[ aquarius records — Electronic ]

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Showing results 3901 through 3950 of 5033.

For a Kompakt release, Supermayer seem to be throwing some quark and even some pop sensibilities in the face of the usual blurred ambiance and we like it! Save The World, the debut collaboration from Kompakt's own Michael Mayer and Superpitcher is diverse in range, but never comes across as indecisive. At their most poppy, the duo could be easily compared to early Minty Fresh superstars Tahiti 80 and Papas Fritas. Even Looper and Moby come to mind when the pop conventions are coupled with a tinge of electro. Short, experimental, ambient tracks help the album flow nicely between pop and their other focus, housey electro that toes the line between your classic Kompakt bliss and a more Daft Punk style electro-groove. Highly recommended!

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The only compliment we can give this album is that it's big in Germany. Super_Collider's "Raw Digits" is a painful attempt by two white Brits (Cristian Vogel and Jamie Lidell) to reconstruct sub-par R&B slow jams for the smarty-pants electronica crowd. I guess if you convinced yourself that Beck is not an ironist and was sincere in his Prince knock-off "Midnight Vultures," then you can probably convince yourself that this is worthwhile. Otherwise, avoid at all costs.

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We didn't know too much about Surachai, or his record Plague Diagram, but from the way it was described to us, as a one man electronic / metal outfit, whose sound was equal parts black metal, doom metal, powernoise and avant garde, we were sorta convinced it would be right up our alley (and yours), and now that we're finally hearing this stuff, we're pretty sure we were right. The metal sounds remind us of the more mechanical / industrial groups like Godflesh and Pitchshifter, the sound churning and chugging, the rhythms, precise and clinical, hard to tell if it's a real drummer or a machine, but it hardly matter, this is some serious heavy, downtuned crush, and even in the first track, there are hints that this is more than just a metal record. Little stutters here and there, chirps and glitches and squelches, subtle at first, before eventually, the metal dissipates, leaving a weird bit of black ambience, all bleating horns, looped low end, hazy shifting drones, fluttering backwards effects, gradually growing more and more abstract and tripped out, before giving way to the second track, which opens with a flurry of soft chaos, machine like rhythms erupt as do buzzing riffs, those bleating horns seeming to still be present, underpinning the relentless chug, the vocals harsh and howled, the arrangement mathy and precise, and then again, out of nowhere, the song splinters, and is barraged by strange electronics, mysterious sound effects, before slipping into another expanse of ambient drift, all muted distorted glitch, heaving low end melodies, all strangely cinematic. The rest of the record plays out similarly, a churning and chugging electronic flecked metal gradually decays eventually leaving some sort of glitched out sonic shadow, a tangle of dense pulses and layered shimmer, of staticky squelches and grinding blackened melodies, the final few minutes of the record maybe our favorite, a strange sort of slowed down demonic IDM, all chirps and hisses and whirring, that gives way to an almost Aphex Twin sort of melodic drift, albeit just a bit twisted and slightly atonal, sounding a bit like a demonic Christmas Carol, before gradually being overtaken by another squall of black buzz. Includes lots of strange guests: Richie Devine, Nordvargr, Otto Von Schirach and others, and is pretty nicely packaged, pressed on 180 gram clear vinyl, housed in a thick PVC plastic sleeve, with a printed insert and a sticker. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES.

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"Intelligent techno", I guess, from a guy best known to us for his Mogwai remix...

One of five new tapes from the awesome Austin based experimental tape label, Holodeck. Largely documenting the growing and diverse Texas underground scene of synth conjurers, drone lords, psych meditators, and classical folk devotionalists, each tape conceived as a unique listening experience with beautifully designed minimalist packaging. We listed tapes by Lumens, Smokey Emery and Thousand Foot Whale Claw awhile back, and this time around we have another tape from Thousand Foot Whale Claw as well as tapes by M. Geddes Gengra, Silent Land Time Machine, Amasa Gana and this one from mysterious synth quartet Survive. Two side long tracks, the first a pulsating cavernous modular synth exploration, an extended version of a track from their self-titled debut 10" which we had a handful of but are now gone (though if we can get more we'll surely list it). That track is otherworldly, sci-fi and dark, like early Cluster, Klaus Schulze and Alpha Centauri-era Tangerine Dream. The other side is more spacious and primordial, and begins like a still night on some toxic planet. Gaseous rumbles, eerie night whistles and percolating textural bloops, far off some humming phased mechanoid vocals building up to what sounds like it could be the foley for the final hellish scene in the movie The Black Hole. Stripped of John Barry's ominous orchestrations, what we're left with is cold robo-futurist doom, laid to rest by an extended funereal space dirge. Limited to 100 copies!

One of six new tapes from the always awesome Holodeck label out of Austin, Texas is the full length debut (and second Holodeck release) from Texas Synth worshippers, Survive. We've previously listed a self titled tape and a self titled 10" (all of their records are basically self-titled and only distinguished by their catalog names) and we had the vinyl version that came out on Mannequin records for a little bit, but never had enough to list and now that's gone too, but at least we have this new tape to enjoy. The 10" debut had an airy feel to the synth formations that gave the compositions lots of space, but their sound now has darkened into a molten early Klaus Schulze-like aesthetic. There's a more alien and perhaps passively menacing vibe at play that creeps into an eighties sci-fi soundtrack trajectory like you might hear in Judge Dredd, The Black Hole, or Tron. The moods are somber, cold and anxiety ridden, but not in a human emotional sense, more like the unrealized dreams of robots but with an occasional ray of hope in an otherwise darkened universe. Limited!

Sutekh takes sound sources from Alva.Noto (aka Carsten Nicolai / Noto), reconstructing his piercing tones into a dancefloor irritant. On the flip, newcomer Geoff White restructures Sutekh material while Kit Clayton contributes to a full on collaboration.

San Francisco's Seth Horvitz aka Sutekh returns with the follow up to 2000's "Periods Make Sense" for Mille Plateuax. After a handful of tech-house singles on various labels like Force Lab, Delay, Plug Research and his own Context Free Media label, "Fell" sees Sutekh fleeing from the confines of the dancefloor, pursuing an exploration of texture and the nature of sound through electroacoustic analysis. Fractured timelapse rhythms collide with clinical pulses and piercing tones in a superdistorted faux exotic world of minimalist dub and triphop. A microcosmic journey into the anatomy and dissection of pure sonics. Slow paced and expansive, yet highly cerebral and thoroughly engaging. Another beautiful release from the enchanting folks at Orthlorng Musork.

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San Francisco's Sutekh straddles the ever increasing chasm between all night parties of the Bay Area's longstanding populist house scene and the SF avant-electronica community of Matmos, Kid 606, Lesser, OST, and the Blechdums. "Incest: Sutekh Live" is characteristic of his live Laptop Techno sets, with digitally factured, whirring samples bouncing within a taut and occasionally minimalist tech-house groove. Everything -- from the rhythms to the melodies and especially the basslines -- on this album has the strange appearance of being pitched up abnormally high. I guess that's why Force Inc can call this avant-garde.

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

SORRY. Sutekh is one of the resident DJs at Static - easily the most interesting electronica club in San Francisco. His spartan tech-house grooves employ the digital (and at times dubby) glitchery of fellow Static cohort Kit Clayton. This is techno that certainly has its origins in the Detroit sound of Kevin Saunderson and Carl Craig, but essentialized down to a spare late-nite house pulse layered with little gossamer atmospheres.

This local black metal / drone-noise duo have been cranking out recordings like crazy, not that you would ever know it, as all of them were released as lavishly packaged, outrageously limited cassettes (and all in batches of something like 50 copies). Finally, the band seem to be making waves beyond the WAY underground, and a comprehensive reissue campaign is under way, as well as a whole spate of about-to-drop new releases. But THIS, this is the first recording we've been able to get from these guys to list, and fans of noise drenched blackness, and super distorted psychedelic heaviness will be in heaven (hell?). A blasting, blown out, ultraviolent blend of raw, primitive black metal buzz, dense drones, lysergic psychedelic atmosphere and caustic abrasive blacknoise, these two tracks require iron ears, a black soul and preferably some headphones to get lost in SH's bizarre black cacophony. "Bled Thy Likeness" is a blurred and muted expanse of crackly, staticky black thrum, murky and muddy, a writhing, swirling sprawl of hazy washed out minor key riffage, laced with streaks of soaring guitars woven into a background of distorted black ambience, eventually exploding into a whitenoise drenched blast of heaving, crumbling, ultra distorted blackdrone crush, hellish shrieked vokills smeared into undulating sheets of Merzbowian buzz, all underpinned by a haunting monkish chantlike melody, adding a strange bit of melancholy mystery to the harsh hellish buzz. "Murmur" is just as intense, a wild frenzied blown out assault of fierce and fucked up blacknoise chaos, the shrieked vox distorted and processed into another layer of furious buzz, tangled up in the frenzied berserker riffing, the whole sound a twisted, gnarled tangle of face melting, ear shredding, soul shearing fury, the song somehow blossoming part way through into something subtly more melodic, the blacknoisebuzz and grim black-blast infused with a strangely lush and warm melodic undercurrent, a deep sonic swell, rife with epic black metal majesty, but nearly suffocated by the caustic clouds of brittle buzz and in-the-red roar overhead. LIMITED TO 400 COPIES. Super striking, thick black and white jackets, and printed on nice heavy vinyl...

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The name of this 'group' might not be familiar to you, it wasn't to us, even though this is Suum Cuique's second album. SC is in fact Miles Whittaker, whose name you also might not recognize, but he is in fact one half of aQ faves, the hauntological electronic duo Demdike Stare, but Suum Cuique, while sharing some sonic similarities with Demdike, is very much its own beast, with Whittaker recording straight from the mixing board, using only analog equipment and almost no edits or overdubs. You wouldn't necessarily be able to tell, but it does lend the sounds of Suum Cuique a sort of raw urgency and an old school primitivism that is definitely missing from Demdike records. The record begins with a wild squall of spacey synths before slipping into a long sprawl of skittery primitive drum machine driven space kraut, wreathed in metallic shimmers. The record gradually drifts towards a more reverbed soft noise collage, peppered with rhythmic pulsations, the sounds oozing into blackened drones, abstract percussive workouts, and finally, finishing up the A side with a looped sounding stretch of hypnotic murk, al buried sine tones and rumbling crumbling whirs, sounding quite a bit like Philip Jeck. The flipside is equally all over the map, starting off with a churning doomy electronic dirge, that gradually dissipates into an ominous ambience before transforming into some hazy hauntological dronescapery, only to splinter into a serious blast of super distorted blown out Our Love Will Destroy The World style rhythmic noisiness, all looped and layered, gnarled and tangled, only to finally fade out in a cloud of cosmic FX shimmer. LIMITED TO 700 COPIES!!

Fresh off his collaboration with Aidan Baker and Andrea Belfi as B/B/S, Norway's Erik Skodvin aka Svarte Greiner outdoes himself on this one, one of the most "miasmatic" of the releases on his own Miasmah label yet. Doomiest anyway. And while some doom or dooom or dooooOOOOOoooom relies on heavy, highly amplified guitar riffs and anguished (or Ozzyish) vokills, Svarte G has none of that, pure instrumental atmosphere instead, drones and tones and ominous percussive sounds only, stately and suspenseful, "acoustic doom" he calls it and it IS. Seriously, imagine your most bummed out session of existential "why am I here, what is life about" angst, this is the soundtrack, but one that somehow finds the radiant beauty in that mood. Mood being doom spelled backwards as we all know, and Svarte Greiner has it both ways. Two long tracks, "Black Tie" and "White Noise" (hmm, is he a Bowie fan?), each 20+ minutes, both slowly unfolding, strangely soothing, yet total void-embracing, never-to-awake-or-return sonic nihil. How does he conjure such blissful darkness, with sudden soft-edged reverberating crashing chords interspersed amidst sparse, quietly textural soundfields? Sure probably with a piano or cello, guitar, synth and effects and other mundane everyday musical gear; but the results sound like they're sourced not from within an instrument or a computer but within the inner spaces of your own mind and (damned?) soul, for good or ill, the way you might, in a isolation tank, listen to your own heartbeat or bleakest unspoken thoughts and feelings, gaining solace from the blurred continuum of self and non-self. Whatever that means, but that's the sort of thing that the music of Svarte Greiner makes us ponder, and THAT at least should mean something. If you're already a fan, and so many are for good reason, then that this gets the eyes closed, zoned out, thumbs up from us should be enough, get it, it's another transcendent slab of Svarte Greiner's cinematic downer drone loveliness. Also recommended to anyone into other Misamah soundscapes, Deaf Center and the like, stuff on Type too. Those still on the outside looking in, take a chance on crossing over and sink into this, it will sink into you.

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The latest record from former Yellow Swan finds Pete Swanson continuing to explore/dissect/reimagine/reinvent his own mutant strain of techno. Like on his recent Man With Potential lp, the sounds here are raw and chaotic, home brewed and noisy, a lot like what you might have imagined a techno Yellow Swans might have sounded like. The framework is classic, a thumping four on the floor, but it's the setting and surroundings that makes Swanson's sound so compelling. Very much like the more beat oriented jams of Our Love Will Destroy The World, or the dancefloor experiments of Astral Social Club, Swanson seems to be coming at techno from a similarly genuine, yet sonically removed, angle, a bit of kitchen sink, mad scientist noisiness, with lots of the sounds obviously culled from an arsenal of synths and drum machines that are not all that dissimilar from what he employed in his noise making floorcore days. But Swanson has definitely proven himself, this is no mere dalliance, these jams are fierce and driving, and in a weird way, seriously funky. The title track here is a mesmerizing blast of super layered, heavily textured techno, that has SO much going on. Total maximalist techno, tangled melodies, chirping fragments of high end, thick shard of rumbling bass thrum, the sort of groove you never want to end. The VIP mix of the same song, just strips back the melody, and piles on the noise, adding even more hiss and glitch, the bassline pushed up in the mix, woozy and hypnotic, the sounds sharp and jagged, and yet the whole thing somehow still so mesmerizing and kinda catchy. The idea that you could get this sort of thing stuck in your heard, seems preposterous, until you find yourself humming these sort of melodies, hours later. The B side is the real gem here, a sprawling expanse of minimal noisescapery, all washed out shimmer, fluttery fragmented high end melodies, and super spare skeletal skitters, everything beneath a layer of gauzy ethereal hum, the vibe way less electronic, and more sort of Jeck / Tim Hecker style soft noise ambience, the beats not so much beats, as just more texture, buried rhythms and blurred pulsations, even filling up a whole side, you'll find yourself lifting the needle and playing it again and again and again. Saucy retro Chippendales cover art too.

As much as we love discovering new genres, it's almost more exciting to watch those new genres develop, transform, and spawn new and infinitely varied subgenres. It used to be that the evolution of scenes and sounds took months, maybe years, as bands toured and records made it to new listeners, but with the advent of the web, Facebook, MySpace and the like, it can now take weeks, hell, even days. And it seems like electronic music, more than most genres gets constantly and consistently mutated into new forms. At any given time there seems to be some sort of '-step', pick any word, and there's some microgenre, dronestep, drugstep, slugstep, doomstep, and of course the billions of variations on techno, jungle, downtempo, IDM... The most recent IT genre is dubstep, even the new Britney Spears single features a killer blast of synth heavy dubstep, and of course dubstep as been evolving constantly, and while we tend to like our dubstep dark and heavy, with booming beats and massive ribcage rattling bass, we found ourselves mesmerized by a guy called Clubroot, and strangely blissed out, atmospheric take on dubstep, stretching out the sounds into hazy droney shimmerscapes, stripping the beats way down, and weaving lush landscapes of dubby skitter and swoonsome drift. Two albums and a couple 12"s (a new one reviewed elsewhere on this list!) and we still couldn't get enough. And then along comes UK trio Swarms, who follow a similar path, taking dubstep somewhere else entirely, melding a minimal dubby shuffle to the abstract avant electro soul of How To Dress Well and Burial, weaving soulful vocals into clouds of softly swirling effects, pointilist piano, subtle guitar jangle, shimmering synths, taking elements of shoegaze and post rock, slow build dramatics and hazy atmospherics, layering them into washed out, dreamy and druggy expanses of sultry, laid back R&B flecked dubstep drift. Swarms augment the usual studio assemblies with plenty of organic instrumentation: guitar, violin and piano, and the vocals, these guys don't just slap on some soulful crooning, no they transform vocals into another instrument, sometimes speeding them up into little hooks hip hop style, other times they wreath the vocals in echo and delay and reverb, and pull them out into ghostly streaks, the male vocals are sometimes slowed down, and become a sort of chopped and screwed warble, but the vocals are just one part of the whole, and what a lush, expansive, multi layered kaleidoscopic whole it is. Totally mesmerizing, hypnotic, trancelike, sun dappled and dreamy one second, haunting and ominous and otherworldly the next, the songs woven into an epic sonic travelogue, a mysterious songsuite, a hazy glimpse of a musical otherworld, a transmission from the ether, a blurred impressionistic projection of dubstep from an alternate dimension. Incredible.

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The Foundry is a San Francisco ambient label, whose definition of ambient resides squarely in the mid-'90s. At that time, the utilitarian chill out rooms of warehouse parties and raves intended to calm the over-stimulated, ecstacy-addled brains of ravers; yet it also began to produce a very specific variation of synth-based ambient music that converged with world beat, post-industrial, psychedelia, and anything else that you could zone out to. Labels like Beyond, Emit, and Silent offered warm and fuzzy ambient cocktails with holistic claims of inter-dimensional travel, brain-tuning, and other new age drivel. Yet, with any aesthetic form, gems did emerge, with the mid-'90s ambient highlight being the Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works Vol 2." Ben Swire's debut EP aspires towards that Aphex pinnacle, and comes respectably close with an interesting use of IDM-informed / post-drum & bass rhythms spartanly skittering amidst the synthetic floes of ambience. Swire, who has previously worked with Neotropic on one of her NTone singles, displays a slippery use of nursery rhythm melodies that unveil themselves to be quite sublime, not unlike Boards of Canada's "Geogaddi" album.

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Meditative electronica made by one Xian Hawkins who's released a couple records as Sybarite and was also the part of the reformed Silver Apples a few years ago. Groovy and jazzy while at the same time displaying most of the qualities that makes people love the stunning Scottish duo Boards of Canada, like off-kilter breakbeats, lots of melancholy atmospherics, a sense of angst and sadness.

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Extremely evocative soundtrack material that sounds intensely warm and melodic and brings to mind visual images of fear, peace, love--all that good archetypal stuff that soundtracks have to do well. Plaintively plucked guitar over shimmering electronic chimes; synth drones and melodic interludes that always make in-store customers ask what we�re playing. Can be favorably compared to AQ staff favorites such as Boards of Canada, Seefeel, the Aphex Twin when he was still --ambientÊ, Kid Loco, and maybe even the mellower moments of Kruder and Dorfmeister. If you like any of those groups, this�ll do it for ya. By the way, Sybarite is Xian Hawkins, who may have come to your attention as one of the folks who collaborated with Simeon in the 1990s version of the Silver Apples.

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Such a fantastic complement (and compliment) to David Sylvian's last album Blemish (which you may or may not know was a particular fave of Andee's)! You almost wouldn't think it possible, but on many of the remixes on The Only Daughter, Sylvian's chosen remixers have stripped down the tracks to an even more stark and austere state than that of the originals -- at times giving the impression that Sylvian has gone beat poet or is having intimate tete-a-tetes with a petulant piano or lonely horn. One of the best moments on this remix collection is Readymade FC's work on "A Fire In The Forest" with its gentle crunch-crackle-chime of an old neglected musicbox. Beautiful. The impressive list of participants also includes Ryoji Ikeda, Burnt Friedman, Yoshihiro Hanno, Tatsuhiko Asano, Jan Bang, Erik Honore, Sweet Billy Pilgrim, and Akira Rabelais -- all of whom have treated Sylvian's material with the utmost respect and furthered the haunting moods and atmospheres of Blemish in a most fitting manner.

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Symbol is the incredible debut solo effort of Christopher Royal King, founding member and guitarist for epic post-rockers This Will Destroy You, as well as founder of the Light Lodge label which has brought us some of our favorite Austin scene releases by Pure X , Silver Pines, Survive and Sleep Over. Online Architecture is the latest release on Holodeck, and it's a perfect follow-up to the label's last release of Ssleeperhold's Ruleth, leaning on the more brooding side of ambient synthesis. Not quite as goth as Ssleeperhold or Troller, instead Symbol plays into the more Tim Hecker/ Fennesz side of faded and worn down sounds, cinematic and epic, but also remotely nostalgic and beautifully melancholy. Sound sources are parsed through multiple filters and blurred into psychic layers of damage and decay, yet still sound so intriguingly tranquil and elegant. Deep, slow and heavy, Online Architecture is a thoughtful and considered release, embarking on an introspective journey into what may be a futile future. Highly Recommended! Also, maybe the coolest, most striking record cover / album art we've seen in YEARS!!

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Another obscure reissue from Dark Entries! How obscure might you ask? Well, System Liliputt was a one-man band of the Norwegian Geir Vassang, who released only one cassette in 1984 in an edition of 150 copies. There were some blogs which got a hold of crappy rips of the cassette in recent years; but for the most part, this is a project that nobody has really heard. The Norwegian new wave tunes that Vassang produced oscillated between motorik, disco arrangements and standard verse-chorus pop arrangements on his polyphonic synths, drum machines, guitar, and an occasional bass. Some of the sequencing that Vassang gets has a hollowed plasticity heard in some of the tracks by Cabaret Voltaire or Casssandra Complex with a brittle jangliness to his guitar playing cribbed from The Cure's Seventeen Seconds. The pop-song side of Vassang's production can be quite fragile in its construction, which lend itself to the subjects of loneliness and death through these bittersweet tunes alternately sung in English and Norwegian. We mentioned The Cure earlier, and we got to say this really does hit the magic mark of our favorite era of The Cure. So many of the songs on here are leaving a lasting impression with us, especially "Gatelangs" which should be put on every mix tape this winter. One of those records so perfect for the onslaught of rain we've had the last few days. You just want to sit locked in your bedroom while flipping this over and over and sulking in such great sounding misery!

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Conceived as a soundtrack for a 1980 Amnesty International short film against the Death Penalty, French electronic music maverick, Bernard Szajner (pronounced Shy-nerr) came up with one of the most geniusly bizarre concept records ever made. Imagine if Suicide, David Bowie, Conrad Schnitzler, Bruce Haack, Giorgio Moroder, and Magma made a record together about the de-humanizing extremes of an existentialist Death Row, it might sound something as cold and freaky as this! A minimal wave Magma is definitely not that far off the mark, as Szajner was the lighting and visual effects designer for Magma's live shows in the seventies, and Klaus Blasquiz and Bernard Paganotti of Magma guest here. The opening track, "Welcome To Death Row" was featured on the awesome compilation of French coldwave, "So Young But So Cold" and Detroit techno producer, Carl Craig has claimed this to be his favorite album of all time! It's definitely got the slow disco vibe down, even though it's hardly a dance record. Add some crooning David Bowie in his Low period moments, but it's way weirder with creepy synth elements, robotic vocals, radio collages, electronic pop and tight, proggy guitar solos added in to highlight a more distasteful side to what Szajner felt to be the all too pleasant quality of synthesized sounds coming out of Germany at the time. That might mean for some, on a first superficial listen, parts of the songs may go to questionable places you may not wish them to go (it was made in 1980, after all!), but it's a much more satisfying listen to follow the songs down all the rabbit holes they go with an open mind. It's definitely one of those eccentric missing link records that crosses through many genres but doesn't sit easily in any one of them. Bernard Szajner made five records of avant-garde electronic music in the late seventies and early eighties before sadly abandoning music for good, but none of them are quite like this! (His 1981 follow-up Superficial Music has also been reissued and we'll hopefully review it in a future list.) But for all those into such sundry bands as Daft Punk, Droids, Cold Cave, Air, Kraftwerk, Heldon, Arthur Russell, Lindstrom, Gina X, Jonas Reinhardt, the weirder sides of Serge Gainsbourg or any of the bands or artists mentioned above, you need to check this out now!! Oh, and this also includes three bonus tracks, previously unreleased!

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Bernard Szajner is one of the more eccentric pioneers of French post-prog electronic music. Released in 1981, Superficial Music, was the follow-up to his bizarre avant-electro-rock concept record against the evils of capital punishment, Some Deaths Take Forever. Superficial Music is less high concept (or more depending upon how you look at it) than Some Deaths, as it uses Marcel Duchamp's ideas of the readymade coupled with Eno's Oblique Strategies to make a compelling work of tape manipulation synthesis. It's definitely not as rock-oriented as Some Deaths. Reworking tapes from his first release, Visions of Dune, and processing them backwards and at half speed, Superficial Music is both strangely atonal and oddly enticing, full of dark pulsations and brooding oceanic turbulence, following in the footsteps of other cosmic tape music such as Fripp and Eno's No Pussyfooting, and Eliane Radigue's Vice Versa while sounding akin to the heavier cavernous analog explorations of Klaus Schulze and Kluster. The second half of the record is Szajner's three part suite, Oswiecim (Polish for Auschwitz) and obviously it doesn't get much lighter in tone. Ghostly and hushed, with unnerving spectral drones, this suite addresses Szajner's family roots with the Holocaust and though it's not as brutally heavy-handed as it could be, it's more often disquieting in its cold and near silent detachment. This reissue also includes two previously unreleased bonus tracks from the period that complement the work nicely. Fans of that Musique Electronique En France compilation we raved about a while back, as well as modern day doomdrone, should definitely check this out!

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

SORRY. Very Strange and Unpredictable, and Fun. As if Holger Czukay put out a Digital Hardcore album! Samples from Eastern European marching anthems and various other strange sources, Szeki Kurva make short attention span techno-folk music suitable for an surreal James Bond film. This Hungarian (we think) band is an exciting new discovery for us (though reportedly they are huge in their homeland), so odd that even The Wire might miss it, upping the ante on the exotic and bizzare everywhere.

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

SORRY. Third full length that rubs up against us just as well as their first two albums, this is "6 Days In The Life Of The International Szeki Massive, Fighting The Worldwide Vampire Menace So You Don't Have To!" -- i.e. great, chaotic, funny, and completely kick ass jungle filtered through a weirdo Eastern European sensibility. Nobody in the world sounds like this group.

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

SORRY. Five new "extreme" electronica tracks from these Hungarian media terrorists. Marching bands and sirens and drum'n'bass...

Spokes is the debut full length from aQ customer Jeremy Young and is a fantastic collection of impressionistic dronemusic and miniature guitar compositions, blurred into a sprawling sonic drift, it's a "conceptual tone-cycle" which incorporates text from Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs Du Mal (1857), and features a handful of aQ faves reading Baudelaire, Aki Ondo, Liam Singer, and others, and while we're often a bit put off by 'spoken word' records, Spokes is something else entirely, the brief bits of spoken word are in fact very brief, and are often deftly woven into the sounds surrounding them, in fact the 12 minute opener, features a spoken word intro, but then proceeds to unfurl a fantastically mesmerizing stretch of abstract minimalism, from droning upper register tones, to hushed dreamlike shimmer, from hazy almost pop ambience, to a folky soft focus psychedelia, not to mention a long stretch of what sounds like field recordings and tape experiments, and some cool electronic glitchery, all held together by a drone that seems to run throughout. Elsewhere, the spoken word bits are laid upon soft billows of glistening shimmer, wreathed in gauzy streaks of warm thrum, or set amidst field recordings of rushing water and all manner of wildlife, but surrounding those brief bits are still more lush stretches of sound, Barn Owl like atmospheric twang, strange bits of sci-fi electronics wrapped in lush undulating Niblock like tones and overtones, cinematic soundscapes laced with melancholy melodies drifting through clouds of static and hum, it's all quite hushed and lovely and dreamily haunting reminding us of Machinefabriek, Jasper TX, and other explores of similarly hushed ambient beauty and abstract dreamlike songsmithery. So nice. Packaged in a minimal, super striking 4 panel digipak, and wrapped in recycled hemp twin with a manilla tag.

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It's always an exciting day at aQ when a new Italians Do It Better 12" comes in as that label is really at top of its game, releasing some of the best and most suave sounding dance jams over the last few years (Glass Candy, Chromatics, Nite Jewel, Desire, Twisted Wires, etc.). While most of the stuff they've put out has a very Moroder-esque disco vibe, it's awesome to hear something on a different side of the dance equation this time out. T & K is the collaboration between DJ Kaos and Tiago, who mine gold from the heyday of the Chicago house scene and prove that it wasn't just the early days of disco that had the ingredients for melty and sexy dancefloor grooves. The sounds of classic house from America make its way into the ears (and sound) of these two European producers who hail from Germany and Portugal, and who for sure add a nice touch of their own, that totally silky and seductive side of Euro dance music that really makes this an Italians Do It Better release, retaining the label's high standards of sexy soundmaking, yet offering a much needed different taking off point for reaching that state of smoke filled dance floor bliss. So good!

Imagine if you can, some sort of modern electronica dubstep / traditional East African folk music hybrid. Sounds pretty amazing for sure. Definitely kind of difficult to conjure up, but Wireless, the final recording from techno producer T++, has taken these two sonically disparate elements and created something truly spellbinding. T++ is just one of the many pseudonyms producer Torsten Profrock has used over the years, loosely affiliated with the Skull Disco collective, exploring various permutations of dub and techno, but this is the first we've heard from him in any guise, and we have to say it's pretty killer. Combining super skeletal skittery beats with archival recordings from EMI's archive of historical music (the same one Honest Jon's as has been working through to compile its various reissues), Profrock takes various recordings of vocals and ndingidi (a one string fiddle like instrument) from old 78s and chops and cuts and reassembles and reinterprets, creating a super haunting minimal abstract techno that is ghostly and otherworldly but also very human and organic sounding. "Cropped" loops a simple 2 step rhythm around a gorgeous hummed melody, a refrain that gives the listener chills every time, while beneath the beat, various bits of buzz and shimmer, and fragments of melody drift and swirl. "Anyi" starts out thick and squelchy, only to splinter into some super abstract dub, peppered with shards of hiss and fuzz. Soft swells of intense vocalizing and mournful minor key melody undulate just below the surface, along side thick streaks of buzzy bass. "Voices No Bodies" is another stretch of skeletal skitter, wreathed in woozy spectral loops, the African elements barely audible beneath the hypnotic clipped shuffle. And finally "Dig", which is the most traditionally 'dubstep' sounding of the bunch, with bigger beats, and that lurching two step stutter, laced again with mysterious fragmented voices, bits of buzz, clouds of soft focus effects, all woven into a gorgeously rhythmic and hypnotic whole.

Sweet! This is the sort of thing that makes for a good Record Of The Week both 'cause of how it sounds (always the biggest consideration of course!!) and also 'cause the back story is pretty cool, too. We'll start with that. T.R.A.S.E. stands for Tape Recorder And Synthesizer Ensemble, a name that, if used by a band nowadays might seem just a bit unimaginatively straightforward & blandly self-explanatory, or perhaps meant ironically academic-sounding somehow. But when you learn that T.R.A.S.E. were a DIY "ensemble" masterminded by a precocious British schoolboy back in 1981, making experimental electronic home recordings that sound not too far from stuff such modern-day outfits as Emeralds and Umberto and Soft Moon would be doing years later, then the name becomes fairly endearing, eh? Just take a look at the cover photo, two skinny teenagers, one looking kinda cool in T-shirt and shades, standing with electric guitar in hand, the other kid in sweater and jeans, looking a bit dorkier as he sits amidst a cluttered array of electronic keyboards, amplifiers, reel-to-reel tape machines and other assorted audio gear. The latter teen is T.R.A.S.E. founder Andy Popplewell, most definitely an A/V geek at his school, who put together his own six-channel audio mixer at age 16 following plans in a issue of Practical Electronics magazine. Being into both sci-fi soundtracks and new wave music like The Human League, Ultravox and Gary Numan (one of the tracks here is a Tubeway Army cover) it wasn't long before that mixer, and other gear he built, like an "Elektor Chorosynth", was put to use to record his own music. Kraftwerk, Jean-Michel Jarre, and Giorgio Moroder where among his other inspirations. T.R.A.S.E. recorded one unreleased cassette lp called Electronic Rock, and the deep diggers at B-Music/Finders Keepers have compiled tracks from that tape here along with other home studio / real studio / demo tracks by Popplewell and T.R.A.S.E., 14 total cuts of adolescent outsider synthsplorations, all tick-tocking drum machines and swells of droning synth, adorned with phaser and fuzz FX, replete with gentle melodies and warped "cosmic" soundz. These tracks are mostly instrumental, though a few have vocals, like the Messethetics-ish downer electro pop of "Talk To Me" and the sad, fuzzy "Unrequited Love". So much primitive shimmering synth beauty, the more abstract of the tracks glistening rhythmically, the more song-like coming across like lo-fi coldwave cuts. Perhaps the best recommendation we can give this, is that playing it in the store, generally results in customers asking about it and buying a copy. Probably the best "long lost tapes" release of vintage unknown electronica since that Rodion G.A. record!! One of those serendipitous discoveries, occasioned by a fortuitous meeting between Andy Popplewell and Andy Votel of Finders Keepers. The cd booklet includes color photos and vintage synth kit adverts, alongside detailed and very revealing liner notes penned by Popplewell himself, who in the wake of T.R.A.S.E. later became a BBC radio engineer, now works in audio media restoration, and who currently studies conspiracy theories and other esoteric knowledge in his spare time. Fyi, we momentarily had an import vinyl version of this a while back, but it took 'til now for the cd to materialize, glad it finally did, though it's too bad we don't have the vinyl anymore (maybe again, someday?).

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A live recording from a local outdoor performance. Tabla Beat Science pretty much typifies world beat music; emphasis on the 'world', emphasis on the 'beat'. Zakir Hussain on tabla, Bill Laswell on bass, former Skratch Pikl DJ Disk wielding turntables, plus personnel supplying sarangi, synths, vocals, etc.

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Takagi Masakatsu's electronic ambience has been glitchified as another laptop excursion, yet he maintains a whimsical sense of melody rarely heard since Oval's "Diskont 94" and a sly use of the field recordings, allowing for the laughter of children and various sounds of domesticty to intervene in the subtly shifting glitch collages. Only disc one has audio, with disc two being a CD-Rom for both Mac and Windows.

Takahashi So specializes in high piercing tonalities and chest-cavity rattling bass originating from pure sine waves that crystallize into hypnotic rhythms and structured loops -- much like Noto, Ryoji Ikeda, and Sachiko M, but not quite as austere with a few cut up intrusions.

Longtime AQ fave Nobukazu Takemura -- ex-Mo'Wax-style club DJ, Steve Reich remixer, Tortoise collaborator, Powerbook maestro -- offers a new full length of bubbly electronica / pop with attention to texture, whether it is bass like a quiet heartbeat, or chiming bell-like electronic tones cavorting in the background like Raymond Scott gone minimalist techno, or glitchy clicks goodnaturedly jockeying for position. On 10th, Takemura also really gets into the frankly-fake casio-filtered vocals that have made occasional appearances in his past work. This time the vocals, often sung in English, are cut up into delightful little snippets, sounding like a happily hiccupping big sister of the sad Mac guy on OK Computer. Fans of Mouse on Mars and other burbly bloopy fun electronica, take note!

RealAudio clip: A Puff of a Word
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The first track on highly regarded Japanese electronicist Nobukazu Takemura's newest album harkens back to his first domestically-released record Scope. Its clicks and high end chatters are melodically arranged into an Oval-ish pleasant modern sound. The rest of the tracks on the record, however, are more difficult listening, consisting mostly of machine-generated atmospheric whooshes, seemingly-random (tho' I'm sure that to him they're logically ordered) digital squiggles and sonic exclamations that are about texture and nuance, not melody. Listen to both tracks before buying. Experimental yet accessible. MPEG Download: "Conical Flask" [/audio/takemuraconical.mp3] MPEG Stream: "Conical Flask" [/audio/takemuraconical.m3u]

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Most of us who already love powerbook maestro Nobukazu Takemura will be familiar with his other domestically-released album, Scope, a brilliant record that is all about austere sonic textures and half-melodic gestures. Another side to Takemura's talent is

RealAudio clip: The Sign
RealAudio clip: A Theme for Little Animals

Japanese electronicist who was responsible for one of the best tracks on the recent Steve Reich Remixed album. Making the most of very simple sounds (synth, static, skipping cds), Takemura constructs surprisingly melodic and appealing pieces. Oval fans will LOVE this...

This cd issue of The Sign 12" from last year might as well be considered a new album from Powerbook maestro Nobukazu Takemura, cos it's over an hour long. The title track is bubbly electronica / pop with attention to texture -- very reminiscent of Moebius' and There's a second disc with a great animated video of "The Sign" by Japanese artist Moshino, who also did the cover to this record.

RealAudio clip: The Sign

Welcome to the sensual realm of John Talabot! This Spanish producer has been releasing some of the most ecstatic, hypo-rhythmed, DEEP sampledelic house music going back to the release of his breakout single "Sunshine" in 2009. Some of us around here have been obsessed with the enigmatic producer for a while now and are fully stoked to be sharing fIn, his debut full length with you, our dear customers, on this most holy "list Friday". Talabot's sound world is a multilayered tapestry of disembodied samples, glistening synths, intricate but organic sound design, and ASS-SHAKING rhythms. To be sure, this is most certainly house music, but his treatment and subversion of the idiosyncratic nature of house music is what draws us in. Because of that, his sound world seems to be entirely his own. He bucks the trends and comes up with some of the most beautifully personal and dreamily hazed out jams we've heard in quite a while. The second track, "Destiny" featuring another up and coming Spanish producer, Pional on vocals, is a smashing cosmic roller. The verse sung sexy and sweet over lush synth melodies and syncopated marimba notes melting together into a warm cocoon of transcendent SOUND. Bleary eyed and sun addled, the sound is like the come down freefall after an all night beach rave. The joy and release still on the periphery of your consciousness, with the sorrowful realization that the reverie must end, slowly creeping to the forefront. It's somehow simultaneously rapturous and melancholic. "Missing You", a tripped out slow jam is another of our favorite moments on fIN. The drum programming rolling out subtle slowly developing riddims as an otherworldly pitch-fucked "guitar" sample enters on top, reminding us of a more luminous, yet just as haunted Burial. And then some seriously far out, processed into outerspace vocals enter, and the tune just develops into, well, a CHOOOON. Futuristic pop music for sure. The following track, "Last Land" finds Talabot right in his zone, which is arranging samples into impossibly beautiful dance tunes. Starting out with a subtly dubbed out disco break into a gorgeous string / vocal loop the track is a slow burner. Hypnotic and pulsating, the rhythmic texture building into silence! Following this functional breath from the beat, the bass line slowly creeps in and the whole thing swells into an ecstatic drop, the string sample now reconfigured to create an amazing melodic hook. Stunning. The last track, "So Will Be Now", another one featuring the this time pitched down vox of Pional, is a beautifully developed deep and dreamy house cut. The mood is dark and evolving, the vocals acting as a grounding constant as the fuzzed out lush textures and astoundingly psychedelic percussion layering result in dance floor timelessness. You truly want to hold on to this musical moment for eternity. fIn is most definitely a journey of discovery, and we need not spoil that. It is some of the finest dance music we've heard in ages, on par with The Field's "From Here We Go Sublime"... totally EXQUISITE!

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