The German drone ensemble Troum and its predecessor Maeror Tri have been long-time favorites of Aquarius, never failing to deliver powerful recordings of bleak atmospheres densely folded upon fragile melodies. We are pleased to announce that Troum's collaboration with the American dark ambient duo Yen Pox is no exception. Both Troum and Yen Pox rely upon the metaphoric characteristics of the drone to evoke dream like states. Within their prediliction for gossamer melodies from guitars, lutes, accordion, and flutes all buried under many layers of reverb, delay, and other blurring effects, Troum's work fixates upon the language of dreams and hypnogogic states (even their name is an archaic German translation for dream), as something of a semiotic / transcendental escape route from the confines of earthbound reality. On the otherhand, Yen Pox relies upon the hauntings of nightmares to shape the contexts of their drones, often referencing the sci-fi paranoia of black holes or the Gothic invocations of unknown horrors found in the best Lustmord recordings.
On "Mnemonic Induction," the two outfits seemlessly merge their respective sounds into a sublime droning hybrid that thrives on billowing oxygenated washes and delicate melodies floating up from a continuously thundering low-end rumble. Consequently, this album is far darker than anything that Troum / MT has ever done, but provides a greater focus beyond the scope of death-obsessed imagery common within the Yen Pox dark ambience.
This album should not be missed.
This is a preorder, for what might be the most extravagantly packaged 7" we've ever seen, and quite possibly the most expensive. Which is precisely why this is a preorder, as it's incredibly pricey, so we can only afford to get as many copies as we get orders for, and it's extremely limited (only 179 copies!!), and even with the crazy price tag, they're going fast, so if you want one, now is the time to order one, cuz again, we'll only be getting enough copies for the people who actually order them. What's the hubbub you ask? Well have a look at the picture, the record is a gorgeous picture disc 7", pressed on super thick vinyl, and housed in a transparent waterproof plastic die cut sleeve, filled with blue gel and shimmery glitter, which when combined with the picture disc, creates psychedelic underwater effects, it's really quite breathtaking, and considering the packaging, and how few they made, well, that's exactly why they are so crazy expensive.
But it is a record after all, not just an object d'art, and as always, it's another fantastic collection of "guitar drone-muzak" from this German duo, the A side a lush and luxurious, almost symphonic soundscape, all chiming melodies, hazy loops, lush orchestral swells, warm swirling chordal shimmer, very epic and cinematic, sprawling and majestic, laced with strange effects and glimmering electronics. The B side is darker and more minimal, but still hauntingly cinematic, woven from softly undulating drones, dreamy and melodic and a little dirgelike, a slow dramatic build that begins hushed and abstract, but soon blossoms into another miniature soundtracky epic.
As with pretty much all Troum releases, sonically totally recommended, and as for the packaging, well, we've maybe never seen such a deluxe and over the top 7".
Again, this is a PRE-ORDER, which means if you want one, order one now, you will be charged for the price of the record, but it won't ship until later, at which point it can either ship with your current order, or we can calculate the postage when the records arrive, and charge you the shipping then.
While Troum and their previous incarnation Maeror Tri may be familiar to Aquarius customers, the other two participants in this three way split release, Kallabris and Tam Quam Tabula Rasa, are certainly far more obscure entries from the post-industrial, noise 'n' drone community. With loose connections to the anagramatically complex, post-industrial ensemble Cranioclast, Kallabris detaches from most external references with two lengthy cuts of clinical Minimalism, subduing all sounds into purely concrete ambience. Tam Quam Tabula Rasa hails from the Italian scene of industrial ritualists, which has presented outfits like Ain Soph and Sigillum S. The restrained atmopsheres of Kallabris are again present; yet TQTR situates clanging metallic percussion and death-industrial allusions into the perpetual droning. AQ favorites Troum are in top form on their two lengthy tracks which are clearly the strongest amongst the three. With hissing drones, muffled distortion, and bleary reverberations built from guitars, bass, and source material from Yen Pox, Troum again position themselves as the malevolent doppelganger of My Bloody Valentine, with their beautiful guitar drones creeping into empathically haunting and occasionally threatening references. Limited stock!
MPEG Stream: KALLABRIS "Napping" [/audio/kallabrisnapping.m3u]
The jurors for the 2000 Ars Electronica competition were so generous to Carsten Nicolai that they handed down an honorable mention to his aesthetic twin Uli Troyer. "Nok" is the first release by Uli Troyer and is dominated by a simple incremental building of crystalline sinewave tones, quick algorithmic glitch sequences, and slow moving bass booms -- offering a near complete mimesis of Carsten Nicolai.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
"This is a collection of recordings of air vibrations from inside hollow objects." A pretty self-explanatory definition of this humble archive of Toshiya Tsunoda's field recordings. In Tsunoda's investigations, his interest lies in the pockets of resonant sound which often lie undetected by everyday observation (inside bottles, in a crack in manhole cover, etc.). In recording the sound of waves breaking off the rocky coast of Japan as it vibrates within a small cavity no bigger than a fist (amongst other spaces), Tsunoda captures delicately shifting drones from beautiful natural washes of sound. Very nice!
This is the third entry from the exceptional, if self-explanatory archives of Japanese field recordist Toshiya Tsunoda, concentrating here on "solid vibrations" as the follow up to the second volume which dealt with the microphonic properties of air within hollow objects. In his liner notes, Tsunoda explains that most of the interesting properties of solid vibrations are too faint to be heard under normal listening circumstances; yet with the aid of a piezo-ceramic contact microphone (a simple device which translates immediate vibrations into electrical currents), these vibrations can be made audible. Tsunoda concentrates his recordings around distinctly urban environments -- construction sites, wharfs, highways, wire net fences, metal plate fences, and industrial detritus -- due to the presence of large motors and engines which can activate the vibrations he seeks out. These tend to be very-low frequency rumbles and drones dappled with fluctuations from any number of environmental changes and human interactions. As in all of his other recordings, Tsunoda studiously documents all of the details from each recording, providing interesting tidbits about the sources for these vibrations (i.e. that a swinging element from one his recordings is the sway of an anchor deep in the ocean). Tsunoda is careful to point out that his recordings are "for the purpose of being heard. It is for improving the occurrence which one encounters every day. Therefore, pure scientific detection is not being carried out here." This is a really wonderful document, and may be the best yet from Tsunoda!
For several years now, Frans De Waard has been commissioning artists to recycle the sounds of his own recycling sound project Kapotte Muziek. Up until now, the series had been exclusively based upon the live recordings of Kapotte Muziek; but Japanese field recording expert Toshiya Tsunoda took hold of the studio works found on the 1992 cassette Vier Stukken. Given the terminal obscurity of much of the original source material, how much or how little any of the remixing artists put into the recordings is up for debate. Probably Frans, Tsunoda, and maybe ten other people in the world will know the answer to that riddle; but for the rest of us, it ultimately doesn't matter, as this is a great recording. It appears that Tsunoda took that Kapotte Muziek cassette to the Nagaura Bay in Yokosuka City, Japan (mentioned as the recording location on the sleeve) and played that cassette back in a number of contexts on that beach. Sometimes, playing the sounds through a bottle which acts as a rudimentary frequency filter, other times quietly situating the cassette sounds against the distant wash of the surf and birds, and others blasting the source material quite loudly. While these actions are readily discernable, others are not so easy to figure out, such as the suggestive crackling on the first track. Yeah, the detective work can be quite compelling; but fortunately, Tsunoda gives us plenty of reasons to keep on listening.
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We got this sometime last year, but our supplier ran out before we had a chance to list it. Now we've gotten some in again direct from the label, so any Tsunoda fans who missed this have another chance to grab a copy now. It's another installment of his amazing field recordings, microscopic sonic examinations of everyday vibrations -- everything from a signboard creaking in the wind to the rumble of a fishing pier and the tide. (And yes, if you've never heard Tsunoda before, it's good listening, opening up a whole new world that your ears aren't normally focussed enough to hear). The booklet provides information on each track, like notes on location, technical details of microphone placement and such. In addition, there's some more general words from Tsunoda about how he catagorizes the sounds he's documenting here: events on "boundary lines", spacial context, and "observation and object"... giving some conceptual insight into Tsunoda's interest in the meticulous recordings of the seemingly mundane with which he's made his career.
Lucky Kitchen -- those bright-eyed and bushy-tailed purveyors of anthropologically minded, but nevertheless cutiepie electronica -- has commissioned Japanese field recording minimalist Toshiya Tsunoda to do an album for their "Sparkling Composer" series (though he's not exactly a composer, more of a conceptual recordist). Tsunoda's previous releases "Extracts From Field Recording Archive Vol. 1" and "Vol. 2" were incredibly stoic offerings of amplifications of very quiet resonant frequencies, and stand as some of the most challenging, unprocessed field recordings we've ever heard here at Aquarius. Some of us here prefer those discs to this new recording but others really like this new album too. We all agree that this album has all of the prerequisites to be interesting, with Tsunoda's elaborate explanations of the technical set-up and circumstances of his recordings (such as the reflection of prepared test signals of very specific frequencies against a wall, or the placement of microphones in bottles or pipes, exposed to radio broadcasts or the sea). The liner notes certainly make for interesting reading, we'll not try to paraphrase them here. We were touched, though, by this comment: "Track 14 exceeded the input level at the time of recording and thus needed the technical help of my best friend and engineer Yukiharu Higashioji."
And the results of these recordings are fascinating and indeed beautiful listening. Much of "Pieces of Air", though proclaimed by Lucky Kitchen as an example of Tsunoda's sense of "child-like wonder", might actually make for a great horror movie soundtrack. Vaguely sinister thumps, humms, splashes, and drones abound. One of the best tracks is the last, recorded in Istanbul during the noontime call to prayer. Half-audible chants, drifting throught the air from across the city, mingle and merge in an ambient haze.
Toshiya Tsunoda has always impressed us with his impeccable recordings that undermine whatever preconceptions you might have about what a field recording is, or what sound art is, or what constitutes minimalism. For well over a decade now, Toshiya has been trawling around the world (but mostly in his native Japan) with a couple of ceramic contact microphones collecting various vibrations from incredibly simple sources that yield unbelievably dynamic sounds. Ridge Of Undulation is no different, with Toshiya again providing the pithy descriptions as to the contexts of each of the recordings as the track titles. Hence, "Sine waves mixed with the sound of a vibrating surface" is really what it says it is; but Toshiya's prowess is in how he situates those two sounds in the stereo field that instantly makes the hair stand up on anybody's neck all the while rippling into a sublime dronework. Throughout Ridge Of Undulation, Toshiya alternates between studio situations such as the aforementioned track with pieces like the unedited field recordings of a distant cargo ship's motors idling in Tokyo Bay. Toshiya's work is so simple in its phenomenological purity that words really do fail to describe it. As always recommended.
Toshiya Tsunoda never ceases to amaze with his extrordinary field recordings that document a very fine delineation between man-made and natural phenomena. He gives most of his recordings very dry, self-explanatory titles, like Extract From Field Recording Archive #3: Solid Vibrations for instance. As of late, the Japanese sound artist has been choosing rather baroque titles for his recordings (i.e. O Respirar Da Paisagem) and thus presenting an additional layer of meaning to his always incredible work. The word Decalcomania in this disc's title is the highly specialized artisan process of transfering an image onto china, marble, or glass. While the etymology of this term is the same as decal, Tsunoda infers a meaning far more precious and delicate than something you would slap on your skateboard!
On Scenery of Decalcomania, Tsunoda presents several of modes of operation. There are the raw field recordings such as the dynamic whistlings from the wind whipping across a small corroded opening on a handrail, and the unnerving doppler phasing from the resonant frequencies of two passenger ferries reflecting their sounds throughout the Kisarazu Bay. Along with these field recordings, Tsunoda also sets up situations which document the physical vibrations of glass bottles and copper foil. As in all of his records, Tsunoda provides an incredible amount of detail into the specifics of his recordings. And like all of his recordings, this comes highly recommended.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Electronic music from composer pianist David Tudor, realized at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in 1973. Two tracks, consisting of two different mixes, each 27 minutes and 30 seconds in length. Unfortunately the liner notes are all in Italian, but judging from the schematics included in the booklet and the sound of the recording the process appears to function as such: two boxes, each containing a speaker and two microphones, are set up in a feed back loop. Integrated into this loop are several devices for processing the envelope of the sound, gain, etc. resulting in swells of reverberant feedback drone which are constantly shifting in timbre and color. Not unlike Arcane Device.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Temperate electronica, pretty ditties rest on cyclic heaving -- some dismantled soul and some traditional-ish Japanese vocals.
Tujurikkuja is a meeting of San Francisco musical minds, namely Kit Clayton and Chris Dixon. It has been a very long time since we've heard anything from Clayton, the digital wunderkid who recorded a handful of deliriously glitched-out dub albums around the turn of the millennium and also ran the highly influential Orthlong Musork imprint which released work by Stephan Mathieu, Blectum From Blechdom, Akira Rabelais, AGF, Timeblind, and Gold Chains. While he hasn't released much of anything in the past six or seven years, he does perform here in the Bay Area mining the gaps of audiovisual errata as well as DJ-ing full-frontal techno sets. His partner in the Estonio-phonically named Tujurikkuja has recently been copping a dour drone-noise pose under the guise Earth Jerks, but he's long been a noisenik artrocker in Death Sentence Panda and Murder Murder. This one-sided lathe-cut 7" sports a spaced-out electro-drone mantra with Dixon churning through a shoegazing riff muffled through a mountain of cotton candy FX, and with Clayton delicately layering analogue (or seemingly analogue) electronic tones and drones throughout. Very lovely stuff; and we do hope to hear more from Tujurukkuja very soon. For those who care about such things, the lathe was cut at Funky Frankenstein the heart of middle Tennessee on a sheet of polycarbonate which shouldn't degrade or do any damage to the needle. Limited to 50 copies!
We were WAY over glitchy laptronica when Tuk's Shallow Water Blackout knocked us upside the head a few lists back and demonstrated that just cuz some sound was played to death, didn't mean that amazing things couldn't still be done with it.
That Diskont itch that seemingly only Oval could scratch, had been getting itchier without us even knowing it, who would have realized we had been secretly hankering for a gitched up stuttery underseascape of burble and skitter, of muted rhythm and haunted melody. Well we were and Shallow Water Blackout hit she spot, and good! So much so that we figured we oughta track down Tuk's previous record, Proud Princess Of A Brand New City, and dang if it ain't just as purty!
In fact, it might even actually be a little bit prettier, definitely more serene and subdued, a little bit more musical. The rapid fire chop and splice and reassemble of Shallow Water Blackout is still present but in smaller measures. There's a bit more of a minimal angle, it's much more melodic and dreamy, rife with low drones and mumbled melody, and more actual instrumentation. It's got a fuzzy sort of sheen that has us thinking even more of groups like Jasper TX and Machinefabriek than the new one did.
Our favorite track might just be "German Holidays", beginning with a simple sad, guitar line, it's quickly surrounded by bits of glitchy ambience, clouds of record crackle and weird disembodied buzz, but it's about halfway through where it gets really good, suddenly, in comes some distorted guitar, eighties cop show, made for TV movie music, looped into a super Circular rhythm with breathy background vocals and streaks of glistening feedback, it sort of krautrocks along before it begins to deteriorate, the riff getting more and more distorted, the melodies beginning to crumble, beautiful and haunting, and surprisingly super catchy.
Those sorts of unlikely musical moments continue to surface throughout the record, suspended in Tuk's wide open fields of blissy glitch and whirring warble, making us want to just curl up and drift off...
Most of us got kind of bored by the whole laptop revolution years ago. Nerds checking their emails while some sound program runs basically on its own, a cascade of bleeps and bloops and glitches. Electronica, intelligent dance music, glitchcore, glitchtronica, what-the-fuck-ever. There have been exceptions of course, and some folks can most certainly turn a crappy old laptop into a wheezing world of wonder, or an alien symphony. One of our all time favorite 'glitch' records would have to be Oval's Diskont, a gorgeous murky underwater soundscape of burbling beauty and glistening shimmer, all woven together from digital glitch in the form of skipping compact discs. Few records since then have managed to bridge the massive gap between technical tomfoolery and emotional resonance. But damn if this latest (and first as far as we know) from Guillaume Graux, aka Tuk doesn't come damn close.
Unlike Diskont, Tuk's Shallow Water Blackout isn't all dreamy bliss and soft focus flutter, instead Graux weaves super dense tangles of sound, organic and otherwise. The most notable sonic elements are traditional instruments, acoustic guitars, piano, harps, organs, but it's what he does with them... chopping and stretching, twisting and tweaking, long stretches of skips and stutters somehow coalesce into strangely haunting minor key melodies, occasionally getting all backed up into huge crunchy, super dynamic rhythms, but not dance music rhythms, more sort of 'song' rhythms. The opener is the perfect example. What begins sounding like Hill Street Blues or Christopher Cross given a Jeckian muted mumbled abstract dream fuzz makeover, gets more and more dark and moodily melodic, bookended by these amazing math rock style stop/start arrangements, where huge blasts of fuzzy ambience give way to utter silence, only to burst back into motion again, the glitchy electronic equivalent to the hardcore breakdown maybe. With the same physically powerful affect.
And the whole record continues in that fashion, gorgeous chopped and reassembled minor key guitar tangles, bits of piano and random song fragments, peppered with digital crunch, of course plenty of glitch, loads of fuzz and hiss and crackle, all perfectly interacting and transforming the organic elements. Graux most definitely has a deft hand at composing and songwriting. These are not just huge messes of sound, these are actual songs, dark and beautiful, with an internal logic, a sonic story, a melodic journey through a weird world of dissected and strangely reassembled pop music. Much like labelmate Ignatz, who constantly reimagine and reinvent Appalachia and Delta blues, creating a whole new sound, Tuk do something similar with electronic music, coming up with a sound that is neither cold nor unemotional, not dance-y or really in any way groovy, but instead is some weird futuristic mood music, weirdly emotional mysteriously ominous and so so lovely.
Think Oval, Chris Clark, Jeck, Tim Hecker, Pierre Bastien, Dialing In, Part Timer, Machinefabriek, Jasper Texas, Grouper... So pretty...
There's definitely a knack to crafting, moody, sweeping post rock epics, sure any one can string together a few minor key chords, add a little rhythmic shuffle and whip it all up into slow building crescendos, but much like drone music, or black metal, or anything really, it's not the being able to do it, it's the being able to do it in some super special way. To make it sound at once warm and familiar, but alien and challenging. That part is tough.
Richmond, Virginia's Tulsa Drone pull it off big time, with a sound that is epic and majestic, a gloomy, metal-tinged post rock Appalachia, mesmerizing, droney, slightly twangy, incredibly spacious, with a definite deserty vibe, due in no small part to the instrumentation. Sure the arrangements are ace, evoking all sorts of wide open vistas and barren landscapes, but the fact that these guys augment their bass / drums / guitars lineup with harmonica, slide guitar, theremin and most importantly (and uniquely) hammered dulcimer is what really seals the deal. We can't really even think of another rock band with a dulcimer player, but after spending some time with this disc, there sure as hell should be more. Lots more. The sound of that instrument is so organic, and meshes so well with the more traditional rock instruments, but is also weirdly buzzy and percussive, and has much to do with TD's unique sound.
Each song here is spacious, expansive, brooding, dreamy and lovely, with looping moody melodies, motorik rhythms, haunting harmonicas, wheezing out dusty distant textures, the drums simple but expressive, the guitar unfurling languid smokey melodies, lots of twang and shimmer, bit of Morricone for sure, the slower sultrier tracks sounding a bit like some Dirty Three post rock threnody, darkly dramatic, but with harmonica instead of violin. A few songs even feature vocals, but instead of mucking up a perfect instrumental record, they add another unique and gorgeously haunting element, the vocals, delivered in a deep Nick Cave like croon, wrapped in billowy reverb, only add to the mystery and moodiness of Tulsa Drone's windswept desert crawl. So good.
The first time we heard Scott Tuma play guitar, was with skeletal slowcore country legends Souled American. His washed out dreamlike atmospheric guitar parts helped define their sound, but more importantly, introduced Tuma as a truly idiosyncratic guitar player, with a haunting and mysteriously unique sound. Tuma's music was like an acoustic version of Tim Hecker or Fennesz, but whereas those guys use electronics and computers and effects to transform their guitars into blurred dronescapes, Tuma's approach is much more organic, unfurling skeletal guitar lines, a slowed down Appalachia deftly woven into a sprawl of slow motion, washed out, sepia toned countrified ambience. Tuma's two proper solo records, Hard Again and The River 1 2 3 4, are both HUGE all time aQ favorites, so we were pretty excited to hear about a brand new release, especially since we've been waiting patiently for almost 5 years!
Not For Nobody begins quite strangely, a super spare, lo-fi recording of barely there guitar, stretched out beneath reverb drenched childlike vocals, cooing and purring, a bit like a countrified Bjork, the sibilance stretched out into glistening shimmers, the melody, mournful and dreamy, bits of tinkling chimes, and muted ambient clatter, the whole thing sun dappled and soft focus, so strange and haunting, but so lovely and sublime.
The next track finds us on much more familiar ground, a loose tangle of steel string guitar, sounding like it could have come off one of the later Souled American records, but sans vocals, the melodies lyrical and lilting, couched in a thick layered backdrop of warm whir, sprinkled with tinkling bells and chimes, laced with bits of piano, somehow sparse and skeletal, but impossibly lush. Which is sort of Tuma's specialty, turning minimalism into maximalism, but without losing any of the former's hushed urgency or whispered intimacy.
The whole record is quite varied, but each track manages to sound like it couldn't be anywhere else, every one seamlessly leading into the next, a song suite, an album of cohesive musical pieces, not just a collection of songs. The third track, "Eloper", introduces what sounds like horns, for a haunting funereal march, a woozy fanfare that seems to slowly spread out, a simple pulse like rhythm beneath hazy streaks and deliberate minor key strum. The next track begins as a jaunty upper register steel string lullaby, giving way, part way through, to a languorous late afternoon sun dappled sprawl, slightly atonal, gorgeous and bleary eared. "New Joy" buries the guitar in a haze of whirring buzz and warm swirls of lush chords and muted feedback, very liturgical sounding, a dark ambient drift through some ancient crumbling cathedral, while "Rakes" begins as a simple stripped down halfspeed Appalachian hoedown, before transforming into a sea of sawing strings, of layered buzz and extended steel string drones.
The record finishes the way it began, with that ghostly childlike voice, the bits of spare guitar, the massive clouds of delay and reverb, that voice a wraith hovering above the web of subtle minor key guitar, the floorboards creaking, motes of dust tinkling like chimes in a soft evening breeze, creepy, sorrowful, and so completely gorgeous.
Tuma conjures a timeless magical mystery with his guitar. He plays the mysterious traveler, a wandering audio alchemist, turning notes and chords into gold, or rather, golden streaks of dusty memory and soft golden glimpses of some hidden and blurred otherworld. His are sounds to get lost in, to wrap around yourself like some cloak spun from gold thread, to hide under with a flashlight like a child, creating worlds of light and shadow, a sound at once mystical and enigmatic, warm and familiar, and truly truly sublime.
ATTENTION!! The first 100 copies come packaged in a gold on black, cardstock gatefold sleeve, housed in a special oversized handscreened 7" style outersleeve, black ink on metallic gold paper, each one hand numbered. We managed to get nearly 3/4 of that first 100, but the way things have been going these will probably not last long, so once we run out, you'll get the normal, slightly cheaper version (the innersleeve white on brown instead of gold and black, and without the oversized hand numbered outer sleeve).
We first discovered Scott Tuma when he was playing guitar for stoned Chicago slowcore country cosmonauts Souled American, his distinctive sound helping to shape SA's totally idiosyncratic music. And after Tuma parted ways with Souled American, he seemed to mark the event by jettisoning traditional songs completely, instead crafting a series of gorgeously gauzy country dronescapes, like an organic folk version of Tim Hecker, his lush landscapes, blurred and gauzy, washed out smears of impressionistic country music, evoking lost loves and bygone eras, his music utterly timeless and totally unlike anything we'd heard.
So every new Tuma releases is definitely worth celebrating, and Peeper is no different. A five song suite that captures everything we love about Tuma's music. The opener is a barely there stretch of gauzy sun dappled shimmer, which gives way to a stretch of slow motion Appalachia, the notes left to float weightless in wide open stretches of warm whirring ambience, a creaky, glacial bit of old timey drift, like a broadcast from some other time, playing through a busted old radio on a rickety old porch, the sunlight glimmering through the branches of the trees, the summer fading ever so slowly. Like on past records, Tuma is joined by members of Zelienople, and as the record progresses, the trio begin to unfurl fuzzy stretches of soft noise, of industrial creak, and layered grey drones, peppered with bits of percussion, clatter and whir, growing noisier and more propulsive, more like some murky psychedelic outfit, a haunting melody laced noise drenched creep, that's both caustic and lovely, eventually dissipating and leaving more hazy hushed dreaminess, what sounds like harmonium, piano, lazy and warm and languid and so sweetly beautiful.
The flipside of the tape, as far as we can tell, features a reinterpretation of Tuma's music, or maybe Tuma's sounds are sampled, or perhaps it's simply an homage, but the oddly named Brothers Pus (aka Johnny Kember & James Provencher), weave a thick sea of layered bass rumbles, of keening distant high end streaks, of tolling bells, a dark industrial dronescape, infused with bits of melody, that gradually fades out and gives way to something more folky, the industrial whir dialed back, while guitars pluck out melancholy melodies over the top, a dark droning country drift, that had we not known better, would have assumed it was Tuma himself.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES! Already sold out, we have less than 20 copies and that's IT.
Scott Tuma is easily one of our favorite guitarists, from his stint creating warped and warbly underwater twangscapes in legendary downer country legends Souled American, to his gorgeous solo records of warm hazy Appalachia, so it's nice that Tuma seems to be back on track, after a seemingly long stretch of inactivity. The recent Not For Nobody, which was of course an aQ Record of The Week, and now this, a brand new collaboration with Zelienople's Mike Weis, which manages to take that Tuma sound we love and transform it into something new and different.
Weis is the drummer in Zelienople, and since Zelienople never had much cause for a proper drummer, Weis manages to be super creative behind the kit, or maybe more accurately, with an arsenal of cymbals and gongs and chimes, creating textures and layers more than rhythms. Which is precisely what he brings to this collaboration. Tuma is of course doing what he does best, weaving lush landscapes of sound, his guitar keening and moaning, drifting and twanging, sounding underwater one minute, weightless and spacey the next, those sounds are given a whole new context when paired with Weis's unique percussion. The drums here seem to consist mostly of a sort of soft cacophony, manic skitter, clouds of tinkling chimes, bowed cymbals, the deep tones of BIG cymbals or gongs, plenty of clatter and clang, but all sort of smeared into a living backdrop, reacting and interacting with Tuma's guitar, the result is often like a strange Souled American free jazz mashup, which might not sound good, but actually is, although elsewhere the results are a bit more subtle than that.
The guitars slip from hazy and underwater sounding, to gently shimmering, acoustic guitars unfurl woozy Appalachia, bits of twang, soft strums, all gently laid over a sea of skitter and thump, the deep shimmer of reverberating metals, the result is gorgeously murky and indistinct, less like two players playing off of each other, and more like two people contributing to the same sprawling sound. The first side plays out like the two getting acquainted, a delicate dance, their unique sounds quickly finding common ground and melting seamlessly into each other, culminating in a gorgeous track of hushed minimalism, introducing piano, Weis's percussion kept to a whispered thrum, everything wreathed in lush reverb and delay, so lovely.
The second side, features several longish tracks, where Tuma gets to try something a little more distorted and aggressive, the duo creating extended bouts of deep ominous dronemusic and thick caustic buzz, each player's contributions still distinct, at least with close listening, but step back, and the various parts take on surprising shapes, long stretches of heaving, droning, mesmerizingly meditative and surprisingly fluid drones, that manage to be warm and melodic as well as darkly mysterious.
Packaged in beautiful fold out silk screened sleeves, and LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!! ALREADY SOLD OUT!! THESE ARE THE ONLY COPIES WE'LL HAVE, EVER.
Finally, now you can not only proclaim your love for Andee's record label and all the killer bands who have released records on tUMULt: Weakling, Leviathan, Iran, Hammers Of Misfortune, Harvey Milk, Bathtub Shitter, Souled American, but also your disdain for all other bands! Or maybe just ALL bands...
This two button set features one button with the ubiquitous tUMULt upside down cross logo, a logo so heavy it seems to have slid down the button, to settle near the bottom, the other featuring the ever popular "I hate your band" legend printed all by its lonesome. Perfect as a non verbal response to the age old query "So, what did you think of my band" or even "How did you like the cd I gave you". Just point, and problem solved! So c'mon, represent!!
Both buttons are extra big too, not tiny band button sized, but also not huge weird soccer mom button size either, just a little bit bigger than your typical 1" button (they're 1.5" just so you know), so they're small enough to decorate your favorite denim vest or trucker hat or tube top, but big enough to make the rest of your buttons cower in terror! ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
Portland has been a veritable hotbed of underground dronefolk, floorcore and free noise lately, even with the dissolution of the Yellow Swans, we're left with Valet, Dark Yoga, Tunnels and lots more. Tunnels, when we first discovered 'them', was in fact a one man band specializing in rumbling droning buzz, static black ambience, that eschewed melody and arrangement for texture and mood. And we loved it. But over the last few Tunnels releases, we watched as the sound has gradually developed from that minimal low end blur, to something much more varied and songlike, prettier and way more musical. We're tempted to think that Tunnels is no longer a one man band, as the sound now sounds like some foresty folk collective, feeling their way around lilting melodies, and fractured song structures. Regardless, it still sounds fantastic, just now it is more in line with stuff like Avarus, or No Neck, or Kemialliset.
The drone is still ever present, but now it's just a tiny part of a much more sprawling and expansive whole. The sound lo-fi and home recorded, but deep and dense and warm and lush. Guitars drift, distorted melodies surface here and there, percussion is erratic and playful, stumbling and not always specifically rhythmic, voices moan and croon, wreathed in effects that don't distort as much as they just soften and blur. Some tracks sound distinctly African, with a distinct Konono vibe, others remind us of Amps For Christ, haunting jaunty buzz drenched hoedowns, while still others are soft serene soundscapes, that shimmer dreamily, all the distortion and buzz allowed to remain, just way off in the distance. The sound of Tunnels now is much less specific, and certainly harder to define, but it's probably exactly what makes this disc so compelling, and keep us wanting to hear more and more.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!
Latest from this one man Portland based psychedelic drone outfit, we blew through the last two cd-r releases (we've got three others in stock we've yet to review, check the in stock not yet reviewed section of this list if you want to buy any of those) and this is the latest, a super micro pressing of only 50 copies, so we won't bother to say too much, as from past experience we know there are WAY more psychdrone obsessives than we got copies of this disc.
Way more active than the first Tunnels cd we listed, and much more varied than the second, Cluster of Rainbows starts at a similar sonic starting point, a slow burning, near static wash of rumbling whirs and distant low end moan, a washed out expanse of shimmering drone, but now there are vocals, disembodied and drifting, chant-like, adding a sort of space rock vibe. The first half of this nearly hour long track is a series of variations on that initial spaced out cosmic drone, various timbres of buzz, layers of whirring sound, chiming harmonics and glistening bell-like tones, all woven into a constantly fluctuating sea of black ambience, the real surprise comes about 30 minutes in, when all of a sudden an acoustic guitar surfaces, gently strummed, delicately picked, a haunting little chunk of Appalachia draped over the smoldering low end, both building in intensity, before fading into a pulsing stream of crackling blackened low end, warm melodic swells, and finishing off with several minutes of near silence, and barely audible conversation.
Packaged in cool dvd style square plastic digipaks, with photocopied covers, and an insert, hand numbered.
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES!!! We got half the pressing, after that, these are gone for good.
It's been a while since we've had a proper full length from Tunnels, aka Nicholas Bindeman, who over the last few years has given us a whole mess of gorgeous, and sadly for the most part all out of print, cd-r's of deep shimmering drone music, abstract minimal freak folk, and everything in between. This latest tape finds Bindeman taking his sound even further into that more songy direction, and we're digging it big time. Fuzzy and psychedelic and woozy and groovy and druggy, mixing looped droning ambience with buzzy hypnotic Spacemen 3 style drug psych, even a bit of Wooden Shjips drug rock, each track seems to be built around a single riff, locked and looped, mesmerizing and tripped out, while all around, guitar leads tangle and super reverbed vocals croon WAY down in the mix, the vibe is sun baked and lysergic, surprisingly rocking too, acoustic guitars unfurl all folkily, before they begin to buzz and suddenly we're in Six Organs or Jack rose territory, a little buzz drenched Appalachia, but infused with plenty of ramshackle foresty tinkle and chime, and there's even some of the old school Tunnels dronemusic happening, but that too is all psychedelic and blown out, reminding us of newer sonic explorers like Expo 70. Needless to say, it's about time folks into all that new fangled modern psych, and abstract krautdrone got hip to Tunnels, this definitely pushes all the same buttons. Expo 70, White Hills, Wooden Shjips, Lamp Of The Universe, Heavy Winged, Sleepy Sun, all that sort of stuff, this is just as heavy and dreamy and trippy and psychedelic and awesome as any of that. Buy this now, and track down the rest of the Tunnels records if you can, this sort of shit can't stay under the radar for much longer.
Super fancy packaging, deluxe 6 panel full color fold out sleeve, with a printed vellum obi, each one hand numbered, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!
We got super into Portland one man drone outfit Tunnels a while back, and have tried to carry everything we could get our hands on, check out all the rave reviews on the aQ site, so we went ahead and ordered a bunch of copies of three new releases, all put out by the band, all hand made, the covers glued and taped, all fantastic and beautiful, dark and droney, mysterious and murky. But before we could review them and list them, we started selling them like crazy, in the store, and to eagle eyed mailorder customers who spied them on the in stock not yet reviewed list (always check there!), so much so that we were soon down to a number too few to review on the new arrivals list.
Unfortunately, now, all three of them are out of print, and we have the last remaining 8 or so copies of each. So fair warning, judging from how quick they went in the store, odds are these will be gone in a flash. And we can absolutely NOT get more once we run out, as they were limited to 50 or 70 or some crazy small amount.
And for those of you new to the sound of Tunnels, well, the name is your first clue, it's dark and mysterious, but shot through with a warm distant glow, part abstract ambience, part minimal drone, part drifty krautrock, dreamy and washed out and hypnotic, sometimes building into huge swells of low end, other times shimmering ghostlike. Gorgeous, gorgeous stuff. It's high time somebody released a proper record. But for now, these cd-r's will have to hold us over.
And again, out of print, last copies ever, act fast, and all that...
More dreamy drones from Portland, Oregon. The second audio document from the man known simply as Tunnels, and the weird thing is, the music actually sort of sounds like tunnels... We have had a few other Tunnels cd-r's, we still have a few in stock, have a look at this week's instock not yet reviewed section, they're all great, but this is the latest, and we actually managed to get enough to actually review and list.
Unlike the self titled cd-r on Yarn Lazer (now out of print, so don't order), which seemed to be mostly low end rumble and minimal drone, Radiant Bodies begins with nothing but vocals, disembodied coos and purrs left suspended in haunting stretches of reverbed shimmer and glitchy percussive skitter. Sounds a bit like Yarn Lazer head honcho Honey Owens' Valet project. The second track continues on in a similar trajectory, billowy smears of melody, over a blurred dentist drill backdrop, a pretty gauze draped over a jagged landscape of hiss and grind. The next track is even more ephemeral, gorgeous spaced out krautrock synth drift a la Popol Vuh or Tangerine Dream, but even more blissed out. In fact very little of the record is low end rumble, instead it's all blown out space rock drift, long glimmering expanses of pulsing minimal sound, meditative and hypnotic and so beautiful.�
Packaged in a mini dvd style plastic sleeve, with full color cover, and full color mini insert.�
Thrill Jockey seem to be snapping up lots of underground faves, Barn Owl, Eternal Tapestry, Wooden Shjips, Sun Araw, and now Tunnels. We have to say we were a bit surprised, as Tunnels seemed WAY underground, but it makes sense as Tunnels, aka Nicholas Bindeman, is also a member of Eternal Tapestry (as well as a sometime member of Jackie-O Motherfucker). And we were also surprised when we threw this on, cuz the sound here is nothing like the Tunnels of old. All of the various cd-r's we'd reviewed in the past from Bindeman had been super minimal dronemusic, or occasionally tripped out dritfy psychedelia, but The Blackout threw us for a loop. Not sure if there's an element of bandwagoning going on, but the NEW Tunnels sound is strangely similar to the NOW sound, a sort of retro gloomy gothy electro wave, or cold wave, or synth wave, or whatever you want to call it. Apparently Tunnels' new sound began a while back, as a sort of primitive lo-fi Suicide live experiment, but eventually evolved into this, a sound we dig for sure, and one that seems like it would have been right at home on Sacred Bones or Captured Tracks. And to be fair, for all of its similarities to other modern retrowave outfits, Tunnels influences seem to go back further, the sound more machine like, more classic industrial. The label mentions Throbbing Gristle, and we definitely hear some of that, we also hear a little Gary Numan on opener "Crystal Arms", and a little Devo on "Volt 1979", but all via some lost eighties new wave. And really once our initial shock faded (we were expecting some dreamy psychedelic dronemusic after all), this record really began to grow on us, twisted and Teutonic, gloomy and gothy, and pretty dang catchy and poppy. And poppy is the key for us. For all the industrial crunch and old school electronic bleep and bloop, the icy sung/spoken vox, it's the low slung basslines and the crazy catchy hooks that go with them that transform this from some vanity experiment into a seriously killer chunk of retro industrial electro pop!
We got super into Portland one man drone outfit Tunnels a while back, and have tried to carry everything we could get our hands on, check out all the rave reviews on the aQ site, so we went ahead and ordered a bunch of copies of three new releases, all put out by the band, all hand made, the covers glued and taped, all fantastic and beautiful, dark and droney, mysterious and murky. But before we could review them and list them, we started selling them like crazy, in the store, and to eagle eyed mailorder customers who spied them on the in stock not yet reviewed list (always check there!), so much so that we were soon down to a number too few to review on the new arrivals list.
Unfortunately, now, all three of them are out of print, and we have the last remaining 8 or so copies of each. So fair warning, judging from how quick they went in the store, odds are these will be gone in a flash. And we can absolutely NOT get more once we run out, as they were limited to 50 or 70 or some crazy small amount.
And for those of you new to the sound of Tunnels, well, the name is your first clue, it's dark and mysterious, but shot through with a warm distant glow, part abstract ambience, part minimal drone, part drifty krautrock, dreamy and washed out and hypnotic, sometimes building into huge swells of low end, other times shimmering ghostlike. Gorgeous, gorgeous stuff. It's high time somebody released a proper record. But for now, these cd-r's will have to hold us over.
And again, out of print, last copies ever, act fast, and all that...
We got super into Portland one man drone outfit Tunnels a while back, and have tried to carry everything we could get our hands on, check out all the rave reviews on the aQ site, so we went ahead and ordered a bunch of copies of three new releases, all put out by the band, all hand made, the covers glued and taped, all fantastic and beautiful, dark and droney, mysterious and murky. But before we could review them and list them, we started selling them like crazy, in the store, and to eagle eyed mailorder customers who spied them on the in stock not yet reviewed list (always check there!), so much so that we were soon down to a number too few to review on the new arrivals list.
Unfortunately, now, all three of them are out of print, and we have the last remaining 8 or so copies of each. So fair warning, judging from how quick they went in the store, odds are these will be gone in a flash. And we can absolutely NOT get more once we run out, as they were limited to 50 or 70 or some crazy small amount.
And for those of you new to the sound of Tunnels, well, the name is your first clue, it's dark and mysterious, but shot through with a warm distant glow, part abstract ambience, part minimal drone, part drifty krautrock, dreamy and washed out and hypnotic, sometimes building into huge swells of low end, other times shimmering ghostlike. Gorgeous, gorgeous stuff. It's high time somebody released a proper record. But for now, these cd-r's will have to hold us over.
And again, out of print, last copies ever, act fast, and all that...
Another dreamy drone document from the burgeoning "Portland Psychedelic-Drone underground", this time from one of the�Jackie O Motherfuckers,�Nicholas Samuel Bindeman, who touches on lots of droney sounds we love: the spacey krautrock drift of Expo '70, the shimmering high end ur-drone of Sunroof!, the ultra minimal murmur of Coleclough and Chalk, the muted melodic smear of Fear Falls Burning, but give it all his own personal twist, rendering all of his influences in soft focus hues and indistinct blurs.
The opening track is all�long slow slithery swells of gently pulsing ghost like shimmer, wrapped in a twinkling cloud of glistening FX sparkles and soft breathy whir, underneath it all, haunting minor key melodies drift and twist, almost entirely obscured by the foreground's static beauty. Track two is more thick and gritty, channeling some Stars Of The Lid, with deep mournful sonic drifts, minor key laments stretched into longform soundscapes, dense and lush, a burnished pulsing almost glowing super dramatic slow build.�
Track three begins almost inaudibly with barely there subsonic vibrations, that gradually grow into sprawling black tendrils, over which glistening high end scrapes and creaks are blurred into wispy clouds of bowed metal and struck bells, metallic and delicate. Finally, the closer,� a warm billowy barely moving swirl of deep, soft tones, delicate crepuscular curlicues, floating weightless in some clouded landscape, gauzy and dreamlike, a disembodied journey through some�vaporous soundworld. So lovely.�
Released on Yarnlazer, one of our new favorite labels, home of Acre, Ghosting, Bonecloud, Valet, Dark Yoga and more...
Packaged in cool hand screened sleeves, with photocopied insert.�
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
Another new release brought to us by Finland's Ektro, the label run by our pal Jussi of Circle. Ektro's releases are always graphically quite nice and musically quite adventurous and unpredictable, although Jussi's interest in prog and psych usually is evident. In this case, we have a percussion extravaganza from one Janne Tuomi (currently, a member of Circle and various underground Finnish improv ensembles). It's mostly percussion, anyway -- the list of instruments in the cd booklet reads thusly: "drumset, cymbals, percussion, tam-tams, opera gongs, changgo, pandiero, raagini-pro, pocket trumpet, voice". With these implements, and "no overdubs, no editing", Tuomi has created five instrumental pieces (not conventional songs, we mean), bridging free jazz and Finnish free-folk. Carefully constructed, rising and falling, with hazy drone and dramatic clatter, soothing bells and rattling sticks...not a noisy racket at all, but a personal sound-world quite listenable for something that falls into the 'solo percussion' category.
If you go way back in the aQuarius list archive, you'll find us raving about Turing Machine years and years ago, and while that was before our reviews got to be so long, it didn't take a huge review to explain that they were one of our favorite instrumental post rock bands. We compared them to Polvo and Drive Like Jehu, Pitchblende, Shellac, Unwound, their sound was mathy and propulsive, driving and complex, a modern day kraut / prog combo that made it all seem effortless, from darkly hypnotic minimal grooves, to wildly dense almost metallic heaviness. Much of their magic was the incredible drumming of Jerry Fuchs, who tragically passed away a few years ago.
This album, recorded prior to Fuch's death, is the first Turing Machine release since their Zwei record in 2004, that long hiatus in no small part due to Fuchs' extracurricular drumming activity, which included a whole bunch of dance outfits, !!!, the Juan Maclean, LCD Soundsystem, even Massive Attack, and all that dance music drumming definitely had a huge effect on Turing Machine, who were no longer just a nineties style math/post rock outfit, but instead had become something much more. Fear not though, there's plenty of awesomely motorik post rock jamming, it's just that a lot of the time, there are also pulsing synths, or electronics. But just check out album opener, "Yeah, C'mon", which starts out like some strangely percolating new wave jam, the drums almost disco-y, the driving synths, but as the guitars come in, and coalesce into riffs, the song begins to take on rock form, until finally, exploding into some seriously fierce and driving post rock, wrapped in wild guitar squiggles and all sorts of random electronics, and the drumming, fucking KICK ASS.
"Lazy Afternoon Of The Jaguar" is equal parts laid back dance groove and motorik krautfunk, the guitars looped in woozy psychedelic swirls around the super tight bass/drums foundation. "Slave To The Algorithm" is total electro kraut-funk, Fuchs doing his best robo-beat accompanied by all manner of pulsing synths and weirdly processed guitars. The title track sounds like "Legs" by ZZ Top, stripped down and given a cosmic psychedelic space rock makeover, the synths again in full effect, but the drums locked tight, and the guitars loose and spidery and wildly psychedelic. "If It's Gone (It's On)" adds vocals to the mix, and lays down a serious slab of crunchy, fuzzy, guitar driven post-punk electro-funk, and record closer "Bovina 2/23/08" finds the band in full on heart of the sun mode, effortlessly channeling the sort of FX drenched space rock psychedelic freakout that should most definitely endear them to fans of White Hills, the Heads and the like.
Beyond Painting displays another facet of the enigmatic Robert Turman. Way back in the late '70s, he founded the seminal noise project NON with Boyd Rice, who soon adopted the name for his own work, with Turman seemingly disappearing from the public realm for well over three decades. There were just a smattering of self-released cassettes which emerged in the '80s, but it wasn't until John Elliott unearthed the beautifully hypnotic patter of Turman's 1981 cassette Flux on Spectrum Spools, that people began to really pay attention to Turman's work. Then the slew of Turman 'reissues' began to emerge, although it's really hard to call them reissues as the original editions were utterly minuscule. Beyond Painting dates back to 1990, but wasn't released for another 20 years as a self-released cd-r in an edition of just 100 copies; and thankfully gets a proper 2lp reissue via Fabrica. While Turman is often associated with noise culture, all of the work we've been able to hear (outside the early Non recordings) has steered clear of an aggressive tone with Flux adopting an introspective minimalism and with Beyond Painting taking a somber approach to ambient music with a distinctly postindustrial touch (e.g. Zoviet France, Cranioclast, etc.).
Spectral hues and back-masked synth notes interlock for the introductory "Soft Self Portrait" which ends up being austere, bleak, and self-negating if in fact it is a self portrait. A slow-motion, post-punk dubby bass line girds the stalker atmosphere of "Al Qa'ida" with its buzzing, harmonic synth lines. The name of this track in 1990 wouldn't have had the cultural weight that it does now, but there is a desperation and abjection to the desolate melodies that pushes through the lens of 9/11 right on through today. Another masterfully done piece is found in "Relux" whose eerily sci-fi / narcoleptic melodies predating what Aphex did on Selected Ambient Works II, but way creepier, or even what Burzum did on the ambient half of Filosofem. Yeah, it's that good! The second LP holds more of a Zeit era Tangerine Dream vibe with deep cosmic swells and hypnotic patterning through resonant tones and melancholy coloring. Who knows what other hidden recordings may emerge from the vaults of Robert Turman? Please keep 'em coming!
Robert Turman may be more well known in early industrial noise circles as a part of Boyd Rice's NON project (contributing to the seminal conceptual noise single "Knife Ladder" with its additional holes drilled into the vinyl) as well as other obscure noise groups such as Z.O. Voider and Comfort Control, but this recording shows a completely different side of this multi-instrumentalist composer's sound.
Flux, recorded in 1981 and originally released on cassette, is a series of long form compositions of lo-fi meditative minimalist grandeur, a home-brewed study of new-age avant-classical aspirations made through a distinct DIY sensibility. Reminding us a lot of the spacious dreaminess of Anton Batagov, Turman uses piano, kalimba, a rudimentary drum machine and tape loops to make slow-paced tones and textural phrases that eventually repeat, and form drifting mesmerizing patterns. Eventually the looping aspects of the various compositional components begin to gently overlap, causing the sounds to shift subtly and collapse on each other. A mysterious vibrational resonance flows throughout, created both through the hypnotic longevities of the pieces but also through the low fidelity manipulation of overtones. Rough button clicks and other sonic debris of the recording process occasionally cause crackles and distortions, emphasizing their home recorded origins. The choice of instrumentation and their processional pacing give off an Eastern influenced quality, but it also shows a deliberate effort to push the boundaries of minimalism within a challenging limitation of sonic palette and available technology. It's this restraint that makes this incredibly beautiful. Hats off to Spectrum Spools for allowing this to see the light of day again!
And for all of you non-vinyl folks, a cd version will be available soon!
The conception for Spirals Of Everlasting Change began in 1982 for Robert Turman - best known as the founder of NON with Boyd Rice and to a lesser extent within the obscurant noise project Z.O. Voider. He envisioned two separate cassettes to be played simultaneously on two decks with the languid ambient tones of one cassette lashed across the harsher industrial-klank rhythms of the other. By 1987, he reworked all of the material into a single mix again sprawled across two cassettes, with the dreamy, zoner tracks corralled onto one tape and the more dissonant pieces on the other. He released Spirals Of Everlasting Change in two formats in the late '80s, once as a cassette inside a 5" reel-to-reel tape box and again as part of the Chapter Eleven anthology comprised of eight cassettes that documented all of the recorded output up to 1988. So far, only the seminal Flux album (which got reissued on Spectrum Spools a couple years ago) and Spirals Of Everlasting Change have been resuscitated from the dustbin of terminal obscurity, as Chapter Eleven is downright impossible to find. We can hope that a reissue campaign of all of those recordings will eventually materialize; but until that happens, we'll definitely jump at the chance for another archival Turman recording.
The titular tracks are the more abrasive pieces, with the ready-made loops sounding very similar to what Boyd Rice delivered on his infamous Black Album of delirious repetitions for tape-gyrating dervishes and maddeningly insistent phrases that may have been culled from thrift store belly-dancing records. "Lonesome Echo" and "Lower World" are eerily prescient of the work that William Basinski became famous for - lilting melodic passages generated from simple overlapping loops that have a ghostly recollection of a forgotten past, smudged in a kirlian glow of distressed chromium oxide and industrial dub debris. This double lp set of Spirals Of Everlasting Change is super limited, coming out of Luxembourg in an edition of 289 copies, of which we only have a few!
Actor turned musician Simon Fisher Turner has had a long and illustrious career, TV and film, from punk rock to extreme avant sound making, this latest releases comes in the form of a super limited cassette on the Tapeworm label, number 4 for those of you keeping track, with previous installments from Philip Jeck, Stephen O'Malley, and a recording from a text by Baudrillard. Turner's contribution to the series is an odd one. The A side is a super cool field recording from Spain, the procession of the Virgen Del Carmen, you can hear people talking, laughing, footsteps, various ambient sounds, until the music starts, a swirling festive gypsy big band, horns, snares, strings, peppered with huge booms (fireworks?) and of course the voices of people lining the procession route, wheels on the dirt road, what sounds like distant thunder. Really really nice.
The other side features two solo piano improvisations, recorded in 2003 as a film score, very haunting and atonal, strange angular melodies, lots of space, little flurries of notes, looped and hypnotic sounding, slipping from dark and almost balladic, to more jagged and manic and back again. Cool stuff for sure, not sure how the two sides tie together, but each on its own is a super satisfying listen.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!! And if this one is anything like the other installments in the series, these won't last long at all.
We know almost nothing about Turnquist, other than he's a guitarist from New York, we even missed this when it first came out a little while back, but we're kicking ourselves now, cuz it's a thing of absolute hypnotic beauty. A gorgeous extended songsuite of looped 12 string guitar, vibraphone, glockenspiel, piano, violin, cello and harmonics, hovering somewhere between 20th century classical, and avant free folk, it's blissy and sun dappled, meditative, utterly lovely, each track a breathtaking expanse of washed out dreamlike drone folk minimalism, dramatic and cinematic but never overwrought.
The first track begins all delicate and crystalline, before the acoustic guitars begins to unfurl soft clouds of shimmery thrum, a small tangle of melody that constantly shifts, slowly changing shape, but retaining a trancelike core, occasionally being supported by tinkling chime, and a gorgeous counter point piano melody, that adds so much emotion and pathos. About midway through the nearly 20 minute track, everything fades out, leaving just the guitar, to spin a glimmering web of looped and layered soft focus guitar harmonics, hazy and gauzy and hushed, only to slip into a warm languid, slow build, like an extra minimal, spacious and spare Godspeed, note loosed one at a time, over a backdrop of soft sonic swells, and blurred pop ambience. So incredibly gorgeous.
The second track is another smeared field of abstract looped Appalachia, almost like a guitar version of Lubomyr Melnyk, a constantly shifting field of rapidly picked steel strings, melancholy melodies, again, anchored by a maudlin piano melody way in the background, softly frenzied and almost dizzying, the hypnotic drone folk give way to something more serene and tranquil, a string swept folk lope, the violin singing sorrowfully over a gorgeously looped steel string figure, evoking loss and memory, and places visited but forgotten.
The final track is the shortest of the bunch, but by no means the least powerful, with Turnquist again setting up the foundation by spinning reflective swirls of steel string guitar, this time the piano much more present, the guitar more a background thrum, the two instruments, dancing and interwoven, subtle but melodically complex, the melodies and overtones and subtly rhythms interacting, this track especially is super cinematic, not at all schmaltzy, just intense, and emotionally resonant, reminding us quite a bit of aQ fave Erik Enocksson, sweetly sorrowful, epic and so dreamlike and lovely.
So recommended, one of our new favorites for sure.
The last record from Alexander Turnquist, the lovely and exquisite As The Twilight Crane Dreams In Color, was a fantastic surprise from this fairly new to us (but quite prolific) composer/guitarist. That record was a lush landscape of glimmering harmonics, and crystalline ambience, all woven around Turnquist's strange and inventive guitar playing. This new record seems to follow suit, with Turnquist again setting the foundation with impossibly dense little soft squalls of steel string tangle, lush with overtones and unlikely harmonics, it's like some avant Appalachia, a sound we wish would go on much longer than its way too brief 2 minutes. But then that feeling is washed away by the equally lovely title track which follows, a swirling, sweetly melodic guitarscape, again, a looped set of steel string tangles providing the anchor, creating a billowing cloud of washed out melody, not unlike pianist Lubomyr Melnyk, a rapid succession of notes somehow transformed into something tranquil and serene, the tangled melodies further tangled by vibes and violin, those two elements providing the melodic counterpoint, and some extra sonic pathos, adding a dark bit of tension, and a sweet melancholia. The sound is dense, while remaining ethereal and dreamlike, the repetition adding a drone element, that makes everything hypnotic and totally mesmerizing.
On "Spherical Aberrations" the trio apply the same methodology to chamber music, the vibes almost jazzy, the violin achingly melodic, all the while the guitar spinning impossible webs of melody and texture underneath.
The record's centerpiece would have to be the sprawling "Waiting At The Departure Gate", which take Turnquist's Reich/Riley compositional style and lets it spread out into a gorgeous layered epic, the guitars impossibly intricate and dense, eventually sounding nothing like guitars at all, instead like some sort of sound generator, while the vibes and violin weave magical melodies over the top, the sound stately and darkly romantic, Turnquist's guitarscapes constantly slipping from background texture to main melody and back again, before finishing off with a bit of minimal Appalachian folk drift. The record is bookended with another brief bit of harmonics heavy steel string tangle, that sounds like a way more avant experimental Michael Hedges. So fantastic. Turnquist is fast becoming one of our favorite modern composers/guitarists!
We managed to get a tiny handful of these from a distributor, they're priced super cheap, as the label has since folded, so these are the very last copies we'll ever be able to get, and we have just THREE of them...
With Enso, composer / soundscaper Luigi Turra has conjured up an organic and contemplative three-track epic, that resonates on subsequent listenings. Infused with Japanese sonic architectures and rigorous reductionist principles, this is a deeply meditative world of gently plucked instruments, and faded atmospherics, peppered with closely focused tinklings and crystalline shards adding all manner of texture to the proceedings. In some ways this sounds like a more minimal / academic Taj Mahal Travellers, the flute especially giving much of this a Japanese folk ritual vibe. There's a warm ambience, and a super intense intimate production, which helps Turra fuse a delicate substrata of drifting tones with elegantly plucked and struck instrumentation, that is never overdriven, and devoid of unessentials. Gorgeous and sublime. And super recommended. Sad we have so few...
Best appreciated in a solitary environment, these restful pieces will bring calm to an engaged listener.
Also on vinyl!
The thing about being a modern-day "psych" or "prog" rock band, is that you have 40+ years of rock n' roll (and other) musical history to draw upon, you don't need to just pretend it's 1969 or 1971 or 1978 all over again (though that can be cool too). French band Turzi are definitely open to mixing things up in interesting ways, with no regard to whether it sounds "authentic" or not for the duration, their kitchen sink psych aesthetic pushing many and various buttons for us here in ways that maybe no single other band manages to do! At one moment bringing us blissed-out Frippertronics, at another heavy stoner riffage, sometimes in combination. If we didn't know they were a band, we'd think they were an excellent psych-digging DJ! We thought the mantric synth-rock of their debut, entitled A, was pretty Awesome and now here's their second album, B, and it's even Better (with more of what we liked about A, and nice surprises too). It follows the same track-titling convention of A, where on that album all the songs started with the letter A, here they all start with the letter B, and now for some reason they're all place names as well. Also as with A, much of B is instrumental, but when there are vocals, they've got some famous friends helping out.
We said they mix a lot of different elements into their music - for example, to pick a sequence of songs in near the middle of the disc, "Bombay" begins like a Bomb Squad cut, with a sample from a civil rights era speech, that's mashed up into a hard charging, distorted metallic gallop with urgent organ chords, over which they then crank a killer 'exotic' Eastern sounding riff like something by the Flower Travellin Band, or from the most intense Turkish psych single ever, Turzi really kicking out the jams on this one! But that soon mellows out into the next track, "Bethlehem", a hushed mystic ceremonial trudge akin to The Stooges' most John Cale inspired moment, "We Will Fall" or something by Acid Mothers Temple. But then the next thing you know, next up is "Baltimore", a techno-delic ravey raver, kinda '70s glam too, which we were already gonna say reminded us of Primal Scream, before we realized yes indeed it features guest vocalist Bobby Gillespie, of Primal Scream. Elsewhere, a lot of the songs pulsate immensely with kosmische synth delights, 'cause Turzi are French of course making us think of their countrymen Heldon (and also Air), but also naturally Harmonia and other '70s electronic krautrock brigades...
Wow. Whatever this is, psych or prog or whatever, looking forwards futuristically or backwards retrowise, or sideways even, Turzi has succeeded in synthesizing (with synthesizers!) a whole lot of what we like about both similiar -and- dissimilar artists such as Heldon and Zombi and Diagonal and Astra and AMT and Maserati and Etienne Jaumet and Witch and Circle and Oneohtrix Point Never and Itavayla and GR & The Full Blown Expansion... the icing on the cake is the nearly 10-minute finale "Bamako", all dreamy and droney, made all the more Beautiful by another guest vocalist - Brigitte Fontaine! Sweet.
First we've heard from this oddly monikered duo, just bass and drums, who traffic in a sort of sludge/doom dirgery, the bass super distorted and blown out, sounding in places more like a guitar than a bass, but unfurling thick slabs of buzzing low end, while the drums deliver a plodding caveman accompaniment. The vocals might be the strangest of all, a sort of sung/spoken demonic growl, which give Tuurd a much more abstract experimental vibe. It really does sound like a Neanderthal version of OM. The groove is dark and stonery, thick and sludgey, but when it slows down, and gets a little mathy and dynamic, stripped down while the vocals gurgle malevolently, it's transformed into something else entirely. Which is also what happens on the second track, at least in the first half, the band ditching the sludge for some dense mathy noise prog, the bass and drums in a wild tussle, which finally gives way to a more slithery downtuned groove.
It's hard to really nail these guys down, the label mentions all sorts of other duos, from Lightning Bolt to the Ruins, as well as other bands that occupy a similar sonic space, Sleep, Abruptum, Killdozer, Slug (someone needs to reissue all the Slug records!), Black Sabbath and a bunch of others. But to our ears, Tuurd sound like slowed down power violence, like Man Is The Bastard covered by Corrupted, or some rare Slap A Ham 7" spinning at 5 or 6 rpm, but that's only one side of the Tuurd, the band totally capable of whipping out some seriously dense downtuned progginess, the combination of the two is what makes this stuff so good. Murky and muddy, dirgey and doomy, crusty and filthy, heavy as fuck obviously, proggy and mathy and not without a sense of humor (check out "Eating Ice Cream With Satan"). Definitely recommended for fans of any and all of the above mentioned bands, and anyone who like their music sloooooow and loooooow.
Super striking cover art, the album titled drawn in dirt on the front, the band name smeared in mud (please let it be mud!) on the back. Pressed on brown vinyl (of course) and includes a digital download.
Brand new super limited 7" from this awesomely monikered drum and bass duo, and like their previous lp, I Wish My Wife Was This Dirty, these two jams deliver some seriously stripped down, doom / sludge / noise rock minimalism. The bass super distorted and almost guitar-like in its riffery, the drums suitably caveman like, the sound churning, and lumbering, super dynamic with plenty of mathiness, but ultimately, it's some serious Neanderthal heaviness, like OM with a frontal lobotomy, or a more abstract / avant version of Aussie heavies Dead. Needless to say, if you like it slow and low, heavy and hypnotic, this is the sort of minimal hypnorock heaviness that should push all your buttons. Especially spinning at 33, at which point it turns into pure, rib cage rattling slo-mo sludge!!
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!! Pressed on random different colored vinyl, the packaging super deluxe, a cool origami style Stumptown Arigato cardstock silkscreened sleeve, with two silkscreened color prints, and of course a digital download as well.
This new band on Fonal with all the double-u's in their name is of course Finnish, and in fact is something of a super-duo: Fonal boss Sami Sanpakkila (Es) and recent Wire magazine cover star Jan Anderzen (Tomutonttu, Kemialliset Ystavat) are the two collaborators here (at last!). The name they've chosen is apparently a play on the humorous Finnish phrase "tuusan nuuskana", which means something like "total shambles" in English. Ok, well, but while the abstract, intermittent, fractured soundz & rhythms heard here could lend themselves to that description, Sami & Jan are actually exercising a fair amount of control, and the tracks here, while not your usual sort of "songs" are most definitely music, not noise. Instrumental, full of sweet sweet drones and distortion, shining shimmer... we think most fans of both Es and Tomutonttu and other Finnish/Fonal acts on the more abstract edges of soundmaking will appreciate this quite a bit!!
The five long tracks find this project getting out of the usual "Finnish forest folk" thing we associate with Kemialliset and instead seem much more sci-fi and electronic, synth zips and zaps transmitted from a mad scientist's laboratory. Some of the sounds remind us of sferics, that spooky VLF radio noise phenomenon of the Earth's magnetosphere we used to sell whole cds of (Stephen P. McGreevy's Electric Engima and Auroral Chorus II, wish they were still in print). Somehow those sorts of sounds - however produced - are woven into a detailed, textured sound world that's at once both pleasant (really) and intriguing. Finnish forest science lab fans won't be surprised.
And, the usual obi-strip with which Fonal packages their cds is cleverly been utilized here to enhance the cover art with a simple form of animation. Designed by Shogun Kunitoki's Jari Suominen, it's a clear acetate strip printed with narrow stripes, that interacts with the cover art to create a pretty cool optical illusion of motion (a flickering, spinning pinwheel) when you slide the obi across the cover. Neat! (We haven't opened the lp, but assume it must also contain a similar insert.)
The Chicago lap-top trio TV Pow has always been a hit or miss operation, situating themselves closest (when at their best) to their one time Icelandic collaborators Stilluppsteypa as a recombination of microwave / glitch work and the erratic, shifting
This Chicago' trio of laptop chin scatchers offers another album of .................... ...................... .......................click..........................................................................................................................................................................................................clek........................................................................................clikcekcik.............................................................................................................clkckilckicCKilKCEk......................CKli............................................................................................................clk...................................................................................................................clki...............................................pop
The shiny happy side of Finland's Fonal roster. If we didn't know better we would probably believe it if someone said that they were from Japan or France because they kick out that totally bubbly, playful and addictive flavor of pop that totally brings to mind the best moments of Cibo Matto, Pizzicato Five, Stereo Total (yeah we know they are from Germany but you get what we're saying), Buffalo Daughter, etc. This time out we also hear some nice fuzzy USA influence with some Beach Boys moments and an overall feel that reminds us a lot of Mates Of State. What's so great about TV-Resistori is how they keep their sound so warm, punchy and catchy without resorting to all out quirkiness or kitsch. Too many bands trying to pull of this style suffer at the hand of over the top and glossy production that in the end kind of erases all the charm that might be within the songs. TV-Resistori do it right and keep their sound rich and dense with an analog warmth and a tender touch on the control boards which so nicely compliments their songs, and makes for one of the better pop albums of the year.
