[ aquarius records — Electronic ]

IMPORTANT (Please read to avoid confusion): Some items below may be tagged with a bold, red, all-caps OUT OF PRINT/UNAVAILABLE notice. This does NOT mean that all other items not so tagged are, in fact, in stock — or for that matter, in print and available, though there's a good chance they are. Some folks get confused on this point, and we can see why, so please read this for further clarification and other important before-you-order information. Unlike some mailorder websites, we don't have an electronic inventory system linked to our site, so you can't be sure of what we actually have or don't have in stock at any given moment without asking us — please email our mailorder department for availability status — or better yet, just go ahead and place your order using our shopping cart function and we'll get back to you with the status of each item. If you have general non-mailorder questions, email the store.

Showing results 4901 through 4950 of 5033.

Not sure if the distinctive arrow-in-a-circle on the cover is meant to reference legendary label No U-Turn, but it had us expecting some sort of throwback jungle, some dense tech-step style drum & bass, but instead, Signals is a modern take on classic dubstep and grime, sounding a bit like a slightly less minimal Burial, if that makes any sense, it's still all slo-mo and murky, but the beats are a lot heavier, and there are a lot more vocals, mostly fragmented snippets, which are all over the brief intro, but when "Galactic" kicks in, it's a fierce fucker, all stuttery skitter, beneath weird monk like chants, a twisted little metallic melody, the various sounds and samples in constant flux, slowing down, speeding up, the whole thing a lurching, lumbering, woozy creep, that mysterious little Close Encounters melody will stick in your head like crazy, and then in swoop some strings, and suddenly it's some sort of symphonic dubstep epic, and it's so good. Listen to the sample, if that doesn't do it for you, we don't know what will. Much of the rest of the record is a bit more low slung, more blissed out, the electro-drift of "Lunar", adds a sort of washed out kosmische vibe, while "You Know" adds some female vox to the mix, but then "Persian" kicks in, all electro-murk, laced with cool Middle Eastern melodies, the result is haunting and mysterious, almost like a dubstep Muslimgauze. A bunch of the tracks have a hip hop vibe, big beats and serious swagger, albeit run through a cracked techno/dubstep filter, but others, like "Time", remains stripped down and skeletal, laced with brief bits of vocals, and weirdly psychedelic atmospheres, or the title track which is straight up grime, wound around a seriously jungly groove, the vocals chopped up and swirled into a dizzying beat heavy mix, which reminded us how much we love grime! Speaking of which, record closer "Play Your Corner" is a serious sick slab of classic grime, with some killer vocals over a sinister bed of strings, draped over tangled rhythms and wound up with a dizzying production. Love it!

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Gerald Wenzel's first album for Phthalo (one of the cd-r pressings) is a unique reconstruction of electronic debris into squiggly damaged breakbeats and patterned machine noise abstraction that sounds like it could be the night stalker side project of Aphex Twin.

On his second album for Phthalo (this one an actual cd, not a cd-r), Wenzel tries to create an aural representation of prairie desolation. "Prairie Program" is an exceptional collection of distilled electronica and computer synthesis that varies from the clinicism of Raster's post-techno to metallic percussive 808 bombast.

Just because this is on Skam doesn't necessarily mean it's an easy listen, interesting maybe, but not easy. To see listings for this record on other sights / postings on which the authors professed their critical admiration of this record makes me ask a common asked question at Aquarius : "Is anybody really listening?" At least in regards to the stupid piece of Negativland and V/VM influenced electronica comedy, the answer is no.

The follow-up to the smash AQ-hit The Lobster Boys -- dozens upon dozens of copies sold here, and counting, no petite potatoes considering that the disc only sold 500 in all of Europe! -- is in fact a follow-up in the best sense. When doesn't return to the dark soundtrack stuff a decade ago that made earlier When albums so beloved of the black metal community. No, When gives us what we want -- sunshiney sike-pop n' electronica incorporating international ethnic sounds into a heavenly yet weird pop concoction. Pretty much The Lobster Boys part II, but with lyrical concepts taken from The Arabian Nights! Those fables and proverbs are rendered with gentle, even gently twee, self-harmonized vocals with a British accented lilt. You'll hear the Beatles, XTC, and some Bowie too. Combine that vocal-pop capability with sampled, shambling Middle Eastern bazaar musicks, jangling exotica and electronics, and you've got When's winning formula on Pearl-Harvest. It's a bit like Tipsy on a magic carpet ride with Andy Partridge doing the vocals. There's some darker, cartoon-wacky surreality thrown in that echoes old, disturbing When stuff, but that's almost a warped Disney element that works in perfect contrast to the pop-perfection of most of the songs. If you're not already one of the many AQ customers to have acquired a copy of The Lobster Boys (or Psychedelic Wunderbaum, or WriterCakeBox, or...) then you maybe unaware of the who and what of When. It's the project of Norwegian Lars Pederson, an eclectic eccentric musical mastermind if there ever was one. Here he sings and plays almost all the instruments -- keys, zither, flute, xylophone, programming, etc. -- with a little help from friends making guest appearances on accordion and guitar. We've liked all his stuff in the past, but this sampledelic pop niche he's been exploring recently is most impressive, and certainly the most sweetly satisfying.

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A bit of archival noisiness from aQ pal Monte, who most of you might know as the man behind brooding twangy heavy drifters Burial Tree, as well as the more ambient projects Dark Matter Halo and Time Spent, but the sound of When Prophecy Fails is something else all together, recorded while Monte was still in graduate school, this chunk of blown out digital noise and dense black ambience was in fact inspired by a book about a cult from the fifties, their expectations of the impending apocalypse, and how they dealt with it all when the end of the world did not come to pass (sound familiar?). So if you're reading this, we can assume the most recent extinction event also didn't end up happening, so once again, a legion of doomsdayers are forced to deal with their (and everyone else's) continued existence. And what better way to represent the ever impending apocalypse and the frustration of a million mysterious and undecipherable end of world prophecies, than with clouds of grinding Merzbowian murk, screeching strings, machine gun analog stutter, heaving swirls of grit and grim and glitch, undulating tangles of sculpted hiss, fracture melodic fragments, mysterious samples, haunting stretches of muted electronic shimmer, pocked with jagged shards of digital errata, guitars and violins, doused in effects, the sounds pulled apart until they're fully removed from their sources. The sound chaotic and brutal for much of the disc, but often settling into haunting passages of serene drift, soft psychedelia blurred into crackling swells and muted smears of dense, tense buzz and howl. These brief respites are of course bookended by dizzying bursts of crunch and howl and skree, but even at it's most chaotic and freeform, there does seem to be a method to this musical madness, which comes into clearer focus on the final two tracks. The first of which is based on recordings of a mentally ill woman (Monte works in the mental health field and captured these recordings with the woman's permission), her voice cracked and weary, the words garbled, but occasionally certain phrases stick out, "can you help me?" being the most disturbing, and they are looped and layered, subtly effected, some reversed, all tangled into a disturbing collage of pain and anguish, which is as fascinating as it is strangely compelling, and of course chilling. Which leads into the final track, which is downright lovely, albeit creepy and sinister and broodingly dark, as if this was in fact the moment of rapture, deep rumbling tones, lush layered droned, slowly shifting over an expanse of deep black nothingness, the instruments coming to the fore, what could be a bit of guitar drifts amidst this abject sprawl of groaning, moaning minimal ambient creep. The sound subtly glitchy, cavernous and dense, a dark strain of black ambient industrial shimmer, the soundtrack to a timelapse film of the end of the world, a cascade of slo-mo blackened churn, that plays out glacially as everything around it, and us, fades into oblivion. Cool packaging too, printed cardstock inserts, in a stickered plastic sleeve, each disc accompanied by a doomsday fortune, predicting your end, and what you'll experience at the end, along with six unlucky numbers, all printed on a little fortune sized piece of vellum.

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One of three new releases from UK tape label The Tapeworm, and yet another one we'd never heard of before. Where Is This, the project of one Mark Ward, is a seriously dense wall of sound, a heaving, crushing sprawl of blacknoise, power electronics, and blown out psychedelia. There's certainly an element of Merzbowian brutality, as in to the weak eared, this might come across as pure noise, but with headphones, and heck, even in places without, the sounds here are super nuanced, textured and dare we say melodic, with streaks of chordal color draped across churning expanses of white noise skree, arcs of feedback are sculpted into melodic fragments, and then woven into thick, dizzying swirls of crumbling distortion, and fried zoner drones, the whole tape is a constant squall, but once you're full immersed, the sounds surround you, and wrap you in mysteriously melodic bits of sound, a cascade of crunchy, buzzy, blistering shriek and howl, somehow tamped down and muted, and woven into some seriously mesmerizing psychedelic noise, the sort of thing, that somehow becomes more and more listenable and lovely, the longer you listen, all the while not shedding a bit of its searing sonic intensity. Noise is often a tough proposition for us, but when done right, it can be something impossibly brutal and beautiful, epic and majestic, and fantastically transcendent, and Ward really does do it just right! LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!!

While introduces big crunchy electro grooves and rolling big-beat breaks into his second release for Miami's answer to Warp -- Chocolate Industries -- after producing one of the best IDM singles for Funkstorung's Musik Aus Strom label. While is still fraught with Autechrism (the same disease which plagues Funkstorung - even with their oddly progressive hip-hop lyricism), but is getting better at the electronica thing with the heavier breakbeats and expressive melodies.

While his brilliant debut single on Musik Aus Strom was a dark melodic take on old Autechre, While (the man) settles for atmosphere rather than melody on his first full album, sounding a lot more like Disjecta, Boards of Canada, and at times Coil.

A while back we made a record by a Chinese duo called White+ our Record Of The Week. And folks flipped for it. So much so we could barely keep it in stock. A dizzying collection of droned out psychedelic krautrock style grooves and experimental electronic hypnorock. A drummer and a synth player with all kinds of weird FX and noisemakers. Originally described to us as sounding like Neu crossed with Yellow Magic Orchestra, to us it ended up sounding much weirder. Ever since that review, we'd been wanting to list this, an earlier record from these two, but only just now did we manage to get enough. Talking more to our friends in China, we're beginning to think this band is simply called White, and maybe that other record is titled White PLUS. But really, it hardly matters, we'll keep calling them White+, and keep digging their crazy sounds, which are even crazier here, processed vox, churning sheets of synth thrum, clouds of swirling FX, buried pulsations, shimmering strings, minimal percussion, some tracks dense and dizzyingly dark ("Space Decay"), others dreamy and almost raga-like ("Spring House"), some tribal and percussive, angular and abstract ("Conch Crunch"), some like kraut-age electro-pop ("Build A Link"), and some others minimal and rhythmic, rife with junkyard percussion, and mysterious vocals/FX ("Train Song"). Fans of the other White+ will want this for sure, and really, anyone into tripped out electronic minimalism, psychedelic krautrock, experimental ambience, and twisted rhythmic hypnorock, this will definitely be a new fave. We have a bunch, but once we run out, we have to get more from China, which can sometimes take a while, so please get one quick, or be prepared to wait patiently. We also have a few copies in stock if the other White+, you can find it elsewhere on the site, or just ask if you want one of those too...

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Not one, but TWO brand new records, brand new BANDS in fact, from the man behind avant black metal weirdos Pyramids, Sailors With Wax Wings and White Moth, both heavy and weird in their own way, and both featuring incredible ensemble casts, not so much guests and collaborators. In some ways it does both of these records/groups a bit of a disservice to lump them together, as most reviewers (including this one) do, but it's sort of unavoidable, for as different as these two records may sound, there are quite a few similarities conceptually and even sonically. For those unfamiliar with Pyramids, we've been pretty smitten with these guys ever since we first heard their double disc debut on Hydra Head, a dizzying sonic concoction that infused black metal blasts with washed out shoegaze glimmer, swirling dreamy ambience, blurred slowcore drift, actually it might be more accurate to describe Pyramids as some sort of blissed out shoegaze slowcore outfit that flecked their dreamy sound with bits of black metal buzz, but either way, the sound these guys cooked up was heady and psychedelic and pushed our buttons BIG TIME. Everything we could want in a weird heavy band seemed to be all smeared into this gorgeously indistinct entity called Pyramids. And the interesting thing about that debut, is that it already sort of foreshadowed the genesis of these two new projects, by including a discs of remixes/reworkings featuring Swans drummer Ted Parsons, Toby Driver of Kay Dot, Colin Marston of Behold the Arctopus, James Plotkin of OLD and Khanate, Justin Broadrick of Jesu / Godflesh and French industrial black metal crushers Blut Aus Nord. And the recent 5 cassette box seemed to be another sign pointing at Pyramids' mainman R Loren's restlessness, and need to keep creating and collaborating, featuring hours and hours of interpretations and reimaginings. Which brings us to Loren's latest projects, a simultaneous release of two different record, by two different groups, each sonically disparate, yet inexorably linked, Sailors With Wax Wings, whose sound is like a more abstracted shoegazey Pyramids, and White Moth, whose sound has been described by Loren as "digital hardcore", but also infuses its drill and bass and industrial crunch with plenty of Pyramidal blissed out black metalisms (including vocals from John Gossard of Weakling and Asunder!). White Moth is just as awesomely tripped out and confusional as Pyramids, with a lineup of collaborators as similarly expansive and eclectic as Sailors With Wax Wings: Alec Empire (Atari Teenage Riot), Shelby Cinca of Frodus (!), Lydia Lunch, Ashley Scott Jones (Treasure Fingers, Evol Intent), Sam Hillmer (the Zs), Jacob Kirkegaard, Christoph Heeman (H.N.A.S.), Colin Marston (Krallice, Behold�The Arctopus), Dalek and of course John Gossard (Weakling, Asunder)... White Moth splits its focus between textures/atmospheres/ambience, and beats, BIG gnarled drill and bass beats, mean hard heavy, self described 'digital hardcore' beats, but the opening track is surprisingly lovely, with its shimmery dreamy droney intro, its lush cascading guitars, a blissed out beat-heavy chunk of electronic pop, which is pretty much how the next few tracks play out, and to a certain extent the whole record, for all its purported black metal and digital hardcore elements, the resulting sound is electronic, and shoegazey, lots of buzzing guitars, but the buzz is muted and dreamy, giving the songs a more sort of washed out hazy glow, a surface of prismatic shimmer under which, beats and riffs churn and roil. It's not until the third track, that things get HEAVY, and even then, it sounds less like digital hardcore, and more like some sort of electronic flecked noise rock, howled almost emo vocals, soaring guitars, all on a bed of relentlessly stuttering squalls of sputter and crunch, occasionally slowing down to a doomy lumber, before smoothing out into a thick stretch of droned out guitars, and then finally some hushed ambient shimmer. "Shoot The Clock" features Dalek, and is a thick noisy swirl of guitar heavy hip hop skitter, that's definitely a perfect match, but then after all, it's the guy from Pyramids making this record, so he throws in some blown out saxophone, and layer after layer of throbbing psychedelic guitar buzz. The next three tracks are all cut from the same cloth, soaring swirling squalls of epic black metal guitar, over frantic frenetic beats, hovering somewhere right between blissed out prettiness and blown out electronic chaos, definitely leaning toward the former, even at its most extreme and punishing, it's like Loren has some pop gene, that no matter how hard he tries to subvert it, manages to worm its way into everything he does, but hell we're not complaining, it's precisely what makes this stuff so compelling, and listenable. We're all for a blackened wall of grinding beats and buzzing guitars, but when they're deftly assembled into something laced with melody and texture, even better! The final track "To The Cathedral" is the one that features something you probably never thought you'd hear, the vocalist from Weakling, shrieking and howling over a bed of spastic electronic beats, all wrapped in gauzy streaks of blurred melody. and laced with dreamy crooned clean vocals, all tangled and chaotic and wonderfully blown out, the guitars here again are sort of black metal, but the buzz is more dreamy than grim, and you gotta listen close, cuz Gossard's vocals are buried WAY down in the mix, almost just another layer of buzz, and then it's all over in 3 minutes, a gorgeous blown out blast of hazy blackened metallic bliss pop electronica, which dissipates leaving a softly shimmering cloud of soft whirring ambient dronemusic to finish things off. On first listen, White Moth sounds like a huge departure from Pyramids, and well removed from sister project Sailors With Wax Wings, but it only takes a few more plays to reveal that perhaps the differences are not as great as they seem, both White Moth and SWWW are buzzy and blissy, freaky and far out, psychedelic and atmospheric, brutal and beautiful, and while like Pyramids, both are probably WAY too far out to appeal to the true grim hordes, for everyone else, this is some bafflingly brilliant and abstract heaviness.

MPEG stream: There Was A Man With Tongue Of Wood
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White Ring are another witch house outfit who manage to gain a serious amount of notoriety, with very few proper releases, relying more on YouTube videos and limited cd-r's, as well as downloads and filesharing, but of the many groups of that ilk, they were definitely one of our favorites, so it's not that big a surprise that they would end up on Handmade Birds, even less so once you get an earful of their amazing cover of Neil Young's "Hey Hey My My", which transforms the original into a hazy ethereal bliss out, that is until the drop, when the drums come in, and the buzzing synths, very reminiscent of Salem obviously, but it's a sound we're still not tired of, Southern crunk style hip hop skitter, over fuzzed out low end, everything wreathed in a dense cloud of dreampop haze, the vocals an almost wordless croon, which soar skyward along with the synths/beats, only to bliss out once again in between. We've listened to that track so many times it was ages before we even made it to the flipside, but it's a good one too, much more downtempo and dark, woozy and wondrously warped, the track building to epic soaring Salem like crescendos, reminding us of the blissed out shoegaze of M83, but then retuning to the murky skitter that is so much a hallmark of witch house / drag. Fans of Salem, and all the other witch house we've reviewed are probably gonna want this, and everyone into shoegaze and dream pop, who have yet to check out anything like this, White Ring might just be your gateway... Sorry if we run out though; couldn't get very many of this limited release.

First we've heard from sampledelic South London producer Paul White, whose new album for Now-Again ought to appeal to everyone who liked the Madlib Medicine Show No. 6 disc we listed last time (which was a crazy DJ mix of vintage psych/funk/prog from around the world). Paul White likewise takes a chopped-up, dial-spinning, hiphop approach to quite similar, psychedelic material coming from but ONE source: the records of cult Swedish psych purveyor ST Mikael (who records for the Subliminal Sounds label, same as Dungen). Sampling, editing, looping, and layering snippets of ST's stuff, Paul also contributes additional synth, percussion and vocals, constructing a veritable psychedelic fantasmagoria, 25 delirious and delightful tracks that mash n' meld hiphop beats, popsike melody, Eastern string zing, folky strum, freaky electric guitar, odd sound FX, head nodding funky grooves, mystical atmospheres, non sequitur spoken bits, etc. While we must admit we were only passingly familiar with the work of ST Mikael (and what we'd heard, or maybe it was just his record covers, seemed a bit cheesy, in an aging New Agey hippie sort of way, he's from the '90s after all) but Mr. White's hiphop makeover of Mikael is definitely cool. The results are a bit like the aforementioned Madlib, also remind us of When albums like The Lobster Boys and Pearl Harvest, as well as the likes of DJ Shadow, BMSR, and Rockford Kabine. Dreamy and druggy and definitely A.D.D. Recommended for sure. YOUR brain will be purple by the time you're through listening. The cd version comes in a cardboard wallet, the vinyl in deluxe "paste-on" jacket, and in addition, the vinyl version includes a bonus 12" (first 1000 copies only) featuring Paul White together with Guilty Simpson.

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Maybe it's the encroaching autumn, but lately we can't get enough of solo piano music. Especially when it's all minimal clusters of wistful passages, lilting progressions and sustained overtones. While this isn't a solo piano record per se, the liquid piano playing of Italian classical composer, Ludovico Einaudi, collaborating with electronic artists Robert and Ronald Lippok (To Rococo Rot, Tarwater), is at the heart of every track here. The group works fluidly together as a single unit (they recorded this live, together in one room) with the electronic nuances and occasional, but never overpowering, rhythms interlocking with Einaudi's playfully lyrical compositions. It's a lovely album that reminds us of the Rune Grammofon label's prettiest releases, and is fast becoming one of our favorite late night / early morning records. Highly Recommended!

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You know him as Hrvatski (Boston-based electronica maverick fond of long German words and 'Amen' breaks), we know him as Keith, our friendly sales rep at Forced Exposure distribution. With this new cdep release under his own name, Keith/Hrvatski combines his

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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. Keith Fullerton Whitman aka Hrvatski takes a break from glitching and skittering and breaks of all shapes and sizes to indulge his first loves, minimalism and Krautrock. This *lp only* release is 4 tracks of hypnotically blissed out drones and Sunroof! like shimmer. One track does start to pulse and almost rock, with booming percussion and a darkly propulsive riff, but for the most part these pieces fall more into the Reich, Riley, Flynt, etc. sonic realm. Beautifully droning and repetitive, dark and abstract ambience.

A few years back, Keith Fullerton Whitman wowed the students of the Harvard University Studio for Electro-Acoustic Composition with a few workshops that demonstrated his wizardry with the Max/MSP computing language. In exchange, he got access to the University's collection of antique synthesizers including the Buchla Music Box and Serge Modular Prototype with their massive banks of patch bays, knobs, and toggle switches. The images of these devices which grace the album artwork in taxonomic presentation immediate provide a cold, tonal air of paranoiac, bunker aesthetic that out of the early history of institutionally funded electronic music (i.e. Xenakis, Ussachevsky, Eliane Radigue, Arne Nordheim, etc.). Multiples far exceeds whatever expectations one might have when gazing upon the covers, as Whitman once again argues his case as one of the most gifted electronic musicians of the contemporary era. Each of the tracks honestly profess their source material as 'stereo music for acoustic, electric, and electronic instruments' including those aforementioned electronic devices from Harvard as well far more commonplace instruments such as a hi-hat cymbal, a drum kit, and acoustic and electric guitars. The album opens with glacial timbres that emerge from that hi-hat which Whitman transforms into a Mirror-like dronescape of murk, fog, and mystery. Next, the Serge Modular Synth buzzes with complex saw-blade waveforms of agitated electricity, phase pattern sweepings, and post-Dockstader pointilist spectroscopy. Harkening back to his early work with tape delay and guitar repetition, Whitman's work with a Yamaha Disklavier Prototype is sublime in its hypnotic prowess echoed with a lingering sense of melancholia. Whitman then shifts to a wonderful recreation of the vintage organ 'n' drum sound from Swedish icons Hansson and Karlsson, with baroque shifts in melody upon a simple drum propulsion. Altogether, Multiples showcases the many personalities of Mr. Whitman for a marvellous album!

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This burly bearded electronic wizard releases yet another jawdropping dose of "real time music for hybrid digital-analogue modular synthesizer" that Whitman posits as the companion piece to the recently released Editions Mego album Generator. His set-up presumably is similar to what was found in the Generator album in attempting to coax and wrangle strains of errata from his highly complex networks of re-engineered synth circuits through overlapping digital algorithms and systems. Whitman also pegs this as the 'free jazz' counterpoint to the 'minimalist' strains of Generator. That seems just about right. There are plenty of dance / anti-dance notions within the electronic patterns and subsequent deconstructions that come out of Whitman's polydactyl blorping, with grooves evolving out of sequential firings of scattershot electronic bleeps only to trip over themselves and stumble into a tangle of fizzing tone, radiant atom smashing, discombobulated delirium, and plate reverb bath simulation. The sporadic sequential bursts from a machine sourced drum kick and some electronic source that could be thought of mimetically as a flapping bassline (yup, think a cyborg version of Jaco Pastorius) and the free jazz references start to seem not too far of a stretch. It's a manic, frenzied, and totally uncompromising album from a very skilled electronic artist going fucking nuts. Oh, we played this at the wrong speed too the first time, and it sounds pretty wicked at 33rpm. Two albums for the price of one, eh? ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*

Keith Fullerton Whitman has been globetrotting over the past couple years, presenting his Max/MSP patch wizardry at pretty much every major electronic music festival, venue, and institution that the world has to offer. The self-evidently titled Recorded In Lisbon found Whitman returning to an old infatuation with '60s minimalist / process oriented strategies like the sort found in Alvin Lucier's strongest work, as Whitman situated a feedback system of speakers, fm receivers, and speakers at Galeria Ze Dos Bois. In turn he augmented this system with recordings of "static sine-tone harmonics, squared-off electric guitar haze, clangorous room-tone eruptions, and high-end synth freakouts," to quote Hrvatski himself. From the onset of this album, Whitman introduces pristine tones with all of the timbral clarity of bells and church organs, which he slowly circulated into a sonic architecture of revolving chirps and stately loops. There's plenty of similarities between these sounds and the weightless particles which comprised his acclaimed Playthroughs album from a few years back; but a heavier set of low end pulses stochastically as a bass counterpoint but not really as a rhythmic structure. Eventually, sweeping siren tones broach the celestial minimalism amidst a cloud of pixelated glitches. The single track gradually extends to an amazing crescendo of jagged saw-tooth pink noise slowly cycling through a plainsong melody for the 21st Century. As the melody falls apart in a ring-modulated freefall of tape deceleration, Whitman concludes the album with a skitter of percussive blows and granular synthesis. Immaculate.

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Keith Fullerton Whitman made his way down to Australia in early 2006, showcasing his DSP-folklore collision of pastorally painted ambience, jump-cut drill 'n' bass rhythms, electronic esoterica, and a knack for Swedish prog riffs just for kicks. As a treat for his Antipodean audience, Whitman composed a piece which reworked an older track which clocked in at 10:32, doubling it to 21:04 and also re-composing the source material to be what Whitman qualifies as "bi-directional, meaning that it plays the same forwards as backwards," in other words, a palindrome (and what a fun word that is!). This plaintive reworking of drone-poetry for drifting bass rattle, rounded percolations of modular tone, and whisps of timbral trickery would have been a tour-only cd had it not been for Lawrence English convincing Whitman to release it through his Room 40 imprint. An elegant and thoughtful abstraction of digital post-ambience that more than lives up to the high standards of Whitman's previous albums!

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Back in 2002, Keith Fullerton Whitman and Greg Davis stopped by Aquarius during their cross-country tour to do an instore performance. If memory serves us correctly, Keith had just had his laptop stolen and was working off of a brand-spankin' new PowerBook. Unfortunately, he hadn't worked out all of the bugs as his machine continuously crashed during the performance. Not that anybody in attendance would have noticed, as he never broke his stoic game face and Davis proved to be more than capable of being able to fill in the blank spaces with digital splutter and post-Mego pixelated abstraction. Alas, none of the material from the Aquarius instore made their way onto this condensation of a year's worth of live laptop improvisations. From that year's worth of performances in New York, Cologne, Utrecht, San Francisco, Marsailles, etc. Whitman and Davis jitter, jink, and jive with their fizzing digi-chunks of sound that pass through the duo's constant manipulation of Max/MSP patches from source material that includes twinkling bells, deep gongs, erratic hammond organs, motorcycle engine blasts, metallic scrapes, etc.

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It's Bjork! And Bogdan Raczinski!

Another warped gem from the Tri Angle label, this one, a dark, brooding, moody bit of skittery slo-mo soul, in the tradition of other Tri Angle artists like Vessel, oOoOO, Holy Other, Balam Acab, How To Dress Well, etc. The weird bit being that this is no mysterious electronic producer, or bedroom misanthrope (well, okay, he could be that), but it's actually the side project of James Kelly, who readers of the aQ list might know better from his day job, playing in post black metal outfit Altar Of Plagues. And it's not like there was lots of stuff like this lurking below the surface in AoP. Or maybe it was, just WAY beneath the surface. There's literally nothing metal about Kelly's Wife project, so metalheads steer clear. And really, we might expect a metalhead making a weirdo avant electronic soul record to come up with something seriously damaged and demented, but really, amidst the other above mentioned Tri Angle artists, Wife tends a bit more toward the mainstream. Sure the sounds are strange, the arrangements too, and apparently these songs are crafted from found sounds, filed recordings and homemade instruments, but the final project is surprisingly polished, very poppy, still murky and mysterious, but one of the few records on Tri Angle that has breakthrough potential. Fans of more mainstream fare like Portishead and Massive Attack and even to a degree Radiohead, will definitely dig a lot of what's going on here. And we're not trying to downplay the weirdness. It's still plenty weird, it's just that the weirdness is deftly woven into songs and sounds that are much more accessible. We also hear a little Majical Cloudz (on tracks like "What's Between"), dark, crony electronic torch songs, with lushly layered vocals, dreamy gothic ballads, haunting and darkly lovely, the sound is utterly mesmerizing, and really quite gorgeous, and again, we'd never guess this was the work of a metalhead, but we're digging it a lot. And obviously, fans of other Tri Angle stuff will definitely dig, but for folks who have been thinking abut dabbling in weirder electronic music, this might be the perfect gateway record.

MPEG stream: Like Chrome
MPEG stream: Tongue
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The whole UK grime scene / movement seems to have fizzled in terms of blowing up in the US. Which is too bad 'cause what we've heard so far has been awesome. We all totally dug the Dizzee Rascal record, and the Wiley single from a few months back hit the spot as well. With stuttering, un-funky two step garage (pronounced gare-ij), fuzzed out monster synths, and a convulted cockney flow. So Wiley's full length is finally here (beating Dizzee's sophmore effort by a matter of weeks) and it totally delivers. Funky and funny with massive beats, ridiculous flows and totally alien, squiggly synth melodies. Relentlessly funky and fucking awesome. The real question is with stuff this weird and amazing coming out of the UK, why the fuck does anyone give a shit about the massively boring Streets?? We'll never understand.

MPEG stream: The Game
MPEG stream: Pick U R Self Up

You know once Dizzee Rascal exploded over here, it was only a matter of time before everyone went looking for more of the same. And they found it in Wiley. Another export from the UK's grime scene, the same scene that spawned Dizzee and a handful of other folks who decided to add a bunch of fuzzy synths, buzzing basslines, and tongue twisting toasting to their two-step garage (pronounced gare-ij), a simple and repetitive offshoot of drum and bass. So if you loved the Dizzee Rascal record, you'll probably dig this, especially as the single is a dig at the whole garage scene. And those of you who are new to this stuff and haven't heard that Dizzee Rascal record, imagine a jungle record, stripped to its very framework, all extraneous beats removed, leaving just the kick and snare (two step, geddit?), and a big ol' farting burping bassline, and some Jamaican style toasting/rapping and you've got an idea of Wiley / Dizzee and the grime/garage sound. Also contains a video viewable on your computer!

MPEG stream: Wot Do U Call It?

As hopefully you fondly recall, just a few weeks back, we made a double cd entitled Might Of The Planet Eater, by this eccentric Finnish outsider blackened industrial / electronica act, our freakin' Record Of The Week. 'Twas a sprawling and utterly bizarre set, part Pan Sonic, part power electronics, part (ir-)rhythmic occult ritual, apparently what happens when a Finnish black metal weirdo does DIY industrial experimentation. Weird and primitive and (to us) utterly awesome. While we absolutely LOVE Will Over Matter, we'll readily admit they're, uh, possibly a difficult listen (but then, compared to some other things we sell, maybe not really). And fortunately a lot of you folks seemed to dig it! So, of course, we thought you'd want us to list this one too, an earlier album from Will Over Matter, also on Bestial Burst. This disc is actually the first WOM we ever heard, preceding Might Of The Planet Eater by a couple years. What happened, is not long ago one of us came across a Will Over Matter track on the internet somewhere, got kind of obsessed, and was happy (and amused) to find that we actually already had one of their albums in stock!! That was this one, 9 To The Moon, which we'd apparently ordered from Bestial Burst a couple years ago (2009) when it came out, but never reviewed. The next time we did a Bestial Burst order, we also got the newer double cd, and, our obsession growing, decided to make it Record Of The Week. So all of you who liked that one, you want this too! Again, outsider electronic electro-dirge, chock a block with squeaky squelchy static-y sounds, stuttering irregular rhythms, noisy glitchy distortion damage. Bloop zwoop zip zap. Buzzing electricity. Sinister analog synth. Computers gone haywire. The occasional disembodied, drugged out voice buried in the mix (heard on the plodding "No Waste Of Sorrow" and elsewhere). Yes, the blown out, black and white, lunar landscape (?) cover art is so appropriate for these alien, bleak, brutal sci-fi sounds, that are both confusional and compelling. To recap, WOM is a one-man band, a project of Harald Mentor from equally insane AQ faves Ride For Revenge, allegedly a "black metal" act. WOM is not black metal (though Beherit did dabble in this direction once upon a time) but anyone who really appreciates Ride For Revenge, as well as anything totally fucked up, ought to enjoy it. And the esoteric themes of these songs (they ARE songs) are as out there as any black metal weirdness ever. The song titles aren't even provided, but the internet knows what they are. While it's not a double disc like the other one we listed, there's 9 tracks, all of 'em long... with grand finale "The Burning Logic" building and building for over 8 minutes of crinkum crankum, industrial electro-dirge hypnosis. The whole thing is possibly dangerous headphone listening all right!

MPEG stream: No Waste Of Sorrow
MPEG stream: Geometric Law Of The Psyche
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We got this in on the day we sent out our last list, the latest from weirdo Finnish avant electronic surreal industrial outfit Will Over Matter, the solo project of the maniac behind damaged sort-of-black-metal avant rhythmic alchemists Ride For Revenge, and we were totally tempted to just list it then, with a review that simply said "This is so much better than anything on this week's list" and leave it at that. We wussed out at the last minute, thinking it a bit too flip, and like all records we love, we really wanted the chance to gush and get a bit more in depth, but it seriously only took a day or two of listening, before we were very nearly incapable of listening to anything else. The music of Will Over Matter, whose Might Of The Planet Eater double cd we made our Record Of The Week a few months back, is simultaneously infuriating and addictive, baffling and beautiful, a dizzying collage of primitive electronics, of abstract spaced out synths, of bizarre spoken word vocals and sprawling pulsing glitchy malfunctioning buzzscapes, like an Emeralds record if it was crafted by some strange tribe of interstellar cave dwellers, or Daniel Higgs creating primitive spiritual rituals post frontal lobotomy. There's definitely an Amps For Christ vibe too, the same sort of controlled chaos, disparate sounds and tones woven into songs both textural and strangely melodic. The opening track here is the perfect example, a 12+ minute of warped lo-fi kosmische exploration, sounding a bit like it was culled from samples of the Starship Enterprise, recorded on a handheld microcassette recorder, and then played back on a busted up old Casio sampler, a sort of spaced out industrial power electronics, but with the power rendered not so much in volume and intensity, but in depth and mystery, a hazy sort of pulsating rhythmic ambience, one that takes on more and more hiss and buzz as it goes, and it's not until about 9 minutes in, when all of the noise abates, leaving a jagged throbbing synth pulse, beneath which a strange voice intones some mysterious manifesto, the sounds gradually blurring until finally blinking out. Even though the above paragraph would seem to point to the opposite, this stuff is actually insanely difficult to describe, because it is so unlike anything else we've heard, a compelling bit of modern electronic industrial minimalism, with touches of cold wave, of classic old school industrial, hints of course of the rhythmic weirdness of Ride For Revenge, but here stripped way down, and presented as something much more austere and cold, the voice a Teutonic bellow, that only occasionally erupts unto a more black metal growl, while the music does all the heavy lifting, creating undulating stretches of analog synth, blown out bursts of gristly glitchy crunch, rhythms cobbled together from bits of hiss and thrum, skies full of skittery bleep, of old modem high end flutter, of white noise and pink noise and brown noise all sculpted into sort-of-shapes and almost-melodies, creating again, something that to many ears might be perceived as damaged and difficult and borderline unlistenable, but to us, and presumably many of you, that's part of what makes this so amazing, the fact that it IS completely and utterly whatthefuck bizarre, while somehow managing to be totally mesmerizing, and impossibly listenable, a warped chunk of avant outsider electronic industrial weirdness that has quickly become some of our favorite music ever, and even now, we're still fighting the urge to erase this whole review and just write "this is so much better than anything/everything else EVER"...

MPEG stream: The Enemy Collector
MPEG stream: Blades Sharpened Again
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The awesomely titled Might Of The Planet Eater is the latest from mysterious Finnish one man band Will Over Matter, which just so happens to be the work of a fella by the name of Harald Mentor, who you might know better as the maniac behind avant outsider not-quite-black-metal weirdos Ride For Revenge. So if the low end rhythmic weirdness that is Ride For Revenge is one step removed from black metal, imagine Will Over Matter as about 5 or 6 steps past that. Not black metal at all, but more like some sort of outsider electronica. Our obsession with Ride For Revenge stems from the fact that over the course of their career, their sound has changed to the point where they are now totally subverting and transforming the idea of black metal into something much more primal and rhythmic, forgoing the buzz and blast and replacing those obvious BM tropes with looped mesmer and tribal pound, stripping the sound down to its essence, and then slowing it down as well, sounding more to us like Aluk Todolo than Beherit. Although the mention of Beherit, another Finnish black metal institution seems particularly apt here, in that Beherit are infamous for their non-black metal output, their experimental electronics, which is precisely what Will Over Matter is. If Ride For Revenge is Mentor's twisted take on black metal, well then Will Over Matter is his skewed attempt at power electronics, or industrial music, channeling the spirit of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Whitehouse, and all the rest, but filtered through some sort of cracked and damaged blackened Finnish lens. Will Over Matter combines the stripped down rhythmic minimalism of Ride For Revenge with experimental industrialism, melding lumbering beats to fields of spaced out static, wrapping sheets of Merzbowian noise around shuffling low end thrum and machinelike beats, adding distorted alien vox to squalls of glitched out electronics, or winding multiple streams of electronic information into strangely twisted sonic barrages. The opening track here is a bizarre soundscape of chittery electronics, of twisted feedback and growled super distorted vocals, pelted by grinding crunch and skittering squelches, a strange array of bleeps and bloops, and buried within, a sort of almost rhythmic bit of ever shifting static, which leads directly into the next track, a droned out stretch of pulsing electronic shimmer, which manages to sound spaced out and sinister at the same time, the tone and timbre switching constantly creating, again, it's own sort of psychedelic rhythm. It's not until "Read The Signs", track number three, that the various elements coalesce into what is really the core of WoM's sound, another fluctuating field of static, of strange space-y electronics, bits of glitch and hiss, but wound around a lumbering, skeletal beat, some sort of alien krautrock, before switching gears, and becoming a weirdly propulsive throbbing electronica, but with elements of kraut/post/space rock, at it's most propulsive sounding a bit like Bastard Noise offshoot and former Record Of The Week-ers Geronimo, and at its least, like nothing you've ever heard before. The track offers up strange electronic squiggles, sinister high end buzz, all in the surface of trailing behind that motorik beat, which itself is in constant flux, cymbals popping out of the mix, processed and all dubby, while the various electronics get more and more tangled and frantic. Then there's the sprawling 24 minute "Stone Cold Heart", a super spare and abstract stretch of blackened rhythms, and distant buzz and shimmer, that buzz, growing ever more insistent, the vocals here not so distorted, more ominous and intense, intoning some sort of ritual, over what almost sounds like a black metal Pole, minus the barrage of wildly buzzing synths, and primitive analog electronic tones. One of our favorite tracks is the gorgeously droned out and hypnotic "Forever Nameless" that seems to inadvertently channel John Carpenter and Goblin, into something much more dark and sinister, a totally mesmerizing rhythm, wound up in a thick, corrosive buzzing low end melody, while way off in the distance, a Burzum like synth melody plays out, again reminding us of a less noisy Aluk Todolo, totally hypnotic, the vocals here are almost sung, wrapped in a weird warped distortion, the end result like some sort of doomy drone pop slowcore or something. Throughout the remainder of these two discs, WoM stretch out strangely stiff rhythms, or pull apart robotic electro beats into weirdly metallic anti-grooves, which unwind lazily beneath hazy streaks of static, creating a series of tarpit crawls, often swallowed whole by heaving walls of electronic sound, that seem to emulate the sheer crumbling power of SUNNO))-like doomdronedirge, but are more often left to pulse, and pound, and throb, a strange alien death march, as the label describes these rituals, each ritual an "epic journey through inner knowledge, lunar madness and cosmic superpowers of satanic possession", the twisted bastard child of some dark forest, outer space ritualized mating of industrial music, black metal, power electronics and krautrock, brilliantly baffling and maddeningly mesmerizing, by now, it should be easy for you to tell if this is your cup of seriously spiked tea or not, and for most of you, we imagine it must be. Fans of Ride For Revenge, Aluk Todolo, Geronimo, Mammal, Bastard Noise, This Heat, spaced out ritualistic blackened electronics and fucked up Finnish weirdness, this one's for you...

MPEG stream: Precautions
MPEG stream: Read The Signs
MPEG stream: Superficial Solutions Collapse
MPEG stream: Led By Instincts Alone
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Back in 2011, we made Might Of The Planet Eater, the debut from weirdo minimal blackened power electronic one man band Will Over Matter our Record Of The Week. We initially discovered WOM via the fact that the 'one man' behind that one man band, was none other than Harald Mentor, mastermind of aQ beloved Finnish rhythmic black metal minimalists Ride For Revenge, who for some crazy reason, we just realized, have never nabbed Record Of The Week honors, cuz in retrospect, any/all of their previous records were more than deserving. As we mentioned in our reviews of the other Will Over Matter records, if you thought Ride For Revenge were weird, then prepare theyself to be blown away, baffled, confused, frustrated, thrilled, unnerved, disturbed, most likely all of the above. Will Over Matter takes the dense rhythmic churn, already sort of spaced out and abstract, and replaces the bass and drums and traditional instruments, with what sounds like a battery of cobbled together electronics, home made machines and invented instruments, it's tough not to envision Mentor as some sort of mad scientist, in his murky musical laboratory, surrounded by walls of primitive electronics, old computers, blinking lights, blown speakers, a room full of towering obelisks of obsolete technology, harnessed into something otherworldly, and improbably next level. The sounds these machines emit glitchy and gristly, jagged and hiss-drenched, in some ways the template for WOM is the same as it was for Ride For Revenge, the 'band' locked into simple, lurching, lumbering motorik grooves, the 'beat' wrapped in dense sonic swirls, thick fields of static, everything glitched out and in-the-red. A head spinning sprawl of blackened kraut-noise synth-drone power-electronic minimalism, that RULES. Which brings us to the latest missive from Mentor, which is another psychedelic minimal electro-noise WTF doozy, the vocals kept to a minimum this time, the three lengthy tracks, spaced out and droney, slow shifting layers, constantly morphing textures, pulsing and pulsating, the sounds raw and gristly, the tracks maniacally repetitive and cyclical, in a way that to our ears is total tranced out bliss, but to less adventurous ears, might be just the opposite. The lack of 'song' and 'structure', not that there was that much of either on past WoM release, but even less so here, is precisely what makes Phenomenal Highways a whole different beast, at times, it's like past WoM records stripped down to their very skeletal essence, the opening track some sort of primitive kosmische ritual, a single synth locked and looped into a seemingly endless cycle of simple pulses, weirdly warbly and super distorted, a heartbeat like pulse wreathed in filthy, crusty synth squelch, that squirms and oozes, occasionally shaped into actual melodies, but more often than not droning and buzzing hypnotically, the final few minutes, finds the sounds transformed into weird lazer blast like blurts before suddenly blinking out. The second track is even MORE minimal, a super spare soundscape that sounds like some mysteriously manipulated alien field recording, something you might here on Editions Mego, a field of crumpled low end crackle, muted and murky, peppered with little bits of percussion, the sound a weird bit of grinding muddy noise, it's not until 7 minutes in that the sound splinters, the background smoothing out into a whirring distorted drone, while Mentor delivers some demonic sermon over the top, his voice processed and doused in distortion, before the track explodes into a field of grinding electronics, tangled melodies, swirling tones, a robotic psych-noise freakout that manages to be more listenable than it has any right to be, a head spinning psychedelic churn that blossom into a final super blown out speaker shredding blowout, before oozing into the final track, a weird shuffling sprawl of rib cage rattling low end, dense subsonic tones delivered through what sounds like slow motion helicopter rotor wash, weirdly rhythmic and mesmeric, this minimal ooze and creep soon joined by strange curlicues of melody, the deep tone gathering all sorts of acoustic crunch as it goes, and once again, about seven minutes in, a super distorted blast of fractured blown out melody surfaces, giving the whole thing a seriously psychedelic vibe, those tones totally overtaking the rest of the sound, before fading out, and returning us to the slow-swell pulsations of the first half, only to fade out into a crackly sprawl of sculpted feedback, wreathed in hiss and hum, the sound smoldering and sinister, draped over a buried barely there rhythm, some echo drenched vocals in there too, everything sort of washed out and blurry, drifting beneath sheets of feedback and fields of staticky hum, all culminating in a final freaked out psych-noise squall, that does little to disguise the haunting melodic beauty that lurks within. As always, amazing, bizarre and bafflingly brilliant, a dizzyingly abstract, twisted industrial psychedelic drone-noise masterpiece. That is of course also extremely limited...

MPEG stream: Generous Is My Master
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It's been a while since we've heard from Australian label Hidden Shoal, and just as long since we've heard from SF sound sculptor and dreamdronedrift composer Wes Willenbring, but now that we're all reunited, we can go ahead and gush over yet another fantastic Hidden Shoal release, and another gorgeous disc of ethereal ambience from Mr. Willenbring. Willenbring is an accomplished pianist and guitarist, and those instruments form the basis of these songs, in some places that's obvious, but in others, the piano and the guitar, or any semblance of either, are blurred, or smeared, or pixelated into hazy clouds of sound, of softly shifting streaks of crystalline shimmer, the guitar often transformed into a buried pulse, the piano into soft focus flurries of barely there melody, at its most diffused and abstract, this is total bleary eyed starlight pop ambience, the sort of hushed orchestral drift that would appeal to fans of other sonic abstractionists like Stars Of The Lid or Tim Hecker or Fennesz. But Willenbring doesn't rely entirely on effects or processing, much of the music here is darkly delicate chamber music, shimmering strings, over pointillist piano, buzzing steel strings unfurling melancholic melodies in slow motion, one note at a time, a sound that's lush and haunting, cinematic and subtly epic. Totally sublime moody minimalism, a late night moonlit, slip-into-the-ether sort of dreamdrift dronemusic, equal parts gauzy abstraction and languid whispery post rock drift, that is as divine as it is dreamy.

MPEG stream: I'm Looking Forward To Your Funeral
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Like many of the 'lowercase' and 'microsound' artists, the Berkeley digital technician Christopher Willits defines his interests in an electronic music "that is generated spontaneously, non predetermined... with a focus on the the material implications of self-organizing systems." What is often left out of contemporary methodologies such as Willits' (or Taylor Deupree, Kim Cascone, Carsten Nicolai, or even Autechre) is a seemingly paradoxical requirement for these autonomous, generative systems to unilaterally contextualize the aesthetic output within the parameters of the glitch. The persistence of this glitched aesthetic is running the risk of becoming a cliche, in which the simple invocation of a fractured sample will no longer have any cultural value beyond a one-way reference to generative systems. That said, Willits finds himself in an increasing subset of the glitched aesthetic whose practitioners have been manipulating the guitar (particularly the rich warm sounds of an acoustic guitar) through such digitized systems to add an extra-dimension to the music. Amidst the geometrically jagged sounds, aerosol dispersals of terse clicks, and random fluctuations in sonic densities, Willits' debut "Folding And The Tea" reveals itself more as Derek Bailey guitar improvisation with all of those gritty, spidery texures replaced with a very clean, very polite set of semi-structured harmonics. It neither has the density nor the shameless pop sensibility of Fennesz, nor does it have Keith Fullerton Whitman's interest in the transcendence of Minimalism; its focus is somewhat ambiguous, but the plasticity of surface found within "Folding And The Tea" rivals either of those artists in terms of craftsmanship.

RealAudio clip: Scrims
RealAudio clip: Mesh, Then

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

SORRY. We loved Willits' last full length so were were pretty excited for this one. Not nearly as abstract and 'academic', Pollen insted focuses much more on melody and song structure, approaching these pieces more like a songwriter than a composer. And while a few folks have been disappointed by the poppier results, we think fans of Oval, B. Fleischman, Ekhard Ehlers and the like will definitely find this hits the spot, a sun dappled, sweet and super warm, totally organic, chilled out glitchscape.

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Mr. Wilp, a strange German fellow who in the '60s composed crazy playful pop cocktail soundtracks and advertising jingles for among other products Mad. Ave. Perfume and AfriCola, gets the remix treatment by such equally sharp, stylish and fluffy artists as StereoTotal, To Rococo Rot, Tipsy, and Yasuharu Konishi (of Pizzicato 5). Very light and super fun.

"The Awkwardness" is an EP of remixes by Carnival Wave, Pulseprogramming, I-Sound, Calla, and Windsor For The Derby themselves. Very few of these remixes bear much resemblance to the original downer, math-rock sound of Windsor For The Derby. Only Calla

RealAudio clip: I Change.C?
RealAudio clip: Ice Age Blues

Couldn't be a more perfect name for this bay area duo who craft such breezy cosmic delights. Samuel Grawe who also plays in Hatchback and Daniel Judd whose record as Sorcerer last year was one of our favorite electronic releases of '07 have created the perfect sounds for a beachside disco party at sunset. Released on a new label run by Prins Thomas, they inject such a refreshing and easy approach to creating cosmic flowing sounds that really do bring images of waves, sand and shimmering coastlines to mind. There are a couple tracks with vocals that kind of make us think of the Sea & Cake collaborating with Lindstrom, but they are at their best when they let their warm orbiting sounds find that perfect wave to ride into infinity. While most of the current crop of neo-disco cosmic peddlers tend to project a more cold and late-night vibe we think much more about how rad it would be to get to hear Windsurf play in the afternoon as we sprawl out on the warm sand and let their mellow grooves carry us off in daydreams with such delight.

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A while back we reviewed a super limited tape of ultra obscure early nineties proto-trip-hop from a woman named Leslie Winer, who recorded much of her music under the mysterious symbol/moniker ©, and who was in fact a former model, a pal of William Burroughs and Jean-Michael Basquiat, not to mention a sometime guest vocalist on records by groups like Bomb The Bass. Apparently Winer ditched modeling, and soon dropped off the map, but not before making a record called Witch, considered to be an essential early chunk of skittery, hazy, woozy, trip hop style electronica, well before there really WAS trip hop. The record featured Jah Wobble among others, and was/is a gorgeous chunk of druggy, dubbed out minimal electronic murk that most obviously referenced Tricky, Massive Attack, even Portishead, but predated all of them (with much of Witch having been recorded in the eighties). On this new cd collection, on the newly launched Wormhole imprint (and offshoot of the kick ass Tapeworm label that put out the Winer tape we first heard), that tape is expanded to include even more mysterious sounds from Winer's mostly unheard back catalogue, a sprawling selection of tracks recorded throughout the eighties and nineties, including several collaborations with Vincent Gallo which appear here for the first time. Long sprawling horn flecked dubscapes, rife with barebones rhythms, tripped out FX, warm muted chordal swirls, plenty of downtempo weirdness and creepy crawly late night shimmer. A dark skeletal avant dub, softly roiling morass of blurred sonics that underpin Winer's strange vocals, hushed and whispered, a sort of slow motion toasting, spoken one second, crooned seductively the next, occasionally multitracked into dreamy harmonies, but just as often slipping into something far more sinister. The tracks expanding into billowing clouds of thrum and whir, anchored by loping rubbery basslines, and wreathed in slowed down samples, fragments of reggae guitar, disembodied horns, all woozy and warbly, everything wrapped in a gauzy haze of record crackle, tape hiss, smeared psychedelic ambience. Here and there the drums are cranked up into something more block rocking, but even then Winer transforms it into something more murky and surreal, the bass gets super distorted and fuzzed out (some dubstep foreshadowing for sure), everything wrapped around effected acoustic guitars, sampled, layered, recontextualized vox, Winer's vocals slipping easily into lower registers, and sounding a lot like Tricky, due in no small part to the rhythmic murk they're wrapped in, and throughout, strange little flurries of percussive filigree, all of these swirling abstract elements woven into a mesmerizing sprawl of shuffling tripped out, psychedelic downtempo moody muddy groove, that should definitely appeal to fans of witch house, as well as the warped fringes of modern downtempo electronica (Burial, Holy Other, Balam Acab, James Blake, How To Dress Well, etc.). Super swank packaging to boot, an oversized A5 glossy cardstock insert, liner notes on one side, art on the other, as well as a fold out poster, everything printed in metallic silver ink, and all in a thick PVC sleeve.

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Why it has taken so long for this to be reissued is baffling, but we're just so glad it's finally here. We have raved about Leslie Winer's musical work on two previous archival releases from Tapeworm and its offshoot label Wormhole, but those really only hinted at the genius of Witch, her only previously released record, from 1993 (though much of it was recorded in the late eighties). Records don't get more cult than this. Released on a white label, using the copyright symbol as her moniker, here designed as a circle of Ourobouros that was originally hand stamped onto blank white sleeves. Even the album and song titles with their alphanumerical wordplay ("N1ear", "1nce Upon A Time") would fit right at home with the obscurant syntax of witch house, even though this was recorded nearly 20 years before. Witch has been labeled as "proto-trip-hop", which it sort of is, as this record predates what Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky were doing just a year or two later, and even Winer herself has been called by NME "The Grandmother of Trip Hop", a label she has rejected and rightly so. "Grandmother" doesn't have the same aura of respect as what the music press names male musical innovators such as "Godfather" or "King", and Winer, a poet and formal model with a chic androgynous style who was close friends with both William S. Burroughs and Jean-Michel Basquiat is hardly a little old lady. Witch is both a product of its time and far ahead of it. On the surface, it's not that far removed from Sinead O'Connor, especially her song "I Am Stretched On Your Grave" with its James Brown drum sample and spoken intonations, but Witch is much darker, cooler and more subdued. It has a very London feel to it, a feeling of frustrated action against cultural stagnation and trying to create something new out of nearly nothing. Winer doesn't necessarily sing as much as observe and respond with cool detachment, a sort of soundtrack of her experiences relayed poetically to an unknown listener as beats, dub rhythms (from Jah Wobble no less), and musical samples and snippets of dialogue coalesce around her. It's a heady mixture, definitely dreamy and druggy, but she refreshingly doesn't try to endear the listener to her own personal entanglements and positions on gender, beauty and social norms. It's more like she's having a searching complicated conversation with herself. Musically, what Witch really predates is the contemporary woozy and warped electronica of Peaking Lights and Maria Minerva, especially in the layering of breezy dub rhythms in hazy reverb and abstract murk. It's a beautifully extraordinary work that continually rewards the more we listen. Big thanks to Superior Viaduct for making this more widely available. Incredible and soooo recommended!

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A brief blast of swirling organs, shards of crumbling noise, chanting children, streaks of feedback, swirling melancholy melodies, all tangled up into something at once caustic and chaotic, but also weirdly moody and moving, which is how we're introduced to Winter Line, aka Steven Vallot, who on this new tape (his debut?) displays a pretty serious knack for crafting beauty from blackness, his tracks like some sort of alternate universe, experimental noise DJ Shadow if that makes any sense. His sound palette is quite varied, but much of it tends towards the difficult. Be it blasts of high end buzz, or grinding metallic crunch, but those elements are balanced by Vallot's deft hand at weaving that noisiness into soundscapes of surprising musicality, a glowing dark energy seems to suffuse all the tracks here. It's often loud, ominous, clattery and crunchy, distorted and downright noisy, but it glimmers and shimmers, soars and swirls. At one point, a crunchy bit of rhythmic clatter is laid our beneath a sky full of high-end glimmer and tinkling chimes, wreathed in clouds of crunchy staticky hiss, and children's voices reciting some sort of ominous incantation, it could be a mess, but instead it all falls together perfectly. From there on out, Vallot anchors thick clouds of black buzz, to churning machinelike rhythms, and drapes delicate melodies over the top. In some ways, it sounds a bit like recent Record Of The Weeker Dan Friel mixed with Philip Jeck or Tim Hecker, both also past ROTW-er themselves, the tracks here are expansive and lush, and quite lovely, not despite the noisiness, but really because of it, and because of Vallot's deft hand at balancing those two extremes and meeting somewhere in the middle. At times, we get glimpses of Carpenter or Goblin, that sort of brooding synth soundtrackiness, and at others, it's just a gorgeous prismatic soft noise bliss out that's hard to really put into words, but it's rare sort of 'noise' we love, a noise that manages to move beyond sheer noisiness and attain its own sort of rhythmic and melodic beauty. Wow. So gorgeous. Fans of soft noise technicians and abstract soundscapers will be in heaven! Includes a download code too!

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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. New 7" from these AQ favorites. Side one is a peculiar pop concoction of Beck-ish funky drummer and Sparklehorse-style distorto vocal, while the B side is the real winner, a dreamy desert travelogue, as if Boards of Canada were from Arizona and neighbors of Giant Sand or Scenic. Really nice.

Whoa, as the first track begins on this new Wisdom Of Harry full length, we're hit with the thought that somewhere along the line Wisdom Of Harry got some even more raucous funkiness in their formerly sweet, sensitive folk-tronic sounds. They've certainly gone through their fair share of stylistic shifts in the time between their albums, the lovely 1999 collection called Stars Of Super 8 (an AQ fave) and the somewhat jarring House of Binary released in 2000 (not an AQ fave) and this their third full length. But hang on a sec, it seems mainman Pete Astor and co. have fused elements of their past two divergent releases into something new, both intimate, earthy and groovy, revealing a greater depth to Wisdom Of Harry. Lo-fi programmed beats, raw acoustic percussion, folksy acoustic guitars, slinky electric guitars, and shifty electronic textural layers along with Astor's smoky return to the sensitive guy vocals all fall into place with seeming ease. The much more confident and cohesive Torch Division definitely brings to mind shades of Beta Band, Badly Drawn Boy and The The.

MPEG stream: Joe The Astronaut
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This is a really bizarre record of cyclical howls, bizarre vocalisations, and droning cut ups, recorded over 35 years ago and finally reissued on vinyl, in Sub Rosa's "Early Electronic" series. Very much in the style of Reich or Palestine, with the 45 minute "Red Bird", British electro-acoustic composer and theorist Trevor Wishart takes the sounds of birds, animals and spoken word, chops and reassembles, and gradually transforms these disparate sounds into each other, making for a weirdly beautiful, and kind of creepy, listen. Composed and recorded between 1973 and 1978 at the University of York, and originally released in 1978, this has been a disturbingly intense, avant-WTF? fave ever since we first heard a cd reissue in the year 2000. Silver vinyl, assuredly limited.