Who would have thought that this little cd, an insane one-man Carcass/Morbid Angel hybrid, released on a tiny European label, would cause such a stir here at Aqaurius even among non-metalheads? And after running out of the 5 or 6 copies we were able to
Putrefaction. I love that word, especially how it's spelled. Anyway, despite the generic death metal band name, album title, and lyrical content, Necrophagist is by no means your run of the mill generic death metal band!! No sir. First off, it's one guy (German, I think) playing the guitar, grunting the vocals, and programming the drums. Bedroom home studio metal. The main thing, tho: playing the guitar. This might be the ultimate crazy squiggly guitar lead album ever, outdoing even Morbid Angel and Krisiun in the extreme guitar soloing sweepstakes. It's insane, really. As brutal as the music gets, there's guitar shredding wedged into every available moment of music. As mentioned, this is one guy, probably recording at home. Well, I don't know about that for sure, but there must have been a long ProTools session involved in this!! 'Cause there's no way anybody could do this live. So, as a death metal record, pretty great indeed. Ignore the death metal aspect (if only the dude who did this would have!) and you've got an avant-garde guitar shred fest for John Zorn fans. It would make Buckethead weep. And supposedly there IS a new record on the way, this time a FULL band, that's fully capable of pulling this stuff off live. Just hope they manage to make it over here. In the meantime, just sit back and enjoy the onset of putrefaction.
Seminal krautrockers Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger have at long last (after an uncomfortable decade-plus of legal wrangling) patched up whatever their differences were in order to allow their three classic '70s albums to be offical released on cd for the
For those of you not already Neu!-savvy, these are the guys responsible (along with Kraftwerk, with whom guitarist Rother and drummer Dinger once played -- that's how they met, before splitting to form Neu!) for the "motorik" beat, the propulsive, autobahn-friendly, proto-punk electronics hybrid that has influenced countless bands. From big fans Bowie and Eno back in the seventies to the hundreds of postrock/electronica acts that namecheck them now, Neu! are gods. Negativland not only got their name from a Neu! song off the first album, but even the name of their label, Seeland, comes from a track off of 75. Indeed, some bands have built their entire careers on, uh, paying homage to Neu! (Michael Rother, quoted in the most recent issue of MOJO: "I went to a Stereolab concert once. Suddenly I had the impression I was listening to myself -- very strange!")
Astralwerks has done a nice job with these reissues. No, there's no bonus tracks or extensive liner notes or anything "extra", but all the original artwork is included (not that we have an original Neu! lp handy to compare with, but anyway they look nice). We could have done without the stickers on the front with blurbs from famous fans, but that's discarded once you unwrap the cd so no big deal. We'd guess that Neu!'s first album will sell the most copies, as it's graced with the endorsement of Thom Yorke, whereas we hope that Neu! 75 won't suffer from the moronic blurb from John Frusciante.
In keeping with the generally fucked up saga of these records/reissues, we're already having trouble getting enough of these in stock (our suppliers getting one title, but not the others; very small quanities, that sort of bs), so act fast. Sorry for the high price, it *might* come down as the supply situation changes, but for right now it reflects what we have to pay for these. Argh. And the vinyl versions (YES! they're doing LP reissues) have been inexplicably delayed until the end of July! Double argh.
Neu! 1 (1971) is a stunning work of art, drifting back and forth between the stripped down minimal kraut-pop that they're most commonly associated with, to long, spacey and psychedelic forays with lapses into musique concrete like moments with lapping water, children and jackhammers. Their sound could be most closely compared to early Kraftwerk or Cluster. In fact, the track "Im Gluck" sounds an awful lot like both Kraftwerk's "Radioland" and, believe it or don't, the beginning preamble to Rush's "Xanadu." Whether these two had Neu! in mind when they worked these songs out remains to be proven, but it's nice to think of such dissimilar groups drawing from the same well.
Neu! 2 could possibly be considered the world's first "remix" album, as a good portion of it features "varispeed" versions of previously released Neu! material. They ran out of studio time/money, so the story goes, and after recording two songs for a
The critical status quo qualifies Neu! 75 as the best of three albums, simply because it is the most musically adept and holds the most studio polish. While we here at Aquarius are not going to deny that Neu! 75 isn't a great and possibly required album, we
The two previous albums were infused with a bold spirit of experimentations that led to the mutable pace of the motorik grooves on "Negativland" (from Neu! 1), and the idiosyncratic "remixes" from Neu! 2. While Klaus Dinger's percussion remains unchanged from the first two releases, Michael Rother moves away from the risk-taking agendas from the first two albums, to a more commonplace rock schtick. Rother's guitars hold a greater range of dynamics with beautifully soaring Pink Floyd-esque harmonics to gritty aggro / glam rock power chords, but his insistance on singing much more isn't a great idea. As previously mentioned, Neu! was a profound influence for David Bowie; thus, it is not a coincidence that Neu!'s "Hero" (from Neu! 75) predates Bowie's "Heroes" by a good two years.
Germany's Night In Gales return with their fourth album. This time out, they've added an '80s Bay Area thrash/Metallica element to the melodic death metal sound that their previous releases shared with so many popular Swedish bands like In Flames and Soilwork. Fast, intense songs with truly "sung" vocals are the rippin', rockin' result.
Nuisance is an interstate power electronics / noise assault group with its members hailing from both the Bay Area and Chicago. It looks as if Blake Edwards of Vertonen and Thomas Dimuzio have something to do with this one. Opening with blistering shards of Whitehouse like high frequencies piercings, Nuisance gradually expands into the full-frequency power found in the Merzbow and
Pre-Kraftwerk cosmic hippy krautrock classic now re-issued on (probably quite limited) vinyl.
All the people in Owls were in the far punker outfit Cap'n Jazz, but this band is more like the Owls' Kinsella Bros other project Joan of Arc. Midtempo angular emo with tortured vocals (which kind of ruin it for me, but I'm stupid). On Jade Tree.
Listening to "Da Natura Sonorum" it's easy to understand where Autechre borrowed their mutable rhythms from. Often cited as a huge influence upon those figureheads of current abstract electronica, Bernard Parmegiani emphasized the "instantaneousness of the ephemeral and the mobility of the repetitive" within his fusionist compositions between musique concrete and live instrumentation.
Bernard Parmegiani is a French musique concrete / electronic music composer who has worked extensively with the influential INA GRM recording studio / label. While a number of 20th Century composers avidly footnote their work with dense historical references and conceptual overviews, Parmegiani favors the acousmatic approach (currently espoused by Francisco Lopez) of creating a
Reissue of their '87 six-song demo plus 9 tracks from a live show that recorded that same year. Phantasm, if you don't remember, was the band of ex-Hirax vocalist Katon W. DePena and ex-Metallica bassist (pre-Cliff!) Ron McGoveny. The demo tracks feature drum god Gene Hoglan (Dark Angel, Old Man's Child, Death, etc.). Thrash!!
Reason #651,953,891? (oh heck, I've lost count!) why Japan rules: Polysics! They've been described as the Devo of Japan. And they certainly do give a hearty nod to the genius of Mothersbaugh and co, but they do so in a manner that is purely Japanese...
Cd reissue of the 1975 second album from obscure French prog-fusion act Potemkine, a "Zeuhl" band in the mold of Magma. Not as heavy or dark as we were hoping for, but still it's cool, complex stuff. Includes tracks some from their debut lp and single as
Scott Herren -- who was responsible for the equally underachieving Delarosa albums on Schematic -- has managed to push all the right buttons in terms of hype generation for his Prefuse 73 project, but never really gets the album off the ground. This is an
Thank you, Sub Pop! It's about time these classic Radio Birdman tracks got a decent Stateside reissue -- this their first in over 20 years! One can always quibble with "best ofs" but this really IS pretty much the essentials: at 22 tracks, 70 minutes, it's
You just may have heard me (cup) raging about the punky pop magic that was The Rondelles last album entitled "The Fox". Really, it was one of my top picks from 1999. Well, when the time came to press play on this their newest sock hop offering, I was positively giddy. Granted this is a bit of a mishmash collection containing six new songs, two K Records singles and a Teenbeat Records
The Czech Republic's Root are one of the most talented, original, and eccentric black metal outfits around. Slowly we in the West are getting clued in to their stuff. Here's two of their earlier efforts remastered and repackaged as a double cd: 1991's relatively raw "Hell Symphony" and 1995's more advanced and melodic "Kargeras". Also included: some live bonus tracks recorded in
Bass and drums boy/girl duo who were popular in San Francisco before taking off to the Czech Republic. Urgent, angular stuff that's as weirdly hyper as the early Minutemen. Both punk and prog in a lo-fi fashion. We're lucky that their latest album made it all the way here! Comes in a cd-sized little fold out book with two pop up panels. We have only three copies in stock.
Anthemic indie-rock on the Get-Up Kids label. LA sing-along-songsters rock in the dynamic power-chord tradition of Get Up Kids, the Anniversary and The Stereo. Since when did punk rock get so bubblegum? (Not to mention a suspiciously glossy website where they brag about working with a producer who has worked with Beck.) However, this is a fine kickass pop record. Check out the song
Built To Spill... meet Peter Cetera. Just kidding, that's just what struck me within the first few bars of this album. Sunshine-y retro-pop tunes with very Beach Boys-esque soaring vocal harmonies. Definitely listen before buying.
New on Emanate (if.then.else, o.s.t., sybarite, lilienthal), Portland's David Chandler's latest release is a schizophrenic collage of Aphex-Twin skitter, Eno ambient, Adult electro and Reichy-Glasssisms. Nice.
First album (from '94) by Albion's masters of epic Celtic/cosmic doom metal. It's nothing compared to their more recent masterpiece "New Dark Age" but if you're a fan already, check out their plenty heavy beginnings. Reissued with the artwork altered to look more like that of "New Dark Age" -- a pretty cheesy move on the part of their old record label!
Sutekh takes sound sources from Alva.Noto (aka Carsten Nicolai / Noto), reconstructing his piercing tones into a dancefloor irritant. On the flip, newcomer Geoff White restructures Sutekh material while Kit Clayton contributes to a full on collaboration.
After the fairly savage review we gave to Tarwater's previous effort (we said we thought "Animals, Suns, and Atoms" sounded like a new Lou Reed album!) we can happily say we like this new one better. Indeed, we'll call it a comeback for the Tarwater duo of
The specialization of language offers the ability for those acquainted with certain phrases, words, and even verbal inflections to communicate with a greater efficency. Here at Aquarius, we've coined such neologisms as "dronology" and "fuckery," simply because
On the other hand, Italian composer / musicologist Giancarlo Toniutti communicates in nothing even close to a common vernacular; instead, his writings are a confounding display of specialized academic language and are composed within extended run-on sentences that make Aquarius look like the saints of brevity in comparsion. There may have been a time when I had the patience to read Derrida, but not anymore.
Given that ridiculous prologue, I have to say that the collaboration between Toniutti and Andrew Chalk (who in contrast to Toniuitti has always been painfully quiet about his work) is truly fantastic. As the language in the massive liner notes is too convoluted to decipher with any certainty, I'm guessing that the two artists collaborated upon long thin wires which they set up in natural settings. They then took these recordings of windswept scrapes, amplified creeks, and bowed metals to ICR Studios where Colin Potter helped them mix their recordings into that eerily angelic drone which emanates from all Andrew Chalk recordings. As Chalk doesn't entirely dominate the proceedings, Toniutti's penchant for gritty textural striations does add an important aural characteristic to the recordings. In spite of the difficult-to-impossible liner notes, the music which it attempts to describe is transcendentally beautiful.
Shagrat was a British psychedelic "mystic-rock" group formed by Steve Peregrine Took after he parted ways with Marc Bolan and Tyrannosaurus Rex. This is apparently Shagrat's complete output, compiled from scratchy acetates and so forth dating from 1970 and
True "Outsider Music" lovingly culled from the thousands upon thousands of bad records out there, and don't get us wrong, these are certainly very bad too, but bad in a good way. By Outsider Music we don't mean music made in the Great Outdoors, we mean music
Contained herein: solo warblings courtesy Howard Finster (better known for his fantastic outsider art sculptures), multi-track tape manipulations sounding like early cartoon music a la Raymond Scott, singer songwriter fare performed in a van to an audience of one dog, amateur poems set to music by seasoned "pros", vanity songs played by hired orchestras, Beat poetry performed over psychedelic squiggles, hotel-bar bands playing Smokey Robinson, kids tunes, retarded young adults performing "This Little Light of Mine", music performed on the 1973 Comet (an instrument that has 400 notes per octave!), even a bonus track from electronic children's music pioneer Bruce Haack, himself the object of several recent reissues. 25 tracks in all, 71 minutes of either great listening or aural torture (it's up to you to decide.)
Lots of liner notes and pictures, just be aware that this is a cd-R (and given that, we are sorry about the excessive price of this disc, but it's based on what the compiler is charging us). This recording is for those of us folks who think The Shaggs are all that.
As "tribute" comps go, this is a really good one. Usually a tribute succeeds only if the cover versions are really different from the originals (for instance, the pop-punk bands doing metal covers on the "I Heart Metal" tribute). At the very least there can be
Blue Cheer of course is the granddaddy of all metal/stoner bands, with their first two and a half classic albums still being heavier in their own way than most stuff released today. And Black Widow have put together a pretty excellent international line-up of their progeny to pay tribute. Pentagram (who are on here twice, and may as well BE Blue Cheer 'cause they do it so well!), Internal Void, Thumlock, Natas, Fireball Ministry, Ufomammut are a who's who of some of today's best doom/stoner acts. Plus there's some more obscure names from the space/prog axis as well. The only puzzle about this comp is that several bands chose to cover songs from Blue Cheer's not-so-heavy early '70s albums, which turn out well, but I can't figure out why they did that, except to be different and demonstrate what big fans they are. Still, quite a bit of 1968's "Vincebus Eruptum" and '69s "Outsideinside" is represented. Right on!
Incredibly cheesy and fun comp out of Munich that gleefully covers all sorts of '80s and '90s hits using Commodore 64 Atari gamesounds as its only instrument. Now this is what I *wish* I could have listened to while playing Frogger back in the day. 8-bit hilarity, in the form of "Always on My Mind", "Blue Monday", "Enola Gay", "Venus", "Mission Impossible", "Smells Like Teen
Now on vinyl! Twenty eight tracks of rare and unreleased funk and exotic outerworldliness specially selected by Luke Vibert from the music libraries of Chappell, Southern, iM and PIL. Artists featured include Nino Nardini, Jack Arel, Eddie Warner, David Holland, Anthony King and more. Don't be misled into thinking this is Luke Vibert's music, it is him doing the selecting and
Soul influenced tracks from Brazil dating mostly from the mid to late seventies. Laced with funky electric bass, rhodes piano, horn sections, female choruses singing backup, and even the occasional string section, this is a perfect soundtrack for swank retro cocktail parties to get those guests dancing. A must for fans of the saucy soundtrack releases on the Crippled Dick Hot Wax
Kid606's label celebrates its second birthday with this double cd (for the price of one!) that compiles 44 tracks from the usual (and unusual) electronica suspects: Lesser, Blectum From Blechdom, Com.a, Dat Politics, Mikael Stavostrand, Wobbly, Pisstank,
Hmmm, me thinks this sounds a wee bit like Portishead... no, on second thought me thinks this sounds a shamefully lot like Portishead and the Cocteau Twins, but terribly terribly watered down. The disappointment is only exacerbated by the fact that one half of this duo is Robin Guthrie formerly of the Cocteau Twins. Oh dear. The other half is Mono's Siobhan De Mare. Thumbs down.
Talented Portlander M. Ward croons in a hoarse whisper over hushed acoustic guitar, slide guitar (giving the music an eeire Court & Spark-style twang), cracklings, shaken bells, and piano. The fingerpicked guitar is pretty impressive, god this guy must
"Theres a young feller up Portland way,
who managed to wrangle some display
Of a juxtaposition of songs in a pseudo-stunning way
So inclined then was I, to help flip this heap up
So others might lap that toss
and have some brand new tasty pup."
The third album of (alternative is it?) country-folk from singer/songwriter Gillian Welch, following up 1998's "Hell Among The Yearlings", which became a big favorite here at Aquarius (and elsewhere too of course!). Primarily focused on lonely acoustic
For years now, Jon "Wobbly" Leidecker has skirted around the edges of the electronica community, collaborating with People Like Us and The Weatherman (that amazing voice in Negativland), and finding more than a few unreleased samples of his work popping up on
Using a MiniDisc player feeding back upon itself as the sole source, Dion Workman (formerly of the Sonic Youthish avant-rock ensemble Thela with Dean Roberts and Rosy Parlene) and Australian sound artist Rohan Thomas have constructed an incredibly austere piece of digital minimalism that sounds very much like the Bernhard Gunter album "Details Agrandis." An album that tries very hard
Back in stock! (But act fast!) DJ Z-Trip and the rest of the Phoenix-based Bombshelter crew excel at mixing rock music into the hip hop subgenre of turntablism. Z-Trip has for years been performing his Monsters of Rock set, and you may have already heard him
As we said before, Uneasy Listening is super rare, we only know of a couple stores to whom Z-Trip brought the disc, and he will not be making any more after the thousand are gone. This is the last batch we'll ever have.
Bay Area hiphop turntablist action from DJ Zeph with additional beats & scratches from fellow DJ's Quest (Live Human), Imperial, and others. There's lots of live playing from local jazz cats, with flavors like flute, sitar, and trombone in addition to upright bass, drums, and electric piano, etc. Several tracks have lyrics from local rapper Azeem (Spearhead), but most are funky
