[ aquarius records of the week ]

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Yet another amazingly alienating, mildly offensive, totally hilarious issue of the mighty CHUNKLET magazine. You may remember the last Chunklet and it's 'biggest assholes in rock' theme, well there's even more shit-slinging this time around as Henry Chunklet compiles 'The Shit List', a random assortment of shitty shows, shitty bands, and shitty people. And some bands contribute their

Finalnd's mighty masters of metallic hypno drone rock return, with yes, another limited LP only release, and their obsession (one of many obsessions they have) with Southern Rock has finally reached critical mass. Not so much musically, although there are subtle hints here and there, as visually and conceptually. This set, recorded live on Brian Turner's radio show on WFMU when Circle were in the states last time is a monster. Two side long tracks, combining the metallic leanings of their later records, with the murky propulsiveness of their earlier records, as well as their droney improvised abstract side (most noticable on the LP only Mountain). It's kind of remarkable how all of Circle's disparate musical personalities fit so well together. But before we get to the music, let's talk about the sleeve. And the Southern Rock. The cover features a knotty pine background, riddled with bullet holes, two crossed pistols above the band name. Very Sergio Leone... The reverse side features a band photo seemingly branded into the wood, with Circle donning cowboy hats and sombreros, whooping it up like that last freeze frame in an episode of Bonanza (maybe it was CHiPs, but Bonanza makes more sense here). Then there's Brian Turner's eyewitness account of the musical showdown that occurred when Circle showed up at WFMU to record their set. Woe was the pasty British garage band that felt Circle's wrath. Broken glass and tobacco spit figure prominently. And let's not forget the Confederate flag on the LP label. Thankfully (or maybe not, some might be thinking) this Southern Rock doesn't filter all the way down to the music. Instead we've got more of that Circular genius we just can't get enough of. Side one begins as an abstract soundscape of spacey affected riffs, sort of blurry and drifty, above strange mumbled mutterings and what sounds like alien scat singing. The vibe is strangely dubby and Middle Eastern sounding. Eventually a warm wash of woozy distorted guitars builds into a monstrous swell of sound, warm and thick and sort of heavy, while buried beneath is a burbling cauldron of electronic squiggles and gurgling vocal sputters. Out of nowhere, like a beam of sunlight with a small flock of faeiries flitting about, comes a strange dreamy drift of almost rennaisance faire sounding festive folk, which dissipates quickly into a swirl of speaking-in-tongues vocals and insect like electronics before drifting off. Side two is a bit darker, with faux throat singing over ominous psych sludge riffing like classic Circle but slowed way down. Groovy and dark, peppered with subtle tribal percussion. Weirdly enough, that weird dreamy stretch of faerie flecked folk sunniness that surfaced briefly on side A, shows up again here in a slightly different form, and disappears just as quickly, returning to a VERY Circular propulsive groove. Drums skitter instead of pound, while a guitar drifts and stutters, sounding a bit like the guitar line from the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now" but way more druggy and psychedelic! So we'll all have to keep waiting for the inevitable, that record they keep threatening us with, when Circle finally become a bizarre krautrock psychrock dronemetal version of the Marshall Tucker Band, but for now, just crack open that Jack Daniels, throw those boots up on the desk (careful with those spurs!), pull the brim of your ten gallon down over your eyes, put a little pinch between your teeth and gums, turn it up and drift off...

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!!!

MPEG stream: Duunila
MPEG stream: Salenius
MPEG stream: Muhle
MPEG stream: Viitane

Oh lord, what will the mischievous mind of Circle mainman Jussi Lehtisalo come up with next? Not long ago, there was the conceptually confusional arrangement under which our Finnish space rock faves Circle changed their name to Falcon (Ex-Circle), and then recruited a completely different group of musicians to record an album under their former name of Circle (which was great!), after which the original Circle guys switched back to being called Circle (Ex-Falcon). Whew. And now they're just Circle, again. BUT, how's this for another confusing idea: Circle, and their not-all-that-different-really side-project band Pharaoh Overlord have now simultaneously released albums with the titles "Circle" and "Pharaoh Overlord", no, not self-titled albums, the Circle one is called Pharaoh Overlord and the Pharaoh Overlord one is called Circle. And they have very similar art/graphics. Yep. That's what they do for laffs up in Finland, although knowing Jussi, he probably has some very serious, meaningful reason behind this scheme, but the explanation would be impossible to understand. It makes a circle or something. Regardless, what we've got here are TWO NEW Circle and/or Pharaoh Overlord albums, however you slice it, and that's a good thing! Of course, they just showed up yesterday, the day before our list, but we already have spun these a bunch of times and know we will spin them lots more, so sure let's make 'em both Records Of The Week! The Circle album is quite, well, it's pretty much redundant and superfluous to say in a review of a Circle album that the music is "mesmeric" but goshdarnit, this is indeed mesmerizing. They don't try to sound especially like Pharaoh Overlord, by the way, whatever that would entail, not of course that they don't, either. Instead, the quick takeaway here would be that this is "the Circle album with horns". (Oh, wait, there's a PO album called Horn, maybe that's the weird connection, hmmm??) Anyway, the horns are the big X-factor here, tooting along syncopatedly and cyclically Circle-like. A little jazzy, certainly proggy, those horns, along with the wordless vocal choirs, make us think of Magma and other '70s large-ensemble prog symphonics. We're also put in mind of some suspenseful '60s/'70s film soundtracks, like David Shire's The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three just a bit. It gets intense, with stabs of distorted guitar chords to further intensify the mood. Meanwhile, the vocals, which include some impressive caveman freakout screams, are also crucial, and hark back to the early days of Circle, when they did the monk-chanting thing in their own made up language (a la Magma as well) on albums like Zopalki. Ultimately, it's really gorgeous and, again, super mesmeric, these tracks all of course built around endless repetitive grooves, simple (deceptively so, we're sure) and effective in the usual Circle style. And the only reason one track ever ends, it seems, is that another one needs to begin. And we wouldn't have it any other way. This Circle consists of circles within circles to spin the mind around. Wow, nice. Recommended, as is the other one by the other band. FYI, vinyl versions of both of these are forthcoming in a month or two...

MPEG stream: Kavellen Luiden Paalla
MPEG stream: Aldebaran

Perfect! Who better to do the soundtrack to a film about people running around in circle, than, of course, Finland's masters of repetitive hypno-rock, Circle?? Six Day Run is a short film made by Finnish documentarian Mika Taanila, all about something called "The Self-Transcendence Six Day Race", which takes place every year in the vicinity of New York City. No, we'd never heard of it either, but we'd be curious to see the movie sometime and find out more about this extreme endurance running event and the presumably equally extreme people who decide to compete in it. Sleeping as little as possible, the runners have six days to try and log the most miles around a paved one-mile loop in a park (Flushing Meadows, Queens). Apparently it's a tradition dating back to the 1870s! So it's sorta like an ultra-marathon run on a treadmill, running and running and never really getting anywhere (except maybe somewhere deep within/without yourself). You can check out the YouTube trailer for the film here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqTrJVMZnZE. Of course, when we first heard about this, we imagined that the runners were running in, like, a ten foot diameter circle for the six days, with Circle playing in the middle the whole time, wouldn't that be cool? The album contains six tracks, one for each day of the race. It starts off with the upbeat "Day One", with one of Circle's usual motorik rhythms in motion from the get-go, augmented with handclap/whipcrack sounds, sounding bright and jaunty, the sort of thing that in the headphones of a runner might help energize and encourage them, without making 'em burst into a sprint or anything, allowing them to pace themselves. On "Day Two", though, things get a bit darker and hazier, the music more nervous and pensive sounding, some sense of doubt creeping in: "Can I do this? Why AM I doing this?" one imagines the runners thinking as their bodies begin to grow weary. For those of us merely sitting still at home, though, it's another atmospheric and incessantly rhythmic Circle track, full of lovely floating tones and drones. And so it goes, each track/day offering moments of gauzey, gossamer beauty as well as constant, churning, endless rhythms. Definitely trance-inducing, as Circle so often is - and as the act of running in a circle for six days straight also must be, indeed HAS to be, if one were to ever hope to get through it! Circle's music here gets at the intensity of the Six Day runners' extreme test of their own stamina physical and willpower, and yes also the transcendent quality of the experience, being at times both dense and exhausting, and also triumphantly airy and uplifting. And it's really some of the most straight-up "circular" Circle music we've heard from them in a while. Because it's a soundtrack, this album is all-instrumental, without any detours - none of the absurd, operatic vocal antics, no ironic faux-metal moves. Not that we don't love those common aspects of Circle, but this focuses pretty tightly on the repetition thing, and of course does it well. It's got a bit of an early '80s krauty/new age vibe, prominent use of synths reminding us a bit of recent works by Life Coach and Emeralds, and harking back of course to Michael Rother and Harmonia. Good thing the filmmaker was Finnish, as Circle are certainly THEE obvious, best choice to make this soundtrack, one that is makes for a nicely trancey, energetically meditative (is that an oxymoron?) listen in the comfort of home too, for all of us armchair joggers, watching the record spin rather than running in circles ourselves. Although, one could also get up and clean the house, this would be good music for a task like that too!

MPEG stream: Day One
MPEG stream: Day Four
MPEG stream: Day Six

A long lost Circle album??! Sort of. One of Circle's best albums?! Definitely. The deal with Taantumus is that it came out on the Finnish label Bad Vugum back in 2001, falling betwixt Prospekt and Sunrise (approximately, it's hard to keep track) in the ever-expanding Circle discography. At the time, there was talk of Taantumus getting a domestic release in the US, so we never imported any copies from overseas. Well, that domestic release never ever happened, but thankfully, years and years later, this amazing "lost" (to most folks outside of Finland, anyway) Circle album has been reissued by the band's own Ektro label, now crowned with the 9:21 bonus track "Veitsi"! Now, you should already be aware we LOVE this hypnotic Finnish space/prog/psych/metal/kraut band. If we could marry them, we would! So of course we're excited by any release of theirs. However, this one is definitely extra-deserving of Record Of The Week honors, as it's really one of their best efforts (though we'd be hard pressed to agree upon a definitive Circle top ten, let's not get sidetracked). One listen should convince. To one track, even. The first track, "Kultaa", that's IT. Right there. Damn. Hit Circle song, in the universe where Circle could have hit songs, which is our universe, as far as we're concerned. Boom boom on the floor tom, the guitars hitting the same chord over and over again. Repetition, repetition, repetition. But utterly energizing and maddeningly catchy. And then, the vocals - Meronian monks whooping it up. Track two, "Kekkone", tick tock drums and electronic flutter, with melodic guitar lines tiptoeing across the stereo field... utterly exquisite! Track three, "Valtaisa Hahmo", another monster motorik HIT. With whistling FLUTE, well maybe it's a recorder, and droning synths. Track four... well heck we're not gonna go through 'em all. What's the point, you already know you want this, right?? So get it and listen for yourself, at home, cranked up LOUD. (Not that this is loud music, per se, some of it sure is, but lots of it is subtle, stuff that if listened to at volume will simply allow one to more easily bask in its glory). That way you can find out about the kick ass harmonica jam of track 9, "Morn", all on your own. (Shades of Itavayla there.) Rest assured, Taantumus is stocked with plenty of Circle's trademark mantric riffs, throbbing bass, precision timekeeping, cosmic shimmer, and curious noise. OK, we'll mention a few more of the many treats to be found on this 66 minute disc... Track 5, "Suopea", brings in extra distortion and heaviness, contrasted with a haunting vocal choir that floats over, of course, a tight percolating rhythm. Track 7, "Lyhytaallosta", is a slab of bass heavy angular postpunk, Circle style, with chiming no-wavey guitars and deepvoiced Viking vox - plus weird glitch and gurgle. Into the more "metal" side of Circle? Try track 10, "Siivet", a killer "speedkraut" cut foreshadowing their later Panic disc, albeit with piano. And Mika's operatic vocals, something first unleashed on the preceding Prospekt disc. Heavier still is "Pelqton", which sounds like Circle doing abstract Isis... but, again, with piano. Oh, and yeah the bonus track is awesome too. Droning density that skitters into deep grooves with some near spoken singing. Actually, elsewhere on the album there's mysterious vocal bits in the background that somehow sound like they could be a song from The Mighty Boosh, if you are familiar with that British TV comedy you'll be scratching your head too. So, wow. This is the sort of album that leaves us puzzled - why isn't Circle the biggest band in the world? (Maybe they really HAVE hypnotized us.) But really, aside from being really WEIRD, and not widely released, you'd have thought that an album like this would have made Circle megasuperduper stars. I mean really, what do they gotta do, besides being one of the best bands ever? You think that'd be enough. You'd think Taantumus would be enough. Well whatever, in our universe it is.

MPEG stream: Kultaa
MPEG stream: Suopea
MPEG stream: Rautasilta

We made the cd version of this Circle disc our Record Of The Week a while back, only for it to go out of print WAY quicker than anyone expected. So now, Tyrant is available once again, for a limited time, on vinyl, a double lp to be precise. But again, like all Latitudes stuff, very very limited, and add to that the fact that it's Circle, well, you should know what that means. Here's what we had to say about Tyrant when we first got it WAY back in 2006!! Be sure to read to the end though, as there's some extras with the lp edition.... BRAND NEW CIRCLE ALBUM!!! TYRANT!! INCREDIBLY LIMITED LATEST INSTALLMENT IN THE LATITUDES SERIES!!! IT'S HERE!!!! Okay, just wanted to get your attention. We've been waiting for this for a long, long time. As have many of you, we imagine. We've all been loving the Latitudes series of ultra limited releases from bands like Ginnungagap, Shit And Shine, the Grails, Ariel Pink, Sir Richard Bishop... so when we heard that Finland's gods of metallic hypno drone rock were going to do one, we were so psyched, and so we waited anxiously, but patiently, until finally, after months of waiting, they arrived, just a few days ago, and as if we even have to tell you, IT'S AWESOME!!! But this declaration of awesomeness does require a bit more elaboration, as Circle have a wide variety of awesome sounds: murky propulsive modern day krautrock, wild guitar heavy NWOFHM proto-metal, extended ambient drones, loping mesmeric jazzy shuffle, it's really hard to know where the band will head next. As if it were too much to wish for, Tyrant, somehow manages to combine all of their disparate sounds into one practically perfect whole, and some of us are declaring this our favorite Circle record in ages (no mean feat, since their last one, Miljard, was fantastic, a Record Of The Week too). Three 15 minute tracks, each one a slow building epic, droning, dense, dark, hypnotic, but each with its own unique elements. The opener, "Screaming Luovutus", is an endlessly looping space rock drone mantra, a relentlessly throbbing bassline, haunting little swirls of fluttering keyboard melody, little bits of guitar filigree, simple propulsive rhythmic shuffle, all woven into a endlessly throbbing krautrocky swirl, when suddenly over the top strange whispery demonic growls surface, super distorted, another layer of fuzzy sound, howling and whispering all ragged and harsh, almost like Circle covering Abruptum or a black metal Necks, if that makes any sense. Dizzying and weirdly heavy, a black ambient krautrock drone groove, if such a thing were possible. And if it were, you know Circle would be the ones, ahem, ARE the ones to make it happen. The second track, with the very metal title "Steel Torment Warrior", is maybe the least metal of the batch. A super creepy, almost jazzy, soundscape, of muted rumble, bursts of super effected dubbed out drums, flurries of spaced out FX, hushed hissed vocals, splattery free jazz skitter, warbly, seasick guitar tangles all wrapped in a druggy blissy ambience. It's like a less propulsive Necks, a damaged jazzy shuffle looping into infinity, but twisted into a uniquely Circular shape. The closer, with the even MORE metal title of "Amputation Crusade", is the grooviest and space rockiest of the three, a simple darkly melodic guitar figure, loops lazily above a slow slithery bassline and a super laid back, barely there rhythmic shuffle, like Can or Faust in extreme slow motion... you can hear the Necks again, but the band add some extra druggy fuzz guitar, and the laid back riffing is pregnant with the possibility of imminent explosion. Strange vocals lurk below the surface, the whole thing an epic trawl through some jazzy black space rock soundscape. Near the end, things build to a bit of a subdued climax, the guitars ringing and chiming, the drums pounding a bit more, very epic and majestic, but still somehow muted and laid back, petering out into a creepy little coda of guitar FX and gurgling monster vocals... Wow. Seriously, we love Circle and everything, more than most folks, but this disc is an absolute killer!! Heavy and droney, groovy and jazzy and completely epic and mesmerizing and amazing!! Comes packaged in the usual black and white Latitudes diecut 12" sleeve, includes the same black and white insert from the cd, featuring the band posing with spiked gauntlets in front of Stonehenge!!! Well, actually, in front of the chainlink fence in front of Stonehenge, which somehow makes more sense. The inner lp label has two strange NWOFHM / Tyrant (the 't's in tyrant are battle axes of course) hooded knights. And as if that weren't enough, the second disc is a PICTURE DISC, one side features the Stonehenge band photo blown up, the other side is an image of... well, an lp, in fact the -other- record in the set, complete with the hooded knights in the center and printed record grooves, which while actually being playable grooves, seem to be there just for show.... Either way, one more chance to pick up this kick ass Circle record, and on vinyl to boot! LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!!!!

MPEG stream: Screaming Luovutus
MPEG stream: Steel Torment Warrior

BRAND NEW CIRCLE ALBUM!!! TYRANT!! INCREDIBLY LIMITED LATEST INSTALLMENT IN THE LATITUDES SERIES!!! IT'S HERE!!!! Okay, just wanted to get your attention. We've been waiting for this for a long, long time. As have many of you, we imagine. We've all been loving the Latitudes series of ultra limited releases from bands like Ginnungagap, Shit And Shine, the Grails, Ariel Pink, Sir Richard Bishop... so when we heard that Finland's gods of metallic hypno drone rock were going to do one, we were so psyched, and so we waited anxiously, but patiently, until finally, after months of waiting, they arrived, just a few days ago, and as if we even have to tell you, IT'S AWESOME!!! But this declaration of awesomeness does require a bit more elaboration, as Circle have a wide variety of awesome sounds: murky propulsive modern day krautrock, wild guitar heavy NWOFHM proto-metal, extended ambient drones, loping mesmeric jazzy shuffle, it's really hard to know where the band will head next. As if it were too much to wish for, Tyrant, somehow manages to combine all of their disparate sounds into one practically perfect whole, and some of us are declaring this our favorite Circle record in ages (no mean feat, since their last one, Miljard, was fantastic, a Record Of The Week too). Three 15 minute tracks, each one a slow building epic, droning, dense, dark, hypnotic, but each with its own unique elements. The opener, "Screaming Luovutus", is an endlessly looping space rock drone mantra, a relentlessly throbbing bassline, haunting little swirls of fluttering keyboard melody, little bits of guitar filigree, simple propulsive rhythmic shuffle, all woven into a endlessly throbbing krautrocky swirl, when suddenly over the top strange whispery demonic growls surface, super distorted, another layer of fuzzy sound, howling and whispering all ragged and harsh, almost like Circle covering Abruptum or a black metal Necks, if that makes any sense. Dizzying and weirdly heavy, a black ambient krautrock drone groove, if such a thing were possible. And if it were, you know Circle would be the ones, ahem, ARE the ones to make it happen. The second track, with the very metal title "Steel Torment Warrior", is maybe the least metal of the batch. A super creepy, almost jazzy, soundscape, of muted rumble, bursts of super effected dubbed out drums, flurries of spaced out FX, hushed hissed vocals, splattery free jazz skitter, warbly, seasick guitar tangles all wrapped in a druggy blissy ambience. It's like a less propulsive Necks, a damaged jazzy shuffle looping into infinity, but twisted into a uniquely Circular shape. The closer, with the even MORE metal title of "Amputation Crusade", is the grooviest and space rockiest of the three, a simple darkly melodic guitar figure, loops lazily above a slow slithery bassline and a super laid back, barely there rhythmic shuffle, like Can or Faust in extreme slow motion... you can hear the Necks again, but the band add some extra druggy fuzz guitar, and the laid back riffing is pregnant with the possibility of imminent explosion. Strange vocals lurk below the surface, the whole thing an epic trawl through some jazzy black space rock soundscape. Near the end, things build to a bit of a subdued climax, the guitars ringing and chiming, the drums pounding a bit more, very epic and majestic, but still somehow muted and laid back, petering out into a creepy little coda of guitar FX and gurgling monster vocals... Wow. Seriously, we love Circle and everything, more than most folks, but this disc is an absolute killer!! Heavy and droney, groovy and jazzy and completely epic and mesmerizing and amazing!! Comes packaged in a super intricate hand screened die cut fold over sleeve with a full color insert (featuring the band posing with spiked gauntlets in front of Stonehenge!!! Well, actually, in front of the chainlink fence in front of Stonehenge, which somehow makes more sense). The cover has two strange NWOFHM / Tyrant (the 't's in tyrant are battle axes of course) hooded knights silkscreened on the front and each copy is hand stamped and numbered. Limited to 1000 copies worldwide, 500 of which made it to the United States, about 250 of which made it HERE. That's right, we got an entire quarter of the pressing. And we're pretty sure that still won't be enough, we guarantee these will not be around for long...

MPEG stream: Screaming Luovutus
MPEG stream: Steel Torment Warrior

Everybody knows that we at aQuarius are HUGE fans of the Finnish space/prog/hypnorock band Circle, right? We have raved about 'em for years, even had 'em play our 35th Anniversary Party back in 2000. So, naturally we get lots of folks, just starting out with their own Circle obsession, who ask us, which Circle album is The One To Get? 'Cause there's at least, like, over thirty albums in Circle's vast discography, thus far (though not all are still in print), and they're all pretty great. Well, among the longterm Circle fans here at aQ, the answer to that difficult question is, when it comes down to it, if we have to chose: Zopalki, Circle's second album, originally released back in 1996 by the Bad Vugum label. For a lot of us, it's arguably Circle's best ever record, among many great ones. And, significantly, it's also the one that we first heard, that first caused us to totally freak out about Circle, and led us to become such ardent fans, ever after. So, yeah, Zopalki! But, for years and years, it's unfortunately been one of those out of print titles. Kind of a holy grail for latter day Circle initiates. Until now - because we just got the brand new remastered, reissued version on Circle's own Ektro label in the mail. And thus, an automatic Record Of The Week! Like we said, this is The One that, so many years ago, turned us on to Circle's unique brand of rhythmic psychedelic hypnosis. It's heavy, it's atmospheric, it's tight, it's sprawling, it's incredible. The staccato Helmet-like riffage of their debut Meronia is still in effect, but even proggier experimentation is afoot, with a darker, murkier, neo-krautrock, chamber rock vibe pervading the proceedings. There's choppy guitars, dubby drumbeats, sinister string arrangements, and eerie Gregorian chant style vox (yes, this was many Circle lineups ago, long before current operatic weirdo Mikka Ratto joined the band, but the vocals are still quite unusual). Originally released on vinyl also, as a double lp (the new liner notes in this edition amusingly explain the "negotiation" with their record label that resulted in this being a double), it's got a dozen tracks stretching over 72 minutes. They range from explosive & percussively propelled to the dolefully droned out (often accomplishing both feats in the same epic composition). "Bonoroid" is among the most blissful, "Sector" the most psychotically hectic, "Argont" perhaps the most grindingly heavy, but heck we just picked a favorite Circle album, don't make us pick a favorite song too! Our only complaint about this reissue, is we wish they'd have included the bonus track found only on the long-gone vinyl version... for a moment we thought this reissue had the bonus track, but it's just that for some accidental reason the tracklist here says the final song is "Contact" (which was that bonus track) when it's actually "Gregorium Vaernd Valerii", which closed the original cd. Whoops. Regardless, we're SO glad to have this back. It's remastered (louder!), and the redesigned, expanded cd booklet now contains Zopalki-era photos of the band, as well as brand new retrospective liner notes from former guitarist Teemu Elo, from which we learn that "Zopalki" means "matchsticks" in Polish (though we don't learn why that was chosen for the title, or why the title was in Polish). More importantly, we learn a lot about the young band's struggle to make the record. It's worth noting that he says, "Zopalki caught most of us in the process of widening our horizons more than any other Circle album". It widened OUR horizons too...

MPEG stream: Valerian
MPEG stream: Warszawa
MPEG stream: Bonoroid
MPEG stream: Re-Masturbated

The latest limited release from the the Handmade Birds label, a new and already insanely prolific sonic imprint run by Pyramids' R. Loren, comes from long time aQ faves, Finnish outsider black metal weirdos Circle Of Ouroborus. And a new record from CoO means it's time again to wonder why we even still consider these guys black metal, since it's been several years and many records since they were a proper black metal band (if they ever were at all). We are constantly baffled by groups like CoO, who are so beloved by so much of the black metal world, and we're talking the true grim hordes, yet they continue to create music that we imagine would not be pleasing AT ALL to such folk. Maybe we're selling black metallers short. Or it means the appeal is more than purely sonic. It speaks to the spirit of the sound, the black energy put into the music, which eventually must come out, even if it does as some sort of twisted Jandekian fractured folk or some minimal synth wave weirdness, at its core, the sound is dark, black, evil. All of this talk in some ways is moot, as this latest record finds the band doing what they do, which is sort of black metal, sort of post rock, sort of whatthefuck, but it's all objective, and this music's 'blackness', or even its 'metalness', by most typically metal measures would be found wanting, but as far as we're concerned, this is exactly the sort of metallic blackness we love, murky, muddy, washed out and woozy, warped and stumbling, equal parts dark pop, fragmented folk, otherworldly creep, oh yeah and a little black buzz. It only takes a few seconds to realize this is not at all like any black metal you've heard (unless of course you've heard lots of Circle Of Ouroborus!), the band launch into what almost sounds like Ariel Pink playing black metal, or some murky chunk of mysterious James Ferraro style lysergic pop, which just so happens to be laced with some evil vox, the riffs are blurry streaks of melody, that almost sound more like horns or keyboards (which they could be), warbly synths wheeze and sputter, the vocals alternate between gruff growl and dramatic croon, the drums distorted and stumbly, everything wreathed in a druggy haze, the sound like some alternate universe pop, or some strange mutant strain of new waves, especially when the drums switch to an almost disco beat, the blackness really only represented by the vokills, otherwise this is some gloriously warped melodic doom pop weirdness. The B side brings things down even further, unfurling a haunting mournful bit of balladic dirgery, the sound bleary and blurry and drowsily depressive, the vocals doused in echo, those weird keyboard/horn guitars continuing to undulate and oscillate, surge an swell, creating strange ethereal melodies, which remind us of synth guitar weirdos Xynfonica / Shevalreq, the same sort of medieval majesty, but here buried in sonic murk and mire, the vocals so expressive, and strangely plaintive, the drums slipping from lazy plod to urgent pound and back again. In fact, the B side seems pretty evenly split between druggy propulsive post pop warble, and downright dreamy drift, all ephemeral and gauzy, the whole thing laced with chiming harmonics, warped melodic tangles and weirdly fluctuating production, the sound occasionally slipping into near perfect (albeit extremely damaged) pop, but more often then not, oozing and billowing, the sound seeming to melt before our ears into a warm whirling, almost liquid sound. A strangely soporific and somnolent sprawl of blurred blackness and murky melodicism, that truly is some of the weirdest, most beautifully baffling shit you will ever hear. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Gorgeous packaging too, super striking artwork on a gatefold reverse board jacket, with a big booklet, featuring hand inked artwork, black and white, with gold and silver metallic detail. Gorgeous!

MPEG stream: Warpath
MPEG stream: Staining The Paper To Create

New project from Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices... and it's great, probably the best thing he's done in years. Thank goodness! We were afraid he'd lost it, y'know. The guy is so prolific that it's hard to keep up the enthusiasm when the quality of his (We also have the LP for 14.98, although this is probably limited.)

RealAudio clip: Feel Try Fury
RealAudio clip: Spectacle
RealAudio clip: Lizard Food
RealAudio clip: Knife Song

When we first discovered mysterious Northwestern black metal outfit Velvet Cacoon, it wasn't just their blown out buzz that had us enraptured, it was all the rumors and weird stories about the band itself, that they were some sort of eco-fascists, who had built a huge gasoline-driven HARP which was responsible for their massive buzz. We later discovered that the whole eco-fascist / droneharp thing was a ruse, a put on, the band intentionally fucking with what they considered to be a contemptible black metal scene. It was then revealed that Velvet Cacoon were in fact a couple of drug obsessed dandies, who when they weren't crafting some of the most stunning black metal weirdness, were waxing about the various drugs they took, and their decadent lifestyle. But all that stuff only made them more interesting, and gave the sound a certain twisted cachet, coming as it did from these unlikely creators. As it happened, the band got fed up with the drama and the internet message board bullshit, and decided to scrap Velvet Cacoon entirely and start fresh. A new band, a new name and a new sound. Thus we have Clair Cassis, whose sound really is not all that far removed from the washed out black buzz of VC, but does distinguish itself in some important ways. The first being the song length. The band described CC in an interview as being a more pop Velvet Cacoon, and so it is, the shortest song is under 3 minutes, the longest just less than 7, the band forcing themselves to be more succinct, to move through their musical ideas in a more structured and less unhindered way, instead of letting songs and parts drone on and on. Not that we minded before, in fact, we like it when our black metal drones and buzzes endlessly, but there's something to be said for the opposite approach, which tends to force the write to craft SONGS more than SOUNDS. The other big difference is the bass. And with that the above mentioned pop element. The lack of bass in black metal is practically a running joke, the brittle buzz and furious blasting of most black metal generally relegating bass to a barely there buzz, so when a black metal band takes the bass, and makes it as much a part of the sound as the guitar, it changes the whole shape of the sound, in the case of Clair Cassis, gives it a sort of woozy, gothic, cold wave vibe, black metal is dour and depressive by its very nature, but here it's gloomy and haunting, an emotional sort of darkness and depression. This new sound/direction is immediately noticeable on opener "Ambercandle" which begins all warped and woozy, the riffs twisted and seemingly melting over the pounding doomy drums, when the track finally kicks into gear, the bass drives the songs, thick and dense, the notes slippery, haunting gloomy low end swells that add some pathos to the already loping minor key dirge, besides that it makes the sound so much heavier. Even on the next track, "The Feathered Fog" which begins with a somewhat standard burst of blackness, droney and relentless, still the bass is there adding heft, and a melodic counterpoint to the frenzied riffage, and then when the song switches gear, lurches into halftime, the bass swoops right to the front and the song transforms into a woozy seasick dirge. And as you listen, the record definitely reveals itself as more than buzzing black metal, and knowing what we do about the folks behind it, it's not hard to imagine them creating this otherworldly pop music, and simply choosing to cloak it in black metal finery, which definitely explains the catchiness, the heavy bass and buried grooves, but it's probably best to not analyze it too much. A casual glancing listen will definitely provide plenty of black metal pleasure, the guitars are thick and gnarled, the drumming (real this time it sounds like) heavy and blasting, the arrangements trancelike and hypnotic, with long stretches of deep shimmering drone music, as well as plenty of pounding doomic dirgery, Velvet Cacoon fans won't be disappointed, but digging deeper reveals all the other subtle sonic alterations that make Clair Cassis simultaneously much more accessible, but also even weirder than VC. The songs may be shorter, but they're no less complex and convoluted, in fact in some ways, they're even more, considering parts don't drone on, the band flits from part to part, from blast to plod to drift to blast again. "Pearls & Pinesmoke" is another standout, a soaring blasting droner, thick with bass rumble and throb, grim enough, the drums a little loose and chaotic, the vocals a creepy croak, and then the breakdown comes, and it's total melodic black nirvana, half tempo, the guitar still buzzy, but the bass unfurling an insanely melodic and ridiculously catchy part, that totally transforms the song, and then the sound shifts again back to blasting buzz, somehow the bass remains, adding unlikely melody to even the blackest bits, and fear not, a part that good comes back again, fans of Alcest and Amesoeurs will be in heaven. And after a strange interlude, the track shifts again, into another woozy, differently melodic dirge, laced with more melodic bass, but this time wrapped around spidery acoustic guitars, all still wreathed in crumbling buzz. Finally the record finishes with the awesomely titled "Hazelhearted In The Seaparlour", which explodes immediately into a dense churning blast, heavy and harsh and layered, with a strange midtempo bridge/chorus, that features a strangely bouncy, and again surprisingly melodic bassline, way up in the mix, changing the focus of the song, before dropping out again and letting the guitars take over, before the track finally fades out, leaving nothing but the wheezing strains of what almost sounds like elevator music, or the music they play in the middle of the night at outside malls, the sound here replete with random bits of found sound, footsteps and other curious ambience. And just leave it to the fickle folks who disbanded Velvet Cacoon at the height of their popularity to nip their new band in the bud as well, which apparently is exactly what happened. Clair Cassis is no more. But what a way to go. There is a second record floating around, who knows if it will ever get properly released, but for now, this one is not surprisingly shaping up to be a serious contender for black metal record of the year!

MPEG stream: Ambercandle
MPEG stream: The Feathered Fog
MPEG stream: Kir Royale
MPEG stream: Our Overwinter In The Ivories

BACK IN STOCK!! When we first discovered mysterious Northwestern black metal outfit Velvet Cacoon, it wasn't just their blown out buzz that had us enraptured, it was all the rumors and weird stories about the band itself, that they were some sort of eco-fascists, who had built a huge gasoline-driven HARP which was responsible for their massive buzz. We later discovered that the whole eco-fascist / droneharp thing was a ruse, a put on, the band intentionally fucking with what they considered to be a contemptible black metal scene. It was then revealed that Velvet Cacoon were in fact a couple of drug obsessed dandies, who when they weren't crafting some of the most stunning black metal weirdness, were waxing about the various drugs they took, and their decadent lifestyle. But all that stuff only made them more interesting, and gave the sound a certain twisted cachet, coming as it did from these unlikely creators. As it happened, the band got fed up with the drama and the internet message board bullshit, and decided to scrap Velvet Cacoon entirely and start fresh. A new band, a new name and a new sound. Thus we have Clair Cassis, whose sound really is not all that far removed from the washed out black buzz of VC, but does distinguish itself in some important ways. The first being the song length. The band described CC in an interview as being a more pop Velvet Cacoon, and so it is, the shortest song is under 3 minutes, the longest just less than 7, the band forcing themselves to be more succinct, to move through their musical ideas in a more structured and less unhindered way, instead of letting songs and parts drone on and on. Not that we minded before, in fact, we like it when our black metal drones and buzzes endlessly, but there's something to be said for the opposite approach, which tends to force the write to craft SONGS more than SOUNDS. The other big difference is the bass. And with that the above mentioned pop element. The lack of bass in black metal is practically a running joke, the brittle buzz and furious blasting of most black metal generally relegating bass to a barely there buzz, so when a black metal band takes the bass, and makes it as much a part of the sound as the guitar, it changes the whole shape of the sound, in the case of Clair Cassis, gives it a sort of woozy, gothic, cold wave vibe, black metal is dour and depressive by its very nature, but here it's gloomy and haunting, an emotional sort of darkness and depression. This new sound/direction is immediately noticeable on opener "Ambercandle" which begins all warped and woozy, the riffs twisted and seemingly melting over the pounding doomy drums, when the track finally kicks into gear, the bass drives the songs, thick and dense, the notes slippery, haunting gloomy low end swells that add some pathos to the already loping minor key dirge, besides that it makes the sound so much heavier. Even on the next track, "The Feathered Fog" which begins with a somewhat standard burst of blackness, droney and relentless, still the bass is there adding heft, and a melodic counterpoint to the frenzied riffage, and then when the song switches gear, lurches into halftime, the bass swoops right to the front and the song transforms into a woozy seasick dirge. And as you listen, the record definitely reveals itself as more than buzzing black metal, and knowing what we do about the folks behind it, it's not hard to imagine them creating this otherworldly pop music, and simply choosing to cloak it in black metal finery, which definitely explains the catchiness, the heavy bass and buried grooves, but it's probably best to not analyze it too much. A casual glancing listen will definitely provide plenty of black metal pleasure, the guitars are thick and gnarled, the drumming (real this time it sounds like) heavy and blasting, the arrangements trancelike and hypnotic, with long stretches of deep shimmering drone music, as well as plenty of pounding doomic dirgery, Velvet Cacoon fans won't be disappointed, but digging deeper reveals all the other subtle sonic alterations that make Clair Cassis simultaneously much more accessible, but also even weirder than VC. The songs may be shorter, but they're no less complex and convoluted, in fact in some ways, they're even more, considering parts don't drone on, the band flits from part to part, from blast to plod to drift to blast again. "Pearls & Pinesmoke" is another standout, a soaring blasting droner, thick with bass rumble and throb, grim enough, the drums a little loose and chaotic, the vocals a creepy croak, and then the breakdown comes, and it's total melodic black nirvana, half tempo, the guitar still buzzy, but the bass unfurling an insanely melodic and ridiculously catchy part, that totally transforms the song, and then the sound shifts again back to blasting buzz, somehow the bass remains, adding unlikely melody to even the blackest bits, and fear not, a part that good comes back again, fans of Alcest and Amesoeurs will be in heaven. And after a strange interlude, the track shifts again, into another woozy, differently melodic dirge, laced with more melodic bass, but this time wrapped around spidery acoustic guitars, all still wreathed in crumbling buzz. Finally the record finishes with the awesomely titled "Hazelhearted In The Seaparlour", which explodes immediately into a dense churning blast, heavy and harsh and layered, with a strange midtempo bridge/chorus, that features a strangely bouncy, and again surprisingly melodic bassline, way up in the mix, changing the focus of the song, before dropping out again and letting the guitars take over, before the track finally fades out, leaving nothing but the wheezing strains of what almost sounds like elevator music, or the music they play in the middle of the night at outside malls, the sound here replete with random bits of found sound, footsteps and other curious ambience. And just leave it to the fickle folks who disbanded Velvet Cacoon at the height of their popularity to nip their new band in the bud as well, which apparently is exactly what happened. Clair Cassis is no more. But what a way to go. There is a second record floating around, who knows if it will ever get properly released, but for now, this one is not surprisingly shaping up to be a serious contender for black metal record of the year!

MPEG stream: Ambercandle
MPEG stream: The Feathered Fog
MPEG stream: Kir Royale
MPEG stream: Our Overwinter In The Ivories

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY. The music of such '70s krautrock pioneers as Kraftwerk and Can has long been treasured; and during the cd reissue boom of the '90s yet more classic kosmische & motorik sounds of the seventies were rediscovered, from the likes of Cluster and Neu!, along with many other amazing but lesser-known acts of the era revealed via the exhaustive efforts of dodgy but helpful labels like Germanofon. Yet, of course, there's always more! And now it seems that a second generation of rather more obscure cosmic, electronic krautrock from the eighties is giving up its secrets, little by little, with reissues by artists like You, Gunter Schickert (well, his later works), and Rudiger Lorenz, to name just a few. To name another: Clara Mondshine. OH YES!!! We've been intrigued by this artist & album ever since seeing mention of it in a useful reference book we found called New Sounds: A Listener's Guide To New Music, published in 1987... After checking it out online (thank you, blogs and YouTube), we were like, someone really should reissue this! Happily, someone just did. And here it is. One might hope for Clara Mondshine to be the rare female (or perhaps transexual, a la Wendy Carlos) krautrock composer, but no, in fact Clara Mondshine was the pseudonym or project name for a man named Walter Bachauer, a radio director and journalist as well as composer and musician. His krautrock pedigree does extend back to the '70s when he played in Peter Michael Hamel's excellent improvising acoustic/ethnic ensemble, Between. As a solo artist, he released three albums under the Clara Mondshine moniker, starting with this one, Luna Africana, in 1981. (Perhaps he would have made more records, but he sadly passed away in 1989.) Mondshine's music on Luna Africana is DIY cosmic electronica, 'Berlin School' style, made with analog synths and other probably fairly lo-tech, lo-fi electronic gear. Mondshine's repetitive machine mesmerism is super droney and trippy, and almost playful too, these all-instrumental space-outs also sometimes having a touch of ethnic/world music to 'em as well (a la Between). This is also another example of something at the intersection of krautrock and (good) new age. Hence titles, once translated into English, like "Raga Of The Rising Planet" and "Harp Of The Amazons". On one track, delightful melodic figures repeat over equally charming pulsing patterns of motorik rhythm, followed by a more atmospheric excursion into the outer space drone-zone on the next, and then it's back to relaxing runs of gentle tones over cyclic bleep-bleep-bloop, wreathed in whips of drone� What's not to like about that? Definitely for fans of much Cluster, Kraftwerk, A.R. & Machines, and Axxess from France, among others... Also, we just realized that an edit of the first track on here was included on that excellent Dirty Space Disco compilation we crushed on a few years back! Note: also reissued on vinyl, but we couldn't get enough lps to list, hopefully more will be forthcoming soon.

MPEG stream: Die Drachentrommler
MPEG stream: Lange Melodie Fur Den Countdown
MPEG stream: Fischer Des Meeres Der Stille

The history of the legendary New Zealand indie label Flying Run quite literally begins with The Clean. Impressed by a slew of The Clean's live performances in their home town of Dunedin, New Zealand back in 1980, Roger Shephard began Flying Nun, simply in order to release the band's first single "Tally Ho." That song, an upbeat but simple post-punk number that crashed together jangling guitars and persistant organ melodies, surprised everybody with a considerable amount of commercial success in New Zealand, and became one of many songs by The Clean that found enthusiastic audiences in the US during the college rock days of the '80s, offering a quirky, exotic alternative to staples like REM, the Replacements, Robyn Hitchcock, and Elvis Costello. Formed in 1978 by the Kilgour brothers David and Hamish, The Clean never stooped to the depths of the Gallagher brother's public fisticuffs; but the band -- which flushed out its membership with Robert Scott and (in the early days) Peter Gutteridge -- spent more time broken up than together. Yet, their eternally catchy pop songs became the blueprint for almost all of the other Flying Nun bands (in part due to the numerous Clean related projects on Flying Nun, including The Bats, The Great Unwashed, Bailter Space, Snapper, Stephen, and others). The Clean's self-explanatory "Anthology" runs through their numerous albums, offering a good chunk of their fantastic early work (the aforementioned "Tally Ho," the "Boodle Boodle Boodle" ep, the "Great Sounds..." ep, and a couple of oddities) on one disc. Edgy yet unswervingly optimistic, these songs were sloppy four-track recordings of monomaniacally simple rhythms, cacophonously jangly guitar melodies, and happy-go-lucky vocals. Disc two contains excerpts from the '90s albums "Vehicle," "Modern Rock," and "Unknown Country," which marked a considerable polishing of The Clean's sound, in part because they recorded that material in well established studios like Blackwing studios in London, but also as the songs, while still simple in their own right, were slightly more restrained. Highly recommended!

RealAudio clip: At The Bottom
RealAudio clip: Tally Ho
RealAudio clip: Point That Thing Somewhere Else

Breaking Day is record number two from Cleared, the duo of Steven Hess (Locrian, Haptic) and Michael Vallera, and much like their self titled debut (reviewed elsewhere on the aQ site), this record finds the duo weaving longform landscapes of rhythm and sound, texture and noise, drawing influence from abstract ambient electronica as much as lo-fi floor-core noise. In fact, in many ways, Breaking Day feels like a continuation of that first record, touching on many of the same elements, but here having honed those elements into something spectacular. Born of live performances in the studio, employing both live drums and sampled percussion, as well as atmospheric guitar work and all manner of droned out soundscaping, Cleared create gorgeous expanses of minimal krautdrone noise-dub, that weds rhythmic mesmer to lush layered minimalism, churning hypnorock throb to gauzy softly caustic ambience. Opening track "Rogues" is pretty much all we've been listening to lately, a slow building sprawl of chiming soft focus shimmer, peppered with squalls of white noise, and wreathed in washed out sine wave tones, the bursts of static building a barely there rhythm, that gradually solidifies into a Necks style jazzy skitter, the sounds growing more and more dense and intense, and when the rhythm proper comes in, it's epic, a simple stuttery pulse, but it changes the whole tone of the piece, giving it some serious heft and momentum, mix in some dubbed out snares, add layer after layer of hiss and hum, and it's total psych-jazz-kraut-noise bliss. Ten minutes is way too short. This could have been the whole record, had they stretched it out to 40 minutes and it STILL would have been Record Of The Week. The group explore similar territory on the rest of the record, but in smaller chunks, "Sighted" is a churning expanse of tinkling melodies, wavery low end thrum, and buzzing static, blurred into some seriously mesmerizing (and subtly propulsive) ambience, the title track veers into a sort of This Heat beholden post rock / post punk, all big chiming brittle guitars, woozy rhythmic churn and gloomy atmosphere. "No Path To Claim" revisits the vibe of the opener, creating a sort of soft noise raga, laced with chimes and bells, the churning low end miasma lush and textured, the track's propulsion more implied than explicit, finishing off with a haunting swirl of psychedelic guitar drift and woozy low end pulsations. "Quartz" lays down a gorgeously dense stretch of grinding minimal dronemusic, thick and viscous, but weirdly warm and hypnotic, underpinned by soft shimmery chordal swells, and the record finally finishes off with "The Harvest", the most abstract of the bunch, and one which sounds strangely like another one of this week's Records Of The Week, the bowed reindeer antler music of Hornorkesteret, with its creaking and rumbling, dark swirls of rumble and drone, distant keening melodies, what sounds like field recordings of clatter and shuffle, hints of some creaking ship abound, it's haunting, atmospheric and very evocative of some ancient mysterious ritual. Fantastic stuff!

MPEG stream: Rogues
MPEG stream: Sighted
MPEG stream: The Harvest

While the rest of the world is freaking out over Death Grips' drum driven aggro noise drenched hip hop, especially with the recent release of a downloadable new collaboration with Bjork called Niggas On The Moon, it might be a good time to also dig into the brand new Sub Pop debut from LA noise-hop trio Clipping. (and yeah, the period is part of the name). Their sound, like Death Grips, finds its roots in classic hip hop, but both diverge in interesting ways. In the case of Death Grips, it's a live drummer (Zach Hill from Hella), and some seriously bombastic noise, not to mention the confrontational flow of rapper Stefan Burnett. It's a sound we love for sure, but the sound of Clipping. we love even more. Imagine that instead of that drum driven noisiness, you replaced the music with super minimal abstract noise, the sort of stuff you might hear on an RRR comp, think Bastard Noise or Sissy Spacek making a hip hop record and you'd be close. Even more interesting though, is that the two guys responsible for the music in Clipping. are Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson, whom avid readers of the aQ list, and film nerds too, might know more from their stunning score to the Stanley Kubrick conspiracy documentary Room 237, the soundtrack which was released on Death Waltz. But this is no retro soundtrackery, this is twisted noisy weirdness, wild feedback drenched analog skree, squelch drenched gristle, hiss and hum and screech and howl and thrum and buzz, blasts of digital noise wound around low slung beats. Check out the intro, which features rapper Daveed Diggs, spitting rapid fire flow a cappella over an ear piercing sine wave tone, eventually delivering the closer "It's Clipping bitch", before launching into the record proper, which gets no less weird, and no less noisy. "body & Blood" rides a grinding industrial beat, with a creepy processed voice 'chorus', but then "Work Work" surprises (as does much of the record), with its almost dreamy looped glitchy gamelan, that transforms into some low slung low rider booming bass throb. And while at first blush, some of the lyrics sound typically hip hop sexist, dig deeper, and there's way more going on, which is again balanced when Cocc Pistol Cree delivers her bad ass verse. And there are other guests too, King T, Gangsta Boo, Guce and more, but it's the core three who have their sound down. King T's guest verse on "Summertime" is a crusher, especially when the background sound swells into a cloud of alien laser blasts, deep bass thrum, and woozy sonic squiggles. Then there's tracks like "Taking Off", which sounds like it was made from damaged cd's, all skipping rhythms, looped and layered into a weirdly lurching beat, the perfectly wasted stuttery backdrop for Diggs' rapid fire flow. Gangsta Boo delivers a killer verse as well, over a weird bed of creaks and gristly moans, again a weirdly perfect match for her toasting flow, not to mention the strangely Kanye-ish chorus croon, with a rumbling thick low end swell underneath, the sort of track that would be all over the radio, if there was any justice. And let's not forget the insanely infuriatingly brilliant "Get Up", where the music is essentially JUST the sound of an alarm clock, maddening for sure, but then so satisfying when they modulate the sound into a weirdly radio pop chorus. And so it goes, Digg's flow world class, the background sounds a continually shifting landscape of fractured loops, woozy synths, clanging pipe fight rhythms, digital glitchery, weird damaged turntable rewinds, and dizzying noise collages, so unlikely, but so impossibly catchy, the magic of Clipping. in that it can be so obtuse and difficult, but still so groovy, so hooky, so funky, and so goddamn, catchy, this is exactly the sort of shit we'd be blasting through our booming system, no doubt shattering glass and bursting eardrums as we passed. On both cd, and vinyl, both of which are slightly different (the aforementioned "Intro" is not included on the lp, but the version of "Body & Blood" is longer for example) but vinyl nerds are still in luck, cuz the lp comes in a super swank spot varnish printed triple gatefold, with an extra lp side, loaded with ONE HUNDRED locked grooves, noisy, distorted, blown out, abstract, dubby, clicky, funky, bloopy, bleepy and pretty much every variation in between. Both versions feature a bad ass blinded out Sub Pop logo too...

MPEG stream: Intro
MPEG stream: Body & Blood
MPEG stream: Work Work
MPEG stream: Summertime
MPEG stream: Taking Off
MPEG stream: Tonight

We raved about Cloaks' 2009 release Versus Grain, a caustic collection of crushing beats and sculpted noise, with sounds sourced from recordings of breaking glass and clanging metal, and live shows reported to rival the craziest rock bands in terms of blood, sweat and destruction of gear. It was in fact a record that we ended up listening to so much and for so long, we realized in retrospect that we really should have made it a Record Of The Week. So here we are 2 years later, and Cloaks return, but VERSIONS Grain is not a new record, instead, it's their own twisted idea of a remix record, with Cloaks contributing a couple new tracks, but with the bulk of the record made up of reinterpretations of jams from Versus Grain, by an eclectic crew of "remixers", including Justin Broadrick (Godflesh, Jesu, Pale Sketcher, etc.) and former Record Of The Week-ers Legion Of Two, as well as Dead Fader, Ancient Methods, Devilman, Volt Music and Oyaarss, who all manage to retain the originals' beat heavy brutality and almost avant dancefloor destroying noise, while adding whole new dimensions, that make this easily as worthwhile as the original. The record opens with Cloaks own reworking of Versus Grain's closer, and like the original, it's a lurching sprawl of super distorted crunch, weird industrial robotic whirs and buzz, lots of gristly static and blurred muted white noise, like the sound of some alien factory set to some dubbed out crumbling slowed down DHR beat. Which leads directly into Legion Of Two's version of "Against" which ends up sounding like it could have been plucked right off LO2's own Record Of The Week, with live drumming, wild dubbed out snares careening all over the place, thick undulating almost dubsteppy basslines, lots of super blown out synths, cascading decaying electronics, way groovier than the original, but totally spaced out and psychedelic at the same time, another heady chunk of industrial machine funk that kills. Broadrick takes on "Rust On Metal", and actually cleans it up a little, the original was claustrophobic, the sounds bleak and blackened, and while there is still a bit of a grim vibe, the beats are more skeletal, the melodies more synthy and swirly, and then about 2 minutes in, it explodes into something way more metal, churning industrial beats and chugging distorted riffing, not to mention howled dub drenched vox, total Godflesh territory for sure, peppered with bouts of skitter and droned out mesmer and finally finishing off in a blaze of white hot buzz. Ancient Methods also dial back the crunch and robotic churn on their version of "R.F.I.D.", wreathing everything in a cloud of gristly static, strange processed vox, woozy low end rumbles, and then some pulsing dubby minimal techno beats, lots of clipped samples, truncated melodies, stuttery and staggery, weirdly hypnotic and off kilter, that over the course of its 9+ minutes is barraged by twisted sci-fi electronics, warm warped distorted guitar melodies, lush swirls of fuzzed out synth, more strange voices, that beat slipping from muted and minimal to speaker destroying block rocking crunch. "Sixmenace One" finds Cloaks imagining a first part to accompany the second that showed up on Versus Grain, and it gets a serious working over, even more damaged and noisy, super filthy and crusty and distorted, weirdly creepy and soundtracky, while ultimately just a gnarled ever shifting tangle of crumbling pulsing synths and swirling swaths of electronic hiss and some seriously brutal almost-beat heavy buzz. Oyaarss follows up with their version of "Sixmenace Two", which is drastically different, adding a weird ethereal almost shoegazey sheen to the proceedings, a super thick, slithery big beat fat bass dubstep, with some of the filthiest most distorted bass wobble ever, but melded to some dreamlike melodic shimmer not to mention some drifty harplike melody, for dubstep headz, this might be THEE jam here, we can't help but imagine this as a 12", and the sort of rib cage rattling dancefloor destroying damaged that would result. "Dead Fader" keep the spirit of the original "#00148", which opened Versus Grain, if anything, they just stretch it out, brighten it up a bit, strip away some of the murk, but add their own extra ingredients, which includes some twisted beats, some strange wailing synth melodies, not to mention all manner of synth squiggles, and grinding glitch. Devilman's "Against" again reinvents the original as something much more abstract, at least in the beginning, and buzzing, hissing, fuzzed out industrial creep, until the beat proper lurches into motion, and the track becomes a weirdly mesmerizing noise-dub groove, that lumbers and swaggers menacingly, until the last minute or so, where it seems to transform into some strange sort of post Bollywood whatthefuck, with all sorts of weird 'rewinds', chaotic drum programming, and cloying melodies, which go surprisingly well with the extremely dense and brutal buzz. Finally, Volt Music finish things off with another version of "R.F.I.D.", which starts out all murky and staccato, before the song stumbles into motion, and unwinds like some super slow-motion gabber track, sped up this would be a pounding acid anthem, but here it's a maniacally mesmerizing rhythmic churn, laced with little bits of jungle-y filigree, not to mention all sorts of distorted and decaying FX. Awesome stuff. And the sort of electronic music that should appeal to heavy music folks as well, dark, distorted, loud as fuck and so good.

MPEG stream: Sixmenace One
MPEG stream: R.F.I.D. (Volt Music Remix)
MPEG stream: Agains (Legion Of Two Remake)
MPEG stream: #00148 (Dead Fader Remix)

This is another one of those records, that's almost too good, and too weird, to be true. Especially coming as it does from the Dead-Cert label, run by weirdo music obsessive Andy Votel. In fact, based on the description, AND the sound, we were pretty much convinced that this had to be Votel himself conjuring up some imaginary lost sonic artifact. How could it not be? Son Of Octabred is/was apparently a 'birthing' record, as in an album to assist/instruct with giving birth (?), recorded on primitive analog synths and 'originally broadcast' on a radio show in Anchorage, Alaska - its sound a strange hybrid of kosmische synthscapery, spaced out kraut-psych, minimal dronemusic, and percolating early electronica. But once again, whether it's all true or not, almost doesn't matter: if it IS true, what a ridiculous and impossibly WTF find, and if it's NOT, well, goddamn, total brilliant art prank / fictional sound conjuration. The record begins with a female voice instructing the listener to breath and push, with some strangely poetic descriptions of having a baby, then a man's voice talks weirdly about 'his pregnancy', before in swoop some space synths, and we're off, on a cosmic journey, some alien planetarium show, swirling percolations, swooping FX, shifting textures, playful melodies, there's definitely a sort of John Carpenter / Klaus Schulze vibe, pulsing kraut-psych gives way to weird vocodered vocals, not singing so much as just humming/crooning more textures, and again if this is real, it's hard to imagine just flipping on the radio in the middle of the night and hearing THIS. Or, being born, and hearing it! Crazy. The sound soon erupts into something much more sinister, thick swells of swirling shadowy rumbles, and staticky clouds of hiss, all over buried voices and keening melodies, some serious black ambience for sure, that sounds like birthing music for Rosemary's Baby. The flipside returns to the playful percolation of the opening, sounding a bit like Perrey & Kingsley, before devolving into a weird sprawl of dubby gamelan like percussion, and strangely processed abstract rhythms, all floating in the ether, before a Close Encounter synth melody surfaces, swopping wildly from speaker to speaker, the whole thing dizzying and seriously trippy, before once again drifting into darker sonic territory, some ominous shadowy drift, that eventually returns to the light, for a final bout of bouncy bloopy synthiness and one final burst of wild tangled psych-synth freakout. So cool, and so weird. Real or not, we love it! ----* ----* Highlights : ----*

Cleveland's Cloud Nothings began life as fuzzy jangle poppers, but even in those early days, the group displayed a knack for not just crafting killer hooks, but also for being pretty adept and serious psychedelic noisiness and blown out bombast, which all came to a head with their most recent full length, Attack On Memory, which was way darker and noisier than anything that came before. If anything, this new one splits the difference, still heavily indebted to that classic nineties indie/college rock sound, Cloud Nothings make it their own, crafting noisy, poppy gems that slip easily from hooky, fuzzy crunch, to wild, blown out shoegaze noise rock pound. Opener "Now Hear In" sounds like something you could have heard on the radio back in the day, roughed up a bit and doused in distortion. Which when we think about it pretty much describes the whole record. If you love that sound, and as we've established by now, most of us do, then Here And Nowhere Else is about as good as it gets, a perfect approximation of that sound, but cranked to high heaven, rife with impossible hooks, raspy vocal howl, wild tangled of buzzy guitars, sheets of noisy distortion, wild chaotic drumming, some tracks slowing it down a bit, but even those seem to always eventually explode into full on frantic and frenetic noise rock blowouts, that like on Attack On Memory, often verge on total emo/screamo, and all with a bit of gothy, gloominess running throughout, which means fans of Interpol, Ceremony, Holograms, Iceage and the like will dig this too. Closing track "I'm Not Part Of Me" might be the catchiest jam here - which is weird, cuz what band tucks their catchiest potential hit way at the end of a record? A band like Cloud Nothings with hooks and potential hits to spare! We loved this the very first time we played it, but with every listen we dig this record more and more, and for the noise pop nerds around aQ, this is fast becoming a contender for our favorite record of the year! Definitely a Record Of The Week.

MPEG stream: Now Hear In
MPEG stream: Quieter Today
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THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY. During a humid trip to Nashville in the summer of 1998, Jim had the fortune to catch a 30 minute garage-rock-dirge made earlier that day in a basement by the The Legendary Dave Cloud. With just a simple request for information / recordings posted here on the AQL and some patience, we gleefully present the debut album from Mr. Cloud. Calling him a drunken poet may situate Dave Cloud on too high of a pedestal, but drunk would certainly suffice. Nearly delusional songs of true love found during drinking binges and of the profound abjection from the hangovers & lonliness the morning after are crooned by Cloud with his hoarse cigarette damaged voice. Musically, Cloud pens grimy garage songs that wouldn't have been out of the repetoire of the V-3, the Velvet Underground, early Dead C, and most certainly The Shaggs. While the purposefully lo-fi qualities from Siltbreeze bands may be interpretted as an avant-garde disregard for acceptible production techniques, Cloud's aesthetic couldn't really be regarded as such due to the drunken naivete that seeps through the songs like spilt beer seeping through polyester. Cloud's backing band features members of Lambchop though you won't find any of the sugary dixie pop here. Sadly the 30 minute drone-dirge mentioned earlier is not one of the songs he will always sing, but the album is a worthy meditation on alcohol.

Cloudland Canyon always seemed like some impossible classic krautrock / noise rock hybrid, their records equal parts German Oak, Faust, Amon Duul, My Bloody Valentine and the Dead C, a washed out sonic world of gritty hypnotic haze, of lumbering psychedelic grooves, of twisted FX drenched drift and looped druggy ambience, as likely to explode into a super rocking fuzzed out dronejam as they were to emit thick billowing clouds of swirling blurred psychdrone shimmer, but always, at the core of their sound was pop. Little hooks buried in the murk and the mire, catchiness subtly woven into the fabric of every bit of spaced out crush or raga-like skree, the thread that held their sound together was spun from melody and harmony, no matter how much those elemental forces were obscured. Recently CC shared a split with Citay, both bands paying homage to fuzzy dream poppers Galaxie 500, CC's version was especially fantastic, drugged out and hypnotic, somehow transforming the original into what could have been a proper Cloudland Canyon jam, and in the process, revealing, more explicitly than ever, the warm glowing pop heart, that beat inside the buzzing, lysergic krautrock chest of Cloudland Canyon. Which it seems, lead to this, Fin Eaves, a fully realized exploration of pop music, filtered through CC's gloriously cracked kraut/drone/noise filter, the result, one of the fuzziest, most washed out, dreamiest noise pop / dream pop records in recent memory. Every track a swirling morass of druggy effects, of muted melodies, of buried reverbed vox, of subverted jangle, muddy grooves, subtle hooks, a soft focus collision between My Bloody Valentine, Teenage Filmstars and Galaxie 500, a three way pileup where the various elements simply sink into one another, blurring and smearing into fantastically new shapes, a little bit of looped hypnotic Spacemen 3 style drug rock here, a little super distorted minimal Jesus and Mary Chain stomp there, slipping seamlessly from gauzy soft pop shuffle, to dense crumbling popnoise damage, to hushed loping slowcore haze, to soaring prismatic space psych bliss, each and every track is dense and spacious and layered, the various sounds constantly shifting, transforming, pealing melodies sloughing off only to reveal even more subtle melodies beneath, streaks of electronic glitch and clouds of warm whirling hiss drift amidst deep thrummed bass, and simple motorik rhythms, gorgeously out of focus vocal harmonies, and all manner of texture and timbre, a rare record as much about song as sound, strip away the sound, and you'd have a surprisingly perfect pop record, take away the songs, and you'd still have some fantastically abstract sonic earcandy, but combine the two, and you have this, an utterly gorgeous disc of otherworldly noise drenched lysergic dream pop. Fans of Teenage Filmstars, Beach House, Jesus & Mary Chain, Flaming Lips, Galaxie 500, Spacemen 3, Candy Claws, Mercury Rev, School Of The Seven Bells, and other psychedelic dream poppers, this is your new favorite record.

MPEG stream: No One Else Around
MPEG stream: Fin Eaves
MPEG stream: Sister
MPEG stream: Pinklike / Version

Once known simply as "the rust record", this is the debut recorded collaboration between AQ-fave sound artist Loren Chasse (id battery, Thuja, himself, etc.) and AQ-fave staffer Jim Haynes! Jim, known for his decay-oriented visual art, provided the

RealAudio clip: Mirrors/Needles
RealAudio clip: Fossil And Transmitter
RealAudio clip: Chronograph In Phosphorescence

COH, aka Ivan Pavlov, has been a long time favorite, taking that click and beep and buzz we love so much, that austere clipped electronic minimalism, and somehow infusing it with melody, and emotion, and while we love Pavlov's contemporaries, that might just be what makes the music of COH sound so special to us. And as if we weren't already excited about a new COH record anyway, IIron is Pavlov's 'metal record', a continuation of 2000's Iron, which was ostensibly his rock record (thus the title IIron should be read as Iron with the Roman numeral two replacing the 'I', as in part two), and much like other COH records, his take on minimal electronica bears little resemblance to his peers, especially here, taking acoustic guitars, chugging metal guitars, skittery electro rhythms, synth new wave, droned out low end crush and nineties style electronic industrial, and tangling it all up into some weird electro-avant-metal hybrid, that varies wildly from track to track, but manages to weave them all together into a somewhat cohesive whole. Besides the usual minimal buzz and click programming and electronic beat crafting, Pavlov incorporates both recent guitar recordings as well as various guitar recordings made back in the eighties during Soviet era Russia, when even listening to metal music, let alone crating it, was expressly forbidden, Which also adds to the tension and emotional resonance of these tracks, which vary from propulsive and electro, to blackened and sludgey, to chuggy and noisy. The opener "Red Square" begins with a bit of delicate fingerpicked steel string guitar, wreathed in record crackle, which is soon overtaken by some pulsing industrial pulse and pound, a little Skinny Puppy, a little Ministry, but a bit more skeletal and cinematic, the crunchy distorted guitar, chopped up and spaced out into a weird sort of rock riff chug, all wrapped around a seriously creepy bit of soundtracky ambience, and a tangle of melodies that sounds almost like a electro-metal version of gypsy folk. "War End War" is where the record first gets truly metal, after some deep barely audible subsonic rumbles, the low end roils and churns, a Tim Hecker-ish bit of blurred bassy melody, all hazy and indistinct, which builds and builds until a lurching lumbering doom-ic riffscape stumbles from the murk, wreathed in swirls of glitched out electronics and strange spacey FX, the sound crusty, and crunchy, distorted and crumbling, all wound around a big thick metallic riff just chugging away, the sound gradually smoothing out, until the song has returned to the murky muddy thrum that started things off, this time laced with a simple guitar melodies, and distant little curlicues of effects, all beneath a patina of crumbling gauze, before that riff returns, only this time to get all glitched up like a super scratchy skipping record, and then to get fused with some pulsing trancey electronica, the result a buzzy, metallic bit of doomy abstract industrial electronica. The metal element is not so pronounced on some of the other tracks, or at least not obviously so, "Soii Noir" is a super minimal bit of pulsing electro, spare and spacious, sounding almost like a game of Pong, until another crunchy, lo-fi distorted riff enters the picture, but like before, it's all twisted up and distorted, wreathed in crackle and crumbling buzz, and molded into something distinctly UNmetal, but still heavy and riffy, where as "Slowup (Quadrate Fur Jah)" begins like some old demo tape of garage band riffery, only to become something much more playful and pulsing, like Neu! if they had drafted a metal guitarist to join, the same sort of sun dappled krautrocky drift, albeit with that one extra six stringed element. "Fist Of Glory" distorts the guitars even further, turning a buzzy lo-fi riff into a layered bit of glitched out textural ambience, cutting out, skittering and skipping, clipped and looped, like some decaying reel to reel of plunderphonic metal, dizzying and abstract, but in its own way strangely rhythmic and hypnotic. "All Lights Are Fire" is super spare and skeletal, the guitars muted and muddy, the electronics glitchy and squiggly, the sound somewhere between the electro dub of Pole and the krautrock of Can or Neu!, motorik, meditative, hypnotic, but as the track progresses, the guitars grow more buzzy and insistent, the production more noisy and distorted, the arrangement more chaotic. Finally, IIron finishes off with "Satsugaii", which starts out all minimal murk, spare electronic pulses, and deep low end thrum, before some seriously Shellac-y noise rock guitars come in, which are mirrored by some pulsing synths, creating a weird bit of metallic electro-noise-rock, or something, whatever it is, it's like the perfect middle ground between old school krautrock, modern Carpenter / Goblin style cinematic electro-wave, nineties industrial and noise rock, especially with the addition of wild squalls of psychedelic guitar tangle, all over thick pounding pusling electronics and crunchy clipped riffage, heavy and heady, eventually slipping right back into that opening bit of minimal electronica, and finishing off with some hushed steel string guitar, and one final blast of psychguitar skree. Awesome stuff for sure. And quite possibly one of our favorite COH records yet, which we should have assumed, considering the record bears the irrefutable legend: "HAIL TO WORLD PEACE AND DEATH TO FALSE METAL!" Swank gatefold sleeve for the double vinyl, the cd version in a nice digipack, with art and design by Stephen O'Malley.

MPEG stream: Red Square
MPEG stream: War End War
MPEG stream: Soii Noir

As we've mentioned in the past, the music of Coh, aka Ivan Pavlov, is quite difficult to describe. Which is probably why he tends to be one of our favorites of the many modern electronic minimalists. He releases records on Raster-Noton, yet his sound manages to both embrace R-N's signature minimal glitch and click, while at the same time subverting it, creating something simultaneously warm and familiar, alien and totally original. Every record is thematically and sonically unique, whether he's collaborating with other musicians, or simply creating a song suite based on some random idea, even a whim, once it works its way through Pavlov's brain into the computer onto disc and into our stereo, the resulting sound is more often then not transcendent, minimal in sound sure, but with maximum impact, his music emotional and personal where others creating similar sounds are cold and clinical. For Strings, Pavlov has decided to take the sounds of certain stringed instruments, which played some part in his musical upbringing, and in some way to enrich and expand those sounds, to twist and transform, allowing the instruments to be recognizable, and sound like they sound, but to create a whole new setting for those instruments. The focus here is on the 4 instruments that Pavlov played throughout his life: piano, guitar, saz and oud. The opener is all piano, and sounds the most at home on Raster-Noton, simple melancholy melodies are suspended in smeared shimmers of reverb, the notes stretching, stuttering, blurring into washed out whirs of dreamy chords and long drawn out tones. Sounds bent and stretched, layered and allowed to hover in long expanses of distant high end flutter. Hushed and gorgeous, the digital manipulation deftly applied so as not to distract from the gorgeous hushed drift. Really quite lovely. The piano continues on into the second track, where the sounds are much more manipulated, looped and layered, but this time into a swirl of Melnyk-like flurries, which are augmented by a stuttery techno like pulse, the whole thing skittery and hypnotic, peppered with streaks of buzzy squelch, until the final few minutes when the beat drops out and the various notes are allowed to swirl like sonic snowflakes. The next few tracks are like a suite, beginning with what is either a saz or a lute (sorry we can't tell for sure), locked into s super rhythmic strum, and processed into a propulsive minimal almost-techno, which is soon wrapped in thick sheets of low end buzz and glitch, almost synthy sounding fuzz, eventually building to an almost metal riff, all blown out and wreathed in crumbling distorted buzz, finally erupting into a confusional tangle of crunchy riff, processed hum and rumble, and Middle Eastern sounding melodies. This leads directly into a lumbering doomy digitized metal workout, the main riff grinding its way through clouds of swirling effects and smears of squelch and buzz, distant soaring sort-of-strings, all very dramatic, until the guitars fade, leaving just a skeletal rhythm, and super dramatic slow burning electronic swell and skitter. The next track is all Middle Eastern melody, laced with bits of glitch, a muted electronic throb, a bit like a slightly more techno Muslimgauze, but as the track develops, the sound becomes more digital, the original melody chopped up and wrapped around a propulsive beat before fading out into a shimmer of pixilated piano, which gives way to the record closer, beginning again, with moody, simply strummed strings, before being swallowed whole by a massive buzzing electronic drone, gorgeous and layered and so thick, while the strings below continue to unfurl. The track gets all old school techno briefly, skittery and stuttery, clipped notes, until again, near the end, that howling buzz drenched drone returns, this time all chopped up and even more corrosive and blown out. It sounds all over the map, and it is, but all the tracks, as disparate sounding as they are, slip in and out of each other so perfectly, a definitely sonic suite, with more in common than just the stringed source material. The second disc features a single 17 minute track, that starts out sounding like Machinefabriek, all dark bell like tones and deep blackened shimmers, soft whirs, stretched out almost-melodies, some strings do pop up part way through, sounding again quite Middle Eastern, and again wreathed in a brittle techno stutter, before a long drawn out stretch of near silence, and a brief coda of soft strings over distant drone. So awesome. Maybe the best thing we've heard from Coh, which is saying a whole lot. And the packaging. Holy moly! Super elaborate, die cut fold out multi panel printed sleeve, the cds held in place by various slots and slits, revealing the curved silver edges of the discs as part of the design!

MPEG stream: Piano Tranquillo
MPEG stream: Andante Facile
MPEG stream: Mezzo Forte Passionato

Never heard of Charles Cohen? Neither had we. Which is really not surprising, considering this composer and master of the Buchla Music Easel synthesizer (he's one of the few Buchla masters in the world), managed to remain largely unknown outside of Philadelphia, where he spent the late seventies and eighties composing for dance performances and art installations, famously refusing to record, concerned with the 'ephemerality' of his music, and being somewhat of a recluse outside of his music making. But oh the music he made! In a world and time where pretty much any unheard record is considered reissue-able, very little of it truly is, and yet Cohen's music is so well deserving of a wider audience, especially considering how sonically prescient his music truly was. A mix of musique concrete, kosmische new age, electronic krautrock, alien exotica and layered dronemusic, the sounds collected here are at once all over the map and unpredictable, but also all somehow also sonically linked. It's impossible to describe two discs' worth of Cohen's music in shorthand, but too daunting two go through each of the 22 tracks, one by one, but imagine, a fluid soundscape in constant flux: murky, lo-fi flurries of percussion wreathed in swirling electronics, almost like some alien gamelan - weird abstract dub, all glitchy and spaced out, almost industrial, but also sort of dreamy and ambient - very Kraftwerk sounding propulsive electro grooves, squelchy and shimmery, but hazy and psychedelically cosmic - Les Baxter like electro-exotica, maybe as envisioned by Nurse With Wound, and that's just the first four tracks. From there on out, it just gets cooler and weirder, more mysterious and even more abstractly beautiful. "Sonomama" sounds almost like Asian folk music, again as re-envisioned by someone like the Residents, especially the second half when the sounds become more frantic and chaotic. Some tracks almost sound like eighties Carpenter soundtracks, check out the "Velcro Dance", which totally sounds like it could be playing as the credits roll on some old VHS tape, but then seconds later, there's the darkly delicate "Sunrise Women-Men", which almost sounds like Morricone, a wistful, cinematic sprawl, laced with muted melody and occasional percussion, before transforming surprisingly into something way more futuristic! At this point, we essentially are going track by track through the whole collection, but it's hard not to. Every track here is a mysterious gem, sonic surprises lurk around every corner, some short bursts, others, long, slow building epics, some playful and almost goofy, others somber and haunting, even sinister, but again, every second of sound here is utterly stunning. There's tons more info in the liner notes, lots of rare photos and different writers and fellow composers offering their impressions of Cohen and his music, much of it truly fascinating, but like all great music, even knowing nothing about its provenance, doesn't take away from the magic and power of the sounds here. A truly fantastic discovery, and no doubt a contender for reissue of the year!

MPEG stream: Club Revival Performance
MPEG stream: Tubs
MPEG stream: Ukip2
MPEG stream: Blue Krishna
MPEG stream: Sonomama
MPEG stream: Velcro Dance

Cold Cave have really been making the rounds as of late, but unless you were one of the lucky few to obtain some of their super limited vinyl only platters or their recent Cremations collection (which is still available), you may have been left out in the... cold. HAHA! But anyway, Love Comes Close is the first official Cold Cave record, though it does include the three songs (re-recorded?) off the band's disgustingly limited Etsel and Ruby 12" which we had for about 5 minutes, as well as the song "The Trees Grew Emotions And Died" from the ep of the same name, all of them winners. We are happy to report that this baby more than ably lives up to all the hype. It's not that the sound of Cold Cave is revolutionary or progressive... nay, in far less skilled hands, this could easily be filed under the "derivative shit" category, but Cold Cave's remarkable melodic sense and keen understanding of songcraft are so expertly handled that their tunes come off more like lost synth pop classics. It's actually a bit unbelievable just how darkly catchy these songs are, and how they will just pop into your head at random moments like they've been there for ages. Cold Cave's music is the perfect combination of everything that is great about '80s synth based music with none of the dated cheesiness, or maybe more appropriately, just the right amount of dated cheesiness. OMD styled melodies and uber dramatic vocals from the school of Ian Curtis meld with throbbing rhythms, awesome life denying lyrics, and a pronounced gothic element, but goth as interpreted by hardcore kids. All of these combined are enough to make Cold Cave stand out from the rest of the pack. Plus, you know it's gotta be good when various folks may *want* to dislike something but can't muster the hate in their hearts simply because it's so great. The album kicks off with "Cebe And Me", with super minimal percussion and murky, distorted female vocals that weave around a repetitive synth buzz. This sets things up perfectly for the next track, "Love Comes Close," with CC mainman Wes Eisold's deadpan vocals and music that manages to be both upbeat and melancholy as hell. The real kicker with this one, however, is the fact that it is a DEAD RINGER for the melody in the infamous mirror dance scene in Silence Of The Lambs. So now all you dudes can fashion a mangina and prance naked in front of your mirror within the comfort of your own home, just like Buffalo Bill. "Life Magazine" utilizes a blown out buzzy keyboard to hold the foundation while more down to earth programming and amazing female vocals courtesy of one time Xiu Xiu collaborator Caralee McElroy help to make this maybe our favorite track on the album. A reedy little synth melody sits atop everything else, and the dreaminess of it all sends things way off into the clouds... Goddamn, it's so good. Naming a song "Heaven Was Full" definitely sets the bar pretty high, you're pretty much obligated to make it awesome, and that's just what Cold Cave did with this one. Subsonic oscillations swirl below what sounds like wispy winds made by a synthesizer, accompanied by Eisold's low croon and some of the catchiest and most beautiful melodies on the album. The slow movement of this piece really strikes an emotional chord, it's a real downer, but it's so irresistible it hurts. "The Tree Grew Emotions And Died" features some cool clanky drum machines with staccato boy/girl vocals and an ever present layer of super blown out guitars (we think), with a nice, slightly bouncy keyboard melody carrying the song forward. Album closer "I.C.D.K." is a quirky yet slightly ominous dance number that will certainly keep many an ass shaking all night long, and when it's all over, you first instinct will be to put Love Comes Close on for another round. Undoubtedly Cold Cave will have trouble escaping comparisons to bands like the Cure, Joy Division, and even the Magnetic Fields at times, and not without good reason. But the band's greatest strength is its ability to go beyond their influences and deliver music that is too amazing and well written to be ignored. If you don't dig it, it doesn't mean people will respect your supposed impeccable taste and appreciation for groundbreaking music... it means you're missing out.

MPEG stream: Love Comes Close
MPEG stream: Life Magazine
MPEG stream: Heaven Was Full

One of Aquarius's favorite drone compositions, Jonathan Coleclough's "Period" was originally released early in 2001 as a limited edition piece of vinyl on Anomalous Records and has now been reissued with an extended mix of the title track that is better suited to the CD format. Coleclough began collecting field recordings and transforming them into emphathic dronescapes back in 1989, around the same time he began corresponding with Colin Potter about his ICR cassette projects. Since then, Potter and Coleclough have worked closely on a number of projects starting with Andrew Chalk and Darren Tate in Ora, and culminating more recently with their well-received "Low Ground" collaboration. "Period" again finds Coleclough employing the production / engineering talents of Potter (who has also been working quite intently with Steven Stapleton in Nurse With Wound). Throughout his career, Coleclough has defined himself as a sound organizer, modifying acoustic events and field recordings to enhance the emotional resonance that he finds in those sounds. Here on "Period," Coleclough draws all of his sounds from a Bluthner grand piano, surrounding the spartanly placed clusters of impressionistic notes with a complementary set of delicately fluctuating drones. Coleclough does well to accentuate the sublime reverberant decay that follows the piano's sustained tones. Furthermore, Potter offered his interpretation of the source material entitled "Periodic" which effectively erases the obvious references to the piano and leaves behind a densely tangled web of calm reverberations. As a whole "Period" stands as an amazingly rich and balanced piece of work on par with Brian Eno's "Thursday Afternoon" and the Cindytalk piano improvisations. Aquarius has also gotten in a limited number of the double CD sets of "Period" which features a third mix of "Period" by both Coleclough and Potter, and a gorgeous track called "Summand," which is a re-working of some of the source material that Coleclough brought to the "Sumac" sessions with Andrew Chalk. There's only 300 of those double CDs in print. Don't blame us when they sell out!

RealAudio clip: Period
RealAudio clip: Periodicity (with Colin Potter)
RealAudio clip: Summand

Wow. Of the many recent Alice Coltrane reissues, I have to say this is the best one yet. Recorded in 1971, the record swells with beauty and emotion. It is serene not in a boring way, but in a sort of drone-y way, a state of suspended bliss and yearning that is colored with propulsive drumming courtesy Rashied Ali and Jack DeJohnette, tensely highpitched violin from Joan Kalisch, shimmering bells, and of course Alice's manic improv on the harp and ocean-lulling notes on the organ. This record is so incredibly unbelievably beautiful, there's not a track that fails to attain superlative heights, and I highly recommend you get it, whether you're a beginner or an Alice fan from way back. Fans of modern experimental work like Vibracathedral Orchestra and Sunroof! should also definitely check this out. Comes in a cd-sized mini gatefold sleeve (like an LP). Really well done!

RealAudio clip: Hare Krishna

The Conet Project, originally released in 1997, has attained near mythical status around here. Many folks associate The Conet Project inextricably with our store itself. Which makes sense. We championed the Conet Project relentlessly, everyone here is obsessed, most of us owning multiple copies, some of us incorporating sounds from The Conet Project into our own music, and The Conet Project still ranks as probably THEE best selling release ever at aQuarius. Even more remarkable for the fact that it's not really music at all, at least not in the typical sense, and it is and always has been pretty expensive, as a deluxe 4-cd set initially, and import to boot. In fact until it went out of print for the last time a few years back, we had sold close to one thousand copies, and that's just in our little store. We even used to have a big chart on the wall, where we kept track of the sales, and for a while, we were even taking Polaroids of people who bought the Conet Project to display in the store, a snapshot of them holding what we can only imagine would become their new favorite record (buyer #382: Mike Patton!). Which all leads to the question some of you may have, what the heck is The Conet Project, and why are we (and many of you) so obsessed with it? And so thrilled that it's finally available again?! Yes, available again and obviously a big time Record Of The Week. Basically, the Conet Project is a now FIVE-cd compilation (more details on the new 2013 edition's additional fifth disc is down below, near the end of this long review!) of recordings of mysterious shortwave radio broadcasts, known as "numbers stations". These numbers stations are generally believed to be encrypted spy transmissions, but no concrete evidence has ever surfaced proving that supposition. However, no credible *alternate* explanation has ever been demonstrated, either. For years (ever since the start of the Cold War), amateur radio enthusiasts have come across these sinister signals, and they continue to this day, broadcast in many languages all over the world (the theory is that some are CIA, some are KBG, some are Mossad, etc). In general, the transmissions consist of a deadpan voice (sometimes an old man, sometimes a young woman, etc.) reading a seemingly random, meaningless series of numbers over and over. Sometimes the broadcasts are preceded by a musical cue (the "Swedish Rhapsody" music box one being a favorite of ours), and sometimes the numbers are not conveyed by voice but by even more cryptic electronics (as with "The Buzzer", and other noisy, abstract stuff found mainly on disc four). Needless to say, hearing those amazing and baffling sounds collected on these cds is an unnerving experience. Not only does knowledge of the supposed purpose of these transmissions imbue them with a disturbing quality, but the repetition of the numbers combined with the background of shortwave radio static makes for a aurally hypnotic experience. If merely regarded as a piece of experimental ambient sound sculpture, The Conet Project would be a brilliant and affecting piece of work, yet with the added context of international intelligence and conspiracy theory, it becomes even more intriguing and creepy. Lots of information is included that provides a great deal of description of, and speculation about, The Conet Project. Which is possibly the most incredible, and weirdest, item of sound art/documentation that we've EVER had here at aQuarius. Mesmerizing, fascinating, unique, massive, scary, but sometimes even soothing. 100 percent recommended to the adventurous listener ('cause it's not for everyone!). And once you have it you'll understand why it had to be so many cds - being overwhelming is part of the obsessive allure of this Project. And it's not just us, The Conet Project has popped up in lots of unlikely places, most notably it was sampled on Wilco's breakthrough Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album, the title of which in fact comes from The Conet Project itself. Wilco were also famously sued by Irdial, the label who released it, and they lost! Some sounds from the Conet Project also popped up in that Tom Cruise movie Vanilla Sky, and over the years, we've heard it in various films and on various records, it shouldn't be surprising that so many weird music obsessives love The Conet Project. Really, as we said, if there's one recording that seems to be most identified with aQuarius recOrds, or that at least we mention most often when trying to explain to people what it is that we're all about here, it's most definitely The Conet Project, and yeah, over the years there have been plenty of others, including Sounds of North American Frogs, Os Mutantes, Burzum's "Filosofem", Comus' "First Utterance", Boris, Circle, Philip Jeck, Village of Savoonga, and loads more since, many other records near and dear to our hearts (for instance, hearing the first Neutral Milk Hotel album always makes us nostalgic for the old 24th street store). But for some reason it's The Conet Project that really seems to sum it all up. It's all the things we really love: completely ridiculous (4, no, now 5 cds!), completely fucked (secret government spy transmissions), droning, weird. It's just so interesting and evocative on so many levels, both musical and totally non-musical, as a listening experience and also as a geopolitical cold war and beyond artifact. Definitely an all time perpetual aQ fave: Allan's got the whole thing on his iPod, so does Andee, he also owns multiple copies of the set, many of which found their way into his old band A Minor Forest's live performances, Jim has steadfastly maintained that this is the greatest record of all time, and who are we to argue? If it's not obvious, we all are a little bit obsessed. And what this is all leading up to is that YES, finally after literally YEARS of being out of print and unavailable, The Conet Project, has been reissued AGAIN, but this time, with a WHOLE EXTRA DISC, with its own jewel case and booklet!! That's right, the new Conet Project is FIVE discs, not four, and if you're big Conet nerds like most of us, you might just have to buy a second (or even third!) copy. The new disc is not just another numbers station disc though, instead it's a collection of "noise stations", which essentially sound just like the numbers stations MINUS the numbers. So it's a series of gorgeous buzzes and strange hissing fields of blurred melody, lots of crunch and crackle, buried rhythms, whistling tones, strange textures, in fact, much of it is downright musical, so much so that we were musing, hmm, what if this new disc is in fact a hoax, a series of number/noise station like soundscapes created by some electronic musicians like Hrvatski? Naw... But there was in fact talk of a Conet remix project for years now, so it's not that far fetched, and in a way, if it WAS a hoax, it would be even cooler. But as far as we can tell, and according to our resident numbers stations / shortwave expert Jim, these are in fact that kind of weird alien sounds you can hear, tuned in to these mysterious stations. As much as we love the other four discs of The Conet Project, this new one is pretty exciting, and we have to say, definitely makes a case for buying it AGAIN! But for all the rest of you who have yet to discover the bizarre sonic mysteries of the Conet Project, there is no higher recommendation we can give, an all time unanimous aQ fave, our best selling record EVER. Sonically, and conceptually mind blowing. We never made it Record Of The Week before for some reason, but in our hearts, it has always been, and always will be, a perpetual aQ Record Of The Week!!! FOREVER. BTW, this counts as a "box set" for shipping, it won't fit in the USPS flat rate box we use, so it'll have to go media mail or UPS if you're mailordering it domestically.

MPEG stream: Swedish Rhapsody
MPEG stream: 5 Dashes
MPEG stream: Iran/Iraq Jamming Efficacy Testing
MPEG stream: Magnetic Fields
MPEG stream: Tyrolean Music Station
MPEG stream: The Buzzer
MPEG stream: "Data Bursts, 5.201kHz (USB And AM)
MPEG stream: "Exotic Cipher, 6.215kHz/AM October 5th, 2008 19:27 GMT
MPEG stream: "Descending Jammer, 7.969kHz/USB
MPEG stream: "Drone, 17.964kHz
MPEG stream: "Oscillating, 5.178kHz, March 12th, 1997
MPEG stream: "348|10|13|36|19|21, 11.573kHz, 19:17 GMT

Bands have been naming themselves after all manner of objects and creatures since the beginning of rock and roll. Heavy bands tending toward the mighty, the fierce or at least the very large. All manner of monsters and demons, various tigers and lions and even some sea creatures have been represented. But the largest, most imposing objects in nature have been sadly neglected as a source for inspiration and band-naming. TREES. So we have Conifer to right that wrong. And in doing so, judging from this ferocious slab of indie rock / metal sludge hypno-pummel, you'd certainly be forgiven for thinking this particular tree could take on any of the rock demons and metallic beasties that came before. Conifer sleepily trawl through the dark recesses of post rock, taking the languorous slow burning churn of bands like Slint or Seam Or Bastro, all dark and brooding, simple and insistent, and stretching the riffs and melodies into expansive stretches of moody melancholy, swathed in Pink Floydian swoosh and whirl, before dropping the bomb. Massive downtuned guitars explode, splitting post rock atoms into clumps of corrosive riffage, peppered with raspy howls and screeching banshee melodies, sometimes gaining momentum and becoming unstoppable exercises in epic doomy drone-metal ala Neurosis or Isis, sometimes becoming glacial explorations into slow motion doom a la Khanate, and other times employing distorted ghostly computer vocals and buzzing psychedelia into Butthole Surfers-like sonic freakouts. A lot of this does definitely sound like Isis, Neurosis, Pelican or Buried At Sea, which is obviously a good thing, but more often it sounds like a doom-sludge A Minor Forest or a post rock Boris or a very metal Slint. Which is an even better thing!

MPEG stream: Turning Sand Into Glass
MPEG stream: Albuquerque Reprise

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY. Excellent reissue! Out of print since its release in 1972 when it went almost completely unnoticed, this album is finally available in special 30th anniversary boxed double disc format! A shorter version of it was available briefly in 1993 but this features a whole other disc of extra material. It wasn't until after playing and performing for over ten years that the now-legendary experimental violinist Tony Conrad finally put his music down on wax. This was after his tenure as an integral member of the Theater of Eternal Music's Dream Syndicate with Lamonte Young, Marian Zazeela, John Cale, and Angus MacLise (NB: the latter two being founding members of the Velvet Underground, which got its band name from a paperback Conrad found lying in the street.) The Dream Syndicate's raison d'etre was exploring the sonic depth, meaning and sound of the almighty DRONE. A chance meeting with producer Uwe Nettelbeck resulted in an intense three-day recording session at Faust's secluded farm slash studio and it was here that Conrad finally got to breathe life into his own take on the drone. The Faust fellows supply a warm, insistent drum beat and a just as unstoppable bass throb. Both the bass *and the drum* are 'tuned' to specific notes over which Conrad lays his droning violin. And that's it. For half an hour. So great! Not boring at all -- your ears quickly become attuned to the waverings, harmonies, and other minute changes amongst the three elements. Fans of Neu, Can, Kraftwerk, and of course Faust NEED this. As does anyone into hypnotic droning rock ala AQ faves Circle, Highly recommended, definitely seminal album by one of the pioneers of drone.

RealAudio clip: excerpt 1
RealAudio clip: excerpt 2

Making music is all about transporting the listener to another place. Creating sounds or songs that transform the listener's whole world, so with eyes closed, a person could be anywhere, drifting through space, wandering in caves miles below the surface of the earth, laying in tall grass in the countryside, holed up in a concrete bunker during a war, wandering through the smoking ruins of some ancient city, all through the magic of music. Most of our favorite sound makers use their considerable talents to sonically alter the course of time, taking us back with them to some unrealized past, some mysterious otherworld where it's still the middle ages, or the 1900's, or the fifties or even just the seventies. Their sounds are faded postcards, old snapshots browned with age, glimpses of places and people long forgotten, it's all very evocative and hauntingly emotional. Philip Jeck, Tim Hecker, William Basinski, Jasper TX, Machinefabriek, they all meticulously craft windows to other worlds, using various instruments and techniques, they allow us to step through our speakers and into some rainy day, an overcast afternoon, in a barely populated city, an intimate get together with family and friends, a lonely walk through dark alleys and rain slicked streets, but unlike a film or a photo, these are less distinct, more like memories than actual visual images, and like memories, they are nothing but personal recollections of events long past, and like memories, some parts are fuzzy, indistinct, everything seems faded and ghostlike, on the verge of being lost forever. Capturing that ineffable sound, manufacturing a world of mysterious musical memories, with music, never fails to captivate us completely, and we could listen to those sounds, rich with nostalgia and warmth, rife with magic and mystery, pretty much forever... French experimental sound artist Eric Cordier has taken a bit of a detour from his usual electro-improv and installation work and has joined the ranks of our favorite sound makers, with his latest, Breizhiselad, an epic and gorgeously inventive exploration of tape, the turntable and a single 78rpm 10" record found in the attic of a friend's grandmother. The original recording, one of the first to proudly feature the Breton language after years and years of persecution, was to Cordier's ears, "horrible because of the catechism-like vocal arrangements" but the conviction of the vocalists, as well as the condition of the record itself, convinced him that these were important sounds. SO he transferred the sounds to tape, and attempted to capture the essence of the music, the power and the passion, while discarding the rest. The result is a haunting epic, an expansive drift through some lost era, the voices are disembodied and wreathed in murk and static, an EVP broadcast from the beyond, rhythms and melodies develop suddenly amidst a cacophony of distortion and processed voices. The opening track sets the tone, with a looped low end rumble, fuzzy and mysterious, the rich warm sound of deep harmonies, amidst a bed of tangled crackle, looped and chopped into lurching rhythms, like some disembodied short wave doom, a creepy low end moaning melody that gradually fades into a soundscape of layered angelic voices, creating a stuttering blurry chorale. The record is peppered with field recordings and bits of found sound, whipping wind, footsteps, snippets of conversations, the crunch of boots in snow, all woven into the strangely liturgical sound of Cordier's mysterious world of sound. Imagine the murky undersea drift of Oval's skipping cd-scapes, but wrapped in a thick cloak of analog imperfections, skips and pops and crackle and hiss, imbued with an ominous undercurrent, minor key melodies assembled from rumble and hum, thick swells of static and clipped stuttering snatches of organ or voice, all transformed into creepy complex squalls of sound, scraping and hiccuping, but just as often, smoothed into hushed, dreamlike drifts, warm and muted, almost like some analog Pop Ambient, letting us float serenely and ghostlike through a sonic world of dark forests and crumbling castles, small villages and rolling hillsides, battlefields and ruined cities, of war, famine and death, but also of hope and salvation.

MPEG stream: Breizhiselad / Ar Baradoz
MPEG stream: Lieux De Repos

Giles Corey is not a person. Not Exactly. It's simply (or not so simply) another musical alter ego of Have A Nice Life's Dan Barrett, who is also Black Wing (reviewed recently here) AND the head honcho of the awesome Enemies List label, and much like HANL and Black Wing, Giles Corey is a fantastically idiosyncratic slab of gloomy, dreamy weirdness, and like those other projects, the sound of GC is really difficult to describe. The first song alone seems to be in a constant state of metamorphosis, from haunting piano driven balladry, to chaotic collaged noisiness, to abject angsty howl, to lumbering industrial creep, to freaky field recording soundscape, to noisy psychedelic skree, to drowsy, downer slowcore. It sounds kind of scattered, but it all somehow hangs together. Perfectly. The rest of the tracks, while occasionally a heady mix of sounds, are all rooted in a surprisingly classic songsmithery. "Blackest Bile" sounds a bit like a more reverby, noisier Elliott Smith, while "Grave Filled With Books" is something close to classic torchsong, a little like Low maybe, and closer "Buried Above Ground" is some kind of baroque pop, replete with horns and an almost impossibly anthemic chorus. The sound of the record touches on lush cinematic swirl, breathy, bedroom folk, and moody minimalism, but certainly more than any of Barrett's projects hews closest to proper indie rock, or at least some psychedelic variant, with voice and guitar forming the backbone of most of the tracks here, and it's a testament to Barrett that the songs are equally effective whether left unadorned, or wildly kitchen sinked. And while we generally recommend Barrett's records to fans of weird sounds, there's definitely much to love here, even if your tastes tend toward the not so wild side. In fact adventurous indie rockers would do well to explore this (and potentially Have A Nice Life and Black Wing as well)! This reissue is a fancy double lp box set, that includes the book that originally accompanied the long out of print cd version, presented here housed in a foam block(!). Hence the price. Shipping might be extra too, cuz it's a lot bigger than your average lp!

MPEG stream: Blackest Bile
MPEG stream: Empty Churches
MPEG stream: I'm Going To Do It
MPEG stream: No One Is Ever Going To Want Me

Boris may be the drone dirge darlings right now, but we've always had a soft spot for their more obscure countrymen Corrupted. Where Boris revel in cartoonish imagery, seventies kitsch, eighties heavy metal, bell bottoms, double neck guitars, and balls out rock and roll, Corrupted lurk in the shadows, sullen and distanced, weary and wary, crusty and curmudgeonly, wrapped in mystery, each record printed in stark black and white, a Japanese band singing exclusively in Spanish strangely enough, who are obliquely political, and much more grim and gloomy than Boris at their droniest. Every record a massive plodding slab of depressive doom, epic and monstrously heavy, but with stretches of delicate beauty. Rumors have been floating around of a triple cd, single three hour song, Corrupted release, but until that truly materializes, El Mundo Frio will probably remain the heaviest, creepiest, most beautiful, epic, expansive slab of slowcore doom drone you will ever hear. Ever. One hour and twelve minutes. A cloud of shimmering drone underpins hazy, haunting piano and warm chordal swells, plucked harps and simple finger picked guitars. For almost ten minutes, Corrupted creep along dreamily, stepping lightly, drifting lazily through a stark ambient soundfield, before the heavens collapse and the sky begins to fall in huge crushing chunks, and massive stabs of super distorted guitars swell and crumble into an abstract pounding rhythm. Completely heavy, but strangely lovely at the same time. A lilting melody is hidden somewhere beneath all that buzz and rumble. Eventually the stabs slowly mutate into a creeping, loping post rock rhythm, with minor key strums, simple shuffling drumming and growled semi-spoken vocals, before the whole thing fades to almost nothingness, revisiting the delicate shimmer of the beginning of the record. The last twenty five minutes are mostly ambient with snatches of that hypnotic post rock, and a brief but furious explosion of soul crushing heaviness with the same vocals delivered now in a glass gargling gurgle, and then the track drifts off into ten plus minutes of barely there dreaminess, mostly single notes on the harp drifting like snow flakes against a black night sky. So lovely. Easily the most fully realized 'doom' or 'dirge' track ever wethinks. So emotionally charged, so effortlessly complex and yet so utterly and beautifully simple. Somehow it's the perfect blend of Boris's Flood (our favorite Boris!), the doleful slowcore of Low, the abstract dirge of Harvey Milk, the epic expansiveness of Godspeed You Black Emperor, the metallic post rock of Pelican, the downtuned ultradoom of Skepticism, and the majestic dreaminess of Growing. Mighty expensive but well worth it. Comes packaged in an extravagant hardcover book style digipak, with a gorgeous booklet, lots of abstract black and white landscapes, printed on vellum and overlaid other images. So nice!

MPEG stream: El Mundo Frio

It's sad but true. After 17 years, the final record from Japanese doom/sludge legends Corrupted. Or at least the last record by the original Corrupted. It seems that this is the very last recording to feature the core Corrupted members: Chew on drums, Hevi on vocals, and Talbot on guitars. Chew will go on with a whole new band, to forge a new chapter in the ongoing sonic saga of Corrupted, but Garten Der Unbewusstheit is a pretty incredible swansong for sure, and a sonically surprising one at that. Recorded back in 2009, the first thing you might notice is the title. One of the strange things about Corrupted on past records, was that all of their lyrics were in Spanish. So of course we were wondering if this time around, they would be in German. But it's hard to tell. The lyrics in the booklet are in Japanese and English, and listening to the record itself is not much help in discerning the language either, not surprisingly. Released on Chew's newly launched label Nostalgia Blackrain, Garten Der Unbewusstheit is, at least according to the band themselves, is their most melodic, and far removed from their punk/doom/sludge roots, and "totally transcends our usual sense of time. Like feeling a minute & a second like infinity, and feeling 60 minutes & 360 seconds like moment...... this transcending sense can be described as the sense of liberation from material and life through music." Which is interesting, as we thought all Corrupted records transcended time, these sprawling epics that were so easy to get lost in, but this one in particular, is a brooding slow builder, almost more post rock that doom/sludge, the opening track, "Garten" just shy of a half hour long, drifts along spacily for nearly 8 minutes, all spidery melodies, and barely there super spare drumming, the vocals finally come in, a deep growled croon, the drums an occasional pound, but the song itself, still a shimmery drift, and then when the track does finally explode into something more heavy, it's not the lumbering dirge or downtuned doom we're used to, it's way more melodic, soaring and epic and majestic, like a doom Godspeed, the thick metallic riffs underpinned by clean guitar melodies, and slow smoldering leads, the vibe woozy and dreamlike, almost spacey and psychedelic more than dirgey and heavy, although it most definitely is heavy, just a washed out dreamier heaviness than we're used to. The band slip back into that opening chime and shimmer, and while they do offer up another couple stretches of grinding post-doom lumber, they eventually return to that dreamy drift. The buzz of the opening track spills over into "Against The Darkest Days" before fading out and leaving just acoustic guitar, the piece revealing itself as an interlude of sorts, a lush gorgeous bit of steel string shimmer, haunting and hushed, which leads directly into the 30+ minute final track, "Gekkou No Daichi", a slow smoldering acoustic intro, a continuation of the interlude, unfurls leaving lots of space, the notes drifting in the ether, before being joined by a second more distorted guitar, the guitars tangled into a spidery woozy harmony, and then song blossoms into a massive soaring squall of blissed out heaviness, again the doomy dirge of the past seemingly replaced by something much more melodic, a slow motion creep that seems to hover and drift and soar more than pummel and pound, the track settles into a gorgeously blown out low end dirge, rife with warm melodies, the vocals a demonic bellow over the top, the drums pounding rhythmically one second, offering up abstract percussion the next, as the track progresses and nears its end, the guitars get more frenzied, the sounds more chaotic, a definite sloe build to something spacey and psychedelic and epically heavy, finally finishing off in a dense squall of black noise, but still shot through with the minor key melodies that seem to run through all of Garten Der Unbewusstheit. The noise eventually fades, and the track finishes with a stretch of hushed acoustic guitar, drifting on a sea of cymbal shimmer and fading hum. Wow. What a way to go. A perfect finish to a nearly perfect run. The prettiest thing we've heard from Corrupted, and a heartbreakingly emotional sonic finale. We're sad to see the end of a group we've been obsessed with for nearly 20 years, but we're excited to hear the new Corrupted, and are most definitely curious about what comes next.

MPEG stream: Garten
MPEG stream: Gekkou no Daichi

Sadly, the legendary Japanese label HG Fact, longtime home to sludgelords Corrupted, closed up shop recently, rendering loads of amazing records gone for good, but Corrupted managed to acquire a handful of remaining copies of this otherwise out of print doom/sludge classic, and we got as many as we could from them - not many. So this is indeed available again, for what we're guessing will be a very, very limited time... Here's our review from way back in 2000 when we first listed the all-time classic Llenandose de Gusanos, and in fact made it a Record Of The Week: Japanese sludge-core doom merchants Corrupted return with this monumental effort. Their previous album consisted of one long, crushing song. Llenandose improves upon that by taking TWO full discs for two tracks. WARNING: if you already intend to purchase this incredible album, read no further. Your enjoyment will be enhanced by not knowing the precise musical details that we are about to reveal...Disc one begins not with the expected wall of brutalizing guitar, but with quiet, hypnotic piano playing. An eerie voice begins to croak softly in Spanish (did we mention that for some reason Corrupted's lyrics are always in that language?) but the music is almost pretty, lulling the listener into a stupor that sets them up for the eventual entry (after 25 minutes or so!) of a slow-moving but awesomely heavy guitar/drums dirge. Eventually the piano re-enters and the disc comes full circle. Beauty and depression co-exist on this disc like none other, it's like George Winston at 16 rpm with Burning Witch playing in the background (and diabolical whispers in your head).. Disc two is the "ambient" disc, and is also really well done, a creepy quiet grey wash of sound, the sound left in the world AFTER its destruction... One of the best releases of 1999. Fans of Esoteric, recent Neurosis, Sleep, Earth, Skullflower, etc. should bow down to Corrupted. Additional information for Japanese-music-o-philes: Corrupted's drummer Chew used to play in Omoide Hatoba. And here's a 'customer review' (which just happens to back up our claims above), emailed to us by recent purchaser-of-Corrupted and classical music fan John Botz: "The Corrupted album (Llen...Lleandos...uh...something about 'Gusanos,' i.e. 'worms') absolutely kicks ass. It's hard to accurately describe just how far beyond my expectations this album is. I was totally willing to go with Andee's recommendation on this one, but I was half expecting the three main parts of the album to be: banal, new agey, minimalist piano followed by some fairly generic bongtar sludge riffs, followed by fifty minutes of gray-washed amp noise. Not Even, dudes! These guys have obviously had some classical training, and this album is further proof of how much more depth ANY music acquires when there is some solid classical training behind it. The opening piano section, far from sounding like ambient/new age drivel, sounds like Rachmaninoff on codeine and muscle relaxers. The entry of the 'metal section,' with portentous feedback, makes a real impact, and the choral ambience of the keyboards at the end, added to the piano sound, sinister vocals, and distorted guitar makes for an even more ominous feeling at the apocalyptic conclusion of the first disc. Wow! But maybe disc two was the most pleasant surprise of all! This is genuinely atmospheric (and good) ambient drone, with enough variety and layering of sounds to keep one interested for the full 74 minutes. I kept thinking of the spacey, eth-eerie-al, sections of 2001: A Space Odyssey (one of my two favorite movies, by the way; and my favorite soundtrack: Kubrick's choice of Ligeti's otherworldly choral/orchestral music juxtaposed with the majesty of R. Strauss, the grace of J. Strauss, and the austerity of Khachaturian's adagio was truly an inspired stroke of genius). Perhaps the Corrupted is the REAL 'Soundtrack of the Apocalypse.' Anyway, your description was apt/excellent, and this album become one of my instant favorites, not just a curiosity. And, by the way, whoda thunk that the Spanish vocals would be so effective, adding an esoteric arcaneness to the album?"

MPEG stream: excerpt from disco primero
MPEG stream: excerpt from disco segundo

A lot has changed since we first listed Paso Inferior nearly a decade ago. Here's our very short review from way back then: "Japanese crust-sludge band, super slow, super heavy. Their new disc. Some facts: 1) they just toured the States. 2) their lyrics are all sung in Spanish. 3) the drummer used to be in Omoide Hatoba, Boredoms guitarist Yamamoto's weird jazz/pop project, but he quit when Omoide signed to a major. 4) this album features only one song, it's 40+ minutes long... Great vegging-out music for fans of Earth, Sleep, Eyehategod, Swans, etc." Well, all of that stuff still applies for sure, but this is not, as we thought, a vinyl reissue of the original cd. Instead this is a rerecorded version of Paso Inferior, recorded in 2002, utilizing the same themes and melodies, but a whole new song, the A side sonically similar to the original, the B side, a droney blissed out drift, which is in fact an 'ambient version' of the original Paso Inferior!! Since the original release, the group has released several more records, each slower and more epic than the last, even incorporating piano and acoustic guitar. And you can hear that in the reimagined Paso. Their appeal spread way beyond the punk rockers and hardcore kids who held them so beloved. Metalheads are Corrupted obsessed nowadays, as are the new breed of dronedirgedoom fanatics. But back in the Paso Inferior days, they were the underground kings of sludge, sharing splits with pretty much every power violence band that was up for it. A band that was spoken of in hushed reverent tones, but whose actual recorded output, included only a single full length, Paso Inferior. The spirit and power of the original are definitely present, but the sound is better, heavier, and weirdly pretty in that way only Corrupted seem to be able to pull off. One sidelong doomsludge crawl, the guitars black and viscous, the track laced with squealing washed out feedback, the vocals a growled gurgle, the drums a loping lumbering pound, recent talk of a single 3 hour song don't seem at all far fetched when listening to the reimgined Paso Inferior, there's something magical and mysterious about the music of Corrupted, no matter how slow or sludgey or stripped down, it never gets boring, it sucks you in and soothes your spirit, while it crashes and pummels, mesmerizing, hypnotic, so heavy, but weirdly transcendental. The other half of the new Paso Inferior is another sidelong epic, this one dark and ambient, all shimmery drones, haunting melodies, mysterious voices, a dreamy drift rife with long tones, layered chords, but all muted and blurred and stretched into something more dark and lovely than grim and ominous, perfectly balancing the sludgey sprawl on the flipside. All new artwork to go with the music, black on black, shiny on matte, the band logo and flames or drips or streaks of some kind, inside a printed insert, pressed on nice thick vinyl, and of course CRAZY limited. In fact pretty sure this is out of print now and we might be one of the only places with copies. Which means, as always, these will go FAST.

We've all fallen in love with this one! It's a minimal-wave fantasy come true, imagine your sultry French girlfriend whispering in your ear over mesmeric machine beats... Obscure origins, limited edition, and (most importantly) utterly captivating atmosphere = Record Of The Week!! In 1981, Belgian minimal-synth experimentalist Alain Neffe began his Insane Music cassette imprint, with the first of many Insane Music For Insane People compilations. We're pretty sure that all of the material on that first compilation was penned by Neffe with the help of a few other people, including Pseudo Code, Human Flesh, and Bene Gesserit. Some of those projects (especially Bene Gesserit) moved towards a disjointed, minimal-wave agenda, while others moved towards a cacophonous industrial sound with Pseudo Code in particular paralleling the information overload of SPK or Nocturnal Emissions. Cortex might have been the most elegant of Neffe's projects, with baroque / sci-fi ambience setting the stage for monotone recitations of French lyrics from a rotating cast of female vocalists. Neffe's surrealistically charged drones, suspenseful passages of pregnant silence, and baroque synth fragments figure somewhere between Edward Artemiev's frigid soundtrack for Tarkovsky's film Solaris, the bleaker moments of Richard Pinhas (especially on Iceland), and with those breathy female vocals, the radiophonic works of Luc Ferrari. Everything on the first disc of The Whole Story came from various cassette and lp compilations from the early '80s, but Neffe managed to keep the Cortex sound very consistent almost as if he were anticipating some archival collection some 30 years later. The second disc is almost all unreleased material, except for the 24 minute "Cortex O" which was the b-side of a cassette released back in 1984. The longer tracks of the second disc favor the spaciousness of Cortex's aesthetic, augmented by skittering drum machines and prog-tastic meanderings on the intertwining synths influenced by Schniztler and Pinhas for sure. Very nice to have this reissued, although probably not for long as it's unfortunately SUPER LIMITED, Korm Plastics only printed up a mere 300 copies of this 2cd set.

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Perhaps best known for being the 'electronics guy' in the live version of Nine Inch Nails, Alessandro Cortini is also a formidable solo artist, as well as one of the few masters of the Buchla synthesizer. Having heard none of his solo work to date, we were actually expecting some sort of analog synth, goth industrial hybrid, would make sense since it ended up on the Hospital label, but instead, Sonno is a gorgeously hushed and evocative collection of minimal synthscapes, recorded in various hotel rooms on tour, all with just a single synth and a delay pedal, occasionally some portable speakers, the sounds defined not simply by Cortini's compositions and the settings on the instruments, but also the rooms, open windows, resonant tiled bathrooms, faucets on, the whir of air conditioners, sounds from the outside leaking in, all of this subtle and deftly woven into delicate, crystalline sprawls of soft focus synthsound, some tracks here cinematic an sinister, but most are ethereal and airy, fans of Emeralds will find much to love here, although Cortini's vision is much more low fidelity, but it's easy to forget about the fidelity completely, as the sounds are lush, and lovely, even the darker, shadowier movements, are gauzy and dreamlike, sometimes building to ominous billows of resonant thrum, but just as often settling into something tranquil and tranced out. Imagine Stars Of The Lid, and Emeralds, and William Basinski, and the Caretaker, all blurred into a hauntingly mesmeric ambient kraut-psych, a pulsing, atmospheric dream-drone drift... gorgeous stuff...

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My favorite hip hop record of the year, along with Cannibal Ox's Cold Vein, is The Coup's Party Music. A lot of you heard *about* it before it ever got released, due to the cover art which depicted The Coup's Boots and Pam the Funkstress blowing up the World

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The long awaited debut from San Francisco's purveyors of epic and sweeping country rock heartbreak is finally here. If the Beachwood Sparks (last week's record of the week) can be likened to the bouncy and sunny side of The Byrds, all harmonies and jangle, then The Court and Spark represent The Byrds' dark side: melancholy murmur, stark and wintery, like the restless ghost of Gram Parsons, with echoes of Nick Drake and Townes Van Zandt. TC&S produce perfectly bittersweet songs and spectral soundscapes constructed from plaintive piano, delicately plucked guitars and found sounds. A wash of sweet strings, organ hum and muted buzz, pedal steel and breathtaking harmonies. Epic and sweeping. Gossamer traces of sounds heard in dreams. Dobro, mandolin, banjo, and even glockenspiel. And then there's the voice, a deep and ragged drawl, rough and world weary. For fans of the abovementioned artists, as well as folks who like the Scud Mountain Boys, the Jayhawks, and Souled American. Which reminds us, we should mention that this is being put out by our own Andee's fabulous tUMULt label, and it may well be the only other tUMULt release that will appeal to those who have been waiting for a follow-up to tUMULt's Souled American reissues, except of course, for the very broadminded!

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OMG!, as they say. It doesn't happen very often, but once in a lucky while, one of us here at AQ will suddenly find out about some impending reissue and just about jump up and down exclaiming, "AT LAST!!!" We're talking about holy grails, like Bruce Haack's The Electric Lucifer, and Moolah, and Joakim Skogsberg, and Pandemonium... All of which we made Records Of The Week, by the way. So, last week we had another such exciting moment, when it was revealed that THIS album had just been reissued on cd, for the first time ever (barring bootlegs). Not to be confused with a host of other Covens out there, this Coven was a uniquely doomy, gothic metal band from Detroit, who released but one record, 1987's Worship New Gods. No, we've never ever even seen an original lp copy - this band is pretty obscure. You might find a track of theirs on a DJ mix by Darkthrone's Fenriz, but that's about it. To give credit where credit is due, we first heard of Coven thanks to the great metal collector nerd website The Corroseum [www.thecorroseum.com], who had reviewed and raved about Worship New Gods with enough enthusiasm to get us to, ahem, track down for ourselves personally one of those bootleg copies previously mentioned. That was several years ago, but now, though, thanks to Shadow Kingdom, we've got a legit version we can happily share with all of you. The Corroseum review said of Coven that "they sound like no other metal band that ever existed", yet went on to explain how in FEEL Coven could conjure comparisons to the likes of Cirith Ungol, Celtic Frost, Bathory, and even Bauhaus (more on that angle in a minute). We may as well quote the conclusion of their write-up: "Some dark, cloudy, angst-ridden days you cannot listen to anything else but Coven." Quite a recommendation, we had to hear 'em! And when we did, we fell in love. To the extent, that, like the Pandemonium, this became something for Allan & Andee here to daydream about trying to properly reissue ourselves. Fortunately, Shadow Kingdom were a little more proactive about that than we were, and here it is. Pagan-proud true martial metal, '80s steel that those into the epick, eccentric likes of Manilla Road and Max Planck ought to bow down to. But that's hybridized with even heavier, doomier fare, a la Black Sabbath and Candlemass (triumphantly lumbering opening track "The Riddle Of Steel" definitely shares some DNA with Sabbath's "Electric Funeral"). That's the metal side of it. But there's more: Coven also convey a strong post-punk, '80s gothic death-rock vibe, at the same time. Think Bauhaus, The Mission, Christian Death, and 45 Grave... And, thus, like The Corroseum said, they don't sound like any other -metal- band, exactly. There's just something so haunting and magical about 'em. What really puts these songs of blood and fire over the top are the stirring, echoing vocals, they sometimes struggle and strain, but that only enhances their emotive appeal. And, again, goes a long way to making this band indeed not sound like any other, their music massive and murky and melodic, swirling and psychedelic. Their battlecries from a bygone age are doomy and druggy (well, if Vikings did drugs) and oh so atmospheric. Reissued with a 16 page cd booklet full of lyrics and vintage photos in both b&w and color. No liner notes, though, but in some ways that adds to the mystique, in fact, maybe they should have left out some of the photos, too... SO glad this has been made available. Until now, all we could do, was reference 'em in our reviews of the underground epic metallers Realmbuilder, and hope that somebody somewhere would know what we were talking about. Now's your chance to find out. Don't miss it. 'Cause Coven's record is definitely some under the radar weird genius, a truly lost gem of metal, and more...

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For every ecstatic high, there often needs to be a soul crushing descent, a dark, dark comedown. San Francisco electronic music pioneer Patrick Cowley is best known for his trailblazing signature sound which helped spawn a whole dance music genre (Hi-NRG), as well as his amazing production work, not to mention guest spots on many of our favorite Sylvester tracks. But we always knew there was another side to Patrick Cowley's musical genius. His life ended way too early, as one of the first victims of the AIDS epidemic (before they even understood what AIDS was), but in the short time he was on this planet he recorded hours and hours of electronic music light-years ahead of its time. Most of those recordings have never seen the light of day. In recent years it seems a whole genre of "space-disco" has emerged out of the influence of the Sylvester track "I Need Somebody To Love", produced by Cowley, who almost single handedly created the cut's distinctive minimal spacey/sensual sound. And within the many solo Cowley releases, there were hints of this darker sonic side, a whole part of his music making beyond the greatness he created for disco divas and sweaty dance floors. Tracks like "Mutant Man" and "Sea Hunt" gave us an intoxicating glimpse into a much weirder and way more abstract world of synth-sounds, that had us hungering for more... Enter School Daze, a Dark Entries collection of previously unreleased tracks, which showcase that warped and dark side of Cowley's music. These tracks were originally commissioned by the LA-based Fox Studios, makers of gay porn, and as we listen to this over and over, we can only imagine what kind of hazy, foggy, fucked up, beyond high, drug addled state of mind that folks must have been in to watch pornography set to these dark & dizzying sounds! The opening track is the outlier here, a chunk of classic Cowley Hi-NRG, but it's certainly a misleading introduction, as throughout the rest of School Daze, there is hardly a trace of Cowley's typical dance floor production, instead these songs much more concerned with capturing a mood and vibe that evokes melting and dripping trippiness, seemingly designed for late, late nights long after the party has ended. Tracks like "Tides Of Man" take us on a harrowing dark voyage, the listener losing control and spiralling deeper and deeper into the empty void. "Seven Sacred Pools" displays an epic side of Cowley's sound, the track drifts drowsily from underwater warble and woozy spaciness into shimmering and tranquil soft wave shimmer, the sort of soundworld we wish could get lost in forever. The title track reveals Cowley reigning over his own majestic prog sci-fi fantasyland. Whatever the sound, Cowley somehow makes it his own! And we love it! Traces of Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, Jean Michel Jarre, Kraftwerk, Harmonia, Cluster, The BBC Radio Workshop and even musique concrete are woven throughout School Daze. We're also reminded quite a bit of some of the proto-dark techno records that Moebius was making in the early '80s with Conny Plank and Gerd Beerbohm, on albums like Double Cut, Strange Music, Material, and Zero Set. What's even more astonishing is how so many of these sounds predate by several decades the sound of so many of our favorite contemporary electronic artists. In fact, we might go so far as to call the sound on School Daze "proto-IDM", as these tracks contain blueprints to the more spaced-out sides of artists like Aphex Twin, Boards Of Canada, The Orb, Seefeel, Bola and Isolee, as well as some of our more recent faves like Glitterbug, Actress, Reuber, Gatekeeper, Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom. It's unclear exactly how many of these tracks actually made it into the films, but we can safely say this is still some of the most fucked up, avant-garde porn music we've ever heard. In fact we wonder if Matmos took inspiration from some of these Cowley tracks when they were asked to create their own soundtracks to some underground kinked out porn... While the circumstances of these songs being commissioned for porn makes for a fascinating and intriguing story, there's certainly no shortage of lost reissues with wild stories behind them. Sadly, it's often the case, that many of those super hyped releases, are way more interesting to read about than actually listen to. But in the case of School Daze, these are truly subversive and trance inducing sounds that still hold up after all these years. In fact, some of this stuff actually sounds way more damaged and avant than almost any new left-field electronic release that comes our way. For an artist so known for taking his listeners higher, School Daze plays out like the sonic version of what happens afterwards, the wasted aftermath of staying up all night, awake for days, smiling, sweating, arms in the air, it's the sound of bodily displacement, the dreadful coming down. When you can no longer dance, or even stand, but instead are left gliding, sliding, swirling, reaching, caressing, wishing, hallucinating, and grasping for one last chance of ecstatic bliss. This is the dark, drifty, drugged out record of the year! HUGE kudos to Dark Entries not only for releasing this amazing artifact, but for donating the proceeds to Project Open Hand and AIDS Housing Alliance, two wonderful San Francisco nonprofits who do important work helping those whose lives have been impacted by HIV and AIDS. ***Prude Alert*** The inside sleeves of this gatefold double lp contain LOTS of explicit still images from the pornos that many of these songs were featured in!! You have been warned!

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Wandering the streets of San Francisco in 1963, radio "comedians" Mal Sharpe & Jim Coyle presented themselves with an aura of research based authority as they carried out their ludicrous pranks on the unsuspecting public. Dressed rather conservatively in double breasted suits and armed with a tape recorder, they confronted people on the street with such proposals as "For the sake of scientific investigation, can we drill a hole in your head to document the sound of your unconscious thoughts?" or "Please join our cult of three-ism, in which you will join us in a collective agreement and disavow any personal individuality." Coyle & Sharpe's charisma and genuine interest to engage their audience has resulted in a confrontational humor that has rarely been matched. If you have the Coyle and Sharpe cd that was released a few years back on Henry Rollins' label ("On The Loose") you know how funny this disc will be, and don't worry, this one features entirely different but equally insane material. Brilliant, hilarious genius! They far pre-dated the now-commonplace man-on-the-street / guerrilla interviewers. Today's reality TV can't hold a candle to these guys. Just think, this was long long long before passers-by were prepared for what was in store for them! They're the O.G.!

Hallelujah!!! All of you folks already well-versed in the much-more-than-comedy duo of Jim Coyle and Mal Sharpe, you know this is the one you've been waiting for! If you've not yet gotten your introductory dose of their genius antics, this is a perfect place to commence your schooling. For a brief spell in the early '60s -- waaay back before everyone and his mother became acclimatized to guerrilla 'man on the street' style pranks -- these two sharp dressed gents were wreaking havoc in and around SF, blindsiding pedestrians along Market Street. Their unflinchingly methodical mischief was an effortless razor sharp blend of social criticism, surrealism and utter hilarity. Often their verbal interrogation would take on somewhat sinister and/or downright subversive undertones. Indeed, theirs was a much more refined and thought provoking mind-boggle than the recent parade of heavy on the obnoxious, gross out factor peeps such as the Jerky Boys or Jackass crew. Sure much of Coyle and Sharpe's antics may seem tame by today's standards, but simply put, their perfect balance of lightning quick wit and stoic straight-facedness has seldom been matched, let alone bested. Released on the Sharpeworld label run by Mal Sharpe's daughter Jennifer, this fantastic four disc set comes pretty much straight from the horse's mouth... well, at least one of the two horses' mouths. Sadly Jim Coyle passed away in 1993, but in the years since his passing his cohort Mal Sharpe and their legions of diehard fans (including one Henry Rollins) have kept the Coyle & Sharpe magic alive. Sharpe compiled the proceedings here which include a Best of '63 collection recorded off the radio on New Year's Eve '63, a reissue of Coyle & Sharpe On The Loose (originally released in 1995 on Rollins' 213 label), a third cd of recently unearthed raw recording odds'n'ends with their earliest known recording from '61 plus 'Coyle & Sharpe Get Arrested' (yes, really!), and finally a dvd of the pair's 1965 pilot TV show The Imposters (the socialite dinner party and employee evaluation segments are particular viewing treats). This is truly a case of that old truism "they don't make 'em like they used to"! These 2 Men Are Imposters is a genuine treasure trove. Highly recommended!!

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There's a dearth of actual info about the the 'band' Creeping Pink, whose Mirror Woods is the latest release on the Castle Face label run by Thee Oh Sees' John Dwyer and a couple of his cronies. All we could find was a picture of a long haired dude on a dirt road, and a poem-like description penned by Dwyer, in which he compares Creeping Pink to The United States Of America, Vangelis, July, Silver Apples and Arthur Russell (or at least AR's NY apartment). All of which we can definitely see. We might also add Sentridoh, the fucked up, home brewed, early acoustic alter ego of indie rock institution Sebadoh, cuz along with the various mutated psych elements, the fractured beats, the collaged samples, and melted melodies, there's a streak of outsider, avant, downer folk, fused to some serious psychedelic drug-pop. In fact if we had to whip up some band math, it might look something like: SENTRIDOH + TEENAGE FILMSTARS = CREEPING PINK!!! Or maybe WHITE FENCE x ELEPHANT SIX = CREEPING PINK. You probably get the idea. This stuff is damaged, and druggy, gorgeously shambolic, noisy, loose, but also pretty, lilting, shimmery, dreamlike and mesmerizingly melodic. Many of the tracks here are more fragments than songs, but in the tradition of other lo-fi visionaries, those 'pieces' weave the proper 'songs' (themselves barely even songs by most traditional standards), into a lush, flowing psychscape, that drifts drowsily from the motorik, soft focus haze pop of "Come Into My World", pairing warbled vox with blurry, retro new-wave-isms, the whole thing seemingly recorded on some seriously fucked up old cassettes, to the baroque DIY pop of "Sour Fruit", which reminds us of a less purposefully antagonistic Strapping Fieldhands. From there on out, "Peaches" unfurls as a murky, smeary space jam, hypnotic and loopy, while "Bacavan Blues", is some sort of glam-folk piano ballad, one that's dipped in droning organs, and wreathed in yet still more warble. The bulk of he record tends toward a laid back and trippy, droned out zoner-fi folk-pop that over the course of the record, bolsters each chunk of perfect (albeit damaged) poppiness (the impossibly catchy "The Town"), with more abstract soundscapery (the gorgeously hazy "A Well Placed Mirror"), or FX drenched mellow creep (the haunting, brooder "By This River Again"), or even moments of straight up Joe Meek like sonic alchemy and kitchen sink experimentalism (the kosmische lullaby closer "Mirror Woods Abduction"). Plenty poppy, extremely trippy, easily on the far out side of the Castle Face canon, the sort of thing that will appeal to fans of weirdo/avant/outsider/lo-fi pop, and still definitely recommended for the more adventurous fans of the usual CF suspects (Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees, White Fence, Fuzz, Bare Wires, Warm Soda, Trin Tran, etc.).

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Now finally, also reissued on vinyl! Thanks to local label Superior Viaduct. When we got the cd version of this on Kitten Charmer late last year, we didn't happen to make it a Record Of The Week, but probably should have. We certainly sold enough of 'em for it to have been the Record Of The Week by default. So, now that it's on vinyl, let's make it official! (Oh, and the cd version is now gone it seems.) The first proper, non-bootleg reissue of classic material from this seminal SF punk group came in the form of a demos collection released on John Reis from Rocket From The Crypt's Swami label, and in that review, we offered this concise description of Crime: "Crime proclaimed themselves to be San Francisco's 'First and Only Rock and Roll Band'. That hyperbole of course ain't quite true but indicates the level of punk attitude you're in for. Hard rocking, fast, and snotty, Crime were violent and stylish - they kicked out the jams in SFPD uniforms and shades! This definitely belongs on the same shelf with your Iggy & the Stooges and Dead Boys discs�" And now finally this long in the works, OFFICIAL singles collection sees the light of day, now on vinyl too, gathering up the groups iconic first three (and only) singles, along with what is essentially a whole record of previously unreleased studio tracks! Up first is there debut single, "Hot Wire My Heart", which was famously covered by Sonic Youth, and listening to the original, it's easy to hear why SY were drawn to it, with its droned out melodies, killer hook, and noisy guitars (especially for the time), in fact, it actually kind of sounds a little Sonic Youthy in its original form, which is pretty remarkable. The flipside "Baby You're So Repulsive" is all swaggery knuckle dragging snarl, and like the A side is surprisingly noisy and is definitely prescient, knowingly or not, of what would follow. There's some strange stuttery lurches too, which make this just slightly damaged, and a fucking killer jam that sounds as good now as it did 35 years ago!! "Terminal Boredom" is a furious blast of nihilistic punk rock, laced with plenty of poppiness, a killer main guitar melody, and some mush mouth vocals, that perfectly capture the titular mood. The flipside of that single starts out loose and sloppy, and practically falls apart, before they launch into "Dillinger's Brain", which manages to sound nearly as loose and sloppy, somehow without actually falling apart! "Frustration" is up next, and the group inject some power poppiness into the aggro punk stomp, with a super catchy main riff, as well as more kick ass guitar melodies (sort-of leads?), before they finish off the singles proper with the B side that gives this collection its name, a Black Flag sounding doomy dirge (SF's doomed for sure), all churning creep, before things crumble into chaos halfway through, only to explode into some serious almost surf punk sounding crunch, that quickly devolves into some snarly, sonic swagger. And if that weren't enough, there's NINE extra tracks, most of which sound like classic Crime, except maybe for the weird electronics flecked "Gangster Funk", but stick around for the crushing alternate version of Crime's classic "San Francisco's Doomed"!

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When we first heard about a new band featuring Sam Coomes of Quasi and Spencer Seim of Hella, we were definitely curious, but to be honest we weren't expecting anything this amazing and weird. We figured on some fuzzy jangle, some poppy hooks, which are definitely present here, but this is WAY removed from your typical indie rock record. In fact the record opener, "No More Dumb Fun", starts things off with a blown out impossibly distorted buzzy main riff that sounds more like synth than guitar, the drums downright groove, which had us imagining an indie rock version of Justice or some Ed Banger outfit making a record for Matador, but then Coomes' vocals come in, and the sound is transformed into some sort of weird twisted super psychedelic, druggy and delirious take on indie rock. That opener adds all manner of swirling effects, some strange industrial banging off in the distance, Coomes' vox wrapped in echo and distortion, the result hews closer to something like Black Moth Super Rainbow or The Flaming Lips, but even more twisted and noisy and fantastically fuzzed out. In fact if you've heard about the soon to be released collaboration between The Flaming Lips and Lightning Bolt, it seems Crock have beaten those guys the punch, cuz this has the same sort of fuzz drenched psychedelia, spastic sputtery stuttery rhythms and studio-as-mad-scientist's-laboratory production, but Coomes injects the proceedings with plenty of pop hookery, Beatles-esque at times, but also recalling old school Northwestern outfit Pond, albeit utterly deconstructed. "Corpsecrystal Mountain" dials back some of the fuzz and dips a big toe into some serious indie rock, but again it's all tweaked and twisted, the drums weirdly recorded, again super groovy, the music a tangle of synthy squiggles, with some wild progged out lo-fi weirdness that sounds more like some warped bedroom experiment that an indie rock super group, which is precisely why this is so good. "Nutritional Beast" might be our favorite, sounding like a weirdo electronic indie rock fuzzpop combo doing their best Carpenter / Goblin, but failing brilliantly, and coming up with one of THEE fuzziest, hookiest jams EVER. "Where We Get Off" is classic pop ballad, done Crock style, Queen by way of Torche, epic and soaring and dramatic, but also pretty much perfect pop. While "Bad Moves" opens like "Tom Sawyer" before stumbling into a lurching fuzz drenched dirge, and "Eat Your Hat Out" is total modern day indie pop fuzz prog, with tangled melodies, soaring vox, everything warm and washed out, gauzy and dreamily druggy. And so it goes, the whole record, a bombastic and blissed out, lo-fi psychedelic pop experiment that has yielded one of the most fantastically fun records in recent memory. The rhythms drive everything, sometimes sounding electronic, always groovy, and hypnotic, but often exploding into bombastic Bonham style rib cage rattling pound, which is where the Hella really starts to show (and where the Lightning Bolt comparison stems from). And unlike most 'indie rock', where it's the jangly guitar that drives the proceedings, almost nothing here sounds like a proper guitar, whatever riffs there are, end up twisted and FX drenched, blown out and gloriously fried, those guitars (if they're even guitars?) blur and distort until they sound like fuzzed out analog synths, and if they're in fact synths, they're about as in-the-red and fucked up as they can get and still remain melodic, then the vocals, which while occasionally surfacing as a proper croon, spend most of their time dripping with weird effects, buried in the mix, drifting amidst the sound, hazy and druggy, it's a pretty irresistible combo, one that definitely straddles the line between indie rock and full on noise rock, in fact we'd probably qualify this as noise rock if it weren't so warm and melodic and dreamily fuzzy. But it IS noisy, and loud, and kaleidoscopic, and weird as fuck, but somehow still crazy catchy. The perfect mad scientist fuzz pop concoction, and quickly becoming one of our new favorite records.

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MPEG stream: Different Strokes
MPEG stream: None Came Back

Thought we should mention that we have this slab of classic weirdness on vinyl now too... a favorite old ESP release, not a free jazz session but a freaky hippie jam that couldn't be replicated in this day and age. Here's some of what we had to say about one of the previous cd editions (and it is still in stock in that format, btw): An anomaly, even on the always far out ESP label, Cromagnon was the result of two top 40 songwriters (accustomed to producing bubblegum pop) who seemed to have completely lost their minds. I mean they must have, to produce something as wacked as this record. Austin Grasmere, Brian Elliot, and their mysterious 'Connecticut Tribe' spewed forth 50 minutes of primitive dada-ist folk psych. Chanting, tribal percussion, short wave radio, maniacal, almost black metal vocals, hysterical laughter, bagpipes all coalesce into something ridiculous and amazing. Track one "Caledonia" sounds like a strange hybrid of Comus and In Extremo, with bagpipes, jaw harp, crickets, raspy chants and teutonic percussion ("Caledonia" was even covered later by industrialists Test Department). Later on in the record is an alternate version of "Caledonia" from the b-side of the original lp, slowed down to a third of the speed, producing an impenetratable swampy murk. "Ritual Feast of The Libido" features a groaning and moaning vocal over whirring and rumbling machinery. Then comes "Fantasy", where a faux Beach Boys intro almost convinces us that Grasmere and Elliot have returned to their bubblegum roots, that is until it devolves into a messy seven minutes of garbled laughter and clattering percussion. Today this all still seems pretty damn crazy, so back in 1968 when it was recorded it must have really freaked people out, even despite the pervasive drug culture of the time... definitely for those of you who were blown away by the Comus, and for everyone who is in need of a new favorite fucked record, this is it. Now a unanimous AQ fave.

MPEG stream: Caledonia
MPEG stream: First World Of Bronze