[ aquarius records — Found Sounds Field Recordings Oddities ]

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Of all the sound manipulators, soundscapers and dronologists out there, few can touch Philip Jeck. A master 'turntablist', able to create whole new worlds out of sound, to transport the listener to another place, real or imaginary, with just a clutch of record players, a handful of dusty old vinyl, some cheap Casio keyboards, a couple minidisc recorders, a few mixers, a bass guitar and some effects pedals, the musical equivalent of some mad scientist, creating a time machine, or some temporal shift manipulator, out of odds and ends from the kitchen or the garage. The magic is in the process as much as the result, that result being at least partially beholden to the process, not to discount the sheer creativity and ingenuity of the artist. Because that's exactly what Jeck is, an artist, painting impressionistic landscapes with sound. Instead of colors, he deftly manipulates textures and rhythms, layers and melody, subtly mixing various elements to create something other, the various constituent parts irrelevant to the final piece, like staring at a painting up close, it's not until you step back, that the various elements coalesce into something magical, and beautiful. An Ark For The Listener is a sonic mediation on a poem about the drowning of five exile nuns in the 1800's, and was performed in various locations throughout 2010, this recorded version incorporates bits of the live performances into the final recorded piece, a gorgeously somber soundscape of deep drones and of mysterious sonic swells, the opener "Pilot/Dark Blue Night", is a hushed drift of stretched out tones and muted sonic garble, a chorus of croaking frogs beneath moaning low end melodies, a slowly unfurling minor key drama wreathed in hiss, truncated rhythms, and clouds of click and chitter, deep bell like tones, and swirling soft focus ambience, culminating in the final few minutes with a super emotional bit of looped strings and epic almost choral swells, strangely skipping, uncharacteristically revealing their vinyl source, but it's precisely what makes it so intense and mysterious. "Ark" is a tinkling driftscape of chiming tones, and distant melodies which gradually transforms into a weird bit of droney wah wah-ed bass flutter, "Twentyninth" is a perfect slab of Jeckian dreamdrift haze, shot through with moving minor key melodies, and cinematic like tension, a few of the tracks grow dense and turbulent, the sounds thickening, becoming almost caustic and corrosive, while others seems to grow more and more fragile, diaphanous stretches of crystalline shimmer, the record proper finishing off with the surprisingly rhythmic "The Pilot (Among Our Shoals)", with its soft avalanche of looped beats, its tangled flurries of pizzicato strings, a soft focus frenzy of dizzing turntable swirl, which gives way to a lovely outro of hushed barely there drift and breathless low end murmur. The cd tacks on two bonus tracks, reworked versions from the Suite: Live In Liverpool record, one previously released, the other unreleased, both working surprisingly well with the record proper, "All That's Allowed (Released)" a shimmering expanse of blurred strings and disembodied melody, of softly staticky crackle, and hazy hushed drift, and "Chime, Chime (Rerung)", a crunchy and tactile stretch of tolling bells, reverberating metal, booming gongs and tinkling chimes, all wrapped in a gauze of crackle and pop, buzz and warble, the whole thing lit with some glimmering shimmering otherworldly light. So great.

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Since the early '90s, the Norwegian electronic musician Geir Jenssen has dazzled his audience with an astute handling of rhythmically laced ambient electronica, working under the moniker Biosphere. For a while, it seemed that he might make the jump into more commercial ventures after he licensed one of Biosphere tracks for a Levi's commercial, acting as something of a precursor to the entrepreneurial spirit embodied by the likes of Moby, Air, and even Boards of Canada. But Jenssen quite literally had other mountains to climb instead of economic ones. In 2001, Jenssen ventured to Tibet to climb Cho Oyu, the 6th highest mountain in the world. Such a pursuit was not conducted out of blind ambition, for Jenssen is also an accomplished alpinist with the terrain of Norway proving to more than an adequate training ground for his quest. Like any self-respecting electronic musician, Jenssen brought with him a mini-disc recorder and a set of microphones to collect field recordings. While the ensuing recordings have been billed as "Field Recordings From Tibet," Jenssen isn't entirely true to the field recording ethos, by grafting a handful of his environmental recordings onto rhythmic templates which could easily find their way onto one of his Biosphere records. As deft as Jenssen is with a skeletal loop and abstracted ambience, these tracks seems too refined and polished for the concept at hand: a brutally self-reflective journey to the top of the world. Jenssen's recordings work best when he merely filters out the unwanted frequencies from his recordings, leaving the details of the work to speak for themselves. Here, highlights include the bells from a yak caravan as their shepherd tries to lead them around the Himalayan mountains, and the shortwave radio recordings of air traffic controllers guiding aircraft through the turbulent winds of Tibet. Jenssen also manages to capture plenty of windswept soundscapes of that mountainous region. This album is really quite good, although it pales slightly when compared to fellow Touch field recordist Chris Watson or lesser known environmental composers such as Tarab or Scott Smallwood. Still, some great listening...

MPEG stream: Zhangmu: Crossing A Landslide Area
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Stromboli is an active volcano located on the island of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea, and what we have here is a field recording of said volcano, captured by Geir Jenssen better known under his electronica moniker Biosphere. As you could imagine, a volcano sounds FUCKING RAD!!! Big explosions from molten rock hurled outward from the center of the earth, hissing clouds of sulfuric gases, rumbles and crackles of magma slowly cooling after oozing out from the mantle, and the gentle patter of hot ash falling from the sky. Jenssen's field recording, which fills the first side of the 12", is seriously impressive; and the B side (in true 12" fashion) is the dub version, which is a collaged manipulation of the sounds captured on the A side with an emphasis on the slushing, gaseous activity caught in a slow vortex of delay / echo dub effects. Yeah, it is a proper dub track, but don't expect a slow-motion Rhythm & Sound pulse popping through the mix. The recordings that Jenssen made are admittedly short and certainly were strong enough to warrant a lengthier documentation, but perhaps the brevity speaks to the inherent danger of even making an attempt at recording a volcano.

We've been loving us some hell-fire Gospel tunes lately, thanks especially to Tompkins Square's Fire in My Bones triple cd threat and of course the granddaddy of all Gospel collections, Dust to Digital's Goodbye Babylon box set. So we're extra excited about this release coming from Parlortone, the vinyl arm of Dust to Digital. While this is not a Gospel Music recording per se, the figure at this center of this recording, The Rev. Johnny L. "Hurricane" Jones was a popular Gospel singer in the sixties and seventies, but he was even more well-known for his sermons, and since 1960 has recorded many of them on reel-to-reel and cassette tape. He still preaches in Atlanta to this day at the age of 73! So this record is a collection of some of his best sermons including the 13 minute title track, Jesus Christ from A-Z which he preaches in alphabetical verse. But what makes these sermons stand out is the sounds of the choir and his congregation responding with Amens, whooops, shouts, and Hallelujahs. Even if you are not religiously inclined, just the field recording quality of the sounds makes it amazingly worthwhile.

Be warned, the $21.00 price tag and the title of this disc "The Complete Recordings" might be a little misleading. The complete recordings of James Joyce actually total all of 12 minutes. "Eolian Episode" recorded in Paris in 1924, and "Anna Livia Plurabelle" (from Finnegans Wake) recorded in Cambridge in 1929. Both scratchy and antiquated, that sound we here at AQ love so much. Also included in this set is a huge book(let) containing an unpublished book by Eugene Jolas as well as an introduction written by Marc Dachy about the friendship between Jolas and Joyce. Haven't had a chance to delve too much into the book, but it looks really interesting, and helps justify the price. We have to admit to being a bit diappointed by the brevity of the disc, but fans of Joyce will obviously need this.

MPEG stream: The Complete James Joyce Pt. 1 (excerpt)

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SORRY. Once you realize this amazing single is totally acapella, the title finally makes sense! Jud Jud do stunningly perfect straight-edge punk/grindcore/emo -- except that every cymbal crash, every wail of guitar feedback, every single note is done acapella! Must be heard to be believed! This is their second single. Now if only they would do a covers album...

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SORRY. Friedrich Jurgensen's efforts in what he deemed Audioscopic Research is compiled here as the exquisite follow-up to AQ's Halloween fave "The Ghost Orchid." Both are collections of (alleged) recordings of examples of Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP), which is a broad catagory of unusual interruptions by unknown voices onto magnetic tape or the radiowaves. Parapsychologists like Jurgensen, Raymond Cass, and Konstatine Raudive (the latter two were featured on the aforementioned "Ghost Orchid") claim that these voices may be from beyond the grave or may even have an extraterrestrial origin! While other researchers have devised intricate methods to focus these voices, Jurgensen claimed that his own telepathic tendencies could harness these voices, causing them to appear on radio or tape. All of Jurgensen's recordings feature voices speaking in German, Italian, Swedish, and (if that wasn't enough) polyglot--the intermingling of languages. One of the criticisms of EVP investigation is that the listener/researcher may be forcing the syllabic utterances into the recognizable patterns of his/her own native tongue or within the confines of a narrative context. While no one is questioning the actual presence of these vocal sounds, the interpretations (of origin and/or translation) that accompany the recordings are far from solid. As I have no real working knowledge of any of the languages featured, an utterance from one of the tracks which was supposed to be in Italian or German came out as clear as day to me in English as "we have to leave." Does this debunk the possibility that these recordings are of alien/ghostly origins? No. Could it be an interesting anomaly within the context of analytical thought on the subject? Maybe. Could I be wrong? Quite possibly. Anyway, listened to purely as sound artifacts, Jurgensen's recordings are downright creepy, and highly recommended!

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The sound of science! This is not the fictionalized abstraction of synthesized tone and pulse that come across as sci-fi dramas in the works of folks like Oneohtrix Point Never or Klaus Schulze, instead field recordist Ernst Karel has ventured into the various laboratories at Harvard to capture the environmental sounds found within! To astrophysicists, chemists, and cognitive science researchers these are the quotidian noises of work; but beyond the walls of any given science institution, these clanks, hums, hisses, and groans can take on any number of allusions. Such a strategy is not uncommon, as John Duncan had the opportunity to capture the sounds of the Stanford Linear Accelerator for his potent powerdrone masterpiece The Crackling, and Francisco Lopez brought focused sensibility to his Machines. Karel's approach to his source material seems to be one of cautious awe and political neutrality. On the first track on Heard Laboratories, Karel captures the metronomic clicks from an organometallic chemistry process that results in atomic layer deposition. There is a rather clinical definition of what this process is, but no explanation as to what this could be used for or why. The various clicks emerge from a growing vortex of precision tuned motors and pressurized hiss, broken on one occasion by an incoming telephone call. Elsewhere, the sounds of sterlizers and centrifuges take on a particularly ominous set of rasped bursts of noise that bear a bone-chilling resemblance to a dental drill. Marathon Man, perhaps? The tiny bird-like squeaks from the tamarins being used for cognitive research infiltrates Karel's sound field, bracketed by massive vibrations from cooling systems used to protect much of the equipment. The clinical hiss of a canister of liquid nitrogen resonates with the cycling pulse of a lazer that it was intended to cool takes on an almost musical quality of chorale-like minimalism touched with slow crawling rhythmic swells. Karel offers a pretty amazing set of field recordings here, certainly recommended for anyone interested in the aforementioned John Duncan, Francisco Lopez, M. Behrens, Tarab, Eric La Casa, etc.

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Ever been to the Alps? Well, even if you haven't, you can imagine that in a landscape of towering mountain peaks, tiny human beings might have to find some unusual ways to get around. Travel along the vertical, as well as horizontal, axis, is the necessary norm. The ground may be crazy steep, or far far below. Field recordist Ernst Karel, whose Heard Laboratories cd documenting "the sound of science" we've previously recommended, visited Switzerland and produced this disc which will help you to imagine that lofty Alpine landscape, in a unique way, by presenting the sounds of the various modes of, indeed, Swiss mountain transport that he encountered - various suspended gondolas, an aerial tramway, a "transverse-seat chairlift" (the last one in Switzerland, now out of service, we're told), a helicopter, and a couple funicular cable cars (inclined trains, which are wonderful things, as depicted on the back cover of this release). Of course, as a sonic experience only, this "documentation" is as (deliberately?) mysterious as it is enlightening. The mechanical clanking, the whirring, the wind, the murmurs of passengers... these ambient sounds sometimes quietly soothing, sometimes noisy, certainly curious. Makes for a nice companion to Chris Watson's El Tren Fantasma highlighted last list, for those into journeys through sound (of journeys) - though this one is raw audio verite, not a "fictionalized" construct like Watson's disc. A few color photos are provided on the packaging, along with location, date, etc., specifics of the individual tracks (details for, ahem, trainspotters). Nicely done, from the same great field recordings label that last brought us the Water Beetles Of Pollardstown Fen (more of those soon on the way, btw!).

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We've had plenty of compilations that featured excerpts of Balinese Kecak performances, but never a recording of the complete Ramayana Monkey Chant, and it's pretty phenomenal! Recorded in 1987 by David Lewiston, who recorded most of the music featured on Nonesuch releases of Indonesian music, this release is not new but it's definitely a classic and totally worth checking out. An old fave indeed, Allan here first heard this 'round about the same time he first got into the Boredoms, and they're somehow linked in his mind, makes sense, 'cause we'd imagine Kecak like this could in fact have been an inspiration for some of the Boredoms' wilder stuff! Those new to the sights and sounds of "Balinese Monkey Chants" might think that these performances and pieces are long passed on oral traditions and rituals from centuries ago, but in truth they are a modern cultural invention. They were created with the help of a Russian-born German artist named Walter Spies living in Bali between the World Wars, who was a strong advocate for the advancement of Balinese arts in order to appeal to the tourists who visited the island. Spies saw potential in the traditional Balinese trance rituals such as Sanghyang, a spirit communication usually during troubled times. One of the main features of these rituals was the Cak (pronounced chak) chorus, a group of males who chant in highly syncopated and precise rhythms. Spies thought that the Cak chorus would appeal to tourists if it could be made into an entertainment involving a story. So working with a Sanghyang group in the early nineteen thirties, they fashioned a drama from the great Hindu epic, the Ramayana, a story well known to the Balinese people and to many of the foreigners who frequented the island. Using dancers and performers to act out the main parts of dramatic adventures of Prince Rama and his wife Sita, her abduction by the evil Rawana and her rescue with the help of Hanuman and the King of The Monkeys, the role of the Cak Chorus became greatly transformed by not only expanding their variety of sounds by exploring the Balinese language abundant use of onomatopoeia to mimic gamelan rhythms, but also by integrating themselves into the action through choreographed waves of dramatically intense synchronized movements. Sitting in a large group of 5-6 semi-circles, the male chorus use their arms in unison to great effect, sometimes waving up or to the sides or forward while at other moments of the drama, the chorus representing the advancing armies of Rawana, half of the group will stand and lurch forward to display aggression while the other half lies back in surrender (James Cameron borrowed heavily from this for the Na'vi rituals in Avatar). While it is amazing to watch, it's also quite incredible to listen to as the waves of chanting hover between chaos and control in precise furies of sound. You'll hear what we mean about maybe influencing the Boredoms... If you don't have any Kecak in your collection, you don't know what you're missing!

MPEG stream: Introduction
MPEG stream: Sita's Abduction
MPEG stream: Interlude

Kink Gong is the long running project of Laurent Jeanneau, a Sublime Frequencies contributor, who as Kink Gong uses some of the actual field recordings he collects to create a strangely avant experimental world music, virtual collaborations with the musicians he records, often manipulating the various songs and sounds, but just as often, he'll simply play an indigenous instrument, process those recordings and then combine them with the originals. The sound is pretty remarkable, in many cases Jeanneau contributions super subtle, to the point of seamlessly weaving his own sounds and manipulations into the unaltered recordings, resulting in what essentially could be a field recording proper, but here and there, the changes are radical, and the combination of computer processed sounds and organic acoustic recordings makes for some truly wondrous and mysterious 'world music'. The liner notes on the lp sleeve are super explicit, describing the original recordings, and just exactly what Jeanneau did with which sounds, the remarkable thing being that even knowing all that, none of the magic is lost. The record opens with a collage of 10 voices, from two women and a man, those voices are layered and blended over a slowed down mouth organ, resulting in something strange and lovely, and almost alien sounding chorale, with just enough of the original sounds to keep it sounding like some impossible indigenous music, the organ droning darkly in the background, the drones and the voices producing all manner of sympathetic overtones and strange sonic colorations. The second track features a woman, reciting text over a 4 string lute, processed by Kink Gong, and eventually accompanied by two women singing, the sound laced with actual field recordings, chickens, and voices in the background, the lute transformed into a swirling drift of soft focus drones and blurred melodies, the singing voices tangled up in that droning drift. And finally, the A side finishes with a recording of a percussion ensemble, accompanied by Kink Gong on bronze cymbals, played and processed, all beneath the voice of a female vocalist. Super tribal and trancey, a definite No Neck Blues Band vibe, also a very doomy feel, glitchy and gristly, the electronically modified background a strange contrast, but one that creates a strange sort of psychedelia. The flipside begins with a vocal choir, and a collage of three recordings from another ensemble, as well as an electronically modified lute, the alterations here so subtle, it's quite difficult to tell what's been done, we're guessing it's mostly the collaging, but it's done so deftly, that it sounds untouched, but even in its seemingly unaltered form, it's dense and layered and lovely. Then two lutes and a woman's vocal choir are merged into a rumbling, skittery tangle, a droned out low end swirl beneath which gorgeous vocals drift and soar. And finally, Jeanneau takes traditional Chinese instruments, and processes them into a lush sprawl of dreamlike shimmer, all smeared into a soft swirl of almost synth sounding ambience. Gorgeous stuff, and fans of Ghedalia Tazartes' invented world music and imagined sonic rituals should check this out as well...

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SORRY. Unlike the Douglas Quin recording of Antarctica for Miramar, Bernie Krause's field recording "Green Meadow Stream" is a willfully self-evident production, documenting the chorus of chirping birds along a burbling brook in the distance. These recordings were made in the Lincoln meadow near Yuba Pass in the High Sierras, before that meadow was clear cut and yet to recover. Quite a nice recording.

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SORRY. For "Kalimantaan," it appears that Bernie Krause has added a bit of post-production to his field recordings made in Borneo (whose ancient name is the title of the disc), but there's nothing that detracts from the recordings natural beauty, just a touch of reverb and narratively minded editing. The first track is dedicated to the sounds at dawn, starting out with a haunting choral duet for Gibbons, before being quelled by a cloudburst to quiet the variety of insects and birds that form the white noise ambience of the rainforest. The second track focuses on the heat of the late afternoon with more monkeys (orangutans and proboscis monkeys) hooting behind the polyphony of tree frogs, before rain falls again on the forest. This is a truly magnificent field recording!

Bernie Krause has had a broad ranging history in audio and music - having played with the folk group The Weavers as Seeger's replacement, studying music at Mills and collaborating with Paul Beaver in the sixties to produce several oscillator heavy electronic records. In the last 25 years, however, he's devoted his life to recording animals and insects around the world. This release represents a sort of best of collection of Krause's recordings, plus a very handsomely printed 95 page hard cover book - on recycled paper - of essays and journal writings by Krause.

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SORRY. Another well-rounded recording of pure natural sounds by Bernie Krause. This time he's attempted to track down the site of natural echo reflection where a troupe of baboons have situated themselves to bounce echoes of their barks off of a 300 foot granite sheer face. While's never actually found that specific site, Krause was able to get solid recordings of those baboons as well as the serene dawn chorus of the forests innumerable birds.

A slight departure from the silence and drones that often-inaudible composer Bernhard Gunter's Trente Oiseaux label is known for, this disc by Japanese cello and violin duo Kuwayama Kiyoharu and Kijima Rina is a live acoustic improv set. Not exactly jazz improv, though! More of an avant-garde modern classical chamber improv thing, but minus the actual "chamber", 'cause the real twist is that "01.06.16" isn't just live, it's what you might term a "field recording" -- they recorded it outdoors, beside a highway at midnight! So you get the sound of passing cars and trucks, adding a whooshing, rumbling texture to the proceedings. We're not sure if they're really listening to the traffic and interactively improvising with those sounds -- although it seems that way at least some of the time -- but the ambient (and very present) pulsation of the highway noise makes a nice setting for the creaking, scrabbling, droning interplay of their strings. This type of thing is this duo's modus operandi, as we've also heard Mr. Kuwayama's and Ms. Kijima's previous, self-titled disc on GG Records which featured them improvising similarily in a warehouse and on the construction site of an expressway. Although we're still a bit surprised to find this on Trente Oiseaux -- being the label that released Reynols' "Blank Tapes", we'd have expected them to want even more highway and less violin and cello on this release...

RealAudio clip: 01.06.16 f

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SORRY. Eric La Casa is a French sound artist primarily interested in curating unprocessed field recordings, which are usually of the most common natural element of minerals, wind, and water. With only the contextualizing resources of the recording level and the narrative position, La Casa masterfully reveals the volatile sonic properities of seemingly inert substances. If you're a fan of Chris Watson's incredible field recordings, you should certainly check this one out.

There was a highly dubious rumor going around that some sound ecologists boasted that they could identify the exact locations of water recordings based on the specific aural characteristics of mineral content, salinity, acidity, and whatnot. An obvious pile of bullshit, if we ever heard one; but we'd like to witness the ensuing debate of two blowhards making fools of themselves trying to argue that this sound of water came from Bangalore and not Brazil. Proof that two refined artists can hear totally different things from the same locations is found on Zones Portuaries. Here are two French modern-day concrete artists who use field recordings as the building blocks in composition; and both have done so for well over two decades having blossomed in the wake of the cassette culture of the '80s. Peyronnet may be better known as Toy Bizarre, whose prolific output clock in at over 200 compositions, all of which given the unwieldy and unknowable acronym "kdi dctb" followed by the corresponding number. La Casa did use the moniker Syllyk way back when, but probably nobody remembers that one. These two artists based their compositions on original recordings that were made in the same two cities (La Harve in France and Liege in Belgium) during the same year (2010, if you must know). La Casa's clamorous sounds from Le Havre give the impression of that city being a labyrinth of massive steel doors whose battleship resonance and squeaking hinges are constantly monitored by sensors and alarms. It's a very claustrophobic experience, and the Belgian recordings are equally as monolithic if more based on pneumatic motors and pressurized hissings, with a bit more of the environmental ambience (e.g. birds, foghorns, people yelling into walkie-talkies, etc.). Peyronnet's opening piece is a remix of La Casa's source material from Le Havre, reprising those same metal door bangings and oscillating alarm calls, although Peyronnet is far more likely to extract a particular frequency to build an alien drone suspended throughout the piece. His other two pieces adopt this strategy with compacted layers of hiss, grit, echo, and fizz that twist and bend with phase patterning undulations. Yeah, these are two totally different interpretations of the same locale; and both are riveting in their organic / synthetic amalgams of the urban environment.

MPEG stream: Liege 2
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SORRY. Finally, we've managed to restock Alan Lamb's Night Passage, one of the most evocative and sonically engaging dronescaping records that has ever passed through these doors. This Australian composer's sole source material is the sound of wind blowing against telephone wires. In recording the raw material, Lamb simply attaches contact microphones to telephone poles, sits back, and lets the weather blow through the wires how it sees fit. The resultant drones are sublimely rich in their metallic timbres and amazingly complex reverberations, that is not all that far off from Harry Bertoia's sound sculptures. I (Jim) actually had a very hard time believing that they were what Lamb said they were: unprocessed wire music. That is until one cold, blustery summer afternoon on the craggy coastline near Point Reyes north of San Francisco, I heard those exact same sounds from the wind raking across the telephone wires that extended out to a distant lighthouse. These sounds were eeriely beautiful, yet unsettling as they vibrated the air with such ubiquity that their origin was impossible to pinpoint. For Night Passage, Lamb's recordings originate with the Faraway Wind Organ, a half mile of abandoned telegraph wires in the outback of Western Australia. Unfortunately, this network of wires has collapsed due to lightning and termites, making Lamb's recordings a very rare documentation of an amazing naturally occuring sonic phenomenon. Also included with this double disc package is the Demixed album, in which Thomas Koner, Lustmord, Ryoji Ikeda, and Bernhard Gunter were given Lamb's raw recordings to treat and compose with. Where Lamb's compositional sensibility privledges the intrinsic qualities of his recordings with just crossfades and equilization, these four blurred the source material that reflected their own signature sounds. Koner leans to expansive gaping drones; Lustmord collapses everything within a bleak catacomb of oppressive ambience; Ikeda ruptures the sound into a subtle piece of minimalism; and Gunter stretches the boundaries of perception. This is one of the best all around remix albums, completing what is otherwise an already impeccable document.

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SORRY. Alan Lamb is a biologist who entered the realm of music after discovering the complex choral harmonics of the telephone wires that span his native Australia. Lamb's allegiance to both biology and the spectral sounds of the frequencies of a long thin wire reacting to natural events isn't that odd as Lamb himself explains, "that these principles (in wire frequencies) have much in common conceptually with those underlying the generation of coherent patterns in biological systems... and it is probably not too far fetched to suggest that wire music is an aural embodiment of some of the most fundamental dynamic laws of the universe." "Primal Image / Beauty" is the culmination of 7 years of field recordings, during which Lamb discovered the best meterological situations for certain timbres, the best wires that emanated these harmonics, and good microphones to capture the sounds (for this phenomenon is externally ampified by the wires under the right circumstances). Even in listening to the incredible textural dronework from Organum or Xenakis, it is pretty awe-inspiring that this is simply the sound of the wind resonating a wire. For those who live around the Bay Area, this phenomenon can be heard on occasion at Point Reyes, especially when the wind is coming straight down the coast from the north and strikes the wires which run east-west along the barren peninsula.

RealAudio clip: Beauty

Rural Canadian schoolkids ages 9-12, sixty of 'em, singing pop hits like "Space Oddity", "Good Vibrations", "I'm Into Something Good", and "Band On The Run", backed by shimmering, gamelan like percussion and sparse rock instrumentation?? Yes! And of course it's Irwin Chusid (of "In The Key of Z" fame, a specialist in "outsider" music) who's responsible for getting these 1976-77 recordings finally issued on cd for our enjoyment. Apparently these kids had a somewhat unorthodox music teacher, who, tapping into his student's musical enthusiasm, arranged and captured this amateur outpouring of charmingly naive genius...lovely yet fucked up. And funny. Yet so heartfelt and innocent. Over the course of these nineteen earnest tracks, you'll either lose your mind or fall in love with the Langley Schools Music Project. Genius or not, certainly Paul McCartney, the Beach Boys, Bowie, the Bay City Rollers, Fleetwood Mac, the Carpenters, the Eagles, Barry Manilow, etc. never sounded so...odd. "Lo-fi Spectorian majesty" indeed. It's like an all-Shaggs orchestra playing AM radio covers. We have to agree with John Zorn's cover sticker blurb: "Touches the heart in a way no other music ever has, or could." So terrible, yet so brilliant. Never intended for release (it was originally pressed as a limited double 12" for the kids and their families) but now the 2-track tape reels have been remastered, and this cd, with a detailed 16-page booklet featuring super cute photos of the kids, has been unleashed on the world! Great Christmas gift material, if we may be so bold.

RealAudio clip: Space Oddity
RealAudio clip: Desperado
RealAudio clip: Rhiannon

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

SORRY.

If you haven't already decided to buy this just 'cause of the title (which is indeed indicative of what this is - field recordings of water beetles!!!), we suppose we should provide something of a review. Though, if you're like us, there's not much more you need to know besides that it's WATER BEETLES - and a release on the great German sound-art label Gruenrekorder... The liner notes in the cd booklet here begin with a very apt quote from composer David Dunn: "All of the sound we hear is only a fraction of all the vibrating going on in our universe". And while it's probably good that we can't hear it all, all the time (boy that would be noisy) it's also cool once in a while to experience some of the sounds that we're usually missing out on. In this case, a sonic glimpse of another, secret world, what it would sound like if you lived in a marsh, and got your ears up close underwater next to some talkative, chit-chattering insects... which, interestingly, is a lot like some stuff in our experimental/drone section. Turns out the water beetles of Pollardstown Fen make mesmeric mad-scientist "music" that would fit in with the clicks and cuts on Raster-Noton! Abstract, ambient, but not exactly beatless - there's rhythmic pulses to the seeming electronic transmissions from these beetles. From track to track it's quite varied, these tracks teeming with all manner of bleepings and burblings, chirpings and cracklings... constantly changing, constantly fascinating, the noises these waterbugs make with their microscopic mating "cries" is AMAZING. Buzzing drones, sferic-like swoops, sawing sounds, gurgling grind, morphing and modulating in pitch... And it's not just them, there's other sounds found in their aquatic environment - did you know that photosynthesizing plants made sounds? The ten tracks here, all recorded at locations within the Pollardstown Fen, an ancient alkaline marsh in County Kildare, Ireland, might somehow suggest mechanical sources, but are all indeed natural and organic (the liner notes take pains to specifically state that there's no electrical interference to be heard here, nor were any mechanical devices in operation upon the Fen at the time of these recordings). And yes, though we are quite happy to let our imaginations make the most of these recordings without any further information, for the curious the cd booklet does contain detailed notes, getting all technical and scientific about both the recordings and the insects in question, which should convince any skeptics suspicious about the actual origin of these sounds! Let's quote an example here, the description of track ten, just to give you the full flavor of the text, and also some idea of what you're in for, when you listen: "This recording is a protracted performance given by a single waterbug (Water Scorpion) in heightened antagonistic stance. The hydrophone has been positioned about one inch from the insect. The insect stridulated in this way for approximately nine hours. In the background the communicative songs of the wider ecosystem can be heard. Towards the end of the recording an interesting oscillation technique takes place." On that track, they only let that antagonistic waterbug go on for just about 13 minutes, but the whole disc itself is well over an hour and always interesting, and for us ultimately meditative. If you liked another recent waterbug cd we listed (yes, we've had more than one!), Thomas Tilly's hydrophonic field recordings from a castle moat in France, this is maybe even more "immersive" and pleasantly evocative of its watery natural world... Recommended!

MPEG stream: Seven Springs
MPEG stream: Moore's Well
MPEG stream: Hawkfields

In January 2009, the Bay Area sound-artist and composer Cheryl Leonard embarked on a residency program at the Palmer Station in Antarctica. There, she took every opportunity to venture out into the summer's perpetual daylight to make as many field recordings as possible and to collect an array of penguin bones (with the permission of the Palmer Station, of course) to use in her rather elegant, beguiling compositions. In the past, Leonard had used a variety of branches, rocks, and other natural elements in these beautifully textured compositions whereby she would bow and clink those objects into masses of textures that came across somewhere between the work of Loren Chasse, Jeph Jerman, and Small Cruel Party. So, it shouldn't come as a surprise that she actually released a split 7" with SMC's Key Ransome some 15 years ago. While Chattermarks is a collection of pure field recordings, the use of those abraded sounds within a composed swarm points to what she was listening for in Antarctica. In hearing Leonard talk about her Antarctic adventure, she is quick to describe the brutality of the wind and the intensity of the cold, all of which wreaked havoc upon her binaural mics and hydraphones. Many of her recordings feature the noises of Antarctic animal life: adelie penguins, elephant seals, skuas, and gulls. The slumbering snore from a couple of the elephant seals is particularly striking as are their bellowing barks and guttural thrumbings. But the sounds of ice are probably the most intriguing recordings on Chattermarks, from the huge rumbles of a glacier that crumbles into the ocean with smaller tinklings of ice racing down an embankment to the searing hiss of millions of shards of ice clattering together next to a disintegrating wall of packed snow. The only document of the Antarctic wind was captured in a haunting recording of wind whipping around an antenna punctuated by the booms of a glacier splitting in two somewhere in the distance. An obvious treat for anyone keen on Douglas Quin's polar recordings, but Leonard has an excellent flair for subtle drama that's also heard in those impeccable Chris Watson field recordings. Highly recommended!

MPEG stream: Beach Adelie Penguins
MPEG stream: Shore Brash Ice
MPEG stream: Elephant Seal Nap
MPEG stream: Storm At Gamage Point

Finally, the debut LP from Providence, RI's Lightning Bolt gets reissued! Now on cd for the first time, with over forty minutes of bonus live material! When this record first hit the streets a couple of years ago, people either instantly fell in love with or

RealAudio clip: Into The Valley
RealAudio clip: Fleeing The Valley Of Whirling Knives

We just couldn't pass this one up, and it's got us considering whether maybe we ought to start an "Intercepted Transmissions" section in our store (separate from the found sounds, et al). Let's see, we've got Petros Drecojecai (cordless phones), Today's Voices (cell phones) and to this end we might be able to squeeze the Conet Project and Kathy McGinty in for that matter. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. The Playaphone Project, as it's explained within the liner notes, was intended as an art installation of sorts and executed at the 1998 Burning Man event in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada. Several phones were set up around the Burning Man site. Each one was connected live to the other phones and as far as can be told, none of the participants knew one another, nor could they see one another from phone to phone. What do you get when you have a group of people running around the desert, high on hallucinogens and lord knows what else, and stick a phone in their hand with another random reveler? Well, let's just say we're not sure whether we're more surprised that there isn't much phone sex or more... The editors of this disc took the endless hours of phone conversations and culled them down to the hour or so included here (no editing of the actual conversations was done though) and produced their own rock soundtrack to accompany the results. Weird? Weird.

MPEG stream: Cold Robot
MPEG stream: Marshall & MacLennon

You think by now we'd be sick of crank calls. And we sort of are, but as with any 'artform' there are always a select few who manage to take that 'artform' to another level. Thus we have the enigmatic Longmont Potion Castle. This master of deadpan confusional telephone terror. Mr. Longmont no longer practices his art, having hung up his phone (hee hee... sorry) several years ago. But the kind folks at Reptilian have unearthed "the last known recordings of phone fun made at the Longmont Potion Castle." And fun it is. The cool thing about LPC, is he's not an asshole, and he doesn't necessarily set out to piss people off, even though it's obviously inevitable. And when he does get in a tough guy "I'll kick your ass" sort of verbal sparring match, his choice of threats are so ridiculous and nonsensical, you find yourself almost embarassed for him, like the little tiny kid who is oblivious to his mortality and insists on standing up to the bully and always gets his ass whupped. The add in his obsession with squid meat and an amazing litany of bizarre items / objects / names / services he invokes or offers or pretends to be looking for: Spencer Zebra, Aqualamb, Chowder Julius, Wovenloaf, Frickey Weaver, Chimp Giraffe Loop (making me laugh just typing those!). Wow! It really is amazingly funny. And bizarre. If you've never heard longmont this is as good a place to start as any! Sad that it's the last time we'll hear that oh so familiar dedpan drawl looking for Spencer Zebra or threatening to bring various household objects "to ya lip."

MPEG stream: UPS Freakout 1
MPEG stream: Spencer Zebra
MPEG stream: Aqualamb
MPEG stream: Loud Tones

LONGMONT POTION CASTLE IS BACK!!! Longtime readers of the aQ list know how much we love this twisted master of the crank call. Maybe the only crank caller worth our continued attentions. Hilarious, tripped out, nonsensical, infuriating, straddling the line between totally genius and hilarious, and completely ridiculous and stupid. Confusing innocent victims, picking fights with some of them, befriending others, posing as the UPS man wanting to deliver some sod, or acting as a representative of City Search offering a service to reverse negative feedback, for only $1300. Mr. LPC always sounds so laidback, like maybe he's stoned, or drunk, but even when things get heated, he never gets riled up, delivering his confusing threats as coolly as if he was ordering a pizza. And he's always ready to spit out another totally classic line, which with repeated listens will turn into things you and your friends end up quoting all the time: "I'm a webmaster, do you know what that means?!", "I'm on 9 now, I don't want to go to 10 on you!", "I was trained in fruitland", "Are you ready to peep my growth?". And the response from the folks on the other end of the line are usually just as hilarious if not more so than the stream of brain melting non sequiturs coming out of LPC's mouth. It's hard to explain exactly what makes LPC so much better than pretty much all other crank calls, give a listen to the sound samples, check out the reviews of the other releases. Part of it, as we may have mentioned before, is that it's anything but mean spirited, weirdly playful, poking fun, and even when the 'victim' starts swearing up a storm, offering to beat the shit out of LPC, dude remains cool, and definitely threatens back, but usually his threats are so confusing and WTF, that they often diffuse the tension, and they ended up having a somewhat friendly, and WAY weird conversation. Number 7 is peppered with LPC "medleys" and "themes", which are basically, classic calls chopped up and collaged into bizarre free form soundscapes of demented zingers, irate freakouts, mumbling weirdness, all set to music, and doused in reverb and delay. Those tracks are almost as fun as the phone calls proper, and are definitely packed with some of LPC's best, and most awesomely insane lines EVER. Also as a bonus, the final track is an awesome drum machined speed metal jam. On past records, the phone calls were split up between killer chunks of thrashing home recorded metal, but this one "Interlude Encore" might be the raddest yet. Totally shredding, chugging Slayer guitars, swooshing ambience, shredding wah wah leads, and furious frenzied drum machine double kick blast beats. We'd definitely be up for a whole record of jams like this. Needless to say, Longmont Potion Castle rule, the music, the calls, the vibe, the mood, the concept, it's hilarious, baffling, funny as fuck, and so fun to listen to. Might even win over the anti crank call haters out there. Probably not though. As always. WAY WAY WAY RECOMMENDED!!

MPEG stream: Negative Feedback
MPEG stream: LPC 7 Medley 1
MPEG stream: Spicy Legato
MPEG stream: Interlude Encore

Can't say enough about Longmont Potion Castle. Perhaps the best, funniest, most bizarre series of crank calls ever. There's the always popular picking fights with strangers, but Mr. LPC does it so much better than most with his Steven Wright deadpan and his ridiculous non-sequiters. Constant references to deliveries of peacocks from Lithuania, offers of free manure, and an endless litany of nonsensical recommendations, bizarre suggestions, and problematic overtures, all delivered in that likeable guy-next-door deadpan. Always does raise the question WHY DON'T PEOPLE JUST HANG UP?!?! Lucky for us they don't. We also get a dose of Longmont's metal obsession with the occasional freaked out death metal interlude. This may be the last Longmont record too, as according to LPC himself, he went through all his tapes and collected everything he had left. So don't miss out. So dumb and funny and brilliant. Be sure and stick around at the end for a truly distrubing call, that goes from funny to really fucking sad in a matter of minutes, between LPC, a depressed suicidal goth teen and his overbearing fucked up dad. Wow.

MPEG stream: Syop Playing Harmonica
MPEG stream: Goat
MPEG stream: Levi
MPEG stream: Peacock

Holy shit! This is the crank call mother lode. By now if you don't immediately start to giggle at the mere mention of Longmont Potion Castle, you are truly missing out. This one man prank call juggernaut has spent almost the last 20 years torturing unsuspecting folks, shop keepers, Radio Shack employees, old ladies, testosterone fueled jerks and pretty much everybody else with his totally surreal, unbelievably hilarious phone calls. This box set collects EVERY Longmont recording ever, including a whole disc of unreleased stuff, as well as the long out of print and barely available VHS tape on DVD for the first time! You think the calls are crazy, you should see the havoc this man can wreak on a call in talk show. This is absolutely essential for any one onto bizarre recordings, found sounds, prank calls, all around weirdness. Included in this box set is LONGMONT POTION CASTLE (originally released in 1988), LONGMONT POTION CASTLE II (originally released in 1992), LONGMONT POTION CASTLE III (originally released in 1995), LONGMONT POTION CASTLE 4 (originally released in 2002), LATE EIGHTIES-VEIN (originally released in 2003), LONGMONT POTION CASTLE 5 (originally released in 2005), a bonus disc that includes a lot of the metal interludes that were cut when the original cassettes were transferred to cd, and the original LONGMONT POTION CASTLE VHS tape, now on DVD(-r) for the first time with tons of extra footage. Also includes a massive set of liner notes, with detailed track listings and the story behind each disc, as well as a custom LPC magnet. Each one personally signed by Mr. LPC himself! Here's some of our past raves about all things LPC: How can you not love a guy who gets off on torturing the clerks at radio shack and is obsessed with Tandy products?! A guy who spits out the most retarded and baffling products/names/etc: gugliata, voltor, leprechanjulius!! And on one disc, he continually harasses a foul mouthed cantakerous old man, but by the end of the disc, they become buddies, with the old man asking how the tape was going and LPC promising to send him a copy. FUCKING HEARTWARMING! How often do you get that on a crank call record?!!? Stupid and silly and once in a while totally inspired. This is still to this day constantly in the stereo on all of our road trips and so much Longmmont verbiage has become vernacular for us and all of our friends. Longmont Potion Castle is the master of deadpan confusional telephone terror. Mr. Longmont no longer practices his art, having hung up his phone (hee hee... sorry) several years ago. But we can still listen and laugh. This stuff never stops being funny. The cool thing about LPC, is he's not an asshole, and he doesn't necessarily set out to piss people off, even though it's obviously inevitable. And when he does get in a tough guy "I'll kick your ass" sort of verbal sparring match, his choice of threats are so ridiculous and nonsensical, you find yourself almost embarassed for him, like the little tiny kid who is oblivious to his mortality and insists on standing up to the bully and always gets his ass whupped. Then add in his obsession with squid meat and an amazing litany of bizarre items / objects / names / services he invokes or offers or pretends to be looking for: Spencer Zebra, Aqualamb, Chowder Julius, Wovenloaf, Frickey Weaver, Chimp Giraffe Loop (making us laugh just typing those!). Wow! It really is amazingly funny. And bizarre. I Easily the best, funniest, most bizarre series of crank calls ever. There's the always popular picking fights with strangers, but Mr. LPC does it so much better than most with his Steven Wright deadpan and his ridiculous non-sequiters. Constant references to deliveries of peacocks from Lithuania, offers of free manure, and an endless litany of nonsensical recommendations, bizarre suggestions, and problematic overtures, all delivered in that likeable guy-next-door deadpan. Always does raise the question WHY DON'T PEOPLE JUST HANG UP?!?! Lucky for us they don't. We also get a dose of Longmont's metal obsession with the occasional freaked out death metal interludes. So dumb and funny and brilliant. Be sure and keep your ears peeled for a truly distrubing call, that goes from funny to really fucking sad in a matter of minutes, between LPC, a depressed suicidal goth teen and his overbearing fucked up dad. Wow. these discs are full of magic moments like that, a few sad, lots of them just plain demented, but most of them so completely bust a gut hilarious!! So buy this or we'll start talkin' whip, and may even bring a tennis racket toyaleyup!!!

MPEG stream: Syop Playing Harmonica
MPEG stream: Goat
MPEG stream: Levi
MPEG stream: Peacock
MPEG stream: UPS Freakout 1
MPEG stream: Spencer Zebra
MPEG stream: Aqualamb
MPEG stream: Loud Tones

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

SORRY. Documenting the environmental sounds of a Costa Rican rainforest, Portuguese composer / ethnomusicologist Francisco Lopez has composed this continuous collage weaving the multitude of sounds from the forest: frogs, birds, rain, watrerfalls. The true feat of this album is the liner notes which features a lengthy taxonomy of the almost all of the species causing these sounds (i.e. at 29'09" there's the croak of Debdrobates pumulio - the Strawberry Dart-poison frog).

Francisco Lopez has long proposed his work under the banner of "absolute music" - a conceptual framework through which his processed field recordings shed their symbolic, metaphoric, or iconic meaning and become the raw material for compositions that push to the transcendent realms of the sublime through radical erasure, muscular amplifications, and / or slippery minimalism. There was a time some 20 years ago when Lopez released a handful of near, mostly, or wholly silent records as conceptual endgames to these theories; which left us with a bit trigger shy when it came to fully embracing the Lopez oeuvre. Fortunately, Lopez exhausted that line of thought quite a while ago, meaning that with every Francisco Lopez album, we can be assured of discovering strata of sound from the natural, the industrial, and the microcosmic. Untitled (2011) collects a eight compositions of variable strategies that opens with a placid chorus of insects buzzing pleasantly alongside the ritualized strikes of a temple gong and the distant call from some deep-throated Japanese raven. Lopez does explain the origins of the sound sources, but little else allowing the Byzantine swells, bursts, and gasps of environmental sound to stand on their own as discrete elements. The second track speaks to this with its peculiar resonance that sounds like it was entirely recorded, edited, and mixed from within an exhaust pipe attached to a slaughterhouse. Elsewhere, Lopez composes a piece entirely using the digital clipping and wind distortion that is the bane of every sound ecologist for a disturbing piece of brut-noise; and then there's the strange Luc Ferrari like whispering of an uncredited female speaker layered amidst his boiling metal drones.

MPEG stream: Untitled 279
MPEG stream: Untitled 288
MPEG stream: Untitled 291

So, Andee just asked the perennially valid question, when it comes to Lopez recordings at least, after coming up to the front of the shop and seeing this new cd on the counter, yet hearing 'nothing' coming from the speakers: "Are you actually listening to this right now?" With a sizable portion of Lopez' nearly 300 compositions being sub-audible at best, it is in fact not always a bad idea to pose that question. It should be stated that the above query was made between tracks one and two, when Lopez was enjoying some downtime; but aside from this brief moment, Lopez is much more forthright in presenting a goodly amount of immersive sound. For Elektra Bidasoa, he and Xabier Erkizia (better known as half of the AQ-endorsed noise-rock outfit Billy Bao!) slogged down the Bidasoa River in Spain, making recordings from the various hydroelectric plants located on that waterway. Earlier in 2011, the two presented an installation of their findings intermeshing the two sets of recordings; but here, their findings are presented in parallel. While both Lopez and Erkizia were drawing from the same source material - industrial hum, hiss, drone, and klank - they arrive at considerably different compositions. For Lopez, the whorl of the turbine, the hum of the circuit board, and the hiss of the cooling unit all become sustained elements in a gradually evolving composition of dehumanized activity. Such pneumatic and automated systems can function rightly on their own, seemingly independent of the human hand; and Lopez speaks to the engineered functionality as an aestheticized language - a poetry of the sterile and antiseptic. Erkizia is far more in awe of those machines than Lopez', presenting his recordings with considerable dynamic force. Along with the machined drones that Lopez uses, Erkizia occasionally turns his microphones to the water which drives those dams, at times sloshing at the riverbank and at times roaring through the massive concrete sluices that guide the water through the turbines themselves. This contrast from the bursts of activity from either source, poses a threat of electrocution. Coupled with the intense explosions that Erkizia uses in his concrete-styled composition, this work can be downright scary at times.

MPEG stream: Untitled 226
MPEG stream: Bidasoa, Presak

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

SORRY. Pea Hicks from San Diego, California has a habit... scrounging around thirft stores for recordable 78s and crappy TDK tapes filled with nearly pornographic love letters, 'foul-mouthed' kids whose definition of obscenity is the word 'jerk', and attempts to get baby to recite the alphabet. Mr. Hicks has built a hilarious collage of all of these found recordings, occasionally augmenting them with his arsenal of Optigon keyboards (which are the focal point of his other outfit, Optigonally Yours, a duo with Heavy Vegetable's Rob Crow). Hearing this makes us long for those tapes we made when we were young... not so much for nostalgia, more in fear that our embarrassing tapes will find their way to a thrift store, and eventually onto your stereo.

We have a customer in Japan who HATES Keiji Haino, and delights in sending us emails detailing just how much he loathes the man and his music. Andee of course delights in torturing Allan, an admitted Keiji mega-fan, with these very same missives. Having spied Haino shopping in a record store, our customer remarked "Even the way he looks at cds sucks", and once he emailed that he could make a Keiji Haino record simply by sticking an electric guitar and an amp in the trunk of his car and driving around on bumpy Japanese roads. Which brings us to Guitar Drag, the soundtrack to a video installation in which Christian Marclay, took an electric guitar, plugged it in, tied it to the back of a truck, and drove around dragging the guitar behind him and recording the results. Visually it's pretty amazing. And a clever statement on music and art, as are all of Marclay's pieces. But the sound yields something surprisingly listenable. Super lo-fi, a swirling, clanging crash and crunch of hum and twang and rumble and roar, a noisy mess, perhaps, but surprisingly dynamic, with random melodies and some remarkable sounds surfacing from the murky stringed chaos. Actually, one was to listen to this not knowing it was some art prank, one would most certainly be forgiven for thinking this was in fact some totally abstract free rock psychedelic freakout, the Dead C, or some mysterious Matthew Bower project, or even -that- above mentioned nonexistent Haino guitar-in-the-trunk record we wish would come out. Not sure what it says about those bands when dragging a guitar behind your car produces the same sound, but who cares?! Art nerds already need this, but now all you free noise psychedelic freaks can feel all 'arty' when you throw this on right between Fushitsusha's Live 2 and the Dead C's Trapdoor Fucking Exit! Cool sleeve image, a video still of the dragged guitar, and pressed on super swank cloudy clear vinyl.

You ever have that problem where you're in an internet sex chat room, and you make a date with some pervy girl for a phone sex session, and then when you call her up it's actually some jerk with a sampler loaded with a sexy female voice telling you things A few of the callers figure it out, and then it gets even more pathetic as they continue to masturbate, being such geeks that they're turned on by the technical details of the joke (one guy asks, excitedly, about if the sampler is triggered by keyboard or mouse). But most of the guys are so clueless and horny that they're completely unfazed by Kathy's bizarre comments ("I think you might be racist", "I want to have your retarded babies", "I've got a pickle in my ass") and limited vocabulary (she says "Yesssss!" the same way every time), or her deafeningly noisy, Merzbow-level obviously-looped screams of orgasmic ecstasy. We could go on, but we don't want to reveal too much. Just get this, it's the best crank call disc we've heard in a long time. You'll be playing it for everyone you know, except maybe your mom. Absurdly funny.

RealAudio clip: I'm Jamming It In Deep, Baby
RealAudio clip: I'm Not A Child Molestor, But I'll Fuck You

It's was a happy day at Aquarius when we heard about this new release! American radio hobbyist Stephen P. McGreevy has dedicated himself to the documentation of earth's magnetosphere by using home built VLF radio receivers (whose schematics are readily available from McGreevy's website). On "Auroral Chorus II" -- his second release after the acclaimed but sadly out of print "Electric Enigma" double cd set for Conet Project label Irdial -- McGreevy turns his charmingly enthused attention to the VLF phenomenon associated with the Aurora Borealis (a.k.a. the Northern Lights). Along with low buzzing hisses and crackles (not unlike those heard on records by hard disc editors like Fennesz and Pimmon), McGreevy's recievers have also picked up some beautiful choruses in which the magnetosphere resonates in beautiful wavering tones and whistling risers. Furthermore, McGreevy shows off his technical savvy with some stereo recordings -- with two VLF receivers with antennae along the north / south axis and along the east / west axis! As far as found sounds, McGreevy's VLF recordings are some of the more alien, yet most beautiful that we've ever encountered. So, if you missed "Electric Enigma" you now again have the chance to investigate these amazing sounds courtesy of McGreevy's fascinating obsession.

RealAudio clip: #7
RealAudio clip: #10

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

SORRY. From the same label that brought us the truly disturbing Conet Project comes Stephen P. McGreevy's VLF recordings. With a knowledge of basic radio telescopics, a few choice geographical / atmospheric anomalies, and a good ear, McGreevy records the earth's electromagnetic signature generated through such phenomenon as the Alaskan Northern Lights. Delicate whistles streak over loud crackles, that bring to mind Id Battery's fascination with recorded fire, or John Duncan's shortwave radio experiments. Word of caution, one of our faithful customers complained that this created rather deleterious psychosomatic effects.