[ aquarius records — Experimental ]

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

Showing results 7701 through 7750 of 9280.

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

SORRY. Over the years, I have met many people who have taken the pains to make coldhave seen (heard) "Solaris" lately, you know how beautiful and mysterious it is too. Japanese imports, hence the price (nice packaging though.) "Ivanovo" is a little cheaper because it's a little shorter.

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

SORRY. Over the years, I have met many people who have taken the pains to make cassette dubs of the "Stalker" soundtrack straight from the video. No longer necessary. Dark and heavy orchestrations and vibrations resonating from the claustrophobic cloak of the cold, cold iron curtain. And one folk dance. Very highly recommended. And if you have seen (heard) "Solaris" lately, you know how beautiful and mysterious it is too. Japanese imports, hence the price (nice packaging though.) "Ivanovo" is a little cheaper because it's a little shorter.

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

SORRY. While we've raved about the insane and insanely elaborate packaging from local boutique label Time Released Sound, we try to stress that all this fancy pants packaging wouldn't mean shit though if the music wasn't able to stand on its own, and thankfully, since a lot of the TRS releases sell out before we can get our hands on them, or are just a bit too pricey for some folks, they also come available as more affordable discs in less extravagant packaging, which is especially good news, cuz it would be sad for music like this to only make it into the ears of the 80 people who managed to nab the deluxe version. Taskerlands is a duo consisting of Michael Tanner, aka Plinth, who was responsible for that incredible Collected Machine Music disc all created from the sounds of vintage music boxes, and David Colohan from psych folk outfit United Bible Studies. Tanner and Colohan each strap on a guitar, run it through some pedals, and out comes some gloriously dreamy pastoral psychedelic folk, lush and sun dappled, the notes and chords wreathed in reverb and echo and allowed to drift weightless over darkly delicate piano, and the sweet melodies from a bass clarinet fluttering just below the surface. Two twenty-one minute tracks, each one a softly smoldering sonic rumination, slipping from dense tangles of abstract Appalachia to brooding low end swirl, flickering melodic drift to dark distorted droned out minor key dirges, from haunting hypnotic thrum, to washed out hazy psychedelic shimmer. Lovely, lovely stuff. Not as limited as the deluxe version, but limited nonetheless, so grab one before they're gone!

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This is the second pressing of A Strange Artifact which dates to 2004. The second edition, like the first, comes by the way of Darren Tate's own Fungal imprint, although he's vastly improved the artwork with reproductions of Tate's stain-and-ink drawings adorning the sleeve. Given the limited nature of the original edition, this one is certainly new to us; and for better or for worse, the second one will soon depart from these doors. Darren Tate has been a regular fixture here at Aquarius with his self-produced constructs of eccentric droneworks, although he's best known for his impressionist compositions with Andrew Chalk and Colin Potter, in Ora and Monos respectively. A Strange Artifact is a suitable title for this album, which Tate composed as a fictional piece of automatic music through accordion, guitar, and field recordings. The accordion tentatively seesaws a quizzical arpeggiation that when brought up to speed sounds like a primitive variation of Phillip Glass's early work, but mostly is a slow meander through notes providing something eerily carnivalesque like a Svankmajer soundtrack. Spindly guitar plucks float amidst the accordion, and subterranean field recordings churn in the distant. Perhaps this is the least droning piece we've encountered from Darren Tate, certainly one of the weirdest, too. Limited to 100 copies.

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Another Sunday is another self-released micro-edition from the British drone maestro Darren Tate, best known for his work in Ora and Monos. Here, Mr. Tate presents three lengthy tracks of analogue synth variations on a theme and one pastoral field recordings of the birds flitting around his country garden. The analogue sounds revolve around a kosmische swirl of filter-sweep minimalism dappled with oceanic, tonal glissandos which gently sway up and down for a subtle hypnotic effect. Tate weaves into these ambient modulations a chorus of sympathetic vibrations, which taken on their own could easily be confused for the glacial pacing of Eliane Radigue's compositions. The coda of birds is a nice touch, countering the navel-gazing circuitry of the electronic sound with a fanciful chorus of avian calls. For those of you who have picked up any number of those field recording documents from Sittelle, try your hand at identifying all of these birds. In any case, Another Sunday is super limited, with an edition of 100 copies. We've got only a handful!

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Stranger and stranger Darren Tate gets, even as he releases this set of previously unreleased archival material from 1986-87, which finds Tate rummaging around in his garden shed and garage with an unnamed collaborator creating all sorts of clamorous textures, metallic klangs, and screeched bowed drones in a picnic-on-a-summer-afternoon take on the bleak industrial ritualism that was oozing up from the European soils (e.g. Metgumbnerbone, Zero Kama, Ain Soph, and plenty of lesser acolytes from the Temple of Psychick Youth). The spaciousness of Calm In A Teacup does recall the documentary / field recording agenda that Organum offered forth a year later on the magnificently mysterious Vacant Lights album; and a similar metaphysical time/space warp occurs here in Tate's recording through the interplay between the environmental sounds and the hands-on clattering. Very little of the sounds have much in the way of effects or treatments, mostly just the natural echo within the garage and / or shed. Nonetheless, the whole album is pretty zonked-out along a similar axis to Richard Youngs, Taj Mahal Travellers, or Avarus. One would hardly believe Tate would have made records with Andrew Chalk and Colin Potter that would sound so bloody sensible in comparison to this. Signed and number by Darren Tate himself. Just 100 copies.

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Close Timid Night is another hand-fabricated, super-limited production from the British eccentric sound artist Darren Tate. His field recording and drone-based work was part of the seminal collective Ora, which found Darren working closely with Andrew Chalk, Colin Potter, Michael Northam, and Jonathan Coleclough. Since then, he's loosened his grip on the drone and has encouraged atypical interactions between long passages of field recordings and an outsider approach to guitar and / or synth. He populates this piece with nocturnal domestic events of creaks from the attic, the ticking of a wind-up clock, the murmur of passing cars, the meowing of cats, and the occasional rattling water pipe all tied together with recordings of distant bursts of fireworks with none of the celebratory cheer and reveling that always echo the flashes of light and thunderous cracks. There's plenty of space for these starkly described environmental sounds, and Tate overlays a monotone hum and his meandering clusters of notes on his synthesized harpsichord. It gives the feel that Tate is allowing his mind to wander whilst peering through the window at the fireworks streaming over a nearby village. Not too sure how limited this one is, but probably somewhere around 50 copies would be our guess.

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Once a collaborator many years ago with Andrew Chalk in a project called Ora, Darren Tate has been steadily self-releasing his own diversions of drone, field recording, and eccentric sound-design at quite a brisk pace. Late Afternoon is already the fourth album he's released in 2010, and we might have actually missed one or two. We're pretty sure that the Keijo he's dedicated this album to is the freaked-out Finnish psychedelic minstrel with boatloads of albums on PseudoArcana, Digitalis, Last Visible Dog, etc. Unlike many of the recent Tate records, which had been heavy on the weirdo-synth tip, this one finds Tate adopting the beloved Jewelled Antler strategy of recording out in the wilderness, allowing all of the incidental sounds - manmade, natural, and otherwise - to tread upon whatever musical notes might be generated. Tate doesn't let on to where this recording was made, but it's got something of a natural concrete reverb, it's near an airfield, and it's infested with pigeons. Tate's minor intrusions include a set of chimes which tinkled gently in the thickened reverberations, an acoustic guitar which Tate strums occasionally in brightly ringing chords that again cascade in that reverb, and there's one big cough about 18 minutes into the disc, which Tate purposefully leaves in the mix. Forest folk minimalism meets field recordings! Limited to about 100 copies, of which we have only a handful.

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Darren Tate has quietly amassed a substantial catalogue of treated field recordings and electrical eccentricities over the past twenty years, most notably through his collaborations with Andrew Chalk in Ora and more recently through his drone-centric project Monos, which typically features Colin Potter as Tate's trusted foil. While billed as a solo record, Nature In The City was to be the follow-up to the well received (and now out of print) Monos 2cd Generators released on Die Stadt in 2005. That album with its science fiction bleakness through analog electronics was the jumping off point for many of the recent Darren Tate experiments, and was clearly something that Nature In The City comes out of. However, Die Stadt decided to drop Nature In The City from their release schedule, leaving Tate to put this recording out through his own Fungal imprint. Here, Tate concentrates upon atonal flares of sawtooth synth tones and phaser-shot guitar noises that jump out from beds of undulating drones, bellowing loops, and eerie LFO-driven frequencies. Oblique half-melodies nervously flicker out of these constructions, occasionally joined by dreamy flickerings of pixel dust, all awash in nocturnal reverberations. Limited to a mere 100 copies.

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The eccentric British sound artist Darren Tate delves back into the drone for this nocturnal album of slippery surfaces. His earliest recordings with Andrew Chalk in Ora and later on with Colin Potter as Monos explored the crepuscular regions of dronemuzik as dappled with sodden field recordings and occluded gestural noise. Yet his solo work of late eschews more and more of the drone quotient, emphasizing the erratic if subdued expressionist elements found in his blorping synths and anti-everything guitar fragments, all of which are bracketed by prolonged periods of quietude. The brilliant producer / engineer Colin Potter (the most sure handed colleague for Stapleton's recordings & performances through Nurse With Wound) amends and adds to recordings provided by Tate on No Longer Here, perhaps transforming the source material into the elegant, mercurial drones found within. A deep thrumming, low end frequency sprawls from end to end of this 45 minute epic, with eerie spectral tones ebbing between synthetic filigrees of cosmic electronics, hallowed reverberations, and watery elongations of sound. Beautiful stuff! The more times we hear this record, the more Tate's outsider strategies become more evident amidst the oceanic currents of drone, making this one of the best "solo" records we've heard from him in a very long time and another exemplary drone album from the whole Chalk / Coleclough / Potter / Tate axis. Not sure how limited this edition is; but probably won't be around for long!

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Ah, a drone-centric album from Darren Tate this time around; and perhaps it is not surprising that Nothing By Chance is a reissue of a long out-of-print cd-r that the British eccentric produced way back in 2003. Those were the days when Tate was entering the final stages of his work with Ora - the much revered British drone collective that spilled from the collaboration between Tate and Andrew Chalk (alongside Colin Potter, Jonathan Coleclough, and Lol Coxhill). As a continuation of the rich vernacular of Ora, Tate maps a verdant hypnogogia from home-grown psychoactive tones, drones, and field recordings. There are two long-form tracks on Nothing By Chance, with the first one being girded by a bright, ringing sustained tone from a chord organ furthered along by Leslie-styled flutter / oscillation of the frequencies. Here, Tate's work resonates with a stately grandeur found in the best organ-clad work from Charlemagne Palestine. Sodden recordings of rain tumbling between damp stone houses dominates the second much-longer track, which is a whopping 42 minute expedition of somber patter, sullen street noise, and very English dreariness coming to a rainy-day conclusion with a saturnine round of church organ tones gracefully set against the grey backdrop. Limited to 50 copies, of which we have only a handful.

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A wayward psychedelia and an English eccentricity sets Darren Tate apart from many of his psychedelic dronework counterparts. He's unashamed to declare his infatuation with cats and gnomes throughout his many productions. His early recordings with Andrew Chalk (amongst others) as Ora had self-released through their imprint Gnome Records with a few of Tate's kooky watercolors of cats gracing the covers of those albums. Old Pointed Hat was ostensibly to be Tate's "Christmas" album, but he decided to go with the gnome theme once again... at least for the cover art. It's hard to see how gnomes fit into this primitive recording for electronics and guitar, which sounds more like something that should have come out on Snatch Tapes back in 1982, and was only now rediscovered by the bloggers. It's clear by now that Tate has become less interested in the pure drone, pushing more towards an expressive urge through gesture and abstraction. Tate sets up his Roland 101 synthesizer to randomly shuffle through a stoccatic sci-fi bleepity-bloop that slowly evolves into a malcontent post-TG turgid pseudo groove. Throughout this evolution, Tate interjects with a metallic splatter of splintered guitar noise coupled with radio interference and warbles of odd distortion. Growled sawtooth low-end noise and horror / sci-fi half melodies elsewhere on the album give an early Maurizio Bianchi / Hospital Productions vibe. Limited to a 50 copies.

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One of the dronescapers behind the seminal Ora project, which also prominently featured Andrew Chalk and Colin Potter, Darren Tate has been quietly churning out tiny edition CD-Rs. Most of his self-released discs have completely evaded us, but we managed to snag the last batch of copies of Organ Of Sight from Mr. Tate himself, who has warned us that these are indeed the last copies to be found. The limited availability of this album is not reason alone to investigate, as Darren Tate has long been an exemplary proponent of otherworldly, long-form abstraction and Organ Of Sight is no exception. A spectral vibrato of an analogue synth set to UFO hover is the foundation for Tate's untitled opening piece, which flashes with eerie electronics on par with much of the '60s esoterica genius mined found in the Creel Pone series. These paranoiac ambient gestures also resemble the general tone of Tate's contributions to the Monos album Generators, from 2005. While the second track rumbles with a deep space frequency and echoes with unsettled sonar pings, Tate counters his isolationist sentiment with a languid series of synthetic harpsichord melodies which make for a dreamy, blissful atmosphere. The final number rattles with a deadened vacuum cleaner hum spotted with smallish events and spooky sound effects cracking the event horizon, which altogether resembles something like Nurse With Wound's A Missing Sense. Limited to a mere 100 copies.

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Reflections On A Ceiling is another micro-edition from Darren Tate, the founder of the seminal British avant-drone project Ora with Andrew Chalk. In his recent investigations both under his own name and the Monos project, Tate has been pushing towards a more electronic context with all of the cold, barren, and alien references found in '60s electronic music (e.g. Delia Derbyshire, the Forbidden Plant soundtrack, and most of the electronic esoterica reissued through Creel Pone). Reflections On A Ceiling continues with that trend. Tate opens the album with a series of cold wet field recordings of rain, wind, and other soggy, sodden sounds. Out of this introduction, Tate unravels a series of oscillating tones whose ringing electronics occasionally tumble into declining melodies only to drift into the distance as a Klaus Schulze ambience. For a few minutes in the middle of the album, the synthetic notes subside in a deep dark mass of ghastly electron murk, sort of sounding like a typical Hospital / Hanson production gone by the way of Brian Eno. Tate slowly slips back into the twin-note phase shift with thickly delayed field recordings of wind and rain as the finale to this album. Nicely done. There's something like 150 copies of this kicking around. We've also read that the pressing was only 50 copies. In either case, we don't have many and it's unlikely we'll get more!

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Leave it to Darren Tate to throw us for a loop, if only for 53 seconds. Smack in the middle of Secret Mantra is the untitled fifth track, puncturing all of the weirdo DIY electronic spaciousness that came before and comes after it. Just 53 seconds of Tate fingerpicking the guitar, and the melody there is so so sad, so heartwrenching, so damn near perfect a recapitulation the bleakest of British folk, and so fucking brief. Over the years, Tate has been confounding us with his uber-sparse concoctions of zoner radiophonics, field recordings of various English gardens, and slumping drone hypnosis. Secret Mantra would have nestled nicely into his extensive catalogue of eccentric soundscaping, but those 53 seconds make us wonder if Tate might have quite a second career in front of him as England's answer to Jandek, one who carries forth the traditions of indigenous folk songs but through a cracked visionary lens. As it stands, that vignette is just a tease while he turns back to the monosynth, the radio static, the bells, and the clocks that culminate in the smoldering miasma of dub-patterned rhythms and nocturnally mechanical clatter on the untitled ninth piece, which has something of an acoustic :zoviet*france: quality to its eerie repetitiveness. Secret Mantra celebrates the fifthieth album that Tate has released though his own imprint Fungal Records, and like so many of its predecessors, this is limited to a mere 100 copies. Professionally duplicated, we might add.

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Here's a second pressing of this micro-edition release from the hermetic, British sound artist Darren Tate. For many years, we've been championing his strange wunderkammer of drones, field recordings, radiophonic synth meanderings, and slumped stasis; but even so, there seems to be a number of releases that we somehow missed. Small Worlds was one of those recordings that was originally released in such a small edition that it flew completely under the radar; but Tate has remedied that somewhat with a second pressing, but still only in an edition of 70 copies. Working under such monikers as Ora and Monos, Tate has collaborated alongside the likes of Andrew Chalk and Colin Potter off and on over the years, providing some triangulation as to where his aesthetic lies, but his solo recordings tend towards stranger waters so to speak. He populates the astringently barren album Small Worlds with an undercarriage of rumbling, nocturnal drones and deep space meditations. Subtle tonebent phrases quietly cycle through a downer melody at the onset of the album which gives way to spooked-out, sci-fi vibes and eventually some of Tate's beguilingly soft-focus guitar plucks and plonks, all of which barely poke out of the shadowy tones and drones that manifest through the entirety of the album. A very nice one for sure!

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Shhh. It's a very quiet recording for Darren Tate. The esoteric sounds of the former Andrew Chalk collaborator have calmed to a nocturnal hush on this, yet another micro-edition release. He's been partial to his analogue synth as of late, with a lot of sci-fi weirdness on display; but here, the sustained tones strike out on a rather lonely orbit, marching through the black of deep space guided by the sparest of oscillations. Tate collapses these tones into a hiss-filled passage of empty spaces, but with the window in that room opened to let in the sounds of soft English rain or maybe the distant hum of a freeway, he quietly situates a series of delicate synth plinks that seem to parallel a few of those reductive sketches Andrew Chalk produced on Ghost Of Nakhodka. Clanks and rattles from small metal objects nestle against sustained drones from Tate's synth only to dissolve into a series of skeletal plunks from his electric guitar echoing its notes in a rich delay pattern, sort of in the manner of the rainy-day psychedelia of Roy Montgomery, but with much more space between all of the notes. Limited to about 100 copies, and certainly not around for long.

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

SORRY. The title may be an accurate mapping of Darren Tate's methods, but there is a clear compositional structure to this album which belies the equation of improvisation with mere wanking. Darren Tate's work has long been a staple here at aQuarius through his sodden impressionism in Ora and the deep-end dronework of Monos, with his solo work dialed into one of the odder facets of England's Hidden Reverse (to use David Keenan's terminology). Field recordings, empty spaces, blorping synths, Jandekian guitar plucks, and unkempt sonic rituals all revolve in and out of Tate's albums. And Two Improvisations finds the man situated behind two synths (a monotron and a casio, plus a few bells, and the aid of some avian twitter just outside his window), settling into an early Delia Derbyshire type of soundscaping with tonal long-form undulations pricked by a slow celestial beacon of a synth pulse. Towards the end of the first piece, Tate tweaks the filters to the shimmering electronics which point to the cosmic trippiness of JD Emmanuel. The second piece is considerably shorter and much weirder, with clusters of hand bells tapping against the microphone itself and an oscillating beat pattern hovering just at the event horizon. Another hand-numbered edition from Tate, this one was only pressed up in a batch of 80. We probably won't be able to restock it once it's gone...

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Yet another intriguing direction for Darren Tate can be found on this micro-edition. Tate's drone work, which began many years ago with his collaboration with Andrew Chalk piloting the seminal project Ora, has slowly given way to a hermetic, sci-fi sound of electronics augmented by occasional scrapes upon the guitar. Here, Tate has stitched together countless episodes of acoustics, electronic, and ecological soundmaking into a single piece, occasionally pushing toward the realm of the sound poetry aesthetics of Henri Chopin. Tate has never been one to hurry through his compositions and that trait is strongly featured here, as field recordings of birds, gentle drippings of water, intimate rounds of vocal ululations, electrically charged raga drones, percussive rhythms, and even some rather lovely post-Fahey / Mazzacane Connors fingerpicking on an acoustic guitar are positioned rather elegantly with a fine sheen of reverb connecting all of these sounds as a gossamer web of echo and decay. Limited to about 50 copies and already sold out from the source.

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For many years now, Darren Tate has been content to issue micro-editions of his work, his earliest recordings with Andrew Chalk and Colin Potter as Ora almost always emerging as an edition of 50 copies or so on cd-r or cassette before warranting a larger pressing on vinyl or cd. Yet recently, the editions on his Fungal imprint have remained the tiny editions with little notion that any will resurface later. True, Tate's eccentric droning, autodidact guitarwork, and psychedelic electronics equate with far more difficult listening than the impressionist blurs of Ora's grand atmospheres; but the paucity of these releases (augmented by their peculiar nature) makes them treasures all the more. Let's assume this album to be an exaggerated view of what Darren might be meditating upon when he stares out his window. While he's been known to incorporate field recordings from various sources into his work, the flutter of moth wings or the buzz of a wasp won't be found here. The insectoid repetition from the seasickly swooshing glissando that opens the album is the weird science mimesis you get instead; and from there, Tate presents an ever collapsing set of two note melodies (very much on the Giancarlo Toniutti / Maurizio Bianchi end of the hypno-melodic drone spectrum), flanging oscillations, spectral Tetuzi Akiyama style stabs at his guitar, and plenty of asynchronous tone clusters to hang in empty space. Limited to 75 copies, and that's it!

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For the first collaborative effort between venerable British dronescapists Darren Tate (Monos, Ora, etc.) and Andrew Liles (a recent collaborator with Steven Stapleton in the live presentations of Salt Marie Celeste), Liles identifies himself as the Conductor with Tate providing improvisations and field recordings. On the first couple of tracks, the division of labor also equates to a dualism between the menacing minimalism which Liles has been producing with frightening success as of late and the rather charming sounds of Tate's field recordings, consisting of numerous birds twittering around his Northern English garden. But later on, Without Season spirals into a blur of asynchronous loopings, creepy minor key piano progressions, dissonant swells from an accordion (played by Tate's 79-year old neighbor Kathleen Vance), complex chorales for filigree feedback, and post-Jewelled Antler communions with nature. It would make sense if Liles controlled the outcome of Without Season through his claim as the Conductor, as the album's overall feel resembles his unnerving sleights of hand and eerie ambience as opposed to the impressionist dreary dreaminess of either Monos or Ora. Liles' sensibility provide subtle hints at something horrific creeping throughout the charged ether collided with earthen crackle; and it's these occasional reflections of something unsettling that sets this record apart. Exceptional.

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Here are the last copies of this album we thought was long out of print. Of course, Darren Tate is the British alchemist who has dozens upon dozens of albums filled with zonked ambient murkiness and psychically unstable drones; and his idiosyncratic soundscapery we've championed here at aQ over the years. Paul Bradley is another British drone-dude, who comes more from the mold of Colin Potter's latter-day working methods. These two have paired up off and on over the years in Tate's on-again / off-again project Monos, which in turn was a continuation of the suspended sound design that Tate produced as Ora with Andrew Chalk and the aforementioned Colin Potter. Acoustically resonant drones from bowed metals and long string instruments seem to be the sources for Sometime Today, with plenty of incidental actions, gestures, and Tate's infatuation with countryside bird song. Out of these materials, the composition organically coalesces into a sublime two note melody that follows the Morton Feldman playbook very nicely through an austere spaciousness, only to dissolve back into the amorphous cauldron of blurry harmonics and ghosts of radiophonic glissando. This album looks forward to much of the transcendent, psychedelic ambience that came through the likes of Quiet Evenings or Mind Over Mirrors, but produced in a manner of eccentric Englishness. Recommended!

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Taurpis Tula are a Scottish duo made up of guitarist / shortwave radio operator David Keenan (who you might recognize as a writer for The Wire) and vocalist / pedal steel guitarist Heather Leigh Murray (of Charalambides and Scorces). The two create a druggy haze from buzzy tentative guitar explorations mired in a wash of shimmery static. Occasional ghostly barely there vocals, and minimal melodies drift and flutter before being swallowed up again. Side two is a single track, an extended ambient blur of bombinating instruments, percussive creaks and fragile theremin like melodies keening in the distance. Like a smoke filled room, operatic vocals buried beneath a dense swirl of murky blackness. Packaged in a gorgeous screen printed black on black sleeve, with a black on black insert. LIMITED TO 700 COPIES!

The latest from this French ethno-experimental composer is a document of sort of a trip to India, on which the composer gathered material, both audio and video, to document a fantastic journey, one that goes well beyond simply India, and into some mysterious realm of the sonic unreal, where Tazartes is really the only guide you need. Combining all manner of sampled sounds, from music to voices, found sounds to bus station broadcasts, busy rhythms to animal calls, Tazartes has fashioned a seriously dense, collaged sound world, that may just require headphones, not to understand what's going on, no mere mortal could hope to do that, but to become totally immersed and fantastically lost. From the word go, it's a dizzying non-stop barrage of sound, with almost no let up, looped rhythms cascade over vocal fragments and snippets, layered and rearranged into strangely shifting textures, street conversations morph into tangles of acoustic guitar, splatters of handclaps, yelps and screams, the calls of monkeys, total plunderphonia overload! A warped lo-fi blues surfaces, over the woozy clatter of percussion, and blurts of blown out electric guitar buzz, dense swirling drones wrap around colliding breakbeats, barking dogs, warped sampled drums, Tazartes has a definite kitchen sink approach, but there's always a method to his madness, or at least seemingly so, since even at it's most chaotic, his music manages to make some sort of twisted sense. Buzzing steel strings and warbly classic folk drift over manic turntable scratching, and distorted clubby rhythms, the sound settling into a dreamy drift with crooned operatic vox floating above soft swirls of mutated parlor piano, before the sounds seem to drown in a sea of woozy manipulated turntables, beneath a sky full of screaming seagulls, and murky barely there drums buried in the mix, until finally, the sounds seem to soar into a sprawling finale, epic and noisy, and chaotically swirling, weirdly funky at first, but eventually tripped out and dizzying, finishing with a final psychedelic plunderphonic squall. The lp includes a bonus dvd, which features some of the footage gathered while Tazartes was in India, that was meant to be inspiration / source material for a composition for a dance company. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!

Ghedalia Tazartes' Diasporas might be most famous at this point for being included on the infamous Nurse With Wound list, a list of artists that was included with NWW's 1979 classic album Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella, and was basically a list of musicians and groups that NWW head honcho Steven Stapleton was influenced by. Looking at it now, it almost reads like an aQ list: Agitation Free, Algarnas Tradgard, Zweistein, Iannis Xenakis, Throbbing Gristle, This Heat, Igor Wakhevitch, Ya Ho Wha 13, Taj Mahal Travellers, Supersister, Der Plan, Sperm, Achim Reichel, Moolah, Magical Power Mako, Basil Kirchin, Jan Dukes De Grey, Exmagma, Cromagnon, Crass, Il Balletto Di Bronzo and so many more. And Ghedalia Tazartes fits perfectly amidst such esteemed and such gloriously twisted company, a French ethno-experimentalist and composer, whose sound is a dizzying concoction of mysterious vocal chants, traditional gypsy folk music, bizarre sonic rituals, sound collages and tangled tape loops, his records playing out like alien field recordings, often layering multiple sound sources into twisted psychedelic freakouts. Diasporas, originally released in 1979 (recorded in 1977), is the perfect example of Tazartes' idiosyncratic sound, a thick layered stretch of multiple voices starts things off, his gypsy croon wailing over a lopped snippets of opera, as well as looped growls and, sampled strings, the sound building to a deafening crescendo, before settling into a strange bit of hypnodrone, with the operatic vocals relegated to a clipped pulse, the sampled strings creating a hauntingly repetitive melody, over which he mumbles and growls, the sound building and building until somehow it's just piano, and strangely processed voices stretched out into a swirling undulating drone. And it continues on in a similar fashion, each track beginning like some field recording, simple percussion, strange vocals, like some abstract alien world music, those voices underpinned by drones and murky loops, which seem to become more pronounced as the tracks progress. A few of the tracks to play out almost like straight folk music, but even then, there's something slightly off kilter, whether it's the production, the arrangement, or some subtle sonics lurking below the surface but it's never long before the sound returns to something much more twisted, be it some growled almost throat singing, blurred into a weird almost scat singing dronescape, or thick squalls of rumbling growls over which, samples are draped, and Tazartes' feral wail, or machine like loops and mechanical skitter wound around super passionate howls and looped baby talk. It's definitely WAY out there, but there's a reason even back in 1979 Stapleton had this on his list, cuz it's one of the strangest, most hauntingly beautiful and fantastically disturbing listens EVER.

MPEG stream: Un Amour Si Grand Qu'il Nie Son Objet
MPEG stream: La Vie Et La Mort Legendaire Du Spermatozoide Humuch Lardy
MPEG stream: La Berlue Je T'Aime
MPEG stream: Casimodo Tango

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

SORRY. Ghedalia Tazartes' Diasporas might be most famous at this point for being included on the infamous Nurse With Wound list, a list of artists that was included with NWW's 1979 classic album Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella, and was basically a list of musicians and groups that NWW head honcho Steven Stapleton was influenced by. Looking at it now, it almost reads like an aQ list: Agitation Free, Algarnas Tradgard, Zweistein, Iannis Xenakis, Throbbing Gristle, This Heat, Igor Wakhevitch, Ya Ho Wha 13, Taj Mahal Travellers, Supersister, Der Plan, Sperm, Achim Reichel, Moolah, Magical Power Mako, Basil Kirchin, Jan Dukes De Grey, Exmagma, Cromagnon, Crass, Il Balletto Di Bronzo and so many more. And Ghedalia Tazartes fits perfectly amidst such esteemed and such gloriously twisted company, a French ethno-experimentalist and composer, whose sound is a dizzying concoction of mysterious vocal chants, traditional gypsy folk music, bizarre sonic rituals, sound collages and tangled tape loops, his records playing out like alien field recordings, often layering multiple sound sources into twisted psychedelic freakouts. Diasporas, originally released in 1979 (recorded in 1977), is the perfect example of Tazartes' idiosyncratic sound, a thick layered stretch of multiple voices starts things off, his gypsy croon wailing over a lopped snippets of opera, as well as looped growls and, sampled strings, the sound building to a deafening crescendo, before settling into a strange bit of hypnodrone, with the operatic vocals relegated to a clipped pulse, the sampled strings creating a hauntingly repetitive melody, over which he mumbles and growls, the sound building and building until somehow it's just piano, and strangely processed voices stretched out into a swirling undulating drone. And it continues on in a similar fashion, each track beginning like some field recording, simple percussion, strange vocals, like some abstract alien world music, those voices underpinned by drones and murky loops, which seem to become more pronounced as the tracks progress. A few of the tracks to play out almost like straight folk music, but even then, there's something slightly off kilter, whether it's the production, the arrangement, or some subtle sonics lurking below the surface but it's never long before the sound returns to something much more twisted, be it some growled almost throat singing, blurred into a weird almost scat singing dronescape, or thick squalls of rumbling growls over which, samples are draped, and Tazartes' feral wail, or machine like loops and mechanical skitter wound around super passionate howls and looped baby talk. It's definitely WAY out there, but there's a reason even back in 1979 Stapleton had this on his list, cuz it's one of the strangest, most hauntingly beautiful and fantastically disturbing listens EVER.

MPEG stream: Un Amour Si Grand Qu'il Nie Son Objet
MPEG stream: La Vie Et La Mort Legendaire Du Spermatozoide Humuch Lardy
MPEG stream: La Berlue Je T'Aime
MPEG stream: Casimodo Tango

We sold a ton of the recent reissue of Diasporas, a record by French ethno-experimentalist composer Ghedalia Tazartes, a record that was probably most well known for being on the infamous Nurse With Wound List, but one that most definitely lived up to that hype, a dizzying concoction of manufactured vocal folk music and imagined sonic rituals, all woven from processed vocals, looped samples and all manner of strange found and manufactured sounds. Mesmerizing, hypnotic and so mysterious. And first we were under the impression that this was in fact new recordings from Tazartes, but in fact, it's even more exciting than that, it's the first release of Repas Froid, in its complete form, a collection of unreleased recordings from the seventies and eighties woven into two sidelong compositions, and previously released on cd only as fragments, partial tracks and random source material. And on listening, it's easy to hear much of what we loved about Diasporas, although if anything, this is a bit more chaotic. A confusional collage of drums and field recordings, random loops and found sounds, keyboards and vocal drones (sung by Tazartes himself), the result is a fantastically mesmerizing, but seriously unhinged bit of vocal and rhythm driven sonic experimentation. Symphonic snippets collide with children's voices, various loops hiccup and stutter creating gorgeous, rhythmic Philip Jeck like soundscapes, percussion is looped and woven into all manner of random rhythms, sometimes abstract, other times motorik and hypnotic, the sound is often overwhelming, dizzying, the songs laced with street sounds and birdsong, often a seemingly jumbled passage will suddenly coalesce into something impossibly lovely, and often some perfect arrangements of loops and voices will crumble and fall apart and become something else entirely. The best part of the record is the end of both tracks/sides, which each seem to culminate in something more akin to an actual (if imagined) folksong, with Tazartes singing over buzzing strings and all manner of layered sonics, resulting in some alien gypsy folk, a droned out vocal raga that is so haunting and mesmerizing and gorgeous, especially the A side, which is the sort of tripped our psychedelic raga folk that few could even imagine, let alone execute, while the culmination of the B side offers up something similar, but more like old time folk singing over weirdly sped up loops. The results in both cases are truly divine! LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Pressed on 140 gram vinyl, housed in a gorgeous matte finish full color jacket, that housed in a gold printed PVC plastic sleeve.

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

SORRY. Drone Records, the 7" only label run by Stefan Knappe of Troum / Maeror Tri, offers another fine excursion into the underground of German drone music; this time with a single from TBC, the acronym used by Hamburg's Thomas Beck. Using field recordings and voice as source material, Beck's repetitive chunks of sound revolve into elliptical patterns of murky ambience not far from Cranioclast or possibly a more lo-fi re-creation of Biosphere's synthetic sound. Limited to 250 copies, and pressed on pink vinyl.

Ahhh, so delicate, slinky, and ephemeral. UK solo artist Ryan Teague implements no solid objects nor hard lines on Coins & Crosses. If we were able to get our ears right up close, this is what we imagine the hazy clouds taking their sweet time making their way across the evening sky would sound like. There's a very slow motion film soundtrack feel. Later in the album electronic glitch and long gauzy tones materialize and draw musings of: what if Boards Of Canada were to perform segments of the Andromeda Strain soundtrack? At once, it's a haunting and blissful affair.

MPEG stream: Nephesch
MPEG stream: Rounds

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

SORRY. Avant-electronica turntablists Otomo Yoshihide, Frank Schulte, Christian Marclay drop huge breakbeats around the free music improv-noodling of Marc Ribot, Fred Frith, Iva Bittova, Chris Cutler, Phil Minton, Jon Rose, Sainkho Namtchylak, Nick Collins, Evan Parker, and others. Odd and enjoyable.

Pummeling, cavernous and, needless to say, HEAVY. Portland's Tecumseh offer up another cathartic dose of slow motion, glacial rust. Dream-doom realizations of soul sucking necromancy. Sprawling, low-end riffs shrouded in warm distortion, drifting feedback and subtle electronics. And like we've said before, with this type of ambient sludge, its all about THE RIFF, and Tecumseh has definitely got it down. So while some of this plays like an homage to Earth 2, Avalanche and Inundation manages to take things a step forward. The gorgeous chord progressions move with a tectonic hugeness that is more marvelous and immersive than most drone-sludge outfits. Towering and fully engulfing, Tecumseh's brand of heavy hypnosis will weigh you down into infinity and leave you there to rot. Usually a three piece consisting of two basses and one guitar, Tecumseh appears as a five piece here with two other dudes on electronics and cymbals (at least that's what we heard, since the liner notes don't mention instrumentation). This cold ripping disc of hollow desolation is highly recommended for your next descent into hell.

MPEG stream: Skies Of Joy And Sorrow
MPEG stream: Traveling Alongside Death

This one is for the slow and low crowd. More gorgeous slow motion sludgery, crawling dreamdronedoom, a slow black sprawl, but unlike the current crop of guitar-against-the-amp droners (and no dis, we love that stuff), this disc by the trio Tecumseh, harkens back to the classic Earth 2, the record that spawned a million sludge bands, by reintroducing the riff. And as we must have mentioned before, it's always ALL about THE RIFF. So all three looooong tracks here, begin with a riff, downtuned of course, nearly to the point of dissolution, and slowed way down, so that 9 or 10 times through the riff might cover half a side of vinyl, and that riff is stretched out as far as it will go, the notes drifting in blackened expanses of buzz, no drums to speak of, it's all about the riff. EXCEPT, for something strange going on in the background. A constant low level hum, the soft swirl of wind like whirs, all manner of subtle buzzing and layered drones, all woven into a constantly, but subtly, shifting background, in front of which, Tecumseh's slow-low grind creeps and crawls. Not so much heavy as it is meditative, it's very dreamy and soothing and mesmerizing, not to take anything away from these guys, cuz I'm sure this sort of band prides itself on it's heaviness, but this is the perfect metallic drifting off music, almost like they've discovered some new genre, sludge-ambient, doom-age, whatever you decide to call it, it's pretty amazing, and fans of all things slow motion, downtuned and yes, heavy will dig this big time. Packaged in gorgeous thick fold over gatefold sleeve, hand screened, blue metallic on grey, and of course quite limited...

Latest batch of grim drifting blackness from these Portland low end necromancers, two side long tracks, still using Earth's classic 2 album as a template, but taking that churning glacial riffage and stretching it even further out, infusing the sound with more ambience, more subtle electronic flourishes, adding space and strange shifting textures, a glancing listen will still conjure up visions of robed axemen, and fog drenched walls of glowing amplification, but Tecumseh offers up the sort of ritualistic heaviness that rewards total subjugation, each track an immersive world of black buzz and rumbling creep, rife with mysterious melody, and all manner of sonic wonder. As with past releases, the band strike a perilous balance between suffocating crush, and blackened mesmer. The A-side here is the perfect example, lumbering low end thrum, pulses and throbs, underpinned by wheezing ephemeral synths, a shimmering texture barely audible through the wall of crumbling riffage, but then it gets even heavier, and more dense, as layer after layer are piled on, and the various strands of rumble and buzz, coalesce into a seriously crushing, massive funereal dirge, corrosive, distorted, but still strangely tranquil and hypnotic, the whole track locked into a woozy soporific lop. So minimal, the sounds is more drone than metal, the undulating riffscape warm and liquid, laced with sweeps of muted electronics and buried bits of whir and glitch. The second side starts off much more eerily, with distant voices, streaks f feedback, the sound of some overheard ritual, wrapped in cavelike acoustics, subterranean and haunting, eventually, peals of lower register buzz begin to surface, and again the track builds gradually, thickening and growing darker and blacker and heavier, slowly slipping into another expanse of rumbling glacial dirgery. And while this was meant to play at 45, give it a spin at 33, even more abstract and minimal and dronelike, the heaviness and crush transformed into something way more abstract and psychedelic. LIMITED TO 333 COPIES, housed in super swank, 3 color hand screened jackets, with printed cardstock inserts.

Finally. Finally. FINALLY! If ever there was a more anticipated (around here at least) or a more criminally overdue reissue, it's this one right here. A mind blowing three-fer from should-have-been-massive blissed out fractured psych pop masters Teenage Filmstars, fronted by the inimitable Ed Ball, whom as we mentioned in our review of Star, TF's genius debut, was once described by My Bloody Valentine mainman Kevin Shields as "A sensitive soul from another planet. A modernist musical alchemist". Shield also had this to say about Ball: "Where other people struggle, Ed Ball plays what we're thinking." Which coming from the man behind My Bloody Valentine means a lot. Especially when considering Teenage Filmstars, who employ a sonic palette not all that far removed from MBV's. BUT, and a very big but at that, minus the explosive bursts of caustic noise, MBV hewed more to a traditional pop sensibility than Teenage Filmstars. Where as Loveless, even for all its amazing wall of guitar heaviness, and effects drenched dreaminess, was still anchored to a verse chorus verse framework, with Teenage Filmstars, those conventions are tossed aside, or at the very least, flipped over, doused in effects, chopped up and played backwards. Which is why once again, we must proclaim, that in the landscape of (not so) popular music, TEENAGE FILMSTARS ARE BETTER THAN MY BLOODY VALENTINE. And don't get us wrong, we LOVE LOVE LOVE My Bloody Valentine, but imagine an alternate universe MBV, where for some reason, Shields' guitars played backwards, effects boxes grew sentient and demanded as much space as the instruments and voices, imagine viewing all of those sounds, already twisted and skewed, through a fractured funhouse mirror, and then, if you can, imagine some musical wizard, who is able to reign in all of those sounds, and somehow shape them into some of the most perfect UNpop you've ever heard. Which brings us to Rocket Charms, record number two from Teenage Filmstars, which finds all the sounds on Star, pushed even farther out, the backwards sounds are more backwards (and there are more of them), the guitars are crunchier and more crumbly, the melodies are more catchy, the murk and shimmer are both murkier and shimmerier, and the production, is even more hazy and spaced out and lysergic and psychedelic and fucking head spinning. And yet somehow, Rocket Charms is a pop record, hooky and catchy, lilting and melodic. Opener "Pressure" is an immediate 'hit' if there ever was one, processed falsetto vox over swooping backwards rhythms and washed out guitar haze, a sort of druggy backwards Beach Boys pop ambience. And it just goes on from there, every song, a gorgeous slab of outsider twisted pop, on the surface a whirling sonic dervish, but within drift all manner of classic pop tropes, in the able hands of Ed Ball, subverted and turned inside out, wreathed in hiss and sparkle, and rendered, well, Teenage. But then amidst all this deconstructed shoegazey noise pop (or pop noise), comes the track "Alone", quite possible our favorite jam on Rocket Charms, a slow brooding dirge, all skittery Stone Roses-y drums, thick distorted bass, disembodied voices, swirling ominous dark ambience, and a main melody that just might be the catchiest bit on the record, sounding like a slowed down twisted take on the Cure's "Close To You", but via Pop Will Eat Itself or some other warped UK grebo combo. The crazy thing is, Rocket Charms for being as fantastic and over the top and incredible, isn't even our favorite Teenage Filmstars record. That honor belongs to the awesomely titled Buy Our Record Support Our Sickness, which takes all of the songs and sounds from Rocket Charms and Star, and makes them WAY HEAVIER, WAY MORE FUCKED UP, the processed guitars and backwards guitars and vocals have gone haywire, the songs are less songs here and more fucked up fragmented pop experiments, but again, Ball has such a deft hand that he manages to take all these totally freaked out elements, and gets them to work, and sound like pop songs, albeit, totally dizzying and abstract, psychedelic and almost metallic at times. The record's defining moment is the opener "Physical Graffiti", not a Zeppelin cover, but hell, it sounds like it could be some sort of insane My Bloody Valentine / Led Zeppelin mash up maybe, but one that had been totally tweaked, chopped and screwed, then sped up and flipped reverse again, listening to it, it's hard to imagine how anyone could envision music like this, let alone actually make it. The guitars swoop all over the stereo field, stuttering, blurring into huge backwards swells, the drums are chaotic, the vocals sound backwards too, but not overtly, the melodies so memorable and catchy, at one point the whole track begins to stutter, almost as if your cd player is skipping, but it soon swoops back into the dreamlike psychedelic swirl. Not all of Support Our Sickness is as heavy and crunchy, many of the tracks begin as classic sixties sounding pop, but as they progress, the effects seem to slowly take over, often one or more of the instruments flipping backwards and erupting into a squall of psychedelic freakout, but just as often, sprawling into a woozy almost balladic bit of slithery backwards slowcore. But even at its prettiest, the sounds are slightly tweaked, the vibe is subtly menacing, laced with bits of sunshiney jangle for sure, but this is some seriously drugged out dream pop damage, and remains to this day, one of the most amazing, and unlikely genius pop records EVER. The first disc features 5 bonus tracks, two from the Support Our Sickness sessions, as well as three other unreleased jams, none quite as twisted, but still awesome, and in fact, they almost sound like they were rough drafts, just waiting to get the Ed Ball mad scientist backwards fucked up FX makeover. So that's it, BUY IT, you won't be sorry, this is easily some of the most forward thinking pop music ever, heavy and psychedelic, druggy and delirious, catchy and crazy and bafflingly brilliant. But wait, what's this, a THIRD record? Teenage Filmstars final missive, and a pretty bizarre sonic sea change, in fact, it sounds like a totally different band. To be honest, we're not into it at all, Bring Back The Cartel found the band doing some sort of skittery smooth jazz electronic mood music, it makes very little sense that this one would get tacked on with the other two, when we first ordered this we actually thought it WAS just those other two, but maybe some folks will dig Bring Back The Cartel, there are some moments, here and there, but it doesn't at all approach the sheer brilliance of Rocket Charms or Buy Our Record Support Our Sickness, so our advice would be probably to just give it a spin, and if you dig it, cool, if not, just ignore it, pretend it's not there, and immerse yourself in those first two, let the sounds twist you inside out and carry you off, play it over and over and over and over, forever and ever and ever and ever. Totally fucking incredible, and not just worthy of Record Of The Week honors, definitely something more, like how about Record of FOREVER!?!?

MPEG stream: Pressure
MPEG stream: Alone
MPEG stream: Physical Graffiti
MPEG stream: Guruprophecy
MPEG stream: Feeding The Blue Jays
MPEG stream: Whatever Happened To Richard Boon

Ah, Teenage Panzerkorps. This confounding, transcontinental quartet has quite a punk / avant-rock pedigree. Edmund Xavier was born Glenn Donaldson, whose work within the forest-dwelling psychedelic collective Jewelled Antler spawned such projects as Thuja and the Blithe Sons, not to mention the paisley-pop project the Skygreen Leopards and Art Museums; and Boy True is the pseudonym for Jason Honea, who joined the leftist-punk band Social Unrest in the late '80s and Ten Bright Spikes in the '90s, before accompanying Donaldson and company on some of the more outre projects of Jewelled Antler. From the perspective of Jewelled Antler, the iconography of Teenage Panzerkorps makes a lot more sense, as a re-imagining of the childhood games playing with toy soldiers, where political and moral implications are lost within the wonder of play, all the while these childish ideals are smashed into the epiphany of hearing punk for the first time, with all of the social and political ramifications very much on the line. The Teutonic bark of vocalist Bunker Wolf and all of the militant iconography might give the impression of these guys being Nazi sympathizers, but this is hardly the case, as Der TPK's folding of symbols and metaphors is far more nuanced in its appropriation, pastiche, and parody. German Reggae is album number four for Der TPK, and it exhibits some variation beyond the drone-punk propulsion which dominated their Games For Slaves and Nations Are Insane albums. Honea's basslines look back to the first couple of PiL records and Jah Wobble's thick punk-dub, and Bunker Wolf's delivery is a bit more understated, to which some have compared now to a Germanic Mark E. Smith. Even with these differences, Der TPK puts their collective head down for these propulsive, grimy post-punk numbers with plenty of references to the pre-Joy Division Warsaw recordings, Savage Republic, and Wire, not to mention contemporaries like The Soft Moon and Cult Of Youth.

This one was a long time coming. We reviewed a tape ages ago by a boy/girl duo from Oakland who made a gloriously grim, dense blackened ambience that pushed all our buttons. That tape sold out super quick, and thus we began the wait for more. A wait that kept stretching out longer and longer. The two became disillusioned with the East Bay, and made their way northward, landing in Portland, and still we waited. Until finally, we received word, that there was indeed more, and it comes by way of the mighty Malignant Records, home to much fantastic blackened noisiness and ambient miserablism, a perfect home for these two, and for their Teeth Engraved With The Names Of The Dead. And you think that sort of move would temper their abject grimnity, a new friendlier neighborhood, a new home, might lighten up their shadowy sonics, but if anything, they've dragged some bad Oakland energy with them up North, cast their very own musical pall over this new land, and molded it into this fierce sprawl of hateful, harrowing blackness. A guttural rumbling haloed in distant feedback opens the proceedings, a sonic representation of a scorched earth, swirling hiss, and dense tectonic low need vibrations, the sky full of strange electronics and muted FX, a sonic calm before the blacknoise storm as it were, the sound slowly mutating into a stretch of undulating grey thrum, over mysterious transmissions and disembodied voices, until helicopter like pulsations, choppy waves of rhythmic throb, churn and chug, blurred into a cascade of gristled, crumbling distortion, under which, mournful melodies drift drowsily, a strangely effective juxtaposition of harsh noise, and tranquil ambience, that builds to a furious hissing frenzy, before fracturing into a finale of sonic shards and decaying sonics. From there on out, sheets of noise wash over chiming tones, and stretched out drones, keening high end filigree buried beneath squalls of chaotic howl, the slow builds strangely mesmeric and almost melodic, processed vocals smeared into the roiling noise, thick gassy swells underpinning skies streaked with soft noise shimmer, and more haunting, buried melodies, the sound epic and majestic and mournful, aching melancholy wreathed in jagged crunch and grinding buzz, eventually erupting into what is essentially black metal, with all the metal sucked out, a heaving throb of grim black fury, the vokills monstrous and harsh as fuck, all tangled up in dense black swirls of sound, tripped out and impossibly psychedelic to boot. The record culminates in the epic 25+ minute "When Storms Come", which is a bit like their version of Burzum's "Rundtgaing", a sprawling ambient epic, but in this case, Teeth Engraved's ambience is a churning morass of brown noise, blurred and soft focus, heavy and blown out, but muted and murky and blunted, the result more mesmerizing and hypnotic than brutal, a tough feat with what is essentially a half hour of noise, but here, it manages to soothe and entrance, and is the perfect black noise comedown bliss out finale for sure. Housed in a DVD style case, with a printed insert.

MPEG stream: Radians
MPEG stream: Vital Reaction
MPEG stream: Shredded Sky, Hung In Tatters

The first two records from this UK psychedelic space rock combo were primo examples of the current space/psych sound that we can't seem to get enough of - huge lumbering Hawkwind beholden sprawls of epic kosmische heaviness and tranced out kraut jams and blissful FX drenched atmospheric drifts. The band seemed to align themselves with the usual suspects: Carlton Melton, the Heads, White Hills, Mugstar, the Hills, etc. Those earlier Teeth Of The Sea records took that spaced out psychedelic sound and twisted it all up, adding near metallic heft in places, cheesy eighties soundtrack music, sci-fi electronics, swirling synths, raga like drones, heck even horns, so this new one came with lots of high expectations, but somehow, even as weird as those other records were, we weren't prepared for this. After a weird bit of garbled vocals, the first proper track kicks in, with a pulsing, eighties sounding electro drum machine, then some percolating synths, reverbed percussion, weird electronics, processed horns, tinkling chime-like melodies, deep chordal drones, the band definitely dipping into the whole John Carpenter / Goblin sound, but making it totally their own. Immediately sounding like a WAY heavier version of our recent Record Of The Week from The Slasher Film Festival Strategy, and we were totally prepared for the whole record to unwind like some lost eighties soundtrack, but still in the first track, in come big, bombastic drums, some almost funky bass, the synths pulsing, a lumbering, loping cosmic soundtracky groove that's so good! All before the song EXPLODES into a wild, synth heavy, distorto guitar psych-prog blowout. Already worth the price of admission right there, and we're barely seven minutes in. Thankfully, it only gets cooler and weirder and WAY more far out. Echo drenched horns are looped into a strange melodic cycle, sampled spoken vocals drift in and out, all over a skeletal electro groove, before the sound blossoms into some ultra creepy cinematic synthscapery, the synths buzzy and gristly, the vibe sinister and ominous, those looped, effected horns giving it a strange sort of almost Morricone gone Goblin vibe! From there, the sound devolves into a weird loose, super abstract almost-dub, reminding us of some old Adrian Sherwood record, via Muslimgauze or African Headcharge, but give a sort of heavy psych reworking, before in swoop swirling dizzying prog synth tangles and more spidery Morricone like guitars, the horns too, laying down a droned out brass backdrop, heady and hypnotic and really amazingly strange and original sounding. Pushing lots of our musical buttons, but turning those familiar sounds we love on their head. At this point we're only halfway through, with the second part not letting up for a second, creepy atmospheric ambience, giving way to buzzing metallic crush, and blurred out slo-mo dooooom, laced with subtle synth and guitar filigree, shimmery outer space drift, ethereal and celestial that floats weightlessly, before some mariachi horns (!) bring it back to earth, gristly, grinding grey noise, and disembodied vocals, draped over a field of static, driven by buried pulsations, making for perhaps the most harrowing 2 minutes on the record, before launching into another psychedelic electro-dub excursion, all synth squelch and reverbed rhythms, which build to some seriously caustic crunch, before the record settles into the epic nearly 11 minute closer, a total eighties, soundtracky electro synth masterpiece, the perfect score for some lost horror art film, tribal rhythms, wheezing synths, tripped out vocodered vox, electronic beeps and trills, shimmery psych guitar, some driving propulsive grooves, and those horns, nearly driving the song at one point, and when matched to the grinding synth buzz, the swirling atmospheres, the fuzz guitar crunch, and the psych-kraut groove, make for something twisted and fantastically fucking far out. Masterful!

MPEG stream: Reaper
MPEG stream: Black Strategy
MPEG stream: Pleiades Underground / Inexorable Master
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This is the second lp from UK psychedelic instrumental space rockers Teeth Of The Sea, their third record over all, and another twisted batch of heavy twisted psych, it makes sense that it would be on Rocket, home to other aQ fave space rock heavies like The Heads and Gnod, and these guys traffic in a similar sound, but one that is most definitely all their own, just check out opener "The Ambassador", one of THEE heaviest, trippiest slabs of space psych we've ever heard, thick low slung bassline, weird burbling electronics, tripped out processed vox, all hazy and buzzy and gristly, it sounds like a spaced out dirge rock Butthole Surfers almost, the guitars thick and distorted, the song a lugubrious crawl, until a second guitar swoops in, playing a slithery stoner riff, and the horns, the HORNS, bleating out a dark funereal drone, those freaky voices making everything way more druggy and demented, the drums come pounding in, it's not until about halfway through, that the guitars unwind wild peals of psychedelic leads, the drums grow more tribal, and yet, it never full explodes into conventional space rock, this is something else entirely, the song blisses out part way through, weird sci-fi squelches and more horns drifting in an expanse of distant guitar shimmer, and muted rhythms, everything gradually fading out leaving just tabla like drumming, subtle organs and swirls of electronic bloops and bleeps, and hell if that's not the way to start a record... And the rest of the record, defies convention still by never quite settling down into anything even resembling proper space rock or psych rock, even compared to their last record we reviewed, this is as about far out as it gets. The next track is all drum machine, weird industrial electronics, processed voices, swirling synths, almost like some heavier take on Goblin / Carpenter soundtrack stuff. The title is all horn flecked slow burn drift, a gradual build to a more post rock crunch, building to a sort of Godspeed climax, but one that's all super high end guitar tangles draped over the otherwise seemingly sedate sonic background, dramatic and tense and surprisingly cinematic. The rest of the record continues to take the concept of psychedelic space rock and twist it all up, from pulsing kosmische synths, to almost cheesy, eighties sounding soundtrack music, like a more metal Beverly Hills Cop or Miami Vice (!), to murky hazy washed out ambience, all muted processed guitars and blurred gauzy melodies, to a weird final track that's a hazy shoegazey soundscape of minimal drumming, chiming guitars, and lots and lots of horns, again very haunting and cinematic, and really quite gorgeous. Weird these guys seems to still lurk so beneath the radar, might be cuz they're just to far out and freaky for the psych/space rock crowd, which is a shame really, cuz this is some of the coolest stuff we've heard in ages.

MPEG stream: The Ambassador
MPEG stream: You're Mercury
MPEG stream: Midas Rex

Telepherique's slow grinding industrial repetitions (industrial defined more as relating to factories churning enormous machines rather than Nine Inch Nails) culled from a variety of field recordings where voices slip in an out of the macabre atmospheres and shifting rhythmic elements. Thematically based as a tour of a grimy horrific underside to an undisclosed German metropolis.

We've long been fans of the Telescopes, a veritable UK institution. A long running blissed out space rock outfit as adept at crafting dreamy billowy drone rock epics as they are spewing huge gobs of caustic guitarnoise and wild psychedelic freakouts. This ultra limited 7", in Trensmat's ongoing series of eps, finds the band dabbling in the latter. Two tracks of crumbling slowly decaying space rock ambience, washed out guitars, streaks of glittering feedback, rumbling drones, coruscating white noise guitar buzz, blurred disembodied chordal bliss and crunch slabs of fuzzy distortion, all stretched out into mesmerizing sprawls of dreamlike psychedelic space drone. Heavy and dense, noisy and divine! Includes a cd-r with the same tracks as the 7", but also with a 40 minute cd-rom film. A gorgeous and super abstract black and white video and live performance recorded in 2006, all stripes and striations, static and video white noise, shifting and slowly moving and changing shape, crumbling beauty, abstract decay and distortion, the visual analogue to the Telescopes blown out ambient skree. Pressed on opaque cloudy blue vinyl. Packaged in a cool full color sleeve with a half cutaway on the back revealing the single and the cd. LIMITED!!! Of course. Less than 100 copies worldwide...

One of two new 7"s on the Trensmat label this week, the other, the most recent from NYC bliss poppers Cheval Sombre, is reviewed elsewhere on the list, and then there's this, a record from psychedelic space rock legends The Telescopes. And as we no doubt have mentioned before, folks into the current crop of psych/space rock, who dig folks like White Hills, Carlton Melton, Wooden Shjips, etc., who somehow haven't heard the Telescopes, well, shit, it's never too late, and odds are you're have another new favorite band, and loads of records to track down. And this 7" is as good a place to start as any, although it definitely offers up a less rocking side of the band, the A side, a brooding cover of the Nick Drake track "Black Eyed Dog", here rendered in shades of black and grey, thick blurred swells of smoldering guitar, laced with delicate skeletal spidery melodies, and soft shimmery clouds of barely there FX, the vocals a hushed croon, the original was dark, but this is seriously haunting and ominous, a gorgeous bit of moody minimal mesmer. The B side starts with a strange sort of intro, a minimal bit of banjo laid over a churning swirl of buzzing FX, with spoken word by John Sinclair (founder of the White Panther Party, and one time manager of the MC5), while the second song on the B side, continues on in a similarly abstract direction, a strange soundscape of lazer effects and buzzing guitar drone, of blurred feedback, and jagged shard of truncated melody, bits of percussion and recordings of random conversations drift along this tripped out stream of smeared psychedelic minimalism. The record includes a download code, which not only gets you the 7"s tracks proper, but also includes a killer live track, that finds the band sounding more like Birchville Cat Motel or Sunroof!, with another sprawl of abstract guitardrone and ambient experimentalism, as well as an instrumental version of "Black Eyed Dog", featuring Bridget Hayden, and which cranks up the 7" version, adding more noise, more guitars, and turns it into something much more blown out and heady! Super limited, with Trensmat releases we generally only get one shot, and once the batch we get runs out, that's it, which means, of course, you should grab one of these before they're all gone for good.

MPEG stream: Black Eyed Dog
MPEG stream: Mind Hold

We won't go into too much detail with this as we only got 10 copies and we're pretty sure we won't be able to get more. A super limited (less than 100) lathe cut 7" from UK space rock institution The Telescopes. But don't be expecting any Loop like grooves (Loop the band, not loop the... um.. loop) or Hawkwind heart of the sun psychrock blow outs, or even any introspective shoe gazing, instead, this is the Telescopes at their most abstract and minimal, emitting a gorgeous multi-layered high end squall, very much like Sunroof! or Vibracathedral Orchestra. Sheets of wail and skree, keening streaks of feedback and wavering shimmering washes of glimmer and glisten. Two tracks, both barely shifting high end drones, and both quite lovely.� The cool thing about this single is, that it comes with a cd-r containing the same tracks that are on the 7", so since it's a lathe cut, and lathe cuts lose a little on every play, you can play it like crazy, letting it degrade slightly with each listen, enjoying the every changing sound quality, allowing for more crackle and hiss and distortion, probably getting more and more beautiful, without sacrificing the original tunes. Plus the cd-r also includes a QuickTime movie of the band performing in 2006 in Ireland... Awesome.

MPEG stream: Psychic Viewfinder 1
MPEG stream: Psychic Viewfinder 2

Three new sonic missives from the ether, from whatever mysterious alternate sonic universe the NOTHingness label exists in. A world of bleak emptiness, massive expanses of barren rumbling tundras, of glassy black surface sonic pools... Every disc dark and lovely, creepy and ominous, haunting and super intense. And of course outrageously limited... Through Fire is the first collaboration between these two relatively unknown (at least to us) US industrial ambient drone outfits, Temperature Within and Lovepowerexperiment, and together, they weave a suitably rumbling whirring shimmery series of slow burning dronescapes, that subtly shift and swell and morph over the course of eight Roman numeral-ed tracks. The opener is a prime slab of mysterious melodic dark ambience, imagine Lustmord if the sound was as pretty as it was scary, buried melodies tangled up in gritty crumbling swells of thick low end thrum. But by the end of the track, it has transformed into some sort of epic cinematic swirl, sweeping melodies, simple propulsive rhythms, a lost soundtrack to some dark drama. The rest of the disc unfolds in a similar fashion, tracks wander abstractly through shadowy stretches of haunting tension, barely there soft melodic shimmers, caustic corrosive walls of crumbling drone, and muted neoclassical flares tucked amidst deep blackened swells and slow swirling expanses of slow motion sprawl.� LIMITED TO ONLY 111 COPIES!! Packaged in a slimline dvd style case with full color cover.

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