[ aquarius records

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Showing results 151 through 200 of 1581.

Disc number 25 (!) from one of our favorite Japanese experimental composers, the ever prolific Koji Asano. With his album-a-month schedule, we've been worried about quality control, but he rarely disappoints, although it's been tough for us to keep up -- we're

Ok, it's that time again. We've got two new ones here from AQ fave Koji Asano, the eclectic and very prolific Japanese experimental composer. These are numbers 38 and 39 in his steadily growing cd catalog!! The thirty eighth, Final Insurance, isn't actually a brand new recording, it is (as the full title suggests) a collection of previously unreleased tracks from the period directly prior the release of Asano's first actual album, Solstice, in 1995. Wow, that was a while ago now, but I remember when we first got that disc -- who would have guessed that ten years later we'd have reviewed dozens more cds by him? There's twelve tracks here, varied in approach from squeaky, sci-fi electronic noise (a la Ryoji Ikeda) to gentle field recordings (kinda like something Toshiya Tsunoda might do). There's improvs on guitar and piano as well... everything here is interesting, some of it harsh, some of it beautiful. He carefully selected these tracks from a vast amount of material recorded in this youthful period of sonic activity and discovery, and it's all good stuff that deserves to be heard!

MPEG stream: Lettuce No. 2
MPEG stream: Humidity

Japanese experimental music wunderkind Koji Asano has already produced a slew of fine albums that range in focus from guitar noise-rock to meditative piano improvisation to electronic soundscapes... Now, with this release, he ventures into the realm of modern classical, with three long tracks of melancholy and unsettling yet not-unmelodic music for strings, performed by the Koji Asano Ensemble (piano, cello, viola, violin, and contrabass). Koji Asano is perhaps Japan's answer to the United States' own prolific and multitalented new music prodigy Jim O'Rourke (and Asano has yet to release any dubious "pop" music). Recommended.

Another eclectic early recording from our fave Japanese composer living in Spain.

One of Koji's first releases, with his group Gravity: an instrumental, guitar-keys-drums avant-rock band! Hard to describe, improv-meets-surf-meets-metal-meets-prog music, quite different from much of his vast catalog, but nonetheless one of Allan's faves.

Koji Asano, the AQ-beloved Barcelona-based Japanese sound artist, is back at last with a new cd (the twenty-seventh release on his own label Solstice). This new one, "January Rainbow", consists of a 64 minute long track that successfully combines two of our favorite Koji Asano compositional styles: his abstract but lovely piano improv, and electro-acoustic noise-drone! Asano's flowing piano explorations of almost romantic, fractured melodies are heard through a more-than-ambient fluctuating field of thick static, hum, and crackle. If you play this at a low volume, it's like listening to a mellow and pretty avantgarde piano recital over a messed-up shortwave radio signal. But turn it up, and the physical presence of the rumbling electronic noise really takes over! Your choice, both are nice. Those familar with Koji's back catalog need only imagine a DJ mix of his solo piano discs "You Can't Open The Door Because It's Already Open" or "Monsoon" (which already had their a background-ambient-noise element to 'em) with one of his noise-drone oriented discs like "Momentum" or "The Last Shade of Evening Falls". A truly mesmerizing, beautiful balance of melody and drone is the result. So, not only are we glad to hear from Koji again, but we think this is one of our favorite entries in his vast catalog so far!

RealAudio clip: January Rainbow (excerpt)

Here's another great release from one of our favorite sound artists, Japanese twenty-something Koji Asano, a fellow who really ought to be on the cover of The Wire sometime, in a just world. He is more deserving of that sort of coverage than, say, last issue's cover star Pole. Not that we don't like Pole, but c'mon, that guy has made more-or-less the same record three times in a row, and his work is not based on that original of an idea in the first place. However, Koji Asano has produced over a dozen creative albums, all of them excellent and inventive, in a variety of experimental subgenres, from piano-ambient to electro-noise to skronky guitar rock... but no hip hype for him. Anyway, this newest effort from Asano deviates from his recent discs of piano improvisations and chamber music compositions with a collection of recordings that we've been told have been "created by two loudspeaker's woofers and the air pressure from the movement of them. Two microphones put inside of the speakers and directly touched on the woofers to make a sound of moving. Those movements were amplified again and again by controlling the mixer and changing the position of microphones." The result is a wash of crunchy, squealing and pulsing drones not all that far from some of Maurizio Bianchi's early power electronics, but without any of the doom 'n' gloom industrial-horror imagery. To go into more detail: the first of the three unamed tracks, is 10 and a half minutes based on a rhythmic helicoptering sound, a clipping rotor-like "whack whack whack" that modulates in tone, tempo, and volume over the length of the track. Also occuring is additional, carefully sculpted feedback noise. Very nice, really, sounding somewhat like a more "live air", electro-acoustic version of the sort of "clicks & cuts" music made by the likes of Noto, but more driving and organic and less sterile. The second, much longer (42'33") track has bursts of scratchy electronic hum forming interwoven patterns of drone. Static never sounded so good. Eventually the "feedback" comes to the fore, rather like some impossibly precise, persistent, obsessive, repetitive guitar / amplifier battle session. Piercing sounds mix with deeper, hesitant drone-segments, eventually mutating into insect realms of buzzing whine. That segues into the final track, seventeen minutes that morph the insect-like sounds into something resembling some solo saxophone free improv I've heard, rather quiet and sparse, but with a bit of lawnmower-sounding blurt as well. The whole disc is always changing, always alive, and thus full of interest for the adventurous listener. Check out Koji's website at http://personal4.iddeo.es/koji for more info and sound samples of his stuff, most of which we have available at Aquarius.

See "Avalanches" for info.

Koji's back (again)! The very prolific Barcelona-based Japanese composer -- who just returned from the Instal 2002 festival in Glasgow, where he appeared alongside the likes of Mirror, Ryoji Ikeda, Alva.Noto and Phill Niblock -- follows up his recent, wonderful "January Rainbow" release with this new disc (#28!) of experimental electronics. No pretty piano this time, rather you get a dreamlike, if ominous, background hum out of which glitchy bursts of chirping, grinding electronic noise emerge. These interruptions build in intensity and density, first establishing some kind of abstract rhythm, then coalescing into a loud, layered, rumbling drone. Eventually Koji brings the piece back into a zone of bleep-punctuated silence. These could be the voices in the head of an unstable antagonist in an imaginary techno-psycho-horror film...to our ears, quite nice! If you like the, shall we say "abrasively listenable" side of Koji's eclectic sound explorations, the stuff that aligns him with Merzbow and Aube, "Octopus Balloons" should interest you indeed. And as with all of Koji's recent releases on his label Solstice, this disc comes packaged in a slim cardboard sleeve, featuring another of Koji's beautiful urban landscape photos on the cover.

RealAudio clip: Octopus Balloons (excerpt)

Little-known but highly talented young Japanese avant-garde composer Asano works with piano, electronics, guitar etc. on this disc.

Composer/multi-instrumentalist/improviser Koji Asano's 13th self-released cd is here! A beautiful yet strange, oddly recorded disc of solo piano meditations, 67 minutes spread over six tracks. The ambient background his/hum is at times as much part of the soundscape as is Asano's piano playing (not unlike one of his three earlier piano discs, the lovely "You Cannot Open The Door Because It Is Already Open", which was recorded in an abandoned castle near St. Petersburg which provides plenty of echoey atmosphere). This one, though, was recorded in Asano's new home of Barcelona, Spain, and the atmosphere probably comes from the monaural micro-cassette recorder used for the recording! With a nice cover photo as always, a desolate desert landscape/sky with hopeful saplings sprouting inside protective cages.

Japanese sound artist Koji Asano recently (last weekend!) graced AQ with an instore performance, and it's a shame if you missed it 'cause what we'll call his "laptop Merzbow" style electronics were intense and mesmerizing indeed. He brought along copies of this

The big 4-0 for our pal Koji here. No, he hasn't turned 40 (far from it) but he's reached his fortieth cd release! We've been fans since way back when you could count Koji Asano albums on the fingers of one hand. And we're happy to say that he's kept up the quality all along, as anyone who picked up number 39, reviewed here not too long ago, knows. Rabbit Room Reservation Centre (Koji has a thing for rabbits, it seems) is a visit to the dronier side of Asano's ouvre, which is a nice place to be. There's three tracks, lasting 10, 23 and 24 minutes or so. They've got the sound of insects and/or appliances amplified and abstracted... but we can only guess how he actually made this music. His press release reads thusly: "new electro-acoustic works, infiltrating slowly while deeply resounding." That doesn't say a lot but it's accurate! Generally we think he likes to leave things to the imagination, a bit mysterious, cryptic... so we'll simply offer up that some of this gives us the vibe of a propeller-driven airplane droning over the Himayalas, that sort of loneliness in a vast space... even if this simply may be the processed sounds of appliances in Asano's apartment. Or a Rabbit Room Reservation Center, whatever that is!

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Man, we've got some catching up to do. Since we last listed anything from prolific AQ-fave Koji Asano (that'd be 2002's Octopus Balloons), the Japanese avant-composer has moved from Barcelona back to Japan, gotten married, had a baby, and somehow managed to record and release another NINE albums. He's up to his thirty-seventh release now!! Dunno if we're gonna manage to retrospectively, individually review all of 'em but we'll at least try to get back with the program by presenting to you now numbers 36 (Sanctuary On Reclaimed Land) and 37 (Takoyakikun). We do, however, also have a couple copies each of The Giant Squid, Gondola Odyssey, Piano Suite Vol. 1: Fitness Club No. 1-20, Absurd Summer, Suite For Organ And Recorders No. 1: The Alien Power Plant, Zoo Telepathy, and Wind Gauge in stock for any fellow Asano enthusiasts that need to complete their collections right now. Anyway, Sanctuary On Reclaimed Land is definitely still the Koji Asano music we know and love. Recorded as part of an installation in an empty warehouse on the Osaka waterfront, literally a "sanctuary on reclaimed land", this 51 minute piece is the sound of the interaction of a grand piano with a computerized sound system inside the echoing interior space of the warehouse. Notes played on the piano were amplified, reflected, and reproduced via computer processing and multiple microphones and speakers. Asano says he "received the inspiration of moisture and the sea breeze, while vibrating the Osaka harbor warehouse by a large volume and ... completed a large integrated work of the grand piano and computer sound". The results are a gorgeous ambient drone piece, that sounds not unlike Wolfgang Voigt's work as Gas. We've always enjoyed Koji's various piano-based projects (discs like Preparing For April, The End Of August, You Cannot Open The Door Because It Is Already Open, and January Rainbow) and this one belongs in that bunch, but at the end of a continuum where the piano as an identifiable sound source is almost entirely abstracted. Very nice. Instead of the cardboard sleeves of most of his recent releases, this (and Takoyakikun too) comes housed in Asano's newest style of cd packaging, a plastic, sort of cd-sized dvd case.

MPEG stream: Sanctuary On Reclaimed Land (excerpt)

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SORRY. Album number 1 in Koji's catalog. One of our all-time favorites of his. It's eclectic and noisy, with one part that sounds like a sampled ping-pong game.

With album number 26 in his rapidly expanding discography, Japanese experimental composer Koji Asano switches from packaging his cds in jewel cases to putting them in slim cardboard sleeves. He tells us that the reason for this change is in part because of a This 72-minute "Spherical Moss Factory" disc continues Koji's interest in high-end (shrill) sonic explorations, being a piece in two parts written for violin and contrabass, performed by the Koji Asano String Ensemble, which consists of Tomomi Tokunaga and Kentaro Suzuki on those instruments respectively. But the first few minutes of track one don't betray the stringed instrument sound source, as the near-inaudible scrape of Tomomi's violin starts things off in what sounds like an emulation of the sine-wave electronics of Sachiko M. But soon the listener realizes that this is no computer processed piece, but an avant-classical composition featuring real human musicians on acoustic instruments. Track two displays quite a bit more energy from the get go, as Tomomi saws away on her violin with abandon, before relaxing and entering into a duet with Kentaro's deep contrabass bowing. All throughout both tracks, the violin and contrabass together trade mournful moans in a melodic (if melancholy) mode, punctuated by frenzied scrabblings. We may not be season ticket holders to the symphony or 20th/21st century classical experts, but we know what we like, and we do like this.

RealAudio clip: Spherical Moss Factory pt. 2

AQ-fave Japanese sound experimentalist Asano is putting us to the test with another of his monthy (!) releases, another one on the "difficult" (for him) side of things. Maybe the monthly schedule is getting the better of him, too, 'cause here he kinda takes a

RealAudio clip: Spirit Of The Wardrobe (excerpt)

Ok, it's that time again. We've got two new ones here from AQ fave Koji Asano, the eclectic and very prolific Japanese experimental composer. These are numbers 38 and 39 in his steadily growing cd catalog!! Number 39 is his very latest recording, Spring Estuary. The vague information we have seems to indicate that Asano used water as a sound source for this disc. But it sure doesn't sound like him splashing about in the bath! It's really shimmery and sort of churchy -- we would have guessed that he was manipulating recordings of pipe organ and/or bells, though the third track sounds like more like wheezing horns, all distorted and billowy. There's a total of four tracks here, the final one taking up the majority of the disc at almost 34 minutes in length. Imagine that the children's carousel in the park is somehow also one of Philip Jeck's turntables -- a giant Jeck turntable/carousel, turning and turning, its pretty music blurred and warped and utterly overwhelming and enveloping all around it. Very nice!

MPEG stream: Spring Estuary II
MPEG stream: Spring Estuary III

See "Avalanches" for info.

Man, we've got some catching up to do. Since we last listed anything from prolific AQ-fave Koji Asano (that'd be 2002's Octopus Balloons), the Japanese avant-composer has moved from Barcelona back to Japan, gotten married, had a baby, and somehow managed to record and release another NINE albums. He's up to his thirty-seventh release now!! Dunno if we're gonna manage to retrospectively, individually review all of 'em but we'll at least try to get back with the program by presenting to you now numbers 36 (Sanctuary On Reclaimed Land) and 37 (Takoyakikun). We do, however, also have a couple copies each of The Giant Squid, Gondola Odyssey, Piano Suite Vol. 1: Fitness Club No. 1-20, Absurd Summer, Suite For Organ And Recorders No. 1: The Alien Power Plant, Zoo Telepathy, and Wind Gauge in stock for any fellow Asano enthusiasts that need to complete their collections right now. Takoyakikun is a bit of a departure for Asano, or maybe a return to his roots. For one thing, it's not one long, cd-length track, but several different, individual songs. Songs? Well, instrumental rock numbers anyway. Yes, rock. Or avant-rock, or prog-rock, or something. And, unlike most of his releases which are solo recordings (or sometimes string ensembles), this is a band project -- the very same band with which he made one of his first discs, Gravity. Maddeningly convoluted and repetitive at times, this is choppy, angular, occasionally melodic, no-wave instrumental improv prog from a trio of guitar, keyboards and drums (Asano being the guitarist). We think folks into other skronky underground Japanese prog-core acts like Ruins and Korekyojinn would find this of interest... The keys definitely give it a "classic" prog vibe, and there's even a drum solo in track five! Recorded in 1997 (and released as a cd-r only at the time) now Asano has remastered and repackaged Takoyakikun for a proper cd release on his Solstice label.

MPEG stream: Takoyakikun track 1
MPEG stream: Takoyakikun track 2
MPEG stream: Takoyakikun track 3

Beautiful! This new release from prolific Barcelona-based Japanese experimental composer Koji Asano, number 22 (!) in his ongoing series of fascinating self-released recordings, is described by Asano as "a long lost memory of a once heard piano." Now, he has

RealAudio clip: The End of August (excerpt)

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SORRY. Briefly, part two rachets the tension up even further with some insectoid drones, lonely and menacing.

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SORRY. Part three seems to have the most dynamism, with Asano's gurgling late-evening drones meeting with sudden, eerie, shudder-inducing stabs in the growing darkness.

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SORRY. ...And the fourth and final installment of Asano's "Last Shade" wavers and keens like the mad monstrous pipers of Azathoth's court in the center of the universe trying to play a Tony Conrad composition!

A noisy/ambient one, in a digipak.

So lovely. Another AQ-fave by this AQ-fave Japanese composer. "You Cannot Open The Door Because It Is Already Open" is moody, abstract piano improv, recorded in an abandoned Russian castle, which provides the mysterious background ambiance.

Japanese composer/experimentalist (and AQ fave sound artist) Koji Asano is known not only for the quality of his work (almost always quite excellent) but for the sheer quantity of his releases over the last few years -- sixteen of 'em as of today, more if you count limited edition cd-rs -- which run the creative gamut from gorgeous piano meditiations, to computer noise, to chamber music, to rock guitar improv. Also unique about Koji is that ALL his music has been released on his own label, Solstice (now based, as he is, in Spain). And as if to cement Koji's reputation as a prolific composer, now Solstice presents the simutanous release of four new cds, comprising one extensive composition of abstract electro-acoustic drone, entitled "The Last Shade of Evening Falls". Now if there's one thing that drone-lovers can agree on, is that you never want 'em to end -- so what could be better than the over four and a half hours of this piece? Each disc is over an hour long, one track. Now it's not at all pure drone all the way through, that's but a part of the equation. Over the course of these four cds, Koji utilizes all sorts of slow groaning burbling tones, higher-pitched distortion, moaning echoes. His sounds are derived from violin and contrabass -- not that you'd guess, although you can tell they're from something "organic". Koji wrote music for those instruments that was recorded in Japan by his Koji Asano Ensemble, and then he spent the long dusks of a week in Barceleona near the time of the summer solstice to reconstruct and recompose the piece in his computer, processing and manipulating the original recording. Overall, "Last Shade" is dark, textural work that's going to take us longer than the running time to come to fully digest -- but what we've heard so far has been lovely. We're selling the cds seperately but obviously you need to get all four! However, a capsule review of "1/4" is that it's relatively more "melodic" than the other discs, and establishes a murder-mystery sense of tension as well.

New Yorkers Asobi Seksu brings the bright carefree pop of the late '80s (think: The Primitives, Lush, Velocity Girl) together with the moody UK shoegazers of the early '90s (a la My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Swervedriver or perhaps the more recent atmospheric modern rock of Magyar Posse). However, what sets their second album Citrus apart is its high gloss J-pop production style. Each song showering the listener with a Puffy Amiyumi level of shiny shiny, sugary pearliness. Singer Yuki Chikudate's high flittery delivery recalls that of Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser... and if you don't know Japanese then the lyrics may prove just as cryptic as Fraser's. Countering the sweetness of Yuki's vocals are her bandmate James Hanna's variety of electric guitars. He builds up billowing spirals of highly effected washes which he punctuates with sharper edged, punchy melodic segments. All the while Chikudate's voice ties giant bows of satiny sorbet ribbons around the proceedings. Yes, Citrus is filled with many seemingly incongruous elements, but the band whips them all together into a delectable effervescent confection. Yum!

MPEG stream: Strawberries
MPEG stream: Pink Cloud Tracing Paper

As some of you probably realized, this Friday (today) was a Black Friday 'Record Store Day', which is a sort of mini-RSD, to hold everybody over until the real deal actual RSD in the Spring. A much smaller batch of special releases on BFRSD, but a few things we were pretty excited about, and some of those, we even managed to get a bunch of, so our faithful mailorder customers without a local record store to call their own, could still nab a copy, like this one, a limited split 7" between Japanese heavy rockers & longtime aQ faves Boris, and US shoegaze blisspoppers Asobi Seksu, each band covering the other. The A side finds Asobi Seksu taking on Boris' "Farewell" from their record Pink. And in the hands of AS, it's transformed into an ethereal swirl of soft focus electro-pop shimmer, soaring and sweetly melodic, female vocals drifting over a lush layered backdrop, all anchored by some stuttery glitchy beats, the sounds building slowly to a full on MBV worthy psychedelic shoegace coda, before slipping back into a hazy vocal/synth dreamlike drift. On the flipside, Boris take Asobi Seksu's "New Years", retitle it "Neu Years", and proceed to unfurl a heady sprawl of modern electronic flecked indie pop crunch, the sound super polished and sounding like something you might even hear on the radio, with Wata's angelic voice floating atop big booming drums, and soft streaks of choral shimmer, the whole thing rife with strange effects and studio production weirdness, culminating in a cool backwards psychedelic breakdown, before a final burst of exuberant electro indie pop bombast. Both bands masterfully re-imagine the music of the other, and is revealing that for two bands with dramatically divergent fanbases, and very distinctive singular sounds, they they aren't so different after all!

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SORRY. Totally fun, dizzyingly silly Japanese band takes zany electronic hiphop rock to a new level, coming across like a combination of Afrika Bambaataa and The Chipmunks.

Another mysterious release from the mighty aRCHIVE label who in the past have brought us releases by Bardo Pond, Goslings, Keiji Haino, LSD-March, Growing, Khanate, James Plotkin, Earth, Boris as well as Jack Rose and Tetuzi Akiyama (elsewhere on this week's list), all super limited and amazingly packaged. Astral Travelling Unity is a Japanese space drone outfit fronted by Hiroshi Hasagawa of legendary Japanoise combo CCCC. But turn back now if 'tis noise ye seek.. ahem... nothing noisy about this disc, this sounds exactly like the name would lead you to believe, deeeeeeep astral drone music for travelling through inner space. Guitars are pulled apart into wispy tendrils, sitars buzz, and that buzz shimmers out into slow lazy ripples, analog synths supply even more buzz and drone, not a thick tangle mind you, this is gloriously spare and spacious, abstract spiritual ur-ambience, the sound of universes forming, with your eyes closed you can see forever and ever and ever. Distant streaks of melody color an infinitive landscape of deep droning swells, glistening song fragments sparkle as they float lazily through a night sky dense with twinkling stars. The second track is live, so it's a bit more raw, a little bit more lo-fi, with Acid Mothers Temple guitar guru Kawabata Makoto adding some extra guitar and showing an amazing amount of restraint. The raw live sound adds a whole other layer of fuzz and atmospheric ambience as does the addition of some simple percussion. Utterly spaced out and divine! Amazing packaging. The disc is affixed to a full color two panel sleeve with paintings by Hasagawa, with a color acetate insert printed with another of Hasagawa's oil paintings that lays over the cd, which is printed with an image of a cd-r found washed up on the beach. LIMITED TO 600 COPIES!!

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That would be one of the most ridiculous names for a band ever, if we didn't know that it's a conglomeration of names reflecting the international collaborative lineup here: members of Astro (Hiroshi Hasegawa, Japan), Jazkamer (Lasse Marhaug and John Hegre, Norway), and Hair Stylistics (Masaya Nakahara, Japan), natch. Well it's still pretty ridiculous but at least it makes some sense. Not so sure about the album title, but at least it's an attention-getter. Another attention-getter: this is one of them limited releases on the aRCHIVE label. Just 600 copies. And with usual aRCHIVE special packaging, the cd on a plastic nipple attached to a glossy tri-fold diecut cardboard sleeve, with graphics by Marhaug: the Ghost Rider on the front, and incongruous images of Johnny Cash and, uh, Mr. T on the back and inside, non-sequitur style. It's all about *attitude* we guess. Mr. T? He pity the motorcycle fuck fool!!! That's the spirit. Yeah, you want attention? Just try cranking this up loud. One track, 46 minutes, recorded live in Japan 3/3/2007. The three-word-description: Distorted. Noisy. Insanity. This is Merzbow territory, folks. Grinding overloaded amp-blasting electronic skree, a dense howling storm of unfettered feedback n' noise, static-y but far from static, in fact totally in motion, an active, extreme, almost-psychedelic freakout. Seemingly every noisemaking device and/or effect these guys possess juiced up and sent into the fray. That there's enthusiastic applause at the end of this disc, rather than simply the stunned silence of what remained of a numbed audience (read: victims) is amazing. But of course, this was in Japan! Need we repeat, LIMITED TO 600 COPIES...

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Brand new 7" from one of our favorite soundmakers, Japan's Aube, whose modus operandi involves utilizing a single sound source for each record. In the past he's used water, fire, even pages being torn from a bible! This time it's not so easy to discern what the source material is. Not that it is really normally. But often the title or the artwork will hint at it, but here it's not so clear. A field of holes on a purple and red background. A drain? It sure sounds like that could be it, as the music is a muted burbling, a distant gurgle smeared into something softly percussive, a haunting underwater field of percolations and glitchy hum, going from barely there whisper to intense frenzy, to then what sounds like an airplane passing through the sky way off in the distance. A bit of research reveals that the source material here is actually some vintage synth, but even as obvious as that sounds, in the world of Aube it sounds more like processed field recordings of a drain than an actual synthesizer! The flipside betrays the sound source a bit more, as after a hushed start, the track transforms into a glitched out tangle of analog electronics, squiggly and chaotic, a flurry of bleeps and bloops and buzzes, glitch and hum, but all of that quickly fades into something much more tranquil, a warm static drone, bathed in an electronic rainfall, the preceding squall relegated to a place off in the distance, like sitting on an old rickety porch and watching a lighting storm dance in the sky. Nice. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, we only have a handful. Pressed on clear vinyl in full color sleeves...

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SORRY.

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SORRY. Two new recordings from one of Japan's best noise artists (Marc's favorite). Akifumi Nakajima uses a single sound source to craft his bizarre soundscapes, heartbeats in the case of "Cardiac Strain" and florescent lamps for "Dazzle Reflexion." The textures range from ambient drones to harsh noise, and are never as random-seeming as the work of many of his contemporaries.

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SORRY. More Good Alchemy - very extreme sounds from one of Japan's best, most conceptual noise artists.

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SORRY. The newest Aube project, this time using only a copy of The Bible as sound source material! Blasphemous crinklings and tearings? Yes, and he's mangaged to coax a sort of mechanical heartbeat out of it as well, among other noises. Of course without knowing already one could never guess that those sounds were coming from a book, let alone from the pages of The Greatest Story Ever Told--but that knowledge is an added bonus to this enjoyable listen.

Two disc set of remixes of Aube's 1999 disc "Pages From The Book", whose source material was solely an amplified Bible! Remixers of the Greatest Story Ever Told vary in extremes from the brutal aural assaults of Merzbow, Brume, Princess Dragonmom (Warn

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SORRY. Continuing his single source material aesthetic, Aube pulls out a staple from his bag of tricks... glass. Looping samples culled from taps, cracks, and scrapes form a solid structuralist frame for closely amplified striations of glass. For the most part, Aube has left these sounds (aside from the sampled looping) alone, allowing the signature sound of glass to speak without too much external processing. Packaged in an oversized 6" x 9" paper envelope.

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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. Voltage Control Oscillator is the answer to the question ("what is the source of the sounds on this new Aube disc?"). Aube's stuff is always less noisy and more soundscape-y than some of his fellow Japanese noise copatriots (Mezbow, Masonna, Incapacitants, etc.) and this is no exception. Drones and tones (some quite piercing, but placed in such a way as to make the resumption of the drones all that much more soothing). Nice.

Wow! An exceptional release from Akifumi Nakajima aka Aube! While most recordings by this highly prolific artist utilize unique sound sources (water, fluorescent lamps, heartbeat, or most notoriously - an amplified Bible!), "Timemind" is a more rhythmic, one

RealAudio clip: III

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

SORRY. One of Japan's best (and most prolific) sound-sculptors, Aube here collects 20 tracks from various compilations and tapes, mostly on the noiser side of his ouevre. On the British label that last brought us Szeki Kurva.

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

SORRY. More Good Alchemy - very extreme sounds from one of Japan's best, most conceptual noise artists.

[ aquarius records — Japan ]