Longtime regular aQ customer Joshua Maremont commented that Cindytalk's Camoflage Heart is a record which was only really meant for about 30 people. Not that only 30 copies of this record were released, or that it is so terminally obscure and willfully difficult that it by design has a marketing ceiling of an elite few. What he's on about is that Camoflage Heart is such a personal document of self-realized torment, pain, and sorrow that when Cindytalk embarked on the project, it's hard to imagine that they had any delusions about the intensity of this album and the potential for these songs to alienate beyond a limited few.
At the helm of Cindytalk is transgendered vocalist Gordon Sharp, who to this day is probably still best known as one of the multitude of vocalists who appeared in This Mortal Coil. In many ways, Sharp is the masculine equal to the Cocteau Twins' Liz Fraser in delivering expressionist falsettos, trills, and banshee wails in an eerie, yet heavenly fashion. He's one of those few vocalists who can make the lyrics embody their content by shaping the words into emotionally charged sound. In fact, Sharp and Fraser had come together for a duet back during the Cocteau Twins' Peel Sessions of 1983. In his 4AD lineage, Gordon Sharp's first band was the criminally overlooked punk-glam ensemble The Freeze, where his Marc Bolan strut matched the nightmarish lyrics on top of some truly fantastic Bowie / Buzzcocks sparkplug riffs. Sharp, alongside fellow Freeze band members John Byrne and David Clancey, found shortcomings in the glam punk agenda, and sought a wholly new direction that became Cindytalk.
While undeniably dark and theatrical, Cindytalk cannot be pigeonholed as an '80s goth band, even in comparison to such off-kilter groups like The Virgin Prunes, Princess Tinymeat, or Sex Gang Children. Camoflage Heart was Cindytalk's first album and originally came out in 1984; and it's an album like those This Heat albums which is quite unique in terms of production and aesthetic. The album opens with the militant drum machine of "It's Luxury" setting the stage for an explosion from a monotone guitar riff, coated in amplifier grit, distortion, and detuned heaviness that comes across as a mix between late-'80s Skullflower and The Cure's Pornography. At this moment, Sharp's voice also erupts into the mix crooning with a downtrod beauty to this industrial dirge, spitting and swooning at the same time. The next track "Instinct (Back To Sense)" is more of an ambient interlude with distant heartbeat rhythms, haunted with impressionist piano trickles and Sharp's siren song buried between an atmosphere of smoke and mirror. Two more explosive tracks -- "Under Glass" (featuring Mick Harvey from the Birthday Party for a disjointed stutter of abject rock) and "Memories of Skin and Snow" -- are examples of loud / quiet / loud dynamics, later embraced by the likes of Slint and Mogwai to equally profound effect. "Everybody Is Christ" is often viewed as the pinnacle of Camoflage Heart with its harsh arppegiation of electronics cast against Sharp's heavenly voice. Soon after, the album disintegrates in a cascade of delicate piano, voice, and grim drones.
As Cindytalk had suffered through the fate of several record companies going out of business (first Midnight Records then World Serpent), their work might have been forgotten had it not been for this reissue. Thankfully, that oversight can now be remedies with this long overdue reissue.
Prior to Hold Everything Dear, the resurrected Cindytalk had been the work of Gordon Sharp sitting down at his computer by himself to experiment with digital glitches and abstracted electronic drones. The Crackle Of My Soul from 2009 felt more like the first fruits of Sharp wrangling with his ideas in a digital environment with a few too many compositional rough edges that were in need of refinement. Up Here In The Clouds was a marked improvement through the glassine drones and fizzing noise; but Hold Everything Dear is the first Cindytalk album that truly feels like it has a connection to those brilliant post-punk records from the early '80s. While Sharp hasn't returned to the noise-rock abjection of Camoflage Heart and he has yet to sing on any of these recent albums, the fragmented smears from bowed metals, haunted clanging bells, watery field recordings, and impressionist piano of Hold Everything Dear harken to those post-noise ambient constructions found on the Eno-esque album Wind Is Strong and which concluded In This World. Many of the cavernous sounds on the album are probably sourced from the late Matt Kinnison, who had been Cindytalk's bassist since 1982 and who died in 2008. Sharp has cast a bleary atmosphere throughout the album through subterranean passages of sodden drones, cobwebbed dark elegance, and decayed textures. Sharp pocks this album with plenty of piano interludes whose somber half melodies and shadowy ambience are pulled from the same mold as those earlier piano works. They were beautiful then, and they are still beautiful now.
So the rumor goes that Gordon Sharp was invited to join Duran Duran after Sharp dissolved his Edinburgh glam-punk band The Freeze in the late '70s. He turned them down. Elizabeth Fraser and Robin Guthrie also put out the request for Sharp to join the Cocteau Twins. After a brief stint accompanying the Cocteau Twins for a Peel Session in 1982 and a guest spot on This Mortal Coil's It'll End In Tears, he opted for his own project -- the obscure, yet majestic Cindytalk.
In This World is an opus in every sense of the word. Originally, In This World came out in 1988 as two separate albums under the same name, each with slightly different artwork. One album, a masterpiece of abject post-punk that in all honesty is the closest parallel to Swans' Children Of God; the other, a delicate ambient construct of melancholy piano scarred with surface noice prognosticating pretty much everything that Type Records has released (e.g Machinefabriek, Jasper TX, etc.). It's very good thing that both of these albums have been repackaged into one self-contained object, as the only half of In This World that seemed to be floating around was the piano-laced ambient one. As good as that half is, you need the grit and dirge of its companion album to complete Cindytalk's ideas of grand dualities: heaven / hell, pleasure / pain, holiness / transgression, etc.
While billed by Sharp as the 'disgusting' part of the In This World diptych, the first half begins with a lovely tonefloat of scratched violin drones and painterly piano notes. Yet, with the crushing rhythm and noise attack of "Janey's Love," Sharp does not disappoint with his disgusting tag. This is a monstrous industrial dirge with huge monotone slabs of distortion and atonal drones counterpointing Sharp's soaring falsetto. The punk poet Kathy Acker supplies a brief spoken word interlude as the coda to this incendiary number. Immediately hereafter, Cindytalk continue their turgid rhythmic marches with an angular distorted rhythm, slippery bassline mired in audio rust, and twin guitars spitting acid, fire, and brimstone on such tracks as "Gift Of A Knife" and "Circle Of Shit." As the first half of the album progresses, the songs steadily disintegrate as rhythm, song structure, and noise all collapse into a blur of smeared grey that is eerily reflective of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops. The piano which opened In This World becomes the dominant sound in Cindytalk's soundscapes, also marking the delineation between the two halves of In This World. Yes, this is the beautiful side of Cindytalk, coated in ash, snow, bruises, and rust. Gordon Sharp's piano playing comes from Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon, which in turn came from Erik Satie; and that impressionist sentiment continues forward amidst subterranean drones and field recordings of barren spaces. Sharp's voice is mostly absent from these tracks, although the eponymous finale to the album showcases one of Sharp's most emotive croons. They really don't make albums like this any more, with such attention to detail and dynamics between rage and beauty.
Fortunately, both of these records were concise enough that they could both fit onto one CD; and if you've not had the opportunity to hear Cindytalk, please do not let this album and its predecessor Camoflage Heart pass you by!
One of the more recent Circle records finally released on vinyl by our pals at Static Caravan. Good thing too since the cd is out of print. Double lp, colored vinyl in a nice gatefold sleeve with some of the most tripped out artwork we've seen in a while, different from the cd version. Here's what we had to say about the cd when it first came out.
Is there such a thing as Circle overload? We don't think so. In their case, you can't have too much of a good thing. A brand new disc of their hypnotic avant-rock compositions. Newer than their recent "Andexelt" album, and just as good. Not as sparse and dubby as that disc, "Prospekt" is rather heavier and denser, mesmerizingly repetitive as always, and kinda startling, with some incredible vocal acrobatics / operatics in the opening track "Dedofiktion". Really great!
Everybody knows that we at aQuarius are HUGE fans of the Finnish space/prog/hypnorock band Circle, right? We have raved about 'em for years, even had 'em play our 35th Anniversary Party back in 2000. So, naturally we get lots of folks, just starting out with their own Circle obsession, who ask us, which Circle album is The One To Get? 'Cause there's at least, like, over thirty albums in Circle's vast discography, thus far (though not all are still in print), and they're all pretty great. Well, among the longterm Circle fans here at aQ, the answer to that difficult question is, when it comes down to it, if we have to chose: Zopalki, Circle's second album, originally released back in 1996 by the Bad Vugum label. For a lot of us, it's arguably Circle's best ever record, among many great ones. And, significantly, it's also the one that we first heard, that first caused us to totally freak out about Circle, and led us to become such ardent fans, ever after. So, yeah, Zopalki! But, for years and years, it's unfortunately been one of those out of print titles. Kind of a holy grail for latter day Circle initiates. Until now - because we just got the brand new remastered, reissued version on Circle's own Ektro label in the mail. And thus, an automatic Record Of The Week!
Like we said, this is The One that, so many years ago, turned us on to Circle's unique brand of rhythmic psychedelic hypnosis. It's heavy, it's atmospheric, it's tight, it's sprawling, it's incredible. The staccato Helmet-like riffage of their debut Meronia is still in effect, but even proggier experimentation is afoot, with a darker, murkier, neo-krautrock, chamber rock vibe pervading the proceedings. There's choppy guitars, dubby drumbeats, sinister string arrangements, and eerie Gregorian chant style vox (yes, this was many Circle lineups ago, long before current operatic weirdo Mikka Ratto joined the band, but the vocals are still quite unusual).
Originally released on vinyl also, as a double lp (the new liner notes in this edition amusingly explain the "negotiation" with their record label that resulted in this being a double), it's got a dozen tracks stretching over 72 minutes. They range from explosive & percussively propelled to the dolefully droned out (often accomplishing both feats in the same epic composition). "Bonoroid" is among the most blissful, "Sector" the most psychotically hectic, "Argont" perhaps the most grindingly heavy, but heck we just picked a favorite Circle album, don't make us pick a favorite song too!
Our only complaint about this reissue, is we wish they'd have included the bonus track found only on the long-gone vinyl version... for a moment we thought this reissue had the bonus track, but it's just that for some accidental reason the tracklist here says the final song is "Contact" (which was that bonus track) when it's actually "Gregorium Vaernd Valerii", which closed the original cd. Whoops.
Regardless, we're SO glad to have this back. It's remastered (louder!), and the redesigned, expanded cd booklet now contains Zopalki-era photos of the band, as well as brand new retrospective liner notes from former guitarist Teemu Elo, from which we learn that "Zopalki" means "matchsticks" in Polish (though we don't learn why that was chosen for the title, or why the title was in Polish). More importantly, we learn a lot about the young band's struggle to make the record. It's worth noting that he says, "Zopalki caught most of us in the process of widening our horizons more than any other Circle album". It widened OUR horizons too...
Originally released as a deluxe 5lp boxset for this year's Record Store Day, this amazing collection, gathering up the first three albums from this seminal eighties indie pop outfit, is now also available as a triple cd set (and as individual lps, which we'll list/review soon), and reveals once again, to a whole new audience hopefully, what an amazing and influential band Cleaners From Venus really were.
Bandleader Martin Newell, who was bitter after some bad record label experiences with his previous band, became obsessed with doing everything himself (a real DIY band for sure), which meant recording records on a 4 track in his bedroom, dubbing the tapes himself, and releasing those tapes in super limited editions, of course distributed by Newell himself, which probably has a lot do with why these guys didn't get more attention than they did. But masterful pop music like this with such incredible songwriting was bound to work its way to the surface, and this stuff did manage to make its way into the ears of obsessive pop nerds, and quickly attained a cultlike status, and for good reason. Listening to this stuff now, it's easy to hear what a huge influence these guys had, and that their lo-fi pop was years ahead of groups like Ariel Pink, who would trawl the same sonic territory, albeit a bit more ironically. Jangly outsider pop, with strange homebrewed production weirdness, bizarre edits, twisted little intros and outros, brief snippets of conversations, sudden fade outs, that inexplicably fade right back in, the programmed drums, gorgeous vocal harmonies, hooks galore, definitely a product of the early '80s, with a different production and a less skewed take on pop, it's not hard to imagine this stuff on the radio or on MTV alongside groups like the Style Council or Human League or any of the other bands popular at the time, but Newell's Cleaners had it's own twisted take on the sound of the time, channeling Elvis Costello, XTC and the rest, but transforming that commercial pop sound into something much more personal and urgent, and without any restrictions, or any hopes of mainstream popularity, Newell never shied away from trying anything, no matter how weird it may have seemed, and the results definitely speak for themselves.
The first record, 1981's Blow Away Your Troubles, is the rawest of the bunch, and might still be our favorite, it's definitely the weirdest, with even this meticulously assembled reissue replete with those weird edits and damaged tape dropouts, all of which merely adds to the mood and mystery of the music. The second record, 1982's On Any Normal Monday, might be objectively the best record though, for a home recorded album, it sound incredible, still rife with all sorts of weirdness, whether that meant dubbed out snares, or strange spoken word segments, thick sinewy basslines or xylophone melodies, the sound is lush, and so fully realized, and the songs, catchy and meticulously crafted, in different circumstances, another instance where some of these songs definitely could have been hits.
The final record in the set, Midnight Cleaners, also from 1982, found the band's sound shifting once again, the vibe a bit more new wavey, the recording still polished, but but a bit more raw than On Any Normal Monday, still warped and weird, and reminding us a LOT of Guided By Voices, who seemed to fancy themselves a sort of imaginary Cleaners From Venus, a lost unsung genius pop band, GBV would after all manufacture a sort of faux Britishness that definitely approaches the Cleaners dreamy eighties pop sound, especially on Midnight Cleaners. Some of the songs here had us seriously thinking GBV might owe these guys some heartfelt thanks, if not actual royalties.
We had been subsisting for years on a worn out mix tape of Cleaners tracks, so it's thrilling to have all these songs in one place, many of which we're only hearing now for the first time, and we have been gleefully immersing ourselves in The Cleaners From Venus' twisted pop world, and we're hoping that the designation that this is in fact volume one, means that volume two is on the way...
Cliffsides is the solo work of Ryan McGill, a Georgia native currently residing Brooklyn who is half of the kosmische synth project Afterlife. Where Afterlife tightly wound itself around the post Manuel Gottsching / Klaus Schulze ethos that led into so many of those great Emeralds related projects, McGill's solo work is all sleepwalking sprawl and narcotic mist. Bubbling abstractions, big sweeping oscillations, and lazer-shot synth tones work through the variable curtains of delay and echo effects that McGill pours over all of the synthesized sounds. Vast empty spaces with distant vocal and guitar signals cascade through those delay patterns creating a 'floating in outerspace' vibe from the onset, only to glide into a very choice step sequence of Schnitzler-esque melodicism.
By the second side, McGill offers forth some midnight electronica / sci-fi worship channelling Tangerine Dream's Zeit only to turn that into a very dark set of ambient passages, complete with ritualized chanting and industrially grim sawtooth synth lines. There's lots to cover on this tape, as McGill sprawls and drones for over 80 minutes here. Nice that somebody is using the long form medium of the cassette to its fullest potential! Limited to 100 copies; and like most everything on Hooker Vision, this will not last long.
Maybe it's a good thing that the Climax Golden Twins don't put out a lot of records. That way, when one of their damaged recordings of post-everything psychedelia marred with hallucinatory sound collages does come our way, we can savor it all the more. Along comes 5 Cents A Piece, and we couldn't be happier. Yup, this is a fucking great record. Is it their best? Maybe. But it most certainly ranks as one of the musical triumphs of 2007.
In many ways, the Twins have operated on parallel tracks to their geographical / spiritual brothers from the Sun City Girls, with the Twins mining more from the underbelly of Americana than the esoterica of South-East Asian pop. But Messrs Taylor and Millis are not without an appetite for such eccentricities, as Robert Millis continues to be an occasional contributor to the always exceptional Sublime Frequencies series. That said, the Twins are no longer a duo as they had been for so many years; here, on 5 Cents A Piece they've added the talents of percussionist Dave Abramson to their lineup. His quick turns from cosmo-rock hammerfist to free-jazz tumble down the stairs to plinkering vaudevillian backbeats make for the perfect foil to the twin guitar splatter of Taylor and Millis. As much as Abramson's presence is noticed on 5 Cents A Piece, the auditory dementia of Taylor and Millis steers the album (if it can be called 'steering,' that is). At times, they throw themselves into cacophonic skronk in a battle between finger tendon and guitar string as to which will snap first; then, they will slide easily into the ghostly folk melodies that paralleled their Highly Bred and Sweetly Tempered album from 2004. Elsewhere, a blast of West Coast hesher rock erupts amidst a headspinning, subterranean echo, with the Twins giving Comets on Fire a run for their money.
Limited to 500 copies and bound to be out of print in a matter of minutes, what more do you want to know? You need this!
The Climax Golden Twins have always had their hands in as many cookie jars as they could; and all of the records are true adventures in sound that could include fucked-up collages of old 78s, thudding art-rock that has earned them opening spots for Sonic Youth, blissful ambience for narcoleptic art-installations, clattering urban gamelan presentations, and plenty more. Eerie Fragrance hits all of these marks and then some, having originally been released as a cassette back in 1995. The original title to the cassette was Eyeless Formation, but has been redubbed as Eerie Fragrance for the vinyl reissue. There's also a couple of extra tracks which didn't appear on the original cassette which had appeared on compilations from around the same time period.
The album quickly revolves through a collage of improvised bursts that accelerates up to an unsettled loop of a woman possibly in the midst of a breakup repeating her pleas over a turgid thrumb of static and rumbling drone which spills out of a series of peculiar squeaks and squiggles. As such, these moments have more in common with Nurse With Wound than their geographical and spiritual neighbors in the Sun City Girls; but is certainly well within the scope of CGT's esoteric collages. Noirish loops and raucous crowd noise tumble out of the beginning of the flipside, with guitar plucks that sound more like rubber bands snapping in the distant. Artifacts of tape noise and crusty debris inhabit a set of overlapping loops topped with gnarled scrapes on the guitar. Crunches of leaves and thick industrial field recordings give way to seasick wooden creakings, laughing gulls, and bellowing foghorns. As disconnected as all of these elements appear after the fact, they all work rather effortlessly in the context of this recording. Really great!
Another brilliant, corroded, and demented facet of the Climax Golden Twins is found on the reissue of their 1996 debut full-length cd. From the release of this album, it became clear that the Sun City Girls were no longer the only game in town, when it came to fucked-up deconstructions of noise-rock propulsion with South East Asian overtones and painterly freeform improvisations. In a lot of ways, this album is a slightly more focused version of the Sun City Girls' 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda, sans the Bollywood punk tunes blurted out by Alan Bishop. Yeah, it's that good!
The principle Twins (maestros Robert Millis and Jeffery Taylor) invited eight musicians to join them and producer Scott Colburn for a series of studio driven improvisations, which were in turn sculpted into this "epic masterpiece," as Colburn later quipped and to which we can certainly agree. The urban gamelan infused improvisations meander through rhythmic tinklings upon metal bells and vibraphones, which provide a queasy Martin Denny air of tropical sicknesses abundant in every buzz, rasp, and clang of the ensemble's polyphonous scatter. As much as these elements do recall the equally skittering moments of the Sun City Girls, the Climax Golden Twins growl with the best of the post-hardcore noiseniks on Blast First (e.g. Sonic Youth, Big Black, A.C. Temple, Head of David, etc.) with some volatile, Mack-truck riffage scraping across lumbering backbeats with ample amounts of amplifier mangling distortion. Fucking great, we say!
This is a record that shouldn't be around; yet, against the odds, we have a handful of these discs in stock for the moment. The Climax Golden Twins refer to this eponymous CD as Locations although we can't find any reference to that title on the all white, embossed folding cardstock. In recent years, Robert Millis of the Twins has produced some of the finer contributions to the Sublime Frequencies series of obscure ethnomusicology, including the Phi Ta Khon DVD and the Harmika Yab Yum compilation from Tibet. And, had this 1998 collage of field recordings and shortwave radio transmissions been released in this day and age, it surely would have warranted a Sublime Frequencies release, as it fits so closely within their agenda. Yet, it remains a Climax Golden Twins production, and given CGT's radically eclectic aesthetic sensibility (Victrola 78 collages, cannibalized psychedelia, horror soundtracks, long-form dronemusik, etc.), why not call this a Climax Golden Twins record? So what we have here is an interwoven collage from unspecified locations, with some of the locales being more obvious than others. The temple gongs and bells getting banged about with jubilant indeterminance are from South-East Asia (probably being Javanese Gamelan), the deeply reverential incantations set against clouds of crickets could be from any Muslim temple in Asia, and only an etymologist could pinpoint where in the world those cicadas could be residing. Altogether, a mighty fine collage of phonography before such a term was coined.
In 2012, Vinyl On Demand published the first Horology box set from Clock DVA, a compendium of the early, self-published cassettes on the projects on Dvation imprint before they released White Souls In Black Suits on Industrial Records in 1980. There were six lps to that box set, and it proved to be an uneven collection with Clock DVA venturing into Crowleyian collage and electronic ritual on some of those recordings and more of a mutation of dank post-punk on others. While Crowley's influence can be felt throughout most all of the Clock DVA / Adi Newton discography, these were the weakest elements of Horology, with those albums of sludgy electronics and creep-crawling rhythms making for a very interesting precursor to the art-funk constructions on White Souls In Black Suits. 2nd stands out as the best of the albums from Horology, taking up this latter style of zombified synth-punk played at a slow-motion torpor. Think the earliest Cabaret Voltaire or Throbbing Gristle in their SixSixSixties vein, completely with spectral guitar meanderings, distorto-bass lines, and blank-stare atmospherics. So, very glad that this has been made available as a stand-alone album, given the unevenness of the full box set.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
During a humid trip to Nashville in the summer of 1998, Jim had the fortune to catch a 30 minute garage-rock-dirge made earlier that day in a basement by the The Legendary Dave Cloud. With just a simple request for information / recordings posted here on the AQL and some patience, we gleefully present the debut album from Mr. Cloud. Calling him a drunken poet may situate Dave Cloud on too high of a pedestal, but drunk would certainly suffice. Nearly delusional songs of true love found during drinking binges and of the profound abjection from the hangovers & lonliness the morning after are crooned by Cloud with his hoarse cigarette damaged voice. Musically, Cloud pens grimy garage songs that wouldn't have been out of the repetoire of the V-3, the Velvet Underground, early Dead C, and most certainly The Shaggs. While the purposefully lo-fi qualities from Siltbreeze bands may be interpretted as an avant-garde disregard for acceptible production techniques, Cloud's aesthetic couldn't really be regarded as such due to the drunken naivete that seeps through the songs like spilt beer seeping through polyester. Cloud's backing band features members of Lambchop though you won't find any of the sugary dixie pop here. Sadly the 30 minute drone-dirge mentioned earlier is not one of the songs he will always sing, but the album is a worthy meditation on alcohol.
Second release from this droning duo. Coelacanth is our very own Jim Haynes and AQ pal Loren Chasse (Jewelled Antler, Blithe Sons, Thuja, Franciscan Hobbies, Id Battery et al). Four extended tracks of gorgeous space-y drone-y almost-ambience. Forests of cricket-like chirps are blurred into smeary ambient washes of cool greys and pale whites, beneath smatterings of clinking clicking clatter. Keening, indistinct moaning tones sound like distant foghorns, reflected from the slowly shifting terrain. Underwatery warped sonic shudders billow outward as vague melodies drift and float, chiming and reverberating, eventually dissipating into misty clusters of ethereal almost transparent notes. Hissing, fuzzy high end buzz whirs machinelike over industrial clatter that has been smoothed out into pulsing, barely-there rhythms. So so nice. All of the sounds were collected from various public and private Coelacanth performances over the last couple years, before being assembled into the Glass Sponge. Released by local sound art nonprofit 23five.
There's undoubtably a secret history to this album, one that will never be known as the founding / principle members John Balance and Peter Christopherson have both died in the past decade. Backwards was the Coil album that was slated for release sometime in the mid-to-late '90s on Trent Reznor's Nothing imprint, with various declarations of its pending release sporadically offered as a monumental tease to Coil's fanbase. To track the history a little bit: Coil released their groundbreaking album Love's Secret Domain in 1992 and began crafting the tracks for Backwards during a period of searching that took Balance & Christopherson to New Orleans back to England and finally onto Bangkok. Whilst in New Orleans, Coil (then fleshed out with Danny Hyde and Drew McDowell) recorded a what would become the Backwards album; but for reasons that always seemed opaque, the tapes sat dormant. Lawyers at Interscope and Universal could be to blame for the fact that Coil refused to deliver the tapes. Some fifteen years later, Christopherson would remix those tapes into The New Backwards, an album that represented his final vision of what that material could be; and some of those songs and tracks had made their way onto other Coil albums and as compilation contributions in some remixed form or another. But finally, FINALLY, there's now the posthumous release of Coil's Backwards, engineered into this current form by then Coil engineer / member Danny Hyde.
If anything, Coil were a baroque proposition; and Backwards is very much a baroque album, with a kitchen sink of electronics and live instrumentation liberally saturated throughout the cryptically serpentine synth-pop sensibility that made Coil such a unique band. Skittering, static pulse sequences formed the basis to much of Backwards, alternating between darkly lysergic dance numbers and ballast-heavy marches of somber, twisted, and / or malignant thought. The titular track is certainly a standout with Balance chanting amidst scurrying, hectic collages, countered by the swaggering hip-sway of the rhythm track - very much in keeping with what Coil had done on Love's Secret Domain. The immediate next track "Amber Rain", with its impassioned vocal hymn from Balance and an melancholy melody for synthetic piano, looks forward to what Coil would later do on Musick To Play In The Dark. Hindsight is 20-20, and of course, this album has been claimed to be - and should be seen - as the transition between those two landmark works by Coil. The original version of "Heaven's Blade" did get a much better makeover on the Ape Of Naples in 2005, but here it stands as a proto drill'n'bass number of compressed breakbeats and a splattered tapestry of occluded electronics amidst Balance's vocals. Many more rich, dark, and sordid details await on Backwards - a very welcome entry in the already hallowed Coil canon.
We here at Aquarius haven't agreed with the critical acclaim that's greeted the recent output of Coil; however, we do agree that their second proper album "Horse Rotovator" should still be viewed as one of the great electronic albums of the 1980s. Immersed in Industrial Culture's transgressive ideologies, and thus intended as perversions of contemporary media and politics, Coil produced
With bands like Peaches and Trans Am trawling the '80s solely for the purpose of irony, Coil's work from that decade may appear today as excessively bombastic, too homoerotic, or downright dated. However, "Horse Rotovator" and the criminally unavailable "Love's Secret Domain" undeniably stand at the apex of Coil's extensive career.
The re-issue of "Love's Secret Domain" from 1991 is not unlike unearthing a long lost exquisite treasure. Obsessively coveted and revered over the last decade, it re-emerges still sounding fresh and current. Sadly and strangely, this album was often
During the construction of this album, Coil's core duo -- Peter Christopherson and John Balance -- had immersed themselves in the acid house culture of the UK that flourished around The KLF (I don't care what you think of "What Time is Love," The KLF were geniuses in the art of pop subversion), 808 State, and even the early bleep techno from Warp Records. To Coil, the UK rave culture reflected many of their own ideas of transgression through almost pagan rituals of communities uniting around liberating music, sexual exploration, chemical enlightenment, and the release of hidden dark energies from the body and spirit.
"Love's Secret Domain" embodied a near-perfect harmony between the dark, occultish overtones from their previous albums "Scatology" and "Horse Rotovator" and the technological futurism at the heart of rave culture. Within this synthesis, Coil has not just created a handful of singles (although "The Snow" and "Windowpane" off of this album still make great dancefloor fodder), but has articulated the entire album as a sonic narrative. Swelling through the sampledelic abstraction on "Disco Hospital" (recently covered by admitted Coil fans Matmos) and the surreal tension of "Things Happen" (with Annie Anxiety Bandez' obtuse guest vocal appearance), Coil offers "The Snow" as a magnificient techno track, with creepy cut-ups of choral elements, constantly shifting and reforming melody patterns, and an 808 techno pulse. "Windowpane" in turn is far more seductive in its low slung bassline and downtempo pace. The rest of the album continues through a darkened path of hallucinatory electronics, intricate instrumentations, and occasional bursts of subverted pop sentiment. Unlike a lot of electronica records, nothing on "Love's Secret Domain" ever feels like filler.
This is a marvelous record that even after a decade has very few rivals.
Cremations is a collection of previously released tracks from the darling noisenik / minimal wave project Cold Cave, the bulk of which had been so painfully limited that they might as well have not been at all. The first three cuts should be familiar to most Aquarius readers, being from Cold Cave's awesome 7" single Painted Nails. The other tracks came from a cassette and an LP, both of which Cold Cave's Wes Eisold released through his Heartworm Press as editions of 100 in 2009 and 2007 respectively. The description we gave to the Painted Nails single is still apt: a morose and melodic blast of blown out noise-wave, a corrosive chunk of Cure-meets-Whitehouse or New Order-meets-Wolf Eyes. The tracks that follow the Painted Nails single on this collection certainly live up to the hype of that single, standing as lo-fi, scribbled new wave tunes for simple bass-synth lines, eerie-as-hell melodies, tinny drum machines, and alienated vocals with plenty of megaphone noise and 4-track scratchiness embedded into the mix. Cold Cave also tosses in some incidental music tracks which sort of sound like the interludes from Christian Death's Elektra Descending redone for Brian Eno's Music for Airports. It should be noted that none of the tracks here have been fleshed out like the incredible The Trees Grew Emotions And Died 12" which came and went a couple months back, and we don't mean that as a negative. Seriously, how many times have we championed the shittiest recordings on the crappiest media: flexi-disc, microcassette, wire recordings, shortwave, etc. And much of Cold Cave's grit and grime on Cremations appeals to that very aesthetic of ours. In fact a lot of these tracks remind us of some of our favorite electronic punk acts of the new dark age: The Screamers, Primitive Calculators, early Severed Heads, Dark Day, etc. You won't just be hearing it from us: this is incredible!
(This IS coming out on vinyl too, eventually, but we have no date for that yet...)
On one end of the Cold Cave spectrum, there is the blistering terror of low-fi electronics with sparse hints of new wave flecked through a sound better suited to Wolf Eyes; and on the other, Cold Cave can effortlessly toss out a darkly pop-eyed, minimal wave gem that wouldn't out of place next to Depeche Mode or Gary Numan. So far, Cold Cave (aka Wes Eisold) has not done us wrong no matter what he ends up producing. The hyper limited Etsel And Ruby 12" is of the latter, poppier sensibility, in the footsteps of the terminally catchy single The Trees Grew Emotions And Died from 2008. The production values here are a little higher than the gutter-punk scratchiness found on the Cremations collection; and while punchier drum machines and upfront vocals give Cold Cave a gloss with a broader appeal, we seriously hope that he doesn't leave the nastier sound behind.
The A side "Love Comes Close" is a jangly, jaunty number that could very well be a lost track from The Cure's The Head On The Door, with Eisold's croon almost sounding like Stephin Merritt. The first of two B sides finds Eisold handing over the vocal duties to an unknown female singer, whose detached, cold vocals fit perfectly with the Cure / Joy Division basslines laced around the darkened electronics. The cut is like the best Fad Gadget song you've never heard before, with an insistent electroid melody that builds and builds throughout the track. Great stuff. Limited to 300 copies!!! Available only from the label and right here at aQ!
In listening to the few releases from Cold Cave (to date, just this 12" and the "Painted Nails" 7" on Hospital), we can easily see Cold Cave becoming huge. Maybe not as megalomaniacally huge as Coldplay or U2; but maybe there's a Wire or XLR8R cover for Cold Cave to grace sometime in the future. The Trees Grew Emotions And Died predated the heavily acclaimed Painted Nails single; and like that single, this gem of crunched noise mingling with retro-garde synth pop has gone in and out of print several times. It's still a limited pressing of 500 copies, so be forewarned!
Cold Cave is the work of one Wes Eisold, who fronted a couple of East Coast hardcore bands before starting a collection of thrift store samplers and synthesizers. In wiring all of these half-functioning devices through various effects and distortion pedals, he's arrived at an abrasive minimal wave sound that has two feet firmly planted in the worlds of New Order and Wolf Eyes. Had Eisold added a guitar into the mix, Cold Cave might have ended up not all that far from those brilliant bliss pop mutations from Woodsist (i.e. Crystal Stilts, Blank Dogs, Wavves, etc.), but he's admitted that part of his frustration with hardcore was over his two-decade losing battle in learning the guitar. So, the synthesizer is the instrument of choice for Cold Cave. This three track EP showcases his pop genius with minor key melodies bobbing along insistent drum machines and sinister atmospheres. "Heaven's Gate" and "Our Tears Help The Flowers Grow" start with the minor-key synth melodies which buttress Depeche Mode's Violator and The Cure's Faith, with megaphone distortion crackling the detached male / female vocals. The title track is considerably up-tempo and up-beat with a bouncy melody that WILL get stuck in your head in all the right ways, like those incredible singles which made their way onto the first Adult. album. Very highly recommended!
Cole the Canadian and Ambarchi the Australian have been collaborating when they can over the past five or six years. Mostly, their work together has been in performance, as that has been the preferred venue for Crys Cole's output until recently. In general, her work hedges towards the textural expressionism of Organum and Small Cruel Party, albeit somewhat quieter, using contact microphones and her own body as the principle instruments for her sound-sculpting. Ambarchi proves once again he is deft in adapting his own tools to fit that of his collaborators. Here on Sonja Henies Vei 31, he's put aside his array of electronics, pedals, and guitars to work alongside Cole and her means of production. There is something uncomfortably explicit about these recordings - wet smacks and watery splashes that seem awfully intimate, coupled with breathy exhortations and soft moans from Cole. If this is the result of two sound artists rolling around the sack, it's a rather unsettling document complicated by the eerie sinetones, clattering metallic actions, and visceral scrabblings of unknown objects, which seem all the more bizarre when put in the context of a consenting-adult activities. The result is very brave piece of Fluxus-inspired actionism an engaging and inventive series of decontextualized concrete sounds that are on par with Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing or Nurse With Wound's A Missing Sense. Strictly limited to 150 copies!
While the UK drone ensemble Ora dissolved a little over a year ago, its scattered members have been incredibly active with like-sounding projects: Andrew Chalk has been busy in Mirror, Darren Tate now works as Monos, Colin Potter has been collaborating
Quite happy in releasing sporadic productions in painfully small pressings, Jonathan Coleclough has been one of Aquarius' favorite dronologist / deep listening composers and one who deserves a place in the experimental ambient pantheon that glorifies the work
One of Aquarius's favorite drone compositions, Jonathan Coleclough's "Period" was originally released early in 2001 as a limited edition piece of vinyl on Anomalous Records and has now been reissued with an extended mix of the title track that is better suited to the CD format. Coleclough began collecting field recordings and transforming them into emphathic dronescapes back in 1989, around the same time he began corresponding with Colin Potter about his ICR cassette projects. Since then, Potter and Coleclough have worked closely on a number of projects starting with Andrew Chalk and Darren Tate in Ora, and culminating more recently with their well-received "Low Ground" collaboration. "Period" again finds Coleclough employing the production / engineering talents of Potter (who has also been working quite intently with Steven Stapleton in Nurse With Wound). Throughout his career, Coleclough has defined himself as a sound organizer, modifying acoustic events and field recordings to enhance the emotional resonance that he finds in those sounds. Here on "Period," Coleclough draws all of his sounds from a Bluthner grand piano, surrounding the spartanly placed clusters of impressionistic notes with a complementary set of delicately fluctuating drones. Coleclough does well to accentuate the sublime reverberant decay that follows the piano's sustained tones. Furthermore, Potter offered his interpretation of the source material entitled "Periodic" which effectively erases the obvious references to the piano and leaves behind a densely tangled web of calm reverberations. As a whole "Period" stands as an amazingly rich and balanced piece of work on par with Brian Eno's "Thursday Afternoon" and the Cindytalk piano improvisations.
Aquarius has also gotten in a limited number of the double CD sets of "Period" which features a third mix of "Period" by both Coleclough and Potter, and a gorgeous track called "Summand," which is a re-working of some of the source material that Coleclough brought to the "Sumac" sessions with Andrew Chalk. There's only 300 of those double CDs in print. Don't blame us when they sell out!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Released a few years back as a one-sided piece of vinyl, Jonathan Coleclough and Andrew Chalk's "Sumac" has been one of those hidden gems within the deep listening realms of music that has continuously amazing us. Fortunately, "Sumac" has re-emerged from obscurity with this lengthy 70 minute cd version. Andrew Chalk is a veteran of the noise / drone scene who has recorded with Organum, Ora, and Feral Confine. Working with upstart dronologist Jonathan Coleclough, Chalk has conjured a breathtaking memser of bowed metal wires, cymbals, and other pieces of metal with shifting chunks of backward masked slow aerated sound. "Sumac," shrouded in a glistening darkness, is one of the all-time great drone records.
It's been nearly a year and a half since the venerable British drone composer Jonathan Coleclough has offered us something new; and this collaboration between Coleclough and Murmer (aka Patrick McGinley) is well worth the wait! The two met a couple years back after contributing works to the same compilation. Soon after, Coleclough began making regular contributions to McGinley's weekly radio series Framework for Resonance FM in London; and their continued communication sparked the interest for a collaboration. Much of the music found on Husk originated from semi-improvised sessions whereby the two processed various field recordings, small tactile events, and other electronic devices -- gradually developing beyond the gestural and into a monumental sprawling album which is in the running for best drone album of 2006. The two had cited their source material as refrigerators, thunderstorms, sheep, car horns, ferryboats, windblown sand, and crackling charcoal; and it's a crap shoot to discern which of these electrically blurred drones hails from an overheating kitchen appliance or from farm animals. Not that any of that really matters, as the art of Coleclough and McGinley is in their alchemy, transforming the commonplace into the celestial (albeit, a very dark and very cold heavenly body). Throbbing drones of low end harmonics are joined by secondary sustained timbres which undulate as polyamorous tangles, spreading rhizomes, and slippery knots bristling with tactility and spotted with plenty of hints of the organic. Each of the four tracks proposes a variation on glassine drones counterpointed by rasping textures, at times hedging for the subdued drama of smoldering crescendos and others the sublime stare at glacial immobility. Coleclough's work has always been exceptional, and his collaboration with Murmer is no different! Highly recommended.
Much like the entire back catalogue of John Duncan, British avant-drone artist Jonathan Coleclough has often buttressed his work through an ongoing set of collaborations, each of which push his work into interesting territories while maintaining that essence of Coleclough that makes all of his albums so enthralling. His 2006 collaboration with Murmer was easily one of the best drone albums of that year, twisting field recordings and quiet sessions with electric objects into a gauzy, crepuscular blur that even made those at Artforum perk up their ears and listen. Torch Songs came to fruition when both Coleclough and Liles performed in Preston (probably at the request of the ever-charming Colin Potter) in 2005. In fact, much of the source material for Torch Songs originated from Coleclough's performance to which Liles went on to "add, subtract, multiply, and divide" further. The fundamentals of Torch Songs are primarily Coleclough's signature moves: swelling, resonant drones manipulated from acoustic sources and distilled into tonally vibrant beams of pure sound. Yet, Liles (who in and of himself is a fine technician of sonic alchemy to the point where he has often graced the stage alongside Steve Stapleton, Colin Potter, and Matt Waldron in Nurse With Wound) interjects his own sidereal gestures with wooden creaks, digital time stretching, radiant eruptions of dissonant couplings with Coleclough's drones, and occasional jaunts of heavily filtered tin-can and rubber-band rhythms that parallel much of the output from Liles' recent 12 part Vortex series. Yet for all of Liles' baroque flares for the sonically surreal, it is Coleclough who authors the strongest material on Torch Songs through his sublime use of the drone. The first 300 copies of Torch Songs comes with a bonus CD that documents Coleclough's aforementioned Preston performance back in 2005.
Through his exceptional career that spans work in Ora, a handful of fantastic solo projects, and the AQ-favorite "Sumac" collaboration with Andrew Chalk, Jonathan Coleclough has mastered the harder-than-it-looks art of disguising how he constructs his epic droneworks. His recordings have always been marked by a vigilantly maintained resonance of acoustic phenomena, which appear not as ephemeral sonorities but rather as epochal, monumental tones. "Low Ground" -- recorded in collaboration with engineer extraodinaire Colin Potter (also of Nurse With Wound fame) and saxophonist Tim Hill -- is no exception to the Coleclough blueprints. That said, Coleclough has been slowly moving away from the Ora / Chalk purity of sound, with an increased interest in digitizing his drones.
Under most circumstances, the presence of a saxophone on a drone album would make me cringe in agony; but thankfully, Coleclough's alchemy is so complete that you would be hard pressed to hear anything remotely sounding like a saxophone on "Low Ground." Instead, beautiful slowly aerated pulsations of ringing tones open this album, recalling the strangely comfortable sounds of a radiator pushing hot steam through archaic pipes on a cold winter eveneing. Coleclough and Potter gradually treat these sounds with some DSP actions (mostly timestreching and EQ-filtering) that pixelate into digital buzzings. "Low Ground" shifts from these sedate, transcendent metaphors into far more malevolent sci-fi scores, with the introduction of deep, menacingly low-end frequencies smattered with natural events of snapping twigs and trickling water. As the album draws to a close, Coleclough and Potter twist tiny slashes from the dark, slightly wavering drone into a majestic coda of those digitized radiator wheezes which opened the record.
As wonderful as anything else that Coleclough has done. Very highly recommended.
Anthem collects two sets of long out-of-print 3" inch singles from Joe Colley's earlier days, right after he shed the Crawl Unit moniker in the early oughts. There's the titular track which was originally released on C.I.P, which came out in 2001 and which we had been able to stock back in the day through Mr. Colley himself. The flipside contains all of the material from the uncomfortably packaged triple-business-card cd-r entitled Triptych For Paranoia Calibration, released through the terminally underground California noise label Banned Productions. The first side, subtitled "Static For Empty Life", lifts itself out of deep rumblings with streaming, cold gray ribbons of electrical fizzings that subtly phase across the stereo field. These physically active drones build up to a sublime chorus of electrical field hummings, that deflate into silence before throbbing mechanical stabs of low-bit-rate noise drive to the end of the piece. Where moments of "Anthem" are relatively placid and almost pretty (for a Joe Colley track, that's saying something!), "Triptych" is a torturous affair of brutalist squiggles, damaged circuit-bending techniques, mistreated electronics, and dead-line tones, all of which get caught in out of phase tape loops. Brilliantly toxic work, as always. Limited to just 200 copies.
While he may have permanently dropped his industrialist moniker Crawl Unit, Joe Colley continues to impress with his ominous compositions of mistreated electronics, tonally pleasing feedback mantras, and abrasive physicality. "Anthem: Static For Empty Life" lifts itself out of deep rumblings with streaming, cold gray ribbons of electrical fizzings that subtly phase across the stereo field. These physically active drones build up to a sublime chorus of electrical field hummings, which abruptly jump-cut to throbbing mechanical stabs of low-bit-rate noise. Often alluding to less specific metaphors of urban decay or social collapse, Colley's aesthetic choices are just as strong as work by John Duncan or Francisco Lopez. It's a bit of shame that it's 18 minutes long, but it does make for a great ride!
If you hold the cover at just the right angle, a misanthropic and self-loathing text emerges from what might appear at first to be simply just another austere, all white package housing another austere album of micro-glitch minimalism. This well-executed design strategy (courtesy of Randy Yau) works to complement Joe Colley's subversive agenda, which even ends up undermining his own intentions. For all of the macho posturing of the text (e.g. "REMEMBER HOW WE DESTROYED THE THINGS THAT MADE US HAPPY AND HOW WE STILL DO? LETS DAMAGE EACH OTHER BEYOND REPAIR..." and so on) and the opening 8 second jolt of unneccessary noise, Colley's sound constructions speak of an inquisitive spirit. Throughout this record, Colley pokes and prods various sonic-making situations that often hold fascinating textural detailings. The most obvious example of this is found in his recordings of water being absorbed by modelling clay, which results in a dense chorus of tiny squeaks and squiggles. Colley almost allows himself to be seduced by these sounds; but just before he does, that misanthropic urge deep within his being instructs him to obliterate those curious textures though harsh digital noises, piercing arpeggiations, and noxious jump-cuts. This strategic hammering of sound certainly keeps the listener alert to what may be coming next; thus making the intricate detail work far more enjoyable... if "enjoyable" can in fact be a description attributed to Colley's solo output or his earlier work as Crawl Unit.
A triple boxset that was originally released back 2010, Disasters Of Self represents what may be the final released works for Joe Colley - the existential noise artist who embarked on a flurry of activities in the '90s under the moniker Crawl Unit before shifting over to his given name around 2000 or thereabouts. Since the release of this album, Colley had released a couple of archival tracks that date back much earlier. Colley has not publicly professed to ceasing activities (such as the case on two occasions for Maurizio Bianchi); but the province he finds himself is that of Melville's Bartleby - the refusal to act as a quiet declaration of intent. This position, this circumstance is one where we also find Colley in the production of Disasters Of Self.
An array of square wave tones, electro-mechanical clattering, and rasping LFO waveforms quickly extinguishes itself at the onset of Disasters Of Self's first piece of vinyl. Inscrutable, yet wholly organic field recordings emerge as the hushed sound that might trickle down from the air vents of a fallout shelter that unfortunately saw its intended use come to pass. Scrabblings of high frequency static and percolating tactile demolition implode into a Luc Ferrari like concrete passage describing and abstracting the inner workings of a doomsday clock.
For the second lp, radioactive crackling gives way to an ominous thrum which begets a toxic explosion of circuit bent errata above a pitch-shifted grounding error hum that gives the whole piece a psychological tension through a clinical malaise, detachment, and acrimony all at once. Through all of these records, Colley inserts the compositional dead-end of a locked groove. The strategy willfully inserts the listener into the process, forcing her or him to decide when the composition is over, disrupting whatever envelopment of psychic dread or aesthetic wonder with the act of having to remove the needle from the vinyl. This too is an act of negation, refusing to allow for a particular trajectory of sound or a compositional motif to come to resolution.
The third lp swarms with profoundly ugly electric field disturbances that phase into a blackened sludges of electricity, feedback, and brute forces, balancing the conceptually opposite but aesthetically similar environs of Le Syndicat and David Tudor. And of course, this final lp terminates in a locked groove of blackened crackle and sinetone unease.
A few of these have trickled into the store over the years, but we've never been able to get enough copies to stock in earnest. That said, these are the last copies we obtained from C.I.P., so act fast.
Some 10 years ago, there was Joe Colley hulking over a four-track on the floor of 964 Natoma - a performance space in San Francisco that hosted the monthly Field Effects series by Aaron Ximm (aka Quiet American). Ximm populated the very large loft in that converted autobody shop into one of the best places to experience live music, by encouraging the audience to sprawl out on futons, couches, bean bags, and pillows in order to better zone-out and focus on the sounds at hand. While much of the work that Ximm would curate focused on sound ecology and phonography, he would bring in some more intense acts such as R.H.Y. Yau & Scott Arford's legendary Infrasound, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, and Joe Colley. At the time of this performance in 2002, Colley was just starting to record under his own name after a stint using the far more abject moniker Crawl Unit. As the explosive and negating power of his earlier noise constructions matured into complex, more conceptual pieces, Colley began to develop into something akin to the Bruce Naumann of sound art - with repetitive, occasionally self-destructive actions that investigated psychological, behavioral, and cultural codes.
"Lonely Microphone" is a reconstruction from the original tape-piece that Colley presented at 964 Natoma; and our memory of the night doesn't recall much more than the view of the lumbering Colley crouched over his gear and the impact of his signature jolts of sonic juxtaposition. Here, Colley masterfully puts together an album that looks to the woolly electronic scrabblings of David Tudor, the expressive environmental collage work of Eric La Casa, and the dead-line feeds of CM von Hausswolff. Ugly buzzes from gutted consumer electronics, terse piezo chirps, blasts of wind-shearing noise, monstrous din from some infernal machine belching beneath the San Francisco urbane crust, and plenty of watery field recordings threatening to short out Colley's haphazardly constructed microphones and hand-soldered circuits. That sense of threat is a constant in Colley's work, the threat of disaster, the threat that nothing will be resolved, the threat of another dead end, the threat that 'no' might be the only answer. "Lonely Microphone" is one of the more subtle presentations of Colley's work, and more self-contained than the post-structuralist ellipsis of his opus "Disasters Of Self." Recommended as with pretty much everything he's ever done.
Earlier in 2006, Joe Colley won an Award of Distinction at the 2006 Prix Ars Electronica in Digital Music for his album Psychic Stress Soundtracks. The jurors of Ars Electronica grafted a political sentiment onto Colley's work by drawing parallels between Psychic Stress Soundtracks and the use of extreme sound as a method of interrogation pushed to the brink of what can be defined as torture under the Geneva Convention. While Colley's previous work has intentionally blurred the boundaries between noise, sound research, and psychology, all of his investigations (including Psychic Stress Soundtracks) appear as exercises in self-negation and existential failure manifested through maltreated electronics (as opposed to what those at Ars Electronica saw in his work as a mimetic work of external horror). Waste Of Songs is a blunt follow up to Psychic Stress Soundtracks, and true to Colley's demeanor, he's not particularly inclined to resolve any questions about the intentions of his album or its relation to the outside world. Rather, it's another brilliantly executed album of his own "negative reactions to an environment" as realized through jittering electronic feedback, overdriven servo-motors smoldering with too much voltage pushed through their dynamos, volatile drones extracted from the ether, and field recordings rendered toxic with choice use of DSP treatments. The exact synthesis between Xenakis' precision and Wolf Eyes' malaise; yeah, that's close enough to describing this. Highly recommended.
This is not a split release as Joe Colley is the individual behind Crawl Unit, and perhaps should be seen as an indication that Joe is phasing out his Crawl Unit moniker. Regardless, "Sound Until The World Ends" is another great addition to the often overlooked / underappreciated catalogue of Mr. Colley, whose work has always been as good / if not better than Francisco Lopez, Zbigniew Karkowski, and other manipulators of physical sound. This vinyl only LP (as is the case for everything released so far on ERS) is broken into discrete sections which begin quite benignly with low-end drones and the delicate flutter of delay pedals feeding back upon themselves. But any tranquility these sounds offer quickly dissipates amidst noxious distortions and chopped white noise that steadily build up into a crescendo and quickly drop off into an abyss of deep tonal floats. This is the pattern that Colley follows through 4 or 5 sections throughout the record. Constructed at Colley's base of operations in Sacramento during the much ballyhooed California power crisis in the summer of 2001, "Sound Until The World Ends" alludes to the hyperboles of apocalyptic literature (found in the title and the pseudo-luddite note that this album was "mixed by hand (without a computer)". Given how incredibly hot Sacramento can get in the summer, such references may be warranted. Nevertheless, this is a great album.
Another gorgeous outing of hushed acoustic sprawl and hauntingly grey ambience from San Francisco's Common Eider, King Eider. It's record number three from this mysteriously monikered band of outsiders, now expanded into a four-piece, still led by Rob Fisk, former member of both Badgerlore and Deerhoof.
We've always been impressed with the ghostly decay that seems to be so effortlessly flowing through CEKE's sound, a perfect balance of organic drone and instrumental songwriting, all bundled together into a seamless journey into the coldest, deepest woods. We must say that Worn immediately appears more melancholic and somber than past CEKE releases, whether it's the doom laden vocal drawls of Grouper on "Ennui" or George Chen's heaaaaavy buzzing guitar riff on "All They Will Find Is Blood", we're totally blown away!
Swells of gorgeously shimmering vocal melodies weave in and out of the rumbling distorted guitars like some shoegazing doom opera, an ocean of distortion buzzing under a glowing sky, so serene and moving. What we really love about Worn is while there are defiantly heavy moments of sheer epicness, there are also moments of precise composition and gently guided ambience. "The Rabbits Will Come Again" unfolds with gracefully bowed notes ringing out into the moonlit sky, while distant bells and shimmering feedback melt into the mournful piano. Vocal sighs and whispers set the mood for a deep forest seance, super chilling and super amazing. In addition to the special appearance made by Miss Grouper, don't miss out on Tom Carter's whirlwind cameo on "Earth Liver"! And don't forget, this one is limited to 300 copies, complete with lp covers that fold out into full size posters, lovely packaging for this ice cold, psychedelic epic!
The Conet Project, originally released in 1997, has attained near mythical status around here. Many folks associate The Conet Project inextricably with our store itself. Which makes sense. We championed the Conet Project relentlessly, everyone here is obsessed, most of us owning multiple copies, some of us incorporating sounds from The Conet Project into our own music, and The Conet Project still ranks as probably THEE best selling release ever at aQuarius. Even more remarkable for the fact that it's not really music at all, at least not in the typical sense, and it is and always has been pretty expensive, as a deluxe 4-cd set initially, and import to boot. In fact until it went out of print for the last time a few years back, we had sold close to one thousand copies, and that's just in our little store. We even used to have a big chart on the wall, where we kept track of the sales, and for a while, we were even taking Polaroids of people who bought the Conet Project to display in the store, a snapshot of them holding what we can only imagine would become their new favorite record (buyer #382: Mike Patton!). Which all leads to the question some of you may have, what the heck is The Conet Project, and why are we (and many of you) so obsessed with it? And so thrilled that it's finally available again?! Yes, available again and obviously a big time Record Of The Week.
Basically, the Conet Project is a now FIVE-cd compilation (more details on the new 2013 edition's additional fifth disc is down below, near the end of this long review!) of recordings of mysterious shortwave radio broadcasts, known as "numbers stations". These numbers stations are generally believed to be encrypted spy transmissions, but no concrete evidence has ever surfaced proving that supposition. However, no credible *alternate* explanation has ever been demonstrated, either. For years (ever since the start of the Cold War), amateur radio enthusiasts have come across these sinister signals, and they continue to this day, broadcast in many languages all over the world (the theory is that some are CIA, some are KBG, some are Mossad, etc).
In general, the transmissions consist of a deadpan voice (sometimes an old man, sometimes a young woman, etc.) reading a seemingly random, meaningless series of numbers over and over. Sometimes the broadcasts are preceded by a musical cue (the "Swedish Rhapsody" music box one being a favorite of ours), and sometimes the numbers are not conveyed by voice but by even more cryptic electronics (as with "The Buzzer", and other noisy, abstract stuff found mainly on disc four).
Needless to say, hearing those amazing and baffling sounds collected on these cds is an unnerving experience. Not only does knowledge of the supposed purpose of these transmissions imbue them with a disturbing quality, but the repetition of the numbers combined with the background of shortwave radio static makes for a aurally hypnotic experience. If merely regarded as a piece of experimental ambient sound sculpture, The Conet Project would be a brilliant and affecting piece of work, yet with the added context of international intelligence and conspiracy theory, it becomes even more intriguing and creepy. Lots of information is included that provides a great deal of description of, and speculation about, The Conet Project. Which is possibly the most incredible, and weirdest, item of sound art/documentation that we've EVER had here at aQuarius. Mesmerizing, fascinating, unique, massive, scary, but sometimes even soothing. 100 percent recommended to the adventurous listener ('cause it's not for everyone!). And once you have it you'll understand why it had to be so many cds - being overwhelming is part of the obsessive allure of this Project. And it's not just us, The Conet Project has popped up in lots of unlikely places, most notably it was sampled on Wilco's breakthrough Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album, the title of which in fact comes from The Conet Project itself. Wilco were also famously sued by Irdial, the label who released it, and they lost! Some sounds from the Conet Project also popped up in that Tom Cruise movie Vanilla Sky, and over the years, we've heard it in various films and on various records, it shouldn't be surprising that so many weird music obsessives love The Conet Project.
Really, as we said, if there's one recording that seems to be most identified with aQuarius recOrds, or that at least we mention most often when trying to explain to people what it is that we're all about here, it's most definitely The Conet Project, and yeah, over the years there have been plenty of others, including Sounds of North American Frogs, Os Mutantes, Burzum's "Filosofem", Comus' "First Utterance", Boris, Circle, Philip Jeck, Village of Savoonga, and loads more since, many other records near and dear to our hearts (for instance, hearing the first Neutral Milk Hotel album always makes us nostalgic for the old 24th street store). But for some reason it's The Conet Project that really seems to sum it all up. It's all the things we really love: completely ridiculous (4, no, now 5 cds!), completely fucked (secret government spy transmissions), droning, weird. It's just so interesting and evocative on so many levels, both musical and totally non-musical, as a listening experience and also as a geopolitical cold war and beyond artifact. Definitely an all time perpetual aQ fave: Allan's got the whole thing on his iPod, so does Andee, he also owns multiple copies of the set, many of which found their way into his old band A Minor Forest's live performances, Jim has steadfastly maintained that this is the greatest record of all time, and who are we to argue? If it's not obvious, we all are a little bit obsessed.
And what this is all leading up to is that YES, finally after literally YEARS of being out of print and unavailable, The Conet Project, has been reissued AGAIN, but this time, with a WHOLE EXTRA DISC, with its own jewel case and booklet!! That's right, the new Conet Project is FIVE discs, not four, and if you're big Conet nerds like most of us, you might just have to buy a second (or even third!) copy. The new disc is not just another numbers station disc though, instead it's a collection of "noise stations", which essentially sound just like the numbers stations MINUS the numbers. So it's a series of gorgeous buzzes and strange hissing fields of blurred melody, lots of crunch and crackle, buried rhythms, whistling tones, strange textures, in fact, much of it is downright musical, so much so that we were musing, hmm, what if this new disc is in fact a hoax, a series of number/noise station like soundscapes created by some electronic musicians like Hrvatski? Naw... But there was in fact talk of a Conet remix project for years now, so it's not that far fetched, and in a way, if it WAS a hoax, it would be even cooler. But as far as we can tell, and according to our resident numbers stations / shortwave expert Jim, these are in fact that kind of weird alien sounds you can hear, tuned in to these mysterious stations. As much as we love the other four discs of The Conet Project, this new one is pretty exciting, and we have to say, definitely makes a case for buying it AGAIN! But for all the rest of you who have yet to discover the bizarre sonic mysteries of the Conet Project, there is no higher recommendation we can give, an all time unanimous aQ fave, our best selling record EVER. Sonically, and conceptually mind blowing. We never made it Record Of The Week before for some reason, but in our hearts, it has always been, and always will be, a perpetual aQ Record Of The Week!!! FOREVER.
BTW, this counts as a "box set" for shipping, it won't fit in the USPS flat rate box we use, so it'll have to go media mail or UPS if you're mailordering it domestically.
- MPEG stream: Swedish Rhapsody
- MPEG stream: 5 Dashes
- MPEG stream: Iran/Iraq Jamming Efficacy Testing
- MPEG stream: Magnetic Fields
- MPEG stream: Tyrolean Music Station
- MPEG stream: The Buzzer
- MPEG stream: "Data Bursts, 5.201kHz (USB And AM)
- MPEG stream: "Exotic Cipher, 6.215kHz/AM October 5th, 2008 19:27 GMT
- MPEG stream: "Descending Jammer, 7.969kHz/USB
- MPEG stream: "Drone, 17.964kHz
- MPEG stream: "Oscillating, 5.178kHz, March 12th, 1997
- MPEG stream: "348|10|13|36|19|21, 11.573kHz, 19:17 GMT
Control Unit are the Italian duo of Sylvia Kastel and Ninni Morgia, the latter having done all sorts of scattered psychedelic projects including a prolonged stint in La Otracina. But in teaming up with the uncompromising Sylvia Kastel for Control Unit, his expository tendencies are tempered in the heavy sourness of Control Unit's grim electronics. In A Frame is their second lp and perfects the bad-drug cocktail of early '80s Italian industrialisms and the narcotic / narcoleptic vibes of Factrix and Mars which they first began to manufacture a couple years back. Kastel and Morgia employ monotone guitars, beatboxes, and cheap synthesizers cast through ghostly delay patterns and a zombified / exhumed production grit that alternates between abstracted decompositions of Hansen records styled electrical damage and tracks which could almost be considered songs with their step sequenced skeletal rhythms haunted by Kastel's vocalizations. These more structured elements seems to corrode from within, as the geiger-counter rhythms and ticking pulsations misfire and palpitate amidst the crosshatching loops and erratically fired patterns. Even with all of the cold/minimal/wave revivalism going on, Control Unit are dialed into a very specific historical reference of most death-obsessed electronica circa 1982. Creepy, horrifying, chaotic dirges for the industrially minded. Limited to just 275 copies!
Had this been issued on Vinyl On Demand as something from some terminally obscure tape label from East Germany circa 1983, we wouldn't have batted an eye. All of the trappings of quintessentially bleak industrial music alluding to the best of SPK (i.e. Information Overload Unit), The New Blockaders, and everything on Broken Flag way back when (i.e. Ramleh, Mauthausen Orchestra, Toll); and with very little discernible digital effects (including a 'direct to cassette' citation in the liner notes!), this doesn't sound like a contemporary noise project at all. Everything is overblown but with the attack of the high end blunted into static distortion and the low end snarled into a morass of tape rumbling. These caustic noises are not the end result, but the toxic patina which is applied to some fine synthpunk / industrial culture dirges. Baltimore's Copper Glove fortunately has been listening to all of those aforementioned projects quite a bit, and has done a great job of synthesizing noise, drum machine rhythm, urban malaise, and detached resentment into this exemplary tape only release from the ever consistent Monorail Trespassing. Twenty-six minutes and limited to 125 copies.
Beginning back in 1989, French experimentalist Eric Cordier (who you may know from the stunning electro-improv ensemble Afflux) began building immersive audio installations that broadcast sound through hundreds of speaker cones mounted to the wall at the average height of the audience's collective ear. "Houlque" dates back to 1996 and is but one of many of the soundtracks that Cordier designed for such installations. While originally an 8 channel piece, Cordier has compressed the music down into a stereo recording for this release, making it a bit more compatible with most folks' home systems! Layering multiple tracks with sustained drones from hurdy-gurdy, dulcimer-vina, harpsichord, and church organ, Cordier has successfully crafted a dense piece of maximalism that harbors similarities to Hermann Nitsch's "Harmoniumwerks," Jim O'Rourke's "Happy Days," and even some of Organum's textural density. Coincidentally enough, Cordier is responsible for introducing both O'Rourke and Keiji Haino to the hurdy-gurdy, which has played a considerable role in both artists' work. Beautifully packaged with lots of photographs of Cordier's installations.
Sadly, the legendary Japanese label HG Fact, longtime home to sludgelords Corrupted, closed up shop recently, rendering loads of amazing records gone for good, but Corrupted managed to acquire a handful of remaining copies of this otherwise out of print doom/sludge classic, and we got as many as we could from them - not many. So this is indeed available again, for what we're guessing will be a very, very limited time...
Here's our review from way back in 2000 when we first listed the all-time classic Llenandose de Gusanos, and in fact made it a Record Of The Week:
Japanese sludge-core doom merchants Corrupted return with this monumental effort. Their previous album consisted of one long, crushing song. Llenandose improves upon that by taking TWO full discs for two tracks. WARNING: if you already intend to purchase this incredible album, read no further. Your enjoyment will be enhanced by not knowing the precise musical details that we are about to reveal...Disc one begins not with the expected wall of brutalizing guitar, but with quiet, hypnotic piano playing. An eerie voice begins to croak softly in Spanish (did we mention that for some reason Corrupted's lyrics are always in that language?) but the music is almost pretty, lulling the listener into a stupor that sets them up for the eventual entry (after 25 minutes or so!) of a slow-moving but awesomely heavy guitar/drums dirge. Eventually the piano re-enters and the disc comes full circle. Beauty and depression co-exist on this disc like none other, it's like George Winston at 16 rpm with Burning Witch playing in the background (and diabolical whispers in your head).. Disc two is the "ambient" disc, and is also really well done, a creepy quiet grey wash of sound, the sound left in the world AFTER its destruction... One of the best releases of 1999. Fans of Esoteric, recent Neurosis, Sleep, Earth, Skullflower, etc. should bow down to Corrupted. Additional information for Japanese-music-o-philes: Corrupted's drummer Chew used to play in Omoide Hatoba.
And here's a 'customer review' (which just happens to back up our claims above), emailed to us by recent purchaser-of-Corrupted and classical music fan John Botz: "The Corrupted album (Llen...Lleandos...uh...something about 'Gusanos,' i.e. 'worms') absolutely kicks ass. It's hard to accurately describe just how far beyond my expectations this album is. I was totally willing to go with Andee's recommendation on this one, but I was half expecting the three main parts of the album to be: banal, new agey, minimalist piano followed by some fairly generic bongtar sludge riffs, followed by fifty minutes of gray-washed amp noise. Not Even, dudes! These guys have obviously had some classical training, and this album is further proof of how much more depth
ANY music acquires when there is some solid classical training behind it. The opening piano section, far from sounding like ambient/new age drivel, sounds like Rachmaninoff on codeine and muscle relaxers. The entry of the 'metal section,' with portentous feedback, makes a real impact, and the choral ambience of the keyboards at the end, added to the piano sound, sinister vocals, and distorted guitar makes for an even more ominous feeling at the apocalyptic conclusion of the first disc. Wow! But maybe disc two was the most pleasant surprise of all! This is genuinely atmospheric (and good) ambient drone, with enough variety and layering of sounds to keep one interested for the full 74 minutes. I kept thinking of the spacey, eth-eerie-al, sections of 2001: A Space Odyssey (one of my two favorite movies, by the way; and my favorite soundtrack: Kubrick's choice of Ligeti's otherworldly choral/orchestral music juxtaposed with the majesty of R. Strauss, the grace of J. Strauss, and the austerity of Khachaturian's adagio was truly an inspired stroke of genius). Perhaps the Corrupted is the REAL 'Soundtrack of the Apocalypse.' Anyway, your description was apt/excellent, and this album become one of my instant favorites, not just a curiosity. And, by the way, whoda thunk that the Spanish vocals would be so effective, adding an esoteric arcaneness to the album?"
Over the past couple of years, Nostilevo has enjoyed an unblemished run, continuing now with Craow's eponymous album that seems to pick up where fellow Los Angeles EBM synthesist Oil Thief left off last year with Obsolescence & Monality. Yes, yes, yes, that latter album was on Chondritic, but there's more than few overlaps on the Nostilevo and Chondritic rosters. Craow occupies a far more muscular, minimal, and frenetic position amidst the minimal wave recombinations produced by such recent darlings as Xeno & Oaklander or Cold Cave. The convulsively twitching electronics and buried vocal vortex of echo and delay snap against the booming crack of the goth club rhythms, walking the tightrope between heavy ear-drum noise and infectious dark techno grooves. At the album's finale, Craow disengages the throttle for a nocturnal Joy Division / Cassandra Complex mid-tempo number that chimes with suitably spectral guitar melodies. Gotta think that Regis would be floored by something like this.
To say that Homunculus Equinox is a more accessible record than Crawling Chaos' preceding album The Gas Chair is certainly true, but also a bit misleading since this album is as complex and weird as the best work of Amon Duul II, Brainticket, or Pere Ubu. The Gas Chair is just that odd of an album! Homunculus Equinox falls considerably far from the grim, Mancunian post-punk sound of Factory Records who released the aforementioned Gas Chair album. Even so, everything from Homunculus Equinos came from the same hours and hours of recordings that the band made during the Gas Chair sessions at their own studio back in 1981. This second album was self-released on their own Foetus Productions as a cassette. It's not really a surprise that Factory didn't release it, as Factory's in-house producer Martin Hannett was disgusted that Tony Wilson might consider releasing something as lo-fi as Homunculus Equinox. The remastering job on this CD renders the album with as much clarity as any given reissue from, say, 1967, but admittedly lacks the pristine surface that Hannett provided to Joy Division.
Homunculus Equinox is wilfully eccentric album, fully aware of its predecessors. Crawling Chaos produced a weird hybrid of indulgant Krautrock psychedelia, bleepity bloopy electronically driven space rock, and post-Morricone melodies that get so epic and bittersweet that it wouldn't be surprising if Quentin Tarantino appropriates Crawling Chaos for one of his upcoming soundtracks. Thoroughly surprising and vigorously challenging.
Typically dismissed by Brit-pop collectors as "the worst album to be produced by Factory Records," The Gas Chair is anything but. On the contrary, Crawling Chaos' bizarre fragmentation of art-rock, lysergic psychedelia, and primitive electronics should rank as one of the great, lost art-punk records to be re-discovered. Were it not for the fact that Tony Wilson did sign Crawling Chaos to Factory, The Gas Chair would have surely disappeared entirely never to have been heard again. But because LTM has dedicated their energies to reissuing the remainder of the Factory catalogue from the early '80s, The Gas Chair (as well as Crawling Chaos' self-released 2nd album Homunculus Equinox) have thankfully returned to print, and now here we are singing their praises.
Those Brit-pop afficionados are right in saying that there is very little in Crawling Chaos that has anything to do with the Martin Hannett's production or Joy Division's dour atmospheres or anything that remotely sounds like what a Factory band should sound like. Rather than punk antagonism or death disco grooves, the Crawling Chaos harken back to a broken psychedelia which rewires the already complex sounds of Can, Faust, Joe Meek, Comus, and Cro-Magnon. I'm not even sure that they would have found much solace in contemporaries such as Nurse With Wound, The Residents, This Heat, and The Lemon Kittens. As a result, Crawling Chaos don't really sound like much of anything else; but there is an intellect behind the band which keeps The Gas Chair from merely being weird for the sake of being weird. Elliptical post-punk effect dour brooding; oblique electronics meld with serpentine Arabic melodies; thoroughly disturbing pagan folk songs splattered with psychedelic noise, mirroring Comus and Cro-Magnon; Brian Eno-esque pop idiosyncracies disfigured and dislocated; mechanoid synth-punk workouts repleat with vocoder heavy vocals. There's always the possibility that The Gas Chair is a situationist joke, a grand piece of irony that was smarter than most everything around it. Perhaps the aesthetic wandering appealed to Tony Wilson's situationist desires; and that may be the only reason why he signed Crawling Chaos to Factory.
Regardless, The Gas Chair is infinitely more bizarre than the Homosexuals and executed with much greater panache than Metal Urbain, making it one of the best art-punk reissues to come out in a very, very long time.
Due to Bristol's rather incestuous pool of avant rock bands, Crescent's name often appears in conjunction with Flying Saucer Attack, Movietone, Third Eye Foundation, and Amp. As it should, since members of Crescent have performed with all three of those groups. It is a tad disheartening to see customers buy Crescent records with the hope of hearing a cosmic drone of blissful feedback, only to find an antithetical abject muck, and then selling them back.
And you know what, there's absolutely nothing wrong with an abject muck, actually we really like abject muck. If you listen closely to the tracks that Matt Jones (Crescent's mastermind) has appeared on in Amp and Movietone, you'll realise that everything he touches ends up with a gritty lo-fi quality. And for Crescent's third album, he has taken up residence in a Bristol church to capture a rather humid, almost rusting sound on top of his very loose songs. A gothic (NOT in the Trench Coat Mafia definition) sensibility of decaying atmospheres, permeates the slow moving waves of sonorous basslines, loose hammond organ semi-improvisations, and skittering rhythms, somewhere between jazz and krautrock.
Thanks to a Joy Division gig in which Cripsy Ambulance's singer Alan Hempsall successfully subbed for a missing in action Ian Curtis, the ties (not just in terms of sound) between Crispy Ambulance and Joy Division became quite solid. With a penchant for gloomy sound
sculptures more than post-punk pop, Cripsy Ambulance at their best could create unsettling almost sci-fi soundtracks, at their worst they fit in the same catagory with Joy Division, In Camera, and Wolfgang Press / Rema Rema (all circa 1981). And that is not a bad thing at all.
This long time aQ fave now reissued on vinyl!!
Thanks to a fateful Joy Division gig, where Crispy Ambulance singer Alan Hempsal successfully and secretly subbed for a missing Ian Curtis, The Ambulance seemed to be cursed with a reputation as pale imitatiors of Joy Division. But while at moments, Crispy Ambulance *are* dead ringers for Joy Division's post-punk pop, they were even more adept at crafting truly creepy gloom and haunting sound sculptures. At their best, they could create unsettling almost sci-fi soundscapes, and at their worst they could hold their own with their early '80s cronies Joy Division, In Camera, Wolfgang Press, etc. Totally excellent. Still sounds as fantastic as ever!
Up until now, SF garage popper Mikal Cronin seemed to exist mostly as sideman, his name usually following an ampersand, which in turn seemed to typically be preceded by the name Ty Segall. Thus most of our experiences with Cronin had been the duo of Segall & Cronin, and everything we had heard we dug, a LOT, but it was hard to tell what exactly Cronin was bringing to the table, versus Segall, but listening to this now, seems the answer is EVERYTHING! And as much as we love Ty Segall, we're thinking that maybe much of that garage pop magic was coming from the other side of the ampersand, cuz WOW is this record totally great. Anyone at all into the SF garage pop scene, Thee Oh Sees, the Fresh & Onlys, Ty Segall, Bare Wires, etc., will go absolutely nuts for this. And if this record doesn't immediately catapult Cronin into the spotlight, then there's something very very wrong with the world.
It's a perfect blend of sunshiney jangle, garagey fuzz, paisley pop and noisy psychedelia. And for all the warped fuzz and reverbed drenched lo-fi crunch of his peers, it seems Cronin has much more of a pure pop heart. That pure pop is however gloriously corrupted by little bits of wild flute flecked freakouts, strange horns, noise rock jams, and whatever else struck Cronin's fancy it seems, yet whatever sonic weirdness Cronin adds to the mix, it never sound gratuitous, it always sounds like an organic part of the song and the sound, and without fail, the song is crazy catchy, and the sound is fantastically lush and psychedelic and utterly ruling.
The first track manages to sum it up pretty perfectly. Starting with some dreamy Beach Boys a cappella harmonies, then some big distorted guitar crunch, pounding drums, before slipping right into some dreamy almost folky jangle, acoustic guitar strum, fuzzy bass, sweet vocal harmonies and HOOKS FOR DAYS, like the best song the Fresh & Onlys never wrote, but a little bit more twisted and a little bit more Byrds / paisley pop, but with plenty of crunch and fuzz, a little bit proggy in its arrangement, and then out of nowhere, with about a minute left, the song explodes into a double time pounding psych rock blow out, complete with jagged guitar crunch and a wild flute freakout (courtesy of John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees, who knew he played flute?). We've probably listened to that song 50 times since we got this in.
But once we dug deeper, we realized that pretty much every song here is an absolute gem, "Apathy" with its start/stop acoustic strum, wild feedback, and total classic pop hooks (reminding us melodically of The Olivia Tremor Control actually), "Green And Blue", with its thick crunch droned out guitar buzz, dirgey drumming, thick blown out wall of sound and wild tangle of psychguitar freakout, "Get Along", which is another acoustic guitar driven chunk of practically perfect dreampop, rife with sweet harmony vox and some cool tripped out backwards psych guitar melodies, "Slow Down", a lo-fi, organ driven ballad, all stretched out drones and fuzzy reverbed vox, "Gone", another crunchy, riff heavy rocker, that should have Thee Oh Sees fans frothing at the mouth. And so it goes, the perfect mix of modern garage pop and classic indie jangle, and some of THEE best songs EVER. This week's list is chock full of contenders for pop record of the year, but if any of the other ones are gonna come out on top, this is gonna be the one to beat.
Oh, if you're wondering if it's vinyl-only, no it's not. But we're just listing the vinyl format this week, 'cause for some weird reason, the cd version we originally received turned out to be a cd-r. However, the label has fixed that and pressed some actual, real cds, we're just waiting for them to show up. They're on the way, should be here sometime next week, so if you're a cd person, or just prefer the cheaper format, let us know and we'll put your name down for one. We'll also of course list it on our next list.
Another choice slab of gnarled industrial dekompositions from Black Horizons! Crooked Columns is a new project to us, hailing from Portland, Oregon with handful of equally unknown ancillary projects from the various members. Searing synth tones, crushing noise concoctions, and an occasional rhythmic outburst of militaristic aplomb set the stage for a cassette that could easily be passed off as something with origins dating back to 1984 from some armpit town in sodden England or from some death-obsessed Italian miserably enduring the Mediterranean sun. Even with all of the noise and grind and toxic bloom, Crooked Columns muster some intriguing variations on their core strategies of loops and noise. Sure there's plenty of references to MB's mechanical lurchings from back in the day, but that extended track with pronounced rhythms has more of a Konstruktivists feel topped with atonal horns and plenty of scabrous blurts of noise. Warbling loops and heart-beat pulses lead into smashed amplifier destruction on the second side of the tape, with plenty of horror-score sound design vibes tossed in for good measure. Really great stuff, we have to say. And as is the case with all of the Black Horizons tapes these days, very nice packaging with gold offset printing on metallic blue paper. Careful though of the drug-sized baggie tucked away inside the J-card. Supposedly, the rusted metal has been dosed with tetanus. Don't tempt fate, please. As with all the Black Horizons tapes... LIMITED TO 100 COPIES.
If our instore cd player had a counter we're pretty sure we would have maxed it out by now with endless repeated plays of the debut full length by Crystal Stilts. As much as their debut ep blew us away (check the review elsewhere on the site for much gushing), this record is taking our love for them to even greater heights, so much so that we're becoming pretty darn obsessed! And how could we not, an entire record filled with smokey and catchy dark pop gems. With crooning vocals and rich hooks imbedded into every song, they've managed to create a record that we're always in the mood to hear and don't think we'll ever get sick of. You can tell that these guys probably love '60s pop and girl groups as much as they do post-punk and psychedelic garage sounds, as the songs on Alight Of Night sound like Phil Spector laying his Wall of Sound on a band whose own sound falls somewhere between The Smiths and Joy Division, or if Spacemen 3 did a record full of Crystals covers. In fact this is reminding us a lot of the Jeremy Jay Airwalker ep that we fell in love with right around this time last year.
It's so cool to see AQ customers of all stripes getting swept up in the 'Stilts' sound, unable to resist as we're blasting it in the store, and it's inevitable that they eventually make their way to the 'now playing' holder to find out who is responsible for these sound getting under their skin in such pleasurable ways. Got a good feeling this will be on many of our year end favorite lists...so damn good!
