[ aquarius records — Experimental ]

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Showing results 5501 through 5550 of 9280.

This one's been in the works for so long I was sure it was only to be a pipe dream. Death Sentences is really two almost completely independent Negativland projects combined as one for release. The book, a collection of photographs of junk yard automobiles and their contents, is the brain child of Richard Lyons -- one of the founding members of the group and an on again, off again contributor in recent times. Lyons spent years visiting junkyards (remember he's the auto obsessed maniac behind the O.T.E. "Starting Line" show), digging through battered cars for tell-tale documents that might give insight into their former owners. Each page contains a scanned image of a letter, or other -- primarily hand written -- short memo overleafed with a photo of the now demolished car from which it was retrieved. All of this handsomely packaged within a sleeve mock-up of an accident report. The book is at once impossible to put down and difficult to trudge through. Not because it's poorly put together (on the contrary, like most Negativland releases, it's gorgeously laid out and beautifully packaged), but because the contents are so incredibly depressing. Several letters are apparently written from prison, or rehab, with the author's pledge that this time when they get out they'll straighten up and fly right. This contrasted with a demolished car, some from brutal accidents, windshields containing shattered buldges where the occupants once sat, reposed in a bleak and overcast auto graveyard in the Pacific Northwest (one of the most depressing areas of the U.S., for those unfamiliar with our messed up little country.) The disc, for its part, is a bit of a departure for Negativland. One might refer to this as their "instrumental" album, for while there are voice tapes processed and buried within the mix, there isn't a narrative driving the album like pretty much all of their albums have had in the last 10 years or so. In a way, Death Sentences brings Negativland back to the beginning of their career with their eponymous release of 1980. Which makes one wonder if the band, having become so bogged down in copyright this and fair use that, is either trying to reinvent themselves or if Death Sentences is in fact their swan song. Its success as an album is perhaps best judged by one's tolerance for freeform electronic improv. While there are moments of cohesion here, for the most part the disc sounds like someone crossfaded together all the improv segue sections from Negativland's live shows. In the end though, even if the CD isn't your cup of tea, the book more than carries its weight for the set. In that case you can view the inclusion of the disc as a free bonus to your purchase of the book.

RealAudio clip: Pack It Up
RealAudio clip: Don't Fool Me

DICK VAUGHN IS DEAD! But that's old news by now. Moribund Music of the '70s is volume four in Negativland's Over The Edge series of live radio broadcasts. In this installment, Richard Lyons' (a.k.a Dick Vaughn) vainly attempts to be the first to cash in on

RealAudio clip: Celebrity Wives Quiz, More Idle Threats, People Are Talking, etc.
RealAudio clip: Introduction, Witness For the Documentation, Disclaimers and Floaters, etc.

Completely satisfies (MUCH more so than their last few releases) with the unpredictable, sharp soundcollages you already know and love, plus surehanded SONGS that remind us of early Brian Eno. This time instead of U2 and Casey Kasem, the object of Negativland's righteous wrath is Pepsi. Contains snippets of memorable Pepsi moments, even the commercial where Michael Jackson's hair caught on fire, but for some reason leaves out the Suicidal Tendencies.

First new Negativland release in over two and a half years. We thought these guys had all but quit on us, when actually there's no better time than the present for a new Negativland release; what with file sharing and intellectual property issues being such a continuing hot topic. So it should come as no surprise that "No Business" is focused around such issues as public domain, fair use and out dated modes of conducting business in the music industry. "Bunch of smartasses..." one might ponder, "why don't I just download their album for free?" Well you could, and I don't think the Negativland boys would begrudge you for doing so. But then you wouldn't get the oversized folder with the 50 page essay "Two Relationships To a Cultural Public Domain" (well you could probably find a PDF of that somewhere). But there's no way in the world you're going to be able to download the genuine whoopee cushion imprinted with a giant copyright logo on its top. The disc, in stark contrast to the more song oriented Dispepsi and Free releases (Mark) is a pure cut up job (Don) which boasts on the cd booklet that "no elements original to Negativland were used to make these recordings." On some such tracks, like the re-edit of Julie Andrews singing "My Favorite Things", this old methodology works great. In fact, everyone here seemed to laugh their asses off at that one. Unfortunately some of the other tracks, like "Keep Rollin'" (from a trailblazer commercial) and "Piece of Pie" (from a 1940's radio drama) go on a bit too long. I think the move from analog tape, where every edit was carefully thought out and executed to ProTools has allowed the boys much more leeway to play fast and loose with their compositions. In the grand scheme of things, those old Negativland records (Big 10-8 Place, Helter Stupid) were a-joke-a-second mind bogglers of edits. On No Business in contrast, you're bombarded with the same joke over and over for 5 minutes. What this release lacks in compositional density it makes up for in the aformentioned ancillary contents. The essay is a good read and the whoopee cushion is a good sit (it really does let out a real "Bronx Cheer"). If that ain't enough there's a video -- featuring animation cells lifted from Disney's Little Mermaid -- of "Gimme the Mermaid" (from the cd that was included with the Fair Use book) that's not only hilarious, but screams lawsuit.

MPEG stream: Downloading
MPEG stream: Favorite Things
MPEG stream: Piece of Pie

Negativland's thirteenth album Thigmotactic is primarily the brainchild of founding member Mark Hosler with a supporting cast that includes the rest of the group as well as a few other particularly notable sound artists Thomas Dimuzio, Wobbly and our beloved former aQer Byram Abbott! According to the group this is their first "entirely song-based project... of electronic folk-pop noise songs". Hmmm, that description sounds conventional enough, does it? But of course we weren't fooled because even their most seemingly conventional of works is galaxies away from that of the common folk. As always can be expected from a Negativland release, they turn everything - be it low-brow and high-brow art and literature, pop culture, social traditions, politics, mundane everyday objects and products, not to mention other artists' works - on their collective head with a healthy dose of irreverence and mischief. It's a well documented fact that Negativland have a keen ear for melody too. Here in the spotlight, Hosler's frayed cardigan, rain-soaked puppy singing voice could easily be mistaken for that of an indie rock popster (a la Sebadoh, Pavement or Bright Eyes)! Of the album's generous seventeen songs, some sound like campfire or coffeehouse singalongs ("Extra Sharp Pencils"), some like the jumble that you hear when spinning the radio dial ("It's Not A Critique"), some like a b-side from a long lost Magnetic Fields 7" ("Basketball Plant" and "Lying On The Grass"), and some are more typically deliriously Negativlandish ("By Truck", "Virginia's Trip" and our current fave "Your Skin Is Gelatin"). A wryly witty, utterly tweaked, cut-up audio extravaganza with plenty of ear candy and lyrical absurdities. It includes a hefty 36-page booklet too! Doo dah!

MPEG stream: Lying On The Grass
MPEG stream: Your Skin Is Gelatin

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

SORRY. Consists entirely of MUSIC (for a change) recorded live on Neg'land's weekly KPFA radio show Over the Edge.

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

SORRY. Volume 1 1/2 of Seeland's Over The Edge series (so named for the weekly radio show produced by Negativland on KPFA) originally recorded in 1985. On this (single) disc Richard Lyons, aka Dick Goodbody, hosts an auto trivia show with both complete sincerity and expert detail. It's probably the most amazing piece of radio theater since the zenith of the Firesign Theater's semi-improvised comedy antics during the seventies. You'll hear callers attempt to stump Dick with questions about their classic cars. You'll hear the Weatherman go head to head with Contra Costa County's top radio trivia whiz Daryl Garrison where callers abuse them with their trivia questions and much more. Though the idea of an "auto-trivia" show may seem pedestrian to some it is perhaps in spite of this that somehow the show works and is quite funny. It's like tuning into an AM radio show in the middle of the night after taking several tabs of acid. The performance is dry, so dry in fact that several participating callers don't appear to realize that the show is a joke. As a bonus to this CD edition you get a "Dick's Auto Hive" key chain, and a fold out full page advertisement for the Auto Hive from a faked Contra Costa Times page circa 1985. Also included on this disc is the "Rototiller Singalong"; thirty five minutes of madness, the highlight of which is a five minute segment at the end where David, the Weatherman, presents a stereo recording he made of his neighbor rototilling his backyard!

RealAudio clip: Auto Trivia: Cool Cars, Cheaper Cheese, Limousines of Pope John Paul VII, etc.
RealAudio clip: Pure Full Stereo Rototiller and So Long

Way back in the 20th century, 1991 to be precise, media pranksters Negativland got themselves into a legal tussle with Island Records when they naively released a single on SST that covered U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and revealed Casey Kasem to be a foulmouthed ogre, all on the same track! Both SST and Negativland were subsequently sued into submission. Copies of the original U2 cd can still be had for anywhere from $75 to $100 US for the disc and bootlegged copies have been floating around ever since the track was pulled. Rather than go further into that whole can of carnuba wax I'll just refer those who are unfamiliar with this mother of all fair use lawsuits to Negativland's thorough and entertaining book "Fair Use: The Story Of The Letter U And The Numeral 2", a 288 page document of the entire court case and Negativland's subsequent legal troubles with Greg Ginn and SST. Well now, here we are in a new millennium, on the ten year anniversary of the lawsuit where Seeland has already tested the legal waters with their re-issue of John Oswald's magnum opus "Plunderphonics" and so far the sharks aren't biting. Sensing that maybe the industry's lawyers have lost their taste for such passe copyright issues in favor of the much tastier Napster and the whole peer-to-peer fiasco, the label "Seelard" (hmmm...) has stepped in to see the return of this classic piece of copyright infringement. As a bonus to this risque reissue Seelard has included 9 extra tracks relating to the original single such as an excerpt from an Over The Edge (Negativland's Don Joyce's weekly radio show on KPFA) show from 1989 where the germination of the single began. One track is an edited version of the "Radio Edit" so that you *can* now safely play it on the radio -- all the nasty words have been covered up with a cornucopia of sound effects. The seven remaining tracks on this disc were taken from live performances by Negativland in 1990 (Knitting Factory, NYC) and 1993 (Great American Music Hall, SF) and cover Casey's "Long Distance Dedication" on up to material that wound up on the cd that accompanied Negativland's book (see above). There's an abundance of good material added to the fated single in these live performances including numerous tapes referring to "U2" that Don Joyce had picked up in the interim, plus some more serious audio forays detailing Francis Gary Powers' fateful flight over the USSR in a Lockheed U-2 spy plane. Diddley Shit!

MPEG stream: Special Edit Radio Mix - I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
MPEG stream: The Black Lady of Espionage (Live)

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

SORRY. Like they did so well with Casey Kasem and U2 way back when, this is *TOTALLY ENTERTAINING* nose-thumbing at smooth talk radio show host who avoids the hard questions as best he can... This clever aural collage is available only on 7".

Volume three of discs derived from Negland's Over The Edge weekly radio show. Herein issues of gay repression are addressed apparently. Also included is a free booklet, The Weatherman's Dumb Stupid Dictionary, a glossary explaining the strange words and phrases used by the Weatherman...

Volume 6 in Negativland's Over The Edge series (so named for the weekly radio show produced by Negativland on KPFA). This volume is dedicated to David Wills -- aka The Weatherman -- and his obsession with field recording, most notably his fixation with recording his family. Don Joyce and David produced several shows on Over The Edge dedicated to David and his tapes and then distilled it down to these two discs. Beginning with a recording of David with his first tape recorder as a young wippersnapper and continuing with all the various tapes he made through his youth, adolescence, and on into adulthood. One of the principle subjects of David's recordings are Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with his family. In David's house, where he lived with his parents up until they passed away, he had both his room and the kitchen wired for sound so that he could play tapes of his mom and grandmother talking while making thanksgiving dinner as they made thanksgiving dinner a year later, or two years, or five... etc. The two then remark on the previous years as David continues to record them and talk back to them. The result is a really bizarre, non-linear ongoing conversation. Interspersed throughout these two discs of David's audio history are sections where listeners to the show call up and query Mr Wills for help with their cable TV repair, radio and electronics problems, ask questions about home cleaning and participate in the "Fake Bacon & Electronic Music" hotline.

RealAudio clip: I'm A Vegetable, Wired Up House, Steamin' Mad At Dirt, etc
RealAudio clip: Fuck You, Tough Darts, Jingle Bells, etc

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

SORRY. Negativland's first album, originally released way back in 1980 (damn, has it really been that long?) Seeland has gone through the trouble of attempting to recreate the original packaging of the album, in that each is individually packaged, no two are the same. Each one comes in a 5" cardboard box and each one is decorated with pictures cut out of Home & Garden magazines from the 60's (disturbing food fads seem to be a popular choice.) Included inside are some recipe cards and a "Seat Be Sate" pin. The album is a lot darker and creepier than what Negativland would move into later. The voice tapes are still there, but they don't play as predominant role as they do in their following albums. Holds the test of time quite well.

Listen and learn, kiddies.

Seth Nehil and John Grzinich have been collaborating in various sound ventures off and on for well over a decade, back when the two met in Austin, Texas. Gyre marks the conclusion of a body of field recordings and agitated environments that the two began working on while travelling throughout Eastern Europe and later manipulated into installation soundtracks, arriving at three lengthy tracks. A constant fluidity of gray sounds wraps around the opening track of Gyre, which gives the impression of being deep underwater investigating the nether regions; yet the tactile sounds of various rubbings and cracked details contrast the subaqueous references with earthen found sounds of soil, stone, wood, and metal. The second piece acts as a call and response to the acoustics of some crumbling Soviet warehouse, with wooden tappings echoing from various parts of the space, presumably from the two participants. Gradually, a thick rumble of low end thrumb reverberates through additional layers of chattering birds which serves to counter the 'industrial' sound debris. The creaking from a high tension wire sets the stage for the final piece on Gyre, with ringing metallic vibrations amassing into a beautiful aura of hallowed droning. On par with the likes of Murmer, Loren Chasse, Tarab, Eric La Casa, and Small Cruel Party, Gyre is an excellent album.

MPEG stream: Cast
MPEG stream: Weald
MPEG stream: Glaze

Strangely enough, we had never managed to get any of these records in stock when it originally came out in 2002 as the companion to the now out of print album Confluence, which had been released on the Intransitive label. Stria is one of many collaborative projects between these two impressive sound artists, straddling the realm of dronescape delirium and dislocated field recordings. Seth Nehil and John Grzinich first began working together in the humidity of Austin, Texas in the revolving door collective of Alial Straa, which also proved formative for Michael Northam and Olivia Block. But as all of these folks wandered to various corners of the globe (Grzinich in Estonia, Nehil to Portland, Block to Chicago, and who the hell knows where Northam currently calls home), the collaborations have become impressively focused projects, even as they take several years to complete. Like its companion piece, Stria centers upon the idea of resonance, spread across three longform pieces. The first of which collects various bowed tones from a huge ensemble of musicians and twists them all into a sinewy mass of slowburning drones and gradual progressions. The reference in the liner notes to Alvin Lucier makes complete sense in view of this impressive dronesmear crescendo on par with anything that Jonathan Coleclough or Organum had mustered. The second piece is more in keeping with Grzinich's recent work with clattering stone and found objects in concrete bunkers, as scrabbling sounds and tactile noises echo back and forth against murky atmospheres. The final piece returns to the drone work with motors agitating long thin wires with phase shifting oscillations and eerie turbulence rattling what otherwise would be some very pretty ambience, but instead becomes a sublime listening experience. An excellent piece of work all around.

MPEG stream: Tome Gather
MPEG stream: Arboreal
MPEG stream: The Mirrored Corner

Naturalist aktionism? Sure, let's call it that. We can't really say that the Hermann Nitsch and Gunter Brus bloodletting as grand allegory is applicable to this collaboration between Portland based sound artists Seth Nehil and Matt Marble; but a rigorous body of work is definitely at hand. These two are the editors of the sound art journal FO A RM, and have both generated impressive bodies of conceptually minded compositions through field recordings, found objects, the almighty drone, and hand-built instruments. Here, Nehil and Marble wax poetic about the overlay of tactile sounds to emphasize the ruptures, holes, and negative spaces which may have been present on each layer of sound. So, instead of a gaping piece of unbroken ambience, Ecllipses is a tense and discordant album of rollicking textures which bristle and scrape against each other. Nehil and Marble revel in tumbles and scrabbles of what could be a revolving metal drum filled with various pine cones, twigs, and pebbles. Elsewhere, they focus upon churning bowed steel-strings, which offer buzzing clouds of softly rendered acoustic noise; and then soft pluckings of what sound like softened dulcimers drift into prolonged echo, hinting at avant-folk drones of Jewelled Antler (especially the Ov recordings) and Kemialliset Ystavat. Barring a minimal amount of signal processing and ring modulation, the album flourishes in the sodden palette of natural objects: wood, grass, leaves, soil, and rock.

MPEG stream: Aprupture
MPEG stream: Hither
MPEG stream: Ecllipses

Long time collaborators (and OG Jandek backing band, for his first live shows ever), AQ fave Richard Youngs and Alex Nielson once again team up for an absolutely gorgeous collection of sonic wonder, from lilting fuzzy folk, to massive churning guitarscapes. Five tracks, all ten to fifteen minutes long, each a sprawling expanse of dreamy deconstructed pop, fluttering free folk drift, abstract percussive clatter or full on wall of sound rrroooaar. The opener is a delicate, tribal swirl, Rumbling low tones, pulsing piano, ethereal chant like vocals, dark moody melodies wrapped around flickering electronic FX, shuffling hand drums, a bit Wicker Man, a little hippy drift, hypnotic and meditative, drowsy and so lovely. The follow up is just as lovely, but way more abstract, a slowly shifting ambient tableau of sizzling cymbals, muted distant melodies, disembodied voices, and shimmering washes of abstract sound, all smeared into a blissfully blurry soundscape. Track three jacks up the cacophony just a bit and suddenly the disc gets dangerous. Super blown out guitar throb underpins a clattery skeletal framework, supporting slippery slivers of high end feedback, everything clouded in thick swirls of dense effects, eventually building to an impenetrable psychdrone fug. And even before you can shake it off and get that ringing out of your ears, the band slips back into tribal drift mode, building another dreamy swirlscape of looped whir and muted rhythmic scrape, glistening acoustic guitar and coo-ing vocal ambience. The final track is another dreamy drone-y drift, but this time wrapped in spike-y psychedelic guitar leads, the whole track hovering beneath FX-drenched warped and warbly wah wah guitars, everything spinning and swirling, like the soundtrack to one of those sixties films about getting high, but even more druggy and gloriously far out.

MPEG stream: New Moon Alone
MPEG stream: Pictures For The Multitudes

For everyone who missed out on that last Nekrasov, which is probably most folks as it was a cd-r limited to 50 copies, half of which we got and sold in a flash, here's another new full length, from this Australian black metal / blacknoize terrorist, and this one is also limited, but never fear, not nearly as limited as that last one, and it's an actual cd, so we should have these for a while, a little while at least. Which is good news, cuz this might be the best Nekrasov yet, let's start with the packaging, wow, a gorgeous and grim 6 panel sleeve, with intense black and green paintings, each panel featuring variations of the new super intense NKRSV logo printed in reflective clear ink, so striking, and pretty representative of the sounds within. For those new to Nekrasov, his sound is a blasting blackness almost entirely ensconced in blacknoise, a swirling chaotic squall of hiss and grinding skree and blown out howl, within which lurks frantic riffing, relentless drumming, although much of the time, it feels implied more than actually heard. Like WOLD, Nekrasov rewards close listening, headphones strapped on, reveals a crumbling, abject hellish sound world, hateful and harsh and harrowing, it doesn't get much more brutal than this, or noisy, but on Cognition Of Splendid Oblivion more than even, Nekrasov finds a balance, letting the noise swallow certain portions whole, but dialing the noise back in places, giving us glimpses if riff or melody, of blast, ror texture. And the noise itself, is not straight up Merzbowian brutality, there's definitely nuance, almost like the noise is an artifact of the guitars being TOO distorted, the drums TOO crushing, the vokills TOO brutal... "Psychic Epilepsy In The Butcher Of Light" might be the heaviest thing Nekrasov has recorded, the riffs seemingly MADE out of noise, churning, throbbing, the vocals struggling to be heard through the sheer crush of the riffs, the drums no more than a distant pulse. But within this black buzzing void, the sounds grow epic and majestic, soaring and struggling to shine through the thick black clouds of sound. The other cool thing about Nekrasov that we may have mentioned before is the breadth of tone and timbre, the noise is multi dimensional, and varies from track to track, because it's not just noise for noise sake, it's part of the composition, an integral part, so sometimes the sound is hissy and brittle, other times murky and muddy, some track get all shoegazey and blissed out, others threaten to gouge your eardrums out. The second to last track starts out all dreamy and washed out, then the BM kicks in, sans noise, and we're treated to a rare glimpse of the buzz and blast behind the curtain, before the final track crushes everything in its path with some of the densest and pummeling noise possible, and even then, it's weirdly listenable, twisted and textured, a swirling blackness that grinds and howls and blasts and buzzes until finally slipping into oblivion.

MPEG stream: Heresy.Heresy. Heresy. Oh. Where Have You Gone
MPEG stream: Psychic Epilepsy In The Butcher Of Light
MPEG stream: The Person And The Yawning Abyss

Not one, but two new missives from mysterious blackmetal/blacknoize merchant Nekrasov, an Aussie one man horde who crafts some of the most twisted sickest noise drenched black metal we've ever heard. Elsewhere on this list you'll find an older title, a split/collaboration with Canadian doom-ed black metal peddlers Humiliation, but this right here is the latest bit of filth and fury, transmitted from NKRSV headquarters directly into your rotting blackened earholes. And weirdly enough, while it's still noisy as fuck, it seems Master Nekrasov has dialed back the noise a bit, right out of the gate, the awesomely titled "We Are Just An Indifferent Interpretation Of The Black Plague" explodes in a frenzy of lightning fast programmed beats, of insectoid riffing, of hellish howling vokills, but the whole thing weirdly and impossibly melodic, it's all relative of course, but woven into the fabric of the furious grinding black blast, is a distinctly hooky undercurrent, which not only makes it crazy catchy, also infuses the rest of the track with a distinctly weirdo black vibe. The second track is another blast of pounding grimness, this time the harsh vox are balanced by what sounds like monks chanting and yet still more strangely pleasing melodies, all buried under the relentless pound and churn, the result is a strange bit of almost orchestral sounding brutality. After a lengthy bit of blackdrone drift, all muted rumbles and buried industrial percussion, a sort of militaristic windstorm ambience, the record slips back into blackened buzz, this time, much punkier, not blasting so much as pounding furiously, the vocals super hot and in-the-red, swallowing up all the other sounds with every shriek, while in the background the new surprisingly melodic side of Nekrasov struggles to shine from behind the black curtain of frantic buzzing and machinelike pound. More ambience follows, some field recorded creepiness, laced with buried bits of melody, culminating in an avalanche of crumbling distortion and harsh blurred black crunch, the final bit of pure buzzing metallic blackness comes in the form of "Chant The Name Of God In A Thousand Languages Until All Is Blood And Feces", a return to the noisy Nekrasov of old, a buzzing old school black metal smothered in thick sheets of hiss, the distortion so blown out, the vocals so processed and inhuman, the whole thing threatens to crumble to pieces, and is constantly blurring into an almost full on blackdrone. The record finishes off with two lengthy tracks, nearly 22 minutes, of creeping, haunting, abject, miserable black ambience, the first a thick black churning dronescape, heavy glacial guitars smeared into dense streaks, trudging across a sonic wasteland, all industrial filth, whirring church organ (!) and mysterious melodic drift. And finally, the 16 + minute title track, a corrosive blackened noise drone, layered and dense, also industrial, but less rhythmic, heaving crumbling swells, the sound of cities crumbling, of collapse and decay, of death and oblivion. Brutal and intense.

MPEG stream: We Are Just An Indifferent Interpretation Of The Black Plague
MPEG stream: Matter Is The Bastard
MPEG stream: Pre-Fetal Non-Mantra

A pretty strange, but in many ways pretty perfect pairing, cult Aussie black metal / black noize horde Nekrasov, and industrial cinematic black doom project Aderlating, which just so happens to be an offshoot of the mighty Gnaw Their Tongues. Both blackened, both noisy, here the two drift together and end up meeting somewhere right in the middle, floating in the hellish black abyss, heavier on the ambient than the black metal, more abstract and atmospheric than harsh and harrowing. Nekrasov offers up a side long stunner, which begins as a roiling minimal dronescape of textured blackness, muted streaks of submerged melody, buried vocals, creeping slow motion pulses, constantly shifting layers, deep dense overtones, creaks and scrapes, utterly haunting and otherworldly, occasionally building to a SUNNO)))-like wall of sound, before slipping back into something more slithery and cinematic. By The end, the sound has reached a fever pitch, a swirling, caterwauling cacophony of inhuman vocalizations, tangled black tendrils of buzz and skree, all woven into an organic, heaving blackened ambient drone driven sonic beast, before finishing off with a stretch of hushed minimal shimmer. Aderlating, aka Gnaw Their Tongues, otherwise known as Mories, counters with a set of three interlocking soundscapes, abject and industrial, set amidst a sea of softly swirling black tones, shapes and sounds seem to creak and groan, like some hellish machine, churning away just below the surface, spewing gouts of feedback, and sinking ever deeper into the vile black void that somehow keeps it afloat. Fragments of voice, melody, surface here and there, only to be swallowed up again. Occasionally the proceedings seems to almost coalesce into some sort of garish subterranean cabaret, but still cloaked in swirling swaths of hellish hiss and black buzz, and epic rumbling low end that threatens to devour all the other sounds. Fragmented barely there rhythms lead into an avalanche of crumbling distortion and in-the-red psychedelic blacknoize, which roils and churns and explodes in a frenzy of sonic chaos, before returning again, to its more tranquil state, which even itself is rife with industrial clatter and swaths of muted caustic noise, finishing off in a blaze of brilliant bristling blackness. Gorgeous packaging, stunning cover art, black inner sleeve and pressed on sick green, white and black splattered vinyl. LIMITED TO 300!!!

This is not actually brand new, it's from last year, but we've been doing our best to track down enough copies to list for ages now, and were finally able to get some direct from NEKRASOV HQ. And holy shit was it worth the wait. Nekrasov, the one man Aussie blacknoize wrecking crew who have long terrorized aQ with epic blasts of furious blackness, teamed up with Canadian black metal misanthropes Humiliation, for a seriously malformed chunk of audial evil. And while it's a split, it's also a partial collaboration, each band contributing three tracks, one of which has been augmented and fucked with by the other. The proceedings begin with Nekrasov unfurling drifting clouds of muted murk, which give way to a barrage of blurred riffage, then blown out tumbling blast beats, all gnarled and blurred, weirdly pretty and washed out, Humiliation adding various sounds to the already dense racket. For the next two tracks, Nekrasov goes it alone, first the epic (and epically titled) "From Where I Sit The Sky Was Full Of Wrath And Ill Will", a sprawling 11 minutes of tangled spidery guitar melody, creeping droned out drift, hushed industrial ambience, ominous orchestral swells, harsh howled vokills, a brief blast of black metal crush, and then a tripped out squall of twisted effects drenched blackened noise. Finally, things finish off with a a super abstract final jam, all lumbering machine like lurch, rumbles and creaks, clatter and processed grinds and buzzes, eventually smoothing out into a deep subterranean sounding low end thrum. The first Humiliation track begins as a haunting whirl of strange processed winds and voices, almost like some sort of EVP style field recording. Soon the voices become more pronounced, wreathed in effects, the ambience peppered with disembodied riffs, bits of chug, soaring bits of minor key melody, all suspended in a field of hiss and whir and buzz, eventually exploding into some seriously filthy and damaged black doom, harsh vokills, lo-fi drum damage, thick black chugs, a strange bit of Khanate-meets-Abruptum-meets-Burzum-meets-Wolf Eyes, a spaced out bit of grimness, eventually fading into a soft swirl of music box like melody and distant rumble, before exploding into the follow up, another chunk of lumbering hateful black stumble, which over the course of the next 8 minutes drifts from abject industrial pound, to tripped out Gnaw Their Tongues style almost orchestral minimal doom, to clattery creepy soundtracky ambience, to Swans like Teutonic pound, to almost dreamy otherworldly drift. The final track, begins like another slab of industrial flecked doomic plod and crush, wreathed in a corrosive halo of crumbling distortion and malfunctioning effects, before the riffing drops out completely, leaving a roiling expanse of fractured feedback, strange samples, grinding scrape and howl, all wrapped in wildly explosive layers of blown out buzz. More necessary Nekrasov, and something serious to whet your appetite for more fucked up filth from the mysterious Humiliation...

MPEG stream: From Where I Sit The Sky Was Full Of Wrath And Ill Will (w/Humiliation)
MPEG stream: Barbarians (w/Nekrasov)

Two new releases on this week's list from Medical Records, both of which have us once again wondering, where in the heck do they find this stuff?? Paul Nelson was a Portland native, who was obsessed with analog synthesis, he was well versed in music and music theory, but was also into ELP and Brian Eno, and as the years went on gathered more and more synthesizers until he had the opportunity to record an album, which was Vortex, recorded in 1981. Limited to just 1000 copies and self distributed, over the years Vortex became quite the collector's item, and it's easy to see why. The opening track, the only non-instrumental track, is a primo slice of futuristic synth wave electro pop, complete with robotic vocodered vox, crazy catchy, and ultra poppy, it's not hard to imagine "Automated Man" as a could/should have been eighties hit. But the rest of the record is way more spacey, the bulk of the album made up of the five part title track, which finds Nelson channeling Tangerine Dream and John Carpenter, swirling synths, pulsing arpeggiations, spaced out and sci-fi and cinematic, especially on the second part, where things get downright Carpenter/Goblin-esque, fans of Zombi and Majeure and Umberto will flip for sure. The rest of the "Vortex" movements drift from planetarium show style cosmic drift, to smoldering galactic Euro-synth shimmer, to ominous, brooding soundtracky synthscapery. The suite is interrupted by "Labyrinth", which is all eighties electro pop, pulsing rhythms, programmed drums, swirling ethereal shimmer, you can almost imagine the Human League like vox that would fit perfectly, but instead, it remains instrumental, blissed out and softly psychedelic. As always, fantastic packaging, heavy full color jacket, the vinyl 180 gram white opaque splatter, with a printed insert featuring an in-depth interview with Nelson, and of course, it's also super limited...

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Nemeth is the first solo outing from Stefan Nemeth who we know best for his work with Radian, one of the more compelling and stimulating electronic post rock outfits of the last several years. It makes perfect sense that he has also been hard at work scoring various films projects since he has such obvious skills for creating brooding sounds that sizzle with subtlety and mounting tension. Over the last several years Nemeth found himself creating soundscapes for experimental filmmakers and installation artists. He used those works as his source material in creating this debut solo work. This is by no means a laptop project, as Nemeth used lots of organic instrumentation like guitars, percussion and synthesizers along with his electronics and programming skills to create these chilling sounds. It's pretty impossible to tell which sounds are real and which are electronically generated in this work and that's what makes Nemeth's music so spectacular. He treats all of the elements he uses with a fluidity that makes all the disparate sounds wash into each other. Film reminds us a bit of the more subdued and ominous elements of Pan Sonic, the hypnotic qualities of Circle, the ghostly decay of Thomas Brinkmann. All great company to be in, Nemeth has created a record that uses all its layers and textures with mindful perfection!

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This Japanese guitarist would have been much better off calling this record anything other than Improvisations #1. To be fair, these five extended pieces of drone smolder are technically improvised, but they sure as hell do not sound like the improvisations of Keiji Haino, Tetuzi Akiyama, Masayuki Takayanagi or any other giants of Japanese improv guitar bruitism. Shinobu's work recalls much more of the post-shoegazing excursions that you would get from Explosions In The Sky, Tarentel (circa From Bone To Satellite), and even some of Machinefabriek's constructions. As we mentioned, Shinobu does technically improvise each of these tracks, although it might be better stated that be records these pieces in single takes, collecting loops through his arsenal of pedals and layering them into these architecturally dense mounds of compacted fuzz, drone, and noise all blurred into a beautifully shoegazing atmosphere. The first track builds a warm enveloping haze on top of which Shinobu plops a rich piece of slide guitar work, that gives this track train-chugging-through-desert-valley-at-sunset type of cinematic scope. The second piece takes a slightly darker arc that billows with bioluminescence and distantly mechanoid pulsations. Again, Shinobu continues darker still throughout the album with the ensuing tracks, as the guitars become more spectral, more laced with shadow, and heavier on the low end frequencies. Here, you'll find more references to Troum or Aidan Baker, in terms of a darker take on the ambience. With the fourth track, Shinobu brightens everything with a guitar driven variation on the Gas / Pop Ambient sound that's very, very nice. Afterwards, the darkened murk and shadow returns on the finale, a majestically black piece of ambience. So so cold. Experimedia has been turning up some pretty amazing artists from around the world that previously we had never heard of, and this album is certainly one of the gems in their increasingly prolific catalogue of releases. Limited to 150 copies!!!

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Neotantrik is the duo of Finders Keepers / B-Music head honcho Andy Votel, and Sean Canty of Demdike Stare (the two also run the Pre-Cert label), accompanied by legendary electronic pioneer and Buchla synth master Suzanne Ciani, Swiss jazz legend Bruno Spoerri and folk chanteuse Jane Weaver! We weren't entirely sure what to expect, in fact we somehow missed the first NeoTantrik lp entirely, but Blue Amiga is pretty stunning, a series of pieces captured live over the last year, a gorgeous collection of cinematic ambience, and blissed out synthiness. Beholden to classic cinema for sure, the sleeve was designed by Asia Argento (daughter of legendary director Dario Argento), and features giallo actress Daria Nicolodi floating in shimmering blue water, the sounds drift from the blurry, bleary, blissful hushed thrum of the title track, to the strangely soundtracky "Mimologue", which adds all sorts of percussion and mysterious electronics, to an otherwise dreamy shimmer, the results tense and intense, but still strangely lovely. From there on out, there's creepy Carpenter like synth swells, tripped out kosmische ambience, glistening crystalline drone music, blissed out planetarium ragas, avant musique concrete, and a sprawling final track that sounds like the score to some mysterious art house thriller, woozy, swoonsome swells, and keening high end melodies, deep resonant bass throbs all infused with a minor key melancholia.

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Second transmission from this strange super group, headed up by Finders Keepers mastermind Andy Votel, who on the last NeoTantrik record, was accompanied by Sean Canty from Demdike Stare, electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani, Swiss jazz legend Bruno Spoerri, and folk songstress Jane Weaver. We're getting the impression that the rest of the crew might not have made it along on this second voyage, it's a much more minimal affair, and way murkier, and moodier, unfurling as a kaleidoscopic cosmic drift, a sprawling psychedelic slow burn ambience, that sound like mysterious transmissions from beyond the outer reaches of the galaxy, sun dappled, but likely by some other, alien sun. Background of smoldering shimmer, gauzy, and hazy, overlaid with strange chittering electronics, that sound more like weird interference than proper rhythms, textures ebb and flow, pulses surface and recede, soft squalls of smeared noisiness wash over but soon drift away, ghostly long tones stretch out into lush, undulating layers, the sound manages to be equal parts hushed and intimate, sinister and psychedelic, cinematic and surreal. Buried percussion bobs on dreamlike expanses of softly distorted shimmer, before settling into a darkly rhythmic groove, woozy and dreamily druggy, a sort of soundtrack electronica, that at times sounds like it was plucked from some obscure seventies soundtrack, and at others, like some collaged landscape of ominous ambience, wreathed in reverb, peppered with little flurries of what sounds like xylophone, tolling bells, a combination of archival sounds, old tapes, and improvised performances, deftly woven into some a truly trippy slab of kosmische cinematic psych. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!

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Subcutaneous Memory is the debut recording for Nephila, the solo project of Shannon Kennedy - better known as the cellist / electronics sorceress from Pedestrian Deposit. Just as she brought a spooky sense of calm to balance the infernal noise manifest of Jon Borges' side of the Pedestrian Deposit equation, this is a super creepy tape made of and for the dark arts. The first side was all crafted on a zither, which she's plucked into haunting, slow-motion cycles of creepy melodies interspersed with atonal slashes and contact mic noises that look back to those apocalyptic collages from Current 93's early days. The second features haunting incantations looped from a "branch fiddle", wood, and voice, creating a hypnotic miasma of arboreal wooziness. Another fantastic tape from Monorail Trespassing, and we certainly hope to hear more from Nephila!

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SORRY. Loren Nerell is the ethnomusicologist who compiled the exceptional field recording album "Indonesian Soundscapes" for Soleilmoon. "Lilin Dewa" is his outstanding studio production based on archaic Javanese and Balinese gamelan styles infused with dronologist electronics to add a dark mystery to the delicate percussive processions. It makes perfect sense that Brian Lustmord released this on his Side Effects label.

Latest from these noisy Oakland oddballs, who at the outset, sound a bit like a way more fucked up, way more musical Negativland or Tape Beatles, at least over the first few songs (and the last few), the same sort of cut-up recontextualism, but way less linear, and way more warped, the samples less the focus, and more just another element, and while it is noisy, it's also lush and textural, glitched out and electronic, droney and industrial, the various voices and found sounds eventually disappearing almost entirely for the bulk of the record, beneath heaving swells of crumbling distortion and sheets of hissing shortwave interference, warm whirling melodies drifting over dense rumbling reverberations, occasionally things lock into subtle rhythms, throbbing like some buried subterranean pulse, other times the songs seem to expand, sprawling into blackened noisescapes, abstract and amorphous, each one a mysterious hazy stretch of garbled muted haze, an undulating surfacesound, barely obscuring all the action right underneath, chittering percussive skitter, roiling bass heavy thrum, squalls of blown out synth buzz, bursts of superdistorted in-the-red crunch, weird abstract drones wrapped around conflagrations of blurred bleary noise that begin to sound almost like beats, flecked with all manner of hum and whir, the whole thing growing gradually prettier and more melodic as it goes, the noise elements definitely restrained, more textural than caustic and the end result for the most part is less of a noise record, and more of a super varied, abstract avant drone record. That said, the band do occasionally fuck shit up, with super intense bursts of howled blacknoise, or shards of grinding metallic buzz, but for every one of those moments, there's another of dark brooding dronescapery, or haunting cinematic drift to balance it out. Cool stuff. Packaged in an oversized full color sleeve, partially covered by a grey fabric hood, and wrapped up tight with copper wire.

MPEG stream: Cochlear Phantasmagoria
MPEG stream: Mechanical Camel Toe (Smell It My DNA)
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Japanese duo Nerve Net Noise, with previous releases on Meme, Zero Gravity, and Hronir, make the sort of experimental electronic "music" that really separates the men from the boys (or, shall we say, the insane noise geeks from everyone else). But while Tsuyoshi "Tagomago" Nakamaru (who handles the mix and effects) and Hiroshi Kumakiri (who builds NNN's unique synthesizers) are from Japan, this *isn't* howling vacuum cleaner grinding shrieking death noise in the tradition of Merzbow/Hijokaidan/Masonna/etc. Rather, it's closer in style to the clicks n' cuts of Ryoki Ikeda and the "empty" sine wave pulses of Sachiko M. Some call it "onkyo" music. How about we call it squeaky toy, modem on the fritz, annoying buzzer going off music? Yep, it's still room-clearing stuff, y'know. Indeed, it was hard to review, 'cause my co-workers kept yelling at me to turn it off!! But to NNN's ears, this is beautiful music. From Kumakiri's liner notes: "At first, Nerve Net Noise enjoyed pure sound. These days, we try to think about music. We aspire to create music that is between played and not-played, between controlled and uncontrolled. We feel that consciously performed music can have too much evidence of human planning. But we also dislike random music that displays no evidence of human planning at all. We try to find a satisfying middle area with our albums." Well, that's an uncommon idea of "music", now isn't it!? But it explains a lot about how this album sounds. Basically, Kumakiri's array of homemade synths are switched on and allowed to make the noises they want to make, while the NNN duo tweak the volume and so forth, affecting the sounds and rhythms. When they're happy with what they're hearing, they record the results. It's kind of a Metal Machine Music concept. Imagine a nest of robotic birds, mechanically, repetitively chirping at one another, slowly building into patterns and rhythms that will drill themselves into your brain, causing either the euphoria of a trepanation (if you're into it) or simply the pain of such. But it's clear that the former is the intention. These guys aren't trying to make assaultive music for masochists -- they just hear things differently from most folks. For instance, we suspect they'd hear the beauty inherent in a malfunctioning car alarm. If you want to open *yourself* up to this realm of sound-appreciation, then "Meteor Circuit" wouldn't be a bad place to start -- just don't expect your co-workers, housemates, family, etc. to enjoy it! (Is it perverse to like this stuff? 'Cause some of us here have more than one NNN cd in our collections...)

RealAudio clip: #1
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"Various Amusements" by the Japanese glitch / onkyo / minimalist ensemble Nerve Net Noise was billed to us as an electronic meditation on the common activities of teenage girl's afternoon, such as shopping, talking on the phone, putting on make up,

RealAudio clip: Afternoon Nap
RealAudio clip: Make Up

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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.

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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.

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SORRY. save a couple bucks

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

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We have long been huge fans of New Zealand noisemaker Nigel Wright ever since we first heard him on a cd-r way back in 2005. Since then we've tried to carry everything we could get our hands on, but unlike his overproductive countrymen, it hasn't been much. We flipped over the recent Tapir 3"cd-r and only just recently got a handful of this disc. Nest is a duo, featuring Wright and LA based sound maker Andrew Scott, and for this little 3" the two have teamed up with Mark Sadgrove (of MHFS and Infintesimal) and together these three kick up quite a din, huge distorted washes of sound that shift and pulse and twist and throb like something alive. Burning white hot and blown out, it's a glistening wall of supernova guitars, wreathed in a hazy cloud of dense distortion and buzzy reverb. Like a single shard of My Bloody Valentine psychrock blowout, looped and run through a busted up old distortion pedal. A gloriously crumbling, coruscating blast of face melting psychedelic free noise bliss. Already out of print. We have about 25 copies, but these will probably go quick...

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Last year we reviewed a cd-r by the duo Nest, guitarist Andrew Scott and NZ noisemaker Nigel Wright, where they teamed up with fellow kiwi MHFS, but for this latest outing, the duo has teamed up with yet another New Zealander, Tim Coster, and the results are again sublime. But in a much different way than the last collaboration. Where that one was distorted and heavy and buzzy, this new one is much darker and more introspective, guitars and laptops blurred into warm whirring blurs, soft distorted pulses smoother out into soft swells, a dreamy dark tranquil drift, that continues that way for much of the track's 25 minutes, but right around the 17 minute mark, the guitars grow a bit restless, the sound a bit more corrosive, over the continuous low end flow, soars streaks of coruscating high end, shards of feedback, eventually shedding the low end completely, leaving the sharper guitar to riff weightlessly and slowly transform into a fuzzed out chunk of slow swirling murk, that unfurls until the track's end. Good stuff. Fans of the usual abstract free drone stuff will dig this heavily!

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Another mysterious disc that just showed up in the mail one day, and totally knocked our socks off. So we ordered a bunch cuz we wanted to share them with all of you, but then we realized we had to describe it, and damn if this isn't a tough one to figure out. Dark and somber, rhythmic and minimal, a muddy, murky, sort of krautdrone drift. The rhythms are pulses, that drift in and out, the guitars moan and keen, electronics warble and rumble, lots of twisted bits of low end, changing speed and tone, super abstract and drifty and otherworldly, the band occasionally coalesce into a sort-of-groove, but even then, it's a sort of convoluted lumber, vocals, wrapped in reverb and echo, draped over the stuttering anti-funk, the melody carried by deep slow shifting swells, all around fragments of sounds tangle and untangle, their overtones creating strange minimal melodies. When the vocals do come in, it almost sounds like some sort of avant coldwave, imagine a cold wave Starfuckers maybe, a little bit cold and clinical and machinelike, but Net Shaker are less concerned with song, and groove, and being new wave or cold wave or whatever. They definitely exist in their own fucked up and fractured world. The sound may be hard to pin down, but it's definitely mesmerizing, hypnotic, cyclical, a woozy, warped, murky assemblage of cold Teutonic pop, layered drones, motorik krautrock, spaced out post industrial ambience, not to mention some fractured druggy sonic collage. Noise rock, post punk, avant pop, dirge wave, cold core, krautwave, not sure what to call it, or if it even needs a name, what we do know is this is one of the most original sounding records we've heard in ages, and we find ourselves listening to this cd-r all the time. Which pretty much says it all...

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Finally, a brand new record from aQ pal Ernest Gibson, who as Net Shaker, and solo, creates some of thee most warped, and idiosyncratic music we've ever heard. And it seems like every record not only gets better, but somehow also gets weirder. It's always been incredible to describe Gibson's music, even after four releases, we still struggle to put into words, what he manages to conjure up out of a seemingly super minimal sonic palette. The first thing we notice on I'm So Cold, is the groove, the opening track is downright groovy, at least for Net Shaker, a sort of slowcore, downtempo dirge, all shuffling rhythm, wreathed in swirling murk and hushed vox, it's like Starfuckers covering Portishead, or something, but definitely super polished and dare we say, 'danceable'. But fear not, the second track returns us to the cracked sonic underworld that Gibson rules over. A sprawl of throbbing pulses, of heaving industrial moans, and echo drenched anguished voices, chopped up and layered into weird textures, and when the rhythm proper does kick in, it's just a trash can lid cymbal hit, monotonous and robotic, all the while, the sounds underneath swirl and sway, the whole thing on the verge of total collapse. Which is sort of what Net Shaker seems to be all about. A series of meticulously assembled sonic epics, which on some level, reveal an intricate array of inner workings, like the musical version of one of those visible man medical dummies, but in so doing, also reveals that all of these sounds, these melodies, these arrangements are balanced precariously on a knife edge, this impending doom, this black hole that seems to lurk beneath each of these songs, somehow imbues Net Shaker's music with a dark glow, a restless tension, that makes the songs exude a nervous energy, which is even more remarkable for the fact that many of the songs are near somnambulant, in a sort of circular stasis, yet still displaying some sort of warped gravitational pull to the surrounding sounds. The cool thing this time around is that the loose abstract sonic mysteries, seem to be balanced by more composed jams, minimal dubbed out dirgescapes, the sort of sound that's even too slow and low for a label like WordSound. Tracks like "Be Back" are like Spectre on Thorazine, a creepy, murky crawl, a slo-mo space dub, that measures grooves in minutes instead of seconds. And once you're locked into Net Shaker's nocturnal flow, the record collapses and the sound is transformed into a field of Geiger counter flutter, or swirling smears of soft focus thrum, but before long, another beat surfaces, and Gibson hangs whatever bit of melodic murk or tortured texture he has handy, and away we go, tranced out and mesmerized, until the cycle repeats, and we tumble into the next sprawl of garbled sonic detritus, as we wait patiently for the next beat to pass by. And yeah, this record is another weird one, but some of the songs here display a surprising sonic mastery, that's beginning to make us think Gibson is working really hard to try and NOT make music that's more accessible. But his struggle makes for fantastic and twisted listening. ESSENTIAL.

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Got just TWO copies of this, found tucked away in the closet here, originally released in 2003, looooong out of print, the label too is now defunct, this is some seriously epic, black hole, bottomless low end deepdarkdronemusic. Bleak and hushed, ambient minimal shimmer, cold and barren, cinematic and utterly ominous, shot through with streaks of crumbling distortion, the whole thing so gorgeously haunting and harrowing. Definitely for fans of Thomas Koner, and other masters of the grim black drone. Packaged in an oversized dvd case, full color printed cover, and as mentioned above, out of print, last two copies EVER.

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It's that time again. That mysterious time, which only occurs a few times each year. Like an equinox or a solstice. When strange shimmering sonic clouds drift lazily across the sea and land gently in our earholes. That's right, it's time for some new sounds from one of our favorite labels in the world, Celebrate Psi Phenomenon. This instalmment comes from the mysterious Nether Dawn, which is the work of Mr. Antony Milton, who just so happens to run another one of our favorite labels, PseudoArcana. Milton has spent much of his time lately making big noises, and causing much sonic destruction performing his own brand of free-drone-metal as Mirag, but here returns to his drone-drfit roots. Outer Dark is a gorgeously pastoral spacescape, fuzzy and washed out, huge drifts of shimmer and wide expanses of sun baked ambience. Delicate and crystalline, melodies lurk innocently beneath thick swaths of sweet buzz or dash furtively and barely noticed through deep swells of rich rumbling sound. Notes soaked in reverb float lazily through twilit skies, like listening to the most beautiful music with your ears crossed, so everything is just a little bit fuzzy, a little bit smeared, notes become tinly little shooting stars, their tonal colors turned into little musical trails drifting into the ether, while guitars are stretched into soft gauzy sheets, everything warm and wonderfully dreamlike. Beautiful!

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Nether Dawn is the alter ego of Mr. Antony Milton, who really needs no more alter egos, but what the heck, with each alter ego comes another chunk of gorgeous sound, so we're not complaining. This is not really new, it's just been sitting here waiting to get reviewed, and we've finally gotten around to it, and as is often the case, from the second we threw this on, we were wondering why the heck we waited so long. Whisky Mute-Down begins as a gorgeous crumbling wall of rumbles and drones, of buried melodies and streaks of high end feedback. Noisy, but soft noise, it totally had us wishing it was the only track here and would continue on in the same vein for another hour. But thankfully, the rest of the record has other sonic treasures to offer. A spare guitar drifts above buzz and crackle, of amp buzz and the sound of bad connections and old cords, warm soft whirs spread out in thick waves, sounding a bit like field recordings, far beneath the call of some alien creature rings out, a clattery clanging guitarscape rings out over an almost techno pulse, the beat and the pulsing guitar swaying woozily back and forth, while a second guitar unfurls delicate little high end melodies, a long slow burning distant grinding guitar shimmers beneath glimmering high end, and above bellowing low end, the various layers blurring together like oil and water, offering up various colors and tones, and finally, another minimal dronescape, a doomy riff, wreathed in crackle and stripped to the bone, occasionally rearing up to chug and crunch, but otherwise laying prone, and the buzz and hiss pile up, the whole thing a smoldering sea of distorted drones, decaying before our ears. Worth it for the first track alone, but even more worth it for the rest...

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