[ aquarius records — Experimental ]

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Showing results 6401 through 6450 of 9280.

MPEG stream: Time's Arrow
MPEG stream: Slavery In The Bahamas (Instrumental)

Two new tracks from Dom Fernow, Hospital Records head honcho, and the man behind a multitude of projects these days including Vatican Shadow, Christian Cosmos, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, among others. Prurient is Fernow's original project, but the sound of Prurient has come a long way since the harsh noise of his earlier releases. In fact, these two new tracks, like much of the recent Prurient output, most definitely falls more in line with Fernow's more recent electronic releases. Not that we're complaining, the A side is a fantastically grim slice of dark ambient drift, with distant vocal drones, and buried keening sine wave tones, draped over subtle murky pulsations, building gradually to a more driving rhythmic pulse, wreathed in static, the whole thing eventually engulfed in squalls of gritty noise and blown out crunch. The flipside though is whole 'nother thing, tranquil and almost new age-y, swaths of swirling synth, the whole thing hazy and ethereal, and hauntingly meditative. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!! All on colored vinyl!

Latest noisy missive from one of our favorite 'noise' artists going. Prurient, aka Dom Fernow, has managed to rekindle our waning love of noisemusic, by incorporating all sorts of typically un-noise elements, the least of which is black metal, but also, melody, dynamics, mood, mystery, all without losing any harsh energy, and without resorting to any of the tired hackneyed devices used by noise musicians as far back as there has been noise music. The sound of Prurient may have begun life as a blast of face peeling white noise, but has blossomed into a dark art, a creepy, sinister, fucked up and black as pitch exploration of negative sonics, and we can't seem to get enough. Every release seems to stretch the boundaries of noise music into some new shape, challenging and weird enough to appeal to the not strictly noisists, but brutal and intense enough to keep the faithful's ears bleeding. This limited 7" offers up two new blasts, both employing a similar sonic approach, but to different effect. The A side is an explosion of beautiful noise, a dense tonal wall of sound, but beneath the caustic hiss, is a hypnotic minor key melody played on what sounds like a marimba, looped and repeated, building tension and creating a truly creepy atmosphere beneath and within the could of blacknoise surrounding it. Wild unhinged vocals howl, bathed in distortion, all in a downpour of hiss, but that strange haunting Carpenter / Goblin style melody repeated below the surface imbues the track with a cinematic menace that only sounds that much better wrapped in prickly noise. The flipside is another wave of intense crunch and crumble, this time the melody beneath the skree is some sort of tangled guitar melody, but the effect is the same, repeated and looped mantra like, the crushing grinding lurching noise is transformed into something beautiful and beautifully ominous. White sleeve, white vinyl, white labels, black and white insert. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES.

As most of you well know by now, we're not that into straight up NOISE music. Thus we never really got into Prurient, until the Black Vase record. There was just something about that disc that spun our heads around, and had us yearning for more noise. Other than a few splits we haven't heard too much from Prurient (aka Dominick Fernow, who runs Hospital Productions as well as playing in Ash Pool and the Vegas Martyrs) since then, but this here brand new 7" ep just showed up and it's seriously damaged and brilliant, but maybe not in the way you might think. The A side begins just how you'd expect, a caustic vitriolic wall of sound, mostly vocals, which immediately sounds like just another dense slab of speaker shredding ultranoise, that is until the vocals drop out, and reveal what is lurking underneath. The vocals are so in the red and blown out that they swallow everything within earshot, so when they pull back, they reveal a crumbling soundscape of smeared melodies and blurred ambience, still noisy for sure, but also haunting and abstract, with fucked samples a bits of dialogue, and the occasional brief blast of white noise fury. The flipside is even weirder. Some sort of distorted synthpop, like Depeche Mode through a set of blown speakers, then some super creepy processed vocals come in, and the track devolves into another hazy and distorted stretch of obscured beauty, with a fucked up lopped low end outro. Maybe the 'nicest' thing we've heard from Prurient. Probably not noisy enough for the noise crowd, but definitely weird enough that it might just appeal to the Hecker / Fennesz blurred sound crowd, if they can handle a bit of brutality with their beauty...

Not sure what it is exactly, but the days of Prurient being a full bore noise band are long gone. We're guessing it has a lot to do with Prurient aka Dom Fernow joining Cold Cave, the shift seemed to coincide, and not that we're complaining, we've never been all that into harsh noise ourselves, and we much prefer the more melodic, less harsh side of Prurient, but even we weren't prepared for this new double 7", which is most definitely the most mellow, and melodic, and subtly striking Prurient record yet. It makes sense when you discover that these were essentially conceived as sketches for the record that would become Bermuda Drain, another Prurient record that had us marveling at how much the group had changed, but these tracks, even as sketches, are pretty lush and lovely, surprisingly mellow certainly, but still dark and brooding. The first single layers sample voices, children talking and laughing, over drifting dreamlike swells, over which a weird muffled vocal rumbles wordlessly, the sound shimmery and washed out, laced with bits of glitch here and there, the feel layered and collaged, and quite lovely. The flipside is even more ambient, all glistening and crystalline high end drift, distant vox buried in the mix. The second single begins with a hazy whir, and soon introduces a murky buried almost house-y percussive pulse that runs throughout the A side, slowly blossoming into deep lush melodic drones. The B side is the strangest of the bunch, the main chunk of the track, a warped bit of abstract guitar strum, weirdly tuned (or perhaps it's a harpsichord), a disembodied alien folk of sorts, bookended on both sides by more hushed minimal drifting drones. Super swank packaging too, full color jacket, with artwork by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, both records pressed on different colored vinyl, with sensationalist tabloid record labels, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, each one hand numbered.

You might think that the results of a collaboration between Prurient and Kevin Drumm would be nothing but a seriously noisy and speaker destroying affair, but then you'd be underestimating these guys, and the extent to which they've pushed the noise music envelope. The last few Prurient records have been less about caustic abrasion and more about dark soundscaping, more about drones and darkness less about shrieks and blinding fury, and well, Drumm has always been capable of a soft touch, and often tempers his brutality with gorgeous melodicism. With that said, both of these guys are perfectly capable of whipping up serious squalls of crumbling chaos, and do so here and there on All Are Guests, but the key in noise music, at least for us, is dynamics, and these bursts and blasts of sonic fury that pepper the landscape are perfectly balanced by long stretches of subtle drones, field recordings, whirring atmospheric buzzscapes and creepy vocals. The opening track sets the stage and is a strange one, a dark, lugubrious crawl, with slowed down ominous vocals, reminds us quite a bit of AQ faves Burial in fact! But with a bit more Whitehouse mixed in. A lurching low end slither underpinning haunting disembodied vocals, you can't help but expect some stuttery dubstep beat to drop, although it never does of course. "On This Slab" is more a proper noise track, with howled distorted vocals, crunchy blown out electronics and glitched out malfunctioning buzz, but all chopped up and arranged into a strangely melodic noisescape, laced with little bits of melody, and dense grinding chunks of almost-melodic buzz, not to mention some spare tranquil stretches. The there's "There Died Venus", a washed out super distorted slab of crumbling blissdrone, gorgeous melodies buried beneath a roiling sea of ultra blown out crunch and buzz, strange rhythms surfacing amidst the constantly shifting layers of whirring sound, in the background a near constant upper register shimmer, wouldn't be all that out of place on a Tim Hecker disc. "Though The Apple Is Rotten" sounds almost like a straight field recording, the sounds of children playing, footsteps, wind random clatter, but in the background there's a lot of other sonic stuff going on, hard to tell if it's just tape hiss, or if the band has woven a delicate backdrop, either way, it's quite cool. "In Long Rows" is a 10+ minute chunk of minimal dark ambience, think Lustmord, Coleclough, Chalk, but with a bit more grit, a bit more hiss, maybe slightly more lo-fi, and with a brief resurgence of those murky pitchshifted vocals from the first track. Finally, the last track finishes things off with, well, not a bang, but a burst of grinding whirring, mechanical chaos, like several Wolf Eyes jamming at once, a rumbling rusty metal beast, busted gears and blown speakers, a giant unholy machine designed to do nothing but make this glorious noise, a deep resonant distorted voice, speaking beneath the din, buried below ground in some ancient hellish oratory, the sound seeping up through black cracks in the ancient soil. And even then, as the duo expel a cloud of noxious drone and buzz, they still manage to make it sound almost dreamlike and dangerously close to pretty.

MPEG stream: First Memory Of Pain
MPEG stream: On This Slab

Yet another DIY electronic-industrial album from the wacked archives of Alain Neffe. This Belgian was a mover and shaker in the cassette culture of all things industrial, post-punk, minimal wave, and otherwise zonked musics in the '80s. His Insane Music imprint released something close to 60 cassettes, most of which were compilations of his own constellation of projects including Bene Gesserit, Cortex, Human Flesh, and Pseudo Code. His work garnered one of the early Vinyl On Demand boxset; but that only covered a small sliver of Neffe's output and a number of labels have embarked on the daunting task of sifting through all of that material. Pinkity Plonk has now published three such Neffe / Insane reissues, first being that wistful Cortex collection of sci-fi tone poems (which we lauded as a Record Of The Week back in early 2012), the second being a Human Flesh album (albeit with that project 'pretending' to be Pseudo Code), and now a proper collection of Pseudo Code material. Pseudo Code was ostensibly a trio of Neffe, Xavier S., and Guy-Marc Hinant (who later went on to found Sub Rosa Records), and With Helpful Hands finds that trio augmented by some of Neffe's other cohorts. Pseudo Code operates well within Neffe's visionary pursuits of snaking drum machine rhythms, ominous synth chords, and scatterings of judiciously extemporaneous sci-fi guitars. These four lengthy tracks including one drugged-out, 34-minute voyage of inner/outerspace explorations simultaneously recalling Conrad Schnitzler, the Legendary Pink Dots, and Cabaret Voltaire. Limited to just 300 copies, we might add!

MPEG stream: From Land to Land
MPEG stream: Report to Authorities
MPEG stream: Let's Get It

The sticker on the cover sez: "A collection of sound waves to disturb your air-space! Journey to the dark side of drone psych!" Well, okay. This mysterious Psychatrone Rhonedakk fellow was last heard 'round here in the company of former Acid Mothers Temple keyboardist Cotton Casino on their collaboration entitled Baron Von Rhonedakk and the Crystal Sun. His new solo disc is again an exploration of dark, synth-heavy psych, full of haunted hippy percussion and whooshing electronics jamming in total '70s krautrock style. You'll also hear his gentle vocals on three cover songs, tracks written by Warren Zevon, Bill Martin, and Peter Sando of Gandalf (whose "Can You Travel In The Dark Alone?" is such a freaking great song -- get the Gandalf reissue on Sundazed to hear the original, you'll be glad you did). I'd buy this just for Rhonedakk's droned-out Gandalf cover, personally, 'cause I like them and that song so much, but all the moody, Moogy spacescapes found here are also an attraction.

MPEG stream: Can You Travel In The Dark Alone?
MPEG stream: Ground Zero Station

Another band we were in love with before we heard a single note of music. C'mon, they're called Psychedelic Horseshit! And they're on Siltbreeze. And they sound almost exactly how we imagined, only BETTER. Willfully noisy and chaotic, snotty, snarky and blown out, in the red, a complete feedback drenched dissonant pop shamble, it's like a mad scientist beneath some mountain top somewhere, discovered the gene for the Siltbreeze sound and injected it into these guys when they were babies, ensuring that they would blossom into this, perfectly fucked up freaked out noise drenched pop miscreants. And pop is the key here. Cause these guys at their core are a kick ass pop band. Little nuggets of crunchy jangle, but dipped in filthy amp buzz, and rolled in busted casio beats, doused with liquid LSD, plugged into an amp with a blown speaker, set up on a street corner, and blasted into the empty street at midnight in the pouring rain. The clatter and clang of old Pussy Galore, yelped distorted vocals, like a punk rock Dylan, that whiny drawl, all around it crumbling distorted bursts of psychedelic guitarnoise, a totally damaged snarling lo-fi punk rock jangle, like the Strokes via the Strapping Fieldhands. Or the Dead C covering Pavement. A glorious, chaotic, hook filled crust pop mess. Awesome.

MPEG stream: Nothing Is Revealed
MPEG stream: Portals
MPEG stream: Rather Dull
MPEG stream: New Wave Hippies

NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL!! This former record of the week available on lp for the first time... Over the years, there have been plenty of records that have become AQ hallmarks, the Conet Project, a quadruple disc of short wave spy transmissions, The Ghost Orchid, EVP recordings of the voices of long lost loved ones as intercepted via radio waves, the Thai Elephant Orchestra, a real live elephant gamelan, and of course Laddio Bolocko, a rock group that made the most beautiful white hot, black hole noise we had ever heard, a seriously jaw dropping blast of superdistorted, ultra complex, psychedelic prog rock freak out. When LB disbanded, half the band went on to form Electric Turn To Me, a curious neo-cabaret act complete with icy campy female vocals and a sort of new wave Krautrock sound. Definitely interesting but not at all what we were hoping for from a post LB outfit. So along comes The Psychic Paramount, featuring the -other- half of Laddio Bolocko, guitarist and bassist Drew St. Ivany and Ben Armstrong, joined by the drummer from Sabers, and it is EVERYTHING we could have hoped for and more. It's like they took Laddio Bolocko and just smashed it to bits, reassembling all the parts into a gorgeously Frankesteinian blown out, fuzzed out psych rock, bizarre and beautiful, chaotic and always on the verge of falling apart. The record starts off with almost three minutes of dreamy, noisy, backwards psychedelic bliss out, equal parts My Bloody Valentine and Teenage Filmstars, keening hyperdistorted guitars, dreamy sunsoaked melodies, that awesome percussive fthhhhp sound of backwards drumming, all in supercharged splattery Technicolor swirl. The rest of the record is some sort of outerspace Krautrock, where the order of the day is still hypnotic and motorik, but this is not Neu! or Faust, not unless you took those guys, lit them on fire and launched them into space! Guitars careen and wail and keen and shriek, slipping fluidly from gorgeous melodic runs to full on fiery freakouts, all over a thick snarled bed of throbbing serpentine bass and ultra distorted drums (recorded so hot that every hit sends the needle even MORE into the red). This is like an indie rock Last Exit, or a more freaked out metallic This Heat. It's not just noise and pummel though, these are killer songs, the guitar parts especially, not only are they so complex and confusional they make you think this band must have at least three guitarists to whip up this sort of squall, but they are totally hook laden, which they sort of have to be as The Psychic Paramount are all instrumental. You'll totally find yourself anticipating certain riffs and licks, like you would your favorite line in a normal song. This record effortlessly steps all over pretty much every record in its path, it's not metal but manages to be way heavier than half the metal we hear, it's not really prog, but it's so much more complex and, well, progressive than nearly ANYTHING we've heard, and on top of everything, it's totally catchy, and noisy, and weird. It's really weird. Lots of that is just the sound of the record. In fact the recording is as important as the drums or the guitar or the bass. Ultra blown out, drenched in organic fuzz and room noise, super hot and in your face, with occasional tape drop outs and natural reverb and recording level abuse that adds a whole 'nother layer to the already dense sounds herein. The record finishes off with a completely confounding, but totally killer one two punch. "X-Visitations" is a ten minute free noise dirge, equal parts, SUNNO)))-like rumble and Sunroof!-like shimmer, that just sort of slithers and vibrates. The final track, "Gamelan Into The Mink Supernatural", starts off as a jazzy shuffle, building slowly in intensity and distortion, until it's a roiling relentlessly propulsive pummel, before it just cuts out suddenly, only to burst back into motion after an entire minute of silence! So awesome.

MPEG stream: Megatherion
MPEG stream: Para5
MPEG stream: Echoh Air

Over the years, there have been plenty of records that have become AQ hallmarks, the Conet Project, a quadruple disc of short wave spy transmissions, The Ghost Orchid, EVP recordings of the voices of long lost loved ones as intercepted via radio waves, the Thai Elephant Orchstra, a real live elephant gamelan, and of course Laddio Bolocko, a rock group that made the most beautiful white hot, black hole noise we had ever heard, a seriously jaw dropping blast of superdistorted, ultra complex, psychedelic prog rock freak out. When LB disbanded, half the band went on to form Electric Turn To Me, a curious neo-cabaret act complete with icy campy female vocals and a sort of new wave Krautrock sound. Definitely interesting but not at all what we were hoping for from a post LB outfit. So along comes The Psychic Paramount, featuring the -other- half of Laddio Bolocko, guitarist and bassist Drew St. Ivany and Ben Armstrong, joined by the drummer from Sabers, and it is EVERYTHING we could have hoped for and more. It's like they took Laddio Bolocko and just smashed it to bits, reassembling all the parts into a gorgeously Frankesteinian blown out, fuzzed out psych rock, bizarre and beautiful, chaotic and always on the verge of falling apart. The record starts off with almost three minutes of dreamy, noisy, backwards psychedelic bliss out, equal parts My Bloody Valentine and Teenage Filmstars, keening hyperdistorted guitars, dreamy sunsoaked melodies, that awesome percussive fthhhhp sound of backwards drumming, all in supercharged splattery Technicolor swirl. The rest of the record is some sort of outerspace Krautrock, where the order of the day is still hypnotic and motorik, but this is not Neu! or Faust, not unless you took those guys, lit them on fire and launched them into space! Guitars careen and wail and keen and shriek, slipping fluidly from gorgeous melodic runs to full on fiery freakouts, all over a thick snarled bed of throbbing serpentine bass and ultra distorted drums (recorded so hot that every hit sends the needle even MORE into the red). This is like an indie rock Last Exit, or a more freaked out metallic This Heat. It's not just noise and pummel though, these are killer songs, the guitar parts especially, not only are they so complex and confusional they make you think this band must have at least three guitarists to whip up this sort of squall, but they are totally hook laden, which they sort of have to be as The Psychic Paramount are all instrumental. You'll totally find yourself anticipating certain riffs and licks, like you would your favorite line in a normal song. This record effortlessly steps all over pretty much every record in its path, it's not metal but manages to be way heavier than half the metal we hear, it's not really prog, but it's so much more complex and, well, progressive than nearly ANYTHING we've heard, and on top of everything, it's totally catchy, and noisy, and weird. It's really weird. Lots of that is just the sound of the record. In fact the recording is as important as the drums or the guitar or the bass. Ultra blown out, drenched in organic fuzz and room noise, super hot and in your face, with occasional tape drop outs and natural reverb and recording level abuse that adds a whole 'nother layer to the already dense sounds herein. The record finishes off with a completely confounding, but totally killer one two punch. "X-Visitations" is a ten minute free noise dirge, equal parts, SUNNO)))-like rumble and Sunroof!-like shimmer, that just sort of slithers and vibrates. The final track, "Gamelan Into The Mink Supernatural", starts off as a jazzy shuffle, building slowly in intensity and distortion, until it's a roiling relentlessly propulsive pummel, before it just cuts out suddenly, only to burst back into motion after an entire minute of silence! So awesome.

MPEG stream: Megatherion
MPEG stream: Para5
MPEG stream: Echoh Air

A haunting, damaged and enchanting new musical endeavor/state of mind from local soundstress Leyna Noel. Using primitive and crumbling electronics, distorted murky guitar and captivating vocals, Noel taps into a very fuzzy, buzzy, witchy and sonically rewarding state of sound. The opening track "Omni" is noisy and deliciously disturbing, roaming in a territory similar to early Pocahaunted and recent Inca Ore, although the true show stopper is the next track which is a completely breathtaking adaptation of Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come", here transformed into something that sounds both so modern yet timeless, spellbinding, hypnotic endearing. While her vocals are buried beneath many layers, the secret weapon and what really sets this apart from so many other like-minded warped/bedroom creations is that Leyna really does possess such an amazing and powerful voice, an instrument that she channels into a truly dense and tripped out atmosphere. Just under 15 minutes of music but a totally great introduction to what is no doubt just the beginning of what will be a long journey for Psychic Reality. Imagine what could happen if Grouper, Kuupuu and The Skaters joined forces and begin to get a glimpse into the exciting otherworld that Psychic Reality inhabits. There is also a new Psychic Reality cassette that we have in called Real/Chic that we hope to list next time but they might not last long so might be smart and grab one of those now as well.

MPEG stream: Change
MPEG stream: Omni

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

SORRY.

Two-way split from these two weirdo soundscapers, the debut vinyl release for Leyna Noel, aka Psychic Reality, after a whole mess of super limited cd-r's and tapes. She lets it all hang out (on the naked sparkly cover too), spreading a clutch of interwoven songs over a whole side, letting them all blend into one organic whole. A dizzying mesh of primitive home brewed new wave avant pop, skittery looped rhythms and weirdly chantlike vocals, playful little almost-African sounding melodies, eventually adding a thick layer of buzzing feeding back guitar, a heaving, churning swirl, that sounds almost metallic, but at the same time weirdly poppy, that mechanical rhythm and Noel's soaring vox the link between the various movements. Blown out fractured cold wave noise pop gives way to hushed abstract ambient drift, which gives way to squalls of Eastern style skronk, and intense swells of howling caterwaul, a haunting intense Diamanda Galas / Lydia Lunch soul purging, only to slip back into a dark swirling abyss, tranquil and shimmery. LA Vampires are a whole different can of warped distorted musical worms, sounding more like a floorcore, underground noise version of Madlib, taking snippets of old tapes, dusty, scratched up records, adding lots of effects, random bits of noise, extra vox, all under a haze of tripped out lysergic crackle and hiss, a patina of bongsmoke and druggy warble, flutes flutter, voices flit, beats, lurch and shuffle, everything twisted and washed out, and seemingly melting very very slowly right before your ears, cool cool stuff for sure. LIMITED TO 450!! With awesomely sexy, sparkly, painted, hippy, nude cover art.

We managed to get a very small handful of this very limited, Not Not Fun, Bored Fortress series split, between Psychic Reality and Sex Worker (Daniel from Mi Ami). And what a nice slab of damaged and entrancing sounds it is. Sex Worker's side is a Blondie cover transported to an underworld within an underworld of sound that is both decaying and roaming in another orbit, which had us imagining Cupid Car Club remixed by Excepter, Replikants (that awesome Justin Trosper side project) or Black Dice. Psychic Reality continues to really come into their/her own as this track finds her bringing moments of beauty and sweetness into an overall fucked up and disorientating sound. Fresh off her split with LA Vampires, this finds her sound lurking somewhere between early Gang Gang Dance and a much more primitive version of what's been radiating out of the witch house scene as of late. We would gush even more but like we said we only have a handful of these and once they're gone they are GONE for good. So you know what to do....

While the rest of the world has been reveling in the resurgence of the cassette tape, some folks have been taking it a step further, and going full VHS! Video Horror Show is a label who releases VHS tapes, which feature not only music, but also appropriately enough accompanying psychedelic visuals. Past releases have included the electro goth witch house of Masacara, and the droned out abstract psychedelic black metal of Suffer The Shards Of The Lost Cult Of Silence, which was in fact members of Woe and Absu, and now comes Psychic Teens, which weirdly enough might sonically fall right in between. Described by the band as "the time you saw your creepy metalhead brother at 80's night" which isn't really that far off. Imagine a sound that was equal parts dirgey psychedelic metal, and broody deep vocal-ed goth, and you'd have the Psychic Teens, and we have to say, it's a pretty bad ass sound. Especially if you're tired of all the wimpy twee eighties throwbacks, this is more like a metalized Sisters Of Mercy or Kommunity FK or Fields Of The Nephilim, with some thick squalls of blown out shoegaze psychedelia mixed in for good measure. The sound is dark and gloomy, a little poppy, a lot heavy, the guitars thick and crunchy, the vocals deep and dramatic and wreathed in echo, this is the sort of eighties throwback we can get behind for sure. And these three songs have definitely whetted our appetite big time! The accompanying video is appropriately VHS looking, mostly live footage of the band, but super grainy and gristly, with plenty of old school interference, the pic flickering and flipping, as if it was being viewed on an old TV with a busted horizontal hold, a playback of an old videotape that had been in a box under the stairs for the last twenty years. Awesome. Nicely packaged in a cool old school style VHS case, with printed grey on white covers, and recorded onto a white VHS tape, includes a download coupon as well! LIMITED TO 75 COPIES!!

MPEG stream: Rose
MPEG stream: Arm

We first heard Philly psychedelic shoegaze death rockers via their VHS tape (!) released on Video Horror Show, and as we mentioned in that review, the band describe themselves as sounding like "the time you saw your creepy metalhead brother at 80's night", which while hilarious is really pretty spot on. The guys are most definitely gloomy and gothy, thick Joy Division-y basslines, reverbed dramatic vox, all moody and minor key, but beyond that, they buck lots of gloom pop and goth rock convention by tethering that stuff to big muscled drum pound, clouds of wild psychedelic guitar freakout, not to mention dense distorted guitars, reminding us at time of Bailter Space, thus the shoegaze vibe, the result a sort of eighties death rock, cranked up and spaced out and metalized, in fact that Bailter Space comparison definitely taps into what makes us dig these guys so much, cuz in some ways, with the noisy guitars and thick bass, and the deep vox, they almost sound more like some super obscure Flying Nun band from the eighties, who put out one lp that no one really heard but that still pretty much destroys everything else you've heard. They also remind us of AmRep Aussies Kingsnakeroost and Lubricated Goat, that sort of noise rock blues stomp just gothed up a bit. Plus they pepper their gloomy crush with blasts of almost punk sounding crunch, which makes them seem even heavier when they slip back into the churn and pound. These guys must kill live, which definitely seemed to be the case from what we could discern from that VHS tape (of which we have a few copies left), and this record oozes the sort of live energy most recordings lack, which of course means this is WAY recommended, for fans of gloomy heaviness, metallic gothrock, psychedelic shoegaze deathrock and other sonically similar genres we just made up! Pressed on white vinyl, housed in a cool striking heart-art cover, with a big white 'x' affixed to the outer sleeve. Includes a download coupon as well!

MPEG stream: YUNG
MPEG stream: KIRA
MPEG stream: ROSE

Newly available on vinyl again, the 1983 second album from Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson's experimental collective Psychic TV after the demise of Throbbing Gristle remains one of our very favorite aural documents from the entire post-TG catalog. It almost reads as a companion piece to TG's 20 Jazz Funk Greats in that it invites unusually accessible chamber folk and pop tropes into their sound only to subversively twist them into something much more underlyingly sinister. Recorded using Zuccarelli Holophonic technology to create an atmospheric spatiality of near and faraway sounds (this is a headphones record if there ever was one!), the group was then able to record in some very unusual places like The Hellfire Club Caves (a notorious British site of aristocratic Satanic liturgies and hedonistic ritual) and take advantage of the systems 3D effect. The album's mixture of sweetness and light with ritual creep and foreboding is at once beautiful and deeply unsettling and on first listen it's hard to decipher what you are hearing and its mystery still beguiles 21 years later. We're invited in by the melancholy pastoral chamber pop of "The Orchids" with its vibraphone, guitar and oboe and Genesis' dueling vocals welcoming the morning light in innocent VU "Sunday Morning" fashion. But then the totality of the album swings from reverential to eldritchly mystical and from remotely animalistic to eerily brutal and back again mimicking the cycle of a day or a season as it moves between songs and strange far-off occultish musique concrete. There are lots of guest appearances both real and invoked. Monte Cazazza is heard reciting lyrics over the phone, and one can hear Jhonn Balance of Coil getting a tattoo. There is an angelic choirboy singing a Charles Manson song, and most notably on the track "White Nights", a sweet Christmas-y pop number is sung by Genesis (with doo-wop backing vocals, no less!) with lyrics creepily taken from Jim Jones final sermon at Jonestown. Throughout, bells intone, chants are muttered, a lot of acoustic exotic instruments are played with atmospheric intentions more than melodic ones. But the full power of the collective's brutal aural abilities culminates in the penultimate track - "In The Nursery" - which invokes fairytale symbolism and ritual and industrial soundscapes in a nightmarish blend of hellish terror. Essential listening!

MPEG stream: The Orchids
MPEG stream: White Nights
MPEG stream: Eden 1
MPEG stream: In The Nursery

A throwback of sorts to the ritual esoterica of late 80s industrial culture, Psychonaut sets down trance inducing percussive tracks of tribal drums, Tibetan horns, and Crowleyian incantations not unlike the earliest Current 93 or ritual Psychic TV recordings.

Psychophysicist is a one off collaboration recorded back in 1994 between Andrew McKenzie (better known as the Hafler Trio) and Adi Newton (Clock DVA, The Anti Group Conspiracy). The two claim to be working under a Gurdjieffian approach to science and sound as a method towards metaphysical knowledge and gnostic understanding of the universe. That said, McKenzie has been known to exaggerate Sonically speaking, both McKenzie and Newton are no slouches, although some of Clock DVA recordings are painfully dated within Industrial culture. The Psychophysicist collaboration brings together their mutual interests in psychoacoustics - the ability of sound to affect the mind and body in profound ways. Within the record, complex hypnotic sweeps of radio static are processed to resemble the tonal patterns of interlocking sinewaves, sounding much more like Hafler Trio than The Anti Group and much more than Clock DVA. Furthermore, close observers of the Hafler Trio's work will recognize elements from "Masturbatorium" and "Mastery of Money," as the recycling of sound elements within different contexts had become an increasingly important agenda for McKenzie throughout the mid-90s. As the Hafler Trio albums - once overflowing experimental bins across the globe - are now becoming scarce, this would make an excellent introduction into McKenzie's work.

Carly Ptak, one half of Chicago's Nautical Almanac, presents her solo effort through her own Here See label. Hot rodded primitive electronic machines and overdriven contact mics are manipulated and sonically mutilated by this young experimental music killer.

RealAudio clip: You're Your Yore

Fuck. Puce Mary. Her real name is Frederikke Hoffmeier, she's a striking Dane who hails from the post-punk / art collective Posh Isolation, which may be known best outside of Copenhagen through the retro charms of Lust For Youth and the punk snarl of Iceage. There are charms to the noise of Puce Mary, with those charms being nekromantically violent, libidinally impure, and just fucking sick. The historical thread of Puce Mary's work traces all the way back to the true crime litanies of Throbbing Gristle's "Very Friendly" and "Hamburger Lady" cast upon bleak arrangements of nauseating electronics. There's plenty of nods to the equally seminal works of SPK, Brighter Death Now, Whitehouse, Premature Ejaculation, and Wolf Eyes; but it has to be said that most every major figure and visionary author of power electronics is a dude. Puce Mary / Hoffmeier represents one of the few great female artists wholly operating within this insular aesthetic. As we noted before in earlier discussions on the work of Puce Mary, Pharmakon is an obvious contemporary with considerable presence; but Puce Mary's overall catalogue exhibits greater breadth and better ideas. So here stands the epic album Persona, which counts as her second solo lp (alongside a wealth of hard to find cassette releases and a couple of collaborations). The militant, mono-rhythmic pound on "Courses" is raked with squalls of distant pierced tone and a sickening electronic blurt that sounds more like Cosey's coronet than anything electronic. The vocals are buried in demonoid distortion, tremolo, and flange - a conflation of effects that run through the death industrial ethos dating back to the early '80s. The recurrent vomiting and retching (presumably from Hoffmeier) on "The Viewer" dots the horror-synth sound design of sustained atonal church organ drones, Hellraiser squiggliness, and disembodied bone-saw whirr. The slow crawl of doomy timpani on "Pigs" looms with empty spaces by what could be poltergeist activity and the commanding voice of hers again buried in throat-ripping FX. There is a refinement to Puce Mary's work that's rare within the sewage-work of the id produced through industrial culture; but that refinement doesn't eschew the raw, existential negativity that boils through Persona. Death-industrial at its finest.

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It's inevitable that Frederikke Hoffmeier (aka Puce Mary) is gonna get compared to Pharmakon, as the number of women producing the sour and sick tones of high caliber, industrial malaise is paltry at best. Pharmakon's mini-album Abandon was certainly a highlight for 2013 through her blighted electronics, bloodcurdling vocalizations, and the abject imagery of larvae crawling across her bare legs; but we did have to wonder if Pharmakon had more to offer than those four scalding tracks, wondering if she was just a flash in the pan, creating a visage that adopted the violence and terror of industrial culture as a marketing ploy of shock in order to rattle / titillate the nerves of the fainthearted. Enter Puce Mary, whose output of noise-culture vulgarities easily outpaces that of Pharmakon, with an impressive slew of sadly impossible to find cassettes and lps (including a handful of releases on the Iceage related Danish imprint Posh Isolation). Her voice is at the center of The Great Panic, uttering desolate screams, longing sexualized moans, glossolalic ululations, and barked declarations that may or may not be understandable to her fellow Danes; and she buries all of this amids carpet-bombed detonations of crusty noise, mutant bass-synth pulsations, and atonal flurries, pushing her work as a distillation to the necrotic pall of Brighter Death Now, the hyperbolic tautologies of Whitehouse's delerium, and the scabrous distortion of Mauthausen Orchestra. Bad vibes guaranteed.

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Ultimate Hypocrisy is another cassette only release from Denmark's reigning queen of noise -- Puce Mary (aka Frederikke Hoffmeier). The tape is a bold statement of power electronics and noise tactics that eschew much of the overtly troubling imagery found throughout the genres, in favor of a more poetic adaptation of existential nihilism. It begins with an uneasy, marching churn of chirping electronics latched onto a grinding locomotive plod, all processed through crude machines and effects recalling the classic industrial murk of SPK, Anenzephalia, and Factrix. She follows this with a horrifying piece of sound poetry that would make the demented aktionist Otto Muehl proud, through an extended passage of psychosexual sobbings and moanings adjoined to a gloomy, creepy thrum of blackened emptiness. The unsettled spaciousness of this track emphasizes her vocal gasps and deep throated utterances that might have been lost had she taken a wall-of-noise approach. Elsewhere, Hoffmeier does belt it out in a staccato, militant delivery although the content is thoroughly obscured through heavily flanged effects and the complement of juggernaut metal-on-metal bashed rhythms. Razor-slashes of caustic noise, coarsely rendered oscillations, paranoid-as-fuck tension, and sick-sick-sick tones foul the air throughout the remainder of the tape. Of course, it's recommended!

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The found photos of the dead racoon, the family posing with the dead lion and the beer-swilling truck driver provide little clues into the mysteries of Puddle Theory (although I like to think that the beer-swilling trucker made this record in the extensive 'home studio' in the cab of his 18 wheeler). Dark and gritty washes of processed feedback with ominous sweeps of electronic isolationism, Puddle Theory's self-released cdr is a worthty entry into the realm of black energy drone, inhabitted by Xenakis and Arcane Device and others.

Another blast of Stooges-via-AmRep noise rock snarl and swagger from these Ohio heavies, and like their Siltbreeze full length, they kick up a seriously dense noisepop din, the vox slathered in distortion, the riffs blown the fuck out, the drums a buried barely there pound, tons of effects, lo-fi, but still in the red and LOUD, the A side has a killer dubbed out / tripped out chorus, that sends the vocals careening through clouds of buzz and crunch, and there are even some wildly skronk horns in the mix. The flipside takes the same sound, and slows it down, turning it into a serious slab of noisy sludgey pummel, chugging and churning, a blurred, buzzy, druggy dirge that hides a pretty kick ass hook, which leads right into the brief instrumental closer, a short sharp chunk of fuzzy garage punk jangle, all wrapped up in squiggly psychedelic leads, atonal and angular, noisy and chaotic, but still jangly and poppy and weirdly catchy. Super rad!

That's right. Another killer collection of sci-fi space drone synth bliss from big time aQ fave Pulse Emitter. And yeah, this one is again, crazy limited. Only 100 copies made, we got the very last 20. Which means once these are gone, we will NOT be able to get more. And since we're fairly sure there are more than 20 people out there in aQ land who wand, nay NEED, all things Pulse Emitter, we'll keep this brief. Grass, while not as 'oppressive' as the recent Oppressive Nature release on Digitalis, and not as meditative as the three part Meditative Music series, manages to fall somewhere in between, probably a little closer to the meditative side of things, we'd say. Slow burning dreamdrones drifting through space would sum it up in a sentence, but why leave it at that. The sound on Grass is epic and expansive and space-y, definitely a Pulse Emitter disc that would hit the spot for all you Expo 70 obsessives, the same sort of space kraut vibe. Loooooong tones undulate and shift, melodies surface and dissipate, laced with some strange Morricone like faux flute melodies. The foundation is a dense throbbing low end, layered and gorgeously textured, shifting overtones and barely restrained feedback, but above and all around that main drone, various layers and melodic fragments drift and shimmer and float weightless as if in orbit around a brilliant black star. So gorgeous. Definitely recommended, as is grabbing one of these quick before they disappear. Already out of print, these are again, the LAST 20 copies. Packaged in super nice full color sleeves.

Daryl Groetsch - the one-man synth symphony better known as Pulse Emitter - has just answered one of the more commonly asked questions by passersby, but strangely on of the more difficult questions for us to answer: Do you have any music for massage? That question gets addressed here at Aquarius more often than you might think; and the answers that *we* would like have as the soundtracks to our massages (i.e. SUNNO))), Corrupted, Lustmord, Hazard, Thomas Koner, hell, even Merzbow might work for us!), well they just don't seem to cut it for most folks. So with this series of contemplative and un-cheesy ambient recordings, Pulse Emitter has that perfect record that we can recommend for that particular purpose; and it certainly works for us in terms of drifting to sleep music as well. The first installment of Meditative Music unfurls a stream of undulating synth lines, whose phase pattern shifts and oscillating tones are hypnotizing in their own right; then a set of crystalline tones calmly rise and fall at a pace that seems to always be getting just a little bit slower. That's pretty much all that happens with Meditative Music, but it works very well. This is great inner-cosmos exploration music using the simplest of techniques that probably the ambient pioneers of Cluster, Eno, and Schulze would not have shied away from. As Groetsch put it, here's an excellent album for "sleep, massage, or any activity where a peaceful and balanced sound environment is desired."

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Daryl Groetsch - the one-man synth symphony better known as Pulse Emitter - has just answered one of the more commonly asked questions by passersby, but strangely on of the more difficult questions for us to answer: Do you have any music for massage? That question gets addressed here at Aquarius more often than you might think; and the answers that *we* would like have as the soundtracks to our massages (i.e. SUNNO))), Corrupted, Lustmord, Hazard, Thomas Koner, hell, even Merzbow might work for us!), well they just don't seem to cut it for most folks. So with this series of contemplative and un-cheesy ambient recordings, Pulse Emitter has that perfect record that we can recommend for that particular purpose; and it certainly works for us in terms of drifting to sleep music as well. The second installment in this series features a soft bit of white noise undulating in the distance, acting much like a field recording of wind, surf, rain, or any combination you would prefer. Above this, Groetsch gradually unfurls a revolving set of notes from one of his modular synthesizers that overlap in various combinations, occasionally creating nifty harmonics, but mostly gradual swells and blossoms of Doppler-effected tones. There's nothing ominous, nothing cheesy, nothing hackneyed about these drifting ambient passages - just great music for, as Groetsch puts it, "sleep, massage, or deep reflective thought." Nice.

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Daryl Groetsch - the one-man synth symphony better known as Pulse Emitter - has just answered one of the more commonly asked questions by passersby, but strangely one of the more difficult questions for us to answer: "Do you have any music for massage?" That question gets addressed to us here at aQuarius more often than you might think; and the as far as music *we* would want as soundtracks to our massages (i.e. SUNNO))), Corrupted, Lustmord, Hazard, Thomas Koner, hell, even Merzbow might work for us!), well they just don't seem to cut it for most folks. So with this series of contemplative and un-cheesy ambient recordings, Pulse Emitter has that perfect record that we can recommend for that particular purpose; and it certainly works for us in terms of drifting to sleep music as well. The continuation in the Meditative Music series brings us to the brightest of the three released so far. A slow, shimmering oscillation of an interwoven set of synths from Pulse Emitter's patch-bay modules gird the entire album which is dotted by a series of chiming bell-tones placed above. This is more of a record for summertime daydreaming than of the introspective meditations found on the previous two. Still a potent opiate through sound despite the warmly rounded tones of the album. Groetsch offers a brief description of this one: "placid waves for reflective times."

The fourth in Pulse Emitter's series of Meditative Music cd-r's, and like the first three, another hour long expanse of warm liquid synthmusic, designed, according to Mr. Pulse Emitter himself, Daryl Groetsch, as the perfect music for "sleep, massage, or deep reflective thought" or as an album ideal for "sleep, massage, or any activity where a peaceful and balanced sound environment is desired." Which this most definitely is, minimal, spacious, spare, abstract and ambient, lush and hushed, softly pulsing synth swells drift in and fade out, leaving lots and lots of space, eventually, the various swells overlap and are layered into blurred stretches of barely there melody, the notes stretched out into long blurred streaks of chordal thrum, allowed to ring out and fade nearly to silence, before another note takes its place, a sort of space music, the soundtrack to the cosmos, or an ultra minimal Carpenter style soundtrack, dark and languorous and so mysterious, the perfect music for mediation or relaxation, but also perhaps to accompany gazing into the heavens, or wandering across moonlit vistas. Besides the usual synth suspects, Pulse Emitter's Meditative Music definitely reminds us of folks like Leyland Kirby/The Caretaker or Indignant Senility, their strange gauzy ambience definitely an analog for PE's hushed sonic dreamworld, if anything, PE taps into the same sort of wistful melancholy, it's definitely relaxing and serene, but it's also infused with a certain amount of pathos and mystery, that evokes thoughts and memories of other worlds, lost memories and forgotten pasts, a lovely chunk of electronic minimalism, that will definitely appeal to anyone into abstract sonic wonder and dreamlike kraudronedrift.

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Oppressive Nature couldn't be a more apt title for this album from Portland's wizard of analogue synthesis Daryl Groestch (aka Pulse Emitter), or at least for the opening track of this album. Through and through, this is a far cry from the pastoral ambient sensibilities administered through his surprisingly great Meditative Music cd-r series. A grim curtain is cast from the onset, with squelching distortions, animalistic grunts, and wounded chirps propagated through electronic means. All of these blistered, cracked, and abused noises are strategically placed on a rumbling battlefield of crunched-low end rumblings, lending comparisons of today to Wolf Eyes and UW Owl and of yesterday to SPK and Factrix. Groestch lets off the distortion pedal for good chunks of Oppressive Nature, relying upon his filter-sweeping modulations and sinusoidal oscillations to craft isolating, deep space atmospheres. Weirdly majestic melodies counter the streams of noise generated throughout the untitled second track, eventually overtaking the noise amidst a series of tightly appregiated squiggles. The fourth cut hangs a sequence of revolving tones of phased dissonance upon a hyper minimal structure of tiny clicks and glitched pulses, which had they been generated digitally could easily fit within the Raster-Noton ethos. The album glides to a stop with windswept drones laced with distant clouds of feedback, white-noise, and one of Groetsch's melodic motifs.

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The good news is that there's a new Pulse Emitter, another collection of dreamy analog drift, softly serene meditative new age synthscapes, laced with muted rhythms and softly swirling abstract melodies. The kind of stuff we, and you, can't get enough of. The bad news, is that we COULDN'T get enough of it, literally. This is out of print already, and we only have 4 or 5 copies, after selling half of the batch we got, which was already less than half the number we ordered. So apologies, we tried our best, we figured we might as well list the copies we had so that way, at least a tiny handful of folks will get a copy. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES (why?!?!), nice, thick offset printed covers, and again, already OUT OF PRINT.

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First vinyl release from this one man sci-fi synth slinger. Two epic sides of blown out, FX drenched synthesizer spacescapes, drones, and rippling fields of alien bleep and bloop. All produced from a handful of homemade synth modules. The first side is wild and playful, total b-movie sound effects, tripped out and bizarre, atmospheric, buzzy and squelchy, like some long lost recording from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Lots of these sounds would be right at home on an episode of Dr. Who! The flip side is much less playful, more dark and moody, dreamy stretches of fuzzed out drones, very cinematic and Goblin-like at times, a constantly shifting soundscape of rumbling atmospheric murk, peppered with little bits of damaged synth noise. Awesome stuff. Gorgeous psychedelic cover art, full color paste on black sleeve, with a full color insert. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!!

After the darker, more cinematic buzz and whir of Pulse Emitter's recent The Palace Of Love cd-r, Spiritual Vistas, the latest from Daryl Groetsch, aka Pulse Emitter, finds his sound, as the title might suggest, returning to a zone much more dreamy and washed out, ethereal and kosmische. Four looooong tracks, all variations on that dreamy PE space-synth krautdrone shimmer, the sonic element linking the various tracks together this time around seems to be a super melodic almost new wave sounding synth bassline, that pulses right below the surface, offering a sort of anchor to the otherwise light and airy sounds above, the opening track is a sort of kosmische kraut lope, which gives way to full on Tangerine Dream style ethereal new age swirl, but still held together by that low end pulse. The flipside starts off with lush string like swells, all majestic and warm, lush and layered, minimal melodies hovering over constantly shifting backdrops, rife with overtones and subtle sonic colorations, the sound so dreamlike, meditative and tranquil, like new wave, blurred and smeared into a sun dappled shadowy impression, before slipping into the final track, which revisits the ominous, more darkly cinematic vibe of the above mentioned cd-r, adding some buzz and crunch to the hazy whirl of prismatic thrum and droned out lysergic shimmer. So nice. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!

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

SORRY. One of our favorite Portland Modgular synth wizards is back to business with another deeply dreamy dose of synthisizer bliss. Per usual, Sunset Into Night is limited to an edition of 100, a down-right shame considering how much we dig this spaced out new outing. Falling somewhere between his Meditation series and a loosly knit Goblin, Sunset Into Night shimmers, sails and dissipates into the cool evening air, all the while inviting the listener on a cinematic journey through analog dream zones and icey modualr drips. Deep, glacial drones lift off into infinity, gorgeous notes and sounds flutter and errupt through buzzing filters and ambient wash, so nice. But not all is sunny and blissful in Pulse Emitter's world, the dreamworlds give way to moments of somber reflection, quiet sonic shrines to dusk and the setting sun. Moments of tension dissipate into the sinking tide, darkened tones pulse and hover in blackened ambiance, all oozing into a pool of nu new age grime. We dig Pulse Emitter's tendency to walk the line between light and dark, borrowing equaly from new age soundscaping and dark ambient synth magik, so rad and so recomended!

Latest batch of swirly swooshy, psychedelic sci-fi synth new age drift from Pulse Emitter, aka Daryl Groetsch, and since we've raved on and on about PE over the course of close to 15 releases (and those are just the ones we were able to get enough of to list) we most definitely risk repeating ourselves, which is probably okay, as this is another perfect installment in Groetsch's ever expanding catalogue of otherworldly synthscapes. This one is crazy limited too, we only have about 15 copies, and it's already out of print so odds are these will be gone in a flash, fans, you already know what you're instore for, and probably want to grab one of these quick. Newbies, prepare to be transported to some strange futureworld, but one as envisioned by our 1980 selves, rocket cars, and space probes, cities in orbit around dying planets, whole worlds buried beneath the ruined surface. We can't help but envision Logan's Run, especially on the first track here, a percolating arpeggiating synthscape laced with laser beam effects and deep buzzing ominous basslines, super soundtracky, and evocative of some low budget sci-fi future. The second track is a bit more sun dappled and new agey, but is cut from the same cloth, so in some ways it almost sounds like the love scene from that imaginary future, but it too is laced with weird swooping low end buzz, and strange streaks of blooping and bleeping FX, which transform the tranquility of the main synth lines into something a bit more dramatic. After a short-ish, music box like synth ballad, thick swells beneath tinkling melodies, comes the 10+ minute closer, a sprawling expanse of sci-fi space kraut synth drone bliss, super spare and abstract, dreamy and woozy and mediative, hazy and hypnotic, and the perfect soundtrack to drifting off, and floating weightless into space. So good. And again, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Already sold out at the label so these are indeed the last copies we'll be able to get...

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Killer match up between Pete Swanson of the Yellow Swans (and also overlord of the mighty Jyrk Collective label) and Pulse Emitter, a one-man synth outfit from Portland who not only whips up a serious wall of analog sound, he also builds his own gear, and has been making his own synths for years. Eat your hearts out Wolf Eyes. Actually, Wolf Eyes would not be a bad reference, although this collaboration is not nearly as caustic or abrasive as Wolf Eyes. In fact, it's downright soothing in a way. The opening track is a swirl of thick warm fuzzy washes of analog synth, like floating weightless in a sea of buzzing whir, neither soft nor sweet, but more a sort of roughly smooth. The second track is a bit more noisy, lots of high end, definitely testing your aural stamina, but in there somewhere is some melody, although it would take a suit of armor and some shock proof pliers to find it. The final track is a gorgeously creepy drone, almost like someone took the least structured Goblin track, and sort of smeared it into a single slow shifting tone, still rife with creepy tension and all sorts of haunting goodness, eventually letting the track explode in a frenzy of thick fuzz and some serious Merzbowian rrroooaaaar! LIMITED TO 150 COPIES. WE GOT 30 COPIES, ONCE THESE ARE GONE, THEY ARE GONE FOR GOOD, IT'S ALREADY OUT OF PRINT AT THE LABEL!

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Originally scheduled to be released earlier this year on Record Store Day, this was easily one of the most anticipated RSD releases, which now, just a few months late, is finally here! Avid aQ list readers probably don't need to know much more. After all, it's four different aQ faves spread out over two lps: Pulse Emitter, Peaking Lights, Date Palms and Faceplant (Aaron Coyne of Peaking Lights), each offering up a whole side of unreleased material. But in case you do need a little more to go on� Pulse Emitter, aka Darryl Groetsch delivers two length drifts of celestial synthscapery, all new age raga shimmer, soft swirling swells, dreamy melodic cascades, all woozy and washed out, ethereal and abstract, laced with playful melodies and lush ever shifting textures. Date Palms deliver a sidelong slab of smoldering psychedelic minimalism, one that starts out deep and droney, but soon blossoms into something much more rhythmic, a super skeletal sprawl of krautrock like mesmer, driving by a spare programmed rhythm and a thick buzzing bassline, wreathed in sitar like buzz, the vibe laid back and swoonsome, with just a hint of sinister malevolence, the perfect soundtrack for endless highways through darkened deserts, with the various elements gradually growing more and more dubbed out before slipping into a final stretch of hushed mesmer. Expo 70 starts their side off with some Sabbath like riffage, low slung and swaggery, and then the drums kick in, and we're in full on metal territory, classic old school doom, who knew they had it in them? Sure they flirted with it in the past, but here they go for it. The heavy riffing and caveman drum pound is laced with some more psychedelic breakdowns with killer sorta shredding leads, the sort of spaced out stoner rock jam that could go on forever, but here eventually winds down into an oozing sprawl of muted black buzz. The second track is more what we're used to from Expo 70, at least at first, a sort of brooding cosmic shimmer, thick layers of synth and guitar whirring and swirling beneath a cloud of shimmering soft focus FX, but soon the drums come in, the track ominously and malevolently krautrocky, before blossoming into full on psychedelic space rock blowout, a sky full of tangled leads, the drums pounding and propulsive, the bassline woozy and fuzzy and darkly driving. Another mega jam that needs no terminus, but before it's cut off by running out of vinyl, the drums drift off, leaving just the guitar again to slowly fade out. Faceplant's side opens with a cosmic disco version of Coynes' Peaking Lights, all dubbed out and psychedelic, but seriously groovy, and darkly funky, squelchy synths, spacey shimmer, plenty of reverb and echo, squiggly synth melodies everywhere, total retro-futuristic dubfunk grooviness. The second track is much more murky and laid back, sounding like a way more psychedelic and tripped out Muslimgauze, lurching rhythms, beneath a sky full of effects heavy swirl, more synth pulsations and an almost housey throb buried underneath, before finishing things off with a track that finds Coynes doing his best Carpenter / Goblin style synthscaping, a warped VHS soundtrack dipped in dub and sent spaceward, heady and hypnotic. Killer stuff from all four groups. And as you might have imagined, LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES. Includes a download coupon as well.

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From jaunty opener "Eye Bath" onward, this album is one that surprises and delights and offers so much interesting DIY recorded avant-drone *texture* along with its actually quite catchy indie-pop song-iness! We always knew we liked the music of New Zealander Stephan Neville, aka one-man-band Pumice (also a member of The Futurians), he's definitely been in there amongst all the cool, home-taped dronological sounds appearing on obscure cds, cd-rs, cassettes, lathe-cut vinyl and so forth from his entrancing island home that we've been geeking out about over the years. But all the releases tend to overwhelm. Not just Pumice's, but Birchville Cat Motel and Omit and Peter Wright and Antony Milton all the rest. We can't always devote our full attention. And actually, Pumice's previous album, Yeahnahvienna, released a year or so ago on Soft Abuse was a bit ho-hum we thought, we didn't even ever get around to reviewing it. A lot of it was too stripped down and acoustic, revealing too much of the vocals which aren't really Mr. Neville's strong suit. But we're glad we didn't miss this new album! It's different, dense, infectiously fuzzed, and really really good (one of those albums that gets all the AQers coming up to the counter to see what's playing when it's on). Actually our interest in Pumice was rekindled by the recent underground NZ comp on Xeric, Need For A Crossing. Neville, along with Pseudoarcana's Antony Milton, curated it, and it featured several cuts by Pumice and other projects of his, which were quite striking. So suddenly were were like, hmm, Pumice, hey let's be sure to check out this new disc Pebbles. And lo and behold, it's a winner. Like we said, Pumice makes lo-fi indie rock, the Dead C and the Velvet U are both likely influences, also all the rich history of NZ indie awesomeness from labels like Xpressway and Flying Nun, artists like The Clean, Tall Dwarfs, and Alastair Galbraith. The music here is damaged, reverbed, distorted, as much about sound as song. Regarding Pebbles, Pumice claims Moondog and Simply Saucer as inspirations -- while we might not have thought of those disparate outsider references, they're not so outlandish when we think about it. And although Neville has a reputation for gloominess, the sheer pop umph buried beneath the lo-fi grit and noise of these tracks can't be denied, and tends to balance the depressive effects of the doleful droniness also much in evidence. Yeah, there's moments of rollickin' destroyed rock as well as an experimental folkiness that Richard Youngs fans will dig... and again if you like ye olde Xpressway style NZ indie stuff this is gonna be a blast. Another reminder for us here at AQ that we need to make a New Zealand section in the store again, like we used to back in the day!

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For the last 14 years, New Zealander Stefan Neville has been issuing a steady stream of cassettes, lathe-cuts, cd-rs, 7"s and other assorted slabs of mysterious small-run skronk under the Pumice moniker. Somehow through it all Neville has managed to find a comfortable spot nestled in between two very distinct strains of NZ music-making. At their heart, the songs he writes are pop songs obviously indebted to the legacy of Flying Nun, The Tall Dwarves and The Clean; that said, his willful disregard for fidelity, his love of tape hiss, wow and flutter, garbled vocals and blasts of harsh drone are a tip o' the hat to kiwi noiseniks like Birchville Cat Motel, Dead C, and Antony Milton. It's a compelling combination, as it allows his records to be both densely textural and supremely melodic - for every piece of blown out headphone candy, there's a memorable vocal or frighteningly catchy guitar riff. It's this incredible tug-of-war between (as we put it in our review) "doleful drone" and "sheer pop umph" that made us flip out over the last Pumice full-length, Pebbles, and we're happy to report that Neville's latest, Quo, finds him refining the Pumice formula in all the best possible ways to create a record full of impish charms, slack anthems, rambling bedrooms hiss, and speaker fried drone assaults! Quo opens with "Pumice Quo," a song that hints at what is to come on the rest of the album: fuzzed-out, atonal guitars klang and skree like some sort of netherworldly faux-sitar over a ragged, swinging stomp that effortlessly mutates back and forth with a breezy, expansive, half-time swagger. Rhythmically and structurally it's all angular and math-y but it never sounds cold or analytical - it's like some incredible mix of Doc At The Radar Station and Celebrate The New Dark Age where you can't tell if it's Beefheart covering Polvo or vice versa, but everything sounds perfectly fucked up and damaged but so inexplicably catchy at the same time. Likewise, "World with Worms," a creeping, rumbling, blown-out, billowing sea shanty that mixes Neville's signature, mannered (almost goth, really) vocals with a teetering melody pounded out on some sort of half-broken chord organ or accordion. The first half of the record continues to cast a few different lines - "Fort" sounds like some sort of classic mid-'90s B-side pop anthem you'd expect from GBV or Boyracer buried under 10 feet of shrieking keyboard noise; "Thermos in the Studio" is a winsome bedroom pop instrumental that would sound right at home buried amongst the ruins of Pavement's Westing (By Musket and Sextant) with lyrical slide guitar melodies that are simple, gorgeous and over in an instant; "Pebbles" is 2 minutes of rambling, shuffling, ramshackle pop. However, everything starts to come together with the second half of the record, as "Whole Hoof" looks back to the Polvo/Beefheart battle royale of the album opener but this time ads layers of distorted howling vocals. It starts out like Simply Saucer plowing through some freaked out rockabilly jam but mutates into something completely creepy and sinister at the end. The album's second half is incredibly strong and manages to focus the scattershot elements of the first half without sacrificing any of those songs' chimpy playfulness. There's a darker element that emerges, but it never overwhelms the whole proceedings. "Sick Bay Duvet" starts out like a lost Fahey side being played back on a broken down gramophone, all rumbling, twanging, echoing, and slightly out of tune. When drums, melodica and a low, throbbing drone finally kick in at the end, it changes into something completely different - a kind of dour, anti-anthem that leads perfectly next track, "Dogwater," whose warbling, garbled take on Blackheart Procession's western goth vibe manages to come as both tongue-in-cheek and gracefully mannered. Things get stronger still with the last three songs: "Heavy Punter" is a solemn funeral shuffle built around a fractured Beefheart/Polvo riff filled out by ghostly keyboards that woosh and drone in and out of the background and fantastic, layered, pseudo-goth vocal stylings; "Battersby" is almost like Pumice's stab at punk rock with Casio tweeters battling against four on the floor drums and stumbling, disaffected vocals that wouldn't sound out of place on a Fall record (the whole thing comes across like some weird mashup of a NZ cd-r salvo and something off of a Messthetics comp - bizarrely catchy and certainly one of our favorites!); and album ender "Beak Remedy" is 7 minutes of blissed out, see-saw chord organ drone, ghostly tape loops, fluttering, stuttering ambient flickers of feedback, hum and hiss with percussive clomps that sneak in toward the end until the whole thing trickles out with choppy puffs of feedback and static. All this adds up to a brilliant mix of pop songwriting and freaked out fuzzmongering that has been perking the ears of both customers and staff since it first arrived. We're confident that Quo is going to show up on many of our year end best-of lists, and we think you'll feel the same way about this blissed-out, smashed to pieces, melodic, thoughtful, mannered, playful and thoroughly recommended record!

MPEG stream: Pumice Quo
MPEG stream: Heavy Punter
MPEG stream: Whole Hoof

Another slice of prime lo-fi New Zealand "pop" music. But pop only in the absolutely loosest sense of the world. Pumice, AKA Stephan Neville, crafts a haunting, murky, off kilter, otherworldly sort-of-pop music. Lots of warble, both instrument and malfunctioning tape, big ol' reverbed guitar, super distorted heavily affected melodies that sound like high pitched alien transmissions, mumbling marbles in the mouth vocals, clattery percussion, damaged motorik rhythms, not exactly in tune guitars, angular riffing, all cobbled together into one big beautiful chaotic pop mess that sounds a bit like a battle of the bands between the Dead C and the Velvet Underground, after all had partaken of the complimentary pot brownies, the secretly spiked punch, the PCP popsicles, oh and all that horse tranquilizer.. Damaged and druggy and darkly delirious, truly bizarre but strangely beautiful

MPEG stream: In Space (On The Burst)
MPEG stream: Pipes

Re-release of two out of print cassettes from 1998-2202. Indie rock, but of the fuzzed out, buzzy and drone-y, ramshackle EXTREMELY LO-FI variety. Jangly at moments, sparse and damaged at others, noisy and spastic at others. Cool and weird and pretty fucked up. Includes a handful of extra live tracks! MPEG Download: "The Lady Of The Pitch" [/audio/pumicelady.mp3] MPEG Stream: "The Lady Of The Pitch" [/audio/pumicelady.m3u]

MPEG stream: The Lady Of The Pitch
MPEG stream: Tank In The Hole

MPEG stream: Embrace The Place
MPEG stream: The Space Writer Proves Everything Is Possible

Underground NZ drone pop from Stephan Neville, veteran of many a cassette and cd-r release. Some really nice moments, particularily in its second half. But we'd wouldn't put it in the front rank of Pumice releases 'cause it suffers a bit from being too acoustic-y in parts (we like the thick, distorted stuff instead) which tends to put too much stress on his singing, which isn't perhaps his strong suit. Fans certainly should check it out though.