You may be familiar with hyperbole like "this is one of my favorite records" popping up throughout the our reviews and you may wonder if that declaration really means anything. Obviously, there are many of us who write this list with lots of opinions as to
While electronica darlings like Andrew Weatherall, The Chemical Brothers, and Gilles Peterson all proclaim "Coup" as the pinnacle of 23 Skidoo's catalogue, I boldly mutter "Hogwash! 'Seven Songs' is easily 23 Skidoo's best work!" 23 Skidoo recorded this album during a three day period in 1981 with production by "Tony, Terry, and David" (aka Genesis P-Orridge, Peter Christopherson, and Ken Thomas). With those three behind the mixing board, 23 Skidoo obviously enjoys a similiar spirit of sonic experimentation as invoked by the founders of Industrial Culture. Yet, 23 Skidoo also employs the death-disco of PiL, A Certain Ratio, and Gang of Four, often played on homemade junkyard instruments built to replicate Indonesian gamelan. This bizarre hybridization of styles has few if any parallels, but 23 Skidoo's eclecticism and experimentation are never so alien as to not also be funky, melodic, and infectiously catchy.
Just as Windy places Os Mutantes near the top of her musical pantheon, Andee proudly proclaims his infatuation with Hanoi Rocks, and Allan drools over all things Magma, I say that if you're at all like me, you won't be disappointed by 23 Skidoo's "Seven Songs"!
Originally released on LP back in 1984 on Illuminated Records, and only seeing a few seconds of shelf life as a cd re-issue in the early '90s, "Urban Gamelan" is the aptly named third album from 23 Skidoo, back again on cd! This British trio developed one of
"Urban Gamelan" finds 23 Skidoo addressing two distinct aesthetics, the first being their post-apocalyptic funk (which had been previously mapped out on their first album "Seven Songs") and the second emphatically pronouncing their faux-gamelan sound. The album in fact begins with a remix / reworking of their hit single "Coup," which has had the infamy of getting ripped off by the Chemical Brothers. Driven by counterpoints of bass and distant bursts of haunted trumpets, the first half of the album recalls some of Pop Group's dub fuckery, with an inclination for a more natural funk. 23 Skidoo then drops all of the electric instruments for an exhibition of their complete gamelan repetoire. If you ever thought that Einsturzende Neubauten or Test Dept. needed to get their groove on, then you definitely need to check out 23 Skidoo. The 23 Skidoo reissues may be some of the most important to come out this year. It will be well worth your while to check these out!!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
One of the cd-r releases from Phthalo with an edition of 250, 4mod3 is the work of SF electronica genius Kit Clayton. Recorded in early 1999, "A Translation of Simpilicity" is a precursor to the neo-dub mastered on Clayton's albums for Scape. Setting up what could be an aquatic virtual sound arena, Clayton's highly processed glitches float to the surface with all of the erratic behaviour of air bubbles around reverberant sonar-dub tones and hypnotic downtempo rhythms. Brilliant as always.
A Certain Ratio, who took their name from a lyric off Brian Eno's flawless pop album Taking Tiger Mountain, began their career alongside fellow Mancunians Joy Division back in the late '70s, crafting a sound that evolved through the bleak references of punk
In addition to the first disc which collects many of their best songs (although hardcore ACR fans might take issue with some of the selections), what's extra nice about this reissue are the b-sides and rarities that comprise the second disc. Those of us who missed out the first time around and are perhaps only familiar with the ACR tracks on the wonderful In the Beginning There Was Rhythm compilation will be surprised to hear that the driving dance-iness of those tracks were balanced out by the decidedly more gloomy sound typical of Joy Division's dark and angular choppiness. Far more punk than dance. Another fine case of a band's demos and rarities being a valuable good listen, instead of being collected for collectors' sake. Highly recommended!
Ah now this is more like it! The ACR retrospective that Soul Jazz / Universal Sound released a year or two ago was an honest, if partially flawed overview of ACR's occasionally problematic sound, developed during the height of the post-punk movement in the late '70s up through the mid '80s. Where I believe ACR really succeeded was in their earliest recordings documented here on The Graveyard and The Ballroom, which was originally released as a cassette on Factory and later through the Rev-Ola subsidiary of Creation. On these early recordings, A Certain Ratio struggled to balance the two dominant personalities of the group. On one hand there was Simon Topping with his grim poetry barked in a desperate baritone voice, on the other was self-professed Parliament fan Donald Johnson behind the drum kit. Johnson may have ultimately won whatever aesthetic battle took place ACR, but during these early recordings the band thrived on the tension between Topping's bleak vocals and Johnson's amazingly deft grooves. During that time period, ACR -- like many Factory bands including Section 25, The Wake, and Crispy Ambulance -- was accused of being Joy Division imitators. The skeletal Martin Hannent production and the similarity bewtixt Topping and Joy Division's singer Ian Curtis certainly enflame such accusations; yet the music of ACR with its choppy guitar angularity and percussive dexterity lent itself far closer to comparison with the post-punk grooviness of James Chance or ESG. Explosively groovy tracks like "Do The Du," "Crippled Child," and "All Night Party" put all the current roster of post-punk enthusiasts to shame.
This has long been one of my favorite recordings, and I'm very glad it's been reissued. That said, the choice of bonus tracks are a bit disappointing -- the first of which the excellent "And Then Again" appeared on The Old and The New, and the second of which "The Thin Boys" is a throw-away demo track.
We ran out of the special Record Store Day limited tote bag version of the AMF reissues, but we just got the last remaining copies of the vinyl reissues (sans tote bag) direct from the band. Both lps are again sadly out of print. But while they last, we have a handful of the nice priced 4lp set which includes both Flemish Altruism and Inindependence... Here's our review of both when we listed this back around Record Store Day...
In the most recent issue of Entertainment Weekly (!), our very own Andee was asked about what Record Store Day Releases we were most excited about. He mentioned a bunch, but the two they actually included in the magazine, were the utterly hilarious music nerd classic Rock, Rot And Rule (now sadly out of print), and these two vinyl reissues, from recently reunited / reactivated nineties post/math/noise rock combo A Minor Forest, which as many of you know, is in fact Andee's band! He was kind of joking, and a bit embarrassed when THAT was one of the ones they picked to print, but really, we WERE pretty excited. These two records have been out of print on vinyl for a decade, and have been remastered, now come with digital downloads, and one has all new artwork! But instead of making Andee further toot his own horn, we figured we'd try to be more objective, and let some other folks weigh in. A couple reviews from the past, and a couple from the present. So when we first reviewed these back in the day, for AMF's debut, Flemish Altruism, we asked beloved aQ-pal Douglas Mosurak to say a few words about that record, here's that original review from years and years ago:
"October 22, 1996: Bay Area rock trio A Minor Forest stop indie rock dead. Their new double LP on Thrill Jockey is so incredible, and subsequently so complete, that no other records of its kind need to be produced anymore. Lesser bands of their stripe are currently being petitioned to break up immediately to save embarrassment. And while some people will miss, like, June of 44 or the Archers of Loaf for a little while, with the proper exposure to Flemish Altruism, they'll forget all about it. AMF manage to piece together everything good about every post-Big Black and every post-Heroin outfit into a seamless, epic sound; fairly dense, deeply emotional and thoroughly human. They have the sense of humor required to lift it off, too. Some of their songs prefer to hide in the corner; some lunge for your throat. Their style is such that their original ideas fill in with ones borrowed from their rich lineage in such a manner that pays tribute without disrespect. It's a thoroughly engaging sound that I'd rank up there with the Bitch Magnet discography, with the Bastro LPs, with the Gore records, with the cream of the Gravity crop, even with the Shellac album. Best rock record of 1996, and currently outweighing all proposed rock concepts until the close of the millennium. Buy two. Wow."
Then, the follow up Inindependence was reviewed thusly by us upon its original release (when aQ reviews were still concise and impossibly brief):
"Simply put, this may be the last bastion of rock on Thrill Jockey, before they devolve into a purely electronic/jazz label. Sure we may be boasting a little, because A Minor Forest is our very own Andee Connors' band. But this truly is a great record of delicate math rock instrumentations executed with violent precision!"
So here were are 15+ years later, and both records, now reissued and available as a swank 4lp / tote bag set, in honor of the just passed 2014 iteration of Record Store Day, are ripe for reassessment, a new listen to some old sounds, with fresh ears, a bit of distance, and years of subsequent music making in their wake. So, here's what the illustrious Pitchfork site had to say this week about both AMF records:
According to legend, the A Minor Forest song "Bill's Mom Likes to Fuck" - a high point of the post-rock group's 1996 debut album, Flemish Altruism - was swiped from an inside joke that had circulated for years among the punk kids of Rapid City, South Dakota. A Minor Forest wasn't from Rapid City; they hailed from far-off San Francisco. But the band toured extensively throughout the country during its 90s-spanning existence, playing many of the same DIY venues that hosted the burgeoning post-hardcore and emo bands of that decade. If there's one thing that brings people together, it's cruel humor - and A Minor Forest, brooding and abrasive as well as downright delicate, knew a good joke when they heard it.
Flemish Altruism was reissued on vinyl for this year's Record Store Day, alongside A Minor Forest's other studio album, 1998's Inindependence. The rollout has been humble one, and it can't help but be compared to Slint's deservedly lavish Spiderland box set this month. Slint blazed trails with its dour, eerie ominousness; A Minor Forest, on the other hand, neither innovated nor intimidated. That doesn't make Flemish Altruism any less tense. The shadow of Slint - as well of Slint's slower, icier cousin, Codeine - loom large over A Minor Forest's distended syllables and dangling chords. The group had been honing that sound on singles and EPs since 1994, but Flemish Altruism tracks like "...But the Pants Stay On" and "Jacking Off George Lucas" groped for a new vocabulary out of the fragments laying around after post-rock's early-'90s Big Bang. What resulted was pidgin Slint-but in that process of restructuring, A Minor Forest came damn close to inventing post-post-rock, where the subgenre's self-seriousness was wrestled with until it laughed, gasped, and collapsed.
Steve Albini and Bob Weston produced Flemish Altruism, and the nerve-tightening cello they'd previously captured on Nirvana's In Utero feels almost deliberately evoked on the album's most arresting song, "Perform the Critical Straw Transfer". Singer/guitarist Erik Hoversten opens it with a deadpan punch line: "Guess you really lucked out�" he begins, his numb voice trailing off as bassist John Trevor Benson screams bestially yet faintly in the background, "�on this one." Sarcasm never sounded so black. Beneath them, cellist Dominique Davison saws with quiet strength, as if mocking and apologizing at the same time. The screaming gets pushed to the fore on thoroughly non-dainty "Dainty Jack and His Amazing Technicolor Cloth Jacket", an erratic spasm of dissonance that shows an affinity for San Diego screamo (A Minor Forest had previously recorded with Matt Anderson of Heroin), only broken up here and there with squibs of pinpoint jazziness. The balance is struck almost perfectly on "Bill's Mom Likes to Fuck", a 10-minute noise-cycle of mood swings, red herrings, and curdled blood.
The wiseass, scattershot racket of Flemish Altruism settles into a more predictable groove onInindependence. Concise and controlled by comparison, A Minor Forest's second and final album (not including their 1999 singles-and-EPs collection, ...So, Were They in Some Sort of Fight?) drags more algebra into the rhythm and more calculation into the off-kilter melody. It wouldn't be fair to say the band had begun to take itself either more or less seriously - but the music is more serious, and even the song titles are less crass. If "Erik's Budding Romance" is to be taken at face value, that relationship flip-flopped randomly and often between coy, candlelit dinners and table-flipping eruptions of lust. Drummer Andee Connors, an unsung hero of his instrument and era, is in top form, coaxing every shade of texture, dynamic, and emotion out of the kit. There are honest, unabashed hooks on the deliciously brief (that is, under four minutes) centerpiece, "�It's Salmon!!!", as well as in "Michael Anthony", which skips a sweet melody across a minefield of disjointed changes and chords. At the same time, the album's 18-minute monster "The Smell of Hot" never fully jells; as A Minor Forest's recording career drew to a halt, patience-testing jams occupied one extreme of their spectrum, while a hint of pleasing pop teased at the other.
A Minor Forest's legacy is not a towering one. Most notably, Hoversten went on to play with Pinback, where he was able to indulge his love of angular melody much more avidly. The band never seemed to want to make bold statements, and it always punctured whatever atmosphere it crafted with wiry self-deprecation and perverse wit. When A Minor Forest reunited in 2013 after a 15-year hiatus, Hoversten said in a radio interview, "[This reunion is] sort of like, take an outfit you wore 15 years ago, then put it on today. Clearly you liked it at one point, but it's not exactly the outfit you would have chosen today. That being said, it's not like I'm being asked to put on a clown suit." Despite their crank titles and in-jokes, A Minor Forest was never a funny band. But they had fun, and that fun seeped into their music. And that makes Flemish Altruism and Inindependence two of the most endlessly rewarding albums of the 90s post-rock boom, if never the most monolithic.
And finally, here's a review of both Flemish Altruism and Inindependence from the always awesome Pop Matters:
The bare truth behind two classic albums from the 1990s.
I remember it clearly: the road was a hazy sequence of distant glares kept together by a dense, hazy lull immersed in the purest of mists. My friend, the proud owner of the CD, was holding the music artifact with one hand, while the other occasionally found its way up and down the wheel, now on this side; now on the other. I never knew how both hands also managed to offer such an accurate interpretation of the drumming, but his abilities ceased to amaze me when my side of the car hit a guardrail that seemed to have popped out from nowhere. My friend carefully placed the CD case in the glove compartment and met me outside the vehicle, where we assessed the damage. "That drumming! Oh boy, that drumming!", was all he had to say.
Not much has happened in the 16 years that followed that day. My friend got married, paid his way to a divorce and when we meet, I drive, so he can be Andee Connors and I can take good care of our lives. In the real world, the influence of a band like A Minor Forest - a scruffy bunch of lads from San Francisco - still echoes on both sides of the Atlantic. Inheritors of the legacy initiated by bands like Slint, Bastro, Gastr Del Sol and Shellac, A Minor Forest's name appears, rightly or wrongly, almost invariably as part of the American post-rock scene, as if their own legacy could not be singled out and stand on its own two feet. But while most people blame them, together with a whole bunch of Midwestern acts loosely located in the "Corn Belt", for the explosion of the math-rock plague, the impact this short-lived ensemble has had on indie rock is probably still far from being recognised.
Their two classic albums, Flemish Altruism and Inindependence, reissued on vinyl by Thrill Jockey for Record Store Day on 19 April, are both presented with an array of previously unpublished pictures in a special four-LP set that includes download cards. However, what matters the most is that these albums, which have been out of print for a decade, have been remastered from the original tapes. The sensuality of the naked, raw sound that was the core of that scene (and I hereby use this term in the artistic, rather than in the geographic sense) is therefore faithfully represented in all its purity and ingenuity. "The Dutch Fist", "So Jesus Was At the Last Supper" and "...But the Pants Stay On" are some of the finest representations imaginable of noise as the most spontaneous by-product of the deconstruction of rock grammar. This primary necessity regulated by tradition - Erik Hoversten (guitars and vocals) and John Trevor Benson (bass) had both studied music at Berkeley - found its champions in Steve Albini (who else?) and Bob Weston (he too of Shellac fame), whose uncompromised affection for stripped-down sounds and total lack of artificiality constituted the perfect match for the band.
Flemish Altruism is the result of this formula, and tunes like "Jacking Off George Lucas" or "Ed Is 50" betray an improvisational approach which heavily relies on the dichotomy between the extreme unpredictability of noise and the discipline usually behind melodic patterns. The almost mandatory (at least back then) tour of most of the US would lead, two years later, to the recording of Inindependence: an album that followed the path traced by its predecessor, perpetuating the angularity and eclecticism that would make A Minor Forest easily recognizable years after their dissolution.
Flemish Altruism and Inindependence are the band's only full-lengths and it could not be otherwise. Although a collection of much of their out of print material, plus a couple of new tracks made it onto the Were They in Some Sort of Fight? CD on My Pal God Records in 1999, these two albums vouch for an incredibly inspired band which disbanded once they realized that the traditional rock instrumentation was starting to restrict their enormous potential and creativity. Does this awareness affect these two records? Not at all. A Minor Forest didn't live long enough to see their craft surpass their inspiration, and for this reason their legacy is definitely safer now than it was 20 years ago!
As mentioned above, both Flemish Altruism and Inindependence have been remastered, both include digital downloads, and are housed in swank full color gatefold jackets, Flemish Altruism has all new artwork!!
In the most recent issue of Entertainment Weekly (!), our very own Andee was asked about what Record Store Day Releases we were most excited about. He mentioned a bunch, but the two they actually included in the magazine, were the utterly hilarious music nerd classic Rock, Rot And Rule, which you'll find reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, and these two vinyl reissues, from recently reunited / reactivated nineties post/math/noise rock combo A Minor Forest, which as many of you know, is in fact Andee's band! He was kind of joking, and a bit embarrassed when THAT was one of the ones they picked to print, but really, we WERE pretty excited. These two records have been out of print on vinyl for a decade, and have been remastered, now come with digital downloads, and one has all new artwork! But instead of making Andee further toot his own horn, we figured we'd try to be more objective, and let some other folks weigh in. A couple reviews from the past, and a couple from the present. So when we first reviewed these back in the day, for AMF's debut, Flemish Altruism, we asked beloved aQ-pal Douglas Mosurak to say a few words about that record, here's that original review from years and years ago:
"October 22, 1996: Bay Area rock trio A Minor Forest stop indie rock dead. Their new double LP on Thrill Jockey is so incredible, and subsequently so complete, that no other records of its kind need to be produced anymore. Lesser bands of their stripe are currently being petitioned to break up immediately to save embarrassment. And while some people will miss, like, June of 44 or the Archers of Loaf for a little while, with the proper exposure to Flemish Altruism, they'll forget all about it. AMF manage to piece together everything good about every post-Big Black and every post-Heroin outfit into a seamless, epic sound; fairly dense, deeply emotional and thoroughly human. They have the sense of humor required to lift it off, too. Some of their songs prefer to hide in the corner; some lunge for your throat. Their style is such that their original ideas fill in with ones borrowed from their rich lineage in such a manner that pays tribute without disrespect. It's a thoroughly engaging sound that I'd rank up there with the Bitch Magnet discography, with the Bastro LPs, with the Gore records, with the cream of the Gravity crop, even with the Shellac album. Best rock record of 1996, and currently outweighing all proposed rock concepts until the close of the millennium. Buy two. Wow."
Then, the follow up Inindependence was reviewed thusly by us upon its original release (when aQ reviews were still concise and impossibly brief):
"Simply put, this may be the last bastion of rock on Thrill Jockey, before they devolve into a purely electronic/jazz label. Sure we may be boasting a little, because A Minor Forest is our very own Andee Connors' band. But this truly is a great record of delicate math rock instrumentations executed with violent precision!"
So here were are 15+ years later, and both records, now reissued and available as a swank 4lp / tote bag set, in honor of the just passed 2014 iteration of Record Store Day, are ripe for reassessment, a new listen to some old sounds, with fresh ears, a bit of distance, and years of subsequent music making in their wake. So, here's what the illustrious Pitchfork site had to say this week about both AMF records:
According to legend, the A Minor Forest song "Bill's Mom Likes to Fuck" - a high point of the post-rock group's 1996 debut album, Flemish Altruism - was swiped from an inside joke that had circulated for years among the punk kids of Rapid City, South Dakota. A Minor Forest wasn't from Rapid City; they hailed from far-off San Francisco. But the band toured extensively throughout the country during its 90s-spanning existence, playing many of the same DIY venues that hosted the burgeoning post-hardcore and emo bands of that decade. If there's one thing that brings people together, it's cruel humor - and A Minor Forest, brooding and abrasive as well as downright delicate, knew a good joke when they heard it.
Flemish Altruism was reissued on vinyl for this year's Record Store Day, alongside A Minor Forest's other studio album, 1998's Inindependence. The rollout has been humble one, and it can't help but be compared to Slint's deservedly lavish Spiderland box set this month. Slint blazed trails with its dour, eerie ominousness; A Minor Forest, on the other hand, neither innovated nor intimidated. That doesn't make Flemish Altruism any less tense. The shadow of Slint - as well of Slint's slower, icier cousin, Codeine - loom large over A Minor Forest's distended syllables and dangling chords. The group had been honing that sound on singles and EPs since 1994, but Flemish Altruism tracks like "...But the Pants Stay On" and "Jacking Off George Lucas" groped for a new vocabulary out of the fragments laying around after post-rock's early-'90s Big Bang. What resulted was pidgin Slint-but in that process of restructuring, A Minor Forest came damn close to inventing post-post-rock, where the subgenre's self-seriousness was wrestled with until it laughed, gasped, and collapsed.
Steve Albini and Bob Weston produced Flemish Altruism, and the nerve-tightening cello they'd previously captured on Nirvana's In Utero feels almost deliberately evoked on the album's most arresting song, "Perform the Critical Straw Transfer". Singer/guitarist Erik Hoversten opens it with a deadpan punch line: "Guess you really lucked out�" he begins, his numb voice trailing off as bassist John Trevor Benson screams bestially yet faintly in the background, "�on this one." Sarcasm never sounded so black. Beneath them, cellist Dominique Davison saws with quiet strength, as if mocking and apologizing at the same time. The screaming gets pushed to the fore on thoroughly non-dainty "Dainty Jack and His Amazing Technicolor Cloth Jacket", an erratic spasm of dissonance that shows an affinity for San Diego screamo (A Minor Forest had previously recorded with Matt Anderson of Heroin), only broken up here and there with squibs of pinpoint jazziness. The balance is struck almost perfectly on "Bill's Mom Likes to Fuck", a 10-minute noise-cycle of mood swings, red herrings, and curdled blood.
The wiseass, scattershot racket of Flemish Altruism settles into a more predictable groove onInindependence. Concise and controlled by comparison, A Minor Forest's second and final album (not including their 1999 singles-and-EPs collection, ...So, Were They in Some Sort of Fight?) drags more algebra into the rhythm and more calculation into the off-kilter melody. It wouldn't be fair to say the band had begun to take itself either more or less seriously - but the music is more serious, and even the song titles are less crass. If "Erik's Budding Romance" is to be taken at face value, that relationship flip-flopped randomly and often between coy, candlelit dinners and table-flipping eruptions of lust. Drummer Andee Connors, an unsung hero of his instrument and era, is in top form, coaxing every shade of texture, dynamic, and emotion out of the kit. There are honest, unabashed hooks on the deliciously brief (that is, under four minutes) centerpiece, "�It's Salmon!!!", as well as in "Michael Anthony", which skips a sweet melody across a minefield of disjointed changes and chords. At the same time, the album's 18-minute monster "The Smell of Hot" never fully jells; as A Minor Forest's recording career drew to a halt, patience-testing jams occupied one extreme of their spectrum, while a hint of pleasing pop teased at the other.
A Minor Forest's legacy is not a towering one. Most notably, Hoversten went on to play with Pinback, where he was able to indulge his love of angular melody much more avidly. The band never seemed to want to make bold statements, and it always punctured whatever atmosphere it crafted with wiry self-deprecation and perverse wit. When A Minor Forest reunited in 2013 after a 15-year hiatus, Hoversten said in a radio interview, "[This reunion is] sort of like, take an outfit you wore 15 years ago, then put it on today. Clearly you liked it at one point, but it's not exactly the outfit you would have chosen today. That being said, it's not like I'm being asked to put on a clown suit." Despite their crank titles and in-jokes, A Minor Forest was never a funny band. But they had fun, and that fun seeped into their music. And that makes Flemish Altruism and Inindependence two of the most endlessly rewarding albums of the 90s post-rock boom, if never the most monolithic.
And finally, here's a review of both Flemish Altruism and Inindependence from the always awesome Pop Matters:
The bare truth behind two classic albums from the 1990s.
I remember it clearly: the road was a hazy sequence of distant glares kept together by a dense, hazy lull immersed in the purest of mists. My friend, the proud owner of the CD, was holding the music artifact with one hand, while the other occasionally found its way up and down the wheel, now on this side; now on the other. I never knew how both hands also managed to offer such an accurate interpretation of the drumming, but his abilities ceased to amaze me when my side of the car hit a guardrail that seemed to have popped out from nowhere. My friend carefully placed the CD case in the glove compartment and met me outside the vehicle, where we assessed the damage. "That drumming! Oh boy, that drumming!", was all he had to say.
Not much has happened in the 16 years that followed that day. My friend got married, paid his way to a divorce and when we meet, I drive, so he can be Andee Connors and I can take good care of our lives. In the real world, the influence of a band like A Minor Forest - a scruffy bunch of lads from San Francisco - still echoes on both sides of the Atlantic. Inheritors of the legacy initiated by bands like Slint, Bastro, Gastr Del Sol and Shellac, A Minor Forest's name appears, rightly or wrongly, almost invariably as part of the American post-rock scene, as if their own legacy could not be singled out and stand on its own two feet. But while most people blame them, together with a whole bunch of Midwestern acts loosely located in the "Corn Belt", for the explosion of the math-rock plague, the impact this short-lived ensemble has had on indie rock is probably still far from being recognised.
Their two classic albums, Flemish Altruism and Inindependence, reissued on vinyl by Thrill Jockey for Record Store Day on 19 April, are both presented with an array of previously unpublished pictures in a special four-LP set that includes download cards. However, what matters the most is that these albums, which have been out of print for a decade, have been remastered from the original tapes. The sensuality of the naked, raw sound that was the core of that scene (and I hereby use this term in the artistic, rather than in the geographic sense) is therefore faithfully represented in all its purity and ingenuity. "The Dutch Fist", "So Jesus Was At the Last Supper" and "...But the Pants Stay On" are some of the finest representations imaginable of noise as the most spontaneous by-product of the deconstruction of rock grammar. This primary necessity regulated by tradition - Erik Hoversten (guitars and vocals) and John Trevor Benson (bass) had both studied music at Berkeley - found its champions in Steve Albini (who else?) and Bob Weston (he too of Shellac fame), whose uncompromised affection for stripped-down sounds and total lack of artificiality constituted the perfect match for the band.
Flemish Altruism is the result of this formula, and tunes like "Jacking Off George Lucas" or "Ed Is 50" betray an improvisational approach which heavily relies on the dichotomy between the extreme unpredictability of noise and the discipline usually behind melodic patterns. The almost mandatory (at least back then) tour of most of the US would lead, two years later, to the recording of Inindependence: an album that followed the path traced by its predecessor, perpetuating the angularity and eclecticism that would make A Minor Forest easily recognizable years after their dissolution.
Flemish Altruism and Inindependence are the band's only full-lengths and it could not be otherwise. Although a collection of much of their out of print material, plus a couple of new tracks made it onto the Were They in Some Sort of Fight? CD on My Pal God Records in 1999, these two albums vouch for an incredibly inspired band which disbanded once they realized that the traditional rock instrumentation was starting to restrict their enormous potential and creativity. Does this awareness affect these two records? Not at all. A Minor Forest didn't live long enough to see their craft surpass their inspiration, and for this reason their legacy is definitely safer now than it was 20 years ago!
As mentioned above, both Flemish Altruism and Inindependence have been remastered, both include digital downloads, and are housed in swank full color gatefold jackets, Flemish Altruism has all new artwork, and while they last, available ONLY at aQ (or from the band on their upcoming tour, which begins a few days after this week's list!), both records are bundled together (4lps!), for a special low price, and housed in a silkscreened tote bag, with a killer new AMF logo by none other than Christoph Szpadjel, the Lord Of The Logos!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
This is a reissue A.B.G.S.'s early '90s album "Erdlager." Utilizing only junked objects (i.e. steel plates, oil barrels, plastic containers) and recording only in abandoned warehouses, A.B.G.S. fits in with post-industrial niche of German guys banging on metal. Perhaps the result of Thomas Koner's post-production work, these recordings are much more subtle than that of the big egos in Einsturzende Neubauten, Test Dept, and Crash Worship. A.B.G.S. has since disbanded with some of its members forming the haunting drone ensemble Multer. Released on the label run by a fellow from Cranioclast.
A whole lot has changed since we first laid our ears on this glorious slab of cinematic Finnish casiocore way back in the twentieth century. At the time Derek, the debut full length from these Finnish freaks, was released, it was just about the weirdest and coolest thing we'd ever heard. And the last few years haven't changed that one bit! What has changed is the fact that now, the whole world, at least the underground music world, have their eyes squarely on Finland's fertile music scene. Eating up anything and everything, and it's all amazing! Circle, Kemialliset Ystavat, Avarus, Anaksimandros, Paavoharju and on and on and on. But before all these bands (except for Circle) Aavikko were busy creating impossibly catchy, Eastern tinged synthesizer scores for imaginary Westerns, or Bollywood movies, or whatever crazy Finnish movie could handle being accompanied by this maniacal music. Think of it this way, the fictional filmscores of Godspeed You Black Emperor or Barry Adamson are meant to be played at 33 rpm, to capture all of the scope, space, and time of their bleak sonic imagery, right? Well supposing that is indeed true, then Aavikko's utterly absurd and gloriously frolicsome music is some alternative universe version of those filmscores meant for 33, but played at 45. Or heck, 78!! Manic twin casios wiggle out catchy tunes that could easily have sprung from the mad mind of Martin Denny, had he been composing for 60's spy thrillers. Tomi Leppanen (Aavikko's human metronome, and currently the drummer for Circle AND Pharoah Overlord) propels the casio madness with pseudo disco syncopations and hyper-active breakbeats, while second hand synths weave surprisingly lush noir soundscapes, equal parts moody cocktaily jazz, propulsive spy thriller soundtrack muzak, spastic mechanical sounding krautrock and pretty much every musical stop in between. The surprising thing is that every song, no matter what strange twist or direction it takes, is wildly fun, unbearably catchy and weird as fuck. Full of hooks and unlikely sounds, funky grooves and hauntingly playful circus music, this record is one of the greatest warm and fuzzy, feel good, psychedelic groove lounge freakout records EVER! Aavikko's original label Bad Vugum coined the term maniacal monkey jazz for Aavikko, and we're not sure we could come up with anything better!
We can't tell you how psyched we are to have this back in stock. This is one of THE essential Finnish records, definitely one of our top five Finnish records EVER. This reissue is so long overdue as Derek has been out of print practically for freaking EVER! 7 or 8 years! Until now! Plus, this reissue includes two bonus tracks from the also long (and still!) out of print Aavikko cd ep. And who can argue with MORE Aavikko?!?!
Returning from a long absence, here's a three song ep from Sweden's infamous improv-black metal band Abruptum. None blacker! The first track, dating from way back in 1991, starts with gothic keyboards and has a lot of Satanic screaming, but with its gothic
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Finally, Andee's tUMULt label releases some new shit! Yes, it's been *months* since tUMULt's last releases (Guapo, 7000 Dying Rats). But don't be fooled. All that time has been well spent preparing stuff by Japan's Solar Anus, the soon-to-be-huge OCS [the prolific John Dwyer of Dig That Body Up It's Alive (also coming soon on tUMULt), Coachwhips, and Pink And Brown], Finland's Worms, Norway's Brainbombs, SF black metal one man band Leviathan, a new Circle -and- a new Iran, for imminent release!
But for now, we can revel in this, the latest installment of psychedelic majesty from Japanese avant-hippy heroes Acid Mothers Temple. This is the debut entry in a series of 12" picture discs (future volumes to include Skullflower, Troum, Circle, Reynols, Loren Chasse and more) to be released over the course of the next 12 months and quite an auspicious start it is too. Recorded well over a year ago, this is AMT at their absolute prime, featuring special guest star Tatsuya Yoshida of the Ruins! Two extended tracks (35 + minutes) of transcendental psych-drone. Side one has to be the most beautiful track they've ever recorded. Uncharacteristically tranquil and captivatingly beautiful. Droning, shimmering chimes coalesce into some sort of cosmic Ur-drone, punctuated by simple caveman thuds and epic swooshes, resulting in a grand and gorgeous ambience! Side two is a single track separated into two apparent movements. The first sees AMT back on more familiar ground, with swooping synths and freak out guitar. A stumbling kosmic krautrock, with motorik rhythms and free guitar, amidst a swampy wash of rumbling low end and squealing synths. The track erupts into bubbling atonal out-rock exploration splattered with mad scientist synthesisers as the whole thing slowly mutates into 'cosmic slop' of the nth degree, becoming gradually free-er and free-er. The second 'movement' is all slithery free jazz with bubbling cauldrons of synth sputter, wild keyboards and Can-like rhythms until the whole thing gets all dreamy, eventually blissing out completely. When Andee asked AMT to do a 12", they weren't yet Wire cover stars with so many dozens of releases out -- but this is still one of their absolute best recordings!
As you might have guessed, this is EXTREMELY LIMITED. Hand stamped sleeves. A gorgeous picture disc, with a striking flowers/UFO image on one side, and a scintillatingly saucy photo on the other (you'll just have to buy it to see it!) Frustratingly (for Allan at least) only available as a picture disc lp, although there will be a cd version in the near future, but (even more frustratingly for Allan) the tracks on the cd will be completely different!
One of our favorite Acid Mothers Temple records available again thanks to the kind folks at Swordfish. Originally released on the band's own label and long out of print (we reviewed it originally way back in 2000), this new version is ultimately the same with a few minor alterations, different liner notes, now in a jewel case instead of a cardboard sleeve, but it's the music that matters, and the music is mind blowing.
Ivan Piskov's Wild Gals A Go-Go was these Japanese space travellers' third album and is jam packed with freaked out avant-hippy insanity. "Tumultuous psychedelic trip sound...Potentially massive frontal lobe damage. Real punch-drunk music!" is what it says inside. And that's pretty right on. Ultra epic psychedelic guitars blown into fuzzy druggy psychedelic space rock madness that we can never seem to get enough of.
This pretends to be a soundtrack to a supposed "psych-nonsense" film by alleged "Russian mondo film" director Ivan Piskov, but we're pretty sure that's all a put on. Regardless, check it out, especially if you need your fix of outerspacepsychrock!!
From its beginnings, the Icelandic arts organization Kitchen Motors has been pairing off interesting cross-platform artists who may not have otherwise had the opportunity to work together. "The Hymn Of The Seventh Illusion" was a commission by Kitchen Motors
Compounding the collaborative spirit, Kitchen Motors employed The Hafler Trio (whose solo member Andrew McKensie now lives in Iceland) to remix "The Hymn Of The Seventh Illusion." As McKensie has been moving further away from the fictional research projects and more towards the electro-acoustic studies from Luigi Nono, The Hafler Trio is a perfect fit. This remix has stretched and abstracted the polyphony of the chorus into a very creepy extended drone collage. Very nice work!
Somewhere between Gary Numan and Jean-Jacques Perrey. The aesthetics of Kraftwerk fused with punk brought the industrial sounds of SPK, Esplendor Geometrico, and Nocturnal Emissions...this continuum continues under the guise of "post-rock" with Trans Am, Six Finger Satellite, and now Add N To X...a bloody assault of analogue synths, propulsive bass lines and hyper catchy tunes...recommended by those kids at the Wire!
In our review of the first Aeolian String Ensemble records, we attempted to discern who or what this British conglomerate was, postulating that perhaps Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton may have been involved with the Ensemble at some point. The truth is that we still have no clue who these people are or what else they've worked on. If he contributed anything to the Ensemble, Stapleton's contributions were in all likelihood minimal. Regardless, that first Aeolian String Ensemble record Lassithi / Elysium has long been one of our favorite drone-based albums. Similarly, we can again wholeheartedly endorse the second Aeolian String Ensemble album Eclipse.
What is so striking about this album (and the Aeolian String Ensemble in general) is the single-minded approach to sound making that spans almost 20 years. Eclipse features 3 extended tracks from 1981, 1986, and 1998 respectively; and all of them share a very similar timbral quality in their melancholic, sweeping ambience rippled with generous amounts of reverb and delay. The Ensemble claims to generate everything from Aeolian Harps, which are stringed instruments designed to be excited by the wind; yet, the resulting sounds have a post-Kraut / late'70s prog-ambient sensibility closely resembling the synth and guitar driftspaces of Klaus Schulze and Popul Vuh, rather than actual aeolian harps. No matter, as their sonic poetry is utterly beautiful. Eclipse will certainly rank as one of the best drone records of 2005.
So happy to have this repressed and back in stock, after so many years - we originally reviewed this back on list #145! It's an all time dronological classic, so if you missed it way back when, here it is again:
It's a little hard to say who or what the Aeolian String Ensemble is, but a few references point toward the Nurse With Wound encampments, as Christoph Heemann takes some credit for this album (as both a contributor to the ensemble and as the cover artist), and David Kenny (longtime Nurse With Wound / Current 93 collaborator) produced and engineered the record, and United Dairies was originally scheduled to release it. Rumors persisted for quite a while that Steve Stapleton himself was behind these Aeolian Strings, only later to be refuted by Stapleton himself. Regardless of the Ensemble's participants, this album is a gem of post-industrial, British dronology.
Presumably the source material for the Aeolian String Ensemble is the aeolian harp, an antique instrument which gained popularity in the nineteenth century in English country gardens. The aeolian harp is fitted with a number of strings with different thicknesses but all tuned to the same key on top of a resonator box. Wind sets the strings in vibration in such a way that their harmonics are heard, rather than the fundamental note; thus creating an impressionistic chorus of droning sounds. From these harps and the subsequent post-production of judicious delay pedals and sustained reverb, the Ensemble coaxes some of the most beautifully immersive drones from these harps, on par with Andrew Chalk & Jonathan Coleclough's Sumac album, any of the Troum recordings, and the score to Tarkovsky's Stalker. A truly fantastic album that is fortunately back in print again!!
Oh, shit. Here's one of those discs that we just know we don't have enough copies of. AFCGT is an acronym for A Frames + Climax Golden Twins, a project that fortunately didn't just disappear as a one-off collaboration. The five-piece, instrumental ensemble for three guitarists, a bassist, and a drummer had knocked our socks off with a couple of awesome recordings in 2008, most notably their eponymous debut of noir-tinged noise rock girded by uncanny, propulsive grooves; and they're still doing it in 2009. The Square Microphone Tapes are cracked sessions of mutant psychedelia transposed through damaged punk-post-punk slabs of sludge, woozy noise, and art-damaged riffage. The opening cut "Strike 9" is a barnstormed of a scuzzed garage rock track with allusions to the days when Sub Pop and grunge meant something that was crafted on a shitty 4-track in some Northwest warehouse. Well, that's exactly where this was recorded! AFCGT unravels the recordings through a divergent set of x-ray guitar licks breaking off low-slung backbeats, some slo-mo tape exercises that come across as Stooges outtake played back at the wrong speed a la Neu! 2, and lots of heavy-tracks that could be the improbable sound of the Sun City Girls recording an album for AmRep. In other words, it's pretty fucking awesome. Hopefully, there will be more than the 20 copies we know exist...
Whew! The first time we got something in from AFCGT, it was a painfully limited cd-r that exploded like a supernova and then disappeared just as quickly from the site. So, it's a damn good thing that this awesome collaboration between A Frames and the Climax Golden Twins has resulted in another batch of unbelievably good recordings. This time, it's a bit less limited, as Dirty Knobby has pressed these 8 tracks onto a 10", which should mean this thing will be around a little bit longer than the debut. The sound of AFCGT here is pretty much the same. Instrumental tunes with Mack truck rhythms, spring-loaded basslines, and giddy explosion of jagged guitar riffs that come together in what AFCGT blurts out as "New Punk." These swamp mutations of detuned Cambodian garage pop songs with an excess of stereoscopic distortion certainly have a Sun City Girls meets the Birthday vibe going on, with occasional excursions into a free noise mess of devolved noise and out of control drum fills, sort of like some of the Laddio Bollocko breakdowns. Who can complain about a Laddio Bollocko reference? Not us!
Holy shit, this is fucking great! And who would have ever thought that the A Frames and the Climax Golden Twins would make a record together? And who would have imagined that it would be this fucking awesome? It's all superlatives and all expletives in describing the first collaborative production from AFCGT. The A Frames had managed to raise some eyebrows here through their post-punk appropriations of early Wire and early Fall, but the vocals had always been something of a miss for them especially on the last Sub Pop album. But in working with the AQ-endorsed Climax Golden Twins who are a band accustomed to delivering exemplary instrumentals from literally every corner of the avant-rock landscape, the A Frames have the permission to shut the hell up and let the Climax Golden Twins dump the fucking kitchen sink all over A Frames rhythmic swagger. The album opens with a tumultuous blast of glue-huffing noise-rock, sort of like a fistfight between the Butthole Surfers and the Sun City Girls. Soon after, a series of bad-ass Birthday Party / Oxbow swamp rock riffs explode with spindly space-age gamelan leads; elsewhere, the No Wave ghosts of R.L. Crutchfield-era DNA emerge with of jagged chops across the guitar pick-ups, bloodied fingers and all. Fuck, it all sounds fucking great! It's a damn shame that this thing is only limited to 50 copies! That perhaps is our only complaint.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The enigmatic Agnes returns with yet another suitably dark and suitably mysterious transmission of gritty textures and carcinogenic drones. As we mentioned before in our review of her oblique, eponymous 3" cd-r, we can find little information on who Agnes is. She hails from Chicago; and this is the second release we've been able to track down, but that seems to be all we can discern. Who else she's worked with or what she's done before these two releases remains an unknown. All of this matches with the sounds she produces, bringing to mind the early work of Maurizio Bianchi, in part finding parallels to his mythic disappearance by 1983 from the noise community with all sorts of conspiracies and hearsay getting tossed around; but also in hearing a sympathetic aesthetic through Agnes' zombified electronic swarmings, high voltage crackle, and generalized bad vibes. The first side buzzes and marches along grimy arpeggiations which seem both organic and machined at the same time. The second side laces a more noxious crackle against a chugging rhythm that steadily loses its will to live and gets consumed by tactile drips, clicks, whirs, and squeaks sending visions of greasy machines dating to the early 20th century whose gears spit out metal filings, run at unsafely hot temperatures, always on the verge of blowing a cog and causing the whole operation to grind to a halt. It's really nice to hear Agnes stretch out her compositions along a broader axis beyond the 15 minutes or so of that aforementioned cd-r; but unfortunately, this tape is super limited and already out of print. That said, we've heard rumors of a full album on wax from Ms. Agnes. Bring it on, lady!
Ok, we know what you're thinking (maybe). Alice Cooper? Aquarius Record(s) Of The Week? Two of 'em?? If you're not familiar with these albums, you might be wondering... and while we know that many loyal AQ customers are of course extremely knowledgeable about all sorts of cool music, just as much or more so than any of us who work here, we also wouldn't be surprised if more than a few of you had never been exposed to these first two Alice Cooper albums before. Which is why we HAVE to list them and make them Records Of The Week!!�After being out of print for far too long, they've now been newly reissued on cd (in limited editions, see below for more about that), and we're excited to be able to tell you about 'em.
So, when most people think of Alice Cooper, what comes to mind? The big '70s shock rock act, up there with KISS, the guy who was the Marilyn Manson of the '70s, or maybe the regular on Hollywood Squares, or even the early '90s hairmetal Alice, of Wayne's World "we're not worthy" fame. Campy and kitschy and scholocky and alcoholic, with snakes and blood. All good things of course. But even if you are a fan of the Alice Cooper classics from the '70s, albums like Love It To Death, Killer and Billion Dollar Babies, the Alice Cooper Band's 1969 debut Pretties For You and its 1970 follow up Easy Action are often overlooked, and underrated. Originally released on Frank Zappa's Straight label (and whatever you might think of Frank Zappa, he had a good track record for releasing freaky music by other folks, Captain Beefheart ferinstance!) this early Alice Cooper stuff is NOT the heavy metal hard rock you might be expecting. That was a direction AC went in really only after moving from LA to Detroit and hooking up with producer Bob Ezrin. There's hints of heaviness, of course, but this is waaay more psychedelic and poppy and proggy. And weird. If you think you know what to expect, think again. You're in for a bizarre treat indeed. (Some Alice Cooper fans might not agree, but we hope most open minded AQ customers will!)
The front cover of Pretties For You has a painting that make it look like a Robert Wyatt record. And on the back cover, the band, posing in a gallery of strange modern sculptures, show off a visual style that makes 'em look something like a cross between Blue Cheer and Roxy Music. Intrigued? Throw the album on, and you're confronted with the first of this album's many non-sequiturs, the orchestral fanfare of "Titanic Overture", which segues into the why-be-normal, twisty-turny psych piece "10 Minutes Before The Worm" (actually only 1 minute, 40 seconds long). They weren't trying to ease anybody into their "thing" it seems. Better yet is track three, "Swing Low Sweet Cheerio", the album's first true pop gem, and still plenty weird. And that's what this is, a pop album, full of great pop songs, super Beatlesy, hummable stuff. But it's Beatlesy in a tripped out Sgt. Peppers way. And wait a second, Pretties For You? The Pretty Things' "SF Sorrow" might also have been an influence. There's a lot of quirky dynamics, theatrical art rock gestures, cryptic humor, wild psychedelic effects, screaming fuzz guitar, strange stops and starts... it can be off-putting at first, probably difficult listening for some, with as much in common with Amon Duul II or even Olivia Tremor Control as they do with Alice Cooper's later million-sellers. But, you like '60s garage psych right? Well early AC were really a Nuggetsy garage band (originally called The Earwigs, then The Spiders, and then The Nazz, finally settling on Alice Cooper following a legendary Ouija board session). Doing their thing on the Sunset Strip in LA, they gradually got nuttier and nuttier, more psychedelic and experimental. If AC hadn't gone on to such later success, we're certain this would be regarded by psych lovers as an obscure cult classic of late '60s freakdom, like 50 Foot Hose or West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band or something. Instead, it's the record that probably confuses average Alice Cooper fans, and isn't heard by anybody else, which we think is a shame...
Alice Cooper's swaggering second effort, Easy Action, is just a bit more straightforward, more of a "rock" album, proto-glam in fact, AC maybe trying to take on T-Rex? On it, with some wicked lyrics, Alice starts to develop his better known, "mentally ill" or "evil" sick humor persona, in a wittier way though than the cartoonishness that later took over in later years. His ever-so-slightly-raspy, steeped-in-decadence voice, of course, always had star power from the very beginning, but here he occasionally breaks out a snarl that never surfaced on Pretties, amidst more melodic crooning. And one of the tracks, the spasmodic tour de force "Still No Air", foreshadows Alice Cooper's later West Side Story obsession on School's Out.
And Easy Action proves to be still pretty darn trippy and weird, with plenty of progtastic twists, just like Pretties. Heck, "Lay Down And Die, Goodbye" is 7+ minutes of pretty much just sound FX laced freakishness. This album boasts several more glorious psychedelic pop gems like "Laughing At Me", the piano ballad "Beautiful Flyaway", and the very Beatlesy "Shoe Salesman", alongside the harder rockin' likes of "Return Of The Spiders"... Oooh so many good tunes. Compared to the debut, it's perhaps a more confident, slightly less confusional record, that set them up for major label success of their next album, another huge favorite of ours, Love It To Death, recorded with Ezrin after their relocation to Detroit - a move that made sense, considering they did have a lot in sonically common with The Amboy Dukes and even the MC5. You'll also hear parallels to very early Blue Oyster Cult and David Bowie... And (moreso on Pretties) an American version of Pink Floyd (Syd Barrett era mind you...) or even a more obtuse The Doors...
While Alice Cooper (both the man and the band) made a lot of classic music in their career(s), no other Alice Cooper records were ever quite as arty and bizarre, with the unique one foot in the psychedelic sixties mix of throbbing manic energy and melancholic moodiness that's found on Pretties For You and Easy Action. Are we going out on limb by making 'em Records Of The Week? Nope, what could be more AQ?? These have been favorites here for a long time, but rarely available. And Jim and Allan bonded over these back when they both first started working here years ago. Also, we know the guys in Harvey Milk will have to be stoked to find that their new album got ROTW honors alongside these two!
And by the way, we insist on filing these under A, not C. It's the Alice Cooper Band dammit. Alice himself didn't go solo 'til Welcome To My Nightmare in 1975. The original act, featuring guitarists Glen Buxton and Mike Bruce, bassist Denis Dunaway, and drummer Neil Smith, alongside the former Vincent Furnier on vocals and snake handling, deserves their due! One of the great American rock bands.
One final note: these reissues on this new Rhino "Encore" imprint are based around the (dumb) idea of doing releases that are only available for a limited time. It's like the way Disney puts out DVDs. So, all the more reason for us to shout from the rooftops about these two albums -- in six months, according to the label, these reissues will be out of print, again!! Argh. So get 'em while you can, if you don't already have them in your collection!! And buy a copy for a friend!
Ok, we know what you're thinking (maybe). Alice Cooper? Aquarius Record(s) Of The Week? Two of 'em?? If you're not familiar with these albums, you might be wondering... and while we know that many loyal AQ customers are of course extremely knowledgeable about all sorts of cool music, just as much or more so than any of us who work here, we also wouldn't be surprised if more than a few of you had never been exposed to these first two Alice Cooper albums before. Which is why we HAVE to list them and make them Records Of The Week!!�After being out of print for far too long, they've now been newly reissued on cd (in limited editions, see below for more about that), and we're excited to be able to tell you about 'em.
So, when most people think of Alice Cooper, what comes to mind? The big '70s shock rock act, up there with KISS, the guy who was the Marilyn Manson of the '70s, or maybe the regular on Hollywood Squares, or even the early '90s hairmetal Alice, of Wayne's World "we're not worthy" fame. Campy and kitschy and scholocky and alcoholic, with snakes and blood. All good things of course. But even if you are a fan of the Alice Cooper classics from the '70s, albums like Love It To Death, Killer and Billion Dollar Babies, the Alice Cooper Band's 1969 debut Pretties For You and its 1970 follow up Easy Action are often overlooked, and underrated. Originally released on Frank Zappa's Straight label (and whatever you might think of Frank Zappa, he had a good track record for releasing freaky music by other folks, Captain Beefheart ferinstance!) this early Alice Cooper stuff is NOT the heavy metal hard rock you might be expecting. That was a direction AC went in really only after moving from LA to Detroit and hooking up with producer Bob Ezrin. There's hints of heaviness, of course, but this is waaay more psychedelic and poppy and proggy. And weird. If you think you know what to expect, think again. You're in for a bizarre treat indeed. (Some Alice Cooper fans might not agree, but we hope most open minded AQ customers will!)
The front cover of Pretties For You has a painting that make it look like a Robert Wyatt record. And on the back cover, the band, posing in a gallery of strange modern sculptures, show off a visual style that makes 'em look something like a cross between Blue Cheer and Roxy Music. Intrigued? Throw the album on, and you're confronted with the first of this album's many non-sequiturs, the orchestral fanfare of "Titanic Overture", which segues into the why-be-normal, twisty-turny psych piece "10 Minutes Before The Worm" (actually only 1 minute, 40 seconds long). They weren't trying to ease anybody into their "thing" it seems. Better yet is track three, "Swing Low Sweet Cheerio", the album's first true pop gem, and still plenty weird. And that's what this is, a pop album, full of great pop songs, super Beatlesy, hummable stuff. But it's Beatlesy in a tripped out Sgt. Peppers way. And wait a second, Pretties For You? The Pretty Things' "SF Sorrow" might also have been an influence. There's a lot of quirky dynamics, theatrical art rock gestures, cryptic humor, wild psychedelic effects, screaming fuzz guitar, strange stops and starts... it can be off-putting at first, probably difficult listening for some, with as much in common with Amon Duul II or even Olivia Tremor Control as they do with Alice Cooper's later million-sellers. But, you like '60s garage psych right? Well early AC were really a Nuggetsy garage band (originally called The Earwigs, then The Spiders, and then The Nazz, finally settling on Alice Cooper following a legendary Ouija board session). Doing their thing on the Sunset Strip in LA, they gradually got nuttier and nuttier, more psychedelic and experimental. If AC hadn't gone on to such later success, we're certain this would be regarded by psych lovers as an obscure cult classic of late '60s freakdom, like 50 Foot Hose or West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band or something. Instead, it's the record that probably confuses average Alice Cooper fans, and isn't heard by anybody else, which we think is a shame...
Alice Cooper's swaggering second effort, Easy Action, is just a bit more straightforward, more of a "rock" album, proto-glam in fact, AC maybe trying to take on T-Rex? On it, with some wicked lyrics, Alice starts to develop his better known, "mentally ill" or "evil" sick humor persona, in a wittier way though than the cartoonishness that later took over in later years. His ever-so-slightly-raspy, steeped-in-decadence voice, of course, always had star power from the very beginning, but here he occasionally breaks out a snarl that never surfaced on Pretties, amidst more melodic crooning. And one of the tracks, the spasmodic tour de force "Still No Air", foreshadows Alice Cooper's later West Side Story obsession on School's Out.
And Easy Action proves to be still pretty darn trippy and weird, with plenty of progtastic twists, just like Pretties. Heck, "Lay Down And Die, Goodbye" is 7+ minutes of pretty much just sound FX laced freakishness. This album boasts several more glorious psychedelic pop gems like "Laughing At Me", the piano ballad "Beautiful Flyaway", and the very Beatlesy "Shoe Salesman", alongside the harder rockin' likes of "Return Of The Spiders"... Oooh so many good tunes. Compared to the debut, it's perhaps a more confident, slightly less confusional record, that set them up for major label success of their next album, another huge favorite of ours, Love It To Death, recorded with Ezrin after their relocation to Detroit - a move that made sense, considering they did have a lot in sonically common with The Amboy Dukes and even the MC5. You'll also hear parallels to very early Blue Oyster Cult and David Bowie... And (moreso on Pretties) an American version of Pink Floyd (Syd Barrett era mind you...) or even a more obtuse The Doors...
While Alice Cooper (both the man and the band) made a lot of classic music in their career(s), no other Alice Cooper records were ever quite as arty and bizarre, with the unique one foot in the psychedelic sixties mix of throbbing manic energy and melancholic moodiness that's found on Pretties For You and Easy Action. Are we going out on limb by making 'em Records Of The Week? Nope, what could be more AQ?? These have been favorites here for a long time, but rarely available. And Jim and Allan bonded over these back when they both first started working here years ago. Also, we know the guys in Harvey Milk will have to be stoked to find that their new album got ROTW honors alongside these two!
And by the way, we insist on filing these under A, not C. It's the Alice Cooper Band dammit. Alice himself didn't go solo 'til Welcome To My Nightmare in 1975. The original act, featuring guitarists Glen Buxton and Mike Bruce, bassist Denis Dunaway, and drummer Neil Smith, alongside the former Vincent Furnier on vocals and snake handling, deserves their due! One of the great American rock bands.
One final note: these reissues on this new Rhino "Encore" imprint are based around the (dumb) idea of doing releases that are only available for a limited time. It's like the way Disney puts out DVDs. So, all the more reason for us to shout from the rooftops about these two albums -- in six months, according to the label, these reissues will be out of print, again!! Argh. So get 'em while you can, if you don't already have them in your collection!! And buy a copy for a friend!
Utilizing the same sort of packaging (dessicated leaves, twigs, and lichen encased between the jewel case and the tray) and exploring similar sounds as AQ fave l. chasse, this collaboration between Alio Die and Ora (here Andrew Chalk and Darren Tate) is a beautiful shimmering synthesis of dark ambience and organic droning. Recommended as with all of the Andrew Chalk releases we have heard to date!
Allegory Chapel Ltd offers a refinement of technique and conceptualization on this ominous chunk of sidereal electronics. Coil's dark sparkle of psychedelic sounds and references is a clear touchstone for ACL here, tracking a different belief system as the foundation upon which to build these sequential pieces. The Enochian invocation of pitchshifted vocal chant and slow spiral synth drone certainly hints at Current 93's early catalog, while the boomingly prophetic voice intoning "You are not a machine" alongside a deliberately programmatic sci-fi step sequencer parallels the man-machine conflict and compulsion aesthetic of Conrad Schniztler and the like, leading into the very Clock DVA sounding "Solar Rite", assumed to be a Luciferian reference, though all references are stripped bare in the midst of this smartly rendered minimalist techno squelch. The album's finale - a recitation of a song from the Koran, addressing man's origin as a clot and his subsequent model of spiritual life through prayer - matches that sacred song with atonal electronic bell tones, a ghostly broadcast from the empty quarter.
Funny to discover a project from San Francisco by way of LaGrange, Georgia; but that's the way it goes some times. Aloonaluna is the one-woman project of Lynn Fister who landed her first cassette of thoroughly drugged-out drone-pop on the thoroughly drugged-out imprint Hooker Vision (run by Grant and Rachel Evans, of Nova Scotia Arms and Motion Sickness Of Time Travel respectively), and it's a warped gem of twisted psychedelic lullabies that seem to bridge the damaged tape resurgence with a Jewelled Antler style miasma of half-dreamt songs and half-remembered drones. She loops bells, guitars, field recordings, gristly synths, her own voice, and whatever else she can find into hazy, atmospheric songs that turn inward on many tracks (a la Grouper) but at times like on "Watercolor Rabbit" she breaks out a punchy drum machine to turn her somnambulant, stumbling songs into giddy, lo-fi dance numbers (sorta like Kwjaz remixing Julee Cruise). "Antarctica" could almost be her homage to Richard Pinhas' "Iceland" in terms of coldwave synth propulsion. Twelve tracks in all over this 45 minute tape. Nice stuff, but unfortunately this tape is already sold out at the source... so what we got now is all we'll ever get!
Alp is the work of Roger Horberry also known for his participation in the ethno-ambient affairs of O Yuki Conjugate. Here, Horberry engages the far more ubiquitous sounds of boiling water, fax machines, furnaces, and other household items which emit teeny-tiny sounds lost in the excess noise of everyday life. After contact miking these objects, Horberry has amplified and processed the whirring drones into an extraterrestrial arena of reverberating washes with a particularly digital clarity. A solid deep listening project not far from Toy Bizarre or even some of the later Zoviet France recordings.
A few months back we bellowed loudly about the impressive Berlin Super 80 DVD / CD compilation, which presented the parallel activities of the nascent German DIY film community and the incendiary musical scene which collectively qualified themselves as The Ingenious Dilletantes in the late '70s and early '80s, after a huge arts festival co-curated by Einsturzende Neubauten's Blixa Bargeld. Exasperated by the pressure cooked environment, the members of this very loose community which also included painters, performance artists, actors, etc. embraced an aesthetic of bleak nihilism often tinged with post-ironic absurdity. While not being featured on the musical program of Berlin Super 80, Alu was one of many bands mentioned in passing in that document, having played alongside the likes of Sprung Aus Den Wolken, Neubauten, and Malaria back in the day. Like many of those terminally obscure but often exceptional electro/post-punk projects that Vinyl-On-Demand has reissued in recent years, Alu set forth Frankensteinian, synth-punk and monotone grooves, upon which they chanted dead-pan German vocals sounding not too far from early SPK, Throbbing Gristle, or even Suicide. What's curious about Alu is not the fantastic sound of this, their only studio recording Autimenschen (which actually never saw the light of day back in the '80s, and only now has been discovered and released by the good people at C.I.P.), but in the fact that the two members of Alu also hailed from the obscure '70s Krautrock trio Sand. The morose hallucinations and sprawling psychedelia of Sand are a far cry from the tense, motorized bleakness of Alu; but nonetheless both Alu and Sand stand out as magnificent discoveries from their respective genres.
It's been two long years we've been waiting for this, another mysterious rhythmic communique from French blackened post krautrock alchemists Aluk Todolo. But it's not like they've been idle. Since 2007's Descension, two thirds of Aluk Todolo have recorded a record and toured the world as Gunslingers, and all of Aluk Todolo do double duty in French black metallers Diamatregon, who recently released a new full length on tUMULt called Crossroad.
But as much as we love those other two bands, and we do, there will always be something magical about the strange sonic world Aluk Todolo are able to conjure up. Especially considering they're a three piece, a power trio, drums, guitar, bass. Nothing else, no synths, no strings, just the basic rock band instruments. It's testament to the power these three wield, that they can do so much with so little. Or more accurately, so little with so little. As the music of Aluk Todolo, is disarmingly simple, subtle and minimal, but in its minimalism, lies its power. The power of rhythm, of texture, of mood, these five long pieces are so evocative, so expressive and strangely emotional. Even at its most spare and skeletal, the sound is palpable, almost a physical presence, which is surprising again considering just how stripped down Finsternis actually is.
Descension, Aluk Todolo's debut, was heavy and space-y and rhythmic, we described it as a buzz-less black metal, some of the songs were thick and caustic, others were loping and motorik, but on Finsternis, it's as if the band decided to strip away all the extraneous sounds, leaving just the core, the root, the heart of the music, and that heart beats out a simple, hypnotic rhythm.
The record is split into 4 parts, with a brief interlude, but those four parts are split into two distinct movements. The first, which comprises the first two parts, is much of what we described above, simple skeletal rhythms, surrounded by minimal guitar whir, bursts of grinding distortion, fragmented jangle, keening feedback, but it's all about the rhythm. After a brief burst of mathy chaos, the track reverts to its initial rhythm, this time the bass more prominent, fuzzy, distorted, woozy and mesmerizing, the band locked in tight, the bass and drums solid and unwavering, while the guitar sings in the background, moaning and keening and howling, giving the track an ominous otherworldly vibe, a trudge across some hostile alien landscape, a weary, washed out deathmarch.
Then the interlude, a haunting abstract percussive sprawl, simple percussive thuds set amidst a sea of warped distorted low end, bits of glitch and hiss, and grinding shards of industrial clatter, which gives way to the second, noisier movement, the drums transformed into a simple machinelike pound, snare and cymbal crashing over and over and over, the guitars whipped into a frenzy of blurred buzz and warped swirling blackened chaos, what at first sounds noisy and harsh, soon reveals itself as strangely textural, and as hypnotic as the more stripped down first movement, the guitars slip from monochromatic whir, to insectoid black metal riffing, constantly swirling around the motorik pound and pummel, the final track finds the guitars slipping into ever higher registers, blissing out, laced with feedback, smoothing out into warm smears and blurs, before a brief deconstruction, and a surprisingly tranquil last few minutes, the drums back to a woozy lope, the guitar offering up warm swells and shimmering thrum, the bass throbbing beneath, eventually stumbling to a halt in a cloud of creaking metals and static-like tape hiss. Woah.
Just like Descension, Finsternis is an intense and emotional journey through sound, a haunting and hard to describe exploration of rhythm, mood and texture, a slow shifting otherworld defined by This Heat, Geronimo, Laddio Bolocko, Can, Faust, accessible only via the three shadowy figures that make up Aluk Todolo, whose magic and mystery has been rendered in these glorious black rhythms.
Housed in a multi panel jacket with super striking original artwork by Stephen Kasner, on the always impressive Utech label (whose other two new releases, from Gog and Olivier Dumont, we'll review on the next list, although we do have both in stock if you want 'em, and we're fairly sure you do!).
Recording with addition of Alva to his Noto moniker, Carsten Nicolai hasn't altered his palette of sine wave oscillations, modulating tones, rhythmic clicks, and other electronic gizmos, all bathed in a clinical purity of sound. Surrounding himself with these machines, Nicolai sets up little repetitions that build to, dare I say, catchy complexities full of rhythmic invention and hinting at melodies.
Here's the much anticipated cd reissue of this way-too limited Alvarius B album which came and went on vinyl in a matter of days early in 2011. Alvarius B is the solo project of Alan Bishop, better known as one of the Sun City Girls - a project which dissolved after over twenty years following the death of drummer and fellow provocateur Charles Goucher. The Girls (a trio rounded out by Bishop's brother Richard) were specialists in frustratingly brilliant psychedelic-punk, damaged with free jazz, Southeast Asian pop, and fucked-up beat poetry. They were notorious for their designed lack of editorial constraints in situating brilliantly over-charged weirdo-pop melodic crescendos often hybridizing the likes of Ennio Morricone and Vietnamese songwriter Trinh Cong Son next to an uncomfortably misogynistic rant from Alan Bishop's slimy Bukowski parody as Uncle Jim. Even the most die-hard Sun City Girls fans who could stomach and perhaps grow to love their confrontational affronts will undeniably say that it's Torch Of The Mystics or 303,003 Crossdressers From The Rig Veda that are the masterpieces of borderless songwriting.
So with the Girls no more, where would Alan Bishop take his own work? The Sir Richard Bishop records have been uniformly brilliant in their fiery elliptical fingerpicking, exploding the Takoma handbook; and Alan has often given off the appearance of being a trickster figure, presenting himself as a minstrel with an immense emotional range only to pull back the mask to reveal a devilish, blackened heart intent on causing misery upon all who hear. With all of this as a preamble, we can say that Alan has followed where the Sun City Girls ended their career on Funeral Mariachi, with this gorgeous record in the form of Baroque Primitiva.
The album is rich with covers, although an Alan Bishop cover would certainly amount to a delirious transfiguration. The man has long been obsessed by Ennio Morricone, and this expertise has been applied to some of the best compendiums of Morricone's best work during the '60s and '70s. And 6 of the albums 12 songs are attributed to Morricone, or "Maestro Padre Supremo" as Bishop describes him in the liner notes. These songs enjoy the lilting yet complex melodies that Morricone had been so known for, with Bishop crooning all of the wordless oohs and ahhs that Morricone had originally penned for a female vocalist. Bishop has long been known for his ability to hit sharp falsettos in the Girls. Even though he does bend many of the notes towards atonality, he is quite reverential towards the Morricone text. In fact, the contrast between Morricone's ecstatic songs and the many cracks in Bishop's deliberately lo-fi production (think Sebadoh's four-track recordings with just multi-tracked voice, guitar and chord organ) serves to heighten the drama of these recordings. There are a couple of Bishop originals, "Humor Police" is very much a manic carnavalesque number and "Well Known Stranger" is a classic downer jam of strum and vocal mope that sounds like it could be a lost Neil Young tune, but done way better. The two other covers on the album are also quite noteworthy: the only song to emerge from his aborted album of John Barry covers in the form of "You Only Live Twice" and one hell of jubilant romp through the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows."
This is very nicely packaged in the form of a 30 page hardback book, featuring various close-ups of the nude mandala artwork photographed by Kristen Anderson, to sweeten the deal. Already proving to be one of the best albums of 2011. So don't let the cd pass you by, if you didn't have the good fortune of getting hold of the vinyl already.
Originally released on vinyl in 2005 on the Sun City Girls' Abduction label, Blood Operatives Of The Barium Sunset was at the time the first Alvarius B release in 7 years, a project of Sun City Girl Alan Bishop, accompanied by long time SCG accomplice Eyvind Kang as well as Randall Dunn, Tim Young and Andrew McGinnis.
Alvarius B is some sort of weirdo psychedelic cabaret folk music, somewhere between Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and show tunes (?). The opener is a swampy bit of country folk, all slithery acoustic guitars, junk yard percussion, weird voices, Bishop's snarly vox, lots of buzz and tense atmospheric shimmer, and the lyrics, an over the top tale of miserable miscreants, while the second track is even more Tom Waits-ish, a piano ballad, haunting and melancholy, distorted and creepy, over a chorus of nighttime crickets, as if Bishop was set up on the porch of some old house on the edge of a black swamp. From there on, the sound slips into a strange lilting doom folk, Kang's viola, moaning over some atonal strum, and Bishop ranting like a madman. Deep chanted vocals draped over jagged acoustic guitar, a distant choir competes with some strange grunting, jaw harp, moody hushed vocals drift over a latticework of spidery steel string buzz, super dramatic and over the top, helps that that one is actually a cover, a piece by Italian horror soundtrack composer Fabio Frizzi, lyrics of course courtesy of Bishop. Which is what turns it into something much sicker and more hauntingly demented than even Frizzi could have ever imagined.
They also tackle a Morricone track, and a traditional, but it hardly matters, Bishop and company make the songs their own, transforming them into oozing, misanthropic swamp folk dirges, creepy, and funny, and fucked up, exactly what you'd expect from one of the Sun City Girls, an aural roadtrip through the hellish mind of a madman, a lost world of run down houses, bleak swampland, of destitution and despondency, but viewed through a serious cracked lens, that makes even the most dismal and brutal and miserable situations and characters seem endlessly fascinating and mysterious. Awesome stuff, essential for Sun City Girls obsessives of course, but maybe a bit TOO out there for the general population, which is precisely what makes this so awesome.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!!
Fucked up minstrel-tunes, misogynistic murder ballads, and world-weary blues played by a man who's too smart and too talented to play everything straight. Yup, it's Alan Bishop of the Sun City Girls in his singer-songwriter guise of Alvarius B. Alan's poetics of cruelty and black humor are highlighted most egregiously on this eponymous album (not to be confused with another self-titled record from 1994), and if anyone is expecting the puckish tunes from Bishop's acclaimed 2011 album Baroque Primitiva with its Morricone, John Barry, and Beach Boys covers will be shocked by all of the dead whores and vulgar epithets that come a mile a minute from Bishop's venomous mouth. Bishop's arrangements typically find the man scraping and rapping his bloody knuckles across his steel-strung acoustic guitar with a violent aggression that splutters out of stolen blues progressions, always punctuating his deranged lyrics. As was the case with the Sun City Girls, Bishop's solo work teases with moments of musical ecstasy thanks to some downright brilliant songwriting that get all twisted and fucked up with those gnashed acoustic chords or subverted by a peyote visions (e.g. "he sucked all of Arabia from a herbivore's labia") or downright mean spirited lyrics (e.g. "Fucking maggot, you're in the way!")
Originally released as a double lp 1997 on Abduction, the album went out of print quickly only to fetch small ransoms on eBay. The double cd sports six bonus tracks including the Sun City Girls classic "CCC" from 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda. It's pretty fucking recommended, but only if you don't mind getting sonically slapped in the face every other song.
A spectacular release from Tzadik's Composer series! Maryanne Amacher is a reclusive sound sculptor who constructs the aural equivalent of rust to be heard in the reverberant spaces of cathedrals. The sonorities constructed out of mutilated recordings of bells, tape noise, and lots of highly amplified alien noises that would normally be on the quiet side of inaudible.
A beautifully cromulant release.
More than ten years old now, this cool collaboration finally gets released on vinyl!!
When this was originally recorded, the Powerbook improv ensemble was a relatively new music performance hybridization that was having trouble finding any sort of tangible success in attempting to bring the fluidity of free-jazz improvisation to the digital clickery of live hard disc editing. Recorded results we'd heard had been mostly boring, self-important collages of inconsequential noodling from musicians who seemed more interested in being loud or noisy or simply upstaging their companions rather than in pure creative collaboration. While the cavalier Christian Fennesz and the studious Peter Rehberg have been involved in a few of the more egregious failures of this genre, this, their collaboration with Keith Rowe, Oren Ambarchi, and Paul "Pimmon" Gough perhaps still ranks as one of the best powerbook ensemble recordings. The keys to the success for "Afternoon Tea" are the high degree of restraint from each individual collaborator and the indecipherability betwixt the guitars of Ambarchi & Rowe and the computer trickery of the rest. Slow rhythmic creaks, subtle drones, and hacked musique concrete elements form and dissolve various structures, with a lot of room for each of the sounds to breathe. While this clocks in at almost 50 minutes, you really want it to go on for much longer. Nice.
The absolute hardest albums to write about are those we hold in the highest esteem and though we have an aversion to the general notion of a "desert island selection", this Amon Duul II disc is one of those albums that we could see as an definite inclusion on
I had begun to wonder if Richard and Karine would do anything worth while again, as their debut Sirenes clearly stands above everything they have done... until Stenorette. Working with producer Robert Hampson (Main, Loop), Amp has traded in their four track fuzziness for the crystal clear digital purity of Hampson's studio. In doing so, they have written a beautiful album of gossamer electronica / pop songs that nonetheless maintains their ghostly sadness.
A new slab of glacial metallic beauty from Paradigms, one of our new favorite labels. In the past, they've brought us the drone dirge of Hjarnidaudi (an aQ Record Of The Week), the chamber gloom of Amber Asylum, the cult black metal of Throne Of Katarsis, the druggy prog of Blueprint Human Being, and now two new releases, a grim slab of icy pagan Canadian black metal from Utlagr (reviewed elsewhere on this list) and this, the newest release from dirge doomists the Angelic Process.
Described as slow motion doom drone, The Angelic Process are so much more. This is not just some series of cromagnon metal riffs slowed down and turned into 'art', nor is it a monochromatic wash of rumble and whir, not that there's anything wrong with that, we love that stuff, but the Angelic Process are more of a proper band, with songs, vocals, drums, parts, choruses, verses, all that normal band stuff. They craft simple, swoonsome dream rock, like M83 or Spacemen 3 or Cyann & Ben, albeit a lot more dark and ominous, but it's what they do with that rock, with those songs, that makes this record so special. And so mind meltingly heavy. Each of these songs is buried under a sea of warm sonic swirl. Where a normal band would kick on a distortion pedal for the chorus, The Angelic Process kick on a thousand, and it sounds like they maybe also have 30 or 40 extra guitarists standing at attention just waiting to dump a monstrous mass of churning thick blown out guitar fuzz all over everything. Closer reference points might be Jesu or My Bloody Valentine. The songs are moody plods, droney dirges, but within these songs, and beneath all the murk and fuzz and buzz, there are buried epic swells, heart rending melodies, soaring beneath the gauze and haze, it's like Low or Godspeed being backed up by Earth, performing live with Glenn Branca's guitar orchestra and produced by the Teenage Filmstars. Or maybe Swans if they made a record for French blisspop label Gooom. One of those extremely rare records that manages to be as breathtakingly lovely as it is crushingly heavy. The best blown out blissed out space rock drone guitar record since Loveless! SO RECOMMENDED!
Limited to 750 copies, packaged in a mini lp style sleeve wrapped in a hand stamped brown paper outer sleeve.
What can we say that we haven't already said about this dynamic dronedirgedoom duo? Seriously, have a look at any of the other reviews we've written about The Angelic Process, and see us gush like crazy, what's not to love? Gorgeous swirling black ambience, massive crushing metallic pummel, soaring majestic melodies, the sound somehow heavy and brutal, but washed out and gauzy, a thick My Bloody Valentine haze draped over everything, voices drift amidst the buzz like paper angels dropped into a roaring fire. Everything glistening and sparkling, glimmering and shimmering, then roaring and grinding and washing over you like some suffocating black tide.�
All�of their records are fantastic, each feels and sounds like a continuation of the one before it. As if they were all movements in some metallic black hole symphony, with each record, each movement, offering up its own subtle twist on the AP's black buzzing sound world. This latest might be the most sonically varied of the bunch. It's been out for a while now, but we had been working our way through the older titles first.
The overall sound like the others is warped and warbly, a slow crawl though an alien world, like every note and melody is being twisted and bent, tangled up into shapes that confuse and confound, the distortion so thick and viscous it seems to be able to alter the natural order, to use gravity as just another effect, ton-of-bricks downtuned guitars don't fall forward like an avalanche, they seem to drift like billowy black clouds somehow, slabs of low end fall upward, guitars slither in reverse, vocals twist inside out, a gorgeous multidimensional swirl of sound, that occasionally coalesces into a roiling propulsive thunderstorm of blissed out doom. Songs grow�from whispers into roars, a black doom Godspeed, but the heavy parts aren't just heavy, they're unearthly, unreal, melodies are pulled apart into sparkling notes that spin and soar, dancing atop a churning miasma of crush and crunch. The sound is an impossible blend of light and dark, evil and good, beauty and utter and complete horror. Like Katatonia broadcast through a wall of clothes dryers, doom metal performed by a symphony of leaf blowers tuned to drop-D, pop songs composed using cement mixers filled with gold bricks, a DJ spinning My Bloody Valentine over diSEMBOWELMENT, Winter remixed by Tim Hecker, all nestled amidst dreamy drifts of hushed shimmer and soft focus ambience.
We could go on and on and on and on and on and on.... needless to say, an absolutely essential slab of blissed out dreamdronedoooooooooooooooooooooooooom...
Reissued on ultra limited vinyl! Here's what we had to say about the cd:
A few years back, Michael Gira dissolved the Swans, and effectively split his band's aesthetic in two, with the soiled ambient project Body Lovers / Body Haters on one side, and the orchestrated songs of Angels of Light on the other. "How I Loved You" is the second Angels of Light album and, as could be gathered from the title, is a collection of love songs. The album begins speaking of love with elation, as in "Evangeline," where Gira pleads to his object of desire with the wistful innocence of a school boy. The following "Untitled Love Song" is a strolling duet between Gira and ex-Pain Teen's singer Bliss Blood, both of whom seem uncharacteristically full of sweetness and light. With those being the most benevolent images of love that he has to offer, Gira then guides the album down a steep slope of sexual dependency, perverse lusts, and a gristled despair in which Gira's body continuously betrays his mind's wishes to never fuck again.
From there on, each track from "How I Loved You" begins with a simple languid melody that could easily be mistaken for anything from the recent Low record but steadily builds in complexity, driving into deeper, darker, and more intense realms. So nice!
Now on vinyl! Right after the dissolution of Swans in 1997, Michael Gira released two albums of haunting psychoacoustic music as The Body Lovers and The Body Haters, and apparently gave up writing songs. Fortunately, this hiatus was merely temporary, as Gira delivers a new collection of acoustic guitar based songs as The Angels of Light. At times lush in orchestral swells of strings and vibraphone, at others angular and tense, New Mother is quite good indeed. Lovely reissued as double LP by Broken Sparrow in conjunction with Important Records and limited to 500 on black vinyl.
The UK's Anna Planeta (a band) presents a double cd of recordings they made in a derelict Catholic school house that has been empty since 1980. The band improvises on a number of acoustic instruments and guitars powered by cheap battery powered amps in the once-grandiose assembly hall of the school that is now filled with shattered glass, empty beercans, and spent glue-sniffing bags. It sounds like any number of, to use our coined terminology, "pipe fight" or "lithium drone" bands (No Neck Blues Band, Organum, or Skullflower) recording one of their albums with the microphone right next to a electric transformer or a buzzing light bulb. Very nice work, combining improv "outsider rock" with atmospheric environmental recording. Oversized silkscreened cardboard packaging, and a nice price for 2 cds!
Last night we were playing this in the store and the consensus amongst customers and staff is that The Anniversary sounds like a mix of Modest Mouse, Rainer Maria, PEE and the Get Up Kids. Makes sense since this is on the Get Up Kids' Heroes and Villains label. Dueling girl/boy vocals over angular melodic shards. Super catchy. From Lawrence, Kansas.
What the hell happened here? The Anniversary has poised themselves as the heir apparents to the emo / power pop throne now occupied by labelmates the Get Up Kids, yet with their second album "Your Majesty," these kids from Lawrence, Kansas suddenly think they're Noel and Liam, constructing a bombastic album of baroque pop with lots of harmonizing choruses, extended guitar solos, dramatic piano chords, and distant nods to The Pixies and Supertramp. This record was a real slow burner. In the beginning we all hated it, wondering what happened to our emo pop anniversaries, but the more we listen, the more we began to understand. I began catching Jim or Cup listening to it when they thought no one was the wiser. And Windy is pretty much playing it nonstop in her car: http://aquariusrecords.org/windyscar.html. So now, we give it a thumbs up. The only bummer is the one guy singer who whispers in a earnest croon and ends up sounding lame. Outside of that, they're probably the best Brit pop band America has. A few painfully public inter-band squabbles and loads of coke and the sky's the limit!
The album from which Richard D. James' electronica genius became obvious. Selected Abient Works 2 is as if James sonically replicated the post-slumber / pre-waking state when sunlight first strikes the dream riddled eye within the memory banks of his rewired samplers. A beautiful, synaesthetic and haunting post-techno ambient that really must be heard!
Selected Ambient Works Volume II has been required listening since the album was originally released in 1994 right as the Aphex Twin was poised to capture the world's imagination with his mutant electronica, self-immolating techno, and acid laden drill 'n' bass. Here, the second chapter of Aphex's ambient works (sadly, no third volume followed this) is exactly what is claims to be, a brilliant collection of ambient works that re-engineered and re-interpreted Brian Eno's definition of ambient as a convoluted Phillip K. Dick cosmology of dreaming androids and quixotic sentient machines. This album stands at a crossroads of a number of musicological strains, with Aphex Twin's Richard D. James self-aware and self-conscious of the broader implications of making not just a collection of ambient music, but in making *this* collection of ambient music at *that* particular time. In the post-rave aftermath in the UK of the early '90s, chill-rooms were the zones for all sorts of lightweight collages of directionless new age musics and much of the 'ambient' music that was being produced around those chill-rooms was essentially amphorous techno that tempered the rhythm to a soft pulse and added a bird song here or there (e.g. The Orb, Future Sound Of London); but an ambient music that spoke to a community that was beginning to shape their digital / virtual selves was lacking.
Enter Richard D. James and the Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume Two. The album follows the direction of Eno's Music For Airports with 24 vignettes that ascribe to a constant atmosphere of gilded tones and lugubrious rhythms, which are more often sequenced patterns and cybernetic echoes through mercurial pools of sound. Tracks glisten, lurch, dissolve, morph, materialize, crystallize, bloom, and collapse amidst a subtle latticework of beguiling electronic melody, something that the Aphex Twin has always had in spades. It was a brilliant record when it came out, and it's still brilliant today. This is especially true with the resurgance of new age wallpaper music, as this album outshines pretty much everything on the current landscape.
For nostalgia's sake, we'll reprise what we wrote nearly twenty years ago about this record: "James sonically replicated the post-slumber / pre-waking state when sunlight first strikes the dream riddled eye within the memory banks of his rewired samplers. A beautiful, synaesthetic and haunting post-techno ambient album that really must be heard!" How true. How true.
Though Lawrence, Kansas based Appleseed Cast has been around since 1998 they haven't been as widely heard as their contemporaries The Get Up Kids and The Anniversary, and I would have imagined that the release of "Low Level Owl" volumes one and two would
The thing that really kicks a hole in our pants with these albums is the obvious love and meticulous care that went into recording them. The band apparently spent three months recording all the tracks; laying down the initial tracks and then sculpting them with additional overdubs and extensive tweaking, even miking leaves blowing along the driveway outside the studio and including it as a segue between two songs. In fact, both albums are obviously meant to be listened to in their entirety, with nary a second of silence between songs, as tracks bleed and drift into one another. Volume two begins, quite ingeniously and literally, where volume one leaves off -- with a brief reprise of the ending track. It could be me, but volume two seems to contain more Mogwai style extended jams and instrumental musical forays and experiments. So if you wish to start with a more "pop" oriented record, choose volume one and if you want more of a drifting and pensive record, choose volume two. Chances are that you'll wanna pick up both eventually anyhow. Everytime we play this in the store, someone buys a copy or two.
Though Lawrence, Kansas based Appleseed Cast has been around since 1998 they haven't been as widely heard as their contemporaries The Get Up Kids and The Anniversary, and I would have imagined that the release of "Low Level Owl" volumes one and two would
The thing that really kicks a hole in our pants with these albums is the obvious love and meticulous care that went into recording them. The band apparently spent three months recording all the tracks; laying down the initial tracks and then sculpting them with additional overdubs and extensive tweaking, even miking leaves blowing along the driveway outside the studio and including it as a segue between two songs. In fact, both albums are obviously meant to be listened to in their entirety, with nary a second of silence between songs, as tracks bleed and drift into one another. Volume two begins, quite ingeniously and literally, where volume one leaves off -- with a brief reprise of the ending track. It could be me, but volume two seems to contain more Mogwai style extended jams and instrumental musical forays and experiments. So if you wish to start with a more "pop" oriented record, choose volume one and if you want more of a drifting and pensive record, choose volume two. Chances are that you'll wanna pick up both eventually anyhow. Everytime we play this in the store, someone buys a copy or two.
Finally! The first in a series of super limited, artist designed aQ T-Shirts, featuring original art by some of our favorite artists, who just so happen to be loyal aQ customers as well! Each one will be super special, totally unique, and will only be available for a limited time, as we're only making a finite amount of each.
The first shirt design is by aQ pal and infamous killustrator Justin Bartlett, whose style many of you no doubt will recognize. He's done tons of drawings for Oaken Throne black metal magazine, as well as record covers for grim groups like SUNNO))), Moss, Nadja, Pentemple and loads more. His style is incredible, super detailed, pen and ink with tons of stippling, lots of skulls and guts and demons and various crusty oozing offal. For aQ he's designed a super creepy and super evil mother and child, heads in bags, their rotten innards spilling out, skulls on spikes, and "Aquarius Records" carved into the stone archway in the background. It looks amazing, and will for sure get some eyes a popping as you wander through the grocery store or sit in church (heaven forbid).
The back features a small aQ logo up near the collar, the shirts are white on black, they are Hanes heavyweight T's, 100% preshrunk cotton, and we have sizes all the way from Youth Large (for kids and little ladies) all the way up to XXL (for the big guys).
We will only be selling these for a couple months, so don't miss out. Once they are gone, they won't be reprinted. EVER.
Future aQ Artist Edition T's will include designs by Savage Pencil, Stephen O'Malley, Aaron Turner and more more more!!!
Finally! The first in a series of super limited, artist designed aQ T-Shirts, featuring original art by some of our favorite artists, who just so happen to be loyal aQ customers as well! Each one will be super special, totally unique, and will only be available for a limited time, as we're only making a finite amount of each.
The first shirt design is by aQ pal and infamous killustrator Justin Bartlett, whose style many of you no doubt will recognize. He's done tons of drawings for Oaken Throne black metal magazine, as well as record covers for grim groups like SUNNO))), Moss, Nadja, Pentemple and loads more. His style is incredible, super detailed, pen and ink with tons of stippling, lots of skulls and guts and demons and various crusty oozing offal. For aQ he's designed a super creepy and super evil mother and child, heads in bags, their rotten innards spilling out, skulls on spikes, and "Aquarius Records" carved into the stone archway in the background. It looks amazing, and will for sure get some eyes a popping as you wander through the grocery store or sit in church (heaven forbid).
The back features a small aQ logo up near the collar, the shirts are white on black, they are Hanes heavyweight T's, 100% preshrunk cotton, and we have sizes all the way from Youth Large (for kids and little ladies) all the way up to XXL (for the big guys).
We will only be selling these for a couple months, so don't miss out. Once they are gone, they won't be reprinted. EVER.
Future aQ Artist Edition T's will include designs by Savage Pencil, Stephen O'Malley, Aaron Turner and more more more!!!
Finally! The first in a series of super limited, artist designed aQ T-Shirts, featuring original art by some of our favorite artists, who just so happen to be loyal aQ customers as well! Each one will be super special, totally unique, and will only be available for a limited time, as we're only making a finite amount of each.
The first shirt design is by aQ pal and infamous killustrator Justin Bartlett, whose style many of you no doubt will recognize. He's done tons of drawings for Oaken Throne black metal magazine, as well as record covers for grim groups like SUNNO))), Moss, Nadja, Pentemple and loads more. His style is incredible, super detailed, pen and ink with tons of stippling, lots of skulls and guts and demons and various crusty oozing offal. For aQ he's designed a super creepy and super evil mother and child, heads in bags, their rotten innards spilling out, skulls on spikes, and "Aquarius Records" carved into the stone archway in the background. It looks amazing, and will for sure get some eyes a popping as you wander through the grocery store or sit in church (heaven forbid).
The back features a small aQ logo up near the collar, the shirts are white on black, they are Hanes heavyweight T's, 100% preshrunk cotton, and we have sizes all the way from Youth Large (for kids and little ladies) all the way up to XXL (for the big guys).
We will only be selling these for a couple months, so don't miss out. Once they are gone, they won't be reprinted. EVER.
Future aQ Artist Edition T's will include designs by Savage Pencil, Stephen O'Malley, Aaron Turner and more more more!!!
