The long overdue reissue of the Rifts anthology, which was originally released on cd by No Fun in 2009 as a collection of the first three vinyl releases from Oneohtrix Point Never (Betrayed In The Octagon, Zones Without People, and Russian Mind), and now also sports a half dozen or so tracks from OPN's constant stream of cassette and cd-r releases, many of which never made their way to aQuarius. That was a double CD, which now gets expanded to FIVE pieces of vinyl, with even MORE unreleased material!
Here's a bit of a rehash of what we've said about those earlier records (and which would apply to the bonus material as well): Oneohtrix Point Never is a curious resuscitation of progressive electronics by Daniel Lopatin who so far has not strayed into the dodgy waters of vapid ambient-lite found in so so many New Age records from the late '70s and '80s. His vision is a conscious nostalgic trip into the cosmic drones of Klaus Schulze and the lazer-ping melodies of John Carpenter. The seven tracks from Betrayed In The Octagon ripple with densely layered electronic swoosh and sweep, with more of a sci-fi sound design feel than anything else. It's not entirely ominous in these emanations of analog synths, but a gloominess persists just beneath these tumbling oscillations of electric drone. A few tracks bubble and percolate with clunky, geometric arpeggiations and major chord melodies which have all of the charm of an '80s John Carpenter filmscore, or for that matter a Zombi album of today (although admittedly not as well produced).
Above a solar-powered electric hum, the tracks from Zones Without People interweave poly-synth pulses which insistently push up against each other, collapsing into the electronic sunrise which is the next track of slowly building arpeggiations and sequences situated on top of cybernetically pastoral ambience. When Lopatin gets to the title track of Zones Without People, his laser beam pings have calmed into a sublimely sad offering, easily the best thing that he's produced to date. This isn't to say that the rest of these tracks are duds. Far from it, as a wigged-out squiggling collage splatters into cosmic arpeggiations and stargazing drones to amazing effect.
A set of gaseous ambient chords opens Russian Mind and could have been lifted from an early Boards Of Canada release, although the lack of IDM-rhythms to the Oneohtrix Point Never's electronics steer this work in an entirely different direction. His bright chimes of arpeggio poly-synth tones build asymmetrical waves that are as compelling as they are cheesy. But that's always been the point, to terminally obliterate the lines between a high-brow piece of Terry Riley minimalism and a lowest common denominator of sub-Eno ambient drivel. Here, Lopatin tends to be a bit more stratospheric in nature, with these sublime arcs of vapor trails passing through moonlit nightscapes, all redrawn in neon hyperdelic colors.
Beautifully packaged in a stunning heavy box, with eye popping new artwork, each one hand numbered, and LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!!
Russian Mind is the third piece of vinyl to be released in 2009 by Daniel Lopatin's ever-amazing Oneohtrix Point Never, following Zones Without People and Betrayed In The Octagon. All three of these LPs have recently been collected on the Rifts anthology, also released through No Fun, and this week's Record Of The Week!
The ideas of a forgotten future had been recently employed by Leyland Kirby on the driftscape trilogy Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was; but where Kirby pegged his lost future as somewhere in the early portion of the 20th century, reclaimed through downpitched and blurred 78s, Lopatin firmly pegs his lost future as the one perceived from the time period between 1975 and 1985. Given the title of this album, Lopatin's retro-garde zone-tripping looks back to the former Soviet Union. Such is also the case for some of Lopatin's appropriated video work, which features '80s Russian commercials with all sorts of a wonderfully corn-ball, lazer-clad video effects. Furthermore, he claims this album was "transcribed by the Material Eye Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Universitetskaya nab. 1, St. Petersburg, 199034, Russia." Nope, there is no such institute at the Russian Academy, but it makes for a good piece of fictional context.
A set of gaseous ambient chords opens Russian Mind, and could have been lifted from an early Boards Of Canada release, although the lack of IDM-rhythms in the Oneohtrix Point Never's electronics steer this work in an entirely different direction. His bright chimes of arpeggio poly-synth tones build asymmetrical waves that are as compelling as they are cheesy. But that's always been the point, to terminally obliterate the lines between a high-brow piece of Terry Riley minimalism and a lowest common denominator of sub-Eno ambient drivel. Russian Mind tends to be a bit more stratospheric in nature, with these sublime arcs of vapor trails passing through moonlit nightscapes, all redrawn in neon hyperdelic colors. A marvelous record for sure.
Another explosive slab of world destroying sonic love from Campbell Kneale and his new one man wrecking machine known as Our Love Will Destroy The World. Taking up right where the now defunct Birchville Cat Motel left off, Kneale is a master of constructing impossible dense assemblages of sound and noise and rhythm, layer upon layer upon layer, a one man band that sounds like 5 or 6 bands playing at once.
Infusing a droney drift, with industrial rhythms, metallic riffs, textural buzz, blown out crunch, all manner of hum and howl and skree and clatter and clang, which like many things, in the hands of someone less deft, could be and most likely would be a massive sonic clusterfuck, but Kneale, like some insane sonic juggler, manages to herd all these sounds into a constantly evolving shape, not that it's not a struggle, part of the joy comes from listening to the various sounds and elements and layers do battle, the magic happens when what sounds like pure noise, suddenly reveals itself as a lumbering doomic drone, or a weirdly melodic drift, what sounds like random bits of crunch, suddenly take shape and become rhythm, what sounds like a wall of heaving low end, becomes melodic, and suddenly things seem strangely songlike, and dare we say, sort of pretty.
Fucking Dracula Clouds is the perfect representation of what Kneale can do seemingly so easily, and so many others find difficult bordering on impossible, turning noise into music, but without losing any of the noise, creating sounds that are caustic and abrasive, but weaving them together into something that is neither, like building a warm roaring fire out of shards of ice, or assembling a warm secure shelter out of wet leaves and cold mud, it's some kind of magic for sure, and we are definitely under its spell.
MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT!! MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT!! MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT!!
The above is of course for the benefit of the legions of Mississippi obsessives, that seems to be growing with each and every release. Fans who will buy anything and everything Mississippi, whether it's blues, or gospel, or world music, whether it's African or Greek, classic New Zealand pop, or legendary underground Portland Punk. Which is totally understandable, the guys at Mississippi have great taste, and besides their incredible compilations, and unearthed rarities, they also have a knack for picking out old records that folks have been DYING to get on vinyl. But even if you're not a Mississippi obsessive, this here is well worth checking out. And may be just the disc to convert you to the cult of Mississippi...
Here we have a kick ass gospel record from 1963, originally reissued on Arhoolie, now available on Mississippi, ON VINYL. And while we're not super well versed in gospel music, we do dig what we've heard, but very little of what we've heard sounds like the Rev. Louis Overstreet. It's festive and inspirational, but at the same time it's super rocking. Most of the tracks collected here are relentless garage gospel grooves, the guitar and drums locked into killer jams, the guitar occasionally pealing off some wild licks, but for the most part offering up a jangly twangy strum, the congregation clapping in time, and hooting and hollering. The testifying is minimal, and when there are vocals, they are alternately crooned and howled, The Rev.'s voice is gritty and soulful, but even when he's singing, it's the groove, irresistible and unstoppable and most certainly inspired. It does slow down here and there, and gets all super bluesy and soulful, but for the most part, An Evening With is some seriously rollicking and rocking praise-the-Lord good time gospel rhythm and blues!
Probably would have been a lot easier to get us to go to church when we were younger if it sounded like this!
San Francisco's legendary confrontational exports Oxbow return with another sonic beatdown in the form of this vinyl only release. The first side features the band and French noisemaker Philippe Thiphaine winging it in the studio. The fact that these songs are improvisations recorded "in 180 non-successive minutes" is testament to this band's unholy powers. The songs are lumbering and almost doomy at times, but Eugene Robinson's crazed vocals give the band a slurred swamp blues feel. It kind of sounds like the Jesus Lizard on quaaludes - meaning this is right up our alley. It's disturbing and awesome, and Oxbow, more than most bands, really understand how to work with negative space for that extra dose of creepiness. It's sort of like walking down a dark alley and knowing you're about to get your ass kicked, without knowing exactly when. At the same time, Oxbow are experts at rocking out. Their sound is nihilistic and unstoppable like few others. It wouldn't be right to call them "metal," but they certainly possess many attributes that so many metal bands just can't grasp but desperately wish they could. One thing's certain: Oxbow are scary as fuck.
Side 2 features the band in the most ideal setting - live, in concert, terrifying small clubs throughout Europe (though not France, if you are curious). The band simply SLAYS here, and if you needed any more proof of their truly unique sound, look no further. It's interesting that Oxbow takes a sort of post-punk starting point and ventures seamlessly into greater realms of musical exploration. Robinson's voice is something to behold here as he screeches and moans like a crazy man. The band is in top form on these tracks, displaying a loping, queasy attack that is both tight as hell and almost, ahem, "jazzy" at times. It's heavy and atonal as it winds all over the place, and strangest of all, it's actually kind of catchy. It sounds like the culmination of years of collective hatred and a perfect understanding of their own sound.
This one comes housed in a classy thick sleeve on nice heavy vinyl, and we give this bad boy our highest recommendation.
Harry Partch's ingenious and prodigious musical output can be a bit too much to wrap your mind around, especially considering his vastly unique and maverick musical theories involving microtonalities and the arsenal of unique hand-crafted instruments he used to create them. But all it takes to reel us in, is just to look at all the amazing instruments on display on the back-cover: The Cloud-Chamber Bowls, the Chromelodeon, the Diamond Marimba, the Kithara, the Harmonic Canon, and an odd array of metal cylinders called The Spoils of War, amongst many other musical curiosities. Even if you are not quite sure what they sound like, you just know they sound like no other instrument could. There's been plenty of Partch collections, but it's really nice to just get a small but lovely dose on vinyl especially for the uninitiated, for whom a large collection may be too overwhelming.
The World of Harry Partch, originally released in 1969 on Columbia Masterworks, was the first introduction of Harry Partch's music to the larger world, and still serves as the best starting point to immerse oneself into the Partch universe. Three long form compositions, "Daphne of The Dunes", "Barstow" and "Castor & Pollux", each take us into a different realm of his pantheon of influences from soundpieces for theatre and dance, his folkloric ruminations on hobo life (he lived life as a hobo during the Great Depression), and his great dedication to non-Western musical scales and ideas culled from Chinese, Indian and Greek musical forms. Partch's intensive compositions and exacting instructions for his performers can be an acquired taste for some (the vocal intonations on "Barstow" for instance, have a definite beat poet vibe that hasn't particularly aged well in our opinion, but it's also the shortest track!). But the gamelan-ish bell tones, plucked string runs and metallic percussive noises on his longer compositions are often quite eerily beautiful!
Yet, this is definitely not "free" music, and though we appreciate Partch's considerable genius, we can't help but wonder what those instruments would sound like in the hands of latter day free players like No Neck Blues Band or even a group like Taj Mahal Travellers. Still, a highly worthy addition to any seeker of other-worldly and eccentric musical forms!
Phantom Limb is a Brooklyn based drone-noise exploratory project that shares some of its members with the clattery improv noise-rock ensemble Peeesseye. It's also one of those projects that claims to channel the creativity all of its members even if they are not present during the recording sessions. Very transcendent, eh? On this production for Gill Arno's art label Unframed, Phantom Limb (here adding the "and Earth's Hypnagogia" to the name) finds just two of the members (Jaime Fennelly and Shawn Hansen) actually recording in the studio, with the absentee members adding their own two cents presumably through astral projection or maybe just heavy drug use.
Fennelly Hansen employ two sets of instruments for this piece: a pair of sine-wave generators and a pair of Farfisa organs. During the first 30 minutes or so of the piece, the two slump over their sine-wave generators which are tuned to an exquisitely body rumbling set of harmonic frequencies. Ones that would make the elder Niblock very proud! When the Farfisas enter the mix with a certain jolt to the narcotic vibe of the sine-wave drones, the mood shifts dramatically towards a sparkling arpeggiation much more in line with the classic Terry Riley pieces of old. Recorded in a single take in a warm sounding room, with all of the rustling and knee shifting that keep the legs from falling asleep. Beautifully designed by Mr. Arno and exquisitely printed by Ben Owen on his letterpress with die-cuts. Limited to 400 copies.
Tomas Phillips is a literary professor (currently teaching at NC State) and a lowercase electronic composer, whose work has been alternatingly brilliant and somewhat banal. Such is the dilemma in using minimal constructions and reduced sound sources as Phillips is wont to do. His 2003 On Dit album for Trente Oiseaux was an impressive album for sure, harkening back to the earlier musique concrete sensibility of Jim O'Rourke especially the album Scend. But since then, the albums have been rather polite but somewhat uninteresting. Fortunately, our skepticism ends with Les Mailles, an album Phillips composed with fellow North Carolinian Dean King.
The title translates from the French as 'the meshes' and specifically references Maya Deren's 1943 film Meshes Of The Afternoon, one of the earliest successes of American avant-garde film that worked through repetitively imagery to unveil an interlocking series of psychological symbols culminating in the protagonist's own suicide. Where that films is quite striking in its imagery even in its slow repetitions, the Phillips & King construct is incredibly subtle, maintaining a slow rumbling drone pocked with small renderings of digital artifacts, ghostly harmonic swells, and quiet field recordings of incidental sounds from enclosed spaces. At times, the album can be quite reverberant and achieve a similarly wintery paralysis that comes from listening to Thomas Koner's recordings; but out of these darkened passages, the two interlock distilled melodies (maybe from the digitally tricked out sounds of a piano?) and fizzing textures that align much more with the 12K / Richard Chartier ethos. Very nicely done.
Besides having an awesome logo, and killer creepy elephant cover art, these filthy Swedes have conjured up a seriously brutal, and weirdly groovy slab of sludge-y doom. Exploding out of a swirling storm of whipping winds that open the disc, these guys waste no time in getting down to it. IT being some gut punching, ear destroying heaviness. We were actually expecting something much less musical, much more abstract and slooooow, Moss, Bunkur, Khanate, that sort of thing, and while it does get downright glacial now and again, Pyramido mostly traffic in something much more groovy and stonery, think Electric Wizard, Church Of Misery, Cough, Eyehategod, Bongzilla, Green Machine...
In fact, Pyramido totally sound like they came straight out of New Orleans, that distinctly NOLA groove, but here that sounds is twisted up a bit, given a little blackness, a little crustiness, the songs stretched out a bit more, the groove not so much the focus as simply part of the sound, a sound that is a HUGE, churning, pounding, downtuned beastly thing. The guitars thick and corrosive, the drums a Cro-Magnon pound, vocals buried in the mix, always on the verge of cracking, a throat shredding howl, and within these blackly groovy, crust laden jams, lurk not only some serious hooks, but some fucking KILLER riffs, and although it doesn't make sense, music like this is often bereft of actual great riffage.
Slow, low, sludgy and brutal as fuck, by now it should be obvious if this is your cup of muck, it most definitely is ours...
The last few years have been pretty damn great for electronic and dance minded sounds. Folks like The Field, Gui Boratto, Hercules & Love Affair, Zomby and Subway have blown us away with their fresh approach and different shades of dance floor glory. But at the same time so much of what has been coming out really does subscribe to an instantly recognizable reference point. Whether it's retro space disco, brooding dubstep, or minimal techno, there's been so much undeniably exciting music that still doesn't really bring any new vision to the table.
With their debut 12", Q & A prove to be a duo who for sure have their own unique groove going, and it's a groove we can't get enough of! Seamlessly mixing their love of kraut, disco, minimal-funk, hacienda clouds of ecstasy, prog, Detroit techno, and dub, Quinn Luke (The Phenomenal Handclap Band, Coppa, Bing Ji Ling) and Alexis Georgopoulos (Arp, The Alps) have truly created one of the most enjoyable and memorable slabs of dance music this year. These two long tracks sound great on first listen, but the fact that we keep playing them over and over and only get more into them each time is a testament to the fact that it's possible to make groove filled dance jams that also have substance.
Alexis was one of the founding members of Tussle and you can for sure hear some of that signature Liquid Liquid inspired sound in the midst of these songs but in a much more fleshed out and flowing style. While this is their debut outing you just might have heard them before as they briefly were recording and remixing under the moniker Expanding Head Band, and had one of the standout tracks on that bad ass Milky Disco 2 compilation. One of the hottest 12"s of the year without a doubt!
Oaken Throne is dead. Sad but true, that beloved magazine chronicling all things black and grim, dark and sonically adventurous, has been laid to rest, a labor of love for sure, but it got to the point where no amount of love could sustain the amount of labor that went into producing each issue. So sad. We still have copies of the last few issues, so do grab them while you can, and while OT is gone, one half of the team behind OT, John Mincemoyer, is forging ahead with his own idiosyncratic magazine, Rape & Honey. Not so much a magazine as a broadsheet, it's a handful of pages, each issue focused on a single band, we still have a few copies of issue one, which was all about Razor Of Occam, but this second issue, expanded to nearly twice the size of number 1, might be of even more interest to most of the aQ faithful, being as its focus is on longtime aQ favs, the mighty Funeral Mist.
You can read our rants and ravings about Funeral Mist elsewhere on the aQ site, we gushed about pretty much every FM release, even going so far as to make Maranatha our Record Of The Week a while back. But Rape & Honey Takes you even deeper, incorporating interviews, background, history, reviews, musings, plus Mincemoyer is an excellent writer, and Funderal Mist are indeed fascinating subjects. 8 pages, 8 1/2" by 11", full color, plenty of illustrations, with two printed full color inserts, as well as a Mincemoyer penned Funeral Mist review printed on a cool colored transparency. A great read, and a killer object de' metal art, WAY recommended, to fans of the band of course, but also folks who read Terrorizer and Oakan Throne and Decibel and the like, plus it's super cheap! Skip a cup of coffee and read all about one of our favorite bands...
Geez! Barely had we a chance to digest his last full length from earlier this year than Alasdair Roberts bestows another four tuneful tunes. He can't be stopped, and who'd want him to? Allow your ears within the gorgeous warming embrace of picked'n'plucked acoustic guitar, woozy droning harmonium and forlorn voice. On the surface, his Scottish folk numbers sound utterly traditional and slightly mystical, but delve a bit deeper and listen a bit longer and plenty of modern day sensibilities, details and instrumentation make their presence felt. Mind you, it's in the most tasteful and unassuming fashion. One thing though, the third track "The Royal Road At The World's End" is a bit of an oddity in this grouping, as well as in Roberts' body of work as a whole. It's unexpectedly energetic and fleshed out with a full band. It's a bit of a jolt, but dandy nevertheless. If you've never heard him, this is a fine place to start. Wyrd Meme truly is a wonderful standalone work, but it also makes a tasty appetizer for any and all of his previous full lengths. For the most part, hauntingly lovely!
MISSISSIPPI ALERT!!!!MISSISSIPPI ALERT!!!MISSISSIPPI ALERT!!!!!
Ok, that no doubt got your attention. However, unlike Mississippi's forays into blues, world music, and, uh, Dutch punk rock, this record (an alternately titled reissue of Rockmore's The Art Of The Theremin album) takes a surprising turn into the realm of classical music. But not just *any* classical music, no, this here record will no doubt be familiar to many aQ customers, as Lithuanian born Clara Rockmore (1911-1998) is legendary for her mastery of one of the first and strangest electronic musical instruments ever - the theremin. Even if you think you are unaware of what this unique instrument sounds like, you've definitely heard it SOMEWHERE, most likely in some cheesy sci-fi movie from the 1950s. But rather than retread the story of the theremin in general and Clara Rockmore specifically (for that you're advised to check out the amazing documentary Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey), we will just let you know that this record is completely amazing, absolutely beautiful, and probably unlike anything else you've heard before. Covering selected works from composers such as Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and Tchaikovsky, among others, Rockmore is capable of creating some of the saddest, most mournful sounds ever committed to tape. With literally every song, the theremin sounds like it is weeping out its melodies alongside its piano accompaniment, provided by Rockmore's sister Nadia Reisenberg. Soundwise, many of you will be reminded of a singing saw, or perhaps some heavily sustained bowed string instrument, but the buzzing electronic warmth of the theremin is really beyond classification. The sounds are at once familiar but also totally alien, and anyone who has actually played a theremin should be well aware of how unbelievably difficult they are to control (you don't even touch the thing!). But Rockmore was clearly cut from a different cloth altogether, and to this day she remains undisputed master of the instrument.
Mississippi really outdid themselves with the packaging on this one, the heavy duty lp comes housed in a beautiful thick gatefold jacket with all kinds of detailed information. And we should hardly have to warn you of this record's limited availability, so don't miss out.
First let us say how sad we are about the passing of Jack Rose. Such a tragedy. An incredible musician taken from us way too young. We didn't know him that well, but we loved his records, solo and with the group Pelt. He once played in instore at aQuarius, and it was incredible, seeing him play live was totally mind blowing. He was fun, and funny, and friendly, and we are truly saddened. We offer our condolences to his family and friends.
This 7" is festive and rollicking, as if to celebrate Rose's life. Here Rose is teamed up with VHF bluegrass outfit The Black Twig Pickers for one traditional and one Rose original. The traditional is a wild bluegrass stomp, complete with whoops and hollers, the original is, as always, gorgeous, a minor key lament, a classic Rose rag, fleshed out here by the Twig Pickers, plenty of twang, soaring fiddle melodies, just total timeless classic Rose style bluegrass.
He will be missed. But his music, and memory will live on!
One of the really cool things about working at a record store is how you get to watch as a band gets more and more popular... One day they are just a name on a record no one has heard of and then just weeks later they become a band that everyone calls and asks about. Such is the case with San Francisco's The Sandwitches. We were just as clueless about them as everyone else when we first got their debut lp on Turn Up, but once we heard it we became hooked like so many other folks.
Once you hear their totally refreshing, unique and endearing living room lo-fi garage folk jams, it's pretty impossible to resist. This new 7" gives an awesome alternate version of the song "Back To The Sea" which was on the full length, this time out it's even more of a foot stomper, like The Shaggs doing a Bill Haley & His Comets cover. The B side "Beatle Screams" is a haunting slow burner with a nice pump organ groove running throughout conjuring up images of some kind of wonderfully haunted circus or a state fair gone way weird.
Lots of folks have heard these fine ladies via their amazing back up vocals on The Fresh & Only's records as well as from playing in bands like Pillars Of Silence and Brilliant Colors. But if they keep creating such amazing songs, The Sandwitches will become a household name, you know at least in the kind of houses we all tend to live in!
The second cosmic synth-drone-rock missive from Scantily Clad, a duo of instrumental improvisers split between Northern and Southern California. We loved their first cd-r, an amalgam of lo-fi synth styles from soft lullabies to abrasive noise that showed a lot of promise. Well, that promise is made good on their follow-up, a richer, more focused, and self-assured outing than before. The sonic intensity is beefed up, the songs more composed, the instrumentation more varied, the dreaminess heightened ( especially on tracks like Vanilla, Baby"), and the nosier parts (like what sounds like chipmunks speaking in tongues on "Deep Witch") are even weirder. But it all fits together very well as a fully-realized piece of heavy instrumental spaciness. Even the packaging is cooler, with their clipart collages of mandalas and symbolic animals housed in a sturdy transparent plastic case. Fans of groups like Emeralds and Carlton Melton will find lots to dig here!
Wow, it's definitely Christmas around here and how can we tell? Well, for one thing we got this amazing new soundtrack reissue that we never realized until now we have been looking for most of our adult life. It's on Crippled Dick Hot Wax, one of our fave reissue labels that we haven't heard from in years and had feared they disappeared for good. And it's another lost gem from the proto-Can universe of The Inner Space, the same early group incarnation that gave us the soundtrack to the unreleased surreal-politico film, Agilok and Blubbo!
One of our favorite Krautrock obscurities compilations from years and years ago was called Kraut Demons Kraut and two of the tracks were credited to The Can, but didn't sound like Can at all. These were pastoral and pretty with flutes and guitar, one featured very folky female vocals by Margareta Juvan called, "I'm Hiding My Nightingale", the other track was called "Kama Sutra" (billed here as "Indisches Panorama I"). We had always wondered where those recordings had come from, and how they related to Can. It wasn't until someone put this on in the store after we just got it in that it all came rushing back. Those songs were from a rare 1968 German erotic film by Kobi Jaegar called Kamasutra: Consumation Of Love and were arranged and performed by Irmin Schmidt & The Inner Space, whose then lineup of Jaki Leibeziet, Malcolm Mooney and Michael Karoli was essentially the same line-up of Can's debut full length, Monster Movie.
But much of this is different from the Can we know (though the Malcolm Mooney-sung "There Was A Man" points at what Can was to become, and Michael Karoli's simmering electric guitar lines are as signature as ever), it even sounds very different from the other Inner Space release, Agilok and Blubbo. That soundtrack was more exploratory, improvisational and experimental, while Kamasutra is much more focused and musically gorgeous. Lots of sitars, flutes, acoustic and electric guitars playing slow-burning compositions with loping repetitive rhythms. Occasionally rocking out a groove, but more often wandering through many pastoral raga-tinged extrapolations. This is the most psychedelically kosmiche recording we've ever heard from this outfit, which of course gives it our highest recommendation!
No doubt about it, Ty Segall is really one of our favorite garage rockers around. We're lucky enough to get to see him play all the time and the incredible sweat and energy of his live shows manages to seep its way into his recordings as pretty much every slab of wax he's released has delivered way raw fucked up garage rock at its absolute best!
Teamed up with his pal Mikal Cronin, the two take things to even more of a blasted and fractured state of garage mayhem with Reverse Shark Attack, tons of moments that remind us of the amazing thrashing garage pop scorch of the great Japanese band Acid Eater or some dream universe where Syd Barrett got to jam out Brainbombs covers. In fact they do an amazing cover of the Barrett era Pink Floyd gem "Take Up The Stethoscope And Walk" - it was so rad when we played this in the store for the first time and an enthusiastic customer screamed out "Who is doing some serious fucking justice to the spirit of Syd Barrett right now!?" and we totally understand where that impassioned and immediate reaction comes from! Segall continues to tap into the kind of music making that truly grabs a hold of your body to give you a totally enthralling pure and raw physical experience. We had heard an awesome 7" these two did together earlier in the year that sadly we weren't able to get our hands on, and it seems that Cronin really encourages Segall to go more into the outer limits of sound than on his own and we have to say we really love it! And we pretty much love any and all of what Ty does whether it's the amazing pop hooks he's capable of creating in his great songs on his proper solo albums or when he totally just goes way free and enters a total garage freak-out state that goes way beyond fuzz, like the tracks on Reverse Shark Attack. So rad!
We're huge fans of the Sacred Bones label. They're responsible for some of our favorite records lately, from space rock to cold wave to twisted garage pop. Gary War, Moon Duo, Blank Dogs, Zola Jesus, The Cultural Decay, 13th Chime, so we were definitely excited to check out this latest release, from a fella called Carl Simmons, and once again, SB has come up with something weird and cool and confounding.
Unlike the more gothic or cold wave or noisy leanings of much of the other stuff on the label, Simmons' record is a strange stripped down psychedelic folk missive, that sounds like it was broadcast from some other world, or other time.
Super spare and simple, mostly vocals and guitar, but fleshed out with layers of sound collage, and lots of effects. But unlike a lot of heavily effects laden music, Simmons manages to pile on the effects, without it becoming ABOUT the effects. Lots of reverb and multitracking results in a strange reedy, almost helium sounding main voice, often laid over Simmons' more natural gruff croon, the result is definitely magical, and mysterious, gorgeous druggy loner bedroom folk for sure, but infused with plenty of spaced out shimmer, and muted lysergic energy. If you can imagine a freaky, psychedelic, lost freak folk artifact, equal parts Sentridoh, Peter Grudzien and Ween (the latter mostly because of the processed helium vox), you might get a rough idea of what Honeysuckle Tendrils sounds like, but it's so much more than its influences or whatever references we can come up with. Recorded 10 years ago, and released in a micro edition of almost none, Honeysuckle Tendrils is definitely a lost gem, emotional, intimate, haunting, pretty and definitely a bit twisted.
Fantastic packaging as with all Sacred Bones stuff, cool hand screened arigato style cardstock sleeve, with multiple mini printed inserts.
2009 has been quite a year for noise rock legends Six Finger Satellite. First, long lost recordings from 2001 surfaced as the album Half Control. Now, a few months later, the recently reformed band has returned with its first new studio record, and goddamn it's good to have them back. Sad to say though, but the general response (EXCLUDING this one, of course) seems to be overwhelmingly lukewarm, and even all out negative in some cases. Even around here, the first thing people mention is how this doesn't sound like the Six Finger Satellite of old. Perhaps there is some truth to that claim (though why should it necessarily matter?), but repeated listens really dispel it. It's just that current 6FS is a little less focused on experimental noisiness and more into full on rocking, something they've always done well. It's funny how A Good Year For Hardness is pretty damn bluesy. Maybe some folks just don't dig it, but the big 6FS fans around these parts are definitely pleased. After all, it's not like this shit sounds like typical white boy blues rock that you hear at the county fair. Far from it. This is coked out mutant blues being beamed in from outer space. Mean, depraved blues made by guys who are old enough to step into this territory without embarrassment or any desire to be seen as cool in the eyes of today's indie rockers, who they probably don't even acknowledge. This band has always been ridiculously tight, and the new lineup is no exception. The songs exude a grooving, almost classic rock vibe with warm bass, cool backbeats, and muscular riffage. But then there is singer J. Ryan's trademark vocals, all pissed off and pretty scary, every once in a while punctuated by crazy distorted James Brown-styled screams. And yes, the synths are there, they are just used a bit more sparingly, but to awesome effect. Rarely is the band "quirky" here, but every once in a while, the synths just make everything really weird and almost funny if they weren't within such disturbing songs. A lot of the songs venture into dark, brooding psychedelic territory, almost like some jagged post-punk Doors (some may disagree with this, but whatever). This is probably best demonstrated on closing number "Rise," driven by a warm bass throb and a steady beat with occasional bursts of heavily vibratoed guitar chords. Throughout it, the creepy synths pop up here and there as the barely controlled intensity of non-sceaming J. Ryan scares you just a little more. Awesome.
So far this sonuvabitch is available as an lp only, but the turntable deprived can rejoice over the inclusion of a free download card.
C'mon, it's SLAYER!!! Does this even need a review. What if we said it was the heaviest and maybe best Slayer record in ages? There's never really been a -terrible- Slayer record really, there have been a few missteps, a stinker here and there definitely, and there was that one record that had rapping on it, oof, but for the most part Slayer have always ruled, and continue to reign supreme (and in blood!), and World Painted Blood definitely finds them sounding the best they have in a decade. The songs here are fierce and heavy and complex, catchy in that way only Slayer can pull off, wild squiggly leads, killer riffing, incredible drumming of course, and seriously some of the best Slayer songs in a while. The opening / main riff of "Psychopathy Red" sounds like it could have come straight off South Of Heaven, the title track is another killer, total classic Slayer until about halfway through when the band slips into a crushing half time solo laced chug driven breakdown, "Snuff" explodes right out of the gate with a wild frenzied solo, which you rarely hear, the first 40 seconds are ALL SOLO, fuck yeah! "Beauty Through Order" is a chuggy dirge, with some insane drumming, a wicked hook (like "Dead Skin Mask"), and a weirdly proggy arrangement. We could go on, track by track, not a bad one in the bunch, which definitely hasn't happened in several Slayer records, and is well worth celebrating by blasting this as loud as you can and playing it over and over and over.
Bad ass artwork too, really grim and creepy, almost like black metal art, a blood stain bone adorned booklet, with strange diagrams inside with the lyrics and photos, and a thick red plastic transparency in front of the booklet, making the whole thing look blood soaked!
Latest missive from our favorite Humboldt County free rock / freak noise / avant whatever dream duo the Starving Weirdos, here teamed up with Tom Carter of Charalambides and Shawn David McMillen, for two sprawling sides of slow burning blissed out ur-drone space raga. Which sounds as good as you might imagine. Dark and dense, swirling and whirling and creeping ominously through billowing clouds of slow motion string buzz, fractured melodies splitting into prismatic shards, drifting dreamlike through a haze of outer space bong smoke building to a gloriously soft cacophony, streaks of feedback, and sheets of high end wrapped around a warm pulsing and churning sonic core, all before slipping into something much softer and folkier, a slow slithery expanse of soundscapery, that sounds like a super subdued Wolf Eyes. And that's just the A side.
The second half of Live At The Accident! starts off all abstract and contemplative, the drones pushed way off into the distance, while the foreground is peppered with random crunch and clatter, what sounds like field recordings, buzz and glitch and hiss, which slowly sinks into the blackened morass, locking into a sort of lugubrious post industrial drift, the whole of the side like some late night wander through a ruined factory town overtaken by the forest, a living thing wrapped around the husk of something long dead, mysterious and haunting and ominous, but also strangely lovely, weirdly delicate, slipping from noisy muted crunch, to hushed reverent whisper, eventually disappearing into a strangely looped field of crackle and hum. Nice!
We've said it a million times, but it bears repeating, we love turntables, and scratchy records, and the sounds of both, we even (especially) love the sound of both with the music removed. Or at least most of the music removed. Fuzz and crackle and buzz and pop and warble and whir. All the sounds people try desperately to remove from their listening experience is exactly what we want piled on top of ours. In fact, all the crackle and surface noise that audio nerds discard, well, they should save it all up and bequeath it to us to sprinkle, dollop, pour, douse all of our music with. So it was really a no brainer that the debut cd from Strotter Inst. would be record of the week here at AQ (as it was just a few weeks ago). Strotter is the work of one man, Swiss turntablist / sound artist Christoph Hess, who takes old turntables, augments them with various wires and elastic bands, pieces of metal and all sorts of found objects, and then creates gorgeously Spartan symphonies of rhythm and texture using just the turntable and the stylus, no records at all. No music. The turntable becomes an instrument capable of more than just playing other peoples' music, it is a sound making device, an instrument as viable as any other. Although with a truly unique palette of sounds, reminiscent of some strange minimal electronica, albeit with a much more organic feel.
This disc captures a performance recorded live to minidisc at Oblo Cinema in Lausanne, Switzerland, in April of 2005. And is a gloriously hypnotic soundscape of glitchy beats, warm textural drones and strange low end strums, all locked into hypnotic loops, that slowly shift and drift in and out of sync as more turntables join the fray, or as the speeds of the turntables change, or as various implements shift. The set begins with a lush drone, difficult to imagine how it's produced, but it is warm and deep and quite organic sounding. Soon the sound of the reverberating bands are introduced, sounding a lot like some muted guitar, playing a simple low end figure, the notes coming faster and faster until the whole thing stumbles into a shambolic rhythm, a loping lurch, with occasional bursts of needle squelch, eventually settling into a dreamy motorik groove. The set seesaws back and forth between strange machinelike rhythms and stretches of drone and rumble. Right toward the end there is a burst of super distorted NOISE which slowly gives way to the final rhythmic groove, that slowly winds down, notes drifting off until all that is left is a single mechanical pulse. So nice.
Comes packaged in a cool cardstock sleeve with a little diecut circle perfectly above the hole in the center of the cd. More nods to the record and its design. The picture of Christoph Hess on the inside of the booklet looks like some old faded textbook photo of Einstein Or Edison, hunched over his machines, modified turntables in this case, a study of a quirky inventor, Strotter as the sound of antiquated machinery, of objects reassigned to new tasks, the tireless pursuit of technology recontextualization, only adding to the whole vibe of Hess' music being some recently unearthed or discovered scratchy, crackly sonic artifact.
First black, then red, now CHROME (ok, chrome colored plastic)! Ooh, shiny!
Finally, the long rumored Gristleism soundbox from Throbbing Gristle is here, and it's just about as cool as we hoped. Regardless of your feelings on Throbbing Gristle as a band, Gristleism is another must have for music obsessives and weird gadget freaks, like FM3's Buddha Machine, Gristleism is a small compact battery powered soundbox that plays loops, it has a volume and a pitch control, and a button to switch between loops, but UNlike the Buddha Machine, which until recently came in the generic Asian packaging that all similar machines came packaged in (originally these boxes contained prayers and were used for mediation), and finally got a minimal but stylish upgrade, the Gristleism box is all about the packaging, in fact, we balked at the price before we saw these, but now that we've seen one and held one, WOW. Totally worth it.
The outside sleeve is shiny chrome, gorgeously embossed, or debossed, on one side, elaborately diecut on the other, that immediately recognizable TG pattern, the bottom lettering is debossed into the silver, with the word Gristleism printed in black. But that's just the outer slipcover. Once that is removed, the inside cover is revealed, again, shiny chrome, the credits, the tracklisting, debossed into the silver then inside that is a small printed insert, black ink on thick black paper, and then finally the soundbox itself, which even has the Throbbing Gristle logo pressed into the shiny reflective chrome finished plastic. As an object, this thing is breathtaking, totally striking and even if you never listened to it, would look smashing on your shelf. But you WILL want to listen to it.
Thirteen TG loops, the bulk of which seem to harken from the classic late '70s period of Throbbing Gristle, before the project split into Psychic TV, Chris & Cosey, and Coil.
The low synthetic dirge of "Persuasion" (from 20 Jazz Funk Greats) is the first loop on the box, complete with those unsettling female vocalisations which may be screams of fear, ecstasy, horror, or somewhere in between. The seasick distorted swells and atonal melodica trilled with tremolo come next, culled from the TG classic "Hamburger Lady" (from D.o.A. The Third and Final Report), all that's needed is for you to fill in Genesis' vocals about encountering a charred human body still alive in a hospital ward. Similarly effective is the alien slow-motion grooviess of the title track from 20 Jazz Funk Greats, with Cosey's bleating trumpet hanging in the distance. The windswept eeriness and foghorn blurts on "Thank You Brian" seem to be a loop that's unique to the box, or at least we're not sure where it might have come from. But the proto-acid squiggliness and disembodied vocals of "Maggot Death" reprise a particularly great snippet from TG's Second Annual Report. The "Wimpy Bar" loop doesn't seem to come from one of TG's records either but is one that sounds really familiar with Cosey's knife-on-the-guitar-strings scraping and squiggled electronics, perhaps from one of the many live cassettes? The tenth loop reprises the darkly hallucinatory echoes and atonal blurts from "Heathen Earth". The shepherd tone crustiness of the "Industrial Intro" could have been an experiment that Chris and Sleazey worked out for Second Annual Report. Everything actually sounds pretty awesomely crappy through the little speaker, apparently the band worked quite hard to enhance the sound of these little boxes, according to their website, Gristleism has almost twice the frequency range of the original Buddha Machines, but it's definitely a pretty perfect encapsulation of the TG aesthetic. Low brow high art. We would have liked to have seen a chunk from United or the rhythm from Discipline added into the box, but hey save those for the next one. Please?
The one bummer is that there's no output / headphone jack, so there's really no way to hook this up to an amp or your stereo. Unless... you go to the band's website, where they provide specs for certain mods, insert a jack, do a little circuit bending, so you can add your own twist to TG's Gristleism box.
Needless to say, odds are you're probably gonna want one of these. Or two. If you loved the Buddha Machine, or the recent Black Box variation, then this one's gonna blow your mind. Available in black, red, and now chrome. And be warned, these are super limited, we have a bunch, but we may not be able to get more, or if we can, it might not be all that many...
We first got a couple of these in a few weeks back ('cause we were curious) and it didn't take long before we realized we had a Record Of The Week on our hands. It was obvious, really, since some of us here ending up getting so obsessed with this that it was just about ALL they'd listen to, for days, getting home after work and throwing it on, listening to it going to sleep at night, and when they'd get up in the morning, playing it at the store too... At first, though, we thought well heck maybe that's just us, maybe we're weird to like Tony Tears that much. But of course, we ARE weird, and so are a lot of AQ customers, and that's why this is definitely a good choice for Record Of The Week. Anything this hypnotic and dirgey and doomy and last but not least weird, has got AQ (and possibly you) written all over it.
We had to go to some trouble to acquire enough of these to list, contacting Tony Tears via MySpace, importing copies from Italy, getting all the cds we could lay our hands on. Which means we may or may not be able to get more when we run out, and if we can, it will certainly take a while, so be forewarned...
Tony Tears? So what IS that, you ask? Actually when we first saw the name, we thought it said Ebony Tears, which is the name of another band. But no, it's Tony Tears, as in a guy named Tony, last name Tears. And the "band" is indeed just the work of one man, whose (we presume) stage name gives this its monicker. How perfect is that, a mournful Italian doom metaller named Tony Tears? Already you feel sorry for him. Awww, Tony Tears...
Tony Tears' MySpace page is also perfect for this sort of depressed, lonely sounding music. It's really stark and plain, with a sort of electric purple/pink background color. He's got, like, only 66 friends (one of 'em us), and in his "top friends" listing he still has Tom. You know, Tom the founder of MySpace, who is automatically your first and only friend when you first sign up, but then of course you remove Tom 'cause he's not actually someone you know or care about... But lonely Tony, grateful for Tom's friendship, keeps him around.
So, anyway, to answer your question, this is some sort of underground doom metal, but also Italian in that spooky proggy soundtracky way, so it's kind of like Goblin crossed with St. Vitus, or Umberto teamed up with Trollman Av Ildtoppberg. Or, our early '70s proto-doom prog faves Jacula, channelled through someone's (Striborg's?) basement 4-track today.
Tony wrote the lyrics and the music, sings, and plays all the instruments... there's layers of fuzzy, foggy bass, gorgeously melancholic psychedelic electric guitar leads, eerie Goblin-y synths tinkling and droning, and a rhythmic foundation of slightly stumbling drum machine programming. Along with enough echo effects to give parts of this a bit of a dubby, or druggy, vibe.
Perhaps most crucial to our enjoyment of this are the vocals, which are spoken rather more than sung, and are all in Italian. Which works great, it's a language which even when simply spoken still sounds rather musical, we LOVE hearing Italian in this manner (we're reminded of old fave "Ordine Pubblico" by Starfuckers, especially by the track "Antichi Messagi" here), and we feel Tony's echoing, emotional chant-like recitations further enhance the hypnotic aspect of this lugubrious music. We can imagine Om fans zoning out to this quite easily!
Speaking of hypnotic, one of the times recently we had this playing in the store, a customer asked if it was some sort of new Circle side project... we can see why he thought it might be.
The overall atmosphere of this record is sooooooooo sad, yet somehow comforting. Even though we don't understand the Italian, this comes across as being very intimate & personal, and not just because of a certain sparseness to the mix that speaks to this being a one-man effort.
Tony Tears' repetitive lumbering heavy riffs and dark keyboard coloration, punctuated with mechanical, but not entirely predictable drum beats, awash with flangey, spacey effects and further embellished with his poetically mannered, incantatory Italian, has had quite an effect on the psyches of those here who can't help but keep this in heavy rotation. While rather raw and ragged in a charming DIY home-recorded way, the results are sheer beauty, weird weeping dreamlike beauty.
Definitely in the tradition of such strange Italian dark underground metal/prog/psych as Death S.S., Paul Chain, and Black Hole. But quite something else besides, with no prior interest in that tradition being necessary for appreciation of this. Even moreso maybe than The Puritan album we ROTW'd last time, being into doom metal isn't a prerequisite, as long as you like unusual music. Being into Goblin though might help.
If we can persuade a ton of folks to buy this, hopefully that won't make Tony Tears any -less- unhappy, because we're looking forward to more from this miserable, mesmerizing, and altogether unique act... stay doomed Mr. Tears!
This intense Japanese improv duo, featuring Ruins drummer Tatsuya Yoshida and Altered States/Ground Zero guitarist Uchihashi Kazuhisa, has previously released a double cd (their debut, now out of print), and then a triple cd, and now their third release takes the form of a cd AND a dvd. And if you've got those other two documents, you know you want this too. On the cd, there's 21 more tracks of spasmodic drums vs. guitar interplay, as really only these two could do. On the (NTSC, all-region, pro shot/edited) dvd, you get to see as well as hear 'em doing what they do best, a complex improv collage of utter out-guitar grind, angular stabs and squibs and squiggles, snatches of Yoshida's trademark vocal warble, sudden shifts and synch-ups, syncopated rhythmic assaults, effects-freaked amp output, you want it, you got it!
Sure, on both discs here there's interludes of shimmering soothingness, and some sorta placid parts, but make no mistake, for the most part Improvisations 3 is nothing other than heavy and hectic, with crunching electric guitar doing contortions amidst the ridiculous rhythmic pummel the drums are dealing out. And as usual, hard to believe it's improv, it's got the energy and spontaneity but also so many cool riffs and runs how could they made it all up on the spot, and so telepathically too?! If Yoshida sounds like he's got like eight arms, and Uchihashi about fourteen fingers, as a duo it's like they share one brain. One very insane brain.
This long in the works collection finally sees the light of day. The long lost Haiti recordings, gathered by the legendary Alan Lomax, who made these recordings over the span of about a year, from 1936 until 1937, when he and his wife were documenting music and rituals for the Library Of Congress. Recorded direct to aluminum disc (a total of over 500 discs), these recordings had been unheard by the public, ever since. The original recordings have been painstakingly restored, and they sound fantastic, most of the noise stripped away, without losing any of the music, and if anything, according to the compilers, the music sounds even better now, and closer to the sounds Lomax was actually hearing when he originally recorded these.
It's a pretty overwhelming collection, that invites hours and hours of listening, which we think most folks will happily offer, once they get just a glimpse of the sounds within, from street musicians, to children's songs, far out jazz to dreamy vocal music, classical piano to angelic torch songs, voudou worship to big band, just check out the samples for a little taste, an incredible collection of sounds, which have gone almost completely unheard for the last 70 years!!
Anyone into field recordings, and world music, if you dig the Sublime Frequencies series, the Yaala Yaala series, the Ethiopiques series, this music is amazing, another long overdue glimpse of a people and place, and their music, and that music says so much about the time, the life in Haiti, the politics, and how the rest of the world felt about Haiti, you can hear the influences of various musics from all over the world, the music here is more than just music, it's a sonic exploration of a time and a place, and the sounds are so evocative, they almost transport the listener body and soul. Fantastic!!
The box is gorgeous too, a linen covered hard box, printed on the cover, with a faux Haitian stamp, as if Lomax had mailed this box to you personally for safekeeping. Inside the cover is a pocket containing a reproduction of Lomax's Haiti journal, filled with reproductions of his actual notes, observations, drawings, photos and diagrams. The liner notes are housed in a gorgeous hardcover book, all the songs and artists, photos, lyrics, everything. The cds themselves are housed in another little linen covered miniature hardcover book, with printed paper pockets inside, just like a miniature version of the sleeves that old 78s were stored in. Then there's a reproduction of Lomax's Haiti site map, complete with his scrawled notes, and finally, a few photos, as if whoever sent the box, decided to include some snapshots. And all the various books can be removed with the ribbons attached to the inside of the box. Stunning. There's also some film footage, and there's just so much more.
Needless to say, so so so recommended!!!
No way around it, this is an amazing comp, culled from limited the singles Trensmat released over the last three years, just check out the lineup: Circle, White Hills, Telescopes, Bardo Pond, Cave, Heavy Winged, Astral Social Club, The Shining Path, Area C, Cheval Sombre, Mugstar, and Magnetize, probably couldn't assemble a more bad ass, or more aQ sounding comp if we tried! But, the bummer is, that this collects only ONE song from each single, which while keeping the 7"s special, and relevant, it is sort of a bummer, might have opted for a double disc with ALL the songs, plus a few of these tracks are taken from the series Trensmat did of bands covering Hawkwind, complete with killer Hawkwind style cover art, seems weird to pluck one or two at random, when that series was begging for a proper cd release with ALL the covers, but really, small complaints, once you dig into this comp, and niggling doubts will be quickly washed way by all the amazing tripped out sonics contained within. Some highlights include:
The Telescopes deliver a droning, buzzing raga-like dreamscape, flitting bird-like flutes that swirl and float over a blackened drift of guitar rumble and pulled apart riffs, until the drums kick in, and then it's like you've been launched into space, a full on drug drenched, FX heavy psychedelic space rock jam, with a thick bassy organ groove, wild flutes and effects EVERYWHERE. Dirge-y and groovy and dreamlike.
White Hills ditch much of their usual spaceiness for something a bit harder, and tackle Hawkwind's "Be Yourself" with crunchy chugging guitars, pounding drums, wild tangles of distortion drenched leads over the top, the band not so much covering the original, as transforming it into an endless psychedelic hard rock loop, the band churning and grinding out a steady stream of psychedelia over that endless main riff, before drifting off into a cloud of glittering soft psych shimmer.
Mugstar's track is a super synth heavy, weird sort of post punk noise rock, almost kind of mathy, a bit like a supercharged, way more metallic Stereolab, which intensifies until it explodes into wild psychedelic squalls of acid fried synths and freaked out guitarnoise.
Circle's track finds them at their most stripped down, the drums and guitars locked into a constant loop, the bass following right along, so mesmerizing and seemingly endless, the vocals a barely there whisper, while off in the distance lurk all manner of random clatter and mysterious percussive events. Right in the middle there's an awesome stumbling atonal guitar 'solo' before the band slips right back into that same groove.
Bardo Pond add female vocals to their take on Hawkwind's "Lord Of Light", the vocals drifting ethereally, over a roiling black cloud of FX drenched guitars and some seriously pounding drums, even a bit of flute (we think), and maybe more than any of the others managing to meld the sound of the original with their own, plenty of wah wah guitar, loads of effects, most of the track spent drifting through space, cloaked in blown out super distorted psych guitar and shimmering outer space ambience. Surprisingly heavy and totally blissed out.
Cave contribute "Machines & Muscles" with its Circle-like guitar groove, some hand drums, very tribal and looped sounding, suspended in a field of space streakings and smears of soft effects in the background, the drums get a little more obtuse, a bit busier, but that main riff stays LOCKED in, until it begins to get ALL tripped out, distorted, effects drenched, swinging from speaker to speaker, dizzyingly tripped out, and then finally, the drums kick in proper, and we're in total hynorock bliss, little bits of keyboard pepper, the stuttery rhythm, the main riff staying solid and unwavering, while all around it various other sounds swoop and shimmer.
Astral Social Club surprised us with their jam, total minimal house music, sort of. The main beat a stripped down pulse and squelch, with synthy basslines, and some haunting disembodied piano drifting over the top, making for a truly creepy mash up. Maybe one of our favorite Astral tracks ever!
The Shining Path's contribution is seriously rocking, the drums and bass locked into a motorik groove, while the guitar, super distorted and blown out, spits out riffs in sudden bursts, eventually coalescing into one constant stream of psychfuzz, pelted by fragments of super effected vocals, strange little squalls of FX, and then the bass gets all dubbed out, bouncing back and forth beneath the buzz and fuzz.
We could go on, but why bother, this collection is pretty fucking kick ass, here's hoping they decide to do a second volume that gathers up the rest of those 7"s tracks, but hell, for now, this is definitely hitting the spot.
We kind of always wondered why more people didn't do a release like this sooner. Not a cd or an lp or a tape, but a little mini usb drive, packed with sights and sounds, for this particular releases much more appropriate as it's a collaborative project, in which Noise / Experimental Artists go head to head with Subversive Technologists aka Computer Hackers. Ten from each group were asked to contribute a piece of work, which could be anything, music, sound art, images, text, a video, even software, anything that could be converted to binary! The musicians had the theme of "Subversive Computing" while the hackers had "Noise" as theirs. A pretty rad concept for sure, and the result is pretty cool. Most of the songs are in FLAC form, so you'll have to have the appropriate decoder installed. Most of the bands were new to us, although some familiar names popped up: Sarah's Charity, Francisco, Lopez, Family Battle Snake, the sounds are all over the map, from drone to glitch to 8-bit to, well, you get the drift, it's a strange comp, but definitely cool.
Then there's the subversive computing portion, which is super interesting, but for the Luddites it might be hard to figure out what to do, and / or what the various programs do. From hiding information in noise music, sample generating software (we think), producing transcripts of random audio, generating a rainbow of sound out of the colors of noise, bitmapped chaos, a poem about noise, a video depicting the visual representation of noise, software that uses hacking to create art, a project that creates awareness of the controversial and incomprehensible privacy policies on the net, and more!
Definitely need to spend some time at home, listening, and reading, and exploring, all of these digital goodies are housed in a cool, printed mini usb drive, with a strap, so you can wear it around your neck!
Noise freaks, weirdo sound obsessives, computer nerds, and everyone in between, should definitely check this out!!
For a lot of us, buying comps and reissues and stuff put out by Finders Keepers / B-Music is pretty much a no-brainer. These folks know their stuff. They can DJ for us anytime! So mentioning that The BYG Deal is the latest from 'em might be all we need to say, though dropping some names like Brigitte Fontaine, Jean-Claude Vannier, Daevid Allen & Gong, Giorgio Gomelsky, Robert Wyatt, Vangelis, Ame Son, and the Art Ensemble Of Chicago couldn't hurt. Or perhaps a name like Inter-Groupie Psychotherapeutic Elastic Band - never heard of 'em before, no, but they've gotta be good, right!!? (And they are, their track "Floating" anyway being a blissful bit of la-la-la space psych ceremony).
What we have here is a collection of tracks released by France's BYG, a post '68 radical rock/jazz label that flourished 'til about 1974. We'd heard of 'em before mainly in conjunction with the famed BYG/Actuel series of African-American jazz releases, stuff by the Art Ensemble, Don Cherry, Sunny Murray, etc. But this disc demonstrates that BYG (which according to one graphic here stands for Beautiful Young Generation, though elsewhere we're told it's the initials of the three label owners) was as much about psychedelic pop rock and groovy "hairy funk" as it was about avant-garde free jazz... an awesome blend in our opinion, and blend they do, some of these tracks really hard to classify. Maybe it's the "Total Space Music" of which they speak. In any case, whatever discotheque played this stuff must have been REALLY hip and happenin'.
The music here is almost all super groovy, but often quite quirky too (take Gong's circusy nursery rhyme freakout "Hip Hypnotise You" for instance!), these various tracks loaded with flute, orgasmic female vocals, heavy psych guitar, and equally heavy prog organ (running wild alongside frenetically shuffling drums on Vangelis' "Stuffed Tomato", for example, among many standout spots here). From chanteuse Valerie Lagrange's ye-ye grooves to the poppy psychedelic stomp of Coeur Magique to Banana Moon's Beefheartian crunt, this is pretty far out and awesome.
Here's the complete lineup of artists appearing here: Alice (2 tracks), Francois Wertheimer, Brigitte Fontaine and Areski, Gong (3 tracks), Alan Jack, Couer Magique (2 tracks), Valerie Lagrange, Jacques Barsamian, Alpha Beta, Ame Son (2 tracks), Art Ensemble Of Chicago, Freedom, Vangelis, Paul Semana, Inter-Groupie Psychotherapeutic Elastic Band, Banana Moon, Joachim and Rolf Kuhn. Yep, the disc is crammed, 22 tracks, almost 80 minutes, and the thick cd booklet is equally full up with full color graphics and extensive liner notes, it's amazing the compilers could dig up so much info on this stuff, considering how obscure a lot of this is, but that's their biz!
There's a few tracks you could have run across elsewhere on other reissues, but most of 'em you haven't, that's for damn sure. For instance, the awesomely named track "Astral Abuse" from the rare 7" by Alpha Beta, a one-off Vangelis project. And there's plenty more from other collector's-only, never before on cd sources.
If you liked other B-music compilations like Andy Votel's Prog Is Not A Four Letter Word, this ought to be right up your alley. Likewise if you enjoyed the two Pop Made In France comps we've listed, this is a bit like those (some of the same artists appear, in fact) but way weirder. And of course any fan of Jean-Pierre Massiera's strange productions is gonna find this of interest as well... in fact there's personnel connections to his Visitors project, and connections also to the likes of Magma and Aphrodite's Child for that matter.
Another keeper from Finders Keepers that's for sure, thankfully available domestically, complete with slipcover!
A few of us were very lucky to catch Jozef Van Wissem's recent AQ instore where he played his new 13 Course Swan Neck Baroque Lute, a super long and intricately exquisite variation of the lute we've never seen before, that he wielded mightily, rocking out heavy metal guitar style, and also played whilst walking around the store like a medieval troubadour (check our blog for pictures!). While unfortunately it wasn't our best attended instore, Van Wissem played like it was, and we were graciously rewarded with an intimate and beautifully hypnotizing performance. NEXT time, don't miss him!
And that is what you will find with his latest (vinyl-only) release on Important, Ex Patris. On vinyl only (for now at least), Ex Patris (The Fathers) gives us four new tracks of gorgeous plucked string majesty. Building upon his repertoire of mirrored palindromic compositions, he focuses this release on layered and repeating melodies rather than sparse reductions of past releases. At times, we wonder if he might be using overdubs, something we haven't noticed before in his recordings or if it is just that his new lute offers more depth and range than the ones he used in the past. Hard to tell, but oh so easy to become seduced by its magnificent spell!
Brutal. Beautiful. Brut-iful? it's album number two from Erie, PA's heaviest hitters Village Of Dead Roads (who are one of the "Neur-Isis" crowd's best kept secrets). We dug their debut from a few years back quite a bit, and now on this sophomore release they've unleashed another advanced lesson in sludgecore sonics. Although actually this album is a bit less "experimental" than their first one, dropping the ambient sampling stuff and maybe getting a bit MORE metal, including some rather melodic metallic guitar soloing. There's lots of cool parts, every song with something interesting/artistic to offer musically. Every song also utterly destroying you with its heaviness and aggression, via punishing drums, churning riffs, and throat-shreddingly screamed vokills. Yet, they also manage to incorporate moments of melancholic moodiness inbetwixt the crushing parts, without wimping out or being too post-rock predictable. What we're trying to say, is it doesn't get boring, the way some albums in this genre do (though it may not always fit your mood, for instance if you're, like, happy, and want to remain so).
Heartily recommended to fans of other bands from that Neur-Isis axis! And anything from Eyehategod to Samothrace, Cavity to Cult Of Luna, Black Cobra to Snowblood... Not sure why they haven't become better known, they're as good or better than most, though this might be their final release anyway, not sure, apparently the Village's population is down to just the guitarist/vocalist and the drummer now, both of whom are also in a new (two-piece) band called Cotton Candy, a name which you won't be surprised to learn does NOT describe their sound at all...
Been meaning to review these for ages now, finally getting around to it, the first two records from this legendary Boston band, originally released on the legendary and now defunct Homestead Records label, and who are often compared to Husker Du and Mission Of Burma (the band that drummer / vocalist Peter Prescott played in before the Volcano Suns), the latter especially appropriate since Prescott's drumming was a big part of MoB's sound, as was his occasional singing, and it definitely sounds like some of Burma's songwriting stuck with him.
But Volcano Suns were much more of a pop band, meant to be more fun and a little bit more light hearted than Burma, the songs catchy, the riffs super memorable, but that doesn't keep much of the music from being brooding and intense and complex, super rhythmic, and hypnotic, with long instrumental passages butted up against super catchy choruses, like the Merge website says, these songs are so good, and so memorable, that they really do sound like greatest hits records. We hadn't listened to either of these in ages, but throwing them on recently, we remembered pretty much all of these songs, 20 years later! And they still sound pretty fresh considering how much indie rock has changed over the last two decades.
All-Night Lotus Party was the band's second record, originally released in 1986, and found the band getting a bit darker, and a little more aggressive, the guitars heavier, but without sacrificing any of the pop smarts that made the first record so awesome, and like that record, pretty much every song here is a could have/should have/would have been hit. Catchy as all get out, but super rocking and intense.
This is the first time either of these records has been available on cd. This reissue includes a ton of bonus tracks, B-sides, etc., including some really odd covers, including the Beatles' "Polythene Pam", the Amboy Dukes' "Journey To The Center Of The Mind" and Leonard Nimoy's "The Ballad Of Bilbo Baggins"(!!)...
Been meaning to review these for ages now, finally getting around to it, the first two records from this legendary Boston band, originally released on the legendary and now defunct Homestead Records label, and who are often compared to Husker Du and Mission Of Burma (the band that drummer / vocalist Peter Prescott played in before the Volcano Suns), the latter especially appropriate since Prescott's drumming was a big part of MoB's sound, as was his occasional singing, and it definitely sounds like some of Burma's songwriting stuck with him.
But Volcano Suns were much more of a pop band, meant to be more fun and a little bit more light hearted than Burma, the songs catchy, the riffs super memorable, but that doesn't keep much of the music from being brooding and intense and complex, super rhythmic, and hypnotic, with long instrumental passages butted up against super catchy choruses, like the Merge website says, these songs are so good, and so memorable, that they really do sound like greatest hits records. We hadn't listened to either of these in ages, but throwing them on recently, we remembered pretty much all of these songs, 20 years later! And they still sound pretty fresh considering how much indie rock has changed over the last two decades.
The Bright Orange Years was the Volcano Suns first record, and was originally released in 1985, very reminiscent of Mission Of Burma, a killer collection of classic indie rock, equal parts that classic Homestead sound, with a little SST thrown in for good measure, the songs range from jangly and hooky, to dense and rocking, to noisy and chaotic, but all of them super catchy. We loved this record back in the day, and we're loving it all over again now.
This is the first time either of these records has been available on cd. This reissue includes a ton of bonus tracks, B-sides, etc., including a pretty cool live cover of Prince's "1999" that transforms the original into a weirdly angular post punk jam...
Ahhhh, yes, more Voltaic Omen, the one man black metal weirdo from the Pacific Northwest, who has been blowing us away with recording after recording of fucked up and fractured lo-fi what-the-fuck blackness. And it just keeps getting better, and weirder!
This time around Mr. VO is teamed up with a noisemaker called Fire Island, AK, who we'll get to in a second, but first, VO begins proceedings with a super creepy stretch of processed ambience, all haunting minor key melodies, backwards cymbals, fractured loops, mumbly speaking in tongues vocals, it may be black metal, but it also sounds a bit like some of the super far out Teenage Filmstars stuff. Then all of a sudden, the track kicks in, and it sounds like it's being broadcast from a speaker atop a pole, down the street, murky and muddy and lo-fi, but with a strange clattery, almost Muslimgauze sounding rhythm laid over the top, before slowing down and tripping out, and transforming into some sort of doomic black ritual, slow pounding percussion, groaned vocals, distant tarpit riffing, haunting minor key melody, super hypnotic.
Fire Island, AK, who we'd never heard before, are way more of an experimental free noise outfit, exploring textures and tempos, patterns and layers, reverbed electronic squiggles wrap around bits of scrape and glitch, looped and repeating, gradually growing more dense and frantic, never quite attaining total Merzbowian overload, which is a good thing, even at its most impenetrable and chaotic, there still lurks some texture and rhythm, giving form and propulsion to could otherwise become pure noise. Cool stuff for sure. Buy this for the Voltaic Omen, stick around for the Fire Island. Definitely recommended.
Cool full color inserts, photocopied insert, LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES, each one stickered and hand numbered!!
Have to admit, we were a bit disappointed to find out that these ladies didn't bust out a cover of Duran Duran's saucy early hit on their latest 12" of the same name. Instead we s'pose they're maybe giving a hearty nod to their recent activities (you might've spotted them in the Jim Carrey movie Yes Man?). They've honed their party and playing chops plenty from heaps of touring, and the trio packs quite a wallop... not to mention a soulful stomp and a tribal thump. This ep features six songs - three new ones and three from their 2007 full length Our Own Island!
In a world full of tiny labels, it takes a lot to stand out, whether it's some amazing and mysterious sounds or super unique and hand made packaging. And if anything RuralFaune as shined in both respects, a crazy collection of some of the weirdest noisemakers in the world, and some seriously amazing, and in many cases, fragrant, packaging. Hand printed, painted, folded, pasted, held together with string or wire, often filled with branches or flowers, scraps of paper, seeds or bits of plant matter, many of them very strong smelling, all of them amazing.
Well, Bruno, the man behind RuralFaune, was really getting into heavy music, and decided that maybe RuralFaune was not the place for such musics, so he started FaunSabbatha, a new label dedicated to heavy, creepy, dark music, metal, metallic, or just plain evil. Four new releases, each one outrageously limited, gorgeously hand packaged, and gone before you know it.
Any band that thanks funeral doom horde Rigor Sardonicous is alright by us. Especially if RS are one of the only four entities thanked. One being the label, the other being one of the other bands featured amidst this recent spate of Faunasabbatha releases, Sorc'Henn.
So what comes of an unhealthy love/obsession with Rigor Sardonicous, how about a creepy, ultra sick, noise drenched slow motion doom crawl? Downtuned, and lurching, stumbling and heavyheavyheavy. After a brief intro, all mournful windblown twang, a spidery latticework of spare, sorrowful melodies, plucked out over a whirling expanse of emptiness, comes the filthy, crusty, noisy multiple o'd doom. But sonically, Waverly Hills don't so much resemble funereal doom, as they do, modern noise rock, or Japanese ultra psych. The guitars are caustic coruscating streaks of blurred buzz, unleashed in heaving waves, while much of the band's time is spent crawling doomlike through a field of sonic broken glass, the guitars spend most of their time erupting in squalls of near white noise that sound like Keiji Haino fronting the Dead C. Thick clouds of whirling buzz, deconstructed riffage, super abstract percussion, the vocals a subsonic rumble, a blurred low end gurgle (except when it's a haunting ghostlike falsetto!) underpinning the soaring and drifting slabs of buzz overhead. Imagine doom metal being pulled apart, the notes and chords and riffs being rent asunder, the resulting squall still dark and doomy, by way more tripped out and damaged.
So yeah, you doooooooomlords will definitely dig this, especially if you lean toward stuff like Moss and Khanate and Bunkur and of course Rigor Sardonicous, but it might be even more appealing if your cup of tea is abstract psychedelic noise a la Sunroof!, Total, Dead C, White Heaven, etc...
LIMITED TO 74 COPIES, hand numbered on a tattered, torn piece of cloth, with the Faunasabbatha logo stamped on there as well, in a paper sleeve held shut wit a piece of metal wire.
Curtis Mayfield lookin' superfly on the cover. Inside, a bunch of stuff on blaxploitation films. Also, David Holmes, Iceberg Slim, animator Ralph Bakshi, Library Music, and tons more interesting funky stuff. It would seem this is Wax Poetics' special cinema issue or somethin'. As always, great to read and just to look at, lots of vintage album cover art in full color in here to drool over. Right on.
2009 REWIND! The Wire's annual end of year issue, with their big list of Record Of The Year (do you have 'em all? One of this week's AQ Records Of The Week comes in at #2, guess which one), and various writers' and musicians' reflections on the year that was.
Plus: Monolake, Janek Schaefer, Josephine Foster, and plenty more. As always, maybe especially this issue, essential reading for the musically obsessed (you probably!).
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The first sighting on anything Wooden Shjips related is usually all it takes to induce mass hysteria around these parts. Apparently, you, our loyal customers, feel the same, because man, we have sold a fuckload of Shjips records. We just can't get enough, and these guys deliver without fail every time. And now, right after their amazing Dos record, comes yet another offering, a two song 12" single featuring a Serge Gainsbourg composition, originally written for and performed by Brigitte Bardot, and a new version of "I Hear The Vibrations", which first appeared on the group's insanely limited Vampire Blues tour 7".
It's doubtful that anyone expected Wooden Shjips to go all French pop on us here. They don't. Instead, "Contact" sounds like the Wooden Shjips we all know and love, with warm bass grooves holding the foundation over a cool, midtempo drum beat with a nice tambourine accent. Bursts of filtered fuzz and wah guitar bubble and whoosh about as the organ pulses rhythmically, and the vocals, sung in French, add the perfect amount of mystery to this hazy rocker.
As awesome as "Contact" is, it's the flipside that really has everyone here going crazy. Why? Because "I Hear The Vibrations" is simply one of the coolest Wooden Ships songs to date, that's why. The song somehow manages to be both mellow and cosmically heavy, not in a typical "heavy" way, just... huge. It's a lumbering behemoth of hazed out stoner majesty that would go on forever if we had our way. To anyone - "anyone" being pretty much the majority of the human race - who hasn't heard this one yet, you'll just have to trust us. It's fucking essential. The few of you who actually got a hold of the 7" will also find a reason to snap up this son-a-bitch, because the version presented here (the "E-Z Version" according to the credits) is definitely the way to go. To quote the Mexican Summer website, it is " slower, grander, heavier, and dreamier, and takes full advantage of the 12" format for better fidelity and a truly blissful listening experience." Yep, pretty much. It's everything that was great about the song to begin with, but MORE of it in every conceivable way. Sooooooooooo so awesome.
But, like most things of this nature, and like everything on Mexican Summer, this is super limited, with only a scant 550 copies to be distributed throughout the globe (though we're told there will be second, equally limited pressing done soon). It also comes with a download card, but really, the best way to listen to this is stoned in your room with the lights on low and the stereo cranked all the way, not on your iPod on a crowded bus. The record itself, pressed on asskicking white vinyl, comes housed in a cool disco sleeve that was printed on a variety of colors. We just hope everybody likes green.
Once again, we can't recommend this band highly enough. When you listen, you'll realize that Wooden Shjips have done all the thinking for you and given you exactly what you wanted. Did we mention this was limited? Ready. Set. GO!!!!
We almost sold out of these after only a few days, without even reviewing / listing it, but then it IS a new Xasthur record, and it IS a super limited (500 copies) cassette version, and cassette means cult, in a cool oversized clamshell case, with original artwork by Hildolf from Draugar, and inside, it also contains a photocopied booklet, 3 pins and a patch! So yeah, no real surprise that those flew out of here. We did manage to get a handful more of these, but seeing as how these have been selling pretty much nonstop, who knows how long they'll last.
Beyond all that stuff, we're pretty psyched for sure. Finally, a new record from Xasthur, aka Malefic, a one man doom-ed depressive black metal machine, whose last release, Defective Epitaph was a huge hit around these parts, due in no small part to the shift from drum machine to actual drums, no programmed beats, actual kit bashing rhythms courtesy of Malefic himself, and the result was pretty stellar, creating a sound even more raw and murky and lo-fi than past efforts, but no less bleak or introspective or amazing. So now comes All Reflections Drained, soon to come on double lp, and we would assume cd, but for now available only in the very old school, very metal, and very kult kassette format. And it's very much a continuation of Defective Epitaph, from moment one, the sound boomy and reverb drenched, echoey and WAY lo-fi, loping doomy guitars, stumbling midtempo drums, and then WOAH, the sound shifts, and the drums double time it under a layer of thick low end dramatic piano, creating some strange Skepticismy drift, over the relentlessly buzzing blackness below. The mix is REALLY weird, fractured and gloriously fucked up, the sounds shifting and merging into one another, the songs too, woozy and warped and seasick sounding and a bit waltzy, the drum sound super raw and distant and for the most part buried in the mix, minus some flurries of kick drum that practically explode. The guitars are washed out and melancholic, lumbering doomily through hazy clouds of muted buzz and soft focus hiss, lots of creeped out ambience, and dark soundscaping, way less of a focus on vocals, in fact several songs in, and we barely noticed any, minus some far off clean crooning and some rumbled mutterings, the usual blackened harsh rasps seemingly lost in the swirling off kilter mix.
If anything this record is a logical extension of the direction Malefic had been taking the sound of Xasthur, like a Defective Epitaph part two maybe, but somehow quite a bit doomier, and WAY weirder, more spaced out and experimental, with a serious focus on dark brooding non-metal parts, hints of slowcore and drone abound, some parts are downright orchestral, and the sound is definitely even murkier and mysterious than ever, dripping with buzz and tape hiss, blown out low end (that sounds like a tuba or something similar) and thick crumbling distortion, but fear not troo grim hordes, it's still plenty depressive and dolorous, minor key and epic, miserable and moody, gorgeously buzzy and bafflingly brilliant.
Again, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!! And these will probably disappear FAST... To be sure, there will be a vinyl and perhaps cd version coming out eventually, but they won't be as kvlt as this! ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
Situated somewhere near Cold Cave, Zola Jesus, and Blank Dogs, Xeno & Oaklander offer another fantastic distillation of dark-eyed synth-pop from a previous decade. A duo comprised of Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride, Xeno & Oaklander eschew digital technologies in favor of analogue synthesizers, sequencers, and drum machines, applying these instruments to the ghostly rhythmic electronics of minimal wave bands such as Absolute Body Control or Snowy Red. Less obtuse references would be early Human League, Xymox, and Depeche Mode; but no matter where you want to pin the influences, X&O are looking back to the European stylings of romantic electronica that dates somewhere between 1982 and 1986. Like Cold Cave, Xeno & Oaklander have made an appearance at the No Fun Festival in 2009, probably being one of the acts that some of the stalwart noiseniks must have hated because of their comparatively pretty songs.
There is something golden and polished to the mechanoid sequences and electrical rhythms on Sentinelle, which stands as the 'proper' debut album for Xeno & Oaklander after a cd-r micro-edition and some choice tracks on Wierd's [sic] first two collections of analogue electronic music. Throughout the album, sad electronic melodies are tightly bound around repetitive phrases and spry post-disco drum programming, with the vocals alternating between both McBride and Wendelbo (the latter singing in English and French). The album has the feel that it could be a stand in as a soundtrack to the silent film Metropolis, with its accompanying aesthetics of art-deco modernism tinged with noir shadows and gleaming bursts of reflected light. Despite the obvious allusions to the past, Xeno & Oaklander seem to have wedged themselves between all of their influences and mustered something that they can claim as their own. Very well done!
On the cover, Bristol dubstepper Joker, one of XLR8R's 2009 faves, along with The Field, Martyn, Hudson Mohawke, and Holy Ghost! Inside, also: Nite Jewel, Fuck Buttons, DJ Koze, A Place To Bury Strangers, HEALTH, and more.
It always seems a new installment of this long running and beloved music and arts magazine / journal shows up right when we're working on the New Arrivals list, so as badly as we just want to curl up in a big warm chair and get lost in it, we're forced to finish the list before we can dive in, which is torture, cuz Yeti, every issue, is jam packed with fascinating articles, killer art, and super interesting interviews. And of course there's the accompanying soundtrack cd, always overflowing with amazing sounds.
Number eight offers up these delights: an interview with the legendary Jim Dickinson, an interview with Explode Into Colors, a cool collection of old time real photo postcards and an accompanying essay, an interview with Eliane Radigue, a piece on Bishop Perry Tillis, photographs of an abandoned amusement park in Japan, rediscovering the Johnny Mathis / Chic collaboration (!), a piece on Harry Partch, with lots of instrument photos, artwork by Nicole Eriko Amagai Smith, an article about sound makers Flower Electronics and King Capitol Punishment, artwork by Andrew Neyer, an interview with Zola Jesus, and plenty more.
As always the ads are all jammed into their own section in the back, so you can ignore them if you like, although there are plenty of exciting things to discover / buy. And then the cd, featuring mostly new and exclusive music from Ty Segall, Little Claw, Brown Recluse, Tyvek, Mantles, Bishop Perry Tillis, Inca Ore, Woven Bones, The Splinters, Jim Dickinson, Pete Swanson, The Moles, Vaselines and more more more. As always, RECOMMENDED! ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
