Another WTF? release from this very much non-blues weirdo duo. As usual, but more so than ever, we're not quite sure what to make of it. Opener "Love's A Rondo" really threw us for a loop. A meandering rock groove jam lead by jaunty jazzy piano, ivories being tickled here in the vein of Vince Guaraldi of Peanuts fame, or even Bill Evans. The sprightly piano then mixes it up with distorted but mellow psych guitar wail. It's like Schroeder from Peanuts jamming with Wooden Shjips or something. Kinda confusional but we like it, an assessment that applies to the whole album. There's a soundtracky vibe to the heavier throb of track two, "Iron Pigs", which features happy but slightly dissonant sounding synth-horns and a steady drum machine thwack-thwack amongst other noises. As the album progresses, all these elements - piano, drum machine, guitar, electronics - woozily weave in and out, kind of mellow, kind of strange, kind of pretty, kind of queasy... It's tough to tell if it's "good" or not, but, well, we guess it IS, in that we like to listen to it, in fact it gets played in the shop quite a bit, and we're talking about it, even... Valley Tangents makes an impression as being not quite like anything else. They've successfully captured a true 'outsider' vibe here. It's like Blues Control decided to make a record today that, had it come out in the '70s, would for sure have wound up on the infamous Nurse With Wound 'list'. Or imagine Vince Vince Guaraldi making a krautrock record, with Brian Eno's help perhaps, one that's both pleasant -and- weird.
If you liked Blues Controls' recent collab with Laraaji, or their previous Local Flavor lp, well, you just might like this too. Or maybe not. We doubt BC are bothered much, they're just gonna keep doing their 'thing', whatever it is!
This unlikely freak-funk treasure from Chubby Checker has at long last been properly reissued, fully legit we're now told for the first time. You might recall it under the self-explanatory title Chubby Checker Goes Psychedelic, which is what it was called when we first listed an earlier edition some years back. Here's what we said about it then, which still applies:
When you think deep, soulful, psychedelic tinged rock the first name that probably does NOT come to mind is Chubby Checker. But guess what, he did in fact brew up a totally potent batch of funky psych rock burners that somehow slipped completely under the radar.
Apparently Chubby was living in Holland in 1971 when he hooked up with some eccentric and unknown hippie rockers who all seemed to be smoking some seriously good stuff and together they recorded this batch of seriously scorching tracks! Forget everything you know about Chubby Checker. This is not "The Twist", or the golden-oldies or a novelty comeback with the Fat Boys in the '80s. This is an impassioned psychedelic rock killer with deep grooves and a super emotional and intense vocal delivery from Chubby. Every time we play this in the store someone thinks it's some rare Hendrix track or an unreleased Arthur Lee gem or some amazing group like Black Merda finally being resurrected. In fact just about all of these songs could have appeared on any of the recent spate of psych reissue comps that we have fallen so in love with (Nuggets, Cherrystones), and actually we were given our first sneak peak into this secret world of Chubby Checker a few years back on the great collection Mr. Toytown Presents Vol. 2: Nightmares at Toby's Shop. We never thought we'd finally hear the whole disc, heck, we didn't even think there -was- a whole disc. Turns out there was, first presented to us as Chubby Checker Goes Psychedelic though it was originally released back in the day on some budget labels variously under the titles New Revelation and Chequered.
There are some seriously mind blowing songs here. Songs that aren't just cool cause it's neat and weird and interesting that they are actually being sung by Chubby Checker, but songs that stand on their own two feet and grab your and shake you and sound so damn good! What's also so cool about this recording is that 9 of the 11 songs were actually written by Chubby, so it's not like some hip producer just grabbed a bunch of great songs and slapped Chubby's name and voice on them. He shows such an amazing range, from scorching stingers ("Love Tunnel") to druggy cookers ("Stoned In The Bathroom", yeah!) to darkly solemn tales ("He Died"). What an absolute surprise of a record! We haven't been able to stop playing it since it arrived to AQ. We're completely addicted! And we think you will be too.
Includes liner notes explaining a bit more about how the heck this happened, and the cd has a bonus track!
The Conet Project, originally released in 1997, has attained near mythical status around here. Many folks associate The Conet Project inextricably with our store itself. Which makes sense. We championed the Conet Project relentlessly, everyone here is obsessed, most of us owning multiple copies, some of us incorporating sounds from The Conet Project into our own music, and The Conet Project still ranks as probably THEE best selling release ever at aQuarius. Even more remarkable for the fact that it's not really music at all, at least not in the typical sense, and it is and always has been pretty expensive, as a deluxe 4-cd set initially, and import to boot. In fact until it went out of print for the last time a few years back, we had sold close to one thousand copies, and that's just in our little store. We even used to have a big chart on the wall, where we kept track of the sales, and for a while, we were even taking Polaroids of people who bought the Conet Project to display in the store, a snapshot of them holding what we can only imagine would become their new favorite record (buyer #382: Mike Patton!). Which all leads to the question some of you may have, what the heck is The Conet Project, and why are we (and many of you) so obsessed with it? And so thrilled that it's finally available again?! Yes, available again and obviously a big time Record Of The Week.
Basically, the Conet Project is a now FIVE-cd compilation (more details on the new 2013 edition's additional fifth disc is down below, near the end of this long review!) of recordings of mysterious shortwave radio broadcasts, known as "numbers stations". These numbers stations are generally believed to be encrypted spy transmissions, but no concrete evidence has ever surfaced proving that supposition. However, no credible *alternate* explanation has ever been demonstrated, either. For years (ever since the start of the Cold War), amateur radio enthusiasts have come across these sinister signals, and they continue to this day, broadcast in many languages all over the world (the theory is that some are CIA, some are KBG, some are Mossad, etc).
In general, the transmissions consist of a deadpan voice (sometimes an old man, sometimes a young woman, etc.) reading a seemingly random, meaningless series of numbers over and over. Sometimes the broadcasts are preceded by a musical cue (the "Swedish Rhapsody" music box one being a favorite of ours), and sometimes the numbers are not conveyed by voice but by even more cryptic electronics (as with "The Buzzer", and other noisy, abstract stuff found mainly on disc four).
Needless to say, hearing those amazing and baffling sounds collected on these cds is an unnerving experience. Not only does knowledge of the supposed purpose of these transmissions imbue them with a disturbing quality, but the repetition of the numbers combined with the background of shortwave radio static makes for a aurally hypnotic experience. If merely regarded as a piece of experimental ambient sound sculpture, The Conet Project would be a brilliant and affecting piece of work, yet with the added context of international intelligence and conspiracy theory, it becomes even more intriguing and creepy. Lots of information is included that provides a great deal of description of, and speculation about, The Conet Project. Which is possibly the most incredible, and weirdest, item of sound art/documentation that we've EVER had here at aQuarius. Mesmerizing, fascinating, unique, massive, scary, but sometimes even soothing. 100 percent recommended to the adventurous listener ('cause it's not for everyone!). And once you have it you'll understand why it had to be so many cds - being overwhelming is part of the obsessive allure of this Project. And it's not just us, The Conet Project has popped up in lots of unlikely places, most notably it was sampled on Wilco's breakthrough Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album, the title of which in fact comes from The Conet Project itself. Wilco were also famously sued by Irdial, the label who released it, and they lost! Some sounds from the Conet Project also popped up in that Tom Cruise movie Vanilla Sky, and over the years, we've heard it in various films and on various records, it shouldn't be surprising that so many weird music obsessives love The Conet Project.
Really, as we said, if there's one recording that seems to be most identified with aQuarius recOrds, or that at least we mention most often when trying to explain to people what it is that we're all about here, it's most definitely The Conet Project, and yeah, over the years there have been plenty of others, including Sounds of North American Frogs, Os Mutantes, Burzum's "Filosofem", Comus' "First Utterance", Boris, Circle, Philip Jeck, Village of Savoonga, and loads more since, many other records near and dear to our hearts (for instance, hearing the first Neutral Milk Hotel album always makes us nostalgic for the old 24th street store). But for some reason it's The Conet Project that really seems to sum it all up. It's all the things we really love: completely ridiculous (4, no, now 5 cds!), completely fucked (secret government spy transmissions), droning, weird. It's just so interesting and evocative on so many levels, both musical and totally non-musical, as a listening experience and also as a geopolitical cold war and beyond artifact. Definitely an all time perpetual aQ fave: Allan's got the whole thing on his iPod, so does Andee, he also owns multiple copies of the set, many of which found their way into his old band A Minor Forest's live performances, Jim has steadfastly maintained that this is the greatest record of all time, and who are we to argue? If it's not obvious, we all are a little bit obsessed.
And what this is all leading up to is that YES, finally after literally YEARS of being out of print and unavailable, The Conet Project, has been reissued AGAIN, but this time, with a WHOLE EXTRA DISC, with its own jewel case and booklet!! That's right, the new Conet Project is FIVE discs, not four, and if you're big Conet nerds like most of us, you might just have to buy a second (or even third!) copy. The new disc is not just another numbers station disc though, instead it's a collection of "noise stations", which essentially sound just like the numbers stations MINUS the numbers. So it's a series of gorgeous buzzes and strange hissing fields of blurred melody, lots of crunch and crackle, buried rhythms, whistling tones, strange textures, in fact, much of it is downright musical, so much so that we were musing, hmm, what if this new disc is in fact a hoax, a series of number/noise station like soundscapes created by some electronic musicians like Hrvatski? Naw... But there was in fact talk of a Conet remix project for years now, so it's not that far fetched, and in a way, if it WAS a hoax, it would be even cooler. But as far as we can tell, and according to our resident numbers stations / shortwave expert Jim, these are in fact that kind of weird alien sounds you can hear, tuned in to these mysterious stations. As much as we love the other four discs of The Conet Project, this new one is pretty exciting, and we have to say, definitely makes a case for buying it AGAIN! But for all the rest of you who have yet to discover the bizarre sonic mysteries of the Conet Project, there is no higher recommendation we can give, an all time unanimous aQ fave, our best selling record EVER. Sonically, and conceptually mind blowing. We never made it Record Of The Week before for some reason, but in our hearts, it has always been, and always will be, a perpetual aQ Record Of The Week!!! FOREVER.
BTW, this counts as a "box set" for shipping, it won't fit in the USPS flat rate box we use, so it'll have to go media mail or UPS if you're mailordering it domestically.
- MPEG stream: Swedish Rhapsody
- MPEG stream: 5 Dashes
- MPEG stream: Iran/Iraq Jamming Efficacy Testing
- MPEG stream: Magnetic Fields
- MPEG stream: Tyrolean Music Station
- MPEG stream: The Buzzer
- MPEG stream: "Data Bursts, 5.201kHz (USB And AM)
- MPEG stream: "Exotic Cipher, 6.215kHz/AM October 5th, 2008 19:27 GMT
- MPEG stream: "Descending Jammer, 7.969kHz/USB
- MPEG stream: "Drone, 17.964kHz
- MPEG stream: "Oscillating, 5.178kHz, March 12th, 1997
- MPEG stream: "348|10|13|36|19|21, 11.573kHz, 19:17 GMT
You think you've got some weird cds in your collection? Make room for this one if you dare. Heck, as soon as we peeped the crude fantasy cover art, we were like, new favorite album!
'80s Mexican heavy metallers Cristal Y Acero (Crystal And Steel) were responsible for this strange record, originally released in 1984, billed as the "Primera Opera Rock Mexicana". Kuman was indeed a wild Spanish-language rock opera, apparently about a muscular Tarzan-type character (...in SPAAAAACE!!!). We're not sure, but from the photos included here we think this Kuman musical may have been an actual stage production, or maybe even something filmed for Mexican TV. It comes off like a weird, metallic mash-up of, like, Meatloaf and Os Mutantes, combining Cristal Y Acero's hard n' heavy old-school metal riffing with a variety of other pop musical genres - proggy pomp-rock, sappy soft rock, piano balladry, and more. It of course gets cheesy but in an amazing insane kitschy way, and always Cristal Y Acero's fuzzy hard rock riffage, harmonized leads, and gruff vocals come back in to kick ass, after whatever else happens. There's slinky lounge grooves, guest female vocals, '50s rock & roll pastiche, and METAL.
But that's not all, this cd also includes all the tracks from Cristal Y Acero's more traditional self-titled debut album from 1983, with some songs sung in English. It's pretty charming and cool too, with chugging guitars, widdly solos, and lots of raw old school metal might, in the style of such bands as Saxon and Accept - but Mexican, and on a budget. Presented together with Kuman, this disc is something for both cult metal aficionados and those into straight up WTF? strangeness.
Packaged in a mini-lp style sleeve, with inserts. Perhaps not remastered from the original master tapes.
Dust-To-Digital are known for their excellent reissue work, unearthing and preserving music from scratchy old shellac 78 rpm recordings and the like. Bringing us vintage blues, gospel, Tuvan throat singing, and more, all with elaborate packaging and incredible attention to detail. They've been responsible for a host of fine cds, boxsets, and books, among 'em Victrola Favorites, Opika Pende, Steve Roden's I Listen To The Wind That Obliterates My Traces, and Goodbye, Babylon.
But THIS handsome book + cd set may be their most remarkable release yet, at least in terms of radical sound-conservation technique. It's certainly their most unusual. For example: one of the tracks here is an excerpt of an after-dinner speech given by late-19th century American orator and politician Chauncy M. Depew. You can listen to it on the cd, and distinctly make out the speaker's words, voice, and phrasing, amid a thick patina of hiss, hum, and distortion. Sounds like a poorly-preserved old gramophone disc. But, that sound isn't coming from the disc itself being played (and re-recorded for release on the cd). It's actually derived from a PICTURE of that disc, reduced by 2/3rds original size, that appeared in a 1898 magazine advertisement. The spiraling grooves on the record were pictured clearly enough that with creative use of off-the-shelf computer software, author Patrick Feaster was able to "play" a fairly accurate semblance of the sounds originally encoded on the gramophone record being advertised!!! Ok, that's pretty cool! Talk about DUST-to-Digital. And it's but one example of the MANY different, quite intriguing excercises and investigations in "playing back" sound from such antique and/or unusual "recordings" that Feaster and his colleagues at the First Sounds initiative have come up with, presented in fascinating detail in this fancy (gold gilt edges!), hardback 144-page book and accompanying 28-track compact disc.
Of course, one can argue, just what IS a "sound recording" anyway? In large part, that's what this is about; in fact, Feaster's introduction is devoted to that very question, which turns out to be both a philosophical one, as well as a technical one. Even in Feaster's expansive notion of the term, the idea that "sound recordings" exist from as far back as the year 980AD is perhaps a fanciful one, as he will admit, but still fruitful to consider.
Because, what this book is also about, more generally, is how human beings have sought to understand sound phenomena (from nature, voice, and music), through the ages, how sound has been "captured" and put on paper in graphical form to be perceived and studied visually. These visual representations of sound, are essentially all in the form of graphs of frequency, or amplitude, over time: sound spectrograms, sound oscillograms, phonoautograms, melographic inscriptions, manometric flame sketches, and many more. Various techniques, applied to various subjects. Found in these chapters and tracks, there's FBI voice-recognition studies from the '70s, phonophotographs of Negro spirituals from the '20s, and examples of Athansius Kircher's "Magia Phonotatica" circa 1650 (works which bring to mind Conlon Nancarrow's Studies For Player Piano), among others.
So, this is all very historically & scientifically interesting. Also, completely compelling just for the beauty of these images alone, which may or may not directly reflect the beauty of the sounds they represent - this is a lavishly illustrated book, with full-color reproductions of these various "sound recordings" to accompany the insightful text explaining it all. And the magic really happens, when you experience the book and cd in tandem, as each track on the cd, even the briefest, has an entire several-page chapter in the book devoted to it, and it really helps to read about and look at the visual sound source, while listening. Some tracks sound like antique recordings we're used to from wax cylinders and 78s, complete with the surface static we love so much; others like strange field recordings or ghostly experimental drones or balloons being rubbed together; still others like music boxes or similar devices�
This is the sort of unusual sound document to file with such aQ faves as the mysterious Ghost Orchid EVP recordings, the VLF recordings of Stephen McGreevy, or even the famed Conet Project (soon to be available again, with a bonus 5th disc!). In fact, one of the exhibits here, an 1890 phonoautogram by Emile Berliner, kind of reminds us of a Conet "numbers station" track, being a spoken series of numbers and letters recorded at varying speeds.
All in all, an astonishing, thought-provoking, and simply gorgeous book and cd, recommended to anyone interested in sound, science, OR art; meaning, probably everybody reading this!
We were looking back at our review of the last Melt-Banana record we reviewed, Initial T., which we listed way back in 2009, and yeah, it was just an ep, but even then we were bowled over by how these masters of grinding math pop / noise rock, continued to reinvent themselves and surprise us with every record. The surprise that time was a dramatic shift, into a sound more electronic, one that at the time we described as sounding like a sped up Deerhoof, or like Fuck Buttons. And goddamn if they haven't taken that sound and pushed it even further, transforming their sound, which was already insanely unique, and ridiculously difficult to describe, and literally unlike ANY other bands out there, into something even MORE. Just the first track alone should convince you, it's a total mind blower, a dizzying collision of a million different genres, and so many seemingly incompatible sounds, brilliantly woven into some total next level electro-metal-grind-pop weirdness, that manages to be both the weirdest thing we've heard from M-B, which is saying a LOT, and possibly also the catchiest! That track bears some in depth description, since it pretty much sets the template for the rest of the record. Opening with some glistening kosmische shimmer, some field recorded waves lapping on the beach, some swirling heavily effected guitars, those guitars gradually coalescing into some seriously crunchy riffage, laced with thick sinewy bass-lines, kick ass drumming, weird sound effects and wild FX, before splintering into insane mathiness, the song swinging wildly from indie rock groove, to mathy psychedelic tangle and back again, those super distinctive ultra high chirped vox, before the song breaks down, the guitars locked into digitized loops, peppered with blasts of metallic guitars, more swirling sci-fi FX, some wild double kick drumming, that drumming getting more frantic and chaotic, slipping into full on metal briefly, before launching into a final burst of mathy psychedelic noise pop. It's insanely complex, and impossibly dense, and how the fuck do they cram all that into just 4 minutes? No idea, but we LOVE it. And we won't say it gets weirder, or better, cuz that's not really possible, but it DOES stay that weird, and that good, which is a feat in itself, frenetic, hyper, chaotic, mathy, metallic, poppy, crazy catchy, confusionally fractured, some songs slipping into impossibly soaring epic electronic flecked majesty, others collapsing into dizzying grind-pop freakouts, still others getting all avant experimental WTF? Boredoms style noisiness, and even still others exploding in gouts of wild electro-punk jangle-metal weirdness. A few songs find dreamy guitar shred devolving into long stretches of field recordings, or blossoming into super melodic pop experimental video game krautpop, what a fucking amazing and totally weird record! After all these years, Melt-Banana continue to confound, confuse, inspire, freak out, inspire and blow us the fuck away. Every M-B record is so good, it's hard to proclaim this as their best yet, but you be the judge, cuz, really, we're beginning to think it most definitely is. So totally and absolutely recommended!
Killer vinyl reissue of a long out of print cassette from the Shining Path, aka Ilya Monosov and Preston Swirnoff, brother of our very own Irwin.
Originally released on T.B.T.D and now long gone. Sort of taking off from where Shining Path's first Holy Mountain release left off, these guys take synths, vocals, organs, hurdy gurdy, drum machine and guitar and whip them into a blown out krautrock, wild noise space rock frenzy, some baffling mix of Can, Hawkwind, High Rise and Suicide, that sounds perfect together, a confusionally brilliant wild eyed blowout. Total WTF? free psych heaven! From the opening burst of blown out heart-of-the-sun psychrock meltdown, to a stretch of spacious drifting, mesmerizing motorik fuzzstomp, to the final chunk of weird drum machine driven, electronic krautdrone, these guys are absolutely melt minds and destroy speakers, and we can't get enough. The flipside is another burst of furious dubbed out druggy psych, this batch of tuneage recorded live in Brooklyn in 2006 with guests Little Howlin' Wolf and Peter Barry. Recommended of course.
Cameron Stallones is back from his pilgrimage to Jamaica, where he made that FRKWYS album with The Congos, and now offers up a new Sun Araw album on his own Sun Ark imprint, full of damaged grooves and new twisted strain of avant dub weirdness, fragmented and spaced out, stumbling and super loose, the guitars spidery and echoey, the rhythms skittery and a bit abstract, the vocals doused in effects and WAY up in the mix, the whole thing sounds like it's melting, gradually decaying, peppered with blasts of fuzzy synth, swaths of swirly organ, percussion that sounds like clinking bottles, shuffling processed glitches. The tracks stutter and hiccup, never locking into a groove, so much as drifting and slipping from sound to sound, a series of swells, often fading out to near silence, before slipping back into it, some folks here thought it sounded kinda like Blues Control making a reggae album, while someone builds furniture next door (!), but some of us definitely got a serious Fastest vibe, total fractured outsider whatthefuck weirdo reggae action that will definitely have lots of folks scratching their heads and wondering what the hell is happening here. Although plenty of other folks will flip for Stallones' new, more damaged incarnation. Listen to the sound samples, and you'll know pretty much right away, which side you'll find yourself on.
Meandering and gloriously unfocused, The Inner Treaty definitely lacks some of the catchiness and groove of past Sun Araw releases, but for what it lacks in those areas, it makes up for in confusional weirdness, lacing its sundappled WTF dub with James Ferraro weirdo-wave retro VHS wooziness, and Ariel Pink / John Maus style avant drama-pop, and tangles it all up into something totally bizarre, something in fact that is so fucked up, it's like a musical car crash, we don't necessarily WANT to keep listening really, but somehow can't seem to stop ourselves. Very reservedly recommended, and even then, only for folks who like their music a bit baffling. Which come to think of it, is probably a whole lot of you.
We had to do it. How could this NOT be an aQ Record Of The Week? Some folks will no doubt cry foul, and accuse us of arty pretension, but nothing could be further from the truth. Sure we love lots of strange stuff, and we love difficult listening, and challenging, arty sonic WTF weirdness, and have been known to champion some seriously bizarre records and groups, but we do love all that stuff. Like we love jangly pop, and buzzy black metal, we also love field recordings of abandoned buildings, we love the sound of record crackle, tape hiss, we love industrial sounds, the whir of heating units, the thrum of traffic bleeding through the walls, we love the drone found in everyday life, the music hidden in the most unmusical of places. In fact, it's almost become a running joke around here, we'll be somewhere, and some piece of machinery will be buzzing or humming, or some construction site will be emitting a strangely rhythmic crunch, and our first thought it often "We could definitely sell a bunch of these at aQ!" And after all these years, we know you're right there with us. Buying recordings of hospital rooms and life support machines, recordings of mating deer and drag races, records made entirely from runout grooves, we could go on and on, but c'mon, you love that stuff as much as we do. Which brings us to Sounds Of Silence, which as the title suggests, is in fact a collection of the most famous musical silences! That's right, a silent record. Or at least mostly, bear with us.
We've had other 'silent' records at aQ before, from the not-so-silent Blank Tapes, which found Argentinean weirdos Reynols constructing a whole record from recordings of, yes, blank tapes, that disc a fantastic sonic landscape of hiss and hum, subtly textural and weirdly mesmerizing, to (in the used bin once), a purported compilation of Billy Joel's "Greatest Hits", which was in fact a recording with no sound at all, an obvious artprank jab at the ubiquitous piano man. Hell, we even poked fun at ourselves by listing a cd that didn't even exist on our April Fools list a while back, waxing poetic about the 'nothingness' and the 'void' and the concept behind the lack of actual music, we even made a mock up with an empty jewel case, that spent a good long while on the employee favorites shelf in the store. But the thing is, we do love silence, or at least, the attempt to capture silence, in a world, where true silence doesn't actually exist. From barely there recordings by Francisco Lopez and Bernard Gunter, to field recordings of industrial spaces, it's not so much about the silence, as what surrounds it, and what threatens to destroy it.
So yeah, maybe you'd have to be a pretty big music dork to want to pay thirty bucks for a silent record, but then, we're all pretty big music dorks after all. C'mon, check out the lineup! Andy Warhol, Ciccone Youth, Sly & The Family Stone, Robert Wyatt, Afrika Bambatta & Family, Orbital, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Crass, Whitehouse, The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Soulfly, John Denver, The Count Backwards and lots more. Maybe the most unlikely lineup on a compilation ever. Who knows if this is some super provocative art-prank, or a lovingly curated collection of experimental sound, or heck, a little of both, it's pretty goddamn fascinating, and weird, and cool, fans of lowercase sound will find much to dig, lots of crackle and hiss, of course even beyond the original recordings, depending in your method of playback, each person's listening experience will be different, more noise and hiss and hum and crackle and pop, you could even scratch the shit out if it before you play it and truly individualize it, Christian Marclay style! But the sounds themselves are surprisingly varied, those that come from digital sources, are truly nearly silent, while others are actually not so silent, and still others, don't even exist at all, their length listed as 0'0'', presented here as they were when they were originally 'released', the original intention unclear, high concept, political statement, who knows, but tracks like Sly & The Family Stone's "There's A Riot Goin' On", which was mentioned on the album cover, but was then conspicuously absent from the actual lp, or Andy Warhol's "Silence (Copyright 1932)", which was supposedly created by Warhol when he was 4 years old, or the Afrika Bambatta track "Beware (The Funk Is Everywhere) (Silent Version)", which was originally presented as a "Radical Mix". But fear not, Sounds Of Silence, is not all high concept, there are actual tracks, well, actual sort of silent tracks, it seems a little pointless to describe each one, since, they are all essentially 'silent', and they ARE, both sides, track after track of barely there thrum, fields of crackle, the occasional pop, most of that we're guessing from OUR turntable, but close listening reveals much of the source, some tracks have barely there sounds, whether it's the sound of the room, or the vinyl from which it was mastered, or who knows, maybe we're just hearing what we want to. Maybe there is nothing but silence. A long time ago, we at aQ dreamed of a record made entirely of vinyl lp crackle, which led sound artist Loren Chasse to do just that (sort of, he simulated it with field recordings of surf and rain actually), so in a way, if you remove the high concept angle, Sounds Of Silence, is kind of like that, like maybe a more minimal version of our long dreamed of record crackle record. Either way, you know if this is your cup of tea or if you think it's a total crock of shit. If you've read this far, we're guessing you're in the first camp, but really either way, we LOVE this. It's brilliant, hilarious, confusional, baffling, there are extensive liner notes too, track by track discussing where each one came from, why each one is important, the concept behind them, there's even an essay on silence, it's of course fantastically packaged, and totally over the top. Well, as 'over the top' as a silent record can be.
Recommended for music nerds, weirdo sonic obsessives and anyone who would dig having such a ridiculous record in your collection. Don't believe us? Check out the sound samples? What sound samples? Exactly!
Cool Simon & Garfunkle parody cover art too. LIMITED TO 250 COPIES ONLY!!
We reviewed the Dean Carter disc a few lists back, a killer collection of super twisted rockabilly and garage rock, ultra distorted, tons of weird effects, super rocking and far out, especially for the time. We sold a ton, and still can't seem to stop listening to it. In the liner notes, they kept mentioning a comp called The Midnite Sound Of The Milky Way, a collection of singles from the label that Dean Carter called home, and we figured if it was even half as weird as the Carter disc, we had to have it, and guess what, it totally is.
This one is not new either, a few years old in fact, but somehow we missed out both on the Carter, and the Milky Way, so we figured maybe some of you did too. More twisted garage rock, weirdo rockabilly, some proto-doom (really!) and some stuff that we're not exactly sure how to describe. One name keeps popping up all over this disc, with NINE tracks, and that's Kookie Cook, who just so happened to be a member of Dean Carter's band, and judging from these tracks, had much to do with that twisted sound. "Workin' Man" is a total classic, with a killer main riff, a bunch of whistling, some weirdly delivered sung spoken vocals, lots of "HEY!"s, some awesome drumming, and a screaming lead that lasts all of two seconds. Woah. "Don't Lie" is a slithery twisted swampy bit of blues, with frenzied howled vox, and some strange female back ups. "Revenge" is a total reverbed surf jam, with some more super strange vocals, frenzied and maniacal, all over some shimmery twang, and some seriously pounding drums. "Misery" and "I Feel Alright" are classic fifties sounding rockabilly blues jams, with bad ass guitar wrangling, all super distorted and tangled. "Ooby Dooby" is another fifties style groover, with lots of nonsense lyrics, and some really weird female back up vox, and finally, "Drums" begins with Cook shouting "Drums! Baby!" and then two minutes of wild drum freakout and occasional shouts. So good. We hope this guy has a lost album somewhere. Cook also contributes two tracks with his band the Satalites, one of which sounds a little like the Benny Hill theme mixed with surf rock, while the other is a weird slow jam, all wild manic laughing, and weird horns and 'whoop!'s in the background. And that's just Cook's tracks (which are more than enough reason to buy this), there's also the mysterious 12th Knight, whose "Death Row" is total fuzz drenched proto-doom, like Sabbath played on shitty little amps, so grim and weirdly heavy, and there's a bunch of other groups, The Cobras, Dave Marten, Four A While, George Jacks, Jack Johnson, The Grapes Of Wrath and Willie & The Travelaires, all of them cool, although not as weird or far out as Cook or as heavy and haunting as 12th Knight. Such a killer comp. Anyone who dug the Dean Carter, or just loves lost outsider gems from the sixties, this is definitely well worth checking out!
Sometimes we just have to pinch ourselves to make sure we're not dreaming, and that Japan's EM Records and all the crazy stuff they somehow find and reissue is actually real! Seriously, it's hard to believe, EM dig up such obscure things that are just so AQ-perfect, so darn weird. We have whole sub-genres of stuff in stock here at the store all because of EM - steel pan funk, psychedelic surf soundtracks, singing saw music! And quite a few one-off items that pretty much represent new genres in and off themselves. Like this one, which EM almost too tamely describes as "Obscure evil psycho machine-funk from '80s Washington D.C. Psychedelic madness!".
From the moment Wicked Witch showed up in the mail, we were ensorcelled. Heck, this pretty much had us with the cover, featuring a Vice magazine Dos and/or Don'ts worthy photo of a mysterious, ridiculously bad ass lookin' African American fellow wearing shiny black leather and spikes, sporting a knife in a scabbard attached to one of his boots. He's got his hands on his hips, his eyeballs are colored in red, and we sure wouldn't want to mess with his rad dudeness. But even that strange, sinister image couldn't have prepared us for what this actually sounds like... Which is, to us, ARIEL PINK PLAYING FUNK!! It's that damaged, that lysergic, a one-man outsider take on the druggiest moments from early '70s Miles Davis and especially Funkadelic, like "Wars Of Armageddon" off of Maggot Brain ferinstance.
The first track of this anthology, "Fancy Dancer", a 7" single from 1985, drops the listener right in at the deep end, a dense miasmic phantasmagoria of percolating off-kilter grooves, funky vampings, and creepy, low-end synth buzzings and growlings, further made freakier towards the end of its 5 1/2 minutes with a dose of wild psychedelic electric guitar soloing. Damn. Don't even know if funk is the right word for this. How about "glunk"? 'Cause it's got such a melty, gooey viscosity to it. The credits tell us this appeared on a 7" single from 1985, with all instruments and vocals by Richard Simms (he's the cover star, he's Wicked Witch, and he's apparently quite a character!). Next, track two, "Erratic Behaviour", is maybe even more murky and chaotic, a mixture of echoing, babbling voices and tick-tocking drum machine, set loose amidst swirling electronics. It comes from another 7" single, circa '83, as does the similar track three, "X Rated", which adds some "sensual" guest female sex-freak vocal exhibitionism over the lashing beats, bass throbs, and general dementia. But it's at least as spooky as it is sexy...
Then, track four, "Vera's Back", suddenly shifts things into another realm, delving into Wicked Witch pre-history. Written and produced by Simms, this track was originally released in on a 12" in 1978 by a band he was in (on bass and vocals) called Paradiagm [sic]. It's twelve minute workout of shredding jazzfunk fusion, with over the top chops, a la Return To Forever, with violin and echoing vocals and proggy changes galore. It's a lot "cleaner", less distorted and drugged out than Wicked Witch's later bizarre cauldron bubblings, but still pretty crazy, some of it like Goblin on speed!
The next three tracks bring us back to the more unusual funk (or glunk?) stylings of Rick Simms solo in the '80s, with two takes (one instrumental, one vocal, though both have vocals, the latter just more n' nuttier of 'em) of a track called "Electric War", from a 1984 Wicked Witch 12", and then, for a finale, the disc comes full circle with a previously unreleased, extreme remix of "Fancy Dancer" done in '86. Again, weird, dense, DIY outsider grooviness. Yep, CHAOS: 1978-86 is aptly titled. And we're still astonished, dunno how EM does it. Who digs deeper? You couldn't make this stuff up, we know, but we're still pinching ourselves. Maybe Wax Poetics will do a feature on Wicked Witch one of these days... we can only imagine what became of Simms, perhaps institutionalized in some asylum for the Funkily Insane. In the meantime, you can pour over the photos included herein.
FYI, the above review describes the programming of the cd version, EM's lp of this has a slightly different running order and in fact some different tracks! The vinyl edition omits the "Fancy Dancer" remix and the "Electric War" vocal version. But, its "Erratic Behaviour" and "X Rated" are both remixes different from what's on the cd. And, there's a whole 'nother previously unreleased cut on the lp, "Under Your Spell", eight and half minutes long, from 1986! So we can't tell you which format to choose. Either one, or both, are highly recommended!
