Immune Recordings brings us a lovely new album from longtime aQ fave and sometime Grouper collaborator Ilyas Ahmed, I Am All Your Own being the dapper guitarist's first record in three years! Back at last, Ahmed delves into some somewhat mellower, more singer-songwritery territory here, forgoing the in-the-red raga rock of some of his other efforts, though his background in experimental folk and dronecraft remains quite evident. it's not so much a new direction for him, as it is a perfection of one aspect of what we've heard him do in the past. On 12-string and electric guitars, Ahmed lets loose with the laid back, sun-dappled strum, accompanying his own hushed and breathy singing voice, emotive and earnest. The mystical vibe of many earlier Ahmed works is still present, as is some small amount of heavy duty feedback/drone, carefully sculpted to soothe, but here the emphasis is primarily on the gentle mood & melody of the singing & strumming, despite a couple of untitled tracks that take things down a rather more abstract and ambient path. One comparison would be to Jewelled Antler's Glenn Donaldson, in one of his more David Crosby-esque moods.
All in all, it's a beautiful set of songs, floating along dreamily, cognizant of pain but reassuring the listener that all's well in the end. Most definitely recommended. And, the label was kind enough to provide us with a limited edition, one of a kind art collage created by Ilyas Ahmed, from a series of 100, signed and numbered, for us to give away randomly to a lucky customer who buys this! We'll pick from the first ten people to order this album, fyi, so you might win that if you order quickly!! (Local folks who'd like a chance win, we suggest emailing us right away to have your copy put on hold for you to pick up, you'll be entered in the contest that way too.)
For metalheads like us, a new record from Canadian black metal duo Akitsa is a cause for serious celebration. They're a band that has remained mysterious, hewed to their own sonic blueprint, remaining willfully obstinate, and for the internet age, surprisingly off the radar for lots of folks, and it's all that, as well as their furious and fucked up sound, that has made them one of our favorite purveyors of raw black buzz. Grands Tyrans is their first full length in five years, and opener "Devoile" reminds us just why we love them so much, and just how much we missed their bleak, black threnodies. The guitars are simple and primitive, the sound raw and brittle, insectoid, occasionally splintering into weird scrabbling squiggles, a caveman approximation of leads perhaps, the drums almost a murky afterthought, more a pulse than a pound, all in support of the vokills, impossibly anguished and tortured, a hellish, primal screech, borderline hysterical, doused in reverb and drenched in echo, squeaking and cracking, wailing and shrieking.
But there's another side to Akitsa, which is displayed on track two, "Le Feu De L'abime", a knuckle dragging primitive punk dirge, all churning downtuned riffage and Neanderthal drum pound, the guitars that were so brittle moments earlier, now chunky and fuzzy, the vocals too, transformed, into a snarly, sneering yawp. And actually, there are several other sonic sides the group explores on the rest of Grands Tyrans: a hellish buzzing black metal death march on "Naufrage Contemporain", a grinding, rumbling soundscape of staticky drones and haunting synth melodies on "Les Flots De L'Enfer", creepy synthy cinematic doom on the title track, where the vocals transform yet again into some twisted Ozzy-ish croon, before revisiting some of the previous sounds, delivered in varying degrees of fucked up and fractured production, and with their own sonic mutations, like the weirdo new wave vocals on the super blown out "Je N'y Serai Pas" or sing songy, surprisingly melodic punk pound of "Chimeres", or the frenzied ultra-lo-fi blackened stomp of "Faucon".
Goddamn do we love this band!!! And it's so satisfying how amazingly confusional they remain after all these years. And how on a record that lurches from sound to sound, the production quality in constant flux, the vocals never the same twice, the guitar tone varying from meaty crunch to transistor radio tinniness, they can somehow craft these disparate sounds and songs into what is destined to be one of the best metal records (black and otherwise) of the year.
Super swank packaging, a black and white digipak with debossed, metallic silver printing and a booklet filled with lyrics and stunning shots of a grim Canadian winter.
AND NOW HERE'S THE DELUXE VERSION (REGULAR LISTED LAST TIME)...
Time Released Sound remain one of our favorite labels, a local boutique imprint that never fails to surprise and impress with every release, each one delightfully unique, from the over the top handmade packaging, to the mysterious abstract ambience and pastoral electronic alchemy that lurks within. And while at this point, there is definitely a TRS 'sound', one that we, and apparently lots of you, can't seem to get enough of, the music is surprisingly diverse. Some are subtle and sublime, hushed and dreamlike, others are more abstract, more experimental and yet somehow manage to retain much of the blurred beauty of their less obtuse compatriots. And while we've yet to dislike a single release, we do tend to lean more toward, perhaps not surprisingly, the weirder release, the the grittier, noisier forays into hazy, druggy drift, the fractured sonic collages that seem to smear before our very ears, the looped, and stuttery, wooziness that transports us to some prismatic, fractured otherworld.
Which is precisely the case with Spazio Sacro, the first we've heard from audio alchemist Giulio Aldinucci, who has collected a series of field recordings sourced from sacred locations, and then used these skeletal frameworks for stunning dronescapes, and lush layered sonic swells, cinematic almost Arvo Part sounding choral shimmer, and more minimal, droning drift. The field recordings lend a strange vibe to these recordings, almost as if the music was captured in a similar fashion, wandering through the city, the thrum and clatter of passersby, cars, and shops, when all of a sudden some huge colored cloud of sound, comes whirling from above, wrapping itself around streetlights like some alien fog, the sound organic and alien all at once. the more hushed pieces not that far removed from the moody minimalism of Stars Of The Lid, the addition of strange rhythmic sputters, and fractured skitters, brings to mind the turntablescapes of Philip Jeck.
It's a truly haunting landscape of sound, gauzy and indistinct, softly pulsing and strangely granular, as of whatever bonds holding these songs together is truly tenuous, and as such, songs don't start and stop as much as bleed into each other, crumbling into nothingness, only to slowly surface in another form, that form in constant flux, billowing and ethereal, dense and ominous, whispery and serene, all the while, the artifacts of life, the sonic detritus of everyday life, lay beneath these undulating swells of chordal thrum, of tranquil mesmer, of haunting, harrowing loveliness. This just might be our favorite TRS release yet.
As always, there are two different versions, the deluxe, which in this case is limited to just 75 copies, and comes in a hardback book style cover, wrapped in a fabric shroud, with a 3D collaged landscape inside, made from pages from an ancient Italian book, 150 year old hand written musical scores and mysterious engravings, along with a vintage religious medallion. And as always, there's a slightly less limited, significantly more affordable, standard version, limited to 150 copies, housed in the usual swank TRS style digipak.
Avant hippy Francophone folk psych bongo jazz at its best!!! Seriously, though it is. A great record. Well worthy of the Superior Viaduct vinyl reissue treatment along with the others they've done before by the duo of French chanteuse Brigitte Fontaine & percussionist Areski Belkacem, This one, from 1973 (same year as their equally excellent L'Incendie, hopefully also upcoming as a Superior Viaduct reissue) is so gorgeous and exotic, intimate and dreamy. Multilayered, moaning male/female vocals from our two protagonists weave a delicate spell, accompanied by shuffling beats from ethnic percussion and hooting, fluting grooves. There's la-la-la's and Yoko cackle, eerie strings and folky guitar, rhythmic chant and jazz saxophone. It's an album of various intriguing, mostly minimal moods, from serious avant-classical to moments more playful, with parts that sound like an overheard private conversation (with music) betwixt the duo.
Ascendente is a satellite operation of Chile's dark-prog collective Un Festin Sagital, whose wild-eyed occlusions of metal, art-rock, and punk-prog complexity had dazzled us on all their previous recordings. The debut recording by Ascendente seeks a comparatively simpler / more spacious aesthetic, one that sounds an awful lot like Comus and Slint melded into a single pandrogynous chimera. No easy feat to say the least, and yet the members of Ascendente pull it off with remarkable panache. The loud-quite dynamics of these post-Crimson / pseudo-Mogwai elliptical riffs and neck-throttled bass-guitar chords work throughout all of the Ascendente songs with the vocalist tumbling through narratives in Spanish with plenty of lycanthropic transformation from dramatic tenor into demonic growling and back again. As the tracks unfurl along the constant-flux / long-form explorations previously mapped out by Amon Duul II and German Oak, the gymnastics for the rhythm section are suitably impressive as they glide up to dizzying crescendos and march along at swaggering gaits. As with all other Black Horizon tapes, this is limited to 100 copies.
This two-part solo guitar masterwork recorded for the Takoma label in 1967 finally gets a limited vinyl reissue - and these will be gone fast, so act accordingly! Altogether, these nine pieces and suites are some of the most intricate hybrids of guitar form invention: Celtic, blues, ragas, classical, flamenco and medieval. Lyrical and melancholic, cascading 6 and 12 string filigrees weave into long-form meditations of minor key form and modal beauty. Basho was at the peak of his powers when these were recorded nearly 50 years ago, and their plaintive majesty has not diminished in the least. Did we say limited?? Essential for your Takoma collections or anyone enthralled by John Fahey and early James Blackshaw.
This two-part solo guitar masterwork recorded for the Takoma label in 1967 finally gets a limited vinyl reissue - and these will be gone fast, so act accordingly! Altogether, these nine pieces and suites are some of the most intricate hybrids of guitar form invention: Celtic, blues, ragas, classical, flamenco and medieval. Lyrical and melancholic, cascading 6 and 12 string filigrees weave into long-form meditations of minor key form and modal beauty. Basho was at the peak of his powers when these were recorded nearly 50 years ago, and their plaintive majesty has not diminished in the least. Did we say limited?? Essential for your Takoma collections or anyone enthralled by John Fahey and early James Blackshaw.
Finally, this rare 1978 French disco masterpiece sees the light of day in its original dark and sleazy form. A few years ago, the Rephlex label released a series of 12"s of tracks from this album claiming it was a rare discovery found in a French gas station from an obscure French library release under the name Junior Claristidge, a pseudonym for Bernard Fevre. Everyone originally thought this was a hoax, and was a modern group trying to create a fake retro disco record, but then Bernard Fevre, a French library composer from the late seventies came out of the woodwork and confirmed its origins. Shortly after, Fevre created a new project called Black Devil Disco Club, based on the successful response to the Black Devil rediscovery and used it to make new music based on old unused dance recordings from that period. Fevre is now getting a full on rediscovery with three of his most sought after library records from the seventies being reissued for the first time: Black Devil, Suspense and Cosmic 2043.
While the Black Devil Disco Club records were good, their steely sheen was a little too polished compared to the sonic dirtiness of the Black Devil originals, which sound like Giorgio Moroder and Arthur Russell in a darkly exotic reverie of drugged out fleshy vice. Strobes pulsing in a painted black room, poppers popping, hands groping, lots of congo driven disco beat and vocodered male and female vocals. Imagine Bruce Haack's Electric Lucifer in a hedonistic night of orgiastic dancing after the fall of man, and you get the idea. Enter if you dare!
Download card included!
NOW HERE ON CD... Here's what we said about the double vinyl version (which, we should note, has 4 more tracks than they could fit on this cd):
Not to be confused with the eponymous Bourbonese Qualk album from 1987, this is an exemplary compendium of the British post-punk industrialists' first five records, including tracks from Laughing Afternoon (1983), Hope (1984), The Spike (1985), Preparing for Power (1986), and that self-titled album. During this time period, Bourbonese Qualk was the trio of Simon Crab, Julian Gilbert, and Steven Tanza. They were a band who were uniquely self-sufficient and autonomous, running their own label and forming an artist co-operative not only for their own use but also for other artists, musicians, writers, and political activists. Their wholly independent stance was also one that avoided dogma, leaving their content of their work to stand as an agent that could lead towards change instead of barking against Thatcher, the Falklands War, or the conditions that lead to the Miner's Strike of 1984.
Thus, the studio in that co-op housed a collection of what could be borrowed, what could be repurposed, and / or what could be stolen. Their sound is very much an extension of the situation they crafted for themselves, warts and all.
Much of Bourbonese Qualk's output during this time period is highly rhythmic in nature, aligning with the spirit (much more so than the sound) of a 23 Skidoo and Clock DVA. Metronomic click tracks thrust to the foreground amidst a clatter of metal bashing, detuned bass fug anti-grooves, tape manipulation, and thrashed vocal cord utterances. It's a further deconstructed abstraction of the mutant disco that Clock DVA presented on their early outlier White Souls In Black Suits. For all of their unkempt angularity and droned disorientation, they could craft numbers of dour-dub beauty akin to very lo-fi versions of The Slits or PIL instrumentals. A well-deserved anthology from this oft-forgotten band. The vinyl sports four additional tracks not found on the cd version!
NOW AVAILABLE ON CD!!!
We made the first Chui Wan release, White Night, Record of the Week, and now they have returned with a self-titled album on vinyl and it continues in the same dreamy, spacey, and krauty vibe we loved so much the first time around, but this time with much tighter focus on rhythm and movement. The spidery guitar lines and synth filigrees are still very much a signature, but they service more angular post-punk structures feeling like Television combined with the percussive pummel of A Certain Ratio sheathed in dreamy space rock shimmer. Murmured male and female voices anchor the intricate arrangements, and help give thematic weight to songs that are at times seemingly shrouded in beautifully wayward melancholic mystery. So, recommended.
Cole the Canadian and Ambarchi the Australian have been collaborating when they can over the past five or six years. Mostly, their work together has been in performance, as that has been the preferred venue for Crys Cole's output until recently. In general, her work hedges towards the textural expressionism of Organum and Small Cruel Party, albeit somewhat quieter, using contact microphones and her own body as the principle instruments for her sound-sculpting. Ambarchi proves once again he is deft in adapting his own tools to fit that of his collaborators. Here on Sonja Henies Vei 31, he's put aside his array of electronics, pedals, and guitars to work alongside Cole and her means of production. There is something uncomfortably explicit about these recordings - wet smacks and watery splashes that seem awfully intimate, coupled with breathy exhortations and soft moans from Cole. If this is the result of two sound artists rolling around the sack, it's a rather unsettling document complicated by the eerie sinetones, clattering metallic actions, and visceral scrabblings of unknown objects, which seem all the more bizarre when put in the context of a consenting-adult activities. The result is very brave piece of Fluxus-inspired actionism an engaging and inventive series of decontextualized concrete sounds that are on par with Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing or Nurse With Wound's A Missing Sense. Strictly limited to 150 copies!
Electro-acoustic improvisation need not be the pleasant cohabitation of two avant-garde musicians agreeing with each other than nothing of import needs to happen for there to be a scribble of a record that gets released. There can be, nay, there SHOULD be grit, risk, and error; and through the process, some sort of meaning or revelation comes through the sound. This should explain something about our infatuation with the work of Small Cruel Party, Loren Chasse, Tarab, Steve Roden, Joe Colley, etc. Coppice is the work of two Chicago sound-spelunkers - Noe Cuellar and Joseph Kramer - who are cut from a similar cloth. Their sounds articulate from actual instruments - harmonium, pump organ, shruti box, etc. - whose irradiated audio comes across as something wholly other than what is typically conceived from these sources. Wheezing bellows and tactile exhortations are commonplace within the Coppice vocabulary as are hard-edit tape splices and in situ tape-loop accumulation which all have a very physical Terry Riley "Reed Stream" meets Phillip Jeck sensibility. Drone harmonics emerge sporadically, but mostly appear as the residue of a mechanical intervention rather than the resonance of the musical instruments themselves. Cores/Eruct is a very inventive record of hand-crafted texture thrust into expository movements of communed intellect and instinct.
Ok, sometimes it's true: a cool name, cool logo, and cool cover art DO mean the music is gonna be cool too. At least that's case with Holy Mountain's latest release, the debut from Devil Worshipper, which is a throbbing pounding distorted beast of black-and-chrome motorpsycho bad trippage. Imploding with droning druggy vocal chant, wild unhinged psychedelic guitar soloing, doomy riffs and propulsive hynorock percussion, yeah, this is everything we could have hoped for based on the name & cover, a trance-inducing 'cycle ride into darkness and devil worship. But, there's more... it's not all pedal to the metal Mainliner mainlining, there are tracks like "Ash Brume" that get all liquid and moody, mesmeric in a more mellowed-out way; and also songs equipped with eerie synth and other instruments - including what sounds like pan flute (?), delicate and doodly amidst the mungy grind of the endlessly repetitive "Into Radiation Wave", ferinstance.
We suspect the mysterious Devil Worshipper to be a one-man-band (they're not the Devil Worshippers, plural, after all, plus pretty sure that's a drum machine set to trance-induction), a la the likes of King Blood and GR & Full-Blown Expansion, we could compare 'em to both, as well as such somewhat larger ensembles as Aqua Nebula Oscillator, Follakzoid and Monster Magnet - heck the track "Chemrails", with its uber-echoing groove and sheer distorto-plod, somehow sounds like the magical midway point between the latter two mentioned. Damn good for one guy, if that's the case, and another winner from the Holy Mountain label, who can be counted on for this kind of shit for sure. A solid slab of Satanic-psych blissout oblivion, just like we were hoping for!!
Some records walk through the doors of aQuarius with a gravitas about them, some sort of heavy indefinable weight that's apparent before we even hit play for our first listen. Oceanclots, the umpteenth release from Dhampyr but only the second one we've stocked, is one such album. Written and recorded by the minimally monickered H.L. after the tragic death of his girlfriend (with the help of some collaborators, including vocal contributions from Jacob Thomas of local blown-out hypno-black metallers Dunnock), Oceanclots serves as a harrowing, cathartic, beautiful, singular tribute to her - a swirling, mesmerizing watercolor flurry of hazy blissful psychedelic black metal. Everything about the album is immersive, not least of which the in-the-red wall of sound production, almost indiscernible at first, inaccessible, and then as your ears adjust suddenly alive with lush shimmering detail, like your eyes adapting to the darkness of a jungle. Everything blends together and then seems to come apart. The distant ghostly spoken vocals and the anguished piercing screams. The cloudy melodies like half-memories drifting in and out, impossible to determine even what instrument they might belong to. The crumbling static of white-noise guitar enveloping everything (apparently all of which, due simply to H.L. not having any other way to record, are acoustic, but altered later on to sound like a blistering avalanche of gravelly static - just another piece of evidence that this is an album born of raw emotional necessity.) The truly blissful quiet passages, draped in alien echoes, haunting reverb, and glittering ambience. But beyond the music, as wonderfully and brutally psychedelic as it is, there are so many other details that complete the surreal portrait of this album. The ocean theme, a perfect compliment to the sounds you'll hear, which are like your eardrums bursting and the blissful drift of floating atop the ocean waves all rolled into one. The gorgeously labyrinthine song titles like "Mine Isabella Of Frosts & Poppypins" or "A Kodak Of Guncotton Shipwrecks". The surrealistic and heart breaking free form prose that adorns the booklet. And the final track, the beautiful dreamlike "Sea-Eclogue For Genevieve", seemingly an abstract drift of melodic reverb complimented by pulsing bass & plodding percussion, but which is in fact composed entirely using manipulated recordings of H.L.'s late girlfriend's voice, molded and twisted into an unending landscape of woozy hypnotizing beauty. The perfect end to such an exhaustingly harrowing yet euphorically cathartic album. An essential listen.
PREORDER! ARRIVING MONDAY. As you hopefully saw already on our list, next Wednesday June 10th, we're hosting an instore appearance by Jon Fine, the author of this here book. Jon was/is the guitarist in Bitch Magnet, and band many of us love dearly, later on in other projects including Coptic Light. Now, he's a writer and magazine editor. We're looking forward to having him here next week; not only will he be signing books, but our own Andee Connors (himself of '90s indie rock band A Minor Forest 'fame') will be interviewing Jon about this book and its subject matter. Should be hilarious and insightful. As we suspect this book is, though we won't have them until Monday. So this is a preorder, if you're interested. And if you do order one, if you want, you can mention in the comments field of our shopping cart that you would like Jon to sign it for you on Wednesday. (If not, we can get it shipped to you sooner...)
So, again, we haven't read this yet, but we're looking foward to it - knowing Jon as we do, we're sure it's gonna be good. A memoir "charting thirty years of the American independent rock underground", inspired by Bitch Magnet's 2011 reunion tour that brought into focus the changes that had occurred in the 'music industry' since the pre-internet days back when Bitch Magnet first was doing their thing. The publisher supplied us with a press packet, including all sort sort of advance praise blurbage from the likes of James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem) and Stuart Braithwaite (Mogwai), but the best one was from good ol' Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices, here's what he says about Jon's band, and book:
"When we played festivals, we used to have this thing where we'd walk up to the other bands and ask, 'What shitty band are you in?' I would dare never have asked Bitch Magnet that same question. In fact, I would probably have run and hid from them the same way I would have from Wire or Iggy Pop, or a tear-streaked, mascara-running Courtney Love, in her 'Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?' dress, being escorted through the backstage area on the arms of a couple of police officers. Their music was that intimidatingly good. And in Your Band Sucks, Jon
Fine lovingly chronicles, with strong accuracy, the zeitgeist in which his band excelled."
Hardcover, 320 pages. Again, this is a preorder, it won't be in stock until Monday the 8th of June. And, again, if you want a signed copy, let us know! And/or of course, if you can, come by on Wednesday for the live event with Jon here at the shop - or tune in on the web, our friends at PressureDrop.tv will be live-streaming it.
The Swiss aktionist collective Schimpfluch has been active since the mid-'80s, with its various members seeking out the transgressive, the ultra-violent, and the transcendent all at once, via a dystopian hybrid of noise, punk theatrics, and / or musique concrete. In doing so, these provocateurs follow what their Viennese progenitors had started in the '60s through performance, sculpture, and painting. It can't go unnoticed how much of the iconography that Sudden Infant of Schimpfluch incorporates from Gunter Brus, and how much the hellish comedies of Otto Muehl filter through the modern day work of Rudolf Eb.Er. G*Park (aka Marc Zeier) is the most enigmatic of all the Schimpfluch artists, with no obvious parallels to anyone before him, as he trades in the modern day techniques of musique concrete, although his work acquires a tension, a dynamism, and an existential blight that were never achieved by the likes of Xenakis, Schaefer, Ferrari, or Chion.
G*Park's epic double cd Sub from two years ago still proves to be an exhausting and exhilarating document into the denatured field recordings, cryptic collage, and subcutaneous electro-acoustics from Zeier, with Gour standing a continuation of those themes. Like on Sub, Zeier states the origins of his sound material - crows, pigs, flesh flies, wasps, wolves, frozen lakes, and some less obvious sounds from the Uwaga Squad and the Etang of Gour. Zeier locates mechanized bursts against a backdrop of very distant blackened noise, with all sorts of whipcrack slashes, wooden creaks, watery plops, corvid calls, and porcine squeals constructing a strange and hostile narrative of ritualized violence against an unknown subject. The genius of G*Park lies not in the sounds themselves (even as they are immaculately presented) but in the psychological voids left where Zeier eradicated everything through deathray, sterilizing cauterization, or fastidious vacuuming. A brilliantly done record from one of the very best technicians of the cruel theater of musique concrete.
Finally got a new groovy retro reissue from the great minds at the Omni Recording Corporation and it contains one of our favorite Moog records ever plus a whole other album of delightful space age jazz that's seeing reissue for the first time! Dick Hyman has had a long and varied career as a classical jazz pianist, bandleader and composer. Beginning in the fifties to most recently scoring many Woody Allen films, he has been involved with hundreds of records both in his own name, and in support of other artists. But between 1963 and 1969, he was best known for his Space Age Bachelor pad music made on Enoch Light's Command label, and this collection bookends his first and last forays into the space age with complete tracks from Moon Gas from 1963 featuring the ethereal vocals of Mary Mayo, and his breakout Moog record, MOOG: The Electric Eclectics of Dick Hyman from 1969, with a few selected bonus tracks from its poppier follow-up, The Age of Electronicus, recorded that same year.
Moon Gas, never before on cd, features the vocal stylings of Mary Mayo, a pop-jazz singer in the Julie London style, who seduces us with her ethereal, dreamy and sensuous voice. A galactic cocktail jazz record if there ever was one, Hyman imagines the future using Lowry organ, vibraphones, theremins and an ondes martenot. The album also features the underwater guitar sound of Vinnie Bell, one of our faves, to spacey effect
But it's the Moog album that takes up most of the second half of this disc, that has long been one of our favorites of the Moog-Pop album genre that sprang out of the mid-to-late '60s with the swept up culture of the space age. Hugo Montenegro, Walter (now Wendy) Carlos, Perry & Kingsley, Richard Hayman, Walter Sear and Claude Denjean embraced the new technology as a means to organize vast complex orchestration from a simple modular unit, even though it wasn't really so simple to use. While most of Hyman's contemporaries used the new instrument as a means to exploit the current hit parade of sixties best-selling songs, Hyman's Moog album was a completely original affair creating a wild and jazzy moon age daydream, both goofy and sublime. The opening whistle of "The Moog and Me" will sound familiar to early Beck fans, and the nine minute "Minotaur" was the first original Moog hit to break the charts, a space age jazz raga, very much in the vein of Charanjit Singh's Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat from 13 years later. With songs like "The Topless Dancers of Corfu" and the classic cover art, how can you go wrong? Great to have this one back in print on cd, along with getting to hear Moon Gas for the first time!
Oh, and then the three bonus tracks from The Age of Electronicus include the best Moog cover of a James Brown song ever: "Give It Up Or Turn It Loose". So wrong, yet so right! Recommended for lounge lunatics and jazz eccentrics!
Philip Sanderson has told more than a few tall tales in his time. Back in the early '80s, he produced a handful of industrial-dirge-drone tracks under the pseudonym Claire Thomas and Susan Vezey, nearly convincing the nascent Cherry Red Records to publish a full album from Claire and Susan until they found out that two women were not behind the project. Sanderson and his cohort Steven Ball were the miscreants behind The Storm Bugs and they ran the very impressive Snatch Tapes imprint, much of whose back catalogue had been finely reissued by Vinyl On Demand. Sanderson had also been the author to the project Ice Yacht, which had only released a single track on one the Snatch Tape compilations. The story behind this tape reads as follows - Sanderson (or as the press release states, just Ice Yacht) had the daft idea of retracing the journey of Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen to the North Pole sometime in the early '80s. Here's where the story breaks down, as Sanderson / Ice Yacht somehow lost the only recording of an unreleased album while on that journey, only to have the 'vacuum-sealed tape' find its way into the hand of Fragment Factory in Germany. Hardly plausible, but then, many were convinced of the authenticity of those Jurgen Muller recordings. While there could be something about there being a long-lost Ice Yacht recording from back in the '80s, it's more likely that Sanderson has recorded in this day and age. Thankfully, he's bolstered his fictions with a deliciously vintage sounding album of crude/cold sequences for oblique metallic synth-noise monotone. Somewhere between Factrix, Thought Broadcast, and of course Sanderson's own Storm Bugs. Numbered tapes of just 100 copies.
At a passing glance, this rare recording from the British performance artist Alice Kemp might give the impression of crafting something pretty. The cover, with a nocturnal image of Kemp in a floral robe matched with the Morton Feldman-esque chiming clusters of notes on a prepared piano on the A-side belie the horror found elsewhere as further images of Kemp find her face entirely covered in a thick inky black substance, rendering all of the features unrecognizable expect for a few teeth, that in subsequent images fall from her mouth and into her hands. Pay closer attention to that piano piece and an eerie radio signal seems to be broadcast through an antiquated heating duct and strange utterances borne from an unhealthy human-goat hybrid seem right out of David Lynch's Eraserhead. The B-side takes up the Giancarlo Toniutti thrum of back-masked rumblings of arterial and venal distress, with platelets, coagulants, and malignant tumors rupturing at the wrong place and the wrong time deep inside the human body. Cut at 45, so if you want an even creepier listening experience, you can play it at the slower speed. Limited to 150 copies for this fucked-up document from this uncanny artist.
Generally we're bummed when reissue labels start releasing new albums by contemporary artists, since rarely do those records stand up to the classics deemed worthy of reissue. One exception is he consortium of horror/soundtrack vinyl labels, who have not shied away from modern soundtracks, and for the most part, they've been well worthy of sitting alongside the long sought after rarities that these labels dig up and lovingly offer up to a whole new legion of fans (as well as plenty of old ones). Mondo and Deathwaltz are two of the bigger players and they seem to have struck up some sort of partnership since this record bears both labels' names and logos. And it seems like a good one for them to share, cuz really, it would have been right at home on either.
We've long been fans of Steve Moore, solo, and in Zombi, his duo with drummer Anthony Paterra. And fans of Moore and Zombi, will find much of The Guest sounding very familiar. An action movie released in 2014, about a mysterious stranger who shows up on the doorstep of a family grieving the loss of their son in Afghanistan, the man claiming to be a friend of their son's, but who may not be the man he says he is. And like many of the soundtracks and scores we review, The Guest is a film we have not actually seen yet. But as is also often the case, that doesn't at all keep this from being a cool and compelling listen. Zombi-isms abound, percolating synth arpeggios, swirling kosmiche texture, but a bit more subtle and brooding, lots of low rumbles, and dense drifting thrum, even the pulsing synths, often become more a haunting percussive melody, shrouded in swaths of dark ambience, evoking a palpable sense of dread and at times near terror. Fans of Carpenter, and Goblin, and the modern retro-synth / faux-score movement, will definitely dig, but even removed from the images, this is a stirring bit of sound design and sonic sculpting. If the score to the seventies throwback psychedelic art film Beyond The Black Rainbow wasn't already so perfect, this would have worked just as well, dizzying and claustrophobic, some tracks evoking the sort of panic of being pursued in the dark, others the creeping dread of what lurks in the shadows. We're also reminded of the genius score of Phantasm, one of our all time favorite movies, with a stunning score to go with it (which was also just reissued, and we'll try to list and review soon), which is about the highest praise we can bestow.
As with all these soundtracks, the packaging is super swank, glossy full color covers, a thick glossy full color printed inner sleeve, the whole thing held shut by a caution tape style printed yellow obi.
Quite the dreamdate here between two beloved Aquarius Records artists! Half of Naked Island is the one and only Brian Pyle - the Northern Californian denizen responsible for Ensemble Economique, Starving Weirdos, and RV Paintings; and the other half is the beguiling Felicia Atkinson - better known as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier. The two have crafted freefloating abstractions that deftly walk the line between ephemeral songwriting and hallucinatory dronescaping in their respective projects; and this project maintains that aesthetic course with a few choice surprises thrown in the mix! The A-side features a narcoleptic Atkinson repeating whispered phrases in French amidst the coronas and nebulas of synth expansiveness before a muted techno thump begins to congeal all of the forms into a structured diffusion of propulsive rhythms cruising through their conjoined gaseousness. One could harken back to some of those early Pete Namlook recordings. We're knocking the cobwebs out of our brains to recall which one might be most fitting - perhaps From Within (with Richie Hawtin) or Fires Of Ork (with Biosphere). No matter. This is a great track that begs us to ask that these two continue this collaboration! The B-side girds on rhythm as well but is much more understated through the sampled breakbeat with washes of expansive synth, goth-y guitar drone, and oceanic drift slowly burying that rhythm under ripples of delay that may be the aggregate of Pyle's vocals. Very cool stuff. Also, we should note that the sleeve comes with a very cool lenticular artwork. Fucking trippy!
It's been ages since wed've heard from Aussie black noise one man band Nekrasov. Long an aQ fave, past Nekrasov records found the disarmingly named Bob Nekrasov fusing churning mechanized blackness with crumbling squalls of white noise, the result a caustic black buzz rooted in something much more abstract and avant than your typical black metal fare. And while this isn't a new record, it might as well be since it's actually been 5 years since he last made an appearance on the aQ list. Originally limited to 200 copies and released on the Crucial Blast imprint Crucial Blaze, we got a handful of copies direct from the man/band (his last!), and it's a bit surprising sonically. In the past, Nekrasov's sound was equal parts brutal blown out noise and blasting brutal buzz, but for The Ever-Present, Nekrasov seems to have ditched the black metal component completely, instead lumbering into something much noisier and free form, a sound that will no doubt appeal to fans of full on noise outfits like the Incapacitants and Masonna. Cuz this is actually a noise record. The first disc is two 30 minute tracks, each one a roiling morass of grinding static and swirling speaker shredding psychedelia. With other noise records, we generally play up the surprisingly melodic component, or the fantastically textural ambience, however disc one displays virtually none of the former, and some mutated version of the latter. At first, it's like sticking your head in crematorium oven, but a few minutes in, and even our sometimes harsh noise averse ears started warming to the sound, it gradually becomes more of a grey or pink noise, the texture a hazy, mesmeric garble, almost like distorted transmissions from another dimension. The second track on disc one (both titled like the first with simple Roman numerals), somehow cranks up the crunch of that first track, almost as if some noise-math was done and two tracks are playing simultaneously. It's at this point though, that something does seem to surface, maybe not actual melodies, but like staring bleary eyed at the static on your TV and 4 in the morning, shapes begin to form, movements crystalize, the sound becomes even more tactile, and almost like a living thing, granted an extremely fucking scary, and out-to-destroy-your-soul sort of thing, but iron eared listeners will find this hellish howl some strange sort of sinister blacknoise lullaby.
The second disc seems to veer subtly back toward the Nekrasov of old. No there's no riffs, or drums, or song structure, or even songs really, but there does seem to be the shadow of a song, or perhaps the skeleton, the sound is a bit more muted, tamped down, yet also more dynamic, as if it were in fact some old Nekrasov recording left to rot in a moist, moldy basement, and then years later, played back William Basinski style, a more harsh and harrowing Disintegration Loops, an undulating churn that isn't all that far removed from Basinski, or the Caretaker, or any of the other obscure noise sculptors whose works we treasure like grim black totems.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!! Each one hand numbered. Packaged in a DVD style case, with full color artwork, a vinyl sticker, two pins, and a printed art book. Not sure if we can get more of these once we're out, but assume once these are gone, they're likely gone for good.
Oh, boy! A Cat Stevens record.
Pagan forest dwellers and Kvltists alike, unite, a new Obsequiae album has been brewing in the cauldron and is ready to be drank from the goblet! Like a medieval Marduk or a madrigal Mayhem, Obsequiae capitalizes the METAL in folk metal.
Ostensibly a band since 1998 (then called Autumnal Winds), Obsequiae released their debut Suspended In The Brume Of Eos in 2011, a stunning and powerful debut that left many, like us, wanting more. Finally, enter Aria of Vernal Tombs, a mighty follow up to that record. Obsequiae's Tanner Anderson and Co. mange to combine beautiful, haunting medieval harp tracks with a riff-centric and heavy-yet-melodic black metal assault. On the black metal tracks, Anderson's dueling guitar melodies are the driving force, catchy, melodic, but always heavy.
Aria Of Vernal Tombs (Google tells us "vernal" means of or relating to springtime, fyi... still don't know what a "Brume of Eos" is, though) never feels cheesy or hamfisted in its attempt to incorporate medieval melodies into the songs; rather, these feel like cohesive, melodic pieces that are equal parts beautiful and heavy. Obsequiae is much more interested in making you breathe the medieval air and feel the crumbling stone than playing make-believe at the Ren Faire (no offense to Ren Faire lovers, aQ's own Harry among them). This record will easily slide into our top metal albums of the year chart!
With every new Thee Oh Sees release, we have this fantasy of writing the shortest review, like, "Here's the new Oh Sees record, just do yourself a favor and click add to cart, you know you want to...", but we know there are those who want to know if it's really worth it, because after so many releases, do we really need to buy another one? To which we say, YES! Tell your brain to shut up and add it to your cart already!!! Yet still this may not convince everyone, so, ok, we'll do the legwork and try and break it down for you.
This is the first Oh Sees record since their self-imposed hiatus a year or so ago after leaving SF and moving to LA. A year ain't so long to an average band, but with the prolific output of John Dwyer, who is not only heading this band but also has a new Damaged Bug album out (in stock now!), and is also busy co-running the Castle Face label which is on an unprecedented roll of great releases from Pow!, Male Gaze, Warm Soda, The Blind Shake and King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard, how he finds time to make not only a record, but a great record is beyond us. But with that hiatus, Dwyer completely reformed the group, while staying true to their sound, and really focussed on the studio aspects of the recording process, with beefed up emphasis on organs, synths and acoustic guitars. They have also apparently been listening to lots of Amon Duul, Flower Travellin' Band, Love, Can and early Joy Division.
The cinematic raw power is still there, in fact it's increased. The whole first side is largely devoted to thrusting the energy through the creep of dark psych fairy tales of disintegrating flesh and magical evil. These are not new themes for the band, but there is a commingling of tropes that used to be more separated on previous releases, the pummeling faster songs versus the slower zoners. Here the pummel is tweaked with peaks of sublimity and the slower prettier songs are laced with menace like a minefield. In fact the slow zone, marked by the tracks "Sticky Hulks" and "Holy Smoke", are some of the dreamiest we have heard from them, with organ fugues and strings that leave us floating before the fury drops back in. Similar in scope to Floating Coffin, Putrifiers II and Carrion Crawler / The Dream. An instant classic!
Vinyl version includes download, cd don't need it.
The Present Moment is a gloomy synthwave project of Los Angeles' Milton Scott, who's landed a handful of records on some of the more notable imprints of retro-garde electronics - Disaro, Mannequin, Desire, and now Chondritic Sound. The vinyl version of Cruel (the band's third album) came and went very quickly in lieu of a European tour back in 2014, and even this cassette has sold out at the source. But here, we have a handful of this mighty fine amalgam of urgent synth arrangements that couple staccato bass, simple drum machined patterns, and synth pulses with swaths of ice-drone melodies, which orbit tightly around the stentorian baritone of frontman Milton Scott. Had The Present Moment been conceived some 20 years ago in the exact same town, they would have found themselves in very good company at The Scream Club alongside Kommunity FK, the Abecedarians, Human Drama, and the like.
Right up front, we'll go on record and say this is likely the best cd you'll EVER buy... that comes packaged in a diaper. Prove us wrong. We dare you. But until someone does, revel in awesomely monikered Rebel Wizard, another project by the mysterious madman behind Aussie blacknoise one man band Nekrasov. And unlike the Nekrasov record reviewed elsewhere on this list, where you'll find said man indulging his face melting, amp shredding, ear drum destroying harsh noise tendencies, Rebel Wizard goes just as far in the opposite direction, whipping up a frenzy of classic metal riffage, harmonized leads, galloping drumming, a hybrid of old school black metal and NWOBHM maybe? Hell, the diaper even displays the legend NWONM, scrawled in sharpie, alongside a drawing of what looks like a dead eyed stick figure metalhead. And yup, it stands for NEW WAVE OF NEGATIVE METAL!
It's just blackened enough, the vokills just harsh enough, to give this the negative edge, but the stretches without vocals, it could be some lost demo from some obscure UK band from the eighties. But this shit is so good, a band like that wouldn't stay obscure for long. Any metalhead worth his salt and with a halfway decent record collection while find these tracks push all their very metal buttons, eminently headbangable, super melodic, epic, majestic, but also plenty grim and fierce and fucking heavy. We won't go on at length, since we have less than 10 copies, and these are the very last of an extremely limited run of just 50 copies, needless to say, highly recommended, and for the few of you who will manage to nab one of these, you will not be sorry.
And yeah, these are in fact housed a (unused!) diaper, complete with polka dots, and little cute cuddly animal pictures, and those sticky tabs holding it shut. LIMITED TO 50 COPIES, each one numbered on the inside, each one hand adorned with the record title, the NWONM legend, and the aforementioned dead eyed skull thing. Also includes a printed insert with the track listing.
A strange one for sure. This brief declaration of pagan invocation channeled through Dada collage and power electronics is delivered by the frontman from Kinit Her. In the extensive liner notes, Schafer explains this 21 minute expedition to be "an aestheticized recounting of the daily relationship between a lone recordist and a damned urban soundscape." This is hardly the phonographers / field recordists' take but a more infernal, internalized portrait, laced with searing, mechanized blasts of electronics & drum machines with Schafer's deep, detuned black metal mantra vokills looming throughout. He jump cuts between that modus operandi and collages of DIY electronic gibberish, ambient synth drone, appropriated teledrama orchestrations, scabrous violin screeches, and the deep reverberant thrum of abandoned ammunition bunkers that dot the agricultural landscape to the south of Chicago. If KTL were to remix and recontextualize all of those HNAS or P16.D4 albums...
Now that '90s doomlords Sleep are back together again, touring and even releasing new music (the one-sided 12" we recently listed), it's perfect timing for this release - their very first, long out of print album, officially reissued on vinyl for the very first time!! (With download, too.)
Nascent underground heavies Sleep, after changing their name from Asbestos Death, put out this, their Billy Anderson produced debut full-length, way back in 1991 (when, remember, doom wasn't the popular genre it is today). The title is likely a nod to Black Sabbath's Vol. 4, as of course Sabbath are obviously a big influence - but Vol. 1 doesn't exactly swing as Sabbathy as Sleep's Holy Mountain, their stoner-groovy sophomore album, would. Instead, Vol. 1 is a darker beginning, aligned with the contemporary likes of Gore, Eyehategod, and the Melvins; its spare, lumbering riffs and unhappy vokills giving off an opiated evil vibe, more suggestive of hard drugs than friendly ol' pot. Though we're sure lots of marijuana was smoked in the making of this feedback-laced, plodding, nihilistic heaviness that anticipated the sound of Khanate some years later. Song titles like "Numb", "Anguish", "Catatonic", "The Suffering", and "Scourge" ought to give you an idea of the mindset here - this is the sort of Sleep from which you might never wake up.
FYI: while we still have a bunch on hand at the moment, this first pressing is apparently already sold out at the label, so when we run out, it'll be at least a month or two before we'll see more...
NOW ON VINYL TOO!!!
Prepare for takeoff! As longtime fans, nay, FANATICS about heavy Italian space psych masters UFOmammut, we're super stoked that they have a new album out. It's been 3 years since the one-two punch of Oro: Opus Primum and Oro: Opus Alter, so we're ready for more.
With an intro that sounds like they're calling worshippers (like us) to prayer, then launches into sheer lumbering spacey synth-laden heavosity, yeah, Ecate's opener "Sominum" is the UFOmammut we know and love all right! For the somehow still uninitiated we'll fall back on the old "Electric Wizard meets Hawkwind, with a side helping of Neurosis" shorthand description, but really at this point (15 years, nine albums - including a couple we made Records Of The Week) UFOmammut should be name to check on its own, descriptive of their own special sound, one we might reference with regard to other bands (like, for instance, fellow Italians Nibiru).
Usually either throbbing away mightily, a massive wall of guitar laced with sci-fi synth, chanted screams, percussive pummel, and lysergic FX, or breaking down somewhat softly into a roiling miasma of buried, effected sound samples/vocals and more quietly ominous riff-riff-riffing, this new album provides a fresh new swirling set of single-minded, spaced out, head banging, trance inducing rituals for all acolytes to enjoy - and followers of such bands as Yob, Om, and the various others aforementioned should probably succumb to this as well. Nice tripped out art on the cover and in the booklet, as well, with an illustration for each song, courtesy of Malleus, the psychedelic art collective to which these guys belong.
This here elpee is a pretty killer proposition for any/all of you who're into heavy, heavily FX laden, super synthed-out space rock, Swedish unit Uran coming across like sorta like mutant soundtrack to a hypothetical Hawkwind Atari cartridge, if that makes any sense. Like we said, heavy, pulsing, synthesizer overlord overload. It's distorted, grinding and gritty; played with a punkish energy, gleefully weird... Space rock that sounds like it's not just from space, but is in fact performed by aliens, y'know, green or purple ones with little antennas growing from their heads, waving around as they manipulate the machines (synths) making all these sounds. Whoosh swoosh zap whirr, all knobs twisted 'til they fall off, though there are moments of melody too, like the pretty little intro to, uh, "Fatfucker" before it stutters into the more typical tripped out set the controls for blowing up your brain style stuff. For fans of Gnod, or can you imagine an instrumental Circle gone sorta Skweee, perhaps? This was originally released as a cd on Germany's stoner rock Sulatron label in 2009, now unleashed on limited (to 499 copies) "radioactive yellow vinyl" by Swedish imprint Hoga Nord Rekords. We've only got, like, 3 of 'em and aren't too sure if more will be forthcoming or not, just FYI.
You know those Blues Artwork Calendars we list every year? Adorned with imagery from old blues 78s, those calendars are always packaged with an excellent compilation of vintage blues songs, so you can listen to what you're looking at every month. Well, finally someone came up with the good idea to press those Blues Artwork Calendar comps onto vinyl, starting (for some reason) with Vol.3, the comp that came with 2005's edition of the calendar. Title track "Devil Got My Woman" by Skip James leads off side A, there's also plenty other classics from the '20s and '30s by the likes of Charley Patton, Blind Blake, Ma Rainey, Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Mississippi Sheiks, and more. Including a song called "Christmas In Jail", now that's the blues.
180 gram vinyl, tracks "newly remastered from the finest copies of the original 78s", includes an insert featuring the original promotional artwork from most of those records.
So, are you the curious sort of person that's willing to take a chance on a compilation featuring a whole bunch of bands you've never ever heard of before, as long as most of them have cool and/or ridiculous names?? Then this is for you, featuring as it does contributions from Whitney Houston's Crypt, Bridal Gnome, School Girl Report, Drunk Elk, WASP (no, not W.A.S.P.), and best of all, Girls Pissing On Girls Pissing, to name our favorite band *names* among the 23 on here. There's only one of 'em that we knew anything about already, but it might serve as a recommendation, as the very last track here is a live one by former aQ Record Of The Weekers, shoegazing Australian noise popsters The Bunyip Moon. Their new drummer is the guy that runs the Vacant Valley label, who put this comp together, celebrating five years of activity.
So, you might also be interested in this, if you wanna check out some underground, DIY, lo-fi bands from Australia and New Zealand, 'cause that's what these are. Certainly some cool noisy garagey clang and wallop to be found here! Some of it REALLY noisy and blown out. Other bands are more punk-poppish, or about the electronic weirdness and glitch. All sorts, though noisiness does seem to be a common theme. The cd booklet includes a bunch of show fliers so you can get a sense of the 'scene', along with liner notes. We just got a tiny handful of these comps, totally out of the blue, but now might have to investigate some of these bands further...
Honey Owens sweetly surprises us with a return as Valet, on this beautifully kaleidoscopic record on Kranky. Much has changed in the six years since the nocturnal folk music of Valet's False Flag Society. For starters, Owens increasing attention over the past few years to her live dance music project, Miracles Club, with her partner Rafael Fauria, has given her a broader palette of sound design and a keener focus on production. A recent child had to put that project on hold (cue "babies ruin everything" rant from avid Miracles Club fan and aQ staffer Jill!), so Nature is a way of focussing that conduit of energy from one project to the other with a transition from a solo experimental act to a fully fleshed out band featuring Fauria and others.
Enthralled with the shimmery dream-pop of Cocteau Twins and Lush and the evocative shoegaze of Slowdive and Ride, Valet boosts up the production and songcraft on Nature from previous releases, but uses it to channel some of the internal and organic changes that come with new life and new responsibilities. It's a big change in sound for them, though not entirely new to us, as there seems to be a shoegaze revolution all over again these days with bands like Balms and Chasms, just to mention a couple from here in SF. Yet Valet use it to stunning effect and it's very nice to hear a band comfortable enough to just say fuck it to the complexities of experimentation and just give us a direct gorgeously-realized dream pop record. Kudos!
We're not sure if it is tied to the recent death of visionary ESP-disk label founder Bernard Stollman, but it seems like many of the great forward thinking musical releases of uncategorizable out-rock, avant-jazz and beat performance pioneered on Stollman's label in the sixties and seventies are seeing new light. We re-listed the primal freak of Cromagnon recently, and the legendary Sun Ra lps Heliocentric Worlds vols. I and II are in our orbit once again as well (email us if you want to order). But this week, we have a solid vinyl reissue of the 1966 College Tour album from obscure out-jazz chanteuse, Patty Waters.
An influence of Diamanda Galas, Patti Smith and Lydia Lunch, the seemingly mild-mannered Waters became well known for her 14 minute interpretation of "Black is The Color of My True Love's Hair", from her first ESP album, 1965's Sings. In it she takes the traditional ballad and wrings out every gut-wrenching emotion from restrained grey-toned torch song to epic fits of shrieks and screams. At the time, that song hit a visceral nerve especially coming after a more staid but nevertheless nocturnal repertoire of beautifully skeletal jazz-balladry. Here she was taking Billie Holiday's sad and soulful delivery to new depths of nuance and extreme vocal innovation.
On College Tour she expands upon those dynamic vocals in a live setting using an all-star back-up group as part of a New York state college tour which included Sun Ra Arkestra, Burton Greene, Giuseppi Logan and Ran Blake. With flute, bass, piano and percussion in seemingly improvisational backing, Waters at first sings quietly in wordless coos and breathy whispers, that over time follow traditional jazz singing, but soon evolve (or devolve depending on how you look at it), into brays and wails, animal noises and hollers. The backing music follows suit. Two long suites embrace this dynamic with a brief, transcendent interlude of "It Never Entered My Mind" which is so gorgeously delivered, that it counters any doubt that this performer can actually sing. Water only recorded these two records for ESP, and then disappeared for about 25 years to raise a family. Though she made a new record of jazz standards in the nineties, it was nothing like these two early classics. Dig the Mansonesque cover photo, this is still some next-level shit!
Remastered and hand-numbered to 1000.
Disorganized folks we are, sometimes it happens that more than one AQ staffer writes a review for the same release! When that happens, we try to meld 'em together... or heck just run 'em both, its sorta interesting to see how similarly (or not) the reviews turn out. In this case, two views that aren't very far apart at all. See if you can tell which one was written by Andee and which one was written by Kirk...
Review A:
Another blast of transcendent, spaced out, garage psych from these Arcata stoners, and like past records, it's another gloriously drug fueled, FX heavy excursion into the outer reaches of the sonic stratosphere. Pan starts off with a bang, that bang being a heady sprawl of Stooges-y swagger, doused in some serious Hawkwindy-y swirl, a pounding, churning tranced out hypno-rock that never lets up. The vox are buried, a mumbled wasted drawl, psychedelic organs shimmer in the background, multiple guitars tangle into wild serpentine shapes, the songs oozing organically, stretched out into endless zoner jams, occasionally settling into something a little more tranquil, only to explode into action moments later, and once in a while, winding down into something even more drone-y and dirge-like. And while the rock shorthand for Manna was always Stooges + Hawkwind, Pan is maybe the most perfect distillation of those two sides of the band's sonic psyche, maybe their most rocking, but without sacrificing a bit of the seventies style bongsmoke freakouts, in fact, most of the tracks leave the pop realm altogether within minutes of launch, and never look back.
Review B:
Attention all stoners, trippers, rockers, punks, druggies, freaks, hippies, weirdos, and, well, psych and space rock fans, Arcata, California's own White Manna are back with full length number four (not counting the live one on Cardinal Fuzz)! If you've ever heard a White Manna album before, you already know that on Pan they'll be summoning the dense environs of their hometown, with huge walls of meditative psych dirge. And if you've listened to these guys before, you know they have a unique punk edge to them, often getting compared (by us) to the Stooges. On Pan, right off the bat you get back-to-back repetitive rock riffs that build and twist into spacey trips, definitely giving us that Stooges-meets-Hawkwind vibe. The attitude on Pan has definitely gotten meaner, and more aggressive, calling to mind the last release by Sonoran Desert heavies Destruction Unit. They aren't afraid to really let a song really breath, either, getting into some krautrock territory in some tracks, building and grooving into some 10+ minute jams.
Fans of our other favorite psych bands (Heads, Mugstar, White Hills) and the more punk psych bands like the aforementioned Destruction Unit are in for a treat. Far out.
Oh, and by the way, Captcha also released this as a digipak cd as well as on vinyl... except, that it's not a real cd for some reason, it's just a pro-printed cd-r. So, out of protest at them nonsensically not pressing a REAL cd, we're just listing the vinyl, but heck if you want the cd-r version, let us know, we can get it for you (and unlike the vinyl, it's got a live bonus track, a Hawkwind cover, "Master Of The Universe").
MPEG Stream: "Pan" [/audio/whitemannapan.m3u]
MPEG Stream: "Dunes I" [/audio/whitemannadunesi.m3u]
MPEG Stream: "Evil" [/audio/whitemannaevil.m3u] ----* ----* Relatively New In Stock, Not Yet Reviewed : ----* 999 "The Biggest Tour In Sport/The Biggest Prize In Sport" (Let Them Eat Vinyl) 2lp 31.00
ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE AND THE MELTING PARAISO U.F.O. "High On Heaven: Live In New Haven" (Safety Meeting) 3lp 38.00
AKKOR, KAMURAN "s/t" (Pharaway Sounds) lp 28.00
ALABAMA SHAKES "Sound & Color" (ATO) 2lp 28.00
ALTAMONT "The Monkees Uncle" (Valley King) picture disc 30.00
ALVA NOTO "Xerrox Vol. 3" (Raster-Noton) cd 17.98
AMBARCHI, OREN "Sleepwalker's Conviction" (Black Truffle) lp 26.00
APHEX TWIN "MARCHROMT30a Edit 2b 96" (Warp) 12" 14.98
AYLER, ROBERT "Spirits Rejoice" (ESP-Disk) lp 27.00
BAD GUYS "Bad Guynaecology" (Riot Season) cd/lp 16.98/27.00
BENSIINI "R" (Ektro) cd 14.98
BEST COAST "California Nights" (Harvest) cd/lp 13.98/23.00
BJORK "Vulnicura" (One Little Indian) 2lp 26.00
BLACK MARE / LYCIA "Low Crimes / Silver Leaf" (Magic Bullet) 7" 8.98
BLANCK MASS "Dumb Flesh" (Sacred Bones) cd/2lp 12.98/19.98
BORROWED TIME "s/t" (High Roller) cd 11.98
BRINKMANN, THOMAS "What You Hear (Is What You Hear)" (Editions Mego) cd/2lp 16.98/32.00
BROWNOUT "Brownout Presents: Brown Sabbath" (Ubiquity) cd 15.98
BUDOS BAND "Magus Mountain" (Daptone) 7" 6.98
BUILT TO SPILL "Untethered Moon" (Warner Bros.) cd 14.98
BURROUGHS, WILLIAM "In Dub" (Echo Beach) lp+cd 27.00
CALEXICO "Edge of the Sun" (Anti-) cd/lp 15.98/23.00
CARDUCCI, JOE "Life Against Dementia" (Redoubt Press) book 22.95
CAVE IN "White Silence" (Hydra Head) lp 22.00
CCR HEADCLEANER "Cokesmoker" (Stale Heat/Pollen Season) 12" 14.98
CHADWICK, SARAH MARY "9 Classic Tracks" (Siltbreeze) lp 15.98
CHASNY, BEN "The Hexadic System" (Drag City) book/playing cards 22.00/12.98
CHERRY, DON "Mu Pt. 1 & 2/Orient" (Charly) 2cd 21.00
CIRCLE "Silta" (Ektro) dvd 15.98
CIRCUIT DES YEUX "In Plain Speech" (Thrill Jockey) cd/lp 14.98/17.98
COHEN, CHARLES "Brother I Prove You Wrong" (Morphine) 2lp 26.00
COLE, CRYS "Sand/Layna" (Black Truffle) lp 25.00
COMMUNIONS "s/t" (Tough Love) 12" 12.98
CONFESSOR "Condemned" (Earache) lp 16.98
COTTRELL, DORTHIA "Dorthia Cottrell" (Forcefield) cd 8.98
CRAMPS, THE "Psychedelic Jungle" (Vinilissimo) lp 27.00
CROCODILES "Boys" (Zoo) cd/lp 13.98/15.98
CROOKS ON TAPE "In The Realm Of The Ancient Minor" (Pure Or Gone) lp 16.98
CROWN LARKS "Blood Dancer" (Space Lung/Land Breathing) cd/lp 6.98/12.98
DAMAGED BUG "Cold Hot Plumbs" (Castle Face) cd/lp 13.98/15.98
DAWN OF MIDI "Dysnomia" (Erased Tapes) 2lp 27.00
DEATH "N.E.W." (Tryangle) lp 22.00
DEATH GRIPS "The Powers That B" (Harvest) 2cd 14.98
DECERF, JEAN-PIERRE "Space Oddities 1975-1979" (Born Bad) cd/lp 15.98/21.00
DESTRUCTION UNIT "Live In San Francisco" (Castle Face) lp 15.98
DEVO "Hardcore Devo: Live" (MVD Audio) 2lp 31.00
DIAMOND YOUTH "Nothing Matters" (Top Shelf Records) lp 19.98
DISAPPEARING PEOPLE "Inventory" (Self Released) cassette 4.98
DOCTOR SMITH "Into The Unknown" (Stormspell) cd 11.98
DREAM, THE "Get Dreamy" (Cherry Red/RPM) cd 12.98
DROP DEAD "s/t" (Armageddon) lp 21.00
DUB CONNECTION (PRINCE JAMMY & THE UPSETTERS) "s/t" (Auralux) cd 9.98
EL HIJO DE LA AURORA "The Enigma Of Evil" (Minotauro) cd 17.98
ELECTRIC WIZARD "Dopethrone" (Rise Above) 2lp 34.00
ENFORCER "From Beyond" (Nuclear Blast) cd 13.98
ENSLAVED "In Times" (Nuclear Blast) 2lp 35.00
FAHEY, JOHN "Volume I: Blind Joe Death" (4 Men With Beards) lp 19.98
FAHEY, JOHN "Volume II: Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes" (4 Men With Beards) lp 19.98
FAIRHORNS "Fuckup Rush" (Kindarad!) cd 14.98
FAITH NO MORE "Sol Invictus" (Reclamation) cd 13.98
FATHER JOHN MISTY "I Love You, Honeybear" (Sub Pop) 2lp 21.00
FELL, MARK & GABOR LAZAR "The Neurobiology Of Moral Decision Making" (The Death Of Rave) 2lp 28.00
FEVRE, BERNARD "Cosmos 2043" (Anthology) lp 22.00
FEVRE, BERNARD "Suspense" (Anthology) lp 22.00
FF "Ffeeling" (300 Mics) lp/lp+blotter paper 17.98/24.00
FIORE, GIACOMO "IV: American Electric Guitars" (self-released) lp 23.00
FUNKADELIC "Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow" (Westbound / Ace) lp 17.98
FUZZ, THE "Golden Cage" (Genjing Records) 7" 9.98
GASCOIGNE, BRIAN "Phase IV OST" (Waxwork) lp 29.00
GERMS "Forming" (Superior Viaduct) 7" 10.98
GIBSON, DAUGHN "Carnation" (Sub Pop) lp 16.98
GILBERTO, JOAO "The Warm World Of Joao Gilberto" (WaxTime) lp 19.98
GORGUTS "...And Then Comes Lividity Vol 1" (War On Music) lp 21.00
GORGUTS "...And Then Comes Lividity Vol 2" (War On Music) lp 23.00
GORGUTS "...And Then Comes Lividity Vol 3" (War On Music) lp+7" 28.00
GRASSOW, MATHIAS & JOHN HAUGHM "Mosaic" (Dammerung Arts/Anthem) lp 17.98
GULD, MAX "For Enden Af Corridoren" (Dark Entries) lp 17.98
GUNN, STEVE & THE BLACK TWIG PICKERS "Seasonal Hire" (Thrill Jockey) lp 19.98
HAMMER KING "Kingdom of the Hammer King" (Cruz Del Sur) cd 16.98
HANZ BRONZE "s/t" (Range Life) cassette 5.98
HARLEY, RUFUS "King/Queens" (Atlantic) cd 10.98
HAWN "Badmans" (self-released) cassette 4.98
HAXAN: WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES (WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS) "(OST)" (Sotpackan) cd 17.98
HEADLESS LIZZY AND HER ICEBOX PUSSY "Criminalien Manipulature" (Ophidian Rhythym) cd 9.98
HENRY BLACKER "Summer Tombs" (Riot Season) lp 30.00
HIPERSON "No Need For Another History" (Maybe Mars) 2lp 24.00
HOCKEY NIGHT "Neutral Zone Trap" (Ikuisuus) lp 14.98
HOLDERLIN "Holderlins Traum" (Zyx) lp 21.00
HOLY SERPENT "s/t" (Riding Easy) lp 19.98
HOLYDRUG COUPLE, THE "Moonlust" (Sacred Bones) lp 15.98
HOME BLITZ "Foremost & Fair" (Richie) lp 15.98
IMPLODES "Reverser" (Gilead) 12" 24.00
KING DIAMOND "Tells the Tale of Abigail" (self-released) lp 23.00
KING KHAN & BBQ SHOW, THE "Bad News Boys" (In The Red) lp 15.98
KISS CAM "Kiss and Tell" (self-released) cassette 3.98
KOZELEK, MARK "Rock 'N' Roll Singer" (Badman) lp 17.98
LAST EXIT "Iron Path" (ESP) cd 14.98
LEER, THOMAS "Private Plane International" (Dark Entries) 12" 14.98
LELAND "A Self-Taught, Decathlon, Hard Rock Musician!" (Stoned Circle) cd 17.98
LEVY, BARRINGTON "Shaolin Temple" (Auralux) cd 11.98
LITTLE WINGS "Explains" (Woodsist) lp 15.98
MAY, BRIAN "Turkey Shoot OST" (Dual Planet) cd 14.98
MCLUSKY "Mcluskyism" (Too Pure) lp 17.98
MEDIEVAL "One Morbid" (Buried By Time And Dust) 2lp 32.00
MICACHU "Feeling Romantic Feeling Tropical Feeling Ill" (DDS) 2lp 28.00
MINSK "The Crash And The Draw" (Relapse) cd 14.98
MODEST MOUSE "Strangers To Ourselves" (Epic) 2lp 29.00
MONDO DRAG "New Rituals" (Alive) cd/lp 9.98/12.98
MONDO DRAG "s/t" (Kozmik Artifactz) cd/lp 14.98/22.00
MORRICONE, ENNIO "Veruschka OST" (Dagored) lp 34.00
MORRISSEY "Autobiography" (Penguin Classics) book 18.00
MOTHMEN, THE "Pay Attention" (On U) cd/lp 16.98/22.00
MOUNTAIN GOATS, THE "Beat The Champ" (Merge) 2lp 23.00
NIGHT DEMON "Curse Of The Damned" (Century Media) lp 16.98
NISENNENMONDAI "Live" (Clouds Hill) cd 16.98
NO JOY "More Faithful" (Kemado) lp 23.00
NO MORE "A Rose Is A Rose" (Dark Entries) lp 22.00
NOACK, EDDIE "Ain't The Reaping Ever Done (1962-1976)" (Omni Recording Corporation) cd 17.98
NUN "s/t" (HoZac) lp 14.98
OBNOX "Know America" (Ever / never) lp 17.98
OGRE "Dawn Of The Proto-Man" (Minotauro) cd 17.98
OGRE "Seven Hells" (Minotauro) cd + dvd 17.98
ORCHESTRA BAOBAB "Pirates Choice" (World Circuit) 2lp 30.00
OUR LOVE WILL DESTROY THE WORLD "Carnivorous Rainbows" (Ba Da Bing) lp 17.98
OVERSCAN "Conscious" (Constellation Tatsu) cassette 4.98
PEOPLE OF THE NORTH "Era Of Manifestations" (Thrill Jockey) lp 18.98
PHILLIPE, ANNIE "Sensationnel!: Ye-Ye Bonbons 1965-1968" (Ace) lp 17.98
PLANNING FOR BURIAL "Leaving" (Flenser) 2lp 25.00
POLLARD, ROBERT "Faulty Superheroes" (Rockathon) lp 15.98
POPULARE MECHANIK "Kollektion 03" (Bureau B) cd/lp 19.98/27.00
PORES "Zero Swim" (self-released) cassette 4.98
PORTOPIA '81 "Jet Stream" (Constellation Tatsu) cassette 4.98
PREKOP, SAM "The Republic" (Thrill Jockey) cd/lp 14.98/17.98
PRINCE JAMMY VS CRUCIAL BUNNY "Dub Contest" (Auralux) cd 8.98
PRISONERS, THE "A Taste Of Pink!" (Big Beat) lp 17.98
PYRAMIDS "A Northern Meadow" (Profound Lore) lp 34.00
QUTTINIRPAAQ "Dead September" (Rural Isolation) lp 13.98
ROBERTSON, TIM "Outer Planetary Church Music" (Aguirre) lp 25.00
RUSSELL, ARTHUR "Corn" (Audika) cd/cd 16.98/21.00
SAN UL LIM "The Second" (Granadilla) lp 27.00
SANDWITCHES, THE "Our Toast" (Empty Cellar) lp 17.98
SCHARPLING & WURSTER "The Best Of The Best Show" (Numero Group) 16cd+book 113.00
SCHLIPPENBACH, ALEXANDER VON "Pakistani Pomade" (Cien Fuegos) lp 32.00
SCORPIONS "Lonesome Crow" (Universal) lp 27.00
SETH "s/t" (Minotauro) 2cd 17.98
SHANA FALANA "Set Your Lightning Fire Free" (Team Love) lp 14.98
SHERWOOD, ADRIAN "Sherwood At The Controls Volume 1: 1979-1984" (On U) cd/2lp 16.98/27.00
SHOVELS "s/t" (Homeless) lp 19.98
SILENCE, THE "s/t" (Drag City) lp 25.00
SILVERFISH "Fat Axl" (Southern) lp 16.98
SIR LORD VON RAVEN "The Age Of Machines" (Guitars And Bongos) 2lp 24.00
SLEAFORD MODS "Tiswas" (Invada) 12" 26.00
SNICKERS "On The Hi-Fi" (Poor L'Amour) 7" 4.98
SNIPES, JONATHAN "Starry Eyes OST" (Waxwork) lp 34.00
SOCIETY OF ROCKETS "Plutonian Blues" (self-released) lp 14.98
SONIC YOUTH "Bad Moon Rising" (Goofin') lp 15.98
SOUND PROJECTOR, THE "Presents Pandaemonium" magazine 9.98
SPEAKING CANARIES, THEE "Platter Base Must Be Constructed Of Moon-Rock" (Chunklet) lp 16.98
SPELLJAMMER "Vol. 2" (Riding Easy) lp 19.98
SPRINGSTEEN, BRUCE "Born in the USA" (Columbia) lp 23.00
SPRINGSTEEN, BRUCE "Born To Run" (Columbia) lp 23.00
SPRINGSTEEN, BRUCE "Darkness on the Edge of Town" (Columbia) lp 23.00
SPRINGSTEEN, BRUCE "Greeting From Asbury Park, N.J." (Columbia) lp 23.00
SPRINGSTEEN, BRUCE "The River" (Columbia) 2lp 38.00
SPRINGSTEEN, BRUCE "The Wild, The Innocent, & The E Street Shuffle" (Columbia) lp 23.00
STRINGTRONICS "Mind Bender" (Fifth Dimension) cd 17.98
SUN RA "The Heliocentric World Of Sun Ra Vol. 1" (ESP) lp 27.00
SUN RA "The Heliocentric World Of Sun Ra Vol. 2" (ESP) lp 27.00
SWAMI JOHN REIS & THE BLIND SHAKE "Modern Surf Classics" (Swami) lp 14.98
SYNTOMA "s/t" (EM) cd 22.00
TACTICS "The Re-Mastered Plan" (Minotauro) 2cd + dvd 32.00
TAU CROSS "s/t" (Relapse) lp 23.00
TEENAGER "The Magic Of True Love" (Essex Records) lp 19.98
TELESCOPES / DEADLY CRADLE DEATH "split" (Genjing) 7" 9.98
THEESATISFACTION "Earthee" (Sub Pop) lp 17.98
THEM ARE US TOO "Remain" (Dais) lp 21.00
TIARAS "s/t" (Mt. St. Mtn.) lp 15.98
TONY TEARS "Follow The Signs of the Times" (Minotauro) cd 13.98
TOOP, DAVID "Lost Shadows: In Defense Of The Soul (Yanonami Shamism, Songs, Ritual, 1978)" (Sub Rosa) 2cd 19.98
TRAFFIC SOUND "A Bailar A Go Go" (Lion Productions / Repsychled) cd 15.98
TUNNEL, THE "Apparition Overdrive" (Glorious Alchemical) cd 9.98
TWIN PEAKS "Wild Onion" (Grand Jury) lp 19.98
U/V LIGHT "Cenotaph" (Medical) lp 21.00
UFO "UFO 2: Flying One Hour Space Rock" (Repertoire) lp 27.00
UMBERTO & ANTONI MAIOVVI "Law Unit" (Death Waltz) lp 37.00
UMILIANI, PIERO "L'uomo Nello Spazio" (Dagored) lp 28.00
UNDER THE SKIN (MICA LEVI) "OST" (Rough Trade) lp 19.98
UNKNOWN MORTAL ORCHESTRA "Multi-Love" (Jagjaguwar) lp 17.98
UNREST "Imperial F.F.R.R." (Teen Beat) lp 19.98
V/A "Des Jeunes Gens Modernes Vol. 2: Post Punk, Cold Wave Et Culture Novo En France 1978-1983" (Born Bad) cd/lp 15.98/19.98
V/A "Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock And Roll OST" (Dust To Digital) cd 14.98
V/A "Ever Alive: A Tribute To Snowy Red" (Weyrd Son Records) 2lp 27.00
V/A "Punky Reggae Selecta: 19 Punk Club Classics" (Spectrum) cd 9.98
V/A "Remembering Mountains: Unheard Songs by Karen Dalton" (Tompkins Square) cd/lp 14.98/17.98
V/A "Step Inside My Soul: Rare '70s And Modern Soul" (Cree / Bear Family) 2lp 25.00
V/A "Synesthesia: Medical Records - The First Five Years" (Medical) 2lp 25.00
V/A "White Glove Test: Louisville Punk Flyers 1978-1994" (Drag City) book 60.98
V/A (OBSIDIAN TONGUE / IN HUMAN FORM / AUTOLATRY / INFERA BRUO "Northeastern Hymns" (Acephale Winter) cassette 6.98
VALKYRIE "Shadows" (Relapse) lp 23.00
VASAS "s/t" (Space Cassette) 7" 5.98
VATICAN SHADOW / CUT HANDS "Azar Swan Variations" (Handmade Birds) 12" 22.00
VIET CONG "Cassette" (Mexican Summer) lp 22.00
VISION FORTUNE "Mas Fiestas Con El Grupo" (Faux / Gringo) lp 24.00
WALLS "Urals" (Ecstatic) cd 17.98
WARNER, EDDIE "Progressive Percussions" (Fifth Dimension) cd 17.98
WAXAHATCHEE "Ivy Tripp" (Merge) lp 17.98
WEEPING RAT "Tar" (Handmade Birds) cd 10.98
WELBURN, JAMES "Hold" (Miasmah) cd 19.98
WHITE EYES "s/t" (Numero Group) lp 16.98
WICKED WINDS "Eyes On The Road" (self-released) cd ep 6.98
WICKER MAN, THE "OST" (Silva Screen) lp 44.00
WIRE "s/t" (Pink Flag) lp 29.00
WITCHGRAVE "s/t" (High Roller) cd 11.98
WITCHTHROAT SERPENT "s/t" (Emetic) lp 22.00
YOUNGS, RICHARD "No Fans Compendium" (VHF) 7cd 45.00
ZERO DOWN "No Limit To Evil" (Minotauro) cd 12.98
Zounds! Zoinks!! ZIRAKZIGIL!!! "Z" is the letter of the week here at aQ thanks entirely to this absolutely enormous slab of cosmic progressive supersludge courtesy of Portland's very heaviest Z-word. Worldbuilder is only the sophomore full length from these grizzly wanderers of the astral plane (after their debut "Battle Of The Peak" which we rightfully raved about back in 2013), but already pulses with a wild streak of spiritually charged confidence usually reserved for bands of the Neurosis, Mastodon, Om ilk. What immediately sets Zirakzigil apart from some of their simpler minded sludged-out contemporaries is the level of musicianship on display. While this certainly bears similarities to the aforementioned Neurosis (especially in the vocals) and perhaps also to bands like Isis or Yob, Zirakzigil eschew any kind of hypnotic repetitive approach, instead peppering their songs with whirling stop start time signatures and off kilter drumming, dramatic twisting structures and dizzying transitions, at times even sounding like some jazz-fusion answer to monolithic post-metal. But as wonderful and thrilling as all of that weirdness is, it only serves as a compliment to something even grander. That's Zirakzigil's real secret weapon, distraction. The awesomeness of the more frantic passages, with all their warped musicianship, frenetic rolls & confounding riffing, provides the ultimate disarming contrast to Zirakzigil's truest strength: Those Enormous. Epic. Riffs. When Worldbuilder really opens up and simplifies, it becomes the stuff of mountain crumbling legend - the kind of thing you want to ride out into battle and die to (whether that's on horseback or in a starship is unclear... it seems like either one could apply equally to this record!) It's an approach not dissimilar to Elder's newest album (which we also made ROTW recently!), but Zirakzigil are way more immediate and aggressive. Confrontationally spacey if you will! The way every song seamlessly leads into the next (four tracks all running at 13+ minutes by the way) only makes the experience all the more massive, like being torn slow-motion-asunder by an enormous hour long suite of galaxy swallowing black hole orchestration - a pummeling meteor shower of multicolor Northern Lights heavy, heavy, heavy metal. Glorious, twisted & very recommended.
