THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Repressed and back in print.
Record number two from Leyland Kirby's Caretaker project, whose last record, Persistent Repetition Of Phrases, was a unanimous aQ fave, and was of course one of Wire magazine's top 10 albums of 2008, and was, and still is, one of our best sellers, and it looks like this one is likely to follow suit.
A sonic meditation on memory and loss, The Caretaker, takes old jazz records, various effects, and what sounds like a battery of old beat up Victrolas, and weaves Philip Jeck like soundscapes, but unlike Jeck, the source sounds here are not obfuscated, in fact, in some respects, The Caretaker records are almost like spectral spiritual otherworldly mix tapes, especially on this new one, which sounds like old 78s left to play in a big old auditorium, the room's reverb lovingly wreathing the music in a gauzy old timey haze, the surface noise, hiss and crackle and pop, somehow accentuated by the cavernous space. Better yet, replace the auditorium with an old abandoned mansion. Imagine the great room, animal heads on the walls, old oil paintings, a massive fireplace, charred black, old decaying rugs, all the furniture covered in white cloths, looking like ghosts, cobwebs in all the corners, the floor beneath a layer of dust, and in the corner, an old record player, lit up, its turntable spinning slowly, some old dusty record, to a room full of spirits, a sonic requiem for a time that once was, the music seeming to reflect the ever fading memories, and that's what these songs sound like, some sort of haunted house jazz, old timey seance blues, mournful melodies played on an old piano, muted trumpet, swoonsome strings, shuffling drums, a slow motion big band performing live in the ether, a spectral band playing lament after lament, dedicating it to their lost loves, and loves lost.
An Empty Bliss Beyond This World plays like some archival collection of lost 78's, but where the records' provenance is unknown, timeless music that could have come from anytime, and anywhere, the imperfections and inconsistencies as much a part of the sound as the music itself, all of that hiss and crackle a warm wreath of time-transformed-into-sound detritus, the passing of time mad physical, a sonic memorial to the past. So utterly gorgeous.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The Caretaker spins really old vinyl for the most part much slower than intended and affects the lugubrious pace with assorted warbly effects. This collage of slo-mo waltzes and antique crackles is punctuated by a spartan use of distorto-breakbeat-crunch. Released on V/VM's label and certainly follows the V/VM - Speedranch - Janski Noise aethetic of neo-dada electronica, yet presented with a very sad overtone. In the end this could easily be some gossamer soundtrack to a deep sea nature show or an alternate score to the ballroom scenes in "The Shining".
aQ Hits is a new collection from beloved SF psychedelic space rock minimalists Carlton Melton, and is our second annual official aQuarius recOrds Record Store Day release. Last year's was a live disc called Black Valleys, a document of a killer aQuarius instore by NY psych rockers White Hills, and that one sold out in a flash. This year's looks to do the same - if you like White Hills, you like Carlton Melton, right?!
It's a super limited (just 300 copies) compact disc, collecting a handful of rare, and now out of print vinyl tracks, from various singles and split lps from the last couple years, including one super extended version.
Let's run through the various tracks... "Bottle Of Heat [Extended Version]", is, as you can probably tell from the title, the aforementioned alternate cut, which takes "Bottle Of Heat", originally released on the 2011 Agitated Records 12" comp I'm So Convoluted!, and offers up the unedited full-sprawl recording, stretching out to more than 19 minutes, thick smoldering clouds of soft focus psychedelia, drifting and blissed out, free form and abstract, a meandering epic of lush chordal swell and shimmery FX drenched swirl, all over a shuffling hypnotic and motorik kraut-psych beat. "Handling Snakes" is the A side from the group's Valley King 7" single, and is a jolt of heavy hypno-blues a la Wooden Shjips, but in the hands of Carlton Melton, somehow even heavier with wailing riffs and pummeling drums.
The next two tracks are from Carlton Melton's split 12" with Empty Shapes, originally released on Mid-To-Late Records in 2010: "Call and Response" is an epic (and originally nearly side-loooong) blowout, beginning with a heavy rumble of monolithic sludge eventually progressing into a slow wave of burnt-out blues riffage a la early Comets on Fire, that churns and steeps into a gnarly brew of molten fuzz. While "Purer", is more cosmic and dreamy, built on a layer of percolating synth drones that give way to a more uplifting space rock jam trajectory, total heart-of-the-sun zoner blissout.
And finally, the last two tracks are from CM's split 12" with Qumran Orphics, also originally released on Mid-To-Late Records, that one in the beginning of 2011. "March Of The Cicadas" is a glorious ten minute slab of psychedelic heaviness, that sounds exactly like the title implies, a slowmotion dirge over martial rhythms with buzzing electronic hisses and stratospheric guitar leads. And things finish off with "Murder Ridge", a noirish Bardo Pond-like spiral of burning sonic embers and sustained decay, a gorgeous hazy stretch of blurred lysergic drift, the perfect final movement, psych-drone comedown.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, each one hand numbered, the artwork is printed on metallic silver cardstock, everything housed in a slim dvd style case, only available here!
In an interview for Re/Search sometime in the early '80s, J.G. Ballard quipped that San Francisco must have the highest population of deviants with college degrees. Back then, the Bay Area did boast a sizable contingent of acid-damaged drop-outs, sexpot performance artists, transgendered punks, mischievous hucksters, members of Caroliner, and the unclassifiables, all flying their freak flags, with those numbers gradually dwindling, relocating, and/or aging over the ensuing decades. The weirdos and the degenerate artists still exist; yes, they do! But San Francisco should be a little ashamed that most of them live in the East Bay. Berkeley denizen Gregory Scharpen is one such character, who sometimes goes by the pseudonym Thomas Carnacki and sometimes is the absurdist bandleader for various minstrels operating under a banner of the same name, that being Thomas Carnacki. A gnomish / wizardly type with an old-growth beard and extraneous tentacles dipped with ectoplasm, Scharpen / Carnacki is a larger-than-life character who toils in film, theatre and sound design, with his expertise finding sympathetic ears and fingers in irr. app. (ext.) and Nurse With Wound.
This split release marks the first slab of vinyl for Carnacki, and finds him / them working in parallel with the equally obtuse but less flamboyant outfit Vulcanus 68. The Carnacki ensemble for this 20 minute track includes stalwarts Jesse Burson and Gregory Hagan (the latter also being in Common Eider, King Eider) and occasionalists Sheila Bosco and Cheryl E. Leonard. What these five are doing in a room is really anybody's guess. Huffing glue and fumbling with Tibetan bowls? Channeling the spirits of grizzled thugs and wrestling with those ghosts? Ripping apart a piano and putting the whole thing back together all wrong? All of these could be the method acting principles behind these nocturnal collages and strange actions of slow-moving events. Oakland's Vulcanus 68 (nee Jared Blum and Dominic Cramp) dial in something not too dissimilar to Homotopy To Marie, with plenty of gurgling noises, radiophonic allusions, backmasked gestures, and hauntologically challenged puffs of smoke. These too could have originated from similarly liver-destroying acts of sound immolation as on the Carnacki side of things. Yeah, this really could have been a United Dairies release circa 1983. Limited to 250 copies and comes with a download.
In 1979, Nigel Ayers and Caroline K began recording as Nocturnal Emissions, a project then that was spurned by the nascent Industrial Culture of Throbbing Gristle, Whitehouse, and SPK. Their early recordings - Tissue Of Lies and Drowning In A Sea Of Bliss especially - are classic recordings of information overload aesthetics through abrasive drum machines, electronic noise, tape psychosis, and aggressive sequencing. At the same time, the two began Sterile Records as a means to put out their own recordings and those of likeminded malcontents (i.e. Lustmord, MB, Controlled Bleeding, Konstruktivits, etc.). By the early '90s, Caroline left Nocturnal Emissions to Ayers and disappeared from the public eye; but she did manage one solo record in Now Wait For Last Year.
By the time that Caroline recorded this album, Nocturnal Emissions had grown disenchanted with Industrial Culture, especially all of the blood and horror from the requisite medical imagery that went hand in hand with the punishing electronics. At the same time, Sterile Records had transformed into Earthly Delights promoting an agenda of post-Eno driftscaping. Now Wait For Last Year was actually the first lp to land on Earthly Delights, standing as a fantastic and underappreciated swath of industrially tainted ambience.
Sodden loops of melancholic dronings open the album which all spiral into a 20 minute mantra of murky haze reminiscent of some of the Zoviet France recordings from around the same time period (Mohnomische, in particular), furthered along by a lurching set of mechanical rhythms buried deep in the background. This is followed by a nocturne synthesized from medieval chants and percussion not unlike, the earliest Dead Can Dance or the Fairlight driven works of Coil. The dirge-paced synth number Chearth is more in keeping with John Carpenter score (although certainly less bombastic). Klanggalerie had acquired three bonus tracks from Caroline's estate (she died in 2008), featuring her in more of a Suspiria meets Richard Pinhas vein of mood engineering.
Ah, this record is bloody gorgeous, introducing us to Kate Carr's wondrously droned-out field recordings and somnolent avant-folk strum. Carr is a peripatetic soul, spending her formative days in Sydney, Australia and currently plunked on the other side of the world in Belfast, Ireland with numerous travels that hardly make a straight line between the two locales. On these travels, she tireless collects field recordings - her soundcloud page sports an ever growing archive of fragments of wind, metal, birdsong, subterranean echo, mechanical purr, and nocturnal street emptiness. In her composed work, she'll find sympathetic textures within this archive, and turn these worldy sounds inward to illuminate a dreamlike radiance and an introverted otherness in these sounds. These hushed lulls and emotional pregnant impressions interweave with the more archetypically musical figures from guitar, synth, and their cohabitating shoegazed wash. The utterly downer track "I Remembered It All Somewhere Near Glasgow" centers on a particularly maudlin ellipsis played on acoustic guitar, dripping with sadness as reverberant pools ripple outward from her treated field recordings and distilled environmental hum. The drone is central to her work, but it is one that meanders as coaxed by the wind striking an Aeolian harp, rather than adhere to the plumb line of microtonal adjustments. That organic quality of her harmonics in conjunction with the sodden field recordings and the rainy-day song fragments make for quite a beautifully sad album. Limited to 70 copies.
A brilliant and beguiling cassette from the Australian transplant Kate Carr, whose slippery compositions dissolve her already dreamy song fragments within the ephemeral details from her field recordings. We keep on coming back to A.C. Marias upon listening to these recordings - she was responsible for one overlooked album in the mid-'80s of delicate post-punk electronica produced with Bruce Gilbert of Wire; and she also collaborated in a couple of Gilbert related side-projects as well. Where A.C. Marias was a songwriter constructing an eerie, vertiginous atmosphere through the eradication of form, Carr arrives at a similar aesthetic locale of strangeways and tendrils in building songs from the ground up through environmental elements and ready-made components. It's a strategy that flourishes in empty spaces where the resonance from bells, insect chorales, cathedral echo, tidal currents, and windswept drones guides the patterned ellipses from her moody guitar ambience and subtle rhythmic vibrations, unfurling into a transfixing, mesmerizing album of sodden, pastoral impressionism. Limited to 125 copies.
Carter Tutti. Chris & Cosey. There may be a semantic difference somewhere to be discussed, but this album brigades what those differences may be as the pair of Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti have crafted an album of material mined from the back catalogue of Chris & Cosey albums under the moniker Carter Tutti. Over the past four years, the couple has been touring vigorously, with the set including revamped / recorded / reengineered versions of the older Chris & Cosey material. So many people approached them with requests for the live recordings of these newer versions that they went into the studio to properly sequence these tracks for an album. And we gotta say that Carter Tutti offer up one hell of a recapitulation, and at times, they really do better themselves than what they had done back in the '80s. When Throbbing Gristle broke up and Chris & Cosey ventured out on their own, they adopted the seductive electro-pop subversion facets of TG to their own devices. Their albums eagerly consumed technology and fused any and all forms of electronics into the sexual / somatic rhythms of the human body. Admittedly, some times their ideas were hindered by the technologies that were at their disposal. Samplers that could only fire so fast and so much. MIDI programming that was limited by latency, memory, and timing issues. Jump several decades, and what Chris & Cosey did in the '80s with a bank of synthesizers and sequencers can now be done on any given phone. So many of these recapitulations work with the same set of melodies and sequences, but smoothed out the technological stumbling blocks. "Driving Blind" was one of the better tracks on their 1984 album Songs Of Love And Lust; and here, the two flesh out the arpeggiation of the sequences with a dense polyphony of streaming electronics above their whipcrack techno production - and Cosey's skulldrill monotone mantras are as compelling, delirious, and sexy as ever. "BeatBeatBeat" is one of the most refreshing recreations, mostly because the original was pretty damn annoying, again with a minimal, surgical set of cybernetic techno and Cosey reworking the vocal chorus into more of a celestial chime and less of a mosquito irritant. The S&M inspired "Sin" finds Cosey channelling Siouxsie more so than she's ever done in the full-throated bellows of sexual depravity above another finely tuned machine of chome-plated techno. One can hope that whatever new material comes out of this redux, it will follow this template which is pretty fucking great.
That's Nik Void of Factory Floor once again joining the esteemed duo of Cosey Fanny Tutti and Chris Carter, proving that their first collaboration was not just a flippant one-off romp betwixt likeminded technicians; and hopefully, f(x) will be just one of many albums produced by this meeting of minds. As we experienced on the outstanding album of rebooted Chris & Cosey material, Carter Tutti has been exceptionally good as of late; and the insertion of Void into the mix changes that not one bit. If anything the pop quotient from the Carter Tutti productions has been distilled into faint melodies swimming amongst a chemical amalgam of hyper-processed / semi-aqueous sounds that are all suspended upon the girders of an almighty cybernetic whump generated with teethclenched tension. The rhythms begin and end with a chest-rattling pulse that is omnidirectionally nowhere and everywhere - the beat of an underground nightclub whose entrance cannot be found... the hollow-body vibrations from a multitude of car stereos straining at the urgency of those Gas albums from nearly 20 years ago... the chrome-plated precision of perfectly tuned machines purring at 126 bpm. Vocals and guitars from both Void and Cosey lock into place within these rhythms, albeit throughly processed, abstracted, haunted, and disembodied. The amount of details that pop into focus is startlingly dense for an album so overtly minimal, yet the trio effortlessly corral all of the component parts into one hell of a great electronic album.
One of the niftier 7"s to pass through the store in quite a while is the work of Caruso, a young North Carolinian with his first release on the promising UK label Crustaceans and Reptiles. "Titles Are For Babies" is a quick excursion through a number of
Watch her legion of admirers increase tenfold with every passing moment! Will you join them/us? On this, her third full length, Neko Case's voice pours forth in such an untethered and unaffected manner, yet with such power and control. It's truly something to behold. Through seemingly endless touring since Furnace Room Lullaby (on her own, as well as with the New Pornographers) she's honed her voice into an incredibly dynamic instrument. She delivers old classics like "Runnin' Out of Fools" or "Look For Me (I'll Be Around)" with such ease and conviction so seamlessly amid her own splendid songs like "Deep Red Bells" and "I Wish I Was The Moon" as well as "Pretty Girls" from The Gift soundtrack. On much of Blacklisted, her delivery is not unlike that of a lone, world-weary torch singer. Quite simply, her performance is arresting - deeply dramatic and haunting. Perhaps this may be attributed, in part or in whole, to the fact that these days she's holding all the reins. She co-released this album on her own label Lady Pilot with Bloodshot Records, and produced and mixed it with Darryl Neudorf and Craig Schumacher. Also noteworthy is the absence of "and the Boyfriends" from her name, but she's by no means flying solo - although she did play a greater number of the instruments this time around (various guitars, saw, piano). Speaking of which, the accompanying music is a perfect, richly hued match that warmly envelops and lingers around her every word. She's surrounded by an impressive group of musical friends including Joey Burns and John Convertino of Calexico, Giant Sand's Howe Gelb, Kelly Hogan, Brian Connelly of Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet, Dallas Good of the Sadies, John Rauhouse, Tom Ray, and Mary Margaret O'Hara. A stunning album that glistens and glows from start to finish. Highly recommended.
Frogs. Demonic and / or cult possessions. Caves. Numbers stations. EVP transmissions. VLF static. These have been the subject matters for AQ's favorites from the "Found Sound / Field Recordings" section. Without a doubt, 'The Cat' ranks as one of those great oddball records alongside the Sounds of North American Frogs or the Ghost Orchid or the Conet Project. This album is simply a 45 minute recording of a purring cat whose contented rumblings have been amplified through the careful placement of a contact microphone. The cat in question is named Urchin and resides at Stormy Records in Dearborn, Michigan. There, Windy Weber (of Windy & Carl fame) and Davin Brainard (who helps run Time Stereo) recorded this amazing document of deep-rumbling cat happiness.
Now you can enjoy all the comforting joy of a cat's warm purring without all those nasty hairballs. Allergic? No problem. This cd is hypo-allergenic. No litterbox to clean (or to let get filthy). No fishy cat food to dish out. No unsightly scratching post that the cat will ignore while it shreds your new sofa. What you get instead with The Cat is a marvelous recording of a cat enraptured in drooling bliss. As these recording attest to, Urchin seems to spend a lot of time splashing in water, which isn't normal cat behavior at all. Or at least that's what it sounds like. Maybe he's lapping up milk, or cleaning itself with A LOT of saliva. Anyway, this is a nice disc for you fans of drones and field recordings, who don't have cats of your own to amplify.
And we figured we'd end this review with a couple of timely haiku courtesy of our pal Harvey Sid Fisher:
We're almost equals
I purr to show I love you
Want to smell my butt?
You must scratch me there!
Yes, above my tail!
Behold, elevator butt.
Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca had to start somewhere, somehow, before they had the clout to recruit for their guitar battalions in a quest to generate his minimalist / maximalist mantras of transcendent noise. Fellow avant-guitarist Tim Catlin has yet to branch out into territories of large ensemble guitar compositions, yet it's certainly exciting to witness the birth of an artist who will undoubtedly join the ranks of Chatham and Branca as one of the premier avant-guitar composers. A few years back, we bellowed loudly about the debut recording from Mr. Catlin, an unassumingly great album of mechanically attacked guitar vibrations entitled Slow Twitch; and now, we are just as thrilled by Catlin's second disc, the equally exquisite Radio Ghosts.
At the moment, Catlin prefers the prepared guitar, laid flat on the table Keith Rowe style, and then agitates the entire body of his instrument with any number of mechanical and magnetic means. Fan blades, E-bows, and battery-powered motors are each set up in a variety of strategies to create a complex set of droning vibrations whose multiple overtones send shockwaves of contaminated frequencies across the wood, strings, and metal of the guitar. These sounds are immaculately recorded and given only the bare minimum of mastering to heighten the exhilarating drones. Here on Radio Ghosts, Catlin fabricates the same harmonic dissonance through sustained drones that one might hear in LaMonte Young's dream theatrics or Tony Conrad's blistering violin screech or Organum's cacophonic metallic chorus or Rhys Chatham's billowing mass from 400 guitarists. Yeah, this is pretty much the pinnacle of '60s holy minimalism catapulted 40 years into the future; the only difference is that you've probably never heard of Tim Catlin. Do not miss out on this fucking brilliant album!
We've been digging the music of Tim Catlin a whole bunch lately, and managed to get this old favorite back in stock. We reviewed it originally a couple years back but for those of you who missed it or only just discovered the music of Tim Catlin, here's what we had to say about it the first time around:
Tim Catlin has made maybe the greatest experimental guitar albums you're least likely to hear. One of which is Slow Twitch, released on the under-represented Australian label Dr. Jim's. If you've bought a Christian Fennesz, Oren Ambarchi, Birchville Cat Motel, or Sunroof album you owe it to yourself to pick up Tim Catlin's Slow Twitch. It's really that good. Slow Twitch is not another Max/MSP demonstration of deconstructed guitar samples, nor is it a improvised wall of sound from blistered amplifiers struggling to keep up with high voltage attacks; rather Catlin constructs very low-tech systems of fans, e-bows, and other mechanical devices that keep the guitar strings moving. These experiments are then immaculately recorded with little to no post-production, probably just a couple of edits, snips, and crossfades. In the end, Catlin's automatically propelled guitars resemble the resonant frequencies that Jean-Francois Laporte coaxed out of a bunch of air compressors (or perhaps a Zamboni) on his stellar Mantra disc. Rasping striations of metal vibrating against metal form complex drone harmonics that double and triple throughout the spectrum, with placid low end rumblings sympathetically resonating with angelic shimmerings. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.
The amplifier hum rattles the drum head of a snare which in turns vibrates the gong and sets off a resonant frequency on the piece of metal resting on the guitar strings, which in turns rattles the snare again and the cycle repeats itself. This almost sounds like a game of Mouse Trap or any given Rube Goldberg contraption of ludicrous proportions; yet, Australian avant-guitarist Tim Catlin and Milwaukee's own Jon Mueller used such a methodology for the construction of their seemingly simple but incredibly rich album Plates And Wires. Catlin has just come off of the success of his impeccable Radio Ghosts album of rasping acoustic drones on his prepared guitar and joins Mueller, whose treatments of gongs, bells, the drum kit, and percussive elements of all shapes and sizes mirrors what Catlin does to the guitar. When Catlin and Mueller begin to generate their quiet fluctuations of sustained harmonics and constantly abraded textures, their sounds enjoy an organic intimacy. Each droning sound emerges out of an ambient co-habitation and cross-contamination of psychoacoustic manipulation, resulting from very little (if any) digital tricks. Everything flutters elegantly in sympathetic arrangements of interwoven ebbs and flows in serpentine patterns for an album that parallels the acoustic richness of such tactile minimalists as Glenn Branca, Organum, Rhys Chatham, and Jason Khan.
Oh yeah, this CD comes housed in an oversized 10" sleeve with artwork by Thomas Kovacich and is limited to an edition of a mere 300 copies.
With this 1998 album, Cavity's Sabbath-fried sludge from the swamps of Florida really earned them their rightful place in the pantheon of heaviosity peopled by the likes of the Melvins, Eyehategod, Boris, and Electric Wizard. We liked 'em already, but this record stood above and beyond. Sheer HEAVY pummel, riff repetition chug fulla feedback and nasty vocals. There's quiet respites now and then, making the monster riffage even more monstrous. Definitely the kind of thing that just takes you over, relentless, submersive, and hypnotic. So, we can't believe we never listed this before! It was a HUGE fave among a bunch of us here when it came out on Man's Ruin a few years ago. It's been sadly out of print ever since that label folded, but now Hydrahead has stepped up and reissued a remixed version, complete with new artwork/design and what appear to be 2 new tracks (but, one's missing -- what happened to "Almost Blue"?). So apparently even if you have the Man's Ruin version, you've gotta buy Supercollider again. But this is one of those records you *would* buy again, it's that good! And if you don't have this already, and you like heaviness, GET IT. Cavity's best album (though their last one, On The Lam, was pretty great too). Thanks Hydra Head for giving us the chance to recommend this, again.
We often talk about the heaviest, the fastest, the loudest, and the most fucked-up musics, as we cram more and more letters into the word doom to express how much we love this record or that. Yet when it comes to the minimalist beatitudes crafted by the British drone engineer Andrew Chalk, our hyperbole fails us. With a humility and a reclusive demeanor, Chalk's work stands as an elegant document of what you can do when striving for anything excessive.
For years, Chalk has impressed upon us that few artists have been able to craft something as simple as a drone with such a pristine balance between impressionistic abstraction and phenomenological precision. Starting out the mid-80s recording toxic noises under the moniker Feral Confine, Chalk joined David Jackman in the seminal project Organum for a couple of melancholic recordings of acoustic minimalism. Shortly thereafter, he founded Ora with Darren Tate and Colin Potter; and more recently, Chalk and Christoph Heemann established Mirror. Nowadays, Chalk is venturing out on his own to remarkable success after a couple of beautiful recordings that he's self-released on Faraway Press. Blue Eyes Of The March is the third cd from Chalk's own label, and has been entirely crafted from piano. Given the dreamy soft-focus that Chalk has applied to the instrument, there's very little of the piano's instantly recognizable hammered attack that remains. It's as if he stretched all of the piano's strings across the bow of a Victorian cruise ship, deliberately sank it, and then recorded the sounds deep in the blackened sea off the northern coast of England. Haunted, subaquatic, and timeless, Chalk's swirling sounds spiral effortlessly into a ghostly antiquity whose references may be found in the equally elegant re-constructions of Bartok and Satie by Akira Rabelais on Eisoptrophobia, but done through analogue and not digital processes. As with his previous recordings, Chalk has spared no expense with the packaging, offering a stunning duo-toned silkscreen design upon shimmering silver paper.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Andrew Chalk's haunting drones (from his work with Organum and Jonathan Coleclough) have become favorites here at Aquarius. And this collection of his earliest recordings from the late '80s is no exception. The influence that Brian Eno's ambient work had upon Chalk becomes apparent with the emergence of a few fragile arrangements for piano and decidedly synthetic spacey keyboard sounds. But even at this stage in Chalk's development, his talent at constructing textural collages of bowed metal and hazy tonal reverberations is as solid here as on his recent recordings. This disc includes contributions from David Jackman (Organum) on one track and a remix from Christoph Heemann. Highly recommended.
Easily, one of the most important reissues of 2006, East Of The Sun available again though Andrew Chalk's own Faraway Press, complete with breathtakingly resplendent packaging: a silkscreened and embossed printing. These recordings originally came out in 1994 as a cassette, released through Ora's in-house label, Ora being an early collective that revolved around Chalk, Colin Potter, and Darren Tate with occasional assistance from Jonathan Coleclough, mnortham, Lol Coxhill, and a handful of like-minded British drone enthusiasts. A few years later, the Italian label Hic Sunt Leones convinced Chalk to reissue the cassette in digital form. That CD version of East Of The Sun compressed the two sides of the cassette into a single 50 minute piece and was flushed out with some complementary dronescaping. Chalk was never happy with the Hic Sunt Leones version; and thus his reissue of the album returns to the original version found on the cassette, now gloriously remastered in its entirety. For those persnickety types, the 17 minutes or so which concluded the Hic Sunt Leones version is not here; but that is a minor loss compared to the pinnacle of drone-based minimalism found here.
Sure, Eno's ambient records On Land and Thursday Afternoon were milestones in the realm of ambient music, setting an impressionist context through which any number of the images, thoughts, and ideals could be imagined; but that strategy was perfected by Andrew Chalk on a couple of records. There was his ephemeral album Sumac in collaboration with Jonathan Coleclough, there was the first Mirror album Eye Of The Storm, and there's East Of The Sun. Very dark without becoming unbearably cold, East Of The Sun is a constant bloom of nocturnal frequencies, whose origins may be thoroughly blurred bass guitar or possibly some resonant artifact from Chalk's acoustic work in Organum. Regardless, the resultant drones drift with no beginning and no end, merely rippling, reflecting, and turning upon themselves in a perpetual, very slow motion turbulence. Leaves tumbling in autumnal twilight. Fog spilling over coastal hills. Moonlight tickling the agitated surface of a pond. Any of these organic references for meditation on simplicity to reach the sublime and the profound could easily apply to Chalk's East Of The Sun. Not just recommended, this is required listening.
Goldfall is Andrew Chalk's highly anticipated new vinyl-only album, released on his own Faraway Press imprint. After pretty much of all the Mirror records had been released as super limited vinyl-only editions (with a couple of those getting reissued later on cd), Chalk's recent solo endeavors have been extended droneworks that weren't suited to the LP format. He's clearly outdone himself with the packaging on this return to vinyl, as he's situated the thick slab of vinyl within a dense cardstock sleeve with a die cut opening exposing silkscreened print beneath; and he's sealed the sleeve in a delicate piece of tissue paper that also features an elegant print reminiscent of Shoji screen prints. In contrast to the floral artwork, Chalk's sound production within is a far darker and heavier experience. Sourced from the meandering piano interludes of Vikki Jackman, Goldfall is a dark, shadowy record of protracted reverberation and timbral rumblings. In comparison to Chalk's previous piano album Blue Eyes Of The March or to other exceptional piano abstractions (i.e. Jonathan Coleclough's Period or Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon), Goldfall is downright ominous. And you all should know that Andrew Chalk + ominous = highly recommended. But you should also know that Goldfall is limited to 300 copies.
It remains to be seen if the duo of Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heeman will ever collaborate again, after rumors surfaced describing an acrimonious falling out in the wake of an ill-conceived Mimir / Mirror performance. Sure, Mirror has certainly produced some amazing recordings; Eye Of The Storm, in particular, is an impeccable document of droned-out environmental eerieness. But in all honesty and fairness to Christoph Heemann, Andrew's solo albums are where he really shines. Yet after all of his collaborations with Organum, Ora, Jonathan Coleclough, Giancarlo Toniutti, The New Blockaders, et cetera, his solo output is woefully thin, and almost entirely out of print. Fortunately, Chalk salvaged two recent cd-rs (Shadows From The Album Skies part one and two) from terminal obscurity as they had originally been released on the Mirror imprint Three Poplars in editions of less than 100. Both of the chapters of Shadows find Chalk channelling extended guitar mantras into a beautifully rich minimalism that could easily be confused with the work of Phill Niblock or Eliane Radigue. Both tracks here are constructed from slowly revolving patterns of delicate harmonics floating around an omnipresent timbral drone, with one being considerably darker thanks to an emphasis on low-end frequencies. For all of the times that we've referenced Mr. Chalk's work in describing somebody else's dronings, it's very nice to actually hear something from the master himself. Oh yeah, all of the copies have handmade sleeves and have been signed by Chalk himself. Very highly recommended.
- MPEG stream: 1/2
- MPEG stream: 2/2
Yup, it appears that Andrew Chalk has retained the impressive workload he and Christoph Heemann had managed for their now defunct project Mirror. The River That Flows Into The Sand is the second album in as many months to emerge from Andrew Chalk's own Faraway Press. Like it's predecessor Shadows From The Album Skies, this album is a reissue of a cd-r originally released in a very small edition. However, Chalk has decided to truly develop Faraway Press into a viable cottage industry, encasing all of his work in elaborately hand-packaged constructions, that rival the original Zoviet France assemblages in terms of innovative design. How he managed to print these is a bit of a mystery, although Cup and Jim think it to be a form of decalcomania, in which an image is delicately transferred from one surface to another. Regardless, it doesn't hurt that Chalk again has produced an immaculate drone album housed within the beautiful packaging.
For many years now, the guitar has been the instrument of choice for Chalk's minimalist explorations; and here on The River, he's tightroping between the ghostly impressionism of Keiji Haino's Nijumu project from many moons ago, the narcoleptic atmospheres of Maeror Tri / Troum, the oceanic ambience of Boris' Flood, and the time-reversal qualities of Eliane Radigue. Undulations of extended sounds cascade from his guitar, occasionally rippling with beautiful half melodies. This is a a drop dead gorgeous album, and may even be better than the aforementioned Shadows From The Album Skies. We can't recommend this album enough!
The sequel to the River That Flows Into The Sand had originally been released through Andrew Chalk's Faraway Press imprint as a super-limited edition cassette in early 2006. We never managed to get a hold of those cassettes; and it goes without saying that they disappeared before we could even blink. Thankfully, Chalk has re-released all of that material on cd, remastered by the inimitable Colin Potter. As on the first part of The River, Chalk picks up the guitar for his minimalist explorations tightroping between the ghostly impressionism of Keiji Haino's Nijiumu project from many moons ago, the narcoleptic atmospheres of Maeror Tri / Troum, the oceanic ambience of Boris' Flood, and the time-reversal qualities of Eliane Radigue, all the while putting to shame every upstart drone artist with a cd burner and an Echoplex.
Just as the first River cd meanders through five variations of the cascade sound, Chalk produces another five tracks of rippling drones on this disc. Similarly, he has packaged the disc in the dotted decalcomania which graced the first cd. The major differences can be found in the gritty, growling distortion which exists just beneath the surface of these glassine drones. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!
Sometime back in 2005, Andrew Chalk manufactured a tiny edition of what had been rumored to be the soundtrack to a self-produced film entitled Vega. When several journalists published their findings about the magnificent drones housed within that instantly out-of-print cd-r on Brainwashed.com and in The Wire, many of Chalk's die-hard fans were left disappointed at the existence of what might have been one of their favorite Andrew Chalk recordings had they ever had the opportunity to actually hear it.
While Mr. Chalk maintains a very quiet demeanor and hardly ventures into the public eye these days, he's been hard at work ensuring that his recently formed Faraway Press actually keeps up with the orders for the records that he's been recording. Vega is one such record that he so dearly wanted to re-release sooner, had it not been for the inevitability of delays. It's clear to see why delays would have been incurred on the packaging for Vega, as the original cd-r was housed in a filigree of black lace surrounding a paper sleeve, which amounted to a delicate and frustratingly time-consuming process in terms of putting together each cd-r. Hence, with the second edition of Vega, this time a proper CD, Chalk has expedited the hand-assembly process with an elaborately printed piece of heavy cardstock, sporting a similarly elegant lace pattern.
As for the music within, Vega is simply stunning. Far more vaporous and free-floating than the previous solo outing The River That Flows Into The Sand and certainly more so than any of the Mirror recordings, Vega acts as an aural narcotic, sedating the listener through a constantly shifting, slow motion churn of chiming guitar drones, almost resembling the kosmische-tinged melancholia heard in the Aeolian String Ensemble's dronescaping. As bleary and amorphous as Chalk's drone-clusters are, he's always had the knack for keeping them just dissonant enough so that they do not fall into the ambient trap of background music. Sublime as ever. Recommended just like all of his other work.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heemann have been collaborating extensively as Mirror over the past year, so it seems odd that the two of them have suddenly decided to release an album under their given names. It would make sense if they deviated from their work as Mirror. The source material for this album, bowed bells, gongs, and distant guitar drones, differs, and while the overall beauty and concept reveal a definite Mirror-like desire to capture an elusive spirutual voice through the resonance of drones. Extended organ chords, gentle creaking of an old wooden floors, and long reverberations of breathy flutes make for a more baroque tonal quality than the typicalChalk / Heemann sound. "The Mirror Of The Sea" is a beautiful picture disc with drawings by Andrew Chalk on each side. Of course, it's recommended.
Chalk and Daisuke Suzuki have known each other for many years now, as Suzuki runs the Siren label out of Japan and had released Sumac, Chalk's masterful collaboration with Jonathan Coleclough. Suzuki is also responsible for one of the very few published interviews with the somewhat reclusive Chalk. Their friendship certainly runs deep, and out of this friendship came the impetus to collaborate once again (both Suzuki and Chalk had contributed to the now defunct Ora project well over a decade ago). Slippery drones open the album, declaring that Andrew Chalk is definitely a principle author of this album and mimicking many of the fog-enveloped sounds that Chalk brought to Mirror's Eye Of The Storm. While these sounds quiver like a distant mirage out on the open desert for a passage of time that could be 5 minutes or it could be 25, the long-string drones begin to separate into a series of alien plucks which bear more than a passing resemblance to the expressionist poetics of Keiji Haino at his most introspective. Echoes and vibrations of these plucks ripple underneath in the shadowy reflection pool of echo and shimmer. As the album progresses, the enveloping opiated drone wrapping around cold, cold, cold field recordings of arctic winds racing across a seashore becomes the center piece, reflecting just how good Andrew Chalk's sounds are. Lo and behold, it's another excellent Andrew Chalk record.
In many ways, the work of Richard Chartier is anathema to the aesthetic course embraced by Aquarius Records. It can't be tangentially connected to the expanding definitions of metal, and only liminally parallels the feral dronecore of Birchville Cat Motel and the Double Leopards. It doesn't lend itself to ridiculous ruminations on the artifice of memory and loss, or any hyperbolic rhetoric for that matter. It's hard even to call this type of work beautiful as the rigor embedded into the process is attuned to an cold sterility rather than an aspirations for aesthetic transcendence. Thus, Chartier's work simply is what it is: a pure manifestation of sound elegantly moving through time with a highly refined sensibility for the subtle transition. The simple perfection from the minimalist ethos is difficult to champion as the manifestations are hardly theatrical enough to warrant any of the marketing strategies listed above to make most people jump up and down; but here we are, announcing that Richard Chartier has crafted an exquisite album, one that may be his finest recordings to date.
Incidence is a vacuum of external references, beginning and ending with the same hissing static. Chartier plunges the album into a series of interlocking subsonic frequencies. While these frequencies were never intended to achieve the heaviosity of SUNNO))) or Earth, Chartier's understanding of psychoacoustic principles actualizes an impressively claustrophobic display of blackened tones. As Chartier introduces a simple half-step melody against these extended drone vibrations, his work opens a small referential window towards the grim isolationism of Thomas Koner or BJ Nilsen. Time manages to stand still on the best of Chartier's work, and at over an hour in length, Incidence is over before you know it. Very, very well done.
Easily the best Richard Chartier album we've come across! The DC-based ultra-minimalist has been responsible for a number of albums so reductivist in their methodology and presentation that even with headphones, it can be a strain to discern what profundities Mr. Chartier may be offering to his audience. Yet in recent years, Chartier has been shedding the minimalist hyperbole for sterilized electronica and creating some truely evocative compositions for impressionist ambience. There was his Archival 1991 and his collaboration with William Basinski which caused us to really take notice to Chartier's work as something beyond an exercise in ultra-minimalism; and now there's Retrieval 1-5. Originally released on vinyl through ERS back in 2004, this album has now been revamped for cd where it really belongs. Basinski, Thomas Koner, Lustmord (e.g. Where The Black Stars Hang) and Keith Berry would all be reference points for the steady dronescaping that Chartier musters on these five tracks which were in fact retrieved from old analog material Chartier produced in the '90s. These beautifully rippled and hushed drones may not have the academic rigor that won Chartier the Honorable Mention for Ars Electronica, but they are far more evocative and emotionally connected than any of his earlier recordings. Recommended!
Ah, Chasms! This has been one our favorite local acts in recent years, thanks to their smattering of cassette only releases and their impressive live performances of shoegazing heaviness and goth-laden electronics with an almost dark industrial vibe, which had us imagining Coil remixing Cocteau Twins or Slowdive! Subtle Bodies collects material from two of these (now out of print) cassettes along with a brand new track as a bonus! As we mentioned in an earlier review about the Riser tape (whose four tracks comprise all of side one of Subtle Bodies), the San Francisco duo are at their most focused and effective, starting off with flashes of hot white light, tapping into that classic shoegaze sound, with Chasms aiming and reaching so much higher then most of their peers. "Not In This Dimension" may very well be their most beautiful song yet, a shimmering gem that we had to play over and over after the first time we blasted this on our headphones. And each subsequent time we do, we close our eyes and let the song engulf us, gliding through a world of soft and swirling sonic sensations that we haven't felt since maybe Slowdive's masterpiece Pygmalion.
The flipside dives into a more narcoleptic and narcotic sound with the the drumless haze of "When It Comes" and the claustrophobic, blurred dirge of "Darker Outside" reminding us of some of those super creepy tracks by The Cranes from way back when. The eleven minute "Dissolution Into Light" rounds out the album as a blissed-out ride down the river Styx with desolate thrums of bass distortion and heartbreakingly sad melodies wavering through the feedback and reverb. Totally recommended!
Odd to think that this is only the second solo recording for San Francisco's exceptional sound artist Loren Chasse after his numerous outings with id battery, Thuja, and The Knit Separates. "Exfolia Motors" is a collection of four different works, whose sections are mixed up and interspersed along the continuum of the disc... as if each of these sections have been broken from their original narratives and been rearranged in a more poetic fashion. "Exfolia Motors" presents a beautiful crystallization of droning sound with origins in various bells and gongs, the dynamic pulsations of an amplified strobe light, field recordings from rural Pennsylvania, and the crackling details of paper, rocks, and cloth. Chasse accentuates his source materials with a soft-focus haziness that recalls the tonal purity of Andrew Chalk and Jonathan Coleclough. Rather than extended drone floats, Chasse prefers to situate small events in which he gently smears his subtle sound recordings across stark white silences. Goddamn beautiful.
While certain labels (Meme, Trente Oiseaux) were a bit too slow and missed out on releasing this, we're certain that this wouldn't have had such amazing artwork (each cover is a different hand rubbing from a rough piece of wood... as opposed to the stark non-existent design work of either outfit) if Chasse hadn't put it out through his own imprint Unique Ancient Tavern. Recommended!
Oval, Disc, Autechre... Lots of folks like that digital glitch stuff -- we do too -- but how 'bout some analog 'glitch'? Good old fashioned record crackle! AQ friend and fave sound artist Loren Chasse's new solo release, his first for Anomalous, totally delves into the realm of crackle, from records and beyond. For details, we may as well quote directly from the label's press release (since our own Allan wrote it!):
"The work of sonic artist/investigator Loren Chasse (solo, Thuja, id Battery, and various manifestations of the 'Jewelled Antler collective') usually involves the documentation and manipulation of minute sound events (rubbings, scrapings, clickings) involving found objects and natural phenomena, emphasizing unexpected perspectives and connections. Even when performing in the psychedelic improv outfit Thuja, his 'instruments' primarily consist of contact mics, a mixer, some rocks and twigs, and his imagination. Loren's processed field recordings are fragile and full of strange beauty and feeling.
"Hedge of Nerves is dedicated to a friend of Loren's who dearly loves the sound of record crackle as it mingles with the music from a record's grooves. He also enjoys the sound of record crackle alone, as when an LP cycles on its run-out groove. Compact disc reissues of early 20th century ethnic music 78s, or Portishead, or Philip Jeck: if it's got that crackle, he likes it! So, this friend asked Loren to make him a recording of vinyl surface noise only, one that he could DJ with, mixing with non-crackly musical sources, to create virtual scratchy records. For this reason, the idea was to avoid any obvious looping, but to make a continuous, unbroken and organic field of crackle. Thus inspired, however, the project soon turned into more than that, as Loren decided that it was more interesting to emulate the sound and texture of record crackle using other sources. The resulting cd indeed begins by utilizing sounds from a scratchy old 78 rpm disc (one recorded by Loren's grandfather in the 1930s at NBC Radio) but also explores more 'elemental' crackling sounds derived from fire and wind and water, from rustling branches, waves, and sand. Hedge of Nerves is dynamic, moving from loud crinkly-crackly storming sound-swarms to the sounds of a wilderness quietly bristling. It's a mesmerizing expanse of hiss and drone, buzz and click, with hints of melody (from his grandfather's 78). The originating idea of surface noise is ever-present, but upon closer examination that 'surface' proves quite deep, something within which the listener will become submerged, blissful and fascinated. Hedge of Nerves is a masterpiece -- just ask Loren's grateful crackle-loving friend, who files it with the best of Philip Jeck, Jonathan Coleclough, M. Behrens, Troum, and other masters of detailed drone constructions."
As you might have guessed, that friend of Loren's is of course our own Allan...and he really does love this disc!! (And he did manage to use an advance version of this to DJ with at the Beyond The Pale festival last year -- it goes really well with Bo Hansson, actually.) Even if you're usually wary of some avantgarde academic "experimental" sterility, try this out anyway, it's warm and organic and inviting in a way many glitchy, noisy things are not, like a bonfire on a desolate, foggy sea-shore.
Odd to think that this is only the second solo recording for San Francisco's exceptional sound artist Loren Chasse after his numerous outings with id battery, Thuja, and The Knit Separates. "Exfolia Motors" is a collection of four different works, whose sections are mixed up and interspersed along the continuum of the disc... as if each of these sections have been broken from their original narratives and been rearranged in a more poetic fashion. "Exfolia Motors" presents a beautiful crystallization of droning sound with origins in various bells and gongs, the dynamic pulsations of an amplified strobe light, field recordings from rural Pennsylvania, and the crackling details of paper, rocks, and cloth. Chasse accentuates his source materials with a soft-focus haziness that recalls the tonal purity of Andrew Chalk and Jonathan Coleclough. Rather than extended drone floats, Chasse prefers to situate small events in which he gently smears his subtle sound recordings across stark white silences. Goddamn beautiful.
While certain labels (Meme, Trente Oiseaux) were a bit too slow and missed out on releasing this, we're certain that this wouldn't have had such amazing artwork (each cover is a different hand rubbing from a rough piece of wood... as opposed to the stark non-existent design work of either outfit) if Chasse hadn't put it out through his own imprint Unique Ancient Tavern. Recommended!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Oval, Disc, Autechre... Lots of folks like that digital glitch stuff -- we do too -- but how 'bout some analog 'glitch'? Good old fashioned record crackle! AQ friend and fave sound artist Loren Chasse's new solo release, his first for Anomalous, totally delves into the realm of crackle, from records and beyond. For details, we may as well quote directly from the label's press release (since our own Allan wrote it!):
"The work of sonic artist/investigator Loren Chasse (solo, Thuja, id Battery, Coelacanth and various manifestations of the 'Jewelled Antler collective') usually involves the documentation and manipulation of minute sound events (rubbings, scrapings, clickings) involving found objects and natural phenomena, emphasizing unexpected perspectives and connections. Even when performing in the psychedelic improv outfit Thuja, his 'instruments' primarily consist of contact mics, a mixer, some rocks and twigs, and his imagination. Loren's processed field recordings are fragile and full of strange beauty and feeling.
"Hedge of Nerves is dedicated to a friend of Loren's who dearly loves the sound of record crackle as it mingles with the music from a record's grooves. He also enjoys the sound of record crackle alone, as when an LP cycles on its run-out groove. Compact disc reissues of early 20th century ethnic music 78s, or Portishead, or Philip Jeck: if it's got that crackle, he likes it! So, this friend asked Loren to make him a recording of vinyl surface noise only, one that he could DJ with, mixing with non-crackly musical sources, to create virtual scratchy records. For this reason, the idea was to avoid any obvious looping, but to make a continuous, unbroken and organic field of crackle. Thus inspired, however, the project soon turned into more than that, as Loren decided that it was more interesting to emulate the sound and texture of record crackle using other sources. The resulting cd indeed begins by utilizing sounds from a scratchy old 78 rpm disc (one recorded by Loren's grandfather in the 1930s at NBC Radio) but also explores more 'elemental' crackling sounds derived from fire and wind and water, from rustling branches, waves, and sand. Hedge of Nerves is dynamic, moving from loud crinkly-crackly storming sound-swarms to the sounds of a wilderness quietly bristling. It's a mesmerizing expanse of hiss and drone, buzz and click, with hints of melody (from his grandfather's 78). The originating idea of surface noise is ever-present, but upon closer examination that 'surface' proves quite deep, something within which the listener will become submerged, blissful and fascinated. Hedge of Nerves is a masterpiece -- just ask Loren's grateful crackle-loving friend, who files it with the best of Philip Jeck, Jonathan Coleclough, M. Behrens, Troum, and other masters of detailed drone constructions."
As you might have guessed, that friend of Loren's is of course our own Allan...and he really does love this disc!! (And he did manage to use an advance version of this to DJ with at the Beyond The Pale festival last year -- it goes really well with Bo Hansson, actually.) Even if you're usually wary of some avantgarde academic "experimental" sterility, try this out anyway, it's warm and organic and inviting in a way many glitchy, noisy things are not, like a bonfire on a desolate, foggy sea-shore.
With all of those Jewelled Antler projects keeping AQ's dear friend Loren Chasse busy, it's no wonder that it took over three and half years for him to complete the follow up to his acclaimed 2002 album Hedge of Nerves. Yep, it's true that Loren has released two solo projects under the Jewelled Antler moniker Of; but he doesn't see work such as The Air In The Sand (or Hedge of Nerves, or anything from id battery or Coelacanth, for that matter) as being related to Jewelled Antler. Who are we to argue?
That said, Loren's solo work is made in pretty much the same manner as much of the Jewelled Antler work, particularly The Blithe Sons, where he treks up and down the Pacific Coast making tons of field recordings and then playing those recordings back in similar environments with small speakers and occasional accompaniments from rocks, sand, teasles, leaves, and the occasional alto recorder. Part of this process is an attempt to move away from the constraints of the digital workstation; but at the same time, Chasse is far more interested in the curious alchemy that occurs when a space listens to itself making sound. A nighttime chorus of crickets gurgles within aqueous percolations and the tectonic crash of surf crashing against rock. Rain vaporizes in a caustic sizzle as it falls upon overhead electrical wires, and this sound is compouned by the sharp crack of branches and the slow hiss of sand. For all of the elemental sounds that dominate his recordings, Chasse extracts subtle musical timbres and fragile half-melodies that haunt The Air In The Sand. Beautiful and timeless, this is another marvellous album from Mr. Chasse.
Loren Chasse is a man of many guises, while his recent solo releases being issued under the moniker Of for the past couple of years, his constant output via Jewelled Antler related projects has continued with his revolving presence in Thuja, Blithe Sons, Softwar, Ov, Kyrgyz, and many others. The work that Loren produces under his own name tends toward the sound art end of his aesthetic spectrum, closer to his work with Id Battery and Coelacanth than the field recordist approach to rural psychedelia found in those Jewelled Antler efforts. Throughout all of his sonic pursuits, Chasse's use of sound has always been to spark the imagination and generate a sense of mystery; and that is certainly the case here on The Footpath.
A dark cloud of rumbles and growls announces the beginning of this album, as Chasse grasps several heavy rocks in his hands and caresses their surfaces with sand, dirt, leaves, water, ash, and other debris. As is often the case, these recordings have been recorded outside with a contact microphone or two and a digital recorder. So the external sounds of the environment creep into these crackling textures and eroded drones. The lulling fluctuations of surf and wind are most common, indicative of Chasse's continued wanderings up and down the California coast. But, you will also find the buzzing slash of an insect chorus or the smoldering bristle from a campfire. Chasse deftly abstracts these softened noises without ever making them sound like they had been processed in the digital arena. Every piece here enjoys a wonderfully rough hewn quality with the edges torn, tattered, and frayed. Hints of the melodic phrasing which Chasse brings to Jewelled Antler pop up on sporadic occasion in small two note phrases, that only barely pass for melodies, emerging from the mire and debris, or with his zither buried within a cloud of tape hiss and bunker reverberations, replayed and re-recorded numerous times exacerbating all of that tactile crunch. Chasse's work always comes recommended, and The Footpath is no exception!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
SF dronologist Loren Chasse (from Id Battery) presents the first of what we hope will be many collaborations with multimedia artist Eleanor Harwood. This 30 minute video documents slow visual explorations of natural spaces as seen through a variety of chemical filters - a perfect visual parallel to Chasse's sound investigations. Oval-like mesmer constructed out of looping drones accompanies a slow-motion pan across the negative image of a stagnant lake, whose steady march is disrupted by a car speeding along a far away road. Distant almost Arvo Part-like chorales float with the wispy motion of two baren trees shaken by a steady wind. Very nice work.
Throughout the Marin Headlands just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, the coastal mountains are dotted with countless bunkers which were built during World War II in anticipation of the Japanese invasion that never came. Nearly 70 years later, these bunkers have been weathered by wind, fog, rain, and of course the sodden folks who tromp through the Headlands on a daily basis. These concrete structures with small portals facing the Pacific all have amazing reverberant qualities; and it shouldn't be a surprise that the more frequented bunkers and passageways inevitably echo with the sound of children dying to hear their own voices tossed back to them. The Headlands have been a favored destinations for Loren Chasse, who has sought many of the lesser known and lesser travelled environs for field recordings and jam sessions that would eventually work their way into all things Jewelled Antler (Thuja, Franciscan Hobbies, The Blithe Sons, Of, Ov, etc.). In his recordings, Chasse extracts a profound mystery and grand sense of wonder from that echo, the bunker's grit, the soft recurrence of surf bleeding through those walls, and the distant bleat of a foghorn.
Back in 2005, Chasse took his fellow globetrotting wanderer Michael Northam to the Battery Townsley where the two set up long string wires and various handheld instruments to begin a series of recordings which took a few years to complete after Northam left California. The two did manage to meet up once again in Estonia, there exploring the Soviet industrial ruins that pock the Estonian landscape with similar intentions. Out of the bramble of overgrown weeds, rebar, concrete, dirt, rock, wind, and water, Chasse and Northam straddle those psychedelic leanings of Jewelled Antler and the more studied aspects of minimalism.
The Otolith begins with an acoustic clamor, as if billions of iron filings were brushing against each other under the direction of a couple of hefty magnets, before shifting into a harmonium blur of sustained tones hinting at a melody well beneath these clouds of tousled energy. Softer drones and Aeolian fragments flutter forth out of bowed strings and gently tapped gongs amidst a golden hue of opiated atmospherics. Scrabblings across the surfaces of leaves, rocks, mud, and metal fuse with field recordings of wind and water, as a continuing demonstration of Chasse's alchemy with naturalist sound to bring forth stately ragas and dreamtime psychedelic lullabies. Chasse and Northam work amazingly well together, having produced this thoroughly amazing album. Think Popul Vuh, Parson Sound, Pandit Pran Nath, Harry Bertoia, and Erc La Casa. Totally beautiful and mesmerizing.
It has been far too long since we've heard from Chessie. Seven years, in fact. And that sabbatical, hibernation, hiatus, or whatever you want to call it is somewhat quizzical, considering that Overnight (the 2001 album in question) had received heaps of acclaim from all across the board. For loyal Aquarius customers who happened to venture in the store around that time, Overnight was on the short list of albums that seemed to be in constant rotation here in the store, alongside the likes of Spoon's Girls Can Tell, the first New Pornographers album, Amon Duul II's Yeti, and the Andrew Chalk / Jonathan Coleclough collaboration Sumac. We have our beloved former co-worker Byram Abbott to thank for getting Overnight under our collective skin. Seven years later, Chessie works their magic once again.
A duo comprised of Stephen Gardner and Ben Bailes, Chessie operates along the borders between digitally crunched electronics and impressionist shoegazing. Gardner began his off-and-on musical career in US shoegazing indie-pop band Lorelei back in the early '90s, with a smattering of impressive singles that clearly formed the foundation for Chessie's chiming guitars grafted into an electronica context. Many of the songs on Manifest enjoy wistfully slow-burning, post-pop crescendos (e.g. Pinback, early Stereolab) as remixed through the fizzing Max/MSP patches of Fennesz. Shuffling motorik breakbeats, pierced bleeps 'n' bloops, blissed-out washes of multi-tracked guitars, and maudlin samples from muted French horns and strings pock the album's varied tracks, with occasionally lulls into hypnotic atmospherics only to snap into some truly memorable pop hooks. Had Chessie decided to incorporate a vocalist, perhaps they might be the next Postal Service; but the more adventurous route of the instrumental better serves Chessie's sensibility. A very highly recommended album, and one which will no doubt be on lost of folks 2008 top ten lists!
Beautifully hypnotic, guitar-driven electronica from the Virginian duo of Stephen Gardner and Ben Bailes. Their third full length and first for Los Angeles-based Plug Research, "Overnight" is quite a departure from Chessie's underachieving,
Certainly one of the best thing we've heard to date from the hip electronica label NNA Tapes, and it comes from Anthony Child, better known under his techno moniker Surgeon, as well as for his brutalist British Murder Boys collaboration with Karl O'Connor. Sadly, we've not carried much in the way of the Surgeon catalog, but his variation on techno structuralism is informed by an industrial tension that balances force, control, and rhythm without much melody to get in the way of his graceful yet claustrophobic trax, many of which are on par with the likes of Plastikman and Wolfgang Voigt's first album as Gas. On very rare occasions, Child records under his own name, under the auspices of eschewing the techno underpinnings in favor of tonal abstractions. That's what we've got here on The Space Between People And Things, which opens with a Spartan, if highly squelchy step sequence that rotates between white hot slabs of accelerated white noise. He follows this with an elegant oceanic piece that alternates between several shortwave radioteletype frequencies, which produce the skittering electronic patterns in the delivery of encoded data from radio-linked terminals. It's an outmoded means of communication for sure, but one that you still hear on shortwave today mostly from the US Coast Guard and some governmental organizations. It's still a very eerie sound, with plenty of paranoid X-files overtones, all of which Child happily mines on this album. The second side of the album could actually be something that he might have produced for Surgeon, but with the heavy beats entirely removed. Here's an arpeggiated ambient swath of analog electronics that have all of the deep-space cosmology you'd get from Tangerine Dream's Alpha Centauri or those Eno & Cluster records. There is a bit more of a cybernetic sheen to Child's production than the prog-synth smoothness of his predecessors; and he pushes this toward the end of side two with some sharply rendered swells of sinewave oscillations which follow a similar oceanic patterning from the shortwave work on side one. This would be one for fans of Daphne Oram, Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy For Lilith, and BJ Nilsen. Recommended for sure!
Akita. Menche. Blankenship. Dilloway. These are the men of noise with discographies the size of small town phone books, proving their might in the international noise community by the sheer audaciousness of their output. But then again, you might really only need a single testament to stake your claim as one of the greatest noise musicians. Chop Shop has chosen the latter tactic, with Oxide being that sole document, after a relatively tiny back catalogue of cassette only releases, a couple of cdrs, and two infamous 10"s. Both released through RRR, the first was the Steel Plate 2x10" that was literally bound to a steel plate; and the second was a split 10" with Small Cruel Party that was literally cut in half, making playback a dangerous proposition for the needle on your record player. Both of those releases have long been out of print; and despite the hushed respect that those 10"s demand, Chop Shop has kept a low profile. A very low profile. Hence, after a career that has spanned nearly two decades, Oxide is his first proper CD. And it's stunning.
The sole proprietor of Chop Shop is New York based noise technician Scott Konzelmann, whose audio demolition revolves around speaker constructions forged out of hammered plate metal and disfigured commercial grade pipes, which focus particular frequencies and resonant overtones into swarming orchestras of rust, noise, drone, and static. Tape has long been Konzelmann's medium of choice for recording; and like William Basinski before him, Konzelmann endures the self-disintegration of the medium whilst transcribing the sounds of Oxide digitally. Where Basinski's vocabulary of decay is all romance and melancholy, Konzelmann's is muscular and urgently present. Oxide offers a metallurgist's din where compressed air strikes hard steel and machine vibrations generate noxious resonant frequencies in neighboring vents. Konzelmann composes the old school way, with a razor blade and pieces of tape, generating jump cut edits alongside the self-generated debris from the magnetic literally falling apart. These grey, dead-tech drones thus rupture and explode along the faultlines of those edits, and Oxide emerges as a forceful, dynamic album without resorting to purile shock tactics. This is a seriously great noise album for anybody with a passing interest in Broken Flag, Hansen Records, or early Hafler Trio.
Throbbing Gristle ceased to exist (for the first time) in 1981, shortly after the transgressive industrialists performed in San Francisco in May of that year. TG were deft in their manipulation of media, ominously stating that "The Mission is terminated," with the 'mission' referring to their numerous stark proclamations against society at large conjoined with their adventurous manglings of noise, rhythm, and atonality. But there's another rather self-evident historical fact: that TG's Genesis P-Orridge broke up with fellow bandmate & long-term partner Cosey Fanny Tutti. Shortly thereafter, Cosey and fellow TG member Chris Carter struck out on their own (with a romantic partnership not far behind), and later on in 1981, Chris & Cosey released their first solo project, the minimal wave / synthpunk masterpiece Heartbeat. In TG, Carter's propensity for beguiling electronic melodies and disco rhythms could be heard on such classic tracks as "United" and "Hot On The Heels Of Love." Both of these were signature tracks for Carter's aesthetic, which espoused an economic proto-techno approach to drum machine rhythms and heavily sequenced electro pulse melodies. Such has been the template for Chris & Cosey's sound since.
"Put Yourself In Los Angeles" opens the album with a dizzying percolation of flanged electronics which snaps into a militant march of Cosey's gnashed guitars locked against barked samples of a lunatic radio host and insistent rhythms. At least on this track, it's easy to hear the influence that Chris & Cosey would have on the likes of Front 242, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails. Other tracks such as the metronomic spiralling of "Voodoo" and the downright pastoral birdsounds of "Moorby" looked back to the Krautrock electronic meanderings of Cluster. "Just Like You" is one of Chris & Cosey's finest tracks, oozing with paranoia and dread throughout the slashed noises and found dialogue haunting the minimalist techno-horror sequencing and sustained minor-key melodies. The title track completes the album brilliantly by looking forward to any number of Detroit-inspired techno trax with double timed rhythms emerging out of maudlin, if cybernetic melodies and electronic-pop propulsive sequencing that really does act as a bridge between the realm of Kraftwerk and the British new wave that was bubbling up around Chris & Cosey back in the day. An absolute classic!
Album number three from the electronic pioneers Chris & Cosey is Songs Of Love & Lust, which originally came out on Rough Trade back in 1984. It was on this album that the signature sounds of Chris & Cosey really developed as something other than what they managed to produce in Throbbing Gristle. It may not be a surprise that this was also around the same time that the other former TG members began to really flourish in their own projects with Psychic TV's masterful Dreams Less Sweet and the epic Scatology record by Coil. Here, on Songs Of Love & Lust, Chris & Cosey were polishing their electro / minimal wave surfaces with hypnotic cascades of arpeggiating synths, plucky drum machinations, and outright majestic swells of electronic wash. A handful of these tracks clearly became anthemic floorfillers that inspired acid house in Chicago, EBM in Belgium, and the Detroit / Berlin axis of techno. "Walking Through Heaven" is one such track with its soaring sustained electronics counterpointing all of the scintillatingly brilliant sequencing. Chris Carter had long been a non-ironic fan of Abba, and yes, he was responsible for the cold-sex disco TG classic "Hot On The Heels Of Love" which essentially eviscerated the Abba structures of baroque disco down to a skeletal rhythm with an uncomfortably breathy sensuality thanks to Cosey's vocals. And the ghosts of "Hot On The Heels Of Love" and "United" (another stellar Carter engineered TG song) emerge within this album (e.g. "Love Cuts," "Chiron" and "Driving Blind"), although they are wholly detacted from the grand guignol commentaries of TG. Rather, Chris & Cosey spoke more of a cybernetic sensuality, embracing the technologies around them as a means of expressing, well songs of love and lust. This album has held up remarkably well, and is required listening for anybody who's been gobbling up anything on Dark Entries, Minimal Wave, Anna Logue, or Vinyl-on-Demand.
Christine 23 Onna is a collaborative effort between Fusao Toda and Maso Yamazaki, better known as Masonna. While the presence of one of Japan's most frightening noisicians should be enough the scare away all of the too-hip-and-too-stoned kids who only care about 'rare grooves,' Christine 23 Onna's "Shiny Chrystal Planet" is actually a pretty damn funky record. Yeah, it's noisy, but in a swirling, synth-overload, super psychedelic way, not like Masonna's usual electronic scream-skree. And really uptempo breakbeats set the rhythmic backbone for some awesome trance-rock much like the latest grooves from their countrymen the Boredoms (a la "Super Are" and "Vision Creation Newsun)". The phase shifting fuzz guitar and cosmic space dusted synthesizers get jammy, but fortunately never too wanky. Those of you familiar with the '60s spy thrillers of Jerry Van Rooyen may recognize one of his tempestous songs covered by Christine 23 Onna (we think we do, anyways, although it's not credited as such...). Wild, spacey groov-adelia. All around great stuff! Amazing cover art recreating Ash Ra Temple's "New Age Of Earth"!
Ooooh Ahhhhh! This one has been sizzling in our ears pretty much on endless repeat since it showed up at the store. Chromatics have undergone a pretty radical change from their early herky-jerky no-wave inspired beginnings, as showcased on the amazing and scene defining After Dark comp that we recently listed, and are still so in love with. Chromatics now have a sound that is much more sensual, subdued and spaced out. And we have to say we are loving this new direction. I definitely suits them so much more naturally than their noisier punky past.
With a sound much more rooted in early drugged out disco and '80s Euro-pop, Night Drive is sparse and melancholic enough to reel in folks whose taste usually falls on the darker end of the spectrum yet with songs so damn sexy and enticing that those of us with dance and pop leanings are seduced by their sound as well. With Ruth Radalet's vocals sounding like they are being delivered in a dark room filled with fog and smoke, there is such an intoxicating late night vibe that Chromatics tap into which feels so vacant and so sexy in the best possible way. They take on the daunting task of covering Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" and manage to make it their own, no small feat as that is a song with such deep meaning for so many of us. So damn good!
REPRESSED, BACK IN STOCK!!! Now including the "lost side" of unreleased tracks featured on the recent deluxe vinyl version.
Ooooh Ahhhhh! This one has been sizzling in our ears pretty much on endless repeat since it showed up at the store. Chromatics have undergone a pretty radical change from their early herky-jerky no-wave inspired beginnings, as showcased on the amazing and scene defining After Dark comp that we recently listed, and are still so in love with. Chromatics now have a sound that is much more sensual, subdued and spaced out. And we have to say we are loving this new direction. I definitely suits them so much more naturally than their noisier punky past.
With a sound much more rooted in early drugged out disco and '80s Euro-pop, Night Drive is sparse and melancholic enough to reel in folks whose taste usually falls on the darker end of the spectrum yet with songs so damn sexy and enticing that those of us with dance and pop leanings are seduced by their sound as well. With Ruth Radalet's vocals sounding like they are being delivered in a dark room filled with fog and smoke, there is such an intoxicating late night vibe that Chromatics tap into which feels so vacant and so sexy in the best possible way. They take on the daunting task of covering Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" and manage to make it their own, no small feat as that is a song with such deep meaning for so many of us. So damn good!
So stoked that this awesome album by the Chromatics is available on vinyl now and with a whole side filled with unreleased tracks.
Ooooh Ahhhhh! This one has been sizzling in our ears pretty much on endless repeat since it showed up at the store. Chromatics have undergone a pretty radical change from their early herky-jerky no-wave inspired beginnings, as showcased on the amazing and scene defining After Dark comp that we recently listed, and are still so in love with. Chromatics now have a sound that is much more sensual, subdued and spaced out. And we have to say we are loving this new direction. I definitely suits them so much more naturally than their noisier punky past.
With a sound much more rooted in early drugged out disco and '80s Euro-pop, Night Drive is sparse and melancholic enough to reel in folks whose taste usually falls on the darker end of the spectrum yet with songs so damn sexy and enticing that those of us with dance and pop leanings are seduced by their sound as well. With Ruth Radalet's vocals sounding like they are being delivered in a dark room filled with fog and smoke, there is such an intoxicating late night vibe that Chromatics tap into which feels so vacant and so sexy in the best possible way. They take on the daunting task of covering Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" and manage to make it their own, no small feat as that is a song with such deep meaning for so many of us. So damn good!
While this is the reissue of the second Chrystal Belle Scrodd record which was originally released in 1986, Belle De Jour features some of the earliest recordings that Diana Rogerson produced with her husband Steven Stapleton (aka Nurse With Wound). Belle De Jour opens with three short pieces of bowed cymbal scrapes and metallic screeches bathed in variable layers of reverb sounding not too far off from the early Nurse With Wound album Homotopie For Marie. However, things get really going later on in the disc when Rogerson and Stapleton present "Deadroads / A Gothic Western," which gets off to a groovy start with an infinitely looped '60s go-go rock riff twisted into something that Brainticket would have been proud to have birthed, complete with hallucinogenic guitar freak-outs and Diana ranting in a cavalcade of voices through an impossible to follow stream of consciousness narrative. The thunderous "Riding The Red Rag" follows this piece with Diana's cold-stare vocals haunting above a thick atmosphere of drones and heavily reverbed cracks from a kick drum. Unfortunately, this reissue confuses some of the names of the tracks, as "Riding The Red Rag" is misnamed as "The Demon Flower," and the equally impressive creepfest "Black Mother Mountain" is listed as "Riding The Red Rag." This may probably only upset the die-hard NWW completists; but it certainly does not distract from this amazing reissue of damaged art-rock / post-industrial mantras. Recommended.
Diana Rogerson began her art career in the early '80s collaborating with Jill Westwood in Fistfuck, which has long been referred to as the "female Whitehouse" because of their infamously humilitating performances, intense sonic actions, and degrading films. Some of soundtracks to those films were actually not scored by Fistfuck but by Chrystal Belle Scrodd, the moniker of Rogerson and her future husband Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound. Throughout the early Nurse With Wound recordings, Rogerson made her presence known, thanks mostly to her eeriely zombified vocal delivery which blended perfectly within NWW's surrealist collages of decontextualized sounds and darkly lysergic atmospheres. By 1985, the two conspired to release the first Chrystal Belle Scrodd record as a separate entity from Nurse With Wound. While Stapleton's fingerprints are all over the Chrystal Belle Scrodd recordings, the direction and peculiarties of the debut recording speak much more of Diana Rogerson's sensibility, that's only slightly more indebted to psych-art-rock structuralism than Nurse With Wound. The Inevitable Chrystal Belle Scrodd Record opens with an oblique rhythmic tumble of Egyptian reeds, cat-scratch guitar feedback, and all-thumbs bass fumbling that dissolves into a quiet rumble on top of which Rogerson offers one of her trademark, emotionally detached mantras with plenty of double entendres and overt sexual declarations. Later on, Rogerson and Stapleton get a bit more abstract with nightmarishly kaleidoscopic twists of children's voices, twinkling bells, throbbing ritual drums, and discordant horns soaked in a metallic reverb and haunted drones.
Enter Forced Nostalgia - a label mining the post-punk underground of dark electronics. Judging from this release and their upcoming programming for "a wayward selection of often unreleased, mostly unheard and overlooked material from tape music to industrial, from bossa-pop to proto-techno, and from drone to out and out analogue experimentation," Forced Nostalgia looks to be something wholly different from Vinyl-On-Demand, Minimal Wave, and Dark Entries. The bands here are two terminally obscure Italian industrial outfits who made these recordings in the early '80s with a clear aesthetic framework set forward by the Industrial Records model of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Clock DVA, and Cabaret Voltaire. Cicciolina Holocaust's woozy cornet buried in the mix of murky rhythms and electronic arpeggiations certainly draw their inspiration from the early productions of Chris & Cosey (think Heartbeat and the collaborative single with John Duncan) and of course there's plenty of TG to be heard in the mix. There are a couple of exceptional minimal wave numbers with clockwork nocturnal techno modulations and super creepy windswept dronings, all of which have been expertly remastered and sound really amazing on this piece of vinyl. Sermonizer harkens from the same realm of spooky electronics, with weirdly plucked guitars working through tape-delay splutter which is more Illitch than TG. Cold radio detunings, dark meanderings of synth warble, and highly sexualized moans and groans flush out Sermonizer's contribution to the split. All of these tracks seem to have come from private cassettes handed out back in the day. This is an amazing find and whets our appetite for what else Forced Nostalgia will be offering in the years to come.
