[ aquarius records — Experimental ]

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Showing results 3651 through 3700 of 9280.

Hive Mind is the long running project of Greh Holger, the rust-belt exile now basking in Los Angeles sunsets, smog, and Scientologist horror. Following his ancestry back to Michigan, Hive Mind situates somewhere between the monstrously virile industrialisms of Wolf Eyes and the doped-up synth worship of the earliest incarnations of Emeralds. Recently, Holger (and his cult imprint Chondritic Sound) has been dabbling in the synth-pop / minimal-wave ethos to considerable aplomb; but here on Beneath Triangle And Crescent he's returning to the roots of noise. In fact, this is a reissue of a super limited cassette that was released on Fag Tapes back in 2008. The A side lingers on suicidal synth chords cycling over beds of smoldering noise, with the aptly named "Detritus" channelling the same amphetamine goth-suffocation of downer melodies that opened the titular track to The Cure's Pornography. The side-long title track is a Cronenbergian meditation on psychic violence as played out through the structure of the machine, in this case the skeleton of a junked car festering at the bottom of Lake Erie. Whatever connotations to melody found on the A side are dropped in favor of zombified rhythms smothered in neurotic, black noise and a nihilist venom spewed often by those malcontent Italians (e.g. MB, Murder Corporation, Mauthausen Orchestra, etc.). Bleak shit, for sure.

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Way back in 2002 we listed a record by Norway's Hlidolf, who whipped up (or, er... down) a slow motion swirl of spacey, dark, drifty, deep, and droney doom sludge. Channelling Earth 2, SUNNO))), Lustmord, Klaus Schulze and the like. Obviously it was a huge AQ fave. Unfortunately that release seems to have faded and disappeared into the ether, but thankfully we now have this epic three track disc from Hjarnidaudi, who are the rightful sonic heirs to the space doom drone throne once occupied by Hlidolf (due in no small part to this being the new project of Hlidolf's Vidar Ermesjo). But where Hlidolf was all darkness and doom, winter and wastelands, Hjarnidaudi is white hot light and blinding bursts of fuzz and sparkle, like the impossible birth of a new universe. Sure it's still slow and doomy, but much like the recent Fleshpress III record, this is a doom band moving beyond the confines of pure doom. Huge expansive stretches of majestic slow moving melody, a sort of doom certainly, but instead of murky downtuned gurgling sludge, these doomscapes are constructed from jagged buzzy brittle slabs of crystalline guitars, brief explosive smears of almost ambient fuzz, held together by an impossibly glacial rhythm section. Sunroof! by way of Esoteric, a shoegazer SUNNO))), a WAY less propulsive Jesu, or Skepticism broadcast through the M83 soundsystem. A gloriously thick and rich, warm and shimmering expanse of stretched out buzzing guitars, dreamy melodies, minor key and melancholy, but with a strangely warm embrace. If most sludge-doom-death-drone is like dunking your head in a tarpit, the world a dripping black dirge, Hjarnidaudi is like falling into the Sunn, hot and blinding, the world splintering into a million tiny sparkling pieces. Limited to 750 copies, packaged in a mini lp style sleeve wrapped in a hand stamped brown paper outer sleeve.

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We first discovered Hjarnidaudi via the always amazing Paradigms label, but at the time we were even more excited by the fact that the man behind Hjarnidaudi was one Hlidolf, who was responsible for one of our all time favorite (and sadly now out of print) doomdronedirge records, a massive slab of slow motion spaced out sludge that was the perfect combination of SUNNO))) slow motion sludge and blissed out psychedelic space drift a la Klaus Schulze. So we were surprised to learn Hjarnidaudi was a full on band, still heavy and doomy and slow, but a band, who didn't traffic exclusively in slow motion sludge, but created glimmering shimmering doomscapes, that took the slow and low and wreathed it in fuzz and warmth and shimmer, on Paradigms' Pain:Noise:March. And now it's 3+ years later, and we discover there's a NEW Hjarnidaudi, so we order a bunch cuz we loved the last one (made it a Record Of The Week!), and whattayaknow, we're surprised once again. The band is barely even doomy anymore it seems, instead offering up some looped, hypnotic heaviness, the guitars dense and heavy, the drums big and booming, the sound a sort of epic post metal mathiness, guitars moaning and keening, while another offers up weird high end tangles, super propulsive, downright rocking and a little proggy. But hold off, that's only the first song, the other three tracks are definitely a lot doomier and darker, pounding and plodding, with guitars ringing out, chiming and shimmering, wreathed in crumbling distortion, woozy and washed out, but definitely dark and depressive and dreamily doomy, however, also strangely clean, the guitars more loud and effected than downtuned and distorted, some moments this actually sounds like a more blissed out less gloom pop Katatonia... and by track three the distortion becomes totally blown out and the band slips into full on metallic Jesu / Nadja territory offering up a deafening blown out coda.

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Does spacey, dark, drifty, deep, and droney sound good to you? Then pay attention: "Darkwave" (i.e. industrial, ambient) label Dragonflight Recordings (who last brought us the experimental black metal of Proscriptor) has just established a sub-label for, well, the sub-sonic specialty that can be described as 'doom' (metal or otherwise), and their first release is the debut cd from Hlidolf. Not sure what the name means, or how you're supposed to say it, and actually we don't know much of anything else about Hlidolf except that it's the project of one fellow from Norway, Vidar Ermesjo. He recorded this in "Hlidolf Studios" (his home, we presume) in the dark and cold of last winter. It's one loooooong instrumental track (70min!), sorta somewhere betwixt Earth "2" and Maeror Tri or Lustmord. SUNNO))) and Skepticism also come to mind, and especially the obscure and defunct Neptune Towers project of Darkthrone's Fenriz, which this release pays tribute to in its liner notes ("Not for collective listening...recommended listening with headphones, or large, black stereos..."). Like Neptune Towers, this sounds like Krautrock electronics maestro Klause Schulze gone over to the dark side, all evil and ominous, yet soothing -- good late night, creepy going-to-sleep music, if you like that sort of thing (which I do, though unfortunately it's not the preference of my girlfriend...) Glacial, bass-heavy, beautiful. It's almost religious.

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Fantastic 2nd (first US) release from this all-female Japanese avant-pop group. Yagi Michiyo on the koto (veteran of a Tzadik solo release), Haco on vocals and other instruments, and sinewave sampler virtuoso Sachiko M (known for her work with Otomo Yoshihide in Ground Zero and ISO). Includes a couple of reworked tracks from the import debut on Sachiko's Amoebic label, and more, new wonderful electronic/experimental pop songs in the same vein, strange and lovely. Recommended. [/cat/experimental84.html]

We haven't managed to catch Hodag live yet, but it sounds like it must be a bit like having someone fire ice picks right into your ear canal from a high powered rifle. Or imagine being stripped naked and rubbed raw with some free jazz sand paper. CMJ wrote that Hodag's�debut "doodles corpsepaint on Albert Ayler,�sounding like jazz-spazzes trying to claw their way out of Xasthur's murky coffin." Hard to come up with anything better than that. This is definitely some sort of free jazz, or some sort of ambient noise, there is no black metal per se, but it does sound very black, with swirls of damaged synth, sputtering drum kit spazzouts, lots of space, but lots just as many bursts of ultra dense brutality. For the pure souled and strong eared amongst you! LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!! Each disc packaged in a cool hand screened cardboard sleeve.

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RennFaire gone Rock In Opposition? Italian prog meets medieval madrigals?? We're still puzzling about how to describe this wonderful, wonderful disc, a remastered cd reissue of a rare LP (long awaited by some, totally new to us but very welcome -- thanks Robot!) which was recorded by composer Kay Hoffman in Florence, Italy in 1977, though not released until 1985, on vinyl in Japan only! On Floret Silva, Hoffman and her collaborators, including members of the very excellent and arty Italian prog band Pierrot Lunaire, took a trove of medieval Latin poetry known as the Carmina Burana -- poems written by anonymous authors around 1200AD that are both religious in nature as well as very earthy and real, about such subjects as love and money -- and set them to music. The settings are diverse (as befits the variety of these texts), and the results are often eerie and pretty and even a little bit groovy, with quirky chamber ensemble/prog rock backing and even the use of field recordings. Utterly magical for the most part, most especially due to the delicate vocals of Jacquline Darby. One song reminds us strongly of Stereolab, others call to mind (rather more obscurely) that Flamen Dialis album we've raved about before. This should appeal to experimental psych-folk fans for sure, even if this unique treasure is really something outside almost any genre designation you'd care to come up with!

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What a crazy release! Imagine a drug-addled Doug Blunt turning his outsider RnB synth grooves into something even more strange and rarefied, as if he somehow discovered a primitive synthesized folk-blues through ritual sculpture building and obsessive, constantly shifting meta-narratives about space and technology. Lonnie Holley has quite the backstory. Born in 1950 in Alabama, the seventh of twenty-seven children (!) and the byproduct of the state's poorly regulated foster care system, Holley had a difficult childhood that he overcame through art and music which he developed on his own, his creative output manifesting itself through drawing, painting, sculpture and performance (examples of his artwork are included in the booklet that comes with this cd). Holley had never recorded his music previous to this release, which marks the first time that the Dust-To-Digital label has brought an artist into the studio and it's unlike anything we've heard on the label before. While Holley may look like a Sun Ra type eccentric, and this record was in fact recommended as being very 'Sun Ra-ish', there really isn't a whole lot of that kind of instrumentation or jazz sound, instead, the minimalistic music is mostly layered and woozy psychedelic synth washes and percussion. What's most noticeable and remarkable is Holley's vocals, which come across as a shamanistic Arthur Russell as he sings a primitive-futuristic brew of blues mantras that twist into strange abstracted vocalizations, evoking at first an old-world sound until he starts going off about cellphones and other modern technology. This is a pretty amazing release for folks with a penchant for bizarre outsider figures such as Ariel Pink, Doug Blunt and Jandek. It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it is definitely wholly original!

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Who'd have thought we'd be so taken with an album that opens with a song about "Six Space Shuttles and 144,000 Elephants"? For that matter, who the heck would MAKE an album with a song called "Six Space Shuttles and 144,000 Elephants"?? Well, a 63 year old 'outsider' artist, Alabama's one of a kind Lonnie Holley, would, and did. This is it, and it's pretty special. We highlighted Holley's Dust-To-Digital debut last year, Just Before Music, which was not only Holley's first released recording but also Dust-To-Digital's first 'contemporary' release (as opposed to all their well-researched vintage reissues), and this is the equally fantastic follow-up. Apparently Just Before Music garnered him some fans, as two of the seven tracks here, including the lengthy & hypnotic 13+ minute "Other Side Of The Pulpit", find him collaborating on the music with Bradford Cox (Deerhunter, Atlas Sound) and Cole Alexander (The Black Lips). At first, we were like, oh no, he doesn't need hipster indie rockers messing with his sound - but actually the music on those songs fits in perfectly with all the other tracks that he did all by himself, so no harm done, and probably a great experience for those guys. Holley's music, if you've heard the debut, you know is sparse and minimalist, with some thumb piano, some synth wash and warble (making us think of Tennessee's improv hillbillies the Shaking Ray Levis at times), and a bit of simple drum machine and other percussion. Reminds us a bit of some of the tracks on that Personal Space comp of electronic '70s soul. Often hypnotic and lovely, and an important part of Holley's unique sound, the electronics and instrumentation still take a back seat to his singing, the main event here, which we'd have to compare to an "outsider" Louis Armstrong when Holley belts it out, with lots of rough garrrrrrgle in his voice. His more gentle, mumbling moments are more akin to Arthur Russell, as we mentioned in our review of Just Before Music ("Holley's vocals, which come across as a shamanistic Arthur Russell as he sings a primitive-futuristic brew of blues mantras that twist into strange abstracted vocalization"). That's for sure true, and those vocalizations - sometimes multitracked, as on the very much mantric "Sun & Water" - when not utterly abstract, convey some wonderful lyrics, poetic and sometimes quite strange. That "Six Space Shuttles" song, one of the hardest to grok here, has something to do with the Queen's birthday (Queen Elizabeth II?) and how Holley wants to celebrate it by sending "expandable, transformable, solar adaptable" space shuttles the size of "the Hindenburg and the Titanic both put together" off into the universe, and when they come back "they can heal the air and fix the water", and wouldn't that be nice? Not sure if we quite get what he's sayin', but we're digging it a lot anyway. Other songs, however, are much more straightforward, like the aforementioned "Sun & Water", its title the main portion of its lyrics. What all his lyrics have in common is that Holley is "testifying", as he describes it in his brief liner notes. All his life, he says, he's been testifying, in both is visual art and now his music, testifying about his life, a life that almost ended before it really began, when he was dragged under a car as a small child and left in a coma for three months. His life and thoughts since, both happy and sad, is what he's Keeping A Record Of, in his art and music - that's where the title of this cd comes from. And we're so glad Holley has chosen to share his testimony with us, especially since so much of it is such a "joyful noise", as one short piece here, a conversation with members of his church, makes reference to.

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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. Earlier in 2008, we received a fantastic collaborative project from Darren Tate, Ian Holloway, and Banks Bailey. At the time, we were well acquainted with the work of Darren Tate, thanks to his ongoing British drone eccentricities as Monos and his former Ora project with Andrew Chalk, Colin Potter, and others; but Ian Holloway and Banks Bailey were two whose work we didn't know anything about. Thanks to a suggestion from a long time customer here at the shop, we looked into the solo projects from Mr. Holloway; and damn if that tip didn't pay off with this fantastic cd-r (with more to come from Holloway in the coming weeks!). Self-released in a tiny edition of 50 copies, A Lonely Place is a breathtaking composition for time-stop dronemusik, achieving a similar stasis and similar dark beauty as Andrew Chalk did on his masterpiece East Of The Sun. It's hard to say what Holloway used as a source material for the album -- maybe guitar, maybe long-thin wire constructions, maybe field recordings, or maybe not. Like plenty of dronemusik before, it's the production that guides Holloway's success, as his deft manipulation of acoustics and electronics generates smoke, fog, and mirrors through sound that result in this amazing piece of long-form drone-smear. There's billowing swells of deep architectural space. Kosmiche electronics, rasping gong tones stretched toward infinity, and subharmonic thrumb swaddled in soft focus reverb. Think Expo '70 gone ashen black or Aidan Baker's ambient work at his most somber. Altogether wonderful, altogether very limited.

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From the onset of this choice release, British drone-centrist Ian Holloway engages in a long-staring contest upon the horizon. Through his undulating sustained tones that gradually contort and shift in timbre and clarity, Holloway sets his attention on sun-flecked hazes upon faraway vistas, watery mirages, and sunblind hallucinations. These tones are more on par with the best work from the Ora / Monos axis, which is not surprising considering that Holloway has worked with Darren Tate on a number of occasions in the past. But not before long, he plunges this piece deep into the center of the earth, with cavernous reverberations of actionist gestures that have some of the acoustic doom properties that we have come to expect from Svarte Greiner and Xela. The sinewy tones give way to these heavy clanks and jarring noises swaddled in the long-decay reverb of what we could imagine to be a subterranean sewer, or perhaps a massive cave chamber, or some abandoned industrial warehouse. As Holloway puts aside his bricks and chunks of metal, the earlier gilded tones make their reprise amidst a distant set of bird songs and softly struck hand bells. One of the better pieces to emerge from Holloway's own Quiet World imprint, and this one is limited to just 80 copies.

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One of three new releases from the Quiet World label, focusing on soft drone, tempered field recording, and quizzical ambience, and it comes by way of the figurehead of the label, Ian Holloway. Where Have We Been In The World Today? follows up his Summerland collaboration with Banks Bailey and Darren Tate as well as his exceptional solo album In A Lonely Place. The dark slumbering drones that open the album allude to much of the same sounds from that aforementioned solo project, yet the second track breaks into a curious electronic shimmer. Here, a seasick rhythm tapped out on something like a metallophone and laced with occasional static emerges out of thin air only to disappear next to apparitions of squelchy synthetic noises. Such electronics are more Heldon and Schnzitler than the Chalk and Colin Potter references of his other work, but certainly no less interesting. Throughout the rest of the album, Holloway grounds much of his crystal powered synthesis upon hypnotic, low-end vibrations whose radiant ambience glows from within. Brighter tones shimmer and sparkle against the curtains of subharmonics with some choice moments from dissonant surges of distorted guitars agitating the background. The final cut is a reprise of the first with those tectonic frequencies slowly crawling to a just conclusion. Limited to a mere 75 copies.

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Here's an impressive collaboration between the underappreciated British drone specialist Ian Holloway and the Arizona-based field recordist Banks Bailey. The two had actually worked together on an album entitled Summerland with Darren Tate; yet A Brief Sojourn improves upon the ideas of composing through interlaced field recordings, tone-bent drones, and synthetic ambience. The opening swells of filtered synthesis coalesce into a dark hypnotic tapestry of buzzing noises, although chirping birds from the Arizona desert that Bailey bring to the composition do lighten the mood. About ten minutes into the piece, the recordings of the birds give way a series of water recordings where washes of distant thunderstorms situate next to closely recorded sounds of rain splashing against concrete. As with the transition from one set of field recordings into another, the synthetic undulations are overtaken by a series of reverberant vocal bellows and stretched out guitar tones, which seem to recall the ritualist pieces of Zoviet France meeting the sodden drone restraint of the Ora recordings of old. Certainly not a bad place to be! Limited to 100 copies!

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Eccentric British dronescapists Ian Holloway and Darren Tate (formerly of Ora, currently of Monos) have collaborated in the past on a very sublime album called Summerland which also featured the field recordings of Banks Bailey. This one is more in keeping with Tate's progressive-leaning explorations of cosmic synthesis and guitar meanderings; although it has to be said that we've never heard either Banks or Holloway venture closer to the guttural psychedelic splotches of guitar (with Keiji Haino and Casper Brotzmann being those who immediately come to mind). Low thrumming drones with sawtooth, pink noises sliding into the mix open the Wet Rat Year with periodic punctuations of amp feedback and splattered noises from guitar strings scraped by pieces of metal. Spooky, expressionist stuff. On one of the later untitled tracks, throbbing distorted loops undulate below a cascade of synthetic tones, caught in a perpetual descent as if tumbling out of the sky; and the very next track takes a similar compositional approach with darker results brought on by grizzled guitar, modulated shortwave and a more pronounced rhythm to the underlying loops. This is one of those micro-editions jointly released by Holloway through his Quiet World imprint and by Tate through Fungal. Only 75 copies made, and they're already out of print at both sources... meaning these copies are all that we will get!

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The cover of this deluxe double lp was a bit misleading, two strange deformed skeletons, placed on stands in some sort of laboratory or museum, the group's name and the record title in a very futuristic fond, in a faded circle over the skeletons, it had us imagining some sort of lost industrial artifact, or some modern noise/powerviolence outfit, when in fact, this is something else entirely. In addition, Holly Hunt is not actually a person, but a duo, from Florida, who traffic in a droned out, super distorted dirge metal mesmer, which makes even more sense when you realize that HH features the original drummer from Florida (and pre-Torche) heavies Floor, and really, in some ways that's precisely what this sounds like, churning, crumbling distorted, downtuned riffage, wedded to simple, muscly beats, the whole thing repetitive, and trance-like, melodic for sure, but looped sounding and darkly psychedelic, each track essentially a single part locked and looped, at times sounding like a slightly more melodic, less overtly metallic Gore, and at others, like Torche / Floor, stripped down and slowed down. It's not hard to imagine, bellowed Harvey Milk style vocals over these tracks, but sans singing, they're much more tranced out and mesmerizing, occasionally lurching into something much more rocking, but just as often slipping into some gnarled sludginess, often careening between the two. And the aforementioned melodies are everywhere, this is not just some exercise in pure riffage, the sounds are alternatingly moody and melancholic, weirdly catchy and almost poppy, and yeah some of the tracks to slip into pure riffery, but even then, the sound is textured and nuanced, and eventually works its way back to something more melodic. Some seriously epic, mesmerizing, melodic, metallic heaviness, most definitely essential listening for fans of Thrones, old Earth, Harvey Milk, Floor, Torche, Gore, and hell, even early Nirvana!!

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In the past it's been quite difficult to get stuff on the Opal Tapes label, so we've been pretty excited to get our hands on the last couple releases. The first, reviewed on last week's list, was the latest from Siobhan (we have a few copies left, just ask) and now this, the previously unknown to us Holovr, aka Jimmy Billingham, whose sound is appropriately murky and moody, some strange hybrid of the Caretaker and Boards Of Canada, all grey and hazy, gauzy and washed out, evoking a moodiness similar to BoC, but instead of pastoral and sun dappled, here it's damp and overcast, cloudy and full of shadows, the sound itself, a bleak skitterscape, shot through with burnished guitar skree, in wiry tangles beneath the surface, while over the top, strange kosmische synths drift in and out, the sound seemingly enveloped in blurred billows of hiss and haze, even at it's most propulsive and beat driven, the music is buried beneath a gauze of low fidelity thrum and sonic detritus, making for something ethereal and hauntological. Throughout the record, mysterious voices surface, sampled vocals weave in and out, the beats fragment and grow more jagged and distorted, before slipping back into some sort of somnambulant house music, before once again blossoming into prismatic ambient bliss out, the beats routinely wreathed in a backdrop remains of swirlingly serene, mesmeric and dreamlike, lo-fi bleary eared drift.

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In the tradition of such AQ classic recordings as Peter Cusack's Baikal Ice, recordings of melting glaciers, Alan Lamb's recordings of singing telephone wires, Colin Olan's recording of melting ice, Jonty Semper's recordings of BBC radio silence, Bob Sturm's Music From The Ocean and especially Tsunoda's amazing field recordings of everyday vibrations, comes this latest release from French sound artist Manu Holterbach, who by using a microphone hermetically sealed inside a bottle and allowing it to float in a choppy river, captured an amazing array of alien sounds, the strange hiss of the rushing water, muted and warped through the glass, the percussive plinks of pebbles striking the bottle, dense clouds of hissing whir created from the constantly shifting pebbles on the bottom of the river, the distant sounds of voices, all warbled as they are filtered through both the water and the glass. An amazing experience, an exploration of a rushing river, heard from within, a hissing, soft focus drone being the constant, quite mesmerizing and strangely melodic. Listening at high volumes in headphones reveals still more strange sonic mysteries, giving one the sense, with eyes closed, of actually floating down the river, encased in glass, a fantastical sonic journey for sure. Packaged in a mini 3" gatefold sleeve.

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Without much fanfare, The Helen Scarsdale Agency may have just released one of the best drone records of 2010 with this collaborative outing from Manu Holterbach and Julia Eckhardt, two relatively obscure sound artists from France and Belgium, respectively. The only other time we had come across anything from either of these artists was by way of an mini-album that Holterbach had released through the ill-fated Clouds Of Static label, showcasing an ingenious instrument that Holterbach built out of modified wine glasses whose stems had been hollowed out, so that the water in the glass harmonica could be raised or lowered, thus changing the instrument's pitch while playing the rims of those wine glasses. The resulting sounds were absolutely stunning constructions of tonebending arches of pure drone - just dissonant enough, but wholly beautiful nonetheless. Since then, he has begun the process of sifting through Eliane Radigue's archive, being responsible for the Triptych and Vice Versa discs which came out in 2009. Julia Eckhardt comes from more of an academic / classically trained tradition, and has performed in a number of avant-garde string ensembles over the past few years, including a stint or two performing with Phill Niblock. Those two titans of minimalism certainly loom large in this exceptional Do-Undo recording, with both Holterbach and Eckhardt strong enough in their own right to further those heavy-minded drone constructs with their own agenda. For some time now, Eckhardt has been collecting recordings of her long-passages for droning viola performed exclusively in the key of G, and she had been presenting those recordings to various artists to repurpose those sounds as they see fit. Holterbach had met Eckhardt at a residency program in Belgium, the two hit it off, and Eckhardt gave him the initial recordings that went into constructing this album, which was completed through Holterbach's production and very impressive field recordings. The slow repetition of a temple bell being struck opens the album, gradually accompanied by a tactile scrabbling produced from branches scraping together during a windstorm. Eckhardt's viola elegantly moves from the event horizon to the foreground in the form of a radiant if rasping sustained drone whose acceleration in density hits those headwrangling harmonics and overtones that Tony Conrad, Niblock, Yoshi Wada, LaMonte Young, and Charlemagne Palestine have promoted for a decade or four. Holterbach doesn't linger much upon a crescendo with this thickened drone mass, gradually pulling back upon those tones to reveal further field recordings of that aforementioned windstorm alongside a quiet buzz from a chorale of crickets. Shockingly beautiful and shockingly simple. And that's just the first half of the record. The second piece grafts field recordings of various electrical phenomenon onto Eckhardt's viola drones, with Holterbach taking considerable care in collecting buzzes, hisses, pierced tones, vibrations, and rumbles which were already in the key of G. It's pretty fucking crazy to think that Holterbach is going out and collecting field recordings from power substations and Parisian subways, but only those which were tuned to G! Here, the composition is a bit more reductivist in the use of those sounds advancing into several glacial movements of sustained tonal vibration. Pure transcendence. Fans of Andrew Chalk, Jonathan Coleclough, BJ Nilsen, Thomas Koner, Organum, Harry Bertoia, Brendan Murray, and any of those aforementioned proponents of 20th Century minimalism we mentioned earlier should definitely take note of this album. Very nice letterpressed artwork, in an edition of ONLY 300 COPIES!!!

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Here be the first full length album from Mountains-man Koen Holtkamp. You may recall we got in (and sold out) his contribution to the A Room Forever series of LPs commissioning artists to match a field recording on one side with a sympathetic composition on the other. Where his offering there was a dark-hued, ominous crescendo of crackled drone sourced from acoustic guitar, Field Rituals has its head in the clouds. Holtkamp begins the album with a lovely round of brightly rendered acoustic guitar finger picking with some tricked out ring modulation effects giving each of the tones a sun-flecked glow and funhouse mirror curvature. Sustained drones from loops of melodica and harmonica mutate into an ersatz harmonium with the soaring overtones and sweeping fluctuations of tonalities gently crashing into each other. The loops every once in a while coalesce into a rhythmic underbelly, but mostly they settle as a effervescent bubbling of overlapping delay patterns and softly shimmered ambience. On top of all of this, Holtkamp dapples everything with his shimmered guitar and occasional crackles of tactile objects (he mentions water, seeds, ice, and paper) as well as field recordings of giggly children romping in a playground. The effect is somewhere between the immaculate pieces from Keith Fullerton Whitman's recordings and the bright-eyed naturalist wonder of the Jewelled Antler camp. Really gorgeous stuff from the ever impressive Type label.

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Finally, volume three is here. This long in the works vinyl project finally sees the light of day, and the results are more fantastic and striking, both sonically and visually, than we could ever have imagined. We'd been hearing about this series, a boxed set of vinyl records, each with one side of music, one side of field recordings, a sort of physical extension and manifestation of a long running podcast, both the podcast, and these lps, an experiment in the art of listening. Each lp is limited to 300 copies, comes housed in an oversized box, with a gorgeous actually photographic print affixed to the cover, inside a metallic inked, letter pressed insert. You have to see them to believe them, well worth the price, as they are visually stunning, and the music is breathtaking. The first volume featured Machinefabriek, the second Svarte Greiner (we have very few copies left of each, if you still need them, order asap! They're reviewed elsewhere on the site), this third and final installment in the first salvo, is from an artist called. Koen Holtkamp, one half of the drone duo Mountains, as well as the head honcho of the Apestaartje label. The musical side begins with thick electronic buzzes, that gradually spread out, swooping and shimmering and becoming more orchestral and musical and underwater sounding, a bit like Oval, but much darker and not as glitchy. As the track progresses, all manner of crackle and hiss surfaces, bathing the drones in a rough patina and giving it all a warm tactile texture. The acoustic guitars drift in and the song is transformed into some gloriously hissy acoustic dronefolk. So lovely. The track builds to an intense and frenzied climax, before gradually winding down again, the acoustic guitar drifting amidst soft static and subtly stereo-panned hum. The field recording side is amazing. Strange, bizarre, the sounds while at one moment are obviously birds, at others they sound totally alien, or manufactured. The recording sounds like it took place in some massive space, a warehouse, a train station, someplace with high ceilings and tons of open space, everything is dripping with reverb and natural delay, the birds coo and twitter, the muted ruffle of wings, occasional squabbles erupt into wild squalls of tweet and screech, eventually mellowing out into a constant drift of soft avian murmurs. The sound is just fantastic and intense, so well recorded, and the sound are just amazing. The cover photo is gorgeous too, an body of water streaked with golden ripples, the insert is gold ink on letter pressed textured black paper. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. We got a bunch, but they've been flying out of here, and it's apparently already out of print, so it's very likely that we have some of the very last copies (of the first two volumes too!), so once the batch is gone, we will not be able to get any more.

Latest from this Oakland tape label, who has been killing it recently, with the reissued synthscapes of Ron Berry, the grim, liturgical Black Legions black ambience of Moevot, the droned out buzzscapes of Bre'r, the grinding and gorgeously glitchy Starlite Coffins, the debut tape release of solo surf twang guitar from artist Rich Jacobs, sheesh, we can barely keep up, but it's been a blast trying. There's two more good 'uns from Sanity Muffin on this week's list, elsewhere you'll find some fantastic bay area new age from the eighties, and then there's this, the first we've heard from a mysterious outfit called Holy Family, which in fact is a duo half of which is none other than Lawrence English, and whose sound is settled uneasily right between the classic psychedelic minimalist drones of groups like the Taj Mahal Travellers, and the more noisy, blown out floor-core of modern synth/drone combos. Three sprawling slabs of minimal dronemusic trip out, thick sheets of pulsing, pulsating thrum, gristly and distorted, churning and blackened, but sort of blissed out and cosmic, the first track begins as a total zoner-drone drift before splintering into something a bit more atonal, sound like some lost Hermann Nitsch aktion recast into something a bit more blurry and abstract, a sky of bleating keening tones, smeared into lush chordal swells. So good. The relatively brief second track, begins as a barely there shimmer, a whispery low end creep, before blossoming into some seriously corrosive crumble and crunch, a weird stretched out upper register drone wreathed in swirls of superdistorted buzz, heady and hypnotic and seriously dense and heavy. Which leads directly into the 16 minute final track, a weird field of fractured, fragmented electronic melodies, delivered in sharp spurts, chopped and spread out, surrounded by wide open expanses of hum and thrum, laced with little soft swirls of effects, all above a sea of ever shifting textures, super laid back by comparison, a tranquil bit of buzzy, dreamy drift, that seems to smolder with some sinister shadowy undercurrent, one that always seems to threaten to overwhelm, but instead, just pulses ominously beneath the roiling soft noise shimmer above, when what finally overtakes the sound, is a sort of gristly static, that rises up in an insectoid cloud, before fading out into a hazy, hardly there hum... LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!! Individually tea-stained tape labels!

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It's been a while since we heard from Holy Fuck, we were pretty into their debut, a swirling mash up of blown out loops and space krauty synths, of fuzzy bass and fractured beats, and it seems like maybe things have gotten even more twisted and far out on this latest. After a slow tranquil drone, that gradually builds to a wall of white noise, comes a sort of looped Beastie Boys style funk jam, all loping bass, wah guitar, shimmery synths, but it's not necessarily as simple as that, it sounds, well, created, not played, so there's an element of lurch and stutter, the sounds jagged and not entirely smooth, occasionally locking into parts that almost sound like skipping cds, peppered with little shards of glitch and squelch. And that's sort of the way the record plays out, fuzzy, synth heavy grooves, that sound a bit motorik, a bit spaced out, super propulsive, and heavy in their own way, sometime slipping into almost jazzy sounding post rock, a la Tortoise, but still like that opening track laced with all manner of subtle electronics and production weirdness. There's definitely a pop element, as well as a space age bachelor pad vibe too, a la Stereolab, and tracks like "Silva & Grimes" are total krautrock Neu! worship, repetitive and hypnotic, swirling synths and clouds of distorted buzz wrapped around total head nodding beats, and while those elements inform the rest of the record there's also plenty of big block rocking beats, Daft Punk style synth wave, lo-fi electronic skitter and crunch, and a closing jam that's like some super cool eighties new wave jam, super charged and doused in crumbling distorted synths and buried blown out beats. Latin might just be the weirdo dance party record of the year... And both the cd and the lp come in super cool, super swank diecut covers! Technically this doesn't come out until next Tuesday, so locals will have to wait until then for us to put 'em out in the store, but mailorder customers, go ahead and order like normal, since it'll take at least until Tuesday for you to get your package anyway, most likely.

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Here's great disc that we got clued into thanks to heavy druid dude Julian Cope's Head Heritage website (and label, that put this out). The UK's Holy McGrail (perhaps a silly name, but the guy behind this project is named Chris McGrail) is definitely one for any AQ customer who digs heaviness, droneiness, and krautrockiness. That's a lot of you, eh? Well then, how 'bout three looong tracks ("Lady Holle" running to 23:45, "'Quake Appeal" at 28:51, and "Ur-cow" just 19:59) of pagan drone rock, one with buried-by-bass Amon Duul meets th' Stooges drumming and the rest totally beat-less cosmic guitar and synth-scapes, guest-starring the likes of Doggen (Brain Donor), Julian Cope himself and SUNNO)))'s Stephen O'Malley?? From the freaking lovely purple cracked earth mountain cover art to the dense drones within, this is utterly right-on. Turn it up and let it rumble. Damn beautiful. If you like SUNNO))), Growing, Earth, etc. you should check this out. Now we're looking forward to Holy McGrail's upcoming plunderphonic tribute to Iggy & the Stooges, something called the Raw Power Suite! And soon (next list) we'll be reviewing a cd-r entitled "The Creep" by Slowmo, an aptly named Earth-like duo also featuring McGrail.

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We've been trying to get his new Holy Other record for ages, and while the vinyl version remains tantalizingly out of reach, we did manage to get the cd in, and for you cd folks, grab one asap, cuz it was well worth the wait, another gorgeously warped and woozy collection of nocturnal slo-soul post-witch house groovery, but with some bigger beats, the sound still druggy and drowsy, but with some seriously extra heft, that doesn't detract from that nocturnal / somnambulant vibe AT ALL. Shit this record would be worth it for the first track alone, with a garbled, crunchy, distorted intro, a throbbing pulse, swirling disembodied processed vocal fragments, the momentum building quick, to a loping laid back groove, laced with blooping, bleeping melodies, some handclaps, all sorts of buzzing clanging percussion, sort of muted and muffled, and then when the big beat drops, it's epic, somehow totally bangin'/boomin', but still gorgeously murky and lysergic. The rest of the record takes a sound that could very well be a straight continuation of With U, all Burial style slo-mo soul, with sped up vocal fragments, and muted muddy barely there beats, and twists it all up, making it even more fucked up and experimental in places, while in others going full on commercial, while somehow managing to stay plenty fractured and fucked up. Check out "Inpouring", which sounds like a straight up radio pop soul ballad, but chopped up, jumbled up, and reassembled as some sort of avant dub soul, turning it into precisely the sort of stuff we WISH was all over the radio. In fact, much of this new Holy Other record, sounds like H.O.'s misguided stab at commercial radio, taking just some of those commercial elements, and then weaving them into his way-too-tweaked-for-the-radio sound. And the end result is some of the deepest, darkest 'soul' music we've heard. The sound shifts constantly from swirling Pop Ambience, to stuttering almost dubstep, to murky skittery drift, to -almost- straight up pop, the record super vocal heavy, but in a way that doesn't at all alienate the diva vocal averse around here, in fact, if anything, we're digging this even more that With U, which we LOVED. The tracks much more lush and fully realized, as much about song as sound, it's like these twisted murky witch housey soul jams were written specifically to be pop hits, but then Holy Other just couldn't help himself, and sliced and diced and fucked with the sounds until what once might have had some commercial potential, ended up this twisted slab of dreamy electronic outsider dub-soul weirdness.

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This is the second release we've listed from The Holy See, the ferocious Tarentel side project featuring two members of that ambient bliss rock ensemble. But you won't find any ambience here, or rock for that matter, but plenty of bliss, that is if your idea of bliss is blown out white hot slabs of coruscating feedback and dense squalls of shimmering guitar skree. Which if you're anything like us, most certainly is! The opener is just that, a 25 minute ur-drone, massive and throbbing and pulsing, it's like 100 Skullflowers and 100 Sunroof!'s all playing at top volume through the same amplifier. Beautifully distorted and in the red, overblown melodies swallowed whole by thick sheets of metallic shimmer, everything cracking and crumbling before your very eyes, a soothing sonic shower, like dunking your head into a pool of molten sound. The brief two minute blast of the second track is more of the same, a lightning bolt of grinding blown out electronic buzz, but it's the last track where everything changes. The corrosive skree of the first track is dialed back a bit, so it's more of a low level sea of glitches and grinding malfunctioning electronics, but beneath, is a strangely serene soundscape, gentle melancholy melodies hover and drift, a warm and languorous shimmer wrapped in dense swirls of fuzzy sonic psychout, eventually building to a fever pitch, but managing to not become 'noisier' just more dense and intense.

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Two thirds of Tarentel (Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Jim Redd) take their already abstract bliss even farther into outer (or inner) space, with 70 plus minutes of alien transmissions beamed from the heart of the sun to a dark cave 1000 miles below the surface. From slow shifting slabs of high end drones, all caked in crackle and grit, to muted murmured minimal thrum, to simple spare streaks of nothing but percussion, to pulsing robotic rhythms over a backdrop of humming machinery and industrial clatter. Dark and dense and divine! Hand painted wooden covers, each totally unique and each with a hand painted, typewritten insert. LIMITED TO 200 COPIES. THERE'S A VERY GOOD CHANCE THAT ONCE THESE ARE GONE, THEY ARE GONE FOREVER.

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HOLY SHIT! we can't get enough of this record...or overcome the urge to say HOLY SHIT every few seconds while talking about this new great collaboration between our favorite art-damaged pop songwriter Ariel Pink and his unlikely partner in musical crime, Matt Fishbeck formerly of the shiny happy LA power-pop band The Push Kings. But don't worry Ariel Pink hasn't gotten all normal and boring on us...in fact in lots of ways this is his most captivating and compelling release yet! With a fuzzy folk lo-fi sound that reminds us of the glory days of the great New Zealand label Flying Nun or like some amazing amalgamation of Daniel Johnston and Roky Erikson playing Orange Juice covers. This is what we wish AM radio really sounded like, fuzzy and warped, demented and all twisted up like some poprock funhouse mirror, while underneath it all lurk perfect and precious. Totally catchy pop hooks and great timeless sounding songs. Fishbeck actually tackles most of the vocal duties here, although you'd be forgiven for thinking it was indeed Mr. Pink, and his voice sounds so perfect amidst the dabs of tape hiss, staticky cracklings and WAY off-kilter production. But deep down inside we know, it's Ariel Pink's cracked pop sensibilities that really mold and create the overall sound, warm and lucid, dreamy and trippy, an album that unfolds revealing a deliriously damaged dreamland and takes you on a pop trip that's weird enough to get lost in but cool and catchy enough that you want to stay lost FOREVER. HOLY SHIT we're in love with this record! Packaged in a cool shiny metallic gold and silver digipak. With a cute photo inside of the bandmates smooching out in a grassy field. Awww...

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Once again, these two Chilean psych bands, Follakazoid and The Holydrug Couple, each sharing a member with the other, release their records at the same time, giving us a glimpse of two sides of a similar sonic personality. Elsewhere on the list you'll find the latest from psychedelic space-kraut combo Follakzoid, but here, we're reunited with cosmic, sun dappled dream psych duo The Holydrug Couple. Unlike the stretched out psych jams of Follakzoid, The Holydrug Couple traffic in a sound more overtly poppy, while still constructed from the same psychedelic building blocks, fuzzy guitars, propulsive motorik drumming, echo drenched vox, the song structures looped and hypnotic, THDC locking to endless grooves, and then playing those endless grooves at pop song length, the longest track here close to eight minutes, but most clocking in around 3 or 4. Fans of the Wooden Shjips, Spyrals, and other local SF psych combos will once again find much to love here, a sort of revved up Spacemen 3 vibe, but with plenty of jangle. A quick listen to opener "Counting Sailboats" will tell you whether this is your sort of jam or not. Hazy, hypnotic, darkly groovy, infused with plenty of melody, and subtle hooks, psych pop minimalism that's hard to resist. And the rest of the record plays out similarly, mixing in swoonsome strings, acoustic guitars, organs, loads of FX, and weaving them into all sorts of different sonic shapes, from the fuzzy drift of "Sailor", a psych pop trifle, to the seventies sounding dreampsych soft rock groover "Follow Your Way" (which sounds a bit like a more psychedelic Bread), to the woozy, murky, druggy, longform drift of "Out Of Sight", that really could have been twice as long, even at eight minutes, to the echo drenched garage pop of "Red Moon", to the super warped, lysergic jangle of "Willoweed", to the seriously heavy garage psych of "Paisley", and on and on. Definitely a sweet slab of psychedelic pop, for folks who dig the Shjips, Assemble Head, Sleepy Sun, Moon Duo and the like.

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We won't go into too much detail with these as we only got a tiny handful of each. Latest batch of ultra limited lathe cuts from New Zealand label CMR. Each one packaged in a super striking, simple cardstock jacket, most with printed inner sleeves, Limited to 60 copies, of which we got the remaining stock. Once these are gone, they are gone forever. Hometown Feilding (yep, that is the correct spelling) is yet another NZ ensemble we had never heard until now but are digging quite a bit, their sound a crumbling abstract world of fuzz and crackle, haunting alien melodies, strange bits of fragmented rhythms and chunks of melody, almost like some old wax cylinder recording, all the music buried under layers of grit and crackle, weirdly and nosily pretty. Definitely essential listening for the hiss and crackle turntable crowd...

Eucademix is the second solo album from the more esoteric half of the sadly defunct, beloved US-based Japanese electronic pop duo Cibo Matto. Once again Ms Honda traverses a broad expanse of style and mood. However unlike her last solo experimental pop effort which was, for lack of a better word, more 'serious' (i.e, more experimental than pop) and on which there really wasn't a hint of her former band's sound (which some C.M. fans found to be somewhat alienating), on Eucademix she actually brings some of her playful, funky Cibo Matto side back into view. Just check out the first two engaging tracks "Humming Song" and "I Dream About You". From there she roams through cirrus and altocumulus cloudlike formations of atmosphere'n'rhythm-rich space jazz, groovy beats, psych guitars, pretty chamber strings, and more. Much lighter in mood and perhaps more palatable to a broader audience than her previous album Memories Are My Only Witness, Eucademix very well might be the most accessible release on Tzadik. Helping to keep her trippy flying carpet aloft are her pals Trevor Dunn (Mr. Bungle, Fantomas), Marc Ribot, Petra Haden (That Dog), Timo Ellis and... Miho Hatori her former C.M. partner! Recommended.

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We were really happy to see that Type has added Ezekiel Honig to their great roster, as he's someone whose been making fractured, fragile sounds over the last several years with such great results. His latest shows how masterful he is at crafting dreamy and drifty soundscapes with such a subtle touch. In many ways it's the subtlety of his work that really allows the listener to slowly get lost in the haze and sway of the tracks on Folding In On Itself. Like the most delicate moments on records by Machinefabriek, Jasper TX, Philip Jeck, William Basinski and Fennesz, and with the dream world atmosphere found on recordings by Colleen, Mum, and Koss... This has been our early morning and go to bed soundtrack, as it's just so perfect in slowly transporting you to a softer, dreamier dimension. Understated, shimmering beauty.

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Ezekiel Honig has a delicate musical touch, and has crafted some well textured and nuanced electronica albums over the years, so we were surprised to find that somehow we had never actually listed any of his records. His latest, Surfaces Of A Broken Machine Band, is a great place to start for newcomers and a welcome addition to his backcatalog for those who've kept up with his warm and crackling soundscapes. Seamlessly melding bits of field recordings with minimalist beats and dreamy tones for a sound not unlike the most tender moments of Fennesz, Boards Of Canada, Mountains, Machinefabriek or Jasper TX. In fact Honig would make a great contributor to Kompakt's Pop Ambient series, as these are sounds made to drift, dream and get lost to. So nice!

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A new lp from long beloved noisemakers Hoor-Paar-Kraat. Well, not entirely new, as one side was previously released as a super limited 3"cd-r, but considering how limited that was, most of you will be hearing all of this stuff for the first time. The A side, previously released on Small Doses, is a tripped out burst of mysterious musical abstraction. Two tracks, clocking in at about 18 minutes total, an abstract and spacious drift through some lost alien soundscape. The first track is all tinkling melodies, glistening high end, strange rumbling fluctuations way off in the distance, bits of creak and scrape, everything bathed in foggy reverb and warm wet swirls of tape hiss and atmospheric whir. Melodies creep in and out, as do bits of field recordings, it all feels like some cinematic bleary eyed wander through a hazy druggy flashback, a washed out world of lost memories and fragmented dreams. Here and there guitars grind and reverberate, and strange percussive sonic events drift into earshot, like an even more abstract Wolf Eyes maybe. Quite gorgeous and dreamlike. The second track starts out the same, a smear of high end shimmer, but instead of spreading out into languid pools of blurry sound, things get decidedly more abrasive, the high end becomes sharper, the percussion is more clattery and jarring, a disembodied voice intones some creepy monologue over the top, effects swirl and swoop, deconstructed riffs chug and churn, everything dizzying and disorienting, like the nightmare analogue to the opening track's dream. The flipside also offers up two tracks, the first begins with a swirl of creaking metal, sizzling cymbals, clattery percussion, until suddenly the clang and crunch are transformed into a strangely rhythmic crunch, the metal sounding much deeper, more of a resonant bellow, all very chaotic and cacophonous, underpinned by deep distant rumbles. Which leads right into track number two, all birdsong and tinkling chimes, whispered voices, random sonic detritus, sharp slivers of momentary buzz, soft smears of static, very haunting and ominous and like the first side, quite cinematic. Beautifully packaged as always, pressed on thick vinyl, housed in full color sleeves with super striking artwork from HPK mainman Anthony Mangicapra. We know it's LIMITED too, just not sure to how many.

Latest from one of our favorite sound sculptors, drone designers, and minimal soundscapers, Anthony Mangicarpa, aka Hoor-Paar-Kraat, who's been responsible for a clutch of gorgeous limited and meticulously hand assembled super limited cd-r releases over the past few years. The latest comes�in the form of this super limited lp, which consists of the groups most personal and emotional work to date, as it was all conceived, written and recorded in the shadow of loss and sorrow and death. But some of the most moving art is born out of tragedy and this slab of gorgeous sound is no exception. Previously released as two ultra limited microedition cd-rs, these two movements couldn't sound more meant to be together.� The sounds as always, is deep and dense, long drawn out drones, but here, that swirling black soundworld is augmented by cricket like clicks, soft melodies and crumbling distant distortion, haunting spoken word buried in reverb and draped with feedback, while the whole time a buzzing guitar slowly builds into shimmery sheets of distorted rumble, the chords spread out like ripples in still water, everything blurred and indistinct, until finally, the guitar erupts into a corrosive, aggressive slow motion psychedelic dirge, finishing off with a wild squall of squealing feedback, and speaker shredding high end, intense and cathartic.� The flipside is just as intense, billowing cavernous guitar swells, random bit of clatter, scrape and feedback, all smeared into an expansive sprawl of seasick ambience, melodies are muted and washed out, the distant pulses, and warm languorous swirls all woven into entrancing tidal like sonic swells. So good.� And as always, gorgeously packaged. Hand screened lp sleeves, signed and numbered (LIMITED TO 281 COPIES!!), the lp too is signed on the label, and each one features AM's fingerprints...�

We hate to do this to you again, but here goes. This is a super limited (only 42 copies), gorgeously hand assembled cd-r release from the mysterious Hoor-Paar-Kraat. We only got a dozen or so, but at least that means 12 AQ customers will be among the chosen few. Dark meandering soundscapes of creaking ambience, cavernous drones and slow burning rumble. Processed metallic clatter, whirring spacious muted murmur, occasional roars of ultra distorted feedback, drenched in FX and stretched into squirming streaks of fuzz and grit and all manner of serene drift and delicately diffused bliss. So totally captivating. We promise next time we'll try to get ALL of them, but for now, act fast before these are snapped up. The packaging is pretty fantastic as well. Thick textured oversized sleeves with a super wide rough edged Japanese style obi embossed with vines and ivy, a hand numbered insert with songtitles affixed to the underside, the obi attached to the sleeve with tiny black rivets, the textured paper of the sleeve artfully stained with dark watercolors, and signed by the artist. The disc too is off-white with water color splatter and is also signed by the artist. WOW!

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It's been a while since we've listed anything from Hoor-Paar-Kraat, aka Anthony Mangicapra, but over the years, we've been enthralled and a little obsessed with Mangicapra's gorgeous surreal soundscaping. This new one is another fantastic collection of manipulated field recording, strange melodic flights of fancy, and stumbling abstract rhythms, a super personal project, the title refers to a type of nervous system disorder, one that claimed a family member, and this record is a tribute to him, and in it's strange herky jerky composition, reflects the symptoms of those nervous disorders, the rhythm seemingly provided by a typewriter, while the air around those clicks and clips is filled with scapes and clanks, super distorted chiming melodies, thrums and whirs, buzz and rumble, it's not so much noisy as there is much going on, the result is quite dreamy in it's own softly cacophonous way. The flipside is much more minimal, with what sounds like some of the A side sound flipped and played back in reverse, all wreathed in a keening sine wave high end, and again surrounded by bits of flutter and buzz, hum and drone. Haunting and quite lovely. And as with all Black Horizons releases, the packaging is over the top, a silver ink printed slipcover, around a silver printed black J-card, as well as eight silver printed black cardstock inserts, and a small black envelope, signed and fingerprinted in gold ink, which contains a razor blade. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!

It gets harder and harder to describe the music of Hoor-Paar-Kraat. A subtle blend of abstract noise, composed sound, and field recordings, deftly assembled into the musical equivalent of little dioramas, little soundworlds, where the normal rules don't apply, where the sound of lapping water can be a rhythm, where piercing feedback can be as lovely as a little lullaby, where the creaking of rusted machinery can become soft and warm and inviting, and beautiful melodies can become poisoned and ominous. So while it gets harder and harder, it sure is fun to try. So we'll try again, to describe the sounds, and the little soundworlds contained in HPK's latest, In Eros Veritas, available as a super limited handmade cd-r (like past HPK releases), hand signed, numbered (limited to 38!) and with the artist's fingerprint (oh, and an extra track of dark droning ultra minimalism)! And for the first time, also as an ultra deluxe vinyl version, missing a track, but still, NOT a cd-r and super super nice... The record begins with backwards guitar, bits of abstract clatter, streaks of feedback, the muted metallic thump of what sounds like bicycle spokes, or pachinko machines, all over a backdrop of what sounds like reverbed harmonica. The sound makes us think of some super lo-fi junkyard bicycle gamelan, which is eventually overtaken by circusy keyboard melodies and weird electronic squiggles, which quickly gives way to huge grinding chunks of distorted low end, roiling over creaking metal, everything smeared into layers of kinetic dissonance, tangled up into frantic fragmented melodies. Later the record unfurls into spacious field recordings, voices, lapping water, more creaks and groans, all the while a distant whir paints the background a swirled grey, various sounds wrapped in reverb and allowed to float ghostlike. Occasionally the sounds coalesce into something almost rocking, at which point we're definitely reminded of the washed out murk of the Dead C, with plenty of lo-fi muted clatter and deep resonant rumbles, and still the strange field recordings whisper in the background. The record finishes of fiercely, but still abstractly, with some seriously SUNNO)))-roof! style ur-drone, thick and low and heavy, but somehow impossibly glimmery and radiant, laid thick over the sound of lapping water and huge distorted chunks of grinding bass rumble. So good. The cd, like all the past Goat Eater Arts releases, is packaged in a super deluxe hand made and numbered and autographed fold over card stock sleeve. The lp is in a gorgeous thick black gatefold, and pressed on thick milky clear vinyl. Both are again, EXTREMELY LIMITED!

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MPEG stream: Acta Est Fabula, Plaudite!

When we listed the last release from Hoor-Paar-Kraat, it was limited to only 42 copies, of which we got 12. Which was definitely too bad as it was definitely one of the most amazing releases we had heard in ages and was exactly the sort of release that truly deserved to be heard by WAY more than 42 people. So here we have a brand new release from Hoor-Paar-Kraat, again limited, this time to 93 (when you see the amazing packaging, you'll understand why these are so limited. It must take forever to make them!) and this time we managed to get more than HALF of the pressing, but we're pretty sure these will be gone in no time just the same. While in some ways, Mercurial Little Jitterbug has much in common with its predecessor Asha Dasha, it is in many ways a whole new creature. It's still ambient, still dark and mysterious, spare and spacious. But on MLJ, the sound is much more rooted in found sound and field recordings. Voices, conversations, children laughing and playing, traffic, wind, footsteps, the clatter and clunk of shifting objects, people working, in fact the first track is as far as we can tell a straight field recording. Which is in no way to say it's not fascinating and lovely to listen to, it is. It's just not at all what we expected. which is usually a good thing. The second track is also based around field recordings, the honking of horns off in the distance, children's voices, bird songs, all heavily reverbed and dramatically panned, so a stick run a along a steel fence will trill from one ear to the other. But track two is also where Hoor-Paar-Kraat begins to shape and craft the sounds into dark ambient soundscapes. Adding thick swaths of low end rumble, deftly and subtly using effects to turn the sound of the city and the sounds of nature into an otherworldly dreamlike music. The next track is a barely there ambient whir, punctuated by the sound of dripping water, and some sort of distant bell or chime. Very abstract, but quite beautiful. The ten minute long fourth track is the most active, with the sound of bells and chimes and pipes, metal on metal, doused in reverb and allowed to hover in wide open expanses of room sound, only to occasionally be overtaken by huge throbs of low end and little squalls of kitchen sink clatter. Again so simple, but so strangely haunting and hypnotic. The final track is another muted clattery soundscape, although in this instance, part way through, the sounds bleed and blur, smearing into a washed out whirl of droning sound, metallic reverberations, struck metal, all stretched and blurred into a slow shifting, glacial shimmer, probably the most overtly 'musical' track on the disc. So lovely. In fact, this entire disc is just so completely and utterly captivating. Some of the most affecting, deep listening drone music we've ever heard! And again, SUPER LIMITED! ONLY 93 COPIES TOTAL, WE HAVE LESS THAN 50!! So act fast. Gorgeously packaged in a super elaborate, hand assembled sleeve. Hand stamped and glued thick paper sleeve, with a printed obi that is riveted to the sleeve, and folds over to seal the sleeve. The obi is also hand stamped, signed, and hand numbered. The cd disc face is hand stamped and signed as well.

MPEG stream: Two
MPEG stream: Three

Brand new record from the always amazing Hoor-Paar-Kraat, whose last few ultra limited cd-r's have flown out of here in no time (we have a tiny clutch of the most recent one, The Nagaraja Movements, but those will probably be gone soon too) and like we've mentioned before, it kills us that music this good, in packaging this gorgeous and elaborate will never be seen or heard by more than the 90 or so folks able to get their hands on them, so c'mon, some big label needs to step up and shower these guys with money. The mind boggles at what they might come up with. Anyway, this is a brand new full length from Anthony Mangicapra and his band of not so merry men, and they've managed to kick up another serious din, this one even more dark and creepy and noisy than the last. The opening track is like a lo-fi cd-r modern free-noise version of Whitehouse, a dense field of guitar hum and amp buzz, all manner of strange wailing and moaning, distant percussive thumps, little squalls of grinding glitch and high end skree, over which a voice intones some strange tale of record stores and Steven Stapleton and David Tibet and butterflies, only brief bits of the story are audible over the swirl of feeding back guitar and roaring buzz, weird but strangely compelling and listenable. At times it also reminds us of Dutch black ambient technicians Stalaggh, the way they stir up a dense chaotic skree and then have mental patients wail and gnash their teeth over the top, this opening track is like a more subdued version of that. The rest of the record is also noisy, but in a much more subtle fashion. Guitars and amps buzzing and humming seem to bee the constant, each track offering up various levels of general din, with each, twisting it into a unique shape, sometimes it's muted monklike chants and haunted house creaking, sometimes it's a whirring world of mumbled melodies and strange clicks and skitters, sometimes it's a series of high pitched teapot whistles over a blur squeaks and tinkles, and other times it's reverb drenched loops of girlish laughter and weird crackly static, but it's always dense, and always mysterious and creepy, and always so completely amazing. And like the music, the package is mind blowing, Mangicapra is an accomplished visual artist as well as a musician, and it shows. A gorgeous oversized dark blue cardstock sleeve, with a thick textured silkscreened band (a bit like a Japanese obi) affixed to the bottom with two brass rivets, and then wrapped around the whole sleeve where it tucks in the front and seals it shut. Inside, the liner notes are pasted to the inside of the strip and on the sleeve beneath the strip is a cool silkscreened symbol, Mangicapra's signature and the number denoting which disc it is (out of a mere 93). So awesome. LIMITED TO 93 COPIES!!! We will never be able to get more so don't blow it!!

MPEG stream: I Am Taking You With Me
MPEG stream: Comfort Was The Culprit