[ aquarius records — Experimental ]

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Showing results 8951 through 9000 of 9280.

MPEG stream: Radio Tower
MPEG stream: Noise Musique: Metal Assemblage #1

Field recordists Douglas Quin and Cheryl Leonard have gone to great lengths to capture their Arctic and Antarctic field recordings, spending countless frigid days with frozen fingers trying to hold tightly to hydrophones dangling amidst the ice floes and slushy waters. It's no wonder those two present their work in such an unadulterated fashion when the work came at such cost and at such peril. But Jana Winderen is far more creative in her approach to field recordings, only too happy to transform a watery burble she captured in some obscure fjord in her native Norway into a thickened isolationist dronescape dappled with elemental textures, creating something sonorously as frightening, cold, or desolate as the sound sources would imply. As with the work of BJ Nilsen or Jonathan Coleclough, none of Winderen's field recordings are too precious to be manipulated, compacted, augmented, or simply fucked with. The two sides of Debris were both extracted from a couple of her sound installations, the longer of which is entitled "Drying Out In The Sun", based on recordings made at / near / beneath the surface of the ocean, which plunge into the nether regions of the deep-sea trenches and alluvial plains, amassed into pressurized low-frequency drones. "Scuttling Around The Shallows" returns to her fascination with shrimp which she first displayed on her Tapeworm cassette The Noisiest Guys On The Planet, with erratic snaps, clicks, and crunches made by those small crustaceans amidst deep-ocean ambience. The fourth in Touch's ongoing 'white label' series of super limited vinyl productions.

Paralleling what the Australian sound artist Tarab achieves through his magnificent albums, Jana Winderen collects an impressive array of field recordings and edits them into her compositions without much (if anything) in the way of digital processing. For Energy Field, Winderen traveled to the barren land-and-seascapes of Greenland, Norway, and the Barents Sea, using high-end parabolic microphones for the above ground recordings and hydrophones for the seaborne sounds, capturing creaks from massive glaciers, the slippery resonance of ice crevasses, the sounds of crustaceans (remember her cassette for the Tapeworm label, The Noisiest Guys On The Planet?), the chatter of summertime birds, and huge passages of windswept vibration that sound more like one of BJ Nilsen's swarms of drone than anything produced via natural means. Winderen presents three extended pieces that steadily undulate and crest, much like the patterns of the ocean when viewed from a considerable distance, and have been pocked with various tactile recordings of ice cracking, water dripping, the strange bellows from mating fish, and whatnot. Hypnotic, beautiful, and wholly compelling, Winderen's Energy Field is another exemplary entry in the Touch catalog, and totally up our alley here at AQ.

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At first glance, it's easy to assume this is part of Touch's recent series of seven inches, and on first listen, there's nothing to dissuade us, but in fact, this is the latest release from Autofact, who does indeed have a deal with Touch to do their vinyl, but this is not a Touch record, although as we mentioned it might as well be, and will no doubt appeal to the same folks. Processed field recordings, recorded using hydrophones (underwater mics). The A side is a swirl of textured gurgles, almost a straight field recording of a pastoral creekside (birds, splashes, wind) but as the track progresses the sounds become more textural, almost rhythmic at times, sounding much more like Tim Hecker or Oval. The flipside features a collage of underwater recordings from rivers in Norway, Iceland, England and Germany, deep rumbles, soft creaks, occasional insects, the sound of a stream, water lapping on the shore, the sound shifting to more of a warm whirring very dreamy and abstract, slipping back and forth, above water, below water, crystalline and spacious, murky and muddy and indistinct, woozy and swoony and quite pleasing. Beautiful Jon Wozencroft style full color photo cover, and limited to only 500 copies.

So Windy and Carl just rolled through our neck of the woods (we had the pleasure of sponsoring their show here in SF!!) and aside from unleashing an absolutely gorgeous set of dreamy pop-ambience, they dropped off a few hand painted, special edition tour lps for our lucky aQ W&C worshipers. This cool little lp comes complete with unreleased instrumental versions of songs from their latest Kranky full length, Songs For the Broken Hearted. There's even one track we've never heard or seen before called "I Won't", that could be one of our favorite instrumental tracks from this Michigan husband and wife dream duo. These tracks are so spacious and beautiful in the usual Windy and Carl way, it's easy to tell they've been perfecting their dreamy sound long before the drone was even in style. Daydream inducing and wondrous, the album immediately provides a distant, cloudy headspace to get lost in. Housed in hand-painted, hand-stenciled, hand-numbered recycled LP sleeves, each with it's own unique design and look, these will be gone super super quick, so act fast if you want one. Limited to an edition of 500 on translucent green vinyl, so nice and so essential!!

Dream-drone, slow-slowcore uberwunder duo Windy & Carl are long-time favorites of Aquarius, and by long we mean looooong. As in, we've been with them the whole way, and this fall marks 19 years for the project. So anyway, we were plenty excited when we finally got a copy of this, their newest record. Hot on the heels of Windy's lovely (and haunting) solo record, these tracks were actually started at the same time and nearly went unfinished. Thankfully they were saved! Press releases mentioned vocals, vocals, vocals. Those who know W&C probably understand that "lots of vocals" is relative. Two or three songs a record with Windy singing is kind of a lot! Yeah, so when we got this we were totally blown away. Again! Man, there's definitely a reason we hold them in such high regard: they never fail to take us exactly where we want to go. If you're a fan, you already know that W&C can conjure up the dreamiest six-string drones, never, ever drums, and the sweetest daydream vocals, employed sparingly and pretty damn perfectly. Fans of Labradford, Stars of the Lid, maybe even the quietest Low, this is already - or soon to be - your favorite band! We love Windy & Carl, and we want you to have the chance to love them, too. This is definitely a great place to start. Oh, and check out "Snow Covers Everything," it might be our favorite track on here. If you couldn't tell already, recommended!

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Another list, and another batch of obscure tapes from UK tape label The Tapeworm, this one from someone called Leslie Winer, a mysterious former model, a pal of William Burroughs and Jean-Michael Basquiat, a sometime guest vocalist on records by groups like Bomb The Bass, who ditched modeling, dropped off the map, but not before making a record called Witch, considered to be an essential early chunk of proto trip hop, and this batch of tracks, dating just a year or so after Witch, does indeed offer up a gorgeous murky bit of skittery, downtempo weirdness. Obvious references are Tricky, Massive Attack, even Portishead, the same sort of creepy crawly late night shimmer, dark and dubbed out, the rhythms skeletal, the vocals, hushed and whispered, a sort of slow motion toasting, dark croons over billowing clouds of thrum and whir, loping rubbery basslines, slowed down samples, bits of reggae guitar, druggy and dubby, woozy and warbly, everything wrapped in a gauzy haze of record crackle, tape hiss, blurred ambience. Here and there the drums are cranked up into something more block rocking, but even then Winer transforms it into something more murky and surreal, the bass gets super distorted and fuzzed out (some dubstep foreshadowing for sure), everything wrapped around effected acoustic guitars, more sampled vox, strange little flurries of percussive filigree, all smeared into a mesmerizing bit of shuffling tripped out, psychedelic downtempo moody muddy groove. LIMITED TO ONLY 250 COPIES!

A while back we reviewed a super limited tape of ultra obscure early nineties proto-trip-hop from a woman named Leslie Winer, who recorded much of her music under the mysterious symbol/moniker ©, and who was in fact a former model, a pal of William Burroughs and Jean-Michael Basquiat, not to mention a sometime guest vocalist on records by groups like Bomb The Bass. Apparently Winer ditched modeling, and soon dropped off the map, but not before making a record called Witch, considered to be an essential early chunk of skittery, hazy, woozy, trip hop style electronica, well before there really WAS trip hop. The record featured Jah Wobble among others, and was/is a gorgeous chunk of druggy, dubbed out minimal electronic murk that most obviously referenced Tricky, Massive Attack, even Portishead, but predated all of them (with much of Witch having been recorded in the eighties). On this new cd collection, on the newly launched Wormhole imprint (and offshoot of the kick ass Tapeworm label that put out the Winer tape we first heard), that tape is expanded to include even more mysterious sounds from Winer's mostly unheard back catalogue, a sprawling selection of tracks recorded throughout the eighties and nineties, including several collaborations with Vincent Gallo which appear here for the first time. Long sprawling horn flecked dubscapes, rife with barebones rhythms, tripped out FX, warm muted chordal swirls, plenty of downtempo weirdness and creepy crawly late night shimmer. A dark skeletal avant dub, softly roiling morass of blurred sonics that underpin Winer's strange vocals, hushed and whispered, a sort of slow motion toasting, spoken one second, crooned seductively the next, occasionally multitracked into dreamy harmonies, but just as often slipping into something far more sinister. The tracks expanding into billowing clouds of thrum and whir, anchored by loping rubbery basslines, and wreathed in slowed down samples, fragments of reggae guitar, disembodied horns, all woozy and warbly, everything wrapped in a gauzy haze of record crackle, tape hiss, smeared psychedelic ambience. Here and there the drums are cranked up into something more block rocking, but even then Winer transforms it into something more murky and surreal, the bass gets super distorted and fuzzed out (some dubstep foreshadowing for sure), everything wrapped around effected acoustic guitars, sampled, layered, recontextualized vox, Winer's vocals slipping easily into lower registers, and sounding a lot like Tricky, due in no small part to the rhythmic murk they're wrapped in, and throughout, strange little flurries of percussive filigree, all of these swirling abstract elements woven into a mesmerizing sprawl of shuffling tripped out, psychedelic downtempo moody muddy groove, that should definitely appeal to fans of witch house, as well as the warped fringes of modern downtempo electronica (Burial, Holy Other, Balam Acab, James Blake, How To Dress Well, etc.). Super swank packaging to boot, an oversized A5 glossy cardstock insert, liner notes on one side, art on the other, as well as a fold out poster, everything printed in metallic silver ink, and all in a thick PVC sleeve.

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Battlecruiser is a new label from AQ pal Campbell Kneale who runs the impeccable NZ label Celebrate Psi Phenomenon. Battlecruiser is basically an outlet for a bunch of New Zealand noise guys to fufill their secret desire to be metal gods! Who can argue with that? Cool band names, distorted guitars, demonic vocals and all that good stuff! Metalheads might have to stretch their definition of 'metal' to really get into this stuff, but the rest of us, metal and unmetal alike will find lots of beautiful crushing far out noisy weirdness on these evil 'lil 3" cd-r's! The majestically monickered Wings Of Vengeance offers up gentle chiming harmonics that are slowly overtaken by creaking, moaning waves of slow motion riffs that eventually erupt into hyperspeed death metal, with thick slabs of bass guitar, grunted vocals and spastic drum machines. Less metal per se, more sort of stuttery, throbbing grind sludge. Like the Flipper catalog played by Corrupted. Or something. 9 tracks in 9 minutes! And we also ought to note: this band is named after a Hammers of Misfortune song, oddly enough!

MPEG stream: Wings Of Vengeance
MPEG stream: Necrobehmothra

This came highly recommended from one of our distributors, but we were wary at first, as we've generally had bad luck with the whole spoken word / band combo. There are of course exceptions, and this is definitely one, Winter Family whipping up a gorgeous expanse of brooding, smoldering, slow building post rock ambience, heavy on the harmonium and organ, seeing as one half of the WF duo is keyboardist Xavier Klaine, who has partnered with 'vocalist' Ruth Rosenthal, for this haunting series of songscapes, that as the label suggest, do in fact harken back to groups like Godspeed You Black Emperor and A Silver Mount Zion. Mournful and melancholy, haunting and ethereal, just check out the opening track, the oddly named "Searching Donkeys", with its thick layered minor key organ, the sound rich and lustrous, Rosenthal's vocals settled down in the mix, her mysterious intonations peppered with brief bits of proper singing, lush little bits of harmonized vocalizing, the sound almost chorale, perfectly matching the ever intensifying music, the vibe strangely liturgical. The title track unwinds a thick, slowly pulsing sprawl of crumbling buzz, warped and a little bit seasick, throbbing ominously, Rosenthal's mush mouthed lyrics delivered in a creepy deadpan, the track peppered with bits of abstract ambience, field recordings of crowds and tolling church bells, distorted voices, broadcast through what sounds like a bullhorn, always returning to that thick ominous buzz, creepy and so sonically unnerving. The record is super varied, a few moments definitely veer dangerously close to 'spoken word' for us, but Rosenthal pulls it off, her delivery intense and moving, and quite lyrical, even slipping into actual singing now and again, the music in those moments is darkly delicate, with elegiac pianos, chirping birds, hazy and ethereal, the sound occasionally jazzy, other times more post rocky, but our favorite moments are definitely the more drone based tracks, Klaine layering sound upon sound, weaving lush, slow building, ultra tense soundscapes, cinematic and mysterious, Rosenthal's voice, drifting atop, within and beneath Klaine's lush otherworldly drones, the two conjuring up something so much more than its constituent parts, mysterious and eerie and lovely.

MPEG stream: Searching Donkeys
MPEG stream: Red Sugar
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This definitely has to be the first record ever inspired by a t-shirt. We shit you not. And just to get in the spirit, I'm actually wearing said shirt as I type. But it must be noted it is a really cool shirt! A friend of aQ who used to make t-shirts, whipped up this badass Winter Is Coming shirt a while back, a stark design of leafless branches against a grey sky. Only a handful made it off the press and onto people's back, one of which ended up on a fella by the name of Tom who then started Winter Is Coming, the group, not to be confused with the shirt. And you know what? It's just as cool as the shirt if not cooler. The cd sleeve is an homage to the shirt's design, winter branches against a grey sky, the words Winter Is Coming in olde English letters, but from that point on the shirt comes off and we're into some sort of mysteriously wintery drone sludge ambient shit that is fierce and frightening, and is exactly the sort of thing we can never seem to get enough of. It's like the musical version of a cold grim winter, the sound of icy winds and dying leaves, five massive tracks of slow moving whir and rumble. Sometimes delicate and crystalline, sometimes thick and viscous and almost black in its heaviness. The instrumentation is as unlikely as the band's inspiration, homemade washtub doodle bass with nylon weed whacker strings, dulcimer, dinner bell, creaking chair, jew's harp as well as guitar, synth and vocals. Winter Is Coming is not just a shirt, it's a metaphor for death, as the man behind WiC works in the emergency room and this recording is the musical expression of his experiences with death. The coming winter, the inevitable end. Life like seasons. Heavy stuff. As is the music. A huge glacial crawl, rife with strange sonic irregularities, like a mudslide picking up corpses and random detritus as it lays waste to everything in its path. The bringer of death, but strangely serene and beautiful. Definitely for fans of the sludge and the drone, Boris, Corrupted, Moss, Marzuraan, SUNNO))) as well as the heavier side of the drone, Nadja, Abruptum and the like. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Winter Is Coming indeed... For more on the inspiration behind the coming winter check this out: http://conceptualart.dreamhosters.com/npr/archives/102

MPEG stream: Dwellers In The Mound
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A brief blast of swirling organs, shards of crumbling noise, chanting children, streaks of feedback, swirling melancholy melodies, all tangled up into something at once caustic and chaotic, but also weirdly moody and moving, which is how we're introduced to Winter Line, aka Steven Vallot, who on this new tape (his debut?) displays a pretty serious knack for crafting beauty from blackness, his tracks like some sort of alternate universe, experimental noise DJ Shadow if that makes any sense. His sound palette is quite varied, but much of it tends towards the difficult. Be it blasts of high end buzz, or grinding metallic crunch, but those elements are balanced by Vallot's deft hand at weaving that noisiness into soundscapes of surprising musicality, a glowing dark energy seems to suffuse all the tracks here. It's often loud, ominous, clattery and crunchy, distorted and downright noisy, but it glimmers and shimmers, soars and swirls. At one point, a crunchy bit of rhythmic clatter is laid our beneath a sky full of high-end glimmer and tinkling chimes, wreathed in clouds of crunchy staticky hiss, and children's voices reciting some sort of ominous incantation, it could be a mess, but instead it all falls together perfectly. From there on out, Vallot anchors thick clouds of black buzz, to churning machinelike rhythms, and drapes delicate melodies over the top. In some ways, it sounds a bit like recent Record Of The Weeker Dan Friel mixed with Philip Jeck or Tim Hecker, both also past ROTW-er themselves, the tracks here are expansive and lush, and quite lovely, not despite the noisiness, but really because of it, and because of Vallot's deft hand at balancing those two extremes and meeting somewhere in the middle. At times, we get glimpses of Carpenter or Goblin, that sort of brooding synth soundtrackiness, and at others, it's just a gorgeous prismatic soft noise bliss out that's hard to really put into words, but it's rare sort of 'noise' we love, a noise that manages to move beyond sheer noisiness and attain its own sort of rhythmic and melodic beauty. Wow. So gorgeous. Fans of soft noise technicians and abstract soundscapers will be in heaven! Includes a download code too!

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Latest from these Midwestern noiseniks, this time with a full complement of assistant noisemakers, including Rich Hoak (Brutal Truth, Total Fucking Destruction) as well as folks from Fuck The Facts, The Endless Blockade and 7000 Dying Rats! Sounds like a seriously noisy nasty party indeed. The last Winters In Osaka we reviewed was Orchids, and unlike a lot of noise music, it was way more rhythmic and textural, offering up a series of sort of fractured skitters and looped grooves, all liberally doused with plenty of noisiNESS. But we knew these guys were capable of kicking up a serious din and they do just that on Molded To Crawl. Opening with a 17 minute epic, that begins with muted percussion, samples, buzzing electronics, which quickly builds to a full on face melting skree, but within that skree, synths squiggle, vocals howl, guitars feedback, sirens wail, the chaotic blowout does seem to occasionally almost slip into something drone-y or almost riff like, but for the most part, it's a thick dense wall of sound that is not for the faint of ear. The other three tracks are shorter, and tend toward the darker and the dronier, again rooted around plodding percussion, and layered buzz, the sound veers from lurching machine like industrial lumber, to Godfleshy stomp, to haunting Eastern music box over roiling blacknoise, to thick whirring buzzscape, to wildly careening and crumbling wave of low end crush, to skittery crunch and glitch, to thick windblown wasteland sountrack, to chopped up plunderphonia, to haunting hushed drift. Cool stuff, but definitely be warned, this is some seriously noisy shit!

MPEG stream: Triumph Of Wolves
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We begin so many reviews of noise records, with disclaimers like "we don't typically like noise music" that we're beginning to think we actually DO like noise music. Although to be fair, the noise music that mostly appeals to us, is not the speaker shredding white noise, but rather the carefully crafted, dynamic soundscape sort of noise. With rhythms, however subtle, melody, mood and definitely dynamics. So it might be more fair to say we enjoy noiserock. Or noisy music. (all of this said, knowing full well, that many of us DO in fact like NOISE music, Masonna, Incapacitants, etc�) Semantics aside, we do love our music noisy, and we love plenty of noise in whatever rock it is we're rocking, kraut, space, post, garage, a little noise goes a long way, especially when wielded deftly and applied sparingly. We got this disc in the mail a few months ago. Self professed noise music, so it took us a while to hunker down and throw it on, and what do you know? It was awesome. A strange soundscape of fragmented rhythms and electronic whir, of crumbling drones and spaced out ambience. A more minimal take on a sort of krautrocky noise rock, not all that far removed from recent AQ records of the week by Geronimo and Aluk Todolo. In fact, anyone who bought either of those would do well to check out Orchids by Winters In Osaka. Orchids would be worth it alone for the opening track, a ten plus minute jam that could go on forever as far as we're concerned. A spacious rhythmic noise jam, reminiscent of This Heat's Repeat. A strange electronic trill, the heart of the track, repeating throughout, sometimes panned to the right, sometimes to the left, right up front, then buried in the mix, while underneath, a rhythm skitters and shuffles, locking into a groove, and then fragmenting into strange stuttering hiccups, before settling back in again. Swirling all around are sheets of feedback, minor key synthesized basslines, crumbling static, other bits of percussive clatter, but the main rhythm keeps resurfacing, and that strangely soothing little electronic trill, the whole thing impossibly soothing and hypnotic. And like we said above, that track would be enough, but the rest of the disc echoes that first track, as if the various songs were just movements of a bigger expansive piece, and it works. In fact the second track, is like a more percussive version of the first, the drums more pronounced, that trill still present, but the rhythm distorted and thick, with extra bits of disembodied guitar drifting in here and there. The third too is a part of that first suite, the drums growing even more distorted and insistent, the layers of noise growing more and more corrosive as well. But from that point on the record, while still referencing the opening suite, seems much more varied, little bursts of staccato percussion, thick swaths of downtuned drone, melodies scrawled in squiggles of feedback, moody murky melodic thrums drifting nearly static and almost out of earshot, sprays of hiss, like one of those sprinklers, hooked up to an amplifier, fields of distorted chimes and resonant shimmer. But the magic being that the various songs keep revisiting themes from the song right before it, or hinting at some sonic element no yet introduced. Creating a sprawling rhythmic soundscape of buzz and hiss and skitter, of fuzz and skree and thud, that unfolds and unfurls and fills your ears with glorious glorious noise.

MPEG stream: Orchids Part 1
MPEG stream: Orchids Part 2
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Wire Thicket is the duo of Alex Cobb, aka Taiga Remains and Students Of Decay head honcho, and field recorder and musician David Kirby (whose Inside, It Is Ringing cd-r we just discovered a few more copies of, it's relisted elsewhere on this list!) and this is as far as we know their only release. Self avowed practitioners of "power drone", the main track here is a single 15 minute chunk of slow burning low end smolder, that thickens as the track progresses, layer upon layer, the tones shimmering and burning white hot, soaring, moaning, almost a symphony of deep resonant tones, by the final few minutes, the tone has shifted from corrosive and ominous to effulgent and sun dappled, serious Sunroof! ur-drone territory, massive and epic and heavy, yet mesmerizing and meditative. The sort of track that deserves to drone on forever and ever. There's a second shorter track, a minimal hushed coda of sorts, a glimmering whisper drifting ghostlike over a vast black expanse, a little bit new age-y, a bit black ambience, the perfect comedown chill out after the exhaustive and cathartic first track. Packaged in a mini 3" jewel case with a printed full color cover. Limited to 100 copies, but looong out of print, we have only a handful left, and you know what that means...

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MPEG stream: Brilliant Dead Highways: Revisited

Wirkus, Wirkus, Wirkus. We like that name. 'Specially since we now associate it with some great, rainy day glitchtronica music! Subdued, abstract yet melodic drones n' glitch here from Poland-born, Cologne-based electronica artist Paul Wirkus -- a former improv jazz drummer, who has also played in punk and post-rock bands. His calm, clip-clip-clippy electro-acoustical dronological methodology is very lo-fi "live" and melodic, Wirkus creating shimmering, pulsating soundscapes with microphones, minidiscs, samples, loops, effects, and crackly vinyl. Buried in these densely textured tracks you'll hear (what might be) jazz piano, classical strings, and raw electronic noises...it's all layered and distorted and so so lovely. Track five adds a mysterious French (?) male vocal that works quite well. And track eight sounds like Philip Jeck teamed up with Ryoji Ikeda! Highly recommended. We hadn't heard Wirkus' music until now, and we've totally fallen in love. Turns out that this album, while his first for Staubgold, is his fourth solo effort, and he's also done a lot of collaborating as well, so we'll have to look for more of those Wirkus works...

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This is a really bizarre record of cyclical howls, bizarre vocalisations, and droning cut ups, recorded over 35 years ago and finally reissued on vinyl, in Sub Rosa's "Early Electronic" series. Very much in the style of Reich or Palestine, with the 45 minute "Red Bird", British electro-acoustic composer and theorist Trevor Wishart takes the sounds of birds, animals and spoken word, chops and reassembles, and gradually transforms these disparate sounds into each other, making for a weirdly beautiful, and kind of creepy, listen. Composed and recorded between 1973 and 1978 at the University of York, and originally released in 1978, this has been a disturbingly intense, avant-WTF? fave ever since we first heard a cd reissue in the year 2000. Silver vinyl, assuredly limited.

This is a really bizarre record of cyclical howls, bizarre vocalisations, and droning cut ups, recorded 20 years ago and finally reissued. Very much in the style of Reich or Palestine, with the 45 minute 'Redbird', Wishart takes the sounds of birds, animals and spoken word, chops and reassembles, and gradually transforms these disparate sounds into each other, making for a beautiful, and kind of creepy, listen. The other track 'Anticredos' uses howls and grunts and moans and the sounds of birds to create what sounds like either a soundtrack to some demented cartoon or the loop for a truly disturbing porno movie. Or both.

Newest (and second we've reviewed of four, we'll get to all of 'em!) in this new series of ULTRA LIMITED hand made drone / ambient cd-r's from this new boutique label specializing in short form 3" cd-r's of dark drone drenched ambiance. Wisteriax is a cello based improv outfit made up of Mike Langlie (remember the Twink record of toy piano, that's him!), his wife Karen, and pal Darron handling the mastering. We've always loved the cello, not far behind our love of the flute, the cello is just so deep and resonant, a huge rich organic sound that just fills a room, fills your head with a booming rich lustrous beauty. Wisteriax take that sound and fuck it all up, turning long stretches of bowed cello into huge cavernous drones, sometimes the cello plays unadorned, like a mini string section, but is soon doused with FX and transformed into something entirely new. Imagine thick warm drones, with skittery Autechre-ish beats underneath, and you'll get an idea of what this stuff sounds like. It's all also quite cinematic, and dramatic, reminding us of Barry Adamson's Moss Side Story or some lost David Holmes faux soundtrack dance record. You can totally imagine some modern thriller, cars racing through the narrow streets of Rome, or a desperate couple fleeing on foot through the foggy streets of Paris. Really evocative, sexy and mysterious. A sort of ambient drone electronica, or techno drone or something. Whatever you call it, we are digging it a lot! ULTRA LIMITED and painstakingly hand assembled. Tiny 3" pale green fold over sleeves, with a glossy full color image affixed to the front, sealed at the bottom with two rivets, tied with a ribbon, with a little circular badge. Inside the disc nestles between two sheets of gorgeously textured paper, hand printed and so lovely. VERY RECOMMENDED!

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A black noise project of unknown origin, Witchgrass could very well be some obstinant, apocalyptic cult of survivalist malcontents, shading toward animistic ecoterrorism and politically anarchic nihilism. In all likelihood, Witchgrass is the work of one dude with a crusty collection of pedals and maybe a monosynth; but it's way better just to let the imagination run with the who / what / where / when. So, we're going with Witchgrass as a cult. The aesthetics of the mysterious cabal is one that bridges the more corrosive aspects of the Cold Meat Industries agenda and a handful of bootleg copies of Broken Flag tapes (esp. those with Matthew Bower flying his fucking freak flag in the megaphone vocal department); but given this is 2013, Locrian's pall of post-black metal noise clings to the eviscerated distortion, sporadic rhythmic dirge ploddings, apparitions of raw guitar buzzsaw drone, and harrowing vocal caterwauling. Ritualized blood letting music, sure why not? We've told enough lies today; but it ain't no fabrication that Witchgrass have made one hell of a great tape in Sigil Infection for the equally mysterious Vaald Tapes imprint. Unspecified pressing, but probably out of print at the source already.

What a great band name. Conjures up visions of all sorts of thrashing brutal metallic heaviosity for sure. Or perhaps it just reflects this duo's (not so) secret obsession with metal and their desire to constantly confuse and confound? Either way you won't bee finding any sort of metal here. This might be HEAVY but in a totally different way. This is some seriously deep listening, from the momentous meeting of Mr. Birchville Cat Motel / Celebrate Psi Phenomenon himself, Campbell Kneale, and Mr. Pseudoarcana Antony Milton. Extended fluttering organ drones, shifting like sonic sand dunes, elemental forces dragging melodies and chords out over thousands of years, the glacial flow of sound, warm and dreamy, recorded live in old bunkers and tunnels, these two tracks of primieval ur-drone, reverberate and shimmer, like clouds of crystal shimmer, meditative and tranquil, a gorgeous almost static haze! Some more perfectly pristine drone music from these two masters! SUPER LIMITED AS ALWAYS!! NOT SURE WE'LL BE ABLE TO GET MORE WHEN THESE ARE GONE!

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Everyone hates the term supergroup. But sometimes a group is SO super, you're really left with no choice. Check this out: Campbell Kneale (Birchville Cat Motel, Black Boned Angel, Celebrate Psi Phenomenon head honcho), Antony Milton (AM, Mrtyu, Nether Dawn, PseudoArcana head honcho), James Kirk (Sandoz Lab Technicians, Gate) and Richard Francis (Eso Steel). With a pedigree like that we'd be happy to just sit outside their studio and listen to the guys talk about the weather. As cool as that would maybe be, this is most definitely a lot cooler. A massive sprawl of organic drone all recorded in the great outdoors using battery-powered instruments. A thick swirling fog of sound, warm drifts of drone and rumble, shimmery and soft focused. This is far from the recent spate of metallic sludge some of these dudes have been slinging, instead this is dark and delicate, crystalline and so completely gorgeous. Whispery ambient whirls, subtle pulses, all sort of blurred and dreamlike, with lots of natural reverb, and subtle intrusions form the world around them. So goddamn beautiful. Packaged in a plastic sleeve with a sleeve made from the most gorgeous paper we have ever seen, a soft cottony blend of blacks and reds and purples and yellows, sort of like a soft oilslick rainbow. Nice!

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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.

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Swiss experimental, improvising "jazz" guitarist Stephan Wittwer presents his first solo disc in eleven years. It's guitar, both live and digitally processed, that's been layered into a dense and abstract sound-shimmer. Droning, noisy, rhythmic, skronky, ambient: he does it all! Another great Grob label release, for those into difficult, avantgarde styles of guitar manipulation.

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ATTENTION SUN CITY GIRLS FANATICS!!! Apologies to Wizard Prison for beginning the review like that, but it strikes us that fans of the late great Sun City Girls would definitely dig the strange sounds found on this disc, no huge surprise as half of Wizard Prison is none other than long time SCG collaborator and producer and Climax Golden Twins mainman Scott Colburn.� Not that II is any sort of SCG rip off, in fact, in most ways it doesn't actually sound like SCG at all, but the vibe and the mood, are quite similar, a sort of alien world music, modern instrumentation channeling old world sounds. The disc begins with what first appears to be an electronic trip hop jam, but quickly reveals itself to be a bizarre krautrock style jam, simple and propulsive, peppered with electronic bits and a young girl singing and speaking in some other language. It's a bit Portishead, if they put out a record on Abduction. The second track is similar, a sort of electronic rhythmscape, that quickly begins to sound less specifically electronic, and more -electric-, a pulsing tone over simple drumming, a relentless pulse hovering over strange growling animal sounds and subdued low end melodies, again, it doesn't -sound- like it, but it somehow reminds us of the Butthole Surfers, not sure if it's the strange slowed down vocals, or just the vibe again, but it's dark and damaged and haunting, but also strangely hypnotic and groovy.� The whole record is a series of simple rhythms and looped melodies, mesmerizing, repetitive and hypnotic, most songs with a single riff, a sole part repeated over and over, but with a constantly shifting backdrop of strange sounds and disembodied voices. Almost like a more alien lo-fi Circle, or a more krautrock Nurse With Wound, or like some DJ took their favorite Sun City Girls parts and looped them into endless jams. Some of the tracks are super dark and heavy, others are more murky and mysterious, all seem to have some strange drifting electronic element to them.� The second to last track stands out as super creepy and cinematic, and sounds a bit like Goblin, with haunting minor key melodies draped over slow shuffling rhythms and atonal guitar fragments, and the final track is super spare, and sounds as if it was cobbled together from radar, sonar and the Conet Project, minimal and mysterious.� Plus the whole record is a concept album (the story is printed inside the booklet), and you should know by now how much we love concept records...� Really fantastic, and a nice surprise. Not at all what we expected (not sure what we expected really), but definitely recommended. A new favorite around these parts...

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Wobbly (aka Jon Leidecker) cites Dilated Peoples, Goran Bregovic, Julio Iglesias, Stilluppsteypa, Dr. Dre, Montell Jordan, and Daniel Miller as the most 'blatant' samples found within this documentation of his mutated electronica live performances around Wobbly's plunderphonics were born out of his work on Negativland's weekly "Over The Edge" radio show on KPFA; and have developed into a distinctive sound fitting roughly in the Negativland comedy / commentary style of media cut ups. His work never smacks of provocation, as he has been very keen on disfiguring his pop culture references to stand clearly within the parameters of "fair use." As can be inferred from a couple of those aforementioned references, Wobbly's recent work has been venturing into hip hop, but not as another whiteboy ironic appropriation. Rather, it's an exuberant decontextualization of all of hip hop's hyperboles: scratching becomes so excessively technical as to lose all recognition of the rhythm, diva vocals wail and wander through impossible notes for an eternity, breakbeats are decimated into ungroovy robotic anti-funk. Wobbly's closest comparison is in how Matmos performs surgery on house music, sewing everything back together with ample semantic and compositional counterpoints. What is also amazing about Wobbly's live shows is that they involve no laptops, no sequencers, no midi. He edits in real time using just a mixer, a couple of cd players, and several cheap samplers. With an album coming soon on Tigerbeat 6, Wobbly's definitely one to watch!!!

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Disguising itself as a demonstrational disc from Broadcast Programming, a corporate music marketing and programming group developed to "help you stay on top of your market", the latest ep from Jon Leidecker presents itself as a conceptual piece

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For years now, Jon "Wobbly" Leidecker has skirted around the edges of the electronica community, collaborating with People Like Us and The Weatherman (that amazing voice in Negativland), and finding more than a few unreleased samples of his work popping up on

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Aquarius favorite Wobbly's first release for Kid 606's Tigerbeat6 label and it's possibly his best yet! Taking source material solely from S.F. Bay Area radio broadcasts, Wild Why is the end result of over two years worth of work which began originally as a live set before being slowly and painstakenly honed and sharpened into a carefully rendered studio project. Those who were fortunate enough to catch Wobbly's instore here early this year got a sneak peak at some of the insane plunderphuckery already. Given the nature of the source material (Destiny's Child, Eminem, y'know the type), and the artist's intention that they remain completely recognizable it's logical to expect that this would be a party pleasing mix a la the Kid's "Action Packed Mentallist...", but such a conclusion would be wrong. Wild Why is like a condensed and expanded homage to John Oswald's seminal "Black" or "Brown". Wobbly twists and turns the cliched utterances of contemporary hip hop in upon themselves rendering even the most macho posturing utterly slapstick. And if that's not enough to show Wobbly's dedication to the art of plunderphonics, then one needs only to open up the accompanying booklet to reveal a transcript of the entire vocal contents of the CD. Take and excerpt of track #18 for instance: "come buy, yo play radishes part (bola bo) judgement day (uh huh) I, I, I, I, quit. hey yo, me. Now now, now, now, lust two two three, back, you know what I'm sayin', we about to give you need y'all, jack d with the key, bounce, die peeps..." etc. So you can even read along with the disc. We asked Jon how long it took him to transcribe all this, but he merely chuckled, sighed and changed the subject. Highly recommended!

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From the seemingly infallible Paradigms label, who in the past have brought us amazing releases from (we're gonna have to stop doing this, pretty soon the list of killer Paradigms releases will be longer than most reviews): Hjarnidaudi, Amber Asylum, Throne Of Katarsis, Blueprint Human Being, Utlagr, the Angelic Process, Titan, Jarboe and that amazing Walking With Ghosts compilation. Avid readers of the list probably own all or most of those by now. Each one totally unique and amazing in its own way. This time around we have two more releases just as unique and amazing, the droning doomed classical of Hallvardur Asgeirsson reviewed elsewhere on this list, and this disc of bizarre, convoluted, super dynamic, avant garde doomy post rock from German outfit Woburn House. Hailing from Germany, the strangely monickered Woburn House at first listen sound a but like Dutch hypno-metallers Gore, with an immediately catchy and crunchy riff that repeats and repeats. Actually it's almost so heavy and modern sounding that it makes us think more of some sort of avant metalcore version of Gore. Gloriously grinding, churning riffage, complex yet melodic, over pounding drums. But suddenly, the vocals kick in, a soft, sort of chanted croon, while beneath it, the guitars shift to strange minor key angularity, before the whole song twists dramatically into some super complex Voivod-y metallic prog. And it's then that you realize there's still nearly thirteen minutes to go in the track! And in those thirteen minutes the band will twist and turn and shift and explore pretty much every post rock or metal nook and cranny you can conceive. Blown out high end freakouts, creaking and groaning swells of shipwreck doom, muted slow core minor key jangle, loping dreamlike slowcore, but always returning to that killer opening riff. It's very much like a doom influenced metalcore Slint, super complex, incredibly emotional, with all sorts of disparate parts and melodic fragments that fit so perfectly together, it's hard to imagine the song any other way. Track two revisits the Voivod-y prog of the opener, beginning as a lurching dirge-like doom, with HUGE dynamics, and strange howled vocals, before shifting into a much more propulsive mathrock prog a la Bastro or Drive Like Jehu. Ominous and threatening, but super hypnotic and complex, eventually unwinding into strange strummy minor key jangle, and eventually a soft shimmery expanse of warm church organ whir. The third track is all metallized math rock. See-sawing between spare finger picked guitar and simple shuffling drumming, and huge distorted angular crunch and complex prog pound. Again like a modernized version of Slint or Bastro, the same sort of arpeggiated minor chords, shuffling rhythms and mesmerizingly obtuse arrangements, albeit with much more metal vocals, and some ambient field recordings mixed in. The final track is another epic (all four songs are 10 minutes +) offering up their own take of that whole Isis, Mogwai, Explosions In The Sky, sort of dramatic post rock slow build majesty. And they nail it. The choruses are massive slabs of downtuned chug, the in-betweens are swirls of shuffling rhythms, finger picked guitars, simple strum, melancholy melodies, drifting and shimmering, slowly building to their inevitable climax. We been loving the whole doom dirge sludge meets post rock thing (Isis, Tides, Mouth Of The Architect, Village Of Dead Roads, Irepress, Baroness, Conifer), but we're sort of extra smitten with Woburn House, who sound like we WISHED math rock and post rock sounded back in the day. Instead of making their sludgey metal, sound a little post rock, they sound like they could have been a post rock band back in the nineties, albeit with much bigger amps and much more metal souls!! Unlike most of the Paradigms releases, which come in cardboard sleeves wrapped in hand stamped, brown paper, this disc is in a digipak, with some seriously intense and disturbing (but quite beautiful) drawings...

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We've been dying for this one, the latest from German post rock avant metallers Woburn House, whose last Paradigms release Message To Ourselves Outside The Dreaming Machine totally blew us away, with its weird mix of black buzz, post rock drift, metallic prog and noisy discordant math rock. And while on first listen, it seems not too much has changed, as we get further into the record (heck, further into the first song!), it seems that Woburn House have indeed begun exploring a new sonic direction... It only takes a few minutes for this record to establish it's utter dominance, beginning with a drifty lilting spidery guitar melody, soft and jangly and minor key, before slipping into a lurching downtuned chug, all stop start crunch, before slipping back into the opening drift, this time accompanied by some skittery rhythms, and so it goes until finally the vocals come in, a warm ethereal crooned harmony, with a distinctly shoegaze-y vibe, way down in the mix, allowing the song to grow more jagged, and get a bit Voivod-y, before finally stretching out into a gorgeous looped sounding sun dappled post metal drift, all soaring chiming guitars, and those warm vocals, the track finally winding down in a swirling swell of epic sun dappled psychedelia. Wow. Okay, so yeah, things have changed quite a bit, in as much as WH have managed to expand their sound even further, and taken their metallic sound in a distinctly less overtly metallic direction. The more we listen, the more it becomes evident that this record is much more mellow and poppy, than it's more metallic predecessor, the core sound falling somewhere between the twisted blackened metallic pop of Lifelover and the grandiose doom pop of Katatonia, the result is awesome, emotional, intense, epic, with the songs often building to huge chaotic climaxes, but just as often loping along dreamily, and metalheads fear not, while it is poppier, there is still plenty of crushing heaviness, gnarled riffage, and lurching chug to balance the blissy mathy pop and haunting shimmery drift that makes up much of the rest of the record. "Globus" is some dark dreamy spacedrone, with its tribal drumming, dense fuzz bass, effects drenched guitars, all locked into a looped motorik groove that wouldn't be that out of place on a Expo 70 or White Hills record. "Transmitter" brings the metal back, but definitely drifts into some serious Katatonia territory, with some woozy drifty almost-prog, occasionally giving way to huge swells of metallic heft, and more of those warm crooned vocals, the entire song wreathed in a gauzy washed out sheen. And finally, there's the 23 minute closing track "Transformer", which opens with the most black metal bit on the whole records, a buzzing blast, peppered with warbly minor key melodies, and warm swirling drones, but at its core, this is pounding and thrashing and heavy, until before you know it, the band have shifted gears once again, unfurling a glimmery driftscape of crystalline guitar and warm blackened ambience, when the track does kick back in, it's in a whole new form, a cool, lumbering post rock tangle of metallic buzz and complex start stop arrangements, there's even a long stretch of that sort of blown out Jesu-style metalgaze, before everything drops off, and all that's left is a field recording of birds, and cars, the side of the highway presumably, people talking, all manner of ambient sound, eventually the song does drift back in, and finishes with a few minutes of woozy laid back slow core pop drift, hazy and weary and like much of the rest of the record, dreamy and melodic. Folks looking for lots of buzzing blackness or crushing chugging metallic pummel, might not find enough of that here, but for folks who love their metal infused with all manner of pop, and dig stuff like Amesoeurs, Katatonia, Lifelover, Alcest, and that sort of stuff, will definitely dig this a LOT.

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If you've been paying attention to the Aquarius New Arrivals list (c'mon folks, it's summer now but the school of AQ is still in session, and you're gonna get quizzed on this list later) you'll have come across our recent review of a cd by a heavy, rhythmic British avant-rock outfit with the odd name of Hey Colossus. A great album for those into sludgy, repetitive riffing, maybe like the Melvins meet Circle but more aggro than that. Hey Colossus already employ no less than three guitars to make their noise but on this vinyl-only EP they've teamed up with another UK band called Woe (a skronky, heavy duty improv jazz beast) to get really really loud and ugly/pretty on two tracks, one of 'em a cover of Miles Davis' "In A Silent Way" believe it or not!! With nine musicians -- including two drummers, two trumpeters, two bassists, keyboards and all those guitars -- this has got some serious avant-heft. "In A Silent Way" has never sounded so ominous and heavy, and the flip is full of militaristic rumble as well. Great stuff! Limited to just 200 copies, on nice thick vinyl, and we have but a handful.

Originally released as a super limited cassette in 2004, Badb is one of the first releases from Canadian black metal weirdos WOLD, and if you thought the other records were noisy and demented before, this one will blow your mind (and probably your speakers too). After a quick opening intro of whipping winter wind, that ends abruptly as if someone just leaned over and pushed stop on the tape player, the record launches into the title track, the first song in what is apparently a songsuite based on a the myth of a mysterious war goddess, and is an crumbling onslaught of superdistorted buzz and while there may be drums, if there are, they're buried WAY down in the mix, the vocals however are right up front, a wild demonic shriek over the churning roiling blackness below. And so goes the rest of the record, a twisted maelstrom of sound, a sonic blizzard of black buzz and harsh vokills, the guitars less riffy and buzzy as they are practically a Merzbowian wall of blown out white noise, that white noise seeming to be in constant flux, occasionally coalescing into an almost riffy churn, before splintering again into a blast of face melting buzz. The recording is super lo-fi too, which gives even the harshest passages a strange washed out and muted vibe, the coolest parts when the sounds seem to blur into one another and become a strange sort of pulsing alien rhythm. "Final Offering" might be our favorite, a murky monster of a track, with the most discernible riffing, and a cool murky swirl that envelops everything in its path, and when the vocals back off, the music becomes a weird audial illusion, like those paintings that reveal hidden shapes if you stare at them long enough, the wild tangle of buzz seems to unravel before your ears, the various melodic fragments and interwoven textures shifting and transforming, eventually seemingly melting into a blurry viscous pool of buzz and drone, that eventually fades to black, finishing the record the way it started, with another stretch of frosty winter winds. Awesome. And EXTREMELY noisy, fans of Wold know what to expect, and folks into other noise metal outfits like Nekrosov, Gnaw Their Tongues, Alkerdeel, Hallow and the like will definitely dig, but be warned this is less about THE RIFF and more about blown out blackness...

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Wold are an ultra mysterious outfit from the barren land to the north (Canada, Saskatchewan to be precise), who play the weirdest and most weirdly recorded black metal we've ever heard. Imagine some old radio serial, or some snippet from an old black and white film, sort of scratchy and fuzzy and otherworldly, then smother it in guitarfuzz and blown out distortion, add some keening guitar melodies and blast beats, and you've got what we can only describe as a black metal Philip Jeck. The warm and warbly keyboard melodies and timeless cinematic snatches of sound are so hypnotic and dreamily repetitive. It's almost like a black metal band doing their own blackened version of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops. Kind of hard to describe, but Wold somehow take the drone-y aspect of BM bands like Graveland and Nargaroth even further, adding a creepy and scratchy looped mesmer beneath a wash of almost My Bloody Valentine like guitars. Or an even more abstract analogy, imagine Persephone in Hades, the goddess of Spring who was kidnapped and spirited down into the depths of hell, all these little ribbons of Springtime and loveliness drifting in the cold and grim underworld, a bleak and miserable expanse of sound with brief glints of color and sunshine, glimpses of a world that once was, looped like a rotting old filmstrip, repeated over and over and over, head nodding, thoughts drifting, eyes closing, spirit shifting, soul blackening. As if the music weren't weird enough, the band is fronted by the curiously named Fortress Crookedjaw, and backed up by his cohorts, Operationex and Obey. And then of course there's the band's manifesto: "Wold embraces the Mytho Poetic; the communication is expressed through our music, and theoretical as well as practical work done through our Woldclan brotherhood and our lodge, the L.O.T.M.P.. "Wold venerate our ancestors and cultures through myth and existence, and remain open and reflective to other effective metaphors. "Wold promote awareness. "Wold strive for honor and dignity above materialistic lies and novelty culture. "Wold solemnly swear to adhere to the law of the Self." It takes a lot for a record to so completely kick our ass and to so confound us musically. Definitely one of the coolest and weirdest black metal records we've heard in a long long time!!

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Seems kind of foolish to continue to proclaim different black metal bands the "weirdest ever" or "the most fucked up we've ever heard". We're quite tempted to take that route again with this bizarre Canadian horde, but the truth is, they were barely black metal to begin with, more a sort of Jeckish, Basinskian ambient blackness that bordered on the downright dreamy. Well, if anything the band has moved even further away from traditional black metal and into a distinctly, more damaged and significantly noisier world of sound. Fortress Crookedjaw, Obey and Opex, the trio who make up this ensemble, have taken the strange scratched, looped sepia toned smear of their first record, and torn it apart, doused it in white hot sheets of crumbling guitar and damaged feedback, offering up an even more obscured black metal, a metal turned inside out so we can see the squirming guts inside, malfunctioning electronics everywhere, coating every single riff, every growled lyric, every snatch of barely audible drums, in a crackling sparking field of sonic solar flares. Like listening to Jeck's Surf on a busted car radio, where it's mostly static, but you can -almost- hear bits of melody in there somewhere. Or more accurately, listening to some old skipping 78's on Masami Akita's custom sound system, while Malefic from Xasthur sings along. Some tracks are almost pure noise, the riffs and drums and anything else discernible as actual music, buried beneath an avalanche of Merzbowian skree, usually the vocals hovering atop, like another harsh jagged layer of sound. But occasionally, the noise abates, and we get a glimpse of some melancholy melodic murk inside, or a brief blast of black riffing, but more often than not, those bits are quickly subsumed and the record becomes a roiling chaotic black swirl once more. A few tracks, like "The Field Hag", harken back to the first record, with the noise reeled in, and a haunting muddy soundscape allowed to drift and shimmer ghostlike, beneath a thick layer of fuzz and grit and a glass gargling demonic screech, and theoretically, every track on Screech Owl is like that, just some are more obscured and obfuscated than others. Tracks like "Windmill" and "A Sword Becomes Red With Fury" are so distorted and blown out, that they become Pan Sonic style glitch and buzz scapes, pulsing short circuited rhythms, spare and skeletal, with almost no trace of melody, metal or otherwise. Like that busted car radio when you go through a tunnel, all distorted and choppy with only little bits and snippets able to surface through the distortion and static. Screech Owl weaves chaotically from blown out dreamscapes doused in furious fuzz, to crumbling damaged black loopscapes, to Whitehouse style noise, to soft focus looped ambience to ultra lo-fi black metal buzz, often in the same song. Distortion, noise, processed feedback, every track a delicate balance between huge pulsing flows of fuzzed out electronics, buzzing black metal madness and dreamy fuzzy drone and whir. Baffling and fucking brilliant!

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MPEG stream: So That No Sword May Strike Him Down
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For their latest collection of homebrewed electronic analogue filth, the boys in Wolf Eyes have decided to join the Hospital Productions roster, home of Prurient, Cold Cave, Ash Pool, Grey Wolves, Prurient, Kevin Drumm, Malkuth, and in some ways it's a perfect match. While all of that typically crusty and blown out Wolf Eyesian buzz and glitch and ruble and whir is all intact, Always Wrong actually displays a fairly significant shift, not just in sound, but in song writing. Unlike past efforts which tended toward the epic side long abstract noise jams, AW is practically a collection of songs, with vocals playing a much more significant part, sure they still offer up serious shards of skree and dense chunks of jagged buzz, but the manage as always to make their noise MORE than just noise, texture, timbre, mood, melody, and for the first time, SONGS. The record opens with some electronic buzz and some muffled percussion, and right up front some snarled vox, spitting all kinds of venomous vitriol, over a strangely haunting glitchscape, before finally erupting into a clattery clangy Wolf Eyed Whitehouse jam. Tons of feedback, swooping electronic tones, clipped and stuttery chunks of buzz and squeal, all somehow woven into a lurching, stumbling malfunctioning industrial lumber. But it's the next track where things get really interesting, beginning with another high end squall, the streaks of skree get smoothed into haunting melodies, backing up a drawled gloomy almost Lou Reed sounding vocal, underneath it all a darkly gothic bassline, all murky and buzzy, some crunchy riffage popping up here and there, the whole thing a darkly swirling, but still crunchy and caustic, bit of coldwave, that should definitely please fans of the dark and morose, the brooding and black. "Broke Order" sounds almost punk rock, crushing crumbling detuned crush, over grinding mechanical rhythms, dense clouds of blurred buzz, and yowled vokills, a lumbering lurching ultra heavy distortion drenched monstrosity, that again, manages to still be weirdly, if just barely, melodic. The rest of the record drifts druggily between those different sounds, "Pretending Alive" is a slow crawl, of reverbed metallic percussion, jazzy horns, lots of layered amp buzz and tape hiss, spidery disembodied guitars, "We All Hate You", is another strangely post punk post industrial almost new wave sounding jam, more moody vox, heavily effected electronic beats, thick gritty textures, and woozy minor key melodies, finishing off with "Droll / Cut The Dog", starting our downright pretty, long form drones, deep resonant rumbles, tense minor key melodies, very creepy and cinematic, the buzz and glitch kept to a minimum, eventually shifting gears into another sort of industrial coldwave outro, all pounding minimal rhythm, sung spoken vocals, warm washes of washed out hiss, dense tangles of undulating drones, and as always, lots and lots of glorious blown out buzz.

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Okay, we only got a handful of these in, and in very limited sizes, but we figured we oughta grab as many as we can since so many AQ fans are such huge Wolf Eyes and Grey Daturas freaks. That means act fast, and don't be too bummed if we've already sold out. We took every single one the bands had left. So this pack includes a killer black on white exclusive Australian tour design Wolf Eyes t-shirt, a Wolf Eyes pin, and a gorgeous full color poster. Super limited, and of the sets with large t-shirts we only got 8!!! The shirt/poster/button combo has to ship in a tube, so if you order this with other items it will have to ship separately and thus there will be an extra shipping charge. only 4 in stock!!

Okay, we only got a handful of these in, and in very limited sizes, but we figured we oughta grab as many as we can since so many AQ fans are such huge Wolf Eyes and Grey Daturas freaks. That means act fast, and don't be too bummed if we've already sold out. We took every single one the bands had left. So this pack includes a killer black on white exclusive Australian tour design Wolf Eyes t-shirt, a Wolf Eyes pin, and a gorgeous full color poster. Super limited, and of the sets with medium t-shirts we only got 8!!! The shirt/poster/button combo has to ship in a tube, so if you order this with other items it will have to ship separately and thus there will be an extra shipping charge. only 4 in stock!!

Okay, we only got a handful of these in, and in very limited sizes, but we figured we oughta grab as many as we can since so many AQ fans are such huge Wolf Eyes and Grey Daturas freaks. That means act fast, and don't be too bummed if we've already sold out. We took every single one the bands had left. So this pack includes a killer black on white exclusive Australian tour design Wolf Eyes t-shirt, a Wolf Eyes pin, and a gorgeous full color poster. Super limited, and of the sets with small t-shirts we only got 4!!! The shirt/poster/button combo has to ship in a tube, so if you order this with other items it will have to ship separately and thus there will be an extra shipping charge. only 4 in stock!!

Not sure exactly what this is, tough to keep track of all the cd-r's and limited lps and everything, but it does appear to be a brand new full length, although it's vinyl only for now. Apparently one single track, spread out over two sides, Black Wing Over The Sand continues to display Wolf Eyes' developing musicality, while managing to not lose a single bit of brutality, which is quite a feat. This is another dark slab of beautiful malevolence, equal parts corrosive rumble and shimmery drone, creepy dark ambience and intense industrial clatter. Side one, the first movement, begins with grinding guitars, blown out streaks of spacy effects, huge synth swells and jagged bits of percussion, occasionally overwhelmed by massive waves of low end buzz that somehow manage to swallow everything else up. Near the end of side one, the record winds down into what could only be described as some sort of Wolf Eyes dub, lots and lots of space, a lurching non-rhythm spread waaaaay out, crashing crumbling bursts scattered throughout. Really cool. Wouldn't mind hearing a whole record of that... The second side returns to more familiar Wolf Eyes territory, upping the buzz and the industrial clatter. still creeping along, everything wrapped in a black cloak of fuzz and rumble, but much more aggressive, intense, thicker, with layer after layer of constantly shifting sound. Intense, but still managing to be surprisingly musical and listenable. LIMITED TO 900 COPIES. Vinyl only, packaged in a cool black and white sleeve with some strange animal torture woodcut on one side and a mysterious mountain on the other. Full color printed inner sleeve too. Really nice...

Wolf Eyes really tend to divide folks right down the middle. Love 'em or can't stand 'em. And in typical Wolf Eyes fashion, they're going to do their very best to annoy the fuck out of everybody with their 'big break' Sub Pop debut. Quite possibly the harshest Wolf Eyes record, which is saying a lot, Burned Mind is a caustic mouthful of acid, spit right in your eyes (ears?). A head melting electronic throb, equal parts damaged malfunctioning synths, squealing feedback, ultra distorted howls, skittering skipping sort-of-rhythms. Wolf Eyes, more than almost any other band, definitely sound damaged and fucked and seriously messed up. But what keeps Burned Mind from being a boring old straight up noise record? Hard to say. But something definitely does. Some mysterious intangible something. Burned Mind is definitely harsh, bit in no way unlistenable. In fact it's strangely beautiful and subtly (VERY subtly) melodic. Equal parts Factrix, Merzbow, Throbbing Gristle, Whitehouse but all warped and twisted into the uniquely fucked sonic world of Wolf Eyes.

MPEG stream: Stabbed In The Face
MPEG stream: Village Oblivia
MPEG stream: Rattlesnake Shake

Super limited lp reissue of an even more limited (and seriously out of print) cd-r from Michigan's noise rock super heroes. Recorded right before core-member Aaron Dilloway left the fold, this is the 'Eyes at their most caustic, but also at their most ambient and spare. The sounds are harsh, and hissing and crumbling into jagged shards of white noise, but they are spread out over wide open fields of minimal hiss and rumbling drones. Long stretches of grinding industrial grit, glitchy malfunctioning electronics, bits of random percussive clatter, growled and grunted vocalizations, processed horns, bleats and skronks buried amidst thick swirls of rroooaaarrr, that the band pulls apart into weird desiccated carcasses laying under a burning hot sun, rotting and slowly liquefying into black pools of thick fuzz and clouds of insectoid whir. One side spins at 33, the other at 45, packaged in cool silk screened sleeves. LIMITED TO 600 COPIES!

Ann Arbor, Michigan. Home to heavy, powerful dirge rock and noise from the likes of Gravitar and Universal Indians and the power electronics sabotage of Nautical Almanac. Somewhere in between lies the homemade electronics power sludge of Wolf Eyes. Aaron Dilloway (Mr. Hanson Records) heads this behemoth, always unpredictable -- from beat driven floor shakers to tweaked out

Over the years, Wolf Eyes have morphed into a whole different beast. Without losing the very essence of what made them so vital and exciting. After countless releases (including hundred of tapes and cd-r's), their caustic corrosive confrontational side has been tempered by a knack for creating dark soundscapes, for crafting sinister cinematic tableaus, and for making serious, almost musical music. We never thought it would happen. And it happened so gradually that we almost didn't notice. But a quick listen to opener "A Million Years" tells the whole story. A brooding doomy plod. Grinding industrial drones drift over a simple machine like thud, in the distance free jazz horns bleat and squeal, suspended in thick clouds of grimey glitch and hissing buzz. This could definitely be the soundtrack to some post apocalyptic horror movie. Huge howls spill out of cracked electronics, like pools of black blood. It's amazing, that Wolf Eyes could get MORE melodic and MORE musical, and somehow be even more fucking frightening. And the rest of the record wanders bruised and bloody through similarly harsh and harrowing sonic landscapes. Veering from sounding like some sort of plodding doom metal behemoth to dreamy atmosphericists. A keening buzz becomes a raga like drone and then devolves into a thick caustic dirge, with growled blackened vocals, pummeling throb percussion and what sounds like a swarm of detuned guitars, all lurching evilly beneath a dense cloud of shimmery skree. Gurgling low end, sine waves and grinding electronic grit spread out over a wide expanse of creepy crawly ambience, a drifting droning underworld rife with weird horn like squalls and all manner of little sonic irregularities. Muttered vocalizations, are unfurled Whitehouse style over a corrosive bed of broken synth buzz and muted percussive thump. Huge swaths of grinding, howled metallic grate and howl drift and hover over ominous swirls of foghorn rumble and the growls and moans of some primeval wounded beast. This is some scary scary shit indeed. But at the same time, it's hauntingly beautiful, a glimpse into some hellish underworld, each listen revealing more details, more black shadows, more mysterious melodies lurking around and beneath each prickly squall of creeping bleat, all sorts of minor scale sonic events and subtle dreamlike drones buried within every pulsing wave of subterranean throb and buzzing ambient grind. If Hollywood had any sense, or any balls, Wolf Eyes would be scoring every fright flick from here on out. But the truth is, we've never actually seen a movie scary enough to warrant music this goddamn scary!

MPEG stream: A Million Years
MPEG stream: Rationed Rot
MPEG stream: Leper War

Might as well start out by saying this is most definitely the prettiest Wolf Eyes record we've ever heard. And certainly the most listenable, but of course, both of those descriptors are pretty subjective, especially when applied to a group like Wolf Eyes, who are as capable of conjuring up sheets of face melting noise as they are blissed out industrial shimmer. But for No Answer-Lower Floors, it sounds like they've tried something entirely different. The vibe is droney, and darkly psychedelic, the noise elements are muted, or sculpted into melodies, the opener sounds like Wolf Eyes via Can, a sort of kraut-noise, a simpler rhythm, wreathed in strange bits of buzz and thrum, the occasional streak of high end skree, the vocals laid back and laconic, almost spoken, a sort of woozy croon, the vibe is a mellower Dead C, or a super abstract lo-fi This Heat, weirdly hypnotic and trancey, minimal and murky, it's almost a sort of chill out version of Wolf Eyes, and we dig it a lot. There are some brief song fragments, interludes maybe, that find the group digging into their slightly noisier bag of tricks, one is a sort of pounding muted pop song, laced with wild malfunctioning FX and electronic squiggles, but retains the vibe of the opener. One is a weird collaged of fragmented voices and weird swirling clouds of high end bleeps, all chopped and layered, but then there's "Chattering Lead" which is even more mellow and trance-y than the opener, whirling organ shimmer, over a muted pulse, a skittery electro rhythm, all manner of chitter and bleep swirling in the background, more of those druggy disembodied vox, it's a gorgeously soporific sprawl of minimal creep-pop dirge, reminding us of our favorite Gate tracks, that same sort of sad boy indie rock slowed way down and blurred into a hazy drift. "Confession Of The Informer" is another minimal drifter, this one a bit more creepy and cinematic, lots of space, and ominous rumbles, strange minor key melodies, and soundtracky ambience, there's a pulse, a spaced out rhythm, over which a strange swirl of voices and sounds drift and shift, dark and minimal and moody, hushed and haunting. Finally, the record finishes with another stretch of rhythmic post industrial dirgery, this one flecked with bursts of what sounds like buzzsaw electronics, beneath which, another minimal rhythm unfurls, a dark somnambulant lope, looped and cyclical, a sort of power electronics hypno-drift, and while that relentless blast of electronics is mildly harsh, somehow, it ends up being more soothing and mesmerizing, the whole thing like some caveman This Heat. Definitely our new favorite Wolf Eyes record, and very likely the sort of record that could convince unsuspecting innocents to finally decide they like 'noise music'...

MPEG stream: Choking Flies
MPEG stream: Chattering Lead
MPEG stream: Confession Of The Informer

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

SORRY. Limited, three track mini lp from recent Sub Pop signees and masters of midwestern electronic sludge Wolf Eyes. Not to be confused with their recent "Stabbed In The Face" split with fellow noiseniks Panicsville, these three tracks display the many sides of the boys in Wolf Eyes, all of them nasty and gritty. Side A is an extended slithering electronic knife in the back, with grinding electronic fuzz and pulsing murky beats, and growling vocals. Like a no-fi, no budget Nine Inch Nails. Creepy and dark and really fucking scary. The first track on side B is a beautifully eerie ambient soundscape of electronic misfires and found sound snippets. Amps buzz and crickets chirp. Nice. Track two is a throbbing blast of hypno crush, that culminates in a mesmerising locked groove that was so cool, we let it play for about 15 minutes even after we realised it wasn't going to stop.