[ aquarius records new arrivals

IMPORTANT (Please read to avoid confusion): Some items below may be tagged with a bold, red, all-caps OUT OF PRINT/UNAVAILABLE notice. This does NOT mean that all other items not so tagged are, in fact, in stock — or for that matter, in print and available, though there's a good chance they are. Some folks get confused on this point, and we can see why, so please read this for further clarification and other important before-you-order information. Unlike some mailorder websites, we don't have an electronic inventory system linked to our site, so you can't be sure of what we actually have or don't have in stock at any given moment without asking us — please email our mailorder department for availability status — or better yet, just go ahead and place your order using our shopping cart function and we'll get back to you with the status of each item. If you have general non-mailorder questions, email the store.

Showing results 1 through 50 of 149.

2nd Gen is the work of Manchester's Wajid Yaseen, whose blistering shards of electro-shock hip-hop have graced a good number of Mille Plateaux's "Electric Ladyland" compilations alongside Alec Empire, Techno Animal, and Fever. "Irony Is" finds itself

Formerly an MC with cult LA underground hiphop group Freestyle Fellowship, Aceyalone continues the positive flow with his third album. Kinda reminds us, delivery-wise, of Young MC (blasphemy!) but then again our favorite hiphop is of the more commercial,

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Gorgeous gatefold double lp. The latest in the seemingly endless barrage of recorded output from the mighty Acid Mothers Temple, Japanese hippies whose glorious din has induced pantswetting by psych/drone fans (and label owners, judging by the number of

Singer/songwriter Ned Oldham (brother of Palace's Will Oldham y'know) presents his band's third full-length.

Antibalas is a music cooperative out of Brooklyn, spearheaded by Martin Antibalas. The same group (more-or-less) was formerly known as The Daktaris, who you may recall as the modern-day '70s styled faux-African funk combo who cut an excellent disc for the

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Former Cradle of Filth guitarist Stuart Anstis offers a solo album on the experimental Iris Light label (Szeki Kurva, Aube, Maeror Tri, Band of Pain, etc.). It's not black metal, but more of an electronic soundscape thing with beats...not bad, but not too

Arab Strap's fourth album finds the Scottish duo returning to Chemikal Underground / Matador after an ill-conceived stint with Go! Beat, who were pushing the purveyors of miserablism to produce the big hits like Portishead. It's not really clear what Go! Beat The title of this album refers to an ancient eastern theology which posits that an invisible red thread links soulmates. Yet within Arab Strap's semi-autobiographical tales, the quest for the soulmate has been marred by the regrets of casual sex and the physical misery of one too many hangovers. As on previous albums, Aidan Moffat's half spoken / half sung confessionals reveal little guilt (and more pleasure) from alcoholic misadventures. Musically, this is just as spartan as before, with crappy drum machines given fantastic production and simple minor-chord guitar melodies. Instead of putting those 'Parental Advisory' stickers on this album, there should be stickers advising not to drink when listening to Arab Strap's albums.

Snappy Italian prog-rock originally released in 1974 on Cramps records. Reminiscent of King Crimson or even Henry Cow, Arti & Mestieri move between light and jazzy-but-frenetic riffs to heavy blues influenced prog. Using a very well rounded out line up of

Not really sure why I ended up randomly listening to this cd (I had heard the name before and maybe seen their cds), and I don't really know anything about them, but this is some really great sixities style French pop but with a modern electronic feel,

After a long hiatus since the last Azusa Plane album, Jason DiEmilio has reinvented himself as an angularly avant-guitarist with aspirations of making another David Grubbs album. "The Highway's Jammed With Broken Heroes" is the first release of Azusa Plane in

High quality downer pop from local darlings Baby Carrot, who've been toiling away for several years now, and just may have made their best record yet. Play Every Day contains thoughtful indie-rocking on the order of Rex, Codeine, Karate, or Pavement. Inching

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A total meltdown between Stephin Merritt's Future Bible Heroes and Momus' melodramatic baroque-pop. Heavy duty dance beats with pouty Brit boy and candy-coated girl vocals. For fans of Pulp too.

Third demonic blast from this Austrian black metal band, and easily their best. Takes the primitive buzzsaw blur of their earlier records a step forward, with better production, better songs, better playing and even more pictures of naked demon ladies,

Yet another slab of crunching, crushing electronica from our friends at Fflint, brought to us (of course) by the so far infallible Berkowitz, Lake and Dahmer. This time it's all about the drone, and no one here at AQ can argue with that. While some of the stuttering skitter and jagged glitch remain, they are surrounded by and occasionally overtaken by washes of speaker melting hum and foundation rattling rumble. Fucking amazing.

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While some bands' reunions can leave you cringing, wishing they'd let your warm sonic memories of them glow on unscathed, the return of the Blake Babies does no such thing. They haven't fallen into the unfortunate reunion traps of trying too hard to

Not-as-free-as-a-lot-of-stuff-on-ESP New York free jazz from the Paul Bley Trio: Paul Bley, Barry Altschul, and Steve Swallow. Really nice and dark and sort of late night sounding jazz.

Bogus Blimp were nothing like we expected. I mean, they're from Norway. They release records on Garm's (from black metallers Ulver) label Jester. Who could have guessed that they would sound like circus music, or gipsy music, or sort of like Tom Waits. No

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Here's a cool concept, particularily if you could see 'em in person: a live funk covers band does the work of a hiphop dj. That is, they play a groovy medley of classic funk/soul breaks all segued together in a very dancable mix. On noted DJ Peanut Butter

Very interesting cd-r release from this German experimental jazz-rock group, led by Mr. Bungle fan and super-creative keyboardist Bjoern Eichstaedt. Guitar, tapes, percussion, double bass, various effects, voices, saxophone, flute, electric cello and more are

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When recording under the pseudonym Ester Brinkmann (a name taken in homage to his dead sister), Thomas Brinkmann leans away from his trademarked techno minimalist tendencies in favor of conceptual abstraction. As with the previous Ester Brinkmann recording

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As we're told in the liner notes, BS 2000 is Amery Smith and Adam Horowitz (aka one Beastie Boy). And they proceed to crank out the cheeziest of drum machine beats and meep-meep-y keyboard sounds. Silly dork music with lyrics that would make John S. Hall of

AKA Bullet Proof Scratch Hamsters, this Bay Area "supergroup" is comprised of DJs Eddie Def (Skratch Piklz), Cue (Cue's Hip Hop Shop), Quest (Live Human), Marz, and MC Eddie K.

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The Olympia, WA-based duo of Chris Sutton (Dub Narcotic) on drums and Olivia Ness on bass pump out some bare bones quite Meters-inspired grooves while staying true to the lo-fi K Records spirit. At times C.O.C.O.'s off-kilter boy/girl vocals bring to

"So if a guy brought in a home made cd, you guys would sell it?" So said a homeless guy when I told him that "Branches" -- which had been playing on our house system at the time -- was more the kind of thing we were looking for than the Eric Clapton & Kenny G

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The debut album that's been building this Bay Area group quite a hefty buzz around town. And if plentiful pop pleasures with sunshine-y harmonies are your thing, you'll be buzzing madly as well. Although photos have presented them as sorta Elastica-esque

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Captain Fatass, who have been playing around town for some time now, finally recorded and released a full length album so that now there's no need to wait for their upcoming shows to listen to them. Musically they draw a lot from the musical well of SF's rock

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Cd_Slopper is the collaborative work of Mego contributers Oswald Berthold (of Farmer's Manual) and Florian Hecker. "SaskieWaxi" features both a musical program and an HTML-executable element of text / graphics / etc. The musical format is certainly informed I'll admit that I gave the CDrom portion only 30 minutes or so, but each attempt to view / install the software of the visual data resulted in the computer acting all funny (opening up the wrong programs, not finding the proper html link, or simply crashing). I'm reminded of so many art gallery exhibitions of "internet art" which find the computers always in a similar state of disarray... making me wonder, [1] is that what is supposed to happen (thus, making a really lame comment about the nature of computer glitch), [2] is the artist just a bumbling idiot, or [3] did the last viewer try to download some porn, thereby fucking up the system? In any event, I'm not impressed with this portion of the evening's program.

Loren Chasse (Id Battery, Thuja, Knit Separates) originally released "Synthesis of Neglected Places" as a limited edition cassette but has finally released a second pressing as a cdr. The majority of these recordings were made during Chasse's sabbatical in the keeping up with Steve Roden's retro-grade process of being "experimentally incorrect" (where such 'pop' aphorisms of melody and Martin Baytes' baroque singing could be included with archetypal experimental techniques such as musique concrete), Chasse concludes his album with a beautiful selection of plaintive piano improvisations, rippling with a hazy production wash and tweeting birds in the distance. "Synthesis of Neglected Places" acts as a nice bridge between the droning abstractions of his solo work and his collaboration in Thuja.

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The first actual full-length from these serial-killer fixated Japanese doom-mongers. Super sludgy psychedelic doom metal like a sloppy Sabbath with samples from documentaries about John Wayne Gacy and other famous murderers mixed into the musical mayhem.

Live Leonard, a wonderful previously unreleased performance from his 1979 world tour. Recorded in England. If you've never heard Cohen's sad-eyed, deep-voiced, world-weary storytelling songs, now is the time. Features "Bird On The Wire" and other classic

Coldplay are a melding together of today's best! Radiohead, Pulp, and maybe some Red Hot Chili Peppers balladry (complete with falsetto) backed by lush piano and guitar melodies, a shuffling drumbeat, and the occasional loud guitar wash. All polished to a

Quite happy in releasing sporadic productions in painfully small pressings, Jonathan Coleclough has been one of Aquarius' favorite dronologist / deep listening composers and one who deserves a place in the experimental ambient pantheon that glorifies the work

Not a new release, but we managed to get a few in stock for the moment, so we thought we'd list this. We got turned on to the Confusional Quartet (great name!) a while back because of a review our friend Tim Ellison wrote in his great 'zine Modern Rock

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We're happy to be graced with another lovely Loren Mazzacane Connors release. His trademark style of "Venusian blues" guitar is in fine form here, with the haunting, lonely, late-night beauty of his playing really delving into the darkness over this 37 minute

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Solo piano works performed by avant-garde/Fluxus composer Philip Corner, recorded 1998. "Non-compulsive indeterminacy" never sounded so good.

The story behind Crunch is an interesting one, indeed: Michael Fakesch (the member of Funkstorung who runs the Intelligent Dance Music boutique label Music Aus Strom) claims that he has no information about the identity or origin of Crunch. He received a DAT

Possibly the most polished and "full" sounding album (of the several we carry) from San Francisco's beloved Beth Custer, the restless innovator who, whether as a solo artist or in her prolific past as part of Club Foot Orchestra and other intrepid musical

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Unlike the primitive American black metal ususally found on Killjoy's Baphomet label, this dometic debut from this Japanese band fits better into the technical, brutal death metal scene, a la Cryptopsy and Gorguts -- but with more of an old school, metal feel

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One of 1998's best metal releases gets a digipak reissue with a multitude of bonus tracks! Harkening back to '80s thrash masters Destruction (whose "Curse The Gods" gets covered here), this hyper- andrenalized Swedish power trio somehow created what might

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More unabashed Kyuss worship. And no one does it better than Sweden's Dozer. And I do mean no one. Dozer sound exactly like Kyuss; groovy low end, wailing vocals, warm, desert-baked guitar. So don't look here for anything original, but if you're still missing

Dump is the longtime solo project of James McNew (bassist w/Yo La Tengo). Tackling a heap of Prince songs in his own special way means loading them all into his super-sweet lo-fi machine and setting it to "stun." This cd is a reissue of a cassette (released a

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Swedish conceptualists Leif Elggren and Thomas Liljenberg have published "Experiments With Dreams," a book which collects a number of outlandish letters to politicians, film stars, and business leaders, positing absurdist questions and claiming that the "Two Thin Eating One Fat" appears to be a much more personal documentation of Elggren's and Liljenberg's dream communication, as they have recorded themselves quietly mumbling meandering narratives which are marked by strange political rhetoric and the repeated phrase "let me in." Thick metallic drones, distant pounding drums, and rhythmic exercises with a piezo buzzer accompany and at times interrupt the ongoing spoken murmur. While all of these recordings found on "Two Thin Eating One Fat" were originally produced for various collaborative installations and performances, there is remarkable consistency to this collection which articulates the absurdist intellect behind this artistic pairing.

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Coming out of the same Finnish scene that spawned AQ-faves Circle and Ektroverde, Es is the work of Sami Sanpakkila, who in addition to this solo project, also plays in various bands like Kiila and Velvolino. He also runs Fonal records. (I guess all that

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More slick and super produced kick ass radio ready hip hop from Eve (who along with DMX, Drag-on, The Lox and a few others, make up the Ruff Ryders). We're beginning to wonder why everyone is so into Lil' Kim and Foxy Brown when Eve is poised to knock them

Not sure why one of our distributors described Evoken as 'doom for morons', especially considering how much completely stupid metal they actually distribute. In fact, this record is really great, like super-slow motion death metal. Huge and dark, droning

Fetish 69. The name says everything, right? Well, perhaps not on this double CD of remixes and collaborations. With a name as bad as Fetish 69 (implying some horrid diva-house disaster or worse a My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult sex-horror-shock industrial

Expensive import disc that we brought in because we're unsure whether or not it's going to be released domestically. Kind of like Studio k7's DJ Kicks series of DJ mixes, it's not Fila Brazillia at all here, but them spinning a collection of their favorite

My first year of college, stuck in the Northwest, I discovered an old Steve Fisk cassette in a small record store and bought it to listen to on the way home for X-mas on the Green Tortoise. Cruising down I-5, headphones on, I dug it instantly. Fisk not only had

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Reissue of this 1968 blast of noisy free jazz from this Dutch ensemble. The Free Music Quintet was: Pierre Courbois, Peter Van de Locht, Boy Raaymakers, Ferdy Rikkers and Erwin Somer.

Uhh, meet the kinder, gentler Frogs. Someone must've washed their mouths out with industrial strength soap. I spent my first listen waiting for the pottymouth to start, but it never did (except for maybe a very brief moment or two, I mean, there's a great

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[ aquarius records new arrivals — issue 109 ]