outer space, or in whatever warped sonic reality dub legend Scientist calls home, a dozen killer dubstep jams, from the likes of Pinch and Kode9 and Shackleton, worked over by the master, already blissed out and skeletal, dubbed out and droney, bass heavy and skittery, Scientist takes those original jams and sends them careening into the cosmos. Much of the bass is stripped away, but the drums, oh the drums, they get the science like nobody's business, bouncing from speaker to speaker, stuttering, and hiccupping, everything wrapped in clouds of echo and delay, the original melodies pulled apart until they're just barely-there streaks of sound, the dubbiness already in full effect, gets cranked to 11, most of the vocals are buried, but little bits of vocals are doused in effects and spit into the ether, only to have them boomerang right back, dizzying and dazzling, spaced out and psychedelic, even the most minimal stripped down tracks take on new life via Scientist's golden touch, it's hard to explain just what it is he does, but you can hear it, and feel it, the sounds are more out there, or in there, the original tracks just the blueprint for the abstract work of dubbed out sonic art they were meant to become. Totally blissed out and hypnotic, and so so so good. Makes us want to hear EVERYTHING get the Scientist dub treatment, garage rock, black metal, whatever, anything and EVERYthing. The whole thing comes packaged in an eye popping old school reggae/dub cartoon covered jacket, depicting Scientist manning multiple spacecrafts, each with a cadre of dubsteppers as his crew. Awesome!

MPEG stream: 2012 Dub
MPEG stream: Hackney Marshes Dub
MPEG stream: Ill Kontent Dub
MPEG stream: Abeng Dub

Limited edition 10" from the second volume of Select Cuts From Blood & Fire. Features extended dub versions of both Black Star Liner and Dan Donovan of Dub Cartel's mixes for the compilation.

Basic Channel -- the Berlin-based techno label run by Mortiz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus from 1993 - 1995 -- released only 9 singles and 1 retrospective cd; yet, the impact that Basic Channel had upon the global techno and electronica communities has been tremendous. It's probably safe to say that any self-respecting techno DJ has a couple of the Basic Channel 12"s thoroughly smeared with grimy fingerprints from years of use. Jerome Maunsell in describing Basic Channel for The Wire rightly qualified it as "the Holy Grail of Techno." The sound of Basic Channel ripples with precedents from Lee Perry's schizoid rewiring of tape through his delay pedals to the cocaine-induced mania / paranoia of late 80's Acid House to the skeletal vacancy of Detroit Techno; however, Basic Channel (like its contemporary descendent Chain Reaction) has an unmistakeable signature. Monochromatic, metallic synth stabs cascade through rhythmically precise delay patterns alongside the unrelenting force of a very simple 909 four on the floor techno stomp - often just a huge basskick and an off-beat ride cymbal or hi-hat. For this album, Chain Reactionists Scion (Pete Kuschnereit aka Substance and Rene Loewe aka Vainqueur) were given free access to the Basic Channel back catalogue to create a continuous mixed cd with the help of Ableton's 'live' audio software. The results do not stray far from the original sound, even though multiple Basic Channel tracks have been woven into various sections of the album. And even almost a decade after their original inception, these cuts still sound amazing and fresh!

RealAudio clip: Part 3
RealAudio clip: Part 6
RealAudio clip: Part 7

The Robert Mapelthorp cover art is our favorite part.

With so many Mick Harris projects out as Scorn, Lull, E.O.E., Painkiller, and all of the collaborations with Bill Laswell, it is hard to keep them straight and also to know which are the best to get. This collection of unreleased and hard-to-find material is one of those really great Scorn records... Heavy apocalyptic dub compounding the already dark hip-hop breaks that made Scorn's reputation on "Evanescence" and "Ellipsis".

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SORRY. Scorn is Mick Harris of Painkiller and I don't know who else. Remixes by Bill Laswell, Autechre, Meat Beat Manifesto, Scanner, etc.

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Mick Harris has been operating his dub-electronica project Scorn for over 15 years now, with his first forays being released through Earache and later through the industrial minded Hymen Records. Throughout his career, his goal has been devastation through dub, taking plenty of cues from contemporary contexts, whether that be the Pathological label from the early '90s (e.g. Terminal Cheesecake, Ice, God, etc.) with their post-Public Image Limited heaviness, or from the Illbient dark-dark-dark hip-hop of Spectre and the Wordsound crew, or as is the case on this album, the dubstep of Kode 9 and Burial. A threatening, malcontent atmosphere has always been at the heart of Harris' work, even if you were to go back to his early days in Napalm Death; yeah, you'll find that here creeping around the modulated sub-bass riffs that wow & flutter in most every dubstep track. The tracks themselves are nowhere nearly as memorable as anything that the aforementioned Kode 9 or Burial have concocted; but Harris does have a knack for keeping things dark. And if the dark, the dubby, and the devastating is what you are after, look no further.

MPEG stream: Stripped Black Hinge
MPEG stream: Glugged

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SORRY. Another Mick Harris scary dub-industrial disc, just in time for your next deep sleep nightmare.

NOW ON VINYL! Another manic blast of freaked out 8-bit jams from this curiously monickered purveyor of blown out video game gabber. The sound of Scotch Egg is a bit hard to describe, the closest we can get is, maybe imagine being in an arcade, playing your favorite eighties video game, when inexplicably, lightning strikes the arcade, and the electricity surges through the wiring and right into the video game you're playing, suddenly, the machine freaks out, shooting sparks, the characters on the screen transform into weird shapes and start doing unspeakable things, and the sounds, oh the sounds, that music you grew up with, the soothing lullaby of primitive computer melodies, gone totally haywire, exploding into squalls of utter 8-bit chaos, the rhythms fast and furious tangled and chaotic, flurries of tones, melodies become gnarled and dizzying. You know that part in Galaga where the mother ship comes down and captures one of your men so you can shoot id down later and have a dual shooter? The sound it makes when it sends out its green and blue tractor beam? Now imagine that sound stretched into a whole song, with the dude from Hella going apeshit on the drums in the background. That perfectly describes one of the songs here. Some of the other tracks sound like the Boredoms if they were transported back to the eighties and tapped to do music for Dig Dug and Mr. Do. Or maybe imagine Venetian Snares, zapped Tron style and beamed into a video game, and these are his desperate musical cries for help. Sound wacked? Well, it is, WAY wacked. The sounds are all over the map, many you'll recognize as being purloined from some of your favorite video games, but here, they're just tiny parts of a ear pummeling barrage of sound, from Melt Banana style video game grind, to weirdly intense 8-bit drones, all the 'death' music from video games stretched out into actual songs, There are some real drums here and there, some guitar, some fucked up vocals, some tracks even sound like damaged video game free jazz, while others sound like creepy computer math rock, but for the most part it's just frenzied electronic gabber video game lo-fi 8-bit freak out dancefloor destroying mayhem and we LOVE it. Be sure and stick around for the final track, a weird looped groove assembled from what sounds like a tape recorded video game, all lo fi and muddy, but here looped and assembled into some druggy repetitive almost krautrocky drone jam.

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Like a modern Switched On Bach, DJ Scotch Egg, armed with modified game boys, and a serious arsenal of 8 bit noisemakers, takes all your favorite Bach tunes and turns them inside out, tangles them all up, slathers them in overloaded electronic buzz and glitch and all sorts of squiggly video game music, and creates some glorious bastard classical gabber electronic classical knee-to-the-nuts techno. And it's a blast. Wild and goofy, funny and sort of funky, but completely brilliantly baffling. Lots of the pieces are ones you'd recognize, but they are quickly transformed into blown out lo-fi blasts of damaged dance music. Some tracks feature garbled super distorted vocals, and end up sounding like some toy version of Atari Teenage Riot. Allan thinks a lot of this sounds like the video game version of the theme from Bad News Bears or maybe an 8-bit Virgil Fox trapped in a haunted video arcade. However it strikes you, odds are you won't hear a record this weird and this much fun anytime soon. Imagine playing some insane futuristic version of Dance Dance Revolution on a crappy old Atari 2600, but with the sound patched through 1,000 Marshall stacks. Fucking awesome! If you're anything like us (at least two of us have the sounds of Rastan on our iPods and we have a full size Tron machine in the back room of AQ!) this is so deliriously damaged and absolutely essential!!

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We rarely carry toys, not cuz we don't all love toys, but we already have our hands full with just music. But every once in a while, a toy comes along that speaks directly to music nerds like us. And you presumably. And the folks at PressPop in Japan definitely seem to have our number! Way back in 2005, they released a Bob Moog action figure, wearing a sportcoat, red bowtie and glasses, finger extended to depress a key on his trusty analog Mini-Moog synthesizer. As we proclaimed back then, the perfect gift for "AQ vintage-synthesizer-lovin', action-figure-collectin' shoppers", and we were right, those Moog dolls flew out of here like you wouldn't believe. So here we are 3 years later, and just in time for Christmas, it's time for the second in PressPop's series of electronic music innovators, this time none other than Raymond Scott! By now, Raymond Scott should need no introduction, if you need to know more, do a search on the aQ site and read all about this electronic music pioneer,, his life, his music, and his legacy. Needless to say, like Moog, with out Scott, a whole lot of your favorite bands would sound a whole lot different. Not to mention the fact that he's responsible for some of our favorite cartoon music ever. Anyway, if you're like us, your music room or computer or wherever it is that you spend all your music listening time, deserves to be blessed by Saint Scott, his visage overlooking you sanctuary, as he reaches out to add his own synthesizer buzz to whatever it is you're listening to. The body is the same as Mr. Moog's, so he's got the same magic finger outstretched, but Mr. Scott is dressed in a natty grey suit (with a Raymond Scott 100 year anniversary silkscreened on the back) with a black tie, accompanied by his keyboard of choice, the Clavivox, which he invented and patented in 1956 (and which featured a sub assembly constructed by a young Bob Moog who would design the first Moog synthesizer a decade later!). The doll and the keyboard are housed in an eye popping full color box designed by Mr. Archer Prewitt (of the Sea & Cake), and the back of the box features a killer illustration of another Scott invention, the Electronium, a keyboardless automatic composition and performance machine! And as if that weren't enough, also included is a cd, with more killer Archer Prewitt artwork, which includes: "Powerhouse", probably Scott's most famous bit of cartoon music, a track from Scott's Soothing Sounds For Baby, his collection of electronic music for infants, really beautiful and strange, alien and hypnotic, and coolest of all, three archival tracks of Scott talking about and then demonstrating his various inventions, the Clavivox, the Electronium and the Rhythm Modulator. Holy Cow!!! As with the Moog doll (now long gone), these are indeed super limited, and a little pricey with overseas shipping, but have a read, a look, a listen, so worth it, the perfect gift for the synthesizer nerd or music obsessive in your life, or heck, buy it for your own geek self, we did! (Counts as 3 items for shipping purposes, not one or two, as per our usual 'box set rule'.)

Scratch Pet Land is a Belgian electronica outfit specializing in plink plonk electronica whimsy that aims to be cartoon music for the future, with lots of cute mechanical knocks, pings, whirs, and springs, as well as simple (often 8-bit sounding) silly melodies. It makes perfect sense that this is on Sonig, and sounds like Microstoria remixing Matmos.

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The Tri Angle label has brought us some of our favorite weirdo electronica, from witch house to slo-mo-soul, from dronestep to warped hip hop, just a quick list of some of our favorite Triangle artists speaks volumes: Forest Swords, Vessel, FiS, Haxan Cloak, Water Borders, oOoOO, Clams Casino, Balam Acab, Holy Other, How To Dress Well... So the fact that this might be the weirdest, noisiest, most out there Triangle release yet should not be taken lightly, cuz the bar had already been set pretty goddamn high, but the oddly monikered Sd Laika, aka Milwaukee producer Peter Runge, knocks it out of the park, with what is some sort of post grime, post dubstep, electro noise oddity, that pushes ALL our buttons. The sort of thing that you might have expected to come out on DHR back in the day. The opening one two punch is all it should take, the 90 seconds of "Peace", all grinding gristly synth buzz, keening high end skree and squiggly psychedelic melody, wreathed in swaths of hiss and him, fragmented and blown out, noisy, lurching and lumbering, it kills us that that song didn't stretch out to fill up the whole record. But then comes "Great God Pan", which eases our pain a little, with big billowing clouds of buzzing low end, glitches out drones, and staticky buzz, a field of hazy drift, that is soon interrupted by a seriously twisted beat, that sounds like it was assembled from discarded fragments of others songs, noisy, clattery, skittery, stuttery, all the while, in the background, thick swells of black buzz pulse ominously, and over the top, haunting alien melodies, all tethered to that super sick, unholy anti-groove. Murky and sinister and seriously fucking next level. And it never lets up, all the beats sound like they were filtered through some homespun analog telephone transistor radio broadcast system, fuzzy, and crackly, always dropping out, and then swooping back in, imagine a grime record recorded onto a wax cylinder and then broadcast via short wave radio, in a moving vehicle so the reception is in constant flux. And even when everything is in range, and the sound is relatively hi-fi, the sounds are still warped and woozy, and before long the sound devolves into another gloriously distortion drenched sprawl, often sounding like Leyland Kirby's Caretaker having a go at dubstep, and failing spectacularly. There are some mysterious shards of 8bit sound, some twisted fragmented samples, some flurries of tangled melody, and cascades of synth blorp and grinding fields of staticky thrum, the sound occasionally dipping into cubby tranquility, but again, quickly snapping back into a twisted variant of alien IDM. The whole record is a dizzying collage of fractured sonics, of shattered rhythms, reassembled into damaged, demented rhythms, hints of minimal techno, Pop Ambient, dub, house, electro, all find their way into the sound, but in true mad scientist fashion, those elements are melted down, dissected, and transformed utterly and completely into some strange hybrid of experimental dada-soundscapery and avant electronica, a gloriously mind bending, brain melting, dance floor defying masterpiece.

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For their sixth full length, those Sea & Cakes are venturing even deeper into the groovy electronic chillroom and away from their former sunkissed and breezy acoustic path. Super spacious and dreamy, but with considerably more euro jetset flair. Fluid organ tones, wispy string sounds, jazzy shuffling beats. Sam Prekop's voice is still as mellow and as effortless as ever, but this time there's the added eleganza vocal depth of the Navin brothers from the Aluminum Group -- certainly no slouches themselves in the charm'n'croon department. They're joined by Archer Prewitt and Prekop's subtle guitar interplay and the solid-as-ever rhythm section of bassist Erik Claridge and John McEntire on drums. Oh yes, and to top it all off, they do a cover of Bowie's "Sound And Vision". A blissful beauty!

RealAudio clip: Four Corners
RealAudio clip: Le Baron

If your dream musical date would be with Postal Service and Pernice Brothers, well, the sweet sounds of Seabear come pretty darn close. Shufflin', soft and breezy pop tunes with shy boy lead vocals and angelic girly backing ones. Sure to please devotees of the Morr Music label, and anyone else whose ears need a snuggle!

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Ed Banger producer, Sebastian, really "revs" things up with this 12". The title track "Motor" is the epitome of rude! If you're tired of wimpy dance music and need something to put some hair on your chest, this is probably the biggest, hardest, grinding, pumping, and almost unbearable (in a good way) tune you could hope for. The jist of it is a sample of a motor revving faster and faster, chopped up, pitched in different ways, and arranged over some pretty sinister drum slappage. You'll either hate it or love it and we here at AQ are eating it up. The other 2 B-side tracks are definitely much more endurable and just as good if not better. "Momy" is actually more of a quintessential disco track compared to Sebastian's common production style, filled with strings, trills, and the normal choppery of course. "Army" sums everything up with Sebastian displaying his usual yet crafty beat trickery, throwing pounding drums mixed with more of that gritty, churning, distorted bass synth that we've always loved from him and the rest of the French Ed Banger family. Awesome!

Dark Entries made their debut as a label several months ago with the awesome reissue of the Eleven Pond LP and with that single release we knew we were witnessing the birth of a an awesome reissue label, one with its heart set on finding obscure synth-pop and darkwave and and shining the spotlight on records that never got the love, attention or distribution they deserved the first time around. Second Decay were a German electronic-pop group who formed in the late 1980's dedicated to the sound of analog synthisizers, the album's back cover proudly remarks 'This album was produced without MIDI. It is dedicated to our beloved synthesizers.' And there is no doubt these guys had deep love for the sounds of synthesizers as they used them to craft very infectious, dark new wave with full on pop chops. While there have been tons of reissues and attention paid to the amazing music that was made in Germany in the 70's it's really cool to see someone digging up some of the gold in a post-Kraftwerk Germany as Second Decay have a sound that brings Neue Deutsche Welle to mind (e.g. Grauzone, Liaisons Dangereuses, etc.) and the more dark tinged blasts of electro-pop that folks like Depeche Mode and The Human League were making on their early records, or even early 80's Cabaret Voilatire, and of course you can tell they were WAY influenced by the mighty Kraftwerk. We also hear a cool similarity to the recently reissued Patrick Cowley & Jorge Socarras record Catholic, which kind of makes perfect sense as the man behind Dark Entries was instrumental in saving and preserving the cache of Cowley tapes from which that record was culled. With new bands like Cold Cave and Xeno & Oaklander grabbing our attention lately with their awesome updated version of that classic vintage synthwave sound, it's pretty rad and perfect timing to hear a lost classic from folks who were making that sound almost twenty years ago. Limited to just 500 copies all screen printed and with an amazing remastered sound thanks to the work of the legendary George Horn at Fantasy Studios. This will make you want to wear all black and dance all night. Minimal wave/gothpop at its best!

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"Soul Jazz Records release Secondo's first album of super-funky micro cut-up disco and electronic music. Secondo is Italian/Serbian producer Radovan Scasascia. Born in Zurich in 1975, his super-funky minimal discofied electronic dance music has been appearing sporadically on Soul Jazz Records since 2003 alongside Rekid (AKA Radio Slave and one half of Quiet Village), Kode9, Subway, DJ Rupture and other similarly like-minded electronic pioneers. Secondo's love of disco and minimal European electronic music produces a unique funky-electronic cut up style that shows his close links with the micro-house sound of Germany's Kompakt label as much as that of the New York Disco labels of the late 70s and early 80s. This led to earlier releases such as his celebrated Tom Tom Club cut-up a few years back. Secondo's music features thousands of micro-samples and on "A Matter of Scale", his first album on Soul Jazz Records, the music successfully reflects his aim of reconstructing these minute sonic fragments into new compositions that somehow maintain the atmosphere of the originals as well as creating new worlds. As much at home with his own material as other peoples, his remixes have appeared on a diverse set of European and American electronic artists � Felix da Housecat, Richie Hawtin, Harrison Crump, James Din A4, Kammerflimmer Kollektief and many more."