*Acid Mothers Temple Alert!*
Only the second AMT album to be released by UK's Riot Season label (the first being 2004's Minstrel In The Galaxy) but, oh, maybe the ten thousandth AMT album overall, right? But we're beginning to think that if AMT were to stop (or even slow down) releasing records, the Universe might end. It just could be that it's their continual championing/channelling of the '70s psychedelic krautrock freakout sound, with their typical overload of druggy electronics and crazy guitars and seductive space whispers, that's keeping the great Cosmic pulse from petering out. Certainly there's enough energy on Myth Of The Love Electrique to power a cosmos or two. This is one of those all-bases-covered AMT releases, with the band utterly rockin' and kicking out the jams on two of the four lengthy tracks here, "The Man From Giacobinid Meteor Comet" and "Love Electrique", while also mellowing out for the acoustic-kraut-folk-drone mystery of "Five Dimensional Nightmare" and a beyond-blissful 20+ minute version of live staple "Pink Lady Lemonade (May I Drink You Once Again)?"
Yep, thanks to albums like this, you can count on the Universe not crapping out anytime soon. A very worthy AMT effort indeed.
The robots are coming, indeed! And their latest invasion (released with much thanks and gratitude to our favorite record label of late, Japan's EM!) takes the form of this sexy electronic pop concept duo, The Android Sisters. Originally created by ZBS studios, a nonprofit audio production company from upstate New York whose purpose was to raise consciousness through media, namely via new-age-tinged sci-fi inspired radio plays, The Android Sisters began life in the early eighties as the house band in the radio series, Ruby the Galactic Gumshoe. Taking cues from Bruce Haack's electronic children's records from the '60s and '70s, The Sisters perform satirical "speak-songs" in a polyphonic monotone that goofily riff off of everything from Philip K. Dick inspired silliness ("Electronic Sheep") to Old McDonald ("Down On The Electronic Farm"). They soon developed their own cult following, so an album was released on Vanguard in 1984 called Songs of Electronic Despair. Using wonky keyboards, funky beats and spacey synthesizer passages, The Sisters frequent use of terrible puns and android-inspired humor didn't quite fit in with the wry detachment of the New Wave music of the time and has since been relegated to the realms of pop oddity, occasionally resurfacing as samples in trance, techno and hip-hop ("Ray-Dee-Oh", Sss-x Minus One"). But as radio-plays they are highly entertaining and engaging, silly and goofy for sure but as The Android Sisters themselves say, "Dumb is Fun! " Includes 48 page booklet with song lyrics and illustrations for each song.
*Acid Mothers Temple Alert!*
*Acid Mothers Temple Alert!*
*Acid Mothers Temple Alert!*
Also... it's a *Space Machine Alert!* as well.
Andromelos is a new Japanese psychedelic "supergroup" making their debut on the Ektro records label run by Jussi from Circle. It consists of guitarist Kawabata Makoto, drummer Okano Futoshi, and electronics wizard Yamazaki Maso. Kawabata is best known as the bearded high priest of the Acid Mothers Temple (and other bands like Mainliner, Musica Transonic, Nishinihon, Toho Sara, Seikazoku, etc. etc.). Sticksman Okano is/was a member of Nishinihon, Ghost, and Subvert Blaze. And in addition to being none other than notorious noisician Masonna, Yamazaki is also a member of Christine 23 Onna -- but more pertinent to his contribution to Andromelos, though, is his project Space Machine, which takes its inspiration from '70s cosmic analog synth masters like Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream. Early TD could certainly be a model for Andromelos, indeed. Freaky, waaay out spacey kosmiche kraut-lovin' soundscapes with percussive drive, gobs of electronic FX, ambient drift, and some wonderfully fried guitar fuzz. But if you're familiar with Acid Mothers Temple or Space Machine we probably could omit that description and you'd guess as much anyway! It sounds like just what you'd think, just like what you'd want. If we add that there's just two looooong tracks, totaling 72 minutes, you'll be even more in the ballpark with your imaginings of Andromelos' blasted and blissed out charms. The tracks are titled "Tea Breaks Are Under Attack From 2300000 Light Years" parts 1 and 2, and we've got to say, for once a title on a Kawabata album that really makes sense!! That totally IS what this sounds like. Well, give it a listen n' see if you agree...
Thought we had this band figured out during the first song, but we weren't even close!
From that track's aggressive youthful male angst vocals and bristly guitars, The Annuals turn on a dime and deliver some of the sunshiniest West Coast-y perfect pop! Comparisons to Modest Mouse and Built To Spill will invariably pop up, but The Annuals manage to come up with way more than the mere hero worship that taints many a young band. They bring other variables into the shuffling mix which on their own aren't particularly original but together make Be He Me sound super fresh. Cool.
Another blackened jewel in Norma Evangelium Diaboli's elite black metal crown. Rapidly becoming the only label that really and truly matters in black metal, NED has unleashed upon the world, some of the best (and is some cases, only) recordings from Deathspell Omega, Funeral Mist, Katharsis and now French black horde Antaeus. Even way back in 2000, when they released their brilliant debut, appropriately titled Cut Your Flesh And Worship Satan, it was easy to tell there was something special (and strange) about these guys. At their core, they were pure black metal, very Mayhem influenced for sure, but that record was peppered with weird ambient interludes and fucked up not entirely black metal parts, they were true enough for the grim BM hordes, but their sound hinted at something much weirder, which of course hooked us.
So here we are, nearly 7 years later, and Antaeus have embraced that weird fucked up side, and ended up positioned perfectly along side their black sonic brethren on NED. And it is a perfect fit. Not as weird and post rocky as Deathspell, not as harsh and buzzy as Katharsis, somewhere right in between, closest sonically probably to Funeral Mist, with their blend of ultra creepy ambience and ultra dense, impossibly fast and heavy buzz. And that's the thing, some of this stuff sounds IMPOSSIBLE! It's so fucking fast, but so intricate and complicated at the same time. Furious and thick and dense and incredibly lightning fast. Dizzying bursts of black buzz that constantly threaten to completely splinter into jagged black shards.
All the while, within and between the blasts of bleak grimness and the soul shearing fury, are lots of awesome midtempo grooves, super catchy riffs that lope along all waltzy and seasick, super catchy and memorable, before exploding back into lightspeed motion. Also here and there are long stretches of processed guitars and black ambience, with creaking atmospheres, deep drones and strange keening harmonics.
A super weird, super grim expanse of totally black brilliance. Could very well be one of THE black metal records of the year. Only a few weeks to discover something more heavy or more black. Seems unlikely.
Gorgeous packaging too (as with all NED releases). Black digipak, with bloody hands reaching for the sky, the bands logo, some dripping blood and a crown of thorns sort of tangle, all printed over the top in a barely visible reflective varnish. Includes a big booklet, also gorgeously laid out, with lyrics, printed vellum, and some truly gruesome band photos.
The lead off track on this cd is so wintry you can almost see your breath while it's playing! Branches is the new album from Oregon band Antlerand, and it's a fine introduction. While they initially appear to be treading shimmering sonic ground that's already been well worn by the post rock likes of Mogwai and Sigur Ros, it soon becomes apparent that they're combining it with intelligent pop sensibilities akin to sensitive, smart pop folks Bright Eyes, Arcade Fire and Destroyer... and they're doing it exceptionally well. Chamber strings and horns join the sinewy electric guitars that just might send chills down your spine. Piano, stuttery electronics and chimes pretty things up, as do the sweet female vocals on songs such as "Maybe We're Still Running" and "Make Nothing Happen" which further the comparisons to Bright Eyes when Jenny Lewis is accompanying Conor Oberst. This is simply lovely!
From the seemingly infallible Paradigms label, who in the past have brought us amazing releases from (we're gonna have to stop doing this, pretty soon the list of killer Paradigms releases will be longer than most reviews): Hjarnidaudi, Amber Asylum, Throne Of Katarsis, Blueprint Human Being, Utlagr, the Angelic Process, Titan, Jarboe and that amazing Walking With Ghosts compilation. Avid readers of the list should probably own all of those by now. Each one totally unique and amazing in its own way. This time around we have two more releases just as unique and amazing, the post rock avant doom of Woburn House, reviewed elsewhere on this list, and this disc of droning doomed classical beauty from Icelandic composer Hallvardur Asgeirsson.
It's hard to know exactly how to describe this. That Icelandic sound is there. You can certainly here bits of Sigur Ros, that sort of dramatic dreaminess, but it's way more abstract. Almost like some twentieth century classical minimalism played by Sigur Ros, or even the other way around. Strings soar and drift, weaving melancholy sadscapes of sound, the whole thing wrapped in gauzy streaks of industrial noise, buzzing metallic shimmer, high keening tones, crackling hiss, fuzzy low end rumbles. It could almost be a track from some nonexistent Kranky records tribute to Schonberg. Dark and droney enough to appeal to the usual suspects, but at the same time this is ABSOLUTELY classical music. Mainly piano and strings, but occasionally accompanied by operatic vocals and various percussion, these pieces are alternately minimal, abstract, droney, dense, dreamy and doomy. In fact, track six is simply titled "Doom" and is most definitely doom, with a guitar / bass / drums / contrabass lineup replacing the more traditional classical arrangement, but it somehow manages to still sound classical, albeit, with a heavier dirge element. The final track, the nearly 19 minute "Vitisvelar" takes the super spare sound of modern classical minimalism, mixes in strange fanfares, as well as some driving propulsive rhythms, the result being a very cinematic sound, like the action scenes from some lost sixties spy move. So cool!
Unlike most of the Paradigms releases, which come in cardboard sleeves wrapped in hand stamped, brown paper, this disc is in a white DVD case, with black and white printed insert...
Another mysterious release from the mighty aRCHIVE label who in the past have brought us releases by Bardo Pond, Goslings, Keiji Haino, LSD-March, Growing, Khanate, James Plotkin, Earth, Boris as well as Jack Rose and Tetuzi Akiyama (elsewhere on this week's list), all super limited and amazingly packaged.
Astral Travelling Unity is a Japanese space drone outfit fronted by Hiroshi Hasagawa of legendary Japanoise combo CCCC. But turn back now if 'tis noise ye seek.. ahem... nothing noisy about this disc, this sounds exactly like the name would lead you to believe, deeeeeeep astral drone music for travelling through inner space. Guitars are pulled apart into wispy tendrils, sitars buzz, and that buzz shimmers out into slow lazy ripples, analog synths supply even more buzz and drone, not a thick tangle mind you, this is gloriously spare and spacious, abstract spiritual ur-ambience, the sound of universes forming, with your eyes closed you can see forever and ever and ever. Distant streaks of melody color an infinitive landscape of deep droning swells, glistening song fragments sparkle as they float lazily through a night sky dense with twinkling stars.
The second track is live, so it's a bit more raw, a little bit more lo-fi, with Acid Mothers Temple guitar guru Kawabata Makoto adding some extra guitar and showing an amazing amount of restraint. The raw live sound adds a whole other layer of fuzz and atmospheric ambience as does the addition of some simple percussion. Utterly spaced out and divine!
Amazing packaging. The disc is affixed to a full color two panel sleeve with paintings by Hasagawa, with a color acetate insert printed with another of Hasagawa's oil paintings that lays over the cd, which is printed with an image of a cd-r found washed up on the beach.
LIMITED TO 600 COPIES!!
- MPEG stream: One
- MPEG stream: Two
Meg Baird and Helena Espvall, the string players and female vocalists of Espers, team up with British folkie, Sharron Kraus for a hazy afternoon's recording of traditional English and Appalachian folk songs. Sung simply and played sweetly on guitar, cello, and dulcimer by a trio well versed in the dulcet timelessness of the folk cannon, these nine songs recall the best work of Shirley Collins, Sandy Denny and Shelagh McDonald. Lovely!
Another fantastic release from Aidan Baker, who when he's not making beautiful sounds on his own also spends time making beautiful sounds in the groups Nadja and Arc.
Soundmaking and creating music has to be as compelling and interesting for the maker as it is for the listener, especially when it's improvised music. Often the process is as important as the resulting sounds, even if the listener has no idea what is involved. But often as a listener, it's pretty exciting to know just how the sounds were created. For Pendulum, Baker recorded an electric guitar in a single take, doubled it, and then reversed the double. That probably makes more sense to you guitar / tech nerds out there, but it is cool to think about the path the sounds here took from the guitar to our ears.
Listening to this, it's difficult to pick out actual guitars, although they do surface here and there. Instead Pendulum is a smeared soundscape of blurry sounds. A wide open expanse of slowly moving tonal colors, drifting by one another, occasionally mixing together, forming new colors. Muted and understated, a twilit soundscape of churning low end and glistening high end, mixing together and forming all sorts of subtle sonic shadings. Subtlely melodic, a gorgeous deep droning drift, another one of those records destined to find a permanent home in the late night listening pile. So gorgeous.
Loss is an apt title in describing a sensibility that we find super compelling in music, each list tends to have at least one example of a record that taps into the ideas behind the nostalgic loss of memory and the triggers that cause those memories to flood back into consciousness. For an example, have a gander at the introductory paragraph of the review of Tim Hecker's Harmony In Ultraviolet. Bass Communion's Loss, while not exactly aesthetically sympathetic to Mr. Hecker's pixel smear masterpiece, shares the sensorial drama of residual sounds evoking things past. Steven Wilson, the sole proprietor of Bass Communion, has commented that Loss is an extension of the ideas he previously investigated on Ghosts On Magnetic Tape, which related to the parapsychological research into the Electronic Voice Phenomena, whereby voices (presumably from beyond the grave) break through mediated sound in order to communicate with the living. Of course, that record complete with its spectral droning clouds of sound went over quite well here at Aquarius; and its follow-up does not dissapoint. Sourced from reverb saturated piano, old 78 RPM records, and supposedly a vibraphone, Wilson offers yet another compelling perspective upon the nature of memory and loss through a spartan and occassionally grim unveiling of drones and low-end piano notes.
Included in both 5.1 (as heard on the DVD component of this twin set), and as a regular CD.
Every kid dreads finding a lump of coal in their stocking come Christmas morning, so much so that many spend the weeks or months before the big day doing their very best to ensure their spot on Santa's 'Nice' list. No more teasing the siblings, no more grousing about yardwork, cheerfully doing all their chores, eating all their vegetables, doing all their homework. Whatever it takes. But this year kids have something else entirely to worry about. Sure finding a lump of coal is a drag, but how about finding your stocking full of shit!! Well around here, that's something to be excited about. Because this is the year that Brown Santa comes to town. And who better to fill our hearts with Christmas cheer and regale us with tales of Brown Santa than Japan's shit obsessed grind lords Bathtub Shitter? That's right, it's a Bathtub Shitter Christmas. Record! Forget your Nat King Cole, and Perry Como, and Bing Crosby, and Barbara Striesand, this is the only Christmas record you need! And it's conveniently stocking sized, a cute lil' 3" cd, jam packed with furious grind, howling pummeling brutality, and lots and lots of shit.
For those of you new to the wonderful world of Bathtub Shitter, let's refer to a past review that perfectly and succinctly describes the Bathtub Shitter Experience:
Imagine some strange mix of Drop Dead, the Boredoms, Brutal Truth, CSSO, death metal, grindcore, and well....um...shit! Crunchy riffs swing from almost-surf rock, to Zeppelin groove to metallic crunch, but spend most of their time in grind mode, splattered and speeding out of control. Crazy drumming, farting bass and some wicked guitar noodling add to the sick sonic stew. But the vocals are where things get really weird. The main vocals are of the burping, grunting, cookie monster death metal variety, belching out indecipherable tales of shit and shitting, but their foil is a squealing, squeaking little girl of a man voice, sounding either like a babblingly hysterical middle age housewife shrieking at the top of her lungs or a horror movie cheerleader being evicerated, screaming in that terrified way only dying cheerleaders in horror movies do. The two vocal styles swing and switch and battle and butt heads like some sort of bastard grindcore Beastie Boys. Or imagine Chuck D as Chris Barnes in his Cannibal Corpse days and Flavor Flav as the aforementioned shrieking dead cheerleader. With the everpresent S1Ws made up of members of S.O.D. and Angelcorpse. Other sorts of vocals are occasionally introduced like the 'dog barking underwater' and the 'asthmatic yodel'. The truly strange part is that all of the various vocals come from the very same guy!
Speaking of vocals, our Bathtub Shitter Xmas starts off with the a cappella "Brown Santa", a confusing and brilliantly bizarre series of shrieks and gurgles, grunts and wheezes. This guy could very well give Jaap Blonk a run for his money. Track two is the reverential hymn "Holy Shit", a grinding blast of Japanoise flecked surf-sludge-grind-rock, with insane squiggly guitars, chugging downtuned riffs, blasting octopoidal drumming and of course the 'Shitter hi / lo, shriek / growl vocal battle is in full effect. And finally, what better way to finish things off, than with a classic holiday chestnut, this time roasted over roaring hellfire!! WOOOAHHHAAAA. "Little Drummer Boy" turned into a sludgy slab of slow motion drone metal, huge churning guitars, the only glimpse of the original being the martial snare drum rat a tat tat-ing beneath all that sludge and of course the impossibly guttural growling cookie monster vocals spweing out a barely recognizable "parumpapumpum".
Wow! Now if that doesn't sound like something everyone would want to find in their stocking or under the tree Christmas morning then we don't know does!
"We're dreaming of a... Brown Christmas!"
If you've been hanging out with me (Andee) much lately, you've undoubtedly heard me singing the praises of Bathtub Shitter. In fact before I had even heard them, I knew Bathtub Shitter had the potential to be my favorite band. C'mon, they're Japanese, they are called Bathtub Shitter, oh and did I mention they only sing about shit? For a while I was fantasizing about releasing a split with the two best bands in the world (as determined at the time solely by monicker as I had yet to hear either) Bathtub Shitter and Fuck I'm Dead. I'm still thinking about it, but while I ruminate, we're lucky to have this, the first full length Bathtub Shitter record and their only cd. We spent a good long while tracking down 7"s, but since the world leans heavily in the digital direction we had to wait until this beautiful shiny shit-obsessed marvel fell into our hands! What's it sound like you're probably wondering by now. Well, imagine some strange mix of Drop Dead, the Boredoms, Brutal Truth, CSSO, death metal, grindcore, and well....um...shit! Crunchy riffs swing from almost-surf rock, to Zeppelin groove to metallic crunch, but spend most of their time in grind mode, splattered and speeding out of control. Crazy drumming, farting bass and some wicked guitar noodling add to the sick sonic stew. But the vocals are where things get really weird. The main vocals are of the burping, grunting, cookie monster death metal variety, belching out indecipherable tales of shit and shitting, but their foil is a squealing, squeaking little girl of a man voice, sounding either like a babblingly hysterical middle age housewife shrieking at the top of her lungs or a horror movie cheerleader being evicerated, screaming in that terrified way only dying cheerleaders in horror movies do. The two vocal styles swing and switch and battle and butt heads like some sort of bastard grindcore Beastie Boys. Or imagine Chuck D as Chris Barnes in his Cannibal Corpse days and Flavor Flav as the aforementioned shrieking dead cheerleader. With the everpresent S1Ws made up of members of S.O.D. and Angelcorpse. Other sorts of vocals are occasionally introduced like the 'dog barking underwater' and the 'asthmatic yodel' but I don't want to give away too much. It's better if you just let the Bathtub Shitter unfold before you like a beautiful, shit-filled flower.
Finally a release format massive enough to (only barely) capture the epic mammoth low slung downtuned brutal black beauty of Campbell Kneale's one man drone metal sludge combo Black Boned Angel. THREE full length cd-r's, that's over three hours of planet flattening slow motion guitar crumble and distorted doom crawl.
A collage of sorts weaving together audience bootleg recordings recorded all over Europe as well as demos and studio rehearsals. All held over the fire and melted down into a thick viscous fluid, that is poured into both your ears until the inside of your head melts and all you can hear is black.
Also included is the long out of print and never even seen by us until now "Heavens Blaze Forth the Death Of Princes" 2005 European tour cd.
What are you waiting for? This is IT. What we've been begging for. Hours and hours of soul destroying heaviness, bleak minimal soundscapes of roiling downtuned guitars and 16rpm riffage, like Steve Reich playing the SUNNO))) songbook. Churning and lurching and grinding and flattening all drone rockers in its path, the Black Boned Angel has descended from the heavens amidst showers of blood and black storm clouds to pass judgment, to beat us over the head with an angelic army of guitars, to bury us in a deep pit beneath a mountain of damaged amplifiers, to damn our souls to eternal torment. AND WE LOVE IT!
Packaged in the immediately recognizable CPsiP wallpaper packaging, with three printed inserts.
ULTRA LIMITED!!! We only got 50 copies, and will probably not be able to get more, so don't snooze...
Probably quite limited (Kning Discs are usually not long for this world!) live release from AQ fave UK guitarist James Blackshaw. Recorded in Goteborg, Sweden at the end of May this year, Blackshaw's live performance of the best of his catalog (Sunshrine, Celeste, and two songs from O True Believers) does not disappoint. For those who are not familiar with Blackshaw's majestic 12-string finger picking abilities (O True Believers was record of the week, a few lists back), this live document is a true testament to his amazing skills. Not a note is out of place and the sound quality is breathtaking. Don't miss out. We only have about 20 of these and may or may not be able to get any more when we run out, we don't know!
Bone Awl!!! You know you want it. We can't seem to keep their shit in stock. It flies out of here everytime we get a new title. We're still waiting on two huge boxes of Bone Awl lps to finally arrive. Sorry for the folks who are still waiting. We're as frustrated as you are. AND we're still waiting for the sort of flakey band members to come by and bring us more copies of their old cassettes.
But thankfully, we just got a new tape in to tide you over! Yep, you heard us tape. These guys are old skool. No cds, just tapes and vinyl. All super lo-fi and primitive, visually and sonically.
Vinland / Finland was previously available as a super limited lp on Grievantee (now WAY out of print, so don't ask) and now as a super limited tape on Northern Sky. Four different bands, all brutal, primitive, and ultra grim black metal, Bone Awl (USA), Hammer (Finland), Volkurah (Canada) and Vordr (Finland). We obviously love Bone Awl as do you all it seems, and we are super into Vordr (although we've never been able to get enough copies of their discs to list), we had never heard of either Hammer or Volkurah, but both fit comfortably along side the other two.
So if you're in the mood for some stripped down, ugly, crusty black brutality, then this is exactly what you've been hankering for. And as much as we hate to say it, this is of course super limited. And while we did get a whole bunch, they still probably won't last long.
Click. Pop. Buzz. Fuzz. Whir. We are suckers for all the sounds that most other folks hate. So much care is spent mastering records perfectly, desperately trying to keep lps from getting dusty or scratched. When most of the time we hear a record and think how much better it would sound with some record crackle, or pops and clicks. We could literally hear the same record, recorded in a state of the art studio, and then on a handheld tape recorder in the forest during a thunderstorm, and we're pretty sure you can guess which one would have us flipping out.
In the past we've discovered dreamy drone records just drenched in fuzz and record static, L. Chasse even recorded a record dedicated to our very own Allan, that emulated the sound or record crackle. You could say we're obsessed. There's something about that sound, it's so raw and pure and beautiful sounding. It may be an unwanted byproduct to most, but to us it's one of the most beautiful sounds in the world.
This new record from Thomas Brinkmann, Klick Revolution, is an entire record of super minimal, skeletal techno, constructed completely from the static and buzz of needle on vinyl. At least it sounds like it. And the sleeve is adorned with the garage sale center labels of all the lps ostensibly used in the making of this record. The strange thing is, Brinkmann has always seemed very clinical, his sounds dry and clipped, as if his records were made in a lab, so it's exciting to hear, a very crisp, clipped sounding record made out of the very opposite sort of elements. Organic analog distortion and inconsistencies transformed into cool digital clickery. The other strange thing is that Klick Revolution seems to be Brinkmann's tribute, or homage to the pinball machine, a very convoluted concept concerning the inclined plane in a locked box and Sisyphus playing pinball with a rolling stone... Not sure we get it, but we do LOVE pinball, and by now it should be obvious how much we love record crackle, so needless to say THIS RECORD RULES.
Based on live performances utilizing turntables and locked groove records, these pieces are definitely reminiscent of Pierre Bastien, Strotter Inst. and other modern avant turntablists, but the sound is definitely all Brinkmann. Hypnotic rhythms, a super skeletal techno, a symphony of Geiger counters, the kick drum is a pop, the shuffling snare is a tiny clipped burst of static. So completely hypnotic. He incorporates longer snippets from the records too but only briefly, introducing bits of melody, weird textured sounds, creepy cinematic elements, each surfacing for a moment before fading out.
Strangely impossibly gorgeous and lush considering how barebones and skeletal this is. Somewhere between heroin house, Pop Ambient and maybe even haunted house, a strange and wonderful world where sound is measured in clicks and skips, buzz and fuzz, snap, crackle, pop and very little else. Click. Pop. Buzz. Fuzz. Whir. Click. Pop. Buzz. Fuzz. Whir. Click. Pop. Buzz. Fuzz. Whir...
ATTENTION FINNISH ROCK OBSESSIVES!!! It's time for another strange missive from the Finnish combo known as Chainsmoker, a band created from the bits and pieces of Finnish legends Sweetheart. But where Sweetheart were a corrosive guitar based rock band, Chainsmoker are more of a dramatic, sort of gothic new wave band. If these guys were living in NY and going to all the right parties, getting remixed by DFA, partying with Fischerspooner, they'd be huge. Touring with the Scissor Sisters and screwing Lindsay Lohan and Ashley Simpson. But alas, they are marooned far away from the glitzy nightclubs and drugged out dancefloor kids who would be dancing and fucking and fighting the nights away to their spacey new wave techno groove rock. But there's more to it than that, these guys are Finnish after all, so it goes without saying that they have a bit of a twisted take. They incorporate morose vocals, saxophone, swirling outer space FX, Nick Cave like dramatic crooning, strummy acoustic guitars, cinematic synths, fuzz guitar, full on casiocore freakouts and pretty much anything else they can think of into their jet set, cocaine party, private jet, Studio 54, faux fur, dead of winter, NYC via Paris via Finland, Fischerspooner and Pet shop Boys in a back alley knife fight dance party!
NWOFHM. That's what it says on the inside of the cd booklet, in big bold letters. NWOFHM? WTF? If you don't get the joke, explaining it won't help, but here goes: New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal. Our Finnish friends Circle are apparently referencing the famed NWOBHM (New Wave Of British Heavy Metal) that took the rock world by storm circa 1979, giving us Saxon, Angel Witch, Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Venom, Samson, and many many many more. What's that got to do with the Can and Neu! pulsed space/prog/post-rock normally practiced by Circle?? Well Circle fans know that these guys have indeed established their very own trademark "circular" sound (repetitive, rhythmic, looping, hypnotic rock) that, whirlpool-like, pulls in all sorts of influences, from the aforementioned Krautrock forefathers to jazz and dub and lo-fi drone improv and, yes, metal. When you get a new Circle album, you kinda both know what to expect *and* never know what to expect. Well we'll tell you about Circle's latest studio effort, Tulikoria. In part, it's Circle donning the leather and spikes (metaphorically, perhaps, though they do threaten to do so for real live on stage at their show in San Francisco THIS FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 2nd, THAT'S TONIGHT IF YOU'RE READING THIS THE DAY WE SENT OUT THIS LIST!! SO GET DOWN THERE!!). Ahem. Circle's love of metal, specifically the true, traditional heavy metal of the '80s, has borne fruit before, on several of the songs from their amazing Sunrise album released in 2002 (sadly now out of print). So, the heavy metal component present on Tulikoira is precedented in the Circle discog. But, like Sunrise, this isn't just Circle "doing metal". It's a lot of other things besides! Nobody will confuse it for an "actual" metal album. But heavy metal is definitely, proudly an element here, amongst others. And graphically, too, it's an inspiration, as you'll see from Circle's new fangled, tough-looking symmetrical logo, which even incorporates a lightning bolt!
There's four tracks here, starting with "Rautakaarme", an atmospheric seven-minute cut featuring monkish chant, eerie drone, and energetic bursts of rock action. Second track "Tulilintu" is *entirely* active and energetic, really bringing in the headbanging, fist-pumping metal, complete with guitar leads and soaring screams in the manner of Rob Halford. Seriously. The lyrics are in Finnish (presumably) so we don't know how tongue-in-cheek-or-not they are. Track three, "Berserk", is kinda weird, another atmospheric exercise with some lines in English like "I'm a scorpion" and "I'm a crocodile" spoken over rather spooky, bass-heavy grooves. A lot of tension in this one. Could almost be a noirish film soundtrack from the '70s, but with additional "circular" electric guitar riffing. Then the final track "Puutiikeri" arrives, pretty much taking over the album since it's an epic 24 minute affair, beginning and ending with authentic heavy metal riffing, but journeying far and wide in-between. Creaky improv splatter, lush keyboards, gently whispering vocals, spacey electronic effects, chugging, pulsating rhythms (of course!), and even some quasi-techno beats (!) are stirred into this weird mix. Ranging in mood from calm tranquility to flat out rockin', this is a real trip, as is all of Tulikoira. If you've been following Circle's output in recent years, and rolling with all their eccentricies, from Sunrise to Guillotine to Forest to Empire, you'll be happy to add Tulikoria to your collection too!
The return of the Finland's premiere troupe of music making, crossdressers, who perform all gussied up, you know in makeup, housecoats, stockings and everything, and whose instruments of choice are modified and mic'ed up clothes racks and every day household appliances. That's right, it's the Cleaning Women, whose first record was a runaway hit here at AQ a few months back, so we're super psyched to be listing the even better follow up "Aelita - The Queen Of Mars", a record inspired, according to the liner notes, by the Russian film "Aelita" directed by Jakov Protazanov in 1924. And some of it definitely sounds like it...
Sonically similar to their debut, bit somehow more varied and fully realized, "Aelita" is a dizzying schizophrenic travelogue through a million different musical personalities. the opener is a brooding Arabesque soundscape, all soaring strings and playful percussion, Eastern guitars and strange fuzz guitars. Then all of a sudden, the second track kicks in, a dark brooding bass heavy groove, with whispered vocals, and lo and behold the Cleaning Woman sound a little like Tool, albeit with some strange homemade percussion, but just like a Tool track it builds to a super heavy chorus and then slips back into a moody groove. Hot on the heels of that track is a sort of croony Spaghetti Western style number peppered with gypsy strings and angular guitar. Later on they bust out some super heavy mathy shit that sounds like it could be NoMeansNo or Victim's Family. But for the Cleaning Women, it's all about rhythms, so every track is rife with all sort of rhythms. Some tracks are defined by the rhythm, some are nothing but the rhythms, others incorporate the rhythms subtlely into the bigger picture. But no matter how they do it, each track is a delight. Dizzying and confusional, wild and weird as fuck. The best tracks are the ones where everything drops out and the band go completely nuts on their various rhythmic devices, which must be amazing to see live, it's like the Blue Man Group crossed with Stomp, only if they were transvestites, and were meaner, and less blue, and WAY more punk, armed with fuzz guitars and a stage full of washing machines and dishwashers.
Needless to say, SO recommended!
Our pals at Conspiracy Records, a label/distro based in Belgium, who in the past have brought us records by Boris, Jesu, Shora and more, are this year celebrating their 10 year anniversary. A decade of amazing music. From a bedroom based punk rock label, to one of Europe's most important and influential labels and distros, all we can say is HURRAY! And HUZZAH! It's always so exciting, when a bunch of folks get together to spread the word about great music, great WEIRD music, and survive, even thrive. Such is the case with Conspiracy. And as if that weren't already enough, just knowing that some great people were selling some amazing music, those sweeties at Conspiracy have decided to share the love with us. And you.
To celebrate their 10th anniversary, they've decided to do a super limited subscription series, 12 records over 12 months, each limited to somewhere between 200-500 copies, ONLY available to series subscribers. EXCEPT, they've decided to let AQ have 20 copies of each, we're the only store with copies of these subscriber only lps, and for a brief moment, we can offer them to you, our loyal AQ customers. Needless to say we are thrilled, as the series lineup reads like a who's who of AQ faves, as well as including a handful of lesser knowns. All pressed on super thick vinyl, and packaged in killer hand screened original art sleeves. But be warned, we only got 20 of each, and we will run out fast and we will not be able to get more. When we do run out, there is a chance you can still get one from Conspiracy direct, but what that means is act fast and prepare to leave empty handed.
We knew the Climax Golden Twins were a strange lot. Their records were totally unpredictable, lovely and dreamlike one moment, damaged and demented the next. This just may be the strangest one yet. Two sides, both drastically different, each side has a mysterious etching in the runoff groove, one side says "Vintage Pulchritude", the other says "Ambient Caveman", which should have been our first clue!
The first side is a woozy assemblage of sounds, seemingly drawn from old films, bits of dialogue, snippets of music, all bizarre when taken out of context and butted up against another random bit of speech or sound. But the various snippets are deftly woven into a dreamlike surreal whole, wrapped in crystalline clouds of record crackle, tape hiss, sine waves and various other random ambient influences. Really gorgeous to listen to, but truly haunting and bizarre.
The second side starts on much more familiar CGT territory, with gentle lilting folks, melancholy melodies, left to drift through soundscapes of fuzz and hiss, distant muted percussion, thumps and shuffles, a sort of abstract freak folk that sort of just hovers and drifts. But then all of a sudden, the band launches into a fully rocked out jam, that sounds more like math metal than anything. Hard to say if it was played or sampled, but it quickly dissipates into more abstract dreaminess. But they're not done fucking with us yet. The record closes with another wild jam, this time it's a old school echoey Stoogesy garage rock stomp, raw and propulsive, super distorted and ultra rocking. Cool stuff. Definitely hard to pin down, and we always seem to be knocked for a loop, but that's exactly why we love these guys so much.
Gorgeous hand screened cover and nice thick vinyl. These two will be gone before you know it...
This long awaited reissue of Cluster's stellar 1976 recording, Sowiesoso (So Not So So) sees Roedelius and Moebius at their most collaborative and creative. Recorded after moving to the tiny village of Forst from West Berlin, the progressive evolution of Cluster's solely improvised sound from free-form cavernous synth-scapes to percolating motorik pop had already been documented on their Zuckerzeit album from 1975. On Sowiesoso, that sound gets even more refined, with Moebius's machinist currents of whirs and klangs jutting up against Roedelius's serene Eastern pastoralism, resulting in a haunting mix of pensive ambient beauty that matches the idyllic countryside pictured on the front cover.
So Recommended!
Beth Custer can't be stopped and who'd want her to? She's one of the most prolific and most varied musicians in the Bay Area. You might recall one of her most recent projects was the scoring of the historic silent film A Trip Down Market Street (now on dvd). It's a wonderful treasure! Or how about Clarinet Thing! her clarinet collaboration with Ralph Carney? Or the electronic dance/jazz fusion duo Eighty Mile Beach? Or the inimitable Club Foot Orchestra? She's pretty much done it all, always with a meticulous eye for detail and usually with an unconventional twist.
Bernal Heights Suite finds her performing with The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and it's her first chamber music cd. These vocal and string arrangements are lively, colorful and have a definite theatrical feel. For non-SF savvy folks, Bernal Heights is the neighborhood directly south of the Mission District. Custer has lived there for over a decade, and this is her musical tribute to her ol' stompin' grounds. Terrific.
Dead Raven Choir, a one man band, now living in Poland, formerly of Texas, purveyor of damaged free folk, abstract strum and of course utterly grim black metal. We tried desparately to keep up with his non stop cd-r release schedule and his constant flitting from folk to metal and back again, sometimes pausing beautifully right in between, a gnarled hybrid of campfire twang and lo-fi buzz, then there's Wolfmangler too, his country doom outfit! But, as is often the case, most of those cd-r's disappeared in no time flat. So it's Weird Forest to the rescue, compiling 4 LONG out of print cd-r's (Sheath & Knife, Grand Ravishing Extravaganza, Sevenfold Songs Of Death, and Sturmfuckingleider) onto three lps and packaging them in this "dark forest-clad" box. This one is definitely for the true, the grim, the cult, this is utterly dismal, freaked out and fuzzed out lo-fi black metal. But while sonically it may fit somewhere between the foresty buzz of early Ulver, the midtempo droning hypno plod of Burzum, and the thrashy blur of Darkthrone, this is Dead Raven Choir after all, so beneath and amidst all the buzzing and riffing, there are plenty of banjos, mandolins, and lots of percussion, a creepy clattery folk undercurrent, albeit all bathed in hiss and drone and distortion, black metal folk may be more accurate, closer in feel to Abruptum, a black pagan ritual, shrill and noisy and harsh and HEAVY, but in that home-recorded, perfectly underproduced way. Awesome!
This comes packaged in a printed black box, the three lps are housed in thick black sleeves, there are seven inserts, beautifully printed on thick vellum, with liner notes in perhaps the most illegible black metal font EVER!
LIMITED TO 999 COPIES WORLDWIDE!
At the risk of quite possibly making our lengthy and floridly descriptive, effusive and over the top reviews totally obsolete, we can pretty much sell this one with one sentence. Grind metal, death metal, spastic drill and bass AND a marching band drum corps. And that's not even really a sentence!
Drumcorps is the work of one Aaron Spectre, who not only shares a first name with the man behind Venetian Snares, he also shares a similar penchant for ultra twisted and impossibly convoluted and mind blowing rhythms. But where Venetian Snares builds elaborate rhythmic tangles out of beats, beats and more beats, Spectre, while a consummate beat maker himself, as Drumcorps, he concerns himself as much with riffs as beats. At its very heart, this is a metal record after all. A snarling, grinding crush of acidic metallic riffs and huge downtuned chunks of chugging death metal grind, with howled throat shredding vocals, buzzing squalls of metallic guitar freakout and pounding blasting drums. But as each track develops, you begin to notice something a little strange about this 'metal.' Every once in a while, here and there, the drums will skitter and splinter into little bursts of ultra complex splatter. Or vocals will get twisted and chopped up into a wildly stuttering rhythm, blast beats will get faster and faster until they're nothing but a buzzy blur. Riffs splinter into jagged digital shards which are then tossed about wildly over a skittering expanse of junglistic beats. This isn't just metal, and it's definitely not electronica. It's like some sort of fucked up avant post metal grind laid over super dense hyper programmed drill and bass. Like Pig Destroyer jamming with Shitmat, or Dillinger Escape Plan with Venetian Snares on drums! In fact a quick listen to track three, the aptly titled "Pig Destroyer Destroyer" lays it all out for you. Beginning with a killer drum corps snare workout, that builds into a mesmerizing chopped and looped vocal guitar grind, eventually building into a full on blast of metallic fury, but all tangled up with sputtering, hiccuping strands of head spinning drill and bass.
The amazing thing is, that Drumcorps doesn't sound like some sort of DJ mash up, where some clever fella with a wicked record collection just assembled and sequenced. No, these are real songs, with melodies, atmosphere, riffs, parts, choruses, it seems impossible that Spectre composed and performed a whole metal record only to electronically fuck it up, but if these are all purloined riffs, which at least some of them must be, then it had all the metalheads around here completely fooled. And LOVING it.
But it's not all just furious jungle metal weirdness (although most of it most definitely is!). A few tracks are droning ambient soundscapes, with huge cavernous rumbles washing over brittle complicated snare drums, others are almost funky jungle jams peppered with crunchy clipped riffs, and still others are moody midtempo jams, assembled from slowed down pitchshifted vocals and crumbling distorted guitars, sheets of feedback, and awesome Maiden-ish dual guitar leads. This is another one of those times we almost wish there were actual bands that sounded like this, as opposed to being the mad idea of a single twisted individual, crafting his dream band from a drum machine and his favorite metal records, an impossible metal / drum and bass hybrid. But who cares really, when it sounds this fucking amazing. Fans of past record of the week Drummachinegun should definitely check this out, as should folks into DHR, Venetian Snares, Shitmat and that sort of sputtering spastic drill and buzz (especially if they've got a soft spot for metal). But c'mon, this is a METAL record, so metalheads should absolutely take a chance, and give this a try, but should be well prepared to have their whole world turned upside down.
There are different sorts of buzz. Especially in black metal, where the buzz is God. Or Satan. High brittle ear shredding buzz. Thick, layered My Bloody Valentine blissed out buzz. Super downtuned SUNNO))) style buzz. In fact, if a band can discover a super unique, totally distinctive sounding buzz, they're halfway there. Everything else will hopefully fall right into place.
The second we threw this tape on, we were floored. What a completely overwhelmingly heavy and strange sounding buzz. Durthang are Swedish and play a plodding slow motion black doom. But the buzz!! Such a gloriously thick and dense sounding guitar tone, sort of blown out and tinny, but with the bass pumped way up so there's this ghostly low end. It's one of those sounds that is so pleasing to our ears, there almost doesn't even need to be any song, just single chord or a single riff churning out that perfect buzz forever and ever.
Thankfully the band back up their divine buzz with some killer songwriting, some super memorable riffs, and some amazing dark depressive atmosphere. An utterly bleak and depressive slab of brilliant slow motion black metal doom. So recommended.
It's all about tapes now. Underground noise, black metal, the real raw shit, the weird underground stuff, it all seems to be finding its way to us mostly on super limited cassette tapes. Apparently tapes are the new tool of the underground. The new OLD tool of the underground. Way more true and grim and cooooool. CD-r's are so 2005. Sheesh.
Anyway, we got a whole mess of amazing and demented and brilliantly fucked up black metal recently, so we'll be trying to get them reviewed cuz you all you AQ weird metal fanatics will not want to miss out on any of these.
Dyster is a French one man band, dark depressive and suicidal (the band logo even incorporates a razor blade) who buzzes and blasts with the best of them, and is very reminiscent of French black metal legends Mutiilation. Mostly midtempo, with loud drums and buzzing insectoid riffing. Thick and furious, with killer harsh howled vocals that sometimes become hellish hysterical shrieks. Strange arrangements with most songs veering wildly from frantic blasts to stretches of slow motion doom with haunting arpeggiated guitars to pounding old school black buzz.
Not sure what it is, but we have been listening to this over and over since we first got it. Very recommended.
SUPER LIMITED. Each tape hand numbered.
Another killer tape of weird black metal buzz. This time it's Australia's Empire Of Hate and US black metal horde Morthond (not to be confused with the Cold Meat Industry Morthond).
Empire Of Hate whip up a black storm of relentlessly buzzing guitars, stumbling blasting drums, and some truly tortured vocals. Harsh glass gargling howls that dip into death metal gargles as well as the occasional hysterical shriek. The production is perfectly murky, a depressive suffocating crush, perfectly suited to the hellish buzz and inhuman howls.
Morthond counter with their own brutal black burst, channelling the raw trancelike sound of early Burzum and classic Darkthrone. Some mournful keyboards and whispering winter winds lead us into their wintry world. Mournful melodies give way to murky black buzz, galloping drums, everything drenched in reverb, a furious classic blast of vintage Norwegian style blackness. So good.
Awesome high school binder cover art, with a scary tree and a rabid dog or wolf and a dead body that kind of looks looks like a magic marker version of Munch's The Scream...
We've always wondered why Entrance never got the appreciation they seemed to so fully deserve. But we're thinking might just get set straight with Prayer of Death. Where past releases displayed totally gifted guitar player Guy Blakeslee in a fucked up drugged out modern blues context, Prayer Of Death demonstrates a new urgency and pretty much an entirely new sound. With an over the top (in a great way!) delivery, including an amplified electric orchestra, a paranoid disposition, and death on his mind, Blakeslee has made his most intense and rocking record to date. Maybe it was his move from Baltimore to LA but his flamboyant nature has totally come to the surface and we couldn't be happier. He still plays amazing raga-like guitar, and his sound is still a wander in haunted woods but now he's got ROCK on his radar, all throughout Prayer Of Death. Imagine Sandy Bull joining Queen and you start to get an idea of the fucked up beauty that is this record. You get the feeling something really monumental must have occurred in Blakeslee's life, because these are the sounds of someone with a newfound spirit, not taking anything for granted, making the most out of every note and channeling all the energy, emotion and life into every song he can. We've ALL been digging this record like crazy. So fucking good!
With a brand new record released earlier this year and their first ever live show here in SF, it's for sure been nonstop ESG fever here at AQ. We could probably write the longest most glowing review ever of that live show but suffice to say it was a mind blowing experience which we aren't soon going to forget.
When ESG were on tour last year in Japan they realized that people were spending hundreds of dollars to get their hands on their rare second album called Come Away With ESG, so they asked Soul Jazz to reissue it and now here it is, all gussied up and at a nice price. Originally released in 1983 on 99 Records, the great NY underground label that also put out records by folks like Glen Branca, Bush Tetras, Liquid Liquid, etc. While the bulk of these songs can be found on the great A South Bronx Story collection it's still so thrilling and a little mind blowing to understand how an entire album can actually sound like the best greatest hits album you've ever heard. Pretty much hands down the best dance music made in this quarter century. ESG have been sampled on countless hip-hop records, helping to inspire an entire generation of forward minded dance/punk/dub/funk artists, and have thus continued to keep their vision alive and well. For those who already have A South Bronx story there are a few absolute gems on here not included on that collection. And for those who don't have any ESG yet in their collection, get this right away!!!
Another gorgeous slab of spaced out krautrocky ambience from Expo' 70, this one a live, completely improvised performance back in 2004, with the band expanded to a trio. And if folks' reaction to the first three Expo 70's releases is anything to go by, then these will be flying out of here in no time as well.
For those yet to discover the sublime joys of Expo '70, these guys (usually just one guy, Justin Wright) traffic in glistening dreamlike kosmiche drift. A krautrock that is less about propulsion and rhythm and more about texture and ambience, think Ash Ra Tempel, AR & The Machines, Tangerine Dream, Eno, Popol Vuh. Guitars aren't strummed and picked, they are sort of allowed to unwind, long glistening strands of reverberating buzz unfurl and float into the hazy ether. Synthesizers unleash a similarly disembodied sonic vibe, soft clouds of fuzzy whir and distant chordal warmth. Very much the sonic equivalent to drifting down a warm summer stream, on your back, watching the clouds drift by, the trees on the shore shimmer and sway. Or maybe more accurately, floating in the vacuum of space, everything weightless, untethered and drifting lazily through the inky blackness. The light of stars and suns bends and twists, slowly cycling through the visible spectrum, disobeying all laws of physics, wrapping you in a thick swirl of sonic brilliance. This music has to be the work of some immortal group of dronelords, sitting in their multidimensional fortress, atop some mysterious lost mountain, who in their infinite wisdom, allow their dreamlike drones and angelic ambience to fall from the sky and settle over us like a light dusting of snow...
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Oh man, do we love this band. Totally furious over the top necro blackness from this grim Dutch horde. This record is from way back in 2003, but we figured if some of us somehow missed it, some of you probably did too. Which is a shame cuz this stuff totally slays.
Besides having an amazing band name, a wicked logo, a killer album cover, and some of the coolest corpse paint we've seen in ages, these guys also sound completely amazing! So dense and black and heavy and grim and necro. A completely overwhelming onslaught of utter blackness, complimented by a vocalist that sounds like he has a mouthful of bloody nails and dead babies. Imagine a sky black with clouds, the earth splitting open as the devil unleashes his own plagues upon the world, but the plagues he sends are a rain of spiked gauntlets, a flood of corpsepaint, a swarm of corrosive blast beats, an attack of acidic buzzing riffs, blasting Burzumic buzz, throat shredding growls and a brutal black sound that will shroud the world in darkness and drag every one kicking and screaming down into the pits of hell.
This sounds a little like that. Raw, fast and so brutal. Imagine being strapped to some sort of medieval torture device and being pelted with thousands of Darkthrones, eventually ending up buried beneath layer after layer of corrosive, crusty, buzzing black grimness. Awesome.
Ms. Foster's woozy warble can shriek as loud as a banshee or whisper quiet as a church mouse. And if you are at all familiar with her live sets, she often changes instruments from acoustic guitar, to lap harp to the quaintest of string instruments, the ukulele. On this highly limited edition cd-r from 2004 she goes for the latter in both cases, in these lo-fi 4-track recordings of her finest and softest songs paired with the ukulele's strained tonalities. But like a songbird with clipped wings, Ms. Foster makes the best use of these limitations and provides a fine and archly subdued performance that we're sure her fans will love.
If we were to describe this band as sounding halfway between The Fucking Champs and The Ocean, you'd probably think were were, uhh, fucking with you. We're not though! It's kind of true. These boys have heavy guitars, brooding angst and fiery aggression to spare, and they're getting some of it out of their system... and into yours! Metallic post punk that will for sure satisfy the throngs of dirty rockers who are into corrosive, spazzy, dynamic angular art rock as well, as this comes complete with boy girl vocals, some new wave fuzz, bits of blown out surf rock, some droney krautrock, all scuffed up, roughed up and wrapped in a dark scuzzy sheen. Cool stuff!
Our pals at Conspiracy Records, a label/distro based in Belgium, who in the past have brought us records by Boris, Jesu, Shora and more, are this year celebrating their 10 year anniversary. A decade of amazing music. From a bedroom based punk rock label, to one of Europe's most important and influential labels and distros, all we can say is HURRAY! And HUZZAH! It's always so exciting, when a bunch of folks get together to spread the word about great music, great WEIRD music, and survive, even thrive. Such is the case with Conspiracy. And as if that weren't already enough, just knowing that some great people were selling some amazing music, those sweeties at Conspiracy have decided to share the love with us. And you.
To celebrate their 10th anniversary, they've decided to do a super limited subscription series, 12 records over 12 months, each limited to somewhere between 200-500 copies, ONLY available to series subscribers. EXCEPT, they've decided to let AQ have 20 copies of each, we're the only store with copies of these subscriber only lps, and for a brief moment, we can offer them to you, our loyal AQ customers. Needless to say we are thrilled, as the series lineup reads like a who's who of AQ faves, as well as including a handful of lesser knowns. All pressed on super thick vinyl, and packaged in killer hand screened original art sleeves. But be warned, we only got 20 of each, and we will run out fast and we will not be able to get more. When we do run out, there is a chance you can still get one from Conspiracy direct, but what that means is act fast and prepare to leave empty handed.
Almost not worth listing this one at all. We only got 20, almost 10 were gone almost before they hit the shelves. This latest GInnungagap is Mr. Stephen O'Malley of SUNNO))), Khanate and assorted other outfits. This one sided 12" is mostly solo piano, heavily reverbed, dense clouds of overtones, drifting and shimmery, with abstract bits of percussion and haunting barely there melodies. It actually sounds a bit like a Lubomyr Melnyk piece, played at 16rpm, little slow motion flurries of notes like snowflakes falling through a pitch black sky. Originally the sound component of an art show featuring O'Malley and Seldon Hunt, who also took the gorgeous cover photos, and who's crazy drawing is silkscreened in silver ink on the B side of this 12" Limited to 500 copies. Gone before you know it...
Okay, we only got a handful of these in, and in very limited sizes, but we figured we oughta grab as many as we can since so many AQ fans are such huge Wolf Eyes and Grey Daturas freaks. That means act fast, and don't be too bummed if we've already sold out. We took every single one the bands had left.
So this pack includes a killer red on black Grey Daturas t-shirt, a Grey Daturas pin, and a gorgeous full color poster. Super limited, and of the sets with medium t-shirts we only got 8!!!
The shirt/poster/button combo has to ship in a tube, so if you order this with other items it will have to ship separately and thus there will be an extra shipping charge.
Okay, we only got a handful of these in, and in very limited sizes, but we figured we oughta grab as many as we can since so many AQ fans are such huge Wolf Eyes and Grey Daturas freaks. That means act fast, and don't be too bummed if we've already sold out. We took every single one the bands had left.
So this pack includes a killer red on black Grey Daturas t-shirt, a Grey Daturas pin, and a gorgeous full color poster. Super limited, and of the sets with small t-shirts we only got 8!!!
The shirt/poster/button combo has to ship in a tube, so if you order this with other items it will have to ship separately and thus there will be an extra shipping charge.
On the BBC website, there's a John Peel quote "I just want to hear something I haven't heard before". Wonderful words to live by! And few artists truly fit that bill like Ms Polly Jean Harvey. Although she recorded nine Peel Sessions over the years, this collection of eleven songs personally chosen by Ms Harvey revisits just four of them, but damn, they are a potent few! Hearing her singing "Sheela-Na-Gig" is not only a total blast from the past, but it continues to be an inspiration today. Such brutal rawness and emotional grit is so seldom heard in popular music. The volatility of these live recordings reminds us just how fierce an artist she was in the early '90s. And the songs! Oh the songs! This is cathartic, beautiful music that confronts the listener, lifts you up, and shoves you back into your seat. Both moving and arresting. The album closes with a stunning rendition of "You Come Through" the lone nonofficial Peel Session track which was recorded at a tribute concert six weeks after Peel's death.
Back in stock, at long last. Lower price!
Daniel Higgs is the singer for the band Lungfish and is an absolute modern day shaman. (And solo artist, whose Ancestral Songs album was a recent AQ Record Of The Week.) His presence in person and on stage is absolutely mesmerizing. In another time he would have ruled the world, or been burned at the stake, or had his own cult. But instead, he has carved out a wholly unique musical niche. In Lungfish, his stream of consciousness vocals, add a distinctly spiritual quality to Lungfish's droning repetitive caveman krautrock jams. On this here solo record, Higgs weaves a buzzing melodic otherworld, all from the sounds of a single Jews Harp. Those of you not familiar with the instrument, it's a small loop of steel with a thin strip of metal in the middle. The player plucks the strip of steel making it vibrate, and uses the shape of their mouth and position of their lips to change the tone and timbre. Same sort of method for the the 'talk box'. The results here are divine, droning, alien buzzing rhythms, slowly shifting and stuttering, with strange overtones drifting and colliding, before slipping into vibrating harmony. Imagine a sitar run through a metal digeridoo, held up against your mouth so you could sort of 'vocalise' the notes. Weird and so wonderful.
Wow... A shit storm of fuzzed out psychedelic excess, distortion-to-the-death stomping and tromping over everything in sight. And that's just track one, of ten that are equally intense.
"Howlin' Magic" though?? Hmm, we're not too stoked on the name. But...wow. On second thought, maybe the name works, Howlin' Magic, sure, that makes us think of a psychedelic wizard who has released energies almost beyond his/her control, multicolored fireballs backblasting in an outrageous sorcerous snafu. Quite the fireworks display. Survive or not, it's a spectacle indeed. Yeah, it fits their sound, wherein feedback shards carve clarity from the sheets of white noise amp abuse. We can only imagine an orgy of effects pedals, coupled in polymorphous perversity. The band isn't scaling the mountain, they're making the mountain. A mountain of abused amps and battered guitars. The sticker on the front proclaims Howlin' Magic's affinity with the Japanese scene of garage psych madmen like High Rise, Mainliner, and Acid Mothers Temple at their most extreme. In the red, blown out insanity. Further comparisons could be made to such acts as the Dead C, Comets On Fire, The Heads, Grey Daturas, Aufgehoben, Shit and Shine, Residual Echoes, White Hills, Burnt Hills, Wolf Eyes, Midnight Snake, and others who ought to be required to file an environmental impact statement before they plug in their amps and guitars...
Live acoustic recording of intense, dismal outsider folk from rural Western Japanese singer/songwriter Shuji Inaba. Yoenzanga was previously one of LVD's cd-r releases, back when they were a cd-r label only, and is now blessed with an actual cd edition. You also may recognize Inaba's name as he has had a disc released by Japan's PSF label a few years back. And indeed his raw, emotive balladry is comparable to the politically driven psych folk of fellow PSFers Kan Mikami and Kazuki Tomokawa, whom we love.
Alan Cummings provides English translations of Inaba's lyrics in the liner notes, which is a plus, though really (as with Mikami and Tomokawa too) there's plenty just to FEEL in Inaba's harrowing voice and the haunting, sometimes violent, way he plays his guitar that goes beyond language.
For some dumb reason, we love saying the name of this Norwegian black metal band... but mispronouncing it like "Campfire" with a pirate-y drawl. Campfarrr! Dunno why we enjoy that so much. It's the same with Finnish black metallers Barathrum. "BATHROOM" we call 'em, or maybe "Barthroom". And we chuckle like idiots. None of this is fair to Kampfar (or Barathrum for that matter). Kampfar are in fact very much a not-funny, totally true and serious Nordic pagan black metal proposition, having released several cultish albums in the past, efforts easily the equal of their more famous peers like Gorgoroth and Darkthrone and Enslaved in their early days. Actually we didn't even know they were still around, Kvass is their first album in SEVEN years! And thus, happily, that classic '90s style Norwegian black metal is what you get! Six long, heavy tracks with rasping vox, raw riffage, and some Viking folky bits as well. Frosty and spikey and grim, with lots of slower parts and majestic melodies underneath all the ice. Yah, Kampfarrrrr!
We've been meaning to list this for a while now, but we were always stumped as to how to describe it. It's just so good, and so beautiful and so poignant, we weren't sure a review could do it justice. This is some gorgeously dark, dreamy, stripped down classic finger pickin' country blues, recorded on a 4 track in a shed on the side of a mountain. Cast King is a legendary (around some parts) picker and songsmith, playing since the 40's, even recording a handful of tracks at the legendary Sun Studios. Now in his eighties, these tracks were recorded a year or two back, with just Cast and Matt Downer, who tracked him down during a project to record the music and document the musicians of old Sand Mountain in Alabama.
The liner notes are hilarious, documenting how the two finally got together to "pick" and do some recording. The sound is super spare, stripped down, intimate and personal. King's vocals are warm and rich, weathered but still sweet and velvety. His strumming simple, his lead playing perfect. And his songs are stone cold classics. Any one of these songs, could have been played by Cash, or Jennings, or Haggard and been big ol' hits. In fact if the dice fell just a little bit differently, you'd be seeing Cast King tapes at truck stops all over the US. But as it is, he just sort of faded away, taking his "sackful of songs" with him.
And while this disc doesn't quite make up for the injustice of Cast King not being a household name or a country music legend, it's so damn good to hear these songs now. They definitely sound like timeless classics, so warm and familiar like you've heard them a million times before, but still original and distinctly Cast King. And as far as we're concerned, these are country classics, even if they were maybe never meant to be.
Usually it's the use of the unusual electronic instrument the Theremin that steals the show. But when you've got Japanese avant-garde vocalist Makigami Koichi playing the Theremin, that instrument's typically spooky and wavering tones almost take a back seat to the bizarre sounds coming out of Koichi's own mouth. Moon Ether's eleven tracks are mostly improvs, except for two traditional Asian folk tunes bookending the disc, and range from "Khoomi" throat-singing to totally free Theremin solos... and pieces that sound like sci-fi sound effects, or yodelling chipmunks! A lot of the time you can't tell what's Theremin and what's voice. He plays a Theremin "with moogerfooger", whatever that is. Maybe an example of Koichi's evident humor. There's beauty here, and a great deal of nuttiness. Wild gibberish for fans of Yat-Kha, Zubi Zuba, and Mike Patton for sure!!
You might already know Koichi from his releases on Tzadik -- he guest starred on a Painkiller album, collaborated with Switzerland's Anton Bruhin (the great jaw harp jam Electric Eel), and Tzadik also released an anthology of his '70s/'80s band Hikashu. But *this* is another from the amazing catalog of Japan's doubtmusic, packaged in their usual nice digipack with die-cut cover hole!
Joining in with Aimee Mann and Sufjan Stevens who've already raised their full glasses, er, cds of holiday cheer, Mr. Mark Kozelek (of Sun Kil Moon, Red House Painters) offers his limited edition Little Drummer Boy - Live album. Be forewarned though, it's a bit deceivingly named. While the title suggests a whole live performance of Santa songs, the title track is the lone tinsel tune. Recorded during his recent North American and European tours, the nineteen other songs are sort of a 'best of Kozelek' culled from his vast song catalog as a solo artist and frontman for Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon. You also get a handful of covers (he takes tunes originally by The Cars, AC/DC and Modest Mouse and makes 'em his own) plus two previously unreleased cuts!
We discovered Lamp Of The Universe, aka New Zealander Craig Williamson, via his recent cd-r on Barl Fire, a gorgeously blissed out drone rock space raga that we just couldn't get enough of. And you all apparently agreed as those puppies flew out of here (don't order them now though! they are gone). So we got in touch with Williamson and managed to get a few more of his releases. A couple cds which we'll review in upcoming lists, but we figure we should list this lp first as we only got a handful and it's super limited.
More of that warm Eastern raga tinged space rock, dreamy and drifting and drowsy. Sitar strings buzz and vibrate, tablas sputter rhythmically beneath layers of swooshing fuzz, vocals are soft and lilitng, drifting lazily above the dizzying psych swirl, each track a slow growing soundscape that starts as a drone, becomes a sort of droney raga, and in some cases morphs into a propulsive Krautrocky /post rock groove. Sounds a bit like an Eastern Spacemen 3 most of the time, guitars are druggy and psychedelic, rhythms are simple but hypnotic, making each track, even the 'rockers', totally meditative and mesmerizing.
Packaged in hand made sleeves, with a metallic silkscreened image on cardstock affixed to the front. Limited to 320 copies, each one hand numbered.
There are remix records, and then there are remix records! We got kind of burnt out on the whole remix thing. Sort of seemed like a big exercise in back patting friend rock name recognition. And 90 percent of the time the remix did NOTHING to improve on the original. And most of the time the remix record doesn't happen because two bands realize how totally perfect they are together and how amazing it would be if they collaborated, it's usually because that's just what you do, make a remix record.
With Lansing-Dreiden, it's a bit easier to understand the idea behind a remix record. They are a sort of collective after all. And they aren't just a band, they are artists and performers, as involved in painting, installations and design as they are in music. Plus for D.I. By D.D. they just handed over the whole record to a DJ pal of theirs and let him go nuts.
We're also usually wary of a rock band that gets the hip hop remix treatment. There are some serious Linkin Park "oof"-style ramifications. Especially when rapping is involved. The outcome is rarely rosy. However, the music of Lansing-Dreiden is pretty well suited to be chopped up and looped into laid back DJ Shadow style beatscapes. Their sort of new wave-y eighties art rock, is full of sweeping synths and funky rhythms, lots of weird textures and cool arrangements.
So the end result, D.I. By D.D. is actually fantastic. It's the sort of thing that should be blasting in dark hipster clubs in NYC and L.A. and San Francisco. Groovy and mysterious, sort of old skool, but with some modern flavor. A little bit of rapping, but mostly instrumental, minus the snippets of original L-D vocals. But here's the rub, listening to D.I. By D.D. you wouldn't necessarily even realize that the source material was all some cool NY new wave art rock band. It just sounds really good. It's a lot more exciting if you already dig Lansing-Dreiden and are able to pick out the bits and pieces and see how they fit into someone else's groovy vision. That said, even if you could care less about L-D, but were just looking for some super cool, dark, new wavy, Entroducing-style laid back hip hop flecked dance music, then by all means this will totally hit the spot.
So basically you can't really go wrong, open minded fans of the band will definitely dig this. Folks into stuff like DJ Shadow, Prefuse 73, UNKLE will also probably like this a lot. SO unless you hate the band, and hate any sort of dance music, check it out!!
On occasion our dear aQ customers will grace us with their own music, and such is the case with this self-titled release by Mr. Adam Lipman. Soft spoken in person, he also sings in hushed tones with an unexpected youthful solemnity. The closest comparison would be with Owen Ashworth of Casiotone For The Painfully Alone... if he were an acoustic troubadour who is joined every so often by some dreamy female vocals. These ten intimate, barebones lo-fi songs also recall the earnestness of early Mountain Goats. Nice! The cd-r comes packaged in a digipak with a tiny 1.5" handmade insert booklet.
Y'know those cans of pressurized air that you use to clean out the dust and crud that accumulates in your computer keyboard and other electronic devices? Well, Lithops latest album is sorta the musical equivalent... complete with that distinct fleetingly chilly fizz, mysterious chunks and gritty particles. Each track churns out slabs of glutinous squidge and igneous electronics cut with a dull blade.
Psst, in case you didn't know Lithops just happens to be another musical persona of one Mr. Jan St. Werner of Microstoria and Mouse On Mars fame. Maybe he shoulda called himself Mithops... just kidding!
Yes, you read that correctly. The title for this two cd set is 1991-1988! Munster Records and Los Bichos are taking a few liberties with chronology and wanna take you back in time. And what a wild ride it is!
We have to admit that we're totally new to this long-lost, mysterious punk band from Spain, but we gather from this release that they clearly had a strange swagger all their own. Hmmm, kind of Birthday Party meets Os Mutantes?! Sure wish we'd witnessed them back in the day. If you happen to be familiar with them, you might find yourself jumpin' for joy at the thought of hearing tunes from not only their albums Bitter Pink, My Deaf Pink Love and Color Hits, but also a heap of previously unreleased material. Thirty six tracks total packaged in a hardcover book-style package. Included is a 76-page book filled with tons of historic notes and photos.
