A man of so many moods and modes, Thurston Moore continues to create all sorts of music and sounds, as wide in scope as the insane record collection we know he has. Earlier this year Sonic Youth gave us a fantastic, and very much pop minded album with Rather Ripped, so we had a feeling that Thurston might be itching to unleash his more experimental side. Flipped Out Bride features two long droning guitar pieces that show Thurston practicing restraint briefly before unleashing some intense guitar brutality. Once again proving himself to be a direct descendent of NY guitar legends like Glen Branca, Rhys Chatham and LaMonte Young. There is a focus, subtly and sharp vision to this recording that sometimes seems to be lacking in Moore's other experimental outings. We really like him in this drone-like setting a lot more than when he try's to get his free-jazz skronk on. Nice!
Whoa! Thurston sure knows how to keep himself occupied and totally balanced, if not bipolar. After releasing two of his prettiest and acoustic based solo records, the song based Demolished, and the self explanatory Solo Acoustic Vol. 5 - 12 String Meditations For Jack Rose, he goes the exact opposite route and releases one of his most fucked up and noisy solo guitar records ever. Suicide Notes For Acoustic Guitar, is in fact a cd-r filled with relentless blasts of electric guitar way in the red and filled with an urgency that never takes a breath. In fact it's got the same kind of crazy intensity and bleeding guitar sounds that can be found on records from folks like Mainliner, High Rise, Keiji Haino, Wolf Eyes, Skullflower etc. But within all this psychedelic noise you can still totally hear his patented approach to guitar playing lurking there all the time right beneath the crushing pace and voltage that blasts out of these tracks from start to finish. Who else in their early '50s can thrash and destroy with this much energy and passion on one record, while getting so dreamy and beautiful on another. The man is a legend for a reason! And while we found the title confusing, we now realize its true meaning, that these are the sorts of sounds that would drive an acoustic guitar to end it all!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
This album makes me embarrassed for conceptual art. Thurston created ten short guitar improvisations, each just barely over a minute long. Fusinato completed a painting in the time that it took for Thurston to make his improvisation. While listening to
A new recording of improvisational soundpieces arranged by bassist/cellist Walter Prati. Joining Prati is Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore (on guitar/electronics) and Italian trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini. Most prevalent in these pieces is Schiaffini's horn,
We might normally scoff at a release limited to only 37 copies, but when you see the handmade miniature collage covers and hand painted tapes, you'll understand. Each one is hand made, a surreal landscape of humans with animal heads, fragments of buildings, mysterious shapes and figures, all done, tiny, to fit in a cassette. Folks who picked up the other releases on Custodian, Color Zoo Containers, will know what we're talking about. One had a cover, that was an intricate cut out insect, the other hand painted, each on folded transparencies. But it's not just the packaging that gets a lot of attention, the music inside is appropriately skewed and mysterious. This one is by a duo called The ( ) Moppers (space and parentheses required), half of which is the man responsible for C,CZC and the incredible packaging.
This is the document of a live show recorded back in 2004, and while it's difficult to pick out exactly what instruments are used, the result is a gloriously buzzy, crackly rhythmic soundscape, lots of glitchy crunch, throbbing distorted low end, soft chordal drones, some simple drumming, all super lo-fi and blown out, parts of this almost sound like a lo-fi noise rock Aluk Todolo, the same sort of abstract rhythmic mystery, but here, it's much more intimate, lots of little sonic events going on, what sound like music boxes, simple strummed guitar melodies, even some piano, but the various elements are distorted and woven into a loping field of thump and thud, of crunch and clunk, that seems to sprawl and drift, sometimes billowing into thick buzzing swells or harsh grinding distortion, but more often, meandering minimally.
Fans of Avarus and Uton and other Finnish sonic experimentalists will dig, as folks into minimal lowercase soundwork. Cool stuff. And remember. Limited to 37 copies, each one individually hand mad and numbered, we got more than half, but those won't last long...
ATTENTION TROLLMANN AV ILDTOPPBERG faithful. Trollmann maybe e dead and gone but fear not...
Avid AQ list readers and doomlords worldwide should be well aware of our love of mysterious doom duo Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg. Four full lengths, a live record and a live dvd-r, each a sprawling lugubrious brew of fuzzy spacey keyboards, Skepticism-like slow-crawl riffs, rumbling demon vocal gurgles, as blessed out and darkly ambient, as they are heavy and crushingly ominous. For those new to Trollmann, it's not just the amazing and mysterious music, it's the whole world Trollmann have created, or the world they call home. The records are called Forest Of Doom, Arcane Runes Adorn The Ice-Veiled Monoliths Of The Ancient Cavern Of The Stars, Dark Clouds Blacken The Sky On The Eve Of The Thousandth Sacrifice, Tolling Beyond The Tombs Of Ancient Grimnity, the band members are depicted on their record covers, drawn, never photographed, one a little hairy elf on a toadstool, the other a huge bruiser of an ancient caveman, armed with a massive axe, the instruments used to make this music: "Cosmic keys to gates unknown," and "Rumblings Of Doom, Prophecies Of Times To Come." Hell yeah!
Just bass and keyboards, the duo managed to weave lush and truly haunting soundscapes, doomy drones and slow motion heaviness, like a black metal Tangerine Dream crossed with a much more ambient Thergothon. So we were pretty heartbroken when we discovered earlier this year that the band had called it quits. Their mysterious partnership dissolved, and our portal to that alien sonic dimension sealed forever. Or maybe not!
We arrived to work to discover a huge fissure in the floor of the store, some sort of fog or smoke drifting from below, an unearthly glow emanating from the murky abyss, the bravest among us braved the unknown and reached into the crevice, feeling around, it was warm, and moist, and gritty, the air a completely different quality, until they grasped something, a cloth sack, tied with rough twine, when pulled from the dark, spilled open just as the fissure miraculously closed up. What was in this sack? Some bits of ancient treasure, a handful of bones, some dirty cloth stained with something resembling blood, and THIS! The debut disc from Mordraaneth, aka Belegur from Trollmann, who over the course of these two discs, has thankfully taken up his cosmic keys to gates unknown, and opened up a new gateway, allowing us to return, at least aurally, to the glorious sonic landscapes of Trollmann, drones and dirges, smears of murk and shimmer, dark ambience and black doom. The sound familiar enough that anyone into Trollmann will find this essential, but different enough to remain mysterious and magical.
The opening track is a long meditative keyboard suite, layers of throbbing whir and pulsing chordal washes, the notes and overtones beating against one another, subtle rhythms and textures beneath the tranquil dreamlike drift. Definitely reminiscent of Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, but with a vibe at atmosphere much more ancient, and timeless, the music of crumbling castles, of blackened underground passages...
The second track introduces vocals, a buried in the mix demonic rasp, and a thick layer of buzz, some subtle percussion, a strange slow motion martial fantasy fanfare, wreathed in hiss and static, the distortion crumbling, the track peppered with bits of grinding growl and blown out fuzz, but somehow still hypnotic and dream like, the keyboard running through it, it's melody entrancing and so pretty. The rest of disc one drifts along lazily, like floating down some black river that runs beneath the Earth's crust, winding through lost civilizations and abandoned villages, eye glimmering in the darkness here and there, a permanent midnight. Haunting and ominous and soporific.
The second disc is two looooong tracks, beginning with what sounds like harpsichord, once again transporting us back to some ancient court, you can almost imagine Lords and Ladies, doing some strange dance, beneath a huge stone edifice, lit by firelight and the stars above, the whole disc, all 58 minutes of it, is a weirdly festive medieval folk, like a much more haunting and fucked up Renaissance Faire music, or some sort of ancient new age, imagine Kitaro and Brian Eno in full corpse paint, scoring a film about knights and dragons. Medieval fantasy ambience. Playful and lilting, glimmering and glittering, a gauzy sun dappled cloud of music box melodies, slightly smeared and blurred into a dreamy drift.
Can't wait for Thundarr, the other half of Trollmann, to return with his Rumblings Of Doom and Prophecies Of Times To Come, but for now, we're perfectly happy to revel in the blissy ambient dreamusic of Mordraaneth!
Spit is the debut full length from Ron Morelli, probably best know as the man who runs the L.I.E.S. label, whose American Noise / Volume One 2cd comp was a big hit around here, but instead of doing the record himself, Morelli found his way to Dom Fernow's Hospital label, and it's a really good fit, Morelli's murky electronic minimalism definitely in keeping with the music Fernow makes and releases, fans of Vatican Shadow, Christian Cosmos, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, Silent Servant will find much to dig here. The opening track "Radar Version", in fact sounds like it could be Fernow, all gothed out industrial gloom, skeletal pulsations over woozy buried melodies, everything dubbed out and doused in effects, and swathed in a grey ambience, which by the end of the track is also buried beneath soft synth shimmers and blasts of electronic noise. The tempo is cranked up a bit for the second track, "Modern Paranoia", a sort of lo-fi, ultra minimal electro, but even then, it's soon joined by some garbled bass warble, like a a dubstep wobble, all melting and oozing and slowed way down, soon there are handclaps and weird percussion, and that rhythm reveals itself as some super cheesy Casio style beat, still beneath that woozy bass. And from there on out, it only gets better, the crunchy acid-y electronic squelch and motorik pulsations of "Crack Microbes", the churning looped industrial noisescapery of "Sledgehammer II", the abstract electro dub weirdness of "Fake Rush", the blooping, bleeping, sample laced primitive early electronics worship of "Director Of...", the gritty, gristly, night-kraut, goth-groove of "No Real Reason", and finally, the blurred, grey-noise drone-drift ambience of "Slow Drown." So good. Totally recommended for Hospital label obsessives, fans of Fernow's various projects, and anyone into grim, gothic industrial minimalism, or if you're like us, all three!
Former no-wave (ex-DNA) drummer Ikue Mori has established a career in downtown NYC, performing solo and collaborating with others, as an improvisor with specially modified drum machines! This new Tzadik disc, though, sees her utilizing a laptop computer
It's been a while since we heard from NOTHingness records, but they're back, after a year-long hiatus, with a killer slab of heathen funereal slow motion dooooooooooooom. By now we shouldn't really need to go into too much detail about all those extra 'o's but, needless to say, Danske Hymer Til Morket is massive, and glacial, sloooooooow, and ultra heavy, a tarpit trudge through an expansive landscape of warm washed out synths, slow plodding drums, and downtuned distorted guitars, spread out like the thick black wings of some beast, completely blotting out the sun and smothering the earth in thick pitch black shadow.
Unlike a lot of the funeral doom we've been digging lately, the sound of Morkheim is actually quite melodic, reminiscent of the classic UK doom bands like Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride, but of course slowed waaaay down and dipped in filth, left to crawl bloody and broken across a soundscape of lurching, slithering rumble and buzz.
The keyboards that wash over everything here definitely remind us of ultradoom legends Skepticism, and it's easy to hear Moss and Esoteric and the like, but it's the melodies, and the synths, and the strange mix of the classic and the modern, that results in some strange hybrid, epic and majestic, dark and droning, brutal and black, that makes Danske Hymer Til Morket so interesting. Just check out the album closer, an all acoustic Viking lament, with just simple fingerpicked guitars and soaring majestic vocals, that manages to somehow sound just as heavy and intense as the trudging pummel of the rest of the record.
LIMITED TO 111 COPIES!!!
I have become completely obsessed with Chris Morris. He makes me sad. Sad that we don't have anyone nearly as funny in the United States.
He's been a staple of British radio / television for years now. And it seems like since day one, he's been trying to get himself blackballed. Or killed. His BBC program The Day Today, was a Today Show parody. Complete with a washed up, neurotic weatherman (the also amazing Steve Coogan), a narcissistic and completely cruel host (Morris), and a gorgeous and ice cold business reporting babe that spoke in complete gibberish. After The Day Today was cancelled, came Brass Eye, one of the funniest shows I have ever seen. This time a parody of evening news programs like 48 Hours or 60 Minutes, taking things even further. The goal of this show seemed to be to publically humiliate trusted government officials and public figures (quite successfully we should add) and contributed to Brass Eye's rather brief run. Then came Blue Jam, a totally surreal and unstructured radio show. featuring bizarre (and often offensive) free association / high (low) concept skits over music from a who's who of modern electronica / trip hop (Later turned into an even more unstructured television program called Jam. loosely adapted from the radio show). The Blue Jam cd is basically the best bits from the Blue Jam radio show, featuring Chris Morris and a few other folks, eating and killing and arguing and shitting off their limbs (?) over music from Labradford, Propellerheads, Amon Tobin, Funki Porcini, Herbaliser, Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, Fila Brazillia, 9lazy9, Clifford Gilberto, Jimi Tenor, and more. Until we can get Brass Eye over here, Chris Morris comes to you only via Blue Jam, quite possibly the funniest headphone mindfuck ever.
Holy shit, does this sound like a made-in-hell aQ dreamdate or what? The first filthy sonic offspring of a mutated meeting of the minds, between Mories the mastermind behind longtime aQ faves Gnaw Their Tongues and Aderlating, and the mystery man behind one man Aussie black metal/blacknoize juggernaut Nekrasov, known simply as Bob. Both men specialize in a sick breed of sonic depravity, the soaring orchestral cinematic black doom noise of GTT, the grim harsh buzz of Aderlating, and the noise infused blackness of Nekrasov, but none of that prepared us for the opening track, a haunting near symphonic sprawl of swoonsome strings, laid over a bed of spare percussion, and softly swirling black ambience, a darkly demonic chamber music, that sounds a bit like a satanic Rachel's, or a way more sinister noise drenched Necks, a hushed blackened shuffle, that is gradually subsumed by thick, caustic swaths of crumbling distortion, heaving low end moans and rumbles, the whole thing splintering into a glorious billowing cloud of hellish harsh noise and grim psychedelic blackness.
Which is our baptism by black sonic fire, into the warped and harrowing soundworld that is Mors Sonat, nothing so lovely as that opening track, and if anything, the record is like a musical black pit, yawning before you, and with every track, you get farther and farther from the edge, where eventually, fingers bloody and torn, all hopes of clawing your way out have been abandoned, leaving the only hope to continue down, further into the blackness.
Thick swirls of hellish voices, buried beneath cascades of black industrial crumble, dense low end rumbles and howls, and splinters into a grinding swirls of blackened shards, long sprawling stretches of slowly decaying power electronics give way to sheets of blacknoise, which in turn give way to dense noisy drones, and soundscapes of abject grey thrum, and terrifying cinematic mystery.
There are moments of lightness, subjectively speaking, when compared to most of the records deep black, but those moments are suffused with their own terror, dense and intense, laced with ghostly voices, buried melodies, a strange uneasy oasis surrounded on all sounds by black walls of unstable sound, that can collapse at any moment, and usually do, transforming these small moments of tranquility, into full bore black holes of sonic chaos. Near the end of the record, there's a gorgeous bit of funereal creep, all pounded piano, and grinding blurred staticky ambience, spread out into a haunting expanse of sonic malevolence, lovely but blackly lovely, a final respite, the long slow trudge toward the inexorable end, in the case of Mors Sonat, the final track, an all engulfing blast of hateful, harrowing, feedback drenched white noise terror.
A precocious one, that BJ Nilsen! Morthound (sometimes spelled Morthond on a couple of releases) was Nilsen's project when he was just a teenager, producing some of the more abstract convulsions of dark ambient and collaged electronics that appeared on the seminal Swedish industrial label Cold Meat Industries. This anthology collects the four Morthound / Morthond records recorded from 1991-1994 before Nilsen dropped the moniker in favor of Hazard, through which he matriculated onto Ash International / Touch Music shortly there after. Nilsen appends most of the discs of Mortology with various tracks from the CMI compilations and rounds out the entire collection with a whole disc of unreleased material. Death Time was Nilsen's first outing - a cassette from 1991 on CMI imprint Sound Source - and speaks much beyond the years of a 15 year old kid in Sweden going down to the library to check out sound effects and wildlife recordings to run through his Akai sampler and into a four-track. Along with those source materials, Nilsen also relied heavily on his shortwave radio, whose detuned transmissions and numbers station broadcasts he liberally cut-up into eerie collages full of shadow, drone, and dread. This Crying Age (also from 1991) was the first widely available Morthound cd, with a deep soundtrackish sensibility that recalled more of the early soundtrack work of Graeme Revell / SPK especially the Zamia Lehmanni album with its esoteric / occult mysteriousness through hypnotic, metal klang loops, emotionally somber rumblings, and wispily opiated flute melodies which sporadically graced the dark electronics. In the liner notes, Nilsen explained that he has never wanted to stick within one particular aesthetic, and Spindrift (1992) was very much a departure for Nilsen with this foray into legitimate psychedelic pop, with "Stairhead" being something of a hypno-drone-pop track of glistening guitars and summery organs with much more in common with Ultra Vivid Scene or A.R. Kane than Brighter Death Now! This track is a bit of anomaly as much of the rest of Spindrift is fleshed out with baroque, synthetically orchestral pieces full of John Carpenter / Halloween arpeggiations, David Lynchian themes within the creepy / maudlin scores, and plenty of saddened atmosphere. The final album recorded as Morthound was The Goddess Who Could Make The Ugly World Beautiful (a quote from Taxi Driver, fyi!), finding Nilsen shifting closer to the sound he would soon perfect under the moniker Hazard with stealth-bomber drones and arctic field recordings, but not before unleashing a handful of tracks inspired in equal parts by early Coil and contemporary In Slaughter Natives with a baroque pagan bombast through thrashy guitar riffs and muscular drum programming. The disc of unreleased Morthound material is uniformly bleak, spacious, and eerily abstract. Again, the material here points closer to the Hazard tracks that soon followed; and actually stands as some of the best material that Nilsen recorded during this time period. We have very limited stock on this boxset!
Unfortunately, we're unable to offer much information about Davide Mosconi, other than his affiliation with various Fluxus artists and that "La Musica dell'anno Zero" was constructed entirely from fog horns recorded off the Scottish coasts. This album appears
Another mysterious Finnish troubadour, Ville Forss aka Moskiitto, explores a moaning creaking acoustic ambience, a clattery free folk wilderness, much like his countrymen Avarus, Anaksimandros and Vapaa.
Simple muted guitars strum and shimmer beneath a forest of sawed violins and bowed cellos, creating a dreamy, ramshackle stumbling acoustic folk. A haunting assemblage of scraped strings and mumbled buzz and wheezing reed instruments. Lengthy overlapping melodies unfurl into deep drones drone and ambient drifts, majestic and strangely stately, like some ceremonial ritual. Reverberating steel strings are the framework for the whole disc, their overtones spreading out like ripples in a pond, above which flutter mournful melodies and abstract sonic shimmers. At one point accordions drift in, their melodies floating above a tangle of stretched out guitar melody. Very blissfully rustic, like sitting around some crackling campfire deep in the forest, the music slowly shifting and changing shape as various travellers arrive and produce their own unique musical offerings. Nice.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES.
Welcome reissue of this early work by Swiss musical madmen Norbert Moslang and Andy Guhl, better known by their later moniker, Voice Crack. This 1982 recording shows them on their way to the "cracked everyday electronics" sound of VC, coming out of the FMP / European free improv scene in which they got their start. Although "normal" instruments like soprano saxophone do make an
Norbert Moslang of Switzerland's Voice Crack teams up here with likeminded improvisor Gunter Muller, Norbert commanding his trademark array of "cracked everyday electronics" and Muller making noise with (just plain) electronics and (Apple plug) an iPod. No drums, selected or otherwise, from him this time out.
As you might imagine, it's a fairly abstract soundscape of unrecognizable electronic textures. Sounds like a continously, if mildly, upset stomach. Cool background glitch. Recorded on tour in Japan.
Solo skree from one half of Voice Crack.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
ULTRADOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM. Or MEGADOOOOOOM. Whatever you want to call it, this is DOOM. Capital D. Lot's of o's. Lots of incredibly slow motion downtuned guitar sludge, pounding caveman drums, and a rumbling bowel churning low-end. This is the first recording we've been able to get enough of to list after a ton of super limited releases and demos. And if this doesn't hit the doom spot something good, then nothing will. Bunkur, Skepticism, Catacombs, Rigor Sardonicous, Esoteric, Planet Aids, Thergothon. And now Moss. The first track is a 15 minute slab of classic funereal doom. Soooooo sloooooow. Sooooooo heavy, crushing, pounding, chugging drone drenched sludge. Recorded live in 2004. The second track is taken from their long out of print split with Nadja, but here, the track is "fucked up and buried", and the result is a massive and abstract ambient soundscape, downtuned guitars are pushed way back into the distance, while in the foreground all sorts of rumble and crackle and what sounds like the burbling of a bong. A druggy, space-y ambient excursion through the massive decaying skeleton of what was once a doom metal beast.
Moss is joined by the brilliantly monickered Wolfmangler. Wolfmangler just happens to be the work of one Smolken who you might know as the man behind Dead Raven Choir! Weird but true. For all his Jewelled Antler folkiness, Smolken made no secret of his black metal obsession. As Wolfmangler, Smolken takes that love of metal and doom and tempers it with his love of folk and country, and the results are truly weird and wonderful. Best exemplified on the track "Survive" a doom-ed version of a Hank Williams Jr. song. Fuzzed out drone guitar, random percussion, weird rubbery bass lines, and growled raspy vocals. Like a black metal Souled American? Johnny Cash covering Skepticism. Something like that. The rest of the WM tracks are weird, slow motion, fuzz drone dirges, with strange barely there melodies, occasional guitar twang, and lots of ominous ambience!
Amazingly packaged in a vellum sleeve, printed in black on the outside, so the inside has a weird x-ray negative effect. Includes an insert for each band printed on thick vellum. SO NICE!
Limited to 500 copies. We got 50 of those and will not be able to get more! So act fast!
Only got a tiny handful of these, but couldn't pass up on a new project from aQ pal Mick Barr (Krallice, Oldest, Orthrelm, Ocrilim, etc.), who is teamed up here with former DC hardcore kid and current NYX avant gardist Chuck Bettis (credited here with "Throat + Electronics"), so you can probably imagine a Mick Barr driven duo of guitar and electronics and 'throat' won't be any sort of easy listening, and guess what? It doesn't take much more than a few seconds for that to be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. That said, these two, while kicking up a serious skree, a wall of keening, glitched out noise, do manage to work the sound into something weirdly listenable, with Barr doing his super intense, frenzied almost black metal riffing, sheets of fast picked high end unfurl into tense sprawls of upper register drone, swooping into more 'traditional' riffage' before splintering into more WTF shrieking shreddery again. Bettis more than holds his own, wrapped Barr's guitar in dense swirling clouds of crumbling distortion, woozy low end thrum, wild squelches and glitches, electronic squiggles and malfunctioning electronic curlicues, heaving robotic bloops and bleeps, layers of analog blorp, percussive thumps and dense tangles of grinding psychedelic noise, Bettis' vocals woven into the roiling backdrop, occasionally leaping to the fore, and slipping back into harDCore howl mode, transforming the sound into some muscly alien sci-fi noise-punk, or something. Black metal shrieks buried beneath avalanches of furiously roiling riffage, the vibe weirdly heavy and almost metallic, but simultaneously abstract and free form, black noise, power electronics, a super twisted, skull caving, ear shredding, metallic psychedelic noise juggernaut, that pounds and pummels, drones and grinds, dense and intense, and kinda fucking awesome! Definitely recommended for the iron eared, long time Barr fans will feel right at home, and noiseniks might dig Barr and Bettis' warped strain of noise, which while right on the edge of harsh noise, remains textured and dynamic, subtly melodic, like some super intense avant metal record, pulled apart, reassembled into strange shapes and then melted down into a swirling pool of caustic blackened sonic crush. Super cool. And SUPER limited... TO JUST 66 COPIES!!!!!
We've been digging around lately and discovering all kinds of cool things that somehow never made it onto the list or even the website, this one is yet another long out of print cd-r that slipped through the cracks, a compilation of sorts, gathering up early recordings from Moth, aka Jon Dale, Rhizome label head honcho, an incredible collection of deep, dark dronemusic, lush soundscapes of chiming heavily reverbed metals and warm whirling sonorous tones, this is actually breathtakingly beautiful, we're sort of kicking ourselves for not listing this when it first came out and making a big deal out of it, but since we only have maybe 8 copies, we'll just say, anyone into gorgeous minimal dreamlike dronemusic, grab one of these while you can, and if you dig any of these folks: Stars of The Lid, Peter Wright, Belong, Organum, Expo 70, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Grasslung, En, Jeck, Tunnels, BJ Nilsen, Jasper TX, Dialing In, Machinefabriek, Aidan Baker, you'll probably dig this too.
Long out of print, we have about 8 copies, then they're gone for good.
Yet another brief, but engaging stop in our ongoing journey through the mysterious seas of sound, an expansive world gradually being charted and recorded by the fine folks at Mystery Sea. Constantly in search of "night-ocean drones", hungry to discover another bit of unheard beauty, a new drifting soundworld of ambient dronemusic, that had been heretofore unexplored.
Moth Electret is the strange monicker of the artist responsible for this latest disc in Mystery Sea's long running (going on nearly 40 releases!) series of deep tranquility and beautiful drift. The man responsible is Stig Berg (who has recorded as R|A|A|N in the past) and who for his Moth Electret project has fashioned his own undersea soundworld almost entirely from field recordings, captured in Barcelona, the isle of Sandoy and of all places, Eureka, California!
Unlike the rest of the Mystery Sea series, Moth Electret might just be the least minimal, with lots of stuff going on, this isn't murky or droney exactly, instead it's thick clouds of sound, jagged and sparkling, grinding and looped, muted and smeared into long stretches of soft-noise, still sort of underwater sounding, but a bit more abrasive, more industrial almost, if you could imagine the softer, gentler side of Wolf Eyes maybe, expansive soundscapes of glimmer and shimmer, lots of metallic tinkles and high end buzz, all drifting above static sheets of slow shifting sound, very tidal, but on the skree side of things, like Birchville or Sunroof! more than Chalk or Coleclough. Every track is layered and dense, repeated listens find the listener sinking deeper and deeper, discovering hidden melodies, and surprising little sonic events, even though it's noisier than the rest of the series, it's no less compelling, or listenable, in someways even moreso. So much more going on, and so much sound to explore. Another perfect soundtrack for late night dreamy drift or early evening daylight fade...
Like all Mystery Sea releases, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each disc numbered, and gorgeously packaged in striking full color artwork, with a strange half sized booklet revealing the disc face within. So nice!
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Geez, Rachel Evans is really developing into quite the electronic songstress. Over the past four years or so, her Motion Sickness Of Time Travel has grown from her exploratory bedroom synth-drones into impressionistically sparkling electronica born from the retro-futurism of Harmonia and Delia Derbyshire, with tinges of deconstructed electro, through the druggy, rounded basslines that gird a couple of her tracks on this new cassette on Old Frontiers. "Cut Away" sprinkles bright glissandos of kosmische synths on top of those strange basslines with Evans' wordless voice drifting through the mix in piles of reverb. "Rising" tonebends sad, little melodies amidst a burbling, step-sequencing, arpeggiated fizzings, and star-burst electric blossomings. "In Our Dreams" cycles in a satellite orbit with terse, deep-space bleeps echoing into a shimmering reflection pool of blue-green ambient wash, whose driftscape is wrapped in Evans dubbed-out / washed-out breathy vocalizations. So nice. Twenty-one minutes on this cassette, in a pressing of 100 copies.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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When does she ever sleep? Even during a year-long project in releasing monthly albums in homage to the full moon, Rachel Evans / Motion Sickness Of Time Travel has found the time to also release a handful of mighty fine cassettes, including this one, Alpha Piscium, on her ever impressive Hooker Vision imprint. A simple melodic phrase waltzes through the introduction of the tape, dissolving and re-emerging amidst the moon-lit pools of oscillating, spritely ambience. More jagged radiophonic percolations snake amidst Evans' free-floating vocals which drift through all of her electronics with the phosphorescent eeriness of fireflies in the night sky. On the two part "Ikebana", Evans dissolves the tension from her arpeggiated step sequencing and tremolo patterns amidst lepidopteric flurries of meandering psyche-synth melodies which might as well align themselves with those baroque, deep-space improvisations from JD Emmanuel. The B side continues on her path of lysergic inner-mind navigations of flanging synths, oblique bass-tone melodies, haunted vocalizations, and downright beautiful psychedelic electronic explorations. Already out of print at the source, so there are the last copies we'll be able to get...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Not long for this world, Ballade For A Cold Moon is the third in a monthly series from Motion Sickness Of Time Travel. All of the previous editions (as well as the one that came out right after this one) sold out almost immediately. We were able to snag a few of this one; and we'll try to get the future editions as she releases them. That said, Cold Moon is a longform dreamtime transmission of analogue synth worship hitting all the right sweet spots: Tangerine Dream's Zeit, Klaus Schulze's Irrlicht, and some fine style J.D. Emmanuel for good measure; but all those liquid melodies that drip from the sustained tones and watery ambience are pure Motion Sickness! Can this lady do no wrong? Limited to 50 copies with hand-printed artwork and wrapped in twine.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We're slightly behind in listing these, as the Seed Moon correlates to the full moon for the month of April (or perhaps just the fourth lunar cycle of the year); and as it stands, we only have a few of these super limited cd-rs anyway. The year-long Ballade series is running through all of the full moons as noted in the farmer's almanac, with Motion Sickness Of Time Travel offering her dreamtime interpretations and impressionist visions for each of particular moon. As she started this series a little over halfway through 2013, this marks the eighth in the twelve part series; and so far, each stands as a single 50+ minute track of her spacious kosmische synth+voice excursions somewhere between JD Emmanuel, Iasos, and Klaus Schulze. On Ballade For A Seed Moon, she drips elegant, sparkling synth glissandos upon an oceanic wave of analogue, kosmische blissed-out ambience with her hushed, dreamy vocalizations interspersed in equal measure. One of the airiest and most effervescent things she's ever done! As noted before, we have super limited stock; and it's already out of print at Hooker Vision.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The sixth in the year-long series from Motion Sickness Of Time Travel dedicated to the North American naming tradition of the full moons. The snow moon is ascribed to February full moon, and her rumination on this particular moon is wintery without being gloomy. There's a crystallization of sound through her kosmische synth sequences, trilling melodies, moon-muzik spells, and ethereal vocalizations that captures the snowblinding radiance of the sun casting its rays through the icicles that hang from her Georgian farmhouse. We've got only a handful of these with no chance of a restock. Limited to 50 copies.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.The Ballade monthly cd-r series from Motion Sickness Of Time Travel's with each release thematically linked to the farmer's almanac names of the full moons, is finally nearing completion. The Strawberry Moon (also known as the Honey Moon) corresponds with the lunar cycle that lands in June, which for 2014 happened to be a Friday The 13th, for those astrologically / numerologically inclined. Rachel Evans (aka Motion Sickness Of Time Travel) sinks into her blissed-out kosmische synth drone with church organ ethereal airiness and firefly illumined paisley patterns of pleasantly nocturnal ambience. We've always gotten limited stock on this series, and Strawberry Moon is no exception. Just 50 copies exist, so you know what that means...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Chinaberry is the companion cassette for the eponymous Motion Sickness Of Time Travel album released earlier in 2012 on Spectrum Spools and self-released through Rachel Evans' ever impressive Hooker Vision cassette imprint. Like that album, this too is a fantastic amalgam of deconstructed ethereal pop where she conjures sprawling scores for vaporous electronica and psychedelic ambience. The overall vibe of this cassette is one of stoned phosphorescence, as if she's mapped out an imagined soundtrack to flares of swamp gas that flicker in the Southeastern summer nights amidst the heat lightning and fireflies. She reprises the sustained church organ chords and swooshing cosmic drones that run through her solo work as Motion Sickness Of Time Travel and with her husband Grant Evans as Quiet evenings; and she steers these oozing, darkly pastoral atmospheres into more structured forms with sparkling arpeggios, glowing sequential synth lines, and Evans' thoroughly washed-out voice hovering wordlessly and languidly in the mix. This tape got a slightly bigger pressing than most Hooker Vision releases, with 200 of 'em printed up; but like all of the tapes we've picked up, Chinaberry is already out or print!
Motion Sickness Of Time Travel is the spellbinding synth and voice project of Georgia's Rachel Evans. Up until late 2010, she had released a bunch of tiny edition cassettes and cd-rs through her Hooker Vision imprint, after which her work caught the attention of Digitalis, who released the highly acclaimed album Seeping Through The Veil Of The Unconscious. So acclaimed in fact, that all of three pressings of that album went out of print before we had a chance to wax poetic about the record on our list. It's easy to hear why Motion Sickness Of Time Travel would cause such a stir, as there's something to the easy quip that Rachel Evans is a synth version of Grouper. Evans deconstructs an ethereal pop down to hypnotic looping synth structures and her own whispering voice, all the edges are blurred and softened to a heavenly, glowing gaseousness. Her synth applications typically build from glistening arpeggios and sustained church organ tones, giving many of her arrangements a levitating, Kosmische touch considerably more vaporous in her psychedelic visions than the likes of Emeralds and Oneohtrix in her Cluster fixation. Yet, tracks like the aptly named "Day Glow" eagerly appropriate tone-bent melodies and acid-squelchiness from post-rave ambient engineers (think back to Future Sound Of London), suspended amongst the reverb glide of her breathy vocals. Then there's the oceanic and mysterious drone-waltz found on the lysergically titled "The Walls Were Dripping With Stars" which flickers with backmasked vocalizations and intermittently dubbed out whisperings. Luminaries & Synastry is a real gem; and if past performance is indicative of anything, this album will not be around terribly long. The lp comes with a cd of all the material found on the vinyl, plus a couple of a extra tracks.
Our favorite queen of the cassette - Rachel Evans / Motion Sickness Of Time Travel returns! Oust is her most recent release, just released by the German imprint Sic Sic; and yet again, Evans unfurls a gorgeous collection of bleary-eyed electronic abstractions. This time she tilts in an austere direction, reducing the bubbling percolations in favor of oceanic undulations and woozily sung lullabies all dunked in the reverb pool. The opening track "Black Umbrella" pulls her breathy vocalizations to the foreground above her darkened Schnitzler-inspired syncopations. The second track "Row Of Peach Trees" (certainly an allusion to the native Georgian countryside) begins with a similar vibe through her cybernetic arpeggiations and taut filter sweeps, but over the five minute piece, Evans deftly transitions the austere electronics into a twinkling kosmische sound topped with one of those lovely tone-bent melodies that have become an occasional yet beguiling recurring motif in her work. Again she focuses on the vocalization toward the end of side one of this cassette, reprising those melodies found elsewhere. The second side of the tape waltzes around her bright swells all crystal clear, slow melodies that never sound as cloyingly sweet as some of the new age copyists as of late, but there's much more of a sparkling austerity going on here than at the beginning. Lovely as ever. Very limited stock as with all of the Motion Sickness tapes we get in! Just 100 were pressed.
Probably, the most Conrad Schnitzler we've heard in Motion Sickness Of Time Travel, and you better believe that's a very good thing. The cosmic arpeggiations that Rachel Evans uses to drive the side long track "Initiation" are very dark and squelchy, with the propulsive, '70s cyborg vibe that Schnitzler brought to Ballet Stratique; but with her signature incorporation of a hushed, heavenly voice and solar-flare streams of long synth melodies, the track is very much her own and one of the better things we've heard from her! "Growing Things" is a much airier affair of effervescent electronics that flange through aquatically spluttering sequencing and slowly evolve into the backdrop for Evans' lullaby vocals. Both tracks were recorded on Halloween of 2012, with the first seeming very much in tune with the holiday and the latter being a Spartan response anticipating the grey winter skies of rural Georgia. Just 100 copies were printed of this one, and it's a 32 minute long tape. Don't expect this one to last be around for long.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Rachel Evans brings her humid, oozing synth explorations to Spectrum Spools, which has become quite the launching pad for a wide array of outsider electronics as curated through the judicious ear of Emeralds' John Elliott. The name of Evans' project is lifted from William S. Burroughs' novel The Soft Machine; and with her decentering, liminal drift of half-formed / half-dissolved constructions, she finds herself peering between the kudzu-encrusted fields of her native Lagrange, Georgia and the imagined soundscapes of a primordial Gondwanaland (time-travel for her seems to go backwards in time, not forwards). After close to a couple dozen releases (mostly in the micro-edition format), she's either gotten the doseage right on the Dramamine, or she's acclimated to the queasy side effects of jumping between time and space, as this eponymous record isn't nearly as woozy and narcotized as her previous work. "The Dream" starts out quite dark, with backward-masked slashes that parallel the thickets of razored noise from Current 93's early collage work; but she quickly escapes from these bad vibes into a lengthy daydream of shimmering ambience laced with bright, effervescent sequences and some rather Vangelis-like triumphant synth stabs. "The Center" spins around a latticework of crystalline sequences that blur into massive, oceanic pools of rippling sound, with her voice looped and smeared into an ethereal bliss. "Summer Of The Cat's Eye" is a mellow impressionist piece of synth jamminess akin to Tangerine Dream's wanderings across the keyboard. "One Perfect Moment" is very reverential of John Elliott's work in Emeralds and all of his solo projects, with a sequenced glissando streaming beneath the slow unfurling of bittersweet tonal chords and Evans' pleading vocal delivery. Easily, the most arresting track she's recorded to date, rounding out another fantastic album from Evans' Motion Sickness Of Time Travel.
Rachel Evans has definitely been on a roll recently, with a very steady and very consistent stream of cassette only releases and with a proper slab of vinyl seeming to come out about once a year for her impeccable Motion Sickness Of Time Travel project. While we try our best to get a good amount of stock for each and every one of her records, it's not always possible. Some escape our grasp, some we only can get a two or three copies which quickly disappear as soon as they hit the floor. But, sometimes we can actually get a bunch. This cassette is definitely of the latter, with is thankfully the case with this new one on Constellation Tatsu, limited this time to a more sensible 250 copies, meaning it'll be around for a little longer than usual. Here, Evans presents a split release with her long-time friend Lynn Fister, the Southern transplant now living in the Bay Area who records under the moniker Aloonaluna. Like Evans, Fister pedals in a bleary dream-pop / komische deconstruction with ethereal, and at times witchy vocals that wordlessly orbit the amorphous synth sequencing and fizzing electronics. The Motion Sickness track is a rare instrumental for Evans, with her streaming waves of sparking synthing tones and slippery undulations of drone-pop narcotic. So nice!
