Please welcome the new Sean Hayes full length! You know we sure do! Such a terrific storytelling songsmith with a liltingly sensitive and soulful voice, Mr. Hayes and his music are always an absolute pleasure to encounter. He's followed up 2006's Big Black Hole And The Little Baby Star with a whole 'nother wonderful album that expands on what has come before, stretching its limbs stylistically, expressively and production wise too. In fact, this is his first studio-recorded album, but don't expect anything drastically different, distractingly slick or heavy-handed. No, it was for the most part recorded live, and it retains his trademark intimate, down to earthy charm. Who's joining him this time around? Well, quite an awesome seven member backing band which includes Ara Anderson (Iron & The Albatross) and Ches Smith (Secret Chiefs 3, Trevor Dunn's Trio-Convulsant). This baker's dozen does feature a broader instrument palette than his past releases which offers tasteful horn and accordion flourishes here and there to the rootsy proceedings. Yes, indeedie, Flowering Spade is another feather in his cap. Recommended!
Hey all you Alabama Chickens! Or admirers of Bay Area country boy Sean Hayes' album of that very name! If you're in the Bay Area, you just might've seen him performing with his pal Ms Jolie Holland recently. Such a great combination! From the clamour of folks coming in askin' about him, it seems like he made quite an impression. Well, we're happy to report that we've got a couple of his earlier releases for y'all straight from the man himself. Each proves him to be a prolific and consistently high caliber singer / songwriter.
This one, Lunar Lust is his second full length which came out in 2002. Much like on his debut A Thousand Tiny Pieces, what really struck us right off the bat was the earnest, yearning emotiveness of Hayes' voice. In fact, when combined with the meditative barebones folk guitar plucking, it bears a startling resemblance to that of Tracy Chapman. That in itself is by no means a bad thing, and apart from that initial oddness, this reveals itself to be another fine, achingly expressive album from Mr. Hayes. Fourteen songs in all.
Wow, is this really album #6 for Mr. Sean Hayes? Yes, indeedie it is! Shucks, we kinda knew there was something special 'bout this fine gent waaay back in 2003 when we heard the first few tunes off of his engaging debut album Alabama Chicken which he hand-delivered to us. Now, seven years later he's still tending kindly to the grass roots, self-releasing his music, and personally presenting it to us. We're happy to report that Run Wolves Run is splendid, and sure to please his ever growing legions of fans. While the heart of this Bay Area troubadour's music is unmistakably rooted in folk Americana, he's open to venturing beyond the genre's boundaries and welcoming fresh possibilities while steering clear of current trends. This time we sense that he's injected a bit more rock and funkiness into the proceedings. The results are perhaps a bit more upbeat that his past recordings, but they still maintain a sound that's wonderfully soulful and warmly familiar. Recommended!
Ace Of Spades is a cd-r series of live recordings showcasing the intimate acoustic music of a variety of local indie artists. The series so far boasts consistently strong performances from all participants (well played and well recorded at Mama Buzz Cafe in Oakland).
Of the Volume 5 - January 2005 edition's seven featured artists, AQ customers will probably be most familiar with Sean Hayes. His three songs include "Diamond In The Sun", "Rattlesnake Charm" and a fine rendition of the title track of his beloved Alabama Chicken album. Other stand-outs are the haunting spartan female sung three songs from Black Bird Stitches, the easy-going pop folk double-shot from Songs From The Living Room and the rousing intoxicated gypsy strings of Sour Mash Hug Band. L.Carey, Jason Webley, and P. Panamarenko (who also appears on the Vol. 6 and Vol. 8 editions).
HERE ARE THE VERY FINAL COPIES OF THIS VERY LOVELY PICTURE DISC!!!
Yup, we do love picture discs. They may not sound the best, but they look so amazing. Especially with the right images embedded in that there vinyl. We all definitely have a little treasure trove of picture discs that we hang on to just because they're so goddamn beautiful. It's just a bonus when the music is good too. Especially when the music actually benefits from the limitations of the picture disc format.
The latest release from our very own Jim Haynes is the inaugural release in Elevator Bath's picture disc series and they couldn't have chosen better. For those of you who have never seen Haynes' artwork, he rusts things (as he always so reductively describes his process), but the truth is he coaxes impossible textures and patterns from chemicals and metals, often letting nature determine much of a pieces final look. And they are simple amazing, deep oranges and browns, streaks and smears, strange shapes where metal has rested on other metal, drips and layers where the chemicals have pooled or allowed to shift, inconsistencies in the metal revealed after having some of it's surface eaten away. The process is almost as amazing as the outcome, but needless to say, Jim's pieces are total industrial-wasteland-decay eye candy.
The two images chosen for this picture disc are no exception. And knowing that some of Haynes' music was also created utilizing the process of rusting, it's nice to think that the sounds within are in fact produced from chemical and metal interacting, the picture disc the literal visual analogue to the resultant sounds on the recording. But the sounds here are way too lush and varied to be produced so simply, so the images are left to spin, only somewhat removed from the sounds to which they are linked.
Eraldus / Eravaldus is probably Haynes' most varied and lush recording to date, whether on his own or with sound artist Loren Chasse in Coelacanth. The chirping of birds and the rustling of leaves, underpin what sounds like an airplane passing overhead, but the sound remains, too static to be an airplane, soon revealing itself to be manufactured, gradually melodies take shape, bits of glitch and little shards of electronic interference surface, tiny little sonic events pepper the slow shifting rumble. But those little sonic events eventually blossom into thick streaks of high end, which not soon after transform into strange scraping and whirrings. The rest of the record drifts from mysterious soundworld to mysterious soundworld, dark dronescapes rife with clicks and hiss and grit, like a recording of some swamp late at night, gritty landscapes of reverbed percussion, blurred into droney smudges, smeared static becomes long expanses of slow shifting sound, that slips effortlessly from corrosive to shimmery and back again. Quite nice!
LIMITED TO ONLY 260 COPIES!
Here's the latest from our very own Jim Haynes, dronologist, soundscaper, recorder of rusting metal. These two pieces both represent impressions of Kamchatka, a Russian province often referred to as the "Siberia of Siberia", which speaks to its utter isolation, which Haynes manages to evoke magnificently in the opening track "Lilith", which is a 21 minute sprawl of intercepted shortwave broadcasts, captured and reworked into brittle buzzing textures, swirling masses of crumbling sonic shimmer, and deep morasses of subterranean rumble, the sky full of tinkling chimes and blurred static, beneath it fragmented melodies drift below the surface of a tranquil sonic sea. The track seemingly drifts between two extremes, thick layered dronescapes, and spare stretches of Geiger counter like chitter, those sparse passages draped over what sounds like field recordings of boats rubbing against docks, the clatter of oars, or perhaps the slow decay of nature. Somehow these mysterious purloined sounds are captured and recontextualized as a strange field of scrape and rumble, of creak and groan, all beneath soft focus billows of distant shimmer, and those skittery Raster-Noton cricket-like chirps. Haunting and ominous, the track finally seeming to blossom into the blurred bleary final movement, an ethereal wash of blissful thrum and strangely, an almost aquatic shimmer, that evokes images of some placid body of water, surrounded by miles and miles of emptiness.
The second track, "Rocks Hills Plains", a slightly reworked version of a soundtrack Haynes performed for a film by Paul Clipson at the ATA in 2008, seems culled from the same source material, opening with a gauzy cloud of static, over a softly undulating sea of low end rumble, and continues in a similar manner, all of the rough edges and more clattery elements of the first piece here, smoothed into a swoonsome sprawl of hushed murky mesmer, haunting and cinematic, the sounds creeping and oozing ominously, until the begin to recede, leaving in the foreground a field of softly percussive scrabbling, sounding like strange ghostly rubbings against the microphone, those sounds slowly growing more ethereal and soon transforming into still more cloudy shimmer. Eventually, the sound of the whole track begins to coalesce into something much more pure tone, seeming to shed any vestiges of the low fidelity with about 7 minutes to go, the sound building to something softly caustic, with some serious sonic heft, on the recording it's still comparatively quite, but live through the proper sound system, it's easy to imagine the sort of sonic energy this passage might emit, lush and layered and darkly dense, a powerful (but still minimal) coda, which quickly subsides, winding down as a barely there bit of ambient thrum, laced with disembodied field recordings, a hushed outro that quickly becomes silence.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES. Each one hand numbered, housed in super swank, silkscreened, oversized 6 panel sleeves.
Feedback, shortwave, wasps! Perhaps that's all we need to say to get you to click the "add to cart" button, but let's go on...
Our own Jim Haynes may be primarily a visual artist, working within a self-actualized aesthetic of rust and decay (a small sample of which you'll get with the each-one-unique cover to this release). But his love of music, especially of the 'dronological' variety, of sound art and field recording and experimental glitchscapes, has led him to accompany his recent art shows and installations with soundtracks of his own making. He's also been collaborating with AQ-fave Loren Chasse in the duo Coelacanth, who just released the very nice Glass Sponge disc (reviewed last list), so you know he knows what he's doing. This Magnetic North cd is the audio portion of an installation of the same name and is a despairingly lovely drone-scape, constructed from feedback, shortwave radio static, and recordings of wasps, as we said. Like his visual art, it's just a little spooky and discomforting, evoking ghostly transmissions from the void. It's quiet, wind-tunnel drone that could be a wordless EVP recording of a paranormal haunting, and then begins to sound like the haunting is being itself haunted! Jim's solo work seems less microscopic in focus than what he and L. Chasse do in Coelacanth. It can be claustrophobic, but conversely also spacious and even somehow incorporeal, phantasmal. One track features sparsely chopped clips of feedback, but we like best the tracks that drift endlessly without making the listener consider the physical sound-making process. Definitely for fans of Mirror, John Duncan, Francisco Lopez, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson...or for anyone willing to plumb the abyss suggested by this sound-work.
Right before Christmas 2014, our own Jim Haynes walked into the shop with a hunk of gauze and metal attached to one his fingers, as he had an unfortunate encounter with a table saw which lopped off the tip of his finger in the process. Jump forward a couple of months and he offers forth Scarlet - a nasty, violent piece of scabbed pulses and blasted electric corrosion. While he had finished the album earlier than this incident, the rupture of that event -- torn flesh, greasy machinery, pending sepsis, healing through cauterization - are all the inner workings of the aptly named Scarlet. The source material, it has to be said, is not that of the machine shop but the exploded-view amplification of micro-rhythms from the cheapest of strobe-lights and cooling fans; and back at the end of the summer 2014, Haynes made a lone performance of this body of work, opening for Tim Hecker here in San Francisco. The blister-popped strobes and accumulated tumult made for a much more theatrical, and dare we say, more expressive performance than that of the much beloved Tim Hecker. Scarlet it turns out is the reworkings and reconfigurations of all of the recorded variations that Haynes crafted upto that Hecker show. It's just as deliciously caustic and nervously turbulent as that performance, girded on the rhythmic, noise-pulse interlacing of those electromagnetic devices. The opening "Cerise Cerise" quicksteps from weird angular blurts into a brutal, shrill torrent of noise, like some fucked-up meeting of Factrix and Mika Vainio. The dead-tone "Alizarin" buzzes with blackened drone and brooding mesmer as an viscous, ocean sized acid-bath of bad intentions. Even as the rhythmic clatter subsides on this track, the claustrophobic intensity persists. The psychoid grit of "Venal" erupts with those rhythms in a latticework of out-of-phased patterns and gasped/gnarled loops. And so it goes for Scarlet, barrage after barrage of blown-out abstractions, supercharged locomotive grindings, irradiated hauntings as melody, and the sound of the computerized parts of a cyborg extracting itself from its human host, leaving behind all that sinew, muscle, and bone. Super fucking limited, of course.
We listed this recently as a double disc limited edition, unfortunately that is now out of print, but the single disc is well worth the price of admission. Here's our review attesting to that...
Much like his art, the music of Jim Haynes is based on, and is a continual exploration of the act of decay, an imagining of natural (and un-natural) processes rendered into sound, a world of crumbling landscapes and of microscopic worlds collapsing. While he has yet to figure out a way to actually record the process of metal rusting, Haynes has managed to create a soundworld that sounds precisely how he, and perhaps we, might imagine it.
The process of decay, and erosion, found on and in Sever, is some sort of sprawling sonic time lapse, each track as much about the sounds as the sources, as much about the arrangements as the process of listening, as much about texture as timbre, as much about the tiny details, and the expansive whole, the opening track for instance, is all clatter and crunch, chiming and tinkling, to these ears it sounds like wandering through a ruined world, a dead planet, the sun drying every living thing to husks, these sounds are the dried carapaces, hung from rotted fence posts, rubbing against one another in what little breeze is left under a harsh midday sun. The sound of footsteps, the crunch and scrape of a despondent trudge, a death march, but all of this is carefully blurred and smeared, the obvious references are blunted, so the sound evokes all of the above, yet as if it were a dream, the edges a bit fuzzy, the sounds slightly gauzy, the colors hazy, the sound almost underwater sounding at times, a feverdream in sound.
The rest of the tracks explore a different world altogether. A world of darkness and blight, of grim emptiness and eternal blackness, three variations on the darkness beyond, varying shades of grey and black, ominous, haunting, threatening, abject, deep and so very dark. Almost as if the listener from the first track, stumbled into the cool darkness of a cave, sheltered through the sun, only to find his or herself wandering through an endless labyrinth of tunnels and caverns, the sound massive and bottomless, but simultaneously hushed and intimate, the blackness rife with buried melodies, with warm whirring textures, the haunting clang and clatter of bells? Some sort of metal on metal. Crunch and crackle adds grit to Haynes' subterranean drift, the sound growing ever more ominous, the low end shimmer transformed into a grinding hiss, a black hum, wreathed in clouds of effervescent static, beneath it all, an unlikely pulse, a barely audible throb, a machinelike anti-groove buried beneath, a slow swirling noxious obsidian haze.
The final track explodes with what sounds like the grind of stone against stone, whirring processed textures, that slowly shift and are pulled apart into strands of greyed melody, a whirring, gritty expanse of softly intertwined layers, that seem to extend forever, the various bits of grit and grime worn away as the track progresses, the sounds getting smoother as they grow darker, as if the sounds are dragging the listener further down into the dark, the light from above fading, becoming a warm orange glow, then a smudge of red, before any and all color is swallowed up, leaving just the echoes to ring out before they too disappear.
- MPEG stream: :
- MPEG stream: ::
What the hell? We thought these had long disappeared, but a handful of the super limited edition 2cd version of Sever / Severed were just discovered. These will most likely be the final copies we'll see of this... As for the record, here's what we had to say about it when we first reviewed it:
Much like his art, the music of Jim Haynes is based on, and is a continual exploration of the act of decay, an imagining of natural (and un-natural) processes rendered into sound, a world of crumbling landscapes and of microscopic worlds collapsing. While he has yet to figure out a way to actually record the process of metal rusting, Haynes has managed to create a soundworld that sounds precisely how he, and perhaps we, might imagine it.
The process of decay, and erosion, found on and in Sever, is some sort of sprawling sonic time lapse, each track as much about the sounds as the sources, as much about the arrangements as the process of listening, as much about texture as timbre, as much about the tiny details, and the expansive whole, the opening track for instance, is all clatter and crunch, chiming and tinkling, to these ears it sounds like wandering through a ruined world, a dead planet, the sun drying every living thing to husks, these sounds are the dried carapaces, hung from rotted fence posts, rubbing against one another in what little breeze is left under a harsh midday sun. The sound of footsteps, the crunch and scrape of a despondent trudge, a death march, but all of this is carefully blurred and smeared, the obvious references are blunted, so the sound evokes all of the above, yet as if it were a dream, the edges a bit fuzzy, the sounds slightly gauzy, the colors hazy, the sound almost underwater sounding at times, a feverdream in sound.
The rest of the tracks explore a different world altogether. A world of darkness and blight, of grim emptiness and eternal blackness, three variations on the darkness beyond, varying shades of grey and black, ominous, haunting, threatening, abject, deep and so very dark. Almost as if the listener from the first track, stumbled into the cool darkness of a cave, sheltered through the sun, only to find his or herself wandering through an endless labyrinth of tunnels and caverns, the sound massive and bottomless, but simultaneously hushed and intimate, the blackness rife with buried melodies, with warm whirring textures, the haunting clang and clatter of bells? Some sort of metal on metal. Crunch and crackle adds grit to Haynes' subterranean drift, the sound growing ever more ominous, the low end shimmer transformed into a grinding hiss, a black hum, wreathed in clouds of effervescent static, beneath it all, an unlikely pulse, a barely audible throb, a machinelike anti-groove buried beneath, a slow swirling noxious obsidian haze.
The final track explodes with what sounds like the grind of stone against stone, whirring processed textures, that slowly shift and are pulled apart into strands of greyed melody, a whirring, gritty expanse of softly intertwined layers, that seem to extend forever, the various bits of grit and grime worn away as the track progresses, the sounds getting smoother as they grow darker, as if the sounds are dragging the listener further down into the dark, the light from above fading, becoming a warm orange glow, then a smudge of red, before any and all color is swallowed up, leaving just the echoes to ring out before they too disappear.
The bonus disc features recordings previously thought to originate from a sound installation, but which is in fact the reworked source material of his performance opening for Nurse With Wound back in 2009.
Totally recommended!
- MPEG stream: :
- MPEG stream: ::
- MPEG stream: ::::
Just because Jim is an AQ employee doesn't mean we can't gush like crazy about his new record. C'mon, pretty much everyone who works here plays in a band or runs a label. We like to think that the music we all make and release would be just the kind of stuff we love to listen to and sell, and just the kind of stuff you all like to listen to and buy. And such is the case with Jim's new record Telegraphy By The Sea, an album he's been working on for several years now, cobbled together from material culled from various elements used in installations and performances in New York, Australia and various locations in between.
The disc is lovely, all wrapped in an ominously blackened but totally beautiful package of silkscreen and letterpress that could at first glance be mistaken for another Jesu or Godflesh album with its telephone poles smeared into moire patterns.
The music inside is just as lovely. Rust, drones, shortwave, drones, acid rain, drones, a big pile of rocks, drones, a small pile of rocks, and more drones. Drones and drones. But like all of those great drone artists we freak out about (Chalk, Coleclough, Basinski, Organum, blah blah blah...), Jim's not one to let the drone settle as a terminal pool of inactivity. This is a dynamic album, bristling with texture amidst the shifting passages, dramatic shifts, and evocative soundscapes. The visual side of his installations has this weird eeriness as he builds dense layers of rust and debris on top of corroded photographs of abandoned buildings and desolate landscapes. Those same metaphors of abandoned, desolate spaces are musically represented in Telegraphy By The Sea. In these spaces, time is accelerated with things rusting, falling apart, getting covered in moss, and being washed away by the ocean. Scrapes and gurgles from all of those bits of metal, bricks, and rocks dissolve through radioactive sinewaves into a gorgeous magnetic wall of grey-slab tones, gradually building through half-melodic phrases, a clatter of monochrome, and squalls of crackling static. All of this snaps in an instant at the end of the album, giving way to a wondrous nocturnal ambience cobbled from luminous bell-tones and detuned shortwave radio communications.
One of Jim's good friends and collaborators Loren Chasse, said it better than we could, "A telephone cord in the sand? A message taken down using an alphabet of sea-glass, shell and carapace? It all makes sense in the last 11 minutes!"
Another mysterious sonic missive from our very own resident dronologist Jim Haynes, another excursion into the sound of decay, this time in the form of four sprawling sidelong epics, each its own self contained soundworld, culled from various field recordings, vibrating strings and other sonic errata. Recorded over the last three years, these recordings require headphones to truly explore their depth, and once strapped on, it's easy to get lost in these strange lands of decay and declines.
The A side was originally a commissioned soundtrack for a pair of films that screened at the Hauntology exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2010, and while we've yet to see either of these films, the smoldering slow moving "Ashes" does evoke a certain ontological sonic dread, the core of the sound is of course the drone, but that drone is pulled taut, and the sound seems to fray as the track progresses, shedding sonic detritus in the form of fractured melodies, strange clicks and muted buzz. At times, this begins to sound like perhaps Haynes' most overtly musical record, but that musicality is eventually picked apart, the remaining elements litter the landscape like bits of some sonic wreckage, but then the edges are smoothed, and the stray shards are reigned in, the sound is truly beautiful, whether a deep sonorous drone, or a lush layered stretch of celestial shimmer.
Named for the performance space at which the piece was debuted, "Terminal" is another sidelong soundscape, the majority of the sounds sourced from field recordings of geysers and thermal vents, the opening few minutes unfurling like a raw field recordings, playing out like some obscure scientific document, unearthed from some dusty box filed away in a warehouse, chronicling some lost expedition. The sound doesn't necessarily grow more musical, but instead, seems to blossom and display more texture, and more depth, as if more sounds were introduced and then layered or woven into one another, streaks of blurred hiss, peppered with the sound of wind on microphone or the trickle of water, the white noise of eruption balanced by the hushed murmur of calm before and after.
Side three finds Haynes exploring radioactive decay, unclear what the sound sources are, we'd like to think, that it's indeed recordings of Strontium or Uranium, the radioactivity causing the tape to warp and curdle, but in fact, it sounds more like an assemblage of intercepted short wave broadcasts, and deep bellows of bowed metal, lush chordal swells washing over strange effects, muted glitches, lush tones and surprisingly dreamy overtones, bell like chimes, chittering cricket like clicks, Geiger counter like bleeps, all blurred and smeared into a gorgeous hazy of soft focus shimmer, those clicks coalescing into an almost-rhythm, while the surrounding sounds seem to lose cohesion, the edges softening, all bleeding into one another and drifting like blackened clouds of whir and thrum.
And finally, the last movement in this crumbling sonic tetraptych is the wire recording sourced "Cold", in which Haynes captures the sympathetic buzz of wires and plays them like some sort of abstract harp, at least that's how we picture it, a huge stone room, with metal wires running across in wild tangles, Haynes at the center, wildly bowing and striking wires, creating this delicate crystalline symphony, another blurred buzzscape, that peppers the lush layered shimmer, with creaks and clatter, skitter and crunch, but those errant sounds are quickly subsumed by the warm whirls of hushed bleary drift and an unexpected eruption of caustic blown out noise, a psychedelic squall that acts as the record's coda, before the inevitable decline, the sound slipping into nothingness. Gorgeous stuff.
LIMITED TO 350 COPIES!! Housed in a luxurious full color gatefold sleeve, and pressed on nice thick black vinyl. Includes a download coupon as well.
After killer releases from Motion Sickness Of Time Travel, Grant Evans, Quiet Evenings, Afterlife and a bunch more, the Hooker Vision label gives us a brand new recording from our very own Jim Haynes, who seems to move well beyond his "I rust things" method of sonic alchemy, creating what in Haynes' world is about as close to a minimal avant garde shoegaze as we can imagine. And in fact, we had wondered if Haynes might try something more overtly melodic for his first Hooker Vision outing, and while perhaps The Incident With A Ghost isn't strictly melodic, it's much more lush and warm than past release, seemingly trading in some of the grey austerity he often traffics in for something more organic. The first side opens with a strange rhythmic tangle made up of what sounds like the warm rhythmic patter of rainfall on clay pots, geiger counter crackle and the snap of crackling fires, those sounds form the core of what becomes a slowly expanding sonic sphere, all softly swirling reverberations, lush tonal thrum, and strange pulses and pulsations. The vibe is definitely some underwater world, or the surface of some alien planet. The sound is stormy, that rhythmic crackle blurring into shapeless whorls, beneath which tones shimmer and churn, before a sudden glitch, sends the track into much more tranquil territory, a deep slow building rumble, that begins to smolder, and transform into a sort of soft focus dream-noise, eventually giving way to some Caretaker like creep, all gauzey longform tones, and timestretched ballroom dreaminess, which billows into thick droney clouds that border on serious shoegaze blissout. Maybe the prettiest thing we've heard from Haynes yet!
The flipside is much less active, a sprawl of blackened ambience, pocked with all manner of micro sonic events, scrapes and thumps, rumbles and whirs, the sound a series of slow swells, hazy and haunting, downright tranquil until the last 5 minutes or so, when those tranquil sounds begin to grow corrosive, exploding into a raw, grinding howl of sound, wrapped in junk metal clatter, and jagged shards of static, only to suddenly dissipate, unfurling a haunting outro, all mysterious sounds, voices and machines, buried beneath slow shifting layers of bleak glowing shimmer, a woozy, wraithlike drift.
Nice metallic silver packaging. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
We quipped in the review of our very own Jim Haynes' last album that when he wasn't spending time behind the counter here at aQuarius recOrds that he must be holed up in some subterranean bunker. Apparently, that wasn't far from the mark, as his studio is actually a shipping container perched in the industrial wastelands of East Oakland. Yeah, that makes sense, though he does mention that he would happily switch to a subterranean bunker if one were available. It's a landscape of diesel fuel spills, empty expanses of asphalt, soil tainted with mercury, and the ever present the echo of gunshots. The Shudder Of Velocity is the latest album from Haynes, released by the tiny Portuguese imprint Noisendo who generated the very un-Haynes like collages of '60s pin-up model June Palmer gracing the cover instead of his signature mark-making through rust. The album opens with a tectonic rumble that snaps against tone-split frequencies and electro-shock drones all of which are scraped with these harsh pricks of noise that jettison from the speakers like bolts shaken loose from a perilous decent through the atmosphere in some shoddily build spacecraft right as the fuselage of said spacecraft is about to come apart at the seams. There may be some sort of landing in the future for that spacecraft; but Haynes does puncture a massive hole, whose implosion sends shockwaves throughout the remainder of the track. The woozy, sonar-bleep tone of the second track is ominously prescient of the lost signal from the black-box transponder never to be found from the Malaysian airplane that presumably crashed into the Indian Ocean in the early spring of this year. The smoldering frequencies of overlaid drones and radioactive crackle bury those tones, replacing them with the disembodied shortwave transmissions of detuned voices. Bright electrical hums from a chorale of fluorescent lights, discarded medical equipment, poorly grounded neon build with the smoldering intensity of Phill Niblock's psychoacoustic minimalism on the final track, coupled with slashing waves from bowed metals that lend an updated version to the classic acoustic clatter of Organum, all dappled with prickly textures, corroded atmospheres, and earthmover rumblings. Awesome. Limited to just 100 copies.
Latest from our very own Jim Haynes, and his first for the esteemed Editions Mego label, and like releases past, Haynes immediately delves into a world of decay. As a visual artist, he often jokes that his art consists simply of 'rusting things', and rust is definitely a large part of his visual aesthetic, but it's evident that in some ways his goal is similar in the music making process, to take sounds and corrode them, to treat them in such a way that they crumble, and decompose, revealing whatever mysteries lurk within, those subsequent sonic mysteries also decaying, as if the process was akin to nesting dolls, layer upon layer of sound, peel one away and fall deeper into the abyss, one that seemingly has no termination point.
The source sounds here are quite varied as always (most notably this time around a particle accelerator), but Haynes tends toward the greys and browns, static and hiss molded into streaks and shimmers, melodies subverted and melted down into textures, the opening track on The Wires Cracked (another nod to decay), begins with a hushed rumble, an accretion of thrum and hum, pocked with bursts of static, and shards of granular buzz. As the track progresses, the melodic component, becomes more pronounced, but subtly so, still merely a show beneath Haynes' churning windstorm of sound, a blurred, muted squall that manages to whip up billows of caustic noise, but then tamps them down into something much more malleable.
The sprawling "X-Ray" lays down a field of field recorded crackle and spatter, foot steps on snow, broken glass, hard to say precisely, but that gristled crackle hovers beneath an opening blast of noise, before giving way, to a hushed creep, a distant keening shimmer beneath a series of near microscopic sonic events, headphones most definitely required, a hazy, gauzy expanse of windblown emptiness, the sonic approximation of a wintery tundra, transformed into sound, and again, wreathed in Haynes's slow shifting textures, and peppered with insectoid like chitter. The track seems to seesaw between thick, billowing soft noise swirl, and breathless minimal near nothingness, tense and intense, a sonic travelogue through some lost land, or perhaps as the title infers some strange network of inner pathways, not hard to imagine being shrunk down, injected into a human body, and traversing a series of blood vessels and capillaries, the previously silent sound of the body's inner workings, now rendered terrifying and overwhelming, an organic machine pulsing and throbbing, the listener lost in a world of darkness, with only these mysterious sounds as proof that the listener still exists.
The whole of the second side is taken up by the near 18 minute "November", which unfurls like ghosts in the machine, deciding to dismantle the machine before our very ears, again, the sound is seemingly being pulled apart, Haynes there to chronicle its gradual decay, the most active of the three tracks, reminding us in places of the Conet Project, not the recited numbers, or the snippets of music, but the sounds in between, the various bits of static and hum, the tense interludes between sounds, here allowed to become sounds themselves, erupting into huge droning tangles of crunch and crumble, wrapped in keening high end shimmers, occasionally dipping into serene stretches of bleary ambience, the eye of the sonic storm as it were, the sedges of the sonic field still corrosive and crumbling, lending an air of impending doom to these otherwise tranquil passages, but the hammer never falls, instead, the sounds gradually dissipate, the clouds of noise clearing, revealing a hushed landscape of whistle like tones, smoothed out into a blurred susurrus of streaked shimmer, pocked with what sounds like the rasp of stone on stone, a final moment of decay, before the record itself crumbles into silence.
It seems that when Jim Haynes is not behind the counter at aQ, he must be holed up in some subterranean bunker, or perhaps a network of caves that reach all the way into the center of the earth, or even still, some abandoned space station, drifting weightless miles above the earth. What else could explain the harrowingly abject sounds that make up his various recordings, none moreso than Ununtrium's Daughter, another fantastically and abstractly mysterious selection of deftly manipulated field recordings, and carefully crafted sounds, that Haynes weaves into mesmerizing expanses of lowercase dronemusic. But not the sort of static drift of most drone music, the drone here is often implied, the sounds active and alive, alien field recordings constructed from short wave radio dispatches, and lush, cavernous thrum built from all manner of sonic detritus.
The opening track here sounds like a muted Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, all of the metal elements stripped away, leaving just a murky sonic husk, a thick rumbling, a deep, layered whir, laced with what sounds like human breath, or perhaps that's the rumbling of distant subway cars, it never really matters where the sounds come from, since in Haynes' hands, they become something wholly other anyway. In this case, it's a geiger counter symphony, underpinned by a lush, almost melodic hum, peppered with what sounds like the clunk of someone changing the channels on an old TV, that is if every station was broadcasting some sort of glitchy electronic thrum, and then before you know it, the sound transforms into some Conet Project like transmission, voices drifting in the ether, the ether in this case of Haynes' construction, thick, blackened swirls, that over the course of the track, build to a power electronics like intensity, before settling back down into a slow smolder, all crackle and crunch, hum and hiss. The rest of Ununtrium's Daughter exists in a similarly bleak sonic wasteland, again evoking the aforementioned caverns and bunkers, abstract crumble, staticky drones, ominous black ambience, all laced with strange industrial happenings, creaks and clatter, the sounds of buttons pushed, of levers pulled, of dials twisted, all re-contextualized into abstract anti-rhythms, long expanses of barely there, whispery drifts, offset but roiling clouds of grim, grinding, crunch. A few moments evoke an underwater world, adding abandoned undersea research laboratory to the list of potential Haynes' hangouts, all warbly and woozy, blackly bloopy, respirator like rhythms woven into softly bubbling grey noise arpeggiations, often building to symphonies of chitter and skitter, the occasional insectoid chorus drifting atop black swells, settling into a final stretch, the most hushed and dreamily sinister of the bunch, a muted swirl of blackened thrum, wreathed in gristled layers, the prickly texture constructed from a tangle of processed static, smoothed out into a pulsing sonic cowl, beneath which a strange sound world winds down, gradually, toward eventual oblivion...
Packed in an oversized slim DVD style case, and as you might have figured, quite limited...
Some of you may know Grant Hazard from Oakland-based band The Very Hush Hush, whom we have carried records from in the past. For his first solo effort, Hazard gives us an instrumental cd of icy cool but beautifully melodic ambience. Comprised mostly of minimalist solo piano inflected with spacious textures and droning loops, Hazard's classically-trained musicianship serves him well in recalling the dulcet tones of impressionist composers such as Debussy and Satie, the modern day minimalism of Brin Eno and William Basinski, and touches of the dark-natured cinematic temperaments of Bohren & der Club of Gore. Limited to 500 copies. An excellent debut!
This metal band from the mean streets of San Francisco (featuring members of Walken, Orb Of Confusion, Owl and others) claim to play "epic blackened stoner thrash" and it's hard to argue with that self-assessment. They do play such a thing, if you can imagine that, and it's definitely cool. Gruff guttural vokills roughly rasp desperate battlecries, singing of smoke and mountains, o'er top heaving lumbering grooves and punked out grind. It's sick, and it's sludgy, but it also rocks, way more than we were expecting (was that a cowbell?), with chugging riffery and spirals of old school shreddtastic soloing in spades - the dual axework influenced by classic '80s thrash all right, even as the band's raging sonics range overall into crustier territories redolent of burnt churches, smoldering bongs, and other black and doom metal signifiers. Hazzard's Cure are in and out in about 38 minutes, seven slayin' songs, including amidst 'em an acoustic-y interlude or two, even. They remind us a LOT of another band that's a favorite 'round these parts, the shredding heshers in Saviours. And, in their dynamics and diversity, also the likes of (early) Baroness, High On Fire, Behold The Monolith, and local duo Black Cobra.
Derek Gedalecia is a man who gets around. The Bay Area synthwrangler has largely been releasing Head Boggle tapes on pretty much every cassette imprint under the sun (NNA Tapes, Fag Tapes, Rainbow Bridge, Tusco/Embassy, and his own Greedmink imprint amongst some two or three dozen others); and his two slabs of vinyl have come via pretty fucking high-profile venues. First up was his eponymous album back in 2012 via Spectrum Spools, and here's this album released through Experimedia. The titular instrument that Gedalecia used was found at the Electronic Music Lab at SF City College. For those synth-nerds, this particular model was probably built by Serge Tcherepnin sometime in the late '70s. Tcherepnin had designed this modular synth as an inexpensive alternative to the rather pricey Buchla synth that had been developed also on the West Coast around the same time. The schematics for the original synth are available for those with a soldering iron and considerable patience to build his or her own. With patchbay cables wildly pulled & plugged, knobs twiddled spasmodically, and oscillator switches toggled irregularly, Gedalecia creates a semi-improvisatory free-for-all feel akin to the pioneering work of Francoise Bayle or the polyglot analog+digital systems of Keith Fullerton Whitman. Seeing him do this stuff live where he's bopping around and literally head-banging to step-sequenced tone bursts, you get the sense that he's having a blast doing this stuff. What separates Gedalecia from every other dilettante with a synth fetish.
Headboggle is an aptly named project from Bay Area product Derek Gedalecia, who landed this polydactile, outsider/avant-electronic album on the always impressive Spectrum Spools imprint. Like much of what we've heard from John Elliott's label, Headboggle filters a historical aesthetic through a contemporary-DIY lens with pretty reliable results, and Gedalecia has a pretty different take on that agenda by looking not so much to the cosmic / post-psychedelic era of progressive electronics. He's one to apply a huge amount of studio techniques and references including Tod Dockstader, Francoise Bayle, Nurse With Wound, Caroliner, Stockhausen, as well as Dilloway, Nate Young, and much of the post-noise synth wranglers, although Gedalecia is much more keen on dumping all sorts of odd samples and live instruments into densely packed, yet wholly decentered collages. Yup, he too has the suitcase full of cassette releases that have been spilling forth over the past three or four years, with a few of those popping up in the tape case here at aQuarius even. This self-titled lp is full of way-out there synth jams - citing six or seven synths in various interviews and whatnot, that give the record an 'everything-at-once' sort of overload bursting with candy-colored tones and bright-lite plastic luminosity, all topped with erratic banjo plucks, atonal harpsichords spluttering, and ragtime piano passages. What a trip!
Formerly known as Worship (they released a small cd-r pressing under that moniker), the elusive group who now answer to the name Headdress continue their dusk lit creep through the enchanted wilderness. On Turquoise they craft a beautiful loosely woven tapestry of ivy-like guitar tendrils, lichen-encrusted percussion, solemn mossy male vocals that reside somewhere between Jandek and M. Ward. The album's fifth song "Babylon" sounds strangely like a deconstructed folk rendition of America's "Horse With No Name". Whether intentional or not, the glinting familiarity of the latter's central melody adds to the existing subtle hallucinatory atmosphere of the proceedings. The crowning jewel of rough hewn Turquoise though is the sixth track titled "Moon Of Shedding Ponies". It's a frayed, meditative instrumental populated with generous turns of a rainstick and what sounds like howling wolves or banshees.
If you dig the rustic, abstracted psych-folk sounds of Wooden Wand & The Vanishing Voice and the many bewitching branches of the Jewelled Antler Collective, don't miss this!
Headlands Band are a local quintet who play honest rock'n'roll without pretentions or airs, which makes 'em even more likable even if I didn't already appreciate their music. Well-written songs with that instantly classic traditional sound somewhere between Uncle Tupelo, Neil Young and Dieselhed. The poignant touches of lap steel remind me of Lambchop, and there's also cheerfully strummed mandolin & warbly organ on top of the guitars. The vocals are a slight weak point, sometimes sounding rather strained, and there's one kinda 'emo'-ish song that I try to program out, but other than that this is a solid debut very well-recorded and exectued. Surprisingly, I like this a lot more than the new Jay Farrar (ex-Uncle Tupelo) record, and that's sayin' something. For fans of all the abovementioned bands as well as Granfaloon Bus.
Oops, we meant to review this ages ago, but somehow it slipped through the cracks, and wasn't called to our attention until someone from the band recently dropped off their brand new release which hopefully won't take us 2 years to review. Sorry guys! So this is not new, but then again it's not like this ambient kraut-prog outfit with local and international ties will be easily found anywhere, so better late than never, right? Hedersleben may sound like some obscure krautrock group from back in the day but it's a relatively recent group that features seasoned members from British punk legends UK Subs (!) who formed after working with Nik Turner from Hawkwind on a music project a few years ago (and indeed, Nik Turner makes a guest cameo on flute here). Rounded out by local San Francisco musicians, members of Hollow Mirrors and Dragontime, together they channel the fluidly amorphous spacerock jams of Brainticket, Embryo, Gong, Hawkwind and Temple. With tripped out proggy instrumental interludes woven throughout with druggy whispered female vocal passages, Hedersleben pay such devotional tribute to their influences that it's difficult to decipher that this wasn't recorded in some German commune 40 years ago. In fact, the group has gone on to become the touring band for Nik Turner as well as the studio band for the latest incarnation of Brainticket under the leadership of founding member Joel Vandroogenbroeck. How 'bout that. Very cool dreamy and spacey kraut-psych stylings!
Local early ought's all-casio group with songs about Colors, Margot Hemingway and Mysterious Disappearances. Fans of Marine Girls, Young Marble Giants and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, take note!
A couple of brief outbursts of precision mayhem from Hella, featuring their trademark maniacally dense drumming and head splitting guitar riffery.
Our good customer and friend Daniel Coffeen loves this album so much we invited him to write about it. Take it away, D...
Compared to HATFYR's last record, Shock and Struts, Felt is streamlined, restrained, clean. But then again, these are the facts you requested and as is their nature, they deliver the goods with a stylistic excess. The result is that Felt is at once understated and deluxe, careful and daring, contrived and pathetic. As usual, the band moves through the breadth of pop music. But unlike say, Ween (a certain influence), The Facts don't quote genres: they metabolize them. The result is that while listeners may hear strains of Prince or Bongwater or Flaming Lips these same listeners will always here The Facts: songs that are round and luscious, happy and crafty, clever and sprawling, a grab bag of boys, girls, guitars, trumpets, beats, harmonies, samples, and strumming. Three different songwriters and four different singers take turns showing off -- from the Prince-laden Peas to the bubbilicious stereophonic Tulip to the boy ballad, Remember, this record covers a lot of territory. It's inspiring to hear an album that offers so much -- and that's downright joyous to boot. Like the best pop music, Felt is complex, odd, familiar and unfamiliar, embedded in pop tradition and utterly and thoroughly itself. And as is usually the case with such music, it takes some time, some patience, precisely because it proffers the new. Listen well to this record and you will be felt. Check out "Tulip" and the truly exquisite, crafty "Homebody".
The Bay Area's Here Here make willowy indie rock graced by accordion and strings. Makes a nice counterpart to their emotive yelpy male vocals which are at times akin to Arcade Fire, and at other Modest Mouse. Many of the songs on The Boy With An Orange fit in well alongside both of those bands, but also give a healthy nod to Brian Eno's Here Come The Warm Jets on songs such as "A Place To Find".
We reviewed a record from local garage pop indie rockers the Herms way back in 2006, and if memory serves, we did dig it, but Castle Face head honcho and Oh Sees mainman John Dwyer insisted we forget all about that old record, and revel in this new one, which is not actually a proper record so much as a collection of demos and outtakes and unreleased rarities, but all the songs were hand picked by Dwyer, and definitely demonstrate the sort of lo-fi outsider pop what-the-fuck weirdness these guys were capable of, which wasn't really even hinted at on that way more polished record proper from back in the day. In fact, all it should take is a quick listen to the first track, the awesomely titled "Power Joystick", which sounds like some alternate universe Kinks, with way more bass buzz, some trippy psychedelic keyboard noodling, everything just a bit detuned, maybe recorded on a boombox, and with a totally unexpected midsong burst of blown out super distorted baroque pop majesty, before lurching right back into more of their noisy, jangly, wobbly Velvets-y groove. Fuck, so good. We had to listen to that track 5 or 6 times before letting it play any further. And if you dig that first one, pretty much all of Drop Out Vol. 1 is gonna push all the same buttons. "The Organisation" sounds like some weird archival track from the sixties, replete with dramatic spoken word vox, over warbly whirring organ, crunchy trebly jangle and simple drum pound. "Volleyball" ups the fidelity a bit, hinting at the band's more polished potential, but it all still sounds just a bit off kilter, the mix kind of just slightly wrong, the vox down in the mix, the keyboard melodies WAY up front. Hooky, and fuzzy, and jangly, and pretty much a perfect fit on Castle Face. Fans of Ty Segall, Mikal Cronin, the Mallard, Bare Wires, and of course Thee Oh Sees will definitely dig. We're also reminded a bit of the idiosyncratic home brewed poppiness of Cleaners Of Venus, albeit the Herms are a bit more ramshackle and garage-y. For every moment of classic garage pop jangle, or fuzzy hooky indie pop crunch, there's some twisted, almost avant sounding blast of fractured art rock to balance it out, or sometimes completely cancel it out, often in the same song. A new (old) aQ fave for sure!
Whoa, this is such an amazingly eclectic album, Record Machine is indeed like The Herms' own version of a jukebox. Put it on for a spin and you'll get all shapes and sizes and shades of pop that draw inspiration from each of the past four decades of music. In turn they recall The B-52s' "Rock Lobster" camp, Robyn Hitchcock's engaging cryptic eccentricities, The Kinks' wry pop snap, The Fall's angular snarkiness... and these SF fellas do it all exceptionally well. A super impressive debut that's positively bursting with confidence and energy.
Brand new release from local soundscaper / noisemaker Holly Herndon, a tape designed specifically for where most tapes get listened too. Yep, the car! This recent resurgence in tape releases has had most of us scrambling to find tape players, going to the Goodwill looking for tapedecks, buying Walkman's (Walkmen?) at Radio Shack, but one place tapes still seem to be ubiquitous, is of course in CARS. Not new cars, it's all cd players now, soon to be MP3 player docks exclusively we imagine, or who knows, maybe you'll be able to sync up your car stereo to your iTunes, but for now, those of you with a tape player in your car, or anyone with a tape player period, should check out Herndon's Car, which was created with the automobile driver, weird sound enthusiast in mind, starting with experiments using sine wave sweeps of popular car models, not to mention random samplings of FM radio (do we hear "Owner Of A Lonely Heart"?).
Thick swaths of pulsing sound, streaks of static, layered low end swells, the sound of engine rumbles merged with crackling white noise creating hazy fields of static, which occasionally give way to some flipping through the dial, only to slip right back into heaving sheets of soft focus hiss and whir, throbbing and pulsing subtly within clouds of crunchy static, slipping into softly roiling sprawls of low end hum, which in turn pulse rhythmically, the sounds hypnotic and minimal, like some fractured automobile sourced heroin house. Electric windows are rolled down, their sounds processed and looped into weridly mesmerizing mechanical dronescapes, sounding not unlike The User's ink jet printer symphonies.
Killer stuff, and on headphones it sounds amazing, we can only imagine how it sounds cranked in the car.
LIMITD TO 102 COPIES!!
It's finally here!! Holly Herndon's mini-opus Movement is a striking electronica debut that addresses the intimate relationship that entwined humanity with technology. Conceptually, this San Francisco electonic music alchemist has honed her craft through her studies in the masters program at Mills College and through her current PhD work at Stanford; but she's also got a handful of years absorbing minimalist techno from Berlin's finest dancefloors. The album pretty much splits the difference between the humanist splendor of Kraftwerk's Man-Machine and the technological horror of any given Cronenberg / Ballard amalgam of science fiction. She's quick to assert that none of her sounds are dystopian, even as the human voice is strangled and hacked apart into bite-sized components which she shuffles in and out of slippery, shifting digital sequences. The slow crawl of "Terminal" opens the album with clinical pulses pitched to half-speed and pricked with sharp lazer emanations of probing sound. "Fade" harkens back to her Berlin club days with a tautly engineered burst of angular techno with Herndon's voice reversed and modulated into anthemic chords smacked between Chris & Cosey and The Knife. This is an awesomely fluid track but is somewhat at odds with the uncomfortable cybernetic gaspings of "Breathe" that follow. It's clear that Herndon intends for the album to offer release through the rhythmic aspects of "Fade" and the title track later on in the album, and build in tension through the polymorphous digital abstractions that dot the rest of the album. Movement makes for a bold album that's certainly for fans of Matmos and AGF.
It's taken quite a while for local boys Hey Willpower to have their debut full length come out here in the states. But finally it has arrived, and the party jams are a plenty. The mastermind of Will Schwartz, also of Imperial Teen with most of the music and beats created by Tomo Yasuda from Tussle & Coconut. Hey Willpower have really perfected their live show over the years with impeccable and endearing dance moves and a stage presence that's as sassy as it is sincere. P.D.A. has a couple tracks re-recorded from their debut ep as well as nine brand new songs that tap into their feel good take at unadulterated dance minded pop that lands somewhere between the Junior Boys and Justin Timberlake.
Hip party kids around town have been droolin' for this one for months! Yup, sliding in beside their old Stacy Q and Kylie records, it's the debut release from local candy electro partymeisters Will Schwartz (formerly of Imperial Teen) and Tomo Yasuda (formerly of The Boy Explodes). In response to those naysayers who've been expecting to find irony amid the cheese (we mean that nicely!), Schwartz has proclaimed emphatically that their '80s dance pop love is true... and yes, unlike many music-makin' kids these days whom you know weren't even born when that music was first made, Schwartz is indeed old enough to have experienced it first hand. These cats genuinely adore the most fluffiest and shiniest sounds -- ones that many folks perhaps would've preferred be kept in the past. They along with their pair of dancers have dusted them off and brought them back to their basement discotheque hideaway, along with their shiny rainbow patches and gold sequined skirt 'n' pumps set (except for Schwartz who's opted for the shirtless beefcake pose!). They've offered up just four songs to get the good times rolling, but they've loaded 'em up with fun fun fun! Actually that might be all you can take in one dose before succumbing to sugar-shock. HW partner in crime Yasuda has programmed up a remarkable replication of that decade's lip-glossy backing tracks, while Schwartz has come up with an avalanche of coy, naughty lyrical cliches such as those that pepper the giddy second track "Magic Window". "I play you like a baby grand, I feel you melting in my hands" and "I can make you scream, I'm better than a Krispy Kreme" and "Come to the party in my pants!" Oh my!
Finally! This long in the works vinyl version of a long out of print comp gathering up pretty much everything ever recorded by late great SF punks Hickey, is available again, thanks to the folks at 1-2-3-4 Go! In fact, even if you have the cd version, this swanky vinyl version has NINE extra songs, as well as some super extravagant packaging (more on that in a second).
For those of you who were around back in the nineties, you no doubt experienced Hickey once or twice (or EVERY time), their live shows wild and loose and ramshackle, frontman Matty Luv (who passed away in 2002), the funniest fucking guy ever, whose onstage banter was brilliant and baffling, drummer Aesop, who would go on to drum for Ludicra, Agalloch and others, an animal behind the kit, never averse to leaping over the kit and into the fray if some sort of confrontation required it, the band generally wasted and fucked up and brilliantly on the verge of collapse, and the songs, punky and a little bit metallic, noisy and hooky and heavy and catchy as fuck, the lyrics hilarious, just check out some of the song titles: "Make Sure There Aren't Any Squares At My Funeral", "Hickey Is About Long Hair And Getting High", "Everything I Know About Sex I Learned From KISS", they even recorded a tribute to El Farolito, thee late night Mission burrito joint, then and now. The recording surprisingly hi-fi all things considered, and sounding better than ever here. Some of the songs pure pop perfection, others feral blasts of punk fury, most of the jams here somewhere right in between, and yeah, the quality definitely varies a bit, seeing as most of these tracks came from different sessions, from comps and singles, but the energy is through the roof, and is a glorious tribute to this awesome band, who really could have/should have been a WAY bigger deal, and it definitely speaks to a vibrant time in SF's music history, when the Mission was a fucking hotbed for weirdo punks and killer DIY rock bands, and pretty much any night of the week you could end up at some wild house party or some crazed club show or just hanging out on a corner drinking beer eating burritos and shooting the shit.
RIP MATTY LUV!
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!! Packaged in a super swank full color gatefold sleeve, adorned with all the various record covers and a bunch of flyers and an old tour diary, inside is a massive booklet jammed with still more old photos and flyers, original record covers, some liner notes, there's even a Hickey patch, and a download coupon.
East Bay's Del tha Funkee Homosapien and crew return with some alternative hiphop.
Flap flap flap. More like flwwaapp flwwaapp flwwaapphhgh. Blessed Black Wings cast a shadow across the land, blotting out the sun in their demonic leathern flight. It's the third album from the Bay Area's louder-than-thou High On Fire, the first to feature new bassist Joe Preston (Thrones, ex-Melvins, ex-Earth) and it's not going to disappoint any fans of their previous discs, that's for sure. On this Steve Albini recorded effort, the sheer volume and pummel is cranked to full force, ex-Sleep guitarist Matt Pike's Lemmy-vs-Cronos styled vox doing damage atop a fast-marching mountain of riffery. It really sounds like these guys are beating the bejesus out of their instruments, and not just the drums. It's like an angry, aggro version of Sleep, really. And more than ever, this is somehow sludgily reminiscent of the underground metal thrash of a decade or 15 years ago...I'm hearing Nuclear Assault, Laaz Rockit, Exodus, and oh yeah, Slayer!! Includes (while supplies last, we assume) a bonus dvd disc with five live tracks. So, "Cometh Down Hessian" (that's one of the song titles) and buy this!
It's pretty much a given at this point: High On Fire can do no wrong. For over a decade now, they have been one of the most reliable and awesome metal bands on the planet... so reliable in fact, that it's easy to almost take them for granted. But every time a new album hits the streets, we have the same reaction, which includes foaming at the mouth, an increased heart rate, and the urge to destroy everything in sight. They're that good.
Snakes For The Divine is the band's first post-Relapse album, brought to us by E1 Entertainment, formerly Koch. Not sure what the deal is with this label, but the change has done the band some good for sure. The biggest surprise here is the slightly more polished production courtesy of hot shit producer Greg Fidelman, who you might remember from Slayer's recent World Painted Blood and, cough, Metallica's Death Magnetic. But fear not, because words like "polished" are really only used relative to the band's back catalog and do not in ANY WAY WHATSOEVER take away from the sonic beatdown Oakland's favorite sons have delivered since day one. They've just moved on, but there will be no mistaking who this is. Matt Pike's throatshredding vocals and guitar mastery (seriously, who else in metal today can rival this guy?) will tear you apart in the best way imaginable, and then you got the rhythm section, without question one of the best and most punishing in the biz. Des Kensel's intense whirlwind drumming and Jeff Matz's low end rumble are the perfect accompaniment for Pike's onslaught, making High On Fire sound like an uncontrollable force of nature, or maybe some ancient army storming across the mountains toward their ultimate victory. At the same time, this is the kind of metal that people who aren't really into heavier music can still dig, just because everything is done so perfectly. There's really nothing not to like here, and goddamn, this is some catchy stuff. Considering how brutal it is, that's definitely saying something. For a band that hasn't strayed too far from the sound they established early on, it's amazing that High On Fire can remain so vital and awesome. But they've once again delivered, in fact we'd go as far as to say that this is their best effort since 2002's Surrounded By Thieves, and we have no doubt Snakes For The Divine will have you raging into the next morning. Fuck yeah.
For those of you who miss the big ol' fuzzed out desert rock of the mighty Kyuss, or can't get enough of the throbbing blown out RAWK of Fu Manchu and Nebula, this here SF band will almost definitely hit the spot. High Tone Son Of A Bitch mix the above bands sounds with some Thin Lizzy melody, some Eyehategod sludge, and some quirky complex arrangements to come up with some first rate stoner/sludge/doom rock. This 4 song ep also features appearances from Dave Edwardson of Neurosis playing Moogs... and our very own Andee behind the drum kit (but just for this ep)!
MPEG Download: "Fortune's Crown" [/audio/highfortunes.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "Fortune's Crown" [/audio/highfortunes.m3u]
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
This is the second bit of gorgeous ambient folk drone we've heard from Higuma, the duo of Barn Owl's Evan Caminiti and his musical partner Lisa McGee, after a criminally limited cd-r on Root Strata, sadly this lp is nearly as limited, only 250 copies total, already sold out and out of print, except maybe for the 25 copies we have right now, which as you know means, be quick or be dead (dead as in, no Higuma for you, you won't actually die, maybe).
The sounds is much like you might expect from the Barn Owl / Elm / Caminiti and now Higuma axis, looooong tracks of dark windswept shimmer, dense brooding drones and epic abstract folk flecked drift.
Clouds of processed guitar swirl ghostlike above buried rhythms, chant like vox, skeletal melodies, the sounds sprawl and smolder, occasionally building to drugged out Spacemen 3-like soft cacophonies, but just as often melting into something more delicate and space-y with spidery psychedelic guitars blurred into distant swells, gongs and chimes, adding mysterious textures and overtones to the already gloriously murky and moody proceedings.
The whole record is a delicate assemblage of whir and buzz and rumble, the sounds intertwined, smeared, layered into spectral space drone, but always remaining earthy and organic, not OF the stars, but earthbound and staring up INTO the stars, the sound of deep black night, dusted with starlight, all held at bay by the flicker and crackle of Higuma's slow burning dreamlike blurscapes.
So gorgeous. Cool handscreened sleeves, original art by Caminiti, and again, 250 copies, out of print, and unavailable once these final copies are gone...
Wholly enveloping, river soaked, fog piercing drone. Barn Owl's Evan Caminiti and a previously unknown-to-us artist named Lisa McGee collaborate to bring forth cathartic ruminations in the form of ghostly guitar, softly sparring vocals, various percussive devices and an unnamable, innumerable catalog of various other instruments. The collaboration was a live improvisational affair, which the liner notes claim was recorded "in the valley." The appropriately and cleverly named album, Haze Valley, name checks one of our own neighborhoods here in San Francisco, Hayes Valley. Anyone who checked out and enjoyed any of the releases by Cloaks, White Rainbow (particularly the more sedate side), Barn Owl (obviously), or La Monte Young will be pleased with what they'll find here. Make no mistake about it, this is definitive dronemusic. While it is beautiful and has some structured elements, this is for the true trippers. Those looking for hummable hooks and such may find more satisfaction looking elsewhere, but for an immersive, spiritual headphones experience, this is your destination. It is also worth noting that the cover art was made by Evan, and its burgeoning crystal pyramid couldn't be more lovely or more perfectly suited to the sounds found herein. Drone freaks beware, this could easily take over your stereo.
LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES!!! These are the only ones we'll ever have...
The Brit band ABC started the alphabet monikering back in the 80s. Now, Bay Area young'uns HIJK pick it up a few letters down the line. This ain't no schoolhouse rock nor retro new wave business though. HIJK make emo indie pop that intially lures you in with their gentle boyish Death Cab Gibbard-y vocals, but then gives the proceedings a jolt when the tunes shatter into noise bursts. Cool stuff.
Zach Hill is one busy man. Besides constantly touring and releasing records with his duo Hella he also somehow found time to make records with Greg from Deerhoof (Nervous Cop), Rob Crow (The Ladies) and now he's teamed up with the relentless guitar outbursts of Mick Barr (Orthrelm, Octis, Quixotic) for an album that never lets up, brutal intensity from start to finish. Hill's frantic drumming is the perfect backdrop for Barr's impossibly over the top guitar freakouts. Barr has become one of our favorite guitar players in recent years. His ability to full on rip and never let up has held us in thrall with a iron gloved grip. This is the kind of record that makes you want to drink 8000 cups of coffee and finish your life's to-do list in one fell swoop, no rest, no sleep, no mercy!!!! This is the sound of relentless spirit at its most triumphant. Like Glen Branca on a dirty diet of speed, teamed up with a scrappy drummer making the sort of sounds that put most math rock to shame. This is advanced calculus metal for unrelenting students. One of our customers said it best while listening to this "Whoa the Voltron of shredders!" We couldn't have said it better ourselves.
San Francisco's Anna Hillburg has has been making noise in the garage-pop community for a good portion of the past decade, guesting on albums by The Dodos, Greg Ashley, and The Fresh & Onlys; and we would be remiss not to mention her twee-pop ensemble Dreamdate. This eponymous record is her debut, and finds her again in very good company working with Greg Ashley and Greg Moore (of The Moore Brothers and Joanna Newsom's ensemble), in producing this elegantly simple album of folk-inflected pop numbers. Beach House would be the most obvious reference in the daydreaming pop hooks and hip-swaying / '60 girl-group arrangements, all with some subtle hints of Nashville twang, and an earnest seductiveness, although Hillburg's production is far more intimate, with added flourishes from Hillburg's trumpet. With summer right around the corner, here's a great slow-burner of an album for a lazy Saturday afternoon. Limited to 500 copies.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Back in stock (and at an extra nice price!), but maybe not for much longer! Very few copies remain and it is actually now officially out of print, so nab one while you still can. We are the only store in the known universe where you can still get it!
Folks are certainly all a-buzz about the new Brian Eno documentary film, 1971 � 1977: The Man Who Fell To Earth, and at a recent screening here in SF, there was a special rare performance by the amazing Enochestra led by hardcore Eno enthusiast Doug Hilsinger. We sadly missed it, but were spurred to revisit his wonderful adaptation of Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) album, and heartily encourage you to do the same (or check it out for the first time)! Here's what we said about its original release back in 2004:
What apparently began as a lark has absolutely snowballed... and with what is quite possibly the (unintentional) best timing ever! Indeed it seems the planets have aligned in the most fortuitous fashion for devoted Brian Eno fan Doug Hilsinger (presently in SF band Waycross, and formerly in Bomb and Gifthorse) and his bandmate Caroleen Beatty. Initially planning to record covers of just two of the songs from TTM(BS) for their own enjoyment, they got caught up in the inspired swing of things and progressed right on through the rest. Hilsinger has emphasized that this was not intended to be some grand transformation nor interpretation of Eno's original. This is simply their celebration of a great album, with the hopes of drawing attention back to the original. And it certainly does just that, but it also bears the mark of an immensely talented duo in their own right. If you dig this, be sure to check out Waycross too. Now, we're probably going to catch some flack for this, but we'll dare to say that he improves on a few of the originals. C'mon all of you Eno fanatics who're screaming "Impossible!", it's not all that hard to fathom. Consider the following: back when Eno recorded the album, these songs were fresh and new to him. They tingle with the electricity of experimentation and spontaneity, but there are moments that are perhaps not fully realized. On the other hand, Hilsinger has lived and loved these songs for thirty plus years! He knows them like the back of his hand. With the exception of the lead vocals which were the domain of Beatty, Hilsinger played and produced all that you hear. With a full command of each instrument and the aforementioned inside'n'out knowledge of the songs, his performance and the recordings are breathtaking. The interplay between the instruments captures the subtle dynamics of a kickass full band playing together live. You'd never know it was laid down track by track, piece by piece. Heck, the prerequisite organizational skills alone are daunting. Completing this loving, enthusiastic tribute in the best possible way, Beatty's languid voice winds its way around the slinking arrangements, delivering Eno's words in a most seductive, heavily lidded fashion. Highlights include a great carnivalesque rendition of "Back In Judy's Jungle" transitioning it into a pint-raising singalong, as well as their slowed-to-half-time, intoxicating version of the originally near-punk, Wire-ish, propulsive "Third Uncle". The winding chorused guitars and textural wheeze are rich and effective while the vocals add to the air of subtle unease. Splendid!
So back to the magical tale of good timing... The pair completed the work right around November 2003 which just happened to coincide with a special lecture that Brian Eno was giving here in SF. Of course Hilsinger was in attendance, and personally delivered a copy into Eno's hands. The very next day he received an enthusiastic phone call from Eno giving it his mighty stamp of approval. He even wrote the liner notes! To boot, that year marked the 30th anniversary of the album.
Highly recommended!
John and Peter Hinds (of Sun Ra Research 'zine fame) return with their second album of hybrid jazz/electronica grooves. The mix includes drum'n'bass beats, dub elements, spacy synth, faux-classical compositions, AND incoherent interviews with homeless people
