[ 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.

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We didn't know it would come out on cd yet here it is: Acid Mother's Temple playing Terry Riley's famed composition "In C", wherein the musicians are instructed to play a series of 53 repetitive sections over and over as long as they wish. Almost all the The original Eclipse-label LP version has been repressed as well (with better constructed covers than before) and is also in stock.

Following their absolutely dismal major label debut EP is this full length. We poke at it gingerly. Perhaps the EP was just a minor misguided faltering? Trying to appeal to a wider audience with tentative trials in emo-melodicism? I'd hoped they'd regained

RealAudio clip: It Was There That I Saw You
RealAudio clip: Source Tags & Codes

Here at AQ we try as often as possible to review records without quoting or paraphrasing from the press releases (and when we do it makes us feel kind of dirty). But in the case of New York-based Antibalas, their self-written bio says it better than I can: "Antibalas (Spanish for "Bulletproof" literally "Anti-bullets") is the next generation of afrobeat in the tradition of the Black President, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. This fourteen-plus piece band hits hard with the left and the right -- monstrous horns and bass layered over funky polyrhythmic beats and breaks coupled with furious lyrics challenging and attacking the dehumanizing capitalist system and inciting insurrection in English, Yoruba, and Spanish. Antibalas formed in May 1998 of members of Desco Records' Soul Providers and Daktaris. This union of Latinos, whites, Afro-Americans, Africans and Asian-Americans resides in New York, spread out over Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx." So, if you don't already have some Fela albums, by all means get one or two or twenty before you acquire Antibalas. But if you're already familiar with Fela's Afrobeat sound, how wonderful is it that a modern band can replicate the sound so joyously and exactly. This group must be *amazing* to see live.

RealAudio clip: War is a Crime

East Bay hip hop crew Anticon continue to impress with their wordy, staccato raps, so speedy that they sound like when you run your finger up piano keys really quick. They're really into the texture of the vocals as well as the lyrics, and as always there's

RealAudio clip: We Ain't Fessin' (Double Quotes)
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We were always huge fans of Arch Enemy, the death metal band of Mike Ammott (formerly of the mighty Carnage and the even mightier Carcass, and currently with stoner rockers Spiritual Beggars) until their last record 'Burning Bridges', where they dropped the We have the limited double disc version (and as it's limited, not sure how long we will) that features a bonus disc of unreleased/rare tracks including a Judas Priest cover, an Iron Maiden cover, and a EUROPE cover (?!?!?), a bunch of Japanese only bonus tracks and a video, all with Arch Enemy's original (male) vocalist. Disc one also features a video clip as well as a bonus track.

RealAudio clip: Enemy Within
RealAudio clip: Burning Angel

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

Not really anything new here. This is essentially just a live DJ set by Burnt Friedman, wherein Mr Friedman draws all his source material from the Rather Interesting back catalog. The liner notes claim that Friedman both "drastically" edits and subtly

RealAudio clip: El Ovin Mambo
RealAudio clip: Midi A Go Go

This is such a strange cd. And we've all become completely obsessed with it. A bizarre series of spoken instructions and long droning notes. Easier to just share Forced Exposure's description: "The playing directions for the instrumentalist on this CD are derived directly from the so-called sucking stones sequence in Beckett's Molloy, where the author has his protagonists invent three variations of the correct way to suck 16 pebbles -- distributed between two coat or trouser pockets. Everything takes place inside the head, and yet these image provoking speech rituals find their way to the outside. Everything becomes the listener's projection room. We look on the speakers as we would an open, exposed interior. Speech is its own dissecting instrument. Existence is transferred into speech, being is removed from its time. The images remain, the sound of speech remains -- in which the secret of an entire world is concealed." Simply, it's 3 actors, reciting instructions like: "Take a stone from pocket one. Put it in your mouth. Suck it. Suck it...." and so on. With the occasional moaning horn. Totally surreal and creepy and super great.

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Another cool dance hall single from Jamaica, this time around the rhtyhm is "One Minute Man" (Missy Elliott). B-side, though supposedly containing a "Remix" of the aforementioned rhythm, has a version that is completely unrelated.

Like a few of the newer hip hop dancehall remixes, this one utilizes a few different rhythms crossfaded in and out. The b-side says "version" on it, but -- surprize, surprize -- actually has the Elephant Man theme (using the melody to "Spiderman" of course.) Nice printing bonus on this single is a classic misspelling of Beenie Man as "Bennie Man".

Jesus here it is, what might be the most highly anticipated 'power metal' release of 2002. German metal gods Blind Guardian are a worldwide phenomenon these days, even making headway in the US of A. At least, we here at AQ have been waiting ever since their

RealAudio clip: Precious Jerusalem
RealAudio clip: Under The Ice
RealAudio clip: Sadly Sings Destiny

Man, it's been a while since we heard the name Brick Layer Cake. Ten, twelve years maybe? Brick Layer Cake is Todd Trainer, drummer for Shellac, and while he is definitely partially responsible for the huge racket that Shellac kicks up, BLC is a much

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RealAudio clip: Whats Her Face

From the label that brought you Corporal Blossom, Mutated Christmas, etc. is this puzzling audio work from P Miles Bryson. Ostensibly inspired by the films of Jodorowsky, it borrows from said movies and also adds lots of ambient sounds of children at Packaging includes a Mexican spice packet with some chiles.

RealAudio clip: The empty dress that swung in the breeze like a memory of lost love

Burd Early strikes us as being very Silver Jews-esque. Perhaps a bit Smog, Dieselhed, and Leonard Cohen-ish too. The liner notes offer precious little information on the mysterious figure who goes by the name Burd Early, and further investigation (i.e. a

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A perfect krautrock album. Can's second with Japan-born singer Damo Suzuki. Brilliant!

Oooh. Nice new vinyl reissues of several classic Can albums have just been released. "Monster Movie" was the 1969 debut LP from The Can, that band of kraut-rockin', Stockhausen-studyin', JB's-lovin, beat-poetry-recitin' hippy freaks. This album features the

Oooh. Nice new vinyl reissues of several classic Can albums have just been released. 1971's "Tago Mago" double album was their third full-length release, and their first with expatriate Japanese singer Damo Suzuki (who they discovered busking on the street PS If you like Circle and you don't have this record, get it!!

El-P, producer and beatmaker extraordinaire, here reprises in instrumental form the entire Cannibal Ox album Cold Vein, in order. And we have to say, good call. Because the music behind Cannibal Ox's rapping is totally stellar and indeed deserves its own

RealAudio clip: Iron Galaxy (instrumental)
RealAudio clip: Raspberry Fields (instrumental)

During the past couple of years, San Francisco's Loren Chasse has split his time equally between textural minimalism, as found on his exceptional solo album "Exfolia Motors", and organic improvisations, as heard in Thuja as well as several other bands on the "Fantasy Apparition" is a super limited CD-R pressed in an edition of only 200 and wrapped in hand screened burlap bag. So, when these are gone, they're gone.

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Loren (Mazzacane) Connors' newest album is solo guitar work again from this virtuosic player. The entire record is super slow and dreamlike, and the *gorgeous* guitar tone is eerily reminding me of the first track on Miles Davis' seventies jazz-fusion classic

RealAudio clip: The Departing of a Dream, part 1

Long, long before he hooked up and mellowed out with Burt Bacharach (how 'bout twenty four years ago!?), a young Elvis Costello kicked ass with the punchy greatness of "Radio, Radio" and "Pump It Up" and here is the excellent album that featured these early

RealAudio clip: Pump It Up
RealAudio clip: Radio, Radio (Capitol Radio Version)
RealAudio clip: Running Out Of Angels (Demo)

Total Shutdown bass player/vocalist Nate Denver (who also does time as lead vocalist in Dig That Body Up, It's Alive) heads out on his own and heads in a decidedly less skronky (but no less strange) direction. Ostensibly a 'folk' record, there are elements of Think Robert Johnson, Sebadoh, Ween, Anton Maiden, the Folkways Box, Total Shutdown, Elliott Smith, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Bongwater, They Might Be Giants, Will Oldham and Slayer and you might get an idea of what's going on in Nate Denver's head. Or you might not. Real nice.

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Everyone knows (or should know) that with the apparent cessation of recording/performing by TLC (the R+B band EVERYONE liked, even my 'metalhead' housemate Josh loves 'Fanmail') that Destiny's Child is the only R+B group that really and truly matters. They look

RealAudio clip: Jumpin', Jumpin' (Remix extended version)(Featuring Jermaine Dupri, Da Brat and Lil Bow Wow)
RealAudio clip: Say My Name (Timbaland Remix)

Since her departure from the fuzzy, feedback-laden world of Eric's Trip many moons ago, Julie Doiron has quietly and steadily amassed a lovely, intimate and sizeable body of work under her own name as well as under the moniker Broken Girl - garnering her

RealAudio clip: La Jeune Amoreuse
RealAudio clip: Don't Ask

Another Jamaican dancehall 7". This time the rhythm is again"One Minute Man" (Missy Elliott). And the B-side has a completely unrelated version. Yes indeed, as the title implies this is Elephant Man and Ricky Rudy paying homage to Bob Marley here, singing a slightly altered version of "Time Will Tell".

Falconer's self-titled debut from last year was one of the "true metal" sensations around AQ at the time (that is, for Andee and Allan anyway, and I think we're getting Windy into 'em now too). The band's folk-derived melodicism and sheer heavy metal might

RealAudio clip: The Clarion Call
RealAudio clip: Busted To The Floor

On "Cover Magazine" the follow up to the wonderful "Chore Of Enchantment" from 2000 (and the beautiful recent reissue of OP8's "Slush"), Howe Gelb, he of the ever-severe countenance, takes a slightly different path and is joined by an illustrious gathering

RealAudio clip: Johnny Hit And Run Pauline
RealAudio clip: Human/Lovely Head

All right, we're all probably familiar with Grandmaster Flash, the guy that invented scratching and turntablism, who was instrumental in laying down one of the foundations of hip hop -- he was THE DJ. In the voluminous, entertaining liner notes (it's

RealAudio clip: The Mexican
RealAudio clip: Flash Got More Bounce
RealAudio clip: Tear the Roof Off

First V/VM Test release that isn't a completely moronic conceptual art piece of shit. H>OST is the work of Polish artist Jacek Toszek. Cold and beautiful sonic landscapes much like those found in his native land, Toszek captures and embraces the frigidity

I've been going Hawkwind crazy lately. I [Andee] pretty much missed out on Hawkwind completely the first time around. I was only 2 years old when this record came out. Later, I missed out again, having opted out of the whole high school, pot smoking, parking This reissue contains the original album plus 5 bonus tracks!

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RealAudio clip: Space Is Deep

More Hawkwind. And more and more and more. Lately all I [Andee] want to listen to is Hawkwind. Somehow I manged to make it to 32 without hearing Hawkwind ever. And man, did I miss out. "Hall Of The Mountain Grill" seems to be the poppiest of these 4 Hawkwind

RealAudio clip: The Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear In Smoke)
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If you need a little background on my [Andee's] current Hawkwind obsession see the review for "Doremi Fasol Latido" elsewhere on the list. Needless to say, these records are killing me. How did I mange to miss Hawkwind for all this time. All the stuff I love, Originally released in 1971. This reissue contains the whole original album plus 3 bonus tracks.

RealAudio clip: You Shouldn't Do That
RealAudio clip: You Know You're Only Dreaming

Two discs of sonic mayhem beamed from space through a hazy cloud of pot smoke. Hawkwind are seriously kicking my [Andee's] ass. This is a double live disc of Hawkwind at their best (that would be Lemmy-era). Taking the studio cuts and stretching them out,

RealAudio clip: Born To Go
RealAudio clip: Down Through The Night

A double disc set for the price of one from the inimitable Richard Hell, founding member of New York-style punk in the '70s with the bands Television, the Heartbreakers, and the Voidoids. The first disc is a reissue of the formerly cassette-only ROIR release Disc two is a document of a few live shows, including one that took place in England on an ill-fated tour with the Clash. Hell calls this performance one of the most aggressive he'd ever given, but the recording quality is terrible throughout the live disc, and I don't really get why he chose to release it. Liner notes are extensive, with song by song recounts written by Hell himself, and lots of photos.

RealAudio clip: Love Comes in Spurts
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Well now, this record is certainly a breath of fresh air. I mean when was the last time you heard a decent mathrock record? Hella is two Sacramento guys on guitar and drums and they've made this loud 'n awesome record, which is super listenable and accessible,

RealAudio clip: Been A Long Time Cousin
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Ms. Honeywell possesses a lilting, lamenting voice quite akin to that of Trailer Bride's Melissa Swingle, with the added sultriness of Cat Power and the dark hum of Edith Frost's delivery. On her debut album, we have gentle porchswing songs with

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RealAudio clip: Hug My Heart

Here is the DVD release of "Be Glad For The Song Has No Ending", the film about the Incredible String Band. Hugely influential (the Stones tried to sign them, they played Woodstock, Van Morrison covered them), the band played a psychedelic folk music that

Run by Tom Greenwood and Josh Stevenson, both from Jackie-O Motherfucker, the U Sound series documents lost, hidden and forgotten musical history. Volume 2 features excerpts from two live Jackie-O Motherfucker shows in Portland and Vancouver back in 2000,

RealAudio clip: Charms Of The Viper (Live)
RealAudio clip: Ray-O-Graph (Live)
RealAudio clip: The Pigeon (Live)

More live recordings from the Portland improv collective Jackie-O Motherfucker from 2001 from shows in Portland and Vancouver. This document opens with their often squiggly saxophone mellowing out into sultry almost snake charmers' slinkiness, fronting lots

RealAudio clip: Pray (Live)
RealAudio clip: She Cuts Heart Shapes (Live)

Again, ESP-style revisionist jazz kicks off these two sets from Jackie-O Motherfucker from live shows in their native Portland and Seattle. Of all of the U Sound archives of Jackie-O live shows Volume 4 is the most free-jazz oriented, even their amazingly

RealAudio clip: Pigeon (Live)

YAY, THIS BACK IN PRINT! Now in a jewel case instead of the digipack. Why Philip Jeck isn't as famous as Oval and DJ Spooky is beyond us, as we think his brand of repetitive, crazily evocative warmth is just as good if not better than Oval, and his turntable installations are more interesting than anything Spooky ever (wet)dreamed. For instance, Jeck has subtitled his turntablist experiments "low-fi classics for the electronic generation," working with his orchestra of antique Dansette turntables - an arsenal 180 machines strong!!! With the crackling hiss of records found at flea markets, Jeck's concept for his performances / compositions involve a bottle of glue and a scalpel forcing the record needle into locked grooves at the desired points on the records. Anyway, for the three WONDERFUL "Vinyl Coda" pieces spread across these two cds, Jeck's scratchy vinyl-derived loops fade in and out of percussive polyphony, fractured orchestral majesty, almost industrial / factory grinding, 50's pop vocal snippets, and laughably long applause. It's quiet yet there's SO MUCH going on. And some points it sounds like the quiet parts of a Godspeed or Slint record, gently but urgently loping and hiccupping. Highly recommended!

RealAudio clip: Vinyl Coda I

Heavy, heavy psychedelic acid funk with some Latin vibes, stuff that could have made Funkadelic proud, collected from the Jimmy Castor Bunch's earliest albums. These 16 slabs of funk include almost all the really good songs (which is almost ALL of the songs) from the band's first 2 RCA albums ("It's Just Begun" and "Phase Two"), plus a few from their somewhat less awesome (actually quite weak) third and final RCA disc, the jazzy "Dimension III". Jimmy and the band bounced back and recorded many more funk classics after they left RCA, not letting disco get them down, and you can find those (and a few others from the earlier doo-wop phase of his career) on the "Everything Man" best of comp Rhino released a few years back, which only has a couple of the songs found here. There WAS a 2-on-1 import cd reissue of the first two of Castor's RCA LPs that we had a while ago, but we haven't been able to get it lately. I like the review I wrote of that disc a lot though, so why not quote some of it here: "Blending fat funk guitar, '60s astrologically-obsessed psych rock, Hendrix worship (there's a weird tribute to Jimi here, a Purple Haze/Foxy Lady hybrid cover), as well as doo wop, soul and some sappy r&b...they don't make 'em like this anymore. "It's Just Begun" will send you back, way back, to the time of the "Troglodyte". The cave man theme recurs, with "Phase Two"'s "Luther The Anthropoid (Ape Man)"... Heavy acid funk stomp, silly sexual primal urge stuff to be sure, mixed with some lighter, more 'spiritually' oriented cuts. As we move into album no.2, there are definitely some really bad moments of love song cheese to interfere with your enjoyment of the BAAADDD moments of troglodyte funk, but on the whole this is deep and weird enough to be essential to the dedicated funkateer. For fans of early Kool & the Gang, Parliament, B.T. Express, that sort of thing, but the best stuff here's got a dosed and primordial edge unlike anything else excavated from the early '70s era." This collection cuts out the worst of the "love song cheese" alluded to above (although the songs added from "Dimension III" aren't any better unfortunately) and so makes for, along with Rhino's "Everything Man" comp, a mandatory funk purchase. Not rare groove, but "everywhere groove" as it says in the liner notes.

RealAudio clip: It's Just Begun
RealAudio clip: L.T.D. (Life, Truth & Death)

Supreme metal triumph. The last good (in fact, great) Judas Priest album, also happened to be their last with 'Metal God' Rob Halford at the mic. Originally released in 1990, "Painkiller" at the time seemed like the big Priest comeback, after a string of

RealAudio clip: Painkiller

First cd issue of what is reportedly a highly sought after record of UK psychedelic rock. The singer's got a nice Skip Spence strain in his voice, and there's a lot of sitar on top of the more traditional instrumentation, and the winsome harmonies are

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RealAudio clip: Hallo to Me

Man, does this guy never disappoint? Damien Jurado has released three solo albums of sad, downtrodden rock songs delivered often on acoustic guitar, his plaintive voice throaty and intense. I've compared those solo albums to Springsteen's Nebraska before,

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"I've lost my calculator" or so we believe a line of the lyrics went to the second track of this two song, 26 minute ep. An intentional wink of humor? It's rather hard to say with this oft self-serious breed of apres-rock bands. It appears Karate have

RealAudio clip: Sing

This is indeed the best of both worlds. Touted as the first ever superstar, hip hop/R+B collaboration, ok maybe, but whatever. The pont is, this shit is goooood and I am digging this record like crazy. Imagine any of the last two or three Jay-Z records (and we

RealAudio clip: Best of Both Worlds
RealAudio clip: Take You Home Wtih Me A.K.A. Body

The second album from this dorky (in a good way) electro-rock band. They play poppy, nerdy space-wave with emo undertones complete with alternating earnest boy vocals and vocoded robot voices over clunky early '80s synth lines. It's not unlike a lo-fi,

RealAudio clip: Dawn Of The Butterfly
RealAudio clip: Knodel Rocks

When one of our friends told us about this little cd containing an experimental piece using the sounds of a Zamboni, we got very very excited. A Zamboni! (That's that unusual machine that resurfaces the ice in hockey rinks.) Upon hearing it, we were even more This cute 3" cd, released through Metamkine's esteemed 'Cinema Pour L'Oreille' series of electro-acoustics and musique concrete, contains one track, "Mantra", which opens with a trio of motors starting up and emitting a gentle purr. As these engines warm up and shift through various perfunctory cycles, a wide spectrum of metallic vibrations slowly spins through the stereo field. While it would be nice to believe that these movements coincide with a Zamboni circling a really nice binaural microphone, it's more likely that Laporte exercised his artistic license with a judicious use of crossfading and stereo panning upon his field recordings. As the disc draws near its end, it sounds as if a screw or bolt is loosened by the vibrations and two pieces of metal begin a clamorous bell-ringing arrhythmia. When these motors finally are shut down, those pieces of metal still resonate for a beautifully sustained coda. Back to the Zamboni issue: we'd been told by 'reliable' informants (Loren Chasse who heard about it from Ferarra Pan who heard it on Scot Jenerik's radio show) that the source material for Jean-francois Laporte's "Mantra" was a Zamboni. As the liner-notes (all in French mind you) indicate that Laporte incorporated the sound of an air compressor from an ice-skating rink, it didn't rule out the possibility that indeed that air compressor could belong to a Zamboni, but it didn't actually say anything about Zambonis. (Are they even called Zambonis in France, anyway?) As you can tell, we Aquarians like the Zamboni and would really like to believe that the Zamboni was responsible for this album. Thus, we contacted the label, who merely sent us an English translation of the original liner notes, which again stated the source material to be an air compressor. Thus, we are left to ponder the quandary: is it or is it not a Zamboni? Putting this grand existential question aside and the true origin of the source material out of sight for the moment, what's true is that Laporte has indeed sculpted one of the most compelling drone compositions that we've encountered in quite some time. For loyal readers of these lists, that's no idle comment as artists like Oragnum, Jonathan Coleclough, Mirror, John Duncan, and Francisco Lopez still rank highly for us in the pantheon of dronescapers. Not only as working model but also as a something of belief system, Jean-francois Laporte applies the ideals of the mantra to the urban landscape. To him, the hypnotic audio elements of refrigerators, motorcycle engines, and in this case the Zamboni / air compressor rise above their mundane properties to become something that can be meditated upon and hold transcendent properties. A very, very nice recording, Zamboni or not. Even if you don't normally buy all the weird, droney experimental stuff we recommend, you might want to take a chance and try this out. After all, it's only 20 minutes out of your day and eight bucks. And, maybe it's a Zamboni!

RealAudio clip: Mantra (Excerpt 1)
RealAudio clip: Mantra (Excerpt 2)
RealAudio clip: Mantra (Excerpt 3)

Once again fans of Bjork, Lamb, and Portishead will find a kindred spirit in Berlin duo Laub who add their own experimental twists to those female fronted, melodramatic swansingers. Laub (comprised of Antye Greie-Fuchs and Jotka) produce sparse, crisp beats,

RealAudio clip: Temporaries

[ aquarius records new arrivals — issue 133 ]