Another excellent reissue of the work of French experimental / pop musician Thierry Müller (who we know from the reissues of his pre-Ruth albums under the Ilitch moniker, one of which we recently reviewed). Fast becoming a unanimous staff favorite, Ruth's
Remastered with three lengthy bonus cuts from 1982 and 1984 that teeter on more experimental ground, like Müller's celebrated work as Ilitch, which was more of a dark, droney, experimental prog guitar / synth project.
Norway strikes again! The amazing Salvatore (not to be confused with the cryptic No Neck Blues Band offshoot K. Salavatore) is a mostly instrumental five piece band from that Scandinavian country. They share a lot with their Finnish neighbors (and AQ-faves)
But Salvatore's urgent, headnodding music possesses a gorgeous charm of its own, as there's a lot more in the way of psychedelic guitar burn and use of feedback in their compositions than is usual with Circle. Some other bands that Salvatore seem to reference along with Circle and Neu!: Can, Pell Mell, Flying Saucer Attack, Village of Savoonga... not bad company.
From the first moment we heard this band, we thought: wow, we've *got* to get more of these, Salvatore is a natural for Aquarius! It took us a couple months, but we were finally able to import a bunch of both their first and second albums at a good price direct from Europe. And, after playing them in the store, we're pretty sure we were right about 'em -- we sold some immediately! So good. Both discs are totally recommended, with "Clingfilm" (2000) being overall more structured and melodically catchy and "Jugend" (also 2000) being perhaps more heady, intense, and soundscapey. And both, of course, are not just recommended, but *mandatory* for fans of Circle!
Salvatore's second album, subtitled "Music from and inspired by De Utvalgte's literary installation based on The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde", was recorded in Morocco for reasons unclear to us, although we could go on and draw comparisions to the
Read the review of Savatore's debut "Clingfilm" nearby to get the lowdown on these Norwegians, whose albums are a must for any fan of AQ-faves Circle.
"Jugend" is equally as good as "Clingfilm", with maybe more of the drone quotent, though that's a generalization. It does feature as its opening an eleven-minute epic called "Jugend II" that's an awesomely beautiful heavy guitar drone piece, each delicious wave of feedback-distortion seemingly designed to directly trigger your brain's pleasure centers. Play this one LOUD! Elsewhere on the album, mellow out to the dub effects of "Gallo" or the sheer beauty of "Ambrosia".
And let's just say that track three, "We Have Found The Enemy And He Is Us", may be the best Circle song Circle never wrote!
The theme of Wilde's "Dorian Gray" is the battle of Youth and Beauty with Time, with the lesson being: Live! Such exhortations make sense when in the grip of this music! A fucking great record.
Although Salvatore do remind us so strongly of Circle (and Circle offshoots like Ovalki, Ektroverde, and Pharaoh Overlord), it seems likely that such similarities are the result of shared influences rather than a direct ripoff. And, even if Salvatore *are* shamelessly copying the Circle blueprint, we can forgive 'em 'cause they do it sooooo well.
A final note: their brand new album, entitled "Fresh" will be arriving in a few weeks, we'll list it when we get it. And we hear that they are recording a fourth album in Chicago with Tortoise's John McEntire...
Textural improv psychedelia, what we might term some kind of modern "international krautrock" (our new invented genre), from this group of Montreal outer-limits explorers lead by Sam Shalabi (Molasses, Detention, solo, etc.). This is a fine follow up to their
While the majority of contemporary digital minimalists furrow their brows while contemplating which filter to tweak in order to get the perfect attenuation of a completely inaudible sound, a few practitioners of minimalism have managed to dig a little deeper
The artwork is a series of poorly shot photographs of urban detritus, grimy hallways, discarded plastic bags, refrigerators filled with frozen meat, empty bottles of vodka, children's drawings, and even a portrait of Sigtryggur after an extended bender. Not the most readily discernable collection of images, but provides the sense that Sigmarsson still views himself as the chaos-loving Icelandic punk who founded Stilluppsteypa a decade ago. Match the music and the images with such idiosyncratic titles as "If I Remember, I Have Always Been Certain" or "The Sometime Charm," and Sigmarrson has developed an intriguing set of semiotic puzzles that may or may not have any solutions. When asked by Rob Young of The Wire if his Stillupsteyppa was willfully obscurist, his obvious answer was "In a way we are astronauts, we are filling in the missing gaps." Anyway, this is an album the more than lives up to its title.
The excellent split LP that Six Organs Of Admittance recently did with Charlambides really whet our appetite for this disc, the third full-length album from Ben Chasny (Six Organs, on record at least, is pretty much just him). Actually, we've been eager for
Yet another pseudonym for the insanely prolific Matt Wand, one half of Stock, Hausen & Walkman and Hot Air head honcho. Small Rocks is a bubbly squeaky beat monster that just might send Mouse On Mars, Atom (tm) and even Blectum From Blechdom running home
Don't know much about this artist, but "Yinyue" is supposedly an hour long journey through Beijing via static laden radio transmissions collected and manipulated by DJ Smallcock. Essentially, these recordings (all clocking in at 3:33, by the way) are
A scant two songs from Songs: Ohia. Main man Mr. Jason Molina is joined by Jennie Benford and Matthew Derby. With the focus primarily on his vocals and guitar, he keeps his voice down low and subdues his usual emotive falsetto - perhaps to provide space
"You get a donkey and you get a baboon and you feed 'em a diet of chili and custard for thirty days and then you get 'em to fuck. Their children would be the Germs." -- Kim Fowley
That's just one of the choice quotes in this book, which chronicles the LA punk scene in much the same oral-narrative way that the wonderful Please Kill Me did for the NY punk scene of the '60s and '70s. This book starts in the mid-'60s with the Doors, and covers the Runaways, the Screamers, the Weirdos, X, Germs, the Cramps, Black Flag, SST, Slash magazine, etc etc etc. Everyone is mean and says that Belinda Carlisle was fat and ugly -- aw! The authors went straight to the source, if the sources were still living, so this is a story told from the horse's mouth -- the narrative smoothly constructed from the interviews. While not as perfectly-executed as Please Kill Me, this book is nonetheless highly recommended. COOL BEANS "#14 'The Drugs, Alcohol and Sobriety Issue'" magazine + cd 5.95
New issue of everybody's favorite caffeinated, truck driving, taxi cab, bicycling, indie-rock-music-and-life magazine. This time we've got an interview with our own Andee, on his label, his straight edge lifestyle, and his illogical and unfettered love of drug and booze soaked rock. Also Lee Ranaldo interviews William S. Burroughs, Rob Crow (Thingy, Heavy Vegetable, Pinback), Hood, and much more! CD includes tracks by Circle (2 really short, unreleased tracks), Burmese (doing a Brainbombs cover), Daniel Johnston, Hood, Xiu Xiu, Rob Crow, Mono Pause, Shut Up Little Man! and more. THE WIRE #216 magazine 7.50
Latest dispatch from the UK's preeminent avant rock magazine with Richard Hell (!) on the cover, Gordon Mumma, Rhythm And Sound, a cool primer on music's lunatic fringe (Skip Spence, Wild Man Fischer, etc.), and our own Jim Haynes explores Maurizio Bianchi's Sacher-Pelz box in even greater detail than on a recent AQ list. BROKEN FACE #13 magazine 5.98
Newest issue of one of our new favorite zines. Following a similar path as the Ptolemaic Terrascope, but with a much less hippie, more 'avant' bent, but with lots of love for space rock, psych rock and beyond. Issue #13 has a great interview with Vibracathedral Orchestra wherein Neil Campell fesses up to listening mostly to Dr. Dre, an interview with the reclusive Omit, a piece on the Road Cone label, Marrianne Nowottny, 2001 top tens and tons or reviews!!! ----* ----* In Stock, No Chance to Review : ----* AGATHODAIMON "Chapter III" (Nuclear Blast) cd 15.98 AKITA, MASAMI & ZBIGNIEW KARKOWSKI "MAZK (3)" (Naim) cd 15.98 ALVA NOTO / SIGNAL / BYETONE / KOMET "Mort Aux Vaches" (Staalplaat) 2cd 16.98 AMBARCHI, OREN "Mort Aux Vaches: Song of Separation" (Staalplaat) cd 16.98 ANAKSIMANDROS, THE "Life Is A Skullbow" (Veglia) lp 14.98 ANODYNE "The Outer Dark" (Escape Artist) cd 14.98 BEWITCHED "Rise Of The Antichrist" (Osmose) cd 14.98 BIRCHVILLE CAT MOTEL "Blankangelspace" (Celebrate Psi Phenomena) cd-r 10.98 BIRCHVILLE CAT MOTEL "Creeping Frost Onset" (Celebrate Psi Phenomena) cd-r 10.98 BIRCHVILLE CAT MOTEL "Crop Circle Empires" (Celebrate Psi Phenomena) cd-r 10.98 BIRCHVILLE CAT MOTEL "Long Vanished Spirals" (Celebrate Psi Phenomena) cd-r 10.98 BIRCHVILLE CAT MOTEL "September" (Celebrate Psi Phenomena) cd-r 10.98 BIRCHVILLE CAT MOTEL "Shapeshifter" (Celebrate Psi Phenomena) cd-r 10.98 BOBBITO & DJ SPINNA "Wonder Wrote It Part 2" (Self Released) 2cd 17.98 BOUNTY KILLER "Next Millennium" (TVT) cd 17.98 BRYSON, P. MILES "Alejandro's Carneceria" (Illegal Art) cd 14.98 COIL "Time Machines" (Eskaton) 2lp 25.00 COLECLOUGH, JONATHAN "Cake (version 2)" (Siren / Robot) cd 15.98 DARKNESS REMAINS "To Touch The Depths of Sorrow" (Tribunal) cd 14.98 DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE "Stability" (Barsuk) cdep 8.98 FREESTYLE FELLOWSHIP "Sex In The City" (Ground Control) 12" 6.98 FRITH, FRED "Freedom In Fragments" (Tzadik) cd 16.98 FU MANCHU "California Crossing" (Mammoth) cd 11.98 GILES / GILES / FRIPP "The Brondesbury Tapes (1968)" (Voiceprint) cd 14.98 GUNTER, BERNHARD "Redshift" (Trente Oiseaux) cd 16.98 HALO "Guattari (From the West Flows Grey Ash and Pestilence)" (Relapse) cd 14.98 IDIOT O'CLOCK "(Original First Album)" (Alchemy) cd 19.98 JURADO, DAMIEN AND GATHERED IN SONG "I Break Chairs" (Sub Pop) cd 14.98 LAPORTE, JEAN-FRANCOISE "Mantra" (Metamkine) 3" cd 9.98 LICHT, ALAN "An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn" (Drag City Books) book 11.98 LOPEZ, FRANCISCO "Untitled #123" (Alien 8) cd 14.98 MISS KITTIN & THE HACKER "First Album" (International Deejay Gigolo) cd 16.98 MUMMA, GORDON "Live-Electronic Music" (Tzadik) cd 16.98 NATE DOGG "Music & Me" (Elektra) cd 17.98 PEANUT BUTTER WOLF "The Best Of..." (Copasetik) cd 16.98 POISON THE WELL "Tear From The Red" (Trustkill) cd 14.98 PRAM "Owl Service" cd ROOT "Black Seal" (Redblack) cd 14.98 SAXON, SKY SUNLIGHT "Golden Vaults Volume 1" (Timeless) cd-r 12.98 TOWN AND COUNTRY "C'mon" (Thrill Jockey) cd 14.98 V/A "Czech Assault" (Relapse) cd 14.98 V/A "Kosmos: Soundtracks of Eastern Germany's Adventures in Spaace" (All Score Media) cd 16.98 WORKSHOP "Es Liebt Dich Und Korperlichkeit Ein Ausgerflippter" (Blue Chopsticks) cd 14.98
Remixes of the strangely wonderful Norwegian quartet, whose impressive debut "Det Eneste Jeg Vet Er At Det Ikke Er En Stovsuger" fused modern classical composition (member Maja Ratkje is a renowned young composer in her native Norway) with their unearthly
One sided - one track stunner from Sir Jenkinson, fresh off the tail feathers of "Go Plastic". Like his previous pop hit "My Red Hot Car", this is sooo good, it doesn't even have a name - and it's the only track on here! Vocoded raps and fucked up catchy rhythms in the bent Squarepusher fashion.
If there's one thing you can count on with those Wolfe identical twins (Alison from those grrrrrls Bratmobile and Cindy from this much more southern twangy band you're reading about right this very moment), it's that if they've got something on their minds
Label sampler number two from the only hip hop label that seems to matter anymore, Def Jux. Dark and off kilter, aggressive and bizarre, funky and totally fucked. 12 tracks, 10 of which are previously unreleased. Features: El-P, Aesop Rock, Cannibal Ox, Mr.
Miss Kittin, as huge as she has become in just the past few months, has decided to treat her salivating fans with a continuous mix of some of her favorite techno house tracks (and, of course, two tracks featuring herself -- a remix of Miss Kittin & The Hacker's "Frank Sinatra" and Felix Da Housecat's "Silver Screen Shower Scene"). Also featuring Plastikman, Plaid, Laurent Garnier, Sven
Hey Matmos, when was the last time you were in Montreal? Did you lose a powerbook there? It sure sounds like the kids in Montreal must have ransacked your gear taken all of the bits and pieces that didn't make it into "A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure" or
A collection of tracks produced utilizing Nanoloop, a realtime synthesizer and sequencer for the Nintendo Game Boy developed by Oliver Wittchow at HfbK in Hamburg. Given the limited capabilities inherent in a 4-bit sound chip found on portable game modules, the results are quite impressive and undoubtedly fun (some even downright unbearable given the microtonal capabilities). Many
Right from the beginning, this compilation starts off on the wrong foot. The foundation of the record is a shaky one, attempting to find semiotic connections between electronic music as a form of alchemy and the transmutation of language within the context of
"One2Two" is a double CD compilation of material from the first 12 Intermedium releases, plus a couple of unreleased tracks, featuring Hans Platzgumer, Samuel Beckett, Console and Thomas Meinecke, Philip Jeck, Guenther Koch, Ammer and Console, Walter
Volume two in Kompakt's definitive guide to the tranquil aural haze of Köln. Like its predecessor, Pop Ambient 2002 covers the classic, very distinct Kompakt sound -- dense, gritty and repetitive, always simple and extremely melodic and beautiful. Featuring
Here's a double cd compilation of Angolan shantytown pop from 1965-1975, with a similar lineup of artists as the "Angola '60s" and "Angola '70s" comps we've already been carrying: Artur Nunes, Os Kiezos, Urbano de Castro, Oscar Neves, Jovens do Prendo, Os
Outcaste continues with their impressive Bollywood film music, or "filmi", series with a second volume of songs culled from India's ultra-prolific industry. This collection spans the greatest historical range of the industry yet, including tracks from as
An almost note-by-note, word-by-word, clap-by-clap re-enactment of the soundtrack to Robert Altman's 1975 masterpiece 'Nashville'. If you're a fan of the movie, then you'll know exactly what this is all about! Paying tribute to this film's music is Ms Carolyn
Reissue of a 1978 album, originally released by the Italian avante garde label Cramps in their Nova Musicha series, of almost maddeningly repetitive electronic music by Argentinian composer Horacio Vaggione. Spacey, cosmic, "multilayered sci-fi epic glop"
There's two LP-side-long tracks here. Track one is seventeen minutes of relentless burbling, recorded in 1971 with an IBM computer. Track two is a duet for mini-Moog and Yamaha organ that takes off from the madness of track one to end with a pretty keyboard fanfare of near prog-pop proportions, which in 1978 could have potentially been a hit, with heads anyway.
This disc drove Andee insane (he thinks it sounds like Tangerine Dream on speed), but Allan liked it quite a bit (he also thinks it sounds like Tangerine Dream on speed)!
More hyperspastic drill'n'bass from the super prolific Aaron Funk. Less aggressive and painful than last year's "Making Orange Things". Less playful than the recent "Songs About My Cat". "Doll Doll Doll" is a more straight ahead techno/d'n'b effort,
Judging from the amount of material coming from the Leeds collective, the Vibracathedral Orchestra must be constantly performing, recording, or manufacturing artwork for their exponentially increasing discography of super limited edition cd-rs, seven inch
Purportedly Wickham-Smith's 'religious music' record, 'Extreme Bukake' (named for a style of problematic Japanese porn, the sleeve even has a barely disguised example) is an expansive, rich and captivating exploration into WS's past and present experiences with
Wonderful and extensive (two cds worth!) historical documentation of the Epic Records-period ('58-'61) works of the unquestionable grandfather of rock 'n' roll. Includes many previously unreleased tracks, alternate takes and demos. Everyone from Elvis, The
The return of the orcs!!! Chapter two in the musical tale of Uglach and his band of orcs. Here's a little of what we said about chapter one (which we also have in stock):
"Much like a radio play, the whole drama is played out via dialogue, ambient sounds and incidental music....a musical story, utilising dark ambience, cinematic soundscapes, the sounds of life in the forest (sticks crackling, wind blowing, water splashing, swords clashing) and a litany of grunts and growls, which is the dialogue spoken entirely in orcish."
Chapter two is heavier on the music (not heavier mind you, but containing more music), with less emphasis on battles and dialogue, sounding much more medieval and almost renaissance faire-ish at times (although fear not, there is still plenty of orcish being grunted, as well as the occasional unsheathing of swords). Flutes, hand drums, jaw harp, and didgeridoos are woven into fantastical soundscapes, evoking forests, caves and times of yore. In fact, according to the liner notes, much of the record actually -was- recorded in forests and caves (as well as lakes, rivers and a castle). Those of you who need another Lord Of The Rings fix before film number two might find what you're looking for with Za Frumi. If you don't have the first one, you might want to start there, but if you're anything like us, you'll have to get both!!
