"Spawned from the formidable Louisville, KY collective known as Black Velvet Fuckere (Valley Of The Ashes, Phantom Family Halo, Kark, etc.), Sapat resides as the centrifugal force in this Midwestern psychedelic madrigal set in the psychosexual backwaters of the mighty Ohio River. For the entirety of the '00 decade, members have kept busy collaborating with and/or massaging the egos of various and sundry avant-pontiffs such as Robert Fripp, Magik Markers, Dead Child (David Pajo's metal band. That's right, David Pajo!) and Eugene Chadbourne -- when not honing the orgone energy of Sapat."
We always assumed that Denmark's Sarah's Charity must include Matthew Bower of Skullflower, or Marcia Bassett of Hototogisu, or at least someone from Heavy Winged or Double Leopards or one of those sorts of bands. They have the same sort of slow burning heaviness going on, the washed out walls of psychedelic swirl, grinding guitars, keening streaks of high end. Another one of 'those sounds' we can't ever seem to get enough of.
Ends up SC are indeed from Denmark, and do not count any American or British noise rock ringers among their members, which is just as well, as these guys can totally hold their own, and then some, whipping up a seriously dense and deliriously blown out soundscape of buzz and blur and shimmer and rrrroooaaaaar. The other cd-r we had from SC was equally guitar heavy, but here, the sound seems significantly murkier and more muted, softer even (softer being relative of course), giving it a more dreamy drone-y sound which is no bad thing at all. But fear not, this is still fierce and prickly and caustic and HEAVY, just sort of pretty too.
We only have a handful of these, it was LIMITED TO 150 COPIES (each with a hand numbered insert), and they've been waiting for a while to get reviewed and listed, so pretty sure these are long gone and out of print at the source, but while they last, we got em here...
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Another new, mysterious missive from Heavy Blosssom, the cd-r label run by Marcia Bassett of the Double Leopards and Hototogisu and Matthew Bower of Skullflower, Hototogisu, Sunroof!, Total, etc. Did lots of digging but couldn't figure out a damn thing about this Sarah's Charity outfit. There are guitars. LOTS of 'em. And we're talking the sort of guitars that sound like they are playing themselves, lit on fire, squealing and squirming, snapping at you every time you reach toward the amp and try to turn it down. Sharp and prickly, thick coruscating walls of white hot, buzzing snarling guitars. This is definitely a 'noise' record. But it's also somehow a psychedelic guitar record. By the sound of it, this could be either Bassett or Bower, just sort of going apeshit with a guitar, and about a million watts of amplification and the biggest distortion pedal in the universe. After a few minutes the distinct guitar-ness of the sound begins to blur and distort and all sorts of strange melodies and alien textures begin to emerge. For being very LOUD, and very heavy, and quite harsh, it's also strangely soothing and droney. An amazing, massive acid fried psychedelic free noise outerspace freakout. Released on Hototogisu's Heavy Blossom label. As always, SUPER LIMITED. We only got a handful. Packaged in a hand painted fold over cardstock sleeve. Be careful though when you put this in your player. The cool hand painted disc seems to dry and flake, so before you throw this in, give it a good blow or brush, and then hang on...
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First release from this brand new duo, made up of one part Tom Carter (Charalambides) and one part Pete Swanson (Yellow Swans), gorgeously presented as a one sided clear vinyl lp, the other side featuring silkscreened artwork from Grouper's Liz Harris, housed in a thick clear vinyl sleeve.�
Both these guys bring out the best in the other, dense tangles of chiming metallic shimmer, drifting harmonics, whirring amp buzz, keening feedback, bits of scrape and shuffle, dotted with tiny squalls of burnt psych guitars, swooshing ambience and lots of drifting space.�
The sound is murky, but vibrant, notes and chords spread into a thick slow shifting fog of fragmented melodies and wavery bits of guitar grind. On the surface, this is raw and wild, untamed and even mildly abrasive, but these guys manage to deftly smooth it all out into something downright pretty, without losing any of the raw fire or visceral immediacy.�
As with most things like this, it's also super limited...
We listed the first release from Sarin Smoke a while back. It now seems to be back ordered or our of print or for some reason unavailable, we're working on getting more back in, but in the meantime, they've returned with yet another lp only slab of dreamy, blessed out guitar explorations. The 'they' in this case being Pete Swanson from the Yellow Swans and Tom Carter from Charalambides.
This is absolute nirvana for guitardrone fanatics. Huge glowing arcs of grinding distorted guitars, massive swells of whirring low end incandescence, whispered minor key creep, creaking buzzing shimmering ambience, tinkling melodies, throbbing humid riffing, spare and spacious, contemplative and meditative, but with occasional stretches of almost straight rock riffing, and once in a while bursts of fiery psychdrone radiance.
Limited to 652 copies. Pressed on super thick 180 gram vinyl. And while they last, the first 287 lps comes with a cd (not a cd-r, an actual cd) with the same music for listening and Ipod-ing ease!!! Packaged in super heavy letter pressed sleeves with original artwork from Liz Harris of Grouper.
This is the stuff we like! Slow moving vinyl crackle and click, achingly pretty. Droning melodiously, hum and repetition beautifully employed, this conjures a mood of reverie and melancholic bliss. Saule is the name used by Belgian composer Xavier Garcia Bardon for his turntable-based works, and this Sub Rosa cd is his debut release. The first thing we were reminded of when we heard this was Philip Jeck. You know how much we love that British looper of scratchy old vinyl, right? Like Jeck, Saule also finds music in the grooves of old records -- that is, in the sound of the needle on wax, as well as what's more commonly considered a record's musical 'content'. And like Jeck he's a careful listener, rather than a hyperkinetic whipwhipwhap dj. Futhermore, both Saule and Jeck use multiple turntables to elaborate an aesthetic enamored of dusty, glacially-paced drones. But although they have much in common, Saule isn't merely just another Jeck. No, Saule is more like Jeck crossed with a post-rock band! But there's no 'band', just Saule's prepared records, three turntables, a microphone, mixer, and "headphones (for feedback)". With Philip Jeck, the mesmerizing, crackling loops can be their own reward, but Saule will provide some rock-like resolution as well, as with the sudden burst of distortion that heralds the addition of a sampled, broken drum break toward the end of track one, "Hola". Especially when you get to "Lido", the third of three long tracks that comprise Sentimental Journey, you'll hear this post-rock thing we're talking about. Codeine mixed with Radian comes to mind. "Lido" was apparently originally conceived as a soundtrack to an independent film, stills from which enliven the cd packaging. And it, like the other tracks here, has a cinematic quality, though it might well overwhelm any visuals. This disc is a stellar exampleof 'turntablism' in a non-hip-hop context -- as we said, it's more like instrumental post rock instead, although we're sure DJ Shadow fans will like this! We suggest playing it loud, which will be especially effective when track three swells into something grand that Godspeed could never match.
The 1988 collaboration between the two noise-saxophone titans of the legendary improv outfit Borbetomagus and well-known Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore. Classic squall, now on a domestic cd.
Apparently, a concept record about the children of the future and the terrible legacy we are leaving to them on this planet, with children's voices, jazz guitar, electronics, gamelan, record crackle, field recordings, etc. Japanese musician Sawada is kind of a "kitchen sink" style composer, heavily utilizing the sampler and the studio, but all his sounds are quite beautiful and/or intriguing.
While this might MEAN more to those who speak either Japanese or French, Sawada's music has plenty of charm on its own, without the context the narration provides. Some may remember his excellent and mysterious Base of Fiction cd from 1994, which was similiar but more "rock" (with members of underground Japanese bands like the Ruins joining in).
Tokyo artist Sawako crafts her delicate, minimal ambient soundscapes from interwoven slivers of piano, voices, field recordings among other things.
The results are ultra ethereal and soothing. She would fit very well in either the Mort Aux Vaches or 20' to 2000 series. Hum also features additional instrumental contributions from Taylor Deupree, Aoki Hayato and Kenneth Kirschner. For fans of Deupree, William Basinski, Oval, Colleen and Pan Sonic.
Omnibus is a gorgeous collage of donated sound. Various contributors (Polmo Polpo, Tu'M, Hypo, Yuichiro Fujimoto, Birds in Tokyo and more) each presented various bits and pieces of sound: songs, found recordings, misplaced melodies, snippets of vocals, little chunks of rhythm, all of which were twisted and tangled and stretched and smeared into a gorgeous droney soundscape. The resulting pieces seemingly bear no relation to the original sounds. Instead, they managed to be pretty cohesive suite of soft shimmery sort-of-songs, all cobbled together from looped hiccupping warbles, damaged music box melodies, tape hiss, lo-fi recording detritus, detuned guitars, muted percussive thump, skittery shuffle, blooping bleeping video game sounds, skipping cds, little bursts of some disco-y techno chopped up and reassembled, and loads more impossible to pick out source sounds. But the final product really is more than the sum of its parts. A deliriously dreamy weird and wonderful world of sound.
Do you like sax? Do you like the Ruins? Then, hey, have we got a deal for you! Ruins drummer/mastermind Tatsuya Yoshida teams up with jazz improviser Ono Ryoko (alto sax) in this new unit, Sax Ruins (sorry, no idea what that name means, how did they come up with it?). The Japanese band Ruins has been Yoshida's vehicle for heavy duty, ultra mathy, Magmoid post-punk prog mania since 1985, and has pretty much always been a drums / bass two piece, Yoshida accompanied by several different insane bass players over the years. Their last album was 2002's Tzomborgha, also on Mike Patton's Ipecac label... and then in 2004 bassist number four (Sasaki Hisashi) left the band, yet to be replaced as far as we know. So Ruins is now defunct, or at least on an indeterminate hiatus, but that hasn't stopped Yoshida from performing Ruins songs, in a mindboggling one-man-band format called Ruins Alone. And now, in the Sax Ruins duo!
As you might expect, it's hyper frenetic and jumpy, but also... boppy. The buoyant saxophone helps make this duo's uber uptempo activity feel positively infectious, a joyful noise indeed. And it's not all frantic musical athletics, there's room here for some really lovely, melodic passages too, as on "Epigonen". Ono Ryoko really pulls out all the stops, drawing on her experience playing not only jazz but also funk/R&B, prog, and psych (the latter in collaboration with Acid Mothers Temple). She delves into extended techniques, circular breathing and such, and somehow is a match for Yoshida in the endless energy dep't. Together, what they unleash here is exciting stuff, way more complex and catchy than your average freakout. Imagine a stripped down, pepped up marching band playing really wild Carl Stalling / Raymond Scott style cartoon music. And wisely, Yoshida has kept this instrumental, none of his crazy vocals getting in the way of the sax blasts.
The 17 tracks here include saxified reinterpretations of classics from the Ruins' vast catalog, such as "Hyderomastgroningem" and "Pallaschtom", plus some new tunes too, including the album's title track and grand finale, that one a showstopper for sure.
So, again, definitely for fans of Ruins - who also like saxophone. And those into the likes of Zu, Flying Luttenbachers, 16-17, Alboth, and other exemplars of jazzprogcore craziness. Oh, and of course any John Zorn / Naked City fan ought to be ecstatic! Dunno if we'll really need any MORE albums from Sax Ruins though, 'cause as cool as this is, we're still keen for more Bass Ruins...
Sayona is another one of those outfits that should have the aQ faithful frothing, a new group made up of several members of weirdo Belgian ritualistic psychedelic noise folk occultists Sylvester Anfang teamed up with a mysterious woman known as Shazzula, who most aQ folks probably know from the Black Mass Rising film, which we sold a bunch of, but who has also played with Aqua Nebula Oscillator, Farflung, White Hills, and Mater Suspiria Vision among others, together, they conjure up something weirdly kosmische and new agey, slipping easily from near static drugged out droney drift, to pulsating sci-fi synthscapery.
The tape opens with a field of pulsing static over thick swirls of layered synth murk, very
new agey but far more ominous and malevolent, a sinister soundscape of buzzing electronics, and muted buried rhythms, all wreathed in feedback and a layer of gauzy thrum. The sound blossoms into something a bit more corrosive, with thick guitar buzz unfurling over lush chordal swells, anchored by a programmed skeletal beat, that builds to an actual propulsive groove, darkly driving, giving it a definite machinelike robo-krautrock vibe, super mesmerizing and dreamily druggy, all over a woozy, lo-fi sprawl of celestial whir and hum, shimmer and soft skree.
The tape is weirdly edited, the transitions abrupt and jarring in places, as if someone was changing the channels, but it weirdly works with the overall vibe.
Imagine a mash up of tripped out retro-futuristic late night synth jam, murky blackened sonic ritual and hazy headtrip soundtracks for some super stoned end-of-the-world planetarium show. So good. And most likely VERY limited.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We've reached the eighth installment in Raster's monthly countdown to 2000, and this time it's Robin Rimbaud's turn. His contribution is a minimal array of pulses, blips and beats (nothing too surprising in that discription, now is there?). Very much a headphone listen--keep away from noisy machines.
From the liner notes: "The Scanner series of recordings features the intercepted conversations of unsuspecting talkers, edited into minimalist musical settings as if they were instruments." Robin Rimbaud is Scanner, recorded live in London, March 1995.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
David Shea, Robin Rimbaud, and Robert Hampson follow up their live in London disc with another from the French capitol.
Album number 4 from these home recorded synth rock improvisers, each one has been a beautifully hand assembled package rife with bizarre xerox collages that riff on retro-futurist themes, as does the music though in a more roundabout way. This is modular synth music that doesn't winkingly nod to the vast past of synth heavy music, but takes a more DIY off the cuff attitude towards shaping its sounds and song. Though we can hear strains of groups like Chrome, Add N To X and Stereolab, Scantily Clad don't seem to try and emulate either of those bands instead focusing on a hodgepodge of moods and tropes: Noisy interludes, distorted shoegaze psych, vibrant pop, kosmiche bliss, and avant experimentation. All with strange titles like "Vacant Stare World Exciter" and "Exotic Fabrics And Materials". This is library music for the new modern age!
5 is the magic number for this central California duo of stoner over-driven electronica, looped samples and big noisy drum breaks. The oddly monikered Scantily Clad not only celebrate their fifth cd-r release, but it contains 23 tracks (2+3=5), limited to 55 copies and priced to move at $5.55! That's a lot of high fives! But seriously, we have loved this duo since their first cd-r, their sound a home-brewed collaged confection of dirty over-driven electronics and big beats with a humorous Lynchian sensibility for melody, song titles and packaging, each one a hand-assembled venture of surrealist clip art collage and scrappy recycled cd cases from what must have been from those free AOL trial cds they used to mail out in the nineties.
On their fifth release, the sound is more sample-based and dreamier then ever before. Each track is a miniature world of vintage electronic soundscapery with often a mysterious jazz soundtrack vibe deconstructed, cut and repasted that reminds of something like Madlib or J Dilla remixing Dymaxion or Quintron, or a less self-aware Tipsy. Way eccentric and off-kilter, but also shimmery and narcotic, with occasional clipped vocal snippets peering through the stony layers of hazy sound, twangy strings, cascading harps and drum breaks. Super unique and very likely our favorite release from them so far. Again, LIMITED to 55 copies. Grab one while you can!
This very interestingly, artfully packaged disc is stickered with the information that the debut from Scatter includes a member of Scottish NYC-wavers Franz Ferdinand. And while at least of few of us here at Aquarius really like Franz Ferdinand, that fact is much less relevant to the sound of Scatter than that the nine member Scatter also includes percussionist Alexander Neilson in their ranks, who we only recently were introduced to via Neilson's excellent collaborative cd with AQ fave Richard Youngs, Ourselves. And Scatter indeed proves to be in line with the experimentation of Youngs and others in the UK free-folk underground. On Surprisin Sing, Stupendous Love, you'll find Scatter appropriately enough scattering their music with elements drawn from such diverse traditions as folk music and free jazz. There's some sweet female vocals, softly melodic *and* plenty of abstract, jazz oriented group blowing. Both Appalachia and Sun Ra are referenced. Less dense than delicate, but definitely lively and lovely. We think this is on roughly the same wavelength as the likes of A Silver Mount Zion, Vibracathedral Orchestra, and Black Forest / Black Sea, though sounding mostly unlike any of those.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We can't really think of anything from Australia that sounds like the post-punk / art-rock collective Scattered Order. Maybe bits of the Swell Maps or the very first SPK recordings, but Scattered Order were way weirder. The band formed in 1979 around a couple of blokes from Sydney bored with the prospects of pub rock riffs, taking any number of signal altering gizmos and throwing them into a jagged post-punk context. The band purposefully deconstructed what they came up with into a myriad of dubbed-out rhythms, hazy melodies struggling through the trebly din, angular stabs from guitars, junked metal, and electronics, and a go-fuck-yourself sense of humor.
Prat Culture was the first album from Scattered Order, having been self-released through their own M Squared imprint back in 1981. This was a record that teetered on the edge between control and chaos, with a jagged minimalist fug-rock, with spluttering table saw noises coalescing around jackbooted rhythms that looked forward to what Swans were doing just a year later on their eponymous debut. "Swiss Like Knives And Forks" was something of a 'hit' for Scattered Order, as it was much more a legitimate song with a driving rhythm section, a swaggering Buzzcocks-inspired guitar riff, and appropriately barked vocals. This was actually the track that made us jump at the chance to get a whole Scattered Order album, with a version of this song being included on the Can't Stop It 2 compilation of Aussie post-punk from a few years back. As thoroughly awesome as this one song is, it does stand out against the more amorphous excursions into monochrome riffs, druggist rhythms, atonal drones, and indifferent attitudes. "Slot Car Synth" recreates the accelerating roar from drag-racing through cheap machines and hammered rhythms, "Koo Koo Kamus" is an anti-groove dub track whose chicken scratch guitar rhythms are on par with the oddball post-punk expressionism of Sprung Aus Den Wolken, and other tracks have the feel of This Heat trying to work out how to play Mars songs.
This cd version of Prat Culture features all of the tracks from the "Screaming Tree" 7" - an equally impressive and equally obtuse recording, alongside a couple of live tracks that actually serve to complement the studio recordings without sounding tacked on at all.
A weird and wonderful find!
Janek Schaeffer worked extensively as an architect before shifting his aesthetic focus to sound design -- specifically, vinyl manipulation with modified turntables. On this recording, Schaefer incorporates field recordings into his signature magnification of slow turntablist actions, and utilises much more digital production than in his previous work, creating an exceptional album of drones, but full of eccentric details that remind us of Stilluppsteyppa. "Above Buildings" invokes Schaeffer's architectural fascination not only through the title, but with his compositional strategies as well, musically defining the space of a claustrophobic closet or a majestic open hall. Attention to detail keeps this record interesting, with surface noise being processed to sound like sizzling bacon fat and sawtooth distortion waves cajolled to release subtle melodies. Janek's digitized grey drones ebb and flow as if they were the somatic rhythm of some living architectural entity. Nice.
Before his commissioned performance at the Casa de Serralves in Porto, Portugal in 2002, Janek Schaefer spent several days accruing sounds from the surrounding areas. While collecting his usual armload of antiquated vinyl for his avant turntablist collages, Schaefer also made recordings of a Steinway piano as well as a series of gestural actions that made use of the building's natural reverb. The manipulation of that natural reverb -- both in the electronic manipulation of the pre-recorded sounds and in physical actions made during the performance -- were the crux of Shaefer's performance. The electronic aspect of "Black Immure" follows a similar path as his last couple of records "Pulled Under" and "Le Petit Theatre De Mercelis," with divergent currents of mysterious sounds abstracted into innumerably bleak surfaces. Schaefer punctuates his atmospheres with looped samples from those old records and the piano recordings, using a technique similar to Philip Jeck's, crafting those sonatas into oblique fragments of memory that have been faded beyond all recognition. Within these portions of the performance, the natural reverb of the space does blur the edges of each sound ; however, when Schaefer creates dense metallic clattering from slamming all of the windows shut in the space and dragging chains throughout the space, the reverb takes on an Industrial din. Altogether, "Black Immure" is an impressive piece of work.
MPEG Download: "Excerpt 03" [/audio/schaeferblack3.mp3]
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The third in this series of beautifully but annoyingly (according to several AQ-ers) packaged cds features AQ fave Janek Schaefer (the first two volumes featured Philip Jeck / Otomo Yoshihide / Martin Tetreault and Mika Vainio / Christian Fennesz). Recorded live in Brussels in April, 'Le Petit Theatre...' finds Schaefer in a mellow mood. And sounding not a little bit like Philip Jeck. Less looped sounding than Jeck, but still painting similarly sepia toned, fuzzy and murky soundscapes, with fluttering record crackle, low end thrum, warbly distant melodies, and dreamy gauzy atmospheres created out of layers and layers of rumble and hiss and whir and hum. This fifty minute track veers lazily from ominous dark ambient to free-drone to noisy clatter but always returns to the tranquil turntablescapes that we all find so damn irresistible. Probably one of my favorite Schaefer records so far!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Janek Schaefer - an architect turned sound sculptor - presents two 30 minute turntable collages that build slow moving paranoid drones, rich with amplified blasts of surface noise, vertigo inducing swells of RPM dynamics, and stochatic tones usually associated with musique concrete. Fans of Christian Marclay and Otomo Yoshihide's turntable work should certainly take note.
A while ago Janek Schaefer himself described a record by my band Coelacanth as "soulless" so I am happy to return the favor in my review of Schaefer's latest album "Pulled Under," but of course for an album that is admittedly based upon a novel by JG Ballard, soullessness, vacancy, and desolation is just what he's going for.
Janek Schaeffer works primarily within the scope of experimental turntablism, building his own twin and triple armed varispeed turntables. That said, it's rare to actually hear anything within his compositions that really reflect his tricked out gear, with no scratching at all and very little recognizable appropriations of pre-existing recordings. Instead, Schaefer runs this source material through a considerable amount of digital filters, often maximizing the sounds latent bass reflex and smoothing out the high end. Augmented with equally manipulated field recordings, Schaeffer's "Pulled Under" transforms itself into a cold piece of sonic abstraction, rippling with desolate sonar blips, washes of unknown textures, and refractions of deep, dark drones. Sure, it's soulless, but it's a great soulless.
So, we were playing this in the store, when a homeless guy, after bugging us incessantly for 'water' music, you know, like gamelan or Indian music (huh?), to combat the current water shortage and counteract the rampant petroleum consumption, asked if this Schaeffer record was broken:
"Why does this sound like broken 78s? Is this on purpose?"
"Is this to make money? The Beatles used music to make money, but I don't think this will make money."
"Does this make people happy?"
I'm sure it will make some AQ customers happy, as this is the sort of weird, high concept experimental stuff we dig so much. The first disc of this set is a one-sided lp entitled 'Skate' and refers to the skating of the needle across a record, not rollerskates. And appropriately enough, the record is cut wildly with brief bursts of static and grit, that will send your needle skating to middle of the record. Schaefer suggests this lp as a soundmaking tool, utilising your hands, or a 7" placed on top of the lp, to build clicking popping loops. It is accompanied by a 99 track, 20 minute three inch cd entitled 'Rink', designed for random play (of course), that incorporates a composition using sounds taken from the 'Skate' lp and live recordings from a skating rink installation in Ireland, extending the metaphor/pun even further. Glitchy and clicky and scratchy and staticky, perfectly pushing all those Jeck/Oval/Yoshihide buttons, that at least around here, can't be pushed often enough!
Janek Schaefer's Weather Report is a noticable contrast to the polished surfaces that twist through his previous albums of desolate isolationism, Black Immure and Le Petit Theatre De Mercelis. During his Residency in Minneapolis as part of the American Composers Forum, Schaefer was astounded by the hostility of the storms, tornados, snow, and cold; thus, set out to make a sound portrait of a Minnesotan winter. Schaefer didn't just focus on field recordings of weather, but of media sounds associated with weather. He offers the cryptic taxonomy of his sounds as "underwater ice skaters; flapping; old meteorological kit; leaf blowers; repairing weather damage; various 60's archive audio; melting ice, ski across snow, Minnesota forecasts on radio, in the car and on TV; Tornado chasing & test equipment; snow flakes landing on mic; squeaky tree; National Weather Service balloon launch."
Using very rough splices to join his material together, Schaefer looks back towards the pioneers of musique concrete to aid him through this psychogeographic piece of sound poetry. A brief 21 minutes long.
The Austrian noise artist Helmut Schafer died in 2007, leaving behind only a handful of recordings despite his constant travels to music / art festival around the world, including appearances at ARS Electronica and Documenta back in 1997. His work dealt mostly with psychoacoustic principles of intense frequencies at intense volumes, as such he found a sympathetic ear in Zbigniew Karkowski - who became a longtime friend and often collaborator. Yet, beginning around 2003 he came across some dismantled church organ pipes and began experimenting with alternative ways of activating the tones and timbres of those pipes, including a contraption of hairdryers that pushed small currents through the pipes to generate hushed, muffled tones. In building compositions through this system of organ pipes, he radically shifted away from the searing noise and towards a very quiet, contemplative electro-acoustic sound, involving violin, electronics, percussion, and ample pockets of empty space. Thought Provoking III is Schafer's final recording dating back to 2006 when he employed percussionist Will Guthrie and violinist Elisabeth Gmeiner to perform the piece in a Vienna church. In fact, Guthrie stitched this recording together from the rehearsal sessions and the performance itself, attempting to keep true to Schafer's wishes. The proceedings are solemn excursions in electro-acoustic mark-making built around those bellowing hums from Schafer's organ pipes amidst intermittent percussive flourishes, subtle gong overtones, sustained violin trills, and fizzling electronics. The non-repetitive clustered events sound akin to anyone from the Miasmah roster taking up the task of remaking late period Morton Feldman. For the final track of the album, Zbigniew Karkowksi took up remixing elements of Thought Provoking III into a piece reflective of Schafer's more volatile compositions. While full of the frigid vibration and electric toxicity, Karkowski shows considerable restraint in his remix, and constructing a poignant tribute to his lost friend.
A bit of a Schimpfluch kick going on at aQuarius lately, and that's hardly an infliction that's for the faint of heart. We recently got in the impeccable, existential blank stare of an album in G*Park's Sub, and now we have this super limited cassette from the overarching Schimpfluch-Gruppe. The loose knit Swiss collective of aktionists, noise tacticians, and performance artists mines the psychologically violent territories of the id, including the aforementioned G*Park, Dave Phillips (aka Dead Peni), Sudden Infant, and Rudolf Eb.Er (aka Runzelstirn & Gurglestock), amongst other malcontents. Here, the Schimpfluch-Gruppe is represented by Rudolf Eb.Er and Dave Phillips, neither of whom are artists known for their subtlety. Surprisingly though, this cassette is a rather slow burning affair based on manipulated field recordings. But lest you think this a droll exercise in phonography, Phillips and Eb.Er guide their composition into something very carcinogenic. Unsettled frequencies from dripping water and early morning bird twitter are extracted and molded into piercing drones, atonal billowing masses, and lurching loops of jittery white noise with horrific exasperated vocalizations from one of those two. Phillips in particular has a facet in his body of work that favors the hellish chorals of Southeast Asian insect noise that can be equally hallucinatory and terrifying; and that's not too far from what he and Phillips are doing here. Something around 100 copies in existence.
As you may have heard, Allan here just had a baby! And thus, our last in-between list's special theme was "baby music" - a bunch of suggestions by friends who are parents, of music that they liked to play for their newborns and infants. But, what has Allan really been playing for his little girl? Well, um, actually she's been hearing a lot of the things Allan has been working on reviewing for aQuarius. Fortunately for her, one of 'em was this disc, by German electronic experimentalist Gunter Schlienz, his first full-length cd after quite a few obscure cassette and cd-r releases over the past four or five years.
And it's totally baby-approved and appropriate, these delicate, otherworldly ambient instrumentals full of light and shade and (occasionally eerie) blissfulness, with titles like "Immaculate", "Numb", "Lament", "Shimmer", and, oddly enough, "Janitor".
Schlienz's modular synth and field recordings create Cluster-y swells of sound, moving in gentle waves adorned with simple sweet melodies and darker drones. A few of his friends, including Norm Chambers (aka Panabrite, also the guy who actually made the Science Of The Sea album by "Jurgen Muller" we liked so much) appear as guests on here as well, adding strings, piano, etc.
We're not really sure if Allan's baby likes this a lot or not (hard to tell, as yet), but HE sure does. Consider Contemplation to be a lovely, peaceful set of abstract electronic lullabies for adults, and possibly their children too! Limited to 300 copies, btw.
Oranur III is a classic postindustrial album from Schloss Tegal, a cryptic American duo who traded in death-shroud ambience and paranoiac aesthetics - both of which feature prominently here. Originally, released back in 1995, the album drew inspiration from the latter day ideas of Wilhelm Reich. This Austrian psychoanalyst from the early 20th Century had attempted to reconcile Marxism and psychoanalysis, causing the beginning of a rift with some of the more conservative elements within his field. Over time, his ideas about human sexuality and the energies of the human body became more radical and more bizarre, including such notions of orgone energy and its convoluted mythological system that included extraterrestrial beings, UFO manifestations, deadly forms of radiation, and his tool to fight such nefarious entities - Reich's cloudbuster.
It's these more metaphysically loaded ideas that Schloss Tegal are employing as allegory for the demise / deterioriorization of society, paralleling much of the critiques mapped out by Genesis P-Orridge, SPK, and Monte Cazzaza in the heyday of industrial culture. Schloss Tegal settles all of their tracks with a heavy, foggy atmosphere that gives the sense of being anesthetized whilst various engineers and technicians probe, prod, and invade the body. Murky repetitive samples, some of which speak directly to experiences with extraterrestrial beings, cycle throughout Schloss Tegal's mercury poisoned dronings and irradiated windstorms of blurred noise. The work is not quite as oppressively dark as Brighter Death Now, but embraces a similar existential horror. Great to have this one back in print, now with two bonus tracks not found on the originals.
Better known for his post-Kraut rock electronica as Pluramon, Marcus Schmickler has also been tinkering with the ideas of academic composition. He claims that his interest is a "confrontation with modern classical composers," and that "innovations are only
Marcus Schmickler (aka Pluramon and Wabi Sabi) expands his electronica experimentations creating a surreal open-ended album of painterly textural sounds. Certainly for fans of Jan St. Werner's more experimental outings (Microstoria and Lithops).
Drone. DRONE. DRRRRROOOOOONNNNNNNE. That's what you get on this recent Hapna release by Pluramon's Marcus Schmickler. He's teamed up here with someone less well-known to us, New Zealander Hayden Chisholm, who is apparently a quite successful saxophonist and new-music composer. But Chisholm's not playing saxophone here, instead he's playing bagpipes and sho (a Japanese mouth-organ), whilst Schmickler adds electronics to the mix and processes the sound through his computer, to extend and abstract, to amplify and multiply, and further modulate the drones blown by Chisholm. The results are, well, exquisitely droney. Now we all know that bagpipes can be droney, but pleasantly so? Schmickler's manipulations keep this sounding like there's a real breathing human being behind the instrument, but also sands off some of the shrill grinding abrasiveness characteristic of the bagpipes... yet the threat lurks.
There's two pieces here, the 23:36 title track (dedicated to the venerable dronologist Phill Niblock, and it sounds like it) and the 21:06 "Infinity In The Shape Of A Poodle" (which is dedicated, oddly enough, to Bjork, but still sounds like a Niblock homage). Where track one displays a calm yet powerful, all-encompassing beehive grind, track two starts off rather whispy, more of a gentle drone, and then eventually soars to higher, heavenly realms of (to our ears, and hopefully Bjork's too) glittering beauty, that at the same time also suggests suspense-movie sinisterness.
As noted, both tracks are lengthy, but those many minutes are put to good use. During each there is constant movement, these aren't static drones at all. Basically if you want drone, this here's a good drone disc!!
PS. for some reason, Hapna have switched from their thin plastic sleeve cd packaging to the more ordinary (but no less nice-lookin') digipak.
Once a member of Tangerine Dream and Kluster, Conrad Schnitzler evolved into one of the most distinctive artists within the Krautrock scene. Through such seminal albums as Ballet Statique and Con, Schnitzler developed an uncompromising aesthetic that blossomed beyond the cosmic expansiveness of his fellow psychedelic journeymen and into oblique experiments whose bleak results were the templates that inspired post-industrial expressionists such as MB, Giancarlo Toniutti, Arcane Device, and Cranioclast, not to forget about his impact on the works of Emeralds, Omit, and Oneohtrix Point Never.
10.10.84 is a document of one of Schnitzler's 'kassetten konzert', during which he played back a number of pre-recorded cassettes through upwards of six decks that he would sometimes suspend from a belt around his waste and broadcast through a megaphone wired to a metal helmet that he wore on his head. Given his studies with Joseph Beuys in the '60s, one could postulate that these performances might also warrant some theatrical gestures given the mobility of this set-up. For this konzert recorded in Berlin, Schnitzler overlays sweeping oscillations, clouds of static, and nervous electronic percolations, all of which hold a metallic sheen as if each of these sounds could sharpen knives intent on scraping out the collective inner ear canal of the audience. While the step sequencing of his more accessible works isn't all that present, scattershot firings of horror-laden synth notes burst throughout Schnitzler's signature use of heavily filtered electrical tones. Limited to 250 copies, of which we probably have the last ones.
An album that launched thousands of better known records, Ballet Statique is Conrad Schniztler's masterpiece. Schnitzler, of course, was a maverick in the Krautrock community, having been an original member of both Tangerine Dream and Kluster, and later developing an expressive language of tape collage and electronic synthesis which expanded upon his early studies with Joseph Beuys. His most influential works, however, came out in the late '70s following an almost serialist body of work based on the poetics of various colors through electronic sound, eventually leading to Ballet Statique. It was originally released with the title 'Con' back in 1978 through the Barclay funded Egg Records, Ballet Statique is a skeletal distillation of progressive electronics into a bleak hypnosis of rotating melodies, atonal slashes of synthetic noise, and proto-techno rhythmic propulsion. While this album has been reissued a few times since it's original release, the current infatuation with late '70s electronics - especially through the psychedelic and minimal-wave sensibilities - make this reissue especially timely. "Electric Garden" is one of those elegantly simple pieces of electronica with an abstracted, almost random melody guiding Schnitzler's rigid step sequence cast in a cosmic shower of delay ripples with bent electro-shock noises sliding up and down against his motorik drum machine. From a track like this, one can see where Aphex Twin would have been able to make such a profound break from rave culture with these head-spinning sequences. "Metall 1" is all space-dust and comet debris hung weightlessly through Schnitzler's ominous undulations of bright synthetic shimmers and lurching rumbles of metallic low-end, clearly the inspiration for pretty much everything that John Elliott of Emeralds has ever touched. The deep-space sonor pulses of "Black Nails" reprise the tone-bent noises Schnitzler produced on "Electric Garden," looking forward to the robotic bleakness of Monoton, Dome, and Omit. It's pretty shocking how good this record is, and how timeless it sounds, even with the current strain of '70s revivalism. So highly recommended, it's actually embarrassing that we've not written about this record sooner.
This rare album (only 500 copies of the LP were originally issued in 1974) is now finally reissued on cd! "Blau" (Blue) is the second solo effort from legendary krautrock electronics pioneer Conrad Schnitzler, following his amazing debut "Rot" (Red) and his
