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IMPORTANT (Please read to avoid confusion): Some items below may be tagged with a bold, red, all-caps OUT OF PRINT/UNAVAILABLE notice. This does NOT mean that all other items not so tagged are, in fact, in stock — or for that matter, in print and available, though there's a good chance they are. Some folks get confused on this point, and we can see why, so please read this for further clarification and other important before-you-order information. Unlike some mailorder websites, we don't have an electronic inventory system linked to our site, so you can't be sure of what we actually have or don't have in stock at any given moment without asking us — please email our mailorder department for availability status — or better yet, just go ahead and place your order using our shopping cart function and we'll get back to you with the status of each item. If you have general non-mailorder questions, email the store.

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What the hell is it gonna take for Chris Brady to be huge?!?! How many great records and perfect pop songs qualifies someone for super stardom?? First he fronted the criminally underrated Pond, who with their major label swansong 'Rock Collection' breathed

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We raved recently about Iron Forest, a one man band trafficking in gloriously bleak and blackened industrial noise, his disc a murky expanse of wasted beatscapes and zoner dub power electronics. Auditor is the same guy. Not sure if this record by Auditor signals the end of Iron Forest (we hope not), or if it's just another gnarled offshoot, either way, Form Destroyer (possibly named after the Skullflower record, which would make sense...), basically takes up where that last Iron Forest left off, unfurling a caustic sprawl of gristled dronemusic, grinding fields of electronic static, moaning heaving swaths of suffocating low end, dense roiling clouds of sinister chordal thrum, not to mention, glitched out sort-of rhythms, processed vokills, sheets of hiss and hum, and eventually, fragmented distorted beats, which comes together on the second track, a twisted bit of dance floor destruction, with a rhythm constructed from drum machines and jackhammers (literally we think), a sort of gnarled, blackened IDM, fractured industrial techno recast as grimly groovy lurch and lumber, which quickly (d)evolves into a harrowing black ambient epic, all grinding, pulses, crumbling rib cage rattling rumbles, staticky drum machines, and primitive programmed rhythms, straddling the line between dark and moody, and truly terrifying, ultimately, and seemingly impossibly fusing the two, into something heady and hypnotic, darkly hypnotic and strangely mesmerizing. The last two tracks change tack considerably, with "Betrayer Of Sleep" slipping into seriously blackened doom territory, a heaving slo-mo-crawl, with crumbling distortion, and oozing downtuned riffage, a lumbering deathmarch that is constantly on the verge of blurring into a blackdronedirge, while the nearly 15 minute long closer "I Can Never Be Far Enough From You", adds some female vocals, a keening, mewling cry off in the distance, over a swirling tangle of wild hiss and static drenched churn, almost like a disembodied Diamanda Galas torchsong, smeared into a bleary, blackened drift, the sound pulsing and dynamic, moments of crushing malevolence aside moments of delicate shimmer, a bit cinematic for sure, the blackness and grinding distortion eventually receding completely, leaving just some muted murk, buried melodies, distant rhythms, and that female voice repeating the title, everything eventually enveloped by soft noise and blurred buzz, for one final, almost shoegaze sounding coda, before it's just that voice, and that mantra, wreathed in effects. A haunting, and surprisingly delicate finale.

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Whoa... This, the second album from mysterious Brighton UK outfit Aufgehoben No Process, is some serious, distorted, noise-rock mayhem. And LOUD. Led by Wire scribe Stephen Robinson, and consisting of one, maybe two drummers plus sampler and other indisclosed instrumentation, the Aufgehoben boys (apologies if there's girls in the band, but I'd be surprised, this has a very definite male energy!) are teamed here with (against?) improvising "stereo guitarist" Gary Smith (whom you might know from his heavy "fusion" bands Mass and Powerfield, and most recently the Glass Cage match-up with Hugh Hopper and Shoji Hano, along with other solo and collaborative efforts) for thirteen tracks of high-density heaviness. They indeed scale "magnetic mountains" of riff and noise, venturing also into a few moody valleys of equally-distorted, but quieter, improv fuckery. Mostly, though, this is fully in-the-red sonic assault of utter devastation, full of martial drum pummel, Smith's swooping stereo guitar skree, and beyond-metal instrumental intensity, the likes of which the UK hasn't heard since the glory days of early Skullflower or Kevin Martin's God (and without God's dumb vocals) -- and even then this is taking it up a notch. Heck, even the scariest grindcore metal bands from the early Earache label roster would be sent crying home to Satan upon hearing this. Along with the old Pathological bands like God and 16/17, you could compare this to the best of the current Japanese scene -- imagine the noisiest Japanese psychrockers (Mainliner, Musica Transonic, High Rise, Boris) with a healthy dose of Merzbow added in! So it makes a lot of sense that Aufgehoben No Process enlisted Gary Smith, 'cause he's previously played with High Rise's Nanjo Ashahito, and the rhythm section of his band Mass are former members of God, as well. But this Aufgehoben disc is even louder and noisier than any of that, they're kinda of the Anaal Nathrakh of improv noise rock! We were very impressed, and glad we managed to track some of these down for the store (we'll get their first cd in eventually too).

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Part of the joy of music for us is seeing various genres stretched to the breaking point, testing the creativity of the music maker, whether it's electronic, black metal, indie rock, whatever, it's what really keeps music exciting for us. Not that we don't love us some buzzing blasting grim black metal, or perfectly poppy indie jangle, but sometimes all it takes is that black metal being twisted up a bit, or that pop music tweaked a little, or heck even better, combining the two into some impossible grim black indie jangle, to really get us going. One genre that seems to offer limitless possibilities is DOOM. We've had funereal doom, true doom, black doom, doom folk, doom pop, and within those various permutations, there are still more subsets, ultra doom can be abrasive and harsh and heavy, or washed out and dreamy, doomgaze anyone? But we have to say, we pretty much love most doom, all the various shades of slow and low, doooooooom, the more o's the merrier, the slower, the heavier, the prettier, the more abstract and minimal the better. Which brings us to Quebec's Aun, who to some ears might indeed sound like doom, and heck, certain elements of Aun's sound are most definitely doom-like, but Aun is a perfect example of the above mentioned experimentation. The tropes that define the sound remain the building blocks, but are approached as something malleable, able to be twisted into any shape, and it seems the shape Aun has chosen is something closer to the glacial crawl of SUNNO))) and the metalgaze drift of Nadja. Which is a pretty killer combo, especially in this case, as Aun manages to make that sound, sound pretty unique. The opening track of this new album is a slow motion sea of heaving black swells, downtuned and thunderous, but blurred into gritty streaks of low end, wreathed in glitch and crackle, underpinned by sheets of coruscating feedback, buried in the mix, offering a subtly melodic counterpoint to the mesmerizing glacial pulse of the thick crumbling near static riffage. The result is a totally mesmerizing, almost raga like doomdrone, that manages to be both tranquil and crushing, dreamlike and HEAVY AS FUCK. The second track begins hushed and shimmery, minimal and ethereal, while way off in the distance a churning riff begins to pulse and throb, eventually emerging as a thick pulsing wall of crumbling sound, very much like old Earth, but like the track before, crackling with electricity, and then the drums come in (courtesy of none other than Voivod's Away, wow!!), but not like a normal beat, they sputter and skitter, little explosive bursts, not fully kicking in, just peppering the black expanse with machine gun bursts of percussive crunch, before eventually locking into a rhythm, the track becoming a strange almost krautrocky groove, while all around those sheets of guitar undulate wrapping their blackened tendrils around the beat, shades of Aluk Todolo. The next track is more of the same, that motorik drum beat, but this time the guitars are muted and smoothed out, unfurling haunting melodies beneath the drums, epic and cinematic, and the cool thing is it never gets properly heavy, the guitars remain washed out and minimal, a little spacey, a little psychedelic, the production almost sounds like Xasthur, weirdly lo-fi and lush at the same time, before the track sort of splinters to pieces at the end, allowing the drums to sort of drift off, while those churning guitar drones slowly rev down. The 'final' track (more on that in a second), returns to the incendiary guitar crunch of the first few tracks, spreading out another dronescape of warm buzz, glimmering glitch, and blown out blurred melody, all hazy and super distorted, there's a brief bit of drum driven dirgery, before the track settles into some softly crackling shimmer. After the 'final track', there appears to be an unlisted extra track, sounds like maybe it could be live, hardly matters, it fits perfectly with the rest of the record, another expansive buzzscape, all layered ever shifting drones, truncated melodies, strange textures and timbres and overtones, the most abstract of the bunch, a swirling shimmering blackened drift, still heaving and heavy, but way more ethereal and space-y, the perfect final movement for sure. Equally recommended for doomlords, dronelords, and pretty much anyone who likes it slow, low, mysterious, heavy and BEAUTIFUL.

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From the same label that brought us the blackened atmospheric doom of Charnel House, the abstract doom-ed black metal of OS, the psychedelic industrial dronescapes of Agakus, the fuzzy, droney, cosmic weirdness of Sky Projection and the tranced out black metal minimalism of Avakr, comes this gorgeous collection of dreamy avant psych folk, from the oddly named Aurora Dorey Alice. But this is very likely not the psych folk you might have been expecting, which shouldn't surprise you considering the label it's on, it's not strummy or croony, it's WAY more abstract and minimal, skeletal percussion suspended in fields of barely there shimmer, lots of abstract sound, scrapes and creaks, mysterious percussion, rhythmic and murky, prismatic and crystalline, the sounds blurred and hazy and gauzey and washed out, the music is gorgeously lush, but somehow also druggy and minimal and abstract, the music is reminiscent of outfits like Avarus, and No-Neck Blues Band at times, but at others the sound is some alien electronica, all swirling and pulsing, ADA's voice throaty and powerful, at times fluttery and ethereal, wreathed in echo and delay, not always singing, sometimes blending into the sonic backdrop, all shimmery streaks of vocal sound, very haunting and psychedelic and lovely, but also strangely sinister. And when she does sing, it's gorgeous and powerful, transforming the experimental drifts, and glitched out distorted dronescapes, into dark, brooding gothic torch songs, albeit, far out, experimental, avant ones. Fans of Chelsea Wolfe, Zola Jesus, Marissa Nadler will find it easy to get lost in ADA's twisted subterranean electronic flecked goth-psych drone-folk soundworld. So great!!!

For as much as we love this band, we had never seen them play live until a few weeks ago, and our minds were blown big time. Not only did they have an entire music store's worth of gear, so many speakers it required renting a U-haul to get them to the club, and also required setting up on the floor since they wouldn't fit on the stage, they also sounded incredible. Two super unassuming guys, kicking out the sort of rib cage rattling heavy jams that would make most 'proper' metal bands seriously envious. All that, and they were funny as fuck too, playing to a strange backing track, that not only included their drum machine, but also a strange robotic woman, who sort of narrated, explaining the different songs, pimping out merchandise, and even arguing with the band members between songs. So genius. And it's no small feat to be funny, and not be a joke band. But these guys have it nailed. If you've ever seen their hilarious non-music videos, you'll know what we're talking about. But none of that would matter if they didn't rule, and they most certainly do. Definitely heavily beholden to the late great Big Black, with churning, super distorted bass lines, impossibly down tuned guitar chug, the sound angular, thick and corrosive, tranced out and HEAVY as fuck, then there's guitarist Justin Foley's hilarious vocals, that slip easily from sardonic spoken word, to wild bellowed yowl and back again. And if anything, not only is this new record heavier, and more focused, it's also way more melodic, with a much bigger focus on actual songcraft, not to mention some seriously tripped out production and unlikely sounds throughout. That crazy catchiness surfaces in the most unlikely places, the songs themselves, complex and intricate and downright proggy, a dense, relentless crushingly heavy, impossibly hooky noise-pop, industrial metal-prog that is so goddamn good, it baffles the mind that these guys were always the unsung / less popular weirdos on the Hydra Head roster. But hopefully, now that they've struck out on their own, this being the first release on their own label, folks will wake up and dig the crazy heaviness, and warped weirdo poppiness, these guys have (not so) quietly mastered over the last however many years. And yeah, it's definitely their best record yet. And no it's not all the same note (fuck you Justin). Definite contender for record of the year, so leave a space on that list, you won't be sorry... Available on cd, vinyl, and as a 1/4" reel to reel tape, for the super music mega nerds out there (the band, also uber nerds, suggest that version, as it sounds the best haha)!

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It's hard to know exactly what to say about these guys, we have to fight our urge to just gush madly, and as you all probably realize by now, we can only put up so much of a fight... the last Austerity Program record was a bombastic homage to the drum machine fueled acerbic brutality of the late great Big Black, which we absolutely loved. But this record somehow manages to retain that sound (how could it not at least a little, especially considering the lineup is guitar, bass and drum machine?) while taking it so much further. Sure Big Black were amazing, as were the legion of drum machine driven behemoths that followed, but the Austerity Program are way more than the sum of their parts. Especially the drum machine part, which seems to define most bands that utilize one... The drum machine here doesn't always sound like a machine at all, which is the key, it's super tight, and precise, but could maybe be an actual drummer. Occasionally the band do take advantage of the machine's super human abilities, but for the most part, the drumming while crushing and brutal is also weirdly deft and subtle. The vocals also can't help but give a nod to Albini and Big Black, it's not a hellish howl or a guttural growl, it's more of an angry nerdy wail, a hyper literate, snarky rant delivered in a sung / spoken, regular guy shout. But the vocals are generally few and far between, which means it's mostly all about the bass and guitar... And fuck if these aren't some of the heaviest, and thickest guitar sounds ever. It helps that the riffs totally destroy, super catchy, weirdly melodic, soaring and epic as often as they are metallic and pummeling. Sometimes super affected, but just as often a straight forward chest caving crunch, the bass throbbing and pulsing right along, often offering up some super unlikely melodic counterpoint, never content to just be a low end presence, the bass grinds and growls as intensely as the guitars.� The overall sound ends up being some strange hybrid of Big Black (obviously), Harvey Milk, Jesu, a little bit of Fugazi and some hints here and there of black metal buzz, all tightly wound into an utterly intense crushing blast of beautiful brutality. From the first track, you'll be pretty much knocked the fuck out. It's a super complex mathy metallic workout, the guitars, swirl and soar, slither and shimmer, all the while pounding out some of the most bad ass riffs ever, and it's super dynamic, with the drums and guitar locked tight, stopping to emit little squalls of corrosive feedback before spiraling back into walls and washes of furious buzz. All the tracks are impossibly gorgeous and melodic, as well as being super ultra tight and clinical,�guitars are massive, roiling and thick, the riffs warm and dense, but jagged and razor sharp, and the arrangements are mindblowing, super complex, but not to the point of destroying the flow of the songs, just perfectly obtuse and tangled, so much so that it sounds like one of these guys must have gotten some sort of calculus degree just to program the drum machine. But it's not all pound and crush,�some tracks are slow and brooding, the guitars building and building, a haunting groovy�Fugazi like percussive chug, that eventually builds to a completely catchy, massive grinding guitar / pummeling percussion battle that manages to take the shape of a crazy catchy song at the same time.� We'd be remiss if we didn't mention the fact that these guys are also really fucking funny too. But in that all to rare way, where the music is absolutely NOT funny, the humor is subtle, and clever, and just a bit snarky, but it's all over the place, EVEN in the music, but subtly so. From the sticker and obi text on the outside, to the lyrics (especially the part where they scream�"Here is my favorite part" before, well, what just might be their favorite part), to some of the clever arrangements, some of the strangely almost recognizable melodies, right down to the WTF liner notes, a chunk of pseudo-scientific data analyzing the various songs on the album, based on things like "distinct drum patterns", "average tempo", "vocal references to death", "abrupt pauses" and more. There are graphs and charts, and lengthy descriptions of how the "Divergence Index Value" of each song was calculated. Even the cover art, various swaths of old lady plastic flowers... these guys just totally rule. They're heavy and ultra brutal, but don't take themselves too seriously, they're funny, but the music is not, the humor is smart and funny, and somehow perfectly compliments the sheer epic intensity of the music... They also had a contest celebrating the release of their new record with the grand prize being your very own customized song, and as if that weren't enough, have a peek at this amazing Austerity Program infomercial: http://pl.youtube.com/watch?v=1WcsV7hQ1V4 As if it weren't already painfully obvious, absolutely essential, totally recommended, one of our favorite new records, and a no brainer for record of the week!

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This isn't even remotely new, but it does happen to be perhaps the best Autechre record to date. And as it is only now being released domestically and at a decent price (it was $20 until now) we figured it was time to give this record its due. Besides

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We first discovered Author & Punisher via a super limited dvd, cuz really, as good as the music is, and it is amazing, you sort of have to see the music being made to understand just how fucking nuts this stuff, and this guy really is. A&P is one man, Tristan Shone, who builds his own instruments, which in and of itself is nothing new, but we're not talking cobbled together rickety speakers and Amps For Christ style plywood soundmachines (although we love that stuff), we're talking gorgeous, precision machined instruments, that look like modern art, huge smooth steel drums, strange handles that slide along metal rails, bizarre triggers and stainless steel mouthpieces fitted with multiple microphones, Author & Punisher's setup looks like some post modern Rube Goldbergian sonic mousetrap, all glimmering metals and smooth expanses of perfectly fitted machines, the live performance as physical as any normal instrumentalist if not more so, Shone spinning the huge metal; drum creating thick swells of rib cage rattling low end, slamming the strange handles along the steel rails producing booming bursts of percussion, the strange Cylon like microphone producing an inhuman alien bellow. Even sans sound, the performance is riveting. Mesmerizing. We were lucky enough to host an Author & Punisher instore, and besides being incredible to see up close, the sounds produced shook the old wooden building that houses aQ so hard, that our upstairs neighbors came down in a panic, explaining that the whole hose was vibrating, and things were falling off shelves and tables. Now imagine that sort of physical energy, converted into sound, but not just any sound, but totally mesmerizingly epic, crushing buzz drenched post industrial heaviness. A sound that falls somewhere between the industrial crush of Godflesh, and the blown out electronic buzz and glitch of Digital Hardcore, but all blurred into a sort of abject blackened industrial doom. All manner of low end pulsing and buzzing, rumbling and whirring, the beats skittery and stuttery one second, pounding and Teutonic the next, and then there's the bass generator, which we assume comes from that huge metal disc, cuz a sound that thick and intense should really come from a massive 300 pound hunk of spinning metal, that impossibly dense low end, weirdly woozy and almost liquid, the tones being adjusted on the fly, so much so that it sounds like the speed of the recording is being messed with, the sound warbly and woozy, warped and darkly damaged and druggy. While at the same time being heavy as fuck, and pretty much WAY more brutal that bands with real drummer and a phalanx of guitarists in front of rows of amps. It's amazing how much of the physicality is captured on the record, more so here than on past recordings, the sound managing the delicate balance between blown out amp destroying crush, and tightly wound, barely controlled chaos. The songs slipping from lumbering doomic lurch, to swoonsome skittery abstract dronemusic, from noisy metallic pummel, thick, sinewy digidub, and from thick almost metalgaze drift, to super spare haunting minimal skitter. Ursus Americanus is definitely the culmination of past recordings and live performances, managing the seemingly impossible task of creating something that stands on its own musically, but that captures a soundmaking method that you're unlikely to experience from anyone else. Totally incredible. And obviously, if you get the chance, see A&P live, and have your mind (and ears) blown.

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First off, if you don't know the comic Wuvable Oaf, go track down whatever you can. Right now. There's a forthcoming compendium, which should gather up most everything, but the individual issues (some of which we still have in stock, just ask) come with all kinds of extras, hand drawn covers, scratch and sniff pages, guitar picks, stickers, paper dolls and even records! By the imaginary bands in the comic!! basically, it's all about a big hairy guy named Oaf, his failed attempts at finding love, his crazy cats, and his weirdo friends, the comic is silly, and funny, and clever, and hairy and pretty gay, and has lots of music stuff in it too (our own Andee is featured in one issue, as is "Aquarium Records"!!) One of the bands in the comic is the awesomely monikered Ejaculoid, and we're obviously not the only ones a little bit obsessed with Ejaculoid, as two aQ faves, LA black metal trio Harassor and mad scientist industrial metal instrument builder Author & Punisher, have stepped up to offer their own takes on the Ejaculoid classic "Fearce" (recorded by members of Limp Wrist!), which originally accompanied the Oafanthology collection, but now available on its own... Author & Punisher transform it into what is essentially an A&P track, a churning industrial pound, processed vocals, thick, grinding rib cage rattling bass, sounding like some weird hybrid of Nine Inch Nails, Ministry and robotic gabber, but slowed down into something malevolent, maniacal and darkly doomy. While Harassor turn the track into a lo-fi grim blast of grunted black buzz, furious blast beats and insectoid riffing, laced with some weird electronic squiggles, and breaking down part way through into a swaggery doomic stomp. So rad! On maroon/grey swirled vinyl, with bad ass Ed Luce artwork, includes a download!

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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. Autopoesies live album was recorded during the Mille Plateaux tour that skittered across Europe in late 1999. The success of this album (in direct contrast to the rather boring debut) unwittingly calls into question the role of the 'artist' in front of his / her laptop. This record (and thus the live performance) could have simply been made by inputing abstract images into Metasynth (a program that translates visual files into sound files - perfect for manufacturing Ovalesque clickiness), while 'the artist' could be playing Tetris or downloading internet porn or walking off the stage to get a beer. Sure, Roland Barthes' 'Death of The Author' becomes an easy conceptual basis to justify such a live show, but so is 'I couldn't think of anything else to do, so I'll act like Markus Popp snapping my gum and looking bored." Maybe this rant is without merit, and maybe Autoposies had a kick ass live show. Maybe. And maybe Andee will get that helper monkey he wants so badly for the store. With all of this said, "Live A Noir" is an exceptional album of subatomic digital glitches and white hot crackle, turbulent sonic swells and terse glacial scrape. Fits just right with your Stilluppsteypa and Noto.

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

SORRY. Will our love affair with Finland never end?!?! I sure hope not. And there doesn't seem to be any reason to worry. Certainly not with what seems to be more and more undiscovered AMAZING music cropping up all the time. First we discovered Circle and Mieskuoro Huutajaat and Keuhkot and Aavikko and the baffling and completely awesome Bad Vugum label. Then we learned of the dreamy clattery folk of Kemialliset Ystavat and their hippy percussion jam side project Anaksimandros. And let's not forget drone-doom lords Skepticism and Rapture and Tiermes. And now we have discovered Avarus and the adventurous Lal Lal Lal label. Avarus and Kemiallisett and Anaksimandros all share at least one member and definitely share an aesthetic, combining folk and Krautrock and free jazz and modern noise ala the Dead C into a totally mesmerising modern noise/folk. Avarus, while less percussive/clattery than Anaksimandros, is also less folk than Kemialliset, situating them in a unique musical position, unfurling lengthy meandering almost funereal jams, desolate and mournful, but dreamy and pastoral, motorik and hypnotic at the same time. Strummed acoustic guitars frame distant throbbing caveman percussion, dreamy soundscapes are punctuated by occasional clang and clatter, all swaddled in the warm drone of amp buzz and ambient hum. Wander into their dark forest and join the tribe. A warning: as with their prior 3" cd-r release, this is a SUPER LIMITED EDITION CD-R. We may not be able to keep these in stock for long, so if you want one don't dawdle. Sorry, you'd think that because they're cd-rs they *wouldn't* really be limited 'cause they could just burn more, and xerox more covers, but apparently not. Oh well.

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More limited cd-r madness, again from our Finnish faves Avarus. A super limited one track 22+ minute live set, and it'a a little surprising considering what we're used to from these guys. The last few Avarus releases have been dreamy, stumbly psychedelic tinged folk, with loose tribal drumming, and an odd assortment of bowed, plucked and strummed instruments, reminding us very much of AQ faves Kemialliset Ystavat (with whom Avarus share members) and tribal, free-rock collective the No Neck Blues Band. But this live record is a different beast altogether. Channelling the spirit of the Dead C, Avarus kick up quite a racket, a thick slab of sound, with LOTS of guitars, feedback and some seriously chaotic drumming, recorded hot and overblown, adding just the right amount of distortion and haze to the recording. It almost sounds like some New Zealand noise rock band like Gate or maybe UK psych/drone ensemble Sunroof! -covering- Avarus. A nice new direction for one of our favorite bands! In handpainted sleeves, every one unique!

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Quite a few of you who read our list are probably already followers of the whole Finnish folk-psych underground, right? So this Avarus will most likely already be going in your basket (especially since it contains all of their WAY out of print early releases!)... But if you're not yet a Finn-folk-freak, you'll also find this to be a great introduction to one of the key bands from that scene... This double cd collects the early recorded works of the mysterious Finnish free folk collective Avarus. Previously released as limted run cd-r's and 7"s (in tiny runs of 50-200 copies), these tracks are a tantalizing glimpse into the mist-shrouded musical world of Finnish underground music, equal parts the hypno rock of fellow countrymen Circle, the pagan ritualism of The Wicker Man, the droning throb of Faust, the propulsive rhythm of Can, and the lo-fi clatter and skree of the Dead C. Imagine a land of forests and fjords, a land of dark skies and windswept landscapes. Then imagine the sort of music this land would evoke. Droning hypnotic clattery free folk, dark and propulsive, mesmeric Krautrock, rhythmic pagan musical rituals, all detuned guitars and hand drums, chanting and wild free percussion, and everything in between. Avarus combine psychedelic folk rock, motorik Krautrock, free jazz and modern noise into a totally mesmerising, totally unique modern avant noise/folk, unfurling lengthy meandering almost funereal jams, desolate and mournful, but dreamy and pastoral, machinelike and hypnotic at the same time. Strummed acoustic guitars frame distant throbbing caveman percussion, dreamy soundscapes are punctuated by occasional clang and clatter, all swaddled in the warm drone of amp buzz and ambient hum. Lo-fi, rambling, ramshackle blues jams mutate into wildly propulsive psych-folk with intensely strummed guitars and far-away flute melodies. Dipping their toes into whatever variant of their unique 'sound' that strikes their fancy, Avarus sway woozily from atonal Jandek-ian campfire hippy hoedowns, to wild jams with spastic drumming and sing-songy melodies plucked out on beat up, strangely tuned guitars, to wild clattery bursts of percussion splattered haphazardly over a Skullflower-ish skree, to stripped down, jangly hyperactive psychedelic rock to loose ambient soundscapes of whir and buzz and twang, with slithery, sitar-like guitars. Occasionally Avarus kick up quite a racket, a thick slab of sound, with LOTS of guitars, feedback and some seriously dense drumming, recorded hot and overblown, adding just the right amount of distortion and haze to the recording. It almost sounds like some New Zealand noise rock band like Gate or UK psych/drone ensemble Sunroof! -covering- Avarus! Epic and endless, rumbling and stumbling, space-y psychedlic folk jams spread over two discs, TWO PLUS HOURS. Imagine the Total or The Dead C playing Finnish forest music. Or the Tower Recordings covering International Harvester next door to Reynols' practice space? Droning, damaged clatter, like the wild drunken cavorting of drugged out hippy carpenters. Space-y and druggy and totally mesmerizingly beautiful. MPEG Stream: "Horuksen Vasemman Silman Mysteerikoulu Royh Eli Vuh Tai Siis Moi Kaikki: Rikottu Noidat Haluavat Luusi Universumin Pienin Kysymys Varisten Kokoontumislaulu" [/audio/avarusvasemmann.m3u] MPEG Stream: "Horuksen Oikean Silman Mysteerikoulu Astraalikaali 25 Metria Kavellen Veden Alla Kirjoitusmerkki Aikamerkki Arkistosali" [/audio/avarusoikean.m3u]

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We were totally blown away by this band when we got the ep precurser to this record and we've been super anxious for the full length and it's finally here. Avenged Sevenfold are kids from Southern California who play some of the most explosive metallic

RealAudio clip: To End The Rapture
RealAudio clip: The Art Of Subconscious Illusion
RealAudio clip: We Come Out At Night

Right from the beginning, the second recording from Avsolutized to make the list, this time an earlier demo tape, limited to 99 copies, of which we got the last dozen, so these will no doubt go FAST. Right out of the gate, these Japanese black metal weirdos demonstrate exactly why we've barely been able to keep their cd in stock, with some haunting clean guitar and some INSANE falsetto vocals, like an unhinged hair metal howl, that slips from guttural grunt to warbly croon all the way back up to that freaky falsetto, in a single stretch, and then the band kicks in, exploding in a frenzy of beautifully blown out black buzz, and chaotic drumming, and those vocals continuously slipping and sliding and soaring all over the place. The buzz slips dramatically into some woozy more midtempo Burzumic lopes, with the guitars unfurling soaring melodies and haunting atmospherics, always grounded by a sudden burst of howling screeches or a burst of off kilter rhythms and machine like flurries of blast beat mayhem. Weird to think we might not have ever heard these guys if they hadn't just emailed us out of the blue. Even weirder is that we just discovered there may be some link between Avsolutized, and their equally demented black metal countrymen Arkha Sva, especially considering the distinctive Arkha calligraphy that adorns the tape cover. But none of that matters once you're immersed in the swirling black world of Avsolutized, furious and blackened and heavy, all twisted into strange shapes and tangled up with those insane and impossible vocals, and some seriously inhuman lightspeed drumming. And again, LIMITED TO 99 COPIES! We have less than 15. Each one housed in a cool extra paneled tape cover, and each one hand numbered.

Finally! The long out of print nineties releases from legendary industrial / power electronics / UK noise / black drone one man band AX once again see the light of day. Longtime fans of the mighty Skullflower, will no doubt be familiar with AX, the project of one time SF member Anthony Di Franco, who also did time in a number of other bands you might also be familiar with: Ramleh, Novatron, Ethnic Acid, JFK. But we always had a soft spot for AX, whose first two vinyl lps (collected here), Nova Feedback and II, originally released in 1994 and 1995 respectively, were for some of us our first taste of power electronics, and unlike much of the more harsh, ear shredding power electronics, AX trafficked in something much more droned out, a sound that whether intentionally or not, seemed to foreshadow the sort of slowburn sludge, and crumbling slo-mo ultra-doom that would follow. It's hard not to hear hints of Earth and SUNNO))) and Bunkur and Khanate or even groups like Troum and Maeror Tri, for all of its noise, and it IS noisy, that noise is sculpted in such a way as to render it impossibly listenable, totally hypnotic, and utterly mesmerizing. You can almost imagine a primitive hybrid of Troum and SUNNO))), the dark trancelike dronescape of the former, fused to the impossible black hole heaviness of the latter, but then the whole thing doused in a haze of caustic industrial crunch, and liberal swaths of grinding howling feedback. This collection opens up strangely enough with one track that is NOT from either of those two 12"s, but is instead plucked off AX's only proper full length cd, 1997's Astronomy, but that track, "Kortex", is definitely the perfect opener, and in some ways the perfect introduction to AX. The doomiest of the bunch by far, due in no small part to its plodding slow motion 'beat', a gristly metronomic crunch, that sounds like a snare hit slowed down a hundred times and run through a bank of dead distortion pedals, over which Di Franco lays down a churning layer of crumbling blackened distortion, wreathing those plodding squashed bug beats in squalls of overloaded powergrid buzz, it's a sort of primitive electron-level ultra doom, snakelike tendrils of hiss wrapped around sheets of grinding metallic buzz, all driven by that sinister blacknoise pulse. Which leads directly into "Nova Feedback 1", a swirling psychedelic wash of rumbling black buzz, and phased out thrum, evoking the whole guitar-against-the-amp style near-static minimalist doomdirge. Fans of the late great Vulture Club and other practitioners of that sort of doomdronedrift will be in heaven. "Heavy Fluid" is near symphonic, a sprawling 11 minute soundscape of layered guitar buzz, gristly electronics, shards of static, clouds of hiss, some serious proto-SUNN extreme slo-mo heaviness, which had us thinking a bit of another recent aQ fave, Blackwolfgoat, unfurling an endless cascade of woozy guitar buzz and melting blackened psychedelic riffage, the tones shifting constantly, as if someone was continually fiddling with the pitch knob, or more likely, an endless fiddling with the tuners, letting notes morph into other notes, to dip down into an even murkier thrum, before slowing drifting into a near howl. The sort of track, that we could listen to ENDLESSLY, only really exploding about 8 minutes in, when the original detuned creep is barraged by scrapes and squiggles and an avalanche of still more roiling guitarnoise. There are moments of pure noise, "Theme One", is in fact pretty much a four minute blast of face melting, ultra corrosive, blacknoise blur, but it almost acts like a palette cleanser, as it leads directly into the title track, which might be the most tranquil jam here, again foreshadowing the sort of bleak black soundscapery of groups like Wolf Eyes or Blue Sabbath Black Cheer or Gnaw Their Tongues, a gorgeously abject stretch of haunting post industrial buzz and hum, super cinematic, laced with all manner of grinding guitar noise, and strange moans and creaks, slipping easily from hushed drift, to cavernous bellow, and back again. We then move into the two tracks from AX's II 12", the first a 10+ minute of grinding power electronics bliss out, which after an opening blast of speaker destroying crunch, seems to gradually settle into something more spaced out and atmospheric, but really no less noisy, buried voices, shards of feedback, and all manner of metallic crunch, are blurred and smeared into a softly heaving sprawl of dense, droned out, psychedelic free-noise drift. The second part begins as a low level hum, distant heaving moans buried beneath layers of static and hum, super dense and tense, the perfect cue for the final shot in some long lost seventies horror movie, but soon the haunting elements are all but subsumed by the swirling noise, the result a roiling sea of hiss and howl, grinding metals and churning buzz. Finally, the collection finishes off with the last two tracks from Nova Feedback, the first, a dreamily psychedelic swirl of prismatic deconstructed guitar shimmer, and process chordal whirl, pulsing and pulsating, easily the prettiest track here, those strange melodies a recurring theme throughout the track, but gradually pulled apart and recontextualized, drifting dreamily one second, chopped up, looped and layered the next, wreathed in delay and reverb, and sent swirling into the ether, keening melodies over soft focus background guitarnoise, here rendered a dreamlike haze, totally hypnotic, and strangely tranquil. And finally, "Cluster" finishes things off, with what sounds like a classic chunk of black metal buzz, but here looped and layered and stretched out into an endless stretch of guitarbuzz mesmer, again reminding us of Blackwolfgoat, or perhaps Mick Barr, if he was restrained to just using the lowest strings, but that sort of near symphonic buzz, a churning tangle of blackened riffage, but blurred into something much more amorphous, a dreamlike cloud of psychedelic black shimmer, that is the perfect finish, to a near perfect collection. Needless to say EXTREMELY recommended, and not just for nineties industrial obsessives (although obviously, for those folks, this is a no brainer), but if you dig minimal guitar mesmer, psychedelic doom, abstract heaviness, post industrial soundscaping, all strains of drone, especially heavy guitardrone, this collection will blow your mind.

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MPEG stream: Nova Feedback I
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ALSO ON CD!!! A while back we reviewed Three Virgins, the 1986 debut from NZ pop weirdos the Axemen, and as a frame of reference for what sort of deviant pop to expect, we mentioned Strapping Fieldhands, Guided By Voices, Sebadoh, Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments and older outfits like Captain Beefheart, the Velvet Underground, we also posited that these guys would have sounded right at home on legendary label Shimmy Disc. Well by 1989, very little had changed when the Axemen unleashed their second long player, Derry Legend. If anything, the songwriting was better, with some crazy catchy poppiness tucked amidst the sonic chaos, but otherwise, the sound was as ramshackle and al over the map as ever. The sound has definitely got some Flying Nun DNA running through it for sure. But those genes were mutating big time, and whatever similarities these guys shared with their fellow 'Nuns, the Clean, the Chills, the Bats, in the Axemen, those sounds were all twisted and tangled up into warped and warbly shapes, the sounds melty and druggy, loose and wild, and on the edge of total collapse. No surprise that Derry Legend was one of Kurt Cobain's favorite records, cuz it definitely has much in common with lots of his other faves: The Vaselines, Half Japanese, the Shaggs, etc. From snarly, snotty, swaggery jangle glam pop, to noisy, stumbly, fuzz drenched post punk, to hazy, drugged out fug-pop balladry (replete with Velvets style 'do-do-do-do' background vox), to damaged twee pop warble, to organ driven garage rock crunch, to almost fifties sounding rock and roll, to ominous, brooding drug folk, these guys tied all these disparate sounds into one ever-shifting, outsider mutant pop that will have weirdo pop obsessives freaking the fuck out!

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Long overdue collection of out of print material from SF based free noise sound sculptor Axolotl. Collecting tracks from the Jyrk cd-r Oranur, the Spirit Of Orr cd-r Object Phantom and the more recent Gypsy Sphinx 12" Chemical Theater. As much as we pretty much love everything Axolotl has done, and as much as we're psyched to have some of the older stuff on a real cd, this disc is worth it alone for the two tracks from the Chemical Theater 12", the first record where we noticed a distinct stylistic shift in Axolotl's sound. Here's what we had to say about those tracks: "We had to keep checking to see what we were listening to. Some of the elements are certainly similar, but it's way dreamier and laid back, muted and murky, subtly propulsive, it actually sounds quite a bit like Oval or Gas! Which is a VERY good thing. Slow shifting underwater drift, a looped hypnotic dream world, rich waves of warm sound, a totally gorgeous abstract minimal ambience." Sounds pretty great huh? Well, it is. And the two tracks from Chemical Theater are nearly twenty minutes long! Basically half of the 12". Including the 11+ minute glorious dreamy drone "Illiaster". But the funny thing is, revisiting the older tracks, they are just as good somehow, sounding way more fuzzy and blown out and beautiful than we remember. And we definitely remember digging them, a lot, but they sound SO great... Thick washes of murky gritty grime, drones that twist and rumble and give way to fragmented bits of melody. Soft focus stretches of pixelated ambience, guitar strums that come apart, the notes drifting in all different directions, each note enveloped in its own little swath of buzz or fuzz, simple percussion, damaged rhythms, all wrapped in a dense fog of glowing guitar growl and fuzzed out feedback... So recommended.

MPEG stream: Chemical Theater
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We've been meaning to list more releases on Medical Records, one of the coolest reissue labels going these days. The label describes themselves as "Purveyors of classic synth, cosmic disco, wave (cold/new), and future music", and in the past have brought us killer reissues from Der Plan, Deutsche Wertarbeit, and Alexander Robotnick, with tons more we've yet to review (but hopefully will soon!). But we can't think of a better way to start our Medical Records review campaign than this amazing record, 1983's Novels For The Moon, by the awesomely named Axxess, aka French multimedia artist Patrick Mimran, a record whose genesis is nearly as interesting as the record itself. But before we get to that, just know that ANYone into the current crop of psych-space-synth retro-futurists, a la Zombi, Majeure, Umberto, Gatekeeper, Dylan Ettinger, Nightsatan, Blizaro, Xander Harris, Roll The Dice and all the rest, should grab one of these right now! So, the story goes, that Mimran was working as a top executive at Lamborghini Motors (the exotic sports car / race car company), when he made this record, and originally released it on, believe it or not, Lamborghini's own record label (which had us wondering what other Lamborghini Records releases might be lurking out there?!). His music was heavily influenced by the German krautrock of the time (Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, etc.), and he even commissioned a German engineer to build him a custom synthesizer, a much more complex version of one that the same engineer had earlier designed for Tangerine Dream! And in a further connection to Tangerine Dream, Novels For The Moons was recorded with help from TD member Christopher Franke (who was also in Agitation Free). Needless to say, sonically, this Axxess album has much in common with Tangerine Dream, but also with the creepy synth soundtracks of Goblin and John Carpenter, the sounds on the record ranging from pulsing space disco, to haunting ominous synth soundtrackery, to blissed out kosmische new age, often all of those combined. On first listen, you'll be shocked at how much the current crop of synth wranglers sound like Axxess, an artist probably most of them have never heard, but who no doubt will be immediately obsessed with, how could they not be? The tracks mesmerizing and hypnotic, sequenced melodies, pulsing rhythms, the Kraftwerk vibe HUGE in places, thick swaths of kosmische drift, swirls of new agey shimmer, much of this sounds like mysterious B-movie soundtracks, chase scenes, credit sequences, others sound like background music from some seriously tripped out seventies nature program, all of it sounds druggy and cosmic, soaring and epic and impossibly catchy, driving and pulsating, pulsing and mesmerizing, beyond the classic synth sounds, there's plenty of other craziness going on as well, strange processed vocals, intense stereo panning, even wild monkey screeches on one track, but it's all somehow woven into the whole, which most definitely works as an album proper, but whose sound slip seamlessly from dark and ominous, to playful and goofy, to intense and driving, krautrocky and blissed out one minute, groovy and darkly psychedelic the next. So totally recommended. LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES! Each one hand numbered. Pressed on 180 gram yellow vinyl, housed in a reproduction of the original jacket, with a 12"x12" printed insert with liner notes including pictures of the synth used to make the record, a history of the record and its creation, and an interview with Patrick Mimran!

MPEG stream: Griffin's Disaster
MPEG stream: Twilight Ride
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More grim buzzing black metal from Finland! For some of us, that's all we need to know, but then, go ahead and check inside and discover that the lyrics were "written and stolen from various sources", by someone called Ancient Fisherman, who just so happens to be Albert Witchfinder of the mighty Reverend Bizarre!! Fuck yeah! So in addition to digging through the RB archives and releasing almost as many records posthumously as when they were actually a band, Mr. Witchfinder indulges his glacial ultra doom side as The Puritan, and offers up musical black masses in both Armanenschaft, and now Azrael Rising. Relentless and furious, buzzing and black, the Ancient Fisherman's partner Vitutor lays down some serious grimness, channeling the Nordic elite, but also countrymen like Horna, Ajattara, Beherit, Sargeist, the Finnish elite, and Azrael sounds right at home. Long epic stretches of sweeping keyboards, give way to loping sprawls of midtempo Burzumic buzz, before slipping into lightning fast blasts of blown out blackness. One track stands out, as it harkens back to Reverend Bizarre, a seriously doomy trudge, the vocals slipping from harsh and screechy to bellowy and demonic, while the riffs churn and the tempos lurch, before the last song crashes in, a blown out hiss drenched burst of midtempo drumming, washed out blurred buzzing guitars, and vocals that are wild and gloriously unhinged. So there you go... Black metal. Finnish. Albert Witchfinder. Buzz. Blast. Grim. What else do you need?

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We first discovered Chris Sigdell, aka B-Tong (which, by the way, is usually written with a little circle, you know, the degrees sign, not a dash, but our website doesn't like it, so hence the hyphen), via a four way split called One Man Drone, which as you may have surmised, was a collection of one man drone-groups, and our favorite of the bunch happened to be B-Tong, whose sound was weirdly cinematic, and fantastically and psychedelically noisy and chaotic. We compared the sound to Philip Jeck mixing Goblin and Wolf Eyes! We later discovered that Sigdell played in NID, another group who utilized drones, but wove those drones into something much more cacophonous, and expansive and lushly layered. But still, ultimately, it was all about the drone. We had always hankered for more B-Tong, and while apparently there have been a bunch of full lengths, this is the first we've managed to get our hands on, and it's just as good as we remember; and yeah, if there was ever any doubt, Sigdell firmly establishes himself as an aQ-pantheon-worthy dronelord. The opener, is ominous and cavernous, laced with weird crackles and gritty crunch, kindred spirits with our own Jim Haynes for sure. The sounds oozing a sort of sonic decay, and some deft and subtle sample placement, makes the opener even more chilling. It's almost like some industrial doom, stripped down to its skeletal core. A moody, muted melody, playing out like foghorns in the distance, echo drenched chimes, and tinkling percussion, buried under grey washes of softly undulating thrum, lots of constantly shifting textures, and some seriously harrowing sound design reminiscent of Ben Frost. And the sound continues to drift southward as the record progresses, a virtual journey through dark caverns, toward whatever lurks below, fields of deep resonant rumbles, dripping water, distant billows of thunder, stretched out into weird glossolallic shimmers, thick chordal blurs that ooze and bleed ominously, splashing water doused in FX and transformed into a sort of garbled alien language. Plenty of barely there lowercase ambience, but also super active sprawls of electro static gristle, ultra creepy moans and gasps, sonar pings that disappear into the abyss, short wave broadcasts from beyond, lumbering behemoth beats, dulled into barely perceptible pulsations, smears of almost dub like throb, and keening high end tones dulled into bleary shimmery sonic ripples, all locked in a sort of hazy stasis, while all around, billowing clouds of black hum drift malevolently, and beneath this black soundworld, hushed melodies, and dreamlike sonic coloration, shift constantly creating an ethereally prismatic sonic backdrop. Fantastic. Essential dronemusic for sure!!

MPEG stream: Stasis Field
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Okay doomlords and dronelords, it's been a while since we got something in this heavy and grim and bleak and doomic. Something so blackened and crushing, but also so dark and droney, so blissed out and blurry. The mysterious B.Baphomet, utilizing a strange collection of sound making devices, including bass guitars, Moogs, FX, vocals, Rhodes, percussion, oscillators, seat creaking, vibraphone and of course "knocking something over", has concocted this haunting mysterious collection of blackdrones and downtuned ambient doom, of shimmering whispers and washed out electronic landscapes. Weirdly, two of the tracks here are credited to B.Baphomet, while two of them are credited to M. Colby, who IS B.Baphomet. Regardless, the opener is for the doomlords, a near black metal crawl, huge guitar chords poured out like black tar, super processed vocals howl and growl, streaks of feedback and long stretches of crumbling rumble, like a black metal version of that Vulture Club record we love so much. This is ultra-ultra-megadoom, an impossibly thick wall of black buzz, of low end sludge, creeping and seeping, the vocals buried in the mix, crushing and pummeling, a slow motion sonic flaying. The track eventually morphs into something much more static, the guitars spread out into throbbing drone, layered with fuzzy synths, and tons of low end, occasionally peppered with barely audible vocals, strange short wave interference, damaged FX,13 minutes of utter and glorious aural punishment. But from that point on, the other three tracks, are for the dronelords (and hell, by now most aQ customers should count themselves as both, doomlord and dronelord), something much more abstract and minimal, the second track, is a strange swirl of muted melodies, buried rhythms, swells of processed guitar, all smeared into a blurry glimmering dronescape. The third track is similarly minimal and drone-y but much more gritty, the various tones crumbly and distorted, crackle, hiss, whir wrapped around decaying sound, the track slipping from warm alien glow, to subterranean industrial grind, but always stretched into long drawn out alien sounding sonic expanses. The final track is the prettiest of the bunch, a sort of lullaby, drifting bell like tones, glimmering chimes, muted delicate melodies, warm soft chords, all so soft and shimmery and so unlike the rest of the disc, especially the blackened opener. SUPER LIMITED!! Only 111 copies! Each disc comes in a super swank hand screened brown on brown cardstock sleeve, with a printed red Japanese style obi, inside, a printed color insert, each one hand numbered.

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Baader Brains. This is one of those wonderful instances where the name kind of says it all: frenzied, powerful, pummeling hardcore punk mixed with the aesthetics and politics of extreme Marxist urban guerilla movements. It's by no means a novel combination, but it's incredibly rare for a band of this ilk to be so well done and for every one of its elements to have been given so much obvious consideration. Musically, The Complete Unfinished Works Of The Young Tigers takes the majority of its queues from Damaged-era Black Flag and the Gravity Records catalog, but manages to still sound vibrant, and totally current.�It's muscular, angular, fractured and anthemic all at once and recalls everything that makes us excited about this particular brand of punk rock (post-hardcore, or whatever you want to call it).�This should come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the pedigree of Baader Brain's membership: Mike Kirsch and Jose Palafox (guitar and drums, respectively) have done time in some of the heaviest hitters of the West Coast US hardcore scene since the late '80s.�Kirsch, in particular, is a revered figure in the Bay Area, having lent his talents on guitar, vocals and electronics to a long list of bands including Fuel, Torches To Rome, and Please Inform The Captain This Is A Hijack; while Palafox's drumming has been an integral part of Struggle, The Swing Kids, and Yaphet Kotto.�Both also did time in the mighty Bread and Circuits, who sole LP is an underrated classic.� Suffice to say, if you have even a passing interest in the catalogs of Ebullition, The Mountain Collective, Level Plane, or Gravity Records, this is going to freak your beak. Where Baader Brains becomes (as the youth say) some seriously next level shit, is with everything that surounds the music itself and their uncanny ability to balance the two without either one outshining the other.�The group's devotion to the aesthetic of leftist paramilitary revolution is beyond impressive, while their command and use of its related tropes and references is encyclopedic.�The packaging, album art, liner notes and samples that bridge most of the songs together manage to string together a bewildering series of shout outs (both blatant and subversive) to everything from the RAF to the Khmer Rouge to the PFLP to the Black Panthers and more (there's even some John Zerzan-style future primitivism thrown in there for good measure)!�It's a flood of images, sounds and references that manages to capture the frenetic audio-visual overload of the band's live show, something that we here in the Bay Area are lucky enough to get to see on a semi-regular basis (picture ever-evolving uniforms of the Young Tigers, imposters posing as the actual band being run off the stage at gunpoint, tiger striped balloons falling from the ceiling, split screen video projections, and a seamless integration of live music and samples all crammed together in about 20 minutes of whip-tight performance).�Baader Brains' commitment to its rigorous aesthetic is so complete and so all-encompassing in its mix of different media, that it almost makes more sense to think of this LP as a small part of a much larger piece of ongoing performance art.� That said, this is a seriously ass-kicking record and those of you with no interest in the band's political leanings or no knowledge of the references will find nothing lacking in the record's musical content. Unsurprisingly, The Complete Unfinished Works Of The Young Tigers comes lavishly packaged to the point that it took three separate labels to come up with enough resources to make it happen.� You get a full-colour jacket printed inside and out), an LP-sized obi, two separate insert booklets, and a fully printed inner sleeve.�It's seriously over-the-top, it's limited to 1000 copies worldwide (300 of those are on swirled yellow and black vinyl and yes we have a handful of those, but will be doled out RANDOMLY!!!), and is selling out all over the place.�Don't sleep on this one - this is one of the most exciting hardcore records we've heard in a long time, and we can't recommend it highly enough!

We'd been hearing about these guys for a while, lots of people we trust, kept telling us we'd love these guys, and just how crazy heavy and hooky they were, and you know what? They were right. Imagine the bastard son of the Melvins and Harvey Milk, ok? Now imagine that son got it on with the bastard son of Thin Lizzy and the Champs, and then the resulting bastard son got super into Deep Purple and ZZ top, and ended up hooking up with some hot metal chick into Motorhead and the MC5, and they had a baby, and all they played that baby was nineties AmRep 7"s until it grew up and was basically doomed by several generations of rock genetics to start a band, well, then this is probably the band he or she would start. With any sort of band like this, there's a bit of tongue and cheek going on, not that it's a joke band, but bands like this are meant to be FUN, especially live, the sort of show you go to and end up getting home, beaten and bruised, sweat soaked and drunk as fuck, with about twenty years worth of classic riffs lodged in your head. And they've done a pretty good job of capturing that on vinyl, huge thick guitars, monster drumming, bellowed vox, that sound like that have to be coming from some massive bearded mountain man, the sound flitting easily from dense progged out math metal radness, to punked out metallic stomp, to swaggery classic rock crunch, harmonized leads, cowbell, all the ingredient of ROCK, deftly wielded by these barbarians. Opener "Brick Toothpick" starts out all Champs-y before stumbling into some Melvins style lumber, "Fake Tan" is all fist-pumping, head-banging stadium rock epic writ punk-as-fuck, "Bore" is all churning math metal swagger, with big hooks, big drums, and some awesomely ridiculous lyrics. Elsewhere, the sound slips from super distorted Torche like sludge pop, to -almost- arena ready heavy rocking a la Mastodon or Queens Of The Stone Age, even some tripped out krautrockiness and swirling psychedelia here and here, but these guys don't get weird or musically high falutin', this is the sort of RAWK, that's about drinking and fucking and fighting, this is the sort of hard rocking good ol' boy soundtrack we all hear in our heads as we're making one glorious bad decision after another. Fucking AWESOME.

MPEG stream: Brick Toothpick
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Let's just go on the record and say, that British comedy is far superior to American comedy. Especially in the realm of the ultra-uncomfortable. Love Curb Your Enthusiasm? Just wait until you check out Peep Show. Can't get enough of the Office? Well the British original is way funnier, and WAY more brutal. And you haven't even begun to feel massive gloriously hilarious discomfort until you've seen Alan Partridge (review of the series DVD elsewhere on the AQ site). But way back when, the Brits were already showing us a thing or too, with the utterly amazing, very DIY, and funny as fuck Young Ones, finding its way to American TV in the '80s... the tale of a hippy, a mod, a punk, and a creepy money obsessed shyster, all living in a run down house together, with a talking hamster, an insane landlord, and bands like the Damned or Madness showing up every week to rock out in the living room. After the Young Ones dissolved, the punk and the hippy and the mod went on to the long running meta-sketch comedy show The Comic Strip. Super smart and sharp, but not afraid of being really really dumb once in a while (but in a really smart way). Hence we have Bad News. The worst heavy metal band you've never heard. Taking the whole Spinal Tap thing in a much more dismal, depressing, volatile and gut busting direction. Culled from two episodes of The Comic Strip, the disc captures all of their 'hits' as well as track after track after track of the band bickering and even physically abusing each other. As if you couldn't tell already, this is one of the funniest records ever. EVER! And unlike lots of 'joke' musical projects, the songs are completely kick ass. In fact the song "Drink Till I Die" sounds like some lost Motorhead B-side. Hell, A-side even. They do a painfully bad version of "Bohemian Rhapsody", a Christmas single, and a handful of amazing originals, like their theme song "Bad News" and the super kick ass "Warriors Of Ghengis Khan". But the songs, as good and as funny as they are, are merely musical interludes for the fighting that comes between. And the cool thing, is it's not just clips from the show, it's band meetings, aborted recording sessions (including an amazing bit where they spend forever trying to make 'scary woodland sounds', resulting in one of them moo-ing like a cow, and yet another fight ensues since 'cows are not scary or evil'), confrontations over who re-recorded whose parts, lots of screaming and yelling and tons of profanity. It's intense and brutal and so goddamn funny. It's so relentless you can barely take it after an hour. Any one who is into Longmont Potion Castle or the Great Phone Calls record or Jon Wayne (the band) or Spinal Tap will love Bad News. Plus, if you can, rent the video, which is just as funny as the cd. You get to see Bad News actually perform at a British Metal festival, and get pelted with bottles and eventually beaten to a pulp, as well as all your favorite metal stars (Ozzy, Scorpions, Def Leppard, Lemmy) talking about how much Bad News suck. Soooooooo goddamn funny and amazing and essential.

MPEG stream: Drink Till I Die
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MPEG stream: Warriors Of Ghengis Khan
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From the always impressive Sygil label, who in the past has given us stunning releases from Aurora Dorey Alice, Charnel House, Avakr, OS, Sky Projection and more, comes this gorgeous missive of witchy, washed out dark wave gloominess/dreaminess. Falling somewhere between the drifty murk of Grouper, and the gothic torch songs of Zola Jesus, Bad Psychic unfurls stately, hauntingly meditative gloom-ragas, with soaring, tranced out vocals, over a bed of roiling dark drones, and softly churning synths. Woozy loops, and layered melodies, bleed and blur into softly undulating sonic tapestries, sometimes tethered to a spare, skeletal rhythm, but often left to float weightless in a sprawl of blackened shimmer. Some tracks (like "Dance Spell") slip into a sound a bit more overtly new wave, but even then, it's still creepy, and hazy, and drowsily lo-fi. Opener "Fortune" sets the mood perfectly, with it's tranced out, almost chorale sounding mesmer, that druggy, drowsy vibe surfacing throughout the record, sometimes morphing into a grim kosmische sound, other times blossoming into near poppiness, but always shadowy, and grey, and darkly dreamlike. Even after just one listen, we were compelled to just lift the needle and put it right back at the beginning again. Fans of witchy, dreamy dark pop, especially folks who were bummed on the most recent Zola Jesus record, will find themselves wishing that had sounded more like this. A dark, droney, hypnotic, gloom pop gem, that comes WAY recommended. Includes a download code as well. LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!! Each one hand numbered.

MPEG stream: Fortune
MPEG stream: Dance Spell
MPEG stream: The Veil
MPEG stream: Sister

Awesome! We'd been waiting and wanting more from New Zealand's bizarre Bad Statistics ever since we got their vinyl-only debut, Static, last year. In addition to thinking they had a really excellent band name, we loved the doomic, droning weirdness of their propulsive krauty NZ noiserock, made even weirder by the utter outsider vocal garble that arose over their ritualistic music, like spirits or specters seemingly summoned from the other side. Now, huzzah, there's this new full-length, an actual cd on the Pseudo-Arcana label, and it pretty much picks up where the LP left off! 47 and a half minutes more of mysterious musical ceremony, Bad Statistics style, on these seven tracks. Again, the vocals (produced from the throat of one Thebis Mutante) are really strange, unhinged alien hippy rant-chant, like Ya Ho Wah's Father Yod speaking in tongues, sometimes looped and layered. Together with the throbbing drum beats, distorted electronic textures from guitar and bass, and hollow horn bleat and twitter on a track or two, you have the basic tempel-vibrating template for Bad Statistics' repetitive, rumbling, mesmerizing murk. Best listened to from a yogic position of spiritual openness, legs crossed, mind clear, third eye unblinking. Though, at their loudest, most intense chugging psychrock peaks, some vigorous rocking back and forth will be called for, maybe even full-on writhing on the floor. Let's take the 13-minute title track as an example... it's moaningly eased into, the percussive plod slow and sparse, but after a short while Thebis cries out quite like Can's Damo Suzuki, and the pace picks up, cymbals crashing... before another long droning lull with whistling and mumbling drifting over the slo-mo chug of the guitars and drums... then towards the very end, the singer suddenly seems possessed, his voice dropping into a guttural exhortations, the din of the instruments rising into a psychedelic swirling howl... welcome to the reverse exorcism!! Imagine the kosmic-kraut-primitivism of early Amon Duul, Tangerine Dream, or Siloah, with Circle's Mika Ratto as voice coach, encouraging Yod x Yoko vocal vibrations. Or the linear lo-fi insanity of a secret Dead C meets Reynols monster jam, if directed towards the worship of some ancient god, recorded on cheap cassette only as an afterthought. Yeah. It's pretty much awesome.

MPEG stream: Balloon Outbreak
MPEG stream: Three Swarms Of Bees

Now released domestically!...When we first heard the Badly Drawn Boy, we couldn't believe our ears. Who was this guy? He was like a Britpop Beck; sort of Beck-like voice, twisted pop sensibilities, beautifully Sentridoh-style home recording, and songs that kill. Well, we still don't exactly know who he is, except for the fact that he's the Mercury Prize winner, but at least now there's more than two impossible to find eps. Surprisingly, for his first full length, BDB has abandoned the lo-fi bedroom sound, and lots of his Beck-isms and created a lush, hyper-produced pop masterpiece. Somewhere between Elliott Smith, Radiohead, and Beck. Right off the bat, the first song is a spare arrangement for strings and oboes and cornets. In fact the whole record is dotted with swelling string parts, horns, accordions, bleeps and bloops and super creative production. This is a weird and beautiful (albeit commercial, compared to his earlier recordings and remixes) record, definitely for fans of Beck, Elliott Smith, Radiohead, Quasi, Built to Spill, etc. Imagine Beck or Elliott Smith, if they grew up in England, listening to Radiohead and Oasis, and cut their teeth doing remixes for a who's who of British pop/dance groups, and put a record out on MoWax. It's kind of like that, but not exactly. But it *is* totally great.

RealAudio clip: The Shining
RealAudio clip: Once Around the Block

Sure, "You don't mess with Texas" is a cliche as old as the hills, one that has lost much of its import, but those are definitely words to live by if "messing with Texas" means messing with these guys. Houston's Bahimiron return with the aptly titled Southern Nihilizm, a furious slab of blasting grim blackness, that owes no small debt to the mighty Gorgoroth, giving that classic Norwegian sound through their own cracked Texan twist, the guitars are crunchy and buzzy, the drums are buried in the mix, but are wild and frenetic, and the vocals are seriously demented, going from processed guttural growls, to monstrous roar to almost Cradle Of Filth shriek, often in the same song. The other weird thing about Bahimiron's sound is the production, tons of effects and what sounds like reverb, so everything is dense and noisy, and the riffs sort of blend into one another, turning a black buzz into a droned out buzzing blacknoize. There are some strange moments scattered throughout the record as well, the end of "The Cauldron Born" features a bizarre, awesomely out of place chromatic sort-of-guitar solo, "Agonist The Filth" has killer squiggly leads draped all over the place, "Chambers Empty" features deep bellowing clean vocals doused in effects that transform them into confusional speaking in tongues garbled mumbles then moments later into hysterical howls. The title track has a cool melancholy breakdown in the middle with a distorted guitar playing out a mournful minor key melody, before the band explodes into another blown out black frenzy. And "War Whiskey Sodomy" closes the record with a brief lumbering sludge soaked doom outro. But all that weirdness is deftly tangled up and tucked away in and within the band's furious noisy black metal buzz, making it just weird enough for us, but just grim and true enough for everyone else. Cool cover art, the band's logo and evil goat image rendered in super subtle gloss black ink on a flat matte black booklet.

MPEG stream: The Cauldron Born
MPEG stream: Shattered and Crowned in Deceit

It's been a (little) while since we've had some brand new Aidan Baker / Nadja for the store, thankfully this week heralds two new releases. To be reviewed next time, there's long awaited Nadja all-covers disc (which we'll tell you right now is great), and then there's this, a brand new, limited double lp from Baker solo, and as always it's a doozy, sprawling and shimmery and expansive, that sort of blissed out ambient dronemusic he does so well. But it's far from more of the same. The first track we threw on was almost jungle, with skittery beats buried beneath softly undulating layers of warm whir and deep drifts of soft swirling sound. There's also a bit of Spacemen 3 like processed psych guitar, which gives way to some buzzing raga like blur, draped over still more dreamlike dronescapes, although here, it's laced with chunks of processed alien crunch, and weird little bits of scrape and fragmented riffage. Long stretches of underwater Oval-like wooziness, shot through with streaks of space-y effects and muted bits of glitch and buzz, some of the most washed out and wondrous space (not quite) rock ever! Warped warbly organs are stretched and smeared into warped Philip Jeck like doomy drifts, one of which is apparently a cover of Joy Division's "Twenty Four Hours", although we could only tell by the vocals, and even then, they're so hushed and barely there, that any sense of the original seems to melt into a gorgeously oozing expanse of thrum and shimmer and softly warped rumble. Another fantastic and gorgeous and of course WAY too limited chunk of droney dreaminess from Mr. Baker. Released on the always amazing Equation Records, who really go all out with the packaging as well. Thick swirled/splattered blue vinyl, thick full color gatefold jacket, and a printed full color postcard, each of which is hand numbered, LIMITED TO 444 COPIES!

We sold out of the pre-ordered super deluxe boxset version of the latest full length from dronescaper Aidan Baker, but fear not, for those of you who didn't want to shell out $52 for that deluxe edition, we've got this, the standard version, still quite swank, a deluxe black, blue and silver metallic, 6 panel digipak style sleeve, with the same amazing music at a much nicer price... By now, long time readers of the aQ list know how much we dig Aidan Baker and all his various projects, and it seems that you all do too, based on how many of his records we sell. The sad thing is that so many of his most amazing records were released as super limited cd-r's, often so limited that we were never able to get any for the shop at all. Such was the case with 2007's Noise Of Silence. Originally released on Hyperblasted, the amazing Essence Music in Brazil has now stepped in to make this dark droney gem available again... So what's the big deal about Noise Of Silence? Needless to say at this point, it's doozy, a gorgeous, haunting, 50 minute abstract drone/drift, super cinematic, rife with dark chordal swells, layered shimmer, mysterious disembodied voices, a strange bit of processed sibilance, that could be the vocals processed, but instead becomes weird little shards of soft focus white noise peppering the hushed soundscape, almost like the sonic equivalent of white caps on a blackened sea. It doesn't take long for the track to blossom into something far from tranquil and drifty, the sound growing more agitated, the vibe more noisy, the atmosphere more dense, the voices more strident, a swirling cacophony, that manages to build to an almost white noise squall, but even them the edges are smoothed out, and the sound, while harsh and heavy, still manages to be darkly droney and weirdly hypnotic, the sounds grinding and crunching, the various tones splintering and crumbling, a heady blown out wildly looped collage that gradually settles into something much more mellow, the last 20 minutes a slowly decaying stretch of ambient dronemusic, the whispery shadows of that cacophony still present, hissing and swirling just below the surface, seriously and surprisingly haunting and demonic Baker, we can definitely imaging this as the score for some experimental foreign horror / art film. Gorgeous stuff for sure, and definitely on the dark side of Baker's sound, one we don't get to hear as much as we'd like. Obviously WAY recommended!

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We've joked in the past about Baker and his seemingly inexhaustible output. But we are always quick to point out that we absolutely never ever wish it to stop. Thankfully there seems to be no possibility of that happening anytime soon. The Sea Swells A Bit, released on Italian label A Silent Place, finds Baker musically moody and contemplative, as we've come to expect from records he releases under his own name. The ingredients are similar to those employed in his other projects, bass, guitars, tape loops, drum machines, but here those instruments are not so much played as, turned on and set free. There are riffs, and vocals, but in the opening track, those elements are so soft and airy, you have to listen close to distinguish where one ends and the other begins. Like laying on the ocean floor listening to M83 jamming inside a bathysphere half way to the surface. Murky and mumbly and underwater sounding. Which ties in with the album's title, song titles, and what might in fact be the sonic theme. The drum machine is in there too, but it sounds more like bits of static than any sort of rhythm. But it hardly matters, all the rhythm you need, a sort of barely there primal pulse, is in the drifting disembodied riffs. The second track is a little bit more structured, the dreamlike murk of the opening track is still present, and is buried beneath even more layers of sonic silt and shimmering swells, the rhythm floats to the surface though, and almost jazzy krautrock groove, loping and propulsive, almost like an old Circle record dosed with thorazine and left in the sun too long, blown out, blurry, blissy, but still shuffling into the light. The final track is another rhythm driven drone rocker (although it doesn't really 'rock' as such). Thick cottony swells of gentle buzz and swaying swells of warm whir beneath languorous ambling percussion. A lazy hazy slowed down spacerock dirge. Like a Spacemen 3 forty-five played at 16 rpm, druggy and deliriously dreamlike. Packaged in a nice thick, super swank, textured and lacquered cardstock sleeve.

MPEG stream: The Sea Swells A Bit
MPEG stream: Davy Jones' Locker

Expectations were pretty high for this one. Two long time aQ favorites, both with similar yet distinctive sounds, but with incredibly different bodies of work. Aidan Baker, who releases records a mile a minute, averaging 1 or 2 a month, thankfully managing to hit the bullseye almost every time. And Tim Hecker, who has produced 5 or 6 full lengths in as many years, every one practically perfect. Both Baker and Hecker explore similar sonic spectrums, utilizing fuzz and buzz and shimmer, Baker taking it a step further with his doom duo Nadja, taking the lurch and lumber of the genre and adding swirls of gauze and haze and bliss, while solo, he tends toward the more ambient and abstract. Hecker on the other hand takes what appears to be pop music and subverts it, sublimates it, pulls it apart and recontextualizes the sound, which usually involves wrapping everything in washed out whirs and blurred hiss, and all manner of glitch and crackle, like listening to music through headphones made out of steel wool and insulation. But with two such strong sonic personalities, the potential for this collaboration to be a bit of a mess was fairly high, and then of course there was also the possibility that each would just do their own thing, allowing the other to add bits here and there. But somehow, the sounds on Fantasma Parastasie manage to transcend, allowing glimpses of familiar sounds, hints of each artist's own work, but woven into a whole that is unto itself, a gloriously abstract swirl of sound, longform landscapes of bliss and blur, of buzz and even roar, extended movements, in which the various elements drift and shimmer, overlap and intertwine, melodies and songcraft meet texture and soundscapery, guitars unfurl tangled melodies one second, bleary eyed chordal blurs the next, harmonics glisten and hover amidst deep soft swells, distortion and buzz build into fierce walls of blown out psychedelia, the sounds crumbling and decaying before our ears, threatening to collapse, and in this fragile state lies the beauty of those sounds, effulgent, incandescent, but at the same time, blackening, beginning some unnamable process of inevitable decay. And eventually it does decay, those thick roiling sounds dissipate, leaving something soft and shimmery, glistening on a bed of shed buzz and crumbled crush, floating heavenward, its notes and melodies catching the sunlight, and offering up prismatic reflections. The strange thing about this record is that each song is separated into super short pieces, eleven in most cases, each part between 15 and 45 seconds (it's obviously much more noticeable on the cd). We tried listening to it on shuffle, presuming that was perhaps the intention, and while it still sounds cool, it was a bit too and took too much away from the overall effect. Instead, the various parts, played in order, slip seamlessly into one another, so much so that if you weren't watching the tracks tick by on player, you wouldn't even notice. The two work amazingly well together, bits of guitar, fragments of riffs, looped and repeated, swathed in thick smears of digital crunch, of buzzing rumble, much of the record sounds like a heavier William Basinski, as if the two were experimenting with they own Disintegration Loops. A few of the tracks are quite tranquil, abstract and minimal, but for the most part, Baker and Hecker seem more interested in distressed sounds, in distortion, in pushing the limits, composing in the red, needles pegged, but taking what in other hands could be harsh and abrasive, and crafting those sounds into something simultaneously soft and dreamlike. Even the various movements, drift smoothly into one another the entire record almost like a single piece, expansive and varied and sprawling, epic and majestic, but inward looking, introspective, melancholy, imbuing the crumbling crunch and blown out minimalism, with emotion, with distinctive mood, at once dark and mysterious, but also strangely hopeful. The album closer and title track, is the only one not split up into movements, and is easily the most abstract, the most minimal, a stretch of lugubrious low end, so soft, so weightless, a hushed musical murmur, no distortion, no buzz, just a simple swell and sway, drifting fading, and finally disappearing. Absolutely breathtaking.

MPEG stream: Phantom On A Pedestal IV
MPEG stream: Hymn To The Idea Of Night V
MPEG stream: Gallery Of The Invisible Woman VIII
MPEG stream: Dream Of The Nightmare V

By now, long time readers of the aQ list know how much we dig Aidan Baker and all his various projects, and it seems that you all do too, based on how many of his records we sell. The sad thing is that so many of his most amazing records were released as super limited cd-r's, often so limited that we were never able to get any for the shop at all. Such was the case with 2007's Noise Of Silence. Originally released on Hyperblasted, the amazing Essence Music in Brazil has stepped into re-release it, and as with all their releases, they've pulled out all the stops. This is in fact a PRE-ORDER!! For the super deluxe, boxset version of Baker's reissued Noise Of Silence. We will have the regular single cd non-boxset version, but this right here, this is for the Baker obsessives, like us, like YOU, limited to 122 copies, almost entirely sold out from the label, Essence has graciously set aside about 20 boxes, the LAST 20, for aQ customers, so if you want one, order it now, we'll get them in sometime in the next few weeks, and they can either ship with your current order, or on their own. You will be charged for the box now, but then the shipping will be sorted out when we actually send the box (and it'll ship by weight, not as 1 item). So what's the big deal about Noise Of Silence. And this fancy box? Well, more on the packaging (and the bonus cd-r) further down, but Noise of Silence, is a doozy, a gorgeous, haunting, 50 minute abstract drone/drift, super cinematic, rife with dark chordal swells, layered shimmer, mysterious disembodied voices, a strange bit of processed sibilance, that could be the vocals processed, but instead becomes weird little shards of soft focus white noise peppering the hushed soundscape, almost like the sonic equivalent of white caps on a blackened sea. It doesn't take long for the track to blossom into something far from tranquil and drifty, the sound growing more agitated, the vibe more noisy, the atmosphere more dense, the voices more strident, a swirling cacophony, that manages to build to an almost white noise squall, but even them the edges are smoothed out, and the sound, while harsh and heavy, still manages to be darkly droney and weirdly hypnotic, the sounds grinding and crunching, the various tones splintering and crumbling, a heady blown out wildly looped collage that gradually settles into something much more mellow, the last 20 minutes a slowly decaying stretch of ambient dronemusic, the whispery shadows of that cacophony still present, hissing and swirling just below the surface, seriously and surprisingly haunting and demonic Baker, we can definitely imaging this as the score for some experimental foreign horror / art film. Gorgeous stuff for sure, but definitely on the dark side of Baker's sound, a side we don't get to her so much any more. This new version of Noise Of Silence, is presented as a super deluxe, hand made and hand assembled box, painted in blacks and blues, nicely textured, with what appears to be branches or veins, inside the cd is housed in a gorgeous full color digipak, and held in place by black elastic bands, while right next to it, unfold black triangular flaps, and pull out the accordion like set of cards, each one hand painted like the outside of the box, all unique and surprisingly tactile, to reveal the bonus cd-r, a collection of early works and demos, many of which would in fact show up on later releases in altered forms, all culled from the period spanning 1991-1995, and an eclectic collection of early works, that tend toward the raw, the noisy, the aggressive, but still beautiful and lush and droney, some acoustic ballads, some droned out noisescapes, some hushed minimal acoustic drift as well as some darkly psychedelic and dreamy guitar ragas, incredible stuff for sure, and well worth a proper release on their own, but ONLY available as part of this super limited box. As we mentioned above, we'll be able to get about 20 copies of this box, and that's IT. So if you want one, order it now. We'll charge you and let you know when it arrives. If you're after the normal version, let us know and we can put you down for one of those, but this listing is for folks who want to nab one of these before they are gone for good.

You read that right, this is indeed another new Nadja AND another new Aidan Baker, at the same time! Even after the world record FIVE Nadja's on a recent list. And while we joke about how prolific this guy is, even we're a bit overwhelmed by what is basically, counting reissues, maybe the 10th or 11th new release in a matter of a month or two. Sure we can whip out reviews like nobody's business, but even we're run a little ragged. But we'll do our best. Obviously fans will need this, lots of us bought copies, after all, we've yet to hear a bad record from Baker or Nadja, and this one is no different. However it is special for two reasons, one, it's crazy limited, only 500 copies, hand numbered. When we run out of the ones we have it will be gone for good. And two, it features the first (as far as we know) solo jam from the non Aidan Baker half of Nadja, Leah Buckareff. Three long tracks, released to coincide with a German live performance in April. The Baker solo track is a pretty glistening drift, a bit more dense and thick than past solo efforts, a surprisingly busy sonic swirl, ethereal effects, murky drones, fragments of melodies, bits of feedback and rumble and twinkle, all set in a warm whirring expanse of soft sound. The Nadja track begins all dark and serene, but quickly builds to an incendiary blown out doom trudge, quite possibly the heaviest and most distorted we've heard the duo, the guitar thick and crumbling and so distorted it almost obscures any melody, the drum machine a chaotic splatter, the last few minutes so intense and heavy and freaked out, the squall of swirling black psych and drum machine sputter almost completely obscures the churning riffage below. The big surprise here, although we suppose it shouldn't really be a surprise, is Buckareff's contribution. We're tempted to suggest that she start releasing her own records, but that's just what we need! More kick ass records to buy. Anyway, Buckareff's track, is all low end whir, whispery static, and barely there percussion, that builds to a caustic dirgedrone as heavy and intense as anything Nadja has released, but the cool thing is that even when the sound is a wall of heaving roiling black buzz, beneath it lurks that opening bass melody, the strange pit pat percussion, a mournful lope, slowly being swallowed by a massive swell of muted murky washed out heaviness, that quickly fades out, leaving that minimal bassy shuffle to fade out into silence. Ok, fine, fuck it, bring it on, more Buckareff solo stuff! We can take it. Even if we can't afford more musical obsessions. But after this we need to hear more. Once again, three for three. Nadja, Baker, Buckareff, essential listening for the doomdronedirge inclined. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, hand numbered, in a cool matte paper fold over sleeve.

MPEG stream: Socorro
MPEG stream: Jornada Del Muerto

As we've no doubt mentioned before, metallic post rock seems to be its own little cottage industry, spawning more bands that it's possible to keep up with, and causing lots of bands to suddenly shift their sound, to be either more metal (for the post rock bands), or more post rock (for the metal bands). But as we've also mentioned before, it's tough to complain about a sound that combines two of our favorite musics. Metal, heavy and crushing, doomy and massive, and post rock, with its mathy rhythms, moody melodies, and soaring arrangements. One of our favorite purveyors of this sound is Rosetta, from Philadelphia, who gave us one of our favorite postrockmetal records a few years back in the form of The Galilean Satellites. The approach for that release was unique, in that one disc was song based, with all the requisite crushing riffs and mathy metallic crush, while the second disc was all ambient, long tracks of swirl and shimmer, drone and rumble. With the postrockmetal feeding frenzy, we were sure Rosetta were on the fast track to being big names in the scene, but they seem to still remain just below the spotlights, which seems to have done them no harm in terms of new music, their half of this split destroys. Albeit beautifully and dramatically. Two tracks, both topping 10 minutes. Both beginning with plenty of soaring jangle and Godspeed like cinematic build. Guitars chime and ring out, the drums are simple, perfectly supporting the rest of the instruments as they drift skyward. The first track builds and builds in intensity, only becoming truly metallic near the end, when the chiming high end guitars drift off leaving a churning downtuned riff, but even that riff is wrapped in effervescent streaks of glistening far away guitar harmonics, and strange vocal snippets, and rumbling whirring low end drones. The second track follows a similar pattern, but the heavy parts STAY heavy, with howled guttural vocals, and a very Neurosis-y riff, but again, still surrounded by all sorts of incandescent guitars and dense swirls of ambient buzz. Rosetta are teamed up with fellow Philly noisemakers Balboa, who also do their own version of the metal math rock, but theirs has a foot firmly planted in punk rock, hardcore to be exact. The first track starts off like a super charged nineties math rock jam, with angular guitars and BIG drums, vocals that are sort of sad boy, but build into full on howls, when all of a sudden, the band lurches into an almost blast beat, a furious punk rock blast, that shifts gears again, into a seriously hooky hardcore groove, sounds like a weird mix, but it sounds amazing. And a perfect foil to the languid expansiveness of Rosetta. The other two songs, don't get as punk rock as the opener, instead, mining more of that nineties math rock sound, Polvo, Dazzling Killmen, Hoover, the songs are loping stretched out grooves, the bass and guitar locked in tight, the drums almost tribal, everything crashing together in huge bursts of metallic emo fury. Pretty great. And as if that weren't enough, the two bands combine forces for the closer, the title track, which to be honest sounds like it could be either band, as easy as both, BUT, it's amazing, a seriously gorgeously executed, heavy and hooky chunk of mathy metallic rock. From the beginning, a propulsive, almost krautrock jam, that slowly and steadily builds into a seriously thick bout of massive roiling guitars, and chaotic drumming, all downtuned and dripping with distortion, the only hint that this is actually two bands is about three quarters of the way through, when the drummers engage in a relentless double kick dual, over which ALL the guitarists spit out spidery glistening guitar lines, a huge glimmering tangle of melodies that sparkles and shimmers, and as you might expect is quickly sucked under another crushing wave of grinding growling guitar. Awesome stuff. Fans of the usual suspects (Isis, Baroness, Mogwai, Explosions In The Sky, Pelican, Tides, Conifer, Minsk, etc..) most definitely NEED this.

MPEG stream: Kaddish
MPEG stream: Tma-1

We love our modern Appalachia, tangled steel strings, gorgeous sprawling avant bluegrass, Fahey, Jack Rose, James Blackshaw, Ilyas Ahmed, it's a crowded field, but all the key players manage to create something much more special than just a Fahey rehash. Sure there are tons of folks out there with a guitar, a heavily worn copy of Death Chants, and not an original musical idea in their head, but there are the few, like the above folks mentioned, who took that sound, and were inspired to create their own soundworlds. You can add Matt Baldwin to that list. It's a little hard to put a finger on what exactly makes Baldwin's sound so special, it could be more of a focus on classic melody, than on pick and strum, the opening track on Paths Of Ignition darkly unfurls into a warm whirring pastoral guitarscape, lots of major key melodies, unlikely harmonies, strange bits of slippery slide, and plenty of electric guitar buzz, some soaring growling leads, all woven into some haunting raga infused psychedelic space folk. The whole track is laced with tangles of wild almost-shredding guitar, deep resonant drones, swirling little melodic flourishes, it all transforms -his- take on Appalachia into something much more tripped out, psych rock and almost poppy in its prettiness. The rest of the disc hews a little closer to the neo-Appalachia party line, but even then, his tracks slither and buzz, lots of haunting guitar rumble, intricate finger picking, delicate melodies, dreamy and drifty, mysterious and timeless. Except the one cover, the song that actually got us interested in Baldwin in the first place. It's only 4 minutes long, but it's a killer. Baldwin takes on Judas Priest's "Winter" and nails it. The main riff of the original sounds perfect on a steel string, brooding and ominous, beneath that guitar deep swells of buzzing guitardrone pulses and throbs, and the vocals, Baldwin does a pretty excellent Halford, a reverb drenched high pitched croon, complete with vibrato and little trills, the track finishes off with some killer lead guitar, sprawled over that gorgeous languorous main riff, that seems to slither and drift on forever. Any one into the current crop of modern Appalachian / neo-folk / whatever-you-call-it guitar music will definitely dig this, and while it's worth it for the Priest cover alone, the whole record is pretty fantastic. Now it's up to Blackshaw to cover some old Scorpions, or Rose to take on a classic UFO or Uriah Heep track, so if either of you guys is reading this...

MPEG stream: Winter
MPEG stream: Weissensee

A new wave of ESP reissues has finally arrived bringing a handful of obscure gems back into print. This disc is the Gato Barbieri from the old days, 1967 to be exact, before he had softened up and mellowed out and was still a major player in the jazz avant garde. Dark and rumbling jazzscapes of bowed cello and skittering, slithering percussion and haunting reverbed pianos underscore wickedly inspired solos from session leader Barbieri. Unlikely melodies and furious harmolodic runs are peppered with intense screeching and soulful wailing. Truly inspired and still amazing even after almost 35 years!

RealAudio clip: In Search Of The Mystery

One of our favorite records from this Philly drone / drug / psych ensemble, available again on lp, this time with a bonus track, and a cd version bundled with the lp... Bufo Alvarius, originally released in 1995, was Bardo Pond's first, and some (us for example) might argue, still their best, completely tripped out, hazy sonic sedatives administered in the form of blown out space psych bliss, the guitars not so much riffing as expelling thick undulating sheets of warped fuzz, the drums, loose and propulsive, driving the songs, but not rigidily, the flute fluttering throughout, like melodic flecks floating in a swirling sonic sea of bongwater, the band do occasionally come together, and briefly sound like a super loose spaced out slowed down Stooges, but even then they stumble and meander, lurch and lumber, staggering druggily through clouds of spectrascopic sonic splutter, eventually exploding into full on effects drenched meltdown, managing to sound heavy and dense and trippy, but still totally dreamy and mesmerizing. A few tracks get all jangly, and the band sound like Pavement covering Spacemen 3, while extremely high, the female vocals are doused in reverb and echo and delay, and they drift ghostlike through woozy whirling fields of tangled psychedelic guitar freakout, the whole band seemingly on the verge of total collapse, this record a document of a group teetering gloriously on the edge. When the band rock, they rock hard, and sound a bit like Loop, albeit a whole lot more loose, that same sort of psychedelic hypno-drug-rock, but in the hands of Bardo Pond, those moments never last, instead, what could be a driving super heavy rocker, tends again, to crumble, and collapse, into a stumbling druggy psych dirge of swirling sweet crooned female vox, pounding off kilter drumming, a tangled knot of corruscated guitar buzz, everything wrapped in a thick cloak of grimy, gritty fuzzed out whirr. It really doesn't get heavier, or trippier or more psychedelic than this. Take the nearly half hour track "Amen", a single track, but essentially an entire bonus record, a fantastically OUT ambient sprawl of impressionistic psychguitar, bleary free noise, and druggy dreamlike ambience, the sort of blown out abstraction most current bands couldn't pull off if their lives depended on it. This recent reissue tacks on a bonus track, the groovy woozy jangly "Fixed", that begins all strummy and soft focus, before the drums kick in hard, the vocals serene and sweet, backed up by a wall of churning psychedelia, softy strummed clean guitar, and of course haunting spectral flute. So good. Way recommended, easily one of our all time favorite modern psych records, and to all those folks into the new breed of psychedelic space rock: White Hills, the Heads, Gnod, Eternal Tapestry, Heavy Winged... You NEED this!

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One of two splits on this week's list from local psychedelic space rockers and aQ faves Carlton Melton, both amazingly appropriate team-ups. The other one is a super limited 7" with UK space rockers Mugstar, and then there's this, a vinyl-only split with legendary Phillie psych rockers Bardo Pond, who prove to be the perfect match for Carlton Melton slow burning laid back psychedelic drift. CM's side-long "Slow Growth" (a title by way of an early AQ Carlton Melton review by our very own Scott) definitely describes CM's sidelong jam here, easily one of their best, and most musically cohesive, finding sharp sonic focus even amidst the seemingly freeform drift, the track beginning as a soft hazy swirl, softly churning guitars over what sounds like whipping wind, the vibe tense and ominous and darkly dreamy, it takes a few minutes for the song proper to kick in, but when it does, the guitars immediately swoop in and distort, blossoming into massive crumbling swells, heaving and howling over delicate crystalline strum and simple propulsive motorik drumming. The drums eventually drop out, leaving the sound to slowly implode, growing muddier and murkier, stretched way out into muted drones, laced with shards of feedback and little fragmented melodies, all before another slow build, back into a seriously dense sonic squall, still muted and murky, but seriously black hole dense, a roiling cloud of blackened psych, which billows wildly until the drums gradually return, offering a rhythmic anchor and guiding the track to its final resting place. Bardo Pond counter with one of the best tracks we've heard from them, the sound fierce and epic and lush and SO heavy, launching immediately into a gorgeous sprawl of free form psychedelia, clouds of swirling guitars, tangled melodies, the drums loose and free and awesomely wild, but still managing to somehow hold everything together, but just barely. The vibe is blissed out and druggy, it's the sort of jam, that could go on forever, and sort of does, and is somehow simultaneously static and hypnotic, but also impossibly active and constantly shifting, a swirl of melodies and textures, the guitars unleashing some seriously kick ass leads, filling the sky with sonic contrails and swirling chordal clouds, the flute shows up late, and flutters subtly beneath the ever intensifying guitar freakouts, the vocals come in even later, and then only briefly, but add the perfect sort of gauzy / ethereal vibe to the proceedings, the song seeming to just organically wind down, leaving us to imagine that somewhere else there's a version, that does in fact go on forever. LIMITED TO 800 COPIES!!! ----* ----* Highlights : ----*

Not only have Barn Owl become one of our favorite musical projects right here in SF, but they are now serious contenders to the throne of best purveyors of deep hitting and soul satisfying drone anywhere in the world. While just about everything they've released up to this point has been way too limited and thus are now all sadly out of print, they finally have a release that while still limited will at least get to reach a lot more ears then anything they've put out so far. These are sounds that deserve to be heard by anyone with an appreciation for all things droney, stoney and drifty, done so totally right. While drone-folk bands have become a somewhat common entity in the last couple years, it's actually rare when you hear one that you really feel true soul and spirited passion from. From Our Mouths A Perpetual Light finds Barn Owl striking a perfect balance between sparkling sonics and commanding doom. Imagine Sleep/OM running in the mud with sticks and stones and then meeting up with Windy & Carl, Bardo Pond and Tom Carter. The lp format suits the duo so well, as their songs are filled with deep and slowly swirling grooves. We just listened to one side over and over and over before we even moved on to the second side with which we then did the same. There is both patience and payoff in Barn Owl's sound. Music that makes you want to close your eyes because you know you are entranced by atrists that know so well what they are doing. While they pressed up way more lps than anything else they've released, it's all relative, meaning these LP's are not going to be around too long, in fact we weren't even able to get as many as we ordered. Highly recommended, but act fast!

Barn Owl, the local duo of Jon Porras (aka Elm) and Evan Caminiti (aka Higuma), have always tread a similar path to later era Earth, a sort of blackened twang, Morricone by way of the Melvins, slow motion soundscapes as evocative and slow burning as they are epic and heavy, dark and delicate. With the addition of a drummer, Barn Owl move even closer to their sonic brethren creating a gorgeous songsuite of Western tinged, slow motion psychedelia, dark, dolorous, warm and haunting, heavily reverbed, a sort of dark skeletal doom, rife with warm chordal clusters, gauzy clouds of muted feedback, and epic expanses of effected guitars that sound almost choral. The mood is both warm and inviting, haunting and tense, emotional and intense. The various bits of steel string guitar are draped over dense swells of roiling downtuned drone, everything wreathed in streaks of high end shimmer, all blurred into a burnished black guitar blur, washed out and hazy, yet surprisingly lush and heavy. The second half of the record gets a bit more Appalachian, with delicate finger picked guitars drifting over deep layered drones, stately melodies unfurling like the black tendrils of smoke from a recently extinguished candle, or the fuzzy fog of late afternoon, painted deep blues and reds by the fading daylight. The record builds to a soaring finale, that revisits that choral sound, and infuses it with an hypnotic ur-drone vibe, like some glorious hybrid of Sunroof! and Arvo Part. Hypnotic and transcendent. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. We got the super limited fancy maroon vinyl mailorder version too. And as you might imagine, these won't be around for long...

Latest release from Bay Area doomfolkdrone duo Barn Owl (featuring our very own Jon Porras) who team up on this limited lp only release with long time fave Tom Carter of Charalambides who for now, seems to have shed his psych folks sound for something far more, well more on that in a second... Up first, Barn Owl with three new tracks of bleak blackened dark ambience, invoking wide open spaces, moonlight glimmering on frosted fallow fields, of slow moving brackish water, and of ruined buildings and lonely dirt roads. It makes sense that these guys opened for Earth when they were here, as their sound carries the same spiritual weight. But where Earth employ twang and elements of Gospel, Barn Owl go somewhere much deeper, and more dangerous, a swirling slow motion world of blacks and greys, of blurred landscapes slipping by through smudged windows, shafts of sunlight, moving glacially across the bare wooden floor, causing the dust motes to drift in little flickering flurries. Once the band build momentum, they create long flowing streams of warm whirring buzz, held together by simple percussive pulses, buried rhythmic throbs, all the while the guitars arc above like solar flares. Dark swells rise and fall, wreathed in halos of soft focus FX and smeared streaks of subtle distortion, slipping from hushed shimmery whisper, to groaning wheezing metallic buzz, drifting forever slowly around a warm glowing core, and continuously emitting an aura of mournful dark mystery. Carter approaches his side from a whole different angle, his single 16 minute track takes a slow meandering chunk of dark downtuned blues and transforms it into a coruscating wall of blown out psych buzz, rumbling chug and crunch, wailing noiseguitar freakout, heavy and buzzy and chaotic, but still warm and layered and melodic, like a rural Keiji Haino raised on avant folk and old time blues. A gorgeous ever expanding chunk of blown out heaviness and warm, slowly crumbling deconstructed blues, culminating in a beautiful almost symphonic arrangement of high end skree and warbly buzz, before slipping into a long stretch of languorous unravelling guitar shimmer. So nice. LIMITED TO 380 COPIES. Plain black jackets with a paste on front cover, printed insert, thick black inner sleeves. We got a bunch direct from the bands, and we might be able to get more from the label when we run out, but you never know. Better to grab one while you can...

Finally! The first two kick ass eps from these Georgia heavies combined into one killer full length (we always thought they sounded like they belonged together on the same record). So for all you metalheads who missed out the first time around (these eps have been out of print for a while), you got yourself another chance, don't blow it. Man, Baroness just totally destroys. Three massive tracks of Electric Wizard meets the Fucking Champs metal stoner sludge crush. Some of the catchiest riffs we've heard in a while, from strange melodic finger tapping, to soaring Iron Maiden-esque melodies, to groovy southern stoner rock to pummeling detuned sludge to thrashing punk rock with howling throat shredding vocals -- typically all in the same song! The first track on First has an awesome stomping stop start riff with an insidiously catchy little melody, which ends up sounding like Carcass meets the Jesus Lizard. The second track is all Sabbathy sludge / doom with occasional bursts of rapid fire blasting punk rock. But it's all about the third track. A super epic, proggy complex metallic post rock workout, tons of parts, all of them worthy of their own song, super dynamic and totally catchy with Champs-ish breakdowns and weird bursts of abstract ambience. So fucking great! Baroness' Second, while still heavy and stonery and crushing, seems to be tempering their heaviness with some serious post / math rock, which is just fine with us, think maybe Isis / Pelican majestic sludge metal meets Rodan / June Of 44 style moody post rock. However Baroness' sound still leans way toward the metal side of that equation. Plus, their songs continue to be really weird, rife with strange meters, complex arrangements, lots of slippery guitar harmonies, weird psychedelic wah guitar, spacey electronic burbling, some stretched out slow motion sludge, some intricate riffing and some of the most insane drumming we've ever heard. The reissue features the original eps' killer artwork, kinda like Pushead doing '60s Fillmore poster art, courtesy of Baroness guitarist, John Baizley, and comes in a digipak with cool embossed metallic lettering housed in a slip cover.

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We've been digging this recent wave of super minimal electronic music like crazy, whether it's the stripped down house and dark moody techno of Shed or Terrence Dixon, the post industrial gothic beatscapery of Vatican Shadow, the dour blackened brutalism of Silent Servant, the murky avant electronica of Haxan Cloak and Prurient, the field recording flecked minimalism of Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, or recent outings from new aQ faves like Shifted and Ron Morelli, it's almost like the techno/house haters have had their whole world turned upside down, with all of these gothy, gloomy, murky, grim variants on house music and techno, stripped down to the bare minimum, transformed somehow into something blackly psychedelic and woozily abject, total blunted comedown minimalism, that is easily some of the darkest and most mesmerizing music we've heard in ages. None more so than Oats, from Basic House, aka Stephen Bishop, the man behind the Opal Tapes label, who as Basic House, has created something more than that moniker might imply, sure it could be considered 'basic house', but a basic house constructed from crumbling distortion, and chunks of static, weird field recordings, woozy loops, disembodied melodies, you can hear hints of Andy Stott and Demdike Stare and the Caretaker, but Basic House is something else all together, a sort of decaying hauntological dance music, that seems to be cobbled together from sonic detritus, one could almost imagine this as electronica as envisioned by Tim Hecker and Philip Jeck, it has that same sort of warped warble, and grey, washed out abstraction. It's one of those rare records that is truly difficult to describe, which is precisely what makes it so utterly mesmerizing. Breaking down the first two tracks should give you a rough idea of what you're in store for, beginning with a weird field of stuttering static, shards of tape hiss, and what sounds like gristly analog crunch, all pulsing hypnotically over a backdrop of woozy looped melody, and slow shifting textures, a barely there rhythm seems to be forming, it's not until nearly two minutes in that a proper beat surfaces, a monotonous 4/4 pulse, adding a strangely skeletal framework to the proceedings, before that beat blossoms into something almost electro, adding some distorted dubsteppy bass wobble, but the whole thing remaining super wasted and washed out and ultra minimal. Eventually, multiple melodies swoop in, as do auxiliary beats, the sound a dense swirl, dizzying and weirdly psychedelic, and in a weird way, almost poppy sounding, before devolving in a field of spaced out crackle and hiss, all tangled up with layered loops, and mysterious, almost easy listening sounding samples, before lurching directly into the second track, a churning murk-march of pounding Teutonic throb, and looped ominous whisper, everything wreathed in thick swirls of record crackle / tape hiss, the sound quickly and repeatedly transforming, at one point sounding like alien elevator music, rife with churning, chugging low end thrum, and fields of insectoid click, while elsewhere unravelling like a heaving sprawl of avant industrial noisiness. And while that may give you an idea of what Basic House is all about, the rest of the record does its best to continually confuse and confound. Short stretches of mangled field recordings wrapped around barely there beats, give way to super spare soundscapes of glistening crackle, and mutated textures, jagged shards of caustic digital crunch are sculpted into corrosive rhythmscapes that seem to melt into droned out Wolf Eyes style drones, all high end skree, and scraping digital crunch. Some tracks are whispery latticeworks of groaning and creaking ambience, short wave transmissions drifting through fields of hushed thrum, and barely there chordal swells, sometimes blossoming into garbled grooves, all hazy and bleakly blissed out, other times unfurling mysterious swirls of digital stutter and looped vocal whispers, those alien sounds seeming to collect melody and texture as they creep through landscapes of shimmer and hum. Here and there, the record does return to something more overtly rhythmic, like on the balearic "C-Beat", which is like modern minimalism by way of Pole's granular digidub, but recast as some ghostly trance, all whispery stutter, wreathed in warbly wooziness and glassine high end shimmer, but the record eventually settles into a haunting hushed finale, the meditative, minimal drone of "L-Wave And Combo", which is one long sprawl of buried melody and tranced out thrum, but instead of smooth and shimmery, the sounds are rough and raw, crumbling and crunchy, but in no way does that detract from the track's enthralling mesmer. So fucking great. And just in under the wire, in the nick of time to make it onto plenty of top ten lists, and for some of us here, quite possibly a contender for the top spot!

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This is another in the recent spate of releases chronicling William Basinski's experiments with short wave radio. This 2 disc set, 90 minutes in length to reflect two sides of a cassette tape, is a 2 part piece recorded in 1983 using shortwave radio and primitive tape loops. Fans of Phillip Jeck should pick this up immediately. It's got that sepia toned, gorgeous, hazy old victrola sound, with lots of rough edges, staticky fuzz and warm hum. The tape loops are mostly Muzak, slowed down and stretched out into creepy and hypnotic melodies, under and over shifiting shortwave. Supposedly this was Basinski's attempt to emulate the warm dreamy sounds of the Mellotron, a vintage synthesiser that utilises short loops of tape. And in some ways he has succeeded, creating a weirdly lush, gauze-y, droney soundscape all culled from random shortwave transmissions. So nice!

RealAudio clip: The River Part 1 (excerpt)

One of our absolute favorite minimalist composers pulls another lovely work from his bag of tricks. That bag of tricks being his seemingly endless collection of moldering tape loops initially recorded a couple of decades ago. This time around it's from a deceptively simple piano loop titled "Variation #9: Pantelleria". Pantelleria is a tiny volcanic island southwest of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea whose long and ancient history is steeped in bloodshed, due to its once strategic proximity to warring Christian and Muslim nations. The patina of time on Basinski's key material, coupled with a happy accident of the tape loop slipping off of the tape head, creates a beautifully decaying and lyrically submerged counterpoint effect. What at first seems like five simple notes repeated ends up sounding like Nature cleansing herself of mankind's bloody history. Gorgeous!

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Brand new record from dronelord / guitar deconstructionist Bass Communion, aka Steven Wilson, whose day job is playing with prog superstars Porcupine Tree, but who spends the rest of his time, crafting gorgeous sprawling guitardrones and minimal psychedelic landscapes. The latest of which is captured here, Chiaroscuro is a document of the very first live Bass Communion performance, which took place at the Frenzy Of The Absolute festival curated by Fear Falls Burning. And we're happy to report that BC live is something to behold, a buzzing shimmering cloud of washed out psyche guitar drift, dense blackened billows, floating heavenward, while deep downtuned tones keep the proceedings grounded, amidst the swirl and drift, little shards of melody, and high end fragments surface now and again, only to sink back into the glorious druggy haze. The track shifts gears a few times, an acid fried slow burn blow out gives way to soft focus chiming ambience which slips slowly into a deep meditative rumble, finally drifting off in a hushed whir. The second track was originally released on a split 7" with Fear Falls Burning, available exclusively to attendees of the concert, and finds Wilson with his guitar plugged into his laptop, and again conjuring up some haunting otherworldly minimalism, delicate and abstract, before exploding into a wall of crumbling blown out droneblissdoom heaviness, a wild squall of frenzied psych guitar practically melts the speakers. Wow. Would have liked to hear him do that live. Once again, gorgeous stuff, dark and droney and blissed out and occasionally heavy as all get out, essential listening for the guitardoomdronedirge obsessed among you... Packaged in a super fancy, full color mini gatefold lp style cd sleeve.

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We first got a glimpse of the newly invigorated, and newly METAL-ized Bastard Noise on the recent split with The Endless Blockade, with BN sounding like the second coming of Man Is The Bastard, all heavy and noisy and bassy, but still rife with noise and electronics, incorporating our favorite elements of Bastard Noise offshoot Geronimo into a dizzying hybrid, that hit the spot like crazy. So with this new full length, Bastard Noise have pushed that sound even further. Opening with a brief spoken word monologue, the band explode in an electronic flecked bass heavy crush, the bass and drums locked tight, a lumbering lurching dirge, proggy and intricate, and weirdly melodic, with some of the SICKEST vocals ever, alternating death metal growls and throat shredding shrieks, and all over the place, thick shards of damaged electronics and fractured effects, careening wildly until finally locking into a groove that just won't quit, chaotic drumming, low slung bass buzz, the heaviest, most bad ass thing we've heard in ages. "Me And Hitler" is another blast of Man Is The Bastard style bass driven powerviolence, but with the addition of those shrieked almost black metal vocals, and still more caveman electronics... and when the band again get all proggy and intricate and heavy and groovy, they almost sound like Nomeansno, if NmN were WAY meaner and brutal and caustic, which is in NO way a bad thing. The whole record is a crushing downtuned post-punk avant prog powerviolence electronic kraut-dirge motherfucker, the songs lurch and swing and grind and blast and pound and pummel, bursts of double kick underpin shards of crackling electronic glitchery and analog skree, there are some really strange stretches of almost jazzy drift, crooned reverbed ambience, operatic abstraction, spaced out dronemusic and moody instrumental skitter, but those brief moments only serve to balance the otherwise insanely and genius-ly brutal heaviness. Fuck, this totally rules!

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