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Showing results 451 through 500 of 1218.

It's hard to not simply fall back upon the immediate observation that D. Haines' Emo album is the fictional remix that Wolfgang Voigt (aka Gas) should do for drone label Troum. With the Gas records (especially Konigsforst) and the Troum / Maeror Tri records

RealAudio clip: Kosciousko
RealAudio clip: Peak Communism

Killer reissue of two long out of print full lengths from this long running New Zealand free noise duo, consisting of Bruce Campbell, he of the mighty Dead C, and longtime aQ fave Alastair Galbraith, shedding his usual songsmithery for something a lot more abstract and noisy. The two have been performing on and off together since the early nineties, these two discs collect The Philosophick Mercury from 1994, and Now Gods, Stand Up For Bastards, from 1995. Both recorded live, utilizing guitars, violin, electronics and voice, with the occasional bit of drumming from yet another NZ noise luminary, Peter Stapleton, who's played in pretty much every NZ band of note, from Dadamah to Pin Group to Flies Inside The Sun to The Terminals. The template for A Handful Of Dust seems to be long drawn out tones, plenty of space, loads of feedback, letting the amp and the body of the guitar and the room shape the sounds as much as the player. Later groups like Sunroof! would harness this same sort of free music energy, this primal ur-drone, but there's something about A Handful Of Dust, that makes the sounds seem more alive, more feral, dangerous and dense. There's plenty of scrape and skree, mostly high end, layers upon layers, overtones shifting and drifting and billowing up in huge clouds of static buzz and shimmering squiggles of violin. The pace is glacial, but this music is not about movement or momentum so much as space and time, when there are drums, they don't really propel the song, instead they offer up a sort of loose framework, a crumbling skeleton around which the various buzzing strings and howling amps hang their shimmering sheets of sound. It's hard not to hear some Dead C in the be-drummed tunes (there are only two), but the drums here are WAY more loose, almost free jazz in feel, lending a psychedelic vibe to a music already pretty fucking psychedelic. A few of the tracks offer up some low end rumbles and deep drone, but those sounds are soon infused with streaks of jagged shriek and sharp hissy high end, the two sides not so much battling as swirling warily around each other eventually becoming one, and on rare occasions, melding into something almost rifflike. The closing track on No Gods begins as a total guitar destroying free for all, before transforming into some super tripped out buzz drenched psychedelic warped krautdrone, but only briefly, before it slips back into fractured deconstructed free noise once again. No Gods is definitely the more refined of the two (but only just barely). Philosophick is way more brittle and bizarre, two 30 minute jams, the first features lots of amp buzz, and stuttery shards of feedback, plenty of Derek Bailey like scrabbling, strange processed vocals, some sort-of-chanting, very minimal and textureal considering how noisy it is. The second track is total chaos, a band going all out in a huge room, all the instruments rendered blurs and smears by the distorted amps and the room reverb, the long stretches of feedback and the low low low fidelity recording only add more hiss and blur and texture. The guitars sounding alternately like accordions or bagpipes, sometimes like lowing cattle, the pound of the drums a buried muffled pulse, the cymbals glazing the cacophony with another sizzly layer of sibilance. Beautiful oversized Japanese style mini lp gatefold style packaging with new liner notes from Marc Masters.

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Damn, girl, what took you so long? Strangelands is Camilla Hannan's first full album in close to a decade, with a smattering of compilation tracks dotting the way back to her debut album More Songs About Factories which was released in 2005. It has to be said that the Etsy-craftsy-cutesy cover of a felt collage of a cuddly human couple with teddy-bear heads is about as far removed from what Hannan has constructed on Strangelands as can be. No twee-pop balladeering about lunchroom crushes and pigeon toed growth spurts to be found here; this is a bleak and artfully composed album of environmental toxicity and greasily machined rumble. Think Organum. Think Francisco Lopez. Think BJ Nilsen. Hannan plays up the psychogeographical references of her native Australia being situated at the end of the world (both navigationally and eschatologically) with plenty of citations of outback desolation marked with wild-eyed slashes of Road Warrior violence. Hannan's work begins with field recordings, so filled with vivid cinematic details that she easily builds allusions of the aftermath from a nuclear holocaust through her recordings of abandoned warehouses populated by swarming flies, rank sewer pipes that resonate the thrum of some leviathan breathing apparatus churning 20 miles below the surface of the sea, creaking harbors on the verge of rusting into the sea, and uninhabited islands that are uninhabited for being so uninhabitable. Dingy, grimy, and fucking bloody knuckled, let's go to Australia! Pro-duplicated cd-r in a nice die-cut sleeve with the aforementioned felt collage imagery.

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There's so many reasons to love this record. Here's two: (1) it's about the Lord of the Rings! and (2) it's a beautiful, timeless album of psychedelic instrumental music worth listening to even if you don't know Gandalf from Frodo. So lovely. It's a big fave of most of us here at AQ. (Oh, a third reason would be that it was the first release on Sweden's Silence label, and sold quite well, helping them bring the world such essential psych as International Harvester and Algarnas Tradgard later on!) Previously we've stocked the One Way label version of this, but now, no doubt thanks to the success of the LOTR movie, there's a newly remastered edition on Virgin that's got not only nicer packaging but also a previously unreleased bonus track! No information is given about that over eight minute long bonus track, but it's called "Early Sketches From Middle Earth" and sounds like a demo of themes later used on the album proper. This is what we wrote about the disc before: Many of you already know and love Bjorn Olsson's atmospheric "Instrumentalmusik" cd which Omplatten released a couple years ago. What you may not know -- we didn't -- is that Olsson's album was essentially an homage to the work of fellow Swede, '70s prog/jazz/psych keyboardist Bo Hansson, and specifically his fantastic 1970 album "Sagan Om Ringen" or "The Lord of the Rings" (itself an homage to Tolkien's trilogy). Bo Hansson, together with a group of three other musicians -- percussion, saxophone & flute -- make the music. Bo plays organ along with guitar, bass and moog. The tracks, all instrumental, are lovely atmospheric numbers, reminiscent of early Pink Floyd, or similar kosmiche krautrock of the era. The album doesn't necessarily make you think of hobbits and orcs, there's no overt "fantasy/medieval" themes or anything (it's not like German pomp metal band Blind Guardian's version of the Silmarillion!). But it does capture the otherworldly, pastoral feel of Tolkien's work. Indeed, it would be appropriate to call this album magical...whether you're a Tolkien fan or not you should check it out! Recommended. It's just too bad that Peter Jackson didn't use any of this music in his otherwise amazing LOTR film adaption! Now if only they'd reissue Hansson's "Watership Down" album as well...

RealAudio clip: Leaving Shire
RealAudio clip: Lothlorien

Let's just get it right out in the open, first thing. This should have been record of the week. It's beautiful, weird as fuck, mysterious, it's two whole discs of far out sounds, it comes with a massive photocopied book, filled with lyrics and text from some mysterious professor, and they're called Have A Nice Life... BUT, the band decided to not make any more copies, and let us have their last 40. It will probably be available as a download or something in the future, but for now, these are the last 40 physical copies available EVER. And the only way, as far as we know, to get the book as well. So what's the deal with Have A Nice Life? People are always emailing us about the new wave of shoegaze bands, nu-gaze as some folks like to call it (the same ones who now have us using the term metalgaze), and someone recommended Have A Nice Life, telling us the band was some sort of doom, metal, black metal, gothic, new wave, shoe gaze outfit, so obviously we were pretty curious. So we emailed the band. No response. Emailed the label. No response. Then we just happened to be going through piles of records, and found this one just sitting on the desk, where it must have been for weeks, a cool creepy cover, a color painting of a man's arm, bleeding, the words "the plow that broke the plains" on a black field above it. And it was bundled with a book. Hmmm. With the word Deathconsciousness printed on the front. And wham. It clicked. Those guys had already sent us a copy, which had somehow slipped through the cracks. So we quickly threw it on, and it was everything we had expected, everything we had hoped for, and more. We finally got in touch with the band, who told us they were not going to make any more, but would make one final batch for us. So here they are. Two discs, jam packed with dark blissed out shoegazey, new wave-y, slightly metallic nearly perfect pop. The songs insanely varied, but impossible cohesive. Some sort of sprawling bliss rock opera. Each track, perfect on its own, but even more perfect as part of the bigger whole. The first disc is the prettier and poppier of the two. The opening track is a creepy stretch of Goblin like synth ambience, peppered with simple minor key acoustic guitar, haunting and lovely, which quickly gives way to thick ropy basslines, and reverbed electronic drums, a definitely Joy Division vibe, swirls of thick guitar, gorgeous melodies and heartfelt vocals, it's dirgey and doomy and depressive, but so catchy and poppy. The next track is a big blown out pop epic, all effected vocal harmonies and washed out watercolor guitars, reminding us quite a bit of M83. The rest of the first disc slips easily from gloomy goth pop, to minimal drone, to shimmery shoegaze, often all at once. The disc finishes off with a gloomy dirge, all downtuned grindguitar and pointillist piano. Softly crooned vocals, and a surprisingly catchy melody. Which perfect leads into the second, darker and heavier disc, which begins with a track the boasts probably the greatest song title EVER: "Waiting For Black Metal Records In The Mail". But don't be expecting any black metal, instead it's a killer slab of eighties style indie doom pop, jangly guitar, propulsive drumming, and killer vocals, all wound into an awesome blast of hooky retro gloom, very reminiscent of the Comsat Angels. Hot on the heels comes another awesomely named song: "Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000", but again the title gives no clue that the song is a lilting mostly acoustic jam, with more piano, sad vocals, minor key melodies, a super reverby eighties production, all set to that Casio keyboard preset metronome rhythm. But about half way through, the track shifts and becomes a pounding rocker, the guitars thick and distorted, the drums pounding, but then all around synths buzz, vocals croon, the heaviness transformed into something much more dreamy and blissy. "The Future" is an aggro, almost no wave workout, all jagged guitars and shouted vocals, and more of that thick throbbing bass, but just like the rest of the tracks, it gets totally twisted around, his time by the addition of fake strings, and yet another killer and totally irresistible hook. "Earthmover" finishes things off, but instead of being some dirgey doom epic, it's another blissed out popscape, lots and lots of fuzz and buzz, glistening melodies, minimal rhythms, all buried beneath layers of woozy whir and sun dappled sparkle. Almost like a much prettier and poppier Nadja. And the thing about this record and these songs, is that, they all manage to be outrageously catchy, but not obviously so, and while they straddle about a million different genres, they manage to weave them all seamlessly into each other, making Deathconsciousness feel less like a rock band's collection of songs, and more like one massive organic mass of blackened dronepop jangle-goth bliss. Which as far as we're concerned it actually is. The packaging is amazing. A slimline dvd case, two cd-r's each hand spray painted, full color cover, super spare and striking, and then there's the book. A dvd sized 80 page book, filled with lyrics, liner notes, woodcuts, engravings, illustrations, and a massive amount of text on the soul, spirituality, death, sorcery, Medieval heresy and more, all supposedly penned by an East Coast professor and scholar. So awesome!

MPEG stream: Waiting For Black Metal Records To Come In The Mail
MPEG stream: Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000
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Having difficulties in making wind recordings for his new project, Benny Jonas Nilsen (aka Hazard) asked field recording specialist Chris Watson for some help. Coincidentally, Watson had just finished, of all things, a radio program all about wind for Following the approach of juxtaposing natural acoustic phenomena with synthetic computer based processing that he utilized on his "North" and "Wood / Bridge / Field" albums, Hazard here generates a wide miasmic range of deep drones and dark looping passages from the manipulated wind recordings, but not overly-structuring the material, instead favoring an organic presentation of the sounds. The addition of Watson's pro recordings add a great deal of color to Hazard's otherwise cold grey timbres, with his dynamic recordings of wind whistling through creaky window frames, environmental recordings of westerlies whipping around mountainous peaks, and violent thunderstorms! The result is a fantastic record on par with Andrew Chalk's "East Of The Sun" or Zoviet France's "Mohnomische."

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

SORRY. Hazard's third album sprawls across a cd and an lp, packaged together as one cohesive body of work. Moving further and further away from the industrialist tendencies that Hazard's B.J. Nilsen employed for his previous work on Cold Meat Industries as Morthound, Nilsen deftly manipulates field recordings made in various Swedish forests to evoke an unforgivingly barren Swedish landscape that normally doesn't translate so well on field recordings (unless you're Chris Watson). Hazard's grey sweeps of electronic dronescapes are sparsely punctuated by residual scrapings of what could be wood, leaves, and dirt for a spectacularly chilling work.

With a couple of recordings under his belt as Jetone on Force Inc, Tim Hecker has temporarily shelved his Chain Reactive, techno-minimalist pseudonym to experiment with sonic abstraction. "Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again" is easily Hecker's best album

RealAudio clip: Music For Tundra
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HNAS's fourth album "Im Schatten Der Mohre" has often been cited as the best work from these '80s German eccentrics, following a longstanding opinion from HNAS's Christoph Heemann supporting such a statement. Yet the sporadic resurgence of HNAS recordings may challenge Heemann's claims, as evinced by this authorized cassette release of Melchior on RRRecords. Melchior is in our opinion, in fact, the best of the HNAS recordings; and was the 2nd official album for Hirsche Nicht Aufs Sofa (translated as Moose Without A Sofa), originally released back in 1986 through Steven Stapleton's United Dairies. The presence of Stapleton and his wife Diana Rogerson (aka Chrystal Belle Scrodd) certainly slants Melchior into the paratactic Dada and post-Faust idiosyncrasy of mid-'80s Nurse With Wound (especially Sylvie and Babs). Just as NWW has always been the studio-driven vehicle for Stapleton's absurd audio experiments, HNAS - in 1986 the duo of Achim P. Li Khan and Heemann - used the studio as an alchemical means to recontextualize Krautrock's experimentalism, cheeseball disco, Teutonic chants, and Eastern European prog rock, into an aesthetic collision, that always teetered between working brilliantly and collapsing into a mess of delay ridden effects. When Stapleton's freak-out guitar and Rogerson's eerily disembodied / disaffected voice appear, HNAS gets noticeably better in their monochord guitar blurts, plodding percussion, bleeding 23 Skidoo horns, and unnerving atmospheres. That said, we'll admit our bias in favor of NWW over HNAS. Regardless, Melchior should be required 'out-there' listening!

MPEG stream: Im Sommer Gibt's Nix Zu Essen
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Three long out of print cassettes conveniently collected and remastered onto one cd. Greh Holger (aka Hive Mind, and head honcho of the always impressive Chondritic Sound label) is a master of heavy tone oppression, leaden industrial swarm, and synth-noise miserablism, oozing out of Greh's malignant electronics. Gritty pulses, septic oscillations, and death-throe drones coagulate around the structural spines of rudimentary panzer rhythm and haunted melody as if their were genetically re-engineered macrophages attacking the human body from the inside out. In these brilliantly crude recordings, Hive Mind strikes a balance between the funereal primitivism of the best MB releases and the crumbled organ dirges that Gate sprawled forth on Dew Line.

MPEG stream: Under Old Earth - A
MPEG stream: They Made Me The Keeper Of The Vineyards - A
MPEG stream: But Mine Own Vineyard, I Have Not Kept - A1

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

SORRY. Earlier in 2008, we received a fantastic collaborative project from Darren Tate, Ian Holloway, and Banks Bailey. At the time, we were well acquainted with the work of Darren Tate, thanks to his ongoing British drone eccentricities as Monos and his former Ora project with Andrew Chalk, Colin Potter, and others; but Ian Holloway and Banks Bailey were two whose work we didn't know anything about. Thanks to a suggestion from a long time customer here at the shop, we looked into the solo projects from Mr. Holloway; and damn if that tip didn't pay off with this fantastic cd-r (with more to come from Holloway in the coming weeks!). Self-released in a tiny edition of 50 copies, A Lonely Place is a breathtaking composition for time-stop dronemusik, achieving a similar stasis and similar dark beauty as Andrew Chalk did on his masterpiece East Of The Sun. It's hard to say what Holloway used as a source material for the album -- maybe guitar, maybe long-thin wire constructions, maybe field recordings, or maybe not. Like plenty of dronemusik before, it's the production that guides Holloway's success, as his deft manipulation of acoustics and electronics generates smoke, fog, and mirrors through sound that result in this amazing piece of long-form drone-smear. There's billowing swells of deep architectural space. Kosmiche electronics, rasping gong tones stretched toward infinity, and subharmonic thrumb swaddled in soft focus reverb. Think Expo '70 gone ashen black or Aidan Baker's ambient work at his most somber. Altogether wonderful, altogether very limited.

MPEG stream: A Lonely Place (extract 1)
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From the onset of this choice release, British drone-centrist Ian Holloway engages in a long-staring contest upon the horizon. Through his undulating sustained tones that gradually contort and shift in timbre and clarity, Holloway sets his attention on sun-flecked hazes upon faraway vistas, watery mirages, and sunblind hallucinations. These tones are more on par with the best work from the Ora / Monos axis, which is not surprising considering that Holloway has worked with Darren Tate on a number of occasions in the past. But not before long, he plunges this piece deep into the center of the earth, with cavernous reverberations of actionist gestures that have some of the acoustic doom properties that we have come to expect from Svarte Greiner and Xela. The sinewy tones give way to these heavy clanks and jarring noises swaddled in the long-decay reverb of what we could imagine to be a subterranean sewer, or perhaps a massive cave chamber, or some abandoned industrial warehouse. As Holloway puts aside his bricks and chunks of metal, the earlier gilded tones make their reprise amidst a distant set of bird songs and softly struck hand bells. One of the better pieces to emerge from Holloway's own Quiet World imprint, and this one is limited to just 80 copies.

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Without much fanfare, The Helen Scarsdale Agency may have just released one of the best drone records of 2010 with this collaborative outing from Manu Holterbach and Julia Eckhardt, two relatively obscure sound artists from France and Belgium, respectively. The only other time we had come across anything from either of these artists was by way of an mini-album that Holterbach had released through the ill-fated Clouds Of Static label, showcasing an ingenious instrument that Holterbach built out of modified wine glasses whose stems had been hollowed out, so that the water in the glass harmonica could be raised or lowered, thus changing the instrument's pitch while playing the rims of those wine glasses. The resulting sounds were absolutely stunning constructions of tonebending arches of pure drone - just dissonant enough, but wholly beautiful nonetheless. Since then, he has begun the process of sifting through Eliane Radigue's archive, being responsible for the Triptych and Vice Versa discs which came out in 2009. Julia Eckhardt comes from more of an academic / classically trained tradition, and has performed in a number of avant-garde string ensembles over the past few years, including a stint or two performing with Phill Niblock. Those two titans of minimalism certainly loom large in this exceptional Do-Undo recording, with both Holterbach and Eckhardt strong enough in their own right to further those heavy-minded drone constructs with their own agenda. For some time now, Eckhardt has been collecting recordings of her long-passages for droning viola performed exclusively in the key of G, and she had been presenting those recordings to various artists to repurpose those sounds as they see fit. Holterbach had met Eckhardt at a residency program in Belgium, the two hit it off, and Eckhardt gave him the initial recordings that went into constructing this album, which was completed through Holterbach's production and very impressive field recordings. The slow repetition of a temple bell being struck opens the album, gradually accompanied by a tactile scrabbling produced from branches scraping together during a windstorm. Eckhardt's viola elegantly moves from the event horizon to the foreground in the form of a radiant if rasping sustained drone whose acceleration in density hits those headwrangling harmonics and overtones that Tony Conrad, Niblock, Yoshi Wada, LaMonte Young, and Charlemagne Palestine have promoted for a decade or four. Holterbach doesn't linger much upon a crescendo with this thickened drone mass, gradually pulling back upon those tones to reveal further field recordings of that aforementioned windstorm alongside a quiet buzz from a chorale of crickets. Shockingly beautiful and shockingly simple. And that's just the first half of the record. The second piece grafts field recordings of various electrical phenomenon onto Eckhardt's viola drones, with Holterbach taking considerable care in collecting buzzes, hisses, pierced tones, vibrations, and rumbles which were already in the key of G. It's pretty fucking crazy to think that Holterbach is going out and collecting field recordings from power substations and Parisian subways, but only those which were tuned to G! Here, the composition is a bit more reductivist in the use of those sounds advancing into several glacial movements of sustained tonal vibration. Pure transcendence. Fans of Andrew Chalk, Jonathan Coleclough, BJ Nilsen, Thomas Koner, Organum, Harry Bertoia, Brendan Murray, and any of those aforementioned proponents of 20th Century minimalism we mentioned earlier should definitely take note of this album. Very nice letterpressed artwork, in an edition of ONLY 300 COPIES!!!

MPEG stream: Julia's Ecstatic Spring Phenomena
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An offshoot of Teenage Panzerkorps / Der TPK, Horrid Red is described by the band's Glenn "Edmund Xavier" Donaldson as a militant new wave project somewhere near the likes of Death In June circa Nada. A beloved album of Death In June fans for sure, but Nada was a very clumsy attempt at bringing an occult obliqueness and right-wing imagery to the more romantic strains of new wave - Donanldson's recapitulation of '80s stark post-punk is WAY better. The name Horrid Red might also be a play on the peculiar, forgotten new wave iconoclast Snowy Red, who sort of fell between Suicide and Fad Gadget; this was a band that Donaldson once professed considerable admiration for. That said, Horrid Red doesn't fall that far from the TPK sound, especially since Bunker Wolf is very present in delivering his booming Teutonic vocals with megaphone volume and clarity. Donaldson's arrangements are more stripped down than in TPK, but no-less spiky with their propulsive basslines, and also feature these sad, melodic leads that certainly look back to his earlier work in the Knit Separates and early Blithe Sons. But then there are the minor-key, haunted synths that take a page out of the Blessure Grave / Zola Jesus playbook and the minimal wave rhythms that gird almost every song. Released on Holiday Records, who seem to be the Sacred Bones of Italy. A necessary album for all fans of the recent wave of new goth. Limited to 300 copies!

When was the last time anyone made a Sisters Of Mercy reference and meant it as a wholehearted compliment? Well, that's definitely the case for HTRK (pronounced Haterock, FYI) as this Melbourne trio adopts a bleaker than black stance through their psychosexual dirges. With slinky Goth basslines, ghostly coldwave electronics, and skeletal slow-mo drum machine pulses, HTRK's arrangements mirror those that the Sisters Of Mercy produced for The Reptile House EP (which found them at their slowest, creepiest, and most anti-pop). But instead of Andrew Eldritch and his affected baritone, the singer for HTRK is Jonnine Clementine Standish whose comatose droning is seductive and compelling in its own right. She adopts the roles as the co-dependent, the broken-hearted, the addicted, the master, the servant, and the lonely, all delivered in Lydia Lunch's "I Fell In Love With A Ghost" dispassionate, zombified mantra. On the track "Rent Boy", Standish breaks out of that montone delivery, bellowing this dark ballad that comes across more like PJ Harvey than before. We have to wonder if the title is a reference to the These Immortal Souls track "Marry Me," penned by the former Birthday Party guitarist Roland S. Howard who happens to have produced this record and has sprinkled his narcotized swamp rock guitar throughout. No matter if it is or if it isn't, Howard's voodoo production for HTRK certainly gives them that Birthday Party feel. Great, very dark stuff for sure!

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Once known as the Hate Rock Trio, this Australian-born / London-based ensemble shortened their name down to HTRK (which the band still insists on pronouncing Hate Rock). Unfortunately, in the spring of 2010, the bassist Sean Stewart committed suicide. The remaining members - Jonnine Standish and Nigel Lee-Yang - look to continue making music, although that may seem a difficult proposition given that Stewart's low-slung basslines really drove HTRK's doom and dirge songwriting approach. The Birthday Party, Sisters Of Mercy, and PJ Harvey came together within HTRK's very impressive 2009 album Marry Me Tonight, produced by Roland S. Howard who really emphasized the skeletal, haunted aspect of HTRK's sound. That's quite different from what you'll hear on their 2007 debut Nostalgia, which still had a very strong Birthday Party sound especially with Stewart's recapitulation of Tracy Pew basslines, but the band has buried Standish's exhausted / exasperated vocals, Lee-Yang's swampy guitars, and the minimalist electronic programming in a huge bath of reverb. The spectral morass of all of the reverb really casts as a abjectly narcotic to the feel of these songs. Where on Marry Me Tonight which pushed Standish's vocals to the foreground to dramatic effect, she's lurking around the corners of these songs, howling and yelping deep into the night. It should be noted that a couple of songs from Nostalgia do reappear on Marry Me Tonight, although the difference in production really does change the the outcome. "Look What's Been Done" has become "Ha". "Look At That Girl" reappeared as "Rent Boy" and "I'm All Broke Up" turned into "Disco." Really fantastic.

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It's a bleak world for HTRK, as tragedy and death has surrounded this outfit which has only been around for a couple of years. In 2010, the band's bassist Sean Stewart committed suicide and the producer of their haunted album Marry Me Tonight, Rowland S. Howard died of cancer a year earlier. All of these elements make a connection to The Birthday Party almost inevitable, especially given their historical mirroring in relocation from Melbourne to Berlin and the manifestation of the id through a very raw sound. But where The Birthday Party was an expression of violence, HTRK are in constant search of desire, occasionally finding it only to have it frustratingly fizzle out before anything ecstatic can be achieved. As a result, HTRK's sensual bleariness is in an emotional feedback loop that never can spiral beyond the longing for sex, love, a relationship, etc, without anything ever attained. HTRK's existential portraits of being trapped by one's own desires are in direct opposition to the hedonism found in most electronica. Here on Work (Work, Work), the band parallels some of the horror-affected reverberation of the flash-in-the-pan Witch House crowd; but instead of drawing on unremembered memories of the forgotten '80s, HTRK has profound pain to draw upon... and they want their audience to feel that too. The band had been shifting their sound even before Stewart's death, with a greater reliance on electronics and subharmonic tones girding the spindly guitar work from Nigel Yang and the self-composed breathiness of Jonnine Standish. They were moving away from the rock trio and towards a miasma of voice, guitar, bass, and electronics with boundaries between these sounds far more permeable. The closest references to HTRK's sound would be Ike Yard and Dome, although HTRK are much more interested in building tension with their teasing melodicism through their droning electronics. The first track on the album features a weird collage that Stewart had made of late nite TV sex ads in Berlin amidst slow-motion sighs caught in a half-melodic drone and crawling drum machine pulse. "Eat Yr Heart" ramps a quarter-speed Giorgio Moroder sequence above heroin paced rhythm with Jonnine crooning a sultry melody counterpointed by breathy exhalations. Sexually charged yes, but more of a downward spiral into dejection rather than release. "Poison" is more in keeping with the bass and guitar structures found on Marry Me Tonight, with Sean Stewart's bass clearly present next to the twilight flickering drone-riffs from Yang. "Body Double" overhauls Suicide's classic sound of metallic synth / drum interplay with undulating melodies that stretch into a magnificent coda of cascading melancholy for what amounts to a masterful album. Highly recommended.

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

SORRY. John Hudak remains one of the underappreciated dronologists/lowercase composers, despite a number of really great albums notably "Brooklyn Bridge" and this album. "Don't Worry About Anything, I'll Talk To You Tomorrow" uses as its source material a phone conversation that took place between Hudak and his mother a year before she died. But the voices have been stripped of syllabic content to a bare sonorous abstraction with only the hints at conversational rhythms. Hudak uses these sounds to create a poetic miasma of timestretched insect-like shimmers and delicate tonalities that vibrate above a solemn quietness. A beautiful record that makes the impersonal and sterile Raster-label clickery seem, somehow, lacking.

Years and years ago, a handful of cd-r's showed up in the mail, obviously black metal, it took us a while to figure out what or who it was, the group's logo, fantastically illegible, the artwork abstract and black and white, shapes and skulls, altars and shadows, and the music, woah, dark and ritualistic, buzzy and blackened and pretty goddamn weird, we eventually discovered it was in fact a 'band' called Homunculus, but were never able to get copies for the shop. We've been fans of Texas industrial noisescapers and black drone technicians Husere Grav for a while now, and only just discovered, that the man behind Homunculus is in fact also Husere Grav. But don't be expecting black metal here, HG traffic in a bleak, blackened, post industrial ambience, huge heaving swaths of Lustmordian rumbles, sprawling bleak soundworlds that are equal parts Wolf Eyes at their most minimal, and the grim, kvlt ritualism of Abruptum, all blurred and smeared into hazy expanses of black sonic murmur, and abstract metallic shimmer, abject soundworlds of blunted blacknoize and crumbling squalls of static, most of the tracks here surprisingly tranquil, heady, meditative soft noise minimalism, which sounds at times quite a bit like The Caretaker, albeit a bit noisier and low fidelity, or Caretaker offshoot The Stranger, sculpted static, and buried murky melodies. While folks into black metal, and black ambience, and ritualistic dronemusic will of course dig, the sound here is shot through with a buried beauty, that casts You Are Transparent, as something almost more aligned with Philip Jeck, Tim Hecker or Leyland Kirby, which is most definitely a very good thing. Super deluxe packaging, the disc, housed in a dvd case, with a sixteen page black and white art zine, wrapped in a Japanese style obi, with a sticker and a button. LIMITED TO 400 COPIES, each one hand numbered.

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The debut album from the San Francisco avantgardists I Am Spoonbender is quite a brilliant fare, in which the telephone operates as metaphor to semiological, aural, and sidereal transmissions (Andee's interpretation: "They sing into phones"). But this object finds itself in need of repair, disrupting and misinterpreting the original signals of This Heat and Gary Numan into mutant grooves propelled by Dustin's post-Jaki Leibezeit percussion and Brian's prog bass angularity. On top of all of this rhythmic disruption, Cup's delicate synth melodies fall somewhere in between the tropes of early 80's new wave and Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy for Lilith. Yeah, I already run the risk of making this review far more advanced than it really need be, so I say that this - the aural equivalent of Avital Ronell's Telephone Book - is one of my favorite records of the year. No shit.

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

SORRY. First time on vinyl, and in the form of a beautiful picture disc at that! The only thing that is missing from this version of I Am Spoonbender's first full length is the peic final track "Mr. Knife Miss Fork". Unfortunately due to the time constraints of the vinyl format, the track simply would no fit. Nevertheless even without the final track, the debut album from the San Francisco avantgardists I Am Spoonbender is quite a brilliant fare, in which the telephone operates as metaphor to semiological, aural, and sidereal transmissions (Andee's interpretation: "They sing into phones."). But this object finds itself in need of repair, disrupting and re-interpreting the original signals of This Heat and Gary Numan into mutant grooves propelled by Dustin Donaldson's post-Jaki Leibezeit percussion and Brian Jackson's prog bass angularity. On top of all of this rhythmic disruption, Cup's delicate vocal / synth melodies fall somewhere in between the tropes of late '70s new wave and Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy For Lilith. Yeah, I already run the risk of making this review far more advanced than it really need be, so I say that this -- the aural equivalent of Avital Ronell's Telephone Book -- is one of my favorite records of the year. No shit. Limited pressing.

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After the tricky 3-sided-but-on-a-single-12" vinyl release, I Am Spoonbender offers the (one-sided) cd version of Teletwin. This 41-minute ep starts with an altered version of "Stopwatch Static" (here titled "Clocks Grow Old" to expand the meaning of the original), one of the avant-pop numbers from their 1998 album Sender / Receiver which then fades into "Infinity Limiter", a Steve Reich-ian tune for synths, which has become a staple in the I Am Spoonbender live 'Dream Set'. "Where Do Words Go?" at first appears to be a pretty straightforward cover of Berlin's new wave classic "The Metro" -- but upon closer inspection you realize that it is a 'tele-twin' of sorts, with completely different lyrics exactly set to the original melody! This makes IAS' version an imposter -- passing for the orginal, but actually completely different. Lyrically and conceptually, this now places the song entirely within the IAS ethos (illusion / reality, etc). Furthermore, the song eventually detours into layers of melodic deconstructions and time signature shakeups which somehow all reconvene back into the original song structure for its finish. For "Frozen Dog Futurist", IAS generate Heldon-esque synths with an obsessive bassline matching the disorienting punch of Dustin Donaldson's live drumming. This decomposes into digital glitch manipulated organ drones which could easily have origins in the soundtrack to the classic, freaky film Carnival Of Souls. That is followed by "October Blurred By", a hypnotic rhythmic track of flanged bass repeating a complex anti-funk groove that could be mistaken for a Tones On Tail out-take! "They Don't Have Mirrors" continues the aural relay with a caustic electronic wash which gives way to a blast of percussive math cluster bombs topped by slippery bass distortion before breaking down into thick recordings of steam engine horns with backwards digital skittering... and then erupts back into the aforementioned structure. For all of the plastic / new wave sheen that I Am Spoonbender applies to their songs, their structures may in fact be closer to This Heat or Funkstorung's experiments with fracturing electronica by shifting rhythmic elements in and out of atmospheric moods. Note: we have both the Canadian import version released on Mint Records which features extra-stylin' black jewelcase packaging as well as the domestic version released on Little Army Records.

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Philip Sanderson has told more than a few tall tales in his time. Back in the early '80s, he produced a handful of industrial-dirge-drone tracks under the pseudonym Claire Thomas and Susan Vezey, nearly convincing the nascent Cherry Red Records to publish a full album from Claire and Susan until they found out that two women were not behind the project. Sanderson and his cohort Steven Ball were the miscreants behind The Storm Bugs and they ran the very impressive Snatch Tapes imprint, much of whose back catalogue had been finely reissued by Vinyl On Demand. Sanderson had also been the author to the project Ice Yacht, which had only released a single track on one the Snatch Tape compilations. The story behind this tape reads as follows - Sanderson (or as the press release states, just Ice Yacht) had the daft idea of retracing the journey of Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen to the North Pole sometime in the early '80s. Here's where the story breaks down, as Sanderson / Ice Yacht somehow lost the only recording of an unreleased album while on that journey, only to have the 'vacuum-sealed tape' find its way into the hand of Fragment Factory in Germany. Hardly plausible, but then, many were convinced of the authenticity of those Jurgen Muller recordings. While there could be something about there being a long-lost Ice Yacht recording from back in the '80s, it's more likely that Sanderson has recorded in this day and age. Thankfully, he's bolstered his fictions with a deliciously vintage sounding album of crude/cold sequences for oblique metallic synth-noise monotone. Somewhere between Factrix, Thought Broadcast, and of course Sanderson's own Storm Bugs. Numbered tapes of just 100 copies.

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The original recording of "Clara Nostra" (initially called "Clarinots") was additive piece for a singular clarinet which was bounced back and fourth between multi-tracked recording units resulting in the sound of 106,476 clarinets being played / recorded at the same time(!?!). For "Clara Nostra," If, Bwana remixed the maximalist sound down to half speed, causing a deep resonant rumble. A solid piece of dronology from an outfit that we think usually sucks. Anyway, that's a lot of clarinets for sixteen bucks!

As hard as it is to believe that there can still be a steady stream of amazing reissues of '70s psychedelia from all around the world (but there is!), we're equally amazed that the purveyors of '80s grim synth punk have also been re-emerging with increasing regularity and surprising quality. While the German collector's label Vinyl On Demand have been at the forefront of the '80s resurgence of cold, cold, cold post-punk (mostly of the Germanic variety), Acute has also uncovered some gems, offering us the Metal Urbain reissues as well as a handful of pre-symphonic Glenn Branca projects. Now Acute presents Ike Yard. Hailing from New York back in the early '80s, they were one of the few American bands to sign to Factory Records (the most notable other band being ESG). This collection of tracks from 1980 - 1982 culls all of the material from Ike Yard's one LP on Factory and an EP for Le Disque Du Crespuscule plus the requisite unreleased material. Initially, Ike Yard really does sound like Factory should be their home, easily paralleling the death disco prowess of Public Image Limited or Section 25. Their dour monochrome post-punk enjoys a spectral production quality which haunted all of the Martin Hannett produced Factory recordings. But gradually the Factory overtones disappear in lieu of an claustrophobic electronic sound which reminds us a lot like early Cabaret Voltaire, or rather what we wished CV would sound like given that CV hasn't really weathered all that well up very. Ike Yard though is another matter, as they seemed to really fight over whether to groove on a primal, sexual funk or to alienate their audience with their cold, electro-primitive detachment. Between the metallic synth arppegiations, drum machines struggling to work through the complex patterns, and the angular swatches of screeching guitar, there is Kenny Compton's chilling, zombified vocal delivery that really pushes Ike Yard deeper into the realms of urban malaise. A very cool reissue.

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We're used to hearing clinical clicks from Japanese electronic composer Ryoji Ikeda -- so what's this then? 21st century classical, all acoustic stringed instruments, no electronics at all?? Yes, and it's great. With help from Belgian chamber-prog group Art Zoyd, Ikeda has crafted a gorgeous soundtrack-like suite of droning string bliss, that's far from the chopped-up aesthetic of his earlier use of orchestral elements in the electronic realm. Two years ago, Ikeda released "Matrix" -- an amazing double cd split between pure sinewave aggrevation on one disc and smooth, post-techno click 'n' grooves on the other. While that album was the conclusion of a trilogy of electronic works that also included "0 Degrees Celsius" and "+/-," it remains unclear if the arrival of "op." also marks a disavowal of electronics altogether (as good as this is, we hope not). While the German avant-garde ensemble Zeitkratzer have done very well for themselves in translating electronoise works by John Duncan and Merzbow into atonal orchestrations for classical instruments, Ikeda's "classical" debut bares little resemblance to anything he's done in the past. No cyclical pulses. No clinical precision. No irritants to speak of. Instead, Ikeda's compositions for strings (one piece for 9 strings and the rest for quartet) gracefully glide in and out of complex timbres, with plenty of breathing room in between all of the harmonic tones. Indeed, the closest resemblance to Ikeda's past work is how initial attack of bows on strings can sound uncannily like the electronically-generated tones on the sinewave half of "Matrix"... Soon they reveal themselves for the acoustic orchestra instruments they are, Ikeda apparently using them to tap into the emotions of sadness and majesty, which rock musicians also have appropriated from romantic composers. Yet, with its stoic simplicity and stately pacing, "op." also mirrors the fascination that fellow minimalist Bernhard Gunter holds for Morton Feldman and Luigi Nono, although Gunter's approach has remained within the scope of sampling and hasn't yet arrived at full blown orchestrations. As beautiful and compelling as Ikeda's "op." is, Ikeda has to ask himself how he can build a language that not only reflects back upon successes of his previous electronic works but also understand the peculiarities intrinsic to this form of composition. He's already issued vague statements about his electronic works building "invisible patterns filling the listening space." Is this a strong enough bridge between Ikeda's electronic masterpieces and the possible future for other classical compositions? Only time will tell...

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

SORRY. While this album came out way back in the early 90's, Illusion Of Safety's "Historical" is a great album to see what a 19 year-old kid from Chicago named Jim O'Rourke did to keep himself busy. At the time of this recording the revolving door membership of Illusion Of Safety also included Dan Burke (the mainstay for IOS) and Thymme Jones (later of You Fantastic, Brise Glace, and a handful of other Chicago no-wave revivalist groups). "Historical" opens and closes with blasts of industrial strength plunderphonics, recontextualizing Public Enemy, Simm City, Slayer, and big band horn blasts into synthetic rhythms. But the reason to get the album is for the 45 minutes or so of dark harsh droning reminiscent of the best work of John Duncan. Go ahead I dare you to buy it to play right after Jim O'Rourke's "Eureka".

Back in the early '90s, a 19 year old kid made his first mark upon music as "the guitarist from Illusion Of Safety." That kid then went on to produce a couple of interesting records amongst his huge catalogue of sonic eccentricities, always seeming to be in the Anyway, Dan Burke founded Illusion of Safety in the mid '80s as a schizophrenic continuation of Industrial Culture as a theatrical means of exposing the cracks within culture and human nature. It is true that a good number of the early Illusion Of Safety albums haven't aged all that well (including a number that O'Rourke worked on!); but Burke and his rotating core of collaborators certainly learned what worked (manipulated field recordings and disturbed ambience) and what didn't (grim media sound bites and hamfisted electro-shock rhythms). "In Opposition To Our Acceleration" finds a matured Illusion Of Safety deftly constructing psycholological tense atmospheres from amplified electrical currents, found sounds, microtonal guitar pluckery, and unnerving drones. The pinnacle of the album occurs during a collage from the chinese water torture of a very slow leak dripping into a bucket, alongside a distant choral chant and some nervous sustained tones. A few of the tracks do vector off into the MAX / MSP territory of timestretching samples and glitch fragmentation, but fits nicely into the textural potency of the album as a whole. Along with "Cancer" and "Probe", "In Opposition To Our Acceleration" is one of the best Illusion Of Safety albums.

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The first proper record from Illusion Of Safety in well over 5 years emerges from the Russian label Waystyx, meaning that this will not be around for long and will not be easy for us to track down once these are gone. Just a caveat before we launch into the, um, virtues of this exercise in muscular electronics and brainmelting dronescaping. Illusion Of Safety began well over two decades ago, firmly embracing the death factory imagery and psychological tension that came through the work of Throbbing Gristle, John Duncan, and The Hafler Trio. While the grizzly subjects of torture and sexual violence have dissolved over time, Illusion Of Safety's interest in unsettled soundscapes, collages, and electronic walls of noise remain as powerful as ever. Illusion Of Safety has always been a revolving door project centered around Chicago's Dan Burke; and In Session finds Burke alone at the helms of Illusion Of Safety, concocting a dizzying series of arcing electroshock compositions filled with intense dynamics and rapid crescendos of incremental noise quickly nosediving into subharmonic tones and microtonal squiggles, with plenty of slow building elements in between. The piercing drones that dominate the Illusion Of Safety palette are matched with crumbled textures from electronic circuits on the verge of collapse (see Wolf Eyes, Carlos Giffoni) and contact microphone agitation (see Tarab, Eric La Casa, Loren Chasse, etc.). There's one track of grim psychedelic arpeggiations which sounds as if Prurient were attempting a Terry Riley piece, with bad intentions running through the phase shifting loops. Totally fantastic, if not totally disquieting!

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Arguably the finest Illusion Of Safety record ever made, Probe was the 1992 recording composed by Dan Burke and Jim O'Rourke. The former began Illusion Of Safety a decade earlier with a revolving door personnel policy involving a handful of Chicago malcontents. O'Rourke began working with Burke's project around 1989 or so, when he was still a teenager and studying composition in college. Where many of the Illusion Of Safety albums are full-frontal assaults on the psyche of the listener (especially the groundbreaking album Historical with its raw use of narration from torture documentaries), Probe is a far more subtle and thus effective album marked by the extended use of disturbed silences, predating such sound design techniques that David Lynch mastered in Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway. This use of space is definitely coming from the O'Rourke side of the equation (which according to Burke was 50/50 on Probe), as O'Rourke's early solo album Scend was released at about the same time as Probe with profound similarities. Throughout the subsonic frequencies and unsettled spooky drones, there are numerous punctures of analogue sourced micro-bleeping, errata from shortwave, scrabbling of tactile objects, field recordings of traffic jams, children at play, carnival rides, etc. and jittery digitally sculpted loops. As all of these elements slowly unfurl over several lengthy chapters, Probe truly synthesizes the aesthetics of both Burke and O'Rourke into a cohesive body of work, with Burke's research into the dark and transgressive balanced with O'Rourke's studies into the musique concrete of Luc Ferrari and Michel Chion. Staalplaat first released Probe in a wooden slipcase in an edition of 500 copies. Those quickly went out of print; but fortunately, Perdition Plastics has just reissued this brilliant album, albeit in more conventional packaging...

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Just a few weeks ago, we openly wondered where Illusion Of Safety had been for the past few years. Well, it turns out that Dan Burke (the principal director of the ensemble at the moment) has entered a renewed period of activity now that IoS is 25 years old. This milestone has not softened the psychologically dark currents of one of America's finest producers of post-industrial abstraction and silence-plus-noise sound construction. Sedation & Quell is the first of many releases slated for 2008, being a vinyl-only release pressed on translucent gold vinyl. Sedation bristles with low end frequencies capable of delivering catatonic states. Vinyl crackling and warm swathes of radio hiss billow out of the deep deep deep dronings, and huge oceanic swells of growling frequencies offer a lethargic rhythm to this dark ambient opus. On Quell, a brusque crunch of electronic malfunction is followed by a steady hypnosis of rumbling drones which in turn are engulfed by a wash of hiss and white noise. While it's not the aggressiveness of Prurient or Merzbow that Illusion Of Safety is going for, there is a malevolent strain to this production, as if Machinefabriek were to gingerly steer towards power electronics ever so slightly. Very well done!

Somewhere, an old T-shirt from Illusion Of Safety exists (the last we saw was affixed to Sigtryggur from Stillupsteypa some 10 years ago) with a deadpan/ironic catch-phrase "Illusion Of Safety gives you that soaring feeling" next to an image of a man tumbling headfirst out of a skyscraper window. Such a calculated juxtaposition of word and image was emblematic of the '80s art world (e.g. Barbara Kruger), often speaking to the underbelly of callousness, cruelty, violence and general amorality within consumerist society. Outside of this bold piece of iconography, Illusion Of Safety has operated within a more liminal state of mysteriousness through signifier and meaning. Even in their most placid albums of soft-focus ambience, the specter of some unknowable threat lurks in the background. More common in the Illusion Of Safety catalogue is an iron-fisted grasp of that sense of foreboding and dread through psychologically tense sound design. Over three decades in existence, this Chicago based project has been whittled down to its core member Dan Burke - with a few comrades-in-arms joining him occasionally - and is probably the longest running American industrial project, having produced a very impressive body of work. The 2014 album Surrender fits comfortably next to some of the masterpieces of the IOS back catalogue (e.g. Cancer, In Session, Historical, etc.) through the trademarked juxtaposition of noxious frequencies snaking in and out of harmonic phase patterns only to snap out of existence with a razor-cut edit into an electrical burst of tesla coil noise (for example). Disjointed rhythms, mediated collages, decontextualized field recordings, and psychoacoustic phrases map this album with incredible control and precision. Illusion Of Safety proves once again that they are one of the greats of industrial culture. Grab this album before it disappears, the pro-duplicated cd-r is limited to just 100 copies. Same for the cassette.

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2008 marks the 25th year for Illusion Of Safety. Once an ensemble of misanthropic electron engineers, Illusion Of Safety has effectively reduced itself down to a single member in Dan Burke who has arrived at the silver anniversary with some of his best work produced throughout the sprawling Illusion Of Safety catalogue. There was the Quell & Sedition 10", the In Session cd, and now this small edition cd-r, all of which are exemplary versions of the Illusion Of Safety signature sound for psychologically challenging compositions. The Need To Now is more of a blackened cosmic headspace music, with all of the psychedelic flourishes that burst out of Klaus Schulze or Expo '70 turned towards something much much darker and much more brooding. There is oblivion in front of you when you are floating alone in outer space, and Burke presents that sublime fiction replete with wonder and horror. For all of the bleak subtext of the album, Burke keeps things very subtle preferring to focus on the minimalist dronesmear ruptured with occasional detours. The shadow and vacuum of Illusion Of Safety's aerosolized drone always has something ominous just outside of earshot, something lurking the corners of those corroded metal tones and already eerie passages of sci-fi incidental music slowed way the hell down. Illusion Of Safety breaks up the long-form drones with tense glitch workouts that could be an extract from a CoH production, with all sorts of misfired squiggles, poorly grounded bursts of electricity, and erratic charged samples; but unsettled ambience overcomes each of these crescendo like a creeping suffocating fog of toxic gas. It's an austere and powerful record, in spite of the many subtle twists and turns. Fucking incredible is what The Need To Now is. Limited to a mere 150 copies.

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Illusion Of Safety's Time Remaining was released back in 2003 by the small British imprint Ossonossos. Some five years later, we finally managed to get a hold of some copies; and it remains to be seen, if we'll be able to get more. Now that the scarcity issue has been broached, we must now regale you with the virtues and vices of this record. Illusion Of Safety is the post-industrial project centered around Dan Burke, who has often recruited some fellow Chicagoan misanthropes and avant-garde technophiles to propagate his soundscapes which parallel those of the Hafler Trio, John Duncan, Stilluppsteypa, and Lustmord. There could also be a claim for IOS as a precedent to the fuzzbound digismear of artists like Machinefabriek and Tim Hecker, albeit with Illusion Of Safety producing a much darker, more malevolent body of work. Time Remaining operates something like a horror soundtrack with a bristling introduction of electo-shock noise, mechanical chugs, and Tesla coil bursts, all tightly wound into a precise collage of bloodcurdling intensity. Illusion Of Safety reprises this electric volatility at the conclusion of the album, that may or may not be an homage to their 1993 album Historical, which essentially used the same strategy. In between these two brackets of pierced sound, Illusion Of Safety fabricates equally dark, but far more subtle atmospheres of shadowy hiss, blurry drone, and fluttered recordings of urban decay. Here is actually where Burke's strength really lies, and if David Lynch weren't already so good at sound design, he would want to look to Dan Burke to score his films. It's a bit unfortunate that we've not stocked more work by Illusion Of Safety, but it's better late than never to get into this exceptional album.

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All right. Yet another great homage to the transcendent, cosmological sounds of mid-'70s progressive electronics by way of John Elliott, better known as one of the synth dudes in Emeralds. The number of Elliott's solo / side projects is pretty staggering, with Imaginary Softwoods being the eighth that we're aware of, outside of Emeralds. Given the vast back catalogue from the Elliott / Emeralds axis, it shouldn't come as surprise that this 2lp set has gone through several permutations as well. First on cassette (three of 'em!). Then on vinyl. A cd-r came and went. Now, this remastered set appears once again on vinyl. There is a reason for all of the various editions of this album: it's a damn good record! The first side opens with a cold void atmosphere of filter sweep tones and metallic sawtooth vibrato, reminiscent of Elliott's recordings as Outer Space with more of slant toward the languorous, flanging drones that come by way of Maeror Tri or Cranioclast, minus the post-industrial framework. Elliott settles into a series of tone cluster of rounded synth notes whose cycling phrases have an elegant restraint and somber mood, as if Morton Feldman were to score a isolationist sci-fi soundtrack. Side two offers more of the liquid abstraction that became an Emeralds' signature on What Happened, sprawling through gentle oscillation and bittersweet half-melodies. A church-organ like set of rainy-day impressionism settles onto the third side, before Elliott reprises the cold flanging isolationism and Feldman-like tone clusters noted on the first side. The album drifts into a minor-key oblivion that descends over the course of the three final tracks on the fourth side of the album, tumbling into maudlin suspended tones and drones. So so nice!

The debut album from Chicago's Implodes is a quintessential Kranky release. It's a darkly beautiful production of pop narcotic smeared in layers of shoegaze distortion, monochromatic psychedelia, and slumping atmospherics, harkening back to Kranky's early releases from Bowery Electric, Amp, and maybe even the first Labradford record. That said, Implodes does fit nicely in with the current Kranky roster of Belong and Tim Hecker as well, and moreso Disappears, as Implodes is a conventional rock quartet crafting their tuneful sludge balanced with radioluminosity through pedals and amps. Throughout the album's humid, smoldering fuzz and droned distortion, Black Earth perpetuates the creeping violence and midwestern depression, spoken through the album's cover art, a creepy photograph of a woman's silhouette brandishing a knife in a rather hostile pose. The suitably downer melodies and androgynously murmured vocals flicker amidst the muffled guitar haze like the best of all shoegaze acts, but unlike most who reference My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, or Ride, Implodes is more attuned to Flying Saucer Attack, Bailter Space, or even the desolate drone-rock of Higuma. Tracks like "Screech Owl" and "Experiential Report" slowly burn from downer acoustic strumming into the plodding rhythms and intertwining male / female vocal mumblings buried beneath the narcoleptic atmospheres of muffed guitar haze. But if there was to be a 'hit' on the album it would be "Meadowlands" with its disco-ping synth notes that must be a reference to Joy Division's "She's Lost Control" instead of anything remotely hedonistic. Out of all this fuzz and distortion, sad melodies and muffled androgynous vocals sing of woe and heartache with a psychic conviction that doesn't need anything explicit like lyrics. The music is perfect in delivering this bleak mood all on its own.

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Index was a band like thousands throughout the '60s, encouraged by the birth of rock 'n' roll a decade earlier and fueled by the waves of British bands that would hit the American shores. This quartet was born in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe in 1967, at a time when the country was beginning to experience the pangs of turmoil and Detroit itself could be seen almost as a microcosm of the social unrest that was beginning to unfold. The heritage of Index is certainly notable, as the lead guitarist of the band was one John Ford. While the liner notes penned by drummer Jim Valice never overtly state that John's family was THE Ford family which spawned the automotive empire; the implication is quite clear that it is. While the affluence of John and fellow guitarist Gary Francis certainly helped in getting some great gear and recording equipment, the sound of Index is one of adolescence entering adulthood with an awakening disbelief that so much could be wrong in the world. At least on their first album, Index played with an urgency that sounded like the end of the world was near, as an underlying horror of bleakness lies beneath Index's punchy garage-pop beats and spring-reverb overloaded distortion. Their amateurish production that stumbled upon a cavernous sound certainly helps with this assessment. Think Jandek trying to mimic the sound of Martin Hannett's classic production sound for Joy Division. The band drew from the '60s songbook, covering the Byrds' "Eight Miles High", The Supremes' hit single "You Keep Me Hanging On", and The Bee Gees "I Can't See Nobody", and the band claims Hendrix as a huge influence on their sound, with an incendiary feedback encroaching into their beat pop tunes, at times coming across like Davie Allan and at others looking forward to Ron Asheton's work on The Stooges' first album. All of this came to fruition on what would become known as The Black Album, which was recorded with a single microphone in a large empty ballroom, whose acoustics gave the album its unusual sound. The spring reverb drips upon the overdriven guitar leads and forceful rhythmic guitar jangle, which for 1967 would have been pretty damn heavy. The vocal duties of Index rotated from song to song, occasionally finding all of the members singing these emphatic, if monochordal harmonies that oozed with bittersweet energy and late-teen angst. This is typified on one of Index's best songs "Fire Eyes" and furthered along through their cover of "Eight Miles High". Another great highlight of note is the proto MC5 oil'n'motorcycle grind found on the instrumental track "Feedback". When Index recorded their second album in 1968 later pegged as The Red Album, they had picked up a sound-on-sound cassette recorder, which seemed to be something of precursor to a 4-track. Unfortunately, in this technological jump, Index lost the cavernous murk of that single microphone recording in that ballroom, but they still managed some great songs dominated by Ford's spring-reverb soaked guitars, including a reprise of "Eight Miles High". "Paradise Beach" is a wonderfully downer, '60s pop number, and "Break Out" is a spry instrumental with a fine backbeat lifted from Booker T & The MGs. The band stumbles with the one boogie-rock blues number, but otherwise, The Red Album makes for a great listen. The second disc of this set is a collection of tracks from an unreleased third album in 1970, recorded mostly by Ford and Vallice. A paisley-pop jangle settles into the mix with less of the expressive feedback that drove so much of The Black Album, and the songs show a maturation in the vocal harmonies as well. But the band broke up with the various members torn by their commitments with college, girls, and work. So the world turns. A highly recommended find!

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This is a really nice split LP from two up-and-comers in the ever blossoming US post-noise scene. Infinite Body is the work of Kyle Parker, who constructs sustained swarms of sun-blinding guitar noise that sparkles upon undulating surfaces from crosshatched delay patterns. Belong and White Rainbow stand as Parker's closest neighbors, yet his crystal cracked noise enjoys a knife sharpening quality to the overblown distortion that nudges the work just a little bit outside the realm of post-shoegazing psychedelics. A brief Devendra Banhart-like falsetto recorded on a crappy tape recorder emerges between two extended fuzz tracks as a teasing piece of emotional excess despite its brevity of barely 15 seconds. It's nice to hear more from Emaciator (aka Jon Borges), who had blown us away with his Reflection 2lp not that long ago. Like Parker's Infinite Body, Emaciator transmits a constant stream of overblown noise, but sourced from analog synth and crusty filter boxes. Deftly transitioning through his distorted, shimmering drone with a dense harmonic interplay and almost subliminal melodic passages, Borges creates an entrancing and hypnotic piece that's equal parts Birchville Cat Motel and LaMonte Young. As his blizzard of electricity draws to an end, Borges picks up the guitar with a sadly elliptical chord that winds down gradually. Excellent stuff to be sure!

Armed with two analog synths and an alliance of effects pedals, this NY duo conjure forth a deep cleansing slab of grim new agey bliss. In the same droney vein as newcomers Emeralds, Infinity Window delve deep into the divine world of heavy synth wizardry to unveil two sides of all-encompassing aural blitzkrieg. To say their sound is thick would be a total understatement. These guys know how to lay it down heavy, but there is a lighter side to their heaviness, not really a dooomy type of heaviness, more a melodic and shimmering type of heavy that reminds us of the earlier Growing albums. Both sides build from wondrously minimal, video game-y bleeps and bloops to huge walls of trance inducing, glacial radiance. Like staring directly into the blaring sun, these tracks are celestial and huge but damaged and textured. Fuzz and noise subtly encapsulate the reverberating tones to swiftly steer away from any new-agey cheesiness.

Innode is the project of Stefan Nemeth, an Austrian electronica engineer aQers might be more familiar with as a member of glitchily elliptical, post-rock trio Radian. Here, he's working with Steven Hess (that jetsetting percussionist who seems to be everywhere these days) and Bernhard Breuer (responsible for the drums in the shockingly good 'live' techno ensemble Elektro Guzzi). The idea behind Gridshifter was to incorporate live drums as counterpoints to a rigid latticework of electronic patterns - hence, the title. But the results from Nemeth and his drummers totally transcend any formalist concept, as Gridshifter is full of some serious noise crunching swagger. The live and / or electronic breakbeats stalk through all of the tracks on this fantastic album with glistening waves of controlled, tonal feedback, jarring bursts of whipcracked noise, and ominous rumbled pulsations. In otherwords, it sounds just like Pan Sonic or Alva Noto played with a 'live' drummer. Even some of the analog synths have a bit of a warmer hue as well as if there could be something akin to a chord organ or wurlitzer tossed in for good measure. This would actually be an incredible performance to see live! Let's hope Nemeth can pull off a tour and not just of the European festivals, but into the US as well. Kudos to Editions Mego once again for a killer record.

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The late sixties Swedish musical aggregation that was Parson Sound / International Harvester / Harvester / Trad, Gras Och Stenar (really all one evolving band) was basically an example of the genre we've decided to call "international krautrock". Like a Silence has added an incredible, lengthy (24 minute!) bonus track called "Skordetider" ("Harvest Times") that the band originally intended for an album B-side but never used. It's hypnotic, powerful jam that could have fit well on that Parson Sound release. In other words: wow! Additionally, this cd features extensive liner notes documenting the group's history (the same essay is also found in Silence's reissue of the Harvester album, but with different photos). Along with the Parson Sound double cd, this is definitely one of the reissues of the year for us.

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The Strokes, Andrew W.K., The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Liars, and now Interpol are part of a recent rash of New York punkish bands birthed from the music hype machine as the great salvation of rock 'n' roll. Strange that these bands would garner such praise, since none of them operate outside of the arena of the homage -- either as ironic hyperbole in Andrew W.K. or as The Strokes' downward mobility to blue collar rockisms. Of all the aforementioned bands, Interpol seem the most interesting as they've managed to successfully resurrect Ian Curtis, a task that hasn't really met with much success in other bands. I mention just Curtis, as his persona seems to resonate much more strongly with Interpol than Joy Division as a whole. Sure there are ghosts of Factory's post-punk jaggedness and mororsely bleak temperament; but Interpol's forceful minor keys offer other roadstops past The Strokes' take on brightly-colored, guitar jangle and the sublime washes of fuzzy feedback heard in the early '90s shoegazer bands (MBV, Ride, Slowdive, etc.). Musically, Interpol's debut "Turn On The Bright Lights" is an excellent marriage of those aforementioned styles; but like Joy Division, Interpol is driven by a charismatic singer with a flair for dramatic bombast and a predilection for angst. Paul Banks, Interpol's singer, is a rare breed in the contemporary world of depressed vocalists who have typically followed the emo-centric whimper and scream approach of Sunny Day Real Estate to infuse any lyrical content with immediacy and passion. Instead, Banks can actually really sing, his nervous vibrato echoing the musical accompaniment played between depressed weariness and urgent conviction. Much of Interpol's aesthetic choices and lyrical content (love / hate relationships, urban isolationism, and sexual dependency) have already been done to death, but few have been able to do them as well. "Turn On The Bright Lights" is a fantastic record and actually lives up to all of the hype that has surrounded it.

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Another new release from tUMULt laboratories, finds our coworker Andee's label dipping its toes into pop, and recoiling in horror, as it pulls its feet back covered in muck and crud. Iran take 'Indie rock' and bury it in fuzz and hiss, taking ultra catchy pop, and dragging it through the detritus of lo-fi noise rock, picking up an ungodly assortment of buzz and blur and scuzz. Imagine a Pavement record on Siltbreeze. Or Sebadoh, if Lou Barlow was a jaded fuck instead of a sappy romantic. Or old Smog covering Skullflower. Or Harry Pussy playing Built To Spill. A beautifully cacophonous mess. Iran play damaged folk music, bombarded on all sides by a wild assortment of squeals and shrieks, static and hiss, and speaker clogging grit. Huge and slowly shifting, dronescapes that evolve into perfect little pop songs and then explode into jagged shards of high end skree. Iran are psychedelic and textural and noisey and totally catchy, hardcore, hook-filled low fidelity un-pop noise. Pop. Plus fucking wicked 'tiger' cover art.

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During recent months, the very first irr. app. (ext.) record had been popping up on eBay, going for incredibly high prices. It was assumed that this album was long out print given its original release back in 1997; those assumptions were quickly dispelled by simply getting in touch with the genius behind irr. app. (ext.) Matt Waldron, who replied, "Oh yes, I have a bunch of those! Do you think you can sell them?" There is certainly a charm to Mr. Waldron's mild-mannered self-deprication; OF COURSE we can sell these records. After all, Aquarius did host an exquisite show of Mr. Waldron's visual work, and we have sung the praises of his recent albums as well as his collaborations with Nurse With Wound. To top it all off, this is simply a fantastic album. irr. app. (ext.) operates in a realm where many have attempted to venture but only a few have succeeded in grafting the ideals of psychic automatism, Surrealist metonymy, and Dadaist absurdity onto the context of the contemporary sound sculpture. Nurse With Wound has long been the pinnacle of such an arena; and irr. app. (ext.) has slowly built a catalogue of recordings that demonstrate his own expertise in such matters. For his debut solo recording (which we believe came after the irr. app. (ext.) / Stilluppsteypa collaboration), Waldron constructs oblique shifting sounds from the internal workings of small mechanical devices, metallic scraping, shortwave radio static, and other unknown droning sources. These slowly build as disquieting ambience that abruptly halt and detour with cacophonous crashes, wild tape machinations, and unintelligible snatches of conversation. It's a brilliant beginning to what has developed into an exceptional career.

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A couple of years ago, Aquarius enjoyed a brief moonlight gig as an art space (which we hope to make happen again someday), proposing the same curious aesthetic on the visual front as we continue to do on the musical. One of the more intriguing exhibitions we hosted was from an ambitious, if under-recognized artist by the name of Matthew Waldron. His meticulously eccentric drawings, paintings, and assemblages depicted mutated beings conducting psychic surgery upon each other with all sorts of psychosexual overtones. These provocative and compelling images held their own with the classic Surrealist works of Hans Bellmer and early Salvador Dali. At the same time, Waldron introduced us to the equally ambitious catalogue of sound constructions that he had been quietly making in the Santa Cruz mountains under the moniker irr. app. (ext.). These albums followed in the deconstructed / abstracted sound collage traditions of Nurse With Wound, The Hafler Trio, and HNAS, often times surpassing the quality of those which came before. Sadly, very few people had heard of irr. app. (ext.) because of Waldron's unfortunate round of luck with record labels and general low profile. Jump forward to the contemporary era, and things look entirely different. Today, you will find Waldron a mainstay in the Nurse With Wound performance entourage, being whisked away to play in all sorts of unlikely European festivals; and irr. app. (ext.) has consistently released albums that build upon the successes of those which we had heard before. So for us here at Aquarius, it's very satisfying to see an artist we once supported have their career take off... And that leads us to Cosmic Superimposition, the second in a proposed trilogy from irr. app. (ext.) of releases based upon the writings of Wilhelm Reich. Cosmic Superimposition was a book that Reich had written in 1951; and in that book, he argued how the superimposition of multiple energies is the common functioning principle throughout the natural world. It was through these ideas that Reich arrived at the ideas of Orgone, cloudbursting, etc. On the single 45-minute track that comprises Cosmis Superimposition, irr. app. (ext.) presents a revolving set of organic fluctuations that wax and wane in accordance with a well-tuned internal logic. Glassine ambient passages of processed environmental noise slide into the sustained harmonics of bowed metals which in turn couples with the off-kilter phase pattern of an exhaust fan whose motor is not quite properly aligned. All the while gurgles from streams, clatter from subterranean actions, singing bowl reverberations, and dark elliptical cycles of blackened electronics pock the stately progressions of Cosmic Superimposition's dronemusik foundation. As is stated in the liner notes, Waldron repurposed the source material from the first stage of the trilogy Ozeanische Gefuhle; but Cosmis Superimposition is hardly a replicant remix of the first. Rather, the ghosts, shadows, and ripples of his earlier album emerge in the fluid ambience of the second as bridge that points to Waldron's ambitious and highly successful undertaking. One of the best records of 2007, for sure.

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Invocations of Surrealism have come to reflect a Frank Zappa or Dr. Bizarro form of 'weird,' with little understanding and even less appreciation for the truly revolutionary nature of the Surrealism that dominated avant-garde culture in the early 20th Century. Fortunately, a few sound artists have truly succeeded in manifesting the spirit of Surrealism in their work. The most obvious being Nurse With Wound in keeping true to the Surrealists bawdy appropriation of Victorian aesthetics in exploring unsettling horrors; and to a lesser extent, there's the Hafler Trio who took the intense interrogrations of Surrealism to a gnostic conclusion. Somewhere in between these two giants of sound art is the work of Irr.App.(ext). For the past eight or nine years, Irr.App.(ext) has been toiling in obscurity, and producing a body of work that easily rivals his more well known compatriots. Some of you may remember a stunning art exhibit here at Aquarius records back in the early spring of 2003 with all sorts of obtuse collages, exquisitely rendered nightmarish drawings, and shadow boxes loaded with peculiar juxtapostions and mixed messages. That was the work of Matt Waldron, who also happens to be the man behind the musical project Irr.App.(Ext) along with a couple of likeminded delinquents. Unfortunately, Matt has had a ridiculous spell of bad luck with labels folding before releasing his work, or not being able to find the funding, or just being jerks. His luck has finally changed with the release of Dust Pincher Appliances, which in turn reissues a very early 10" originally released on Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson's Something Weird label back in 1995. Waldron has extended the original recordings with those of a follow-up 10" which was never actually released. Though some eight years old, the recordings on Dust Pincher Appliances are still stunning. The album unfolds as an ever changing drama of Surreal events, evolving through time to reveal startling revelations, disquieting progressions, and atypical juxtapositions of sound. Eerie drones and atmospheres dominate the majority of the album, haunted by distant voices bathed in reverb or unrecognizable events that scurry malevolently like tiny monsters or robotic insects. Carnivalesque episodes often interrupt the proceedings with cackling sound effects, brash trumpet blurts, and toy piano discord. Dust Pincher Appliances is a marvelous album and should be the harbinger of a wonderful catalog that the world needs to embrace.

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It has been a while since we've heard from the hermetic M.S. Waldron and his ignoble project irr. app. (ext.), and now he's released two cassettes through his Errata In Excelsis imprint, continuing his slippery alchemy of surreal collage, spiraling drone, and cracked intention. If that title looks a little familiar (as well as the cover), it is in fact an homage to the 1987 split album between AMM's Eddie Prevost and Organum, entitled Flayed / Crux which sported a bizarre mandala of Victorian-era clip art as cover art. But it's not just the title and the cover that Waldron is riffing upon, he's created two stellar 'covers' of those two lengthy tracks. The originals found Organum's David Jackman accompanying Prevost for "Flayed" with a signature acoustic drone from Jackman's bowed cymbal underlying a reverb-saturated, free-falling excursion around Prevost's drum kit. The irr. app. (ext.) reinvention in "Flux" is nearly flawless in keeping up with Prevost's polydactyl splutter and tempestuously rolling drum fills, while building an equally impressive simulacrum of Jackman's bowed cymbal thrumm of surging electrified friction. As good as both Prevost and Waldron's tracks are, the best work is reserved for the flipside. The original of "Crux" featured an all-star Organum line-up with Jackman surrounded by Andrew Chalk, Dinah Jane Rowe, and Steven Stapleton who's credited performing on "chair." Waldron does list the objects that went into the formation of his reinterpretation entitled "Crayfish" including the enigmatic use of a "chair" in the assembling of this rebirthing drone-construction. Was the chair particularly squeaky? Did Stapleton drag it around to create a muffled texture somewhere in the mix? Did he just sit down and get high? Those same questions can be asked of Waldron, in his use of the piece of furniture in this beautiful swarm of acoustic drones from sustained cymbal drones dappled with shortwave radio detunings and a ritualistic flute that hangs sadly above all the droning surfaces. Waldron's version rings true with the eerie, yet beautiful atmospheric construction that Organum mustered during the height of their career, with the notable differences found in Waldron's use of squishy textures and squeaks that dot the heavy-droning swarm. That said, both the original and this cover should be lauded alongside those magnificient pieces of holy minimalism by Tony Conrad, LaMonte Young, and Charlemange Palestine. Yeah, it is that good! As you know, tapes like this are usually limited, so don't wait around on this one!

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Kreiselwelle is the conclusion to a superb trilogy from irr. app. (ext.) who used the words, philosophies, and eccentricities of Wilhelm Reich as the springboard into a realm of post-Surrealist, post-industrialist, post-drone arena of sound design. While a prominent European psychoanalyst, whose ideas could be seen as an occasional counterpoint to those of Freud, Reich may be best known for his parascientific research into Orgone energy, which he claimed was central and unifying force of life throughout the universe. Much of this latter research has been discredited and unfortunately shed a cloud of incredulity upon his psychoanalytic work. While Reich's claims of cloud-busting and orgone therapy offer particularly strong metaphors, M.S. Waldron - the principle architect to irr. app. (ext.) - has looked more to the psychological aspects of Reich's work. Kreiselwelle translates from the German as spiral wave or gyroscopic wave, and points to the similarities which Reich had noted in the structures of microscopic organisms, turbulent wave patterns, and spiral-arm galaxies. Through this trilogy (which also includes Ozeanische Gefuhle and Cosmic Superimposition), Waldron mirrors Reich's early cosmology through a compositional fluidity that alludes to contemporary drone fascination, constructed through overlapping collages, occluded field recordings, sustained tones from atypical instruments, and crosshatched synthetic noises. All three of these albums were sourced from the same set of field recordings, but each detours into its own particular wandering. Kreiselwelle begins with a very slow hypnotic strum across a detuned guitar with liquid tactility and a warped distance buzz filling in the gaps. Grand sweeps of slashing drones that could originate from an echoing chainsaw deep in the woods forms an unlikely crescendo with sympathetic tones, only to collapse into the softened white noise of cars passing by. Soon after, a rhythmic tapping of agitated electronics forms a motorik rhythm against the tapestry of audio fluidity, with all of the electro-shock bursts of a tesla coil. This in turn morphs into a cauldron of slow locomotive rumbling, which beget one of many glassine drones that float throughout Kreiselwelle. For fans of any of work of Nurse With Wound (after all Mr. Waldron is in the NWW touring ensemble!), H.N.A.S., and the more esoteric recordings of Organum; and certainly of note for those of you taken by Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words, Xela, Svarte Greiner, Expo '70, Emeralds, or any of the darker, weirder, more fucked-up drone ensembles of recent days. Very highly recommended!

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If anyone has the ability to carry the post-Surrealist torch of Nurse With Wound, it would have to be Matt Waldron through his irr. app. (ext.) project. Like Nurse With Wound's eccentric genius Stapleton, Waldron would never qualify himself as a Surrealist, but it's a good jumping off point to describe their respective works. With Ozeanische Gefuhle, Waldron establishes irr. app. (ext.) establishes himself as one of the most gifted sound-sculptors whose work have passed through the doors of Aquarius. If you've ever picked up any drone / minimalist / ambient records or even just anything that Andee has poetically described as 'completely fucked', then you owe it yourself to pick up Ozeanische Gefuhle. This review could ramble on and on, but let's cut to the chase and state the obvious, this album is brilliant. Strangely enough, Ozeanische Gefuhle -- as great as it is -- almost disappeared into the ether, as it was slated for release a few years back on another label who just sat on it for years, much to the chagrin of Mr. Waldron. Fortunately, the good people at the Helen Scarsdale Agency rectified the situation and made sure this album got its due recognition. The title itself is an allusion to Wilhelm Reich, who used the term to describe the natural state of every healthy organism as connected to and engaged with the world around it. Such ideas in lesser hands would result in limp idylltronica with New Age sentimentality; but this is not the case for irr. app. (ext.), who solidly grounds this record upon a fundamental drone, which slinks its way through numerous field recordings and performative gestures. Waldron's masterpiece emerges as a tidal current of electronic sound, rumbling through blackened spaces and soaring with divine expressivity. As good if not better than anything by Nurse With Wound, Organum, :zoviet france:, Phill Niblock, and the Hafler Trio. Yeah, it's that good!

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Slowly but surely, the mighty work of irr. app. (ext.) has been oozing out from the Santa Cruz mountains through various outlets such as Crouton, Helen Scarsdale, and Beta-Lactam. Perekluchenie was originally commissioned as part of a Beta-Lactam Ring subscription series (which if you were lucky enough to sign up would earn you a bonus picture disc with the LP) but the growing interest in irr. app. (ext.) warranted a regular pressing, thanks to such high-profile releases as the irr. app. (ext.) contribution to Nurse With Wound's Angry Eelectric Finger trilogy as well as the Salt Marie Celeste performances with Steven Stapleton himself! The relationship between irr. app. (ext.) and Nurse With Wound has gotten even more convoluted as Stapleton has joined irr. app. (ext.) in their last couple of performances. We should be quick to point out the irr. app. (ext.) and the genius behind the tongue-twisting project is far from a Nurse With Wound copyist. Hardly! While both projects draw inspiration from Surrealism and avant-garde composition, they both express strong divergent aesthetics that show how rich and open the field of Surrealist-tinged sound art can be. Qualified as "a pointless theatrical exercise in one act or less," Perekluchenie actually spans four lengthy pieces of audio madness. Waldron wanders through desolate strums across a prepared piano (or some other instrument that's equally heavy and reverberant) which gives way to ill-tempered birds, ominous windswept drones, and funereal bells. Waldron shatters the grim atmosphere with an unnerving passage for tactile squeakings and poltergeist driven furniture. Elsewhere, discordant horn bleats rupture the heavenly glow of elegaic tones and genuinely baffled exclamations erupt from a very young Django Stapleton. Waldron includes other vocal contributions from Lori Anne Anne Lori Chambers, Aquarius' former owner Windy Chien, and Diana Rogerson (aka Chrystal Belle Scrodd.) All in all, Perekluchenie is a truly wonderful album! We've been fans of Mr. Waldron for many years now, and he's yet to let us down.