Allegory Chapel Ltd offers a refinement of technique and conceptualization on this ominous chunk of sidereal electronics. Coil's dark sparkle of psychedelic sounds and references is a clear touchstone for ACL here, tracking a different belief system as the foundation upon which to build these sequential pieces. The Enochian invocation of pitchshifted vocal chant and slow spiral synth drone certainly hints at Current 93's early catalog, while the boomingly prophetic voice intoning "You are not a machine" alongside a deliberately programmatic sci-fi step sequencer parallels the man-machine conflict and compulsion aesthetic of Conrad Schniztler and the like, leading into the very Clock DVA sounding "Solar Rite", assumed to be a Luciferian reference, though all references are stripped bare in the midst of this smartly rendered minimalist techno squelch. The album's finale - a recitation of a song from the Koran, addressing man's origin as a clot and his subsequent model of spiritual life through prayer - matches that sacred song with atonal electronic bell tones, a ghostly broadcast from the empty quarter.
Emotionally vacant. Desiccated. Erased. Ariisk hollows out the human condition in these cybernetic electronics of hyper reductive sequences for drum machines and synth pulses all run through a heavy amount of flange. Disembodied vocals whisper and crackle in the same black-hole energy corona of metallic flange and echoplex murk, orbiting the filter-variations on these mechanized rhythms that hark back to the earliest of primitive industrial constructions and synth-noise dub obscurities. Think Nord or Portion Control (or even some of the super early Skinny Puppy tracks that bare quite a resemblance to Portion Control) and strip almost everything except for that rhythmic spine, and that may be a baroque equivalent to the hypno-cyborg minimalism produced here by Ariisk. Very intriguing and another spot-on release from Nostilevo.
Long in the works, this weighty box set represents the complete recordings of Harry Bertoia - the furniture designer, sculptor, and sound artist who produced eleven albums in the late '70s all of which were released on his own Sonambient imprint, many of them posthumously, as he died in 1978. Bertoia first achieved acclaim for his mid-century designs for furniture which were formed through lattice works of welded thin steel rods, first commercially available through Knoll and later through Herman Miller. These same thin steel rods became the principle materials for his scultures, many of which featured hundreds of vertical rods mounted to flat bases that would waver and crash into each other with a force as delicate as the wind. The sounds produced by these sculptures are eerie and hallowed - with dense billowing clouds of rich, psychoacoustic overtones and slow decay on the long sustained tones. He produced numerous variations on these sculptures, many of which had made their way into art museums (where they will never be played, only looked at... how fucking sad); and he housed much of his personal collection in a barn near his Pennsylvania studio. This is where all of these Bertoia recordings were made. Throughout the '80s and '90s, the Sonambient lps slowly disappeared from circulation, and in the wake of artists like Andrew Chalk and Alan Lamb generating similarly sublime compositions, Bertoia's work became all the more timeless. Beautifully remastered from the original tapes and housed in a handsome box with 114 page book filled with images, interviews, and expository texts.
After much delay, and much demand, finally available on vinyl!!! (And we also got some other, classic Bowie lps back in today too, btw.)
Although it is impossible not to think about David Bowie's death when listening to Blackstar, to his immense credit that is most likely exactly what he wanted. Eighteen months is reported to be how long Bowie spent fighting cancer - about the length of time since the release of his previous release The Next Day - and he filled that time creating art that will live in the world long after his body. His lyrics are open to a variety of interpretations, but "Lazarus," his last single in a career that touched six decades, seems to be an honest acceptance of his own death and the creative legacy he would leave behind. From heaven Bowie consoles us, his fans, those who loved him, with the knowledge that his body of work will be raised every time his records play.
Blackstar is a phenomenal album, filled with moodily beautiful horn and synth melodies that simultaneously reference Bowie's entire career and find an individual place within it. Bowie's haunting vocals on the opening title track sound as good as anything he's ever done. Much of the album's percussion seems to initially draw from - and improve on - Earthling's drum 'n' bass worship. Blackstar, however, is much darker and less playful, more somber and purposeful. The title track is ten minutes long, and yet totally engrossing, setting the scene for the rest of the album: the frenetic energy of the rhythm section often tempered by the horns and Bowie's voice. Along with the two singles released before his death, the rock 'n' roll drama of the penultimate song "Dollar Days" is a definite highlight. Many people will want to own Blackstar because it is not only Bowie's last studio record, it is truly amazing in its own right. It would be easy to go on forever about each song, but like the man, the album is more than the sum of its parts and will speak for itself.
A brilliant and beguiling cassette from the Australian transplant Kate Carr, whose slippery compositions dissolve her already dreamy song fragments within the ephemeral details from her field recordings. We keep on coming back to A.C. Marias upon listening to these recordings - she was responsible for one overlooked album in the mid-'80s of delicate post-punk electronica produced with Bruce Gilbert of Wire; and she also collaborated in a couple of Gilbert related side-projects as well. Where A.C. Marias was a songwriter constructing an eerie, vertiginous atmosphere through the eradication of form, Carr arrives at a similar aesthetic locale of strangeways and tendrils in building songs from the ground up through environmental elements and ready-made components. It's a strategy that flourishes in empty spaces where the resonance from bells, insect chorales, cathedral echo, tidal currents, and windswept drones guides the patterned ellipses from her moody guitar ambience and subtle rhythmic vibrations, unfurling into a transfixing, mesmerizing album of sodden, pastoral impressionism. Limited to 125 copies.
Delicate? Calm? Circle? Yes. Listen up. You'd think that for a band with, no less than, what, twenty albums to their name AND who always write songs with an invariable central musical concept (circularity, natch, the repetitive pulse that all their songs share no matter what else is different betwixt 'em) we'd by this point feel like we'd heard it all from them already -- even if their all is ALL really great. But no. This new album surprised even us. And it too is great. Really great. If you're expecting the NWOFHM (New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal) stylings of Tulikoria or Sunrise, or the motorik krautrockiness of Alotus or Guillotine, or the heavy prog of Prospekt, or the spacey jazzy dubbiness of Pori, or all of the above (as these descriptors actually apply to pretty much all their albums to varying degrees), well that's NOT exactly what you get with Miljard. There's really no comparisons this time to Neu!, Can, Tortoise, or Hawkwind, let alone Judas Priest! Instead we'll mention Thuja, The Necks, Morton Feldman, Bohren und Der Club Of Gore, Philip Jeck, 3/4hadbeeneliminated... But it's still definitely Circle. It's just that, as Ektro's website puts it, "rocking has been traded for some quiet reading on the couch at home". And boy is this hauntingly atmospheric, instrumental music PERFECT for such activity.
Miljard NEEDS two discs, because this music is so spacious and expansive, a slow-moving stream, or the ripples in a pond. The pond, perhaps, frozen in the Finnish winter, in a twilight landscape softened with snow... The first track on the first disc, "Parmalee", is a twenty minute piece that sets the relaxed and gorgeous tone of this record. Meandering, pretty piano, reminding us of Rob Reger's playing in Thuja, quietly joined by abstract electronics and guitar...and Circle's usual repetition and pulses are still there, at about 11 minutes the pulse becomes more noticable, by that time you're absolutely entranced... already we're convinced, this is a fantastic record, and there's still 1 and 2/3rds discs to go!! The next track, "B.F.F." is slightly more uptempo, but still has the classical vibe from the piano. And then another twenty-minute cut "Duunila" comes on, a whispery dark drone, hushed, with some sparse clatter, and gentle bass notes. Oooh, sheer beauty. And on it goes, all the way through to the gauzey, vaguely gamelan-like 20-minute "Viitane" which closes out disc two, nearly two hours of amazing music, the soundtrack to a limpid dream from which we'd never hope to wake.
Out of the whole Circle discography, the atypically riff-less stuff here comes closest to the material on side one of Mountain, a very brooding and unusually ambient live set which not everybody got to hear 'cause it was a limited, LP-only release. This at least is not so limited.
Geeze, what *can't* they do? With Miljard we're pretty sure Circle have cemented their status as just about the best band ever, as far as we're concerned. Ok, the AQ universe of best bands ever is pretty big, but Circle might just be the best of the best... Recommended, people!!!
In 2012, Vinyl On Demand published the first Horology box set from Clock DVA, a compendium of the early, self-published cassettes on the projects on Dvation imprint before they released White Souls In Black Suits on Industrial Records in 1980. There were six lps to that box set, and it proved to be an uneven collection with Clock DVA venturing into Crowleyian collage and electronic ritual on some of those recordings and more of a mutation of dank post-punk on others. While Crowley's influence can be felt throughout most all of the Clock DVA / Adi Newton discography, these were the weakest elements of Horology, with those albums of sludgy electronics and creep-crawling rhythms making for a very interesting precursor to the art-funk constructions on White Souls In Black Suits. 2nd stands out as the best of the albums from Horology, taking up this latter style of zombified synth-punk played at a slow-motion torpor. Think the earliest Cabaret Voltaire or Throbbing Gristle in their SixSixSixties vein, completely with spectral guitar meanderings, distorto-bass lines, and blank-stare atmospherics. So, very glad that this has been made available as a stand-alone album, given the unevenness of the full box set.
1972's World Galaxy is one of our all-time astral Alice C. faves - if you like avant jazz, if you like cosmic music, if you like Alice Coltrane, this is an essential, now at last again available on vinyl as part of an exciting new reissue series of some Impulse label jazz classics.
Credited on the colorfully Peter Max designed cover to "Alice Coltrane With Strings", that's what sets this one apart. Massive, sweeping strings, sometimes subject to subtle tape manipulation, that has this somehow reminding us of Super Ae by the Boredoms (or rather, the other way around)! For this record, Alice Coltrane's trademark harp (as well as her piano, electric organ, and tamboura) was joined by a 15-person string section, including violinist LeRoy Jenkins, who also solos. Other personnel: Reggie Workman on bass, Ben Riley on drums, Frank Lowe on saxophone, and Elayne Jones on tympani. And, respected Indian guru Swami Satchidananda provides a recitation on the subject of love as part of this album's final track, a heartfelt version of John Coltrane's classic "A Love Supreme". The album also begins with a tune closely associated with Alice Coltrane's late husband, "My Favorite Things". The remaining four compositions featured are Alice Coltrane originals, given the "With Strings" treatment, and all are majestic, beautiful, the album sounding like some very spiritual, avantgarde soundtrack music, with shimmering melodies carried aloft by the strings, intertwined and intercut with Eastern-sounding zing and twang and bass drone and keyboard burble, all the layers coming together with passion and power. A unique item in the Alice Coltrane discography for sure, and one of our favorites for that. (Well, her great Universal Consciousness employed strings too, but this takes it to another level.)
Finally managed to get our hands on a few copies of the 2014 debut from this Japanese
'Catastrophic Noise Metal' band, newly reissued on domestic vinyl by our pals at Hydra Head, and holy shit, this is some crazy, noisy, confusional, brilliant stuff. And as always, a Japanese band takes a sound and transforms it into something completely next level and bafflingly over the top. Although in this case, it's like Endon took the music of ten different bands, and mashed it all together into one swirling chaotic metal mess. And it's glorious. It's like Boris crossed with Melt Banana crossed with Unholy Grave then run through a battery of damaged stomp boxes, adding all manner of industrial crunch and crumble, tripped out backwards FX, echo drenched vocals, the sound seems to be anchored by some unholy grindcore/black metal hybrid, furious blasting beats and frenzied riffing, but depending on the song, it can sound grim and black, or totally nutzoid and super psychedelic. The sound also can collapse into a sprawl of end-of-song noise, but sculpted into dense swirls of drones, freaked out blasts of feral hardcore can suddenly splinter into abstract electronics, demented ambience drifts through fields of chaotic noise-jazz-splatter, death metal vokills, doomy decay riffage, again all blended up into a dizzyingly WTF? sonic concoction. It's exhausting, but utterly exhilarating, and for anyone who grew up listening to the Boredoms, and Hanatarash, and the Ruins, and Space Streakings, and Boris obviously (Atsuo from Boris produced this record btw), this seems like a (il)logical metallic, sonic extension of all that wild and wooly weirdness.
We got VERY few copies of this, and while we should be able to get more, probably best to grab one quick, or be prepared to wait patiently as we try to restock.
From the festering unsilent graveyard that is Minotauro Records comes another fresh cadaver of Italian okkvlt horror! Funeral Marmoori (your guess is as good as ours what a "Marmoori" is) are entirely new to our Aquarian ears, but what we hear is a delectably groovy slab of organ laden heavy rock/doom that would fit snugly in any collection betwixt those musty Paul Chain, Death SS (who get covered here) and Black Hole lps. Although Funeral Marmoori are perhaps a little groovier than some of their Italian forebears, at times recalling more contemporary acts like Blood Ceremony and Reverend Bizarre, but with an added dose of bloody Technicolor giallo spookiness. Don thy ritual robe, sharpen thy ceremonial dagger, and dive in!
We were taken by surprise when we saw there was a new High Llamas record coming out. While it's only been four years since their last release, we have to be honest that we hadn't really thought much about them in quite a while longer than that. But looking back, we started to realize how at their beginning in the '90s, they were tapping into a smart sound of orchestral pop, demonstating a deep love of Van Dyke Parks that predated by a decade the widespread appreciation of Parks and his collaborations with The Beach Boys that that exists now.
The High Llamas album we always return to is 1994's Gideon Gaye, and we're so stoked that this new offering is indeed in that same league of meticulously crafted pop - so refined, yet seemingly effortless and breezy, reminding us also of the baroque pop aspect of Belle & Sebastian as well as the soft & silky side of records by Jim O'Rourke and The Sea & Cake.
Originally created and performed for a stage production, this still works perfectly as stand alone album. As the sun shines and spring seems to have come early here in San Francisco, Here Come The Rattling Trees is hitting the spot for us!
A Southwestern desert refusnik with a Finnish name, unlikely as it may seem. Here we introduce the feral noise of Himukalt, the umbrella project for the hitherto unknown Ester Karkkainen. An ear-slashing, turbine noise of asynchronous synth pulsing lays the foundation for a highly distorted monotone chant at the beginning of this staggering cassette, immediately bringing to mind the top-shelf squalor of Puce Mary. Elsewhere, Himukalt overdrives her tape with heavily pounding rhythms that gird sustained diesel-engine rumblings (or their oil-stained electronic counterparts, whatever it is she's using) and rigid female vocal recitations all swaddled in caustic distortion. These are psychologically grim constructions that march from the death factory, with these tales directing the antipathy inward toward the sites of internal dislocation between mind, soul, and body. It makes for a brilliantly discomforting and decentered recording of brooding electronics and plumbed synth-noise detonation. Along with Puce Mary, references to the bleak energy of Anenzephalia, Premature Ejaculation, and / or SPK are also apt. Part of Helen Scarsdale's ongoing cassette series, this comes suitably packaged with a blood-clot red professional printing job, and is limited to something like 100 copies.
Another ripper of a release from Florida's Absolute Contempt records (who also brought us the furious grind assault that was the Terrorist retrospective a few lists back). This time we're served up a rip-roaring dollop of Swedish melodic black-metal-crust in the form of one-man project Hopelorn. Equal parts gloriously epic and soaring, while also maintaining a seriously gritty edge, thanks in no small part to the treacherously heavy old-school-Swedish-death-metal guitar tone and the shriekingly unhinged vox, which are beautifully undercut by moments of acoustic/string laden haze and synth minimalism. Certainly a must-have for fans of Panopticon, Ludicra and Black Monolith. Recommended!
The same way that the Swim album marked a point of true arrival and a renewed sense of purpose for Caribou, the same can be said for this new album by Junior Boys. In fact we've always sensed a kinship in the way that Dan Snaith (Caribou) and Jeremy Greenspan (Junior Boys) have emerged in recent years as two of the best musical minds in melding smart songwriting wth infectious electronics.
While Junior Boys have always been more about the slow burn, this new record finds them picking up the pace and moving towards driving, intoxicating late night dance floor material. While this finds them embracing a bolder persona, what makes this record so great is the way it's still rooted in the emotional undercurrents that Greenspan has always been adept at exploring through his sensual voice, bittersweet melodies, and lyrics. There's the way that the word "baby", which pops up on almost every song, becomes detached from its usual frivolous use as a trope in pop and dance music, instead ringing loudly with the shifting meanings that the word takes on as our relationship changes shape with whatever "baby" is being evoked.
An early contender of pop record of the year!
The return of aQ faves Jute Gyte, the world's only microtonal black metal band (that we know of). And yeah, music nerds will know what microtonal means, and we could explain it, microtones are intervals smaller than a semitone, which is different than the twelve intervals per octave typically employed in Western tunings, but you know what, why bother, just know that this peculiar/unique tuning means the music of Jute Gyte sounds totally, and geniusly, fucked up. To some ears, this will sound WAY out of tune, the sort of strange note clusters and damaged melodies that make your eyes water, and make your brain hurt, but it also invokes a kind of demonic vibe, the sounds, more than the usual black buzz, REALLY sound evil. It also helps that a lot of the sounds here are more in the doom realm, chords stretched out and seemingly melting, an when combined with the bursts and furious black buzz, Ship Of Theseus is a damaged, experimental, outsider beast of a record, on par with groups like Deathspell Omega and Blut Aus Nord, but WAY WAY WAY weirder. For all the slippery chords, and blurry blasting, and gnarled melodies of those groups, that stuff is all magnified here, pulled apart and reassembled fantastically WRONG, into a dizzying, atonal, head caving sprawl of black psychedelia, abstract blackness, and total next level metallic genius.
If we didn't know better, we'd have guessed these garage punks were from right here in SF, or maybe LA, as their sound is definitely not one we equate with Provo, Utah!! And while they currently do in fact call Utah home, word is they're heading westward, and so don't be surprised if they end up on John Dwyer's Castle Face Records, cuz they'd be a perfect fit. Their sound is a mix of blown out, distorto garage-psych pound (opener "OK, Punch It"), and kinetic garage pop swagger ("Brain On A Hanger"). They have a sort of unhinged Cramps vibe too, almost like a mutant strain of rockabilly, supercharged and given a glam-garage / art punk makeover, with reverbed acid-Elvis vox, and spidery, jangle-buzz riffage. We're also reminded of nineties punk heroes the Didjits. And maybe the best part of The Ladells' sound is that for every blast of sixties style psychedelic garage rock freakout or wooly, noisy, punk rock stomp, there's some near Sabbathy heaviness (check out the seventies prog to metal sounding title track!) that destroys. None of this would be worth a shit without actual songs, but these guys (and gal) have songs for days, hooks galore, killer melodies everywhere, so even the noisiest blast of punked out garage somehow still manages to sink its melodic hooks into you, and never lets go.
First we've heard from this LA (by way of Mexico) power trio, which includes members both of the Melvins and Mr. Bungle. And while there's not a whole lot of Bungle-isms, the Melvins connection is definitely solid. Low Flying Hawks traffic in a slow, lugubrious sludge pop, slipping from downer dirge, to fuzzed out heaviness, to brooding death rock, to swirling psychedelia, all driven by the killer rhythm section of Dale Crover and Trevor Dunn. The mysterious third member / LFh mainman more than holds his own, his guitar crunchy and melodic, crumbling and blown out in equal measure, his vocals landing somewhere between the bellow of Buzz from the Melvins, the anguished wail of Creston from Harvey Milk, the mumbled croon of Dan from True Widow and the sneery snarl of Mark Arm from Mudhoney. The songs lurch and lumber, a sort of shoegaze stoner metal, heavy and doomy and tripped out, melodic and catchy, weary and woozy, a dreamily downer slowcore dirge rock that evokes all kinds of favorites from the seventies, eighties and nineties.
Fans of all stripes of depressing heaviness, moody miserablism and wasted, downer psych, will definitely dig this big time.
Local cavern-dwelling dooooooomsters Lycus are back with their second full-length, although, for whatever reason we missed the boat and never reviewed that one (though we do have a couple copies in stock)! We did, however, review the wonderful Flenser reissue of the demo, which we called a "glacial, downtuned slab of ultra-doom bliss". That's pretty spot on - Lycus revel in the the fundamentals of funeral doom with an eye always towards the sun-drenched bliss and melodic power of the forefathers of the genre - Asunder, Shape Of Despair, etc. They also have no problem breaking into all out blast-beat ferocity when necessary, am element severely lacking in many current wannabe doooom bands. Chasms is, without question, Lycus' most compelling, haunting, and meditative record yet. Lycus, along with Vastum, Dispirit, Pale Chalice, and a whole bunch of others, are keeping Bay Area metal alive and powerful.
A Balearic holy grail of the highest order, we only have a handful of these, the last copies our supplier could scrape up, and they're pretty much gone after that unless this gets a repress, which is so far unlikely. You have been warned!
This singular 1983 recording of global wave exotica featuring Japanese musicians and an Armenian female singer, pressed in small quantities on its first issue has always had an air of mystery and rumor among beat heads and crate diggers. Its cross-pollination of styles from synthesized dance to post-punk to minimalist composition and global classical music (often in the same track), makes it difficult to easily pigeonhole. It definitely sounds more like the crazy Bollywood film vibe that Haruomi Hosono was going for when he recorded Cochin Moon, than Cochin Moon actually sounded like. But Uta Kata No Hibi's six tracks reach beyond dance to a moody exoticism that is spellbinding and captivating, predicting Asa-Chang & Junray's furtive global excursions, as well as a host of Indian and Middle Eastern rhythmic qualities that have inflected the modern day productions of M.I.A. and Grimes. Don't Sleep!
Chris Marker's remarkable sci-fi short film from 1962 is a singular piece like no other in cinema. Made mostly of still photographs compiled together, except for one brief significant moment of movement, its dreamy layered narrative of time travel, apocalyptic future and haunted memories of love and loss, never fails to captivate. Inspired largely by Hitchcock's Vertigo, La Jette has in turn inspired others, namely Jean-Pierre Jeunet's City of Lost Children, David Bowie's "Ashes To Ashes" and "Lazarus" videos as well as Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys, which is essentially a somewhat flawed remake of Marker's masterpiece.
We were delighted to hear Superior Viaduct was releasing the soundtrack, though everyone that was excited was also a bit puzzled as they couldn't quite recall the score. And indeed this is not a typical soundtrack release. In a film that does not use film, Marker employs sound very intentionally and emotionally. The foregrounded sound is essentially a voiceover narration that was done in both English and French. There is a wistful underlying and reoccurring theme by Trevor Duncan that recalls Bernard Herrmann's haunting Vertigo themes, but the most notable sounds are the textural ambient noises of airplanes, heartbeats, whispers, drones and singing birds that punctuate the emotional heart of the story. Essentially, this release is the full audio of the film, and even without Marker's visionary imagery it makes for a beautifully melancholic and magical listen.
Beautiful gatefold with matte tip-on cover, comes with a photo of the film's final indelible image.
Some artists, like Matmos, will forever be exemplars of so much of what aQ is all about sonically and in spirit, representing what we love about art & music. Taking major risks, constantly challenging themselves, committing 100 percent to an idea, never making the same record twice, being super smart while not ever losing a sense of naive play and true experimentation. Who else could be counted upon to make a compelling, and sorta sexy, electronic album entirely from the sounds of a common household appliance!!?
That's right, while past Matmos records have found the duo taking on the sounds of crayfish synapses, or antiquated instruments, or plastic surgeries, or analog synths, this time out they went down to their basement for inspiration, as their trusted washer & dryer provides the source material for this epic one-track album that finds them at their most rhythmic and expansive; silly, splashy, glitchy and groovy.
Like other aQ favorites who could pull of a single, long track as a whole album (in this case, 38 minute) we think about the Boredoms, Magma, and The Necks in the way the track ebbs and flows, and twists and turns, upside down and all around, taking us on a sonic adventure that we never want to end. Playing with all of the possibilities of sounds that the washer and dryer can produce they somehow make something so epic & transcendent out of this household appliance that previously had always been designated one singular, non-musical purpose.
Matmos reminds us that everything around us is capable of having multiple dimensions, meanings and identities if only we imagine & embrace that they do. Highly recommended!
Symphony For A Genocide was the first lp produced by MB / Maurizio Bianchi in 1981 on Sterile Records. Still to this day it is is a landmark of industrial brutality, garnering our praise of "these bleak chilling drones [are] reminiscent of Conrad Schnitzler at his most neurotic, Nurse With Wound at their most droning, and Whitehouse at their least annoying." A few years later, Bianchi returned to the source material for that album to construct what became SFAG 81, released on cassette through Broken Flag in 1983. In this radical statement of self-annihilation, Bianchi pushed all of the references of his hallucinatory electronics and existential vacancy to an extreme reductionism. The rhythmic undercarriage of the source material had been replaced by a black hole void with only X-ray emissions of echo and synthetic dissonance escaping the gravitational pull deep into despair. SFAG 81 was composed during the time that we feel to be his strongest period of composition, when he produced the cancerous electronic albums Endometrio and Carsinosi, and began work on the final recordings of his early catalog The Plain Truth and Armaghedon. One of Bianchi's greatest works, available on vinyl for the first time!
ALSO NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL...
Exceedingly repetitive, doomed out & distorted rifferama here from these instrumental Italian freeks, the disc featuring four long songs slogging semi-speedily in and out of some spacey ambient atmospheres, hammering on various variants of basically just one riff over and over and over and OVER, which you may find mesmeric and/or mind-numbing, for good or ill, but heck it's the kind of monomaniacal stoner garage jamming we can't help but dig for its wretched ridiculousness. Rock on, Misantropus! (Like they care.)
The day-glo anarcho/dub-punk of Rubella Ballet and the convoluted anti-funk of Eight Eyed Spy might be a few of the choice throw-back references you'll find in Naked Lights. This Oakland quintet has produced one of those fantastic wildcard albums that we love, pushing against all expectations of what a Castle Face album should sound like. Twin guitars squiggle and splutter in a dizzying chatter whilst the deft rhythm section belongs to a lineage of complicated grooviness that traces back to Can and This Heat and up to Laddio Bolocko. Vocalist Aurora Crispin maintains a slurred yelp that drags her syllables in an uncanny resemblance to Mark E. Smith. Collectively, the band seems to adopt a number of different strategies in penning their songs - complicated time-signatures, jigsaw puzzle angles and contours, and repetitive grooves that shouldn't work but do. Even when the tracks snap against verse and chorus, these components are fractured and detoured in deft art-punk fashion. Recommended!
Ah, Sylvie & Babs. This album, like Soliloquy For Lilith, Salt Marie Celeste, and Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table, is one of the pinnacles of the Nurse With Wound catalog. It's definitely the silliest amongst Stapleton's always outlandish productions. At the time of this album's original release (that would be 1985), the trajectories of Coil, Psychic TV, Current 93, Test Dept, and other proselytes of the new dark age were almost uniformly bleak; and Steven Stapleton set out to construct an antidote to all of this malaise. Something to get stoned to and provide an instant laugh track for the inner-mind, complete with a pair of eponymous buxom broads on the cover beaming at the audience in glittering '50s Vegas apparel, and a fictional orchestral conductor by the name of Murray Fontana, whom Andrew McKenzie of the Hafler Trio tried to breath fake life into later with his own cut-n-paste job on the Nurse With Wound catalog a few years later. Stapleton's Sylvie & Babs is a chaotic piece of audio collage, liberally sampling from Stapleton's collection of easy / sleazy listening records and extruding all of these along with wind-up toy orchestrations, Spike Jones-esque comedic farts, and various plinkery from his 40-piece strong "orchestra". It's equal parts pisstake and homage to Zappa's Lumpy Gravy, with a theatrical wink and nod never far away. After all, it should be noted than on "You Walrus Hurt The One You Love" (ugh, what a horrible, horrible pun), Stapleton quotes somebody bellowing "It was just a prank!".
So on our last list, we were blown away by the arrival of new Aluk Todolo material, in the form of their Voix cd, which was an obvious, immediate, no shit Record Of The Week. But the Gods of cosmic hypnometal smile upon us, as we get the newest transmission from Oranssi Pazuzu, the Finnish space metallers, only a couple weeks after that disc of krauty French blackness! It is without question that Oranssi Pazuzu's Varahtelija rockets right out of the atmosphere and into our Record Of The Week spot as well.
We've gushed over these guys before, for good reason. Along with the aforementioned Aluk Todolo, Oranssi Pazuzu have set the bar incredibly high for their brand of tripped out, intergalactic lysergic black metal. Oranssi's take on black metal has been refined and perfected - organic, dizzying, and crushing black metal that stands toe-to-toe with any of the greats, progressive but not overly technical. The psychedelia is similarly elevated, heady, cosmic, and heavy, like Ash Ra Tempel played through My Bloody Valentine's amp stacks. Blended together, both elements amplify each other and create a pitch-perfect take on psychedelic black metal that other bands have attempted with not-quite-as-great results.
Have we dropped enough superlatives on you yet? Varahtelija is Oranssi Pazuzu at their peak, simultaneously cosmic and organic, cohesive yet chaotic, precise and catchy. It goes without saying that everyone who bought a copy of Voix NEEDS to hear this disc as well - most non-metalheads will also find this album necessary. Totally essential and a easy early contender for our favorite metal record of the year.
Here speaks J.S. Aurelius (aka Marshstepper, Destruction Unit, architect of Ascetic House, etc.). Numbers station transmissions and caustic utility signal bursts from shortwave radio abound in this very Vatican Shadow sounding cassette of frightening electronics, sermonizing vocals in megaphone barked monotone, stalker dub vibes, and the occasional industrial techno stomp. It has to be said that the numbers station recordings are lifted directly from the Conet Project, but it's unlikely that Aurelius will suffer the same legal troubles that Wilco got from Irdial. These sounds are always creepy no matter the context; and Aurelius does well to match the mood with his hypno-drone guitars, crawling synth drones, and whip-crack drum machinations.
First we've heard from this Canadian drone outfit, but it's definitely got aQ written all over it. Four long tracks, all of which play out like scores to some obscure seventies horror movies, or weirdo European giallos. Cinematic and atmospheric, hushed and haunting, infused with a palpable sense of dread, but suffused with subtle loveliness. Slow shifting textures, long layered tones, creaks and rattles, undulating metallic shimmers, deep echo drenched pulsations, deep, dense dronemusic, that drifts hypnotically from tense, claustrophobic soundtrackery, to barely there, subsonic thrum, to glitchy, fields of electronic static, all seemingly melted down into a viscous black flow, that oozes and bleeds glacially, more tranquil than turbulent, but shot through with enough sinister sonic energy to position it alongside similarly grim dronelords and purveyors of the blackest strains of death industrial.
Behold! Six minutes of absolute blasting grindcore analogue destruction courtesy of Tampa's Sacridose and Florida's Absolute Contempt records. A frantic blur of blastbeats, hellish screams and buzzsaw guitars. Virtually guaranteed to give you a heart attack! Vital stuff. Recommended for anyone looking for a natural caffeine replacement. Includes a download code!
Album number two from London quartet Savages is an blighted and bleak construct of death-rock tropes to equal what was found on their debut, 2013's Silence Yourself. The band's intensity is still driven by front-woman Jehnny Beth, who showcases many commonalities with PJ Harvey's most feral invocations of power, sexuality, and the social constructs around the female body. Beth's subject matter for Adore Life revolves around the nuances of love and the psychological complications of relationships in the modern age. The pacing of the songs often accelerate as if Beth is careening towards a catastrophic end to the narratives she's drawing through the propulsive rhythm section and buzzsaw guitar work; but they can slow to a rhythmless torpor as on album's finale "Mechanics", in which Beth delves deep into emotional well on par with the most cinematic, ice queen torch songs of Siouxsie. Adore Life isn't as immediately anthemic as their fisrt album, but there's a slow-burning intensity to it, and a greater complexity and range to their potent rewrite of the post-punk songbook.
High tension electronics and synth-punk nihilism abound from the mysterious Los Angeles producer Secam Kino. The gritty rhythmic sequences and spring-loaded programming here parallels the retro-industrial panache of productions from Youth Code, and the whole thing telescopes like some videodrome illusion flickering in time and space, whether that be Los Angeles 2016, Berlin 1981, or Chicago 1989. Secam Kino irradiates all of the sounds with transporter de-rezed / cathode ray tube fixation that also seems to find itself near Clock DVA's excursions into psychic / psychological disintegration through electronics. There are no barked lyrics and the sampled vocalizations present on Destined Ages are obtuse in their references, thus the specifics of the political / philosophical / conceptual aspects of those aforementioned icons are vacated by Secam Kino's cybernetic constructions. Nonetheless, a great tape from Chondritic! Limited to 100 copies spray-painted cassettes.
Killer reissue of a long out of print 2006 ep from these raw Romanian black metallers. Their sound, then and now, is brittle and brutal, furious and frenzied, a mix of relentless black buzz and galloping classic metal. The Popeye-like rasped vokills ride atop smoldering slow build epicry, and on-the-verge-of-collapse chaos, the sound constantly surprising, being rooted in total old school grimnity, but displaying super ambitious soundscaping, stunning melodies, and an extremely high level of songcraft for the genre. A quick listen reveals all the buzzing blackness you could want, but deep listening is definitely rewarded with an emotional depth, and instrumental prowess, that in a different context could have turned into an entirely different record. As it is, Lelekosveny seems to capture the best of both, resulting in a dense, melodic black metal, rife with pathos, but pathos presented like a spiked gauntlet to the face.
Includes two killer bonus tracks, both covers, by two bands we had never heard of: Angel Reaper and Fantom! Both will no doubt require further investigation.
Some seriously bleak death industrial from Peter Andersson (of Raison D'etre) along with his partner in sonic crime Tobias Larsson. Long tracks that rumble and hum, grind and throb. The slow build of opener "Now Ever Sleep..." sets the stage with a terrifying suffocating creepy-crawl that manages to build in intensity without building in volume, it's like a black hole getting blacker, with greyed swaths of hiss and swirls of crumbling shimmer, underpinned by distant death drums, stunning and harrowing.
The rest of the album manages to up the intensity even more, splintering at times into bursts of caustic, near metallic brutality, with sheets of grinding noise, heaving machinelike swells, super processed vokills, a swirling morass of sonic miserablism. But those moments are balanced by hushed passages of tranquil ambience, and long stretches of what sounds like air conditioners and heating units and the mundane sound of city life, blurred and smeared into blackened streaks and muted rhythmic pulsations.
A killer slab of raw, cold grimness from this Hungarian horde, whose sound is in fact less black buzz and more noise rock, almost like a swaggering, blackened grunge. We're reminded quite a bit of aQ faves Khold, the same sort of black metal meets Nirvana vibe, with some seriously killer riffing, mid-tempo rhythms, and raw, raspy vocals. And actually, remove those vocals, and this could be some weird undiscovered grunge artifact from the nineties, some totally obscure Sub Pop or AmRep release, all crusty, swagger and snarly crush, lots of dissonance, and minor key melodies, and a whole lot of noise rock-isms that definitely outnumber blast beats or buzzing blackness big time. And while there are some bursts of full on BM, they seem to exist more in service of the riff and the groove, and we have to say we're kinda digging it like crazy!
Semtex was and is a strange record, and one that bridged what seemed to be a vast chasm of aesthetics that dominated Bristol in the early to mid '90s. On one hand, there was the bleached and blanched sounds of Flying Saucer Attack (and the vast satellite of projects that spawned from FSA's rural psychedelia) and then there was the convoluted dub and trip-hop noir of Tricky, Massive Attack and Portishead; and right in the middle of these two was Matt Elliott's Third Eye Foundation, adhering a buzzing shoegaze melancholy to deft Amen break drum'n'bass programming, all slammed through an overdriven four-track. Admittedly, the tape compression keeps Third Eye Foundation from crushing the bass-bins, but the dub-crunch hiss-murk is a brilliant hyper-exaggeration of the Lee Perry productions from two decades earlier. Elliott - who spent time in Flying Saucer Attack, Movietone, and Amp - has a knack for the blown out guitar smear that all of those Bristol projects embraced, with the drum'n'bass skitter and breakbeats building one hell of an album of post-MBV noiserock. Strange to think this album is now 20 years old, and it holds up remarkably well; now fleshed out with 23 bonus tracks (8 of which are on the vinyl, and the other 15 are on the digital download).
A grey area reissue of the impossible to find Tolerance debut, which emerged to a befuddled and baffled Japanese audience in 1979 on the now highly collectible avant-synth-noise imprint Vanity Records. The dedication on the album was made "to the quiet men from a tiny girl" - which in 1980 was cribbed by Nurse With Wound as an album title of their own. Tolerance is certainly less well known than Nurse With Wound, but it shouldn't surprise anybody that this album falls not too far from the early experiments with freeform noise, devolved structures, and stark productions of Stapleton and co. Tolerance presented a thoroughly cryptic album that managed to channel the nocturnal blurt of Mars and the lysergic transcendental musique concrete of Taj Mahal Travellers through these strange anti-songs of Japanese monologues and spluttered guitar, electronics, and very-proto proto-techno, while being VERY prescient of the freak-flag esoterica of No Neck Blues Band, Kemialliset Ystavat, etc. Anomym was the first and much better of the two Tolerance albums, with neither known members of Tolerance doing anything since 1981 - if anyone knows more about them, the Internet would appreciate some information. This re-issue doesn't help at all, with only a pasted print of the artwork on a generic white sleeve, without any tracklistings or liner notes whatsoever.
Chicago's potentates of post-rock, Tortoise, are back with their first new album in seven years. In the past, we've been fairly wishy-washy about how much we like Tortoise (or don't), but this gets the thumbs up, despite the deliberately unappealing cover art, and equally puzzling choice of cover song (they do a version of "Rock On" by David Essex), both of which suggest to us a Trans Am album, not Tortoise! But in any case we like it, 'cause it's got plenty of the sort of fusion-y, electronics-infused post-rock grooves that we haven't heard since the last Tortoise album that we really liked, with the buzzing, hypnotic "Gesceap", the album's longest track, being a particular highlight among these burbling, languid offerings. And the "Rock On" cover, well, it reminds us what a cool, weird, dub-glam '70s hit that was! Tortoise don't even have to mess with it much, for it to fit right in - they even include vocals, courtesy of US Maple guitarist Todd Rittman. A departure for Tortoise, but it's not the only non-instrumental on this album, by the way - the gentle "Yonder Blue" was cowritten and sung by Yo La Tengo's Georgia Hubley.
Rejoice! For it is another ugly offering from Florida's Absolute Contempt Records. II comes courtesy of Tampa's Traitor Crucifix and offers up a short sharp shock of blistering d-beat infused metalized hardcore. All static rage, slashes of razor sharp feedback, pummeling drum rolls & anguished screams. The kind of recording that leaves you for dead & is out the door before you even know what hit you. Awesome! Includes a download code!
In reality, the population of hillbilly, honkytonk country crooners, and the folks they sing about, who happened to see flying saucers or get abducted by aliens (as chronicled in Volume 1 of the Twisted Tales From The Vinyl Wastelands series, UFO On Farm Road 318, reviewed last time) was probably a lot smaller than the number who at some point ran afoul of the law and wound up locked up, behind bars, lamenting that sad fact. And that's what Volume 2 is about, songs pertaining to penal servitude, of which the compliers had a much larger assortment to draw from, which means these 19 tracks aren't all by unknown 'hicks', there are some better known names on here like Lee Hazlewood, Stonewall Jackson, and aQ fave Eddie Noack, among others. It's again an enjoyable, entertaining collection of kitschy, cult classic country tuneage that Johnny Cash would be proud of, and should keep you on the straight and narrow, or at least make you feel a bit better if you're listening to it while doing time in your own jail cell. Songs on here include "Ninety Nine Years To Go", "Life To Go", "The Rest Of My Life", "Walla Walla State Prison", "Lewisburg Prison", "Cook County Jail", not one but two different tracks titled "Death Row", and many more.
Released on vinyl at the same time on Rural Isolation, we just got in a handful of copies from the eponymous album from the enigmatic JT Whitfield on cassette through Chondritic Sound! Here, we have another four tracks of industrial strength bad-vibes. The synthetic murk and tangled ectoplasm which Whitfield dubbed out on that the previous cassette continue here with the heavily thumped rhythms swapped for more of a ritualized, nocturnal set. At times, this has the feel of clandestine happenings by denizens of a subterranean community who have constructed dank hymns and electric chorales in the only cathedrals they ever knew - sewers, drain pipes, and cisterns. Much more akin to Lustmord's Heresy or Paradise Disowned, as a result, and excellent.
Album number five from this Swedish mystic-rock institution. Nucleus continues Witchcraft's exploration into a more expansive and lush sound, sprinkling synths, organs and vibraphones into their bubbling cauldron of '70s magick. That being said, they never stray too far from their Sabbath/Pentagram blueprint. In fact, Nucleus sounds quite a bit heavier than 2012's Legend, reintroducing some proper doom riffery that's been seldom seen in the band's latter offerings. Sure to please all fans of the 'Craft while subtly pushing their sound into some new territories.
For Leaf's 20th anniversary, they have been reissuing some of their most essential releases like Caribou's Up In Flames, Colleen's Everyone Alive Wants Answers and this one, Susumu Yokota's sublime electronic masterpiece, Sakura. Yokota died last year after a long period of illness, and looking back we realized we reviewed almost every one of his releases except for what is arguably his best album, this one. Released in 2000, it it was proclaimed The Wire's top electronic release of the year.
Beginning his career as a house DJ, Yokota later developed an interest in modernist composition, traditional Japanese melodies and ambient textures, eschewing beats almost altogether on Sakura. Instead, like delicate birdsong, the melodies emerge like blossoming flowers, employing thoughtfully used samples of Steve Reich, Joni Mitchell and Return to Forever, in ways that evoke their sonorous qualities without relying on their recognizability. An incredible release that still sounds beautifully timeless.
Compact disc version included!
Some far out celestial psychedelic drift from Sweden, Sublime by Zalys is indeed appropriately titled, as much of the album does exist in some sort of sublime otherworld, touching on elements of Pop Ambient and kosmiche krautrock. Like much of this kind of music, it instantly evokes a planetarium light show, but there's much more going on, as if you leaned back, to enjoy the projected stars and planets, only to find your surroundings fading away, leaving your corporeal form behind, as you somehow become those stars and planets, their aeons of cosmic existence fusing with your relatively brief lifespan, as you're bathed in unearthly light, held aloft by shimmering sonic slipstreams... there also are moments of ominous intensity, but those seem to be bookended by glorious prismatic swirls, and hushed melodic glow.
Mesmerizing and meditative, tranquil and lysergic, but also densely textured, rife with sonic minutiae, voices (or are they voices?) smeared into soft focus cascades of melody, bells and chimes (are they...?) blossom into gauzy fractal patterns, billowing outward like ripples in a cosmic pond. It's a celestial dreaminess that unfurls at a glacial pace, a cinematic musical travelogue though the universe, and a wild eyed aural embrace of whatever lies beyond.
Thankfully, we can offer this cd reissue of the instantly out-of-print collaborative album from :zoviet*france: and Fossil Aerosol Mining Project! Back in 2014, we were able to get a handful of the 2lp which was housed inside two slabs of rusted metal; and the cd version maintains the same packaging in a metal folio rusted just the same and laser-etched with the collective acronym emblazoned in the corner. The work of :zoviet*france: is scarce these days, with very little of the back catalogue available due to the interpersonal politics dating to the early '90s. So any recordings are more than welcome here at aQuarius, and this is also proving true for the like-minded sound spelunkers Fossil Aerosol Mining Project. Both outfits have long histories dating into the '80s (even as FAMP is a relatively new discovery to most) working with forgotten media, destroyed cassettes, uneasy ambience, radioactive feathers (oh, yes, it is true, though not on this recording), and tape-loop technologies. This "call and response of residue and hybrid" becomes a lucid dream of industrial gnosticism wandering through hypnotic cycles of fogged pattern, thrummed acoustic harmonics, and organic decomposition into jaw-droppingly sublime minimalism. As collaborations go, it doesn't get much more seamless than here on Patina Pooling. So highly recommended.
Once this inventory is gone, it is highly unlikely we'll be able to supply these at these price. (And mailorder folks, be aware, these are heavy, it'll count as more than one cd for shipping for sure.)
