[ aquarius records — Experimental ]

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Showing results 2501 through 2550 of 9280.

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

SORRY.

The guys in Enbilulugugal have been sending us cd-r's for a while now. Each one a perfectly putrid blackened slab of black metal drenched in full on NOIZE. Buzzing and snarling and speaker-melting white noise brutality that ended up falling way more on the noise side of things, with riffs subsumed by huge washes of scalding electronic fuzz, and any semblance of songcraft, dropped kicking and screaming into the fiery pit. On this latest cd-r, their first 'official' release, Enbilulugugal have finally harnassed their two sides, the confrontational head smashing noise side, and their troo, grim, cult BM side, and have somehow managed to put it all together into a crushing face-melting blast of ultragrim blacknoize, equal parts brutal lo-fi black metal, Whitehouse style pummel, and Faxed Head fuckedupness. Killer riffs collide with bizarre tape drop outs, howling demonic vox come screaming from dense clouds of Merzbow worthy analog skree, blastbeats become so distorted they sound like your speakers are malfunctioning. On top of all that they heap plenty of forest sounds (wind, owls, etc... ), demonic laughter, blooping bleeping damaged electronics, fucked up effects, and about a hundred extra layers of grime and girt and fuzz. Imagine Darkthrone circa Transylvanian Hunger, with Merzbow on lead guitar, Masonna on drums, and a steam locomotive on bass, remixed by Alec Empire, and you wouldn't even be close!

MPEG stream: Return To Hellrokken Goatsex
MPEG stream: Nunsucking Necrophiles
MPEG stream: Goatoplasm
MPEG stream: Raped By Mammoth

What to say about this guy that we haven't already. A long time aQ fave, every one of his records an absolute drone bliss gem. That's really the most difficult part of this job a lot of the time. First time out, a band's debut, it's easy to gush and get all poetic describing a band's sound, even with the second record, we're usually able to come at it from a different angle, to further describe the sound in a way that conveys what we're hearing through words. But after that, it gets a little rough, especially with a band whose sound remains fairly consistent. On the one hand, we could just say, "it's awesome, buy it", and that's all folks will really need if they're already a fan, but with every release, there are always a few more folks who are discovering a band for the first time, and their discovery is as valid as that of the folks who got the first super limited long out of print cd years back. And thankfully, most of the bands worth listening to record after record, do in fact alter their sound a bit, growing, progressing, exploring, Encomiast are no different. Thus we have the latest from one man dronescaper Encomiast, on Crucial Bliss, the, uh, blissier sublabel of the more heavy oriented Crucial Blast� From the first few notes, we're transported to some swirling sonic nether region, where everything is slightly out of focus, blurred around the edges, lit from within, sun dappled and misted with glistening dew, warm whirling washes of sound drift weightless, voices are pulled apart into their constituent parts and allowed to float freely through the ether, swirling and realigning themselves into dreamlike melodies, in fact the overall sound of Encomiast is so very dreamlike. Fans of Kompakt's Pop Ambient sound will probably wonder why they haven't heard this guy on one of those comps. The sound is appropriately breathy and blissy, soothing and serene, the opening track is the perfect soundtrack for somnolent drift. The second track is another bit of low end shimmer, but introduces some Eastern sounding percussion, tablas maybe, but very minimal and spare, spread out over a creeping doom chord progression, laced with swirling steel string guitar, gorgeously moody and dramatic. The next track too, offers up minimal percussion, and some minor key steel string guitar, which instead of sprawling into some sort of moody ambience, takes the shape of some super abstract folk, lilting vocals way down in the mix, the melody sorrowful and melancholy, there's even some fluttering flute. The second to last track returns to more familiar Encomiast ground, a billowing dronescape of metallic shimmer, a sea of softly reverberating gongs, cymbals, and other chimes and bells, smoother out into long drawn out tones, and woven into what sounds like soft voices and whirring organs. Quite lovely. The biggest surprise is probably the closing track, which begins with soft strummed acoustic guitar, crooned vocals, what sounds like strings in the background, until about the last two minutes, when the drums kick in, some distorted guitars swoop in, and the track is transformed into a slightly metallic soaring shoegazey coda before drifting off again in a fading cloud of processed cymbals and tribal percussion. Gorgeously packaged like all Crucial Bliss releases, a full color two panel sleeve, the front panel folded over like an obi, revealing the full color, hand sewn sleeve inside, as well as a full color two sided insert with liner notes. And as always, EXTREMELY LIMITED.

MPEG stream: Pumpkin
MPEG stream: If The Night Commands It

Another gorgeous collection of thick glistening drones from the man known as Encomiast. Whereas his Havens record that we listed a few months back was a more varied affair, dabbling in grinding industrial soundscapes, fuzzy ambient flutter and everything in between, Espera finds him in a more minimal, seemingly more subdued musical mood. The tracks are still varied, but they are much more static, these are deep dark drones, the variations are subtle, each track is a slow shifting glacial sonic expanse, layered and dense, most of the tracks drift long darkly, all ominous low end, with some barely there streaks of upper register harmonics, a bit like an even more minimal SUNNO))) at times, but just as often referencing Chalk and Coleclough, even Organum, massive and thick, each stretch of sound a nearly static dirge. Gloriously bleak and dreamily dark and dreary. Essential listening for the drone obsessed for sure. And as this is an older release, that we got directly from the band, we may not be able to get many more of these once we run out...

MPEG stream: Annel
MPEG stream: Mechyn
MPEG stream: Arthroscope

Crucial Blast has supplied us with plenty of head melting, ear shredding pummel over the last few years, Skullflower, Genghis Tron, The Mass, the Goslings, but they have a soft side as well, not really 'soft' exactly, but a little bit more, well, blissful. Thus we have Crucial Bliss, a sublabel dedicated to more blissed out drones and dense dark ambience. We had never heard Encomiast before, but this release most definitely has us kicking ourselves. Beginning with some drifting flute passages, these forest flutters are soon consumed by a thick churning wall of white noise, before everything suddenly blissed out into a dense drone, rife with deep reverberations, and grinding industrial ambience. Where as most drone records fine a sound, and just let it drift on and on and on, the tracks on Havens never stop shifting, sounds morph into other sounds, murkiness becomes crystal clear, before slipping into lo-fi hiss again, metallic sounds soften, dreamy fluffy smears harden and become spikey and dangerous. It's always dreamy and droney and moody and gorgeous, but each track is so dense with subtle shadings and is an exhaustive journey through an endlessly shifting soundworld. Equal parts Andrew Chalk, Troum, My Bloody Valentine, Jonathan Coleclough and Wolf Eyes, the duo of Ross Hagen and Megan Garland weave programmed rhythms, field recordings, guitars, flute and vocals into completely immersive and endlessly fascinating soundscapes. Delicate and beautiful, but at the same time harsh and threatening. Definitely one of our new favorite 'drone' records. Absolutely recommended. SUPER LIMITED. Since we only just discovered this disc, it's close to being sold out at the label, we did get a whole bunch but we'd bet they won't be around for long. Packaged in oversized, hand sewn full color sleeves with a cool fold over sort-of-obi. Nice!

MPEG stream: Lunaire
MPEG stream: Jasli

Latest chunk of buzzing, swirling, atmospheric doomdronedreamdrift from this long time aQ fave, a single 21 minute track, derived from an old folk song, and it sounds like it. Warm billows of washed out warm whirling buzz, a landscape of languorous melodies stretched way out into softly undulating layers of blurred sound, reverberating steel strings transformed into clouds of pixelated thrum, all woven into a haunting sprawl, a sea of abstract melodic swells. The various sounds all wrapped in streaks of gauze and haze, a gloriously indistinct bit of drift that definitely reminds us of folks like Tim Hecker, Machinefabriek and the like. A new sonic world conjured up from a jumble of decaying elements, borrowed from the old, a slowly unfurling exploration of this new dreamworld, rendered in bleary eyed sheets of hushed, darkly ominous hum and deep rumbling shimmer. Long stretches of minimal thrum, bookending squalls of more metallic intensity, but eventually all smeared into a single continuous stretch of burnished ambient mesmer. Minimal artwork, housed in a mini 3" case, and of course EXTREMELY LIMITED...

MPEG stream: Malpais Excerpt 1
MPEG stream: Malpais Excerpt 2

The problem with cd-r's, especially super limited editions, is that folks who are late to the party, usually through no fault of their own, end up missing out on so much amazing music. The other problem is that there really is no good reason for cd-r's to be limited, or to EVER go out of print. Because you can always make more! That was supposedly the whole draw of the cd-r, no need to press up 1000 or 2000 copies that may end up sitting forever in boxes in your house. Just make the discs as people order them. Sure, that doesn't play into the limited edition collector frenzy, and discs maybe seem more special if there are only 100 copies made. And sure we can understand wanting to move on and work on other projects, but as far as we're concerned, that shouldn't keep you from making more copies for folks who are dying to hear your music. After all, that's part of why we make music, for other people to hear, and enjoy.� Anyway, the whole point of all this is, we've reviewed three different titles by Encomiast, all of them amazing, and unfortunately all of them no longer available. So now we've finally got a brand new disc, also a limited cd-r, that's just as gorgeous as any of those other now unavailable titles, we got a bunch but we have no idea how long they'll last, so if you're an Encomiast fan already you'll definitely want to grab one of these pronto, and if you've yet to experience the dark drifting beauty of Encomiast, well, then now here's your chance. And as the saying goes, you snooze, you lose... Transit Bed is a glistening wide open expanse of interwoven low tones, spacious epic ambience, peppered with super reverbed percussion, and warm resonant swells. Besides the usual mysterious sounds, there are samples of a live performance, bits of flute and prepared piano, but those too are smeared into fuzzy indistinct shapes, left to float and flutter dreamlike amidst all manner of rumbles and whirs. Dark and dense, warm and so gorgeous. Highly highly recommended. And as always, it's highly recommended that you grab one of these sooner rather than later...

MPEG stream: Rains Pass By
MPEG stream: Not The Time To Be Inarticulate

Ever since we first listed Havens, a cd-r by one man free-noise/drone outfit Encomiast, folks around here just haven't been able to get enough. So we tracked down another older release, Espera, reviewed back on list #259, and that too flew out of here like crazy, so we grabbed a handful of another old title, Winter's End. Not sure how available this still is, we got a bunch direct from the man himself, but as it's been out for a while we may not be able to get more once these are gone. So what is it exactly about Encomiast that has people all in a tizzy? A delirious blend of dark dreamy blackened drones and shimmering cinematic ambience, both deftly woven into long expanses of glacial, oceanic dreaminess. It's a crowded field for sure, anyone with a computer and a cd burner seems to have a label, or at least a drone record our, but there are a select few who are masters at sculpting sound, at creating music with depth and emotion. It's not as simple as notes sustained for the length of a disc. It's all about layer and texture and composition. Winter's End, more than maybe anything else we've heard from Encomiast, is incredibly evocative and cinematic, in fact listening to this, it's hard not to imagine what images should be accompanying these sounds. From drifting fog banks of bleary fuzz and minimal shimmer, to haunting, string-like smears of minor key melody, rife with ominous longing and sublimated terror, to spacious expanses of murky thrum, hovering around drifting mysterious female vocals. From grinding buzz drenched blurs to abstract modern classical, this is music so visual and visceral, it's hard to just classify as 'drone music'. And it's equally hard not to think in terms of cinematic sound. This is the music of some mysterious journey, a lost kingdom, a tragic loss, impossible loves, restless spirits, an abandoned village, it's pretty remarkable that a single disc can invoke all of these thoughts and images, but Winter's End does. Definitely a new favorite...

MPEG stream: Io
MPEG stream: Embrace:Betrayal
MPEG stream: Without Fear Of Wind Or Vertigo

Yet another disc from one of our favorite cd-r dronelords, Encomiast. Last heard from on the divine Bathed In Sunlight released on Crucial Bliss earlier this year, this disc is actually an archival recording from way back in 1999, gussied up in 2006, finally seeing the light of day right now. Bathed In Sunlight was a big surprise as It featured more actual songs, with singing, acoustic guitars, even drums, we still dug it, but definitely nothing like the rest of the Encomiast catalog. This disc however returns us to the brooding slow motion dronescapes that made us dig Encomiast in the first place. Unclear what exactly the instrumentation is, but whatever the source, it's obscured enough that it really doesn't matter. The original sounds are offered up in streaks and blurs, whirs and rumbles, melody here is muted and subdued, this is not nearly as tranquil as some drone records, much of this is harrowing and ominous, sinister and downright scary, Lustmord, Wolf Eyes, you're not far off, some sort of post industrial sprawl, the rumble of distant machines, of subterranean engines, thunder filled skies, a world in ruins, painted in blacks and greys. Later on in the record, strange percussion is introduced, a lurching distorted crunch, that gives the record some sort of strange propulsion, once again, trudging through an eerie wasteland, while all around strange sonic events occur, shining brightly and briefly before fading away. "Concupere" is the record's nearly half hour centerpiece, an ultra minimal low end drift, shifting slowly beneath warm metallic swells, and haunting black ambience, eventually the track morphs into something much softer and dreamier, sounding almost angelic up against the bleak sonic sprawl that came before. Incredibly dark, but also incredibly beautiful. Fans of the slow and low, of deep drones and of dark miserablism, this is your stop.

MPEG stream: Suborbit
MPEG stream: Azazel

Latest from Encomiast, a long time aQ fave, whose expansive mysterious dark drones have never failed to blow us away, but this is not just a new album, it's a sprawling double disc concept record split between two separate groups, and recorded in one of the most haunted buildings in Colorado. The story behind this record revolves around the Belvedere Theater in Central City, Colorado, a group of musicians repeatedly visited with the idea of capturing EVP (aka electromagnetic voice phenomena), where else but an extremely haunted old theater would one be able to capture the voices of the dead, but alas, no such sounds were discovered or captured, BUT, the musicians did manage to record, and those recordings were reworked into the two discs found here. The first is by Encomiast, the second is by a group called The Copper Thieves, which is Encomiast along with members of Mandible Chatter. Both discs conjure up the dark spirit of that theater, each in its own way. The Encomiast disc is downright frightening, all creaking moaning low end, deep ominous rumbles, all manner of tiny sounds drifting up out of the inky blackness, cold and sinister, abstract and ephemeral, the sounds of the theater's busted up old grand piano, smeared into blurred atonal clouds of clustered notes, the overtones drifting like lost specters, voices moan and bellow, the natural room sound as much an instrument as anything else, these deep dark drones totally evoke the spirit of that haunted space, headphone required, to truly get lost, and submerge yourself in these seemingly bottomless sounds. The Copper Thieves disc is not nearly as minimal, but just as ominous and haunting, the piano again plays a big part, but the notes are distorted and blurred into a massive warm wall of softly crumbling sound, which gives way to a strange haunted house of thumps and creaks and glitches and disembodied voices, groaning layers of low end thrum, soft filed of overtones overlap chiming bells, pounded notes on the piano drift up from below like monstrous growls, the disc finishing of with long tones, that seem to glow, warm and almost sun dappled, as if capturing shafts of light, drawing delicate lines on the dusty floor, and illuminating the snowflake like motes drifting in the still air. Both discs are fantastic, darkly evocative, and gorgeously droney, for fans of Lustmord, Andrew Chalk, Jonathan Coleclough, Troum, Organum and other droning denizens of the dark... LIMITED TO ONLY 200 COPIES, a double cd-r housed in a textured cardboard box, hand stamped on the outside with two printed inserts featuring liner notes and photos.

MPEG stream: Freed From Time Yet Vulnerable To Air
MPEG stream: A Nervous Light
MPEG stream: Something Shines Through
MPEG stream: Slam Your Doors

We've never reviewed any records from Seven Minutes Of Nausea, but for the grind/noise core freaks around aQ, they've been a long time favorite. This new record from Israeli label Heart & Crossbone is the latest from End Of Silence, an experimental side project of the long running 7MON, and while fairly far removed from that group's noise drenched grind, EOS does somehow weave some of that sonic fury into these three sprawling abstract tracks of minimal free noise weirdness. The 22 minute opener starts with cymbal crashes, set amidst a field of near silence, super minimal and spaced out, it's not until nearly 5 minutes in, that anything else happens. The anything else in this case, a pulsing sine wave stretch of high end feedback, which is eventually joined by a buzzing low end thrum, as the cymbal hits grow more and more rapid, in some weird way, it almost sounds like experimental classical doom, or something, it also reminds us of the tripped out abstract heaviness of Habsyll, but things have only just gotten going. Soon the sound coalesces into a weird pounding, almost looped sounding metallic minimalism, pounding rhythm, swirls of dense noise and sculpted feedback, buzz and squelch and swirl, finally the drums explode, a flurry of wild octopoidal pound, all of the instruments drifting free, the final few minutes a strange sort of noisy feedback driven free jazz style free for all, dense rhythms, noise squalls, more feedback, some serious stellar psychedelic freenoise freakout for sure. The second track dials back the noisiness, and unfurls a haunting sprawl of abstract shimmer, and soft processed thrum, ethereal cymbal shimmer, and a murky rhythmic pulse, sounding almost like a more abstract Necks, but before they locked into any sort of groove. The sound never explodes, instead, broods and drifts, the background electronics growing more staticky and gristly, the drums only swooping in near the end, and even then, not bombastic so much as textural. And finally, the relatively short closer (13+ minutes to the other tracks' 22 and 23 minutes respectively) begins as a wall of crumbling static, underpinned by deep rib cage rattling rumbles, buried melodies, slow shifting textures, which do soon expand into dense swirls of mangled electronics and tangled strands of feedback, and while it is noisy, it's not noise, it's much more about mood and atmosphere, for this final stretch, one that's a bit caustic and chaotic, but still not completely free, a writhing roiling cascade of blown out sound, which is soon harnessed to another bout of wild drumming, the final few minutes playing out like a blast of Merzbowian free jazz. Cool stuff for sure, recommended for fans of abstract noisiness and heavy free form experimentation.

MPEG stream: Frequentia Resona I
MPEG stream: Frequentia Resona II

Killer power violence tag team, in one corner, newbies The Endless Blockade, who more than almost any current band embody the sound and spirit of classic power violence, and in the other, the grandfathers, and direct descendants of the genre's namesake, Bastard Noise, who have returned to the sound of their Man Is The Bastard antecedents, while still incorporating plenty of twisted Bastard noise noise. We haven't heard Bastard Noise sound this fierce and heavy in years, throbbing low slung bass, pounding caveman drums, howled feral vox, wild screeches, tangled riffs, all woven into tightly wound tarpit grind jams, lurching and stuttering, stop start, freaked out blasts of furious thrash bookended by lumbering doomy crush, all shot through with streaks of electronic skree, clouds of glitched out FX, in fact, if anything this sounds like the perfect mix of classic Man Is The Bastard and another aQ fave MITB offshoot, Geronimo: rhythmic, hypnotic, cyclical. There are some moments of droned out Bastard Noise electronics, but those moments usually end up exploding into shards of hyper rhythmic pound and chug. So awesome. This would be worth it alone for the Bastard Noise side, but we haven't even gotten to the best part of this split... Which is "Advanced Directive", an Endless Blockade remix by legendary academic electronic pioneer Noah Creshevsky (we had a killer retrospective of his work on Japanese label EM!), that is a total skittery, stuttery, psychedelic plunderphonic freakout. Riffs and vocals chopped and looped and pitch shifted and reassembled into a weirdly hiccupping experimental power violence mash up, reminds us a little bit of the recent Record Of The Week by Whourkr, with its impossibly complex and head spinning heaviness. Wow. The fourteen minute track that precedes it is a killer too, pummeling, pounding doomic heaviness, that slips into a strange electronic flecked trip out breakdown, and then a super in-the-red grinding buzz drenched feedback slathered noise freakout, before lurching back into some riffy crunch to finish things off. There is one more track, a remix by noisemaker The Rita, but that one is for the TRUE noise lovers only, 15 minutes of crumbling, blown out, earshredding Merzbowian digicrunch.

MPEG stream: Advanced Directive (Noah Creshevsky)
MPEG stream: Deuteronomy
MPEG stream: Fallen Species
MPEG stream: Movement Two

Debut release from this East Coast duo, who weave a dense swirl of softly rhythmic ambience, druggy dronemusic and abstract psychedelic space drift, utilizing a strange assemblage of instruments. Along with guitars, vocals and pedals, they also utilize a Gameboy, the result is not that far removed from the sounds of folks like Expo 70, Gnod, Sounding The Deep, Pulse Emitter and the like, but these guys describe their sound as "triumphant post-noise and stretched out bummer-wave", which translates to washed out expanses of skittery programmed rhythms, warm shimmery guitars, muted loops and subtle glitchery, everything raw and lo-fi but still lush and expansive, there are vocals, but they tend to be blurred into soft swirls of layered hum and whir, the sound is dreamlike and mediative, but not mellow, instead it's minimally propulsive and blissed out, sometimes slipping into full on Autechre-like skitter, but even then, the rhythms are set amidst dense layers of drone, disembodied melodies, hushed ethereal ambience, or tripped out soft noise. Cool, mysterious and definitely psychedelic, this is the perfect headphone drift soundtrack, or sounds for a rainy day lost wander, or music to help you achieve the next level, to leave your body and attain enlightenment, or to just put on and chill out. SUPER LIMITED RUN, 53 tapes and 47 cd-r's, we only got the cd-r's, and each one comes bundled with a bad ass lazer etched black triangular talisman, that according to the band, will "bring you infinite power", and that Andee has been wearing since we first got these in!! (proof is here: http://twitpic.com/ya15g, http://twitpic.com/ya1cu)

MPEG stream: I Remember
MPEG stream: Distortions
MPEG stream: A Way

No idea who Endless Time is or where they hail from, but his/her/their Coasting cassette on Monorail Trespassing is a great introduction, and stands well with some of the disturbed drone passages that have come from the recent output of Emaciator and Infinite Body. The first side ripples with an ominous drone from a single synth line transmitting beneath a series of haunted piano notes, which split the difference between the Caretaker and Cranioclast (if anybody remembers that once prolific German post-industrial outfit of peculiar darkness). Stretches of iron-clad static burst through these sci-fi atmospheres, giving way to a melodic interlude between two harmonized notes. The second side seems to be a soft dub of the first with alienating bleeps set in motion across an undulating and unsettling electrical field of an analog synth sawtooth drone, placated by pastoral flutes which emerge toward the end of the piece. Here, Endless Time has more of the '80s ambient feel of Vangelis, particularly from some of the Blade Runner soundtrack. Limited to 125 copies, of which we only have a few.

Very impressive. Much less randomly aurally assaultive than her previous works. Atari Teenage Riot's Ms Endo has steadied her aim, and carefully selected her angles of attack. Not a constant barrage of pummelling abrasiveness, but instead more of a

RealAudio clip: One Night Domination
RealAudio clip: The Program And The Brides
RealAudio clip: Mask Identity
RealAudio clip: Neon Sunrise

As always, these Ultra Eczema lps are amazingly packaged, in gorgeously designed sleeves, pressed on nice thick vinyl, and limited to 400 copies, most of which are sold before we even realize they're out. So we only got a tiny handful of these (5-10 copies) so don't get your hopes up. A selection of rare and unreleased tracks from these infamous Swedes. Recorded in the mid to late eighties, these tracks mix electronic experimentation with industrial pummel, abstract noise, sound collage, processed vocals, all tangled up into drummachined blasts of grinding squealing, squeaking, pounding fuzz drenched, super distorted freak out. Think a more newwaved Throbbing Gristle. Dance music for the one legged. A musical metal helmet strapped on and set to stun, ears bleeding and toes tapping. Bogens Massage Institut is a gloriously dense assemblage of thick and corrosive, but sort of surprisingly playful, alien sounds and noises. Includes an insert with extensive liner notes and discography.

One of the more obscure, if highly regarded Swedish industrial / experimental projects, Enema Syringe (aka Kai Parviainen) operated in the constellation of projects surrounding the fledgling Cold Meat Industries in the late '80s. Most of the Enema Syringe catalogue remains unattainable with a recent album on Ultra Eczema being one of the only things that may have been available. Parviainen was also one of the members of the eccentric Swedish collective En Halvkokt I Folie, who did publish one of the most baffling and bizarre albums for Cold Meat Industries, coming across much more like Smegma or Keukhot rather than the signature death-industrial dirges of CMI. This single dates back to 1987, right when Parviainen was beginning to find his stride in constructing his deranged, brut-noise assemblages, and these three tracks had never been released up until now. The title cut laces monotone vocal samples and vaudeville piano melodies about a bluster of tone-deadening low-end rumble, that all joins together in a Jorg Buttgereit amalgam of the macabre and the comedic. The other two pieces are prototypes of modern day power electronics with blown-out synth sequencing, squelched frequency modulation, and yelped vocals. Super limited stock on this one!

MPEG stream: Upshutlenvolte
MPEG stream: En Krullig Mongoloid

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

SORRY.

One of two new Touch singles this week, this mysterious batch of 'incongruous harmonies' comes from Australian composer / sound artist / musician Lawrence English, and these two tracks were both composed and recorded for an installation called Regarding The Joy Of Others, and are both mysterious and amorphous, textural and abstract. The first is a series of gritty washes, deep swells pocked with streaks of crumble and crackle, buried melodies glowing from within a softly heaving surface of burnished thrum and muted static, bleary and blurred and subtly smeared, a gorgeous soundscape of indistinct harmony, quite Jeck-ian in fact, something very lovely, disguised by a gauze of soft noise, the two elements not competing so much as bleeding into one another and becoming a hauntingly beautiful melody infused, slowly unfurling buzz. The flipside peels back some of the grit and grime, leaving something more serene and a bit more ambient, a darkened landscape of distant churning rumbles, shot through with shards of looped high end, almost like a mellowed out Wolf Eyes, but it's not really all that mellow, it's still ominous, and tense, and a bit haunting, a sprawling dronemusic that subtly throbs and pulses with some implied rhythm, while layer upon layer shift and overlap and intertwine, the track actually growing less and less dark, the low end fading away, leaving just the mysterious keening high end warble to drift like some alien distress call. So cool. And like with all Touch releases, super striking design and layout by Touch Records boss Jon Wozencroft.

Kiri No Oto is the first album that Lawrence English has released for the venerable Touch Music. This after a number of releases through his own Room 40 imprint, which bridged environmental recordings and somber electronics with sublime results; but there's been little to indicate that he would generate something as stellar as Kiri No Oto. The Japanese title loosely translates as 'the sound of fog' or 'the sound of mist.' Both are applicable to the extended blur that this Australian sound-artist generates, with its miasma of soft-focus distortion arching into long-form compositions of minimalism. The album doesn't exactly erupt, as the sounds are more soothing in their softened textures; but English cuts into one of his grey-mass drones with little fanfare. English slowly glides his 'sound of fog' down to a muffled static, then brings up tectonic rumblings and kicks the overdrive in on his distortion box (or more likely, some patch on ye olde laptop) for one of those digital distorto-drones that Tim Hecker and Christian Fennesz have been sculpting over the past few years. And yes, we'll throw in an obligatory My Bloody Valentine reference, well because there are plenty of parts here which have the blissed out wash of the ambient interludes on Loveless. Given that similar dynamics appeared on one of the last great Touch albums - BJ Nilsen's The Short Night - it made us wonder if these gestures toward static-laden, shoegazing noise bursts dappling the almighty drone were a coincidence for Touch, or if Touch were handing out particular Max/MSP patches to accommodate this sound. It's probably the former; but the similarities to many of the other Touch artists is too great not to comment. As with all of the Touch releases, Jon Wozencroft delivers his perfect design with an overcast sea-side photograph to match the depth, mystery, serenity, and subtle darkness of this very impressive album.

MPEG stream: Organs Lost At Sea
MPEG stream: White Spray
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Originally released on Touch as a cd, now available on vinyl via the always kick ass Digitalis... Kiri No Oto was the first album that Lawrence English released for the venerable Touch Music label (now, as mentioned above on Digitalis). This after a number of releases via his own Room 40 imprint, which bridged environmental recordings and somber electronics with sublime results; but there's been little to indicate that he would generate something as stellar as Kiri No Oto. The Japanese title loosely translates as 'the sound of fog' or 'the sound of mist.' Both are applicable to the extended blur that this Australian sound-artist generates, with its miasma of soft-focus distortion arching into long-form compositions of minimalism. The album doesn't exactly erupt, as the sounds are more soothing in their softened textures; but English cuts into one of his grey-mass drones with little fanfare. English slowly glides his 'sound of fog' down to a muffled static, then brings up tectonic rumblings and kicks the overdrive in on his distortion box (or more likely, some patch on ye olde laptop) for one of those digital distorto-drones that Tim Hecker and Christian Fennesz have been sculpting over the past few years. And yes, we'll throw in an obligatory My Bloody Valentine reference, well because there are plenty of parts here which have the blissed out wash of the ambient interludes on Loveless. The art, as on the Touch cd version, matches the depth, mystery, serenity, and subtle darkness of this very impressive album.

MPEG stream: Organs Lost At Sea
MPEG stream: White Spray
MPEG stream: Allay

Peregrine falcons are impressive birds of prey that can be found in almost every ecosystem, known for their extreme speeds in flight sometimes reaching over 200 miles per hour. Being quite adaptable, they are often found in urban areas where the pigeons are plentiful; and it can be quite spectacular to see these birds streaking through the skyscrapers of San Francisco reducing the pigeon population one at time with a precision that's the envy of any military campaign. The Australian ambient-laced sound artist Lawrence English came to his appreciation of the Peregrine by way of a book of the same title by J.A. Baker who obsessively mapped the daily activities of a pair of peregrines in England with a purported magical lyricism in his writings. English's ornithological portrait is all about flight and soaring - it's unclear whether English took after Baker by seeking out these birds on his own or if English's work is solely articulated through the lens of Baker's prose. But, English has long been able to express a poetic simplicity through the fog of sound; and he's proved once again how deft he can be. Smeared synth drones and grey-tone ambience streams through each of English's tracks, with subtle melodic interludes of low-end bass tones girding the compositions, coming across as something between Popul Vuh and Tim Hecker. A beautiful record for sure, and one that captures a sublime element of the majesty of the nimble falcon. Limited to 500 copies and comes with a download card.

The more one scratches the surface of Australian sound art, the more gems emerge from the search. We've uncovered a handful of artists whose work has slipped under the radar. Tim Catlin's drone guitar work is one example, Eamon Sprod's treated field recordings under the moniker Tarab would be another; we can now count Lawrence English amongst this bunch. Where those two aforementioned artists have connections to the RMIT program in Melbourne, English hails several hundred miles up the coast in Brisbane. There, he has produced a handful of processed soundfields on his Room40 imprint; and for his Transit album released on Cajid, English offers a concoction of electric minimalism pieced togethe from sources provided by a number of exceptional guest stars including DJ Olive, Robin Rimbaud, Philip Samartzis, and a handful of lesser known artists. Despite the diversity of voices on Transit, English is firmly in command of the album, digitally smearing each of his guests' source material into a spectral ambience dappled with field recordings and textural events. It's not too far off from Loren Chasse's Of recordings if it weren't for the noticable digital sheen; and at times, English hits on a similar bleak isolationism found in Thomas Koner's work. A mighty fine record.

MPEG stream: Oceanic Drift
MPEG stream: That Was A Lucky One
MPEG stream: Closing Frame

A drop dead gorgeous album from Australian drone kingpin, Lawrence English. Wilderness Of Mirrors follows along the same woolly path that he carved out on Kiri No Oto and The Peregrine. Those albums bristled with a fracturous noise that was less of the raw-nerve probing and more a blast of polar wind smashing against your skin and racing past your ears whilst peering at the smeary, gray horizon line between a sullen ocean and a leaden sky. An existential gaze of self-reflection and melancholy. Wilderness Of Mirrors offers a similar avalanche of shoegazing droneworks with English layering noise upon noise upon noise, with everything blurring into a portentous density of somber, doom-laden downtunings broken apart by sparkling radiant bursts of tape-decayed synthtone. English further slows the melodic phrasing buried within the snow-packed masses of distortion, finding his work in very good company with the likes of Tim Hecker and Christian Fennesz. The title is a reference to a T.S. Eliot poem "Gerontion" - yet another fine literary reference from the well-red English, who had adopted the quote's original sentiment along with its latter day meaning as a geopolitical meme in speaking about the prickly business of Soviets and American duplicity throughout the cold war. English posits the title in relation to his own aghast reactions to the contemporary unfolding of political crisis after political crisis; but far from being a mere political statement, English allows the album to unfurl as an allegory full of abstraction and fragmentation enshrouded in a glistening fog of emotive drone. Very nice.

MPEG stream: The Liquid Casket
MPEG stream: Another Body
MPEG stream: Graceless Hunter

Lawrence English is another unsung hero of Australian underground experimental music. We've reviewed one of his discs in the past, a dreamy digital exploration of ghostlike ambience. Sort of a less organic Jewelled Antler. On this latest disc, English teams up with Japanese composer/sound artist Yamamoto to further explore the realms of processed field recordings and minimal electronics. And lord this is some truly sublime stuff. Fans of all things Fennesz, Coleclough, Chalk, Tim Hecker, Ambarchi and the like will find much to love. Dark droning dreaminess, not as digital or electronic as you might imagine. Incredibly deep and resonant, huge smears of glistening shimmer, subtle reverberations, an expansive world of totally mesmerizing drones. Soft colors shift and swirl, organs wheeze and stretch out into thick layers of textured sound, hard to know what more to say about this other than WOW. So totally and absolutely breathtakingly gorgeous.

MPEG stream: Longing
MPEG stream: A Silent Kouta

Following their very well received Live At Showboat recording for Last Visible Dog, Mukai Chie and Yamamoto Sei-ichi have hooked up with French improviser and electro-acoustic wizard Eric Cordier for a project they've entitled Enkidu. Ms. Mukai has been wandering through the Toyko improv scene since the '70 performing with the PSF band Che-Shizu, whereas Yamamoto's illustrious career finds his guitar freakouts splattered throughout the Boredoms, Omoide Hatoba, and Rovo. Harkening back to the psychedelic, ur-drone mantras of the Taj Mahal Travellers, this trio offers a delirious set of improvisations out of Mukai's trademarked two-stringed violin and percussion, Yamamoto's guitar and flute, and Cordier's hurdy-gurdy and mess of electronics. Nick Cain accurately describes the resulting sounds as "swirling and head-spinningly noisy slow burn deep-sound drone-ragas." It takes a good 10 minutes or so for their improvisation to really take off from the incredibly quite introduction of Mukai's deliberate bowing upon her violin. Deep cavernous electronic tones rumble behind, Yamamoto's neck-wrangling of jagged flourishes and Mukai's vocal wailings. The trio constantly builds dense crescendos which in turn they abruptly halt in rough, herky-jerky gestures, only to reform into a new trajectory towards another crescendo, all the while unfolding into a magnificently complex drama.

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There's really no useful information to be found about Roe Enney. She authors a thoroughly cracked strain of bedroom electronica, one that could have been produced around 1983 in some depressed region of the world. We could say Vladivostok for someplace fitting of the sounds but in truth she hails from Phoenix, Arizona. That's pretty much all that we know about her and this tape she produced for the newly invigorated Phaserprone label, who has never shied away from grimy electronics, queasy rhythmic oppression, and fucked-up histrionics. Enney's stoned, witchy vocals would certainly draw parallels to Liz Harris and Amanda Brown, although Enney is far more of a deconstructionist, stripping away her already emaciated structures through a Spartan use of vintage Linn drum machine, synth, guitar, voice, and a fair amount of tape decay with all of these typically keeping their own orbits independent of everything else. The resultant warbling constructions are stunted, ghetto-dub mutations where voice and synth murkily blur into cough-syrup overdosed crawlings whose sewer seduction atmospheres are splattered with her puncturing drum machine programming that rarely acts as time keeper to these personal, dystopian visions. She's channelling the more idiosyncratic elements of Dome, Throbbing Gristle, Tara Cross, and The Storm Bugs, and it wouldn't be much of a stretch to situate this near the early Zola Jesus singles or LA Vampires. Limited tape-only production in a run of 100 copies. Don't expect these to last long.

Now on Vinyl!! The combination of Brian Eno and Cluster proved to be a golden match. The sounds they delicately created together have been echoed again and again in the three decades since their collaborations. A feeling of both effortlessness and a total awareness of the space and sounds they were building radiates throughout the recording. You can hear the tinkering hands of Moebius and Roedelius giving elements of warped spaced out bliss. Eno approaching the songs in a magic space somewhere between Before & After Science and Another Green World. When his vocals appear they just begin to melt and dissolve into your ears. For sure the best backwards vocal delivery we've ever heard can be found on the track "Tzima N'arki". There is such a sublime feeling of melting on this record. These three knew how to meld warmth with an motherly feeling that takes you into golden horizons, mesmerizing twilight and an afterglow that you just want to surrender yourself to. Originally released in '78, once again 4 Men With Beards has done the fine service of bringing it back to a world that's more ready for these sounds then ever.

MPEG stream: Tzima N'arki
MPEG stream: Foreign Affairs

Perhaps the most renowned of Eno's ambient albums, Music For Airports, originally released in 1978, is a (or we should say *the*) seminal -ambient- work. The proof is over a quarter decade's worth of other artists (and some downright imitators) who've amassed an enormous collective body of work directly inspired by this one album. This is the O.G. of gorgeous shimmering atmospheric soundscapes. Truly sublime. While Eno's conceptual "hands off" compositional style is certainly one of the larger factors in his influencing other future ambient artists, the striking thing about this work that makes it so compelling is the way in which the pieces manage to impart a feeling of warmth despite the clinically mechanical way in which the pieces are played. And while the performance here is not executed by machines the impact of it carries on down, all the way to the Aphex Twin's zenith of robotic beauty, The Richard D. James album. The four pieces here (programmatically named "1/1", "2/1", "1/2" & "2/2" for their sequencing on the original LP) build one upon the next. The first is arranged entirely with electric and acoustic pianos (with some help from Robert Wyatt for this), the second a chorus of voices and the third and fourth pieces combination of those elements with additional synth help. The drifting and staggered arpeggios cascade in slow motion giving the pieces a shapeless consistency, somehow always moving forward while remaining frozen. A suitable antidote to muzak if there ever was one. If anything dates, or holds back the three latter pieces on this disc it's the now archaic synth patches. They can be charming, but I've never been able to listen to "2/2" without thinking immediately of Steve Winwood's "While You See A Chance". Needless to say, this small downside can't spoil as great an album as this.

MPEG stream: 1/1
MPEG stream: 2/2

While Plateaux of Mirror could be seen as the inspiration for a generation of new age musicians, On Land (released in 1982) is arguably a place card for a wellspring of darker ambient musicians forging soundtracks for non-existant films. Some, like the now obscure J. Grienke made careers out of this single album. Others, like Richard James on the Aphex Twin's excellent double cd Selected Ambient Works Volume 2, pay homage and move on. But hints of this dark collection of audio soundscapes can be heard from the likes of Biosphere, Deathprod, Andrew Chalk, Troum and even Village of Savoonga. The key elements involved are an elimination of melody and rhythm. As Eno puts it, quite well in fact, in the liner notes: "the landscape has ceased to be a backdrop for something else to happen in front of: instead everything that happens is part of the landscape. There is no longer a sharp distinction between foreground and background". A seminal work and a must have.

MPEG stream: The Lost Day
MPEG stream: Unfamiliar Wind (Leeks Hills)

We didn't review Another Green World with the other Eno reissues featured a couple weeks back 'cuz they turned out to have some weird defect, but that's been fixed now and so here you go: Unlike most of the recent reissues of classic albums, Brian Eno's aren't graced / padded with extra bells'n'whistles (outtakes, demo versions and the like) nor are there swollen booklets of liner notes, photos, glowing praise, etc. No, you get the albums as they were originally released -- albeit remastered and packaged in simple digipaks with plain clear plastic slipcovers -- and frankly, with albums as timeless and remarkable as these, that's enough! Each is an inspired and inspiring work, remaining vital and compelling even thirty years later. Needless to say, each is fully deserving of an honored place in any record collection. What remains to be said about one of the all-time classic art-rock records? Here we find Brian Peter George St. John Le Baptiste De La Salle Eno (yes, that's his full name!) leaving behind the song structures of the preceding albums, and jumping straight into inventing the mood-driven, almost-snippits-but-too-composed-to-be-just-parts style of atmospheric 'songs'. A melding of his ambient sides with occasional vocals. "Sombre Reptiles", "I'll Come Running", "St. Elmo's Fire"... MAN, JUST TOO GOOD. If you've never heard this record, buy it and live with it for a few years. It'll getcha eventually... Really, just a flat-out model and inspiration for everything synthetic / experimental / art / punk / pop from Bowie's Low album to Talking Heads to I Am Spoonbender (Cup admits that IAS often uses a set of Eno's 'Oblique Strategies' cards during sessions, just like those mentioned in the liner notes to this essential release. FYI: they were a small black box containing a deck of cards imprinted with an assortment of open-to-interpretation statements... an oracle of sorts that you could refer to in times of creative blocks).

MPEG stream: St. Elmo's Fire
MPEG stream: I'll Come Running

The opportunity of a lifetime film score for Brian Eno: providing a soundtrack to the most, quite literally, other-worldy film footage ever shot. Eno was approached by ex-astronaut Al Reinert in the early eighties to put his ambient touch on a project that Reinert was working on documenting the apollo missions. Reinhert had sorted through 6,000,000 feet of NASA film footage shot by astronauts on those missions, picking out what he considered to be the best clips. To this he intended to add only the voices of the astronauts themselves -- both from interviews after the missions and from their transmissions to Houston during them -- and Eno's music. Though Eno's score was released in 1983, Reinert's film -- For All Mankind -- wasn't completed until 1989. Recorded just a year after his Ambient 4: On Land, the material here is quite similar. The compositions are far less conceptual than his earlier ambient works, yet the pieces here have an intuitive, textural and emotional feel without relying on -- for the most part -- melody. All but four tracks on this album use that same Eno M.O. of blurring the idea of "foreground and background", much like his previous release On Land. The guitar and bass, when the appear, are subverted from their original roles -- melodic lead, rhythm and harmony -- and instead are used for texture and atmosphere as much as the synths and electronics. The ambient tracks on Apollo have a foreboding and sublime quality -- appropriate enough for the vast eternity of space and the dessicated & bleak terrain of the moon. The four non-ambient tracks on this disc, all nestled together towards its end, are a bit of a departure from the rest of the album. "Always Returning" is probably the weakest link on the album, with its sentimental guitar part played by Daniel Lanois. Lanois however redeems himself with his pedal steel guitar playing on "Deep Blue Day", like a Sons Of The Pioneers tune, shot full of heroin and launched into the vacuum of space.

MPEG stream: Matta
MPEG stream: An Ending (Ascent)
MPEG stream: Deep Blue Day

The second wave of Brian Eno reissues is of his genre creating and defining ambient music albums from 1975 through 1982. The first in the series is Discreet Music and it's in the liner notes here that Eno describes the genesis for his ambient music. The story goes that while he was recouperating in a hospital after having been struck by a car he found himself inspired through another sort of accident. Eno had been brought a record of 18th century harp music to listen to but, after having struggled to put the record on in his weakened state, found the amplifier levels way too low and one channel of the recording completely missing. Thus he was forced to strain to hear nothing but the loudest of notes above the ambient din in the room. Add to this Eno's admission that he considers himself a much better conceiver of plans than executor of them and you have the foundations for Discreet Music. Eno's goal was to set up a system which would generate music with as little input from him as possible. To this end Eno created a feedback loop into which he could insert pairs of notes and let the ensuing echo box and delay line do the rest. The flipside of this coin, included on this album, is a suite in three parts entitled "Three Variations On the Canon In D Major By Johann Pachelbel". For this piece Eno took sections of the Canon and, on each of the sections, gives the players different instructions for the treatment of those parts. In each case the directives result in different but beautiful deconstructions of the all too familiar Canon.

MPEG stream: Discreet Music
MPEG stream: Fullness of Wind

In a lecture given by Brian Eno for the Long Now Foundation last year he explained the genesis of his ideas on ambient music, which was in itself inspired by the music of Terry Riley, Fela Kuti and the Velvet Underground -- music that he felt "flattened" the "hierarchical structure" of its components. He went on to say that "In my own work this manifested in an emphasis on making what would have been called the background more interesting, and what would have been called the foreground, less and less central, thus sinking foreground elements into the background." The results of these musings culminated in, amongst others, the now highly regarded Discreet Music and Music For Airports. Discreet Music was composed of individual elements, each of differing lengths, such that the sonic soundscape would sound similar from moment to moment, but never exactly the same either. Thursday Afternoon takes a similar road map to Discreet Music, but is executed on a much larger scale. Originally recorded for a VHS tape released by Sony Japan of 7 "video-paintings" of Christine Alicino. The advent of the compact disc allowed Eno to greatly increase the length of time under which his compositions could unfold, which is exactly what Eno was able to accomplish with the audio only release of Thursday Afternoon. Thursday Afternoon is like a macro focused version of Discreet Music with every element further stretched, every minutia of hierarchy further flattened and every element of the medium -- compact disc -- exploited. Not only is the scale of the work greater, but utilizing the dynamic range of the CD Eno is able to make greater use of quieter passages with sound that previously would have been lost below the area of surface noise -- towards the end of the pieces as the individual elements drift away, you can hear the faint sounds of birds outside of Eno's studio. The increased time available on a CD, as opposed to the LP, makes for a better execution of his idea of ambient music. No more flipping the vinyl every twenty minutes, just program your CD player to repeat. Like Music For Airports, Thursday Afternoon's most distinctive element is that of a Rhodes -- or similar electric piano -- keyboard playing languid broken arpeggios, underneath which is a glistening mirage of ever shifting drones. The combination of these ever fluxuating elements creates the auditory illusion of movement and stasis.

MPEG stream: Thursday Afternoon

Recorded in 1980, The Plateaux of Mirror is the least successful of Eno's ambient works, with the exception of its success in being the blueprint for the myriad new age records that would soon follow in its footsteps. Budd's meandering legato piano lines sound so maudlin in comparison to the austere rigidity of Wyatt's playing on Music For Airports. There are less syrupy moments here that make for fine soundtracks. In fact, I think I've seen no less than a dozen student and/or low budget documentaries in my day that have used these tracks in their scores.

MPEG stream: First Light
MPEG stream: An Arc of Doves

Another disc we knew nothing about and just luckily stumbled across (with our interest whetted due to its label affiliation, Kning usually being quite interest-ing). We were initially struck by the gorgeous cover, an embroidered landscape, all oranges and blacks, the texture of the background fabric adding grit to the already dark and mysterious shapes and hues in the foreground. The words Farval Falkenberg printed in huge gold metallic letters, strangely poetic song titles. We later discovered that this is in fact the soundtrack to a Swedish film, a coming of age story, sad and bittersweet, and the music couldn't be more perfect. The opening track had us completely smitten within seconds. A gorgeously melancholy acoustic guitar, spinning a soft sad melody, mournful and moody, the main melody is whistled, giving the track a certain childlike vibe, a bit of a Morricone / Bjorn Olsson feel too, it seriously gives us shivers just writing about it. Then the 'chorus' kicks in, and adds soft focus piano plinking in the background, another guitar higher up in the mix, simple tambourine percussion. It's so evocative, you can't help but let your mind start making up different scenes from this movie you've never seen. Lonely walks, sitting by the window, rain pouring down, wandering along railroad tracks, laying in bed staring at the cracks in the ceiling. Wow. And the rest of the record is just as compelling. Every song a mini super emotional epic. Organs wheeze ominously, acoustic guitars flutter and flit, chimes drift and shimmer, the piano returns in dense swells, bits of static and glitchy hiss intrude like someone changing stations on the radio, there are creaks and groans, distant rumbles, bits of electronic skitter, subtle drones, chimes, bells, even the occasional vocals, but it's always about the guitar, it's delicate dreamlike melodies, and how it's so perfectly intertwined with the piano and the organ. So moving and intense. Think Rachel's, Dirty Three, Pinetop Seven, Japancakes, Godspeed, but somehow much less arty, and more genuine, subtly experimental, but practically perfect, dark, emotional, so incredibly moving. Makes us want to see the film so bad, but in the meantime, it's the ideal music for whatever film you have running through your head. And of course the absolutely perfect soundtrack for lonely walks, staring at the ceiling, staring out the windows in the rain, wandering along railroad tracks, etc...

MPEG stream: The Joy Of D.H. Lawrence
MPEG stream: Dusk Settles In
MPEG stream: The Breaking Of Waves

You know you want it. Members of Sunburned Hand Of The Man and No Neck Blues Band sneak out in the middle of the night to perform their strange alchemical musical experiments. Sonically not all that different from the above musikal kults, the hostile growl of stumbling angular guitar, atonal skronk, mysterious world music warble, dangerous hippies spewing abstract psychfolk grit and grime, occasionally blissing out into tranquil otherworldly ragas of sitar like shimmer and tribal paganism. Packaged in a beautiful hand screened Godspeed like cardstock digipak!

MPEG stream: Lon Nil

Not so much an ensemble as it is the work of one of the Starving Weirdos, the one who also records in the equally cool RV Paintings. Although it's unclear why the new monicker was necessary, besides the fact that it's a solo record, since the sound is not all that far removed from the Weirdos', which is no bad thing, if anything, the sound on At The Foot Of Nameless Roads is like a more intimate, more hushed take on the Weirdos' abstract avant ambience. Where the SW sounds like a handful of guys bathed in shadows, around a roaring fire, banging on mysterious objects, coaxing sounds out of big old hunks of electronics and busted musical instruments, the sound of EE, is more tranquil, movements measured and precise, lit not by fire, but by moonlight, or soft sunlight filtered through grey clouds. A series of longform dronescapes, shimmering smoother out high pitched skree spread out over layers of burnished hum. Deep metallic shimmers create fields of swirling overtones and buried melodies, delicate tendrils of washed out buzz spread out like a crack in the ice, creating intricate patterns that when viewed from afar are barely visible, but up close reveal all manner of shapes and designs, dense fields of looped percussion get tangled up with reverberating tones and overlapping chunks of fragmented melody, drums are dubbed out and delayed to the point that they almost become a static blur, and finally the sound of a crackling fire underpins hushes whispered dronelike ambience. This is after all, for all of it's various sounds and timbres, arrangements and processes, a very minimal drone record, and a quite varied and lovely one at that. Cover art by Tarentel's Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!

MPEG stream: At The Foot Of Nameless Roads
MPEG stream: Mud Banks Shine In Broken Shards
MPEG stream: Light Reflects As Seagulls Dive

The latest release from Mr. Bryan Pyle, one half of the Starving Weirdos, as well as one half of RV paintings, both groups who we've raved about in the past, as is the case with Pyle's solo project, Ensemble Economique, whose sound is even more difficult to pin down than either of his other two groups. Both the Starving Weirdos and RV paintings seem to be cut from the same sonic cloth, the difference seemingly being that the SW stuff is roughly torn, while the RV Paintings is delicately cut, the former trafficking in a sort of ramshackle experimental droned out abstract ambience, while the latter, dials back the ramshackle, and deftly weaves in field recordings and produces something much warmer and pastoral. Needless to say, we're huge fans of both. Pyle on his own, is all over the place, incorporating obviously elements of both SW and RV, but definitely doing his own idiosyncratic thing, whether it be progged out krautpsych electronics, dark synth-croon songsmithery, filmic melancholia or dense layered dronemusic, so we were definitely prepared for Pyle to throw us a curve ball with this new one, his first for Dekorder. And we were not disappointed. Not one bit. Opener "Heat Waves" sounds remarkably like Salem, straight up witch house, all fuzzy sun dappled synths, those skeletal crunked out handclap rhythms, some very John Carpenter like melodies, but Pyle definitely makes it his own, adding strange flurries of percussion, stretches those synths out into something a bit dronier, but regardless, Salem fans might find themselves flipping out. "Vanishing Point" dials back the witchiness a bit, but it's still all synthy and drum machiney, very retro eighties, a little bit of that synthdrag we dig so much, but with lush string laden swells, and darkly delicate melodies. And so goes the rest of the records, a songsuite of witchy cinematic eighties retro-futurism, but Pyle definitely is a master, transforming what in lesser hands could be bandwagon jumping, into something all his own, mixing in some downtempo Portishead style grooviness, loads of texture, subtle percussion, the vibe haunting and ominous, even hearing a little Barry Adamson here and there, that same sort of faux soundtrack Adamson did so well. But here it's a bit more twisted, the sound seeming to revisit that Salem-y witch housiness throughout, but on tracks like "Everything I Have, I Give To You", making something new and exciting and sonically compelling, out of a sound that's been done to death, and in doing so, creating his own genre, which is basically what he seems to do with every record. Borrowing a little, but then basically tangling and twisting it all up until it's totally unrecognizable. This might just be our favorite EE record yet, but pretty sure we say that about every one. Absolutely RIYL Salem, Umberto, Dylan Ettinger, Xander Harris, Roll The Dice and various other purveyors of witchy / synthy / retro sounds...

MPEG stream: Heat Waves
MPEG stream: Vanishing Point
MPEG stream: To Feel The Night As It Really Is

At his marine outpost on the western shore of Humboldt County, California, Brian Pyle (aka Ensemble Economique, as well as a member of the Starving Weirdos and RV Paintings) is in a prime location to dial into the ether for radiowaves across the Pacific. With the nearest communities of Eureka and Arcata far less irradiated with electro-magnetic interference which makes shortwave radio listening down right impossible in urban areas, and with Pyle's proximity to the Pacific Ocean (it's a couple hundred yards from his back door) acting as a massive antenna, he's able to listen to transmissions that seem to come from Russia, Thailand, Papua New Guinea, China, and numerous other locales. Along with the baffling radio phenomena of utility signals and numbers stations, Pyle found himself captivated by the sounds of 'interval signals'. These are the specific sounds, phrases, or melodies that announce the end or beginning of a particular program. Often very simple, so as to work within the limitations of shortwave, these signals can sound very eerie and truncated when broadcast halfway around the world. Pyle first incorporated these sounds into a performance back in 2011 for 23five's now-defunct Activating The Medium festival, and those echoing phrases have become a staple in Pyle's live sets. So this entire album dedicated to interval signals, finds Pyle lacing these sounds with insistently dark, piano solos and bleak field recordings of abandoned spaces pounded by monsoonal winds and rains. Interval Signals is a very solitary, impressionist work, showing a sense of spaciousness found more in the likes of Basinski and Coleclough than in most of Pyle's previous work. Still very cinematic in scope, but its an entirely different movie for Pyle this time. A Pixelvision version of Last Year At Marienbad? Yeah, it's that cool.

MPEG stream: Interval Signals Part 1
MPEG stream: Interval Signals Part 2

Drugs. Hallucinations. Isolation. Death. Some pretty classic / heavy-as-fuck metaphors run through the work of Brian Pyle, the mad genius of Manilla Beach up in Humboldt County, California. He's been at it for a long time now, first knocking on our door with his homespun variations of floorcore psychedelia with the seemingly inactive collective Starving Weirdos; then, there was the fraternal act of nature jamming drones through RV Paintings; and Ensemble Economique is Pyle all by his lonesome, where he's proven deft at density of sound laced with a nocturnal pop streak that could even warrant some Demdike witchy references. Pyle's hypnotic structures are deceptively simple and proven emotively effective - a lilting layer of blown-out guitar drones cycling through elegiac melodies, another layer of electronic sequences, oceanic driftings, chanted vocalizations, rasps of bowed metals, maudlin church organ explorations, or thumming dial-tone samples, with crumbled film samples of what could be some Russian / French / Hong Kong noir film of some woman frantically whispering about some crime that may or may not have happened. The individual tracks glide into a purposeful, cinematic song cycle narrative that begins with the thoroughly gloomy, portentous opening track "If You Need Help" that is a real downer of an acid trip spent staring at a ghost ship sinking in the depths of the Pacific with sand, sea foam, and black rain kicking you in the face to make the sense of hopelessness all the more real. Pyle links the two sides of the album with "Ksenia" - a track split in half of percolating acidic electronic sequences girding those female vocal samples and guitar drones. By the end of the album, his delirious slow-motion take on '80s bombast lifts the album's weightiness with two drone-pop ballads of marching rhythms and radioluminescent hypno-melodies. Another mighty fine album from Brian Pyle!

MPEG stream: If You Need Help
MPEG stream: Ksenia
MPEG stream: Radiate Through Me

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

SORRY.

Not really a live recording per se, but a focused session at the Manilla Beach compound where Brian Pyle lives and works in Northern California. Pyle is well known around these parts for his work in the DIY cosmic explorers The Starving Weirdos and psychedelic "nature jammers" RV Paintings, with his solo work being under the guise Ensemble Economique. 2012 has been a busy year for Pyle, even by his manic work ethic, thanks to a lengthy tour from the western end of the European continent all the way into the depths of Russia; and he also took a handful of excursions up and down the California coast bracketing that tour. When Pyle performed his set, which he mapped out for the European tour, it was already an impressive array of discordant Tim Heckerish blasts of semi-melodic fuzz, post-Goblin arrangements of ominously minor-key church organs, and a vibe pointing to late-nite habits of getting stoned and aimless trawling through the vacant spaces on cable television. By the time he got back from the tour, he had the set nailed down; and this recording is THEE document encapsulating all of the detours, epiphanies, and experiments Pyle made along the way. Pyle offers up seven or eight distinct movements within the seamlessly mixed session; and in those movements, electro-tribal rhythms and delirious synth tones gird the swelling arrangements for left-field ambience, punk raga-drones, crusty guitar blasts in prolapsed Morricone-styled melody, and brain-cracked vocalizations, with interludes from field recordings of fire, crickets, and whispering cyborg women. More great work from Brian Pyle. And yup, it's super limited.

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First off, this is a super fucking limited cd-r, produced in the fog-laden confines of Manila, California by the one and only Brian Pyle. This dude is one of characters in the Starving Weirdos and RV Paintings, with Ensemble Economique being the moniker he's chosen for his solo work. The last couple of Ensemble Economique albums - especially the Psychical lp recorded for Not Not Fun - had been veering from a home-grown psychedelic improvisational splatter and into wonderfully off-kilter takes on cinematic melodrama. Psychical was clearly hedging towards the VHS-horror / John Carpenter vernacular, but here Pyle's jumping into dark-synth croon territory as he's molding sparse songs out of his morass of loops, witch house rhythmic skitter, and occasional arcs of luminous downer guitar tones. What's more is that Pyle SINGS throughout the album - not the reverb-soaked sustained caterwaul he would utter in the Weirdos, but more of a late-nite stoned balladeering that could have infected Pyle's brain from too many Miami Vice re-runs. One could imagine this to be Brian Pyle's ode to that show's incidental music - not the Don Johnson chase scene frenzy, but the crying tone-bent guitar excursions that would peg a scene's cinematic tragedy. Bits of dialogue splattered with delay tricks and synth nodes flash with neon intensity against Pyle's naked electronica, all of which was recorded in a marathon session on one day in the summer of 2011. It's pretty dang amazing actually, it even had folks coming up from the back room to find out what the heck was playing, which is always a good sign. We're probably the only source for these discs... and who knows if more can be procured!

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Bryan Pyle should no longer need much in the way of an introduction here at aQuarius as we've long championed the shambolic drone-pop and improbable psychedelia that Pyle has been crafting on the sodden beaches of Humboldt County, California. This once and future Starving Weirdo has been on a roll with his latest stream of Ensemble Economique work. Along with the two recent albums released by Denovali, there's this limited, one-sided picture disc produced for Dekorder's series of releases in conjunction with their tenth anniversary. The three tracks on No Thing-Ness represent a more caustic, more industrial aesthetic for Ensemble Economique, which never shied away from the haunted and the gothic; but here, there is a claustrophobia and paranoiac feel unlike much of Pyle's previous work. The opening cut "All Our Water" is a slinky, ritualized piece of electronica with Muslimgauze-like rhythms, hypnotic media samples, and buzzingly flanged guitar drones that exhibit colorations similar to those found in Soft Moon's motorik work. "Banking System" is the most sinister thing we've heard from Pyle yet, though the cybernetic concoction of monochromatic synth percolations somewhere between Conrad Schnitzler, John Carpenter, and maybe some Bourbonese Qualk. The lengthy "Dream Homes" layers tone-bent synth lines onto militaristic drum machine marches with radiophonic signal beacons and diabolically chanted vocals echoing throughout. A great release for sure, but we should note that it's unlikely we will be able to restock beyond what we currently have on the shelves.

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The Italian horror artwork that graces Psychical is something of a red herring, as Brian Pyle guides his Ensemble Economique into the orbit of Conny Plank and Moebius in his use of electronics rather than one of Goblin or Zombi. Pyle is an artist who should need no introduction as one of principals in the Starving Weirdos as well as RV Paintings, with records on pretty much every cool label under the sun (Root Strata, Blackest Rainbow, Weird Forest, Olde English Spelling Bee, Digitalis, and now Not Not Fun). While the debut Ensemble Economique record was very much dialed into what Pyle was conjuring in RV Paintings through a superb stoner-zoner-drone vibe of gorgeous guitar shimmer and suspended harmonic intonations, his solo EE recordings have been carving out a separate identity other than the Starving Weirdos or RV Paintings. Beginning with the Standing Still, Facing Forward LP released earlier in 2010, Pyle's Ensemble Economique has been mining references from '70s and '80s progressive electronics, mostly looking back to those seminal Germans. Certainly, Holger Czukay, Plank, and Moebius come to mind; hell, even Cranioclast and Stockhausen wouldn't be that much of a stretch. Psychical is wholly dark-trip cast upon waves of two note synth melodies that bounce back and forth against a backdrop of hand percussion and heavily looped drone-shadow. Snippets of dubbed voice and radio transmission crackle ooze a fourth-world, rhythmicist eeriness somewhere between Muslimgauze and that Zero Set record from Moebius and Plank, furthered along by bloodshot guitar snarls. Tom Carter makes a guest appearance on one of the track, bringing a rather incendiary prolonged solo to Pyle's raga-drone rhythms. All in all, another great record from Brian Pyle!